Allied War-Crimes
And Atrocities

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 reasons of 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 and human nature! 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 1945 Sinkings of the Cap Arcona and the Thielbek

The Little-Known Story of the Wilhelm Gustloff, the General Steuben and the Goya

 Grass novel on German 'Titanic' ends taboo By Toby Helm and Uwe Gunther in Berlin

American Leaders Planned Poison Gas Attack Against Japan
 

Katyn Massacre -- 'The Lost 10,000'

Nuremberg: Woe to the Vanquished

 Nuremberg: A Nation On Trial

Why the Atomic Bombings Could Have Been Avoided - Was Hiroshima Necessary?

Bombs on Britain

Did the Allies starve millions of Germans? By James Bacque

James Bacque's two amazing books about Germany after World War Two
 prove that  the Russians, French and Americans committed vast atrocities
against surrendered  German prisoners of war. 
They were starved in open cages without shelter or water and left to die. 
More than a million and a half died.

James Bacque Answers a Critic

Allied Powers: "15,000,000 people have been deported"

      
 The 1945 Sinkings
of the Cap Arcona and the Thielbek

Reproduced From:  The Journal of Historical Review

American Leaders Planned
Poison Gas Attack Against Japan

A long-suppressed report written in June 1945 by the US Army's Chemical Warfare Service shows that American military leaders made plans for a massive preemptive poison gas attack to accompany an invasion of Japan. The 30-page document designated "gas attack zones" on detailed maps of Tokyo and other major Japanese cities. Army planners selected 50 urban and industrial targets in Japan, with 25 cities, including Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Kobe and Kyoto, listed as "especially suitable for gas attacks."

In planning the invasion of Japan proper, America's military and political leaders expected the Japanese to fight with fanatic fervor in defense of their home islands. The overall US plan, code-named "Operation Downfall," called for a two-stage invasion. An assault on the southernmost Japanese home island of Kyushu, code-named "Operation Olympic," was set for November 1, 1945. This was to be followed by "Operation Coronet," scheduled for March 1946: an invasion of the main Japanese home island of Honshu, including an assault on Tokyo.

"Gas attacks of the size and intensity recommended on these 250 square miles of urban population," the US Army report declared, "might easily kill 5,000,000 people and injure that many more." In the first attack, which would be launched 15 days before the Kyushu landings, American bombers would drench much of Tokyo and other cities in an early morning attack with 54,000 tons of lethal phosgene gas. Tokyo would be the largest poison gas target, because an "attack of this size against an urban city of large population should be used to initiate gas warfare."

The report's three authors recommended that the US Joint Chiefs of Staff issue "a policy at once directing the use of toxic gas on both strategic and tactical targets in support of Operation Olympic." Planners called for the use of four kinds of gas, including phosgene (or carbonyl chloride), mustard gas, and hydrogen cyanide. The gas attack study was approved by the chief of the US Chemical Warfare Service, Major General William N. Porter. Only five copies were made of the top secret document, whose existence was first made public in July 1991.

After the horrific use of poison gas during the First World War, the major nations formally outlawed the use of this new weapon. This prohibition was included in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the 1922 Treaty of Washington, and in a 1925 protocol signed by more than 40 countries, including the United States. During the Second World War, both the United States and Germany produced and stockpiled lethal gas for possible use in the European conflict, but neither side -- apparently fearful of retaliation -- actually used the weapon.

Although the public policy in 1945 was that the United States would use gas only in retaliation for a Japanese first use, in private America's military leaders seriously considered striking first with poison gas. By the summer of 1945, American forces were already killing Japanese by the tens of thousands in indiscriminate fire-bombings. Given this, the step to killing by lethal gas was not a lengthy one.

On June 14, 1945, other documents show, Fleet Admiral Ernest King, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, received a secret report on poison gas from Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall. The two men were key presidential advisers. President Truman met at the White House on June 18 with his principal military and civilian advisers to discuss the overall plan for the invasion of Japan. Apparently the gas attack plan was approved at that conference. Three days later, June 21, orders were given to step up production of several types of poison gas to provide stockpiles in the massive quantities urged in the study.

Two American historians, Thomas B. Allen and Norman Polmar, commented on the long-suppressed document in a 1995 article. The June 1945 report, they wrote, "raised the killing of enemy civilians to a level far beyond anything seen in World War II. No [other] known military document from World War II recommends such wholesale killing of civilians." (T. B. Allen and N. Polmar, "Poisonous invasion prelude," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Aug. 4, 1995 [New York Times special features].)

No American official has ever been demoted or even criticized for approving this murderous plan, which has received scant public attention. If Germany had used poison gas during the Second World War, surely the victorious Allies would have severely punished the responsible officials. Similarly, if German military leaders had approved a plan to gas London comparable to the 1945 American one to drench Tokyo in phosgene, doubtless it would have been cited endlessly as a striking example of Nazi evil, and those responsible for drafting it would have been vilified.

Reproduced From:  The Journal of Historical Review

Katyn Massacre -- 'The Lost 10,000'

In his magnum opus, Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn says:

"They took those who were too independent, too influential, too noteworthy; they took particularly many Poles from former Polish provinces. (It was then that ill -- fated Katyn was filled up; and then too that in the northern camps they stockpiled fodder for the future army of Sikorski and Anders)".

But 'Katyn' is a collective word used to embrace not only those 4,500 found in the forest of that name, but a further 10,000 murdered at the same time. These were the men imprisoned at Starobielsk Camp (about 4,000) and at Ostashkow Camp (about 6,000). It is customary to refer to them briefly as "the other 10,000 -- whose whereabouts have remained a mystery." But 10,000 murdered prisoners cannot be dismissed in so short a sentence. This figure represents perhaps the total population of a sizeable town, or if seen as an army advancing across the plain it would appear a mighty host indeed. One thing is certain: just as no word ever came from the 4,500 Poles in Kozielsk camp after May 1940, so too was nothing again heard after that date from the 4,000 in Starobielsk camp, nor from the 6,000 in Ostashkow camp. They could not just vanish, and their bodies must be somewhere. But where?

At this point it is interesting to note that when the Germans first uncovered the corpses in Katyn forest they gave out that they had found 11,000. They did this for propaganda purposes and later amended the figure to the true one of 4,254. However, the Soviets also used the figure of 11,000 when trying to pin Katyn on Hermann Göring at Nuremberg, but there was a far more cynical reason. After all the Soviets knew the true figure as they had carried out the massacre. But they quoted 11,000 at Nuremberg in an effort to smudge the truth and somehow 'lose' the victims from Starobielsk and Ostashkow. As most people now know the Soviet accusation about Katyn fell to the ground and it is a matter for international shame that the whole subject was dropped and no mention of Katyn appears in the final judgment of the Nuremberg trials. So in this strange way some 10,000 men were seemingly made to disappear as if they had never existed at all. It is for that reason that I have entitled this lecture: "The Lost 10,000."

No Historical Review would be complete until every effort has been made to unravel this man -- made mystery, compounded as it is by the cowardice of the international community in creating the "cover -- up" which has banned the whole subject of Katyn from the pages of readily available records. But in the very name of humanity these lost men must be found; the manner of their passing must be recorded and proclaimed, and they must be given back their rightful places in the annals of time. To achieve this should be a solemn duty with any positive and sincere research body in the name of Truth as well as in the name of Compassion.

Now I have said that most of the prisoners from Kozielsk Camp were murdered in Katyn forest; in fact the number of corpses was 4,254 + 1 making 4,255. It is known that 245 were capriciously spared so that we arrive at the correct number originally imprisoned in that camp, which was 4,500. We must now consider the numbers spared from the other two camps, and they are as follows:

From Ostashkow Camp ...... 124
From Starobielsk Camp ...... 79

Thus, of the 6,500 originally imprisoned in Ostashkow Camp 6,376 were murdered, and of the 3,920 originally imprisoned in Starobielsk Camp, 3,841 were murdered. If we now add these last two totals of victims together we arrive at a figure of 10,217 -- and that is the matter we are considering today.

10,217 Polish prisoners each individually shot in the back of the head by the Soviet NKVD in the Spring of 1940. Remember also that the Russian attack upon Poland of 17 September 1939 was all over by 28 September in that year, and recall that the Germans did not attack the Soviet Union until June of 1941. Spring 1940 was, therefore, 'peacetime' in Russia -- and this makes the massacre all the more coldblooded and calculated. But it was, as we know, a deliberate attempt to cut off the flower of Poland by liquidating the leaders so as to leave the remainder of the population rudderless. Such an act is known by no other name than Genocide! In this case not only unpunished, but also unmentioned! We must now return to the two camps at Starobielsk and Ostashkow as being the last places known for certain in connection with the "lost 10,000."

On 5 April 1940 the senior Polish officer at Starobielsk was a Major Niewiarowski and at 9:00 a.m. on that day the Soviet camp commander Lt. Colonel Boreshkov, with Kirshov, the political commissar, called on Niewiarowski and told him that the camp was being wound up and that on the same day the first batch of officer -- prisoners numbering 195 was to leave.

"Where to?" asked Major Niewiarowski.

"Where ... ?' Boreshkov drawled his answer, "Home! To your own homes. You will be sent first to transit camps, and then to where you came from; to your wives." Then he laughed. And from then on, transports were sent out daily after roll-calls in Block 20. The daily groups varied from 60 to 240 persons. One day while all this was going on a Lt. Mlynarski asked Boreshkov: "Why do you send us away in groups of 240 at the most? Having brought us all here in thousands, you could surely send us back the same way?"

"We can't," he replied. "The whole world is at war. We have to be ready too. We cannot spare the transport."

On 26 April the transports were stopped until 2 May when again a certain number were sent off. There was another delay until 8, 11 and 12 May on which days the last transports left Starobielsk camp, and it had been noted that each daily group had been selected from many different prison blocks and never included groups of friends but in total comprised men unknown to each other. This was brought to the notice of the Camp Commander who always replied to the effect that it did not matter as all the prisoners would meet up again in the transit camps. It appears that on 25April one group of 63 was herded into railway trucks and sent to Voroshilovgrad and from there to Kharkov, where the train was held up. One of the prisoners managed to poke his head through a gap in the door and speak to a railway worker who was tapping the wheels with a hammer.

"Comrade," whispered the prisoner, "is this Kharkov?"

"Da -- Yes, Kharkov. Prepare to leave the train. This is where all 'yours' are unloaded and sent further in vehicles."

"Where to?" asked the prisoner.

The railway worker shrugged his shoulders, spat between the wheels and said no more.

Sometimes in history disjointed snippets of information drift in like flotsam, and one such is a report that when the Germans were later being driven back from the Kharkov area Russian shells were bursting north of the town. It is said that one barrage of exploding shells caused "corpses to fly in the air, as if from some burial ground." There is no further corroboration to this item.

It is now time to turn to the camp at Ostashkow which was in a disused monastery in the middle of a lake, joined to the mainland by a bridge. From there too, after 4 April 1940, groups of prisoners were formed and similarly assured that they were being sent home. We have seen that 124 were capriciously spared of the total 6,500. Where did the rest go? Senior Constable of the Polish Police Forces, A. Woronecki, related a story of a conversation he had with one of the camp guards who, in exchange for a pinch of foul black Soviet tobacco, agreed to "let the secret out."

"You will never see your comrades again ..."

"Why -- where are they?"

"It isn't true that they are sent home. Neither were they sent to labor camps."

"Well, then ... what is the truth?"

The guard smoothed out a scrap of newspaper, inserted the tobacco, and rolled a cigarette. He inhaled the first puff and said:

"They have drowned them all ..."

Military Police Sergeant J.B. who was also a prisoner at Ostashkow, confirmed everything related by others -- the prisoner transports always comprised groups of between 60 and 300 men. One day he wandered into the camp bakery where he was on friendly terms with Nikityn, the chief baker.

"Where are they sending us? Do you know?"

"Na sievier, braktu (To the north, my friend). They are sending you somewhere to the North", answered Nikityn.

On 28 April 1940 this Sergeant was in a group of 300 leaving the camp. And they went northwards along the Leningrad line. At Bologoye, his truck with others was detached and sent off in the direction of Rhzev, while the remainder could be seen still standing at Bologoye..

So here, at least, are two place names: Kharkov and Bologoye. We are, perhaps, getting closer to the solution. It must now be recalled that after the German attack on Russia of 1941 the Soviets were rolled back almost to the gates of Moscow and, in desperation, sought everywhere and anyhow to find the means to halt the advances of the Wehrmacht. One such solution was to form an army from the 1 1/2 million Poles they had fed into the Gulag Archipelago. This army, under the command of General Anders, had come together as Poles dragged themselves across Siberia to join. They came from all parts of Russia -- weary, suffering from dysentery and emaciated from their sufferings. But all were private soldiers; the officers were missing! General Anders set up a special office to try and trace these officers, and it was in that office that a list of the missing was compiled.

On 26 April 1943, a woman named Katarzyna Gasziecka, reported to the office. She was the wife of one of the missing officers, and she had this to say:

In June 1941, among a crowd of 4,000 men and women all deported from Poland, I was shipped over the White Sea. We were sailing from Arkangel to the estuary of the river Peczora. They were sending us for further slave labor and misery, and I was sitting on the deck of the barge. I felt a bitter yearning to be free, to return to Poland, and to see my husband again -- I began to cry. This attracted the attention of a young Russian soldier who came over and asked me what was the matter, to which I replied:

"My fate. Is it also forbidden in your country to cry? I am crying also over my husband's fate."

"And who was he?"

"A Captain."

The Bolshevik burst into scornful laughter.

"Your tears won't help him anymore. All your officers were drowned here. In this very sea." Then he cruelly told me that he himself had taken part in the convoy which had transported about 7,000 people, mostly Polish officers and members of the Polish police. They had been towed out in two barges which were later cut adrift and sunk. "All went straight to the bottom." He went away, but another Russian, not a soldier but a barge crewman, came to me. He tried to say something comforting and ended:

"It is true what you have just heard. I also saw it with my own eyes. The barge crew was taken off into the towing ship. The barges had been pierced through. It was an awful sight. No one could have saved himself."

