HISTORIANS, DOGMATICS AND PSEUDO-SCIENTISTS LIE MOST OF THE TIME!
BAFS - 7 December 2018
Martin Brech 1944
The Eisenhower Holocaust - Texe Marrs
https://archive.org/details/youtube-_XDsj8e6MB0
Martin Brech 1944
Eisenhower the "Swedish jew"?
"God, I hate the Germans..." --Dwight David Eisenhower in a letter to his wife in September, 1944
"We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has
witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own
country. Despite these holocausts ..."
"Although it might be necessary to grant blacks certain
political rights, this does not mean social equality or that a negro should
court my daughter"
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters
http://www.amren.com/interviews/2002/0715horowitz/taylor_reply.html
http://www.kshs.org/publicat/history/1990autumn_burk.pdf
http://www.kshs.org/publicat/history/1990autumn_burk.pdf
As observed, Eisenhower was little different from the general
run of whites who held ambivalent views on race and integration, but his default
position was one of patronization of blacks. One historian reported
that when he talked to eager African American audiences, Ike would remove his
glasses and say, �Now, you people have to be patient.� He had served for
forty years in a segregated army and believed, as he told the Senate Armed
Services Committee in 1948, that segregation should continue at the platoon
level and below. He told jokes about black people in bull sessions during
the campaign and even in the White House. He confided to a friend that he
did not believe the races need socialize or that a Negro should court my
daughter. In office as president, Eisenhower and his advisors worried
constantly about
 | Is this man a war criminal? | |||||
| Is this man a jew? | |||||
| By renaming POWs as DEFs, he bypassed the Geneva Convention, a typical jew mentality. | |||||
| Changing his name from Eisenhauer to Eisenhower is a typical jew tactic. |
A comparison of German censuses of 1946 and 1950 shows the effect
of food shortages. The 1950 census showed 5.7 million people fewer than there should have
been according to the number of people recorded in the 1946 census, minus officially
reported deaths, plus births and "immigrants" (people expelled from the east and
returning prisoners) in the period from 1946 to 1950. The total tally of unacknowledged
deaths among prisoners, refugees and non-expelled civilians comes to about nine million people between 1945 and 1950, far more than the
number who died during the war itself. All of these deaths were surplus to those actually
reported. Moreover, those deaths occurred in peacetime while the world media did not
bother to report of them.
The Missing Holocaust
"I've checked out Churchill's Second World War and the statement
is quite correct” not a single mention of Nazi 'gas chambers,' a
'genocide' of the Jews, or of 'six million' Jewish victims of the war.
This is astonishing. How can it be explained?
Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe is a book of 559 pages; the six
volumes of Churchill's Second World War total 4,448 pages; and
de Gaulle's three-volume Mémoires de guerre is 2,054 pages. In this
mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including
the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find
no mention either of Nazi 'gas chambers,' a 'genocide' of the Jews,
or of 'six million' Jewish victims of the war."
In 'Eisenhower's Death Camps':
A U.S. Prison Guard Remembers
Martin Brech
By the time I left the hospital, the outfit I had trained with in Spartanburg, South Carolina, was deep inside Germany, so, despite my protests, I was placed in a "repo depot" (replacement depot). I lost interest in the units to which I was assigned, and don't recall all of them: non-combat units were ridiculed at that time. My separation qualification record states I was mostly with Company C, 14th Infantry Regiment, during my seventeen-month stay in Germany, but I remember being transferred to other outfits also.
In late March or early April 1945, I was sent to guard a POW camp near Andernach along the Rhine. I had four years of high school German, so I was able to talk to the prisoners, although this was forbidden. Gradually, however, I was used as an interpreter and asked to ferret out members of the S.S. (I found none.)
In Andernach about 50,000 prisoners of all ages were held in an open field surrounded by barbed wire. The women were kept in a separate enclosure that I did not see until later. The men I guarded had no shelter and no blankets. Many had no coats. They slept in the mud, wet and cold, with inadequate slit trenches for excrement. It was a cold, wet spring, and their misery from exposure alone was evident.
Even more shocking was to see the prisoners throwing grass and weeds into a tin can containing a thin soup. They told me they did this to help ease their hunger pains. Quickly they grew emaciated. Dysentery raged, and soon they were sleeping in their own excrement, too weak and crowded to reach the slit trenches. Many were begging for food, sickening and dying before our eyes. We had ample food and supplies, but did nothing to help them, including no medical assistance.
Outraged, I protested to my officers and was met with hostility or bland indifference. When pressed, they explained they were under strict orders from "higher up." No officer would dare do this to 50,000 men if he felt that it was "out of line," leaving him open to charges. Realizing my protests were useless, I asked a friend working in the kitchen if he could slip me some extra food for the prisoners. He too said they were under strict orders to severely ration the prisoners' food, and that these orders came from "higher up." But he said they had more food than they knew what to do with, and would sneak me some.
When I threw this food over the barbed wire to the prisoners, I was caught and threatened with imprisonment. I repeated the "offense," and one officer angrily threatened to shoot me. I assumed this was a bluff until I encountered a captain on a hill above the Rhine shooting down at a group of German civilian women with his .45 caliber pistol. When I asked, "Why?," he mumbled, "Target practice," and fired until his pistol was empty. I saw the women running for cover, but, at that distance, couldn't tell if any had been hit.
This is when I realized I was dealing with cold-blooded killers filled with moralistic hatred. They considered the Germans subhuman and worthy of extermination; another expression of the downward spiral of racism. Articles in the G.I. newspaper, Stars and Stripes, played up the German concentration camps, complete with photos of emaciated bodies. This amplified our self-righteous cruelty, and made it easier to imitate behavior we were supposed to oppose. Also, I think, soldiers not exposed to combat were trying to prove how tough they were by taking it out on the prisoners and civilians.
These prisoners, I found out, were mostly farmers and workingmen, as simple and ignorant as many of our own troops. As time went on, more of them lapsed into a zombie-like state of listlessness, while others tried to escape in a demented or suicidal fashion, running through open fields in broad daylight towards the Rhine to quench their thirst. They were mowed down.
Some prisoners were as eager for cigarettes as for food, saying they took the edge off their hunger. Accordingly, enterprising G.I. "Yankee traders" were acquiring hordes of watches and rings in exchange for handfuls of cigarettes or less. When I began throwing cartons of cigarettes to the prisoners to ruin this trade, I was threatened by rank-and-file G.I.s too.
The only bright spot in this gloomy picture came one night when. I was put on the "graveyard shift," from two to four a.m. Actually, there was a graveyard on the uphill side of this enclosure, not many yards away. My superiors had forgotten to give me a flashlight and I hadn't bothered to ask for one, disgusted as I was with the whole situation by that time. It was a fairly bright night and I soon became aware of a prisoner crawling under the wires towards the graveyard. We were supposed to shoot escapees on sight, so I started to get up from the ground to warn him to get back. Suddenly I noticed another prisoner crawling from the graveyard back to the enclosure. They were risking their lives to get to the graveyard for something. I had to investigate.
When I entered the gloom of this shrubby, tree-shaded cemetery, I felt completely vulnerable, but somehow curiosity kept me moving. Despite my caution, I tripped over the legs of someone in a prone position. Whipping my rifle around while stumbling and trying to regain composure of mind and body, I soon was relieved I hadn't reflexively fired. The figure sat up. Gradually, I could see the beautiful but terror-stricken face of a woman with a picnic basket nearby. German civilians were not allowed to feed, nor even come near the prisoners, so I quickly assured her I approved of what she was doing, not to be afraid, and that I would leave the graveyard to get out of the way.
I did so immediately and sat down, leaning against a tree at the edge of the cemetery to be inconspicuous and not frighten the prisoners. I imagined then, and still do now, what it would be like to meet a beautiful woman with a picnic basket under those conditions as a prisoner. I have never forgotten her face.
Eventually, more prisoners crawled back to the enclosure. I saw they were dragging food to their comrades, and could only admire their courage and devotion.
On May 8, V.E. Day [1945], I decided to celebrate with some prisoners I was guarding who were baking bread the other prisoners occasionally received. This group had all the bread they could eat, and shared the jovial mood generated by the end of the war. We all thought we were going home soon, a pathetic hope on their part. We were in what was to become the French zone [of occupation], where I soon would witness the brutality of the French soldiers when we transferred our prisoners to them for their slave labor camps.
On this day, however, we were happy.
As a gesture of friendliness, I emptied my rifle and stood it in the corner, even allowing them to play with it at their request. This thoroughly "broke the ice," and soon we were singing songs we taught each other, or that I had learned in high school German class ("Du, du, liegst mir im Herzen"). Out of gratitude, they baked me a special small loaf of sweet bread, the only possible present they had left to offer. I stuffed it in my "Eisenhower jacket," and snuck it back to my barracks, eating it when I had privacy. I have never tasted more delicious bread, nor felt a deeper sense of communion while eating it. I believe a cosmic sense of Christ (the Oneness of all Being) revealed its normally hidden presence to me on that occasion, influencing my later decision to major in philosophy and religion.
Shortly afterwards, some of our weak and sickly prisoners were marched off by French soldiers to their camp. We were riding on a truck behind this column. Temporarily, it slowed down and dropped back, perhaps because the driver was as shocked as I was. Whenever a German prisoner staggered or dropped back, he was hit on the head with a club and killed. The bodies were rolled to the side of the road to be picked up by another truck. For many, this quick death might have been preferable to slow starvation in our "killing fields."
When I finally saw the German women held in a separate enclosure, I asked why we were holding them prisoner. I was told they were "camp followers," selected as breeding stock for the S.S. to create a super-race. I spoke to some, and must say I never met a more spirited or attractive group of women. I certainly didn't think they deserved imprisonment.
More and more I was used as an interpreter, and was able to prevent some particularly unfortunate arrests. One somewhat amusing incident involved an old farmer who was being dragged away by several M.P.s. I was told he had a "fancy Nazi medal," which they showed me. Fortunately, I had a chart identifying such medals. He'd been awarded it for having five children! Perhaps his wife was somewhat relieved to get him "off her back," but I didn't think one of our death camps was a fair punishment for his contribution to Germany. The M.P.s agreed and released him to continue his "dirty work."
Famine began to spread among the German civilians also. It was a common sight to see German women up to their elbows in our garbage cans looking for something edible -- that is, if they weren't chased away.
When I interviewed mayors of small towns and villages, I was told that their supply of food had been taken away by "displaced persons" (foreigners who had worked in Germany), who packed the food on trucks and drove away. When I reported this, the response was a shrug. I never saw any Red Cross at the camp or helping civilians, although their coffee and doughnut stands were available everywhere else for us. In the meantime, the Germans had to rely on the sharing of hidden stores until the next harvest.
Hunger made German women more "available," but despite this, rape was prevalent and often accompanied by additional violence. In particular I remember an eighteen-year old woman who had the side of her faced smashed with a rifle butt, and was then raped by two G.I.s. Even the French complained that the rapes, looting and drunken destructiveness on the part of our troops was excessive. In Le Havre, we'd been given booklets warning us that the German soldiers had maintained a high standard of behavior with French civilians who were peaceful, and that we should do the same. In this we failed miserably.
"So what?" some would say. "The enemy's atrocities were worse than ours." It is true that I experienced only the end of the war, when we were already the victors. The German opportunity for atrocities had faded, while ours was at hand. But two wrongs don't make a right. Rather than copying our enemy's crimes, we should aim once and for all to break the cycle of hatred and vengeance that has plagued and distorted human history. This is why I am speaking out now, 45 years after the crime. We can never prevent individual war crimes, but we can, if enough of us speak out, influence government policy. We can reject government propaganda that depicts our enemies as subhuman and encourages the kind of outrages I witnessed. We can protest the bombing of civilian targets, which still goes on today. And we can refuse ever to condone our government's murder of unarmed and defeated prisoners of war.
I realize it's difficult for the average citizen to admit witnessing a crime of this magnitude, especially if implicated himself. Even G.I.s sympathetic to the victims were afraid to complain and get into trouble, they told me. And the danger has not ceased. Since I spoke out a few weeks ago, I have received threatening calls and had my mailbox smashed. But its been worth it. Writing about these atrocities has been a catharsis of feelings suppressed too long, a liberation, that perhaps will remind other witnesses that "the truth will make us free, have no fear." We may even learn a supreme lesson from all this: only love can conquer all.
About the author
Martin Brech lives in Mahopac, New York. When he wrote this memoir essay in 1990, he was an Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Brech holds a master's degree in theology from Columbia University, and is a Unitarian-Universalist minister.
This essay was published in The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1990 (Vol. 10, No. 2), pp. 161-166. (Revised, updated: Nov. 2008)
For Further Reading
James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950 (Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1997)
James Bacque, Other Losses: An investigation into the mass deaths of German prisoners at the hands of the French and Americans after World War II (Toronto: Stoddart, 1989)
Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, Nemesis at Postsdam (Lincoln, Neb.: 1990)
Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the Eastern European Germans, 1944-1950 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994)
John Dietrich, The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy (New York: Algora, 2002)
Ralph Franklin Keeling, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies' Postwar War Against the German People (IHR, 1992). Originally published in Chicago in 1947.
Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York: Basic Books, 2007)
John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Story of Jews Who Sought Revenge for the Holocaust (2000)
Mark Weber, "New Book Details Mass Killings and Brutal Mistreatment of Germans at the End of World War Two" (Summer 2007)
( http://www.ihr.org/other/afterthereich072007.html )
|
Eisenhower
Had Jewish Blood
West Point yearbook
West Point was very conscious of any ' Non-White' candidates. It was obvious from Eisenhower's appearance that he was carrying another race's blood. The headmaster quizzed him and he admitted he had Jewish ancestors  "It was clear in 1952 that the Republicans would return to the White House. Harry Truman* had more problems than the Alger Hiss scandal. "Containment" was simply not working. Sicne the concept's origination, hundreds of millions of people had fallen under Communist domination. Americans sensed the need for a strong new leader who could stand up to the Soviets. The favorite of the GOP's rank and file was Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the son of the former President, and an outspoken foe of Communism. Douglas Macarthur openly supported Taft, who entertained plans to make the general his running mate. It was the Establishment's aversion to this candidacy that brought Dwight D. Eisenhower forward. In 1941, the year we went to war, Eisenhower or "Ike", was a lieutenant colonel who had never seen a battle in his life. Yet by 1943 he had become a four-star general and supreme commander of the Allied forces in Western Europe...After the war Eisenhower commanded U.S. occupation forces in Germany. He returned home to become US Chief of Staff...Bernanrd Baruch became a close acquaintance. Althihg he had no academic background, Eisenhower was made president of Columbia University in 1948. He joined the Council on Foreign Relations,... The Establishment knew that to divest Taft and Macarthur of the Republican nomination, they would have to present a candidate who looked incredibly tough and anti-Communist. General Eisenhower, who was still wearing an aura of World War II glory, became their choice. By no stretch of the imagination was Ike a Republican teaditionalist. In fact, until he ran, he had no party affiliation...At the Republican nominating convention, "dirty tricks" abounded. The rules for selecting delegates were changed; Taft delegations from Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas were thrown out and replaced by Eisenhower's supporters...Once again, the Establishment had succeeded in controlling both parties..." The SHADOWS OF POWER, by James Perloff. pp. 102-103. ---------------------------------------------------------------- * Since the inauguration of perpetual peace by the United Notions, only two Presidents, Sheeny Truman (20) and a crook from Texas (21), have had the fun of shipping large numbers of American men to be slaughtered on the other side of the globe, and creating an excuse for massively increased taxation to bleed the boobs some more. (20. His father was a Sheeny, his mother, a White woman, so he was not a Jew by orthodox standards.) (21. Johnson, a small-time politician, on whom see J. Evetts Haley, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, was married to and supervised by a Kikess, who probably guided him to power. His character is adequately shown by the fact that he had or simulated a tantrum when some Vietnamese boats supposedly fired at an American destroyer, but when the Kikes bombed and torpedoed the U.S.S. Liberty, killed many American sailors, and tried to sink the little ship without survivors so that they could blame the Egyptians, Lyndon personally forbade the ships of the U.S. Navy near the scene to go to the assistance of the ship that had been detached from their squadron and personally expressed the hope that the Sheenies would succeed in killing all those stupid American swine on the American naval vessel. He was not impeached, convicted of high treason, and shot.) http://www.revilo-oliver.com/rpo/Surprise_Surprise.html "It is noteworthy that Rabbi Gruenewald ignores the fact that Truman's father was a Sheeny. The pious rabbi may have been applying the orthodox criterion that the sons of Jews by White women are not really Jews, or he may have thought it tactless to mention that Americans, with their simplistic notions of heredity, thought Truman half-Jewish but were evidently not alarmed. A little later, he likewise makes no mention of the Jews' share of Franklin Roosevelt.)" http://www.revilo-oliver.com/rpo/Poor_Old_Ronnie.html ---------------------------------------------------------------- Eisenhower: JEW/NEGRO ANCESTRY The following document was faxed to Richard Claypool [Head of U.S. Presidential Libraries, Maryland] on June 16th 2002 , at (301) 837 3218 , concerning Anne Morrow's identity investigation. A slightly modified version was also faxed on this same date to Harold Holt [Executive Director, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library , Kansas] , at (785) 263 4218. "...Anne Morrow & myself have discovered that the name & spelling of Eisenhower was & has been corrupted from it's original spelling Eisenhauer. Although your establishment discounts Eisenhower's Jewish &/or Negro ancestry [see; http://www.Palatinepress.com/images/teasleyletter2.gif] the corruption of the original spelling , to the existing & publicly embraced & accepted Eisenhower implies the former President's descendents was a Jewish , perhaps even a German bloodline. This further supports Anne Morrow's story & that she in fact descended from "old , old blood out of Europe." Anne Morrow & myself have substantiated that the reason for the Eisenhauer name corruption to Eisenhower was merely for public relations during World War II & through-out the Cold War , & to cloak the true heritage & bloodline of Dwight D. Eisenhower. This corruption was positively reflected & perpetuated most importantly within the confines of education circles. The names Campbell , Gabbard & Morrow seem to be interlocked & are seemingly different names for the same bloodline , which is intended to hide the heritage & origins of an Eisenhauer (Eisenhower) line which extends back into Europe (under most likely , many other different names)." http://www.palatinepress.com/ashley_otooole_letter_11june02.html
Dear DJ,
The following document was faxed to Richard Claypool [Head of U.S. Presidential
Libraries, Maryland] on June 16th 2002 , at (301) 837 3218 , concerning Anne Morrow's
identity investigation. A slightly modified version was also faxed on this same date to
Harold Holt [Executive Director, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library , Kansas] , at (785) 263
4218.
It was Anne Morrow who confided in me , many months ago , after I published a
non-related article in my independently owned & operated publication , BEACHHEAD , her
belief that she was in fact the illegitimiate daughter of former U.S. President Dwight D.
Eisenhower & her biological mother may in fact be Dwight D. Eisenhower's former driver
, Kay Summersby. Rumours were confirmed in 1975 , when Kay Summersby wrote a book titled;
"Past Forgetting; My Love Affair With Dwight D. Eisenhower". It was
Mr.Eisenhower's superior General George Marshall who quashed a plan by Dwight D.
Eisenhower to divorce his wife Mamie & marry Summersby. It has been stated ,
General.Marshall threatened to bust Eisenhower out of the military while fighting in
Europe [World War II] , if he was to go ahead & marry Summersby & divorce Mamie.
As docummented , General George Marshall served in President Truman's Cabinet , as
Secretary of State & then as , Secretary of Defense.
Through my own genealogical research I have established a definite link betweeen the
names Campbell , Gabbard , Morrow & Eisenhower. However , Anne Morrow & myself
have discovered that the name & spelling of Eisenhower was & has been corrupted
from it's original spelling Eisenhauer. Although your establishment discounts Eisenhower's
Jewish &/or Negro ancestry [see; http://www.Palatinepress.com/images/teasleyletter2.gif]
the corruption of the original spelling , to the existing & publicly embraced &
accepted Eisenhower implies the former President's descendents was a Jewish , perhaps even
a German bloodline. This further supports Anne Morrow's story & that she in
fact descended from "old , old blood out of Europe." Anne Morrow & myself
have substantiated that the reason for the Eisenhauer name corruption to Eisenhower was
merely for public relations during World War II & through-out the Cold War , & to
cloak the true heritage & bloodline of Dwight D. Eisenhower. This corruption was
positively reflected & perpetuated most importantly within the confines of education
circles.
