THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE': Chapter Two
SOME MISSING HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
By James J. Martin
AN EXAMINATION OF Raphael Lemkin's Axis Rule In Occupied Europe may be done under a number of misconceptions, which may as a result produce a wholly distorted view of what the book is all about, and lead to a succession of alarmingly faulty judgments on several subjects. The first mistake one is likely to make is to assume that the book is a work of history. In this category so much of the pertinent related information of the time it supposedly covers is not even mentioned that it soon incubates more confusion than it generates illumination.
The principal original obstacle to overcome is to realize that this work is not a narrative of a general sort but a narrow account with a preconceived conclusion, prepared in the form of a long legal brief. Therefore the evidence is carefully selected, for the purpose of blackening the accused, and setting up a situation in which the author's charge will be found valid and the accused, hopefully, found guilty as charged. The discovery that everything exculpatory is omitted and everything damaging to the author's client, the States at war with Germany and its Axis allies, is nowhere to be found, is disturbing only if one forgets what the limited goal of this account happens to be. Unfortunately, anyone assuming that this is a serious, "objective" literary labor is deceived from its very opening, and to base one's understanding of the subject and the broad outlines of the war which brought about what is detailed in this volume by how the subject is laid out here, is to come away with the plaintiffs' view alone, and a very murky, tangled conception of what their case is. In fact, after an exhaustive exploration of the entire contents of this hefty tome, it
30 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
may seriously be questioned whether there is a case at all. If this were handled as a legal action in an American court under Anglo- Saxon legal procedures, the chances are high the whole "genocide" business would not survive the first hearing today.
Most of the historical material in this work, when not directly related to the legal documents collected in its final two-thirds, is so thin and dealt with in such offhand, cavalier fashion, that for one who lived through the time it reads like one were riffling through a stack of random snapshots, coming away with a few impressions but no understanding at all of what it was all about. The book further misleads in purporting to be an account of the occupation laws, procedures and administration of Germany and its allies in some 17 parts of Europe, substantiated almost entirely by reference to a collection of legal documents but not to any actual eyewitness reports of how life was really lived in such areas. In addition to this, though published late in 1944, there is almost nothing of note in it covering the time span after the end of 1941 or the early weeks of 1942. But the most annoying aspect of the book is its neglect of a decent account of the entire scope and background of the wartime drama, especially that part related to what kind of thinking grew out of the events of 1939-1944 and what all this has to do with the incendiary nature of the author's approach, and the social psychology influencing the opinions which he sought to have embalmed into law, for law is an idea, fundamentally. Therefore it has been considered essential to an examination of Lemkin's book at this time that it be preceded by a broad historical look at the time which the book spans, and at the important ideas engendered in it.
To begin with, the almost total failure of Lemkin to come to grips with the topic of the Jews, Poland and Soviet Russia disquieted no one and was discreetly avoided by all, preferring to allow Lemkin to concentrate on German sin and make his points on "genocide" uncluttered by the intense complications sure to have resulted from dealing with the subject broadly, historically, and honestly. By avoiding the controversy of the 1930s over the ultimate destiny of the European Jews, and by inventing and generalizing the legend that the Germans had killed most of them, Lemkin, and others engaged in this extensive propaganda ploy, dodged the entire question, while narrowing it.
One of the big issues even in the 1920s had concerned the controversy over whether the less-favored Jews of Eastern Europe would be better off under the socialism of the Soviet Union or the socialism of the rival but not-yet-arrived Zionism, with its goal of absorbing Palestine, since the end of World War One politically controlled by
Some Missing Historical Background31
Great Britain and physically and actually occupied by an overwhelming Arab majority.
Within a few years after the 1917 Balfour Declaration more or less committing the British to supporting an eventual Jewish home in Palestine, the more energetic and restless of the Zionists, mainly of Polish and some of Russian origins, began to exert considerable pressure upon Zionist organizations for the advancement of a "revisionist" program to ensure the eventual taking of Palestine. This involved a campaign of actual military operations against both the British, who took over Palestine after 1918 on a League of Nations "mandate," and the dominant demographic majority of resident Arabs. This was mainly the vision of the Russian Jew, Vladimir Jabotinsky, later to be referred to as the "Jewish Hitler" by those who resented his program. Actually, his proposal split Zionist organizations in the mid 1920s, being approved by the Order of the Sons of Zion but repudiated by the Zionist Organization of America in a resolution on June 28, 1926. At that time the ZOA not only castigated Jabotinsky but rebuked the Sons of Zion for endorsing it (New York Times, June 29, 1926, p. 12).
This hardly settled the matter. Jabotinsky's views grew in volume and dispersal in the next five years. (In 1962 the National Union Catalog of the Library of Congress listed 51 published works by Jabotinsky, all written before 1940, the year he died, mainly in Hebrew characters, but also in Polish, Russian, Spanish and English, and almost entirely devoted to some aspect of militant Zionism.) And in 1931 Jabotinsky formed the ominous organization named Irgun Z'vai Leumi, destined to dominate the Zionist terrorist activities in Palestine against both British and Arab opposition, and play a most significant part in eventual victory of Zionism in 1948, as well as supplying the new Zionist state of Israel with its most controversial leader in 1976, Menachem Begin.
However, in the meantime, in the aftermath of the 1926 confrontation over the issue of violence in establishing a future Zionist Jewish homeland in Palestine, the weight of numbers still supported the view that such a result had to come about by peaceable means. As late as April 16, 1945 U.S. Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, in a speech before the vigorous Zionist New York City chapter of the Hadassah, declared flatly that a Jewish state in Palestine could never "be advanced by violence, or by the threat of force." (Part of his speech preprinted in Nation, May 5, 1945, p. 513.)
But this view had been increasingly made obsolete and largely irrelevant by the immense expansion of Irgun activities after 1931. One of its enterprises became an almost verboten subject of
32 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
discussion, its close workings with the anti-Jewish Hitler regime in Germany after January, 1933. For over five years it was almost unknown to learn of its establishment of offices in German cities to recruit candidates for emigration (usually illegally) into British-run Palestine, with the full cooperation of Hitler's regime, which not only permitted this activity, but allowed Irgun people to bring in unlimited amounts of foreign currency and escape the strict regulation of foreign exchange in Germany under the National Socialist policies. But Irgun had such relations with other Central European lands with anti-Jewish policies, too, including Rumania, Hungary and Lemkin's own native Poland. Not a breath of this emerged in Lemkin's Axis Rule, but, for that matter, not a word was entered there as well on the ferocity of anti-Jewish public behavior in Poland during the 1930s, far out-distancing such demonstrations in the rest of Central Europe combined. That Polish Jews had taken front rank in the Zionist impulse was not what angered Poles so much, as the presence of so many Jews in high places in the adjoining Soviet Union, since 1917, and the stiff controversy with the Soviets, exacerbated by a fierce war between the Reds and Poland off and on in the three years after the end of World War One, which had sharpened a nationalistic conflict.
The Poles occupied a precarious spot midway between Red Russia and Germany, and had spent most of the previous centuries divided between them. Maintaining independence from both was a big problem, and the growing Polish bellicosity in the 1920s and 1930s had sharpened the conflict to the point where there developed a Polish nationalism so hot that it spawned a large literature of boastfulness, with Poles maintaining that they could defeat both the Germans and the Soviets in the event of a future war involving all three. As late as the outbreak of the Polish-German war in September, 1939 there were Polish statements to the effect that they would soon be dictating peace to Hitler in Berlin. It was Leonard Mosley in his book On Borrowed Time who remarked that when the Poles engaged in saber-rattling, they did it with real sabers.
It can be seen that official Poland in the 1920s and 1930s was not entranced by either the Marxist socialism of Lenin and Stalin to the East, or by the visionary Zionist socialism which seeped from the propaganda of Polish Jews most active in the advancement of a future Zionist state. But as far as the Germans were concerned, at least from 1918-1933, there did not seem to be much of any difficulty on this subject. The Jews of Germany were only a sixth as numerous as those of Poland, in a total population almost three times that of Poland, about 1%, in actuality, where they were roughly 10% of the Polish population. So Polish relations were
Some Missing Historical Background33
somewhat better with Germany, and continued to be so even after the German revolution of 1933 and the emergence of Hitler as the controlling force. Lemkin, as a Polish government functionary between 1925 and 1935, knew all that. He also must have been intimately familiar with the increasing difficulty of Jews in Poland under Pilsudski, Moscicki, Smigly-Rydz and Josef Beck. His book does not even faintly allude to this historical background. That Poland eventually got to be so unpleasant for Polish Jews that many tens of thousands of them migrated to Germany, finding that living under Hitler and the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of 1935 was quite preferable to living in the Polish "Republic" which employed Raphael Lemkin, must have pained him greatly.
So in advancing his grotesquely distorted vision of "genocide" Lemkin had a great deal to conceal concerning the record of his own land, Poland, as well eventually of all the countries at war with Germany in 1944. When Lemkin charged the Germans with being the world's most prominent and persistent "genocidists," he was guilty of intellectual dishonesty of a staggering magnitude. His long history of "genocide," which he declared a few times was in the making, might have been written with the Germans meriting hardly more than a footnote. And had his wartime account been a dispassionate historical survey, incorporating the deeds of the Russians, Americans, British, French, Belgians and others of the precious "Allies," instead of being simply a primitive propaganda twisting of a few months' duration of wartime German actions, as well as those of their allies, there is grave doubt that Lemkin's new crime would have been considered seriously for more than an hour by his patrons and subsi-dizers, and his chances of publication by the lush and opulent Carnegie apparat so microscopic as to raise doubts almost beyond measurement.
There was another important development in this very complicated picture, however. This was the increasing combat among Jews, especially as the 1930s wore on, as to whether there would be a better future for the downtrodden portion of the Jewish community in a socialist Soviet Union, or a socialist future Zionist State. This divided many sharply, and continued to do so even after the creation of Israel in 1948, and, in actuality, right down to the present moment. Behind the upheaval in Soviet-Jewish relations in the last 30 years has been this fundamental confrontation. It was very hot in the decade before Lemkin's book was published, but again we have an important matter of world affairs which he swept under the rug entirely. As both a Jew and a Polish government functionary and obvious Polish patriot, the matter must have disturbed Lemkin profoundly, personally, but publicly he never admitted it existed until
34 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
he joined in Jewish charges of "genocide" against Stalin in 1950.
As a result of this problem, we find that those Jews who denounced Polish atrocities versus their resident Jews were almost entirely Marxist-oriented, either being involved with the Communist Party in several places, or allied to them in the many Marxist-leaning "liberal" pro-Soviet Popular-Front "transmission belts," as CP power-figures were known to refer to them. For the most part, the strictly Zionist Jews somewhat under-emphasized this ongoing event in Poland, probably the result of cordial relations between the Polish government and Irgun, which had a substantial recruiting office in Warsaw, sifting over Poland's unhappy Jews for the youngest and most fanatic in favor of a Zionist Palestine.
There is a very rich literature concerning the treatment of Jews in Poland in the decade or more prior to war between Poland and Germany, September 1, 1939. There is space for only a small representation of it here.
One may for example take a representative year, 1931, using only the Scripture of American liberalism, the New York Times, as a source. In the Index of that newspaper for that year alone it takes an entire column in tiny agate type just to list the stories published on violent Polish-Jewish affairs: the steady outpouring of reports from the scene on anti-Jewish riots, the closed schools and universities resulting from these, and the killing and injuring of Jews, reported nationwide by the end of that year, supplemented by similar stories from Rumania, Hungary and Austria. Using this paper as a guide, one would have to report that Jews had less trouble in Germany than anywhere else in Central or Eastern Europe, even though the level of domestic strife had increased somewhat there as well as everywhere else. (One may recall an address of Adolf Hitler in the city of Brunswick on October 18, 1931 in which he declared that only his National Socialist party could restore "law and order" in Germany. This was a front-page story in the New York Times for the following day, and it is listed in the Index of that paper, for that year, but it is almost impossible to find an edition of the Times filed anywhere from which it has not been deleted. Perhaps those responsible would prefer other things from those distant times to become as invisible, such as the editorial in the Times almost a calendar year later [October 9, 1932], which yawned that Hitler had become a "bore.")
An especially serious outbreak of anti-Jewish rioting occurred in Poland in 1936-1937. The American liberal weeklies, the Nation and the New Republic, with significant pro-Soviet Jews in their organizations, both editorially condemned the riots and killing of Jews. TheNew Republicdenounced it all as "a blot on the name of the Polish
Some Missing Historical Background35
Republic," while that of the Nation (May 22, 1937, p. 578), was somewhat more abusive of Poland. Albert Alien, writing in The Fight, monthly organ of the American League Against War and Fascism, a frankly pro-Soviet propaganda organization, and one with many pro-Soviet Jews in its membership, devoted a whole article to the affair, titled "Polish Pogroms" (July, 1937, pp. 10-11, 26), in which he asserted, "In no country has anti-Semitism been so sustained and devastating as Poland." This, after 4½ years of Hitler in Germany. In December, 1937 there was formed as a protest group against what was happening to Jews in Poland, the Writers Committee to Aid Polish Jews. And on April 2,1938 the Nation published a long article on the subject by William Zukerman, a pro-Soviet Jew, who observed in rather blunt terms,
For the last two years the Jews have suffered almost incessant physical assaults and pogroms .... This outburst of anti-Semitic bestiality has no equal in Europe, not even in Nazi Germany, where despite the vicious propaganda . . . and the cruel anti-Jewish decrees of the regime, the people have not degraded themselves by a single anti- Jewish pogrom.
Eight years later Zukerman, still arguing vehemently against the flood of Zionist promoters of migration to Palestine, and with the war behind everyone, restated this view:
For Nazi anti-Semitism, with all its beastliness and savagery, was primarily political, a means to an end. The anti-Semitism of pre-war Poland was pathological; it was nationalism become abnormal, almost mad. The physical attacks on the Jews in the streets, parks and public places, the daily beatings of Jewish students, men and women alike, in the universities and high schools of Poland had no parallel even in Nazi Germany. (New Masses, Feb. 19, 1946)
There is a large supporting literature reflecting the same kind of narrative supplied by Zukerman, and hardly confined to papers read by a small intellectual coterie. In contrast, Time, read by many millions in the USA and world-wide, on November 10, 1941 (p. 31), reproduced a portion of a piece read over the air from Germany by George Axelsson of the New York Times, which concluded, in summarizing the attitude of Germans at large to their remaining Jews (by then less than 200,000 in the rough statistical estimates of some observers), "In public places or in contacts as a fellow-worker in factories the German working man seems to treat the Jew as an equal." And Alex Dreier, head of National Broadcasting Company's Berlin desk, and the last American radio man to leave Germany, in a magazine article which seems to have been written while on route back to the USA in the end of 1941, stated without qualification,
36 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
"During my entire stay in Germany I never saw a German civilian participate in an attack on a Jew." However, Dreier, expelled on November 15, 1941 along with Howard K. Smith of the Columbia Broadcasting System, probably in retaliation for the expulsion of Manfred Zapp of the German DNB news bureau from New York City earlier, was one of the first Americans to turn over the rumor that the Germans were already murdering vast numbers of Jews. In an article appearing in the +4 million circulation American Magazine in April, 1942, which the editors probably had as early as Christmas, 1941, Dreier, whose radio, and subsequent movie and television career was to go on for over 40 more years, claimed that in mid-November, 1941,
When I left Berlin, as many as 2,000 Jews were being transported in trucks to Poland every day. In Switzerland I heard reliable reports that hundreds were being gassed to death en route.
So, at this early date, Polish and other propaganda yarns of mass murder by gassing were already well under way, and it might be pointed out that such rumors as these were as valid "proof of what was going on as were the somewhat tardier Zionist booklets Raphael Lemkin used as his documentation of similar accusations three years later. (By Dreier's calculations, there should not have been a Jew left in all Germany by the end of January, 1942 at the latest, though their presence in much larger numbers than commonly assumed had to await the end of the war to be verified.)
Raphael Lemkin, a resident citizen and functionary of Poland while this was going on down to the spring of 1940, must have seen many cases such as these persons described in American publications. But he never uttered a word about it in Axis Rule, nor publicly or officially called attention to it afterward, in the dozen years he lived after the establishment of Communist Poland, during which Jews rose to high places in the regime, despite the later distaste of Nikita Khrushchev for their prominence. Therefore his selecting out of Germany in 1947 as the land par excellence in the world for "geno- cidic" behavior over the years was a grave distortion of political realities.
By the time Zukerman had once more called to public memory the serious predicament of Polish Jewry in the 1930s in his 1946 New Masses essay, Communist and Zionist positions and policies regarding Poland's Jews had gone through a succession of coolings and heatings. A peak of estrangement had occurred during the diplomatic crises of 1938 and 1939. During the former year the Polish government, by cancelling the passports of Jews who had fled Poland for Nazi Germany, precipitated the German abrogation of the visas
Some Missing Historical Background37
on these passports and rendering the holders a class of "stateless" persons, leading to tenseness which was capped by the sensational assassination in the German embassy in Paris of the 3rd secretary, Ernst vom Rath, by the young Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, allegedly an act resulting from his resentment at the Germans preparing to deport his parents back to Poland from Nazi Germany. This led to the demonstrations against Jews in Germany which were so massively exploited by Zionist and other propaganda organizations in November, 1938, and were still being utilized in behalf of Zionist goals 45 years later. Though it is hard to attribute directly a single Jewish death to this 15 hours of property destruction on November 10, 1938, it is a source of wonder why this has been selected by Zionists for such massive attention, and not the many pogroms against Jews in Poland before and after, which killed a great many Jews.
The start of the Second World War involving Germany and Poland in September, 1939 after the collapse of the negotiations concerning the Danzig question between the two lands did not appreciably change things, since Communist Russia and Hitler Germany had concluded a diplomatic understanding in August just prior to hostilities, so Soviet neutrality between September 1939 and June 1941 did not lessen repeated Communist commentary on Polish treatment of Jews in the 1930s era. Furthermore, the occupation of over half of Poland by the armed forces of the Soviet Union in October 1939 and the adoption of a repressive policy of their own toward Poles, Jews and non-Jews alike, also had a major part in the downplaying of what was happening. The confusion was maximized by this absence of a common front on the issue and it became a matter of taking sides as far as which of the two occupying lands were injuring Jews the most.
The diplomatic understanding between Germany and Russia on August 23, 1939 produced a momentary attack of sanity in America relative to foreign affairs, and in particular had the effect of cooling the ardor of the tens of thousands of vociferous partisans of Stalin- ism to such an extent that there occurred an unprecedented wave of psychiatric breakdowns among these well-to-do and mainly upper middle class admirers of Bolshevik Communism, later referred to hastily by Malcolm Cowley, one of the directing voices of the New Republic, in 1943. The temporary political neutrality among what are known in these times as the "limousine liberals" was just that, however; it was to be followed by an even more lunatic decade, that of 1941-1950. But in this short hiatus between the pro-Sovietism of 1919-1939 and that of 1941-1950, there was a momentary confusion on the correct line to adopt re the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe.
38 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
Typical of this was the essay by Howard Daniels, an Australian engaged in European refugee work, in the Nation for January 27, 1940 (pp. 92-94), titled "Mass Murder in Poland." Only 4 months after the end of the German-Polish war, this was about the first piece in America alleging that massacres of Polish people, especially Jews, had begun. The indigestible aspect of Daniels' piece in establishing his thesis was that he apparently was spending his time on the Soviet side of the demarcation line separating the two main occupying powers in Poland (Lithuania, Czecho-Slovakia and Hungary had also grabbed parts of the dismembered Polish state too). Daniels declared that Poland's 3,000,000 Jews had been roughly divided into 1½ million apiece under the Reds and the Germans. In the new Communist government the Russians established in their eastern more- than-a-half of Poland, Jews were rising to top posts there as they had in Moscow more than 20 years before. As to the German disposition of their l½ million Jews, Daniels told two contradictory stories; he alleged that the Germans were trying to 1) "exterminate" theirs in ways he was not too clear in laying out, while at the same time he charged that they were 2) encouraging a mass exodus of Jews from their side to the Soviet side of the demarcation line of the occupation, a move which he said the Reds were trying to halt. However, in an attempt to be "balanced," Daniels told America's liberal elite that orthodox religious and Zionist-inclined Jews in both the German and Russian zones were about as badly treated.
With the outbreak of the German-Russian phase of the European war on June 22, 1941 the propaganda situation regarding the welfare of Red Russia in America returned to the period preceding August 23, 1939, with this difference in respect to the Polish Jews: now there began a concerted campaign of defamation of the Germans by both Communists and Zionists, and a joint propaganda accusing the Germans only of massacring the Polish Jews welled up from both centers in a flood, continuing for over 40 years, despite a number of ruptures later on in the fabric of Soviet-Zionist amicability. Though it had long been agreed that millions of Poles, including Menachem Begin, had been moved into parts of the Soviet Union far beyond the Ural Mountains into Central Asia and Siberia by the Red Army, there was a heavy concentration on German behavior toward Polish Jews, with some conflict between Polish non-Jews and Jews who had managed to flee to England and there create one of the pathetic little rump governments-in-exile so assiduously attended by Winston Churchill's British war regime.
Within six weeks of the June 22, 1941 outbreak of war in Poland between the Germans and Russians, this Polish refugee government had issued, in the French language, a White Book accusing the
Some Missing Historical Background39
Germans of gassing Poles. (Time, August 4, 1941, pp. 27-28.) As can be seen, this allegation preceded the spreading of a second or third hand charge of the same nature by the American radio commentator, Alex Dreier, by about four months. It is principally of significance in that it pointed out the road things would proceed upon until the attainment of the destination at Nuremberg.
By about this same time the big guns of Zionism in the USA were starting to be heard, propelled only part of the way by the talk of mass murder of Jews in Eastern Europe, in Germany, or in the other regions occupied by Axis armies. It will be seen that Lemkin almost entirely ignored the domestic German side of the matter, being obsessed with the international aspect of it apparently, in the early stages of his campaign, though he also argued almost from the beginning about making "genocide" offenses international in scope and extraditable no matter where they were committed. An important speech on November 22, 1941 in Boston by Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman before the Junior Hadassah, the young womens' Zionist organization of America, was especially noteworthy as an indication that there was a goal behind all the charges now being wholesaled about the world. Said Rabbi Liebman, of Temple Israel,
The Jewish people will say, "we were the first victims. We seek indemnity for the millions of our people sent across the face of the earth in refrigerated cars to die, for all the children who perished on barbed wires trying to cross inhospitable frontiers, and for all concentration camp martyrs .... We shall say to democracy that we are ready to share its poverty but never to bear persecution again. We have the right to ask in the name of the ideals for which democracy is suffering air raids and bombings, a little piece of earth. Call it Palestine. Let our people find an end to homelessness."
The allegation of the mass-murder of millions of Jews had been well-seated even before the USA became a formal belligerent in the war on December 7, 1941, and it became more and more obvious that Zionism's prize goal of Palestine was what lay just beyond the propaganda charges; the mass death of Europe's Jews was not an allegation supposedly serving a purpose in aiding the winning of the war by Germany's enemies. It was being formed into the moral foundation of the future state of Israel. But the promotion of the charge was now a joint effort of Soviet Communism and world Zionism, and their differing goals in doing so became incidental.
There is no worthwhile examination of the joint exploitation of the charge of the Axis annihilation of Europe's Jews by Moscow and Tel Aviv, 1941-1946, but the existence of a degree of cordiality lacking down to September, 1939, if not June, 1941, surely helped out, and some coordination of respective claims prevailed for sure
40 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
after America and Russia were for the first time war "allies." When the chief Rabbinate of Palestine proclaimed December 2, 1942 as a day of prayer, fasting and mourning among all the Jews of the world in behalf of the already-claimed murdered millions, the New YorkTimes'supporting editorial (December 2, 1942, p. 24), claimed that "Of Germany's 200,000 Jews in 1939 all but 40,000 have been deported or have perished," while going on to assert that "according to evidence in the hands of the [U.S.] State Department," "an order of Adolf Hitler demanding the extermination of all Jews in all territories controlled by Germany" was known to exist. Researchers nearly 40 years later were still searching for that order, or information leading to anyone who might have ever seen it at any time.
What this entire episode represented in reality was a well-coordinated and orchestrated propaganda assault, carried out in a three-pronged operation from London, Washington and New York, involving the machinery and spokesmen of the Polish Government in Exile, the U.S. State Department and at least eight cooperating Zionist organizations located in Britain and the U.S.A. And it was all achieved between November 24 and 27, 1942.
