Death of a Nation
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cciii Berlin was to be renamed Germania after the war and Hitler’s favourite architect (and soon to be Armaments Minister), Albert Speer, built scale models of the most fantastic dimensions for Hitler’s new colonial capital. The first major project constructed by his architect was his new Reich Chancellery, an imposing building close to the old Reichstag, filled with red marble and a great hall twice the size of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Germania was to have a great new east/west axis, whose centrepiece would have been the Volkshalle (the domed People’s Hall) for rallies and meetings of his new post-war 110-million strong German Reich. It was to have stood where the present day über-modern Chancellery stands, built after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a monstrous, hideous carbuncle on the face of the city, which Berliners have dubbed the ‘Washing Machine’. The dome’s dimensions were to have been colossal. Sixteen times the size of St Peter’s in Rome, 220 metres high and 250 metres wide. Some architects have speculated that had the dome been filled to capacity it would have created enough condensation to create clouds and rain! At the other end of the axis facing the dome was to have been a triumphal arch, over 100 metres high. The Arc de Triomphe, on which it was modelled, would have been able to fit inside its arch. When the war ended, Hitler intended to rebuild his new capital, host the World Fair there in 1950 and then retire to Linz. Albert Speer was the only leading Nazi at the Nuremberg trial to express understanding and remorse for the scale of the human catastrophe that the Third Reich had unleashed. Interviewed some years later by Sebastian Haffner and asked, with all the highs and the terrible lows he had experienced, would he rather not have remained a simple but successful architect in his home town of Heidelberg, Speer stared into the distance for a second and then with a wry smile, he said ‘No’.(5)
cciv Hitler’s war cost over 50 million lives in Europe and destroyed over 2 millennia of European domination of world culture and trade.
ccv Kammerknechte had to pay a poll tax to the Emperor’s privy purse. As the Emperor’s personal serfs, all Jews were now stripped of their rights and reduced to the status of a commodity, whom the Emperor could sell, mortgage, massacre, or give away as a gift.(4)
ccvi Pope Paul IV would issue the Papal Bull Cum nimis absurdum propounding the view that, ‘It appears utterly absurd and impermissible that the Jews, whom God has condemned to eternal slavery for their guilt, should enjoy Christ’s love.’ He forced Jews into the Ghetto in Rome, which was to be locked at night. Jewish men were forced to wear a yellow hat and women a yellow kerchief. They were forbidden to own property or to practise medicine upon Christians.
ccvii There was however no state-sponsored terror against the rights of Polish Jews, who formally at least continued to be protected under the constitution.
ccviii Zionist movements had since the late nineteenth century sought an independent Jewish state in Palestine and looked to facilitate their emigration there. The Haavara agreement enabled Jewish Germans to indirectly transmit part of their wealth and smooth the process of emigration to Palestine. A hundred million Reichsmarks were transferred this way enabling some 60,000 German Jews who emigrated to Palestine between 1933–39, to make a new start, in a nation that did not exactly welcome them with open arms.(20)
ccix The rise of nationalism following the French Revolution would see an increase in attacks on Jews everywhere, even where there had been a long-established history of greater tolerance among many of the states of the Middle East, with the Jewish communities in Morocco being systematically destroyed from 1790–92, followed by massacres of Jews in Algeria in 1805, a pogrom against the increasing number of Jews emigrating to Jerusalem in 1920 and in Hebron in 1929. Attacks on Jews in Palestine intensified as the number of Jews that emigrated there increased, bringing British authorities into conflict with both Arabs and Jews.
ccx The Basler Nachrichten newspaper published an article on 14th February 1941 reporting the terrible plight of the Jews in the internment camps in Vichy France, supposedly awaiting shipment to Madagascar. Many had already died and it was estimated half of the remainder would die before the year was out.
ccxi The Madagascar Plan had been drawn up for the forced deportation of Europe’s Jews to the French East African colonial island of Madagascar. Preparations were begun for their embarkation in 1940 under appalling conditions. Many thousands died in the transports. Plans for the deportation of Vichy France’s Jews and the refugees from Germany, along with Hitler’s plans to ship the Jews of occupied Europe to Madagascar were ended when the British occupied the island in 1942. In another largely forgotten chapter of the Second World War, French colonial forces put up a bitter struggle against their erstwhile allies the British, to prevent their taking Madagascar in a war that lasted from 5th May to 6th November 1942, far longer than they had fought the Germans over the Battle of France.(25)
ccxii An obvious parallel is the self-imposed ghettoisation of segments of the Islamic communities in Europe today, with religious teachers who do not speak the language of the indigenous communities in which they preach to their immigrant flock. Community leaders who wish them to remain isolated and sheltered from the decadent influences of Western civilisation and advocate that their children should be taught at Islamic schools, that they must live under Sharia law. These communities have nothing like the centuries-long roots the Jewish communities had in Europe and are in serious danger of ghettoisation from within and without, living a precarious existence on the periphery of society.
