Louis Nizer What to do with Germany 1944 Louis Nizer's modest proposal for handling war criminals
By Robert Verkaik, Legal Affairs Correspondent 10 March 2006
Later in life, he was reported to have said that the two things he hated most were Germans and taxes.
Sefton Delmer/ By Udo Walendy
Bertie Felstead, Soldier Who Joined a Timeout in War, Dies at 106 By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Christmas in the Trenches by John McCutcheon
German WW2 Vet Reviews Spielberg's Pvt Ryan
Since anti-German propaganda-mills are still working overtime in the wholesale vilification of a people, we would like to present the crimes and hypocrisies of those who seem to glory in their self-righteous role as "liberators" and "teachers" of democracy and humanitarian values. This relentless propaganda in the movies, television and "literature," is not only cruel, but amounts to a form of mental genocide of the German people; a people who, like any other people, come in all variations of good and bad, crude and enlightened, compassionate and cruel as well as so many shades in-between. It is quite obvious who, for financial extortion and distraction from their own misdeeds is after 57 years, still beating the drums of hatred and one-sided accusations. How "liberating" it must be in deed, to glory in one's human perfection, not because one is perfect, but, because one is blind to the complexities and intrigues of true history! Like Jesus said, " let those who are innocent throw the first stone!" Are these relentless stone-throwers as innocent as they see themselves? Or do they not even have enough honor to wrestle with their own short-comings as human beings and try to forgive the other as they would forgive themselves? Perhaps more should be said, but in light of the dangers of "free speech" in these times of "politically correct" democracy, we think it best to shut up for the time being and let history reveal its truth as it eventually always does.
The Gnostic Liberation Front.
Dealing in Hate:
The development of anti-German propaganda
Table of Contents
Dealing in Hate
The Development of Anti-German Propaganda
Dr. Michael F. Connors
The Germanophobic fallacy
It is widely conceded today that the kind of thinking which presents any ethnic or national group in terms of a crude, unflattering caricature is undesirable and sloppy at the very least. Conversely, acceptance of others on the basis of individual merit, without reference to racial or national background is regarded as one of the distinguishing marks of the truly educated man.
One of the most widely publicized reason, offered in explanation of our opposition to the regime of the late Adolf Hitler was its severe policy directed at Jews and other enemies of the regime. By some curious irony, however, many of the same Americans who were so quick to attack the Nazi racial doctrines have been the worst offenders in spreading abroad a fantastic myth of singular German wickedness. As a consequence of this Germanophobic myth, the very word German conjures up in all too many minds an uncomfortable, if vague, image of robot-like, goose-stepping legions of glassy-eyed storm troopers set in motion by the harshly barked commands of an Erich von Stroheim type "Prussian" officer. Furthermore, "militarism," "aggressiveness," and a marked preference for "authoritarian" over democracy have well-nigh universally been regarded as "typically German" national traits.
Germanophobia in the thirties and forties had for the "educated" classes in the West an appeal which could never have been held for such concepts as "white supremacy" or anti-Semitism. It is precisely this academic and intellectual respectability of the notion of unique German wickedness, on the basis of specious racial and historical arguments, that has made of it such a dangerous fallacy.
Nineteenth century German prestige
This dark image of a sinister, aggressive, predatory, and militarily regimented Germany only became prevalent in the present century. The English historian, Frederic William Maitland, has described the once characteristic attitude toward the Germans:
... it was usual and plausible to paint the German as an unpractical, dreamy, sentimental being, looking out with mild blue eyes into a cloud of music and metaphysics and tobacco smoke.1
The French writer, Madame de Stael, romantically portrayed for the Napoleonic world of the early nineteenth century a Germany utterly unlike the grotesque image later drawn by the Allied propagandists of two World Wars. Madame de Stael's Germans were a nation of "Poets and Thinkers," a race of kindly, impractical, other-worldly dreamers without national prejudices and, strangely, in the light of later propaganda, "disinclined to war."2
In America too, a similarly warm view of things German predominated. It is difficult to exaggerate the constructive impact of German institutions upon American life and the cordiality of the reception accorded them in the century or so from Frederick the Great to Bismarck. The story of this golden age of German-American relations has been magnificently chronicled by a very thorough and gifted American scholar, Henry M. Adams, in his recently published Prussian-American Relations, 1775-1871.3 In the cultural and intellectual spheres as in the political sphere the relationship was one of immense mutual profit.
The Prussian system of higher education and the cultural flowering which characterized Prussia in the era of regeneration following the Napoleonic wars all left a distinct mark upon America. The list of American scholars and writers -- George Tichnor, Edward Everett, Joseph Cogswell, George Bancroft, John Lothrop Motley, Henry E. Dwight, Washington Irving, Henry W. Longfellow, and James F. Cooper, to mention only some -- who went to Prussia to secure inspiration for their life's work is a most impressive one. Thus, to Americans too, "whether seen in their newly united nation or in this country, the Germans were generally regarded as methodical and energetic people" indeed as "models of progress," while "in their devotion to music, education, science, and technology they aroused the admiration and emulation of Americans."4
It is evident then that Germans in the nineteenth century ranked quite high in the esteem of their European and American neighbors. Two unrelated historic factors seemed to conspire at the time to give widespread currency to views of this sort.
First, there were the truly monumental achievements of Germans in every sphere of cultural, intellectual, and scientific creativity. It could hardly have seemed amiss to speak of a nation of Dichter und Denker when one thought of the contributions to literature of Goethe and Schiller, the historical works of Ranke and Niebuhr, the philosophical studies of Kant and Hegel, the great scientific achievements of Alexander von Humboldt and Röntgen, and the varied musical achievements of Beethoven, the Strausses, and Wagner.
The second factor which seemed to support this attitude toward the Germans was their military and political weakness before their achievement of national unification in 1871.
One cannot imagine a more vivid contrast than that between de Stael's Germans and the stereotyped image of monocled, burr-headed, heel-clicking, mindless robots which Hollywood did so much to popularize in the thirties and forties.
Possibly even more difficult to grasp, for those whose thinking has been shaped by the propaganda of recent years, is the fact that throughout the nineteenth century France rather than Germany was cast in the role of international bully and villain.5 Had not Louis XIV and Bonaparte repeatedly made a battleground of Europe? Could anyone forget that French arms had rolled at high tide across the entire continent of Europe, threatening to engulf even the vast empire of the Russian Tsars? Or could anyone forget that it had required the combined resources of Austria, Britain, Russia, and Prussia, assisted by the fortuitous intervention of nature in the form of the Russian winter, to shatter the might of the Corsican conqueror?
Historic German 'militarism'
A writer inclined to present France in an unfavorable light relative to Germany would find, in the story of the French invasions of Germany since 1300, a veritable propaganda arsenal. Though there were at least seventeen major French invasions of German territory in the period between 1300 and 1600, the period of French intervention that is genuinely appalling is that from 1635 to 1815. The French, after Richelieu earlier had kept the Thirty Years' War going through diplomacy, ravished Germany continuously from 1635 to 1648. They also invaded German territory seven times during the concluding phase of their war with Spain which ended in 1659. A few years later during the War of Devolution and again during their encounter with the Dutch in 1672, the French violated German territory on at least four occasions. Then, between 1678 and 1686, the French, through their reunion policy, committed at least ten major acts of aggression against Germany. The War of the League of Augsburg in 1688 actually began as a French "preventive war" against the German states with the unprovoked devastation of the Palatinate, as well as the destruction of Heidelberg, Worms, and Speyer. Further French invasions of Germany followed in 1702, 1733, and 1740. Again during the Seven Years War (1756-63) French aggression against German territory was repeated. Finally, during the periods of the French Revolution and Napoleon, Germany was repeatedly bled white by French invasions and coalition wars. One might reasonably conclude then that an estimate of thirty French invasions of German territory since the Middle Ages is a conservative understatement.
An examination of the available statistical evidence on the comparative warlikeness and addiction to militarism of the European powers since the end of the Middle Ages reveals some astonishing facts. Assuming the validity of the propagandist thesis of unique German aggressiveness, one might reasonably expect that a study of the relevant data concerning army size, casualties, number and magnitude of battles engaged in, military expenditures and so on, would reflect this alleged German iniquitousness. Yet such is very decidedly not the case.
It has been estimated by a careful scholar that there were "about twenty-six hundred important battles involving European states" in the 460 years between 1480 and 1940. Of these, France participated in forty-seven percent, "Germany (Prussia)" in twenty-five percent, and England and Russia in twenty-two percent each.6 The Prussian record can hardly be described as uniquely warlike on the basis of such evidence! It might also be added that geographic factors, like Britain's insular position and Russia's remoteness from the mainstream of European history during the period, doubtless helped considerably to reduce their percentage of involvement.
Professor Quincy Wright offers this further statistical evidence for the same period, that is, 1480-1940:
Of the 278 wars involving European states during this period, the percentage of participation by the principal states was: England, 28; France, 26; Spain, 23; Russia, 22; Austria, 19; Turkey, 15; Poland, 11; Sweden, 9; Netherlands, 8; Germany (Prussia), 8; Italy (Savoy-Sardinia), 9; and Denmark, 7.7
In the circumstances, one is compelled to assent to Dr. Wright's conclusion that "attribution of a persistently warlike character to certain states ... seems not to have been based upon a comparison of any objective criteria of warlikeness."8
The distinguished sociologist and historian, Pitirim A. Sorokin, in his monumental study, Social and Cultural Dynamics,9 assembled data proving that historically, of all the nations of Europe, Germany had the lowest percentage of years with war. Spain, Poland, Lithuania, Greece, England, France, Russia, Holland, Austria, and Italy all exceeded Germany in this respect. Sorokin's conclusions are very much like those of Quincy Wright above. He writes that "the magnitude of 'militarism' or 'war effort' or 'war burden' shifts from country to country in the course of time. Furthermore ... there are no consistently peaceful and consistently militant countries."10
The eminent British military and naval historian, Captain Russell Grenfell, computed the record of numerical involvement in wars by the major European powers in the crucial century between Waterloo and Sarajevo as follows"11
| Country | Wars |
|---|---|
| Britain |
10 |
| Russia |
7 |
| France |
5 |
| Austria |
3 |
| Prussia-Germany |
3 |
In the face of such evidence, it seems incredible that any really thoughtful person could still adhere to the old popular superstition concerning German "aggressiveness" and "militarism."
Public opinion of Germany to 1914
All these facts were very clearly reflected in world opinion at the time of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. In the words of Professor Sidney Fay, "Bismark's unification of Germany was hailed at the time as a desirable, even glorious accomplishment of the spirit of nationalism."12 Writing in a similar vein, another distinguished American student of this period relates that:
Whatever opinion historians may now hold on the question of responsibility for the war, there was little difference of opinion on this point among contemporary neutrals ... When the war broke out, Englishmen were almost unanimous in believing that the conflict had been wantonly precipitated by the French Emperor, and that the fundamental cause for the war was the French desire to reestablish French hegemony on the continent by the defeat of Prussia and the acquisition of German territory.13
The English writers, Thomas Carlyle and Edward Freeman, were especially ardent in their enthusiasm for the cause of Prussia during the war of 1870. Carlyle, in a public letter to the Times in 1870, advanced arguments of an "historical, racial, and political" nature on behalf of the alleged necessity of a German victory over France. He concluded the letter on the warm note that Germany would become the "queen of the continent," something that appeared to him as "the most hopeful public fact that has occurred during my life."14 The glowing devotion to the cause of Germany of the famous "Oxford School" historian, Edward A. Freeman, was revealed in an open letter to the Pall Mall Gazette in November of 1870, when he asserted it was the "high mission" of Germany to bring an end to the French "conspiracy" against world peace.15
American public opinion too was thoroughly cordial to Germany at the time. The American reaction to the Franco-Prussian War has been described by George H. Blakeslee, in his introduction to a very important study, as follows:
During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, American sentiment was so strongly against the French that many an anti-French editorial of 1870 could easily pass for an anti-German editorial of 1914, if the name Napoleon the Third were changed to William the Second ... In 1870, to the majority of Americans, Germany was the land of universities and of religious freedom, fighting for national unity against an Imperial aggressor. Germany had been one of the few friends of the North during the Civil War; while Germans had formed a notably large proportion of the northern armies and had won for themselves in the nation a position of high regard. The German victories were regarded in the United States with as much enthusiasm in 1870 as they were with regret in 1914.16
John Gerow Gazley arrived at a strikingly similar conclusion in the most exhaustive analysis ever attempted of American opinion of Germany during the period. He found that the American response from the outset of the war was "overwhelmingly pro-German and anti-French" while "in striking contrast to the belief that France represented despotism, decadence and reaction was the common conviction among Americans that Germany's success meant the triumph of progress, liberty and civilization."17
In nineteenth-century Britain, France had long been regarded as the "hereditary enemy," while the French reciprocated with bitter contempt for Perfide Albion. So long as Britain and France remained the two major factors in the European power equation there was but little likelihood of a change in this alignment. Although the French were pathologically obsessed with a desire for revanche upon Germany after their inglorious defeat of 1871, they continued to be at odds with England too, down to the early years of the present century. These Anglo-French tensions brought the world to the brink of war in 1898, at the time of the Fashoda Crisis over the control of the Egyptian Sudan. Only after the Entente Cordiale of 1904 did Anglo-French rapprochement become a reality. With this shift in the European power alignment Britain and Germany became increasingly estranged.
Nonetheless, if we return to the period before this mutation in the power balance, we cannot be other than profoundly impressed by the fact that British scholars and publicists in general had been most favorably disposed toward everything in German, history, culture, and institutions throughout the nineteenth century. The eminent Cambridge historian, Herbert Butterfield, has the following comments to offer concerning this British adulation of Germany:
In England the view once prevailed that German history was particularly the history of freedom, for it was a story that comprised federation, parliament, autonomous cities, Protestantism, and a law of liberty carried by German colonies to the Slavonic east. In those days it was the Latin States which were considered to be congenial to authoritarianism, clinging to the Papacy in Italy, the Inquisition in Spain and the Bonapartist dictatorships in militaristic France. The reversal of this view in the twentieth century, and its replacement by a common opinion that Germany had been the aggressor and enemy of freedom throughout all the ages, will no doubt be the subject of historical research itself someday, especially as it seems to have coincided so closely with a change in British foreign policy ... Up to the early 1900's when historical scholarship in England came to its peak in men like Acton and Maitland, words can hardly describe the admiration for Germany -- and the confessed discipleship -- which existed amongst English historians."18
A careful German scholar has given us a fascinating and detailed study of British historiography on the subject of Germany from the early nineteenth century through the second World War.19 It thoroughly confirms the thesis elaborated by Professor Butterfield above. The extreme Germanophile sentiments of men like Thomas Arnold, Edward Freeman, William Stubbs, and Thomas Carlyle certainly presented a marked contrast to the bitter denunciations of everything German by British (and American) historians during the thirties and forties of this century. Arnold, for example, looked upon Germany not as a nation with a unique predisposition toward authoritarianism and regimentation, but rather as a "cradle of law, virtue, and freedom," and considered it a "distinction of the first rank" that the English belonged to the Germanic family of peoples.20 We have seen something of the Germanophile inclinations of Thomas Carlyle and Edward A. Freeman at the time of the Franco-Prussian War.
Despite a widening rift between Germany and Britain after the An-glo-French agreement of 1904, there was nothing even approaching the wild hostility of the years after 1914. In America there was considerable warm feeling for Germany on the part of scholars and men in public life right up to the eve of Sarajevo. Perhaps the most highly regarded history of Germany in the English language was Ernest F. Henderson's A Short History of Germany,21 which was published in several editions and is still read with respect today. A thoroughly cordial treatment of German history in general and of Prussian history in particular, it was dedicated "by gracious permission" to Prince Henry of Prussia.
In 1905 Andrew Dickson White, a noted American historian, educator and United States Ambassador to Germany, could write that:
Germany, from a great confused mass of warriors and thinkers and workers, militant at cross-purposes, wearing themselves out in vain struggles, and preyed upon by malevolent neighbors, has become a great power in arms, in art, in science, in literature; a fortress of high thought; a guardian of civilization; the natural ally of every nation which seeks the better development of humanity.22
As late as June 8, 1913, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of William II's accession to the throne of the Reich, distinguished Americans, including William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and Nicholas Murray Butler, in a special commemoration of the occasion by The New York Times, heaped lavish praise upon the German Emperor; Taft even cited him as the world's greatest single force for peace at the time.23 Butler's comments were positively rhapsodic. He concluded on the glowing note that "if the German Emperor had not been born to monarchy, he would have been chosen monarch -- or chief executive -- by popular vote of any modern people among whom his lot might have been cast."24 Yet in a year or so William was to be called "the beast of Berlin!" This was achieved via the collaboration of "learned historians" and "gutter journalists." The outcome of their joint efforts was "the first great triumph of the art of modern war propaganda."25
Thus it is evident that Imperial Germany began its national political life in 1871 with an enormous reservoir of international good will. As might be expected in an age of rapidly quickening imperial rivalries, the new Reich became embroiled on occasion with other nations. There were differences with America in the Caribbean area and in the Pacific over Samoa. There were differences with Imperial Russia too, particularly in the Balkans, where the interests of the multinational Austrian Habsburg Empire, Germany's ally since 1879, clashed with the Pan-Slav policy of the Tsars. Indeed, within a few years after the termination of the political career of Bismarck in 1890, his worst fear, "the nightmare of coalitions," became a very distinct possibility when Russia and France concluded a formal military alliance directed at Germany and Austria. The increasing estrangement of Britain and the Reich, which culminated in the fateful Anglo-French understanding of 1904, has already been noted above.