A London dispatch to the New York Times published November 26 quoted extensively from a statement by Dr. Ignacy Szwarcbart (two days later spelled Schwarzbart), a Jewish member of the Polish National Council representing the refugee government in London, that nearly one-third of Poland's pre-war 3,000,000 Jews had "perished" in the first three years of German occupation. He attributed the majority of the deaths to "executions by mass-murder and gassing," as well as by the "organized spreading of diseases." (This latter was also a favorite charge of the Stalinists against the Japanese after the end of the Pacific War.)
Dr. Schwarzbart claimed the Germans had two separate ghettoes in the Polish city of Lublin to process the Jews for destruction, as well as a special center in Belzec where mass electrocutions were conducted, the Jews being stripped naked and pushed into a large room under the pretext of being given a bath, only to discover they were standing upon a sheet metal floor. When the electric current was turned on, the occupants, in to to, according to Dr. Schwarzbart, died "instantaneously." They were then buried in large numbers in vast common graves, excavated by "a large digging machine" "installed nearby." Dr. Schwartzbart also bore a message from the British section of the World Jewish Congress to the effect that Norway's 2800 Jews had been all sent into forced labor in northern Norway or to Poland.
Immediately following this was an even longer story based on a report filed by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, which he claimed was based
Some Missing Historical Background41
on a conference between him and the State Department on November 24. The highlight of this meeting was his hearing that State had possession of a copy of an order by Hitler himself calling for "the immediate extirpation of all Jews in German-occupied Europe." This was backed by "affidavits obtained by the State Department from Jewish sources of information in free countries" (but not from Jews in the occupied lands) that atrocities of the vilest sort in immense numbers were taking place constantly. Said the Times:
Rabbi Wise said the State Department documents included affidavits from "reliable persons who knew" of such atrocities as turning Jewish bodies into fats and soap and lubricants, and the latest Nazi method of killing Jews by having doctors (sic) inject air bubbles in to their veins. He said the earlier gassing with prussic acid had been found too expensive.
Rabbi Wise declared that leaders of Jewish organizations, including the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Labor Committee, the World Jewish Congress, B'nai B'rith, the Synagogue Council of America and Agudath Harabonim, were convinced of the "authenticity" of all this material.
As if by coincidence, the Finance Minister of the Polish Government in Exile also happened to be in New York City, despite the desperate dangers of Atlantic crossings in that grim war year of 1942. In an interview with the press, Dr. Henryk Strasburger, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel November 27, reiterated most of the material emanating from London and Washington, with decorations. Not only were 1,000,000 Polish Jews already massacred, but 400,000 non-Jewish Poles had suffered the same fate, half of the latter in the "human slaughter houses" created in Poland by the Germans, and the remaining 200,000 "murdered by other means."
But this was just a start. There apparently were even larger numbers not included in this 1,400,000 who had been exterminated; "innumerable (sic) others" had been "scientifically starved to death or allowed to die of disease." Dr. Strasburger claimed that all this loss of life had been determined by consulting "official figures of the Polish Government."
According to Dr. Strasburger, elaborating a bit on these horrifying matters, the first German "slaughterhouse" had been created in Kaunas, the capital of Lithuania, which they had taken from the retreating Red Army at the end of June, 1941. The second of these installations went up in Belzec, some 60 miles from the Polish city of Lwow (Lemberg), in southeastern Poland (since 1945 a part of the Soviet Union). It was in the latter "where electrocution and lethal gas chambers were being used."
42 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
At the luncheon which followed this interview, given in honor of this celebrated guest by the Central Eastern European Planning Board, he demonstrated that he came not only to bring tidings of almost unimaginable atrocities, but also to make some suggestions for the post-war political map of that area of Europe, which presumably had the approval of all the powers which had obviously sanctioned this auspicious visit to the U.S.A. Dr. Strasburger suggested that some kind of regional organization take place of all the states of Central and Eastern Europe "extending from the Baltic to the Aegean and Adriatic," presumably the hodge-podge of states created at Versailles between Russia and Germany, and prior to September, 1939 firmly in the Anglo-French orbit. It did not look like the latter kind of organization would come back, and the "new" thinking was along lines of some regional association of not-yet-explained dimensions. Dr. Strasburger, dwelling on their small size and individual weaknesses being attractions to being "subjugated by the great European powers," declared their salvation lay in a federation, an idea which had been batted around for a long time under various auspices, and now undergoing a revival of currency. And its future was bright, for, as Dr. Strasburger declared, the people living in this "parallelogram" had "common characteristics" and were "the children of freedom and democracy." It was a pity that Dr. Strasburger and the other seers of this Planning Board did not seem to anticipate in the slightest that the whole region would in two and a half years be enjoying the Stalinist brand of "freedom and democracy."
But insofar as the matter at hand was concerned, Strasburger's performance meshed smoothly with all the parts of this operation. That same day (November 27, 1942) the Polish National Council in London, during a special meeting, restated the claims of vast Polish loss of life under the circumstances already described by Schwarzbart in London and Rabbi Wise and Dr. Strasburger in New York. With Mikolajczyk presiding, the press heard Schwarzbart testify a second time in support of the allegations, seconded solemnly by another Polish Jewish socialist, one Zygielboim. This set the stage for the December protests and the formulation of the wartime United Nations pronouncement.
By this time a major collapse of German arms in south-western Russia was portending, starting in the third week of November. The evening of November 29, 1942 a large gathering was held in Carnegie Hall in New York City under the auspices of the Committee of Jewish Writers and Artists, at which speakers praised the "victorious advance of the Russian armies," and urged Russian and American Jews "to cooperate in the solution of the Jewish post-war problems," as the New York Times reported the event (November 30, 1942,
Some Missing Historical Background43
p. 3.) The highlight of the meeting was the reading of a personal message from Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization and of the Jewish Agency in Palestine: "Dr. Weizmann said the advance of Russia's armies 'brings us step by step nearer to the hour of liberation for those whom Hitler has sworn to exterminate; every hamlet retaken from the Nazi invaders, every village reconquered, reduces the unprecedented plight of the people under the heel of those evil forces.' "
This was a puzzling declaration by Weizmann. It was not possible to determine from it whether he believed that those rescued in the Russian hamlets and villages were Jews or non-Jews, and, if the former, why they were still there and not "exterminated," as Weizmann declared Hitler had "sworn" to do. If James N. Rosenberg, honorary chairman of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, was right, then the returning Red Army conquerors could hardly have been finding Polish Jews in the regions adjoining Stalingrad. In a statement he made in 1942, widely circulated by Stalinist publicists, and still being repeated nearly a year and a half after the end of the war, the Stalinist regime had pretty well cleared the region of such. In the New Masses for September 24, 1946 (p. 14), Rosenberg was quoted as saying in 1942,
Of some 1,750,000 Jews who succeeded in escaping from the Axis . . . about 1,600,000 were evacuated by the Soviet Government from Eastern Poland and subsequently occupied Soviet territory and transported far into the Russian interior and beyond the Urals. About 150,000 others managed to reach Palestine, the United States, and other countries beyond the seas.
Several times the last figure he gave were known to have reached the USA even while the war was going on, hence this 150,000 total managing to reach points outside Russia was gravely understated, thus suggesting that his figure for those relocating in the Soviet Union somewhere was also an understatement. But these were times for the wildest of amateur demographic statistics being bruited about, with no possibility of a decent scientific census being conducted in the vast area subjected to martial chaos. Therefore the specialists in what today are designated as "ball park estimates" enjoyed a veritable golden era, requiring long periods of study of those who sought to make any of them make any sense, whether gravely exaggerated or understated. The International Labor Office'sDisplacement of Population in Europe(1943, p. 59), declared that more than 1,000,000 people were deported from Poland to the Soviet Union in the 1939-1941 period, but this did not tell anyone much of anything, and this sub-rosa Communist front may have been
44 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
even more seriously reducing the actual total. Nowhere were there any credible reports on the numbers who lost their lives in Communist-occupied Poland prior to the moving of so many of them into the Soviet Union. Considerable numbers appear to have remained in Poland, Jews and non-Jews alike, if the voluminous Zionist literature on the conduct of franc-tireur civilian warfare and sabotage, and that of the Germans reporting on it all, can be believed. From such works as the American Jewish Congress' publication They Chose Life (1973) it would appear that the majority of Jews who spent the war in a "resistance" underground against the Germans did so mainly in the regions of what had been pre-war Poland.
Therefore, when Raphael Lemkin in his short chapter in Axis Ruleon "genocide" made his sole charge of systematic mass murder against the Germans, of Jews, and also non-Jewish Poles and Russians, he was already well behind a stream of similar accusations dating back for many months. It was in a 12-line sub-paragraph, and he cited for his documentary support of this charge a quotation from the December 17, 1942 "Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations," issued simultaneously that day in London and New York, and then published on the first page of the first number of volume 3 of the United Nations Review (1943). In this declaration, gathered together from reports filed by a dozen or more of the enemies of the Axis, but depending heavily on allegations of the governments in exile, the Jews of Europe were said to be being moved to Eastern Europe, where they were being "worked to death," or "deliberately massacred in mass executions." There was no indi cation of the method being used, and nothing was said of "gas chambers," leaving the reader to imagine how this was being achieved. The other source Lemkin cited, along with this wartime UN declaration, was a Zionist propaganda work prepared by the Institute of Jewish Affairs of both the American and the World Jewish Congress, titled Hitler's Ten-Year War on the Jews,(1) published in New York in 1943. This source maintained that the Jewish loss of life directly traceable to German mass murder was 1,702,500 persons, presumably all disposed of by the end of 1942. However, one can see the relative venerability of these charges, well after several others advanced previously. That they antedated mention in the introduction of Lemkin's book by ten months, and mention in the rest of his book by nearly two years, should serve to deflate Lemkin's reputation as the first person to asseverate that Axis-occupied Europe was the site where European Jewry was being systematically annihilated in mass executions.
Why Lemkin chose to use these two sources to support his late 1943 (and unpublished until late 1944) charges of mass murder of
Some Missing Historical Background45
Europe's Jews as a calculated and planned policy is not clear. There were others, just as sensational, all made available at around the same time, early December, 1942. That there may have been specific reasons for this chorus of similar cries has already been suggested. When Rabbi Liebman made his dramatic Zionist speech in Boston in late November, 1941, threatening the world with a very large Jewish "reparations" bill at any coming peace treaty, and suggesting that Jews would be happy with a "little piece of earth" "call it Palestine," there did not seem to be the likelihood of a settlement of the European war anywhere in the near future, with German arms successful everywhere. But by late 1942, it was another story. The impending catastrophe facing the German armed forces in the Stalingrad region of southwestern Russia suggested that the fortunes of war were shifting, and though 'Victory" appeared to be still very distant, it became obvious that postwar claims might just as well be advanced at the earliest opportunity, and, in harmony with past actions, a convincing accompaniment to claims for redress had often been allegations of grievous wrongs suffered. Atrocity propaganda had far more than the search for sentimental understanding as its objective; it was the smokescreen cover for demands for something far more substantial than that.
As already pointed out, organized Zionism had already made a dramatic splash in late November and early December, 1942. But there were others. The most important of these we have seen consisted of charges launched by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, toward the end of the first week of December, 1942, and antedating the formal charge made by the wartime United Nations by a week. Based on alleged statistics supposedly prepared in the Polish "underground" by one of the earliest of the exponents calling for the destruction of Germany, a Polish Jew, Henryk Strasburger, the Wise report drew mixed reactions in the US, and two of the editorial reactions are reproduced here for their contrasting effect. The Communist New Masses editorial, "Poland's Jews," (December 8, 1942, p. 21), accepted it without question:
One of the most fiendish of all the ghastly reports from Hitler- dominated Europe is the news that 1,000,000 Jews—nearly a third of Poland's Jewish population—have been systematically murdered by the Nazis. Another million Polish Jews are now menaced by starvation and the lack of medical supplies. Mass electrocutions and gassing have become common, and, because it is less expensive the bestial fascists are now turning to a new method—the injection of air bubbles in the bloodstream. Dr. Stephen S. Wise has amplified this information with affidavits from reliable Washington sources that the Nazis were offering fifty reichsmarks for corpses which are converted into soaps, fats, fertilizers and lubricants.
46 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
Responding to the same press release, the editors of the venerableChristian Century,the weekly organ of American Protestantism most widely respected in the US, observed ("Horror Stories from Poland," December 9, 1942, pp. 1518-19):
We question whether any good purpose is served by the publication of such charges as Dr. Stephen S. Wise gave to the press last week.... Dr. Wise's figures on the number of Jews killed differ radically from those given out on the same day by the Polish Government in Exile. Whereas Dr. Wise says that Hitler ordered all Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe killed by the end of this year, the exiled Polish government claims only that orders have been issued for the extermination of half the Jews in Poland by the end of this year and that 250,000 have already been killed up to the end of September .... Dr. Strasburger, whose "underground" figures are used to support Rabbi Wise's charges, is the same Polish leader who is campaigning in this country for the complete destruction of Germany .... Dr. Wise's allegation that Hitler is paying $ 20 each for Jewish corpses to be "processed" into soap fats and fertilizer is unpleasantly reminiscent of the "cadaver factory" lie which was one of the propaganda triumphs of the First World War.
The editors of the Christian Century indeed had good memories and had learned the revisionist exposes following the First World War well. The hoary British lie of the German cadaver factories had been admitted by General Charteris as early as 1925, and other British propaganda figures had deflated many others, which had served to inflame neutral American sensibilities, 1914-1918. But this was a new war, being fought and paid for (but not led) by a new generation. Lord Northcliffe, the mastermind of World War One propaganda, had remarked that the only people more gullible than Americans were the Chinese, but it seemed to the Christian Century that the children of those who fought and believed in the First were showing even less reserve and thought while engaged in the Second, even believing the same discredited mendacity a second time around.
An important aspect of the situation at the end of 1942 was the resumed unity of Communist and Zionist propaganda versus Germany, and the essential agreement on the substance especially of the atrocity campaign. The Communists had to forget or suppress their earlier positions in doing so, and, by admitting the latest Zionist allegations, had to admit, though only by default, that they had lied when they claimed to have spirited 1½-2 million Polish Jews to safety, in order to have Zionist claims that more than a million had been murdered by the Nazis and another million threatened with death, make sense. However, this was not done, and both stories flourished side by side well into 1943 and beyond. In fact, in 1943 the Institute for Jewish Affairs book Hitler's Ten-Year War on the
Some Missing Historical Background47
Jews,quoted the Stalinist figure on removal of Jews to the Soviet Union, even managing to raise it a little (1,800,000) without disputing or refuting it (p. 300). But the highest total in this department was not claimed until after the end of the war. One of the most popular departments in the family weekly magazine Collier's, with nearly three million subscribers and probably five times that many total readership, was Freling Foster's "Keeping Up With the World," a page devoted to short news bits in abbreviated paragraphs. In the issue for June 9, 1945 (p. 6) Foster revealed, "Russia has 5,800,000 Jews, 41% of the present Jewish population of the world, of whom 2,200,000 have migrated to the Soviet Union since 1939 to escape the Nazis." There was no later disclaimer of this declaration nor did Foster indicate his source.
But this kind of material was coursing along with quite contradictory competition. The very next month one could read Meyer Levin, later to be famed for his part in creating one of the stage versions of the Anne Frank story, assert in The Nation that "Seven million Jews were slaughtered for being Jews." Levin, in Paris when he wrote this, was aware that Jews were disappearing for quite different reasons as well. "Those who have concluded that being a Jew is not worth the price are constantly slipping away from the community," he observed ruefully; "Day after day in the Journal Offlciel one finds columns of notices of Cohens and Levys who have changed their names to Dumont and Bontemps." (Levin, "What's Left of the Jews," Nation [July 28, 1945], pp. 74-76).
A few years later, such contradictions were quickly buried.(2) Now a still different change in the realities of world politics made attractive a return to the support of such views once more. With the defeat of the Germans before Stalingrad, it was not hard to project their coming general collapse, especially now that the USA was in the war and its prodigious war production beginning to make an impact. December, 1942 seemed to be the time to get prepared for the political realities sure to become evident, hence the rash of atrocity propaganda charges, all amply provided for in the publicity department. But, like the New York Times's claim that an order from Hitler outlining the extermination of Europe's Jews was in the hands of the State Department, the new "evidence" on the German processing of dead Jews for soap and fertilizer, supposedly based on "affidavits from reliable Washington sources," proved to be fully as difficult to pin down, eventually joining the other elusive wartime propagandistic ectoplasm once its purpose had been served. As Norman Angell had observed well before the outbreak of this new war, people acted, not on the basis of facts, but on the basis of theiropinionabout facts. In this case, action was to come about on the
48 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
basis of opinions of non-facts. The latter has always been the mainstay of effective atrocity propaganda, and it is a matter of opinion whether the Reds or Zionists outdid the other in publicization of alarming excesses. The brief period of Soviet reserve on atrocity propaganda, 1939-1941, was followed by the most incendiary of such charges made by themselves. About two weeks before the USA became a formal belligerent in December, 1941, the Communist foreign minister, V. M. Molotov, made an allegation broadcast to the world, accusing the Germans of starving their Red prisoners of war, cutting off their hands, gouging out their eyes, ripping open their stomachs, raping all the women in their advance across eastern Poland and western Russia, and stripping the wounded naked to die of exposure. In the US, Time magazine, probably a psychic belligerent before even the lands which eventually became engaged in the fighting, sympathetically reproduced Molotov's charges in their issue the week before the Pearl Harbor attack (December 1, 1941, p. 26.)
The joining of Soviet and Zionist propaganda campaigns relating to charges of German mass murder of Jews was not a difficult aspect of all this, an enterprise in which the major anti-German countries and the governments-in-exile all joined, leading to the famous December 17, 1942 declaration which turned out to be one of Lemkin's two principal sources in taking part in spreading this story himself in Axis Rule. His failure to update his book, allowing it to appear as a product of the period ending, at latest, the end of 1942, also lost him the opportunity to use a stream of later works dwelling on even more exaggerated aspects of these early atrocity statements. The prize omission from his book was the sensational supplementation resulting from the capture by the Red Army late in August, 1944 of the first German concentration camp to fall into "Allied" hands in the course of the war to that moment, Maidanek, in Poland. The stories which swamped the West after this brought to the mind of some the trusting and naive reportage of Eve Curie in her book of the previous year, Journey Among Warriors. Though she was not quite as vivacious a fellow traveler as Andre Gide a decade before, her clever total-war propaganda had served as a sturdy vehicle for lengthy Soviet atrocity stories, which she said she believed because all the people she questioned about them gave her "the same version of the facts and swore they were true." Such innocence concerning the disciplinary lock step of the Communist Party may have been the order of the day in 1943, but it should have served as warning to some when the Red propaganda publicity machine managed the Maidanek affair, succeeding in outdoing rivals in the purveying of such material, and perhaps stealing a lap on Zionist exploiters of similar content.
Some Missing Historical Background49
The USA first learned of it in any broad manner via the pages ofTimemagazine, which printed a direct translation of the event from a Moscow Communist newspaper, the story having been written by a Red war correspondent, one Roman Karmen ("Vernichtslungslager," August 21, 1944, pp. 36-37). This "first eyewitness description of a Nazi extermination camp," as Time billed it, set the standard for many more to follow it. Karmen claimed the camp contained five crematoria, adjoining several gas chambers, where people were killed 250 at a time, by chlorine gas. The crematoria were supposed to have disposed of 1400 people a day, and the ashes were alleged to have been shipped back to Germany in large cans, to be used as fertilizer. Karmen claimed "more than half a million" persons had been exterminated at Maidanek.
Without permitting any hiatus during which someone else might enter and complicate the scene, the Red promotional drive to publicize Maidanek continued shortly after the big splash made in their behalf by Time. Two new fronts promptly appeared, the Soviet- Polish Atrocities Investigation Commission, and the Polish Committee of National Liberation, the latter the Stalin-backed Red government based in Lublin, not far from Maidanek, and which opposed the London-backed exile remnant, stripped of its real leadership after the mysterious death of Gen. Sikorski in an air crash in July 1943, on a return flight to London from Gibraltar.
The "Atrocities Investigation Commission" rounded up some 30 Western journalists, who had been dutifully reporting the Russo- German war in the East from their hotel rooms and lobbies in Moscow, and conducted them through a guided tour of Maidanek a few days after Karmen's story was published in the USA in translation. In this party was the New York Times's W. H. Lawrence, and various veteran pro-Red figures including Edgar Snow and Maurice Hindus, virtual Stalinist public relations officers in the American press. These three and others poured a cascade of print upon American readers, amplifying the Red atrocity claims, and adding various embellishments of their own. It was "the atrocity story of the year," as the Christian Century described it, though once more calling attention to this "corpse factory" tale as too suspiciously parallel to the discredited version loosed in World War One to be believed. Lawrence reported Maidanek to be "a veritable River Rouge for the production of death," repeating what he was told by the Red tour guides that the deceased had been asphyxiated by gas and their bodies cremated in huge furnaces. Claims were now made that the Germans had killed 18,000 people a day, though the expanded capacity of the crematoria, to 1900 from 1400, still could not have come within a small percentage of taking care of all these dead bodies. The
50 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
death toll, a half million according to Karmen a few days before, was now boosted to 1½ million; Both Lawrence and Hindus repeated this figure in American dispatches. The evidence advanced by the Reds to support this claim was a warehouse, 150 feet long, which contained clothing and other apparel supposedly worn by the victims prior to their massacre. Hindus claimed it contained among other things 820,000 pair of shoes. Snow, citing other figures which he said came from the Red Polish government in nearby Lublin, supported their claims to having found the ashes of 1,000,000 (though all these ashes were supposed to have been shipped to Germany for fertilizer) at Maidanek, and that by this time, into the second week of September, 1944, the Red authorities had uncovered the ashes of some 4,000,000 more at the captured camp at Treblinka and three other German camps in Poland; the taking of Auschwitz, or Oswiecim, lay four months into the future. Snow's piece to the Saturday Evening Post ("How the Nazi Butchers Wasted Nothing," October 28, 1944, pp. 18-19, 96) was datelined "Maidanek, Poland," and was accompanied by official Soviet photos of an incinerator, the pile of shoes, and of cans supposedly containing the ashes of the dead, but strangely enough there was no photo then, or later, of a gas chamber. The editors paralleled Snow's gracious piece of pro-Red promotional material with an angry boxed editorial titled "This Is Why There Must Be No Soft Peace." So part of the motivation for this stunning account was laid bare; the Morgenthau and other plans for the reduction of Germany to a veritable goat pasture were being hurled around the USA by press and radio, and this was very strong supporting material for such plans. There appeared to be another, however, serving Soviet purposes in Poland, not concerning Germany. The Warsaw rebellion against the Germans had taken place at about the time these camp revelations had begun, and the Polish exile government in London, experiencing the anguish of being sold out by their Anglo-American benefactors, had reacted bitterly upon the defeat of the Warsaw uprising by the Germans, claiming that the Red Army had stopped their advance on the city within artillery range, allowing the Germans to suppress the Polish revolt and kill 250,000 Warsaw residents. The London Poles claimed they had inspired the Warsaw rebellion, and that the Russians had allowed it to suffer defeat so as to enhance the fortunes of the Communist Poles based in Lublin, whose leaders had made the Maidanek charges, conducted the Western journalists through the facilities there, succeeded in grabbing the main headlines in the Western newspapers, while relegating the Warsaw recriminations to a subordinate status. The only American correspondent taking part in this memorable first guided tour of a German concentration camp captured by the Reds in
Some Missing Historical Background51
Poland who sensed the political realities behind all this sensational propaganda was Richard Lauterbach, Time and Life Russian correspondent, who sent in his report from Krakow in "liberated Poland." He alleged the 1½ millions killed in Maidanek were dispatched by the German Gestapo, but at least allowed a restrained description of the new political scenery, especially the slow drift of Poland west of the Curzon Line into the orbit of the Stalinist PCNL. It was obvious the Soviet exploitation of the concentration camps and the sensational charges they were lodging concerning the massacre of 1,500,000 in just one of them, which defied any logistical comprehension of such an action, had solid political, not sentimental, objectives behind it.
