The Ruling Elite

by Deanna Spingola

  Officials based the evidence for the mass killings at Auschwitz, supposedly the main extermination center, on an extracted confession. The Allies arrested Rudolf Höss, the commander on March 11, 1946. After three days of sleep deprivation, torture, beatings after every response, being held naked and repeatedly flogged with a whip, he confessed. He said, that, in addition to the four million already exterminated, millions more were scheduled, “about four million Jews from Romania” and “an estimated two and a half million Jews from Bulgaria.” 1898 On April 15, 1946, during the NMT, Höss repeated his confession that the Germans had exterminated four million Jews at Auschwitz. British Military Intelligence Sergeant Bernard Clarke, a Jew, and four other British soldiers extracted his confession. 1899 In July 1990, the Auschwitz State Museum and Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Center announced that perhaps, altogether, one million, non-Jews and Jews, died at Auschwitz. 1900

  Charles F. Wennerstrum, a judge at one of the tribunals, relinquished his position in protest. He issued a statement to the Chicago Daily Tribune before his departure and outlined some of his reasons as follows. Some people working with the Public Prosecutor were motivated by personal ambition and revenge. The prosecution made it impossible for the defense to prepare its case and to furnish evidence. The prosecution, led by General Taylor, prevented a unanimous decision of the Military Court, when they failed to obtain documentary evidence from the U.S. Government. Ninety percent of the court was composed of biased persons who, on the basis of politics or race, supported the prosecution’s case. The prosecution filled the managerial positions of the court with newly-naturalized United States citizens who were hostile to the defendants. And, the purpose of the Nuremberg Trials was to convince the Germans of the crimes of their Führer, the pretext for which the trials were ordered. Wenersturm said, “Had I known seven months earlier what was happening at Nuremberg, I would never have gone there.” 1901

  A permanent stain rests on the U.S. Justice System, resulting from the Nuremberg trials which clearly violated the spirit of the U.S. Constitution. American officials tried people under ex post facto laws where individuals carried out their superior’s orders. It was a travesty of justice that demonstrated the government’s sense of unequal justice. In Germany the “foul fiasco” of Nuremberg evokes a quip, in the Third World War “England will furnish the navy, France the foot soldiers, America the airplanes, and Germany the war-criminals.” 1902

  Ilse Koch who allegedly made lampshades out of Jewish skins stood trial on charges that scientists never substantiated. American troops committed atrocities but officials did not vilify Roosevelt’s New Deal Administration as a criminal regime. The United States was hardly in any kind of moral position to be putting anyone on trial for war crimes. 1903 The Soviets escaped all culpability at Nuremburg for their April and May 1940 Katyn Forest massacre of Polish nationals which author James Bacque confirmed during his investigation in the KGB archives after officials opened them in 1990. 1904 In 1989, Gorbachev corroborated the massacre and introduced documents proving that the Soviet Secret Police, on orders from Stalin, murdered 21,587 Polish enemies and buried them in the Katyn Forest. 1905

  In a document dated March 5, 1940, Lavrentiy Beria, an Orthodox Jew and chief of the NKVD during the war, proposed that they execute all of the members of the Polish Officer Corps. The Soviet Politburo, including Stalin, approved of and signed the document, making it official. The estimated number of victims was almost 22,000 (21,768). The Soviets murdered the victims in the Katyn Forest in Russia, the Kalinin and Kharkov prisons and elsewhere. The Soviets arrested about 8,000 individuals during their 1939 invasion of Poland—about 6,000 police officers, along with the intelligentsia who were intelligence agents, gendarmes, landowners, saboteurs, factory owners, lawyers, officials and priests.