This theory of the prisoners from Ostashkow being drowned in the White Sea is the one which most Poles know, and which many believe. The train route to the White Sea leads from Ostashkow through Bologoye. But it was also known that many thousands of Poles had been sent North, all to work as slave laborers on the new railway system, and they had not been officers. Indeed many of these private soldiers found their way back to join General Anders' Army.

Logically this theory of drowning in the White Sea does not stand up. The liquidation of the three camps at Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostashkow was centrally planned, and as we know, the inmates of Kozielsk were taken to the nearest conveniently secret place, and there shot -- at Katyn. Further, evidence and commonsense points to the fact that it would be militarily better to take the prisoners by train to a railway station nearest to the place of execution and transport them thence by automobile or truck. To take many thousands of prisoners hundreds of miles to the White Sea was to risk escapes and the operation being witnessed by too many of the local population. However the transport of the prisoners from Starobielsk camp to Kharkov by train does fit in with the Katyn plan and thus there is reason to suppose that the Ostashkow prisoners were dealt with in a similar way, meaning that they were taken by train to Bologoye and thence by diesel truck to some nearby wood for extermination.

This is as far as speculation amongst Poles of my acquaintance goes -- 10,000 men buried; piles of corpses, one above another, compressed into a liquefying mass of putrefaction, just as at Katyn -- but over twice as many. The mind is stunned at the thought of these two mass -- burial places, probably alike in every way to the mass graves at Katyn. Men with bullet holes in the backs of their heads -- some with their hands tied; some with sawdust stuffed into their mouths to prevent them crying out. A scene of horror and satanic purposel

But there was another clue. On 14 May 1962 Congressman Derwinsky made a significant speech in the House of Representatives in which he tried to establish a special House Committee on Captive Nations and used as his main argument the Katyn case and the findings of the Select Committee of 1952. He referred to a resolution passed in 1949 by the National Council of the Polish Republic on the motion of the Polish Government -- in -- Exile. This resolution expressed gratification that the initiative for an independent investigation of the Katyn massacre had been undertaken in the United States, and expressed confidence that:

"people with sufficient moral strength would be found in the free world, able to bear the burden of struggle for the truth and to wage this struggle victoriously."

He told Congress how the Soviets had refused to take part in the Select Committee of 1952 and quoted their Memorandum dated 29 February 1952:

"The question of the Katyn crime had been investigated in1944 by an official commission, and it was established that the Katyn case was the work of Hitlerite criminals, as was made public in the press on 26 January 1944. For 8 years the Government of the United States did not raise any objections to such conclusion of the Commission until recently."

Congressman Derwinsky went on to quote the words of Representative Madden who, in 1952, addressed a mass meeting of Poles in London and, inter alia, said:

"Katyn is not only a Polish issue, but one that affects the conscience of the entire civilized world being at the same time a threat to this world."

Continuing his speech, Congressman Derwinsky then made a statement of great significance, albeit that it was somehow not singled out for special attention at the time. He referred to the publication in 1957 of a Secret Soviet document in a German weekly periodical. Giving the date of the document as 10 June 1940, it was said to contain details of how the three camps (Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostashkow) were wound up, and thus contained the solution to the mystery which has bothered so many, and which we are discussing today, namely the whereabouts of "the other 10,000" who were not found in the death -- pits of Katyn.

In 1974 I was actively engaged, as Hon. Secretary, on the work of the Katyn Memorial Fund, and thus was once more contemplating the whole ghastly story. Not for the first time I was filled with a smoldering rage that no nation had forced this issue to the attention of an international tribunal, but instead had allowed the Katyn case to fade away or had participated in the vast cover-up which so many have been at pains to create. And again I found myself pondering the mystery of the "lost 10,000." Somehow these men must be found -- but how? And then I re-read Congressman Derwinsky's speech of 1962 and suddenly the Secret Report of 10 June 1940 seemed to jump out of the page as if highlighted in heavy type. This Report must be found even if it was published in 1957 -- some 17 years previously. But again, how was this nebulous reference to be tracked down?

I made numerous enquiries amongst my many Polish friends, and although some had vaguely heard of the Report none could give a clue as to how it was to be traced, and certainly none had ever seen it. I was astonished to find that no one seemed to have even made any effort to trace this obviously most important document, relating as it appeared to over twice the number of victims as were found at Katyn.

Now all during the work of the Katyn Memorial Fund quiet encouragement had been offered by the German Embassy in London and on several occasions I was privileged to have conversations with Herr Karl Gunther von Hase, the Ambassador. He knew what the Soviet NKVD were like for he had been captured at Stalingrad after which he had spent five years in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp at Vologda, and he had said to me that if there was anything he could ever do to help he would be pleased to do so. At the time I overlooked this kind offer as I did not then see what he could do, but now his words came back to me with startling clarity. The Secret Soviet Report was published in a German weekly newspaper called Sieben Tage (Seven Days) and presumably a copy of it must exist somewhere in Germany. Who better to trace it than the German Ambassador? I approached him with my request immediately.

At first he was hesitant, but I pointed out that it had been the Germans who had discovered the mass graves of Katyn in 1943 so why not complete the exercise and discover the vital clue to "The Other 10,000." He took the point and promised to make enquiries.

Time passed and I heard no more. I made a further enquiry and was told that Sieben Tage had been out of print for many years and, as a publication, was now defunct. Nevertheless, I was informed, investigations were going on for the methodical Germans felt sure that a copy of the relevant issue must be on file somewhere.

And then late in a December evening of that same 1974 the German Press attache telephoned me to say that a photocopy of the vital page was on his desk at that moment. I grabbed a taxi and drove straight to the German Embassy at 23 Belgrave Square. Like a man whose spade hits metal in a treasure hunt I felt a great thrill of expectation. And then, quite suddenly, I had the report in my hand. Was it authentic? Why was it that only this insignificant and now defunct weekly paper had published it?

I showed a copy to a friend who is the Communist Affairs correspondent of the British Daily Telegraph and after examining the photocopy report and the rubber stamps upon it, he pronounced that in his opinion it was genuine. The answer to the second question as to why it had not received greater publicity lay in the fact that in 1957 the war had been over only twelve years and the great mass of guilt piled upon the German nation still lay heavy and leaden upon all. Germans just did not want to hear any more about massacres, mass -- graves, war crimes or even the war. Further mention of Katyn would inevitably bring down a hail of abuse based on the "Holocaust" story and thus it was best left alone. Such had been Allied propaganda that even some Germans thought they were responsible for Katyn and not the Soviets. In view of all this it seemed reasonable to suppose that this was the reason why the Report was never fully publicized nor followed up. But the Secret Soviet Report is probably one of the most significant documents in recent history and it should be re -- printed a million times over. Copies should be sent to every international jurist and every responsible politician. It stands as a terrible indictment of a most horrendous crime committed in peace -- time against defenseless prisoners -- of -- war as a gross act of Genocide and one of the darkest chapters of recent centuries.

Here, then, is the text of the Report:

Secret!

Union of the Socialist Soviet Republics.

People's Commissariat for
Internal Affairs.

Headquarters of the NKVD.
region of Minsk.
(Department )

10 June 1940

To: The Headquarters of
the NKVD Moscow.

Official Report

By Order of the Headquarters of the NKVD of February 12, 1940 the liquidation of the three Polish prisoner -- of -- war camps was carried out in the regions of the towns of Kozielsk, Ostaschkovo and Starobyelsk. The operation of liquidating the above three named camps was completed on 6 June of that year. Comrade Burjanoff, who had been seconded from the Central Office, was appointed to be in charge.

Under the above -- mentioned Order the camp at Kozielsk was liquidated first of all by the security forces of the Minsk headquarters of the NKVD in the area of the city of Smolensk during the period between 1 March and 3 May of that year. As security forces, territorial troops, in part from the 190th Rifle Regiment, were employed.

The Second action under the above Order was carried out in the area of the town of Bologoye by the security forces of the Smolensk headquarters of the NKVD, and was also covered by troops of the 129th Rifle Regiment (Velike Luki); it was completed by 5 June of that year. The Charkow headquarters of the NKVD was entrusted with carrying out the third liquidation of the camp of Starobyelsk. It was carried out in the area of the Dergachi settlement with the assistance of security forces of the 68th Ukrainian Rifle Regiment of the territorial troops on 2 June. In this case the responsibility and leadership in this action was entrusted to the NKVD Colonel B. Kutschov.

A copy of this report is being sent simultaneously to the NKVD Generals Raichmann and Saburin for their attention.

The Organizational Head of the Office of
the NKVD, area of Minsk:

TARTAKOW.

Thus, if the report is authentic (and what reason is there to suppose it is not?) the riddle is solved.

4,254 Polish prisoners were shot at Katyn, 3,841 were shot ot Dergacki, near Kharkov and 6,376 were shot near Bologoye, a total of 14,471 -- and none of them have received an iota of justice nor has any man paid anything for this most dastardly crime!

At this time, in September 1979, we are nearly at the fortieth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland; an invasion which led to the deportation of 1 1/2 million Poles eastwards from whom the cream was skimmed and brutally murdered. It seems an appropriate moment again to call for an international pronouncement on the Katyn massacre, for one thing is certain: the case will never die until that pronouncement is made and the perpetrators condemned. Neither will history be complete until those missing thousands are restored to their rightful place within it. It is a solemn duty to put this matter to rights. No one can bring back the dead but at least this awful chapter must no longer be covered up, as it has been to the eternal shame of human conscience. I call, therefore, for a fresh investigation in the forthcoming twelve months so that the year 1980, the fortieth anniversary of the Katyn Crime, may bear as fruit an awakening of public desire for Truth such as will lead to the missing judgment in this case. This call for justice should best come from a country which for so long has cherished Freedom and justice -- the United States of America.

Reproduced From:  The Journal of Historical Review

Book Review

Nuremberg:
Woe to the Vanquished

Nuremberg: The Last Battle
 by David Irving.
London: Focal Point, 1996. Hardcover. 380 pp. Photos. Source notes. Index. (Available for sale from the IHR for $39.95, plus shipping.)

Reviewed by Daniel W. Michaels

This book is vintage Irving, bearing all the familiar hallmarks of the British historian's skilled treatment of World War II: original research based on primary sources, vivid writing, and consideration for the German point of view, all with a defiant thumb to the nose to "court historians" and their "politically correct" adherents.

As he has amply demonstrated in his 30 published works of history, Irving is a master of excavating nuggets of historical gold from neglected archive files and ignored private diaries and letters. Because of his reputation as a scrupulous chronicler, numerous survivors of the Second World War era who are mistrustful (often with good reason) of establishment historians have, over the decades, entrusted him with their private papers.

In writing this "intimate look at the origins and conduct" of the 1945-1946 International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Irving has relied heavily on many hitherto neglected papers and documents, above all the official and private papers of Robert H. Jackson, a US Supreme Court Justice who served as the chief American prosecutor. Throughout this book, Irving shows considerable sympathy for Jackson, whom he portrays as an essentially decent man caught up in a tragic drama. "If this story needs a hero," writes Irving, "then he is Jackson."

As we learn, Jackson was initially enthusiastic about his important appointment, hoping to be the main architect of a new framework of international law. But even before the Tribunal's opening session, he was arguing in Washington with his superiors, emphatically expressing his ethical and professional position:

If we want to shoot Germans as a matter of policy, let it be done as such, but don't hide the deed behind a court. If you are determined to execute a man in any case, there is no occasion for a trial; the world yields no respect to courts that are merely organized to convict.

Early on, Irving relates, Jackson had a serious disagreement about his job with "Wild Bill" Donovan, head of the United States' OSS intelligence service (predecessor to the CIA):

It soon became clear that the OSS had intended all along to manage the whole trial along the lines of an NKVD [Soviet] show-trial, with Jackson little more than a professional actor. As part of the stage-management, they proposed to run a pre-trial propaganda campaign in the United States, with "increasing emphasis on the publication of atrocity stories to keep the public in the proper frame of mind." To this end the OSS devised and scripted for the education of the American public a two-reel film on war crimes, called Crime and Punishment; it was designed to put the case against the leading Nazis. Jackson declined to participate.

As Jackson came to more fully understand the nature of the role he was expected to play at Nuremberg, he became more troubled and dismayed. Confronted with the reality of the Nuremberg process, Irving shows, Jackson's idealism subsided, but never entirely vanished.

High-Level Decisions

As Germany's defeat became more obvious, the Allied leaders began discussing more specifically how to deal with the vanquished nation and its leadership. President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill and Premier Stalin readily agreed that many prominent German leaders would be put to death, and that Germany itself would be so crippled industrially that it would never again be a major European economic and military power. "We have got to be tough with Germany," said President Roosevelt, "and I mean the German people, not just the Nazis. You either have to castrate the German people or you have got to treat them in such a manner so they can't go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past."

Because the Allies had already publicly branded the German leaders as criminals, the discussions focused on whether they should be executed straight-away or after a public trial of some sort. Roosevelt and Churchill initially favored simply shooting most of Germany's military and political leaders outright as they were found or surrendered. (This is what happened to Italy's Duce, Benito Mussolini, who was simply murdered, along with his entourage.) It was Stalin who, mindful of his success in destroying rivals with the help of elaborate show trials, insisted that the German leaders be put on trial. Roosevelt and Churchill fell in line. Considering the adulation accorded the Nuremberg Tribunal by many in the United States and Britain today, it is strange (Irving notes) that it might never have come into being if the Soviet dictator had not insisted on it.

Not surprisingly, Soviet officials were under no illusions about the real nature and purpose of the Nuremberg proceedings. The Tribunal's Soviet judge, Ion T. Nikitchenko, candidly summed up his government's view of the proceedings: "We are dealing here with the chief war criminals who have already been convicted and whose conviction has already been announced by the heads of the governments." He objected to the "fiction" that the Tribunal was objective, explaining that the judges' job was merely to decide the appropriate punishment, and the prosecutors' simply to assist the judges.

Double Standard

As Irving shows, the victorious Allies who sat in judgment at Nuremberg were guilty of many of the same actions or crimes for which they tried (and hanged) the German defendants. Indeed, the Allies very probably outdid the Germans in crimes and atrocities.