In all this there was no mention of Jews, and from that time to this, there have been discrepancies in the Zionist and strictly Communist accounts of the German concentration camps in Poland. The Zionists have claimed the casualties to have been suffered mainly by Jews, with the Communist stories sometimes failing to mention Jews as victims except in a fleeting moment here and there in their narratives.
But support for the Jewish version was gathering in the wings of this "death camp" panorama. It may be recalled that Zionist and Zionist-sympathizer sources in 1942 and early 1943 claimed that the US State Department and unnamed "Washington officials" had been the support for claims of official German plans for the mass death of Jews in German-occupied Europe. But there had never been an official American affidavit reinforcing Zionist claims in those times and none had occurred thereafter, despite the growing volume of the assertions and the magnitude of the alleged actions. Finally, one of these took place.
As Newsweek (December 4, 1944, p. 59) put it, "Last week, for the first time, an American governmental agency, the War Refugee Board, officially backed up European charges of mass executions by the Germans." The timing, it can be seen, was very close to the publication day of Axis Rule, November 25, and once more gave circumstantial evidence of coordination of different drives concerning a matter of mutual interest, the lodging of atrocity stories with the public, but aimed at somewhat different levels. Newsweek went on to identify the War Refugee Board as largely an agency reflecting the views and goals of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, whose published plan for the reduction of Germany to a pastoral colony of its enemies was really a formula for turning Central Europe into a festering Stalinist satrapy. This new gambit appeared to be tailored to an assault on the American public's sensibilities in order to get the sanction to achieve his aims in Germany, as well as those of many allied to him, politically and psychically.
52 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
Newsweekwent on to support the WRB's claim that the Germans had massacred 1,500,000 to 1,765,000 people at Brzeznia in southwestern Poland, and for the first time rang in the soon-to-be far more ominous location of Oswiecim (Auschwitz), where only another 1,500,000 were alleged to have been disposed of systematically. The evidence for all this? "Stories told by two refugee Slovak Jews and one Polish officer who had been at the camps," Newsweek declared, in summarizing the WRB report. How these "witnesses" would have held up under just the typical cross-examination one has become accustomed to observe in American courts can only be imagined, as accusation was equivalent to conviction in the wartime atmosphere of late 1944, a kangaroo court circumstance which was to prevail for the rest of the 1940s in the famed "war crimes" trials of Nuremberg, Manila and Tokyo, though developed in Russia in 1943, where the prototypes of these judicial lynchings were first paraded before the world.(3)
In sketching the outlines of the atrocities story down to the moment of the publication of Raphael Lemkin's book, one must be aware that several related matters were intertwined with it in almost inseparable fashion, and the complications they all produced can not be understood without at least a minimum effort at describing them as events taking place while the numbers-game of atrocity claims and the conflicting narratives on refugee and emigre preservation and deliverance were reaching the record.
Among these related themes, one must note as the obverse side of the stories dealing with alleged German extermination of the Jews in their grip the threat, prediction, or recommendation that the Germans also be annihilated. That these were threats, in the main, dodges the fact that there was at least a self-fulfilling potential there, and what happened to the Germans between 1945 and 1950 must also be kept in mind as a continuing effort to sort out statistics relative to Jews is being made. The reluctance for those who were neither Communists nor Jews to substantiate the claims of German mass-murder of occupied Europe's Jews is not so much squeamish- ness but tied into other developments, primarily the slowly developing concept of "war crimes," which became entwined in the general theme of atrocities, leading to promotion of calls for retaliation against the Germans in the form of massacre of large numbers ofthem,upon the achievement of war gains and the establishment of favorable circumstances permitting such political reprisals. Soviet as well as Zionist political goals loomed large in this atrocity-reprisal propaganda. One may argue that the loss of life due to German atrocities as alleged, 1940-1945, had to be established as true in order to vindicate the programs inflicted upon the Germans,
Some Missing Historical Background53
1945-1950. With very few exceptions, the flood of postwar plans insofar as they concerned the future of the Germans, from 1942 on, especially, emphasized incredibly ferocious impositions upon a future conquered Germany, though the immediate postwar political realities resulted in the softening of several of the recommendations, some of which will be taken up shortly.
We find another aspect entering into the narrative concerning Jewish refugees and emigres fleeing the Germans, as to their eventual destination, the claims by American and other Western lands for providing ultimate shelter. It was wartime policy on all sides of the "Allied" establishment to soft-pedal this matter, to conceal America as the refuge for Jews in general, later to blossom into a propaganda in which whole books were produced alleging that the USA for all practical purposes refused entry to all but a handful. In all the refugee-Jew drama the class nature of the problem was almost always reduced to a bare murmur, even though it was a rare Jew of means who experienced a German concentration camp (one recalls the special case of the interned French former Premier, Leon Blum, 2 years at Buchenwald, where he had his own private house and servant), while there were continuous but discreetly buried stories the entire war of those with money and friends abroad achieving passage out of Europe with minimum discomfort.
A case in point is the report filed from Lisbon, Portugal on August 7, 1944 by the correspondent for the U.S.A.'s leading weekly organ of Protestant Christianity, The Christian Century, Jose Shercliff. Published in the issue for September 27, 1944, p. 1113, Shercliff was comparing the appearance of two groups of Jews recently arriving in Lisbon, one from Hungary and another party of 153, from North Africa, the latter bedraggled and in seemingly dire straits;
"Different indeed is their case from that of the wealthy Hungarian Jewish families who arrived here last month and are living luxuriously in one of Portugal's most pleasant health resorts, awaiting the end of the war. Fifteen hundred more of these wealthy Hungarian Jews are expected in Spain. General Franco has granted them entry visas, and the German authorities are sending them there in a special train."
And still another, and most important, related theme was that of the Stalinist-inspired-and-led, and mainly British financed and supplied, "resistance," "underground," civilian guerrilla warfare against the Germans in eleven countries, boasted about in millions of words during and especially after the war, in which Jews participated most disproportionately to their ratio in the European population. The rules of land warfare which govern the conduct of the U.S.
54 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
Army provides for draconian prohibitions against such practices in combat in which they are involved, and provides ferocious means of suppression for those caught in such endeavors, about which more will be developed later on in this study. But the Germans were expected to put up with these mass violations of martial conduct (also lacking the sanction of the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907), and after the war were subject to vicious reprisals, especially by the Soviet Reds, for having tried to suppress it. The world press pullulated all during the war in stentorian bawls of praise at the exploits of this forbidden civilian armed enterprise in the lands occupied by the Germans, and had the hypocritical effrontery to urge the execution of all German military commanders who had attempted to put it down. (The "Allies" who righteously supported this had their own innings trying to combat this kind of Communist warfare in their long series of wars in Africa and Asia, 1950-1975.)
Some attention to specific details of the foregoing few issues is now in order.
Ben Hecht, the novelist and playwright-screen writer who was to become a belated Zionist of the most fierce, if not feral, views, declared in his book 1001 Afternoons in New York (Viking, 1941), that the Germans were destined to become "the persecuted, cringing race of tomorrow," doomed to be the Jews of the future, as a consequence of their reputation between 1933 and that moment. Hecht was the spokesman here for a view and position among Jews respective to the Germans which frequently went well beyond what the latter were known to maintain toward Jews. However, it should be pointed out that demands for the annihilation of the German people were no exclusive property of Jews, by any means, then or later. But there were some memorable gestures in this propaganda, a few of those, 1941-1945, worthy of noting here.
The most spectacular and all-encompassing appeared in the spring of 1941, so savage that a publication front was invented to launch it into existence. In its famous report of 1936 on Jews in America,Fortunemagazine, while correctly decrying the erroneous views among many Americans exaggerating Jewish economic power in banking and heavy industry, declared without qualification that Jewish ownership of the taste-making and taste-influencing media in America amounted at least to 50%, which obviously included publishing. However, none of the major companies known to have Jewish ownership, management and editorial direction cared to have anything to do with this work, Germany Must Perish! The author, Theodore Newman Kaufman, was identified by Time magazine as a 31-year-old New York Jew, and his sponsor, Argyle Press, of Newark, N.J., was apparently his own firm. But he apparently had
Some Missing Historical Background55
powerful friends, able to influence Time, which almost never admitted the existence of privately printed books, let alone reviewing them, into devoting long and favorable commentary on this one. Kaufman's book was essentially a plea for the sterilizing of the entire population of Germany, but concentrating especially on that part within the age brackets most likely to produce offspring. This would guarantee the gradual extinction of the German ethnic strain.
Kaufman's scheme obviously awaited the total and unconditional defeat of the German state in war (how he would have prevented the escape all over the world, upon impending military defeat, of maybe millions of Germans, thus guaranteeing their survival as a genetic strain, he did not explain very clearly), and who would fill this large vacant spot in the middle of Europe apparently did not bother him very much, either. But it was a memorable tactical suggestion, even if a strategic catastrophe for the world of incredible dimensions. Its implementation of course was the critical matter related to it all; in the spring of 1941, it did not appear to be one of the most likely things to happen right away.
But it was something to ponder, especially when a journal with millions of readers such as Time took it seriously as a possible policy suggestion. Not quite in its class, but showing much the same sentiments, were the recommendations of the exquisitely Germanophobic University of Chicago history professor, Bernadotte Schmitt. Speaking before the 21st annual meeting of the National Council for the Social Studies the last week of November, 1941, in Indianapolis, a speech also given generous space by Time, Prof. Schmitt, a non-Jew of Alsatian extraction, urged that the first essential was the "complete and overwhelming military defeat of Germany, to be accomplished if possible on German soil." Thereafter, said Schmitt, Germany was to be reduced to an "agricultural economy," which he said was what the Germans were trying to impose on the rest of Europe, a policy which he calculated would reduce Europe's 80 million Germans by 30 million, apparently as a consequence of mass starvation added on to vast loss of life suffered while undergoing military annihilation. As Schmitt analyzed the European situation,
Since there are only 45 million Britons, 45 million Italians, 40 million Frenchmen, and 30 million Poles, as opposed to 80 million Germans, the equilibrium of Europe would be more stable if there were only 50 million Germans.
Schmitt, the leader for over a decade in producing historical works placing near-total responsibility for the First World War on Imperial Germany, was noted by a few to have omitted all mention of Stalinist Russia, closely approximating the combined population
56 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
of Western Europe, and Schmitt never mentioned or considered how many Soviet Communists were too many Soviet Communists for Europe's welfare and "equilibrium." Those who thought Schmitt the epitome of demographic wisdom in 1941 had the 40 years after "victory" in 1945 to mull over and ruminate upon the consequences.
It will be seen then that the ancestors of the celebrated Morgen- thau Plan were numerous. Few followed precisely in the footsteps of Kaufman and Schmitt, and many were somewhat more detailed and specific as to what they wanted wreaked on the Germans. Furthermore, they came from an ever-widening spectrum of opinion-making, but generally were equally savage. In the meantime the statistical guesses and generalizations on the status of Europe's Jews continued, one of the most quoted and "respectable" appearing the week the USA became a formal belligerent in the war in December, 1941. Released by the Institute of Jewish Affairs of the American Jewish Committee, Jews in Nazi Europe was crammed with absorbing numbers. In this 151-page report, it was stated that the Jews of Germany, considered to be 760,000 in 1933, were now down to 250,000. Of Poland's 3,000,000 some 300,000 were now declared to have died, though it was not specified as to what proportion of the deaths were attributed to the Germans and the Russians in their respective zones. This covered the September, 1939-September, 1941 period, and was considered five times the normal death rate. It was further estimated that between 1933 and 1940, 1,000,000 Jews had fled Europe, 330,000 to Russia, and another 300,000 had fled Nazi-occupied western Poland, destination not given. About 150,000 were declared to have gone to England, France, Belgium and the Netherlands from Germany and areas east, 135,000 to the USA, 116,000 to South America, whose Jewish population was said to have gone up 30%, and finally 110,000 to Palestine. Privately, surveyors of this calculation considered it grossly understated and miscounted, Stalinists having already claimed that six times as many Jews had already found a haven in the Soviet than the AJC claimed had fled there. According to a United Press report dated November 6, a month before, there were only 120,000 Jews remaining in Germany, less than half which the AJC report claimed. And a number of related discrepancies could be found by almost anyone with the diligence to note them down and possessing the ability to count.
It is of course true that in a war the military outcome is of primary consideration. But it is still an agency by way of which subsequent policy is established and carried out, and there is never a war so mindless that some kind of political objective does not lie under its surface somewhere. Or, policy may constantly be being formed anew while the fighting is going on, or modified by what takes place
Some Missing Historical Background57
during such fighting, during which time those doing the fighting may be making excuses to themselves why they are at war and what they hope to achieve at its end which would be better than what was prevailing when it started.
In the second World War, quite a bit of the matters just mentioned took shape in 1942, a year of German domination of Western Europe and deep penetration into Western Russia to the gates of the Soviet's major cities. The enemies of Germany had to be content with superiority at the fringes of this action, and largely strategic moves which mainly led to the spreading of the war, stretching out the manpower and resources of the opposition more thinly, and preparing the landscape for a contest of attrition in which their vastly superior manpower, resources and industrial might would bring eventual Axis defeat.
Insofar as the war in the West was concerned, therefore, barring the air bombing of Germany and its surrounding controlled areas from strategic bases in Britain, and an occasional catastrophic sally like Dieppe (turned later by astute propaganda into a successful venture, in the same way the utter disastrous defeat-retreat known as Dunkirk in the spring of 1940 emerged a little later on as a miraculous success), 1942 might be known as the Year of the Illegal Civilian Warrior. And the efforts of the Germans to repress and destroy such civilian military enterprise in occupied Europe had a large part to play in the deepening propaganda campaign against them, the franc- tireursturned into heroes by the Allied propagandists, their successes, fueled by Allied money and guns, praised to the skies, and their defeats mourned at vast public ceremonies, followed by dire threats of future reprisals and generous programs of punitive campaigns and copious executions. This element of novelty soon added its coils and tendrils to the general theme of atrocities and related actions concerning Jewish repressions, complexities which aided the maturation of the entire "war crimes" morality-play acted out before the entire war, in the years immediately following cessation of hostilities.
But it was in the East that the far greater participation in the war by civilians prevailed, also highly praised by the still mainly inactive West, a war which involved very many Jews, even if it was not common for this to be reported at the time. Ultimately this was a source of great pride to Zionists, who simultaneously boasted of their prowess in this illegal enterprise, while justifying it as action in the face of sure "extermination," (a very large number took no part in it and managed to avoid "extermination," too, it seems), and wailing at the fate of those caught at it and executed. It may never be known how many of these civilian guerrillas lost their lives in actual combat with German army units, or were captured and shot
58 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
thereafter, who traded in on postwar reassessments and emerged as victims of the "death camps," or were calculated as lost in other activities than the ones in which they were really in. Raphael Lemkin himself later capitalized on his six months as a civilian guerrilla well after Poland had capitulated, and the accounts of others with similar records and experiences are legion. Later Zionist bibliographies described the participants in this irregular combat only as "martyrs" and "heroes." And as a result of the curious juxtaposition brought about by ex post facto "legal" innovations at Nuremberg and elsewhere, the German enemy and its allies being declared "criminal," the actions of its opponents, no matter how contradictory to the Hague Conventions dealing with the rules of land warfare they were, emerged as the real legal entity in it all. In the histories of no other war than that of 1941-1945 are the illegal and irregular guerrilla participants memorialized so gloriously, with the possible exception of the phase of the Napoleonic wars associated with the French occupation of Spain.
Harold Callender, a well-respected correspondent to the New York Times, in pieces published on December 21 and 22, 1942, related that the so-called "partisan movement" in France was anything but spontaneous, a widely believed fable, but organized by the Stalinists beginning in June, 1941 with the outbreak of the Russo- German phase of the European War. But it enjoyed its greatest success in the East, and surely involved a large number of civilians who either scorned the chance to move to safer areas or were forced to remain as auxiliaries of the Red Army. In Poland they became most active after German forces swept past them, and certainly involved people who were not in any kind of concentration camp. An Associated Press story published in the USA on January 10, 1942 and derived from British radio, announced that "A little war" was "going on along the Warsaw-Lublin railway," that guerrillas had "interrupted all traffic," and that they had shot German officers in Lublin. A similar procedure had been under way in France some months before, where the Germans had responded to the murders of some of their officers by "underground" gunmen by holding French responsible. An editorial in the Christian Century on November 5, 1941 (p. 1359) had deplored this practice, remarking, "The likelihood in the matter ... is that the assassins are probably French Communists, whose first allegiance is not to France but to Russia." (That many of them were not even French Communists but a Stalinist underground originating in several other countries, awaited later recognition.) And a book in 1942, Europe in Revolt (Macmillan, 1942), by a former Berlin and Vienna editor, Rene Kraus, went into melodramatic Description of this underground "resistance," a source
Some Missing Historical Background59
of nagging annoyance to the German occupation, even if its totality was extremely exaggerated in terms of total numbers. On the strength of this innovation, regardless of its real scope, German roundup of suspects, including all the foreign Jews they could find in France, got under way. A new element was being prepared for the concentration camps, as well as a new episode in the atrocity story library.
It can be seen, then, that in the first year of war between Stalin and Hitler, the Red underground in all the countries occupied by the German armies had aggravated them continuously in a series of assassinations of their soldiers and officers from France across Poland, and German tempers were getting raw. Then came the bombing of the car bearing the chief administrator of German-occupied Czecho-Slovakia, Gen. Reinhard Heydrich, in a Prague suburb on May 27, 1942, causing wounds from which he died a few days later. The two assassins were flown into Europe by the British and airdropped near their target, from which they worked with a few members of the pathetically small Czech underground, all cooperating with the tiny knot of emigre Czech politicians constituting the government-in-exile headed by Edouard Benes. It may be debated for a long time what Benes hoped to gain by this unsupported lethal gesture, other than trying at the time to make points with Stalin by showing him that the Czechs were not entirely the most passive land occupied by the Germans, which they were in reality without a doubt.
The eventual death of all the conspirators in a shoot-out with German police and soldiery in Prague a few days later was followed in June by a fierce reprisal, the chief event of which was the demolition of the Czech town of Lidice by the Germans and the shooting of its male inhabitants as a reprisal for having served as a shelter for the assassins.
As far as this study is concerned, however, the principal consequences of this event, as ill-advised as it appeared to be then and which judgment has not changed much since then, was the beginning of the first major propaganda calling for prosecution of the entire German leadership as "war criminals." Benes submitted to the "Allies" a request that in the event of victory, they hang all the top Nazi leadership for Lidice, and a vast propaganda exploitation of Lidice spread across the "Allied" political front. In the USA a Lidice Lives Committee was formed, with the formidable Germanophobe, Clifton Fadiman, as its executive chairman, its nominal chairman being ex-Ambassador to the Soviet Union, the millionaire Joseph E. Davies, author of the fulsomely fawning book Mission to Moscow, so pro-Communist that it even embarrassed Communists. This
60 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
committee sought in the summer of 1942 to persuade 31 towns in the USA, one for each of the "United Nations" at war with the Axis, to change their names to Lidice in memoriam of the town destroyed by the Germans on June 10. By the fall they had succeeded in achieving two: the town of San Geronimo in Mexico on August 30, and, earlier, on July 12, a real estate development near Joliet, Illinois, incorporated as a new town named Lidice. The Fadiman-Davies Committee was still seeking no. 3 in October, 1942.
However, the exploitation of the drama of Lidice went far beyond such maneuvers. Americans in particular were led to believe that the Heydrich murder was symptomatic of widespread unrest against the Hitler regime in Germany itself, and that the underground civilian "resistance" was truly formidable, all of which was pure invention. But it gave many people the impression it was true, and thus encouraged them to believe the war would terminate somewhat sooner than realities suggested, and thus also stimulating the sentiment that proceedings against the enemy's leadership were worth contemplating as a serious, practical matter. Zionist leaders were quick to take advantage of the improved climate in the propaganda war this all provoked, as well. The World Jewish Congress, formed in 1936, and meeting in London late in June, 1942, put the number of Jews put to death by the Nazis at a round one million.
By October, 1942, the machinery had been set in motion in England, Russia and the USA to fabricate a device for postwar handling of "war crimes" and "war criminals," the Heydrich-Lidice drama having been steadily exploited. When it was announced that Lord Simon, the British Lord Chancellor, and Roosevelt, had jointly put into at least shadowy form a United Nations Court of Justice to "try all criminals-of-war after the war," Stalin and his Foreign Minister, Molotov, countered by proposing to set it up at once and start operations immediately "by trying, and hanging, Nazi Arch-Criminal Rudolf Hess," as Time phrased it.
There was no reported opposition to this, and in retrospect it was a remarkable preview of the Nuremberg stagings insofar as they reflected the Moscow purge-trial trappings which assumed guilt and the sentence prior to courtroom proceedings. Time sympathized with Stalin's unhappiness which grew from the report that the British Foreign Office had changed Hess's status from that of prisoner of State to that of prisoner of war, this cloaking him with the protection provided by the 1929 Geneva Convention respecting the treatment of prisoners of war. But this did not restrain US Rep. Emanuel Celler from issuing a supporting bellow in behalf of Stalin, "Shoot Hess Now!" which was launched in the Communist weekly,New Masses,but which went far beyond Hess, Rep. Celler calling also
Some Missing Historical Background61
for punitive action against all known German, Italian and Japanese leaders, and against the members of their political organizations, for their Jewish persecutions. Rep. Celler named many individuals not in Allied hands whom he thought should be executed, and praised the Soviet Union for beginning a general investigation in Russia to provide substance for an eventual massive retaliation of the sort he so ardently desired.
When Hitler, also in October, 1942, took all this talk of coming mass executions of Axis leaders and followers alike seriously, and delivered a speech in which he declared that they were fighting so hard because they knew that they would either win the war or be "exterminated" at its conclusion, it provoked denials of various kinds, typical of which was that by David Lawrence, editor of the U.S. Newsweekly magazine, who scoffed,
Has the President of the United States or the Prime Minister of Great Britain ever said anything to indicate that we intend to exterminate the German Nation? Hitler knows very well that the Democracies, while punishing him and all the Nazi Party criminals [sic], will not suffer innocent people to be harmed. Hitler knows that the Christian spirit that he despises still flows through the veins of his adversaries.
Compared to this perfumed rhetorical eyewash, Hitler was a fairly precise prognosticator, as events were to turn out.
Thus, what had been mainly vaguely expressed sentimental opinions began to take firm outlines in the latter half of 1942, urged on by the spectacular succession of events in Central Europe in May- June, at a time when "Allied" performance in the military field was at a standstill and when words were the only effective weapons making an impact. But the consequences of Lidice were not all there was to the blossoming of talk of atrocities and "war crimes" reprisals. Among the Soviet functionaries, an independent strain of related talk had somewhat proceeded prior to this. When the warmly pro-Soviet book, Moscow War Diary, by Alexander Werth, was published, early in the spring, and well before Lidice, this dependable pro-Stalinist transmission belt had placed his stamp of approval on a statement by S. A. Lozovsky, the head of Stalin's puppet labor union front, the Profintern, that it would be a good thing to kill the entire membership of Hitler's National Socialist Party; in the light of this, Stalin's recommendation toward the end of the war that only 50,000 German military officers be murdered was comparatively mild.
But one way or another, the momentum accelerated, and all involved began to join in magnifying the problem in public display. Jews in 29 countries set aside December 2, 1942 as a day of fasting and public mourning "in protest against Nazi murder of their people,"
62 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
Newsweek reported, with work stopping in New York City for 15 minutes at 10a.m. that day, "while half a million Jews prayed that the killers be brought to retribution after the war." Shortly after that the British Ministry of Economic Warfare, inexplicably, entered this part of the picture by serving as a sounding board for new Zionist claims that another half million Jews had been sent to Eastern Europe, and that the death toll of Jews in Poland and occupied Russia, added to those deceased since the start of the war in September, 1939, now stood at 2,000,000. This set the stage for the famous United Nations announcement at the end of December, 1942 on the part of the three main adversaries of the Germans plus their eight satellite governments-in-exile in London, plus the rump French National Committee there headed by Gen. Charles de Gaulle, wherein they solemnly pledged themselves "to punish this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination" after the war. This propaganda release, read before the House of Commons in London by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and broadcast to the world in 23 languages, was to be one of the two pieces of "evidence" cited by Raphael Lemkin nearly two years later as support for his charge of "genocide." By that time Lidice was mainly forgotten by most, but its subliminal impact, reinforced by many new and more sensational claims, was firmly in place in the popular mind.