"General DWIGHT EISENHOWER (appropriately named "The Swedish Jew" by
fellow West Point cadets) was
promoted over the heads of many more qualified officers for a reason. He
agreed, apparently, to exchange America's honor quid pro quo for 5-Stars and glory.
After the war, at the dedication of a New York City park honoring the Bernard Baruch
family, key-note speaker Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, USA-Ret., admitted: As a young unknown
major I took the wisest step of my life. I consulted Mr. Baruch. (General Dwight D.
Eisenhower, U.S. Army), cited by A.K. CHESTERTON, op. cit., The New Unhappy Lords.)
"...it is hard to escape the conclusion that Dwight Eisenhower was a war criminal
of epic proportions. His (DEF) [POW camp] policy killed more Germans in peace than were
killed in the European Theatre.......one Allied officer compared the American camps to
Buchenwald........It is known, and will be documented in my upcoming book in newsprint
format, that the Allies had sufficient stockpiles of food and medicine to care for these
German soldiers. This was deliberately and intentionally denied them."
Professor Revilo P. Oliver (February 1992):
The real influx of savages began in the administration of the filthy mongrel called
Eisenhower, noted for his open and vicious hatred of Germans and dissimulated hatred
of other Aryans, and his scrapping of what was left of the American Constitution.
"Canada was thus ready for the next act in her enemies' program, and one is
reminded of the trick used so effectively in the United States when the Republican Party
was bought to install in the White House "Barney" Baruch's tool, a mongrel named
Eisenhower.(5)
(5. Eisenhower's mother was probably a quadroon. His features were distinctly Negroid
when he was a cadet at West Point, where he was barely able to "squeak through"
to a commission.)
ALSO: "It is noteworthy that
Rabbi Gruenewald ignores the fact that Truman's father was a Sheeny. The pious rabbi may
have been applying the orthodox criterion that the sons of Jews by White women are not
really Jews, or he may have thought it tactless to mention that Americans, with their
simplistic notions of heredity, thought Truman half-Jewish but were evidently not alarmed.
A little later, he likewise makes no mention of the Jews' share of Franklin
Roosevelt" (REVILO OLIVER) http://www.resist.com/Articles/rpo/1987_Poor_Old_Ronnie.html
The issue of "Life" I have cited contains other significant photographs: the
father of the disgusting creature named Harry Truman was obviously a Sheeny; the
unfortunate mother seems to be a White woman.)
Following WWII, the part negro Eisenhower reclassified surrendering German forces as
"unarmed enemy forces", thus removing them from the protection of the Geneva
Convention which applied to "prisoners of war". This gave them the latitude to
starve to death over one million German "combatants". Read Bacque's Other
Losses. There are two printings. Seek the Canadian version as the American version has
been tainted by jew sanitization.
Kill the Best Gentiles by James Von Brunn
This new book is available for free download of the first six chapters. This carefully documented treatise exposes the Jews and explains what you must do to protect your White family. Kill the Best Gentiles! Is a must for every concerned parent and a manual for every student of World History. Surf over and check it out at: <http://www.holywesternempire.org/page2.html>
----------------------------------------------------------
>From FAEM.com
http://www.faem.com/maguire/goodike.htm
15 August 2002 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Mr. Maguire
In your article Elite American Political Leadership you mention Eisenhower's nickname
"The Swedish Jew". I am interested to know how he got that nickname. To my
knowledge Eisenhower did not have anything to do with Sweden.
Best Regards -- Mr. J. -- Northern Europa PS! I am an avid FAEM-reader and have been for the last two years. I have read almost everything posted on the site. Dear Mr. J., <b>Eisenhower was nicknamed "The Swedish Jew" as a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point. In Ike's time USMA cadets were required to be 100% white and non-negroid, or as close to that as medical doctors and geneological research could then ascertain. Serious official questions arose about Ike's obvious part non-white genetic heritage. These appeared to be negroid in origin. "Ike" explained this away as being due to a Jewish ancestor from Sweden, hence the nickname "The Swedish Jew". </b> Military Academy cadets and other officer candidates get to know each other extremely well during their schooling, provided it's conducted on an intensive basis as U.S. officer schooling formerly was. Everyone is at close quarters running 24/7. There's no place to hide character traits in those conditions. Cadet nicknames are usually extremely descriptive. And when they're keyed to obvious non-white themes it's a warning signal to look deeper. Here's another example. The U.S. Pacific Fleet commander who allowed himself to be surprised at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, was nicknamed "Mustapha" as a midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. Other "Mustaphas" in Egypt and Syria allowed this to happen to themselves in 1967. The academy and officer training schools (used?) to take official advantage of that close quarters peer knowledge through an anonymous peer rating mechanism. I knew this as "Top Five/Bottom Five" and it meant what it said. Officer candidates rated their platoon fellows on leadership in rank order from Top One to Bottom x. People who accumulated too many "Bottom Five" rankings were automatically scheduled for periodic official leadership review boards for enquiry into whether they should be dismissed without commission. The presumption of such boards used to be such individuals should be dismissed unless they could prove they were worthy of commission. Very, very few survived such review boards. Judeo-Marxist Academics like the military scribbler Weigley and the Jew military 'sociologist' Moscowitz are generally extremely hostile to processes like peer rating and also to troop election of officers at regimental level and below. The admixture of females has added feminist hostility to the opposition to such processes. The long-term result is a corps of military leaders who possess less and less confidence where it really counts. That's among their soldiers. This has gone so far that the average U.S. ground combat unit is unusable for its designed purpose. After long military experience and study the wisdom of both peer ratings and also electing regimental officers in militia and citizen-soldier units seems more and more profound to me. I think the only safeguard needed is a veto power for general officers to remove obvious misfits. You can conduct all the bureaucratic schooling processes you want. But if an officer does not possess the confidence of his troops they will not follow him in combat, obey his orders or stay the course in difficult times. Consequently years of academic training simply go to waste. Electing first and schooling second is probably the best way. P.S. The leadership qualities required from military leaders and from political leaders are not identical. Some individuals combine these two attribute sets. Hitler did not combine these qualities, at least at the lower infantry unit level. This is proven by the fact he entered the Bavarian Army as a private and emerged after four years of war as a corporal. Despite this many fellow war veterans from his former battalion willingly followed him as a political leader, including his former battalion sergeant-major and some officers. Nineteenth Century America managed to select many men for high office who did combine both leadership sets in fairly large numbers. This more than anything explains the rapid conquest of the continent. It was not 'luck'. The old American Republic (long since vanished) actually conformed very closely in practice to the ideals of the old Roman Republic in both military process and results. The Roman Republic constitutionally required that political leaders prove themselves as leaders in war. This was an ideal for early Americans but not a definite legal requirement. Had the Founding Fathers mandated this in the Constitution our history would have turned out very differently. Certainly Canada, Mexico and Cuba would not exist as independent states. Whether this would have prevented subsequent miscegenation or the Civil War is another question. And results (output) are the real measure of military efficiency (or any other efficiency). The military stature and efficiency of a state is not measured by the numbers of troops raised or the percentage of the budget applied to 'military' appropriations; i.e. inputs. The Neo-con pseudo-patriots of the Judeo-Republican Party (non-veterans to a womandman) do think in these Communist terms of inputs. If this measurement were valid then Italy would be one of the military success stories of the 20th Century rather than one of the premier failures. When judged by this standard of results 19th Century America was a resounding success as a military state. Twentieth Century America was a military failure to the point that political loss of territory is now occuring in the Southwest. P.P.S. Note to the former student of Russell F. Weigley who wrote in to defend him. In my 1984 edition of Weigley's "History of the United States Army" he devotes about 40 pages to the War of 1812. He dedicates nearly all of this to harping on the relatively small Congressional size authorization and even lower actual personnel fill (about 20,000) of the "Regular Army". In this section Weigley glosses over the militia contribution in the sentence "this number was exclusive of those men from the volunteer and common militias who served for short periods against British raids and invasions in their own districts and who may have numbered in the hundreds of thousands." Then Weigley reverts back to beating to death obscurities like poor Regular Army horse recruitment and rotten contractor commissary stores. The obscure "Battle of Lundy's Lane" (actually a minor skirmish around Niagara) receives an extensive autopsy. The Battles of Put-in Bay, New Orleans and General Harrison's campaign to reconquer the Northwest are ignored. These large-scale decisive events were commanded by regular officers leading Weigley's ignored militia. And New Orleans was decisive despite being fought after 'peace' was signed. Anyone who thinks the extermination of Britain's best veteran regiments at the hands of frontier militia didn't exercise a subsequent deterrent effect on British decision-making doesn't understand how governments arrive at war and peace decisions. The British decision to negotiate over "Fifty-four Forty or Fight!" in the 1840s was undoubtedly influenced by that memory. If Weigley had ever marched even once 20 miles with a 100 pound pack in 100 degree heat he would have understood something. Even 100,000 perfectly trained regulars alone would have resulted in American defeat. In the early 19th Century transport proceeded by foot, by horse or by sea. Since the British had overall naval superiority moving troops by sea convoy was not possible. This left marching on land. The factors of force/space/time applied to North America dictated that the early Republic had to rely on 'militia'. This was especially true when fighting an enemy possessing command of the sea and the choice of where and when to strike with large amphibious raiding parties. There was no possibility of a timely counter-concentration of a central reserve at the tactical level, especially on defense. This comes back to Nathan Bedford Forrest's "he who gets theah fustest with mostest." Overall numbers are irrelevant in such conditions unless you create a 'nation in arms' as was done by the Militia Act of 1792. Like I said, Weigley's book is worthless garbage that should be collected up and pulped -----Original Message----- From: New Order <neworder@execpc.com> To: bikpatel@aol.com Sent: Sun, 8 Jan 2006 14:33:02 -0600 Subject: Re: Eisenhower had Jewish blood
We are not impressed. The evidence you have presented
would not make a very good case in eugenics court.
College high-jinks remarks are not at all convincing.
You must have something considerably more substantial.
Also, having a Jew find a shabbos goy does not make such
a prot�g� a Jew. Remember Lord Beaconfield's Coningsby?
One need not be a Jew to be a swine (if we may be allowed
to disparage swine in this disrespectful manner).
Sincerely,
DJ
----- Original Message -----
From: bikpatel@aol.com
Sent: Friday, January 06, 2006 2:01 PM
Subject: Eisenhower had Jewish blood
http://www.rense.com/general19/gmk.htm One Million German POWs Killed After WWII By US & France Environment News Service 1-25-2 Excerpt from - OTHER LOSSES By James Bacque Stoddart Publishing Toronto, Canada ISBN 0-7737-2269-6 June, 1945 US POW camp in Germany "Starting in April 1945, the United States Army and the French Army casually annihilated one million [German] men, most of them in American camps . . . Eisenhower's hatred, passed through the lens of a compliant military bureaucracy, produced the horror of death camps unequalled by anything in American history . . . an enormous war crime." --Col. Ernest F. Fisher, PhD Lt. 101 st Airborne Division, Senior Historian, United States Army Comment From Stephen R. 1-29-2 I heard this kind of story repeatedly in the late 1940's. Some were much worse as to numbers involved. I was super patriotic, and told a kid his relative was a liar. One Sunday, he came to my house and got me, and I heard a drunken discourse from his mothers' scarey boyfriend who had been a GI guard. He became hysterical talking about burying 100's per day. I have no doubt this was true. He was with some kind of roving death squad. They arrived at the German POW camps late in 1945, took selected prisoners from shelters to open fields in mid-Winter. And watched them in shifts until they were dead. From: dkuehne@erols.com Subject: Eisenhower's Holocaust: I DON'T like IKE! From: "Bob Jones" <dragonslayer@lvcm.com> http://www.nidlink.com/~aryanvic/ikekike.html IKE, THE KIKE! Eisenhower's Holocaust! "God, I hate the Germans..." --Dwight David Eisenhower in a letter to his wife in September, 1944. First, I want you to picture something in your mind. You are a German soldier who survived through the battles of World II. You were not really politically involved, and your parents were also indifferent to politics, but suddenly your education was interrupted and you were drafted into the German army and told where to fight. Now, in the Spring of 1945, you see that your country has been demolished by the Allies, your cities lie in ruins, and half of your family has been killed or is missing. Now, your unit is being surrounded, and it is finally time to surrender. The fact is, there is no other choice. It has been a long, cold winter. The German army rations have not been all that good, but you managed to survive. Spring came late that year, with weeks of cold rainy weather in demolished Europe. Your boots are tattered, your uniform is falling apart, and the stress of surrender and the confusion that lies ahead for you has your guts being torn out. Now, it is over, you must surrender or be shot. This is war and the real world. You are taken as a German Prisoner of War into American hands. The Americans had 200 such Prisoner of War camps scattered across Germany. You are marched to a compound surrounded with barbed wire fences as far as the eye can see. Thousands upon thousands of your fellow German soldiers are already in this make-shift corral. You see no evidence of a latrine and after three hours of marching through the mud of the spring rain, the comfort of a latrine is upper-most in your mind. You are driven through the heavily guarded gate and find yourself free to move about, and you begin the futile search for the latrine. Finally, you ask for directions, and are informed that no such luxury exists. No more time. You find a place and squat. First you were exhausted, then hungry, then fearful, and now--dirty. Hundreds more German prisoners are behind you, pushing you on, jamming you together and every one of them searching for the latrine as soon as they could do so. Now, late in the day, there is no space to even squat, much less sit down to rest your weary legs. None of the prisoners, you quickly learn, have had any food that day, in fact there was no food while in the American hands that any surviving prisoner can testify to. No one has eaten any food for weeks, and they are slowly starving and dying. But, they can't do this to us! There are the Geneva Convention rules for the treatment of Prisoners of War. There must be some mistake! Hope continues through the night, with no shelter from the cold, biting rain. Your uniform is sopping wet, and formerly brave soldiers are weeping all around you, as buddy after buddy dies from the lack of food, water, sleep and shelter from the weather. After weeks of this, your own hope bleeds off into dispair, and finally you actually begin to envy those who, having surrendered first manhood and then dignity, now also surrender life itself. More hopeless weeks go by. Finally, the last thing you remember is falling, unable to get up, and lying face down in the mud mixed with the excrement of those who have gone before. Your body will be picked up long after it is cold, and taken to a special tent where your clothing is stripped off. So that you will be quickly forgotten, and never again identified, your dog-tag is snipped in half and your body along with those of your fellow soldiers are covered with chemicals for rapid decomposition and buried. You were not one of the exceptions, for more than one million, seven hundred thousand German Prisoners of War died from a deliberate policy of extermination by starvation, exposure, and disease -under direct orders of General Dwight David Eisenhower. One month before the end of World War 11, General Eisenhower issued special orders concerning the treatment of German Prisoners and specific in the language of those orders was this statement, "Prison enclosures are to provide no shelter or other comforts." Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose, who was given access to the Eisenhower personal letters, states that he proposed to exterminate the entire German General Staff, thousands of people, after the war. Eisenhower, in his personal letters, did not merely hate the Nazi Regime, and the few who imposed its will down from the top, but that he hated the German people as a race. It was his personal intent to destroy as many of them as he could, and one way was to wipe out as many prisoners of war as possible. Of course, that was illegal under International law, so he issued an order on March 10, 1945 and verified by his initials on a cable of that date, that German Prisoners of War be redesignated as "Disarmed Enemy Forces" called in these reports as DEF. He ordered that these Germans did not fall under the Geneva Rules, and were not to be fed or given any water or medical attention. The Swiss Red Cross was not to inspect the camps, for under the DEF classification, they had no such authority or jurisdiction. Months after the war was officially over, Eisenhower's special German DEF camps were still in operation forcing the men into confinement, but denying that they were prisoners. As soon as the war was over, General George Patton simply turned his prisoners loose to fend for themselves and find their way home as best they could. Eisenhower was furious, and issued a specific order to Patton, to turn these men over to the DEF camps. Knowing Patton as we do from history, we know that these orders were largely ignored, and it may well be that Patton's untimely and curious death may have been a result of what he knew about these wretched Eisenhower DEF camps. The book, OTHER LOSSES, found its way a few months ago into the hands of a Canadian news reporter, Peter Worthington, of the OTTAWA SUN. He did his own research through contacts he had in Canada, and reported in his column on September 12,1989 the following, in part: "...it is hard to escape the conclusion that Dwight Eisenhower was a war criminal of epic proportions. His (DEF) policy killed more Germans in peace than were killed in the European Theatre." "For years we have blamed the 1.7 million missing German POW's on the Russians. Until now, no one dug too deeply ... Witnesses and survivors have been interviewed by the author; one Allied officer compared the American camps to Buchenwald." It is known, and will be documented in my upcoming book in newsprint format, that the Allies had sufficient stockpiles of food and medicine to care for these German soldiers. This was deliberately and intentionally denied them. Many men died of gangrene from frostbite due to deliberate exposure. Local German people who offered these men food, were denied. General Patton's Third Army was the only command in the European Theatre to release significant numbers of Germans. Others, such as Omar Bradley and General J.C.H. Lee, Commander of Com Z, tried, and ordered the release of prisoners within a week of the war's end. However, a SHAEF Order, signed by Eisenhower, countermanded them on May 15th. Does that make you angry? What will it take to get the average apathetic American involved in saving his country from such traitors at the top? Thirty years ago, amid the high popularity of Eisenhower, a book was written setting out the political and moral philosophy; of Dwight David Eisenhower called, THE POLITICIAN, by Robert Welch. This year is the 107th Anniversary of Eisenhower's birth in Denison, Texas on October 14, 1890, the son of Jacob David Eisenhower and his wife Ida. Everyone is all excited about the celebration of this landmark in the history of "this American patriot." Senator Robert Dole, in honor of the Commander of the American Death Camps, proposed that Washington's Dulles Airport be renamed the Eisenhower Airport! The UNITED STATES MINT in Philadelphia, PA is actually issuing a special Eisenhower Centennial Silver Dollar for only $25 each. They will only mint 4 million of these collector's items, and veteran's magazines are promoting these coins under the slogan, "Remember the Man ... Remember the Times.." Pardon me if I regurgitate! There will be some veterans who will not be buying these coins. Two will be Col. James Mason and Col. Charles Beasley who were in the U.S. Army Medical Corps who published a paper on the Eisenhower Death Camps in 1950. They stated in part: "Huddled close together for warmth, behind the barbed wire was a most awesome sight-- nearly 100,000 haggard, apathetic, dirty, gaunt, blank-staring men clad in dirty gray uniforms, and standing ankle deep in mud .... water was a major problem, yet only 200 yards away the River Rhine was running bankfull." Another Veteran, who will not be buying any of the Eisenhower Silver Dollars is Martin Brech of Mahopac, New York, a semi-retired professor of philosophy at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, NY. In 1945, Brech was an 18 year old Private First Class in Company C of the 14th Infantry, assigned as a guard and interpreter at the Eisenhower Death Camp at Andernach, along the Rhine River. He stated for SPOTLIGHT, February 12, 1990: "My protests (regarding treatment of the German DEF'S) were met with hostility or indifference, and when I threw our ample rations to them over the barbed wire. I was threatened, making it clear that it was our deliberate policy not to adequately feed them." "When they caught me throwing C- Rations over the fence, they threatened me with imprisonment. One Captain told me that he would shoot me if he saw me again tossing food to the Germans .... Some of the men were really only boys 13 years of age .... Some of the prisoners were old men drafted by Hitler in his last ditch stand .... I understand that average weight of the prisoners at Andernach was 90 pounds ... I have received threats ... Nevertheless, this ... has liberated me, for I may now be heard when I relate the horrible atrocity I witnessed as a prison guard for one of 'Ike's death camps' along the Rhine." Betty Lou Smith Hanson Note: Remember the photo of Ike's West Point yearbook picture when he was dubbed "IKE, THE TERRIBLE SWEDISH JEW"? By the way, he was next, or nearly so, to the last in his class. This article was first printed in 1990, but we thought it was meaningfull to reprint it now. (Note: During Cadet Eisenhower's time at West Point Academy, Eisenhower was summoned to the office of the headmaster and was asked some pointed questions. At the time, it was routine procedure to test a cadet's blood to insure White racial integrety. Apparently there was a question of Eisenhower's racial lineage and this was brought to Eisenhower's attention by the headmaster. When asked if he was part Oriental, Eisenhower replied in the negative. After some