Irving cites, for example, the British-American fire bombings of Dresden, Hamburg and other German cities, killing tens of thousands of civilians at a time, the "ethnic cleansing" mass expulsion of German civilians from eastern and central Europe, of whom some two million perished or were killed, the widespread summary shootings of German prisoners, and the Allies' use of hundreds of thousands of German prisoners as slave laborers. He also cites such lesser-known incidents as the sinking by British aircraft during the war's final days of a clearly marked German Red Cross refugee ship, the Cap Arcona, killing 7,300 refugees, mostly women and children.

At the Yalta conference in February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin agreed to use millions of German POWs and German civilians as slave labor in Soviet Russia, France, and Belgium as partial "reparations in kind." Jackson was shocked to learn that the Soviets wanted five million of these forced laborers, and France two million. (No final accounting has ever been made of the total number deported to the USSR for this purpose, or of the number who ever returned.) President Roosevelt endorsed this policy, which was in blatant violation of international law, concerned only about the possibly negative impact on public opinion and election prospects back home.

In some cases, the Nuremberg defendants were charged with or held guilty of crimes that were actually committed by the Allies. Most noteworthy, perhaps, is the massacre, at Katyn and elsewhere, of some 11,000-15,000 Polish officers and intellectuals. At Nuremberg Soviet prosecutors presented seemingly persuasive evidence of German responsibility for this crime, and several Germans whom a Soviet court had found guilty of these killings were publicly hanged in Leningrad. It was only decades later that Soviet officials formally acknowledged that the massacre had been carried out by the Soviet secret police, acting on Stalin's orders.

Predictably, the Allies grandly exploited the Tribunal for propaganda purposes. As Irving relates, the Americans forced the defendants to watch US-made "documentary" films of German atrocities that deceitfully included scenes of corpses filmed in the wake of Allied air raids on German cities and factories. Some of the German viewers spotted the deception, and one former Messerschmitt worker said he even recognized himself in the film.

Unprecedented Legal Procedures

In these unprecedented proceedings, the Allies discarded basic principles of Western jurisprudence, perhaps most notably the well-established principle that in the absence of a law there can be neither crime nor punishment -- nullum crimen sine lege, nulla poene sine lege. Instead, the Tribunal established new laws for the occasion, which were applied not only retroactively, but uniquely and exclusively to the German defendants. The Allies thus refused to consider the German defense argument of tu quoque or "you too" -- that is, punishing the German defendants for actions that the Allies themselves also carried out.

The Tribunal rejected defendants' pleas of obeying higher orders, even though, as Irving points out, precisely this had been affirmed as a valid defense under both British and American military law. Article 347 of the American Rules of Land Warfare, for example, specifically declares: "Members of the armed forces are not punished for these crimes, provided they were committed on the orders or with the permission of their governments or commanders."

The Tribunal's procedures, which were a blend of Allied procedures, differed markedly from German practice. In Germany, as in most of continental Europe, the court's primary objective is to ascertain the truth. However, the Nuremberg Tribunal adopted a version of the American confrontational system, in which each side introduces only the evidence that benefits its own case. But because the Allies had confiscated all pertinent German documents and records, and refused access to them by the defense attorneys, the prosecution had a tremendous advantage over the German defendants.

'Semitism Gone Wild'

With President Roosevelt's approval, high-ranking Washington officials of Jewish origin played a major role in setting America's policy on the postwar occupation of Germany, including the Nuremberg Tribunal. These included Isadore Lubin, Samuel Rosenman, Murray Bernays, and Herbert Wechsler. Above all, the malevolent role played by Henry Morgenthau, Jr., US Treasury Secretary and Roosevelt's trusted adviser, insured that the spirit of the Talmud and the Old Testament would prevail.

As Irving shows, at least some Allied figures involved with the Nuremberg proceedings were honorable men who were dismayed by the heavy spirit of revenge. Some American and British officials were repelled by the general tenor of American and Soviet occupation policy toward defeated Germany. No less a figure than US Secretary of War Henry Stimson expressed concern:

I found around me, particularly in Morgenthau, a very bitter atmosphere of personal resentment against the entire German people without regard to individual guilt, and I am very much afraid that it will result in our taking mass vengeance on the part of our people ...

On another occasion Stimson said:

I cannot believe that he [Roosevelt] will follow Morgenthau's views. If he does, it will certainly be a disaster... The President appoints a committee and then goes off to Quebec with the man [Morgenthau] who really represents the minority and is so biased by his Semitic grievances that he is really a very dangerous advisor ...

On still another occasion, Stimson confided: "I have yet to meet a man who is not horrified with the 'Carthaginian' attitude of the Treasury [Morgenthau]. It is Semitism gone wild for vengeance..." Britain's Anthony Eden had much the same opinion of Morgenthau and his Jewish circle: "These ex-Germans seem to wish to wash away their ancestry in a bath of hate."

In addition, Irving relates, officials of "several powerful Jewish organizations" intervened in the Nuremberg process. A few days before leaving for London in June 1945, Robert Jackson met in New York with Judge Nathan Perlman, Dr. Jacob Robinson, and Dr. Alexander Kohanski, who made quite clear their intention to play an important role in running the trial. (See also: M. Weber, "The Nuremberg Trials and the Holocaust," Summer 1992 Journal, pp. 170-171.)

It was at this meeting that Robinson, an official of the World Jewish Congress, told Jackson that six million Jews had been lost during the war, and that he had arrived at this figure "by extrapolation." As Irving tartly comments, "in other words his figure was somewhere between a hopeful estimate and an educated guess."

As it happens, this same six million figure, Irving notes, had been cited 26 years earlier in a leading Jewish-American periodical. In a 1919 essay by a former Governor of New York state, readers were told that "six million" Jews "are dying" in a "threatened holocaust of human life" as victims of "the awful tyranny of war and a bigoted lust for Jewish blood." (Facsimile in the Nov.-Dec. 1995 Journal, p. 31.)

Grave Misgivings

Responsible Allied military leaders disapproved of the postwar trials, especially of their counterparts in the German armed forces. Many American combat officers ardently opposed the prosecution of soldiers for obeying harsh orders issued by politicians. (See: H.K. Thompson and H. Strutz, eds., Dönitz at Nuremberg: A Reappraisal [IHR, 1983].)

In occupied Germany, American officers disliked having to enforce the vengeful Morgenthau directive 1067, and condemned as un-American the "so-called Gestapo methods used in handling Germans" that were being employed by (Jewish) refugees who had hurriedly been drafted into the US Army.

A few high-ranking British and American officers even spoke out on behalf of their German counterparts. For example, US Pacific Fleet commander Admiral Chester Nimitz issued a statement on behalf of Nuremberg defendant Admiral Karl Dönitz, who headed Germany's wartime U-boat fleet, confirming that American submarines had operated in the Pacific just as German submarines had operated under Dönitz' command in the Atlantic.

Francis Biddle, the Tribunal's senior American judge, was moved to conclude that "the Germans fought a much cleaner war at sea than we did." To his credit, Biddle also refused, in an important dissenting opinion, to sanction the handing over of Russian prisoners to the Soviets. (Regrettably, though, both British and American forces did so anyway in such transfers as the infamous "Operation Keelhaul.")

Harlan F. Stone, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, was outspoken in his criticism of the proceedings. While he admitted that he would not be disturbed if the victors put the vanquished to the sword as was customary in days of old, Stone said he was disturbed to have the action dressed up in "the habiliments of common law."

Fraudulent and Suppressed Evidence

As Irving shows, some of the evidence presented by the Allies to the Tribunal was fraudulent. This includes the widely-quoted report of a speech by Hitler to his generals on August 22, 1939, Nuremberg document 003-L, which Irving refers to as a "now notorious forgery."

No testimony had a more profound impact on everyone, including the defendants, than the "confession" of former Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. As Irving shows, this widely-quoted statement, which was extracted after "three days of torture" by British military men, "contained numerous perhaps deliberate errors." Höss had attempted to smuggle out of prison a letter to his wife in which he apologized for "confessing" to horrible atrocities at Auschwitz, relating that he had been tortured into making spurious admissions. The letter was seized by prison officials and never delivered, and is now in private hands in the United States.

The "protocol" of the January 1942 Wannsee conference, Irving writes, has been given "a wholly undeserved reputation as a key document in the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem." As he points out, it "contains no explicit reference to the killing of Jews," and Irving casts doubt on its authenticity.

A key German document on this matter, Irving notes, was suppressed for decades. This is a spring 1942 memorandum by Justice Ministry Staatssekretär Franz Schlegelberger recording that Dr. Hans Lammers, chief of the Reich chancellery, had informed him that Hitler had "repeatedly" ordered the solution of the Jewish problem "postponed until after the war."

On the basis of bogus evidence, Irving relates, a number of familiar Holocaust horrors were supposedly proven at Nuremberg, including gassings at Dachau, steaming of Jews at Treblinka, and manufacturing of soap from human bodies.

As Irving reports, important documentary evidence, including the private papers and diaries of Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Göring, were looted by Allied troops and have disappeared.

Unjust Selection Standards

The Allies were never able to decide just who should be put on trial, or on what basis. As Irving repeatedly points out, at least several of the defendants should not have been in the dock at all. This was particularly true of the military men -- Göring, Jodl, Keitel, Dönitz and Raeder. As prisoners of war, they were supposedly protected by the provisions of the Geneva Convention, which prohibited such trials. To get around this awkward legalism, the Tribunal arranged for these defendants to be technically "discharged" from the (no longer existing) German armed forces so they could "legally" be put on trial. After being "discharged," their military ranks were obliterated. Even their medals (from both world wars) were taken from them and, after removing any precious stones or metals, destroyed.

General Alfred Jodl, whom nearly everyone recognized as an honorable professional soldier, had not even met Hitler until 1939. (Jackson "privately felt the greatest respect for Jodl," Irving relates.) In fact, Jodl was later posthumously exonerated by a German court, which cited the view of the Tribunal's French judge, Henri Donnedieu de Vabres, that Jodl's conviction had been without merit and a miscarriage of justice.

On what legitimate grounds could Rudolf Hess, Irving queries, be accused of war crimes? He played no role in determining Germany's war aims or occupation policies. Indeed, in carrying out his ill-fated "peace flight" to Britain in May 1941, he was "the only man to have undertaken, at risk to his own life, a step to end the madness of war." All the same, the Allied judges sentenced this humane and peace-loving man to life imprisonment. (He died, under mysterious circumstances by strangulation, in Berlin's Spandau prison in 1987. His son, Wolf Hess, says he was murdered. See: "The Life and Death of My Father Rudolf Hess," and "The Legacy of Rudolf Hess," both in the Jan.-Feb. 1993 Journal.)

Hans Fritzsche, a German propaganda ministry department chief and wartime radio commentator, was on trial only as a stand-in for Goebbels, and because he happened to be the most important German prisoner in Soviet hands.

Göring's Spirited Defense

Hermann Göring, once the second most powerful man in Germany, put up the most spirited and memorable defense. This was especially apparent in a remarkable back and forth confrontation over several days with Robert Jackson. "Everything had gone pretty well with the trial until Göring took the witness stand," the American prosecutor himself privately remarked.

Norman Birkett, one of the British judges, commented that Göring was dominating the entire proceedings, and that no one seemed to have been quite prepared for the former Reichsmarschall's immense ability and knowledge, or for his mastery of the captured documents. Of Göring's bravura performance, Birkett wrote:

The cross examination had not proceeded more than ten minutes before it was seen that he was the complete master of Mr. Justice Jackson. Suave, shrewd, adroit, capable, resourceful, he quickly saw the elements of the situation, and as his confidence grew, his mastery became more apparent ... For almost two days he held the stage without interruption of any kind.

Allied journalists were speechless, having believed their own stories that Göring was a dope fiend, a physical wreck and a neurotic.

When at one point an American official murmured something to Göring about Germany's aggressive wars of conquest, the Reichsmarschall shot back:

Don't make me laugh. America, England and Russia have all done the same thing to promote their own national aspirations, but when Germany does it becomes a crime -- because we lost.

Even after the judges had sentenced him to death, Göring delivered a final embarrassing slap to the Tribunal by taking his own life, denying the victors the pleasure of hanging him.

Streicher's Anti-Jewish Fervor

At the other end of the sophistication scale, defendant Julius Streicher, notorious for his anti-Jewish weekly, Der Stürmer, was certain from the outset that the trial was a "triumph of world Jewry," and that "the Jews will make sure enough that we hang." As Irving explains, Streicher was convinced

that "the Jews" were making it their objective to establish final supremacy over the gentile races by ramming multiculturalism and multiracism down their throats. He had campaigned, in response, for the destruction of the Jews, and that no doubt was why he now found himself here.

When Streicher tried to protest from the witness stand the beatings he had received at the hands of his American captors, Jackson had the remarks stricken from the official record.

The Tribunal's proceedings confirmed everything he had ever believed or taught about the Jews. In Streicher's view:

In this trial there is no question of according to the defendant a blind and impartial justice; the trial has been set the task of giving to an injustice a veneer of legality by cloaking it in the language of the law.

Mistreatment

Irving details the maltreatment and tortures inflicted on the defendants by their American and British captors, including a near-starvation diet imposed during the Tribunal's proceedings. The defendants' wives were also arrested and thrown into prison -- and separated from their children, who were put in orphanages.

Even worse was the treatment of defendants in the American-run post-Nuremberg trials. Thus, the US Army war crimes trials at Dachau "were a mockery of the law," writes Irving, at which "defendants and witnesses there were savagely beaten or intimidated to make them sign false confessions."

(See also Joseph Halow's Innocent at Dachau, available from the IHR for $16.50, postpaid.)

Tests conducted by an American psychologist showed that the Nuremberg defendants were of above average intelligence. Several had IQ levels in the genius range: Schacht 143, Seyss-Inquart 141, Göring 141, and Dönitz 138. (A single exception was Streicher, whose 106 IQ was in the normal range.)

To help illustrate the defendants' character and personalities, Irving quotes from letters written by them to their loved ones from their prison cells. For example, Irving cites a passage from a letter Jodl wrote to his wife two days before his hanging:

It is already late and the lights are soon going out. When our friends come round to see you on the evening after my death, that shall be my funeral parade. On a gun-carriage rests my coffin and all the German soldiers are marching with me -- with those who have died in battle out in front and the still living bringing up the rear.