With the mouthpieces of the wartime United Nations now in the atrocities steeplechase on a formal basis, even though their soothsayers had not yet agreed on what a "war crime" or a "war criminal" was, it was time to analyze what the various stands on the subject consisted of, what some of the loudest voices were for, and to have in mind what the exploiters of alleged German atrocities were trying to achieve. The hard-core Germanophobes seemed satisfied with a retaliatory program which smashed Germany flat, killed as many of its populace as possible, cut up and redistributed its territory, and reduced its survivors forever to as mean a livelihood as possible. A British variation of this impulse seemed motivated by the hope that Germany would be rendered impotent as an economic competitor indefinitely as a result of this draconian program.
As for the Soviet Reds, their version of political biology appeared to be satisfied with the dispatch of specific German leaders considered most unlikely recruits in a new Communist order, though they deplored the wrecking of German productive facilities and major real estate, expecting to be the residuary legatees of much of it after war's end. Those with Polish dreams of restitution contemplated mainly being put back into the State business, though most of them began to realize as 1943 went by that this would have to be done at heavy German territorial expense, the Stalinist regime making it
Some Missing Historical Background . 63
more and more evident by the week that they fully expected to retake the large region in the East back into the Russian State. Jews were to be found in all these, as well as purely Zionist goals, and the exploitation of atrocities fitted in well with some sectors of their Haganah underground, which long believed that the way to get Palestine was through desperate action resulting in the "martyrdom" of many Jews, in order to win world sympathy, which was considered a far more potent assist than unaided efforts on their own. The purely revenge-seekers were to be found among them, for sure, though most of them were in literary and political circles; the rabbinate in general expressed little if any of such emotions. There were as many non-Jews as Jews urging a Carthaginian settlement for Germany, and sometimes exceeding the latter in issuing savage recommendations. The UN declaration at the end of 1942 stimulated the expansion of the atrocity tale among all, however, and the accusations began to get more reckless, it now being sensed that reasonable proof was less and less likely to be required to substantiate them. The momentum of favorable public sympathy was with them, and working it for all it was worth was the order of the day.
A remaining objective worth mentioning in the atrocities-counter- extermination propaganda obviously is simply that of strengthening domestic pro-war sentiments and activity, an old goal in all wars, and probably the main one in the dissemination of this kind of atrocity material in the war of 1914-1918. This seems to be evident in the release of the book Is Germany Incurable? (Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1943.) The author was allegedly a psychiatrist, Richard Brickner, and his message could also have been useful to the elements favoring the extermination notions of Kaufman two years earlier. A panel of six supporting psychiatrists was recruited to support Brickner's thesis, which would have been more plainly understood had he transposed the first two words of his title and eliminated the interrogation point at its end. But he and his defending cast were subject to a withering deflation by the liberal historian, Harry Elmer Barnes, who in turn was bitterly assailed by a veritable posse of Brickner's supporters assembled by Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review of Literature,including Cecil Brown, Henry Steele Commager, Carl van Doren, Clifton Fadiman, William L. Shirer and Rex Todhunter Stout, the bitter controversy going on into late October, 1943. But probably the only effect the book really had was suggested well before it all began, by Gregory Zilboorg, M.D., five months earlier:
As a sign of the times, Dr. Brickner's book may be passed over with some forbearance. We are at war with Hitler, and anything that makes the populace hate the Germans is grist to the bloody mill of this global
64 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
struggle. Machiavellian propaganda may appear unsavory to the oversensitive, but in the midst of battle anything that keeps the heat of hate at the level of its white glow is welcome to the combatant.
One may argue that, granting Brickner's book could be interpreted as mainly a contribution to "Allied" wartime propaganda in a war still at its peak, his message had a large and dark undertone which lent itself to long time exploitation, as a support for postwar vengeance, and as an aid for attitudinal poisoning for an immense period of time. The main objection to the Zilboorg interpretation of Brickner's book insofar as its intent was concerned is that there is no shut-off spigot to hate, and its consequences can spread to millions and last for generations, once loosed, for whatever reason. The main hate campaigns of both World Wars were so skillfully and universally projected that large residues of them are still at large, and surface frequently at moments when aspects of these wars are recalled, for whatever reason. That wartime hate campaigns interfered with the re-establishment of peace is most palpable, a matter explored by Francis Neilson, Member of Parliament in 1914 when the First World War began, and a citizen of the USA since the early 1920s, in his booklet, Hate, The Enemy of Peace, issued in 1944, when the road back from a hate position was already quite untraversible.
The post-Lidice months saw the various aspects of the atrocity propaganda campaign and the proposals for fierce punishment of the Germans swirling around in a veritable tornado of words, with the usual sensational and contradictory reports sailing through the air, helping to keep a maximum of unsettled conditions for students to try to understand. Stories that Jews were being sent to Germany to help the severe labor shortage, and employed elsewhere by the German army in labor battalions, began to disappear and to be replaced by new accounts of their mass murder. Newsweek had published short reports on the deportation of Jews from Slovakia to Germany for employment at various wartime tasks, and on January 18, 1943 (p. 10) this same source reported, "Hungarian newspapers have lately carried scores of death notices of Jews killed on the Russian front, though they aren't permitted in the army. Serving in labor groups, they were caught behind the lines by the swift Russian advances."
But paralleling these were allegations of continuing mass murders in Poland and renewed charges of practices repeating those of 1914- 1918. The New Republic (January 18, 1943, p. 65) claimed as authority the "Socialist underground" in Poland for informing them that the Nazis were "using the bodies of their Jewish victims to make soap and fertilizer in a factory at Siedlce" (by Maidanek time, it has
Some Missing Historical Background65
been seen, this activity was supposed to have happened in Germany proper). Shortly after the Christian Century repeated from the London socialist paper New Statesman & Nation a summary of an "official" report from the London Polish government that "the people actually engaged in murdering the Jews in Eastern Europe are a special corps of Lithuanians, Latvians and White Russians, " and not Germans at all.
Not so palatable to Socialists outside the Soviet bloc and Poland, however, was a bit of jarring news a month later that two well-known Polish Jewish Socialists, Victor Alter and Henryk Ehrlich, had been put to death by the Soviet authorities, sometime before December, 1942, when this news was first supplied to William Green, head of the American Federation of Labor, by Maxim Litvinov, one time Red foreign minister. It did not become generally known until this act was denounced in an official report by the London Polish government published on March 8, 1943. Arrested in 1939 when the Reds took over a large part of Poland, they had been released in June, 1941, only to be re-arrested in Kuibyshev, the temporary capital of the Soviet Union, in December of that year, and subsequently executed on a charge of having aided the war fortunes of the Nazi invaders, a most unlikely course of action. The remarkable thing about its propaganda effect in the USA was the tiny stir this event created; the American Socialist leader Norman Thomas was one of the few to protest it. It was interesting to compare the immense outcry in 1924 when another distant Socialist hero, Matteotti, was killed upon orders of Benito Mussolini in Italy, something which was never proven, but a subject for outraged comments for over 50 years after. The Ehrlich-Alter killings by the Soviet government, freely admitted, produced nothing of this kind in America. But it did provide an unsettling situation in the complex of Polish-English-American-Russian relations which set the stage for a far worse circumstance the following month of April, 1943, and was further to complicate the entire atrocity picture.
In the early spring of 1943 one of the most active of "Allied" war correspondent-journalists, Alice Leone Moats, published her book, Blind Date with Mars. It contained one of the very few reports on the Poles deported to eastern Russia and Siberia by the Reds after October, 1939, and amnestied in part after June, 1941 and the start of the fighting with the Germans. She was impressed by their miserable physical condition upon seeing them arrive in European Russia, and she was about the only Western journalist to comment, "no trace could be found of over five thousand [Polish] officers and fourteen generals" among the returnees; it was her estimate that the Soviet regime had incarcerated 2,000,000 Poles.
66THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
A few days after her book appeared, the answer to her speculation was supplied by the publicity and propaganda agencies of the Hitler regime, which announced the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn forest, near Smolensk in western Russia, containing the bodies of many thousands of Polish officers. In the Newsweek report (May 3, 1943, pp. 42, 46), it was quoted from the official German news agency, DNB, that these mass murders were the work of four OGPU (=NKVD=MVD=KGB) Jewish commissars, Lev Rybak, Abraham Borisovich, Pavel Brodninsky and Chaim Feinberg. The reaction by the Polish government-in-exile in London headed by General Wladislaw Sikorski was to ask for an investigation of this by the International Red Cross, which led to a furious attack from Stalin and the breaking of diplomatic relations between the London Poles and Moscow. It is possible the non-communist Polish cause had been slipping in "Allied" esteem and sentiments as Stalin's military star had been rising in Eastern Europe. The Katyn Forest matter signalled its precipitate decline, also timed with the near-simultaneous "Allied" success in North Africa, and the sharp rise in the feeling that the war was definitely heading for an "Allied" victory, which meant heavy repair of all diplomatic and political fences and lines of communications, and that meant in particular the avoidance of antagonism of Stalin.
The official American slant on Katyn seemed to be supplied by Elmer Davis, head of the main US war propaganda bureau, the Office of War Information. Since Stalin was an "ally," it was understandable that Roosevelt regime spokesmen would take a view critical of German charges and supportive of Communist denials, and countercharges against the Germans, though the area where the killings had taken place was not in German hands when they had taken place, by evidence supplied from the dated materials such as correspondence exhumed with the dead.
On the radio Davis repeated the skepticism demonstrated by American fellow travelers with the Reds, and the press almost unanimously followed his lead. The more voluble of the Red apologists in the USA simply turned the accusation around and charged the Germans with trying to cover up an act of their own. The scrambling of the nation's major newspapers to minimize the seriousness of Stalin's break with the London Poles was a pathetic sight, and they were all prostrated by the thought of the exploitation of this affair by German propaganda. Newsweek called it "One of the most tragic disputes to haunt the relations between the United Nations," and theChristian Century called it a "major defeat" for Anglo-American diplomacy. But the Nation brushed it off as a "Nazi trap" and a "bulls-eye for Goebbels," the German propaganda minister. William
Some Missing Historical Background67
L. Shirer in the New York Herald Tribune also stated it was a German propaganda fake, that the Germans had done it, and that they were simply trying to exploit the already strained Russo-Polish political climate. The Nation's counterpart liberal weekly, the New Republic, responded to the event with spinal-cord swiftness, denouncing the whole matter as a "crude and outrageous provocation" of the Soviet Union by Hitler, and undermining all the good deeds the Reds had performed to enhance Polish security. The NR editors fiercely reproved Sikorski's group, attacked them for challenging the previous Red claims to eastern Polish territory, and hoped Roosevelt and Churchill would heal the split, and help bring about a new Polish government "that could work with Russia," and still not be a Red "puppet," a repetition of an endless and futile liberal dream which was not abandoned for decades. They concluded by regretting that the Poles were so independent and not "like the Czech leaders," whose eager pro-Soviet tenor they much appreciated. A week later (May 17, 1943, pp. 651-652), the NR editors returned to the tack of six or seven years earlier, suddenly re-discovering that Poland had been "under a dictatorship for years," after almost four years of endlessly bellowing about Poland being a "raped democracy." Now, they saw Poland as a land "in many respects" "as illiberal as the Nazis themselves." The reaction of the London Sikorski Poles to Katyn was grounds for the "Allies" now to move away from them, and make provisions for the Poles in the postwar period to be guaranteed the opportunity "to set up whatever government they wish" at the end of the war.
Timeaccepted the Communist stand on Katyn also, and agreed it was a German disguise for their own prior atrocity. It also regretted the Poles had "fed the flames of anti-Soviet suspicion" by asking for the Red Cross investigation. In nearly two pages of commentary, Time warmly sympathized with the Reds, yearned for "definite Anglo-Russo-American postwar understandings," supported Anglo-American efforts to squelch the Poles, backed Red claims to eastern Poland and saw this in no way as evidence Stalin was trying to create a Red Poland.
Time'scompanion publication, Life, adopted a similar view, called Katyn a German action, not Russian, and denounced the Poles as "the most chip-shouldered chauvinists in Europe," a return to the Popular Front-fellow traveler estimate of 1934-39. Sikorski's call for the Red Cross to look into the matter Life called "stupid," and the London Poles simply "ultranationalists," and especially chiding Sikorski for failing to "win Russian confidence," "almost the first duty of any Polish government that wants to survive." Furthermore, said Life, it was "healthy" to be reminded that Stalin's regime was
68 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
not influenced by public opinion, that the Atlantic Charter was "not an adequate United States foreign policy," and might even be a "dangerous policy," "if it makes us forget that the behavior of all nations is still controlled by their selfish interests." Since the major aspect of US self-interest lay with Russia, then American diplomats had better not "get too huffy in backing the Poles." It was instructive to see how the Katyn affair so quickly put the torch to the bales of purple words Luce's American Century press had written in worship of moral and ethical abstractions since 1939.
Most of the follow-up stories directed to the many millions of American readers of the major circulation magazines and papers a week after the first reports were solidly with Stalin against Sikorski and the Poles. Newsweek (May 10, 1943, pp. 29-30), varied slightly from the general consensus, coming to the Soviet side, and scolding the Poles for having believed even for a moment that the Germans might be right, though it was believed a matter for concern that Moscow might recognize the Communist Polish puppet entourage in Russia, the so-called Union of Polish Patriots, headed by Wanda Vassilevskaya, wife of Alexander Korneichuk, Soviet Vice Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Ukrainian, "popular" playwright, and supporter of Bolshevik annexation of the Ukraine.
One can see that Katyn was important, probably the only genuine mass atrocity of World War Two which was accompanied by evidence in the form of a large number of deliberately murdered dead (even the Reds when they exploited Maidanek 15 months later showed no pictures of the dead they claimed had been massacred there(4). One can also see that whether the Reds had done it or not, or despite efforts to establish the simple facts, all was quickly buried under hysterical evaluations of it in terms of Western pro-Communist political future relations. Only the Saturday Evening Post, about a month after the first revelations concerning Katyn had been made, showed a distaste for converting the entire matter into a political sentiment display. Irked by the universal press and radio dismissal of the Polish charges of the murder of their officer corps by the Reds as mere Nazi propaganda, the Post editors remarked acidly,
The forgers of public opinion in London and Washington, who first censored the dispute altogether and then tried to sell us the notion that it was all a figment of Doctor Goebbels' imagination, have done a poor service to international realism.
One might argue that little "international realism" was capable of surviving in an atmosphere such as prevailed in wartime London and Washington, but the determination to exculpate Stalin's regime from all responsibility for the Katyn Forest massacre ranked close to the
Some Missing Historical Background69
top of all Western "Allies" political objectives the rest of 1943. One may fairly date the determination to bring about a Stalinist-Red puppet Poland with the Katyn imbroglio. The venom toward Poland rose sharply in the English language press, and Red blinders tended to be worn most of the time by political opinion makers the rest of the war. One of the more succinct admonishments to the London Poles to cultivate Stalin came from one of the more articulate pro- Soviet transmission belts in London, the New Statesman & Nation:
To imagine as some Poles apparently do, that they can rely on the United States or Great Britain to guarantee their frontiers or maintain their security, if they are at odds with their far more powerful neighbor, is to move politics into the atmosphere of cloud-cuckoo land.
This paper was one of those which thought it toweringly sagacious statesmanship for Britain to have promised to support the Poles with assistance should they get in trouble with the Germans in March 1939 by breaking off negotiations for the settlement of outstanding differences, but their turnabout now was not evidence of newly acquired wisdom and realism, nor a manifestation that they had emerged from "cloud-cuckoo land"; the paper had simply moved into a more secure Soviet province of that hypothetical territory.(5)
The fuss created by General Sikorski and his London Poles over Katyn was still swirling when he was killed in the mysterious crash of the plane bearing him back to London from Gibraltar on July 4, 1943. Time thought it had spoken the last word on him and Katyn in its issue of the 12th (p. 36) when it reiterated its conviction that the death of the Polish officers in Russia was simply a wild Nazi "propaganda claim," and it was very unhappy he and his fellow Poles believed it had happened. With the British Foreign Office and Eden on the Red side of this controversy, having just exerted great pressure on Sikorski to appease Stalin, the magazine thought it surely was on the side of the angels re Katyn, and that it would soon blow over. Thirty-five years later Katyn was still a hot issue. It is significant for our immediate purposes however to observe that Raphael Lemkin discreetly skirted the entire subject in his lopsided concern with "genocide" in his book.
The immense flap over the Katyn forest massacres and the enormous embarrassment they caused the directors of war propaganda among the "Allies" because of the pall of suspicion cast over the Stalin regime as the possible guilty party in these murders (long since proved) did not cause much delay or disruption in the pumping out of new calls for the obliteration of Germany and its people in harmony with the numerous suggestions of this sort after the Lidice affair. Some of them were uncannily close to what was to happen,
70 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
while others were not much more that gaseous fulminations of political refugees and emigres.
The professorial made their contributions to this vicious collection, one of the most incendiary being that of the University of Chicago Germanophobe, Bernadotte Schmitt, whose suggestion for the starvation of 30,000,000 Germans had been made before an audience of approving educators in 1941. With a couple of years to think things over, Schmitt went a little beyond his earlier suggestion in a University of Chicago Public Policy Pamphlet (No. 38) which began to get around in the early summer of 1943, What Shall We Do with Germany?Schmitt got right down to business, urging as severe a treatment as could be applied. He declared his program was "based on the conviction that the Germans are not like Frenchmen or Britishers or Americans but possess certain national traits which make them impervious to reason, generosity or even fair play," a discovery which should have been quite a surprise to the scores of millions of Americans of German descent, though none of them were known to have protested this vicious slur. Schmitt urged the utter military wrecking of Germany by armies meeting in Berlin from all directions, the dismemberment and carrying away of the entire industry in the country, followed by intense punitive actions on a vast scale, "in the hope that the sadistic traits of the Germans may be restrained"; "Let us make life difficult and unpleasant for them," Schmitt cooed in conclusion.
On the heels of this came a small book by Emil Ludwig, How to Treat the Germans(Willard, 1943), which he supplemented by a long article in the 3,000,000 circulation family magazine, Collier's, "How to Treat Defeated Germany." It included most of the more ferocious recommendations of others, but included a grim suggestion for the walling off of Germans from the rest of the world, a policy of total non-fraternization, supported by "a law," which he thought "should forbid any German to pass the frontiers of his country." He urged that the occupiers import "hundreds of intellectuals," to replace German teachers, and that education and communications be placed 100% in the hands of non-Germans. He also called for the cutting of Germany into two countries, and for the punishing of "scores of thousands" of its people, though he did not recommend the material looting of the land, so dear to others.
An eerie volume was produced at about the same time by Professor Max Radin of the Law School of the University of California at Berkeley, The Day of Reckoning (Knopf). It was an imaginary work purporting to be a report of a trial of Hitler and his six most prominent lieutenants, held in 1945 following an Allied victory. This uncanny outline of what was to happen three years later (less Hitler)
Some Missing Historical Background71
received enthusiastic reviews (in Radin's futuristic account the defendants were found guilty and executed too), though only the scope of the Nuremberg proceedings was not anticipated. Prof. Radin's professorial colleague, at Harvard Law School, Sheldon Glueck, also gave indications that the legal lights in several regions were at work on the same project in 1943, as was Lemkin; Glueck's later treatise on "war criminals," well before Nuremberg, "Punishing the War Criminals," was given a thorough advance exposure in the New Republicin which he revealed "Proof of guilt is now being assembled and prepared," and felt comforted that the "Allies" had already agreed that "offenders" were to be tried "at the scene of their crimes and under the laws of the victims' countries." This was a clear indication Prof. Glueck would approve of the upcoming first trial run of "war crimes" proceedings, the kangaroo court sessions the Stalinists would shortly stage at Kharkov.
The real season for what-shall-we-do-with-Germany books was to be 1944, but 1943 still had a few to loose, including Paul Einzig's Can We Win the Peace? (Macmillan), another hard-peace, deindus- trialize-Germany recipe. But the work which fascinated especially the liberals and which received far more interest and attention was Heinz Pol's The Hidden Enemy (Julian Messner.) Pol, a Jewish refugee and former "editor" variously in Berlin and Vienna whose pseudonym faintly disguised his original name, Pollack, was essentially fronting a Marxist proposal, intended partially to head off the popularity of the mindless Carthaginian destruction schemes of the likes of ancient professional Germanophobes such as Britain's Lord Vansittart, about which more later. Pol, more in tune with Stalinist desires for maintaining a unified Red German state instead of a fragmented Germany, kept the focus on the class angle. His target for annihilation consisted of the military, economic and aristrocratic elite, to be "purged" in the manner of the somewhat similar elements during the French Revolution. He thought at some propitious moment the "Allies" might cooperatively launch a mighty "Great Purge" of Germans by other Germans, killing off "about five hundred thousand Nazi leaders and other members of the elite," and then develop another elite, but one which was cleansed of German "imperialist" tendencies. Whereupon Germany could proceed onward effortlessly to "the final success of the retarded democratic revolution," by which he undoubtedly meant the victory of Stalinist-Leninist Communism which had been so rudely interrupted by Hitler. Among the enthusiastic reviewers of Pol's book was the venerated Reinhold Niebuhr, at the bottom of almost anything suggested for new policy in Germany since 1934 which promised to involve something which might be described as "democratic collectivism." Niebuhr had months before in the Nation
72 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
expressed the view that Stalin would undoubtedly oppose dismemberment of Germany, a policy which Niebuhr found "ominously favored by certain circles in both Anglo-Saxon countries." But in the case of the aftermath of such a bloodletting as Pol suggested, Niebuhr was not too sure Stalin would let it go to a logical conclusion; he and his social democrat liberal allies were worried that Stalin might even make a deal and come to terms with a Junker residuary legatee of the Nazis. But the job Pol wanted to see done obviously was one which only the Communists could do; Hans W. Weigert, reviewing the book for the Saturday Review of Literature, (September 25, 1943, p. 6), detected this in the book, and flatly stated that the initiative for the effecting of such a program as that of Pol would have to come from Moscow. Nevertheless, the romantic aspect of a grandiose nation-wide murder spree wiping out everyone at the top in Germany enchanted most of the reviewers; Fadiman in the New Yorker (September 4, 1943, pp. 75, 77), spoke for the majority in decreeing that Pol's book should be "compulsory reading" for all Americans.
The Katyn revelations acted as a mild damper on atrocity propaganda from "Allied" directions for a short time, but the predicament of Jews in Nazi-occupied regions remained a subject for wide comment despite it all, and quite aside from all the ferocious plans and recommendations for the obliteration of Germany and its populace after the war (much of this feral talk fitted in well with the increasing mass bombing of German cities by strategic air forces based in England; some of the grimmest calls for annihilating Germany came at the time of the fire-bombing of Hamburg, one of the most frightful events in the history of modern warfare.)
At the peak of the first major wave of recommendations for the elimination of Germany from the map, a frequent correspondent to the New Republic felt constrained to remind the editors that
not one religious Jew, not one rabbi, has ever debased himself to such ignominious nonsense as to propose the "total obliteration" or the total sterilization of the whole German people. That was left to such "intellectuals" as Westbrook Pegler, Quentin Reynolds and even Ernest Hemingway, following the irresponsible Nathan [sic] Kaufman, who rendered inestimable service to Mr. Goebbels.
The reference to non-Jews who had issued calls for the disappearance of Germany from the world was telling, and soon to be well- outmatched, since the notables referred to had relieved themselves of these hate effusions in 1942.
The release of provoking Zionist tracts emphasizing the atrocity theme early in 1943 was matched by a parallel propaganda of a more
Some Missing Historical Background73
positive sort, and fed into a drive for refugee relief which had very mixed results. In New York, two massive spectacles were staged in Madison Square Garden, one directed by the famous showman, Billy Rose, a pageant titled "We Will Never Die," intended in part to "mourn" the 2,000,000 Jews now alleged to have died in Axis-controlled Europe. On the political side among the "Allies," there was a report that in response to a British note, Secretary of State Cordell Hull had proposed an Anglo-American conference to be held in Ottawa, Canada, to consider more "havens" for Nazi "victims" fleeing Europe, an indication people were still able to get out. In the accompanying report to the press on their refugee relief work as of mid-spring, 1942, Britain was credited with taking 100,000 persons and parts of its Empire another 120,000. As for the US, a total of 547,775 visas had been issued between 1935 and June 30, 1942 to the "victims of persecution" by the Hitler regime. As this conference on the refugee question, now set for Bermuda in April, approached, many of these same statistics were repeated, but the British total of actual people of refugee-evacuee-internee status from Axis Europe being maintained in Britain, its colonies and Palestine, was listed as 682,710. It was remarked in closing that the British Dominions had separate totals which obviously upped this figure considerably, but they were not released.