discussion, Eisenhower admitted having some Jewish background. The headmaster then reportedly said, "That's where you get your Oriental blood?". Although he was allowed to remain at the academy, word got around since this was a time in history when non-Whites were not allowed into the academy. Later, in Eisenhower's West Point Military Academy graduating class yearbook, published in 1915, Eisenhower is identified as a "terrible Swedish Jew." Wherever Eisenhower went during his military career, Eisenhower's Jewish background and secondary manifesting behavior was a concern to his fellow officers. During World War II when Col. Eisenhower was working for Gen. Douglas McArthur in the South Pacific, McArthur protested to his superiors in Washington (DC) that Eisenhower was incompetent and that he did not want Eisenhower on his staff. In 1943, Washington not only transferred Col. Eisenhower to Europe but promoted him over more than 30 more experienced senior officers to five star general and placed him in charge of all the US forces in Europe. Thus it comes as no surprise that General George Patton, a real Aryan warrior, hated Eisenhower.) WAR CRIMES - U.S.A. (The Final Truth About WW II) A Book Review on OTHER LOSSES by Lt. Col. Gordon "Jack" Mohr, AUS Ret. ". . . there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed: and hid that shall not be made known." - Matthew 10:26 The Final Truth About World War II Is America finally about to be thrown a scrap or two of historical truth? If so, have the Soviet relations of recent months, which has caused its leaders to admit to the murder of millions of their own people, allowed a few rays of truth to filter down and penetrate the Iron Curtain which has been erected over World War II, and which has kept vital facts from our people? Something out of the ordinary seems to be going on within America's ruling circles. Are we finally to be told the truth about World War II? Recently a book was written by an eminent Canadian author, James Bacque, of Toronto. It is titled OTHER LOSSES and deserves the widest possible distribution in the United States, especially among our veterans who fought World War II. Although Mr. Bacque's book does not picture America and her allies in a favorable light, it has had an amazing reception in Canada, although the people of the United States, for the most part have been kept in the dark about one of the most heinous episodes of World War II, which revolves around the Supreme Commander of the Allies in Europe, Gen. Dwight David Eisenhower, who was known during his days at West Point as that "terrible Swedish Jew." I have my own opinions of Dwight David Eisenhower, opinions formed during the early days of World War II, from information I received from officers who knew "Ike" before he became Supreme Commander. During the days before World War II, "Ike," as he was affectionately called, was noted as a ''ladies man, and the best damned bridge player on the Post." (Quotation not mine.) When anyone would mention Ike as a troop commander, it was met with hilarious, profane skepticism. Then too, my opinions of Ike were formed by the attitude of my Commanding General, Gen. George Patton, who looked on Eisenhower as a "whimp," not worthy of his rank. As many of you will remember, Ike was promoted to Supreme Commander in Europe. From Lieutenant Colonel, in early 1941, Eisenhower was promoted to full Colonel in March 1941, to Brigadier General (temporary) in September. In February 1942, after he became a favorite of Gen. George Marshall during the Louisiana Maneuvers, he was appointed Assistant Chief of the War Plans Division. About this time, Ike became acquainted with the daughter of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and she introduced her boy friend to "pappa." Evidently F.D.R. recognized in this young officer, a man who would agree with his plans and who would do anything to get promoted. This began a rapid spiral of promotions which by-passed many officers who outranked him and who were much more qualified for the posts he occupied. He became Chief of Operations Division, War Department General Staff (March, 1942), to Commanding General of the European Theater of Operations in June 1942, to Allied Commander in Chief, for the invasion of North Africa (November, 1942), Sicily, (May 1943), Italy (September, 1943) and finally to his ultimate designation by President F.D.R. as Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force for the invasion of Europe. It was Eisenhower's advise to F.D.R. and Churchill, which caused the war to drag on for two extra years, resulting in millions of deaths on both sides, and hundreds of billions of dollars of profit for Eisenhower's racial brethren, the International bankers, who financed both sides. In early 1943, General Patton and the British Commander, Gen. Montgomery, presented a plan to Churchill and F.D.R. which called for the invasion of Europe through the "soft underbelly of Europe." This would have liberated all the eastern European countries from Communist control and would have ended the war in 1943. But Eisenhower's hatred of the Germans, which was openly shown many times during those terrible days of the war, demanded that as many Germans as possible be made to suffer for their part in the war. It might be well to state here, that as early as 1902, International Jewry had a plan for the destruction of Christianity in Europe. This called for the destruction, first of Czarist Russia, which took place in 1917, and then for the destruction of Germany. A war chest of some $2-billion was set aside for this purpose, long before a man named Adolf Hitler came on the scene. When Churchill and F.D.R. listened to the advice of Stalin, instead of their two best military leaders, it gave Stalin two years to establish control over all of Eastern Europe, which is now known as the Warsaw Pact Nations. We can see the further treason in Eisenhower's actions, when in 1945, as Patton's armored forces swept into Germany, they were held back from entering Berlin, and were even ordered to withdraw to the Western borders of Germany, until Soviet troops could enter Germany. Any military commander "worth their salt," knows that Patton could have ended the war on the Eastern border of Germany and that country would have never been divided. Patton by this time was beginning to realize that a conspiracy existed among the top war leaders, which were keeping him from the victory he so richly deserved. It was a traumatic lesson which was to be later repeated with General Douglas MacArthur in Korea, when he was not allowed to attack enemy positions north of the Yalu River. The One Worlder's in Washington, D.C., and London had other plans and aided Stalin in his rape of Eastern Europe and Germany. It was the "terrible Swedish Jew" Eisenhower, whose open hatred of everything German, caused him to promote Operation Keelhaul, at the end of the war, where thousands of anti-Communist fighters, who had surrendered to American forces, were forced at bayonet point, back to the tender mercies of the Communists. Thousands of them were murdered outright, or disappeared into the Gulags of Russia. Eisenhower returned to the States, made a hero by the controlled prostitute press of America, and his popularity from a populace he had betrayed, was such that he became the 34th President of the United States in 1953. Eisenhower was quoted at lie war's end as saying: ''I hate war as only a soldier who has lived through it can only as one who has seen it's brutality, it's futility, it's Stupidity" But he did not hate it as much as he hated Germans, and he took a terrible Jewish revenge on over a million surrendered German soldiers and civilians when the war ended. Praised by the media and the ''kept'' historians, this man was directly responsible for one of the most reprehensible acts in the history of civilized warfare. One which should put him in the same class with Atilla the Hun and other barbarians. The peace which was inflicted on a completely defeated Germany in 1945, was called the Morgenthau Plan. It was promoted by Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, a Jew, who later stated that most of the ideas for this plan had come from Eisenhower. Now, after a tremendous research of over twenty years, the truth about this Jew Commander of America's forces, who became the 34th President of the United States, can be known. In 1945, during the post-World War II period, American foreign policy was largely in the hands of a small group of very powerful Zionists based in Washington, D.C. This secret, invisible government, which has controlled America for over fifty years, was headed then by Sen. Herbert Lehman; Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, and Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau. They drew up the "blueprint" for a plan, which the enthusiastic Eisenhower carried out in Europe, which was the most monstrous policy of hate and vengeance known in the annals of civilized history. This policy is still in operation today, fifty years later, where media pundits, twisting, exaggerating, and even manufacturing historical claims, have hounded, harassed, and had arrested 70 and 80-year old European war veterans for alleged ''war crimes,'' which were supposed to have taken place over fifty years ago. The following article, entitled THE EISENHOWER DEATH CAMPS, was taken from the January 1990 issue of INSTAURATION, a scholarly American monthly. Every American veteran who served in World War II should know these facts. They are entitled to know how we were lied to and inveigled into a war for the benefits of the Internationalists. Every American Legion and Veteran's of foreign War Post in this country, should have this article read to its them bets, for you see, the same treason was carried out in Korea and then later in Vietnam. It is we, the veteran's of America, who have the right to know the truth, about the traitors who were responsible for the murder of our buddies, and the crippling of hundreds of thousands more, and who are even now laying the groundwork to get your sons and daughters involved in World War Ill. The National Archives in Washington, (D.C.) contains an official document called the Weekly Prisoner of War and Disarmed Enemy Forces Report for the week ending Sept. 8, 1945. It shows that 1,056,482 German prisoners were then being held by the U.S. Army in the European theater, of whom 692,895 were still classified as POWs (Prisoners of War) and the other 363,587 as DEFs (Disarmed Enemy Forces.) This latter designation was illegal under international law and completely contrary to the Geneva Convention, to which both the United States and Germany were signatories. A German soldier designated DEF had no right to any food, shelter, or water in fact, to anything. Quite often he did not receive even the basic necessities of life and died within days. In the first week of September 1945, 13,051 of the 363,587 Germans died and were listed cryptically as "other losses." This was the equivalent of a death rate of 3.6% per week. At such a rate, all the remaining 350,536 DEFs would have been dead within 28 weeks before the end of the approaching winter. The civilian death rate immediately outside the American camps in Germany was about 2% per year, or nearly 100 times lower, despite the greater proportion of older people. Since adequate supplies were readily available to the American troops at all times, this killing seems to have been deliberate. As for the 692,895 German soldiers still falsely listed as POWs, the last of them had actually been transferred from POW to DEF status a month earlier on August 4, by order of General Eisenhower. Their death rate quickly quadrupled within weeks, from .2% to .8% per week. Assuming the latter rate for the week ending September 8, about 5,543 of the so-called POWs listed in the report as being alive and in American hands had died that week - all would have died within just over two years.. (The reason this death rate was lower than 3.6% weekly for the longer-term DEFs was simply that the barbaric treatment of the DEFs was cumulative, and that some of the American troops refused to go along with this barbaric treatment.) I recall the winter of 1945, when I was on occupation duty in Japan. A similar order came from our local U.S. military commander who was known for his hatred of all Japanese. It did not come from MacArthur's headquarters in Tokyo. We were not allowed to give food of any kind to Japanese civilians, although many of them were on the verge of starvation. I was commanding a detachment of 28 men, which were guarding a Japanese Quarter Master dump at the little town of Niski'ya'hama, about eighty miles south of Osaka. Food in this storehouse was literally spoiling, yet we were not allowed to share it with the Japanese people. For Christmas rations that year, my detachment received eight sheep carcasses and 28 turkeys, with no refrigeration for storage. Rather than see this food go to waste, I shared it with the starving population, and when word leaked out, I came very close to being court marshaled. It was only the intervention of a high ranking officer from MacArthur's Headquarters which saved me. The same thing happened over and over again in Germany, and American officers and servicemen were court marshaled, on Eisenhower's orders, for sharing their rations with the starving Germans. If you were a young man, with several small children at home, you know how these enemy children played on the minds of decent Americans who knew what their government was doing was wrong. Enemy children have never been enemies, to big hearted Americans. But with a man of unbounded hatred for the Germans, his order of August 4th, made it impossible for there to be such a thing as a bona fide German POW in American hands on European soil. Instead, there were vast concentrations of men (including some women and children) starving to death in open, muddy, disease-ridden fields. In November 1945, Eisenhower returned to Washington. A month later, a slight relaxation went into effect. Men of conscience such as General George Patton, had no qualms about killing German soldiers in combat, but he drew a line at the deliberate policy of murder which was advocated by Eisenhower. I firmly believe this was one of the reasons he met his untimely death The truth which is now coming out of old records, show that "war crimes" was by no means a German monopoly, and the "good war," the Jewish media and historians called it in the United States, was as evil as any conflict in world history. Bacque's careful calculations forced hty o conclude: Eisenhower had deplored the German's useless defense of the Reich in the last months of the war because of the waste of life. At least ten times as many Germans - undoubtedly 800,000, almost certainly 900,000, and quite possibly a million died in the French and American camps as were killed in all the combat on the Western front in northwest Europe from America's entry into the war in December 1941, through April 1945." Bacque was ably assisted in his research by Col. Ernest F. Fisher, a senior historian for the U.S. Army, as well as by other highly placed members of the American military. One of them, Co!. Philip S. Lauben, Chief of the German Affairs branch of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force), stated that, in late 1945, "the Vosges (northeast France) was just one big death camp (for Germans)." In spite of everything which has been written about Eisenhower which makes him out to be a hero, there seems little question that Dwight Eisenhower meets all the qualifications of a certified war criminal, even if Bacque's figures are off a bit. (If Germany had been the winner, there is little doubt he would have been tried and found guilty of the most heinous crimes against mankind.) Many veterans will get upset with this appraisal of a man they looked on as a "bona fide" American hero. But the proof for these accusations can be found in what happened to those Germans who were fortunate enough to surrender to the British and the Canadians some two million of them. The evidence shows that "almost all continued in fair health and many were quickly released and sent home or transferred to the French, to help in the post-war work of reconstruction. Bacque specifically commends General Patton for behavior towards his POWs it a civilized manner. His Third Army freed vast numbers of German captives during May 1945, to the dismay, no doubt, of the Zionists who controlled Washington Both General Omar Bradley and J. C. H. Lee, Communications Zone (ComZ) Europe, ordered the release of prisoners within a week of the war's end. This SHAEF order was countermanded by Eisenhower on May IS, 1945. While German soldiers from the British and Canadian zones were quickly regaining manr strength and were helping rebuild Europe, Germans taken by the Americans were dying by the hundreds of thousands - emaciated figures in diarrhea smeared clothing, huddling pitifully in watery holes with perhaps a scrap of cardboard over their heads and a rotten potato for supper. At times many of them were reduced to drinking urine and eating grass. Did all this happen because of one supremely unprincipled and influential man named Eisenhower? Or was Ike in turn influenced by a small circle around him or by his superiors in Washington? Historians will be probing this question for decades to come. Here are the principle dates by which this infamy will live: 1944: Eisenhower told the British ambassador to Washington that the 3,500 officers of the German General staff should be ''exterminated.'' He also favored the liquidation of perhaps 100,000 prominent Germans. Soon after, he wrote to his wife, Mamie: "God, I hate Germans! Why? Because the German is a beast!" Eisenhower said he was ashamed to bear a German name. August 1944: The North American wheat surplus was create greater than at any time in history, nearly one billion bushels. The U.S. corn surplus and potato crop also reached a new high. March 10, 1944: A message sent from Eisenhower to the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) of Britain and the U.S. recommended the creation of an entirely new class of prisoners, Disarmed Enemy Forces or DEFs. At a press conference in Paris, this same day, Ike said: "If the Germans were reasoning like normal beings, they would realize the whole history of the United States and Great Britain is to be generous towards a defeated enemy. We observe all the laws of the Geneva Convention.'' March 19, 1945: Eisenhower's special assistant, General Everett Hughes, visited the American supply depots at Naples and Marseille. In both places, he writes, there are ''more stocks than we can ever use. (They) stretch as far as eye can see.'' Spring 1945: The International Red Cross had over 100,000 tons of food stockpiled in Switzerland. At one point, it sent two trainloads into the American Zone of Germany, but the food was sent back. The Morgenthau Plan for a ''Carthaginian Peace'' in Germany, to use the words of Military Governor Lucius Clay, is implemented through the directive JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) 1067, which specifies to Eisenhower the policy he must adopt towards every institution in Germany. The directive is largely the work of three of Henry Morgenthau's underlings in the Treasury Department Harry Dexter White, Frank Coe, and Harry Glasser. White and Glasser were both Jews and all three were Communist ''fellow travelers.'' April 11, 1945: On the eve of his death, FDR told Morgenthau in Warm Springs, GA: "Henry, I am with you l00%" When Truman took over, he continued Morgenthau's "Carthaginian Policy" towards conquered Germany. April 17, 1945: The Americans opened their enormous Rheinberg Camp, six miles in circumference, with no food or shelter whatsoever. As in the other big "Rhine meadow" camps, opened in mid-April, there was initially no latrines and no water. In some camps, the men were so crowded they could not lie down. Meanwhile, at Camp Kripp, near Remagen, the half-American Charles von Luttichau determines that his German comrades are receiving about 5% as much food as their captors." Complaining to the camp commander, HE SAID: ''Forget the Geneva Convention. You don't have any rights." Late April 1945: Heinz Janssen, a survivor of the Rheinberg camp, described conditions as they were at the time. "Amputees slithered like amphibians through the mud , soaking and freezing. Naked to the skies day after day and night after flight, they lay desperate in the sand of Rheinberg or sleep exhaustedly into eternity ill their collapsing holes.'' April 26, 1945: The Combined Chiefs of Staff sent a message to Eisenhower, urging him not to take any more German prisoners after VE Day. He ignored it. The CCS approved of Ike's proposed DEF status, but only for certain types of German prisoners. The British refused to go against the Geneva Convention. The CCS orders the illegal DEF status to be kept strictly secret. By this date, Eisenhower's Quartermaster General of ASHAEF, Gen. Robert Littlejohn, has already twice reduced the rations to German prisoners. A message to Gen. George C. Marshall, signed by Ike, mandated: ''No shelter'' for German prisoners, despite an unusually cold and wet March and April. May 4, 1945: The first German POWs were transfer-red to DEF status. Mail to and from all German prisoners was banned for more than a year. May 8, 1945: Germany surrendered unconditionally. The U.S. State Department wasted no time dismissing Switzerland as the official Protecting Power for German prisoners, contravening the Geneva Convention. State also informed the International Red Cross that, with no Protecting Power to report to, there is no point in sending delegates to the camps. From this day forward, prisoners held by the U.S. Army had no access to any impartial observer. The British and Canadians also removed the Swiss protectors, but continued treating their POWs decently. May, 1945: The American Red Cross reported that more than 98% of Americans captured by the Germans will be coming home safely, thanks in part to the food parcels sent to them during the war, which were promptly delivered by the Germans. May 15, 1945: Eisenhower and Churchill talked about further reducing the rations for the German POWs. Churchill was informed that the POWs have been getting 2,000 calories per day (compared to 4,000 for American troops) and that 2,150 was regarded as an absolute minimum required for sedentary adults living under shelter. Eisenhower failed to tell Churchill that the U.S. Army was not even feeding many DEFs, and that they were feeding others, much less than 2,000 calories per day. Mid-May 1945: The Bingen camp, near Bad Kreuznach in the Rhineland, was now holding between 200,000 and 400,000 German POWs, with no shelter, food, water, or medicine. The death rate for prisoners in these U.S. camps were now about 30% per year, according to a U.S. medical survey. June 2, 1945: The European Theater Provost Marshal issued two reports. One, the last in a series of daily reports, logged 2,870,400 POWs on hand. The other, the first report in a weekly series, dated the same day, logged only 1,836,000. At one point in mid-June, the prisoner strength on the ration list is given as 1,421,559, despite the evidence of Gen. J.C.H. Lee and others that there were about 4 million. This bizarre bookkeeping persisted throughout 1945 in all branches of the occupying army. The apparent purpose was to obscure the death toll by means of an indecipherable mass of conflicting Statistics. (One of Bacque's greatest coups has been to decipher them.) Mid - June, 1945: British "Tommies" took over the huge Rheinberg camp from the Americans, saving many thousands of German lives. The final act of the ''Yanks" before the British took charge, was to bulldoze one section flat while the men were still living in their holes in the ground. Meanwhile, a team of doctors from the U.S. Army Medical Corps completed a survey of some of the smaller Rhineland camps, holding some 80,000 POWs (not DEFs). They found a death rate 80 times higher than anything they have known in their professional career. July, 1945: Eisenhower becomes military governor of the U.S. Zone in Germany. He continued to turn back all relief teams from Switzerland, the U.S. and elsewhere. July 10, 1945: A French Army unit under Gen. Rousseau, took over the Dietersheim camp (near Mainz) from the Americans. He found 32,000 men and women of all ages in a moribund (dying) State. Another French officer Capt .Julien, was taking command 17 days later and found a vast mire ''peopled with living skeletons, male and female, huddling under scraps of wet card board ." Horrified, Julien wrote: 'This is just like the photographs of Buchenwald and Dachau. July 20, 1945: Gen. Littlejohn received a memo stating, "These men, German POWs are authorized a maximum of 1,150 calories for the non-workers and 1,850 for workers.'' (Remember, it takes 2,000 calories of keep a sedentary adult alive. July 26, 1945: The International Red Cross proposed restoring mail service to German POWs. Fearing that the reality of the death camps might come to light, the U. S. War Department rejected the idea. August 4, 1945: Eisenhower ordered that all remaining German POWs be stripper of their rights, thus reducing them to DEF status. August 27, 1945: In a long memorandum, Gen. Littlejohn informed Eisenhower that 1,550,000 Germans who supposedly were getting U.S. ARMY RATIONS, WERE RECEIVING NOTHING. Ike turned a deaf ear to his report and the death rate continued to climb. August 30, 1945: Max Huber, head of the International Red Cross, wrote a stinging letter to the U.S. State Department about American interference in efforts to save starving Germans. Some months later, an evasive response, signed ''Eisenhower,'' arrived in Washington, falsely claiming that giving Red Cross food to enemy personnel was forbidden. Thousands of train cars loaded with decaying food were sent back to Geneva arid to sources in Paris and Brussels. Huber apologized for tying up the French rail system because of the food which was being returned by the Americans. By this time, more than 2-million German men had been discharged into American custody, including thousands of priests, ministers, doctors, and professors. Not one single camp commander or guard was questioned by the Allied press corps and the controlled media of the U.S. concerning conditions in these hell holes. It might be well, to stop right here and ask this question: ''Is anyone who reads this horrifying account, so naive as to believe that the American people would have put up with these barbaric actions by its chief military men if they had known about it? Do you think that the politicians who were in the forefront of those who kept these facts from Americans would have lasted very long in office, if the truth had been known? Do you think that millions of Americans would show such concern for the Holocaust of the Jews, if they knew that it was Jewish hatred for their fellow kinsmen, that were killing over a million Germans? I sincerely doubt it! That's why these facts have been kept from the American people for almost fifty years. Late Summer, 1945: Jean-Pierre Pradervand, head of the International Red Cross delegations in France, told Henry W. Dunning, an American Red Cross official, that conditions in the French camps are worse, in many instances, than anything seen in the former Nazi camps. Pradervand showed Dunning pictures of the living skeletons. Dunning explained all this to the American Red Cross in Washington, which informed key government officials. Nevertheless, the cover-up continued. Pradervand also informed Charles De Gaulle that one-third of the prisoners handed over to France by the Americans will die soon without a radical change in treatment. De Gaulle showed no interest and the prisoners continued to die. September 27, 1945: Pradervand's pictures of German living skeletons were shown to Eisenhower in his office. September 30, 1945 - October 1: The French newspaper, Le Monde, ran a story which began: "As one speaks today of Dachau, in ten years people throughout the world will speak about camps such as Saint Paul d'Egiaux.'' October 11,13, 14, 15, 20: The New York Times ran a cover-up report of the death camps by star newsman Drew Middleton. Interviewed by Bacque in 1988, Middleton admitted that he never actually visited any of the 50 U.S. camps located within 40 miles of his Frankfurt desk, but was only 'driven by,' as he was being debriefed by the military." December 1945: Eisenhower returned to the States and the U.S. Army allowed the first relief shipment to enter the American sector. 