Each of the condemned went to the gallows calmly, bravely, and with as much dignity as possible under the circumstances. Their last words were expressions of love for Germany and for international reconciliation. Because the Nuremberg hangman botched his grim job, the Tribunal's sentence of death by hanging amounted, in practice, to strangulation.

In one of the several final notes penned just before his death, Göring wrote:

To the Allied Control Council:

I would have let you shoot me without further ado! But it is not possible to hang the German Reichsmarschall! I cannot permit this, for Germany's sake. Besides I have no moral obligation to submit to the justice of my enemies. I have therefore chosen the manner of death of the great Hannibal...

It was clear from the outset that a death sentence would be pronounced against me, as I have always regarded the trial as a political act by the victors, but I wanted to see this trial through for my people's sake, and I did at least expect not to be denied a soldier's death. Before God, my country, and my conscience I feel myself free of the blame that an enemy tribunal has attached to me.

'Fair' Trial or 'Victors' Justice'

This book's central protagonist, Robert Jackson, finished the trial convinced, Irving believes, that all in all it had been fair. Considering the political pressures, the ethnic hatreds, the legacy of millions of war dead, and the vengeful the spirit of the times, the American prosecutor probably did the best he could.

Irving himself, perhaps identifying and sympathizing with Jackson, avoids any condemnation of the Tribunal as such. Indeed, citing such Third Reich misdeeds as "the killings after the Röhm putsch, the widespread liquidation of political enemies or racial groups, [and] the murder of enemy prisoners of war," he expresses the view that "in most cases, the basic justice of the sentences passed at Nuremberg was undeniable." Irving believes that in many cases German courts would have dealt more severely with the defendants than did the Nuremberg judges.

In this reviewer's opinion, though, Nuremberg was -- however honorable the intentions of such participants as Robert Jackson and Henri Donnedieu de Vabres -- a hypocritical undertaking that failed in its great stated goal of establishing a lasting and impartial framework of new international law. This failure was tragically inherent in the Tribunal's origins and makeup. As Jackson himself declared at one point during the proceedings, "this Tribunal is a continuation of the war effort of the Allied nations."

Furthermore (and as Irving mentions), the "International Military Tribunal" was neither truly international nor even military. Its judges, as well as its prosecutors, were chosen by the four main victorious Allied powers. It could have succeeded only if its judges had been chosen from non-belligerent (neutral) states. Moreover, it would have required impartial rules of procedure, including equal access to evidence, humane treatment of the defendants, and the Allies being held to the same standards they applied to the German defendants.

The leaders of the three main Allied countries -- Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill -- settled on this judicial facade to justify an unprecedented act of political vengeance. Because it was, in essence, victors' justice, inevitably its most telling lesson, therefore, was vae victis -- woe to the vanquished.

Having thoroughly demonized the enemy through wartime propaganda, and having attributed all war guilt and crimes to him, the victorious Allies felt comfortable demonstrating their own righteousness to the world by executing the evil-doers. As Chronicles editor Thomas Fleming wrote (in the June 1997 issue), at Nuremberg "the Allies institutionalized the hypocrisy of their own propaganda."

Still Defiant

Irving tells the story of the Nuremberg Tribunal with great style and verve, painting a broad and vivid portrait. He does so, moreover, sine ira et studio -- without anger or partiality. Adding to the impact and immediacy of this handsome hardcover volume are more than 70 photographs, many in full color, and an attractive four-color dust jacket.

Because Irving is one of the few Western historians who has tried to give due consideration to the German view of 20th- century history, he is often unfairly dismissed as a "Nazi apologist" by those who are eager to castigate the Third Reich and its leadership as evil, and who insist that, therefore, there is no "other side" seriously to consider. Americans especially find it difficult to believe that an enemy in war could possible have a just cause, believing (as our politicians remind us) that America always occupies the moral high ground. As any open-minded reader of this book must conclude, though, the German defendants had valid if not compelling arguments to make for their actions.

Reading this book, one can dismiss fears that Irving has somehow "given up." If Nuremberg: The Last Battle is any indication, the gutsy British historian has lost none of his familiar determination or fire. Even if he must keep struggling to keep a few steps ahead of the thought-control police, he seems as dedicated as ever to defying his critics and discomforting the enforcers of the prevailing Zeitgeist with his provocative and enduring historical chronicles.

About the Author

Daniel W. Michaels is a Columbia University graduate (Phi Beta Kappa, 1954), a Fulbright exchange student to Germany (1957), and recently retired from the US Department of Defense after 40 years of service.

Reproduced From:  The Journal of Historical Review

Nuremberg:
A Nation On Trial

• NUREMBERG: A NATION ON TRIAL. Werner Maser, Scribners, 368 pp, hardback, available from IHR at $18.00. ISBN: 0684-16252-0.

This new book is easily the best so far on the hideous aberration of justice known as the "Nuremberg War Crimes Trials." The author is a well-known German historian; his biography of Hitler having been an international bestseller.

Many of the more repulsive aspects of Nuremberg which were brought to light in Richard Harwood's Nuremberg a Other War Crimes Trials are underlined in this new book. This time, they are backed up with hard facts and figures, references and interviews. This book is the product of many years of painstaking research. To take just a few samples of Herr Maser's revelations:

When the ashes of the hanged were taken to a small river to be dumped, each urn bore a fictitious Jewish name (p l2).

Hans Frank was beaten up by two colored GIs as soon as he was arrested (p47). So was Julius Streicher (p 51). who was whipped and forced to drink negro saliva.

The simultaneous interpretation system at the trial was supplied free of charge by IBM, and was often inaccurate (p 83).

Although the Trial Charter allowed defendants the right to represent themselves, Hess was not allowed to (p 73).

The defense were not allowed to have copies of many prosecution documents of evidence (p 97). Defense documents had to be sifted by the prosecution, before they could be submitted in court (p98). Many of their documents were confiscated or stolen.

Prosecution witnesses, such as Pohl, were beaten until they would give "correct" evidence (p l00). Many defense witnesses were not allowed to appear at all.

Affidavits were allowed on the prosecution side, with no opportunity for the defense to cross-examine the authors. The Tribunal announced that it would "take judicial note" of anything which had "probative value" (p l02).

Agreements to advise the defense of topics to be examined next day in court were dishonored and repudiated (p l06). Agreements to supply adequate copies and translations of documentary evidence were too (p l04).

President Roosevelt himself intervened to prevent the truth coming out about Katyn (pll3).

The hangings of the ten condemned Germans was bungled. Ribbentrop took ten minutes to die (p253). Jodl took 18 minutes, and Keitel 24 (p255). Streicher groaned for a long time after dropping, Frick had severe wounds on his face and neck, through striking the edge of the trap (p255). A journalist who managed to persuade a newspaper to publish photographs of the bloodsmeared faces was arrested. Only touched-up pictures were allowed to be distributed (p 255). But in a note, the author tells how the American hangmen at Landsberg did an even worse job. GIs standing underneath the gallows had to finish off the victims by stuffing cotton wool down their throats (p 255f).

The hangman, John C. Woods burned the ropes and hoods immediately after the executions, even though he had been offered $2500 for them as souvenirs (p 327). He himself narrowly escaped death a few years later while testing an electric chair (p 254).

Contrary to Harwood, Maser states that the bodies were not cremated in the "gas ovens" at Dachau, but at a city mortuary in Munich, and their ashes dumped into a brook running at the bottom of the yard (p l3 and p 256). The remaining prisoners at Nuremberg were made to clean up the blood-spattered gallows (p256). The uncanny thing about this new book is that it originated in Germany. Anglo-American Revisionists have become so used to modern German historians running a mile from any criticism of the "Liberation" that many had almost given up hope altogether. But with the Diwald book last year, and now this magnificent work this year, the standard of historiography in the Bundesrepublik certainly seems to be improving.

Reproduced From:  The Journal of Historical Review

Why the Atomic Bombings Could Have Been Avoided
Was Hiroshima Necessary?

On August 6, 1945, the world dramatically entered the atomic age: without either warning or precedent, an American plane dropped a single nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion utterly destroyed more than four square miles of the city center. About about 90,000 people were killed immediately; another 40,000 were injured, many of whom died in protracted agony from radiation sickness. Three days later, a second atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki killed some 37,000 people and injured another 43,000. Together the two bombs eventually killed an estimated 200,000 Japanese civilians.

Between the two bombings, Soviet Russia joined the United States in war against Japan. Under strong US prodding, Stalin broke his regime's 1941 non-aggression treaty with Tokyo. On the same day that Nagasaki was destroyed, Soviet troops began pouring into Manchuria, overwhelming Japanese forces there. Although Soviet participation did little or nothing to change the military outcome of the war, Moscow benefitted enormously from joining the conflict.

In a broadcast from Tokyo the next day, August 10, the Japanese government announced its readiness to accept the joint American-British "unconditional surrender" declaration of Potsdam, "with the understanding that the said declaration does not compromise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler."

A day later came the American reply, which included these words: "From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the State shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers." Finally, on August 14, the Japanese formally accepted the provisions of the Potsdam declaration, and a "cease fire" was announced. On September 2, Japanese envoys signed the instrument of surrender aboard the US battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

A Beaten Country

Apart from the moral questions involved, were the atomic bombings militarily necessary? By any rational yardstick, they were not. Japan already had been defeated militarily by June 1945. Almost nothing was left of the once mighty Imperial Navy, and Japan's air force had been all but totally destroyed. Against only token opposition, American war planes ranged at will over the country, and US bombers rained down devastation on her cities, steadily reducing them to rubble.

What was left of Japan's factories and workshops struggled fitfully to turn out weapons and other goods from inadequate raw materials. (Oil supplies had not been available since April.) By July about a quarter of all the houses in Japan had been destroyed, and her transportation system was near collapse. Food had become so scarce that most Japanese were subsisting on a sub-starvation diet.

On the night of March 9-10, 1945, a wave of 300 American bombers struck Tokyo, killing 100,000 people. Dropping nearly 1,700 tons of bombs, the war planes ravaged much of the capital city, completely burning out 16 square miles and destroying a quarter of a million structures. A million residents were left homeless.

On May 23, eleven weeks later, came the greatest air raid of the Pacific War, when 520 giant B-29 "Superfortress" bombers unleashed 4,500 tons of incendiary bombs on the heart of the already battered Japanese capital. Generating gale-force winds, the exploding incendiaries obliterated Tokyo's commercial center and railway yards, and consumed the Ginza entertainment district. Two days later, on May 25, a second strike of 502 "Superfortress" planes roared low over Tokyo, raining down some 4,000 tons of explosives. Together these two B-29 raids destroyed 56 square miles of the Japanese capital.

Even before the Hiroshima attack, American air force General Curtis LeMay boasted that American bombers were "driving them [Japanese] back to the stone age." Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, commanding General of the Army air forces, declared in his 1949 memoirs: "It always appeared to us, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse." This was confirmed by former Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye, who said: "Fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s."

Japan Seeks Peace

Months before the end of the war, Japan's leaders recognized that defeat was inevitable. In April 1945 a new government headed by Kantaro Suzuki took office with the mission of ending the war. When Germany capitulated in early May, the Japanese understood that the British and Americans would now direct the full fury of their awesome military power exclusively against them.

American officials, having long since broken Japan's secret codes, knew from intercepted messages that the country's leaders were seeking to end the war on terms as favorable as possible. Details of these efforts were known from decoded secret communications between the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo and Japanese diplomats abroad.

In his 1965 study, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (pp. 107, 108), historian Gar Alperovitz writes:

Although Japanese peace feelers had been sent out as early as September 1944 (and [China's] Chiang Kai-shek had been approached regarding surrender possibilities in December 1944), the real effort to end the war began in the spring of 1945. This effort stressed the role of the Soviet Union ...

In mid-April [1945] the [US] Joint Intelligence Committee reported that Japanese leaders were looking for a way to modify the surrender terms to end the war. The State Department was convinced the Emperor was actively seeking a way to stop the fighting.

A Secret Memorandum

It was only after the war that the American public learned about Japan's efforts to bring the conflict to an end. Chicago Tribune reporter Walter Trohan, for example, was obliged by wartime censorship to withhold for seven months one of the most important stories of the war.

In an article that finally appeared August 19, 1945, on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, Trohan revealed that on January 20, 1945, two days prior to his departure for the Yalta meeting with Stalin and Churchill, President Roosevelt received a 40-page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from high-level Japanese officials. (The complete text of Trohan's article is in the Winter 1985-86 Journal, pp. 508-512.)

This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor. Specifically, the terms of these peace overtures included:

• Complete surrender of all Japanese forces and arms, at home, on island possessions, and in occupied countries.
• Occupation of Japan and its possessions by Allied troops under American direction.
• Japanese relinquishment of all territory seized during the war, as well as Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan.
• Regulation of Japanese industry to halt production of any weapons and other tools of war.
• Release of all prisoners of war and internees.
• Surrender of designated war criminals.

Is this memorandum authentic? It was supposedly leaked to Trohan by Admiral William D. Leahy, presidential Chief of Staff. (See: M. Rothbard in A. Goddard, ed., Harry Elmer Barnes: Learned Crusader [1968], pp. 327f.) Historian Harry Elmer Barnes has related (in "Hiroshima: Assault on a Beaten Foe," National Review, May 10, 1958):

The authenticity of the Trohan article was never challenged by the White House or the State Department, and for very good reason. After General MacArthur returned from Korea in 1951, his neighbor in the Waldorf Towers, former President Herbert Hoover, took the Trohan article to General MacArthur and the latter confirmed its accuracy in every detail and without qualification.

Peace Overtures

In April and May 1945, Japan made three attempts through neutral Sweden and Portugal to bring the war to a peaceful end. On April 7, acting Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu met with Swedish ambassador Widon Bagge in Tokyo, asking him "to ascertain what peace terms the United States and Britain had in mind." But he emphasized that unconditional surrender was unacceptable, and that "the Emperor must not be touched." Bagge relayed the message to the United States, but Secretary of State Stettinius told the US Ambassador in Sweden to "show no interest or take any initiative in pursuit of the matter." Similar Japanese peace signals through Portugal, on May 7, and again through Sweden, on the 10th, proved similarly fruitless.