American figures continued to issue from official sources, but their tardiness and mixed categories made any precise summing-up difficult. Kurt R. Grossman, writing in the Nation (December 11, 1943, p. 691) declared,
Of the 314,715 aliens who, in conformity with a Presidential proclamation, registered in February, 1942, as enemy aliens of German origin, the greatest number are refugees who were forced to leave the homeland by the cruel treatment meted out to them. The majority are Jews.
Grossman of course had no figures on those who did not register, the implication of his account being that there was a substantial number here as well. No one complained about Grossman's estimate of this aspect of Government statistics. But Zionist agencies sharply contested Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long's figures, announced before a meeting of the House Committee on Refugees at about the same time in December, when he declared that between 1933 and 1943 over 500,000 refugees had been admitted to the US, and giving the impression that most of them had been Jews.
The reason for this challenge becomes clear when one tries even on a superficial scale to assess the situation in the labyrinth the refugee statistics had become. The Communist, Zionist and Anglo-
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American West claims were irreconcilable. The Soviet Union claimed they had taken at least 1,800,000 Jews from Poland into their interior regions. This figure was agreed to by the Institute for Jewish Affairs of the American Jewish Congress, as late as in their report on the status of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe of September, 1943. TheNew Republicquoted the IJA report as declaring that only 180,000 other Jews had "emigrated to other lands." But the combined Anglo- American claims to admission of refugees went well beyond a million, combined, and these were just the official figures; they made no provisions for those who might have entered the USA, the United Kingdom, including its colonies, dominions and mandated territories, such as Palestine, illegally. Since illegal migration about Europe was a very substantial affair, it was reasonable to presume that it was just as big an enterprise elsewhere. And, of course, nothing was said of emigration of European refugees to such places as the Orient, South America, South Africa, and many other lands not in the war zones or in German hands. For the IJA-AJC statisticians to insist that only 180,000 Jews had gone elsewhere in the world other than the Soviet Union required non-Jews and non-Stalinists to conclude that less than one in ten of the Europeans fleeing Hitler Germany and its allies was a Jew.
Nevertheless, the Zionist publicists stubbornly adhered to the estimate that of Europe's 8,300,000 Jews when Hitler had come into power in 1933, ten years and a half later, only 3,000,000 were left; the Axis powers had murdered 3,000,000 and roughly 2,000,000 had emigrated, only 180,000 of these to other regions than Soviet Russia. That this IJA-AJC report late in 1943 contradicted their report of December 1941 was the most obvious import of the new statement on world Jewish population. In the December, 1941 publication, it was admitted that nearly 350,000 Jews had fled to the United States, South America and Palestine alone, before the USA was even in the war. Now this figure was drastically reduced, with a new total of about half that figure for the entire world outside the orbit of Josef Stalin.
Late 1943 was too hyperthyroid a time to engage in a sober and dispassionate sifting of all these incredible demographic assertions. But it was obvious that a great many people were being declared dead who were very much alive; they continued to grow in number as the allegations of the murdered millions steadily escalated in the next 3 years. American journals dutifully repeated the latest IJA-AJC claims, including the insistence that of the 2,000,000 Jews who had migrated from occupied Europe, nine-tenths of them had gone to Russia, presumably swelling Russia's Jewish population to 5,000,000, all "heroically fighting Hitler in the Soviet Union," as the Communist
Some Missing Historical Background75
weekly New Masses blared ("Toward Jewish Unity," September 14, 1943, p. 6). A month later this journal repeated the earlier figure and identified the origin of the new residents in the Soviet State: "The Soviet Government has admitted 1,800,000 Polish Jews and is looking after their well being." No Zionist organ is known to have complained about this, since it conformed with the identical figure they had published seven weeks earlier. In harmony with their return to prominence in the wartime statistical steeplechase, Communists added their measure to expanded atrocity stories as the summer of 1943 wore on and Katyn drew less and less attention. On August 17, the New Masses announced, "Two distinguished Russian-Jewish visitors to our country recently made the terrible announcement that, according to Soviet Intelligence, the Jews of Germany have by now been completely exterminated." Thus a new source of information had been supplied: Jewish agents of the Soviet spy system, though all they did was re-affirm what the Soviet transmission belt Lion Feuchtwanger had insisted as far back as 1936. But the Communist literary weekly could not resist making the Soviet point once more on the destination of Poland's refugee Jews. In a reproach to Ben Hecht and other Jewish publicists who had taken a belated interest in creating refugee assistance fronts, the latest being the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, the editors acidly commented, "It is understandable that one who has so recently discovered the Jewish problem as Ben Hecht should be ignorant of the fact that 1,800,000 Jewish refugees from Hitler have been rescued by the Soviet Union—more than the rest of the world combined." (Editorial, "Key Hole Outlook," New Masses, November 30, 1943, p. 4.)
A chilling preview of the point toward which the mountains of atrocity propaganda beckoned was provided by the Stalin regime in December, 1943, not long after the famous Teheran conference among Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, where some of the most fateful decisions were made which contributed to the disorder of Europe for the following generation. The first execution of "war criminals" for "war crimes" took place before the United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes, in full flight in London the week before Christmas, 1943, had even been able to come up with a definition of what a "war criminal" was. [This did not bother the respondents to a British Gallup Poll, who favored shooting same outright (40%) torturing them (15%), and trying them (15%)].
Though the bacchanalia at the British Embassy in Teheran where Stalin and others helped Churchill celebrate Churchill's 69th birthday with from 35 to 50 alcoholic toasts and what Time called "the
76 THE MAN WHO INVENTED'GENOCIDE'
most spectacular meal since the Last Supper," did not seem to deal with the subject beyond the strange exchange among the famed participants as to an acceptable number of German officers who should be shot on capture. The grim business of executing "war criminals" was to start in the Soviet city of Kharkov not long after. Four people who confessed to everything as charged, in what looked like a leftover Stalin purge trial of the 1936-1938 time, were promptly hanged publicly in that city before an audience of 50,000. For the first time during the entire war the Anglo-American reportorial corps in Moscow were permitted to see something happen, never having been on the scene of a single event in the war in Russia anywhere before that moment. A belated report (by six months) of the Kharkov hangings was made by Time's Moscow bureau head for 1943-1944, Richard E. Lauterbach ("How the Russians Try Nazi Criminals," Harper's Magazine,June, 1945, pp. 658-664), which, though he tried to decorate it with positive trappings, still came out as little more than a judicial execution ceremony. Nuremberg and most of what else followed subsequently were little more than minor variations on a similar lethal theme.
For a few (only the editors of the Catholic liberal weekly Commonwealwere greatly disturbed by the Kharkov proceedings; e.g., December 31, 1943, p. 267), it was a chance to get back to earth once more, after having forgotten what "justice" consisted of in Red Russia, under the pressure of thinking nice thoughts about an "ally" during wartime. One might have remembered the preposterous column filed from Russia by Bill Downs, Newsweek's Moscow correspondent ("Red Justice," June 7, 1943, pp. 57-58), with its incredible commentary on the prison labor camps, which made them almost sound as though they might be fun to be in. A curious Collier's main editorial a few days before Kharkov ("Our Russian Ally," December 18, 1943, p. 86) echoed Downs and others trying to sell Americans on the genial institutional transformation taking place in the homeland of our Red "ally," though they had broken step a mite by a gentle reference to the "still large and reportedly brutal concentration camps" with their "ten to twelve million guests." It is no wonder the postwar totals of those who spent the war in Hitler's camps had to be escalated upward in such prodigious manner, having somehow to be made imposing and formidable enough to balance off admissions such as this. In any case, Kharkov was a reminder to those who might have swallowed Collier's and their own belief that Stalin was moving the Soviet toward "something resembling our own and Great Britain's democracy" that there were a few things in which the wartime trio of partners were not quite exactly in unison. It took Nuremberg and after to reveal how much more the USA and Britain
Some Missing Historical Background77
had moved in the Soviet's direction when it came to "justice." The Kharkov hangings took place almost a year before Raphael Lemkin's book was published; they aroused no reaction from him.
As 1944 began, it was obvious that there would be no rational settlement of this war, that it might terminate in a hysterical maelstrom of massacre and destruction which would make that ending in 1918 seem orderly by comparison. The tireless exploitation of atrocity propaganda by the Western "Allies," the Jewish massacre charges and dire predictions of coming vengeance were just elements in the total picture. The Reds, not so consistent and not as prominent on the atrocity Ferris wheel, soon became steady riders. Partially to offset Katyn, and partly to profit from increased good fortunes in the war and the opportunistic gains accruing therefrom, the Soviet for a time took the lead. The Kharkov public hangings of "war criminals" gave them a temporary jump on the others, encouraging sustained actions and charges down to Maidanek, in August, 1944, as we have seen, which predicted the somewhat more sensational exploitation of Auschwitz (Oswiecim), early in 1945. In the West the lawyers recruited for the purpose went about it in a slightly different manner, with the fabricating of "war crimes" preceding the actual dispatch of the people accused of committing them. It was obvious that the Axis efforts to dislodge the status quo of 1919-1939 would rank high in the indictment, a clear case of "aggression," by the indictment being prepared, though those who flung this word around could no more define it than they ever had been able to, and would be as helpless later on trying to do it. It grew increasingly evident that indictment in the propaganda of their enemies sealed the fate of the Axis leaders, and their trials, mainly in the Moscow and Kharkov manner, were to be mainly public spectacles seeking to establish how guilty they were. As the year wore on, Stalinist atrocity charges seemed to be lodged against nearly everyone, and it became increasingly difficult especially in wartime America, after the Moscow, Cairo and Teheran conferences, to deny a particle of their validity. Neutrality on the subject had to be avoided because of the large literature already on the record here on Red atrocities against Poland and Finland, 1939-1941, and against tens of millions of their own citizens, still not a proper subject for any Communist-savoring American liberal, or among their old friends among the opulent.
The apparent test for American "principles" came in January, 1944 when the Reds lodged atrocity claims against the Finns, fortuitous allies of the Germans, on the grounds of maltreatment of Communist prisoners. This caused a few pained smiles in American circles, since the Bolshevik regime was not even a signatory to the Geneva Convention respecting treatment of prisoners of war, dating to 1929,
78 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
and had acquired the reputation for being the most outrageous of all regimes when it came to maltreatment of their prisoners of war. It is to the credit of the Finns they rejected the Red charge, and they made the unusual plea of asking a nominal enemy, the US, to send journalists or other investigators to Karelia to investigate the legitimacy of the Red accusations. Obviously, the wartime regime of Franklin D. Roosevelt could not ruffle Stalin's feathers by complying with such a request; the Red charge had to be substantiated, by default.
At about the same time as the accusation of Finnish abuse of Red prisoners the Red propaganda machine played a master card against the Germans, in some ways a Katyn-in-reverse, and well promoted in America by such ardent friends of Stalinism as Jerome Davis, for the millions of middle class American readers of Collier's, and one destined to become a perennial, still dredged up, but mainly later by Zionists. This was Babi Yar. The original account seems to have been broadcast by Communist Germans holed up in Moscow, their radio story, later published, accompanied by the usual Sovfoto pictures, which might have been taken any place in view of the willingness to accept anything from Russia now commonplace in American mass communications of the more affluent connections. According to Davis' account as strained through the German Communists' allegation, the German army, ten days after capturing Kiev, had gathered the city's Jews together, placed them under arrest, following which "the universal belief [sic] is that they were shot in a mammoth ravine called Babi-Yar." The method of massacre later changed, some even believing the dead were buried alive, but the Communists conducted no exhumations here, as the Germans had at Katyn. There was nothing but self-serving statements to back the claims, though there were rumors the dead were victims of the Red Army in its retreat in 1941, when its "scorched earth" policy required the destruction of vast property holdings. A long-kept secret was the Russian civilian resistance to this, and the many small battles fought between them and their own army, accompanied by immense loss of life, all of which was blamed on the Germans, though it is unlikely the latter could have brought all this about, logistically, in view of what they had in manpower and materials when the region had been invaded. Davis was conducted to the site twice by Red propaganda officials, though it was never decided how many dead were there or how they had been killed. Later Zionist publicists went well beyond the original Red promotion of Babi-Yar(6) and it is an established tale in the surviving Zionist version of the war in the East. Babi-Yar was probably what was in the mind of the fierce Zionist publicist, William B. Ziff, when he published the following a little
Some Missing Historical Background79
later in 1944 in his book The Gentlemen Talk of Peace (Chicago: Ziff-Davis) (pp. 373-374):
Millions of unoffending people have been butchered, in a continuous pogrom .... They have been tortured, degraded, burned, robbed, gassed and machine-gunned in whole community batches. Many were buried in mass graves before they died. Eyewitnesses (sic) state that the earth trembled in the convulsions of their last agonized breathing.
Babi-Yar was the obverse of Katyn in the propaganda field, but the Reds missed an advantage in failing to excavate the premises and conduct a body count. Belief replaced evidence here.
The exploitation of Babi-Yar not only reminded some of the Katyn story, it was promoted just a short time before the Reds ran their version of Katyn by the world, having re-captured the Smolensk region and the grim location near it which had become universally known as a result of German publicity in 1943. The first week of February, 1944 the Red Army conducted a guided tour of the captured site themselves, showing it off to 19 persons, one of whom was the daughter of W. Averell Harriman, one of the opulent Americans reputed for his gentle attitude toward Stalinism, and known far and wide as Roosevelt's Kremlin trouble-shooter, in a class almost beyond Harry Hopkins. Seeking to unpin themselves from the blame for Katyn, and to re-pin it on the Germans, this latest episode in this grisly serial did not come off entirely to their satisfaction. Time for one was now not quite as convinced of German guilt as they had been 10 months earlier, but editorial hesitancy was effectively compensated for by their Moscow correspondent Lauterbach, who was well-satisfied that the Reds had proved they were innocent ("Day in the Forest," Time, February 7, 1944, pp. 27-28).
From Jewish quarters the atrocity stories and the totals of the murdered millions continued to come and grow. A late entry in 1943 and generously broadcast in the first half of 1944 was The Black Book of Polish Jewry, a 343-page work decorated by 60 pictures, issued by a refugee Communist Jewish publishing house from Poland, Roy Publishers. Time described it as "an account of the Nazis' systematic extermination of the Polish Jews", and claimed it was based on sources provided by various Jewish entities, the Polish government in exile, and even the German government (January 10, 1944,p. 78.) The Nation (May 20, 1944, p. 604), called it the "appalling story" of the reduction, "through starvation, epidemics, and wholesale slaughter" of two-thirds of the Polish Jewish community, which in this work was claimed to have consisted of 3,250,000 persons in 1939. And I. F. Stone (Isidor Feinstein), writing in the same journal three weeks later ("For the Jews—Life or Death?" June
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10, 1944, pp. 670-671), became the first to assert the new high claim of total lives lost, with his declaration, "Between 4,000,000 and 5,000,000 European Jews have been killed since August, 1942, when the Nazi extermination campaign began." Stone apparently neglected to correlate his claims with those made in past years, and overlooking that Communist and Zionist sources in December, 1942, just four months after Stone asserted the extermination program began, already charged the Germans with exterminating 1,000,000 Polish Jews, something that hardly could have happened just between the months of August and December, 1942. But it was another interesting contribution to the immense conflicting stew of statistical claims of alleged Jewish loss of life at German hands. Stone's figure went well beyond anything repeated by Raphael Lemkin five months later. All ignored the embarrassing job of explaining how such programs were logistically possible.
Punctuating the extermination stories from the East were the continuing escape stories from the West. Barely two months before D-Day (June 6, 1944) Newsweek published still another account of Jews escaping from France with the connivance of German officials bribed by the placing of large sums of money to their credit in Swedish or Swiss banks, for which they acquired exit visas from German-occupied northern France to Portugal (French Jews readily escaped from Vichy France as a matter of course, with or without the assistance of the Vichy officialdom.) Concluding its short account of the above procedure, Newsweek remarked, "Thousands of Jews have bought freedom in this fashion." ("Unhappy Paris," April 3, 1944, pp. 40-41.)
Particularly puzzling was the publication in London by the Jewish Socialist publisher Victor Gollancz, known the world over for his series issued under the banner of the Left Book Club, of a work titled Escape From Berlin, by a Jewess named Catherine Klein. She spent the period from the fall of 1939 to the fall of 1942 in Berlin, prevented from emigrating, she said, by a new law passed by the Nazis after the war had begun forbidding "non-Aryans" from leaving Germany if they were under 46 years of age and engaged in a job involving war work. She managed to make her exit via Switzerland and was in England, presumably, when her book was published. The reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement (March 4, 1944, p. 112), concluded, "It was the deliberate humiliation of people of her race that weighed most on the author's mind." This variation from the extermination claim contributed a strange obbligato to the prevailing main theme of this wartime propaganda concerto.
However, it was obvious that these many separate themes had political overtones. And the world growing out of the objectives of
Some Missing Historical Background81
drastic punishment and repression of the Germans and vastly enhanced Stalinist power and influence over all Central and Eastern Europe did not seem to include provisions for the returned economic and socio-cultural power of other elements displaced by Hitlerian policies and programs. Though the constant publicization of atrocity tales seemed to point in that direction, on the large political plane, Stalinist Communism appeared to be locked in as the main eventual gainer. The principal area of non-agreement appeared to be only the eventual disposition of Germany itself, as will be seen. But it was obvious that a war which appeared to have started out in September, 1939 to preserve the political status quo ordained at Versailles had resulted in a situation making its survival even in the most drastically reduced condition quite impossible. When Pierre Laval predicted in the summer of 1940 that Britain would not return to the Continent regardless of what now happened, he proved to be an incisive prog- nosticator.(7)
In the sobering-off period following the bacchanalia of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt at Teheran, Dec. 2-7, 1943 the Red press made it a little more obvious what could be expected as the new map of Central and Eastern Europe. The Red newspaper War and the Working Classat year's end bluntly declared that the Baltic states of Esthonia, Lithuania and Latvia would not be a question any longer and that the matter was "closed"; they were to be a part of the Soviet Union "by their own choice." Furthermore, no governments would be permitted in Poland and Czecho-Slovakia which were not "friendly" to the USSR. Time put this together with the comment in the London Economist decrying South African leader Jan Christiaan Smuts' prophecy that Europe would be straddled by Russia and with Britain playing second fiddle to the USA as a result of its impoverishment by "victory," as indicating that "it reflected a feeling that Britain must make the best of the new Europe and the new world, find hope and safety with the USSR and the U.S." ("In the Afterglow," Time, January 3, 1944, pp. 31-32.)
Timereassured the British that they need have no fears about Soviet revolutionary expansion; after all, the nationalistic verses sung by those celebrating Stalin's 64th birthday were evidence that the Soviets had abandoned "world revolution." But that obviously did not mean determination to make all the neighborhood as Red as Moscow. A week later Time gloated over the predicament of the Hungarians, being both anti-Slav and anti-Red, lying in the path of Stalin's armies now. And a few weeks later it had much the same to say as the Red Army approached Czecho-Slovakia's frontiers. Time devoted its cover story March 27, 1944 to Jan Masaryk, the refugee government's foreign minister, and his simple trust and faith in the
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Reds saving the Czechs forever from "Teutonic aggression," as well as his compliance with Churchill, as opposed to the refusal of Sikorski and the Poles earlier, in conceding to coming Stalinist "leadership" of Central Europe. In fact, said Time, in their portrait of this far-seeing Czech "statesman" and his predictions of an era of pleasant and fruitful relations with Red Russia, as a result of all this, "The Czech Communists with headquarters in Moscow and a branch office in London, seemed to have a good chance to enter the [Czech] Government," once Masaryk and his cadre were able to return to Prague. (When the Communists splattered Masaryk on the pavement outside his office in Prague four years later, the wartime hallucina- tors and their parrotted call for "coalition with the Communists" got another demonstration of how such unions worked out under the pressure of the Stalinist dynamic.)
It was increasingly evident in the last nine months of 1944 that the main strains of the atrocity propaganda and the hate campaign waged against the Germans had far more than Jewish revenge as its goal. A smashed, impoverished, depopulated and hacked-up Germany was an immense achievement in the advancement of a Red Europe, possibly including Germany itself, and lapping at the frontiers of France and Italy, which, with proper "assistance" and the return from Moscow of their opulently-living Red bosses, Maurice Thorez and Palmiro Togliatti, might be expected to become Stalinized, in turn. A tough anti-Red Germany was the only conceivable obstacle to this grand design, and the many different impulses for wrecking such a Germany all worked for European Stalinization, whether they were conscious of this or not. The purely mindless Germanophobes, mostly concentrated in America and Britain, exerted powerful influence toward such a consequence. It was chill comfort to watch them rub their chins in rueful contemplation of their handiwork a year or two afterward. And the muted bellow of Churchill at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri in March, 1946 announcing the preliminary dimensions of the Cold War versus Stalin, and stealing Goebbels' expression, "iron curtain," to describe what he had worked so hard in company with Stalin to achieve, 1943-1945, was a vainglorious gesture in trying to recoup the unretrievable. It was the task of a generation of liars in mass communications to sell to the English world Churchill's utter debacle as a great "victory," and the wrecking of a possibly tolerable world as the "saving of civilization."
The grotesque and slanderous slur notwithstanding, when the multi-million circulation Collier's magazine declared in their inflammatory editorial "Apes with Machine Guns" (March 11,1944, p. 82) that "This is a war between humans and subhumans for mastery of the earth," they symbolized the self-defeating content of "Allied"
Some Missing Historical Background83
hate propaganda. It typified the kind of totalitarian milieu the more grim of the revanchistes wanted to work in, one which they eventually got, including the desired objective of legalizing the illegal and the declaring of the legitimate "criminal," an ideological turning of the European arena on its head which made the destruction, massacres and deportation of millions and the kangaroo court hanging of enemy leaders all acquire the patina of quasi-legality, a foundation on which the politics of Europe were built and were still continuing over 35 years afterward. At the core of its first stirrings was far more Stalinist than Zionist inspiration, as will be seen in the Pucheu and Carretta cases, the prototypes of what procedures were to be employed against Laval, Petain, Tiso, Mussolini, Quisling, and the luminaries done to death following the process of Nuremberg, Manila and Tokyo, and thousands of the lesser known in the years following.
A brief examination of the differences which prevailed among the American, Soviet and British planners for dealing with the vanquished Germans, once attained, is called for, as well as a look at the purely propagandistic suggestions for action which got the widest attention.
The drive to put a Carthaginian finish to Germany, as has been seen, began well before the plan proposed by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, first aired at the September, 1944 Quebec Conference of Roosevelt and Churchill (Raphael Lemkin's Axis Rule had been in manuscript a full year by then), and subsequently discussed at great length and with much heat for months thereafter. Though underlings of Morgenthau later tried to ascribe its origins to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower (see Fred Smith, "The Rise and Fall of the Morgenthau Plan," The United Nations Magazine, Vol. I, No. 2 (March, 1947), pp. 32-37), the ideas in it and several others were circulating widely prior to September, 1944. The fulminations of Rex Stout and his hand-picked posse of 17 writers associated with the Writers War Board were familiar fodder to ideologists, far more drastic than those of Reinhold Niebuhr and his Council for a Democratic Germany, the latter also being somewhat closer to notions loose in Soviet Russia on this subject. Stout's group was more interested in destruction and annihilation than in political realities likely to prevail at war's end, which affronted others not connected with either the WWB or the CDG. Stout even drew a fiery reproach from the editors of the Christian Century three months before the Quebec meeting ("Hate-Mongers Attack Policy of Decency," June 14, 1944, p. 716), throwing in an additional personal dig at Stout, "an author of detective fiction who has been charged with earlier Communist connections." But there was nothing seemingly related to Communist views in his Germany-must-be-destroyed line, quite out of harmony
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at that moment with what was emanating from Moscow.