1947 - 1950's: Nearly all the surviving records of the Rhineland death camps were destroyed. The West German government concluded that 1.7-million German soldiers were alive at the wars' end, and who were known to have been in fair health, and disappeared. The Western Allies pinned virtually all the blame on the Soviets. 1950: The first German edition of ALLHERERTE KRIEGSVERBRECHEN is published. Never translated into English, the book gives eye-witness descriptions of the conditions which prevailed in the American camps. 1960s - 1972: The West German Foreign Office, under Willy Brandt subsidized books denying the atrocities in American POW camps and the high death rate. 1980: The International Committee of the Red Cross refuses to open its archives to James Bacque and other investigators into Allied atrocities. To this day, the ICRC has remained silent on the subject, despite the visits of Pradervand and other Red Cross delegates to many methhe camps. September 1989: James Bacque's book on the American death camps, "Other Losses," published by Stoddard, a Canadian Publishing House, was released, after being refused by more than 30 American publishers. Saturday night, one of Canada's most respected magazines. simultaneously published a summary of this book as its lead story and within days Canada was buzzing about Gen. Eisenhower's war crimes. Why is it that we have heard little or nothing of this in the United States? As American citizens, many of us who served in the American Armed Forces during World War II, and a great many of us who are of German heritage, should demand of our leaders in Washington, D.C. that the truth about this War be made known. With accurate information of what really happened, instead of Zionist propaganda, just possibly we might be able to avert World War III, which is now being planned by these same One Worlders. It is interesting to note, that it has been proven in recent years, that many of the pictures taken in Germany during WW II, purporting to be Jewish victims of ''racial extermination,'' were actually pictures of German civilians who had died under American war criminals. (Most of the information in this article came from the March 1990, CANADIAN INTELLIGENCE SERVICE. Their mut Wly intelligence newsletter is available from the above address) Gotha http://www.scrapbookpages.com/EasternGermany/Gotha/Gotha06.jpg City Hall & Market Square in Gotha The city of Gotha is mostly known to Americans, if at all, as the first headquarters of the American Army, set up by General Eisenhower in April 1945, and as the site of one of the Prisoner of War camps where captured German soldiers were treated in a barbaric fashion with total disregard to the rules of civilized warfare. Eisenhower mentioned Gotha in his book "Crusade in Europe," as the nearest city to the "horror camp" at Ohrdruf-Nord, the first concentration camp to be discovered by American soldiers in April 1945, but he failed to mention his own notorious POW camp located near Gotha. On March 10, 1945 as World War II was coming to an end, General Eisenhower signed an order creating the status of Disarmed Enemy Forces for the German Prisoners of War who would soon be surrendering to the Americans. This order was a violation of the Geneva Convention because it allowed Eisenhower to disregard the rules for the treatment of Prisoners of War. It allowed him to starve the German POWs, deny them the right to send and receive letters, receive Red Cross packages or packages from Germany civilians. All these rights were enjoyed by the prisoners in the Nazi POW camps and even in the notorious concentration camps. Eisenhower signed this order before he had even seen the horrors of the concentration camps, which so affected him. James Bacque wrote in his book Other Losses: "There were no tents in the Gotha DEF camp, only the usual barbed wire fences round a field soon churned to mud. On the first day, they received a small ration of food, which was then cut in half. In order to get it, they were forced to run a gauntlet. Hunched over, they ran between lines of guards who hit them with sticks as they scurried towards their food. On April 27, they were transferred to the U.S. camp at Heidesheim further west where there was no food at all for days, then very little." On May 8, 1945 the German army surrendered to General Eisenhower, who refused to shake hands with the German General, as is customary. The neutral country of Switzerland was removed as the Protecting Power for German prisoners, which violated the Geneva Convention. General Patton quickly released the prisoners who had surrendered to his Third Army, but General Eisenhower held his POWs until the end of 1946, forcing them to live on starvation rations. Red Cross packages sent to the POW camps were returned. The POW camps had no barracks or tents. The German prisoners were forced to dig holes in the ground for shelter, as the picture below shows. Even though the American army had plenty of tents, the prisoners lived for months in their holes. When it rained, the holes collapsed and the prisoners died. http://www.scrapbookpages.com/EasternGermany/Gotha/POWcamp.jpg German POWs had to dig holes for shelter After 1947 most of the records of the POW camps were destroyed by the U.S. government, according to James Bacque who wrote Other Losses. The Germans determined that 1,700,000 soldiers who were alive at the end of the war and had surrendered to the Allies, never returned home. All of the Allied countries denied responsibility, and the families were never told what had happened to their loved ones. Ironically, Gotha also holds a place in history as the birthplace of the Socialist Worker's Party of Germany in 1875. The very house, called the Haus am Tivoli, where August Bebel and others got together to form this new leftist political party, is at the intersection of Cosmartstrasse, but it is closed to tourists. A plaque was placed outside the house by the Communist East German government, commemorating this as the place where a "glorious moment in the history of the German working class" took place. Karl Marx wrote a scathing paper called "Critique of the Gotha Programme" in which he criticized the new party as a sell-out of the proletariat and the Communist party, which he had popularized in 1848 with his "Communist Manifesto." In 1890, the name of the party was changed to the Social Democratic Party, which is still one of the largest political parties in Germany today. It was the Social Democrats who declared a Republic in Germany on November 9, 1918, forced the Kaiser to abdicate, and then signed the Armistice which ended World War I. The Nazis referred to the Social Democrats as the "November Criminals" and called their actions the "Dolchstoss" (Stab in the Back). The claim that Germany had lost World War I on the battlefield was called "The Big Lie" by Hitler in his book, "Mein Kampf." The harsh peace treaty signed by the Social Democrats at Versailles insured that another war would soon follow. Eisenhower's Starvation Order James Bacque [Allied POW Camp] http://netjunk.com/users/library/camp.jpg Never had so many people been put in prison. The size of the Allied captures was unprecedented in all history. The Soviets took prisoner some 3.5 million Europeans, the Americans about 6.1 million, the British about 2.4 million, the Canadians about 300,000, the French around 200,000. Uncounted millions of Japanese entered American captivity in 1945, plus about 640,000 entering Soviet captivity. [Above: A U.S. Army soldier stands guard over thousands of German POWs at Sinzig-Remagen, spring 1945.] As soon as Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945, the American Military Governor, General Eisenhower, sent out an "urgent courier" throughout the huge area that he commanded, making it a crime punishable by death for German civilians to feed prisoners. It was even a death-penalty crime to gather food together in one place to take it to prisoners ... The order was sent in German to the provincial governments, ordering them to distribute it immediately to local governments. Copies of the orders were discovered recently in several villages near the Rhine ... The message [which Bacque reproduces] reads in part: "... under no circumstances may food supplies be assembled among the local inhabitants in order to deliver them to the prisoners of war. Those who violate this command and nevertheless try to circumvent this blockade to allow something to come to the prisoners place themselves in danger of being shot...." Eisenhower's order was also posted in English, German and Polish on the bulletin board of Military Government Headquarters in Bavaria, signed by the Chief of Staff of the Military Governor of Bavaria. Later it was posted in Polish in Straubing and Regensburg, where there were many Polish guard companies at nearby camps. One US Army officer who read the posted order in May 1945 has written that it was "the intention of Army command regarding the German POW camps in the US Zone from May 1945 through the end of 1947 to exterminate as many POWs as the traffic would bear without international scrutiny." ... The [American] army's policy was to starve [German] prisoners, according to several American soldiers who were there. Martin Brech, retired professor of philosophy at Mercy college in New York, who was a guard at Andernach in 1945, has said that he was told by an officer that "it is our policy that these men not be fed." The 50,000 to 60,000 men in Andernach were starving, living with no shelter in holes in the ground, trying to nourish themselves on grass. When Brech smuggled bread to them through the wire, he was ordered to stop by an officer. Later, Brech sneaked more food to them, was caught, and told by the same officer, "If you do that again, you'll be shot." Brech saw bodies go out of the camp "by the truckload" but he was never told how many there were, where they were buried, or how. ... The prisoner Paul Schmitt was shot in the American camp at Bretzenheim after coming close to the wire to see his wife and young son who were bringing him a basket of food. The French followed suit: Agnes Spira was shot by French guards at Dietersheim in July 1945 for taking food to prisoners. The memorial to her in nearby Buedesheim, written by one of her chidren, reads: "On the 31st of July 1945, my mother was suddenly and unexpectedly torn from me because of her good deed toward the imprisoned soldiers." The entry in the Catholic church register says simply: "A tragic demise, shot in Dietersheim on 31.07.1945. Buried on 03.08.1945." Martin Brech watched in amazement as one officer at Andernach stood on a hillside firing shots towards German women running away from him in the valley below. The prisoner Hans Scharf ... was watching as a German woman with her two children came towards an American guard in the camp at Bad Kreuznach, carrying a wine bottle. She asked the guard to give the bottle to her husband, who was just inside the wire. The guard upended the bottle into his own mouth, and when it was empty, threw it on the ground and killed the prisoner with five shots. Many prisoners and German civilians saw the American guards burn the food brought by civilian women. One former prisoner described it recently: "At first, the women from the nearby town brought food into the camp. The American soldiers took everything away from the women, threw it in a heap and poured gasoline [benzine] over it and burned it." Eisenhower himself ordered that the food be destroyed, according to the writer Karl Vogel, who was the German camp commander appointed by the Americans in Camp 8 at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Although the prisoners were getting only 800 calories per day, the Americans were destroying food outside the camp gate. James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950, pp. 41-45, 94-95. Crimes and Mercies can be purchased from The Institute for Historical Review, PO Box 2739, Newport Beach, CA 92659. $18.95 postpaid (CA sales tax $1.31) http://home.arcor.de/kriegsgefangen/photos/rheinwiese.gif Vae Victis - Blow to the loser After the transport over the Atlantic, many prisoners where locked in "cages". It were extremely bad conditions there. In the book "Other losses" written by James Bacque he claimed, that Eisenhower was primarily responsible for the catastrophe in the cages. Eisenhower let the German soldiers starve despite sufficient reinforcements, just due to his feelings of personal revenge. General Eisenhower was in his own words on a "crusade in Europe". The Canadian Bacque estimates, that about 1 million soldiers died in US custody. The anthology by Bishop and Ambrose tries to refute the thesis of James Bacque. They doubt that there where 1 million casualties. How many men exactly died in the cages, fact is that the SHAEF had with 5 million prisoners a considerable problem at the end of the war. An objective report, of the 11 to 12 million German prisoners of war in 20 custody states, is a publication of the "scientific commission for the documentation of the destiny of the German prisoners of the second World War". With up to 16 employees and important scientists, that commission became 400.000 statements of men returned from captivity, 50.000 reports as well and own interviews, published in 22 volumes at more than 10.000 printed pages. After ten years work, when the study had been finished, the (socialist) Westgerman chancellor Herbert Frahm, better known under his pseudonym "Willy Brand", ordered that this report had to be closed and prohibited publishing. He wanted to avoid a public discussion in Germany or even worst in the foreign countries. In his opinion people could get the impression, that a crosscheck would be opened about the injustice of the Allies against the injustice of the Nazis. He was scared that this could endanger the foreign policy turned toward reconciliation. However, it cannot be that the wrong of one site is discreet and the wrong of the other site get accused again and again. <http://home.arcor.de/kriegsgefangen/photos/rheinwiese.gif> In this air picture of the "Rheinwiesenlager" represents every dot a German soldier sitting on the bare field for month. They graved holes to be protected of the wind at least. Some drowned in their foxhole when it rained strongly because they were too weak to creep out, died by their war wounds, by diarrhea, starved..... A horrible catastrophe. The viable prisoners where obliged to forced labor in France and England for many years. To this the Americans submitted to the French powers approx. 800.000 men. The need of the prisoners was particularly great in France. This doesn't have to be explained by revenge, hate or prejudices but we must consider, that large portions of France were destroyed and the Frenchmen had to suffer under a lack of food also. On 8-21-1945 the ICRC wrote a memorandum, that the life of 200.000 German POW's in French custody where immediately endangered, 2000 would hardly recover, 2000 could take no food and had to be fed artificially and 600.000 men had only inadequate accommodations what dangers their life in the approaching winter. Like on a slave market, farmers chose their workers. Thigh, arms and teeth were examined but the soldiers had not to be naked during that procedure like in Russia. A speedy dismissal was offered to soldiers who voluntarily reported for mine clearing commands in view to their highly dangerous job. But, the explanation was even given in writing, the soldiers who risked their life day for day were sent to the coal mines later. That made the prisoners so brittle that some recruited to the Foreign Legion either and died for France on battle-fields in Alger or Indochina, mutilated their self or tried an escape like 171.029 POW did. http://abbc.com/nj/e2001/history/german_holocaust.htm THE WORST ATROCITY OF WORLD WAR II By CHRISTIAN BORLEIS As soon as World War II ended, the United States began shipping food to the hundreds of millions of people acing starvation as a result of the war. Unprecedented in world history; this massive program fulfilled the highest ideals. Our generosity seemed to have no limit. We fed former enemies Italy and Japan as well as a new enemy, the Soviet Union. Only Germany was left out. It is well known that for the next 50 years the Allies hanged and incarcerated Nazis for their alleged crimes, the murder of 6 million Jews and their alleged criminal conduct of war. The crimes against the Jews seemed to be well documented but were a concoction. The verdict of guilty was a requisite of hanging the political and military leadership and also to justify the ravaging of the vanquished enemy. Far worse than the crimes against the Jews and the pretended general war crimes by the Germans was in fact the National Socialist philosophy, which was intolerable to the international bankers. National Socialism stood against the international capitalism of the West and the communism of the East. Between those superpowers National Socialism emerged, forged by a determined leader to liberate a demoralised country The cruelty imposed on defeated Germany was nothing new to the Germans. They had experienced a hunger blockade after World War I. During those eight months eight hundred thousand people died. The Allies didn’t even allow the German fishing fleet to go to sea. <http://abbc.com/nj/images/muknd.gif> This child looks at you, and to all those who enjoyed the terrible slaughters of Germans as "the only just war of the century"! He doesn't need words - the little face says it all The above foto was taken in Bromberg (West Prussia) on January 22, 1945. It shows a German mother with her little boy. The two were unable to flee Ehrenburg's genocidal Red troops (Morgenthau raged in the west). Ehrenburg's hordes then proceeded to liberate the helpless boy's mother from Hitler. This liberating orgy of rape also "liberated her of her life". For three days and nights the sobbing child clung to his dead mother's hair, until the last strength left his exhausted little body. Heads together, the two, united forever, lay on scorched German earth. The occupying Allied armies carved 25 percent of Germany’s most fertile land (Silesia, Pomerania, East Prussia and Bohemia) and placed it under Russian and Polish control, forcibly expelling at least 8 (and some claim 12) million people into what remained of Germany It has been forgotten that the Allies kept millions of prisoners in forced labour camps. International charitable aid to Germany was banned for another year, then restricted for more than one year. When it was permitted, it came too late for millions of people. The Allies slashed production of oil, tractors, steel and products essential to an industrial nation. They cut fertiliser production by 82 percent They undervalued German exports, depriving Germans of cash needed to buy food. During the next three years following the end of the war Germany’s industrial production fell by 75 percent. The loss of fertile land and the drop in fertiliser supplies caused agricultural production to fall by 65 percent Sixty million people began to starve. The mass expulsions from one part of Germany to another, approved at the Allied victory conference at Potsdam in July and August 1945, were enforced with a maximum of brutality. In the West, the plan to dismantle German industrial capacity began at the headquarters of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower in August of 1944. Eisenhower prescribed a treatment for Germany that would be "good and hard," giving as his reason that "the whole German population is synthetic [sic] paranoid." With 13 percent of Germany’s heavy industry destroyed during the war, an additional 3 percent was dismantled afterward, according to German statistics. But it was the Jewish World Organisation and the Zionist World Congress which saved Germany from this fate of industrial destruction. It was thought that the Germans could be made to pay restitution for the "enormous crime of genocide." In order to commit them to that task they would need to keep the remaining industry intact. The German industrial capacity was restored to aid Israel. <http://abbc.com/nj/images/wende.jpg> Nov. 11, 1944 young German Josef Wende was murdered by the Allied-Armies for wearing a German uniform. The government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer conducted a massive survey about the deaths of German prisoners of war in Allied camps. It was found that some 1.4 million died in captivity. The fall of the Soviet empire in 1989 provided a spectacular test of the truth; the KGB archives were opened for historical scrutiny and the reports from KGB Col. I. Bulanov revealed that 460,000 German POWs had died in Soviet camps alone. In addition, the KGB records show that the Soviets had also imprisoned hundreds of thousands of German civilians, of whom thousands died. Documents from the National Archives in Ottawa, Moscow, Washington and Stanford, Conn., recently revealed that the Allies not only destroyed most major industry but also reduced German food production. A comparison of German censuses of 1946 and 1950 shows the effect of food shortages. The 1950 census showed 5.7 million people fewer than there should have been according to the number of people recorded in the 1946 census, minus officially reported deaths, plus births and "immigrants" (people