The sources of Anglo-German estrangement had become quite apparent years before the first World War. Naval rivalry plus Germany's astonishing industrial and commercial growth, which was viewed with increasing alarm in Great Britain, all tended to create a growing rift between the two nations. British publicists and historians, ever sensitive to the wishes of the Foreign Office, soon began to reflect this new state of affairs in their writings about Germany. What is more, this change in the British climate of opinion created a similar change in American opinion of Germany. Even at the turn of the century it was already evident that a good deal of anti-German sentiment was definitely setting in in the American press. One very important but little known reason which serves to explain this was the utter dependence of a large segment of the American press upon British sources for information about European and particularly German affairs. The Germanophobic Harmsworth press of Great Britain played and especially powerful role in this fascinating game of manipulating American opinion. The anti-German sentiments expressed in the widely read articles of F. W. Wile in The New York Times exemplified this British inspired transformation in American thinking in an especially effective way.26
Entente propaganda
It is not to be denied, therefore, that even before 1914 the shifting sands of international diplomacy had undermined somewhat the proud edifice of Imperial German world prestige. But the Reich was not at all unusual in this respect and, in any case, no power could expect to remain perennially popular in an age of greedy colonial and imperial rivalry. It was not until after the outbreak of the holocaust of 1914 that the grotesque image of a rapacious and bloodthirsty Germany uniquely aggressive throughout history achieved widespread currency in the West. It required the deliberate and systematic diffusion of Allied wartime propagandist distortions to give birth to the pathological Germanophobia that later became such a familiar and integral part of Western thought processes. As Harry Paxton Howard recently expressed it:
Actually, in the literal sense of the word, the biggest job of revising history was done during the first World War when our "histories" were completely revised to show that Germany had always been our enemy, that Germany had started the war in 1914, that Germany had even started the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and that in the Revolutionary War we had not been fighting the British but the Hessians -- not to mention such things as the Germans cutting the hands off Belgian babies, instead of the Belgians cutting off the hands of Congolese. This was a real revision of our histories which has distorted the American mind for more than forty years.27
Soon after 1914 many of the seductive stratagems later employed with such telling effect by World War II propagandists made their appearance. Distorted intellectual history, for example, proved to be a veritable gold mine for Entente propagandists. Selected passages quoted out of context from the writings of all sorts of Germans, however obscure intellectually or remote historically, were offered in support of the thesis of a singularly iniquitous German national character. Indeed, an American historian by no means inclined to pro-Germanism has, in describing the fondness of Western writers for seeking out alleged proto-Nazi elements in German writers all the way back to Martin Luther, pointed out that:
These are not new theories. It was a favorite technique of French propaganda in World War I to quote the words of German writers as proof of the unique character of German nationalism and ruthlessness. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer were quoted more often than Bismarck, and Heinrich Treitschke, more often than Kaiser William II.28
Allied propagandists had a field day after 1914 with the theory that German thinking was dominated by "prophets of war" like Bernhardi and Nietzsche. Even before the war books like Austin Harrison's Pan-Germanic Doctrine,29 loaded though it was with factual errors and a tendentious thesis, were directly productive of considerable anxiety and hostility on the part of Britons toward Germany. Before long these British apprehensions were transferred to America, for even before the war "echoes of these alarms were heard through American magazines."30 Perhaps the first American historian to give book length treatment of these puerilities was Roland G. Usher31 who painted Germany in very sinister colors indeed. For him fanatic German nationalists conspiring to conquer additional European and overseas territories were the determining factor in German Imperial policy.
These fictions have all been exploded in the intervening years. To begin with, Nietzsche and Bernhardi were never "household names" in Germany, as Allied propagandists were fond of insisting. Bernhardi, indeed, got "a far wider hearing in England than in Germany when his book was translated as Germany and the Next War."32 Nor did Bernhardi have any influence on the determination of German policies for, as the investigations of an American scholar have revealed, no one in the Foreign Office in 1914 had even read his works.33 Even had Nietzsche been so popular in Germany as was believed outside that country, it is a mistake to identify him as a "militarist" and protagonist of the "war cult." As a matter of fact, the piously Protestant Prussian military leaders and bureaucracy despised this bitterly anti-Christian philosopher while he responded to them in kind. The Pan-Germans, it subsequently developed, had never had anything like the influence upon German policy planning once attributed to them by such alarmist writers as Roland Usher, Austin Harrison, and Andre Chéradame. So far as the outcome of the crisis of 1914 was concerned, they counted for absolutely nothing.34
After 1914, unfortunately, Americans proved all too susceptible to the blandishments of Entente propaganda. Though Woodrow Wilson might render lip service to the ideal of neutrality "in fact as well as in name during these days that try men's souls," neither he nor America's opinion-making organs remained faithful very long to this principle. The ties that bound many Americans to Britain in 1914 were varied. Among other things were common legal institutions and a common language to say nothing of numerous mutually profitable business relationships. But most potent of all were those ties of a primarily emotional and sentimental nature which bound many Americans to British ways of thought and to British literary and intellectual currents. In the words of Charles Callan Tansill:
Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, Dickens, Burns, Wordsworth, and a host of other British men of letters had knocked on the door of the American heart and had received a warm welcome. There never had been an American tariff on British intellectual goods nor any embargoes on British ideals. In the American mind in 1914 there was a deep substratum of British thought and it was easy to convince the average American that Britain's war was "our war." 35
In the circumstances, it is not difficult to understand why Americans were so easily sold on the theory that Germany alone had provoked the war, that the Reich was uniquely "guilty." In this connection, the invasion of "little Belgium" was widely advertised as a particularly reprehensible though typical manifestation of a brutal and ruthless German policy. On the other hand, the entry of Britain into the war for the ostensible purpose of defending Belgian territorial integrity received almost universal acclaim. The posture of a crusading knight on a white steed charging to the defense of the outraged little country was, despite its essential falsity, assumed with relish and exploited with consummate skill by pro-British propagandists.
The shabby dishonesty of this posture becomes evident when we realize that during a Franco-German crisis in 1887, at a time when Anglo-German relations were most cordial, the British press had openly and unashamedly discussed the advisability of giving the green light to the German army to cross Belgium for the purpose of initiating military operations against France. 36Finally, the British minister, Lord Vivian, informed the distraught Belgian government that Belgium would have to prepare to act alone in such a contingency. As Professor Langer aptly remarks, "considering all this, it is hardly possible to take the denials of the British government during the World War very seriously."37
As a further commentary on alleged Allied "idealism" in this matter we may cite the facts, since uncovered, that the Anglo-French war plans of 1911, 1912, and 1913 themselves contemplated the violation of Belgian territorial integrity in certain circumstances that might arise during a war with Germany! To make matters still worse, the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, even refused to promise British neutrality during the Franco-German war in return for a German counter promise to respect Belgian territory! The simple truth is that, as Grey later admitted, Britain was so committed to the support of France by secret agreements that, with or without the invasion of Belgium, she would have entered the war. Otherwise he would have felt compelled to resign. Indeed, it is evident from John Morley's famous Memorandum On Resignation as well as from the personal assurance of John Burns to Professor Barnes that the actual decision of the British Cabinet to go to war was made before the matter of Belgian was even mentioned! 38
Lusitania incident
The sinking of the British liner Lusitania in 1915 provoked a wild outburst against "Hun barbarism." Cleverly garbled accounts of the sinking confirmed many Americans in their belief in an innate German contempt for the most elementary principles of decency and humanity. Little heed was paid to the German charges that the vessel was armed and carried a cargo of munitions. Though the truth of the former allegation had never been definitely ascertained one way or another, the latter was unquestionably true. Important also was the fact that well in advance of the sinking, the German government had paid for prominent advertisements in the American press warning American passengers of the peril they faced while aboard British vessels in the war zone. These warnings were also repeated by the American Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan.
There are other perplexing facts about the Lusitania as well. For some reason a new captain, William Thomas Turner, was placed in charge for the return trip from New York. Turner flagrantly violated all the formal sailing orders given him in New York. Contrary to these instructions, he sought out rather than avoided the highly dangerous zone in which the vessel was actually sunk. Again, contrary to orders, he neither increased his speed nor followed a zigzag course when in the general zone of danger. Did captain Turner receive a subsequent set of instructions by wireless altering his original orders? Why was Turner met by Churchill upon his arrival at the pier after his rescue and taken directly to King George V and knighted? Was there a British governmental design to invite a submarine attack?39
Whatever the answer to these questions, one thing is certain: even if such a ship were unarmed, the German submarine commander had no way of knowing this and had an obligation to his men to be wary of merchantmen which, in fact, often were armed and travelling under instruction not to surrender "tamely."40 Perhaps the most trenchant indictment of our myopic attitude towards the German use of the submarine comes from the pen of an American student of the subject:
This campaign was the German reply to the British blockade. In so far as America acquiesced in the blockade, she made the submarine campaign inevitable. Since it was treated as a fact in itself, without reference to its genesis, the American Government took up a rigid position of disapproval of the campaign. The American attitude toward the end product of a British policy led us to war with Germany.41
When the American government further insisted, contrary to all reason, upon defending the immunity from attack of even armed British merchantmen and American citizens aboard them, the felony was compounded.42 When Britain followed a policy of waging unrestricted submarine warfare in the Baltic, where the German navy ruled the surface of the sea, sinking unarmed Swedish, Norwegian, and German merchantmen at the cost of numerous neutral lives, the Wilsonian homilies on international morality which were tendered with such regularity to Germany were not at all forthcoming.
As a final commentary on our attitude toward the use of the submarine by Germany in 1915 it should be noted that duirng World War II we adopted essentially the same view held earlier by the Germans when it was a question of one of our own underseas vessels surfacing politely to inform a potentially dangerous merchantman of intent to attack!43
Atrocity propaganda
It has often been remarked that "in wartime truth is the first casualty." The 1914 conflict was no exception to this maxim. Atrocity propaganda in the hands of clever and unconscionable men became an exact science. All the belligerents endeavored to make the best use of this potent weapon. It must be admitted, however, that the efforts of the Central Powers in this direction were fumbling and ineffectual. The Allies, and particularly Great Britain, by contrast, proved themselves most capable of adroitly manipulating world opinion by widespread diffusion of fantastic tales of German villainy. Britain, of course, had the additional technical advantage of control of the cables and hence could rigidly censor all news coming to America. As C. Hartley Grattan expressed it, "honest, unbiased news simply disappeared out of the American papers along about the middle of August, 1914."44
Incredible tales of German barbarism in Belgium and France gave rise to a myth of unique German savagery that continues to color the thinking of many persons to this day. German soldiers, the world was gravely informed, amused themselves by cutting off the hands of Belgian babies. Another oft-repeated tale related how German soldiers amputated the breasts of Belgian women out of sheer viciousness. A slightly different variation of this story asserted that the amputation had been carried out by syphilitic Germans who, having ravished the women, wished to warn their countrymen thereby. There were persistent rumors about the crucifixion of Canadian soldiers. Perhaps the most repulsive and widely circulated of these fabrications was that concerning a German corpse factory where the bodies of both Allied and German soldiers killed in battle were allegedly melted down for fats and other products useful to the German war effort. The fact that Arthur Ponsonby utterly demolished the canard45 did not prevent the Soviets from charging again at Nuremberg that during World War II a "Danzig firm ... constructed an electrically heated tank for making soap out of human fat."46
Atrocity propaganda was immeasurably effective in the United States during the first World War. When in the American papers of May 11-12, 1915, which was during the very week following the torpedoing of the Lusitania, there appeared the notorious Bryce Report on alleged German atrocities, American indignation at Germany reached a blind and febrile peak. The membership of the Bryce Committee, appointed by Parliament to investigate reports of alleged German atrocities, comprised some of the most distinguished jurists and historians in great Britain. To Americans it seemed that the chairman, Viscount Bryce, was one Briton who would never offer himself as the tool of tendentious propaganda. Bryce was a scholar of profound erudition and was considered by many to be the ablest foreign student of American government and institutions.
The "proofs" advanced by the Bryce Committee in support of the wildest tales of German fiendishness, as well as the methods employed in gathering them, violated every elementary rule of evidence. Careful non-German scholars, above all Arthur Ponsonby, have long since demonstrated the entire project to have been a tissue of distortions and outright falsehoods.47 Evidently, Bryce and his esteemed colleagues had few qualms about perverting the truth if it redounded to the benefit of what they termed the "high cause" of Mother England. In later years other scholars in both Britain and America would display a similar willingness to prostitute talent and reputation in the interest of writing vicious propaganda.
The grave consequences of all this lurid atrocity propaganda can hardly be exaggerated. Indeed, "propaganda" of atrocities ... might be said to have contributed more than any other single factor to the making of a severe peace."48 The extreme severity of that peace, it should be pointed out, provided certain assurance of the rise of Hitler or someone like him who would beguile the long-suffering and much-maligned German people with promises to snap the chains of slavery forged by the untried and unpunished "war criminals" of Versailles.
American scholars and 'war guilt'
In the period between the outbreak of the war in 1914 and American entry in 1917 the Allied cause found many ardent champions in the ranks of American academic scholars who fired the first salvos of artillery in the mounting American offensive against Germany. The Anglophile American historian, Bernadotte E. Schmitt49 painted a picture of nearly two centuries of Anglo-German relations out of which, in the end, Germany emerged a very poor second. To Schmitt the war was the end result of a German design to destroy the balance of power in Europe. No less influential was Thorstein Veblen's tendentious contribution Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution50 wherein Germany was depicted as incurably militaristic and Britain, on the contrary, as anti-militaristic to the point of virtual sanctity.
It should occasion no surprise then, in the circumstances, that once we had entered the war all the stops were pulled in the propaganda campaign against Germany. Academic historians like Professors William Roscoe Thayer, Charles Downer Hazen, Munroe Smith, and Albert Bushnell Hart hastened to invest the crude, popular Germanophobic propaganda with an aura of "scholarly" respectability, while the celebrated Committee on Public Information, popularly called the Creel Press Bureau, in a series of highly successful raids on the nation's campuses, enlisted the aid of a still greater list of American historians. The result: a crude but most effective fusillade of wildly Germanophobic pamphlets and brochures with suggestive titles like Conquest and Kultur, The German War Code, and The German Treatment of Conquered Territory. Many of these publications reached circulation marks of a million or more.51
From the German viewpoint, the most damaging wartime propaganda volume was that of Henry Morgenthau52 wherein it was alleged that the Kaiser, in company with the top bankers, diplomats, military leaders, and industrialists of Germany, decided on war at a secret Crown conference held at Potsdam on July 5, 1914. That Morgenthau was American Ambassador to Turkey and so presumably well informed seemed to lend credence to his charges which, he asserted, were based on revelations privately given him by Baron Wangenheim, the German Ambassador to Turkey. Scholars, including Fay and Barnes, whose works have already been cited, have, on the basis of contemporary documents, exposed the fictitious nature of the Morgenthau "revelations." The Crown Conference never took place for the very good reason that the persons alleged to have been present proved to have been elsewhere on that date. Yet Mr. Lansing's Commission of the Peace Conference cited the Crown Conference Legend as justification for Article 231 of the Treaty, the notorious German "war guilt clause."53
The Germanophobes of 1914-18 labored more effectively than even they realized themselves, for despite the brilliant work of a generation of "revisionist" scholars who blasted the entire Entente apologetical structure, they left a permanent residue of Germanophobia deep in Western minds. After 1933 this residue of hatred would be cleverly exploited by unscrupulous writers who would make of it the formulation for an even more widely distorted caricature of Germany, what became, indeed, a Germanophobic myth.
Germanophobia and Hitlerism
The influence of the Hitler regime on Western students of German history has been well described by Theodore Hamerow:
The new school ... assumed that National Socialism was more than a malignant manifestation of spiritual exhaustion and anarchy which had come in the wake of a ruinous war and an even more ruinous economic collapse. According to its view, the origins of the totalitarian ideology are deeply rooted in German life. They go back to the blood and iron of Bismarck, the paternalistic state of Frederick the Great, the political conservatism of Luther, and the resistance of the Teutonic tribalism to the conquering, civilizing, and Christianizing influence of the Romans. All German history is in a sense a gigantic factory manufacturing barbed wire for Buchenwald and Dachau ... Germany is the product of an unwholesome historical environment, it is the juvenile delinquent of European society. Once we recognize that the German mentality is different in kind from the mentality of the other nations of the West, we have the key to German history.54
Nazi racial policy and the assault upon the parties of the German Left provoked bitter reaction in America especially. "When liberals or socialists ... were silenced or forced to flee, their cause was quickly taken up by a very literate and vocal unit of the American public. But even more effective in some ways was the espousal of anti-Nazism by various communist front organizations ...55 Perhaps most important and widely circulated of the volumes on Nazi Germany emanating from the American Left were Frederick L. Schuman's The Nazi Dictatorship56 and Robert A. Brady's The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism.57
Thus after 1933 there was again a resurgence of Germanophobic literature reminiscent of -- indeed, worse than -- that of 1914-1918. That this latest batch of propaganda nonsense was at odds with the more dispassionate conclusions of revisionist scholarship of the immediately preceding years meant nothing to its originators. The calculated vilification of Germany proceeded apace.
Even a distinguished Australian professor in what was undoubtedly one of the relatively most impartial contemporary treatments of the Third Reich, was inspired to pen the following crude libel on the German people:
The Germans are a politically retarded race. They are still in the "myth" stage of development ... The Germans have never wanted democracy; they crave for authority, and respect the strong arm. They do not want individual freedom ... The average German would much rather salute a uniform than have a vote ... The German is designed by history and nature to provide mass material for dictatorship ...58
Anti-German (as distinct from anti-Nazi) feeling after 1933, and especially after the Nuremberg Racial Laws of 1935, encouraged an epidemic of crude potboilers which were given wide publicity by eagerly anti-German reviewers. The newspaper press, by and large, entered into the spirit of this campaign with a vigorous enthusiasm which left little room for complaint on the part of even the most pronounced critics of the Hitler regime. In the climate of opinion thus prepared, it was to be expected that the American mind in 1939 would be receptive to the Allied fiction of unique German responsibility for World War II.
Propaganda and the 'war guilt' charge again
Undismayed by the fact that revisionist scholarship had made a shambles of the same charge as applied to 1914 -- "this time it is different," some were heard to say -- American publicists and scholars for the second time in a generation hastened to join the propaganda drive against this latest manifestation of alleged German perfidy. According to their interpretation, usually delivered in feigned accents of aggrieved piety, the war was simply and purely a struggle between the forces of sweetness and light (Britain and France, of course) on the one hand and an evil, foul-smelling aggressor (Germany, obviously) on the other.
Never before in the history of the nation did America's leadership and opinion-making organs espouse the cause of a foreign belligerent with such unrestrained enthusiasm as they did that of Germany's enemies during World War II. From the outset, the American government, press, and radio openly and blatantly manifested a degree of dedication to the cause of Britain and France that made a hideous mockery of our official posture of neutrality. It has been said that "in wartime truth is the first casualty." The role of America's war-minded political leadership and camp-following press in the thirties and forties bears eloquent witness to the verity of this assertion. Recent research has served only to confirm the charge that "we were lied into the war."