ccxiii Judendeutsch (Jewish German), better known in English as ‘Yiddish’ is a medieval German dialect mixed in with Hebrew, with German suffixes attached to Hebrew verbs producing the infinitives.(33)
ccxiv Zionism was born in Austria and Prussia. The Austrian, Theodor Herzl, pioneered the idea that Jews should have their own homeland and held the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, which created a virtual Israel and established the national anthem. His successor, Kurt Blumenfeld, was an East Prussian Jew who became Secretary-General of the World Zionist Organisation in 1911.
ccxv During the First World War, anti-Semitic elements within the German officers corps surfaced, aimed at preventing Jews from being promoted into the ranks of the officer corps in large numbers. Their efforts focused on having a survey carried out to try and prove that Jews were shirkers — that they were overrepresented at desk jobs far behind the lines. Their findings proved the exact opposite, namely that Jewish Germans were overrepresented at the front and in front line positions in relation to their percentage in the overall population.
ccxvi Goethe wrote in his memoirs of prejudices ingrained from childhood about ‘cruelties committed by Jews against Christian children’. Referring to the medieval prejudicial belief that Jews killed Christian babies and children and used their blood to bake unleavened bread, or that they sacrilegiously abused the communion ‘host’ by perforating it, making it bleed. This kind of nonsense was enough to unleash ‘blood libels’ against the Jewish communities in medieval times in Western Europe and into the modern era in Eastern Europe, resulting in their massacre every time a child went missing.
ccxvii The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were first published in Russia in 1903. These Protocols were a conspiracy theory based on the notion that international Zionism planned to take over the world. This theory became popular after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and was propagated by anti-Semites to state that the start of the spread of Zionist revolution throughout the world had begun. Germany Must Perish, published by Theodore Kaufman in 1941, proved to be a gift for Nazi propaganda; Goebbels used it as proof of a global ‘Zionist conspiracy to annihilate Germany’. Kaufman, an American Jew, advocated the genocide of the entire German population of Europe by sterilisation and total dismemberment of Austria and Germany. An American journalist, Howard K. Smith, wrote a review of the book in which he stated, ‘No man has ever done so irresponsible a disservice to the cause his nation is fighting and suffering for than Kaufman. His half baked brochure provided the Nazis
with one of the best light artillery pieces they have…’
ccxviii The Balfour Declaration, made by the Foreign Secretary of the British government in November 1917, proclaimed the desired objective of the creation of a national homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine. This raised the profile of Zionism on the one hand, whilst at the same time giving rise to greater concerns about the divided loyalties of Jews in the states in which they currently lived.
ccxix As one eyewitness of the eastern pogroms put it, ‘The seed of hatred fell on well nourished soil, which had been prepared for many years by the clergy. The wild and bloodthirsty mob took it as a holy challenge that history had put upon it — to get rid of the Jews. And the desire to take over Jewish riches whetted their appetites even more.’(49) On 10th July 1941, three weeks after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, a terrible pogrom was unleashed by the local Polish population in the town of Jedwabne against its Jewish population: ‘… the Polish villagers slaughtered the villagers with axes, poles, knives and nail studded clubs. Men had their tongues and eyes cut out, women were raped and murdered, babies thrown to the ground and trampled to death. Jews were forced to sing that they had caused the war; other groups of Jews were forced to undress, sing, dance and perform insane exercises, while Polish peasant onlookers, including women and children, applauded. A group of Jews was ordered to lift a giant statue of Lenin (from the time of the Soviet occupation) and drag it to the Jewish cemetery, where they were promptly butchered. All the remaining Jews, reeling from savage blows, were then forced into a nearby barn which was set alight with kerosene, so that they burned alive.’ This was not an isolated incident, other equally murderous pogroms occurred during this period around the Bialystok region. They were nothing new in Eastern Europe and they did not even end with the horrors of the Holocaust but continued well after the war, with Keith Lowe’s book Savage Continent estimating that at least a further 500 Jews were murdered after the war in Poland alone.(50)
ccxx On 1st October, on the eve of the German takeover of the Sudetenland following the Munich Agreement, the Polish government issued an ultimatium to Prague and on 2nd October occupied the Czech town of Teschen. During Hitler’s attack on the rump Czech state in March 1939, the Poles threatened to take the Czech steel works at Witkowitz, prompting Hitler to move forward his invasion plans by twenty-four hours, to pre-empt them.