  These graves at Katyn contained the bodies of thousands of Polish officers. Elmer Davis, head of the OWI provided America’s official statement on Katyn. He said that since Stalin was an “ally,” the FDR administration would essentially reject the German claims and support the Communist denials. FDR charged the Germans for the killings even though the area where they had taken place was not under German control at the time of the slaughter. Davis reiterated his skepticism in a radio broadcast while the press simultaneously supported his view. Communists in America reversed the accusation and charged the Germans with trying to conceal their own crimes. William L. Shirer, a Jew, stated in the New York Herald Tribune that it was German propaganda and that the Germans had committed the murders. Time also accepted the Communist claims regarding Katyn and agreed it was a German atrocity even though the Poles asked for a Red Cross investigation. Life also called Katyn a German action and denounced the Poles. 1906

  Shirer, a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, who posturing as a propaganda analyzer, regularly disseminated caustic anti-German messages while praising the spread of socialism throughout Europe, especially after Hitler’s downfall. Following the war, he wrote End of a Berlin Diary in which he penned his approval of the rapid spread of socialism. 1907

  Lord chancellor Sir William Jowitt, the chair of the London Conference, appointed Hartley W. Shawcross, the Attorney General of Britain, as the lead British prosecutor at Nuremburg. Shawcross visited Nuremberg just to deliver the opening and closing remarks in behalf of Britain. His predecessor, Maxwell-Fyfe did “most of the work.” 1908 On March 16, 1984, Shawcross said in a speech at Stourbridge, “Step by step, I have arrived at the conviction that the aims of communism in Europe are sinister and fatal. At the Nuremberg Trials, I, together with my Russian colleagues condemned Nazi Aggression and Terror. I believe now that Hitler and the German People did not want war. But we (England) declared war on Germany, intent on destroying it, in accordance with our principle of Balance of Power, and we were encouraged by the Americans around Roosevelt. We ignored Hitler’s pleading, not to enter into war. Now we are forced to realize that Hitler was right. He offered us the co-operation of Germany: instead, since 1945, we have been facing the immense power of the Soviet Empire. I feel ashamed and humiliated to see that the aims we accused Hitler of, are being relentlessly pursued now, only under a different label.” 1909

  Joachim Hoffmann wrote, “A myth was widely disseminated in Germany of the alleged possibility of waging ‘humane’ warfare, and that this possibility only vanished due to Hitler’s alleged refusal to consider humane methods of waging war.” From the start, the Soviets, incited to undue hatred, methodically used excessive violence against the Germans. Humanity, then, was not an option on either side. The Soviets refused to ratify the International Conventions regarding the execution of warfare. Admittedly, the Germans committed war crimes in the Soviet Union. Heinrich Himmler directed the executive bodies that approved of those crimes. Officials have thoroughly and repeatedly exposed German crimes while relegating Soviet crimes and Allied crimes “to oblivion” where certain people allow no “comparison” under any circumstances. 1910

  The Chicago Tribune, dated October 2, 1946, under the headline, Aggressor Nations, following the sentencing at Nuremberg, stated, “The truth of the matter is that no one of the victors was free of the guilt which its judges attributed to the vanquished.” According to the tribunal’s standards, American forces, if tried for their conduct, would have been executed for the devastation that they rained down on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, Dresden and hundreds of other places where they targeted non-combatant citizens, all according to the adoption of the London Charter that they devised and signed on August 8, 1945, the same time the Allies were incinerating the Japanese. 1911

  The Allies used the London Charter to justify the punishment of actions that were not prohibited at the time of their occurrence. Rear Admiral Dan V. Gallery said, “When the war was over, they insisted on trying the German Admirals Raeder and Doenitz at Nuremberg as war criminals for permitting their submarines to do exactly what ours did. A justice of our Supreme Court prosecuted them and tried to
hang them. To our eternal shame, we convicted the German admirals of violating the laws of war at sea and sentenced them to long terms of imprisonment: Raeder to life; and Doenitz to ten years.” 1912

  Wennerstrum, mentioned earlier, presided as a judge at some of the Nuremberg Trials, including the Hostages Trial, where lawyers tried twelve Germans. He granted an interview to Hal Foust, a journalist with the Chicago Daily Tribune, then in Nuremberg covering the trials, which the paper published on February 23, 1948. The U.S. Military monitored the journalists covering the tribunals. Foust claimed that the military intercepted his article when he transmitted it and also claimed that the military picked him up and interrogated him. 1913