Many of the circumstances of World War II seem to have been only a repetition of those of 1914. Again the story was circulated that only Germany was "prepared," that France and Britain had innocently or foolishly "slept" while the Axis powers had been feverishly building up their armies. Winston Churchill contributed much to this legend with his frequent allusions to "unarmed Britain." But, in truth, as Mr. Churchill's biographer, Emrys Hughes, had pointed out,59 Britain was hardly the "dove of peace among birds of prey." Two years before the outbreak of war Churchill could boast that "money for defense is certainly pouring out in all directions in Britain." Mr. Hughes aptly comments that Britain "... had plunged into the arms race like the Continental nations."60
The thesis of an "overwhelming" German armed superiority in 1939 is entirely without foundation in fact, as is evident from the official report to the Secretary of the Army of the United States submitted in 1947, which Mr. Hughes discusses at some length.
Perhaps the definitive repudiation of the myth that Germany was plotting global conquest in 1939 (apart from the lack of documentary evidence in support of that melodramatic conviction) is to be found in the amazing fact that Germany was, in reality, ill-prepared both militarily and economically when the war came. The most complete study of this important subject is that of an American economist, Burton H. Klein,61 who, pointing out that in Germany "there was no real mobilization of manpower prior to the outbreak of war," continues to say: "Thus, whether we examine the general nature of German economic recovery, or the raw material self-sufficiency program, or the mobilization of manpower, the same general conclusion is evident: The scale of Germany's economic mobilization for war was quite modest."62 As A. J. P. Taylor recently expressed it: "Even in 1939 the German army was not equipped for a prolonged war; and in 1940 the German land forces were inferior to the French in everything except leadership."63 The case has been concisely summarized by two American historians quite warm in their enthusiasm for the Allied cause in general and the foreign policy of Franklin Roosevelt in particular: "In a word, the Germans were equipped for a two-month Blitzkrieg, such as they waged in Poland. They were by no means ready for the type of war in which they became involved."64
Unfortunately for the schemes of the interventionists at the time, not all Americans were sold on the pristine unalloyed purity of the Allied cause or on the fable of a German threat to our national security. This necessitated a high pressure propaganda campaign, hitherto without parallel in American history. Before the war was barely ten months old, facile propagandists had utilized Germany's stunning military successes in Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Low countries, and France as the basis for shrewdly contrived charts purporting to reveal a nefarious German plot "to conquer the world." Germany's "blueprint for aggression" or "timetable for conquest," as it was variously labeled, was deliberately calculated, when coordinated with the most wildly fanciful tales of an omnipresent German "fifth column," to curdle the blood of unsuspecting Americans. William Henry Chamberlain's comments on this propaganda merit quotation here:
"Hitler's Fifth Column" was a popular subject for sensational magazine articles. One might have imagined that the United States was flooded with Axis agents, carrying on a active propaganda ... for influencing American public opinion. But on sober analysis this "fifth column" evaporates into the mist of overheated fantasy. No doubt there were German, Japanese, and Italian agents in this country. But they were not getting a hearing on lecture platforms or publishing articles in influential magazines. 65
The definitive repudiation of the "fifth column" fraud comes from the pen of a non-revisionist Dutch historian who admits that he too "was a victim of the fifth column panic" at one time.66
With the passage of time even the President himself did not shrink from the unsavory tasks of contributing personally to this palpably dishonest propaganda of fear. With his tongue in his cheek, he told the American people on October 27, 1941, that he had come by a secret German map revealing a Nazi deign to conquer South America. Moreover, he had another Nazi document disclosing Hitler's intention "to abolish all existing religious."67 Needless to say, these documents were not produced then for anyone else's examination, nor have they been produced in the intervening years, and with very good reason. They never really existed to begin with! Had such documents really existed, they would have proved incomparable grist for the prosecution's mill at Nuremberg.
The conventional interpretations given by Allied propagandists to explain the diplomatic origins of the war in 1939 as well as the background to American entry therein are as unlike the truth as it is humanly possible to imagine. When compared with the most recent revisionist research into these subjects, they read like something straight from the pages of Alice-In-Wonderland or a Grimm fairy tale.
Unfortunately, historians in both Britain and America, except for the revisionists, have operated on the assumption that "the question of war responsibility in relation to 1939 and 1941 is ... completely and forever settled. It is widely held that there can be no controversy this time."68 Yet even a casual exposure to the more significant revisionist literature dealing with that topic -- a literature which had developed despite a willful campaign of suppression on the part of most historians, reviewers, and publishing houses -- should occasion some doubts in the bosom of even the most ardent court historian.69 But the truth is that here have been very few signs of vigorous life in the corpus of scholarly integrity in the aftermath of World War II. All moves of a peaceful nature by Axis leaders before or during the war are ignored or misrepresented while the bellicose policies of Roosevelt, Churchill, Halifax, Kennard and other are clothed in the deceptive garb of sweet reasonableness.
Perhaps the most striking and certainly the most unexpected repudiation of the myth of "sole German guilt" for the 1939 war has come recently from the pen of an English historian hitherto almost notorious in his hostility to Germany, Dr. A.J.P. Taylor.70 British historians and publicists desirous of perpetuating the historical blackout in that country were thrown into an unreasoning panic by the appearance of Professor Taylor's volume, for, quite apart from the intrinsic merits of his arguments, Taylor, with his reputation for Germanophobia, is the one scholar from whose pen such a volume would have seemed least likely to come. His wartime treatise, The Course of German History, was one of the most virulent attacks ever penned on Germany by a professional historian anywhere. Nonetheless there is scarcely an article in the sacred creed of Allied wartime propaganda which he leaves unchallenged in his The Origin of the Second World War.
Taking every issue and crisis of major import which divided Germany and the West before the war, Taylor makes it clear that Hitler was a shrewd statesman who never wanted war and certainly not the global holocaust which actually came in 1939. Far from being the culmination of a sinister "German plot" to conquer the world, World War II was, on the German side, a struggle to "reverse the verdict of the first [World War] and to destroy the settlement which followed it."71 At worst, Taylor feels, the war was the unfortunate product of inept diplomacy a terrible tragedy of errors. In his own words: "In retrospect, though many were guilty, none was innocent ... This is a story without heroes; and perhaps even without villains ... The war of 1939 far from being welcome, was less wanted by nearly everybody than almost any war in history." 72
The vilification of Germany, 1941-45
If pro-Allied propaganda had earlier conditioned American thinking so as to smooth the path for eventual American intervention against Germany, that same propaganda after our entry in late 1941 was admirably calculated to persuade Americans of the inspired wisdom of a war and postwar policy of vindictive, grinding harshness toward the Reich.
In Britain, as in the United States, Germanophobia reached feverish proportions. One of the best known and most extreme of the Germanophobic writers in Britain during the period was the late Lord Vansittart. Having held highly important and responsible posts in the British diplomatic service, he was assured of a large and sympathetic audience. In a series of radio broadcasts and in a pamphlet with the suggestive title Black Record he cast Germany in the role of a shrike or "butcher bird" nation which had continually preyed on its weaker and more virtuous neighbors throughout the ages.
Another British writer, E. O. Lorimer, in a volume entitled What the German Needs73 presented the following "diagnosis" of the Germans:
It is now widely accepted amongst those who have given thought to the problem of Germany ... that the world has not a normal, rational people to deal with, but a nation suffering from an acute attack of homicidal mania, rendered more dangerous by a background of specious philosophy and more horrible by a lust for inhuman, calculated cruelty; a nation moreover subject to the recurrence of similar attacks, of which this last is only the most severe ...
Lorimer's solution to the "problem" of Germany included, among other things, a drastic reduction in the size of Prussia, the removal of every German from Danzig and East Prussia (remarkably like what actually happened in 1945), and the use of captured German troops as "labor gangs under Allied discipline and supervision, to build and clear, to dig and drain."74
In America an even more melodramatic and comic-book type interpretation of German history came from the pen of Paul Winkler with his The Thousand Year Conspiracy: Secret Germany Behind the Mask.75 According to Winkler, Hitler and Nazism were but the current manifestations of a millennium-long "conspiracy" against all human civilization hatched centuries ago by sinister "Prusso-Teutonic" forces within Germany.
Another writer in this country, Theodore N. Kaufman, in a book which in retrospect amazes one in that it could even find a self-respecting publisher, 76 insisted the Nazis "were merely the mirrors reflecting centuries-old inbred lust of the German nation for conquest and mass murder." It was the "German people" who were "responsible" for the war and hence "must be made to pay." To rid the world of these "war-lusted souls," Kaufman advocated the "eugenic sterilization" of 48,000,000 Germans. Males over sixty and women over forty-five could be exempted. By such a policy he estimated that "Germanism" could be extinguished in two generations. Meanwhile, German war prisoners could, after sterilization, be placed in "labor battalions" for the rebuilding of ruined cities while the Reich itself could be partitioned among its deserving neighbors. Even the inspired savagery of Joseph Stalin, in whose criminally fertile mind originated what later was called the "Morgenthau Plan," seems tame in comparison with the spirit of the "Kaufman Plan." Yet the self-constituted custodians of international morality at Nuremberg with their boundless capacity for "selective indignation," to use Sir Arnold Lunn's pithy phrase, could find no words of reproof for such genocidal schemes directed at the German people!
One might dismiss writers like Winkler and Kaufman as lunatic fringe fanatics, and even Vansittart was, after all, a politician and hence might be expected to indulge in some strong propagandizing. But it is difficult to understand why talented scholars, without solicitation, rushed into print with the most specious Germanophobic works. For example, the above-mentioned British historian A. J. P. Taylor in a facile book, The Course of German History,77 undeniably characterized by a sparkling literary style, wrote that:
Germany is not a typical European nation, nor even a typical Great Power; shaped by history, it has acquired a unique character and played a unique role, a role almost entirely aggressive and destructive, an alien body in the structure of European civilization.78
No doubt many uninformed non-Germans were impressed by such irresponsible statements at the time. Viewed, however, in the light of the last decade and a half, during which time Berlin had become a glowing symbol of Western opposition to Red totalitarianism, there is something contemptibly mean and petty about them.
The French historian, Edmond Vermeil, in a work of considerable popularity79 expressed much concern about an alleged German offensive against Europe and "Western humanism" throughout history. Vermeil, incidently, became one of the leading spokesmen of a school of writers fond of tracing the roots of Nazism back to a supposedly pathological German intellectual and cultural tradition.
Another example of this type of perverted intellectual history concealed behind impressive trappings of scholarship was William Montgomery McGovern's >From Luther to Hitler.80 In Germany, McGovern explained, there was a deeply rooted feeling that "liberal institutions were essentially pernicious." This feeling was traceable to a "Fascist-Nazi" political tradition that had long been developing in Germany. Thus Luther was an "early precursor" of Hitler as were Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and a long litany of other Germans too numerous to mention.
The prostitution of the intellect for propaganda purposes assumed still other forms. An entire school of Sunday supplement writers sought to explain a mythical "German problem" in terms of the jargon of psychiatry. Germany, according to this interpretation, was very definitely the victim of an "abnormal national personality," possibly even schizophrenic. An American neuropsychiatrist, Richard Brickner, exploited this illicit technique of transferring without warrant psychiatric and medical concepts applicable only to individuals to the entire broad field of historical interpretation when he diagnosed Germany to be a "paranoid" nation with a "paranoid" history going back at least five generations.81 Paranoia, it might be pointed out, is generally regarded as extremely difficult, if not impossible, to cure. Might it not be advisable then to destroy such a nation or to sterilize its population?
Another American psychiatrist 82 concluded that the Nazi regime was the historical upshot of "personality adjustments" deriving from German family relationships. Since the typical German father was a supposed tyrant, it was easy for the Germans to submit meekly to the totalitarian tyranny of Hitler who was the symbolical embodiment of paternal authority.83
Unconditional hatred
During World War II this stream of Germanophobic literature reached flood tide proportions. The situation in the cinema and radio was, if anything, worse. The "hate Germany" motive seemed uppermost even in our top level strategic planning. Indeed, our entire wartime policy can very well be summed up as one of "Unconditional Hatred," to borrow Russell Grenfell's apt term. This driving, irrational impulse seemed to operate without reference to, and even to the exclusion of, all other goals. No thought was given to the power balance situation of tomorrow or the day after, to the insane folly of substituting the inherently far more menacing power of the U.S.S.R. for that of Germany, Italy and Japan in Europe and the Far East. One might have imagined that the alliances and enmities of the period had been given eternal certification in Heaven.84
Had there been even a modicum of rational planning from the standpoint of enlightened self-interest, we would not, we could not, have made "Unconditional Surrender" and the diabolical "Morgenthau Plan" the bases of our policy. Had we not permitted reason and good sense to be consumed in the fires of vindictive passion, we would never have assented to the fateful innovation of constituting ourselves at once as judge, jury, prosecutor, and hangman of defeated military and political leaders at Nuremberg. Had we not permitted ourselves to be moved by the base spirit of hypocrisy, our much vaunted sense of humanitarian values and moral indignation would never have permitted us to wink at and even encourage the "Crimes Against Humanity" perpetrated by the Poles, Czechs, and Russians against 14,000,000 Eastern Germans in 1945-1946.85
Post-World War II Germanophobia
After World War II there was a marked lessening of interest in Germany with the consequence that there was a considerable decline in the current production of literature concerned with that country. Be that as it may, however, books and articles about Germany are still fairly plentiful. Hence the question arises: Has there been any significant development of a corrective literature to counter the tendentious interpretations of previous years? To the shame of honest historiography, the answer must be a very decided negative. There is a continuing "historical blackout," to borrow Harry Elmer Barnes' phrase, where Germany is concerned. The older historians, of the most part, manifest a stubborn reluctance to surrender their fixed delusions. The younger ones have been so indoctrinated during their entire education careers that they seem completely unaware of the challenge thus presented to their scholarship. The sole exception to this is a veritable handful of revisionist historians. Thus far, however, their efforts have been mainly limited, by and large, to tracing the origins of World War II and the genesis of Pearl Harbor. Little attention of a revisionist nature has been accorded to German history as such by non-German scholars.
Typical of postwar attempts by Western historians to perpetuate the Germanophobic myth was Hans Kohn's article "Rethinking Recent German History."86 Kohn resuscitated all the stock villains of German history who had long been so dear to the hearts of melodramatic anti-German writers: Bismarck as the supposed embodiment of Machiavellian power politics; the wicked Prussian and German ruling classes; that nebulous demon, German intellectual development and all the rest of the tiresome litany. He even attacked those who "attempt to show that the pernicious trends in modern German history were common to European civilization as a whole." For example, he cites the charge that Gobineau's racism influenced Wagner, though it is an undeniable fact. He writes:
But isolated trends in Western nations become dominant ideas in Germany. Kings, diplomats, and demagogues, who succumbed to the demoniac lure of power, existed elsewhere; but the inclination of the majority of the German people and of German intellectuals to accept them uncritically is the troubling problem.
Further on he relates that the Nazi "deviation from the main lines of European development ... started long before Hitler." He quotes with obvious approval the hackneyed view that "National Socialism was made possible by the separating of German political thought from Western European thought ..." This supposed separation he traces back to Fichte and Hegel. Perhaps it should not surprise us that even the present urgent state of world affairs had had little influence upon Mr. Kohn's tendentious views of German history. He still seems to feel we can afford the luxury of baiting Germany, as is evident from some of his recent articles in which he delivers his accustomed wearying preachments to the Germans on the alleged pernicious influences in their history.87
A widely read college level text by Louis L. Snyder, gathers between its covers all the threadbare cliches and superstitions ever penned by Germanophobic writers.88 Snyder is virtually obsessed with his favorite delusions of intellectual history. To read his account, one might imagine that pre-Hitlerite Germany had some sort of monopoly on "irrationalism," "racism," and "anti-Semitism."
The following quotation is a fair sample of Mr. Snyder's "scholarship":
Nazi extremism was not a bolt out of the heavens, nor did it occur in a vacuum. Behind it was a long tradition; its roots lay deep in history. It was the result of a national tradition of discipline and obedience, ground into the Germans by a combination of Hegelian worship of the State, Prussian intransigence, militarism, nationalism, romanticism, and historicism ... Germany has remained an obstreperous, unhappy stepchild among nations. Responsible for this phenomenon is a combination of peculiar historical and psychological factors ... Politically immature and beset by a sense of insecurity, the Germans overcompensated by turning to any father-image who seemed to satisfy their needs -- "der Alte Fritz" to William of the iron fist to the hypomaniac Hitler.89
Writing a full twelve years after the war's end, Hilda Graef went all the way back to the writings of Meister Eckhart, a fourteenth century German mystic, for an "already quite plain" manifestation of the "sinister streak" she professed to find in the "German makeup."90 Like many before her, Miss Graef sought to drag psychiatry in by the heels when she offered the opinion that Germany is a "schizophrenic nation."91
It seems incredible that years after the end of World War II sensational treatments of the Winkler-Kaufman-Brickner variety should continue to appear in print. Yet such has been the case. T. H. Tetens in a fantastic volume92 which, if believed, would drive an impassable wedge between Germany and the rest of the West to the advantage of the Soviets, gives a feverish account of an alleged diabolical scheme by German "geopolitical master minds" operating out of Madrid (how fitting from a leftist viewpoint) and Bonn to sell out the West to Moscow. The Tetens book reads like something straight from the pages of Alice in Wonderland or the Thousand and One Nights.93
An article by Alfred Werner94 achieved a new dimension even for Germanophobic cant. Mr. Werner expressed concern lest recent expressions of "philo-Semitism" in Germany might enable the Germans to find a "catharsis" and thus too easily liquidate their "guilt." He tells his readers in reference to recent favorable German reactions to the play The Diary of Anne Frank that "it is one thing to find 'catharsis' in the theater, and quite a different thing to admit, 'Yes, I am guilty,' and to go on living with this feeling of guilt." Apparently no German must ever again lift his head in polite company. It is not at all surprising that Werner should accept the imbecilic notion of the "collective guilt" of the German people so popular with Karl Jaspers and some others. On the other hand, Germans were widely anathematized journalistically for the recent world wide rash of anti-Semitic outrages. It would truly seem as if the Germans are damned-if-they-do and damned-if-they-don't.