In actuality, the Administration launched a semi-official posting of its views on German settlement positions when Under-secretary for State Sumner Welles' book Time for Decision was published in mid-summer, 1944. Norman Thomas, reviewing it at length and with substantial precision in the Catholic weekly Commonweal (July 28, 1944, pp. 354-356), was one of the very few in the land to criticize Welles for his proposals for carving up Germany into 3 states (which is what happened, eastern Germany being attached to Poland andcentralGermany becoming "East" Germany), settling Poland on Soviet terms, supporting the idea of immense population transfers, the assignment of Eastern Poland to Russia, and the clearing of East Prussia of Germans and the attachment of it to Poland. Thomas considered Welles a naive bumpkin with respect to Communist Russia, compared to himself, and remarked that if Welles's experience with the Reds was as broad as his, "he would see in Communism, still completely controlled by Stalin, a far graver potential threat to the peace and harmony of Europe than anything that can be done by a defeated and hated German General Staff." Thomas was sure that Welles's grandiose complicated menage of regional and world organizations, liberally buttered with "blind appeasement of Stalin," would never usher in the millennium, and was already convinced the "peace" was already lost; the persistence of conscription and heavy armament by the big powers after the war would be proof of that. But on Welles and his German policy recommendations, Thomas really unloaded:
No people as a people is bad enough for the fate Mr. Welles would bring upon the Germans, and no people, not even the Big Three nations, could they be assured indefinitely of the leadership of Mr. Welles's hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, along with Churchill and Stalin can or will successfully play the role of God of wrath, modified by the formulae of this book. Mutual forgiveness is a requisite of statesmanship.
But play the "God of Wrath" the Roosevelt entourage certainly did, though they had peripheral advice from others who wanted far worse to be wreaked upon Germany, and Japan as well. The Morgen thau formula for turning Germany into a goat pasture was advanced in parallel fashion for Japan in the Far East. An insider in the war regime writing under the pseudonym "Pacificus" for the Nation (October 14,1944, pp. 436-437) credited Stanley K. Hornbeck, chief of the Far East desk in the State Department, as the principal voice who "favored the transformation of Japan into an agricultural country incapable of waging modern war." An even more drastic
Some Missing Historical Background85
proposal, however, and probably the finest prescription for an eventual Communist Asia, was the suggested plan of the liberal military "expert," Major George Fielding Eliot, in the mass-reader (probably 15,000,000) picture magazine Look for January 23, 1945 (p. 74), "Let's Destroy Japan." It was a program that made the Morgenthau plan for Germany read like a Germanophile design by comparison; it would be hard to find anything to compare with it for incipient political unreality and unsurpassed disaster. In many ways the ferocity of Maj. Eliot was the logical consequence of over three and a half years of unprecedented propaganda savagery which started with Roosevelt's "day of infamy" incitatory exhortations and ended with the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, during which the Japanese enemy was reduced over and over to the level even of non- mammalians. In fact his recommendations were a slightly expanded version seen as early as 1942 in the book by the Columbia University pedagogue, Nathaniel Peffer. In his Basis for Peace in the Far East (New York: Harper, 1942), Prof. Peffer anticipated the bloodthirsti- ness of Maj. Eliot by urging the bombing, burning and machine- gunning of Japan "into total destruction" "for its pedagogic effect." This prompted the New Republic editor and reviewer, Malcolm Cowley, to murmur, "It seems to me that only an essentially mild and bookish author would recommend wholesale massacre as an educational measure or a healing drug." (New Republic [December 21, 1942], pp. 830-831.)
Still another indication of Administration views on a grim solution for Germany was that revealed by the Newsweek columnist Ernest K. Lindley ("Planning Postwar Germany: Behind the Scenes," October 2, 1944, p. 44), considered a direct pipeline for the White House into mass communication. His summary of the ferocious plan for the looting and destruction of Germany after "victory" contained not one hostile or critical word.
But Lindley's Newsweek fellow-columnist and former top New Deal brain, Raymond Moley, went Lindley and the others one better later in his "Punishing War Criminals," (December 11, 1944, p. 112), largely a spirited and warmly approving review of the tigerish bookWar Criminals,by Harvard Law's Prof. Glueck. Moley concluded his accolade with a brief disquisition which sounded as though it had been cribbed in spirit from a Moscow 1936 purge prosecutor:
It may be that the difficulty in making plans is the reconciliation of the legal principles of Soviet Russia, of Continental criminal law, and of Anglo-American law. Russia, quite justifiably, is suspicious of Anglo- American law, with its protections for accused persons, and is proceeding with trials in her own territories in her own way. In setting up international machinery, we shall have to cut through a good deal of our
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own juristic tradition, but this is a case where new conditions must make new law.
No one could have been more in harmony with this view than Raphael Lemkin, and Nuremberg saw just such a recommendation bear fruit, though in reality it was simply the ancient racket of ex post factoreinvoked again, even if done this time with exquisite hypocrisy and a mushroom cloud of wordy obscurantism carrying it well past any previous employment, but casting a drab and dreary pall over the substance of Anglo-American legal tradition and cultural foundations from which they have not yet begun to emerge.
To be sure, payoff time was approaching. After the millions of words of wearying, boresome rhetoric about ending "Nazi tyranny," Churchill had now announced that it no longer was an "ideological" war, a signal to the Germanophobes that they could now wage open season on Germans in toto, without the delicate and dishonest distinctions that the previous years of propaganda had required (but few Anglo-American socialists, Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist or not, had uttered any words of horror about the millions of fellow German Marxists maimed, slaughtered and rendered homeless in the industrial parts of Germany's 70 largest cities under obliteration-saturation bombing). Now the situation called for the material accounts to be brought up to date, though all this required some attention to the political consequences of the destruction and the mass looting being scheduled, along with the depopulation, mass transfers and further massacres planned.
One of the logical elements to undertake this assessment wasU.S. News,its columns traditionally directed to the business-financial-commercial-industrial part of the American community. Seven weeks before the initial promotion of Morgenthau's ideas the editors of USN ("After Germany Falls," August 4, 1944, pp. 14-15), began to agonize on the already-widely recommended schemes to 1) hack Germany into several states; 2) disarm it totally; 3) occupy it indefinitely; 4) turn over its soldiers as prisoner-of-war slave labor to Russia indefinitely; 5) transfer several parts of its territory to its neighbors; 6) strip it of its industry; 7) saddle it with many billions of dollars in reparations, and 8) execute its financial, political and industrial leaders as "war criminals." Their problem was to rationalize all this, which they firmly approved of, but at the same time hoped to achieve while continuing to preserve Germany as a good customer for British goods and preventing the Germans from ever maneuvering itself into "a balance of power game between Russia on one side and the Western Allies on the other." However, as they kept thinking about this through the Quebec conference, and toting up some of the
Some Missing Historical Background87
likely consequences of agreeing with the Morgenthau and Vansittart bellowers for a crushed Germany to be forced to stew in its own wreckage, misery and starvation for generations, some of them were even then convinced that this promise of sustained vengeance could not be realized except for a very short time (it was to last most of the next five years at near-maximum strength). The editors, in a sobered reconsideration (September 29, 1944, p. 8), called to mind that
Germany, in normal times, accounts for half of Europe's trade. An impoverished Germany, one on a sit-down strike, would mean a depressed Europe ... A healthy Europe, with a sick Germany in the middle, isn't a type of setup that can be brought about easily. So, chances are that if the economic going gets rough in postwar, ways will be found to permit Germany to seek prosperity again, that today's attitudes will undergo a rather sharp change.
The only thing wrong with this evaluation was that it took a lot longer for it to be realized than the editors expected. The turnaround was complicated by the looting, massacre and territorial loppings and the legal lynching of its wartime political elite in harmony with Soviet political biology carried out by the Anglo-Americans. Only when Stalin looked like the logical inheritor of all of Germany as a result of this stupidity did the latter begin their reconsideration.
Editor Lawrence, upon further rumination over the wisdom of announcing to the Germans of coming programs for dismembering Germany, dismantling Ruhr industry, dispatching millions of Germans to serve as Russian slave labor, and the whole fantasy of the Morgenthau contingent for the pastoralization of Germany, thought of it only as a strategic blunder by Roosevelt and Churchill ranking with almost any other in history. Undoubtedly Lawrence did not oppose all this, but thought the "Allies" should have kept quiet about it, and advanced instead a formula for getting the Germans to abandon Hitler and promising the Germans "a constructive program of economic opportunity for the German people." (Editorial, "Prolonging the War," October 6, 1944, pp. 32-33.) (U.S. News believed that the real driving force behind the proposal and planning for the de-industrialization of Germany was Harry Hopkins and a "working group" close to him, and that statements on the subject by Morgenthau, Hull and Stimson were "window dressing." October 6, 1944, p. 68.)
A very small, muted strain of criticism of these impulses did exist in the US, probably best exemplified by the main theme in the early wartime book authored by ex-President Herbert C. Hoover and Hugh Gibson, The Problems of a Lasting Peace, treated as a news event by
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Time(July 6, 1942, p. 14). Its strong case against a dismembered Germany, already being talked about by stentorian Germanophobes then, was couched in the homily, "We can have peace or we can have revenge, but we can't have both," which the two distinguished authors extended later in a four-part series in Collier's in June, 1943. The following month, addressing a conference at Princeton, N.J., under the auspices of the Commission on International Justice and Good Will of the Federal Council of Churches, of which he was chairman, John Foster Dulles warned against "the demand for vengeance on whole peoples," which he admitted growing, and disparaged another strong view gaining ground: "a great military force is being increasingly looked upon as the only assurance of future peace, and a new Holy Alliance is envisaged to dominate the world by its might." (Christian Century, July 21, 1943, p. 852.)
To be sure, though its readership was largely confined to a segment of American Protestantism's clergy and influential lay figures, the CC, under the editorship of Charles Clayton Morrison, did act as an influence against some of the headlong totalitarian drives of the liberal war machine headed by Roosevelt, but they could hardly stem it. Again a marked minority, on the Morgenthau Plan, it could not repel the spreading of responsibility for it internationally:
As a matter of fact, his [Morgenthau's] plan comes directly from the Postwar Policy Group of Conservative Peers and Members of Parliament —the controlling body of Mr. Churchill's own Tory Party, which has just issued its second memoranda on war aims. (Christian Century, "British Tories Discover an American Spokesman," October 4, 1944, p. 1125.)
But all British subjects hardly were in accord with the Morgenthau Plan, regardless of a bi-partisan majority in favor of it there, as they were here. A lengthy and very ill-tempered blast at it came from Maj. Gen. J.F.C. Fuller, inexplicably also a wartime Newsweek columnist, on war topics mostly, and probably the most out-of-place writer anywhere in the world during the Second World War. Gen. Fuller in a full page denunciation was mainly concerned with what this "stupid" piece of political warfare had done to stiffen German resistance and extend the war and its loss of life and destruction. Timed with a major "Allied" military breakthrough, to tell the Germans the Rhine-land would be excised and assigned to France, that Brandenburg and Silesia would be given to Poland, and East Prussia to Russia, that the Ruhr would be internationalized, that all Germans would be subject to forced "reeducation," their leaders killed or sterilized, and "80,000,000 Germans crammed into a country which could not
Some Missing Historical Background89
support half this number," was a lapse in political acumen Gen. Fuller did not believe possible. Said he in conclusion:
It raised the devil and this time the devil became a German. Though [Gen.] Eisenhower said, "We come as conquerors but not as oppressors," the politicians shouted: "We come as obliterators and hangmen." What would you Americans and we English have done had we stood in Germany's shoes? We should have done what she has done—set our backs to the wall of the Rhine and have fought like the devil." Fuller, "The Devill Is Raysed Up," Newsweek (October 30,1944), p. 38.
The unofficial "advisers" on policy toward Germany after "victory" were in a class well beyond Morgenthau or any of the other official contributors. In some ways they supplemented Morgenthau, but their main difference lay in killing; the plans being promoted involved far too few German deaths for them. William B. Ziffs The Gentlemen Talk of Peace(Macmillan), issued four months before the Morgenthau proposals were being mulled over after Quebec, was reviewed at some length by the New York Herald Tribune's foreign news specialist, Joseph Barnes, who remarked that in the part of the book dealing with Germany, Ziff "makes the plan attributed to Mr. Morgenthau seem, in comparison, the benevolence of some kindly old gentleman." Ziff wanted the Ruhr amputated from Germany, all its factories dismantled and removed, all the officers and the entire Nazi Party down to its smallest functionaries exiled to Madagascar, all German universities closed, its army and police totally eliminated, and all political rights expunged. Ziff wanted Germany to have zero industry, no access to any raw materials from outside its severely reduced homeland, with Russia to have everything to the Oder River, and all Germans to be permitted to work only on farms or as forced work groups all over Europe.
It was Ziff who published the lawyer Louis Nizer's book, What To Do With Germany,via his own publishing house, Ziff-Davis, on January 31, 1944. Nizer specialized in mass murder recommendations, several hundred thousand carefully engineered killings of Germans in several areas of German society. Nizer's book had the endorsement of Vice President Henry Wallace and Senators Harry Truman and Claude Pepper.
A variation on Nizer's theme came from the famous director of American propaganda in the First World War, George Creel. Creel surfaced in October, 1943 with a lengthy article in Collier's ("Revenge in Poland," October 30, 1943, pp. 11, 69-71), a hyperthyroid accolade to civilian guerrillas and their illegal war against the German occupation in Poland, a type of activity condemned in the bluntest and most severe language if conducted against Americans in the
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Army Field Manual FM 27-10, "The Law of Land Warfare." Creel was overwhelmed with joy at its being employed against the Germans. His anonymous communicant claimed to have killed 800 German soldiers by June, 1943, and his band were supposed to have destroyed 17 German trains, as part of a very long catalog of destruction and death, as well as boasting of shooting many "collaborationists," all "dangerous," by which were probably meant non-Stalinists. Creel's informant closed by confiding that, despite Nazi actions against Jews, he and his co-workers had "managed to rescue a fair percentage of rabbis and intellectual leaders," and had them "safely hidden."
Creel's book, War Criminals and Punishment (McBride, 1944), contained several themes found in later proposals, which he later expanded upon in a long series of over 50 portraits of German leaders and their "principal stooges" among other Axis allies, accompanied by ferocious caricature cartoon drawings of the men involved, which virtually reduced them to insects, by one Sam Berman, though even he did not approach the concentrated hate in such efforts attained by Arthur Szyk. Creel closed the series with an article reinforcing the line in his book, urging the shooting of Hitler and others upon capture, without any trials, the others before military tribunals and dispatched with verve and swiftness, and above all avoiding any of the folderol related to civilian courts. In this way Creel believed it would be possible to put them all to death with a minimum of expense of energy. Creel hailed the Bolshevik Kharkov trials and their swift executions, and thought the US was committed to follow their example.
The theme that the solution of the German "question" might require the killing of the entire German population or the carrying of all of them off to permanent captivity in other lands was a recurrent one in the wartime discussions, especially in the US liberal press. These fates were not considered an impossibility. On occasion there were persons who identified themselves with such views but generally moderated the number they wanted murdered. Look magazine, another publication of an opulent American family which frequently went well beyond the threadbare Communist press in pushing Stalin- ist views on world politics in particular, took up this theme in pressing against anyone in the US favoring anything but a very hard "peace" at war's end. One essay was supplied by a refugee long savored by the liberal weeklies, Max Werner, who, in his "We Can Keep Germany Beaten," (September 19, 1944, p. 74), adopted the political biology line of the Stalinists; his secret formula was simply to kill the entire leadership of the land. "The Who's Who and the Social Register of the Third Reich must be destroyed." Werner followed the Red line in another recommendation. He was against
Some Missing Historical Background91
partition of the country, and thought that all that had to be done was the killing of "a few hundred thousand real war criminals," after which the country could be turned over to "whatever progressive, democratic and anti-fascist forces there are inside Germany." This of course was another recipe for a Soviet Germany. But it was bound to contain too many Germans for a real exterminator along the lines of the Soviet Jew and journalistic hack, Ilya Ehrenburg. Look gave Ehrenburg his head in a revolting hate concerto which was studded with remarks such as "I have enough hate in me to last several lifetimes," with his main message being, "Kill Germans!" ("The Breath of a Child," September 19, 1944, pp. 50-51.)
If these people were too emotional and febrile for the calmly-measured intellectual view, there was always the doyen of Germano- phobia, Britain's Lord Vansittart, who never had taken kindly to the propaganda which had always referred to the enemy as "Nazis". Vansittart's enemy was the entire German people for as far back as anyone wanted to consider, and a string of one-barrel crackpot books dwelled on this simple theme like a one-note symphony. On the occasion of the release of the Morgenthau Plan, Vansittart got access to a large American audience with his counter-proposals, which, again, like several of those which have been examined here, made Morgenthau on Germany seem pale and mild. Newsweek arranged a kind of public debate between him and the widely read American columnist, Dorothy Thompson, a pre-Pearl Harbor war monger of the very first stripe, but steadily relenting in her molten zeal as the war coursed on and the consequences of what she had so wildly favored began to enter her consciousness. What appalled her the most about Vansittart's abominable but skin-deep hate reflexes was the utter lack of any political awareness whatever. She interpreted his program as the surest method of keeping any German from "conversion to liberal democracy," and a guarantee of the capture of Germany by Stalinism, internally, "and the closest possible collaboration with Russia," on the international political level. Her ideal was the "neutralization" of Germany, drawn into an international organization, and "policed" by it. The other alternatives she saw were "the Soviet Union encroaching permanently into Germany" or of Germany becoming "an economic and political colony of the Anglo-Americans." It was the peak of irony for her two "alternatives" to become policy simultaneously and to continue with various sophisticated complications for over a generation afterward. Vansittart angered the propaganda maestros unduly by stubbornly insisting, in his efforts to deal with the Germans as Germans and not as "Nazis" and non-Nazis, that "The number of Germans in concentration camps has been grotesquely inflated and the majority of them
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were not political prisoners," his point being that Hitler never had any real political opposition after 1933 (Vansittart, "The Vansittart Case," Newsweek, October 9, 1944, p. 108). (Whether this was an astute guess on Vansittart's part or whether it was based on his access to intelligence reports establishing it as a fact is not known, but it was true that German nationals were a relatively small minority in the camp system in the closing year of the war. What Vansittart did not know or did not care to state was their immense influence in running the camps from the inside, especially if they were members of the German Communist Party .)(8)
Vansittart's undermining of both Stalinists and Zionists, the principal elements responsible for the "grotesque inflation" of the numbers in German concentration camps, was an interesting variation entered into the vengeance-for-Germany steeplechase, though it should be evident by now that there was a multitude of entrants here, with much mixed motivations as well as some interested only in senseless destruction, massacre, misery and desolation. But in all of it, the Soviet deviation from most of these schemes was quite obvious. Even Stalin's proposal at Teheran that 50,000 German army officers be shot was modest compared to a dozen or more suggested massacres of hundreds of thousands to millions of Germans in all social categories; only his own mouthpiece Ehrenburg was in their class.
As far back as September, 1943 Louis Fischer, the Nation's fervently pro-Bolshevik correspondent from 1922 on, though much exercised by the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact, had suggested, in an Atlantic Monthlypiece, "What Shall We Do with Germany?" (September, 1943, pp. 46-50), and had contemplated the possibility of the Soviet forces occupying Berlin and most of Germany first. Then he quickly drew back, dwelling on the possibly preferable situation growing from Americans succeeding in this. He did not consider the likelihood of all the "Allies" (except China) arriving there all at about the same time. But it can be seen that a Soviet Germany was in the minds of some observers all the time.
One of the most sophisticated was Shirer, who, in his New York Herald Tribune column devoted to the "propaganda front," revealed himself as one of the most polished and finished Germanophobes of those claiming English as their native tongue. Where a Vansittart, a Nizer, a Kaufman or a Hecht would explode like a flame thrower in some vast, uncontrolled book-length outburst, Shirer, the master propagandist, disguised as a propaganda analyzer, dealt out the hate- the-Germans in steady corrosive drippings; his May 7, 1944 column was a classic example. By now Shirer was well past the "Nazis" stage; all Germans were his hate objects now. Where he showed real skill however was in his earnest parenthetical entreaties to look favorably
Some Missing Historical Background93
on the spread of "socialism" in Europe upon the downfall of the Hitler regime, a process he saw spreading rapidly, and with unqualified approval, after the war was over, in a book titled End of a Berlin Diary. This kind of supporter was undoubtedly far more difficult to decipher for the ordinary reader than the explicit Soviet sympathizers. (Shirer never defined his ground rules in his propaganda "analysis" column. It seemed to be based on the conclusion that what he wrote was true, that Hitler's adversaries did not deal in it, and that what the military enemy in Europe, and his critics in America, said, were all lies.)
But the Morgenthau Plan, since it had the obvious trappings of official approval, smoked out the concealed supporters of the Stalinist vision for postwar Europe. The most magisterial was a record six-column editorial in the Nation, "A Plan For Germany," (October 7, 1944, pp. 395-397), presumably written by its editor in chief, Freda Kirchwey. In its firm hostility to the Morgenthau recipe, especially that of wrecking German industry, she stressed the "economic consequences" of this, and managed to sound like Lawrence in the businessman-oriented U.S. News. Stressing Germany's importance as "the heart of the economy of Central Europe," she pointed out that "to destroy German industry is to weaken still further an economic structure already demoralized by years of war." Furthermore, she declared,
It is clear that Russia will support no scheme for the dismemberment of Germany or the destruction of German industry. Only the other day, Tass, official Russian news agency, bluntly said that "projects of this kind have not been and are not considered by the [Soviet] European Advisory Commission." We have had many indications that the Soviet government expects German industry to contribute heavily to the restoration of Russia. As much as two years ago the Russians expressed doubt as to the wisdom of the demolition air attacks on German industrial plants. Their own air force has carried out no such destructive raids.
This did not demonstrate Soviet moral superiority but it surely made evident their light-year political strategy superiority to Roosevelt and Churchill. A generation after the war the Soviet Union still was able to draw interest on the political capital they banked with the Germans by abstaining from such "Allied" atrocities as Hamburg and Dresden, let alone Berlin, the most strategically bombed city of all.
On the subject of personal reprisals, one might say there was a distinct advantage to the Soviet approach of "class guilt," and the political biology of eliminating those whom it could not by any conception imagine might become adjuncts to a Red German future.
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Samuel Grafton, a New York Post columnist and nationally syndicated writer during the war, supported this approach, as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon theories of "individual guilt," even though by their obliteration bombing the latter demonstrated a collective theory of responsibility for the "Nazi tyranny" which went far beyond the views of the Soviets. There was not much individual discrimination in a policy which showered phosphorus incendiaries and ton-weight explosives on an entire city, massacring women and children by the many thousands night after night. Eventually it might be argued that the Anglo-Saxon view expanded to include both individual and collective "guilt," enjoying the prosecution of specific "war criminals" and whole populations via "denazification" at the same time.
The master demonstration of likely Stalinist plans for postwar Germany came directly from Moscow via the transmission to the Saturday Evening Postearly in December, 1944 by its solidly established correspondent Edgar Snow, as reliable a barometer and semaphore-waver interpreting Soviet views as anyone active during World War II. Snow told American readers of the nearly 3,500,000- subscriber SEP that the "real foundation" of Europe had been "laid in Moscow" that past summer, while the other "Allies" were dazzling themselves with such things as founding the "United Nations" at Dumbarton Oaks (August 21-September 27, 1944). Snow claimed the future of Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria and Finland was hammered out there, and probably the future of a large part of Germany as well. He reported a conversation with Edward Boleslaw Osubka-Morawski, chairman of the Polish Liberation Committee, who told him while he was in re-captured Poland that Poland's boundaries were already settled; "Our frontier on the West will follow the Neisse River over to the Oder, and then northward to the Baltic. It will jog a little to the west to include the port of Stettin," the Polish Communist puppet told him. Snow was not sure FOR and Churchill would agree entirely, but since Churchill had already indicated that the Poles would have to yield territory in the East, they could be expected to get compensation elsewhere. As things worked out, Snow had been told what largely eventuated. Snow also quoted Soviet newspapers which printed a story that called for a division of Germany into three zones, and the city of Berlin to be divided into three parts; the Russians were to have one- third of the city, East Germany and East Prussia, Poland was to get Silesia, and the Soviet Union were to have the services of 10,000,000 German workers for ten years, as well as extracting a $300 billion reparations payment from the Germans. Snow further commented on Stalin keeping alive and vigorous in Moscow the collection of German Communists and Socialists arranged under the "Free
Some Missing Historical Background95
Germany Committee," which was committed to full support of Soviet policy. They had accepted "in principle," he said, the Soviet view on the origin of the war, as well as declaring their intention upon assuming power in Germany at war's end the intention to pay off the German war reparations, to punish all war criminals, expropriate "culpable" landlords and industrialists, liberate all political prisoners, abolish all discriminatory racial laws, and to establish "freedom of religion" and of peasant and working class economic and political organizations. In conclusion Snow remarked, probably unnecessarily, "Friendship and cooperation with Soviet Russia is, of course, a fundamental pledge." (Snow, "What Russia Wants to Do to Germany," Saturday Evening Post, December 2,1944, pp. 19, 87-88.)