By mid-June, six members of Japan's Supreme War Council had secretly charged Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo with the task of approaching Soviet Russia's leaders "with a view to terminating the war if possible by September." On June 22 the Emperor called a meeting of the Supreme War Council, which included the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, and the leading military figures. "We have heard enough of this determination of yours to fight to the last soldiers," said Emperor Hirohito. "We wish that you, leaders of Japan, will strive now to study the ways and the means to conclude the war. In doing so, try not to be bound by the decisions you have made in the past."

By early July the US had intercepted messages from Togo to the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, Naotake Sato, showing that the Emperor himself was taking a personal hand in the peace effort, and had directed that the Soviet Union be asked to help end the war. US officials also knew that the key obstacle to ending the war was American insistence on "unconditional surrender," a demand that precluded any negotiations. The Japanese were willing to accept nearly everything, except turning over their semi-divine Emperor. Heir of a 2,600-year-old dynasty, Hirohito was regarded by his people as a "living god" who personified the nation. (Until the August 15 radio broadcast of his surrender announcement, the Japanese people had never heard his voice.) Japanese particularly feared that the Americans would humiliate the Emperor, and even execute him as a war criminal.

On July 12, Hirohito summoned Fumimaro Konoye, who had served as prime minister in 1940-41. Explaining that "it will be necessary to terminate the war without delay," the Emperor said that he wished Konoye to secure peace with the Americans and British through the Soviets. As Prince Konoye later recalled, the Emperor instructed him "to secure peace at any price, notwithstanding its severity."

The next day, July 13, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo wired ambassador Naotake Sato in Moscow: "See [Soviet foreign minister] Molotov before his departure for Potsdam ... Convey His Majesty's strong desire to secure a termination of the war ... Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace ..."

On July 17, another intercepted Japanese message revealed that although Japan's leaders felt that the unconditional surrender formula involved an unacceptable dishonor, they were convinced that "the demands of the times" made Soviet mediation to terminate the war absolutely essential. Further diplomatic messages indicated that the only condition asked by the Japanese was preservation of "our form of government." The only "difficult point," a July 25 message disclosed, "is the ... formality of unconditional surrender."

Summarizing the messages between Togo and Sato, US naval intelligence said that Japan's leaders, "though still balking at the term unconditional surrender," recognized that the war was lost, and had reached the point where they have "no objection to the restoration of peace on the basis of the [1941] Atlantic Charter." These messages, said Assistant Secretary of the Navy Lewis Strauss, "indeed stipulated only that the integrity of the Japanese Royal Family be preserved."

Navy Secretary James Forrestal termed the intercepted messages "real evidence of a Japanese desire to get out of the war." "With the interception of these messages," notes historian Alperovitz (p. 177), "there could no longer be any real doubt as to the Japanese intentions; the maneuvers were overt and explicit and, most of all, official acts. Koichi Kido, Japan's Lord Privy Seal and a close advisor to the Emperor, later affirmed: "Our decision to seek a way out of this war, was made in early June before any atomic bomb had been dropped and Russia had not entered the war. It was already our decision."

In spite of this, on July 26 the leaders of the United States and Britain issued the Potsdam declaration, which included this grim ultimatum: "We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces and to provide proper and adequate assurance of good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction."

Commenting on this draconian either-or proclamation, British historian J.F.C. Fuller wrote: "Not a word was said about the Emperor, because it would be unacceptable to the propaganda-fed American masses." (A Military History of the Western World [1987], p. 675.)

America's leaders understood Japan's desperate position: the Japanese were willing to end the war on any terms, as long as the Emperor was not molested. If the US leadership had not insisted on unconditional surrender -- that is, if they had made clear a willingness to permit the Emperor to remain in place -- the Japanese very likely would have surrendered immediately, thus saving many thousands of lives.

The sad irony is that, as it actually turned out, the American leaders decided anyway to retain the Emperor as a symbol of authority and continuity. They realized, correctly, that Hirohito was useful as a figurehead prop for their own occupation authority in postwar Japan.

Justifications

President Truman steadfastly defended his use of the atomic bomb, claiming that it "saved millions of lives" by bringing the war to a quick end. Justifying his decision, he went so far as to declare: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."

This was a preposterous statement. In fact, almost all of the victims were civilians, and the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (issued in 1946) stated in its official report: "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets because of their concentration of activities and population."

If the atomic bomb was dropped to impress the Japanese leaders with the immense destructive power of a new weapon, this could have been accomplished by deploying it on an isolated military base. It was not necessary to destroy a large city. And whatever the justification for the Hiroshima blast, it is much more difficult to defend the second bombing of Nagasaki.

All the same, most Americans accepted, and continue to accept, the official justifications for the bombings. Accustomed to crude propagandistic portrayals of the "Japs" as virtually subhuman beasts, most Americans in 1945 heartily welcomed any new weapon that would wipe out more of the detested Asians, and help avenge the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For the young Americans who were fighting the Japanese in bitter combat, the attitude was "Thank God for the atom bomb." Almost to a man, they were grateful for a weapon whose deployment seemed to end the war and thus allow them to return home.

After the July 1943 firestorm destruction of Hamburg, the mid-February 1945 holocaust of Dresden, and the fire-bombings of Tokyo and other Japanese cities, America's leaders -- as US Army General Leslie Groves later commented -- "were generally inured to the mass killing of civilians." For President Harry Truman, the killing of tens of thousands of Japanese civilians was simply not a consideration in his decision to use the atom bomb.

Critical Voices

Amid the general clamor of enthusiasm, there were some who had grave misgivings. "We are the inheritors to the mantle of Genghis Khan," wrote New York Times editorial writer Hanson Baldwin, "and of all those in history who have justified the use of utter ruthlessness in war." Norman Thomas called Nagasaki "the greatest single atrocity of a very cruel war." Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the President, was similarly appalled.

A leading voice of American Protestantism, Christian Century, strongly condemned the bombings. An editorial entitled "America's Atomic Atrocity" in the issue of August 29, 1945, told readers:

The atomic bomb was used at a time when Japan's navy was sunk, her air force virtually destroyed, her homeland surrounded, her supplies cut off, and our forces poised for the final stroke ... Our leaders seem not to have weighed the moral considerations involved. No sooner was the bomb ready than it was rushed to the front and dropped on two helpless cities ... The atomic bomb can fairly be said to have struck Christianity itself ... The churches of America must dissociate themselves and their faith from this inhuman and reckless act of the American Government.

A leading American Catholic voice, Commonweal, took a similar view. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the magazine editorialized, "are names for American guilt and shame."

Pope Pius XII likewise condemned the bombings, expressing a view in keeping with the traditional Roman Catholic position that "every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man." The Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano commented in its August 7, 1945, issue: "This war provides a catastrophic conclusion. Incredibly this destructive weapon remains as a temptation for posterity, which, we know by bitter experience, learns so little from history."

Authoritative Voices of Dissent

American leaders who were in a position to know the facts did not believe, either at the time or later, that the atomic bombings were needed to end the war.

When he was informed in mid-July 1945 by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson of the decision to use the atomic bomb, General Dwight Eisenhower was deeply troubled. He disclosed his strong reservations about using the new weapon in his 1963 memoir, The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 (pp. 312-313):

During his [Stimson's] recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of "face."

"The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing ... I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon," Eisenhower said in 1963.

Shortly after "V-J Day," the end of the Pacific war, Brig. General Bonnie Fellers summed up in a memo for General MacArthur: "Neither the atomic bombing nor the entry of the Soviet Union into the war forced Japan's unconditional surrender. She was defeated before either these events took place."

Similarly, Admiral Leahy, Chief of Staff to presidents Roosevelt and Truman, later commented:

It is my opinion that the use of the barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan ... The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons ... My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

If the United States had been willing to wait, said Admiral Ernest King, US Chief of Naval Operations, "the effective naval blockade would, in the course of time, have starved the Japanese into submission through lack of oil, rice, medicines, and other essential materials."

Leo Szilard, a Hungarian-born scientist who played a major role in the development of the atomic bomb, argued against its use. "Japan was essentially defeated," he said, and "it would be wrong to attack its cities with atomic bombs as if atomic bombs were simply another military weapon." In a 1960 magazine article, Szilard wrote: "If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them."

US Strategic Bombing Survey Verdict

After studying this matter in great detail, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey rejected the notion that Japan gave up because of the atomic bombings. In its authoritative 1946 report, the Survey concluded:

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs did not defeat Japan, nor by the testimony of the enemy leaders who ended the war did they persuade Japan to accept unconditional surrender. The Emperor, the Lord Privy Seal, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, and the Navy Minister had decided as early as May of 1945 that the war should be ended even if it meant acceptance of defeat on allied terms ...

The mission of the Suzuki government, appointed 7 April 1945, was to make peace. An appearance of negotiating for terms less onerous than unconditional surrender was maintained in order to contain the military and bureaucratic elements still determined on a final Bushido defense, and perhaps even more importantly to obtain freedom to create peace with a minimum of personal danger and internal obstruction. It seems clear, however, that in extremis the peacemakers would have peace, and peace on any terms. This was the gist of advice given to Hirohito by the Jushin in February, the declared conclusion of Kido in April, the underlying reason for Koiso's fall in April, the specific injunction of the Emperor to Suzuki on becoming premier which was known to all members of his cabinet ...

Negotiations for Russia to intercede began the forepart of May 1945 in both Tokyo and Moscow. Konoye, the intended emissary to the Soviets, stated to the Survey that while ostensibly he was to negotiate, he received direct and secret instructions from the Emperor to secure peace at any price, notwithstanding its severity ...

It seems clear ... that air supremacy and its later exploitation over Japan proper was the major factor which determined the timing of Japan's surrender and obviated any need for invasion.

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945 [the date of the planned American invasion], Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

Historians' Views

In a 1986 study, historian and journalist Edwin P. Hoyt nailed the "great myth, perpetuated by well-meaning people throughout the world," that "the atomic bomb caused the surrender of Japan." In Japan's War: The Great Pacific Conflict (p. 420), he explained:

The fact is that as far as the Japanese militarists were concerned, the atomic bomb was just another weapon. The two atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were icing on the cake, and did not do as much damage as the firebombings of Japanese cities. The B-29 firebombing campaign had brought the destruction of 3,100,000 homes, leaving 15 million people homeless, and killing about a million of them. It was the ruthless firebombing, and Hirohito's realization that if necessary the Allies would completely destroy Japan and kill every Japanese to achieve "unconditional surrender" that persuaded him to the decision to end the war. The atomic bomb is indeed a fearsome weapon, but it was not the cause of Japan's surrender, even though the myth persists even to this day.

In a trenchant new book, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb (Praeger, 1996), historian Dennis D. Wainstock concludes that the bombings were not only unnecessary, but were based on a vengeful policy that actually harmed American interests. He writes (pp. 124, 132):

... By April 1945, Japan's leaders realized that the war was lost. Their main stumbling block to surrender was the United States' insistence on unconditional surrender. They specifically needed to know whether the United States would allow Hirohito to remain on the throne. They feared that the United States would depose him, try him as a war criminal, or even execute him ...

Unconditional surrender was a policy of revenge, and it hurt America's national self-interest. It prolonged the war in both Europe and East Asia, and it helped to expand Soviet power in those areas.

General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of US Army forces in the Pacific, stated on numerous occasions before his death that the atomic bomb was completely unnecessary from a military point of view: "My staff was unanimous in believing that Japan was on the point of collapse and surrender."

General Curtis LeMay, who had pioneered precision bombing of Germany and Japan (and who later headed the Strategic Air Command and served as Air Force chief of staff), put it most succinctly: "The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war."

Reproduced From:  The Journal of Historical Review

Bombs on Britain

PBS Television
"The Blitz"

Sirs:

Rarely have I come across a television broadcast more vicious in intent and more warped in execution than your recent "Blitz on Britain." As a survivor of the mass air raid executed against my native city of Prague, Bohemia, on the Christian Holy Day of Palm Sunday, 1945, by the Anglo-American strategic bomber force -- a raid that maimed or murdered thousands a few seconds before the conclusion of the Second World War -- I say this:

1. There can be no comparison between the brutality of the Anglo-American bomber offensive, on one hand, and the minimality of the German-Italian efforts, on the other.

As the commander of the British strategic air offensive, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris shows in his Bomber Offensive (Macmillan, New York, 1947) 23 German cities had more than 60 percent of their built-up area destroyed; 46 had half of it destroyed. 31 communities had more than 500 acres obliterated: Berlin, 6427 acres: Hamburg, 6200 acres; Duesseldorf, 2003; Cologne (through air attack), 1994. By contrast, the three favorite targets of the Luftwaffe: London, Plymouth and Coventry, had 600 acres, 400, and just over 100 acres destroyed.

2. Anglo-American strategic bombers, according to official sources of the West German government in 1962, dropped 2,690,000 metric tons of bombs on Continental Europe; 1,350,000 tons were dropped on Germany within its 1937 boundaries; 180,000 tons on Austria and the Balkans; 590,000 tons on France; 370,000 tons on Italy; and 200,000 tons on miscellaneous targets such as Bohemia, Slovakia and Poland. By contrast, Germany dropped a total of 74,172 tons of bombs as well as V-1 and V-2 rockets and "buzz bombs" on Britain -- five percent of what the Anglo-Saxons rained down on Germany.

The Federal German Government has established the minimum count -- not an estimate -- of 635,000 German civilians were killed in France, Italy, Rumania, Hungary, Czecheslovakia, and elsewhere.

3. Both Germany and Britain initiated air raids on naval and military targets as of 3 September 1939. However, when the British attacks on port installations in Northern Germany ended in disaster, with a devastating majority of bombers downed -- the Battle of the German Bight -- Britain switched over to less costly night air raids on civilian targets such as Berlin and the Ruhr industrial region. By contrast, Germany replied in kind only in the winter months of 1940/41, a year later.