But undoubtedly the most widely publicized book dealing with Germany to appear in America since the end of World War II had been William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.95 For many months in succession the Shirer volume held first place in the nonfictional category of the best seller list. When one considers the sheer bulk of the volume and the turgid if ingratiating style in which it is written, this is a remarkable tribute to the manner in which skilled promoters can contrive popularity. But far more important, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, embodying as it does the very worst features of the Germanophobic propaganda of 1933-1945, contributes very little to an honest understanding of German history, its publicity buildup and the rave reviews to the contrary notwithstanding. Again and again the reader is sharply reminded of the author's bias against not merely the Nazis but the entire German people. For example, as early as page five he writes that "the German people" were "a natural instrument which he [Hitler, that is] was able to shape to his own sinister ends." And again we are told96 that Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and HItler left a common stamp upon the German people in the form of a "lust for power and domination, a passion for unbridled militarism, a contempt for democracy and individual freedom and a longing for authority, for authoritarianism." And once more in thundering tones of pontifical certitude it is asserted that "Nazism and the Third Reich ... were but a logical continuation of German history." 97
Shirer gives scarcely a hint as to the real reason for the advent of Nazism: the fact that Germany was saddled with a Draconian peace, the terms of which were mitigated through the years but slightly and then haltingly and with ill grace. His account of the coming of World War II simply takes no account of the findings of recent revisionist scholarship, as is perhaps to be expected, while his repeated sneers directed at the members of the anti-Nazi resistance within Germany only betray still further his basic and deep-seated antipathy to everybody and everything German. The appearance of such a work at this time when German and Western amity was never more urgently needed is distinctly to be regretted.
Even more regrettable, however, has been the emergence, in large part during the months following the seizure of Adolf Eichmann, of a body of horror literature alleging brutal German wartime crimes, mainly against the Jews of Europe, of such depravity and magnitude that readers might thereby be tempted to speculate that, whatever Allied statesmen did to provoke conflict with the Axis powers, they were entirely justified in taking such action.98 Should even the worst of these questionable charges against Germany be one day verified by some tribunal concerning whose impartiality there is agreement on all sides, it would still be necessary to remember that they were made possible by the war itself. Equally as important, they would have to be balanced off against the crimes perpetrated against the Germans by the Allies. Hitherto it had been customary only to cite those crimes attributed to Germany.
Allied 'war crimes'
Certainly, the expulsion in 1945 of 14,000,000 Eastern Germans from their ancestral homeland by the Czechs, Poles, and Soviets with the tacit connivance of the Western Allies was a "war crime" by any standard. Moreover it took on distinctly macabre overtones when the discrepancy between the number expelled and those who actually reached Germany reached a possible three million mark.
Surely, too, the as yet little known fact that not Hitler but the British, by their own admission, initiated unrestricted bombing of civilian areas ought to merit for them membership in the select society of "war criminals." The unbelieving reader need only consult the testimony of the British officials J. M. Spaight and Sir Arthur Harris, for incontrovertible proof of this charge.99 A decision of the British Air Ministry made on May 11, 1940, to attack targets in Western Germany instituted the practice of bombing purely civilian objectives. This "epoch-making event," as F. J. P. Veale correctly describes it, marked an ominous departure from the rule that hostilities are to be limited to operations against enemy military forces alone.100 Spaight, former Principal Secretary of the Air Ministry, makes the following amazing comment on the decision of May 11, 1940:
Because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic bombing offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision of May 11, 1940, the publicity it deserves. That surely was a mistake. It was a splendid decision.101
But the "great decision," the "splendid decision" of May 11, 1940, which was ultimately to cost the lives of millions, including thousands of Mr. Spaight's own countrymen, was to have an even more grisly sequel, for, according to Sir Charles Snow who had charge of selecting scientific personnel for war research in Great Britain in World War II, F. A. Lindemann, a Cabinet member and confidant of Churchill, produced in early 1942 a remarkable Cabinet paper on the subject of the strategic bombing of Germany:
It described, in quantitative terms, the effect on Germany of a British bombing offensive in the next eighteen months (approximately March 1942-September 1943). The paper laid down a strategic policy. The bombing must be directed essentially against German working-class houses. Middle-class houses have too much space round them, and so are bound to waste bombs ...102
One wonders if it was the cultivated humanitarianism inherent in this decision to assure the death of more working class Germans per bomb which entitled the Allies, and in particular the British, to sit in moral judgment on German leaders at Nuremberg in 1946!
Can anyone doubt that the "Morgenthau Plan" which envisaged the destruction of the Ruhr mines, the pasteurization of a primarily industrial Germany, and the political dismemberment of Germany was a "war crime?" Had it been carried out rigorously, it would have been, as Freda Utley describe it, "the greatest act of genocide perpetrated in modern times ... At least thirty million people would have died of starvation."103 Though, fortunately, this diabolical scheme was never carried out to the letter, its spirit so permeated the occupational planning for Germany under the early "levels of industry" plans that for a long time after the war had ended Germans were deliberately kept on a diet far below that enjoyed by the inmates of Auschwitz up to almost the end of the war.
Who can doubt the criminal quality of the Soviet butchery of thousands of Polish officer in the Katyn forest in 1940? Even the Nuremberg tribunal resisted (albeit by inaction) Soviet attempts to lay that one at the door of Germany.104 Or perhaps the moral superiority of our "noble" Soviet allies, as we were fond of calling them, rested upon the manner in which they distinguished themselves in brutalizing the women of conquered lands. No doubt the enthusiastic response of the Soviet soldiery to the incitements of Ilya Ehrenburg to seize the women of Germany as the spoils of victory which resulted in the rape of half the women of Berlin alone lent substance to the pretensions of moral dignity assumed by the prosecuting powers at Nuremberg.105
German 'guilt' in perspective
Any final summation or balance sheet of German war crimes honestly verified, it may then be assumed, will most assuredly be balanced out by the sordid record of Germany's hypocritically self-righteous enemies.
At the heart of the conviction that German World War II atrocities were quantitatively and qualitatively without parallel in the annals of human experience is the as yet unverified allegation that, in the pursuit of a macabre "Final Solution," 6,000,000 Jews were cold-bloodedly murdered in gas chambers and before Einsatzkommando firing squads. The "evidence" presented in support of this charge to date had not been more persuasive than that used to substantiate the gruesome stories of German atrocity horrors spelled out in the long since discredited Bryce Report of 1915.
Neither the proceedings at Nuremberg in 1946 nor those associated with the recent trial of Adolf Eichmann were such as to inspire the confidence of the impartial investigator. Likewise the frenetic efforts of some academic scholars to prove the charge have fallen quite flat.106 But even if one should assume the worst to be true and, from the welter of conflicting numerical estimates as to the number of Jewish fatalities, accept the largest, 6,000,000, as undoubtedly correct, the number of victims of these German atrocities would still fall far short of the number of German, Japanese, and Italian non-combatants who perished at Allied hands as the result of mass population expulsions, saturation bombing of civilian centers, postwar deprivation, and Soviet massacres and political liquidations.
The simple fact then is that there is every reason to believe that a final accounting must exculpate Germany of any unique inhumanity in the waging of World War II, just as revisionist scholarship had exonerated her of sole or even primary guilt for the war itself.
Certainly there is not justification for those writers, and above all those academic "scholars," in the West who continue to parrot the crudities and distortions of yesteryear. There is a monotonous uniformity in all their interpretations, the fundamental error of which lies in the fact that they, in assessing the reasons for the demise of democracy and the rise of Nazi totalitarianism in Germany, ascribe primary or even sole causality to factors supposedly indigenous to German history and society. The alleged "weakness" or "ineptitude" of democratic Germans is a theme which runs like a red thread through most such treatments. Coupled with a sinister streak" which has purportedly manifested itself in a diseased intellectual and political development and an alleged obsession with militarism, this usually suffices to "explain" for us "the course of German history" with its "logical culmination" in National Socialism.
As might be expected, such critics scarcely comment on the Allied "statesmen" at Versailles, who, in direct violation of the pre-Armistice agreements, imposed a punitive peace on the Reich. Nor have they much to say of the intransigence of Western "democratic" politicians who refused to make the slightest concessions to Germany during the interwar years. Non-German "guilt," however much it might have contributed to the rise of Hitler, is never a popular subject with them.
Germany during the Weimar era produced in Gustav Stresemann and Heinrich Brüning two of the ablest statesmen of the present century. These men were thoroughly "democratic" to the core.107
Had either of these men been offered a fraction of the concessions to which they were entitled, the Weimar Republic could have been saved and the world spared the insane bloodbath of 1939-45, as well as the consequent alteration of the world balance of power to the advantage of the U.S.S.R. This was the portentous, terrifying essence of the most genuinely crucial period in modern world history; what seems, indeed, to have marked the real beginning of the Decline of the West. It is a story in which the impartial historian can assign at most a very minor role to German villainy. If villains must be had, the historian must also look elsewhere: to Paris, to London, to Washington, and to Moscow, but only lastly to Berlin.
Appendices
Appendix I
The reader may best obtain an adequate insight into the real reason for the advent of World War II in the following: Harry Elmer Barnes:, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, just cited, and his articles "The End of the Old America," Modern Age, Spring, 1958, "Revisionism and the Promotion of Peace," Liberation, Summer Issue, 1958, and "Revisionism Revisited," Liberation, Summer issue, 1959. See also Fritz Hesse, Hitler and the English (London: Allen Wingate, 1954); Emrys Hughes, Winston Churchill: British Bulldog, His Career in War and Peace, cited above; Charles Callan Tansill, Backdoor to War, cited above; and Luigi Villari Italian Foreign Policy Under Mussolini (New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1956). My own article "Revisionism and Roosevelt's Foreign Policy," American Mercury, December, 1959, contains a brief summary of the pertinent facts.
The provocative pre-Pearl Harbor diplomacy which finally eventuated via the Pacific "backdoor" in the war so ardently sought by the Roosevelt Administration is competently chronicled by various writers including the contributors to Dr. Barnes' symposium Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and Professor Tansill's Backdoor to War just cited. Other worthwhile accounts which might profitably be consulted include Charles A. Beard, American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932-1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946) and, by the same author, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948); William Henry Chamberlain, America's Second Crusade, already cited; Richard N. Current, Secretary Stimson: A Study in Statecraft (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1954); George Morgenstern, Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War (New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1947) and Rear Admiral Robert A. Theobald, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor (New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1954). The most complete listing of revisionist books dealing with all aspects of World War II is to be found in the indispensable Select Bibliography of Revisionist Books (Oxnard: Oxnard Press-Courier, 1958).
Appendix II
The interested reader should gain an adequate insight into the true nature of the wartime diplomacy of the West in the following volumes which deal entirely or in part with the subject: Hanson Baldwin, Great Mistakes of the War (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950); William Henry Chamberlin, America's Second Crusade (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1950); George N. Crocker, Roosevelt's Road to Russia (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1959); Richard N. Current, Secretary Stimson: A Study in Statecraft (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1954); Richard F. Fenno, The Yalta Conference (Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1955); John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth (New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1956); Rosalie M. Gordon, How the Reds Won (New Rochelle: America's Future Inc., 1959); William L. Neumann, Making the Peace, 1941-1045 (Washington, D.C.: Foundation for Foreign Affairs, 1950); and Felix Wittmer, The Yalta Betrayal (Caldwell: The Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1954).
Appendix III
The incredible story of the "Morgenthau Plan" is fully exposed by John T. Flynn in his latest edition of The Roosevelt Myth, already cited, as well as by George N. Crocker in his Roosevelt's Road to Russia, likewise already cited. Here one might also consult Eugene Davidson's The Death and Life of Germany (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959) and John Snell's Wartime Origins of the East-West Dilemma Over Germany (New Orleans: The Hauser Press, 1959).
The facts about "Unconditional Surrender" are well brought out in various volumes including: Harry C. Butcher, My Three Years With Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946); Allen W. Dulles, Germany's Underground (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1947); Mother Mary Alice Gallin, O.S.U., Ethical and Religious Factors in the German Resistance to Hitler (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1966); Hans Rothfels, The German Opposition to Hitler (Hinsdale: Henry Regnery Company 1948); and Albert C. Wedemeyer, Wedemeyer Reports (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1958).
The fragile legal and historical foundations of the ill-advised Nuremberg fiasco with its ominous significance for the future are amply discussed in Montgomery Belgion, Victor's Justice (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1949); Lord Hankey, Politics, Trials, and Errors (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1950); and F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism (Appleton: C.C. Nelson Publishing Company, 1953).
The ordeal of the Oder-Neisse and Sudeten Germans at the close of World War II had not yet been fully told, though there is abundant evidence, much of it making for revolting reading, contained in Kurt Glaser, Czecho-Slovakia: A Critical History, (Caldwell: The Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1961); Johannes Kaps, The Tragedy of Silesia: 1945-46 (Munich: "Christ Unterwegs," 1952-53); Jürgen Thowald, Flight in the Winter (New York: Pantleon Books Inc., 1951); Wilhelm K. Turnwald, Documents on the Expulsion of the Sudeten Germans (Munich: Munich University Press, 1953). My own article "Whose Collective Guilt?" in the Social Justice Review of June, 1959, is a brief summary of the trials of the German expellees.
Notes
1. Quoted in Manfred Meserschmidt, Deutschland in englischer Sicht: Die Wandlungen des Deutschlandbildes in der englischen Geschichtsschreibung (Düsseldorf: Michael Triltsch Verlag, 1955), p. 51.
2. See George P. Gooch, Germany (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927), p. 88.
3. Cleveland: The Press of Western Reserve University, 1960.
4. Henry Cord Meyer, Five Images of Germany: Half a Century of American Views on German History (Washington, D.C.: The American Historical Association, 1960), p. 3.
5. It should be noted that the old and persistent conviction that Franco-American relations were undeviatingly friendly throughout the nineteenth century is quite at odds with the facts. For a recent scholarly study which reveals the full extent of Franco-American estrangement during these years see Henry Blumenthal, A Reappraisal of Franco-American Relations, 1830-1871 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1959).
6. Quincy Wright, A Study of War (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1942).
9. New York: American Book Company, 1937, III, pp. 350-352.
11. Unconditional Hatred (New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1954), p. 55.
12. Sidney Bradshaw Fay, the Origins of the World War (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1949), I, p. 51.
13. William L. Langer, European Alliances and Alignments: 1871-1890 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), p. 9.
14. Meserschmidt, op. cit., pp. 20-21.
16. Clare Eve Schieber, The Transformation of American Sentiment Toward Germany (Boston: The Cornhill Publishing Company, 1923), p. IX.
17. John Gerow Gazley, American Opinion of German Unification, 1848-1871 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1926), pp. 322 and 348.
18. Herbert Butterfield, History and Human Relations (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1952), pp. 162-163 and p. 221.
21. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1902.
22. Hermann Lutz, German-French Unity (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1957), p. 14.
23. Harry Elmer Barnes, The Genesis of the World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929, pp. 593-595.
25. F.J.P. Veale, "The Wicked Kaiser Myth," Social Justice Review, April, 1960, pp. 10-11.
26. Barnes, op. cit., pp. 590-596.
27. Quoted by Harry Elmer Barnes in "Revisionism Revisited," Liberation, Summer Issue, 1959, p. 25.
28. John L. Snell, The Nazi Revolution: Germany's Guilt or Germany's Fate? (Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1959), p. XI.
29. London: Harper and Brothers, 1904.
30. Henry Cord Meyer, op. cit., p. 7.
31. Pan-Germanism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913).
32. Henry Cord Meyer, op. cit., p. 7.
33. Harry Elmer Barnes, In Quest of Truth and Justice (Chicago: National Historical Society, 1928), p. 13.
34. Mildred Wertheimer, The Pan-German League, 1890-1914 (New York Columbia University Press, 1924).
35. Charles Callan Tansill, Backdoor to War (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952), p. 7.
36. See Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood In Wartime (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1928), p. 52 and William L. Langer's European Alliances and Alignments: 1871-1890 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), pp. 405-406.
38. Cf. Harry Elmer Barnes, The Genesis of the World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929), pp. 453-583 and Russell Grenfell, Unconditional Hatred (New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1954), pp. 3-23.
39. For more complete accounts of the Lusitania episode see the various treatments by Harry Elmer Barnes in his Genesis of the World War already cited, T.A. Bailey's "The Sinking of the Lusitania" in the American Historical Review of October, 1935, Charles C. Tansill, America Goes to War (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1938) and Oswald Garrison Villard's "The True Story of the Lusitania" in the American Mercury of May, 1935.
40. See Professor Tansill's work just cited, pp. 285-286.
41. C. Hartley Grattan, Why We Fought (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1929), p. 172.
42. Tansill, America Goes to War, pp. 649-650.
43. F.J.P. Veale, War Crimes Discreetly Veiled (New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1959), p. 213.
46. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), p. 971.
47. This raises the fascinating question as to whether some enterprising scholar may not one day do the same for the atrocity propaganda directed at National Socialist Germany during World War II.
48. James Morgan Read, Atrocity Propaganda, 1914-1919 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), p. VIII.
49. England and Germany, 1740-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1916).
50. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1915.
51. For a delightful treatment of the impassioned antics of American historians during World War I see C. Hartley Grattan's article "The Historians Cut Loose" in the American Mercury August, 1927.
52. Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (Garden City: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1918).
53. For a good recent treatment of this Crown Council myth see Harry Elmer Barnes "Revisionism and the Promotion of Peace," Liberation, Summer Issue, 1958, pp. 4-5.
54. "History and The German Revolution of 1848," The American Historical Review, October, 1954, pp. 35-36. For a more recent discussion of the historiography of National Socialist Germany see Andrew Whiteside's article "Understanding and Interpreting the Nazi Movement," Social Education, January, 1959, pp. 5-11.
55. Henry Cord Meyer, op. cit., p. 21.
56. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1935.
57. New York: Viking Press, 1937.
58. Stephen H. Roberts, The House That Hitler Built (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938), pp. 41-42.
59. Winston Churchill: British Bulldog, His Career in War and Peace (New York: Exposition Press, 1955), p. 160.
61. Germany's Economic Preparations for War (Cambridge: Havard University Press, 1959).
63. The Origins of the Second World War (London: Hanish Hamilton, 1961).
64. William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason The Challenge to Isolation, 1937-1940 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952), p. 166.
65. William Henry Chamberlin, America's Second Crusade (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1950), pp. 108-109.
66. Louis DeJong, The German Fifth Column in the Second World War (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Limited, 1956).
67. Charles C. Tansill, Backdoor to War (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952), p. 613.
68. Harry Elmer Barnes, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Caldwell: The Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1953), p. 9.