If affairs in Eastern and Central Europe were moving in a steady, measured pace toward a Stalinist finish, accompanied by a thorough permeation of the entire region by the psychological approach to everything characteristic of a true totalitarian outlook such as only the Stalinist world view was, it might be noted that in 1944, as Stalin's Western "Allies" began to take control of the fringe areas formerly in German hands, something close to a Stalinist finish was becoming evident there as well. The harvest of years of atrocity propaganda and revenge proposals was about to begin, and solutions not much different from what were being imposed in Red-controlled Europe were being employed in places where their influence was obviously far less evident, though in one sense just as real.
One impressive incident indicating things to come concerned the apprehension in North Africa early in 1944 of Pierre Pucheu, the Vichy government's Secretary of State for Industrial Production, and one time Secretary of the famous combine of French iron and steel makers, the Comite des Forges. The makeshift regime of Gen. Charles de Gaulle, propped up by Churchill since their flight to London in the spring of 1940, and given the illusion of being what they were not, namely, a representative of more than just a scattering of Frenchmen, took the responsibility for the "trial" of Pucheu. The chief witnesses against Pucheu were three Communists from the "French" underground guerrilla resistance, another illegal and furtive force working in full defiance of the Hague Conventions and with full support from Churchill's war regime. These three persons declared that Pucheu had been condemned to death by something they called the "Council of Resistance," and demanded that de Gaulle's kangaroo court follow out their action, Pucheu being scheduled for conviction and execution for having had Communists shot while a functionary of the Petain regime in the southern half of France. The prosecution's case was feeble in the extreme, and Pucheu deeply embarrassed it by reminding them that in 1941, some
96 THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
90% of the French people recognized the legitimacy of the Vichy regime, that it had been accorded diplomatic recognition by other lands, including the USSR and the USA, that the de Gaulle Prosecutor himself, Maj. Gen. Pierre Weiss, had supported Petain, Pucheu's boss, and that the Judge, Verin, had taken the oath of allegiance to Vichy. Gen. Henri Geraud, the real chief of state in North Africa, had refused to come to Algiers for the affair, and was against the trial on the grounds that all the documents necessary to conduct an honest proceeding were in France, where they were not accessible to the court, the Germans still being in control there, and the Allied invasion still ten weeks away. But one was able to see in the doom of Pucheu the prototype of a long, long string of similar processes supervised or winked at by the "Allies," while simultaneously intoning imprecations about the lawlessness of the enemy and assembling catalogs of pseudo-evidence such as was soon to be seen in the likes of Raphael Lemkin's Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Pucheu never had a chance.
In truth, there were no elements within the war regimes of either the USA or England which were averse to such proceedings, nor did they frown on the employment of a certain amount of quite naked violence in the "liberated" areas such as North Africa and the half of Italy retaken from the Germans. After the many thousands of pages published, thundering at the "fascists," it may be that it was felt that tolerating a few token assassinations, murders, "executions" (Communist murders were usually described as "executions," and continue to be so identified 40 years later), and lynchings, seemed necessary to vindicate all the tough talk when the talkers were impotent as a consequence of military realities. An electrifying example of this was seen in October, 1944 when a Communist mob broke into a Rome courtroom where a Pucheu-type "trial" was being conducted, kidnapped the defendant, Donato Carretta, the one time director of the Regina Coeli prison in Rome, and drowned him in the Tiber, then hanging him by the heels outside the prison, a grisly barbarism which was to be repeated following the Communist murder of Mussolini six months later. The Pucheu and Carretta incidents indicated that despite all the reverent talk about law, legality and related beatitudes, the Western powers were rather closely attuned to the spirit of Kharkov. A little tremor took place in Henry Luce's plutocratic American Century press after Carretta's lynching, and his picture magazine, the +1,000,000 circulation Life, devoted 2 full pages of photos related to it, accompanied by a slightly queasy editorial ("Danger Ahead?" October 9, 1944, pp. 36-37). A few of his people could see tens of thousands of such murders coming in a dozen countries, whether soiled by the camouflage of a corrupt legal proceeding
Some Missing Historical Background97
or not. The published comments by the New York Times's Anne O'Hare McCormick, and Life's own correspondents from overseas, John Osborne, Percy Knauth and Charles Christian Wertenbaker, frankly faced the strong likelihood of a great many more of such farces as the Pucheu "trial," and the Carretta lynching, in the future, all an unofficial adjunct to homeland Soviet political biology, and all promising the same ultimate result, the advancement of Stalinist political settlements in one land after another. Wertenbaker was convinced France would soon go Communist after a sufficiently prolonged campaign of obliterating possible enemies of Communism; McCormick described the already bitter street battles in Italy between their Reds and the Christian Democrats. The only one convinced that Communism would not prevail was Knauth, in Bulgaria. He was sure there would be no big upheaval there. "Communism never has been and never will be strong in Bulgaria," Knauth assured the Life readership and its ownership. It was a rare foreign correspondent who was ever more wrong that Knauth.
When Knauth's observations were compared with another correspondent, such as R.H. Markham, writing in the Christian Century a short while later (Markham, "The 'New Order' in Bulgaria," August 15, 1945, pp. 931-933), one might have been inclined to think the former was describing another country or perhaps another planet. Markham, fluent in Bulgarian, and with over 40 years' intimate knowledge of the country through literature and residence, described the post-"liberation" in Bulgaria as run by "a Communist-led and Communist-saturated regime," whose idol was "the swaggering, pistol-toting Partisan," and installing a system of "justice" "as new as Tiglath-pileser" (a reference to the 8th century B.C. Assyrian monarch notorious for killing his captives). Markham, commenting on these Stalinists "taking sound movies of their mass executions and sending them all over Russia," concluded that what they were applying was "pure lynch law," and that "the courts were simply a device through which the Communists are wiping out their political opponents." It was a story to be told hundreds of times from a dozen countries from mid-1945 onward.
Actually, while Rome's "resistance" Reds were lynching Carretta and mauling his body, Communists in France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland were having a similar field day in the wake of the advancing Anglo-American armies, to the frontiers of Germany, shooting and jailing their enemies, mutilating or disfiguring them in various ways and marching them through the streets carrying degrading signs about their necks and being announced by their Red captors as having been "traitors." The apparent "treason" of such people had been against Stalin or his underground representatives in these
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countries during German occupation, far more than it had been against their various homelands. Through the months of September, October and November 1944 this massacre continued, slowing down momentarily in France as the befuddled Gaullists who had come into power after arriving on the scene in the wagons of the Anglo-Americans began to realize what a snakepit they were supervising, and started to curb the more hysteric excesses of their Stalinist "underground" allies.
On November 25, 1944, the day Raphael Lemkin's book Axis Rulewas published, the Nation published a furious editorial written by its editor, Freda Kirchwey, who apparently was conceiving herself as some kind of 20th century Madame Defarge, denouncing the Gaullists for disarming the "Communist-led" "Patriotic Guard," and for muffling slightly the murderous proclivities of the Red-led "resistance" "partisans," and the Maquis. Such pressure was also exerted against these Stalinist civilian illegal auxiliaries in Belgium. Kirchwey expostulated, "Allied policy is not likely to be wise enough to recognize that the revolution in Western Europe must be allowed to run its course," a euphemistic phrasing for the 1917-type Red massacres spreading across French-speaking Europe. (Kirchwey, "De Gaulle and the Resistance," November 25, 1944, pp. 632-633.) A little over three weeks later, Newsweek's lead foreign affairs story was titled "France Sated with Bloodletting: Moderates Move to Halt Purge." (December 18, 1944, p. 52.) This deserved the prize for premature story of the year; the bloodletting had barely begun, and it was to run on for years. What it was like to get caught in it was graphically described by Sisley Huddleston, one time foreign correspondent from France for four major London newspapers, who spent the war in Vichy France or Monaco, owned a home in Normandy, and was subsequently caught in the Red roundup, in his books Terreur 1944 and France: The Tragic Years. Months of political killings followed at an even accelerated pace. Newsweek remarked that "spokesmen for the resistance movement" howled in the Consultative Assembly, France's makeshift emergency legislature, for many more; "They asked for heads, and, amid ringing cheers, named the heads that they wanted to roll." And the real power at the time, the Anglo-American authorities, stood by and let it happen, discommoded now and then when the Red underground, still armed, occasionally did a little sniping at men in American army uniforms as well, and engaged American guards of supply depots in minor skirmishes while trying to raid and loot these facilities.
We are now at the threshold of the historical moment when the book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe was published. The foregoing consists of a brief gathering together of pertinent information aiding
Some Missing Historical Background99
the understanding of the total situation surrounding its issuance, and placing in the record many matters the author, Raphael Lemkin, chose to omit, for which there may have been a great many reasons. Since his book gave the illusion of being a factual account of a very large undertaking, but, as will be seen was simply a grandiose legal brief, which traditionally does not include material injurious to the case it purports to establish, this historical survey is for the purpose of calling attention to pertinent facts, opinions and events necessary to the establishment of a clear view of the total situation. James Forrestal, the USA's first Secretary of Defense, had a statement printed, framed, and hung in various offices of the Pentagon, which read, "A man's judgment is no better than the information on which it is based." This preceding historical outline is presented in that spirit.
(1)Two of the latest-dated sources cited most often by Lemkin were small
books titled Hitler's Ten-Year War on the Jews and Starvation Over Europe (Made in Germany),both issued in 1943. These were published without attribution other than indication of their publisher, the Institute of Jewish Affairs of the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress. Since they were the backup for some of his most serious accusations and charges, one might have thought Lemkin would have made an effort to determine who had written them, while choosing to be a transmission belt for two of the most influential Zionist organizations anywhere. But this he did not do. A brief re-examination of this matter is in order, mainly to investigate how reliable any dependency upon them was justified, especially the precise figures they contained as to the number of Jews deliberately put to death in Europe by the beginning of 1943, statistics Lemkin quoted without the faintest reservation whatever.
In view of two different men claiming to have written these books, it is of some importance to memorialize briefly the careers of both of them, Zorach Warhaftig, and Boris Shub, since subsequently they were hardly obscure or inconsequential. And since reference sources made a point of mentioning that both books were based on "research" directly credited to Warhaftig, it is worthy to attempt to establish its relevance and credibility, as well as its pertinence.
Warhaftig, another Warsaw lawyer like Lemkin and Begin, was born in that city on February 2, 1906 and after obtaining a law degree from the University of Warsaw, began a career in law in that city which stretched from 1923 to 1939. (This made him a practicing lawyer at age 17 according to the biographical sketch in Who's Who in World Jewry 1965 [New York: David McKay, 1965], p. 1018). He had early connections with the international Zionist movement, and served as Vice Chairman of the Central Palestine Office in Warsaw from 1936 until the involvement of Poland in war with Germany in September, 1939. His sketch omits the years 1939-43 but this gap was bridged in the book by Marvin Tokayer and Mary Swartz, The Fugu Plan (New York and London: Paddington Press, 1979).
Like many others, Warhaftig fled Poland for Lithuania in 1939 as did Begin, who was arrested there by the Soviet N.K.V.D. and ultimately sent to a Siberian work camp, as he relates in his book White Nights (1957.) So neither of these
100THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GENOCIDE'
two important Zionist functionaries (Begin was head of the Betar youth) ever spent a moment in German custody.
Tokayer and Swartz detail the heavy migration of Polish Jews into Lithuania and Russian-occupied Eastern Poland from September, 1939 on, noting extensive refugee settlements in Bialystok and especially Vilna. From 1940 on a vast movement of these same people began to the Far East via the Soviet Union and on into Siberia, thence to Manchuria, North China and increasingly to Japan. Most traveled on passports with transit visas to the latter country; Tokayer and Swartz relate that in one 15-day period, August 18-September 1, 1940 the Japanese consul in Kovno, Lithuania issued 6,000 transit visas to Jews alone. (Many religious Jews wanted no part of residence in the Soviet Union or its now- occupied Polish and Baltic areas, and these were the people Warhaftig was principally interested in.) The trip to the Far East took 11-12 days by rail via the Trans-Siberian railroad trains, from Lithuania to Moscow, first, then to Vladivostok, and from there several directions, into Manchuria, North China, and, increasingly, Japan, where sizable contingents located in Tokyo and Kobe, particularly.
Warhaftig became one of these himself, leaving Vilna and arriving in Kobe in October, 1940. As a member, prior to this trip, of the executive board of the World Jewish Congress, and also with influential connections in the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Agency as well as the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, he was soon active in getting yeshiva scholars either to Palestine or the West, as he had been in Central Europe working with these Zionist organizations in getting them to Palestine or East to the Pacific.
After arriving in Kobe, Warhaftig went to Yokohama, and in the winter of 1940-41 succeeded in getting visas for hundreds of orthodox Polish Jews to Japan from the Soviet Union on the promise to get them ultimately to Palestine. Most made the same trip from Lithuania to Moscow and thence to Japan from Vladivostok, exclusively on Japanese ships. Many went to Shanghai, now occupied by the Japanese, after reaching Japan, after the plan to get them to the West via visas to the Dutch colony of Curacao fell through, because the World Jewish Congress refused to back Warhaftig up, according to Tokayer and Swartz(The Fugu Plan,p. 174.)
Warhaftig then devoted his energies to getting Polish Jews in Japan to Shanghai, his negotiations having the support of the Joint Distribution Committee. By June, 1941 there were already 17,000 in Shanghai. Warhaftig's Committee for Assistance of Jewish Refugees succeeded in getting several thousand more to China from Japan.
The details of Warhaftig's success in entering the U.S.A. personally in mid- 1941 are not known, though Tokayer and Swartz tell a peculiar story of his being rebuffed by the State Department about others, refusing to grant visas to Jews with relatives still in "enemy-overrun territory" (Tokayer and Swartz, p. 188.) (The U.S. was not yet in the war in mid-1941.) However, he seemed to be quite successful in getting an American visa himself, apparently leaving Japan a short time after the Russo-German phase of World War Two erupted June 22, 1941.
The beginning of Warhaftig's employment as Deputy Director of the World Jewish Congress' Institute of Jewish Affairs In New York City is not precisely
Some Missing Historical Background 101
dated, but well before 1943, the publication date of the two books referred to above. It thus can be seen that he was not in the Central European war zones for nearly four years prior to the issuance of these books, both pointedly related to "research" attributed only to him.
At this point Warhaftig's career crossed over that of Boris Shub. The latter, a graduate of the University of Michigan and Columbia University Law School, went to work as an editor for the Institute of Jewish Affairs, then located at 330 West 42nd Street in New York City, at just about the time Warhaftig arrived in the U.S.A. to become its Deputy Director. Shub's father David was well known in New York journalism, the principal editorial writer for the Social Democrat Menshevik Jewish Daily Forward, and later after the war even better known for a widely circulated biography of Lenin (1948). But this was son Boris's first job of significance, and it was later given very little attention or promotion. Only a reader of reference works was to learn of his involvement in the production of the two books, Hitler's Ten-Year War on the Jews and Starvation Over Europe (Made in Germany.)
Both Warhaftig and the younger Shub were to claim credit for writing these works but the bibliographical references credited them to Shub. In his sketch inWho's Who in World JewryWarhaftig claimed authorship of Starvation Over Europe,a one hundred page work, but in the Library of Congress and National Union Catalog Author Lists, 1942-1962(Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1970), Vol. 124, p. 320, it is plainly stated that this book was "Written by Boris Shub on the basis of research of Z. Warhaftig." The Cumulative Book Index 1943- 1948,p. 1198, also credits this book to Shub. As for Hitler's Ten-Year War, which Warhaftig did not claim, the Cumulative Book Index 1943-1948, p. 2067, identified Shub as its editor, this time, but once more working with Warhaftig's materials.
Shub died quite prematurely on April 21, 1965 at age 52. In the column- long obituary in the New York Times for the same day (p. 45), it was also stated that he had written these two books. The general invalidity of much of these works, essentially a pair of Germanophobe tracts written from a specific self- serving posture, never bothered Raphael Lemkin. He cited them with aplomb as the soundest of factual conclusions. That Warhaftig's absence from the scene most of the last four years of the period they purported to cover undermined them critically was a most obvious factor, but this was a matter not up for consideration. What he could have possibly known except at second, third or fourth hand about German affairs or the state of the food situation in Central Europe while in Kobe, Japan or in New York City 1940-1943 must have been extremely limited. In the interest of history instead of Zionist propaganda Warhaftig might have performed a service by writing a history of the Polish experience of Jews in the 20 years following the creation of the Polish state in 1920. This was something he knew something about, having lived there throughout the two decades in question. Instead the world got these two distorted polemics, wrought into English style by Boris Shub from what was quaintly described as "research" by a deeply-committed functionary of a number of major Zionist organizations. And the convoluted partisan misrepresentations they advertised entered the traffic of Lemkin's brief without the slightest reservation or modification.
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(2) The simultaneous use or issuance of contradictory propaganda material on this question dates back to well before the war, and suggests differing auspices behind the release of such materials, and differing objectives. An example is the book The Yellow Spot (New York: Knight Publications, and London: Victor Gollancz, 1936), and issued in Paris the same year in a German edition, Der Gelbe Fleck.The subtitle is the revealing aspect. That of the English language edition is The Outlawing of Half a Million Human Beings, while that of the German edition is die Ausrottung von 500,000 deutschen Juden (The Extermin ation of 500,000 German Jews).There is obviously several light years of difference in these two conditions. The English language version was prepared in England and its authors identified only as "a group of investigators." The book strains to demonstrate the worst imaginable situation facing the Jewish community in Germany under the impact of National Socialist legal impositions, but ends up making quite deflated admissions. It can find only a hundred Jews among the 2000 persons imprisoned at Dachau, in the 1930s, the symbol of extremity in concentration camps all over the world (those of Stalinist Russia in those days are virtually never mentioned), and its closing sub-section relates widespread German ignoring of impositions against Jews, and articles "testifying to German sympathy and humanity" toward Jews "in the entire press of Hitler Germany." (Yellow Spot, p. 287.)
On the other hand the German language edition of this book, published in Paris in 1936 also, by Editions du Carrefour, bears a special foreword by Lion Feuchtwanger which is not to be found in the London and New York editions. Feuchtwanger reiterates in slightly different language the lurid claim in the subtitle (" . . . die systematische Vernichtung [sic] einer halb Million hochzivil- isierter Europaer.") (Gelbe Fleck, foreword, p. 5.) This suggests that the promotion of the German language edition was mainly a ploy of the Stalinist Comintern (their operation in Paris in 1936-1938 was formidable), even if the English language editions suppressed mention of Stalinism as a factor in German political repression of Jews. In 1936 and 1937 Feuchtwanger was the editor in Moscow of a German language Communist literary magazine, Das Wort, and followed the Stalinist line with precision. His book Moscow 1937 (New York: Viking, 1937) was scathingly denounced by liberal critic Edmund Wilson (Wilson, "Russia: Escape from Propaganda," The Nation [November 13, 1937], pp. 530-535), while Feuchtwanger's servile literary chores for Stalin were excoriated by anti-Stalinist leftist Dwight MacDonald in the March, 1941 issue of Common Sense,the powerful monthly edited by Selden Rodman and Alfred M. Bingham. The failure of Feuchtwanger to acknowledge assisting with the preparation of the book The Yellow Spot is not due to any delicate reservations he may have entertained about involving himself with outrageous propaganda excesses. Three years earlier he had been very generous in alleging that a vast number of Jews had been slain in Germany as early as the beginning of the Hitler regime (New York Times, March 21, 1933, p. 11), though this catalog of atrocities was denied as having happened by Miles Bouton of the Baltimore Sun, 4 days later. However, when the New York Times reported later in the year (November 3,1933, p. 9) that the Central Organization of German Jewry instructed German Jews to support the Hitler regime's foreign policy, and that Interior Minister Frick had issued orders against molesting Jews at the polls, such news stood little chance of
Some Missing Historical Background103
being given credence as against the incendiary Comintern propaganda of massive slaughter of Jews in Germany in 1933. The Times compounded the already-complex situation four days later (November 7, 1933, p. 15) by quoting that consummate combination of Protestant theologian and social democrat Marxist ideologue, Reinhold Niebuhr, as saying that "Hitlerism" represented the first organization of the middle class in modern times. (Niebuhr actually expected a leftist revolt short of pure Stalinism to overthrow Hitler and his party sometime in 1934 or 1935.) In any event, the idea of anything as conservative and law-and-order-oriented as the German middle class endorsing mass murder as envisioned in Feuchtwanger's imagination simply did not make sense as German politics were construed in 1933.
(3) An inkling as to how most of the many 'war crimes' trials in a dozen post-
1944 European countries, and in cowed, subdued satellite-client West Germany would have resulted, had they been conducted in the United States, can be divined from what happened in a New Jersey court in May, 1973.
It involved a hearing prior to the granting of U.S. citizenship to one Isydor Pilcewicz, a Polish Jew by origin and a veteran of a German concentration camp at Alem, near Hannover. He had subsequently emigrated to Israel, where he was a citizen from 1957 to 1962, and thereafter became an immigrant into the U.S.A.
Pilcewicz's worthiness for citizenship here was challenged by Polish and other survivors of this same camp who had emigrated to the U.S. and had also become naturalized citizens. The objection had actually been made in 1972 when this matter first came before the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The principal witness against Pilcewicz was one Abraham List, 41 years old, who swore that Pilcewicz, a barracks leader at Alem, "selected at random" by the German overseers of the camp, had murdered List's cousin and 20 other persons by beating them to death.
After listening to this testimony, Passaic County District Court Judge Thomas R. Rumana, in Paterson, N. J., dismissed the allegations against the citizenship candidate Pilcewicz as "incoherent hearsay," and in his five-page decision, observed that there was "not one direct observation" of Pilcewicz having killed anyone at Alem. Slightly incensed that anyone would dare to lie in his court, Judge Rumana called attention to three major discrepancies between List's testimony in 1972 before the INS and that which he had just made. A full account of this was printed in the New York Times, May 25, 1973, p. 78, col. 7.
(4)The failure on the part of the Polish Communist and Soviet regimes from
1945 on to match the Germans in undertaking mass exhumations a la Katyn seems to indicate they missed a propaganda coup, in view of the widely claimed mass executions of Jews in far greater numbers than were represented by Polish army officers at Katyn. Max Weinreich, in his Hitler's Professors (New York: Yiddish Scientific Institute, 1946), pp. 164-165, charged the killing of Jews by the tens of thousands at a time at Vilna, Kaunas, Riga, Minsk, "and countless towns of the area," including a mass grave of 20,000 Jews murdered in fields near the town of Konin, in central Poland. This latter he reported from a Yiddish weekly published in Lodz, maybe 70 kilometres southeast of the site.
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Nothing whatever in the manner of Katyn was ever undertaken here, or, if so, publicity to such was non-existent.
(5) Early in 1971 the definitive work on the Katyn Forest massacre by Louis
FitzGibbon was published almost simultaneously in England (London: Tom Stacy Ltd.) and the U.S.A. (New York: Scribners), titled Katyn: A Crime Without Parallel. It aroused much comment internationally, and calls for even another inquiry into it all, this one from the British Parliament.
In between the second (April) and third (October) printings of FitzGibbon's book there was released a strange story bearing on the Katyn account from a location previously maintaining total silence upon it all. On July 22, 1971 the widely circulated Israeli newspaper Ma 'ariv published a long account attributed to one Abraham Vidra, a 64-year-old retired building construction employee, both a former Polish citizen and one time resident in the Soviet Union. The reason for this much-belated relation could not be determined, but it did contribute to the gathering of opinion invidious to the Stalinist contentions concerning responsibility for the Katyn slayings.
According to Vidra he had concealed what he knew about it for thirty years because of a promise he had made to a Jewish officer in the Red Army at the time. Vidra claimed he had been arrested by Soviet authorities "for Zionist activities" in Poland (the same experience of Menachem Begin), and had ended up interned in the large prison camp at Starobielsk, in the eastern Ukraine. This was the same camp where some four to five thousand Polish army officers had also been imprisoned by the Red Army.