expelled from the east and returning prisoners) in the period from 1946 to 1950. The total tally of unacknowledged deaths among prisoners, refugees and non-expelled civilians comes to about nine million people between 1945 and 1950, far more than the number who died during the war itself. All of these deaths were surplus to those actually reported. Moreover, those deaths occurred in peacetime while the world media did not bother to report of them. Courtesy of THE DECKERT-DISPATCH, P.O. Box 101117, D-69451 WEINHEIM, GERMANY The Torah-True-Jews proclaim: "[The Zionists] provoked and increased anti-Semitism in Europe which led to the Second World War ... The world-wide boycott against Germany in 1933 and the later all-out declaration of war against Germany, initiated by the Zionist leaders and the World Jewish Congress ... The Role of Zionism in the Holocaust ... The Zionist leaders: 'Spiritually and Physically Responsible'." (www.jewsnotzionists.org) In 'Eisenhower's Death Camps': Part I -- A U.S. Prison Guard's Story Martin Brech In October 1944, at age eighteen, I was drafted into the U.S. army. Largely because of the "Battle of the Bulge," my training was cut short. My furlough was halved, and I was sent overseas immediately. Upon arrival in Le Havre, France, we were quickly loaded into box cars and shipped to the front. When we got there, I was suffering increasingly severe symptoms of mononucleosis, and was sent to a hospital in Belgium. Since mononucleosis was then known as the "kissing disease," I mailed a letter of thanks to my girlfriend. By the time I left the hospital, the outfit I had trained with in Spartanburg, South Carolina was deep inside Germany, so, despite my protests, I was placed in a "repo depot (replacement depot). I lost interest in the units to which I was assigned and don't recall all of them: non-combat units were ridiculed at that time. My separation qualification record states I was mostly with Company C, 14th Infantry Regiment, during my seventeen-month stay in Germany, but I remember being transferred to other outfits also. In late March or early April 1945, I was sent to guard a POW camp near Andernach along the Rhine. I had four years of high school German, so I was able to talk to the prisoners, although this was forbidden. Gradually, however, I was used as an interpreter and asked to ferret out members of the S.S. (I found none.) In Andernach about 50,000 prisoners of all ages were held in an open field surrounded by barbed wire. The women were kept in a separate enclosure I did not see until later. The men I guarded had no shelter and no blankets; many had no coats. They slept in the mud, wet and cold, with inadequate slit trenches for excrement. It was a cold, wet spring and their misery from exposure alone was evident. Even more shocking was to see the prisoners throwing grass and weeds into a tin can containing a thin soup. They told me they did this to help ease their hunger pains. Quickly, they grew emaciated. Dysentery raged, and soon they were sleeping in their own excrement, too weak and crowded to reach the slit trenches. Many were begging for food, sickening and dying before our eyes. We had ample food and supplies, but did nothing to help them, including no medical assistance. Outraged, I protested to my officers and was met with hostility or bland indifference. When pressed, they explained they were under strict orders from "higher up." No officer would dare do this to 50,000 men if he felt that it was "out of line," leaving him open to charges. Realizing my protests were useless, I asked a friend working in the kitchen if he could slip me some extra food for the prisoners. He too said they were under strict orders to severely ration the prisoners' food and that these orders came from "higher up." But he said they had more food than they knew what to do with and would sneak me some. When I threw this food over the barbed wire to the prisoners, I was caught and threatened with imprisonment. I repeated the "offense," and one officer angrily threatened to shoot me. I assumed this was a bluff until I encountered a captain on a hill above the Rhine shooting down at a group of German civilian women with his .45 caliber pistol. When I asked, Why?," he mumbled, "Target practice," and fired until his pistol was empty. I saw the women running for cover, but, at that distance, couldn't tell if any had been hit. This is when I realized I was dealing with cold-blooded killers filled with moralistic hatred. They considered the Germans subhuman and worthy of extermination; another expression of the downward spiral of racism. Articles in the G.I. newspaper, Stars and Stripes, played up the German concentration camps, complete with photos of emaciated bodies; this amplified our self-righteous cruelty and made it easier to imitate behavior we were supposed to oppose. Also, I think, soldiers not exposed to combat were trying to prove how tough they were by taking it out on the prisoners and civilians. These prisoners, I found out, were mostly farmers and workingmen, as simple and ignorant as many of our own troops. As time went on, more of them lapsed into a zombie-like state of listlessness, while others tried to escape in a demented or suicidal fashion, running through open fields in broad daylight towards the Rhine to quench their thirst. They were mowed down.Some prisoners were as eager for cigarettes as for food, saying they took the edge off their hunger. Accordingly, enterprising G.I. "Yankee traders" were acquiring hordes of watches and rings in exchange for handfuls of cigarettes or less. When I began throwing cartons of cigarettes to the prisoners to ruin this trade, I was threatened by rank-and-file G.I.s too. The only bright spot in this gloomy picture came one night when.I was put on the "graveyard shift," from two to four A.M. Actually, there was a graveyard on the uphill side of this enclosure, not many yards away. My superiors had forgotten to give me a flashlight and I hadn't bothered to ask for one, disgusted as I was with the whole situation by that time. It was a fairly bright night and I soon became aware of a prisoner crawling under the wires towards the graveyard. We were supposed to shoot escapees on sight, so I started to get up from the ground to warn him to get back. Suddenly I noticed another prisoner crawling from the graveyard back to the enclosure. They were risking their lives to get to the graveyard for something; I had to investigate. When I entered the gloom of this shrubby, tree-shaded cemetery, I felt completely vulnerable, but somehow curiosity kept me moving. Despite my caution, I tripped over the legs of someone in a prone position. Whipping my rifle around while stumbling and trying to regain composure of mind and body, I soon was relieved I hadn't reflexively fired. The figure sat up. Gradually, I could see the beautiful but terror-stricken face of a woman with a picnic basket nearby. German civilians were not allowed to feed, nor even come near the prisoners, so I quickly assured her I approved of what she was doing, not to be afraid, and that I would leave the graveyard to get out of the way. I did so immediately and sat down, leaning against a tree at the edge of the cemetery to be inconspicuous and not frighten the prisoners. I imagined then, and still do now, what it would be like to meet a beautiful woman with a picnic basket, under those conditions as a prisoner. I have never forgotten her face. Eventually, more prisoners crawled back to the enclosure. I saw they were dragging food to their comrades and could only admire their courage and devotion. On May 8, V.E. Day, I decided to celebrate with some prisoners I was guarding who were baking bread the other prisoners occasionally received. This group had all the bread they could eat, and shared the jovial mood generated by the end of the war. We all thought we were going home soon, a pathetic hope on their part. We were in what was to become the French zone, where I soon would witness the brutality of the French soldiers when we transferred our prisoners to them for their slave labor camps. On this day, however, we were happy. As a gesture of friendliness, I emptied my rifle and stood it in the corner, even allowing them to play with it at theirs! request. This thoroughly "broke the ice," and soon we were singing songs we taught each other or I had learned in high school German ("Du, du liegst mir im Herzen"). Out of gratitude, they baked me a special small loaf of sweet bread, the only possible present they had left to offer. I stuffed it in my "Eisenhower jacket" and snuck it back to my barracks, eating it when I had privacy. I have never tasted more delicious bread, nor felt a deeper sense of communion while eating it. I believe a cosmic sense of Christ (the Oneness of all Being) revealed its normally hidden presence to me on that occasion, influencing my later decision to major in philosophy and religion. Shortly afterwards, some of our weak and sickly prisoners were marched off by French soldiers to their camp. We were riding on a truck behind this column. Temporarily, it slowed down and dropped back, perhaps because the driver was as shocked as I was. Whenever a German prisoner staggered or dropped back, he was hit on the head with a club until he died. The bodies were rolled to the side of the road to be picked up by another truck. For many, this quick death might have been preferable to slow starvation in our "killing fields." When I finally saw the German women in a separate enclosure, I asked why we were holding them prisoner. I was told they were "camp followers," selected as breeding stock for the S.S. to create a super-race. I spoke to some and must say I never met a more spirited or attractive group of women. I certainly didn't think they deserved imprisonment. I was used increasingly as an interpreter, and was able to prevent some particularly unfortunate arrests. One rather amusing incident involved an old farmer who was being dragged away by several M.P.s. I was told he had a "fancy Nazi medal," which they showed me. Fortunately, I had a chart identifying such medals. He'd been awarded it for having five children! Perhaps his wife was somewhat relieved to get him "off her back," but I didn't think one of our death camps was a fair punishment for his contribution to Germany. The M.P.s agreed and released him to continue his "dirty work." Famine began to spread among the German civilians also. It was a common sight to see German women up to their elbows in our garbage cans looking for something edible -- that is, if they weren't chased away. When I interviewed mayors of small towns and villages, I was told their supply of food had been taken away by "displaced persons" (foreigners who had worked in Germany), who packed the food on trucks and drove away. When I reported this, the response was a shrug. I never saw any Red Cross at the camp or helping civilians, although their coffee and doughnut stands were available everywhere else for us. In the meantime, the Germans had to rely on the sharing of hidden stores until the next harvest. Hunger made German women more "available," but despite this, rape was prevalent and often accompanied by additional violence. In particular I remember an eighteen-year old woman who had the side of her faced smashed with a rifle butt and was then raped by two G.I.s. Even the French complained that the rapes, looting and drunken destructiveness on the part of our troops was excessive. In Le Havre, we'd been given booklets warning us that the German soldiers had maintained a high standard of behavior with French civilians who were peaceful, and that we should do the same. In this we failed miserably. "So what?" some would say. "The enemy's atrocities were worse than ours." It is true that I experienced only the end of the war, when we were already the victors. The German opportunity for atrocities had faded; ours was at hand. But two wrongs don't make a right. Rather than copying our enemy's crimes, we should aim once and for all to break the cycle of hatred and vengeance that has plagued and distorted human history. This is why I am speaking out now, forty-five years after the crime. We can never prevent individual war crimes, but we can, if enough of us speak out, influence government policy. We can reject government propaganda that depicts our enemies as subhuman and encourages the kind of outrages I witnessed. We can protest the bombing of civilian targets, which still goes on today. And we can refuse ever to condone our government's murder of unarmed and defeated prisoners of war. I realize it is difficult for the average citizen to admit witnessing a crime of this magnitude, especially if implicated himself. Even G.I.s sympathetic to the victims were afraid to complain and get into trouble, they told me. And the danger has not ceased. Since I spoke out a few weeks ago, I have received threatening calls and had my mailbox smashed. But its been worth it. Writing about these atrocities has been a catharsis of feeling suppressed too long, a liberation, and perhaps will remind other witnesses that "the truth will make us free, have no fear." We may even learn a supreme lesson from all this: only love can conquer all. Eisenhower was nicknamed "The Swedish Jew" as a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point. In Ike's time USMA cadets were required to be 100% white and non-negroid, or as close to that as medical doctors and geneological research could then ascertain. Serious official questions arose about Ike's obvious part non-white genetic heritage. These appeared to be negroid in origin. "Ike" explained this away as being due to a Jewish ancestor from Sweden, hence the nickname "The Swedish Jew". Military Academy cadets and other officer candidates get to know each other extremely well during their schooling, provided it's conducted on an intensive basis as U.S. officer schooling formerly was. Everyone is at close quarters running 24/7. There's no place to hide character traits in those conditions. Cadet nicknames are usually extremely descriptive. And when they're keyed to obvious non-white themes it's a warning signal to look deeper. Here's another example. The U.S. Pacific Fleet commander who allowed himself to be surprised at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, was nicknamed "Mustapha" as a midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. Other "Mustaphas" in Egypt and Syria allowed this to happen to themselves in 1967. The academy and officer training schools (used?) to take official advantage of that close quarters peer knowledge through an anonymous peer rating mechanism. I knew this as "Top Five/Bottom Five" and it meant what it said. Officer candidates rated their platoon fellows on leadership in rank order from Top One to Bottom x. People who accumulated too many "Bottom Five" rankings were automatically scheduled for periodic official leadership review boards for enquiry into whether they should be dismissed without commission. The presumption of such boards used to be such individuals should be dismissed unless they could prove they were worthy of commission. Very, very few survived such review boards. Judeo-Marxist Academics like the military scribbler Weigley and the Jew military 'sociologist' Moscowitz are generally extremely hostile to processes like peer rating and also to troop election of officers at regimental level and below. The admixture of females has added feminist hostility to the opposition to such processes. The long-term result is a corps of military leaders who possess less and less confidence where it really counts. That's among their soldiers. This has gone so far that the average U.S. ground combat unit is unusable for its designed purpose. After long military experience and study the wisdom of both peer ratings and also electing regimental officers in militia and citizen-soldier units seems more and more profound to me. I think the only safeguard needed is a veto power for general officers to remove obvious misfits. You can conduct all the bureaucratic schooling processes you want. But if an officer does not possess the confidence of his troops they will not follow him in combat, obey his orders or stay the course in difficult times. Consequently years of academic training simply go to waste. Electing first and schooling second is probably the best way. P.S. The leadership qualities required from military leaders and from political leaders are not identical. Some individuals combine these two attribute sets. Hitler did not combine these qualities, at least at the lower infantry unit level. This is proven by the fact he entered the Bavarian Army as a private and emerged after four years of war as a corporal. Despite this many fellow war veterans from his former battalion willingly followed him as a political leader, including his former battalion sergeant-major and some officers. Nineteenth Century America managed to select many men for high office who did combine both leadership sets in fairly large numbers. This more than anything explains the rapid conquest of the continent. It was not 'luck'. The old American Republic (long since vanished) actually conformed very closely in practice to the ideals of the old Roman Republic in both military process and results. The Roman Republic constitutionally required that political leaders prove themselves as leaders in war. This was an ideal for early Americans but not a definite legal requirement. Had the Founding Fathers mandated this in the Constitution our history would have turned out very differently. Certainly Canada, Mexico and Cuba would not exist as independent states. Whether this would have prevented subsequent miscegenation or the Civil War is another question. And results (output) are the real measure of military efficiency (or any other efficiency). The military stature and efficiency of a state is not measured by the numbers of troops raised or the percentage of the budget applied to 'military' appropriations; i.e. inputs. The Neo-con pseudo-patriots of the Judeo-Republican Party (non-veterans to a womandman) do think in these Communist terms of inputs. If this measurement were valid then Italy would be one of the military success stories of the 20th Century rather than one of the premier failures. When judged by this standard of results 19th Century America was a resounding success as a military state. Twentieth Century America was a military failure to the point that political loss of territory is now occuring in the Southwest. P.P.S. Note to the former student of Russell F. Weigley who wrote in to defend him. In my 1984 edition of Weigley's "History of the United States Army" he devotes about 40 pages to the War of 1812. He dedicates nearly all of this to harping on the relatively small Congressional size authorization and even lower actual personnel fill (about 20,000) of the "Regular Army". In this section Weigley glosses over the militia contribution in the sentence "this number was exclusive of those men from the volunteer and common militias who served for short periods against British raids and invasions in their own districts and who may have numbered in the hundreds of thousands." Then Weigley reverts back to beating to death obscurities like poor Regular Army horse recruitment and rotten contractor commissary stores. The obscure "Battle of Lundy's Lane" (actually a minor skirmish around Niagara) receives an extensive autopsy. The Battles of Put-in Bay, New Orleans and General Harrison's campaign to reconquer the Northwest are ignored. These large-scale decisive events were commanded by regular officers leading Weigley's ignored militia. And New Orleans was decisive despite being fought after 'peace' was signed. Anyone who thinks the extermination of Britain's best veteran regiments at the hands of frontier militia didn't exercise a subsequent deterrent effect on British decision-making doesn't understand how governments arrive at war and peace decisions. The British decision to negotiate over "Fifty-four Forty or Fight!" in the 1840s was undoubtedly influenced by that memory. If Weigley had ever marched even once 20 miles with a 100 pound pack in 100 degree heat he would have understood something. Even 100,000 perfectly trained regulars alone would have resulted in American defeat. In the early 19th Century transport proceeded by foot, by horse or by sea. Since the British had overall naval superiority moving troops by sea convoy was not possible. This left marching on land. The factors of force/space/time applied to North America dictated that the early Republic had to rely on 'militia'. This was especially true when fighting an enemy possessing command of the sea and the choice of where and when to strike with large amphibious raiding parties. There was no possibility of a timely counter-concentration of a central reserve at the tactical level, especially on defense. This comes back to Nathan Bedford Forrest's "he who gets theah fustest with mostest." Overall numbers are irrelevant in such conditions unless you create a 'nation in arms' as was done by the Militia Act of 1792. Like I said, Weigley's book is worthless garbage that should be collected up and pulped. By Martin Brech FORTY-FIVE years ago, I witnessed an atrocity: the deliberate starvation of German POWs by our own army. History, written by the victors, suppressed all news of this atrocity until James Bacque, a Canadian author, published his brilliant expose, OTHER LOSSES. This book is a best seller in Canada, a sensation in Europe, yet is virtually unavailable (censored?) in the U.S. Our major booksellers told me their distributors are not handling it. When I prevailed upon a small, independent bookstore to order direct from Canada, the publisher told them they would be the only store in New York State to carry the book. This in 'the land of the free'?" Fortunately, Pat Buchanan called attention to OTHER LOSSES in his January 10, 1990 column. He wrote: "Conclusion: the U.S. Army killed ten times as many Germans in POW camps as we did on battlefields from Normandy to V.E. day. (German POWs) had their rations cut below survival level until they were dying at rates up to 30% of exposure, starvation and neglect... Red Cross food trains were turned back and U.S. food shipments sat on the docks...One French officer said the U.S. camps reminded him of Dachau and Buchenwald...The book blames Eisenhower. 