70. The Origins of the Second World War, cited above.
73. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1942, p. 14.
74. Ibid., pp. 110-112 and pp. 114-117.
75. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1943.
76. Germany Must Perish (Newark: Argyle Press, 1941).
77. New York: Coward-McCann, 1946.
79. Germany's Three Reichs: Their History and Culture (London: Andrew Dakers Limited, 1945).
80. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1941.
81. Richard Brickner, Is Germany Incurable? (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1943).
82. David Abrahamsen, Men, Mind, and Power (New York: columbia University Press, 1945).
83. See the devastation refutation of this puerile, pseudoscientific thesis by the American anthropologist, Robert H. Lowie in his Toward Understanding Germany (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1954).
86. The Review of Politics, July, 1952, pp. 325-345.
87. "Out of Catastrophe: Germany 1945-1960," The Review of Politics, April, 1960, pp. 163-174 and "Germany and Russia," Current History, January, 1960, pp. 1-5.
88. Basic History of Modern Germany (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1957).
90. "Sinister Germany," The Catholic World, June, 1957, pp. 186-192.
91. See my reply to Miss Graef, "The Truth About Germany" in The Catholic World, July, 1958, pp. 264-270.
92. Germany Plots with the Kremlin (New York: Henry Schuman, Inc., 1953).
93. See also Hans Habe's Our Love Affair with Germany (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1953) and Brian Connell's A Watcher on the Rhine (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1957) for other treatments which never seem to tire of flailing the dead horse of Hitlerism, as one reviewer has well expressed it.
94. "Germany's New Flagellants," American Scholar, Spring, 1958, pp. 169-178.
95. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960.
98. Comer Clarke, Eichmann: The Man and His Crimes (New York: Ballantine Books, Inc., 1960); John Donovan, Eichmann: Man of Slaughter (New York: Avon Books, 1960); Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz (New York: Popular Library, 1961); Joseph Kessel, The Man with the Miraculous Hands (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cuhady, Inc., 1961); Justice Michael A. Musmanno, The Eichmann Kommandos (Philadelphia: Macrae Smith Company, 1961); Quentin Reynolds, Minister of Death (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1961); Henry A. Zeiger, The Case Against Adolf Eichmann (New York: Signet Books, 1960). See also Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, "My Ordeal in Eichmann's Horror Prison," in the September, 1960 True magazine.
99. J. M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated (London: Geoffrey Bles, Ltd., 1944) and Sir Arthur Harris, bomber Offensive (London: Collins, 1947).
100. F. J. P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism (Apppleton: C. C. Nelson Publishing Company, 1953), p. 122.
102. C. P. Snow, Science and Government (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 48.
103. Freda Utley, The High Cost of Vengeance (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1949), pp. 15-16.
104. See F. J. P. Veale, War Crimes Discreetly Veiled (New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1959), pp. 38-51 and Joseph Mackiewicz, The Katyn Wood Murders (London: Hollis and Carter, 1951).
105. The sickening story of Allied mishandling of the women of conquered lands, including Austrians, Germans, and Hungarians is well exposed in Austin J. App's brochure Ravishing the Women of Conquered Europe (San Antonio: Privately Printed, 1946).
106. Gregory Frumkin, Population Changes In Europe Since 1939 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, Inc., 1951) and Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution (New York: The Beechhurst Press, 1953).
107. See particularly Henry L. Bretton, Stresemann and the Revision of Versailles (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953) and Felix E. Hirsch, "Stresemann in Historical Perspective," The Review of Politics, July, 1953, pp. 360-377. On Brüning consult Herman Lutz, German-French Unity (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1957), pp. 103, 108, 110, 118-123, 126-127, and 130 as well as Charles Callan Tansill's Backdoor to War (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952), pp. 33-35.Verso:
Connors, Michael F.
Dealing in hate:
London, Britons Publishing Co. [1966]
[5], 85 p. 19 cm.
LC CALL NUMBER: DD119.7 .C6
SUBJECTS: Propaganda, Anti-German.
LCCN: 67-72407
Dealing in hate : The
development of anti-German propaganda
Michael F. Connors
Institute for Historical Review
PO Box 2739
Newport Beach, CA
1996
48 p. : 22 cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-911038-55-8
1. Propaganda, Anti-German
LCCN: 79-127993
LC CALL NUMBER: DD119.7.C6 1970z
DEWEY CALL NUMBER: 327.1/4
First IHR edition: 1979
Second edition: 1996
Reproduced from the Institute of Historical Review web site
Louis Nizer What to do with Germany 1944 Louis Nizer's modest proposal for handling war criminals
"There are about 50 million German men and women within the procreation ages, and it is estimated that twenty thousand surgeons performing about twenty-five operations daily could sterilize the entire male population of Germany within three months, and the entire female population in less than three years." — Louis Nizer
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Many reflections spring to mind when reading the Louis Nizer plan for punishing the German people for World War II, but two of these reflections stand out as having particular relevance to the Ukrainian Archive.
Why pick on Ukrainians today?
That is, in Louis Nizer's book, What To Do With Germany (1944), Nizer offers a long and detailed list of all those that he thinks need to be punished. However, Ukrainians are nowhere on Nizer's list. Therefore, if Jews today have placed Ukrainians at the head of the line of those deserving punishment — as they seem to have done in Canada — then this must have happened in one of two ways:
(1) All those that Nizer advocated be punished have already been punished, so that punishment today devolves to those who were not important enough to make it into Louis Nizer's book. However, this is an impossibility, because — as the reader will instantly see below — Nizer's list of the Germans that merited punishment came nowhere close to being exhausted in war crimes proceedings.
(2) Jews have moved Ukrainians to the head of the line, jumping over the hundreds of thousands of Germans who had concerned Louis Nizer in 1944.
If the latter interpretation is indeed correct, then we must ask what the reasons might be. Why are Ukrainians, whose contribution to wartime atrocities did not merit any mention by Louis Nizer, today featured as the sadistic executors of Nazi policies during World War II?
What caused what?
In discussing cause and effect in the UKAR Introduction to Symon Petliura, it has been pointed out that Jews strangling Ukrainian independence can lead to Ukrainian pogroms, just as Ukrainian pogroms can lead to Jews strangling Ukrainian independence, perhaps simultaneously in an escalating spiral. It has been argued that a similar effect took place in the case discussed below. That is, German awareness of the Jewish plans to wreak vengeance on Germany intensified German hostility toward Jews, and resulted as well in Germany not surrendering earlier in the war, with hundreds of thousands of lives needlessly lost, and much property needlessly destroyed. Particularly incensing to the Germans were the privately-proposed Kaufman plan of 1941 to destroy the German people through mass sterilization, as elaborated below, and most particularly the Morgenthau Plan of 1944, which is more Draconian than the Louis Nizer plan below, and which unlike the Nizer plan was for a time adopted as official United States Government policy.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Who is Louis Nizer?
I find at hand the following entry:
Nizer, Louis, (1902- ), U.S. lawyer, author. Active in areas related to arts, copyright, plagiarism, etc. Author of courtroom reminiscences and book on Rosenberg Case. (Geoffrey Wigoder (ed.), Encyclopedic Dictionary of Judaica, Len Amiel Publisher, New York-Paris, and Keter Publishing House, Jerusalem, 1974, p. 455)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1944, Louis Nizer Tells the World:
What to do with Germany
Louis Nizer advocates that 5,000 Germans should be put to death without trial, as a condition of the armistice:
Nazi group leaders must be the first to be punished. Proof of their guilt is abundant. The armistice terms should simply declare them guilty. It would be farcical to try Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Streicher, Ley or other mass murderers. They have written the evidence of their guilt in blood on every pavement in Europe. The dossiers of the United Nations are bulging with data of their unsurpassed brutality. A trial tribunal should permit them to be heard on the questions of proper identification and the extent of the punishment, but no more. (Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 95)
Those condemned by name in the armistice should include the Fuehrer, the members of his cabinet, the Gauleiters, and the members of the High Command, governors of the occupied regions, and the leading bureaucrats in the state, municipal and Nazi Party organizations. These would number approximately five thousand men. Death penalties should be demanded. (Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 96)
Louis Nizer advocates that death penalties should be sought in trials against an additional 150,000 Germans:
Next, the leaders of German mass organizations should be indicted and tried. The Gestapo and Labor Front have about 75,000 such officials. In additions, there are about 75,000 subordinates who organized and taught the S. S., the Peasant Front and other such organizations. This entire group of about 150,000 men were the whole-hearted fanatical Nazis upon whom the ruling group relied. Death penalties should be sought against each of them. (Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 97)
Louis Nizer advocates that uncounted hundreds of thousands of other Germans should also be brought to trial, sometimes with the death penalty sought:
Every German officer above the rank of colonel, including corresponding ranks in the Air Force and Navy, every member of the Gestapo, S.S. officials, and members of the German People's Court and of the German Reichstag, should be indicted and tried.
Every German official, no matter how subordinate, who at any time gave or performed orders for the execution of hostages or the murder of conquered nationals, should be indicted, tried, and the death penalty sought.
In addition, the armistice should provide for the complete dissolution of the Officers Corps of the German army as well as of the army itself. Those among them who have violated any criminal or international law should be tried, and appropriate severe penalties imposed.
Any administrator, no matter how subordinate, who participated in the plunder of foreign countries, all directors of the German Steel Trust, of I. G. Farben or of the other German cartels, who, as we shall see later, participated in the conspiracy against world peace should be indicted, and appropriate severe penalties imposed.
Irrespective of rank or position, every soldier or civilian should be tried, against whom charges are filed involving any violation of law.
It is only by such thorough methods that the backbone of Nazism and Prussianism can be smashed and the danger of future aggression reduced. (Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 97)
Louis Nizer advocates that due process be suspended. Although Nizer appears to apply his arguments to the summary executions which he advocates for the leading 5,000 Nazis, the same arguments can support some similar but unspecified suspension of due process in all war crimes proceedings, and Nizer nowhere advocates that traditional protection of the rights of the accused be reverted to for any category of war crimes proceedings. Thus, Nizer appears to suggest that all war crimes proceedings might benefit from some relief from what he views as a finicky judicial propriety:
It may be contended by those finicky about judicial propriety that no injury could come from a public trial [as compared to summary execution] and that it would avoid criticism against the "absolutism" of the procedure [of summary execution]. However International Law is still to be molded on these critical problems, and it would have a salutary effect if the rule adopted were suitable to the heinousness of the offenses and the public anxiety for swift and certain punishment. The enormity of the crimes announced by the criminals themselves and the existence of millions of witnesses, make the requirement of proof an empty formalism. Since the purpose of the procedure is also to deter future international crime, any lumbering, awkward ritual to prove the self-evident would only cause contempt rather than respect for law. There is a point at which solicitude for a possible innocent victim of a severe rule becomes mawkish over-caution. We must be concerned with the dictates of common sense.
The ordinary man and woman must feel the majesty of law, the directness and practicability of its procedure, and its avoidance of routine ceremony. Only then will the thirst for retribution be directed into healthy legal channels. Otherwise, frustration may set in motion forces of violence far more serious than any legal unorthodoxy. (Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, pp. 95-96)
Louis Nizer recommends several other post-war measures, among them de-industrializing Germany:
First, that all plants and machinery which produce war material be scrapped, removed or demolished.
Second, that the machine tool industry, steel mills, power houses and important "heavy industries" be destroyed or taken from German control. While physical operation could be left to Germans, international trustees should determine personnel of management, contracts, investments and foreign arrangements. [...]
Third, that stocks of metals, oil or other strategic war materials in excess of normal domestic consumption be removed from the country and never replenished. (Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 193)
Louis Nizer contemplates several other measures which could be taken against the Germans, and rejects them — for example, extermination of the German people through sterilization. Curiously, though, Nizer claims to know people who advocate this particular measure. Although he does not identify who these people are, he demonstrates that they have worked the sterilization program out in detail and that he has followed their plan, and he lingers over the option long enough to demonstrate its feasibility. Possibly, Nizer is relying on the writing of Theodore N. Kaufman, Germany Must Perish, Argyle Press, Newark NJ, 1941:
Others, stirred to consuming hatred by German brutality, suggest that they be destroyed as a race by eugenic sterilization.
They argue that if compulsory serum treatments are justified by their benefits to the community, sterilization of the German people might similarly be considered a protective measure to immunize the world forever against the virus of Germanism. They point out that the surgical procedure is simple, painless and does not even deprive the patient of normal instincts, or their gratification. Vasectomy, the operation on the male, simply requires a slight incision since the sperm duct lies just beneath the skin. The operation takes only ten minutes to perform and the patient may resume work immediately afterwards. Ligation of the fallopian tubes, the operation which renders the female sterile, is more difficult but not much more dangerous.
There are about 50 million German men and women within the procreation ages, and it is estimated that twenty thousand surgeons performing about twenty-five operations daily could sterilize the entire male population of Germany within three months, and the entire female population in less than three years. At the normal death rate of two per cent per annum or one and a half million people yearly, the German people would practically disappear within two generations.
We reject this proposal but not because of German protests. They have forfeited all right to protest, for they themselves set this precedent. It is estimated that in Germany 300,000 people have been sterilized and in Poland 700,000 people. They [the Germans] have not been beyond the abolition of education so as to make populations slave-fit, the physical and mental corruption of the masses by pornographic and drug incitation, and the systematic extermination of whole peoples. (Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, pp. 4-5)
On the basis of a statement made by Julius Caesar in the first century BC, Louis Nizer offers his psychiatric diagnosis of the German people in the twentieth century AD:
Caesar wrote: "Their whole life is composed of hunting expeditions and military pursuits; from early boyhood they are zealous for toil and hardship. Those who remain longest in chastity win greatest praise among their kindred; some think that stature, some that strength and sinew are fortified thereby. Further they deem it a most disgraceful thing to have had knowledge of a woman before the twentieth year."
Psychiatrists will find in this observation fruitful material for their studies of the root causes of German sadism and of the inferiority complex which seeks to express itself through conquest and domination. The well-known tendencies in Germany towards homosexuality became public knowledge when Hitler justified his purge of Roehm and his adherents on the ground that they had been guilty of practices of degradation which corrupted the governing circles. Hitler's and Hess' own "aestheticism," Goering's abnormal practices (as determined by a Swiss court), and the evil conduct of the Streichers and other Nazi leaders, fit well into the characteristic pattern of bestiality. The study of psychotic behavior is still in the exploratory stages, but Caesar's report on the training begun ages ago by the German people to deny and invert normal instincts as part of the tribal custom may be a significant clue to sick German conduct. It is possible that German cruelty and blood lust is traceable to sexual inhibitions? Is there significance in the pornographic tendencies of the Germans fed by such official documents as Streicher's Stuermer? (Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, pp. 18-19)
Louis Nizer teaches that Germans are collectively responsible for the crimes of World War II because they collectively suffer from the disease of Germanism:
Millions of little cogs.
There was the Kaiser before Hitler, and Bismarck before the Kaiser and Frederick the Great before Bismark — indeed, two thousand years of Germanism to account for. Under each ruler millions of Germans fought fanatically, heroically, sacrificially. Theirs was not conduct induced by compulsion. Theirs was a will to execute a program and a readiness to die for it. The vaunted efficiency of German aggression depends on millions of little cogs acting in perfect coordination which involuntary compliance could not possibly produce. (Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 13)
Twice in one generation.
[N]o people can be innocent who have twice in one generation burst forth in aggression against all their neighbors, near and far. How is it that one spot on the surface of the earth, no larger than Texas, should so persistently explode and ravage the world?
And what were the toasts, the slogans, the anthems, the battle cries of this people? "Der Tag" — when Germany will rule the world. "Deutschland uber Alles". "Tomorrow we will rule the world." Rule the world! Rule the world! No people who can thrill to such a mission are innocent victims of wicked leaders. (Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 17)
Charlemagne's maddening refrain.
Other leaders had waged war because "from their youth up war is their passion." Plunder and the gratification of conquest were the driving force. But Charlemagne decreed an objective. It was not modest. He sought to conquer the world, a refrain which has since run through German existence with maddening and devastating persistence. He fought a war every year. His brilliant gifts were devoted to annihilating his neighbors and robbing them of their possessions. Germans followed him with fanatical devotion for the same principles which inspired them to follow the Kaiser and Hitler in our generation. (Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, pp. 23-24)
A cult of mass murder.
The Germans have developed a philosophy which makes a religion of war and a cult of mass murder. They consider it their mission to subjugate all other peoples to slavery. They exclude the doctrines of the sacredness of human life and liberty and substitute for it the ideal of war. The unique phenomenon of Germanism is that its conspiracy against world peace is not mere gangsterism or nihilism. It is an intellectual movement, if you please. It is supported by a philosophy carefully devised, nurtured and inculcated into every citizen. (Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 27)
Wagner incites lynching.
Only in Germany could a great artist like Wagner immerse his talent in blood lust and supply an emotional incitation of German mass murder. The significance lies not in some particular theory, but in the association of cultural and intellectual thinking in Germany with mob standards. Lynching is thus raised to the level of national policy. (Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 28)
The greatest indictment of a people in all history.
Never again must we be deluded into misplacing responsibility for German aggression. It is not the leader of the day, whether he be Charlemagne, Barbarossa, Frederick Wilhelm, the Great Elector, Frederick the Great, Bismarck, the Kaiser or Hitler, who wages war against mankind. It is the German people. Conditioned by centuries of false indoctrination — of a mad philosophy, of an absurd "soil-blood" racial theory, of a mystical paganism, the German people have ever been arch-conspirators against civilization. They have deliberately plotted to destroy it and subdue all mankind to serfdom. They have given their brains, their energies and their very lives through the centuries in fanatical devotion to this task. They have used inhuman and sadistic methods to achieve their psychotic national desires. They have ignored all civilized standards and restraints, and have made barbarism an ideal. They have distorted nationalism into a ritual of international murder.