Observers indubitably British, such as the late Labour Minister Crossman, the scientist and writer C.P. Snow, and the Earl of Birkenhead, have demonstrated that it was not Germany but Britain that, after May, 1940, unleashed an official policy of unrestricted and unlimited raids on civilian populations under its new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and his science advisor, Dr. Lindemann. Professor Lindemann, the later Viscount Cherwell, coolly calculated that, by using a force of 10,000 heavy bombers to attack and destroy the 58 largest German cities, one-third of the population of Germany would be "de-housed." The assumption, of course, also was that out of those 25-27 million homeless at least ten percent -- 2.5 to 3 million people -- would be killed. On this score alone, Winston Churchill and his advisors deserve to rank among the maddest mass murderers in history. In fact, as West German records show, 131 German towns were hit by heavy strategic raids. Only the courage of the Luftwaffe pilots, the effectiveness of the air defense network and the strength of the fire fighting organization worked together to prevent a bloodbath to the extent envisioned by the Prime Minister.

4. Blood baths did occur when conditions were right.

When the Anglo-American bombing policy reached its first grand climax in a raid on Hamburg that stretched over several days and nights in July, 1943, a minimum of 40,000 to 50,000 civilians burned to death.

With the defensive power of the Reich worn down in the second half of 1944 and in 1945, the Anglo-Saxons indulged in ever more massive extermination raids against Europe. Communities of little or no military value, even if attacked previously, were now pulverized, preferably under conditions of the utmost horror. Christian holy days, and dates and sites of famous art festivals were select occasions for raids. Many of the most beautiful cities of Europe and the world were systematically pounded into nothingness, often during the last weeks of the war, among them: Wuerzburg, Hildesheim, Darmstadt, Kassel, Nürnberg, Braunschweig. Little Pforzheim in south-west Germany had 17,000 people killed. Dresden, one of the great art centers and in 1945 a refuge for perhaps a million civilians, was decimated with the loss of at least 100,000 souls. Europe from Monte Cassino to Luebeck and Rostock on the Baltic, from Caen and Lisieux in France to Pilsen, Prague, Bruenn, Budapest and Bucharest reeled under the barbaric blows of the bombers.

5. Nor did the extermination raids stop with Europe.

Cigar-chomping General Curtis LeMay demonstrated in. the Far East that record kills could be achieved without resort to atomic weapons. By applying the lessons learned in Europe to the wooden architecture of the Asian mainland and Japan he raised "fire storms" which surpassed even those of Hamburg, Pforzheim and Dresden-Mass raids by superheavy B-29 bombers against Osaka, Nagoya, Kobe and particularly, Tokyo-Yokohama, resulted in a minimum harvest of 125,000 to 150,000 kills per raid. More than 1.2 million Japanese civilians were killed through bombing. Millions of others fell victim to it, from Mukden, Manchuria, to Rangoon, Burma.

It goes without saying that LeMay and his colleagues could not have carried out their campaigns of mass annihilation without the backing of the highest political leaders in the land. In fact, the United States Government had placed orders for the immediate development of four-engined, super-heavy, very-long-range bombers (the XB 15, the B-17, the XB 19, the B-24 and the B-29) starting in 1934.

Thus, the Roosevelt Administration had begun to lay plans for offensive, strategic, global war back in 1933, the year of its inception. With the later exception of Britain, none of the other "large" powers followed suit: neither France, Italy and Germany, nor Soviet Russia and Japan the latter with extensive holdings in the Pacific.

These are sobering facts. PBS, with its record of fine programming, has much to lose if it insists on presenting biased reports such as "Blitz on Britain" or "UXB." If you care to tap the unplumbed depths of sentimentality, envy and hatred, start a comic strip. In the meantime, we'll change channels.

Give poor Alistair Cooke, who has been mightily discomfited of late, a much-needed respite.

Sincerely,
Dr. A.R. Wesserle

Reproduced From:  The Journal of Historical Review

Did the Allies
starve millions of Germans?

by James Bacque [Toronto Globe and Mail, Sept. 20, 1997, pp. D1, D4]

In an article adapted from his latest exposé, a Canadian writer charges that the Western Allies stripped Germany of its industrial and agricultural capacity--and in so doing ultimately caused the deaths of many German civilians.*

As soon as the Second World War ended in 1945, Canada and the United States began shipping food to the hundreds of millions of people who were facing starvation as a result of the war. Unprecedented in world history, this massive program fulfilled the highest ideals for which the Western Allies had fought. Their generosity seemed to have no limit. They fed former enemies -- Italy and Japan -- as well as a new enemy, the Soviet Union.

Only Germany was left out.

It is well-known in the West that the Allies hanged Nazis for crimes--the murder of Jews, the brutal mass expulsions, the deadly forced-labor camps, the starvation of entire nations. What is not generally known is that these occupying Allied armies carved off 25 per cent of Germany's most fertile land and placed it under Russian and Polish control, forcibly expelling about 16 millions people into what remained. It has also been forgotten -- or hidden -- that the Allies forbade emigration and kept millions of prisoners in forced-labour camps. International charitable aid to Germany was banned for another year, then restricted for more than a year. When it was permitted, it came too late for millions of people.

In a plan devised by U.S. secretary of the treasury Henry C. Morgenthau Jr., the Allies "pastoralized" Germany. They slashed production of oil, tractors, steel and other products that had been essential to the war effort. They cut fertilizer production by 82 per cent. They undervalued German exports (which they controlled), depriving Germans of cash needed to buy food. And a large percentage of young male workers were kept in forced-labor camps for years. During the six months following the end of the war, Germany's industrial production fell by 75 per cent.

The loss of so much fertile land and the drop in fertilizer supplies caused agricultural production to fall by 65 per cent. Sixty million people began to starve in their huge prison.

The mass expulsions from one part of Germany to another, approved at the Allied victory conference in Potsdam in July and August, 1945, were enforced "with the very maximum of brutality," wrote British writer and philanthropist Victor Gollancz in his book, *Our Threatened Values* (1946). Canadian writer and TV producer Robert Allen, in an article titled Letter From Berlin, in Reading magazine (February, 1946), described the scene in a Berlin railway station as refugees arrived in late 1945: "They were all exhausted and starved and miserable....A child only half alive... A woman in the most terrible picture of despair I've seen... Even when you see it, it's impossible to believe....God, it was terrible."

In the West, the plan to dismantle German industrial capacity began at the British headquarters of General Dwight Eisenhower in August, 1944. Meeting with Mr. Morgenthau, Gen. Eisenhower prescibed a treatment for Germany that would be "good and hard," giving as his reason that "the whole German population is a synthetic paranoid."

Mr. Morgenthau took a written version of their discussion to U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill when the two met in Quebec City in September, 1944. British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, U.S. secretary of Cordell Hull and the U.S. secretary for war Henry L. Stimson all protested vigorously against the Morgenthau Plan because a pastoralized Germany could not feed itself. Mr. Hull and Mr. Stimson told Roosevelt that about 20 million Germans would die if the plan were implemented.

Most historians say the Morgenthau Plan was abandoned after the protests, but Mr. Morgenthau himself said it was implemented.

In the New York Post for Nov. 24, 1947, he wrote, "The Morgenthau Plan for Germany ... became part of the Potsdam Agreement, a solemn declaration of policy and undertaking for action... signed by the United States of America, Great Britain and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."

I first happened on the outlines of this story while researching my 1989 book *Other Losses*, about the mass deaths of German prisoners of war in Allied camps. For 45 years, historians have never disputed a massive survey conducted over four years by the government of chancellor Konrad Adenauer, which stated that some 1.4 million German prisoners had died in captivity. What is still disputed by the two sides is how many died in each side's camps. Each has blamed the other for nearly all the deaths.

The fall of the Soviet empire in 1989 provided a spectacular test of the truth: If the KGB archives recorded how many Germans died in Soviet camps, the world would know how many died in the West.

In 1992, I went to the KGB archives in Moscow, where I was permitted to troll the long, gloomy aisles, free to read and photocopy anything I wanted. And there I found the reports from KGB colonel I. Bulanov and others showing that 450,600 Germans had died in Soviet camps. Given the figure of 1.4 million deaths, this meant that close to one million had diedin Western camps.

In addition, the KGB records show that the Soviets had also imprisoned hundreds of thousands of civilians, of whom many thousands died.

This was the shadow of a greater tragedy, the fate of German civilians.

The recent declassification of the Robert Murphy Papers at the Hoover Institute in Stanford, California, and the Robert Patterson manuscript papers in Washington focused the picture. Mr. Murphy had been chief U.S. diplomatic adviser in Germany, and Mr. Patterson the secretary for war after 1945.

Some of Mr. Murphy's papers show a catastrophic death rate in Germany, highlighted by a surprising comment by Mr. Murphy in discussing German demographics. He said in a State Department position paper in 1947 that the U.S. statistical projection of births, immigration and officially reported deaths showed that over the next three years the German population should be 71 million, but that "to be conservative and in view of the present high death rate in Germany, a figure of 69 million will be used." In other words, Mr. Murphy was basing high-level U.S. policy on the knowledge that the actual German death rate was approximately double the rate officially reported to Washington by the U.S. military governor.

In the National Archives in Ottawa, I found a document seized by Canadians in 1946, showing a death rate in the city of Brilon in north-central Germany almost triple the total reported by the Allies for their zones of Germany in 1945-46. The U.S. Army medical officer in Germany secretly reported that the actual death rate in the U.S. zone in May, 1946, was 21.4 per 1,000 per year, or 83 per cent higher than the military governor was reporting to Washington.

These documents in Ottawa, Moscow, Washington and Stanford, recently revealed or long neglected, show that the Allies not only destroyed most major German industry, they also reduced German food production to the point that Germans received less food for long periods during several years than the starving Dutch had received under German occupation.

"From 1945 to the middle of 1948, one saw the probable collapse, disintegration and destruction of a whole nation," These are not the words of a revisionist historian of the 1990s, but the sober judgment of a U.S. Navy medical officer on the scene. Captain Albert Behnke compared German and Dutch starvation: For months in parts of Germany, the ration set by the occupying Allies was 400 calories per day; in much of Germany it was often around 1,000, and officially for more than two years it was never more than 1,550. The Dutch always got more than 1,394.

And for his part in starving people in the Netherlands, Nazi commander Arthur Seysss-Inquart was hanged by the Allies.

A comparison of the German censuses of 1946 and 1950 show the effect of the food shortages. The 1950 census showed 5.7 million people fewer than there should have been according to the number of people recorded in the 1946 census, minus officially reported deaths, plus births and "immigrants" (people expelled from the east and returning prisoners) in the period from 1946 to 1950.

Mr. Murphy had, indeed, been conservative, partly because he underestimated the number of prisoners due to return to Germany from Russia. The total tally of unacknowledged deaths among the prisoners, refugees and non-expelled civilians comes to around nine million people between 1945 and 1950, far more than the number who died during the war itself. All of these deaths were surplus to those actually reported.

While Germans starved, the Canadian-U.S. relief program swung into action in other parts of the world. Former U.S. president Herbert Hoover, then chief food adviser to president Harry Truman, flew around the world assessing need and supply. He found big regions of food poverty, as there has always been and still are, but not insurmountable world food shortage. In fact, world food production in 1945, according to the U.S. government statistics, was 90 per cent of the average of the years from 1936 to 1938. By the end of 1946, it was virtually normal.

Mr. Hoover begged, borrowed and bought enough food from the few other surplus countries -- Australia and Argentina -- to feed nearly all the world's starving. He congratulated Canadians warmly for their co-operation in a CBC speech in Ottawa in 1946: "To Canada flows the gratitude of hundreds of millions of human beings who have been saved from starvation through the efforts of this great Commonwealth."

As Mr. Hoover pronounced victory over the greatest famine threat in world history, Germans were entering their worst year ever. In early 1946, reports of conditions in Germany led U.S. senators, among them Kenneth Wherry and William Langer, to protest against "this addlepated... brutal and vicious Morgenthau Plan."

Belatedly, Mr. Truman asked Mr. Hoover to intervene. Mr. Hoover spoke to all North Americans: "Millions of mothers are today watching their children wilt before their eyes." Infant mortality rates in some German cities were 20 per cent per year, catastrophically higher than the average in Germany before the war or in contemporary Europe.

Cases of tuberculosis among children in Kiel, in the British zone, increased by 70 per cent over the prewar period.

Mr. Hoover called for mercy to Germany.

"I can only appeal to your pity and your mercy ... Will you not take to your table an invisible guest?"

Canadians and Americans set the table for the invisible guest.

According to prime minister Mackenzie King's chief foreign-affairs adviser, Norman Robertson, Canada was the only country that had kept its food commitments to help the starving. Only in Canada did rationing and price controls continue long after the war so that others could be fed.

This unique campaign saved 800 million lives, according to Mr. Hoover.

Some older Germans treasure the memory of the "Hoover *Spiese* (food) that warmed their bodies at school in 1947. Many millions--including hundreds of thousands of Canadians born in Germany--also remember their homes in parts of Germany now under Polish or Russian rule. None dreams of reparations; all yearn for us to know their story.

• This article has been adapted from James Bacque's new book, **Crimes and Mercies**, published by Little, Brown. [Now published in paperback from H. B. Fenn in Canada, and available from the Institute for Historical Review.]

From Greg Raven's Web Site

James Bacque

"Skillfully organized, meticulously documented... a real-life thriller, complete with security forces bullying aged witnesses.  Surprises are non-stop." From Kirkus Reviews

Other Losses

Other Losses has a foreword by US Army historian Col Dr Ernest F. Fisher Jr, who assisted Bacque for years in the research.  An officer in the 101st Airborne in Germany in 1945, Fisher was appointed to a commission set up by US commander General Dwight Eisenhower to investigate atrocities committed by US soldiers against Germans.  The commission exonerated the Americans, and Fisher called the decision "a whitewash".

Order your copy, signed by author, James Bacque:
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Crimes and Mercies

The Foreword to Crimes and Mercies was written by Dr. Alfred de Zayas, author of several books about postwar Germany.

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Dear Enemy

"Rare--a sustained conversation, articulate, sensitive, insightful, adult, caring and carried on with a never-failing courtesy...one of life's truly luminescent moments, not unlike hearing Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony or Bruch's Violin Concerto for the first time. I know of no book that matches Dear Enemy as an exchange of pure intelligence, delightfully expressed."--Prof. Dwight Murphey, Wichita State University, for the Journal of Social, Political and Economic Review, Washington.

"Like a thriller--not a dull moment--a kind of intellectual excitement I haven't had from anyone's letters since reading Virginia Woolf's...It was like watching a tennis match--where each brilliant service or return calls up even better from the other side: I sat on the edge of my seat in amazement wondering, 'how can these guys keep topping each other like this.' Bravo and bravo again."--John Bemrose, author, reviewer and critic, Toronto.