  Wennerstrum, as he was packing to leave Germany, said, “The victor in any war is not the best judge of the war crime guilt.” The news article said, “The initial war crimes trial here was judged and prosecuted by Americans, Russians, British and French with much of the time, effort, and high expenses devoted to whitewashing the allies and placing the sole blame for World War II upon Germany. The entire atmosphere here is unwholesome.” The court needed linguists and the Americans are notoriously poor linguists. The court employed lawyers, clerks, interpreters, and researchers who recently became Americans, many of them European Jews. The prosecution selectively chose the evidence from captured records. “The defense had access only to those documents which the prosecution considered material to the case.” 1914

  On June 5, 1950, the Supreme Court maintained that, “if a person has a right to a writ of habeas corpus, he cannot be deprived of the privilege by an omission in a federal jurisdictional statue.” Apparently, this was not applicable to “a non-resident enemy alien.” Francis Biddle, one of the judges at Nuremberg, in an article in American Heritage, dated August 5, 1962, admitted that the American judges knowingly allowed the Soviet prosecutor to introduce “false evidence” against the defenders. Justice Jackson hosted a party for Andrei Vishinski, the Soviet prosecutor in the Stalin purges. During the party, the American judges, joined with Vishinski, in drinking a toast, “To the German prisoners, may they all be hanged.” Any bar association in the western world would have disqualified and charged such judges. 1915

  Eisenhower, in The New York Times, dated May 13, 1954, said, “The obedience of an office must be absolute and is not subject to private moral scruples. The very being of an Army consists in the execution of the commands of the leaders and the laws of the Government, without hesitation, the responsibility for which rests alone upon the Commander-in-Chief… In the Army, as especially in State Service, the oath of allegiance obliges obedience to those in command and their orders. Not for one second would I ever suffer disobedience or insubordination.” 1916 In conjunction with this mentality, the Supreme Court stated that an officer of the U.S. Army was not responsible for injuries resulting from his orders while in the service of the United States in the enemy’s country. 1917

  Additionally, according to the article and the statements of Brigadier General Telford Taylor, the court used self-incriminating statements made by the defendants while they were prisoners for over two and a half years during which time interrogators repeatedly questioned them without the presence of defense counsel. 1918 Taylor wrote Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (1970). On page 86, he wrote, “Karl Doenitz was only a commodore and commander of the small U-boat arm when the war began; the Tribunal found that he had neither been present at Hitler’s conferences nor informed about his plans, and based the conviction on the fact that Doenitz ‘waged’ aggressive war because his submarines were ‘fully prepared to wage war.’” There were numerous inconsistencies at Nuremberg, one of which was the aerial bombardment of Germany. The judges condemned Doenitz’s submarines and their use of underwater torpedoes while ignoring the ally’s massive use of bombs which carried substantially more of a lethal payload. Surely, the judges recognized that the bombing of Dresden would, by the standards of the tribunal, be “war crimes” of immense magnitude. Thus, the victors simply swept their own crimes under the proverbial carpet. 1919

  Obedience, a Psychological Mechanism

  The theoretical legality of the most horrendous acts subtly seduces citizens into engaging in highly questionable behavior. Legalization suggests that one may ignore behavior once considered immoral, abandon one’s value system and disregard the emotional and psychological consequences of debatable behavior. This is particularly true when applied to group behavior, which, by reason of its mass application, gains acceptability. Teachers and others have categorically indoctrinated citizens to view authority figures as infallible sources of solutions and resolutions despite evidence of corruption, self-serving greed and ineptitude. Independent thinking requires physical and mental commitments whereas allowing the state to make tough decisions shifts the responsibility elsewhere. The state, in effect, has become the people’s conscience and the people have surrendered or squandered their inherent accountability.