This is the greatest indictment of a people in all history. But it is the truth. (Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 52)
Louis Nizer does not add collaborators from among the conquered peoples to his list of those deserving punishment because he recognizes that the conquered peoples were victims who turned against Nazi occupation:
Suppose Hitler had possessed an infinitesimal part of Napoleon's, or even Frederick the Great's, administrative capacity, he might have created a "new order" in the conquered territories, which might have given the semblance of security, peace, and a little justice. Then millions of exhausted, disillusioned people might have accepted their conqueror and eased his problems. Instead, his one-track mind, devoted to butchery and terrorism, fanned the dying embers of resistance, so that constant revolution and anarchy burned the heels of the oppressor. (Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany, Ziff Davis Publishing Company, Chicago and New York, 1944, p. 51)
Reproduced From: The Ukrainian Archive Web Site
 |
Irving vs. Goldhagen |
|
In the evening William C., a local chiropractor, drives me over the 26 mile causeway to downtown New Orleans, to the magnificently decorated synagogue in St. Charles Avenue where Daniel Goldhagen is to speak on his book Hitler's Willing Executioners. It came out last May and, of course, my own book Goebbels, Mastermind of the Third Reich was sacrificed by St. Martins Press, to give "Professor" Goldhagen a clear run with his work, as Frank Rich admitted in his syndicated OpEd piece at the time - no nasty confrontations on talk shows, etc., with somebody who might really know what he was talking about when it came to the Nazi era. The rotunda is packed with over a thousand listeners, and there is a sprinkling of police outside. A rabbi reads an introduction, while a thin, badly shaven young man, with a gaunt face reminiscent of Key West's HIV-positive population, slouches on a chair at stage-right. This turns out to be Goldhagen. His talk is disappointingly bland - delivered without notes in a disconcertingly gentle, laid-back voice, at such a slow and hesitant pace that one wonders whether he suffers perhaps from some chromosome defect that the newspapers have been too polite to mention. Goldhagen utters a ninety minute tirade against the "ordinary Germans" who he claims were fully aware of what was going on, and were willing and indeed eager to make up the firing squads when it came to getting rid of the Jews. As he talks of the zeal with which these "ordinary Germans" rounded up, tortured, mocked and killed their opponents, I think involuntarily of the West Bank, of the Arab children shot down with live ammunition, and of modern prime ministers who send assassins into neighbouring countries armed with nerve-gas syringes to dispose of their opponents. Dr. C. afterwards remarks that he has never before heard so much hatred spewed forth in a House of Worship. The same thought occurs to me: it was undiluted Volksverhetzung, far more ugly than the kind which now earns revisionists and other searchers for the truth hefty prison sentences in Europe. Goldhagen finally rambles to a conclusion - mid-sentence, mid-paragraph, in fact mid-lecture for all anybody can tell, since the whole talk is utterly shambolic from start to finish, without starting point, mile-markers, or objective. If he is a lecturer in politics at Harvard, I feel endlessly sorry for his students. One wonders how he got the job; one must ask his father, a long-time benefactor and professor at the university. Goldhagen Jr. probably picked up at least a $20,000 fee for his performance this evening. At question time I get to the microphone, and challenge him:
At this, I can feel the temper of the audience behind me rising. I press on:
The audience are now very restive, as it has dawned on them that I am not a Goldhagen fan.
This generates uproar, but I carry on:
At this there is a sprinkle of applause.
The answer is more verbal Jello from Goldhagen. He is clearly furious to have been accused of "inventing," as he (not I) put it, and he has no real answer to my point that, as he said, the Jews are now "complacent" about the risk of it all happening again. The chairman makes a
point of saying that no more questioners will be allowed to "make
statements." So it seems I got in not only under their radar, but
right under their skin as well. |
Reproduced From:
"I gazed into the mirror... There, staring at me, was the pallid, flabby-mouthed face of a crook" Black Boomerang p. 218
Atrocity Propaganda and Political Justice
Allied Propaganda during World War II
Udo Walendy
Sefton Delmer, born in Berlin in 1904, with Lord Beaverbrook's support, Daily Express correspondent of long standing, promoted in 1940 to be the leading correspondent for the British Information Secretary of State, Duff Cooper, and finally directed the German-language broadcasts of the BBC and the propaganda linked with it. About his first BBC radio broadcast Sefton Delmer wrote as follows:
For Hitler had chosen my first Friday - Friday July the 19th, 1940 - to make his triumphal Reichstag oration in celebration of his victory over France. More important still, he had chosen it as the occasion for his "final peace appeal" to Britain.
"It almost causes me pain," I heard him piously intone as I listened in on the radio in the BBC studio, "to think that I should have been selected by Providence to deal the final blow to the edifice which these men have already set tottering... Mr. Churchill ought for once to believe me, when I prophesy that a great empire will be destroyed which it was never my intention to destroy or even to harm... In this hour I feel it my duty before my conscience to appeal once more to reason and common sense in Britain... I CAN SEE NO REASON WHY THIS WAR MUST GO ON!"
...Within an hour of Hitler having spoken I was on the air with my reply. And without a moment's hesitation I turned his peace offer down. My colleagues at the BBC had approved of what I meant to say. That was enough authority for me.
"Herr Hitler," I said in my smoothest and most deferential German, "you have on occasion in the past consulted me as to the mood of the British public. So permit me to render your excellency this little service once again tonight. Let me tell you what we here in Britain think of this appeal of yours to what you are pleased to call our reason and common sense. Herr Führer and Reichskanzler, we hurl it right back at you, right in your evil smelling teeth..."
...Duff Cooper rallied to my support with all his suave authority. He assured the House that my talk had the Cabinet's full approval. And when the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax replied to Hitler a couple of days after me the sense of what he said was the same, although he used rather more restrained language. (Black Boomerang, pp. 16-18)†
Sefton Delmer finally was entrusted with the command of a "Research Unit," which, however, did not have anything to do with research - but was simply the cover-name - for special radio stations giving the impression, "as if they were working at some place inside the Europe occupied by Hitler." His initial chief was Leonard Ingrams, a key employee in "the Cloak-and-Dagger Organisation S.O.2 later renamed S.O.E. (Special Operations Executive) which was responsible for the organisation of resistance, sabotage, assassination and kindred enterprises" (pp. 36-37). Delmer's remit: "There are no limits. No holds are barred" (p. 38).
Delmer's instructions included the following:
"Accuracy first," I used to tell the writers. "We must never lie by accident, or through slovenliness, only deliberately!"
And as we put out news bulletin after news bulletin and service programme after service programme an entire system of subversive campaigns developed. (p. 92)
We are waging against Hitler a kind of total war of wits. Anything goes, so long as it serves to bring nearer the end of the war and Hitler's defeat. If you [Otto John] are at all squeamish about what you may be called upon to do against your own countrymen you must say so now. I shall understand it. In that case, however, you will be no good to us and no doubt some other job will be found for you. But if you feel like joining me, I must warn you that in my unit we are up to all the dirty tricks we can devise. No holes are barred. The dirtier the better. Lies treachery, everything. (p. 181)
The monitored conversations between the generals, the interrogations, the maps all travelled down to MB [Milton Bryan, near Woburn]. And there they were built up into news stories about the hitherto top secret private life of Hitler and his suite that tortured the ailing Führer with the suspicion that the British had their spies right inside his HQ. Clifton Child was a genius at freshening up a piece of intelligence with a new development that made it sound like something that had happened the night before...
Hitler's suspicions reached their climax when the Soldatensender, using the same technique of intelligent deduction and anticipation which had served us so well in the past, reported an order issued by the Führer at a conference in his headquarters, and did so within twenty-four hours of his having given it and before it had been carried out. (pp. 207-208)
We never attempted to concentrate on individual coups. Our task as I saw it was to corrode and erode with a steady drip of subversive news and 'evidence' the iron system of control in which Hitler's Police State had locked the body and soul of the German people. (p. 213)
Examples of such measures:
The first consisted of posting letters to the relatives of German soldiers who had recently died in German military hospitals in Italy. Fortunately for us the German hospital directors made a practice of sending radio telegrams en clair to the local party authorities in Germany asking them to break the news to the relatives. These telegrams were intercepted and passed on to me. And they gave us all the information we needed - the soldier's name, the address of his relatives and the name of the hospital.
We now concocted a moving letter, written out in German longhand script on notepaper bearing the letter heading of the German hospital. Ostensibly the letter came either from a nurse or from a comrade of the dead man who had entrusted it for posting to someone going to Germany on leave. Whoever was the writer, he or she had been with the dead man during his last hours, and was now writing to comfort his relatives...
On other occasions we used the same technique to tell the relatives that their soldier had not died of wounds, but had been given a lethal injection. The Nazi doctor at the hospital, we explained through our nurse, had considered the man had no chance of becoming fighting fit again before the war was finished. The doctor had required the man's bed for soldiers with a better chance of rapid recovery. (p. 133-134)
Next I decided to fake a letter allegedly written by Mölders expatiating on the doubts he and his comrades felt about fighting for the atheist Hitler... For it was in keeping with the character of young Mölders to have written such a letter. He alone could have denounced it convincingly, and he was dead - murdered, so everyone believed, by the Nazis themselves. (pp. 139-140)
To lighten my conscience a little - and help on our desertion campaign at the same time - I also arranged for food parcels to be sent to those relatives of dead soldiers whom we had hoaxed so cruelly with our 'Red Circle' letters. To reinforce their belief that the dead man was not dead at all but a deserter earning good money in a safe refuge abroad we gave the alleged sender of the food parcel the dead man's Christian name. (p. 142)
When the bombers of the RAF and USAF flew into Germany and some of the German transmitters went off the air so as not to serve as beacons for the raiders, a number of German regional radios closed down with them and their frequencies were left vacant - a practice which we had already been exploiting in our war with the jammers.
Our plan therefore was for 'Aspidistra' [the transmitter] to lie in ambush on the frequency of a German station we expected to go off the air and take over the moment it did. Harold Robin had perfected an electronic device specially designed for the purpose.
It enabled 'Aspidistra' to take over the German target frequency within one two-hundredth of a second of the German station closing down. On it we then planned to broadcast the identical programme the Germans had been broadcasting when they closed down. For the German listerners therefore there would be no break in continuity. They would be completely unaware that the big bad British wolf had put on Grandma Goebbels's nightcap and spectacles and crept into bed in her place.
How did we mean to accomplish this? I had found that when Leipzig or Frankfort, or whichever it was, closed down there were always several other stations left on the air broadcasting the programme which the dear departed had been carrying. All we had to do therefore was to take over this programme from, let us say, Hamburg or Berlin on our antennae and relay it on to the frequency of our German target station through 'Aspidistra'. In much the same way we occasionally relayed the radio speeches of Hitler and Goebbels onto the Calais programme. We only needed to carry on with the relay for a fraction of a minute. Then having established the continuity we would interrupt the programme with one of those special announcements which the German authorities, now that other means of communication had broken down, were increasingly fond of making over the radio. The announcement finished, we would carry on with the Goebbels programme for a minute of so. Then, we, too, would fade out as 'enemy Terror Raiders approached...' (pp. 196-197)
We did not have long to wait for an opportunity to try out Big Bertha. Winston Churchill saw to that.
As the British and American armies began their advance into Germany, the BBC, the Voice of America, and the 12th Army group broadcasters of Radio Luxemburg had all been telling the German civilian population - "Stay where you are. Don't move." They had done so under a carefully considered directive from SHAEF. But when Winston learned of this advice - quite fortuitously - he blew up in hot outrage. (p. 200)
On the Soldatensender, and in Nachrichten, we plugged a story of seven bomb-free zones in Central and South Germany where refugees would be safe from further enemy air attacks. Neutral Red Cross representatives in Berlin, we reported, had informed the Reich authorities that Eisenhower was going to declare these seven zones as bomb-free safety areas. Banks were already moving their securities into them.
These 'safety zones' were all the more effective as almost at the same time as we were announcing them Eisenhower began to proclaim as 'targets for tonight' the total destruction of such city areas as Cologne, Dusseldorf, Frankfort and Mannheim. Ike, too, was following the Churchill directive.
Were Big Bertha's instructions obeyed? Did the population leave the towns and villages, and crowd the roads, as Churchill had wanted? The confidential 'weekly report' of the Gauamtsleiter of Lemgo, which I reproduce in the Appendix, suggests that they did. But I never checked any further.
When I got to Germany at the end of March, the roads were indeed crowded with refugees - miserable ragged families, trudging wearily along the Autobahn and through debris-cluttered streets of bomb ruins. Behind them they dragged carts, buses that had no fuel for their engines, and even hearses. All were loaded with bedding and babies. It was the epitome of everything I had seen in Spain, Poland and France.
I did not stop to question any of them whether it was a message on Radio Cologne or Radio Frankfort that had first started them on their trek. I did not want to know. I feared the asnwer might be 'yes'.
What I do know is that by our intrusion with counterfeit instructions we finally deprived the German authorities of the use of the radio for issuing orders to the German population. For when Hitler's men woke up to what was happening they howled in loud and indignant protest.
"The enemy is broadcasting counterfieit instructions on our frequencies," the Nazi announcers cried. "Don't be misled by them. Here is an official announcement of the Reich authority for..." That was just what we wanted.
"The enemy," said our announcer in Big Bertha's next intrusion, "is broadcasting counterfieit instructions on our frequencies. Don't be misled by them. Here is an official announcement of the Reich authority for..." It was such a pushover for us that Goebbels abandoned the battle. He gave up just as he had given up once before when we counterfeited Mussolini's Fascist Republican Radio from Munich. No more orders and announcements went out over the ether. Instead, the Reich government confined itself from now on to giving out its announcements and instructions over the Drahtfunk, a wired diffusion network on which we could not intrude but which was greatly restricted in its scope. And of course we did not limit our Big Bertha counterfeit to messages designed to get the German population moving out on the roads. I also did my best to further our oldest psychological warfare aim of setting German against German. (pp. 204-205)
It is a matter of course that a tremendous amount of documents were forged in the course of this work.
The war was in its last stages, when Walter Adams the new Deputy Director General, came down to MB and asked me to stay on with the department, in order to take on an important new job in connection with the occupation of Germany.
The department was being reorganised, he said. The old regional directorates were being abolished and in their place three 'Divisions' were being organised to take care of the new tasks which the Cabinet had allotted to us. One division would look after the London end of our political warfare in the Far East. David Bowes-Lyon was taking charge of that one. A second division was to take on the screening and re-education of prisoners of war. A third was to see to it that the Germans and Austrians under British administration got the right kind of newspapers, radio, periodicals, books, theatres and so forth...
"Both [Anthony] Eden and Brendan Bracken say that you are the man for the job." (p. 228)
And after the war in 1945, to the staff at Milton Bryan:
"You have not talked about our work with outsiders and nothing much is known about us or our technique. People may have their suspicions, but they don't know. I want you to keep it that way. Don't be misled into boasting about the jobs we have done, the tricks we have played on the enemy...
"If we start boasting of the clever things we did, who knows what the result of that will be. So mum's the word. Propaganda is something one keeps quiet about..."
What I had not expected was that PWD SHAEF would include our 'black operations' in its Official History and that as a result our work would be dragged into controversy between the two American 'Sykewar' agencies. (pp. 218-220)
Sefton Delmer was among the men "who were given the opportunity in 1945 of making changes in Germany" (p. 228). What these intended changes looked like, the German constitutional lawyer Prof. Friedrich Grimm depicts in his book 'Political Justice' (pp. 146-148):
In May 1945, a few days after the collapse, I had a notable talk with an important representative of the opposite side. He introduced himself as a university professor of his country, who wanted to converse with me on the historical basis of the war. It was a conversation of high standing we conducted. Suddenly he dropped the subject, pointed to the leaflets lying on the table in front of me, we were flooded with during the first days after surrender, mainly circling around the concentration camp-horrors. "What do you say about it?" so he asked me.
I replied:
"Oradour and Buchenwald? With me you force an open door. I am a lawyer and condemn the wrong wherever I meet with it, more than all, when it happens on our side. I know, however, to make a distinction between the facts and the political use one makes of it. I know the meaning of atrocity propaganda. After World War I, I have read all publications by your experts on this subject, the writings of the Northcliff Bureau, the book of the French minister of the finances Klotz 'From War to Peace' (Paris, 1923), depicting how the story of the chopped-off children's hands was cooked up and what profit one got out of it, the enlightenment writings of the journal Crapouillot comparing the atrocity propaganda of 1870 with that of 1914-1918, and finally the classic by Ponsonby: 'The Lie in War' [Falsehood in Wartime], revealing that one had in the preceding war already magazines showing artificial corpse mountains by photomontage composed of dummies. These pictures were distributed, with a space left for caption. It was given out by telephone later on according to the needs from the propaganda centre."
Thereby I pulled out one of the leaflets exhibiting allegedly mountains of dead bodies out of the concentration camps, and showed it to my visitor, who looked at me taken aback.
I continued:
"I can not imagine that in this war with all weapons perfected to such an extent, this mentally toxic weapon should have been neglected that decided the outcome of World War I. More so, I know it for sure! The last months before the collapse I read daily the foreign press. There was reported on German atrocities from a central office, operating in a certain turn. There was one occupied territory after the other called to mind, today France, tomorrow Norway, then Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Greece, Jugoslavia and Czecho-Slovakia.
"First were reported hundreds of corpses in the concentration camps, then six weeks later when it was the turn of this same country again, thousands, then ten thousands, then hundred thousands. Here I thought to myself: this number inflation can not possibly skyrocket into the million!"
Now I reached for another leaflet: "Here you have the million!" There my visitor blurted out: "I see, I have run into an expert. Now I also want to tell you, who I am. I am not a university professor. I am of the central office you talked about: Atrocity propaganda - and with it we won the total victory."
I replied: "I know, and now you must stop it!" He retorted: "No, now we shall start all the more! We shall continue this atrocity propaganda, we shall intensify it, until nobody shall accept a good word from the Germans anymore, until all the sympathy you had in other countries shall be destroyed, and until the Germans themselves shall be so confused that they do not know anymore what they are doing!" I terminated the conversation: "Then you shall burden yourself with a great responsibility!"
What this man had threatened us with, came true. The worst, however, was the confusion caused among the Germans themselves.
Prof.
Dr. Friedrich Grimm did not know the true identity of his interlocutor: It was
Sefton Delmer!
† Walendy calls the German edition 'The Germans and I' and
translates Delmer's response to Hitler's peace offer as "Mr. Führer and
Chancellor of the Reich, we throw this incredible imposition back at you in the
midst of your maladorous Führer snout" (p. 421). The original broadcast
was in German. Delmer's autobiography was published in Britain in two volumes, Trail
Sinister (1961) and Black Boomerang (1962). Additional
reference: Hans Frederik, 'The Candidates' p. 180.