'The German is a beast,' Ike had written... But that was not how the Canadians and British felt, who treated their prisoners justly...It was not the view of General Mark Clark, nor of Patton...Ignoring the book is not enough." Pat Buchanan's courageous column inspired me to help end the cover-up of the atrocity I had witnessed. I wrote letters to several newspapers which were, of necessity, short and incomplete. Now I would like to finally free more of my painful memories, hoping to be heard, so that this will help us to acknowledge our share in the "banality of evil", cleansing ourselves with the truth. Perhaps we as a nation may then put this behind us with some integrity and with some hope for redemption. In October 1944, at age eighteen, I was drafted into the army while a student at the NYS College of Forestry. Largely due to the "Battle of the Bulge", my training was cut short, my furlough cut in half, and I was then immediately sent overseas. Upon arrival in Le Havre, France, we were quickly loaded into boxcars and shipped to the front. By the time we reached it, I had developed mononucleosis severely enough to be sent to a hospital in Belgium. By the time I left the hospital, the unit I had trained with in Spartenburg, South Carolina was so deeply into Germany that I warn placed in a "repo depo" (a replacement depot) despite my protests. I then lost interest in which units I was assigned to because non-combat units were generally not respected. My separation qualification record states that I served mostly with the 14th Infantry Regiment, during which time I guarded prisoners of war and served as an interpreter. During my seventeen month stay in Germany, I was transferred to other outfits also. In late March or early April 1945, I was assigned to help guard a POW camp near Andernach along the Rhine. I had four years of high school German, so I was able to talk to the prisoners, although this was forbidden. Gradually, however, I was used as an interpreter and asked to ferret out the S.S. (I found none.) In Andernach, between 50,000 and 65,000 prisoners, ranging in age from very young teens to very old men, were crowded together in an open field surrounded by barbed wire. The women were kept in a separate enclosure which I did not see until later. The men I guarded had no tents or other shelter, no blankets and many had no coats. Inadequate numbers of slit trenches were provided for excrement, and so the men lived and slept in the mud and increasing filth during a cold, wet spring. Their misery from exposure alone was evident. It was even more shocking to see them eating grass, sometimes throwing it into a tin can containing a thin soup. They told me they did this hoping to ease their hunger pains. Soon their emaciation was evident. Dysentery raged and, too weak and crowded to reach the slit trenches, they were increasingly sleeping in excrement. I saw no sign of provision for water, so the thin soup was their food and water for the day. Some days there was bread, less than a slice each. Other days there was nothing. The sight of so many men desperate for food and water, sickening and dying before our eyes, is indescribable. Even now, I can only think of it momentarily. We had ample food and supplies that could have been shared more humanely, and we could have offered some medical assistance, but did nothing. Only the dead were quickly and efficiently taken care of: hauled away to mass graves. My outrage reached the point that I protested to my officers, but I was met with hostility or bland indifference. When pressed, they explained they were under strict orders from "higher up". No officer would dare to systematically do this to over 50,000 prisoners if he felt he was violating general policy and subject to court martial. The term "war criminal" was just beginning to come into fashion. Realizing my protests were useless, I asked a friend working in the kitchen if he could slip me some extra food for the prisoners. He too repeated that they were under strict orders to severely ration the prisoners' food, and that these orders came from "higher up". But he said they had more food than they knew what to do with and would sneak me some. When I threw this food over the barbed wires to the prisoners I was caught and threatened with imprisonment. I repeated the "offense", and one officer threatened to shoot me. I naturally assumed this was a bluff, but I began to have some doubts after I encountered a captain on a hill above the Rhine shooting down at a group of German civilian women with his .45 caliber pistol. When I asked, "Why?" he mumbled, "Target practice," and fired until his pistol was empty. I saw the women running for cover, but, at that distance, couldn't tell if any had been hit. This is when I more fully realized I was dealing with some cold-blooded killers filled with moralistic hatred. They considered the Germans sub-human and worthy of extermination; another expression of the downward spiral of racism. Articles in the G.I. newspaper, Stars & Stripes, played up the Nazi concentration camps, complete with photographs of emaciated bodies; this amplified our self-righteous cruelty and made it easier to imitate behavior we were supposed to oppose. Also, I think, soldiers not exposed to combat were trying to prove how tough they were by taking it out on the prisoners and civilians. At least, many combat soldiers told me later they would not have tolerated this, for they combined hatred with respect for a courageous enemy. The prisoners I spoke to were mostly simple farmers and workingmen, as ignorant, albeit nationalistic, as many of our own troops. I heard many versions of "my country, right or wrong, my country," which we still hear in our own country today. As time went on, many of them lapsed into a Zombie-like state of listlessness. Others, maddened by thirst, tried to escape in a desperate or suicidal fashion, running through open fields in broad daylight towards the Rhine to quench their thirst. They were mowed down. Some prisoners were extremely eager for cigarettes, saying they took the edge off their hunger. Accordingly, some enterprising G.I. "Yankee traders" were acquiring hordes of wrist watches and rings in exchange for handfuls of cigarettes or less. When I began throwing cartons of cigar-ettes to the prisoners to ruin this trade, I found myself threatened by rank-and-file G.I.s also. At least this taught me an indelible lesson: how wrong majorities and authorities can be. A bright spot in this gloomy picture came, oddly enough, one night when I was put on the "graveyard shift", from two to four A.M. Actually, there was a graveyard on the uphill side of this enclosure, not many yards away. My superiors had forgotten to give me a flashlight and I hadn't bothered to ask, being disgusted with the whole situation by that time. It was a fairly bright night and I soon became aware of a prisoner crawling under the wires to the graveyard. We were supposed to shoot escapees on sight, so I started to get up to warn him to get back. Suddenly I noticed another prisoner crawling from the graveyard back to the enclosure. They were risking their lives to get to the graveyard for something; I had to investigate. When I entered the gloom of this shrubby, tree-shaded cemetery, I never felt more vulnerable, but somehow curiosity kept me going. Despite my caution, I tripped over the legs of someone in a prone position. Whipping my rifle around while stumbling and trying to regain composure of mind and body, I soon was relieved I hadn't reflexively fired. The figure sat up, moving erratically. Gradually I could see the beautiful but terror-stricken face of a woman with a picnic basket nearby. German civilians were not allowed to feed, nor even come near, the prisoners, so I quickly assured her I approved of what she was doing, not to be afraid, and that I would leave the graveyard to get out of the way, telling no one. I left the graveyard as quickly as possible and sat down, leaning against a tree at the edge CF the cemetary to be inconspicuous and not frighten the prisoners. I imagined then, and often since, what it would be like to be a prisoner under those conditions and meet a beautiful woman with a picnic basket. I never saw her again, but I have never forgotten her face. While I watched, more prisoners crawled to and from the enclosure. I saw they were dragging food back to their comrades and could only admire their courage and devotion. As I walked back to my quarters at the end of my shift, a nightingale and I were singing -- both felt a touch of spring. (I originally did not intend to reveal the following incident, for it moves into a realm termed "mystical". However, for me, it was an extremely significant experience, changing my life, providing a light no darkness can extinguish. It must be told, hoping it will foster understanding.) On May 8, V.E. day, I decided to celebrate with some prisoners I was guarding who were baking bread, meager amounts of which the other prisoners occasionally received. This group had all the bread they could eat, and shared the jovial mood generated by the end of the war. We all thought we would be going home soon, a pathetic hope on their part. We were in what was to become the French zone, and I later witnessed the brutality of the French soldiers when we transferred our prisoners to them for their slave labor camps (see below). However, on this day we were happy. After chatting with them about the potentials of peace for the rest of our lives, I decided to risk a gesture of trust that objectively would seem foolish. I emptied my rifle and stood it in the corner. They tested me further by asking to play with it, and I agreed. Intuitively I felt I could rely on their sense of honor not to attack me, for they knew they too were being tested. This thoroughly 'broke the ice', and soon we were singing songs we taught each other or I had learned in high school German ("Du, du, liegst mir im Herzen"). Out of gratitude, they secretly baked a small sweet bread and insisted I take it, explaining it was the only possible gift they had left to offer. Expressing my gratitude with a lump in my throat, I put it in my tight "Eisenhower jacket" so I could sneak it back to my barracks. I later found an opportunity to eat it outside. Never had bread tasted more delicious, nor conveyed to me a deeper sense of communion while eating it. A wonderful feeling pervaded me, gently opening me to an intimation of the Oneness of all Being. Through those prisoners I sensed the ~cosmic presence of what has been called the Christ, Buddha-nature, or, perhaps most aptly, the Ineffable: cosmically present, but hidden and apparently separate, until revealed in the wholeness of the giving of the self. Even within the horror humans had created, I was taught a path to redemption may open by taking a first, tentative step in the direction of love, understanding and forgiveness. This above all the prisoners taught me: not only are we all potentially humane humans, there is divinity within us waiting for us to dissolve the defensive shield of ego. I was pleased to discover later the words of Matthew 25:34-46, expressing the potential within prisoners and all who are at our mercy. Shortly after this experience I was plunged into even greater horror. Some of our weak and sickly prisoners were being marched off by French soldiers to their camp. The truck we were on first passed another truck picking up bodies along the side of the road, and then came up behind a slowly moving column of men. Temporarily we slowed down and remained behind, perhaps because the driver was as shocked as I was. The French soldiers were apparently incensed at the poor condition of our prisoners, not only for labor but for marching to another camp. Whenever a prisoner staggered or dropped back, the French clubbed him to death and then dragged him to the side of the road. For many, this quick death might have been preferable to their prolonged suffering. Even gas would have been more merciful than our murder by neglect in our slow 'killing fields'. When I saw the German women held in a separate enclosure, I asked why we were keeping them. I was told they were "camp followers", selected as breeding stock for the S.S. to create a super-race. We provided them with tents but they were extremely hungry. I spoke to some and must say they were still spirited and attractive. However, I believe I was objective enough when I told all concerned that I didn't think they deserved our treatment. As an interpreter, I was able to prevent some particularly unfortunate arrests. One somewhat amusing incident occurred during a pre-dawn raid we conducted on a town to discover Nazis or arms. An old farmer was being dragged away by some soldiers. I was told he had a "fancy Nazi medal", which they showed to me. Fortunately, I had a chart identifying such medals. He had been awarded it for having five or more children! Perhaps his wife was somewhat relieved to get him "off her back", but I didn't think one of our 'death camps' was a fair punishment for his contribution to Germany. The soldiers agreed and released him to continue his "dirty work". Famine was spreading amongst German civilians also. It was a common sight to see German women up to their elbows in our garbage cans looking for something edible -- that is, when they weren't chased away. When I interviewed mayors of small towns and villages, I was told their supply of food had been taken away by "displaced persons" (foreigners who had worked in Germany), who packed the food on trucks and drove away. When I reported this, the response was a shrug or an expression of helplessness. Although the Red Cross coffee and doughnut stands were available everywhere for us, I never saw any Red Cross in the prison camps or helping the civilians. While my girlfriend had all the "contraband" doughnuts she could eat, most Germans had to share their meager hidden stores and wait until the next harvest. This hunger undoubtedly made many German women more "available", but, despite this, rape was incredibly prevalent and often accompanied by additional violence. I particularly remember a charming eighteen year old girl who had several unsuccessful suitors and was "just friends" with me, who had the side of her face smashed with a rifle butt and was then raped by two G.I.s. The casual shooting of German civilians also continued, usually by drunken soldiers who would tell of this as something amusing. All too many G.I.s gave the impression they were 1ike animals released from cages, free to do what they liked because they were dealing with yet a lower species of animal, a reverse racism, inflamed by our propaganda. However, even the French complained to me that our rape and drunken destructive behavior in their country was excessive. When we had arrived in Le Havre, we had been given booklets instructing us that the Germans had maintained a high standard of behavior with French civilians who were peaceful, and that we should do the same. In this we failed miserably. So what? we might still say. The enemies' atrocities were worse than ours. Certainly my experiences were only of the last phases of the war, when we were already clearly the victors. The Nazi opportunity for atrocities had faded and ours was unleashed. But we might have learned the simple lesson that two wrongs do not make a right. Perhaps we might even have broken the cycle of vengeful retaliation and unbridled hatred, fed by racism, that has plagued human history and blighted human potential all to long. Instead, we committed our own atrocities and now are clinging to a cover-up. That is why I am speaking out now, forty-five years after the crime. We can never prevent individual war crimes, but we can, if enough of us speak out, influence government policy. We can reject government propaganda that depicts our enemies as subhuman and encourages the kinds of outrages I witnessed. We can protest the bombing of civilian targets, which still goes on today. (I will never forget the sickly sweet smell of rotting human flesh rising from the shattered remains of the cities and towns I entered.) And we can refuse ever to condone our government' s murder of unarmed and defeated prisoners of war. I realized it's difficult to admit witnessing a crime of this magnitude, especially if implicated oneself. Even G.I .s sympathetic to the victims told me they were afraid to oppose so massive a policy that would surely seek to cover its tracks. I never heard this directly from an officer, but it was the belief of the rank-and-file G.I.s I spoke to that we were not to "talk" because, first, no one would believe us, and second, we would surely get into trouble. They all insisted it was better not to talk, and slowly I too realized it would be futile and dangerous. That is, until now, thanks to James Bacque and Pat Buchanan. This is not to say the danger has passed. Since I "spoke out" recently, my mailbox has been smashed and I have received threatening phone calls. But I believe it is worth the risk. Writing about these atrocities has been a atharsis of feelings suppressed too long, a liberation, and perhaps will remind other witnesses and citizens -that "the truth shall make us free, have no fear." And, in any case, "the truth shall out". We may even learn a supreme lesson from all this: Hate is self- destructive; only love can conquer and evolve all as One. Martin Brech (Adjunct Professor, Philosophy & Religion, Mercy College; Ex-G.I., Finally Free)
Ike and the
Disappearing Atrocities
New York
Times Book Review, February 24, 1991
Seldom has
the publication of a historical monograph on a subject ordinarily of interest only to a
few specialists - the treatment of prisoners of war - received so much attention or
excited so much anger as James Bacque's "Other Losses." Published in 1989 in
Canada, it was the subject of a cover story in the popular Canadian magazine Saturday
Night, of a British Broadcasting Corporation documentary, of two German television
documentaries and of a coming Canadian Broadcasting Network documentary. (The Canadian
book, I should say immediately, carries a jacket blurb from me that was taken out of
context and used without permission) It has been discussed on American television, in Time
magazine and in many other news media outlets. In its German edition, it was a runaway
best seller. The British edition elicited major reviews in the Times Literary Supliment
and elsewhere. Prima Publishing of California intendes to publish the book in May, which
could fan the flames in the United States.
The reason
for the notoriety is the author's conclusion that Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, as head of
the American occupation of Germany in 1945, deliberately starved to death German prisoners
of war in staggering numbers. Mr. Bacque charges that "the victims undoubtedly number
over 800,000, almost certainly over 800,000 and quite likely over a million. Their deaths
were knowingly caused by army officers who had sufficient resources to keep the prisoners
alive."
Eisenhower's
method, according to Mr. Bacque, was simple: he changed the designation of the prisoners
from "Prisoners of War" (P.O.W.), required by the Geneva Convention to be fed
the same rations as American G.I.'s, to "Disarmed Enemy Forces" (D.E.F.), which
allowed him to cut their rations to starvation level. Mr. Bacque says the D.E.F. were also
denied medical supplies and shelter. They died by the hundreds of thousands. Their deaths
were covered up on Army records by listing them as "other looses" on charts
showing weekly totals of prisoners on hand, numbers discharged and so forth.
So outraged
is Mr. Bacque by his discovery of this heinous crime that he has been quoted in a wire
service interview as saying Americans "should take down every statue of Eisenhower,
and every photograph of him and annul his memory from American history as best they can,
except to say, 'Here was a man who did very evil things that we're ashamed of.'"
Questions immediately arise. If there were a million dead, where are the bodies? Did
Eisenhower have such vast power that he could order starvation on a mass scale and keep it
a secret? Was the undoubted suffering in the camps, especially the transit camps along the
Rhine, the result of Eisenhower's policy or the result of the chaotic conditions that
prevailed in Europe in the spring and summer of 1945?
Mr. Bacque,
a Canadian novelist with no previous historical research or writing experience, says in
his introduction: "Doubtless many scholars will find faults in this book, which are
only mine. I welcome their criticism and their further research, which may help to restore
to us the truth after a long night of lies." Last December, the Eisenhower Center at
the University of New Orleans invited some leading experts on the period to examine the
charges. The conference participants, including me, plan to publish the papers in book
form.
Our first
conclusion was that Mr. Bacque had made a major historical discovery. There _was_
wdiespread mistreatment of German prisoners in the spring and summer of 1945. Men were
beaten, denied water, forced to live in open camps without shelter, given inadequate food
rations and inadequate medical care. Their mail was withheld. In some cases prisoners made
a "soup" of water and grass in order to deal with their hunger. Men did die
needlessly and inexcusably. This must be confronted, and it is to Mr. Bacque's credit that
he forces us to do so.
Our second
conclusion was that when scholars do the necessary research, they will find Mr. Bacque's
work to be worse than worthless. It is seriously - nay, spectacularly - flawed in its most
fundamental aspects. Mr. Bacque misuses documents; he misreads documents; he ignores
contrary evidence; his statistical methodology is hopelessly compromised; he makes no
attempt to look at comparative contexts; he puts words into the mouth of his principal
source; he ignores a readily available and absolutely critical source that decisively
deals with his central accusation; and, as a consequence of these and and other
shortcomings, he reaches conclusions and makes charges that are demonstrably absurd.
Apart from
its assessment of Mr. Bacque's findings, however, the conference - along with the book
itself - raises a larger issue: how are readers who are not experts to judge a work that
makes new, startling, indeed outrageious, claims? Without the knowledge or the time to
investigate, how are they to know if an author has finally revealed the truth "after
a long night of lies," or is simply misleading an unwary public?
As for Mr.
Bacque's claims, the most immediate question is that of Eisenhower's motive: why on earth
would Ike do such a thing? Mr. Bacque answers that Eisenhower hated the Germans. Now it is
absolutely true that in the spring of 1945, Eisenhower's anger at the Germans was very
great. He never attempted to hide these feelings. In "Crusade in Europe,"
published in 1948, he wrote, "In my personal reactions, as the months of conflict
wore on, I grew constantly more bitter against the Germans." He relates that he
signed tens of thousands of letters of condolence to the wives and mothers of his fallen
men, and he wrote, "I know of no more effective means of developing an undying hatred
of those responsible for aggressive war than to assume the obligation of attemption to
express sympathy to families bereaved by it." The uncovering of the concentration
camps added to his emotion.
Eisenhower
was an enthusiastic supporter of denazification, but not because he hated the Germans or
believed in collective guilt. To the contrary, he believed that there were Germans who
were committed to democracy and that the task of the occupation was to find them and bring
them to the fore. In a speech in Frankfurt in 1945, he declared "The success or
failure of this occupation will be judged by the character of the Germans 50 years from
now. Proof will come when they begin to run a democracy of their own and we are going to
give the Germans a chance to do that, in time." This does not sound like a man who
simultaneously was directing the death by starvation of one million young Germans.
Mr. Bacque
completely misunderstands Eisenhower's position and activity in the occupation. He puts
full responsibility on Eisenhower for every policy decision, never recognizing that he had
superiors from whom he took policy directives and orders - specifically, the Army Chief of
Staff, the European Advisory Commission, acting in the name and with the authority of the
British, Soviet and American Governments, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Combined Chiefs
of Staff, that is, the American Joint Chiefs and the British Chiefs of Staff; and the
heads of the British and American Governments. The report at the New Orleans conference on
the diplomatic background, by Brian Villa of the University of Ottawa, noted that the
policy of Eisenhower's superiors was to impress upon the Germans the fact of their defeat,
the fact that they had brought it on themselves and in other ways to "treat 'em
rough." Denazification was one aspect of that policy. Another was that German
prisoners would not be fed at a higher level than German civilians, than the civilians of
the liberated nations, or than the displaced persons (DPs).
An assertion
that is central to Mr. Bacque's accusation is his contention that there was no European
food shortage in 1945. He points to warehouses in Germany full of food. He says that the
Red Cross had food available. One of his most daming pieces of evidence is that a train
from Geneva loaded with food parcels sent by the Red Cross to feed German prisoners was
forced to turn back.
This is
shocking - food was available, men were hungry and American officers ordered the train to
return to Geneva. But there was a reason: the Allied Governments had decided that Red
Cross food parcels would be used to feed displaced persons, of whom there were more than
two million in Germany, and the orders to Eisenhower on this policy were explicit. So DPs
got those food parcels. It is painful beyond description to have to set food priorities in
a hungry world, but it had to be done, and who could argue with the decision?
In his
conference report on the food situation in Germany, James Tent of the University of Alabama
- Brimingham says there was no question that there were severe shortages. Still, as Mr.
Tent points out, there was food stocked in warehouses that was not distributed to
prisoners living on a near-starvation diet. Again, this is shocking, until the reason is
noted. The Allied Governments were fearful of famine in the winter of 1945-46, and they
were stockpiling food. Even with the reserves, they barely got through the winter, and it
was three years before the European foot shortage was overcome.
Mr. Bacque's
myth was Eisenhower's nightmare. No food shortage? Eisenhower wrote the Chief of Staff,
Gen. George C. Marshall, in Februayr 1945: "I am very much concerned about the food
situation... We now have no reserves on the Continent of supplies for the civil
population."
And here is
Eisenhower writing to the Combined Chiefs of Staff on April 25, 1945: "Unless
immediate steps are taken to develop to the fullest extent possible the food resources in
order to provide the minimum wants of the German population, widespread chaos, starvation
and disease are inevitable during the coming winter."
These - and
many, many similar messages - went out before the surrender. After the first week of May,
all of Eisenhower's calculations as to how many people he would be required to feed in
occupied Germany became woefully inadequate. He had badly underestimated, for two reasons.