  Stanley Milgram, a Jew, 1920 grew up in a Jewish immigrant neighborhood. During the war, he and his family listened to the news from Europe. His father’s family “escaped the Nazis” but his mother’s family was not so lucky. Following the war, some relatives came to stay with the Milgram family. He remembered seeing the tattooed numbers. In 1946, Stanley, in his bar mitzvah speech said, “As I come of age and find happiness in joining the ranks of Israel, the knowledge of the tragic suffering of my fellow Jews throughout war-torn Europe makes this also a solemn event and an occasion to reflect upon the heritage of my people—which now becomes mine.” While traveling through Europe in 1958, he wrote home to a friend, “My true spiritual home is Central Europe… I should have been born into the German-speaking Jewish community of Prague… and died in the gas chambers.” 1921

  In 1960, Milgram, a psychologist, as he began his career at Yale, planned to scientifically prove that the Germans have a “basic character flaw” in that they have a “readiness to obey authority without question, no matter what outrageous acts the authority commands,” which should make non-Germans feel better, even morally superior, about the whole business of slaughtering strangers during warfare. Apparently, Milgram learned some of his managerial technique from Solomon Asch, one of the masters of experimental and Gestalt psychology and particularly on conformity.

  William L. Shirer has also used the Germans-are-different hypothesis to explain the alleged systematic destruction of the Jews by the Third Reich. “One madman could decide to destroy the Jews and even create a master plan for getting it done. However, to implement it on the scale that Hitler did meant that thousands of other people had to go along with the scheme and help to do the work. The Shirer thesis, which Milgram set out to test, is that Germans have a basic character flaw which explains the whole thing, and this flaw is a readiness to obey authority without question, no matter what outrageous acts the authority commands.” 1922

  In The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer talked about Hitler as an evil genius with “uncommon shrewdness” who found in the German people, “a mysterious Providence and centuries of experience had molded them up to that time, a natural instrument which he was able to shape to his own sinister ends.” 1923 He wrote, “Did any German, even one single German, protest against this planned ruthlessness, this well-thought-out scheme to put millions of human beings to death by starvation? . . . These plans were not merely wild and evil fantasies of distorted minds and souls of men such as Hitler, Göring, Himmler and Rosenberg.”1924 On another page, he wrote, “There was to be no more opposition to Hitler, not even any criticism of him. The once mighty Army, like every other institution in the Third Reich, would go down with him, its leaders too benumbed now, too lacking in the courage which the handful of conspirators alone had shown, to raise their voices—let alone do anything—to stay the hand of the one man who they by now fully realized was leading them and the German people rapidly to the most awful catastrophe in the history of their beloved Fatherland.”1925r />
  Milgram began his famous, influential and controversial experiments in July 1961, three months after the beginning of Adolf Eichmann’s much-publicized trial in Jerusalem. Milgram, with his experiments, addressed the question, “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” Joseph Dimow, a participant in the 1961 experiment, described his suspicions and early withdrawal as a “teacher,” as he thought that “the whole experiment was designed to see if ordinary Americans would obey immoral orders, as many Germans had done during the Nazi period.”1926 Milgram completed his last experiment on Sunday, May 27, and wrote a letter regarding his experiments to Claude Buxton, Chairman of the psychology Department at Yale on June 1, 1962, the day after the Israelis executed Eichmann for his role in the Nazi’s “final solution” to the Jewish question. In October 1963, the psychological community and the general public, via The New York Times, The London Times, and later numerous other newspapers would learn about Milgram’s “very strong” findings. 1927

  Milgram’s three-year psychological study (1960-1963), as described in Obedience to Authority (1974), provides some helpful answers to those troubling earlier questions. His experiments pose a simple question: How far would ordinary Americans go in inflicting serious harm on a perfectly innocent stranger if they were told to do so by an authority figure? 1928 Milgram maintains, “Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living… Obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose. It is the dispositional cement that binds men to systems of authority.” 1929