Reproduced From:
'Jewish soap'
by Mark WeberOne of the most lurid and slanderous Holocaust claims is the story that the Germans manufactured soap from the bodies of their victims. Although a similar charge during the First World War was exposed as a hoax almost immediately afterwards, it was nevertheless revived and widely believed during the Second. More important, this accusation was "proved" at the main Nuremberg trial of 1945-1946, and has been authoritatively endorsed by numerous historians in the decades since. In recent years, though, as part of a broad retreat from the most obviously untenable aspects of the "orthodox" extermination story, Holocaust historians have grudgingly conceded that the human soap tale is a wartime propaganda lie. In their retreat, though, these historians have tried to dismiss the soap story as a mere wartime "rumor," neglecting to mention that international Jewish organizations and then Allied governments endorsed and sanctioned this libelous canard.
Wartime rumors that the Germans were manufacturing soap from the corpses of slaughtered Jews were based in part on the fact that soap bars distributed by German authorities in Jewish ghettos and camps bore the impressed initials "RIF," which many took to stand for "Rein juedisches Fett" or "Pure Jewish Fat." (It did not seem to matter that the letters were "RIF" and not "RJF.") These rumors spread so widely in 1941 and 1942 that by late 1942 German authorities in Poland and Slovakia were expressing official concern about their impact.
According to a Polish source quoted in a secret wartime U.S. Army military intelligence report, for example, the Germans were operating a "human soap factory" in 1941 at Turek, Poland. "The Germans had brought thousands of Polish teachers, priests and Jews there and after extracting the blood serum from their bodies, had thrown them on large pots and melted off grease to make soap," the intelligence report added.
Macabre "Jewish soap" jokes became popular in the ghettos and camps, and many non-Jews on the outside came to believe the story. When trains loaded with Jewish deportees stopped temporarily at rail stations, Poles reportedly would gleefully shout at them: "Jews to soap!" Even British prisoners of war interned at Auschwitz in 1944 testified later about the wartime rumors that corpses of gassing victims were being turned into soap there.
In spite of its inherently incredible character, the soap story became an important feature of Jewish and Allied war propaganda. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, wartime head of both the World Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Congress, publicly charged in November 1942 that Jewish corpses were being "processed into such war-vital commodities as soap, fats and fertilizer" by the Germans. He further announced that the Germans were "even exhuming the dead for the value of the corpses," and were paying fifty marks for each body.
In late 1942, the Congress Weekly, published by the American Jewish Congress, editorialized that the Germans were turning Jews "by scientific methods of dissolution into fertilizer, soap and glue." An article in the same issue reported that Jewish deportees from France and Holland were being processed into "soap, glue and train oil" in at least two special factories in Germany. Typical of many other American periodicals, the influential New Republic reported in early 1943 that the Germans were "using the bodies of their Jewish victims to make soap and fertilizer in a factory at Siedlce."
During June and July 1943, two prominent representatives of the Moscow-based "Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee" toured the United States and raised more than two million dollars for the Soviet war effort at a series of mass meetings. At each of these rallies, Soviet Jewish leader Solomon Mikhoels showed the crowd a bar of soap that he said was made from Jewish corpses.
After the war the soap story was given important legitimacy at the main Nuremberg trial. L. N. Smirnov, Chief Counsellor of Justice for the USSR, declared to the Tribunal:
... The same base, rationalized SS technical minds which created gas chambers and murder vans, began devising such methods of complete annihilation of human bodies, which would not only conceal the traces of their crimes, but also to serve in the manufacturing of certain products. In the Danzig Anatomical Institute, semi-industrial experiments in the production of soap from human bodies and the tanning of human skin for industrial purposes were carried out.
Smirnov quoted at length from an affidavit by Sigmund Mazur, an Institute employee, which was accepted as Nuremberg exhibit USSR-197. It alleged that Dr. Rudolf Spanner, the head of the Danzig Institute, had ordered the production of soap from corpses in 1943. According to Mazur's affidavit, Dr. Spanner's operation was of interest to high-ranking German officials. Education Minister Bernhard Rust and Health Leader Dr. Leonardo Conti, as well as professors from other medical institutes, came to witness Spanner's efforts. Mazur also claimed to have used the "human soap" to wash himself and his laundry.
A human soap "recipe," allegedly prepared by Dr. Spanner (Nuremberg document USSR-196), was also presented. Finally, a sample of what was supposed to be a piece of "human soap" was submitted to the Nuremberg Tribunal as exhibit USSR-393.
In his closing address to the Tribunal, chief British prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross echoed his Soviet colleague: "On occasion, even the bodies of their victims were used to make good the wartime shortage of soap." And in their final judgment, the Nuremberg Tribunal judges found that "attempts were made to utilize the fat from the bodies of the victims in the commercial manufacture of soap."
It is worth emphasizing here that the "evidence" presented at the Nuremberg Tribunal for the bogus soap story was no less substantial than the "evidence" presented for the claims of mass extermination in "gas chambers." At least in the former case, an actual sample of soap supposedly made from corpses was submitted in evidence.
After the war, supposed Holocaust victims were solemnly buried, in the form of soap bars, in Jewish cemeteries. In 1948, for example, four such bars wrapped in a funeral shroud were ceremoniously buried according to Jewish religious ritual at the Haifa cemetery in Israel. Other bars of "Jewish soap" have been displayed as grim Holocaust relics at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the Stutthof Museum near Gdansk (Danzig), the Yivo Institute in New York, the Holocaust Museum in Philadelphia, the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne (Australia), and at various locations in Israel.
Numerous Jews who lived in German ghettos and camps during the war helped keep the soap story alive many years later. Ben Edelbaum, for example, wrote in his 1980 memoir Growing Up in the Holocaust:
Often with our rations in the ghettos, the Germans had included a bar of soap branded with initials R.J.F. which came to be known as "RIF" soap. It wasn't until the war had ended that we learned the horrible truth about the bar of soap. Had we known in the ghetto, every bar of "RIF" soap would have been accorded a sacred Jewish funeral in the cemetery at Marysin. As it was, we were completely oblivious to its origin and used the bones and flesh of our murdered loved ones to wash our bodies.
Nesse Godin was transferred from a ghetto in Lithuania to the Stutthof concentration camp in the spring of 1944. In a 1983 interview, she recalled her arrival there:
That day they gave us a shower and a piece of soap. After the war we found out the soap was made out of pure Jew fat, Rein Juden Fett, marked in the initials on the soap that I washed with. For all I know sometimes maybe there was a little bit of my father's fat in that soap that I washed with. How do you think I feel when I think about that?
Mel Mermelstein, the former Auschwitz inmate who was featured in the sensationalized April 1991 cable television movie "Never Forget" (and who sued the Institute for Historical Review and three other defendants for $11 million), declared in a 1981 sworn deposition that he and other camp inmates used soap bars made from human fat. It was an "established fact," he insisted, that the soap he washed with was made from Jewish bodies.
Renowned "Nazi hunter" Simon Wiesenthal repeated the soap tale in a series of articles published in 1946 in the Austrian Jewish community paper Der Neue Weg. In the first of these he wrote:
During the last weeks of March the Romanian press reported an unusual piece of news: In the small Romanian city of Folticeni twenty boxes of soap were buried in the Jewish cemetery with full ceremony and complete funeral rites. This soap had been found recently in a former German army depot. On the boxes were the initials RIF, "Pure Jewish Fat." These boxes were destined for the Waffen-SS. The wrapping paper revealed with completely cynical objectivity that this soap was manufactured from Jewish bodies. Surprisingly, the thorough Germans forgot to describe whether the soap was produced from children, girls, men or elderly persons.
Wiesenthal went on:
After 1942 people in the General Government [Poland] knew quite well what the RIF soap meant. The civilized world may not believe the joy with which the Nazis and their women in the General Government thought of this soap. In each piece of soap they saw a Jew who had been magically put there, and had thus been prevented from growing into a second Freud, Ehrlich or Einstein.
In another article he observed: "The production of soap from human fat is so unbelievable that even some who were in concentration camps find it difficult to comprehend."
Over the years, numerous supposedly reputable historians have promoted the durable soap story. Journalist-historian William L. Shirer, for example, repeated it in his best-selling work, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Leading Soviet war propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg wrote in his postwar memoir: "I have held in my hand a cake of soap stamped with the legend 'pure Jewish soap', prepared from the corpses of people who had been destroyed. But there is no need to speak of these things: thousands of books have been written about them."
A standard history studies textbook used in Canadian secondary schools, Canada: The Twentieth Century, told students that the Germans "boiled" the corpses of their Jewish victims "to make soap." The Anatomy of Nazism, a booklet published and distributed by the Zionist "Anti-Defamation League" of B'nai B'rith, stated: "The process of brutalization did not end with the mass murders themselves. Large quantities of soap were manufactured from the corpses of those murdered."
A detailed 1981 work, Hitler's Death Camps, repeated the soap story in lurid detail. While noting that "some historians claim that the Nazi manufacture of soap from human fat is just a grim rumor," author Konnilyn Feig nevertheless accepted the story because "most East European camp scholars ... validate the soap stories, and other kinds of bars made from humans are displayed in Eastern Europe -- I have seen many over the years."
New York Rabbi Arthur Schneier repeated the tale at the opening ceremony of the largest Holocaust meeting in history. In his invocation to the "American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors," held in Washington in April 1983, the Rabbi solemnly declared: "We remember the bars of soap with the initials RJF -- Rein jdisches Fett, Pure Jewish Fat -- made from the bodies of our loved ones."
In spite of all the apparently impressive evidence, the charge that the Germans manufactured soap from human beings is a falsehood, as Holocaust historians are now belatedly acknowledging. The "RIF" soap bar initials that supposedly stood for "Pure Jewish Fat" actually indicated nothing more sinister than "Reich Center for Industrial Fat Provisioning" ("Reichsstelle fr Industrielle Fettversorgung"), a German agency responsible for wartime production and distribution of soap and washing products. RIF soap was a poor quality substitute that contained no fat at all, human or otherwise.
Shortly after the war the public prosecutor's office of Flensburg, Germany, began legal proceedings against Dr. Rudolf Spanner for his alleged role in producing human soap at the Danzig Institute. But after an investigation the charge was quietly dropped. In a January 1968 letter, the office stated that its inquiry had determined that no soap from human corpses was made at the Danzig Institute during the war.
More recently, Jewish historian Walter Laqueur "denied established history" by acknowledging in his 1980 book, The Terrible Secret, that the human soap story has no basis in reality. Gitta Sereny, another Jewish historian, noted in her book Into That Darkness: "The universally accepted story that the corpses were used to make soap and fertilizer is finally refuted by the generally very reliable Ludwigsburg Central Authority for Investigation into Nazi Crimes."
Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history, similarly "rewrote history" when she confirmed in 1981: "The fact is that the Nazis never used the bodies of Jews, or for that matter anyone else, for the production of soap."
In April 1990, professor Yehuda Bauer of Israel's Hebrew University, regarded as a leading Holocaust historian, as well as Shmuel Krakowski, archives director of Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center, confirmed that the human soap story is not true. Camp inmates "were prepared to believe any horror stories about their persecutors," Bauer said. At the same time, though, he had the chutzpah to blame the legend on "the Nazis."
In fact, blame for the soap story lies rather with individuals such as Simon Wiesenthal and Stephen Wise, organizations like the World Jewish Congress, and the victorious Allied powers, none of whom has ever apologized for promoting this vile falsehood.
Why did Bauer and Krakowski decide that this was the appropriate time to officially abandon the soap story? Krakowski himself hints that a large part of the motivation for this "tactical retreat" has been to save what's left of the sinking Holocaust ship by throwing overboard the most obvious falsehoods. In the face of the growing Revisionist challenge, easily demonstrable falsehoods like the soap story have become dangerous embarrassments because they raise doubts about the entire Holocaust legend. As Krakowski put it: "Historians have concluded that soap was not made from human fat. When so many people deny the Holocaust ever happened, why give them something to use against the truth?"
The bad faith of those making this calculated and belated concession to truth is shown by their failure to note that the soap myth was authoritatively "confirmed" at Nuremberg, and by their unwillingness to deal with the implications of that confirmation for the credibility of the Tribunal and other supposedly trustworthy authorities in establishing other, more fundamental aspects of the Holocaust story.
The striking contrast between the prompt postwar disavowal by the British government of the infamous "human soap" lie of the First World War, and the way in which a similarly baseless propaganda story from the Second World War was officially endorsed by the victorious Allied powers and then authoritatively maintained for so many years not only points up the dispiriting lack of integrity on the part of so many Western historians, but underscores the general decline in Western ethical standards during this century.
The "human soap" story demonstrates anew the tremendous impact that a wartime rumor, no matter how fantastic, can have once it has taken hold, particularly when it is disseminated as a propaganda lie by influential individuals and powerful organizations. That so many intelligent and otherwise thoughtful people could ever have seriously believed that the Germans distributed bars of soap brazenly labeled with letters indicating that they were manufactured from Jewish corpses shows how readily even the most absurd Holocaust fables can be -- and are -- accepted as fact.
Mark Weber is editor of The Journal of Historical Review, published six times yearly by the Institute for Historical Review. He studied history at the University of Illinois (Chicago), the University of Munich, Portland State University, and Indiana University (M.A., 1977). For five days in March 1988, he testified as a recognized expert witness on the "final solution" and the Holocaust issue in a Toronto District Court case. He is the author of many published articles, reviews and essays on various aspects of modern European history. Weber has appeared as a guest on numerous radio talk shows, and on the nationally-syndicated "Montel Williams" television show.
Reproduced From: The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)
from The New York Times
Bertie Felstead, Soldier Who Joined a Timeout in War, Dies at 106
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Bertie Felstead, the last known surviving member of the British battalion in World War I that laid down its weapons to play soccer with the Germans in a spontaneous and long-remembered Christmas truce of 1915, died July 22 in Gloucester, England. He was 106.
The truce lasted perhaps half an hour and it meant nothing in the grand schemes of the Western Front generals. But the gesture by Private Felstead's Royal Welch Fusiliers and the Bavarian infantrymen who faced them resonates in the British consciousness as a poignant interlude of civility during a time of unrelenting carnage.
On Christmas Day 1914, there were many instances of British and German soldiers emerging from their trenches to fraternize. Commanders on both sides warned that this was never to happen again.
But it did happen the next year, on Christmas Day, near the snowy village of Laventie, France, west of Lille.
As Mr. Felstead recalled it two years ago, his mortar battalion was shivering in its trenches on Christmas Eve when it heard "All Through the Night" in the German lines 100 yards away.
"It wasn't long before we were singing as well, `Good King Wenceslas,' I think it was," he remembered. "You couldn't hear each other sing like that without it affecting your feelings for the other side.
"Christmas Day, there was shouting between the trenches, `Hello Tommy, Hello Fritz,' and that broke a lot more ice. A few of the Germans came out first and started walking over. A whole mass of us went out to meet them. Nothing was planned.
"Some of them were smoking cigars and offered us cigarettes. We offered them some of ours and we chatted."
The soldiers got by in English, German, French and sign language. "We weren't afraid," Mr. Felstead remembered. "We just sheltered each other. Nobody would shoot at us when we were all mixed up." An informal soccer match began in the no man's land between the trenches.
"Somehow a ball was produced," Mr. Felstead recalled. "It wasn't a game as such — more of a kick- around and a free-for-all. I remember scrambling around in the snow. There could have been 50 on each side. No one was keeping score."
And then, as Harold Diffey, a fellow British private, once recalled it: "After 30 minutes, a vociferous major appeared yelling: `You came out to fight the Huns, not to make friends with them.' So our lads reluctantly returned, followed by a salvo from our artillery."
Albert Felstead was born in Hertfordshire, north of London, on Oct. 28, 1894. He was wounded in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, later saw combat at Salonika, then worked as a civilian storekeeper for the Royal Air Force after the war. He is survived by two daughters, five grandchildren, 11 great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren. His wife, Alice, died in 1983.
As a symbol of the World War I soldier and his yearning for peace, Mr. Felstead was included in a book by the photographer Carolyn Djanogly, "Centurions" (Andre Deutsch, 1999), portraying the people she considered to be the 100 most significant living Britons.
Asked in his last years what he thought of his old enemy, Mr. Felstead remarked that "the Germans were all right."
As he put it: "There wouldn't have been a war if it had been left to the public." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/30/obituaries/30FELS.html?ex=997884996&ei=1&en=535706f9c3678a33
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company http://www.nytimes.com
Lyrics to Christmas in the Trenches
The Christmas Truce of 1914 on the Western and Eastern Fronts may well represent the last time that the face of humanity would be seen in what was rapidly becoming the ultimate nightmare of the industrial revolution. The concept of total war would soon replace any outdated notion of chivalry.
Christmas in the Trenches by John McCutcheon
My name is Francis Tolliver, I come from Liverpool. Two years ago the war was waiting for me after school. To Belgium and to Flanders, to Germany to here I fought for King and country I love dear. 'T'was Christmas in the trenches, where the frost so bitter hung, The frozen fields of France were still, no Christmas song was sung Our families back in England were toasting us that day Their brave and glorious lads so far away.
I was lying with my messmate on the cold and rocky ground When across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound Says I, "Now listen up, me boys!" each soldier strained to hear As one young German voice sang out so clear. "He's singing bloody well, you know!" my partner says to me Soon, one by one, each German voice joined in harmony The cannons rested silent, the gas clouds rolled no more As Christmas brought us respite from the war As soon as they were finished and a reverent pause was spent "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" struck up some lads from Kent The next they sang was "Stille Nacht." "Tis 'Silent Night'," says I And in two tongues one song filled up that sky "There's someone coming toward us!" the front line sentry cried All sights were fixed on one long figure trudging from their side His truce flag, like a Christmas star, shown on that plain so bright As he, bravely, strode unarmed into the night Soon one by one on either side walked into No Man's Land With neither gun nor bayonet we met there hand to hand We shared some secret brandy and we wished each other well And in a flare-lit soccer game we gave 'em hell We traded chocolates, cigarettes, and photographs from home These sons and fathers far away from families of their own Young Sanders played his squeezebox and they had a violin This curious and unlikely band of men
Soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more With sad farewells we each prepared to settle back to war But the question haunted every heart that lived that wonderous night "Whose family have I fixed within my sights?" 'Twas Christmas in the trenches where the frost, so bitter hung The frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung For the walls they'd kept between us to exact the work of war Had been crumbled and were gone forevermore
My name is Francis Tolliver, in Liverpool I dwell Each Christmas come since World War I, I've learned its lessons well That the ones who call the shots won't be among the dead and lame And on each end of the rifle we're the same © 1984 John McCutcheon - All rights reserved
A CHRISTMAS TRUCE
On Christmas Day, 1914, in the first year of World War I, German, British and French soldiers disobeyed their superiors and fraternized with "the enemy" along two-thirds of the Western Front. German troops held Christmas trees up out of the trenches with signs, "Merry Christmas." "You no shoot, we no shoot." Thousands of troops streamed across no-man's land strewn with rotting corpses. They sang Christmas carols, exchanged photographs of loved ones back home, shared rations, played football, even roasted some pigs. Soldiers embraced men they had been trying to kill a few short hours before. They agreed to warn each other if the top brass forced them to fire their weapons, and to aim high.