First, the number of German soldiers surrendering to the Western Allies far exceeded what
was expected (more than five million, instead of the anticipated three million) because of
the onrush of German soldiers across the Elbe River to escape the Russians. So too with
German civilians - there were millions fleeing from east to west, about 13 million
altogether, and they became Eisenhower's responsibility. Eisenhower faced shortages even
before he learned that there were 17 million more people to feed in Germany than he had
expected.
No food
shortage? This is the report of the Military Governor for Germany in July 1945: "The
food situation throughout Western Germany is perhaps the most serious problem of the
occupation. The average food consumption in the Western Zones is now about one-third below
the generally accepted subsistence level." The September report declares, "Food
from indigenous sources was not available to meet the present authorized ration level for
the normal consumer, of 1,550 calories per day."
Mr. Bacque
says that the prisoners were receiving 1,550 calories a day, and he contends that such a
ration means slow starvation. He apparently never looked at what civilians were getting,
in Germany or in the liberated countries. In Paris in 1945, the calorie level was 1,550
for civilians. It was only slightly higher in Briatin, where rationing continued. It was
much lower in Russia, where rationing also continued. As noted, the official ration for
German civilians was 1,550, but often not met. In Vienna in the summer of 1945 the
official ration sometimes fell to 500.
There is
such a thing as common sense. Anyone who was in Europe in the summer of 1945 would be
flabbergasted to hear that there was no food shortage.
According to
Mr. Bacque, Eisenhower personally, secretly, and with sinister intent changed the status
of surrendered German soldiers from prisoners of war to disarmed enemy forces. In fact,
the change in designation was a policy matter. The decision was made not by Eisenhower but
by his superiors, specifically by the European Advisory Commission. Nor was any attempt
made to keep it secret. All those involved acted with the authority of the British,
Russian and American Governments, and they were perfectly straightforward about the reason
for the change in status.
What
happened is simple enough: the Allies could not afford to feed the millions of German
prisoners at the same level at which they were able to feed German civilians, not to
mention the civilians of the liberated countries of Western Europe, and not to mention as
well the displaced persons. But the United States and other Allied nations had signed the
Geneva Convention, which had the force of a treaty. They did not wish to violate it, so
they used the new designation of "Disarmed Enemy Forces." The orders to the
field commanders were straighforward: do not feed the DEF's at a higher scale than German
civilians.
With regard
to another of Mr. Bacque's conclusions, he arrives at his sensational figure of one
million dead through a system of analysis that has left almost everyone who has tried to
check his statistics and methods befuddled. He did make one mistake because of a typing
error by a clerk. He saw a figure of 70,000 prisoners in an Army medical report and then
calculated the total death rate for all prisoners in American hands on the basis of that
number and the 21,000 deaths also mentioned in the report. That is, he arrived at his most
basic conclusion, a death rate in all camps of 30 percent, by dividing the 21,000 deaths
by the 70,000 prisoners. However, the 70,000 figure should have been 10 times higher. All
other figures in the document make it clear that the correct number of prisoners was
700,000. This would make the death rate not 30 percent but 3 percent.
In fact, as
Albert Cowdrey of the Department of the Army's Center of Military History reported to the
conference, the overall death rate among German prisoners was 1 percent.
Mr.
Cowdrey's conclusion, strongly supported by another conference participant, Maj. Ruediger
Overmans of the German Office of Military History in Freiburg (who is writing the final
volume of the official Germany history of the war), is that the total death by all causes
of German prisoners in American hands could not have been greater than 56,000.
Finally,
there is the matter of the column of figures in the weekly reports of the United States
Army Theater Provost Marshal entitled "Other Losses." It is here that Mr. Bacque
finds his "missing million."
What were
the "other losses?" Mr. Bacque interviewed Philip S. Lauben, a retired Army
colonel who was a member of the German Affairs Branch of Eisenhower's headquarters in
1945. He writes that Colonel Lauben told him "other losses" meant "deaths
and escapes."
"How
many escapes?" Mr. Bacque asked.
"Very,
very minor," Colonel Lauben replied. Mr. Bacque says they were less than one-tenth of
1 percent, with no explanation of how he arrived at such a figure.
Neil
Cameron, the producer of the BBC documentary about "Other Losses," told the
conference that he had obtained from Mr. Bacque the tape of the interview. It seemed clear
to Mr. Cameron that Mr. Bacque had got an old man to agree with words that Mr. Bacque used
and then put in his mouth. Mr. Cameron did his own on-camera interview with Colonel
Lauben; in it, Colonel Lauben said he was misled by Mr. Bacque and was wrong about the
meaning of the term "other losses."
David
Hawkins of CNN wanted to do an interview with Colonel Lauben. Colonel Lauben turned him
down, explaining in a letter "I'm not being difficult. I am 91 years old, legally
blind, and my memory has lapsed to a point where it is quite unreliable. Furthermore I am
under regular medical care. Often during my talk with Mr. Bacque I reminded him that my
memory had deteriorated badly during the 40 odd years since 1945.
"Mr.
Bacque read to me figures...It seemed to me that, after accounting for transfers and
discharges, there was nothing left to make up the grand total except deaths and escapes,
i.e. the term 'Other Losses.' I was mistaken."
Thus, Mr.
Bacque's only witness for the charge that "other losses" was a cover-up term for
deaths has twice repudiated what Mr. Bacque maintains that he said.
What then
were the "other losses?" In many cases they were transfers from one zone to
another, something that was regularly done for a variety of reasons, none of them
sinister, and all duly recorded in footnotes on the weekly reports.
But the
greatest number of "other losses" is revealed in the August 1945 Report of the
Military Governor. (These monthly reports are in the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kan.,
in the National Archives in Washington and elsewhere; they are a basic source on every
aspect of the occupation, including food shortages and prisoners. Mr. Bacque did not cite
them and there is no evidence he examined them.) The August report lists the numbers of
disarmed enemy forces discharged by American forces and those transferred to the British
and French for forced labor.
The report
continues: "An additional group of 663,576 are listed as 'other losses,' consisting
largely of members of the Volksturm [Peoples' Militia], released without formal
discharge."
It takes
little imagination to see what happened here. The People's Militia consisted of older men
(up to 80 years of age, mainly World War I veterans) and boys of 16 or sometimes less.
American guards and camp authorities told the old men to go home and take care of their
grandchildren, the boys to go home and return to school. Along with the transfers to other
zones that Mr. Bacque ignores, these people account for all the "missing
million."
In short,
Mr. Bacque is wrong on every major charge and nearly all his minor ones. Eisenhower was
not a Hitler, he did not run death camps, German prisoners did not die by the hundreds of
thousands, there was a severe food shortage in 1945, there was nothing sinister or secret
about the "disarmed enemy forces" designation or about the column "other
losses." Mr. Bacque's "missing million" were old men and young boys in the
militia.
Nevertheless,
Mr. Bacque makes a point that is irrefutable: some American G.I.'s and their officers were
capable of acting in almost as brutal a manner as the Nazis. We did not have a monopoly on
virtue. He has challenged us to reopen the question, to do the research required, to get
at the full truth. For that contribution, he deserves thanks. But as to how he presented
his discovery, I turn again to Albert Cowdrey: "Surely the author has reason to be
satisfied with his achievement. He has no reputation as a historian to lose, and
"Other Losses" can only enhance his standing as a writer of fiction." There
remains, finally, the larger issue. It took a conference of experts to challenge Mr.
Bacque's charges. Individual scholars have hesitated to take him on because to do so
required checking through his research - in effect, rewriting his book. Instead, many of
them have said in their reviews in Britain, France, Germany and Canada that they cannot
believe what Mr. Bacque says about Eisenhower is true, but they cannot disprove it. Mr.
Bacque has all the paraphernalia of scholarship; it looks impressive enough to bamboozle
even scholars. Under these circumstances, what is a lay reader to do? I suggest that he or
she trust common sense. As when confronting the Holocaust-never-
Post-World
War I Germany yields two significant examples of the effective use of
nonviolence. In 1920, a pro-monarchist faction led by Dr. Wolfgang Kapp attempted to seize
control of the Weimar government. German generals, sympathetic to the coup, refused to
assist the civilian government, and many police actively sided with Kapp's forces. In
response, President Theodor Ebert called a general strike and bureaucratic
non-cooperation. While the military eventually came to the aid of the elected government,
nonviolent resistance acted as the chief obstacle to Kapp's seizure of power.
A
second instance of the use of nonviolence came during the
so-called Ruhrkampf from 1923 to 1925. When Germany defaulted on its
war reparation payments, French and Belgian troops entered the Ruhr -- one of Germany's
chief industrial centers -- to extract the payments by force. Strikes and civilian and
bureaucratic obstruction made the occupation so costly that the French and Belgians
withdrew without net gain.
…
some of the most famous cases of nonviolent resistance were carried out
against foreign powers: colonial North America and India against the British [[would
British government agree that it was a “foreign power”]]; Germany against France
and Belgium in the Ruhrkampf; and Hungary against the rule of the Austrian Empire.
Humane
Studies Review Volume 9, Number 1 Summer 1994
THE
LITERATURE OF NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE AND CIVILIAN-BASED DEFENSE
by Bryan
Caplan
… one
neglected but useful perspective comes from the tradition of
nonviolent resistance. While almost exclusively associated with Gandhi,
the idea has a long history of theory and practice. This
bibliographic essay outlines the contours of this
tradition, beginning with its roots in the more general theory of
resistance to tyranny; it then explores the theory and practice of
nonviolent resistance and its implications for classical liberal social
theory.
***Resistance
Thought: Violent and Nonviolent
An excellent
survey of the history of theories justifying resistance to tyranny is
Oscar Jszi and John D. Lewis, "Against the Tyrant: The Tradition and
Theory of Tyrannicide" (Glencoe, IL: Free Press,
1957). While it focuses on the question of tyrannicide,
it actually covers a much wider ground. Unsurprisingly, the concepts of
tyranny and justified resistance to authority simultaneously arose in
ancient Greece. Plato and Aristotle discussed tyranny
without commenting on the permissibility of resistance
to the state, but the histories of Xenophon and Herodotus openly
sympathized with instances of tyrannicide. Romans also considered
tyrannicide. Cicero, Plutarch, Seneca, and Polybius explicitly endorsed
it. Presumably, they would have endorsed less
drastic resistance to authority as well. Christian philosophers
such as Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham endorsed a limited right to
resistance against tyranny. Finally, during the Italian Renaissance, the
revival of classical authors led to a parallel revival of
interest in the right of resistance against unjust
government.
The question
of resistance appeared in its modern form and won profound practical
significance during the Protestant Reformation. While Martin Luther
and John Calvin denied the right of resistance in any form, their
intellectual heirs -- especially Calvin's -- questioned the
doctrine that all "powers that be are ordained of God"
(Romans 13:1) and considered justifications for rebellion against political
and religious persecution.
British
Calvinists radicalized first. John Ponet, successively Bishop
of Rochester and of Winchester, defended resistance and tyrannicide in
his book "A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power" (1556;
reprinted in Winthrop S. Hudson, "John
Ponet" (1516?-1556)
Franois
Hotman's "Francogallia" (1573; trans. J. H. M. Salmon and ed. Ralph
E. Giesey, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1972; Julian H.
Franklin, trans. and ed., "Constitutionalism
and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century: Three Treatises by
Hotman, Beza, and Mornay" [New York: Pegasus, 1969], 47-96) initiated
the genre of French Calvinist resistance -- or
"monarchomach" -- literature. In it he argued that
historically, the French monarch had been limited, subject to both
election and deposition by the people. "It has been
sufficiently demonstrated, we believe," Hotman
concludes in the third edition, "that the kings of France have not been
granted unmeasured and unlimited power by their countrymen, and cannot be
considered absolute" ("Constitutionalism and Resistance,"
90).
Theodore
Beza's "Right of Magistrates" (1574; "Constitutionalism and Resistance,"
97-135) gave this historical critique a firmer theoretical background.
Fearing
individual rebellion, he gave special weight to the right of lesser
magistrates to rebel against a tyrant. He countenanced
individual rebellion only against tyrants without legitimate
titles -- but, only if the resistance of lesser magistrates failed.
Philippe du
Plessis-Mornay, in his "Defence of Liberty Against Tyrants" (1579;
"Constitutionalism and Resistance," 137-99) essentially drew the
same conclusions, emphasizing that the people,
not the king, are properly the owners of the kingdom. Julian
Franklin has abridged and commented upon all three works in his Constitutionalism and
Resistance. Franklin emphasizes that the Calvinist resistance
literature needed to avoid radical conclusions to convince moderate
Catholics to join the Huguenot cause. Quentin Skinner's "The Foundations of Modern
Political Thought," vol. 2, "The Age of
Reformation" (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1978) contains an extensive discussion of Hotman, Beza, and Mornay, as
well as lesser-known Calvinist authors and comments on their Lutheran,
Catholic Scholastic, and humanist predecessors. For a
general treatment of Huguenot thought, see Michael Walzer, "The
Revolution of the Saints" (New York: Atheneum,
1965).
The radical
Calvinists' interest in the right of resistance spread to broader
religious circles.
The
humanist thinker George Buchanan defended the right to resist tyranny
not on partisan religious grounds but on the basis of social contract theory
and Aristotle's politics. "Powers of the Crown of Scotland"
(1579; trans. C. F. Arrowood, Austin: Texas
University Press, 1949) is his most famous book; I. D. McFarlane, in
his "Buchanan" (London: Duckworth, 1981), offers a more detailed
treatment of his thought. At the same time, Catholics
like Juan de Mariana and Francisco Surez validated the right of resistance against
tyranny. Using state of nature theory and the idea that rulers' power
is delegated rather than inherent, both of these Jesuit thinkers
justified some form of the right of resistance. Surez stood behind the classical
distinction between the usurper and the tyrant-by-conduct. While it was
permissible to use violence against a usurper, such could be justified
against a tyrant-by-conduct in only the most extreme situations.
Mariana took a more extreme view; he bypassed the dichotomy between the two types of
unjust rulers and argued for every individual's right to kill a tyrant. Most of Surez's
thought on resistance is in his "Tractatus de legibus" (1612; translated in
"Selections from Three Works of Francisco
Surez" [New York: Oxford University Press, 1944]). Mariana's
chief work in this area is "The King and the Education of the
King" (1599; ed. and trans. George Albert
Moore, Washington, DC: Country Dollar Press, 1948).
It should be
emphasized that the monarchomachs chiefly justified resistance as
such, rather than nonviolent resistance. Their principal contemporary critics
are Jean Bodin and William Barclay.
See Bodin,
"On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from 'The Six
Books of the Commonwealth’ and Barclay, "The Kingdom and the
Regal Power". Both argue that this was more likely
to lead to endless bloodshed and further tyranny than
anything else.
In this
context, Etienne de La Boetie's "Discourse on Voluntary
Servitude" (1577; trans. Harry Kurz, 1942; reprinted as "The
Politics of Obedience: 'The Discourse of Voluntary
Servitude'" [New York: Free Life Editions, 1975]) appeared,
promoting the efficacy of nonviolent resistance. Anticipating David
Hume's "Of the First Principles of Government" (1777; reprinted as
"Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary", ed.
Eugene F. Miller, rev. ed.[Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987],
32-36), La Boetie saw that the rule of a tiny minority over society
was possible only if the majority voluntarily accepted it.
Taking it
one step further, La Boetie argued that the social consensus theory implied that it could
overthrow tyranny peaceably if the majority withdrew its consent. "It is
therefore," he wrote, "the inhabitants themselves who permit, or, rather, bring
about their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit they would put an end to their
servitude" (La Boetie, 50).
While La
Boetie's arguments for mass civil disobedience seem more moderate than the
Huguenot justification for violent resistance, he is, in every other respect,
far more radical. All tyrants, he argued, whether by inheritance, force
of arms, or elections, are equally bad and, therefore, equally
permissible to resist. Perhaps most significant, La
Boetie justified resistance not through custom or national tradition
but because "freedom is our natural state" (La Boetie, 57).
La Boetie
explained the oppressed state of mankind with a theory of ideology and caste exploitation.
The former, he contended, suppresses humanity's natural urge for
freedom; the latter develops as a tyrant fortifies power by privileging a pyramid of
followers.
Despite the
originality of La Boetie's theory, it exerted little influence on
subsequent theorists who continued to equate resistance with violence. Thus,
the three pillars of seventeenth-
The
nineteenth century produced two significant theorists of nonviolent
resistance: Henry David Thoreau and Count Leo Tolstoy.
In Thoreau's
famous essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849;
reprinted in "On Civil Disobedience: American Essays, Old
and New,' ed. Robert A. Goldwin [Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969], 11-31),
he argued that the individual had a moral duty to resist unjust acts of
government. While not primarily a work on collective
action, Thoreau noted that "[i]f the alternative
is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the
State will not hesitate which to choose. . . . When the subject has
refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his
office, then the revolution is accomplished" ("On Civil
Disobedience,
Tolstoy's
"A Letter to a Hindu: The Subjection of India -- Its Cause and
Cure" in "Tolstoy Centenary Edition," vol. 21,
"Recollections and Essays" (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1937) significantly influenced the twentieth-century'
(Gandhi,
35).
Gandhi makes
for difficult reading because he mixed religious ideas with more
practical observations. Gene Sharp does a good job of disentangling these two
strains in his "Gandhi as a Political Strategist" (Boston:
Porter Sargent, 1979). If one ignores Gandhi's
religious views and focuses on his discussion of practical strategic questions, one finds
a shrewd and insightful thinker in the tradition of La Boetie. Several
of Sharp's interpretive essays -- especially "Gandhi on the Theory
of Voluntary Servitude" -- bring together the bits and pieces of
Gandhi's theory of nonviolent resistance. For
further writings on Gandhi's philosophy which emphasize his mystical
side, see Raghavan N. Iyer, "The Moral and Political Thought
of Mahatma Gandhi"
***Nonviolent
Resistance: Theory and History
There can be
little doubt that today's foremost thinker sympathetic to nonviolent
resistance is Gene Sharp. With an eye toward practical strategy rather than
philosophy, his major work "The Politics of Nonviolent Action"
(Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973) covers virtually
every aspect of the theory and history of nonviolent resistance
to government. In the opening of the book, Sharp carefully crafts his
arguments as an extensive discussion of the nature of power. He draws on
the long tradition of thinkers who argue that ideology
and consent -- whether grudging or enthusiastic --
rather than brute force are the ultimate basis of political power. If a
large enough segment of the population refuses to comply with the government, it will lose
its ability to rule. Merely the threat of non-compliance is often
serious enough to provoke the government to redress grievances.
Moreover, when governments use violence against protesters who are
clearly committed to nonviolence, they undermine their ideological
foundations and often make uncontested rule even more difficult. He
cites such diverse thinkers as Auguste Comte, Etienne de La Boetie,
David Hume, Gaetano Mosca, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Max Weber, Jeremy
Bentham, Montesquieu, and Niccol Machiavelli.
Sharp
distinguishes between three stages of nonviolence: protest and persuasion;
social, economic, and political non-cooperation; and nonviolent intervention.
Normally a movement begins with the first stage and gradually escalates
until the government meets its demands or agrees to
compromise. As examples of protest and persuasion
Sharp lists public speeches, petitions, distribution of literature,
public demonstrations, and fraternizing with low-ranking soldiers and
other government enforcers.
Nonviolent
resisters bring more serious sanctions to bear when they resort to social,
economic, and political non-cooperation. Here Sharp offers as examples
social boycott, excommunication, student strikes (social non-cooperation)
Sharp's
final category, nonviolent intervention, includes the most radical
forms of resistance against authority. Some examples include fasting until death
(Gandhi's famed tactic), sit-ins, occupying or
surrounding critical government buildings, blocking
of roads, setting up alternative markets and transportation systems
(such as black markets), overloading administrative systems, and
forming a parallel government.
Sharp
documents a number of examples for each category. While not all of them
have met with success, the historical effectiveness of nonviolent action
is surprising. One familiar but neglected example is
colonial resistance to Britain before the American
Revolution from 1765 to 1775. For further details on the nonviolent
stage of colonial resistance, see Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M.