Vidra's details clashed with known facts to the contrary as to what befell these Polish soldiers. He claimed ten thousand of them were at Starobielsk when less than half that number had been there. That they were moved out while he was there quite likely took place, but they were not the men subsequently systematically murdered and buried at Katyn; no one knows for sure the fate of the Starobielsk prisoners. Approximately 4,000 of these men had been sent to Starobielsk, another 6,500 to a second camp at Ostashkov, and 4,500 more to a third, Kozielsk. It was the contingent of these prisoners of war at Kozielsk which had been transported to Katyn and then murdered, in successive groups of about 300 at a time.
For the rest of Vidra's story we are dependent upon him solely for its veracity. But his dating of the departure of the Polish officers from the camp at Starobielsk also clashes with verified data to the contrary; he maintained these men were taken away at the end of 1940, when it is known they were removed starting in April of that year, and a few maybe as early as the end of 1939.
Vidra declared that these men were assembled in three groups for dispatching beyond Starobielsk, and that it was at the time the third and last group was about to make their departure that he made the acquaintance of and became friends with one Joshua Sorokin, a Soviet Jew and a major in the Red Army, who was in charge of the camp supplies and had been detailed to supervise this final shipping out of the Poles from Starobielsk. Sorokin apparently accompanied them, for Vidra spoke of his return, following which, on a trip to a nearby village, speaking Yiddish to one another when alone, Sorokin allegedly told him the Poles had been shot in the forest near Smolensk, though Katyn was
Some Missing Historical Background 105
not specifically mentioned as the place despite its location in that area. It was during this conversation that Vidra said that Major Sorokin, "badly shaken," claimed he had been an eyewitness to this mass murder; "What my eyes saw, the world will never believe," is how Vidra quoted the Soviet officer. Vidra went on to tell the Ma'ariv reporter that Sorokin made him promise not to reveal what he had been told for 30 years, which the former assured him would remain a secret for that much time.
Vidra then recalled that he had been transferred in February, 1941 to Talitza, in the Ural Mountains, where his new job was to help "break in" the new prisoners. It was there that he encountered among the new arrivals two Soviet lieutenants, whose names he remembered as Alexander Suslov and Samyun Tichonov. They drew attention because "they behaved in a peculiar way, unlike the other inmates," and no one knew why they were imprisoned at Talitza. He had orders to keep these two men away from the others in the prison camp "Because they were not quite all right," and concluded they had suffered nervous breakdowns.
The most dramatic part of Vidra's narrative was his claim that on one occasion, Lt. Suslov had broken down and told him that he and Lt. Tichonov had actually taken part in the shooting of these men, though some of the details are not corroborated by what has long been learned of what happened at Katyn. Suslov according to Vidra asserted that some of the Red soldiers ordered to kill the Poles refused to do so and committed suicide instead, throwing themselves into the mass grave. At the Katyn exhumation in 1943, no bodies of any Soviet personnel were recorded as found there, something which would have caused an immense sensation had it been done.
Vidra concluded by recalling that he met Major Sorokin again, after the war during which the latter had lost a leg. Now discharged from the Red Army, Sorokin implored Vidra again not to reveal his secret, though by now it is apparent Vidra had learned of it independently as a result of his reported experience at Talitza. Vidra, on the verge of emigrating to Israel, renewed his promise.
His explanation of why he was now telling this story was not especially convincing, though its timing may have had something to do with worsening Soviet-Israeli relations. So whether it was a pure invention, a very flawed and partially erroneous effort to capitalize on the Katyn sensation of the moment, or a description of still another mass murder of Polish officers (the fate of some 10,000 others is still a mystery) may never be known. In a conversation between this writer and FitzGibbon in Los Angeles in September, 1979 the latter expressed grave doubts as to the veracity of the entire Vidra account. (TheMa'arivstory entered the wire service traffic worldwide and was made available to newspapers in the U.S.A. via Associated Press. The account on which this summary is based was published in the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph for Thursday, July 22,1971, p. 5-A.)
(6) Despite the close relationship of the exploitation of Babi Yar to that of Katyn, the Soviet propaganda agencies, so finely tuned to all opportunities to utilize atrocity stories for world consumption, one of their major industries for two generations, never undertook an exhumation of the Babi Yar site in an effort to wire down decisively the allegations made about the immense number of massacred Jews buried there. Ultimately the figure grew to fifty times as
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many dead at Babi Yar as at Katyn but all there has ensued has been recriminatory exchanges as to the nature of the dead. Eventually spokesmen for the Jews of the area trimmed down their claims. In the late 1940s charges that 75,000 to 100,000 were shot there were common, an example of this being the Ukrainian Jewish poet Sawa Golovanivski's verse about Babi Yar in 1949. But some years later when Prof. Salo Baron of Columbia University wrote his The Russian Jew Under Tsars and Soviets(New York: Macmillan, 1964), he reduced these larger figures to precisely 33,771 (p. 325.)
This was a remarkable achievement, seeing that neither an exhumation nor any kind of body count had ever been made to determine what the situation was. But larger figures persisted, and actually grew. When the city of Denver permitted the creation of a memorial Babi Yar Park out of unused municipal land in September, 1981, (formally dedicated October 2,1983), it was preceded that spring by a promotional piece written by a San Francisco writer named Andrew Sorokowski published in the Denver Post for April 23, 1981. He claimed that Babi Yar was a site for burial by the Germans of repeated massacres amounting to 200,000 people. In this total he allowed the now accepted 33,700 allegedly killed on Monday and Tuesday, September 29-30, 1941 but asserted, "over the next two years, another 66,000 Jews were rounded up in Kiev, taken to Babi Yar and shot." The other hundred thousand killed and buried there according to that writer were non-Jews.
(7) "They [the English] will not win the war. I have no ill-will toward them, but England's day has passed. No matter what happens now, she will lose her empire. Tomorrow she will have become a Holland. She will not gain a foothold in Europe again. She left it forever when she reembarked from Dunkirk. She did not want to divide the world with Germany and the world is going to get away from her. Everything that doesn't end up by being Russian will be American." — Pierre Laval, quoted by Paul Morand, Chief of the French Mission in London for Economic Warfare, on his return to France, in a conversation with Laval, President of the Petain government, at Vichy, in August, 1940.France During the German Occupation, 1940-1944(3 vols., Stanford, California: The Hoover Institution, 1957), Doc. No. 144, Vol. Ill, p. 1336.
Philip W. Whitcomb, an American journalist, was almost continuously in residence in France from mid-June, 1940 until the declaration of war between Germany and the USA early in December, 1941, and then in Vichy France from mid-1942 to the end of that year. In detention-custody of the French and then German authorities, until early 1944, and returning to France after the Allied invasion in June, 1944 as the Baltimore Sun European correspondent, Whitcomb translated the entire work which was issued in 1957 as France During The German Occupation, 1940-1944. In his own essay, vol, 3, pp. 1603-1610, Whitcomb emphasized that no more than 50,000-60,000 Frenchmen left France during the entire period of the German occupation, fewer than had customarily left the country in peace time. (p. 1607). Even after the American invasion of French North Africa and the German occupation of Vichy France, the total number of French who left France amounted to "perhaps an eighth of one per cent of the population." Not included in this of course is the number of French military prisoners taken by the Germans in the war in the spring of 1940,
Some Missing Historical Background 107
amounting to about 2 million, held as prisoners of war in Germany, and reduced to half that by negotiation between the German government and that of the Vichy regime, during the 1940-44 period.
To a considerable number of outsiders, at least, Laval was a better Frenchman than de Gaulle. At least he remained at home, and tried his best to make the lot of his people under German domination more endurable and worthwhile. It was much easier to run away, as did one seventh of one per cent of all Frenchmen, and make loud noises and threatening gestures from afar. It took far more courage to stay home and face the music. His removal from power and destruction at the end of the war cannot be described other than callous judicial murder. His"trial"was a despicable evasion of the very elementary concepts of justice, howled at by a screaming and gesturing "jury" picked from the tiny knot of returned French political ideologues, undoubtedly most of them working under the strictest Stalinist discipline; the description by the American journalist Whitcomb in the closing pages of the third volume of France Under The German Occupationis not easy to forget. Whitcomb called special attention to Laval being 4 times Premier of France, and 18 times heading one or another ministry in the French government in his political career. (It was Laval's daughter Josee who first turned on the light in the torch held by the figure in the Statue of Liberty.)
An example of "justice" under Charles de Gaulle: Laval was tried before the following "jury" as stipulated by a law signed by de Gaulle; 12 jurors and 12 substitutes were required to be chosen from the 80 people who voted against the establishment of the Petain regime on July 10, 1940 (569 had voted FOR the Petain regime at that time.) Another 12 jurors and 12 substitutes had to be chosen from persons who were deported to Germany, 1940-44.
These 48 jurors sat in raised galleries on both sides of the courtroom and continuously shouted "violent abuse" at Petain, Laval and other accused and witnesses during the trial, according to Whitcomb, a witness to it all as the Baltimore Sun's European correspondent present at the proceedings. France During The German Occupation,vol. 3, p. 1610.
Paul Saurin, member of the Chamber of Deputies representing Oran, in North Africa, in his deposition included in France During the German Occupa tion,vol. II, pp. 690-709, pointed out that de Gaulle had created in Algeria three concentration camps to house his political enemies once Roosevelt and Churchill had approved his installation in North Africa. Further, a few days after the "liberation" of Paris in August, 1944, de Gaulle started flying into Paris various persons he had incarcerated in Algeria for lodgment in the prison at Fresnes. Included, who were treated as common felons, were Flandin, former President of the Council of Ministers, Peyrouton, a former French Ambassador and Governor-General of Algeria, and Boisson, former Governor General of French West Africa. As Saurin concluded sardonically, "The elegance of the deed gives the measure of the man who ordered it."
(8) There have been accounts of the Communists running the German concentration camp at Buchenwald from the inside stretching from Paul Rassinier, who was an inmate there himself for fifteen months, 1944-45, to the head of "Allied" psychological warfare, R.H.S. Crossman, and well beyond. It is very
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likely that there was a Stalinist apparat well entrenched in every German camp from the very beginning, for that matter, starting with the 300 Stalinist Germans who built Dachau from an expanded abandoned World War I munitions factory in 1933 (see story by James G. McDonald, president of the American Foreign Policy Association, on a personal visit to Dachau in the summer of 1933, published in the New York Times, September 11, 1933, p. 9.) But it is part of our fairy tale education that this aspect of it be suppressed, and other features be emphasized, to maximize the effect of atrocity tales, which always have far more ultimate political clout.
One of the more detailed accounts of this above phenomenon largely escaped notice in the scrambling panic of the approaching Cold War in the fall of 1946. It appeared in the October, 1946 issue of the magazine American Mercury (pp. 397-404) during the editorship of Lawrence E. Spivak, known ultimately to millions for his part in radio and television programs as a testy interrogator of government and other guests on information shows. This account was written by Colonel Donald B. Robinson, identified as "Chief Historian of the American Military Government in Germany," and was titled "Communist Atrocities at Buchenwald."
Buchenwald was taken by American troops on April 11, 1945, though in years subsequent to this "liberation" it was turned over to the Stalinist Red Army, who proceeded to convert it into a concentration camp again to housetheirenemies, which was discussed by this writer in a review of an American edition of the works of Rassinier in the newspaper Spotlight for October 8, 1978. What was discovered of Stalinist management of Buchenwald was learned during the period of American tenure of control there, however.
Col. Robinson summarized the findings of an Army report which he said "first crossed my desk when I was on duty at General Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters." This report stated that some 300 prisoners, a cadre formed from all its members from the Communist Party in Buchenwald, had seized control of the camp self-government set up by the Germans (Haftlingsfuhrung) early in 1942. This underground organization proceeded to dominate the 60,000 inmates until the end of the war, and, Col. Robinson declared, "It was stated categorically by the Army report" that "the Communist trusties were directly responsible for a large part of the brutalities committed at Buchenwald."
Said Col. Robinson of the report, further, "It appeared that the prisoners who agreed with the Communists ate; those who didn't starved to death." According to the report, "The most important Communist stronghold at Buchenwald was the Labor Office. There it was that inmates were given work assignments or selected for transport to places like the dreaded Dora camp at Mittelbau," a location of especially hard labor. This was precisely what happened to Rassinier, an implacable anti-Stalinist though himself a socialist and pacifist.
The camp hospital, according to the report, was another Stalinist fort; "Its staff was composed almost 100% of German Communists," and, as Col. Robinson quoted from it, "Hospital facilities were largely devoted to caring for members of the [German] Communist Party. All scarce drugs were reserved for Communist patients, and hospital food was available for members of the
Some Missing Historical Background109
Party." As for the others, "Anti-Communists, when they became ill, were left largely without care."
"Another of the Communist citadels," as Col. Robinson called it, was "the Food Supply organization." Quoting again from the report, he read, "Favorite groups received reasonable rations while others were brought to the starvation level." It was further asserted by the report that this same operation had previously confiscated thousands of French Red Cross parcels sent to French prisoners, and that KPD "block chiefs" got them.
A fourth Red bastion within Buchenwald was, the report went on, "The Property Room, called Effectenkammer", "also under Communist control." Col. Robinson claimed that fleeing German guards took such things as money and gold, but that KPD trusties took everything else; "The day Buchenwald was liberated, the [U.S.] Army intelligence men were astounded to note that the 300 surviving German Communists were dressed like 'prosperous business men,' " the latter three words quoted from the report.
Col. Robinson detailed two threats to German KPD control of Buchenwald. Early in 1943 several large groups of Poles were sent there from Auschwitz, Army intelligence learned; "They had occupied the same ruling position" there, and "attempted to capture the same sort of control in their new home." But, he went on, "The German Communists were too well entrenched," and smashed this effort by having many of the Poles executed.
The second threat occurred a few months later "when large groups of French and Belgian prisoners" were sent to Buchenwald; "Because of their Western outlook, these too represented a menace to the German Communist rule." And as a result, "Almost all of the first convoys were shipped immediately to the dreaded Dora Camp." Neither Col. Robinson nor the report he was quoting from, apparently, discussed the struggle within Buchenwald between the Communists and the common felons, a large number, according to Rassinier, convicted of serious crimes common around the world. These men however were fiercely loyal to Germany as opposed to the Communists, whose basic political affections lay with Stalin in Moscow.
Probably what most surprised American intelligence operatives who put this report together from which Col. Robinson read was learning that the KPD underground in Buchenwald had maintained careful contact with the Communists outside; even at the height of Hitler's war with the USSR, Germany and German-occupied Europe crawled with an immense legion of Stalinist adherents. Camp inmates received steady orders and information from them. There were many French, Dutch and Spanish Communists at Buchenwald as well, and said the report, "A vast underground system of councils and meetings was built up to integrate them." But the Party discipline seemed to impress most of all: "From Buchenwald an inmate went out regularly to establish contacts with a Communist courier bringing news and instructions. Bound by his loyalty to the Party, the contact man never made use of his opportunity to escape personally."
For those whose only scrap of knowledge of Buchenwald was the famous photograph by Margaret Bourke-White of the small party of inmates staring out through a barbed wire fence, obviously staged, and looking remarkably well and utterly lacking in emaciation, this story might have enabled a few things to fit together for the first time, but not much, apparently. Wondrous are the uses of
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left wing photographs. One of the very few in the land who recognized what was being done by this campaign of atrocity photographs and films was the liberal literary and film critic, James Agee, author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1941). Almost alone in the country brave enough to resent the brainwash, Agee protested in his column in the super-warrior left-wing Germanophobe and pro-Stalinist Nation, itself an almost incredible event (Agee, "Films,"Nation [May 19,1945], p. 579):
The recently released films which show Nazi atrocities are only part of what is rather clearly an ordered and successful effort to condition the people of this country against interfering with, or even questioning, an extremely hard peace against the people of Germany. The simple method is to show things more frightful than most American citizens have otherwise seen, and to pin the guilt for these atrocities on the whole German people.
I cannot get my thoughts in order yet, to write what I think needs writing, about such propaganda and the general reaction to it. But I do want to go on record against it as I believe many other people would like to, before our voices become undistinguishable among those of the many confused or timid or villainous people who are likely after awhile, when the shock wears off-and when it is safe or even stylish-to come somewhat to their senses.
Agee went on in this vein for some time, an act of intellectual courage really unmatched in that moment. That few had caught up with him nearly 40 years later testifies to the thoroughness of the work of the multitude of mindbending adversaries he correctly recognized right at the moment it was starting to materialize.
Close corroboration of Colonel Robinson from another American Army officer on the situation in still another German camp "liberated" by the U.S. Army came 20 years later. Ellis E. Spackman, Chief of Counter-intelligence Arrests and Detentions for the U.S. Seventh Army, was involved in upper-level operations attending the taking over of Dachau, near Munich. Writing in the San Bernardino (Calif.) Sun-Telegram for March 13, 1966, Spackman, at that time a professor of history at San Bemardino Valley College, stated the following: "When we liberated Dachau, we found the nationalities represented in the following order: Poles, 9,082; Russians, 4,258; French, 3,918; Jews, 2,539; Italians, 2,184; Germans, 1,173; and scattered prisoners from 34 other countries, making a total of 31,432."
Though Spackman at that time believed the extermination legends just as much as the next as a received opinion, he could not explain these tens of thousands of living prisoners. But he did support, independently, Rassinier and Robinson, in all major details as to the complexion of Dachau and how it was run. He quoted Prof. Albert Kervyn, of the economics department of the University of Louvain in Belgium, himself a Dachau prisoner for a time, who declared, "The SS [German concentration camp guards] rarely murdered anyone." Prof. Kervyn described almost all violent deaths as resulting from the workings of the inside organization of the camp.
Some Missing Historical Background111
The actual camp commandant was identified by Spademan as a former Soviet Red Army officer of Armenian extraction named Melazarian, responsible to a German superior. Melazarian was nearly beaten to death by the prisoners upon the arrival of the Americans, and then, said Spackman, "shot and killed by our troops." His replacement, "elected by the prisoners," was a German Communist, Oscar Mueller, whom Spackman said the U.S. forces consulted. Prof. Kervyn had told Spackman that among the mainly political prisoners, mostly Communists of many national varieties, were "several hundred" desperate felons, who "were mostly murderers serving life sentences." Many of these held "posts of authority over their fellow prisoners," he told Spackman, with one in every 30 prisoners being part of the internal camp "self-government" (Haftlings- fuhrung)(the Germans simply did not have the manpower to staff these camps with anything but a thin managerial cadre.) These prisoner-bureaucrats, Communists or common criminals, alike controlled the distribution of food, the operation of the prison hospital and all health services, and the very important work-assignment details; incurring the displeasure of the Reds, as happened to Rassinier at Buchenwald, meant assignment to a very bad job.
Spackman, still inclined to blame the Germans for all the "monstrous cruelties" that took place, in the face of this information and testimony, had to admit that "the prisoners were the actual instruments that inflicted the barbarities on their fellow prisoners." This was precisely what Rassinier described as what happened at Buchenwald, and independently supported by the U.S. Army historian, Colonel Robinson.
There is an interesting recent source on Dachau, in the British periodicalAfter the Battle,No. 27, February 15,1980. In the article "Dachau," (pp. 1-33), by Andrew Mollo there is a strange mixture of immediate postwar style propaganda incendiary verbiage and very subdued rational talk associated with much later and cooler estimations. Mollo, seemingly obsessed with the topic of American Army massacres of surrendered German prisoners of war at the scene, to which he devoted an unexpectedly large part of his illustrated piece (the photographs are exceptional), managed to escape mention of the subject of "Communists" entirely other than in a reference to the very early origins of the Dachau camp. However, he does corroborate the census figure cited by Spackman, even though he omits mention of the prisoner of war status of most of the men found by the "liberators." Though mouthing the expectable and conventional talk of the "horrors" of the camp at the moment of its capture, Mollo then goes on to say (p. 15), "While the bulk of the inmates were lean and hungry but otherwise in reasonable condition," there were "huts crammed with ill and dying prisoners suffering from tuberculosis and typhus." Mollo's account of who was in charge at Dachau differs completely from Spackman's, while quoting from its surrendered officer in charge (p. 13), that the able-bodied amounted to about 93% of the total. Mollo also skirted very warily the once- trumpeted "gas chamber" subject.
When it comes to memoirs and commentaries from the concentration camp ex-prisoners themselves in the earliest times of their "liberation," one is struck by their paucity, despite the scores upon scores of thousands turned loose. One is additionally impressed by their self-serving, sometimes almost to a revolting proportion, and their incredible contradictions which suggest in many cases the
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most bald-faced mendacity. Among the earliest there are many from Stalinists, which mainly have the frank quality of avoiding the braying of "innocence," a characteristic of the majority particularly of the last two decades, though there are exceptions. One is impressed by the ingenuous quality of the statement by the Parisian, Sim Kessel, on how he ended up in Auschwitz: "When I was arrested on July 14, 1942, I had just crossed the demarcation line [between Vichy France and German occupied France] carrying a suitcase loaded with automatic pistols" (Kessel, Hanged at Auschwitz [New York: Stein and Day, 1972], p. 16). Various others, though just a tiny knot of the total, admit the cause of their arrest as spying for Stalinism, participating in armed civilian ambush warfare against German troops in behalf of some Red campaign somewhere, and other enterprises of this nature.
What is exceptionally scarce is a reminiscence by an ex-prisoner of his part in the camp management, though there is a general conclusion that one in every 30 of the incarcerated had a job running the camp. One of the earliest of a mere handful of such revelations was broadcast nationally in the U.S.A. less than two months after war's end in 1945, in the pages of then-600,000-circulationNewsweek.It was reported by the magazine's Stockholm correspondent and involved an interview with a youthful national of Norway only 21 years old, though the reason for his imprisonment was never revealed in this account. It involved his stay at Auschwitz, which was rapidly overtaking Dachau, Buchenwald and Belsen, all in Germany, as the symbolic center for concentration camp horror stories. It went this way:
The story was told to me by a 21-year-old Norwegian student, Erling Bauck, who has just returned to Stockholm en route to his native Oslo, after spending three years at Auschwitz concentration camp. Bauck admits he was one of the "trusties." He says that none of the horror stories told about Nazi concentration camps was exaggerated, but he himself landed by chance, and otherwise, in a position where he had his own shoe shiner at his service, another man to mend his socks, a third to do his laundry, and so forth. He obtained clean bed sheets, smoked fat Havana cigars, and procured a watch, fountain pen and other articles. The ordinary fare, consisting of a quart of cabbage soup and a half pound of stale blackish bread, he disdained.
The reason for Bauck's favored position was that he managed to get put in charge of the Elite Guard canteen. He diverted to his own use cigarettes, brandy and other merchandise destined for the Elite Guard trade. With these he paid for his privileges and favors.
Bauck was not the only one to enjoy these privileges—out of 16,000 internees in Auschwitz, some 500 were in key positions where they were not only enjoying material favors, but were safe from gas chambers and crematories. These 500 formed a camarilla preying on newcomers who were promptly stripped, upon arrival, of watches, rings, jewelry, food, parcels, and so forth on the pretext that they were making a contribution to a nonexistent underground welfare fund for internees. The plunder permitted camp racketeers to obtain anything they wished by means of barter. For lads who could pay in kind, there were movies, cabarets, concerts, and brothels.
Some Missing Historical Background113
The remainder of Bauck's story as reported second hand included all the expectable reiterations of yarns about what went on at Auschwitz, though none of this had any relation to Bauck personally and consisted mainly of repetition of other peoples' allegations. Bauck's politics were never mentioned, nor the reason for his having taken five months to get from Poland to Sweden, the Auschwitz camp having been "liberated" by the Red Army in January. What Rassinier was to explain in his book Le Mensonge d'Ulysse (five editions, 1948 to 1961) as the appetite for ever more sensational stories from camp veterans led to later multiplications of Bauck's statement of the Auschwitz camp population by twenty and the number of daily deaths and cremations by forty. But the reportage of his story was an interesting momentary breach in the iron curtain of unrelieved monolithic atrocity tales beginning to accumulate in these early post war months, a literature which was to grow large enough to fill a reasonably-sized library in days ahead. For the full account of Bauck's relation see "Luxury in a Horror Camp: Nazi Pets Led Fuller Life," Newsweek (June 25, 1945), p. 50.