A shudder ran through the high command on either side. Here was disaster in the making: soldiers declaring their brotherhood with each other and refusing to fight. Generals on both sides declared this spontaneous peacemaking to be treasonous and subject to court martial. By March, 1915 the fraternization movement had been eradicated and the killing machine put back in full operation. By the time of the armistice in 1918, fifteen million people would be slaughtered.
Not many people have heard the story of the Christmas Truce. Military leaders have not gone out of their way to publicize it. On Christmas Day, 1988, a story in the Boston Globe mentioned that a local FM radio host played "Christmas in the Trenches," a ballad about the Christmas Truce, several times and was startled by the effect. The song became the most requested recording during the holidays in Boston on several FM stations. "Even more startling than the number of requests I get is the reaction to the ballad afterward by callers who hadn't heard it before," said the radio host. "They telephone me deeply moved, sometimes in tears, asking 'What the hell did I just hear?'"
I think I know why the callers were in tears. The Christmas Truce story goes against most of what we have been taught about people. It gives us a glimpse of the world as we wish it could be and says, "This really happened once." It reminds us of those thoughts we keep hidden away, out of range of the TV and newspaper stories that tell us how trivial and mean human life is. It is like hearing that our deepest wishes really are true: the world really could be different. (Excerpt from We Can Change the World: The Real Meaning of Everyday Life, by David G. Stratman.)
Torment of the Abba star with a Nazi father
Anni-Frid was persecuted as a child of the 'master race', reports Kate Connolly. Now people like her want justice
The Europe pages - Observer special
Sunday June 30, 2002 The Observer
When Abba sang 'Knowing Me, Knowing You', there was one member of the cult Swedish pop group for whom it had a special meaning. The brunette Anni-Frid Lyngstad is one of thousands of people who grew up in Scandinavia shunned, persecuted and parentless. It is alleged that some were even used as guinea pigs in drugs trials.
Known as the Tyskerbarnas or German children, they were the offspring of Norwegian mothers and German soldier fathers, the result of a Nazi plan to 'enrich' the Aryan gene pool.
Now the group of up to 12,000, of whom many are now in their sixties, plans to fight for compensation in the European Court of Human Rights.
Anni-Frid Lyngstad's story is typical of the suffering of thousands. After her birth in November 1945 - the result of a liaison between her mother, Synni, and a German sergeant, Alfred Haase - the infant's mother and grandmother were branded as traitors and ostracised in their village in northern Norway. They were forced to emigrate to Sweden, where Anni-Frid's mother died of kidney failure before her daughter was two.
The child found her father by chance three decades later. They met for an emotional reunion in her Swedish villa, instigated by Benny Anderson, an Abba founder and Anni-Frid's then husband.
Afterwards, the singer said of the meeting and her father: 'It's difficult... it would have been different if I'd been a teenager or a child. I can't really connect to him and love him the way I would have if he'd been around when I grew up.'
The depression she subsequently suffered was attributed by friends to the delayed encounter with her long-lost father, a retired pastry cook.
The somewhat morose Anni-Frid, who withdrew for years in Greta Garbo style, is nevertheless viewed as something of a role model by her fellow Tyskerbarnas still living in Norway.
'She's achieved amazing things in Sweden, something she would never have been able to do had she stayed in Norway, where she would have been branded a freak,' says Tor Brandacher, 63, spokesman for the organisation representing the children. Founded in 1999, the group, Krigsbarnforbundet Lebensborn, or Source of Life, takes its name from the scheme run by Heinrich Himmler, the leader of Hitler's feared SS, to create a master race.
It has been pursuing its claims for compensation for abuse and discrimination through the domestic courts. The case, involving 122 people, argues that the wartime Norwegian government - led by the notorious Quisling - was complicit in the Nazi scheme to breed with blonde, blue-eyed Norse women. The government asserts that if crimes were committed, they happened too long ago to be dealt with now.
The case is now going to the country's Supreme Court, but the victims and their families are preparing to take it to the European Court of Human Rights. 'Having been rejected by Norway so far, we have little choice but to take our case further afield,' says Brandacher.
'We see Norway as a rundown gas station in comparison to the gleaming motorway service station that is the ECHR in Strasbourg,' says a hopeful Brandacher, himself the son of an Austrian elite Gebirgsjäger soldier. He says the Norwegian government is likely to face huge embarrassment once the case receives full international attention.
Most of the Lebensborn children who stayed in Norway are social misfits. Few have received proper education or been employed. 'It's typical that they've suffered from depression and low self-esteem,' says their lawyer, Randi Hagen Spydevold.
'Most have had problems forming relationships or being able to relate to the real world, which is hardly surprising when you've spent your formative years being called a German idiot, a no-good bastard who doesn't deserve to be alive.'
Had Germany won the war, they would almost certainly have been heroes. But Germany lost, and soon afterwards the Norwegian mothers lost their status, and their children were classified as 'rats' by government officials.
The postwar hatred towards the offspring of German soldiers was so great that government psychologists commissioned to report on the children and their mothers concluded that women who had fraternised with Germans were 'of limited talent and asocial psychopaths, some of them seriously backward'.
The verdict 'father was a German' was indictment enough to send children to mental hospitals, where many were tortured and raped. They were deemed to be dangerous because of their 'Nazi genes' and capable of forming a fascist fifth column.
Quisling's government was desperate to be rid of the problem and attempted to send the Tyskerbarnas as far afield as Brazil and Australia. Sweden was praised for taking several hundred and thus relieving Norway of an embarrassing 'problem'. Around 250 were sent 'back' to Germany.
Many thousands of their mothers - labelled 'German whores' - were sent to Norwegian 'concentration camps', where they were virtually slave labourers.
Of those children who ended up scattered around 128 Norwegian children's homes, many were released from their virtual prisons as bewildered adults only in the early Sixties into a world of which they had little or no experience.
When her case comes before the supreme court, Spydevold has as one of her witnesses a highly-experienced judge who will testify that a high percentage of the criminals he has seen have been the result of the Lebensborn experiment. 'He will testify that through the Norwegian government's neglect of them, many turned to crime,' Spydevold told The Observer .
But in many ways the most shocking aspect of the whole story is what happened to the children in the homes. In a separate case, Spydevold is attempting to bring the Norwegian government to task over documented evidence of drugs trials carried out on both children and mothers.
Witnesses and documents say experiments with LSD, mescaline and other substances were initiated by the Norwegian military, Oslo University and the CIA.
For Harriet von Nickel, born in March 1942, the road to justice is long but worthwhile. 'As a two-year-old living with foster parents, I was chained up with the dog in the yard,' she says in German Child, her best-selling autobiography.
'As a six-year-old I was thrown in the river by a man from my village, who said he wanted to see if "the witch will drown or float",' she writes.
At the age of nine or 10, she says, drunken villagers from Bursr, near Trondheim, branded her forehead with a swastika made of bent nails, and threatened to rape her. 'A woman saved me, and I rubbed sandpaper on my skin to get rid of the swastika.'
German WWII Vet Reviews 'Saving Private Ryan'
Hans Schmidt Editor's Note: I am proud to call Hans Schmidt, the author of the following, my friend. I have had the privilege and honor to know several German WWII veterans personally, from Wehrmacht privates to Major-General Otto Ernst Remer, and I found each of them to be fine men and great human beings.
In the annals of modern history, I do not believe there are military veterans who have had to face the ordeal of vilification and falsification which these German veterans have endured. They are hated and reviled in spite of the fact that they generally fought cleanly and honorably in a war that can hardly be said to have been of their choosing.
Having met these men in the flesh, my intellectual convictions about the horrors of the fratricide that was World War Two were confirmed emotionally and personally. To regard these blood brothers of Americans as the enemy was the real "war crime."
Spielberg's "Pvt. Ryan" is about saving a surviving brother from the fate which befell his other siblings in the American army. But concern only for the life of the brother in American uniform is fatally short-sighted. Saving Private Fritz was just as necessary. To think otherwise is to engage in deadly self-hate masked by the slick celluloid of Spielberg.
It is this hatred for the image of the German stranger, who is in fact not a stranger, but the face in our own mirror, that is at the root of the rot we observe today in France, Britain and America. Where now is the civilization the Allied soldiers died to preserve?
Contrary to Spielberg's suggestion that Western, Christian civilization was saved in WWII by the killing of Germans, the opposite obtained. One cannot make so colossal a blunder as to mistake one's own brother for the enemy and compound that tragedy a million times and expect the restoration of anything.
I now present to you the only reaction I have thus far seen to "Saving Private Ryan" from one of those brothers our American countrymen sought to destroy. --Michael A. Hoffman II
Mr. Steven Spielberg
Dreamworks Productions
10 Universal City Plaza
N. Hollywood, Calif. 91609
Dear Mr. Spielberg:
Permit me, a twice wounded veteran of the Waffen-SS, and participant in three campaigns (Battle of the Bulge, Hungary and Austria) to comment on your picture, "Saving Private Ryan."
Having read many of the accolades of this undoubtedly successful and, shall we say, "impressive," film, I hope you don't mind some criticism from both a German and a German-American point of view.
Apart from the carnage immediately at the beginning of the story, during the invasion at Omaha Beach, whereon I cannot comment because I was not there; many of the battle scenes seemed unreal.
You made some commendable efforts to provide authenticity through the use of several pieces of original-looking German equipment, for instance, the Schützenpanzerwagen (SPW), the MG 42s, and the Kettenkrad.
And, while the appearance of German infantry soldiers of the regular Army in the Normandy bunkers was not well depicted, the Waffen SS in the street fighting at the end of the film were quite properly outfitted.
My comment about the unreality of the battle scenes has to do with the fact that the Waffen-SS would not have acted as you depicted them in "Private Ryan."
While it was a common sight in battle to see both American and Russian infantry congregate around their tanks when approaching our lines, this rarely if ever occurred with the Waffen-SS.
(The first Americans I saw during the Battle of the Bulge were about a dozen dead GIs bunched around a burned-out, self-propelled, tracked howitzer.)
Furthermore, almost all the German soldiers seen in "Private Ryan" had their heads shaved, or wore closely cropped hair, something totally in conflict with reality. Perhaps you were confusing, in your mind, German soldiers with Russians of the time.
Or else, your Jewishness came to the fore, and you wanted to draw a direct line back from today's skinheads to the Waffen-SS and other German soldiers of the Third Reich.
Also, for my unit you should have used 18 or 19-year old boys instead of older guys. The average age, including general officers of the heroic Hitlerjugend division at Caen, was 19 years!
The scene where the GI shows his Jewish "Star of David" medallion to German POWs and tells them: "Ich Jude, ich Jude!" is so outrageous as to be funny.
I can tell you what German soldiers would have said to each other if such an incident had actually ever occurred: "That guy is nuts!"
You don't seem to know that for the average German soldier of World War II, of whatever unit, the race, color or "religion" of the enemy didn't matter at all. He didn't know and he didn't care.
Furthermore, you committed a serious error in judgment when, in the opening scenes of "Private Ryan" you had the camera pan from the lone grave with the Jewish star to all the Christian crosses in the cemetery.
I know what you wanted to say but I am sure that I was not the only one who immediately thereafter glanced over all the other hundreds of crosses one could see, to discover whether somewhere else was another Star of David.
And you know the answer. In fact, you generated exactly the opposite effect of what you had intended. Your use of that scene makes a lie out of the claim now put forth by Jewish organizations that during World War II Jews volunteered for service in numbers greater than their percentage of the general population, and that their blood sacrifice was (therefore) higher also.
I visited the large Luxembourg military cemetery where General Patton is buried and counted the Jewish stars on the gravestones. I was shocked by their absence.
After World War I, some German Jewish leaders mounted the same ruse: They claimed then and still do to this day that, "12,000 Jews gave their lives for the Fatherland," which would also have made their general participation higher, which it was not. But perhaps the "12,000" figure is intended as a symbol denoting, "from our point of view, we did enough."
During World War II, as now, about a quarter of the American population considered itself German-American. Knowing the patriotic fervor German-Americans harbor for America, we can be certain that their numbers in the Armed Forces were equal or higher than their percentage of the population.
Yet in "Saving Private Ryan" there was not one single German name to be heard or seen among the Americans.
Did you forget Nimitz, Arnold, Spaatz or even Eisenhower? Well, perhaps Capt. Miller from Pennsylvania was a German whose name had been anglicized. In omitting the American Germans you seem to have taken a cue from the White House at whose contemporary state dinners rarely someone with a German name can be found.
Well, maybe someone thinks that the abundance of German sounding names such as Goldberg, Rosenthal, Silverstein and Spielberg satisfies the need for "German-American" representation.
My final comment concerns the depictions of the shooting of German POWs immediately after a fire fight. A perusal of American World War II literature indicates that such incidents were much more common than is generally admitted, and more often than not, such transgressions against the laws of war and chivalry are often or usually excused, "because the GIs got mad at the Germans who had just killed one of their dearest comrades".
In other words, the anger and the war crime following it was both understandable and, ipso facto excusable. In "Private Ryan" you seem to agree with this stance since you permit only one of the soldiers, namely, the acknowledged coward, to say that one does not shoot enemy soldiers who had put down their arms.
As a former German soldier I can assure you that among us we did not have this, what I would call, un-Aryan mindset.
I remember well, when in January of 1945 we sat together with ten captured Americans after a fierce battle, and the GIs were genuinely surprised that we treated them almost as buddies, without rancor.
If you want to know why, I can tell you. We had not suffered from years of anti-enemy hate propaganda, as was the case with American and British soldiers whose basic sense of chivalry had often (but not always) been dulled by watching too many anti-German war movies usually made by your brethren.
(For your information: I never saw even one anti-American war movie-- there were no more Jewish directors at the UFA studios.)
Sincerely,
Hans Schmidt
P.O. Box 11124
Pensacola, Florida 32524-1124
Fax: 850-478-4993
Hans Schmidt is chairman of the German-American National Public Affairs Committee (GANPAC) and publisher of the monthly "GANPAC Brief" ($50/yr. [$35 for students and pensioners] $60 overseas). In 1995 he was arrested in Germany and imprisoned for six months at Bützow prison in Mecklenburg, for the "crime" of having mailed his newsletters to Germany.
The 71 year old Schmidt remains unbowed and continues to address American audiences and write his memoirs. His 490 page paperback book, "Jailed in Democratic Germany" is available from him for $25.00 postpaid.
Revealed: Maxwell was under investigation for war crimes Police files cast new light on mystery of tycoon's death
By Robert Verkaik, Legal Affairs Correspondent 10 March 2006
Later in life, he was reported to have said that the two things he hated most were Germans and taxes.
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article350353.ece
Excerpt:
Later in life, he was reported to have said that the two things he hated most were Germans and taxes.
START:
Revealed: Maxwell was under investigation for war crimes Police files cast new light on mystery of tycoon's death
By Robert Verkaik, Legal Affairs Correspondent 10 March 2006
Robert Maxwell was being investigated for war crimes and was to be interviewed by police just before he mysteriously drowned 15 years ago.
Revelations that Maxwell, a captain in the British Army, knew he faced a possible life sentence for murdering an unarmed German civilian in 1945 lend support to the theory that he took his own life in 1991.
A Metropolitan Police file released to The Independent under the Freedom of Information Act shows that, weeks before he died, detectives had begun questioning members of Maxwell's platoon and were preparing a case for the Crown Prosecution Service.
Maxwell would have been told about the inquiry and knew that, if found guilty, he would be the first Briton to be prosecuted for war crimes. The War Crimes Act 1991 was enacted just six months before Maxwell's body was found floating in the Atlantic on 5 November after disappearing from his yacht, the Lady Ghislane.
No one has been able to explain how he came to die. But the police file shows that, by that time, officers had been able to establish the location in Germany where Maxwell was alleged to have killed an unarmed civilian. The shooting, which is said to have happened on 2 April 1945, was first disclosed by Maxwell's authorised biographer, Joe Haines, in 1988. Maxwell is quoted in the book describing how he tried to capture a German town by threatening the population with a mortar bombardment, a tactic that had proved successful on a nearby village hours earlier.
In a letter to his wife, published in the book, Maxwell recounts how he asked some Germans to fetch the mayor. He ordered the mayor to go back to town and tell the soldiers defending it to surrender or face destruction. One hour later the mayor returned, saying the soldiers had agreed to his demands. "But as soon as we marched off a German tank opened fire on us," Maxwell wrote. "Luckily, he missed, so I shot the mayor and withdrew."
The Met's file says: "The reported circumstances of the shooting gave rise to an allegation of War Crimes. To some extent, the reporting of the shooting incident was confirmed by Mr Maxwell in an interview he gave in 1988 to the journalist Brian Walden [30th October 1988]."
But the police could do nothing until Parliament had enacted the war crimes legislation which had been specifically designed to prosecute Nazi war criminals living in this country.
It was only when a member of the public made a complaint under the new legislation that an official investigation could begin. Two officers from the Met's historic war crimes unit began tracing members of his platoon but had been unable to find a witness to the alleged shooting of the mayor.
Maxwell is presumed to have fallen overboard from Lady Ghislane, which was cruising off the Canary Islands. The official verdict was accidental drowning, though many people, including members of his own family, believe he took his own life. It did not emerge until after his death that he had plundered the Mirror Group pensions' funds to bail out his ailing media empire.
Maxwell was immensely proud of his war record. He fought his way across Europe from the Normandy beaches to Berlin, winning the Military Cross in January 1945. He had a hatred for Germans that stemmed from his earlier life, most of his family in Czechoslovakia having been killed by the Nazis. Later in life, he was reported to have said that the two things he hated most were Germans and taxes.
The Death Of Rudolf Hess Page II
What Did Ezra Pound Really Say?
World Wide Demonstrations against NPD Ban