"Splendid...you have uttered loud and clear what almost everyone else is afraid to whisper....Having read the book through at a single stint (it's genuinely unputdownable), I'm placing it prominently on the shelf in our visitor's bedroom, so that as many people as possible will get the message."--Nikolai Tolstoy, author, critic, historian, Abingdon, England.

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James Bacque Answers a Critic

This is a letter by James Bacque, author of Other Losses. It appeared in The Times Literary Supplement of August 20, 1993.

Sir, -- It is every writer's delight to be attacked in a famous journal by a confused critic, so my thanks go to John Keegan for erring his views on my work in the TLS on July 23.

Mr Keegan has been misled by the editors of the book, "Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts against falsehood," which he cites to refute me. The principal editor, Stephen E. Ambrose, clearly does not know what he thinks from day to day, because he has varied wildly from strong approval of my book, "Other Losses," to snarling slanders of me personally, together with buffoonish misrepresentations of American army policies. Having kindly read my manuscript, he wrote to me as follows: "I am not arguing with the basic truth of your discovery ... you have the goods on these guys, you have the quotes from those who were present and saw with their own eyes, you have the broad outline of a truth so terrible I really can't bear it ... you really have made a major historical discovery ..." It appears from the latest Ambrose writings that, indeed, the truth was something he could not bear.

The same might be said for his co-editor, Gunter Bischof, an Austrian. Keegan admires the "scholarship" of Bischof, but Bischof does not know a displaced persons camp from a prison camp. He chastises me for stating that there was a US Army prison camp at Ebensee in Austria: he says that the camp was for DPs. In fact, I have photocopies of General Mark Clark's secret report about the condition of prisoners of war in the camp, plus US Army medical reports of prisoners in the camp, plus eyewitness accounts of the catastrophe among dozens of thousands of prisoners, including the manuscript of a diary kept by the priest Franz Loidl who ministered to the dying. This manuscript is on deposit in the Church History Institute of the Catholic Theological Faculty, University of Vienna.

In the same book so admired by Keegan is a gross error made by Rudiger Overmanns, who does not even know the number of prisoners taken by the Americans. This was not 3.8 million as he says, but over 6 million, according to US Army records in Suitland, Maryland. Of course, this error, conveniently for Ambrose and Keegan, apparently diminishes the number of lives for which the Americans were responsible.

Underlying the Ambrose-Bischof book is a series on German prisoners edited by Erich Maschke. Underlying that series is no important documentation from the US Army archives in Washington. The author of the book on the American camps casually omits all the significant records that survived the paper purges of the late 1940s. However, for an expert judgment on the condition of American camps Mr Keegan may rely on the words of an American Lieutenant-Colonel who was in charge of the camps in France in 1945. In a report preserved at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry W. Allard wrote that "the standards of PW camps in the Com Z in Europe compare as only slightly better or even with the living conditions of the Japanese PW camps our men tell us about, and unfavourably with those of the Germans". Let us remember that after the war, the Americans executed Japanese for precisely the crimes referred to by Allard.

Mr Keegan does not accept the definition of the term "Other Losses" given me by Colonel Philip S. Lauben. He is unaware of the US Army report discovered by Richard Boylan, a senior archivist at the US National Archives, which confirms Lauben. The report plainly states that the "Other Loses" category of prisoners meant deaths and escapes. And finally, of course, 1,700,000 Germans, plus hundreds of thousands of other Europeans, are still missing from their families. This astounding fact is normally neglected by the Western apologists, unless they can also use it to hammer the Soviets, saying they all died in the Gulag. But now that the Soviets are gone, their archives are open and the truth at last emerges.

That truth is simple. The Soviets took some 4.1 million prisoners of war east and west, of whom some 600,000 died in slavery. Of the total take, some 2.4 million were Germans. Of these, some 450,600 died, the rest were sent home. Subtracting the 450,600 dead Germans from the missing 1.7 million, we see that some 1.25 million are still not accounted for. Of these, probably 100,000 - 200,000 died in Polish, Yugoslavian and other camps. The number remaining is very nearly the number I said in "Other Losses" of those who died among all Europeans taken prisoner in the West.

I wonder if Mr Keegan will consult the Soviet records before attacking them? The surprising thing about the Soviet records is that they are extensive, detailed, accurate and incriminating. For instance, on the subject of prisoners of war, these archives display a dossier for each prisoner, complete with capture records, biographical information, legal,labour and medical history, including X-ray photographs, and so on. The average is about fifteen pages per person. The dossier of Nobel prize winner Konrad Lorenz, the Austrian zoologist contains two hundred pages about him and his work. No such records exist anywhere in the West. In months of work in the archives of the West, I was never able to find the dossier for a single one of the 9 or so million prisoners held. Not one. But in the first hour in the NKVD/KGB archives, I found the archival boxes containing over 4 million personal dossiers. I was allowed to walk up and down the aisles, and take down and photocopy any box I chose at random, and did so. I have scores of photocopies of those records here in Toronto, and Mr Keegan is welcome to consult them. Or he may wish to visit Moscow. He will find interesting information beginning with the story of the Japanese prisoners. The Japanese authorities have long since determined that some 62,000 of their prisoners, chiefly in the Kwantung Army, died in the Gulag. The Soviets lied to the Japanese government for years about the number of deaths, first saying 3,800 had died, then about 4,000, then around 35,000. Finally, the Soviet archives were opened, and mirabile dictu, the death certificates were all there, totalling very nearly 62,000.

Do I hear Keegan protesting that Japan is not Germany? On his visit to Moscow, he may see for himself the Soviet records showing that the prisoners of various nationalities were often mixed together in the same camp, so that Japanese were enslaved beside Germans, were all treated the same way, and died in approximately the same ratio of much the same causes. Letters to me from individual prisoners and records at the Hoover Institution in Stanford all show independently of the Soviet archives that this was the case in more than thirty major camps.

Let me also remind Keegan that the Poles long accused the Soviets of massacring some 14,000 officers at Katyn, but that the Soviet archives reveal that the true total was around 21,000. If John Keegan and his friends wish to attack the authenticity of the Soviet archives, they are going to have to show that the fragmentary documents in the Western archives, airy with lacunae and poxed with evasions, are superior to these tremendous archives which incriminate its masters for a horrifying crime against humanity. What will they say then? That the Soviets are hiding something?

History's Greatest Naval Disasters

The Little-Known Story
 of the Wilhelm Gustloff, 
the General Steuben and the Goya

For many people, the image of a great maritime disaster calls to mind the well-known sinking of the Titanic, which went down in April 1912 after striking an iceberg, taking the lives of 1,503 men, women and children. Others may think of the Lusitania, which sank on May 7, 1915, after being hit by a German submarine torpedo, taking 1,198 lives. [1]

Less well known is the fate of the American packet steamer Sultana, which suddenly exploded and sank in the Mississippi River near Memphis on April 27, 1865. Estimates of the loss of life range from 1,450 to 2,200. Almost all of the victims were exchanged federal prisoners of war on their way home from Confederate camps. A recent article in The Washington Times called the Sultana sinking "the most staggering and appalling marine disaster in history." [2]

But the scale of even the Sultana disaster is dwarfed by the little-known sinkings of the Wilhelm Gustloff, the General Steuben and the Goya -- converted German liners crowded with refugees and wounded soldiers that were sunk by Soviet submarines during the final months of the Second World War. In each case, more lives were lost than in the sinkings of either the Sultana, the Lusitania or the Titanic.

Ignorance and even suppression of the facts of these marine disasters is part of the general ignorance in the United States about the great loss of life and terrible suffering endured by the German people during the Second World War, above all in the conflict's grim final months. For the story of the unparalleled loss of life in the sinkings of these three German ships can be understood only within the context of the general situation during the final months of the war, when the advancing Soviet forces, eager to take terrible vengeance against the Germans, set in motion one of the greatest mass migrations in history.

It began in mid-October 1944, when Red Army forces first broke into German East Prussia. Spurred on by the hate filled calls to violence against Germans by Soviet Jewish propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg, Red Army troops systematically plundered and murdered Germans unfortunate enough to fall into their hands. [3]

One of the first towns taken by the Soviets was Nemmersdorf, in the Gumbinnen district of East Prussia. It was only because German forces succeeded in recapturing this town a short time later that the world was able to learn how Soviet troops had set about brutally raping females of all ages, and slaughtering the old men, women and children there. The fortunate ones were shot out of hand. Many were clubbed or hacked to death. After being raped, naked women were nailed to doors in crucifix positions. In one case, a group of refugees was crushed under Soviet tanks. [4]

German authorities lost no time in publicizing the horrifying results of the brief Soviet occupation. Journalists, including some from neutral Sweden, Switzerland and Spain, were quickly brought in to report on what had happened. Shocking newsreel footage from Nemmersdorf was shown in German motion picture theaters.

Panic-stricken civilians now desperately sought to escape falling into the hands of the advancing Soviets. As a result, during the final months of 1944 and early 1945, long columns of terrified refugees streamed into the towns and villages along the Bay of Danzig, all frantically waiting for boats that would take them to at least temporary refuge further to the west.

In light of all this, it was quickly decided in Berlin to organize a mass evacuation of civilians. As a result, between January 1945 and the capitulation on May 8, 1945, more than two million people -- the great majority of them German civilians -- were safely transported to the West. This second "Dunkirk," which dwarfed many times over the British evacuation in 1940, was organized by Rear Admiral Konrad Engelhardt under the direction of Admiral Karl Dönitz, Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy.

Astonishingly, only about 25,000 lives were lost in what one historian has called "the greatest evacuation operation in history," a figure that is all the more remarkable in light of the fact that by this time the remnants of the German air force were almost powerless to fend off attacks by enemy fighter planes and submarines. [5]

This record of success masks human catastrophes of almost inutterable horror -- including the three most terrible ship sinkings, in terms of lives lost, in history. The first of the great German evacuation ships to go down, the Wilhelm Gustloff, was hit by three torpedoes from Soviet submarine S-13 on the night of January 30th. It sank after 70 minutes, taking with it at least 5,700 lives, and perhaps as many as 7,000. Only about 900 could be rescued from the sub-freezing waters of the Baltic by convoy vessels. [6]

In many ways the fate of the Wilhelm Gustloff was symbolic of the fortunes of the Third Reich. Named by Hitler himself in honor of the National Socialist party leader in Switzerland who had been murdered by Jewish assassin David Frankfurter in 1936, the 25,484-ton liner was christened by the slain man's widow in an elaborate ceremony the following year. It served as the proud flagship of the "Strength through Joy" (Kraft durch Freude) movement, a well publicized and highly successful program that provided inexpensive luxury vacations for German workers. Over the next two years, the Wilhelm Gustloff routinely brought German tourists to the fjords of Norway and the seaside resorts of Portugal and Italy. Many of the grateful working class passengers who strolled the ship's decks had never before ventured outside of their own towns and villages. [7]

Soon after the outbreak of the war, the great liner was repainted for use as a hospital ship. But in early 1940 it was instead sent to Gdynia (Gotenhafen) where it served as the floating headquarters of the elite 2nd Submarine Training Division, the pride of the German U-boat fleet. By late January 1945, with the safety of Dönitz's submariners threatened by the Soviet advance, the Wilhelm Gustloff was quickly reactivated after almost five years of idleness. Originally designed to comfortably accommodate 1,465 passengers and a crew of 417, it set out for Mecklenburg on January 30th crammed with as many as 8,000 crew and passengers -- most of them refugees. [8]

The much-traveled convoy route on which the Wilhelm Gustloff (and its sister ship, the 23,000 ton Hansa, with 3,000 refugees on board) had set out skirted the Stolpe Bank off the coast of Pomerania. Although this area was known to be a favorite haunt of Soviet submarines lying in wait to attack crowded convoys as they slowly steamed to safer havens in the West, so far there had been relatively few successful attacks. Indeed, the Soviet "Red Banner" fleet had failed to make much of an impact on the war, having spent most of the time trapped in the Gulf of Finland by a very effective German blockade. Although the Soviet submarine fleet was the world's largest, the German blockade had resulted in Soviet naval forces sinking far fewer German ships than those of any of the major Allied powers. The German naval command considered Britain's Royal Air Force, which had sunk as many as 18 German ships in the Baltic during the month of January 1945 alone, to be a greater threat to the success of the mass evacuation. [9]

The Germans had little esteem for the Soviet submarine fleet. As Admiral Engelhardt commented after the war, the Germans were grateful that the Soviets utilized only speed boats and submarines in the Baltic during the final months of the war. "Except for the Goya, Steuben and Wilhelm Gustloff, their submarines scarcely had any effect, despite the fact that they as many as 15 operating in the Baltic at the same time," he recalled. "If they had as few as three modern destroyers and one cruiser of the Gorki class between Pillau and Hela, our entire transport operation would have come to a standstill." [10]

The German submarine command based in Gdynia not only had a low regard for the capabilities of the Soviet submarines, it underestimated the potential danger they posed. The submarine command was so confident of German security measures that it failed to inform the 9th Escort Division in Gydnia -- which was responsible for providing security for departing convoys in the area -- of the Gustloff's imminent departure. [11]

Among German submariners a feeling of confidence bordering on arrogance prevailed. They regarded the Baltic theater as little more than a "training field" where skills could be perfected for the "real" war in the North Atlantic against heavily defended Allied convoys. Thus, when the passenger-crammed Wilhelm Gustloff set out for the open sea on January 30th -- its first voyage in almost four years -- only a single poorly equipped torpedo boat provided escort protection. (Two other escort vessels had been obliged to stay behind because of engine problems.)