ccxxi Even the July 1944 plotters who attempted to assassinate Hitler still clung to the belief that Germany’s 1914 borders were their minimum requirement for a negotiated settlement, for an early end to the war. Field Marshal von Paulus, who had surrendered the remnants of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, was adamant when spied upon in captivity stating, “The loss of East Prussia will mean another war.” The Junker caste could not envisage the end of their 700-year tenure of the soil in which their ancestors were buried and the soil which had nurtured the generations of officers that had made Prussia and later Germany great. It was simply inconceivable to them.(6)
ccxxii Although Upper Silesia was divided sixty/forty along ethnic-linguistic lines, the Poles got four-fifths of the industry including 75 per cent of pig iron production and all the zinc mines.(7)
ccxxiii Describing the area east of the Curzon Line (which the Poles occupied after the Polish-Soviet war of 1920), the commission in Paris drawing up Poland’s proposed borders (which the Poles had no intention of accepting) stated, ‘… in the north Poles mingled with Lithuanians and Germans. In the middle, was a huge region ‘with an enigmatic population, which may be White Russian or Ukrainian, but is certainly not Polish.’(10) Poland’s population of 27 million counted in the 1921 Census had increased to 32 million by the time of the 1931 census. This consisted of 21.8 million Poles, 6.4 million others (mostly Ukrainians and Byelorussians), 3.1 million Jews and a dramatically reduced number of Germans counted as only 741,000 from a pre-war figure of over 2 million.
ccxxiv The Nazis would in turn wage war on the Polish Catholic Church, killing more than 2,000 Polish priests and five bishops.(10) After the war, leading Polish Catholic officials played their part in hastening the ethnic cleansing of their dioceses. There was no sympathy for their fellow German Catholics, who had also been persecuted by the Prussian state from the time of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf. It was as if the wars of the reformation had never ended; the Catholic Church lost no time in claiming the largely Protestant regions back for itself once the war was over.
ccxxv This included many ethnic Germans from Romania, which had once been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Among them were Horst Kohler’s parents, a recent president of the Federal Republic of Germany.
ccxxvi The NKVD was responsible for conducting extrajudicial executions and for organising the mass deportations to the Gulags in the occupied territories. It conducted espionage and political assassinations and was the forerunner of the KGB.
ccxxvii To date, lists discovered show that some 2.5 million Poles were sorted into the following four categories, although the actual numbers may have been higher:
List I: Referred to Volksdeutsch or ethnic Germans who could demonstrate to have been German citizens before the borders changed after the First World War (388,640).
List II: Ethnic Germans who could prove their German origins (463,863).
List III: People of ethnic German origin with close ties to the Polish state, language, culture etc. but whom it was thought could be won over to the German cause and prove their patriotism, most likely through service to the Wehrmacht (1,510,315).
List IV: People of German origins who had completely gone over to the Polish cause and who were hostile to Germany (62,208).(20)
ccxxviii The AK is revered everywhere in Poland as a liberation army, as an honourable and glorious resistance movement that fought bravely and with distinction against both Nazi and Soviet aggression and brutal occupation. However, its record has been tarnished by reports of murderous anti-Semitism on the part of some of its members. Aronek Kierszkowski, a Polish Jewish survivor of Nazi and Soviet occupations of eastern Poland and the Holocaust recalled, ‘After the war, and this defies belief, they had a pogrom in the Polish town of Kielce, killing Jews… One of the partisan groups, the Armia Krajowa (the Polish AK), who had taken their orders from London during the war, they were real anti-Semites. They would hunt for escaped Jews in the forest and kill them, often in collaboration with the Germans, who they were supposed to be fighting… My cousin Lisa, who had been sent to Siberia but after the war returned to Poland, told me… The AK were stopping trains, pulling Jews out who had returned home from the concentration camps or Siberia, and shooting them. Incomprehensible! She was on the train from Warsaw — Oh, this must have been in 1946 a year after the war was over — and met a Polish school friend from before the war; they had gone to Gymnasium together. The train was stopped; the AK were searching for Jews. They caught one Jewish fellow and executed him right on the spot. They came to the compartment where my cousin was and the student pushed her under the bench and said, “There’s no one here.” Now that was a good kid!’(22)
8
The End is Nigh: Victory or Death
From the middle of 1942, ominous signs for the Germans began to emerge, starting with the first 1,000-bomber raid hitting Cologne in May 1942. At this point, the German army was still advancing on all fronts. In the Caucasus they reached the Volga in August. Rommel took Tobruk and then penetrated deep into Egypt, standing only 80 miles from the strategic Suez Canal by September 1942, with the massive oil reserves of the Middle East lying just beyond the canal. But from the autumn of 1942 to the spring of 1943, the Third Reich saw a dramatic reversal of its fortunes. Since June 1941, 80 per cent of the German military machine had been committed on the Eastern Front; a campaign that Hitler had hoped would be over before the winter set in, expecting as successful a Blitzkrieg in the East as there had been in the West. The Wehrmacht had taken over 3 million Soviet prisoners of war in the opening months of the battle, but it had underestimated the logisti
cal difficulties of moving massive amounts of men and equipment on poor roads and railways, and over such huge distances. Above all, the German military had not been equipped to fight in the depths of a bitter Russian winter. The German military machine stalled at the gates of Moscow on 5th December 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on 7th December, and following Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States, Germany now found herself at war with the near-limitless resources of the British Empire, the Soviet Union and the largest industrial nation on earth — the United States.ccxxix