Poor escort protection was not the only problem that beset the Gustloff as it set out into enemy-infested waters. Now crammed with as many as 8,000 people, the ship had emergency lifeboats and rafts sufficient for only 5,060. Moreover, the machinery that lowered the life boats into the water had frozen solid in the bitter cold, rendering the life boats virtually useless. And although each passenger had a life jacket, the temperature of the Baltic had fallen to well below freezing. No one could survive long in the frigid waters. [12]

As if these ingredients for disaster were not enough, when Soviet torpedoes finally struck the ill-fated liner, the ship's command somehow sent out the customary "SOS" emergency signal not on the frequency of the nearby 9th Escort Division, but on a different wavelength. Precious time was lost, resulting in the deaths of many who might otherwise have been rescued. [13]

* * * * *

Eleven days later, shortly after midnight on February 10th, the General Steuben sank with a loss of 3,500 lives, making this the third worst maritime disaster in history. The same Soviet submarine that had attacked the Gustloff, and in almost the same location, sank the Steuben with two torpedoes. Crammed with as many as 5,000 wounded soldiers and refugees, the converted passenger liner sank in just seven minutes. [14]

Built in 1922, and owned and operated by North German Lloyd, the 17,500-ton luxury liner was named after the Prussian general who rered invaluable assistance in training the army of the insurgent American colonists during their struggle for independence. When it sank, the Steuben was serving as a transport ship for wounded soldiers. [15]

Although hospital ships are internationally considered to be off limits from military attack during wartime, the Soviet government categorically regarded German hospital ships as legitimate military targets. In an official note delivered in July 1941, the Soviet government brusquely rejected a German request to abide by international law regarding the immunity of hospital ships: " ... The Soviet government gives notice that it will not recognize and respect German hospital ships according to the Hague Convention." Accordingly, Soviet planes and submarines sank four of the 13 German hospital ships employed in the Baltic evacuation operation, and eight of 21 German transport ships used to carry wounded soldiers. [16]

* * * * *

The sinking of the Goya on April 16, 1945, just three weeks before the of the war in Europe, is acknowledged as almost certainly the greatest maritime disaster, in terms of lives lost, of all time. [17]

Indeed, when the 5,230-ton transport ship set out from Hela near Danzig (Gdansk) with its human cargo of some 7,000 refugees and wounded soldiers, the Soviets were pressing into Berlin itself, and the Bay of Danzig, with the exception of the narrow Hela peninsula, had become virtually a Soviet lake. In spite of the merciless blows that were bringing Germany to its knees, what was left of its once mighty military continued to evacuate civilian refugees to the west. Under almost constant fire from Soviet artillery, ships, and planes, German authorities were still able to evacuate 264,887 people to relative safety during the month of April 1945. [18]

German ports in the western Baltic were by now so overcrowded with shipping and refugees that when the already badly mauled Goya weighed anchor on its final voyage, it set out with five other ships for the Danish capital of Copenhagen. As the convoy made its way along the treacherous Stolpe Bank, it was spotted by Captain Konovalov, commander of the minelayer submarine L-3. Considered to be the most successful submarine in the entire Soviet fleet, the

L-3 was credited with sinking four ships in 1941, six in 1942, and three in 1943, including U-boat U-416, by mining. [19]

At precisely four minutes to midnight, the L-3 fired two torpedoes at the Goya, which found their marks amidship and stern. Almost immediately the ship broke in half, her masts crashing down upon the passengers crowding the decks. Before anyone could escape from the holds, the onrushing sea quickly drowned out the anguished screams of the refugees below. The vessel sank in just four minutes, resulting in the loss of almost 7,000 lives. There were only 183 survivors. [20]

"The special tragedy of the Goya," American historian Alfred de Zayas has commented, "was that it happened so close to the of the war, at a time when the German surrender was within grasp." These deaths failed to hasten the end of the war in any way. At a time when the Soviets had already begun the actual expulsion of Germans from the entire Baltic region, he asked rhetorically, "Why then send so many thousands of refugees to the bottom of the sea?" [21]

At the time, the loss of the Goya was hardly noticed in Germany, which had grown accustomed to similar catastrophes on a daily basis. All the same, it was cited in the report of the Führer Naval Conference of April 18, the last conference of which there is any archival record. It is written in language that characterized the cool professionalism that the German Naval High Command had shown throughout the entire period of the evacuation: [22]

In connection with the loss of several hundred persons in the sinking of the steamship Goya, the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy points out that personnel losses in the transports in the Eastern areas up to this time have been extremely small, that is, 0.49 percent. These unfortunate losses seem very large every time a ship is sunk, and it is easy to forget that at the time a large number of ships with numerous wounded and refugees reach port safely.

Although the estimate of losses given here is understated, the mass evacuation operation did, indeed, prove to be an overall success. Under terrible conditions, the German navy and merchant marine succeeded in saving many hundreds of thousands of civilians from horrible mistreatment and almost certain death at Soviet hands.

* * * * *

Although little known, the sinkings of the Wilhelm Gustloff and the Goya -- with a combined loss of more than 12,000 lives -- remain the greatest maritime catastrophes of all time. Moreover, the deliberate and unnecessary killing of thousands of innocent civilian refugees and helpless wounded men aboard the Gustloff, the Steuben and the Goya -- as well as many other smaller and lesser-known vessels -- is unquestionably one of the great atrocities of the Second World War.

1. These figures are taken from The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1987 edition (New York: 1986), p. 754.; In May 1941, the battleship Bismarck went down with nearly 3,000 men. See: Alfred de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam (University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 75.
2. The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1987 edition, p. 754.; "Union Survivor Recalls Loss of Sultana with 2,200 Aboard," The Washington Times, May 16, 1992.
3. Alfred de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam (University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 61-66, 201.
4. A. de Zayas, Nemesis, pp. 61-65.
5. Karl Dönitz, Memoirs: Ten Years and Twenty Days, (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1990), p. 465.; C. Dobson, et al., The Cruelest Night (Boston: 1979), pp. 67-71, 187-188.; A. de Zayas, Nemesis, p. 74.
6. Estimates vary of the number of persons aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff on the night of January 30, 1945, and of the number of those who perished. According to one German reference work, there were 4,974 refugees and 1,626 military service personnel on board. Of this total of 6,600, only 900 could be rescued, and 5,700 perished. Source: W. Schötz, ed., Lexikon: Deutsche Geschichte im 20. Jahrhundert (Rosenheim: DVG, 1990), p. 497. A 223-page English-language work on the sinking of the Gustloff reports that in addition to the 6,050 people (including 4,424 refugees) officially recorded as being on board, another 2,000 desperate refugees were hastily let on from small boats as the ship was leaving the harbor. This would have meant that about 8,000 people were aboard the Gustloff when it sank. Of this number, 964 were rescued from the icy sea, some of whom died later. "It is likely, therefore, that at least 7,000 people perished." Source: Christopher Dobson, John Miller and Thomas Payne, The Cruelest Night: Germany's Dunkirk and the Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff (Boston: Little Brown, 1979), pp. 83-84, 140-141.
7. C. Dobson, et al., The Cruelest Night (1979), pp. 29-32.; W. Schötz, ed., Lexikon (1990), p. 497.
8. C. Dobson, et al., The Cruelest Night (1979), pp. 32-33, 50-57.; W. Schötz, ed., Lexikon (1990), p. 497.
9. C. Dobson, et al., Cruelest Night, pp. 34, 35, 52, 65, 68.
10. Fritz Brustat-Naval, Unternehmen Rettung (Herford: Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, 1970), p. 147.
11. Cajus Bekker, La Ultima Odisea: Danzig 1945 (Barcelona: Bruguera, pb., 1976), pp. 243-247. This is a Spanish-language edition of Flucht übers Meer (Oldenburg: G. Stalling, 1976).; C. Dobson, et al., Cruelest Night, pp. 75-77.
12. C. Dobson, et al., Cruelest Night, pp. 83-85.; C. Bekker, La Ultima Odisea (Barcelona: 1976), pp. 246-250.
13. C. Bekker, La Ultima Odisea (Flucht übers Meer), p. 249.
14. C. Dobson, et al., Cruelest Night, pp. 153-156.; F. Brustat-Naval, Unternehmen Rettung, pp. 48-49.; A. de Zayas, Nemesis, p. 75-76.
15. C. Dobson, Cruelest Night, pp. 150-151.
16. Alfred de Zayas, The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945 (University of Nebraska Press, 1990), p. 261.; A. de Zayas, Nemesis, p. 76.
17. A. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, p. 75.; W. Schötz, ed., Lexikon (1990), p. 154.
18. C. Dobson, Cruelest Night, pp. 163, 165-169.
19. C. Dobson, Cruelest Night, pp. 166-167.
20. C. Dobson, et al., Cruelest Night, pp. 167-168; W. Schötz, ed., Lexikon, p. 154.; F. Brustat-Naval, Unternehmen Rettung, p. 146.
21. A. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, p. 75.
22. C. Dobson, et al., Cruelest Night, pp. 168-169.

***

   Picture from "Feldgrau.com"

According to the ships own records, the list of passengers on the 30th included 918 Naval officers and men, 173 crew, 373 members of the Woman's Naval Auxiliary units, 162 wounded, and 4,424 refugees, for an official total of 6,050 people. This is according to the official list though, and doesn't take into account the many hundreds of other people that one way or another, were able to make their way onto the seemingly safe decks of the Gustloff. In fact, new research has now shown that the total number of people on the Gustloff at the time it was sunk was actually 10,582! Newly published research by Heinz Schon has set the number of people on the Gustloff as follows: 8,956 refugees, 918 officers NCOs and men of the 2.Unterseeboot-Lehrdivision, 373 female naval auxiliary helpers, 173 naval armed forces auxiliaries, and 162 heavily wounded soldiers, for a total of 10,582 people on board on January 30th

From Article On "Feldgrau.com"

For An Extensive Selection Of Pictures And More Information Go To:

Feldgrau.com

This Is A Great Web Site With Lots Of Information About The 

German Armed Forces

***

Grass novel on German 'Titanic' ends taboo

By Toby Helm and Uwe Gunther in Berlin
(Filed: 08/02/2002)

IT was just after 9pm on a freezing night in January 1945 when Russian torpedoes hit and sank the German cruise ship, the Wilhelm Gustloff.

It was carrying thousands of German women and children who had rushed to the coast of East Prussia in an attempt to escape by sea from the approaching Red Army.

As the icy Baltic waters swelled over the decks, a giant wave swept a baby girl out of her mother's arms. "My daughter Ingrid," recalls Irmgard Harnecker, now 77. "She had just started to walk."

Mrs Harnecker also lost her sister that night. "It is a long time ago, but it still hurts," she says. Ever since, she has been racked by feelings of guilt that she survived and Ingrid did not.

This and many other heart-wrenching stories from the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff have rarely been highlighted in Germany.

The 9,000 people who died - six times more than in the Titanic disaster - were largely ignored by the country's literary elite and to an extent by its historians.

For Germany's post-war generation it was seen as politically incorrect for Germans to portray other Germans as victims of the war. "Somebody, we thought, had to pay for Germany's incomprehensible crimes," said Anje Vollmer, an MP for the Green Party and vice-president of the Bundestag.

But 57 years on the taboo has been lifted thanks to publication this week of a book by Gunter Grass, Germany's Nobel prize-winning author.

Entitled In Retrogression, it uses a mix of fact and fiction to tell the story of the Wilhelm Gustloff, which sank to the Baltic seabed between the Bay of Danzig and the Danish island of Bornholm.

Many of those on board were wounded German soldiers. Just 1,200 survived, including 100 children.

Publication of Grass's work has caused a sensation in Germany, where it has been hailed as a turning point in the way the country views the fate of millions of its own citizens who died in the war.

Die Welt said it was ironic that Grass, a Left-winger, was the man to have broken the mould and ended the silence.

"The expulsion [of Germans from eastern territories] was one of the greatest taboos of post-war history, strictly shielded by Left-wingers like Gunter Grass," the newspaper said. "Now it is him of all people who returns to the subject of the collective consciousness - is Germany becoming normal?"

Der Spiegel magazine placed a headline "The German Titanic" on its front page as it delved in this week's edition into stories of human tragedy from the fateful night. In doing so, it has helped to propel the Wilhelm Gustloff disaster to the forefront of national consciousness.

The magazine relates how, on Jan 29, the day before the disaster, a boy named Egbert Worner was born in the ship's hospital. On his birth certificate it says "born on board the Gustloff".

His mother had been fleeing homewards in an attempt to marry her fiance before giving birth.

After the three torpedoes from a Russian submarine hit the ship, she went up on deck holding her baby tightly. He wore a green jacket and cap. As she clambered towards a rope ladder leading down to a rescue vessel a soldier called out "give it to me, you'll get it back right away".

The lifeboat then left without her child and she watched the ship sink. "I thought my child was dead," she said. "I was quaking." Some time later, when she had boarded the escort ship Lion, someone gave her a green bundle and ever since she has wondered who saved her child.

Grass's fictional heroine, a pregnant girl who manages to clamber aboard a lifeboat where she gave birth to a baby boy, is based loosely on another true story from the night of Jan 30 1945. The narrator in the book talks of Germany's post-war reticence to talk about such suffering. "Nobody wanted to hear about it, not here in the west and not at all in the east."

For decades, Grass, now 74, had led the charge of the Left-wing intellectual establishment who wanted the emphasis to be placed firmly on German remorse.

In 1990, the year of German reunification, he said: "Whoever thinks about Germany at this moment should not forget Auschwitz." More recently he began to stress the need for a counterbalance, the necessity for the nation to speak of its own suffering.

He talked a few years ago of how disturbing it was that there had been "no room [in Germany] to commemorate" those Germans who died as a result of Allied bombs and in the mass flight from the east.

Information appearing on Electronic Telegraph is the copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence.

Allied Powers:
"15,000,000 people have been deported"

"Since the end of the war about 3,000,000 people, mostly women and children and overaged men, have been killed in eastern Germany and south-eastern Europe; about 15,000,000 people have been deported or had to flee from their homesteads and are on the road. About 25 per cent of these people, over 3,000,000 have perished. About 4,000,000 men and women have been deported to eastern Europe and Russia as slaves. It seems that the elimination of the German population of eastern Europe - at least 15,000,000 people - was planned in accordance with decisions made at Yalta. Churchill had said to Mikolajczyk when the latter protested during the negotiations at Moscow against forcing Poland to incorporate eastern Germany: "Don't mind the five or more million Germans. Stalin will see to them. You will have no trouble with them: they will cease to exist."

Quoted by Sen. Homer Capehart in speech before U.S. Senate, Feb. 5, 1946.

Reproduced from:  Bradley Smith's CODOH Site

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