Morgan, "The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution" (New York:
Collier Books, 1963); Lawrence Henry Gipson,
"The British Empire Before the American Revolution" (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1961-1965); Arthur Schlesinger, "The Colonial
Merchants and the American Revolution" (New York: Frederick Ungar,
1966); Lawrence Henry Gipson, "The Coming of the American
Revolution" (New York: Harper Torchbooks,
1962); and Murray Rothbard, "Conceived in Liberty," vol.
3, "Advance to Revolution, 1760-1775" (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington
House, 1976). The famous boycotts of tea and other
British imports, refusal to pay taxes such as those
required by the Stamp Act, and ostracism of the Tories imposed serious
costs upon the British government, leading to desperate action to
preserve British authority in the colonies. Fewer
works on later American tax resistance exist. See, however,
Dall W. Forsythe's "Taxation and Political Change in the Young Nation,
1781-1833" (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), and James Ring Adams,
"Secrets of the Tax Revolt" (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1984), both of which David T. Beito discusses at
length in 'Tax Revolts in American History,' "Humane
Studies Review" 4 (Winter 1986-87). Beito's major work in this area,
"Taxpayers in Revolt: Tax Resistance during the Great Depression"
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1989), offers a broad discussion of the largest tax rebellion
in modern America; he emphasizes the tax resistance in Chicago during
the New Deal era.
Post-World
War I Germany yields two significant examples of the effective use of
nonviolence. In 1920, a pro-monarchist faction led by Dr. Wolfgang Kapp attempted to seize
control of the Weimar government. German generals, sympathetic to the
coup, refused to assist the civilian government, and many police actively sided with
Kapp's forces. In response, President Theodor Ebert called a general strike and
bureaucratic non-cooperation. While the military eventually came to the aid of the elected
government, nonviolent resistance acted as the chief obstacle to Kapp's seizure
of power.
For more
details on the Kapp putsch, see Erich Eyck, "A History of
the Weimar Republic" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).
A
second instance of the use of nonviolence came during the
so-called Ruhrkampf from 1923 to 1925. When Germany defaulted on its
war reparation payments, French and Belgian troops entered the Ruhr -- one of Germany's
chief industrial centers -- to extract the payments by force. Strikes
and civilian and bureaucratic obstruction made the occupation so costly that the French
and Belgians withdrew without net gain.
Wolfgang
Sternstein, 'The Ruhrkampf of 1923: Economic Problems of Civilian
Defense,' in "Civilian Resistance as a National Defense," ed. Adam
Roberts (Harrisburg, PA: Stockpole Books, 1968) discusses
the Ruhrkampf instance at great length.
We must turn
back to the Indian struggle for independence from Great Britain, the
most famous and successful twentieth-century nonviolent movement. While
Indian independence quickly sparked ethnic violence and failed to deliver
prosperity and freedom to ordinary Indians and Pakistanis, the struggle
compares favorably to violent colonial outbreaks such as
in Algeria. Sharp estimates that if one takes India's
population into account, Algerian-level casualties would have left
India with three million to three and a half million people dead. The number
of Indians actually killed while taking part in nonviolence was about
eight thousand. (See Sharp, "Gandhi as a Political
Strategist," 7.)
Indians
tried virtually every nonviolent tactic -- tax resistance (such as the famous salt march),
boycotts of British goods, failure to support the British war effort,
and fasting -- during the independence movement. For more details on the history of the
Indian struggle with the British, see Michael Edwardes, "The Last Years of British
India" (London: Cassell, 1963); Ram Gopal,
"How India Struggled for Freedom: A Political History"
(Bombay: Book Centre, 1967); Francis Hutchins, "India's Revolution:
Gandhi and the Quit India Movement" (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1973); and R.P. Masani,
"British in India: An Account of British Rule in the Indian Subcontinent"
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1960).
The most
famous nonviolent struggle in recent American history has been the civil
rights movement. A few of the many histories of the combat for legal equality for
blacks -- fought largely with nonviolent tactics -- are: Arthur I. Waskow,
"From Race Riot to Sit-in: 1919 and the 1960's" (Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1966); James Farmer, "Freedom --
When?" (New York: Random House, 1954); and Alan F. Westin, ed.,
"Freedom Now: The Civil-Rights Struggle in America" (New York:
Basic Books, 1964). Martin Luther King Jr.'s theories of nonviolent
resistance should not be overlooked. Besides 'Letter from
the Birmingham Jail' (Goldwin, ed., "On Civil
Disobedience"
Sharp lists
many historical examples of both nonviolent struggles and violent
struggles with a large nonviolent component. His examples include: Hungarian
resistance to the Austrian empire from 1850 to 1867; the Belgian suffragist
enlargement strikes in 1893, 1902, and 1913; Finland's opposition to Russian
rule from 1898 to 1905; and the Russian Revolution of 1905 and 1906. Anti-colonial
struggles in Asia and Africa were also often nonviolent. They included
China's boycotts against the Japanese between 1906 and 1919; the struggle of the Indian
minority in South Africa against discrimination from 1906 to 1914 and again in 1946;
and Samoan resistance against New Zealand from 1919 to 1936.
See Gene
Sharp, "Social Power and Political Freedom"
(Boston: Porter Sargent, 1980) for a comprehensive list. Sharp finds a
common pattern throughout the history of nonviolent resistance.
After a movement for social change acquires any sort of influence, it
typically meets with repression. While badly organized movements collapse as
soon as resistance begins, the inculcation of solidarity and discipline (akin in some ways
to the training of normal soldiers) can hold a movement
together long enough to win attention and score some
victories. Moreover, the very fact that the protesters remain
committed to nonviolence even as the government turns to repression to
combat them tends to win over previously neutral parties,
arouse dissent among the repressing group, and inspire and involve
other members of persecuted groups. Sharp refers to
this as "political jiu-jitsu" -- jiu-jitsu being a style of
martial art that uses an opponent's aggressiveness and ferocity against
him. Sharp is far from a Panglossian advocate of
nonviolence; indeed, it is precisely because of the possibility
of failure that he is interested in studying the mechanics of nonviolent
struggle. But, insofar as it succeeds, it usually does so
by converting opponents, making repression too
costly to continue, and threatening the very ability of the
government to maintain power.
END PART ONE
Humane
Studies Review Volume 9, Number 1 Summer 1994
THE
LITERATURE OF NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE AND CIVILIAN-BASED DEFENSE
by Bryan
Caplan
PART TWO
Among
Sharp's other works in the area of nonviolence are "Exploring Nonviolent
Alternatives" (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1971); "Social Power and
Political Freedom: Making Europe Unconquerable" (London: Taylor
and Francis, 1985); "National Security Through Civilian-Based
Defense" (Omaha, NE: Association for Transarmament
Studies, 1985); and "Civilian-Based Defense: A Post-Military
Weapons System" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). These
books overlap one another to a significant extent, but,
taken together, they detail the benefits of nonviolent action as a
substitute for violence. Sharp generally utilizes a comparative
institutions approach. For example, he compares the effectiveness of
real-world violence to real-world nonviolence rather than ideal violence
to real- world nonviolence as critics often do. As Sharp puts it,
"Comparative evaluations of nonviolent and
violent means must take into consideration that political violence
is often defeated also. By conventional standards, does not one side lose
in each international war, civil war and violent
revolution? Such defeats have usually been explained
as resulting from certain weaknesses or inadequacies, such as lack of
fighting spirit, insufficient or poor weapons, mistakes in strategy and
tactics, or numerical inferiority. Comparable weaknesses may also lead to
defeat in nonviolent action. The common practice of
explaining defeats of political violence in terms of such
specific shortcomings while blaming defeats of nonviolent action on the
presumption of its universal impotence is both irrational and
uninformed" (Sharp, "The Politics of
Nonviolent Action," p. 756).
With this in
mind, he first notes that violence is usually ineffective. The ability of the
government to use violence greatly exceeds that of the rebels. Indeed,
violent rebellion often strengthens oppressive regimes which can
plausibly claim that rebel violence necessitates
repression. Government's comparative advantage lies in violent action. The comparative
advantage of the people, in contrast, lies in their ability to deny their voluntary
cooperation without which it is nearly impossible for government to
persist. Consider the deadliness to a government of tax strikes, boycotts, general
strikes, and widespread refusal to obey the law. While these tactics are nonviolent, their
universal and unyielding use should terrify any government.
Nonviolence
has other advantages as well. Because it seems less dangerous and
radical than violence, it more easily, as mentioned above, wins broad
public support. The costs of participation are lower, so
more people are likely to participate. Traditional
noncombatants like children, women, and the old can effectively
participate in nonviolent struggle. It is more likely to convert
opponents and produce internal disagreement within the
ruling class. It generally leads to far fewer casualties
and material losses than violence. And since it is more decentralized than violent
action, it is less likely to give rise to an even more oppressive state
if it succeeds.
In addition
to Sharp's impressive and far-reaching "Politics of Nonviolent
Action," one should examine other works, including Richard B. Gregg's
"The Power of Nonviolence" (New York:
Fellowship Publications, 1944), which combines a theoretical
discussion with a partial history of Gandhi's struggle for Indian
independence. Gregg's theoretical approach is roughly equivalent to
Sharp's -- albeit in a less detailed systematic form. A.
Paul Hare and Herbert H. Blumberg's "Liberation Without Violence:
A Third-Party Approach" (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977)
offers a collection of largely historical essays on the use of
nonviolence in India, the United States, Africa, and Cyprus. V.K. Kool,
ed., "Perspectives on Nonviolence"
(New York:
Springer-Verlag, 1990) collects thirty essays on various topics
relating to nonviolence, including a keynote address by
Kenneth Boulding. Leroy Pelton, in "The Psychology of Nonviolence" (New
York: Pergamon, 1974), takes a psychological approach, focusing on the
ability of nonviolent resistance to change minds while
avoiding a vicious spiral of escalating violence.
***Civilian
Based Defense
If
nonviolent action can effectively force one's government to change its
policies or abandon power, then plausibly similar tactics might succeed
against a foreign invader. And, since most
nonviolence has historically been sporadic and unorganized, it might
bepossible to increase its effectiveness through training and
strategic and tactical planning. These two possibilities have sparked
interest in "civilian-based defense" -- the
self-conscious use of nonviolent means for the goal of national
defense. Sharp defines civilian-based defense as "a projected refinement
of the general technique of nonviolent action, or civilian struggle, as
it has occurred widely in improvised forms in the past. This policy is
an attempt deliberately to adapt and develop that technique to meet
defense needs, and thereby potentially to provide...
deterrence to those particular forms of attack" (Sharp, "Social
Power and Political Freedom," p. 233).
While this
may appear intuitively impractical at first, on closer examination the
argument may have strong appeal. From the outset, one
should note that some of the most famous cases of
nonviolent resistance were carried out against foreign powers: colonial North America and
India against the British; Germany against France and Belgium in the Ruhrkampf; and
Hungary against the rule of the Austrian Empire.
Quoting
Kenneth Boulding, Sharp writes "What exists, is possible." More fundamentally,
nonviolent resistance never had any of the advantages that military resistance does.
Usually the military has years to train, strategize, prepare arsenals, test weapons,
stockpile necessary resources, and study the past for lessons. But, nonviolent struggles
have almost always been carried out without the
benefit of personnel training or tactical and strategic planning. What
would happen if countries spent as much energy preparing for a nonviolent struggle as they
do for a military struggle? This is a question that Sharp and other
authors sympathetic to civilian-based defense have tried to answer.
As with most
scholarship on nonviolence, the work of Gene Sharp dominates the
area of civilian-based defense. "Social Power and Political
Freedom," a collection of essays on topics
relating to nonviolence, contains two well-written introductory
essays to the theory of civilian-based defense: "The Political
Equivalent of War' -- Civilian-Based Defense,"and
"Popular Empowerment.
He also
discusses the history of nonviolence, with examples from the Montgomery
boycotts, the Soviet prison camp resistance at Vorkuta, and German and Norwegian
opposition to Nazi policies.
These
introductory examples provide a springboard for an extensive discussion
of civilian-based defense. Sharp insists that deterrents are not limited to standard
military ones. Rather, it is merely necessary for nonviolence to make
occupation so difficult that the costs of conquest exceed
the benefits. Massive tax resistance, boycotts,
incitement of desertion, and strikes might accomplish this. And, if a
would-be conqueror realized that nonviolent techniques might make the costs
of occupation skyrocket, he might be deterred from trying. Sharp
considers specific ways to prepare effective
civilian-based defense: general education and training in the
techniques of nonviolence, as well as a "West Point" for training specialists;
the wide-spread dissemination of publishing and broadcasting equipment to prevent
invaders from seizing all of the means of communication; and local
stockpiles should exist to ease the pain of a general
strike. Lastly, Sharp considers questions of strategy.
He contrasts a "nonviolent Blitzkrieg" -- a policy of total non-cooperation,
a general strike, and massive protests -- with the less dramatic but
more sustainable "selective resistance" --
targeting specific institutions for protection and defense and
certain enemy policies for defiance and protest.
"Popular
Empowerment" offers another telling point. While standard military
defense is easy for a government to use against its own people, civilian-based
defense is not. Civilian-based defense is a positive check against the abuse
of power. If the government acts improperly, the same techniques that
the citizenry can wield against foreigners can be turned on its own
leaders. National defense, properly understood, shields society from all oppression, both
foreign and domestic.
"Making
Europe Unconquerable" was Sharp's attempt to apply his theory of
civilian-based defense to the protection of Western Europe against a Soviet invasion.
While the subject is perhaps passe, the work is useful because it
investigates a fairly specific issue in detail. Moreover, those who
doubted the efficacy of nonviolence against the Soviets
may find it a more plausible tool against the less serious
threats that European nations face today. "Exploring Nonviolent Alternatives,
Some of the
most interesting scholarship on civilian-based defense by authors
other than Sharp appears in Roberts, ed., "Civilian Resistance as a
National Defence." Notable essays include Sir Basil
Liddell Hart's "Lessons from Resistance Movements
-- Guerrilla and Nonviolent"; Theodor Ebert's "Nonviolent Resistance
Against Communist Regimes?"; Jeremy Bennett's "The Resistance
Against the German Occupation of Denmark 1940-5"; Magne Skodvin,
"Norwegian Nonviolent Resistance During the
German Occupation"; and Wolfgang Sternstein, "The Ruhrkampf
of 1923: Economic Problems of Civilian Defense." One should also see T.K.
Mahadevan, Adam Roberts, and Gene Sharp, eds., "Civilian Defense: An
Introduction" (New Delhi: Gandhi Peace Foundation, 1967).
For other
books on civilian-based defense, see Sir Stephen King-Hall, "Defence
in the Nuclear Age" (London: Victor Gollancz, 1958), which argues
that Britain should unilaterally give up its nuclear
weapons stockpile, since the possession of nuclear weapons
makes Britain a more likely target for a hostile nuclear attack; he
recommends civilian-based defense. Norman Freund, in "Nonviolent
National Defense: A Philosophical Inquiry into Applied
Nonviolence" (New York: University Press of America, 1987),
summarizes many of the main arguments for civilian-based defense, as
does Krishnalal Shridharani, "War Without Violence: A Study
of Gandhi's Methods and Its Accomplishments" (New York: Garland, 1972).
A Quaker organization, the American Friends Service Committee, defended
civilian- based defense in "In Place of War: An Inquiry into Nonviolent
National Defense" (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1967). Anders
Boserup and Andrew Mack, "War Without Weapons" (New York:
Schocken Books, 1975), overlaps with Sharp's work;
its main innovation is its explicit attempt to integrate the theory of
nonviolence with classical strategic theory as formulated by Clauswitz. In
so doing, Boserup and Mack open the door for the application of both
rational choice and game theories to the question of nonviolence.
**"It
Can Only Work Against the British" -- Nonviolence against Totalitarian
Regimes
Almost
everyone will concede that nonviolence can work against "civilized"
nations. But what about the hard cases? What about totalitarian governments
utterly lacking in moral scruples and prepared to kill as many people as
necessary to cement their rule? Intuitively, the case against nonviolence in
such circumstances is strong. Yet preliminary
research into the history of nonviolent resistance against Nazi Germany
and Soviet Russia casts doubt on this intuition. While nonviolence may be less useful
against amoral or immoral tyrants, it is far from futile.
Danish,
Norwegian, and Dutch resistance to Nazism from 1940 to 1945 was
pronounced and fairly successful. In Norway, for example, teachers refused to
promote fascism in the schools. For this, the Nazis imprisoned a thousand
teachers. But, the remaining teachers stood firm, giving
anti-fascist instruction to children and teaching in their homes. This
policy made the pro-fascist Quisling government so
unpopular that it eventually released all of the imprisoned teachers and
dropped its attempt to dominate the schools. Other forms of struggle included ostracism,
the refusal to speak to Nazi soldiers and intense social hostility to collaborationists.
Nonviolent
struggle in the Netherlands was also fierce. The Dutch organized two general strikes in Amsterdam;
one in 1941 protested mistreatment of Jews, and a second in 1943
opposed the Nazi plan to intern Dutch war veterans in Germany. In Copenhagen,
Danes used a general strike to liberalize martial law.
Gene Sharp's
sources include Jeremy Bennett, "The Resistance Against the German
Occupation of Denmark 1940-5," in Roberts, pp.
154-172; Magne Skodvin, "Norwegian Nonviolent Resistance
During the German Occupation," in Roberts, pp. 136-153; Bjarne H�ye
and Trygve M. Ager, "The Fight of the Norwegian Church Against
Nazism" (New York: Macmillan, 1943); and Werner
Warmbrunn, "The Dutch Under German Occupation 1940-1945"
(Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1963). For a general treatment
of resistance to Nazism, see International Conference on the History of the
Resistance Movements, "European Resistance Movements, 1939-1945 (Oxford:
Pergamon Press, 1960).
But, surely
the most amazing but widely neglected case of nonviolent resistance
against Nazi Germany was the protection of Jews and other persecuted minorities
from deportation, imprisonment, and murder. In "The Lesson of Eichmann: A
Review-Essay on Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem" in "Social Power
and Political Freedom," Gene Sharp shows how the nations which nonviolently resisted
National Socialist racial persecutions saved almost all of their Jews, while
Jews in other Nazi-controlled nations were vastly more likely to be placed in
concentration camps and killed.
The effort
to arrest Norway's seventeen hundred Jews sparked internal resistance
and protest resignations; most of the Norwegian Jews fled to Sweden. In
Belgium, police refused to cooperate with the Germans, and railroad
workers sabotaged trains transporting imprisoned Jews. Apparently no Belgian
Jews died at Nazi hands, and about half of all foreign Jews living in Belgium survived
occupation. While Vichy France helped deport foreign Jews, it refused to cooperate
in the deportation of French Jews; in consequence, eighty percent were saved. Even
though Italy was a German ally, Italians did not share Hitler's anti-Semitism. As a result
of bureaucratic resistance and non-cooperation, ninety percent of Italian Jews were saved.
When Himmler
tried to crack down on Danish Jews, the Danes thwarted his efforts.
Not only did the Danish government and people resist -- through bureaucratic
slowdowns and noncooperation -- but, surprisingly, the German commander
in Denmark also refused to help organize Jewish deportations. This
prompted Himmler to import special troops to arrest Jews. But, in the end
almost all Danish Jews escaped unharmed. In Bulgaria, the
parliament refused to assist the German anti-Jewish measures, and Bulgarians held public
demonstrations against the persecution of Jews. As far as can be known,
no Bulgarian Jews were killed or deported by the Nazis.
For more on
this, see Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the
Banality of Evil" (New York: Viking Press, 1963). The
omnipresent pattern that Arendt finds and that Sharp emphasizes is that totalitarian
governments are not omnipotent. They need the cooperation of the ruled
to exert their will. If a people denies cooperation, even a government
as vicious as Hitler's, bound by few moral constraints, might be unable to get what it
wants.
The history
of nonviolent struggle against the Soviet Union has, until recently,
been much more bleak. When, in 1953, East Germans used the general strike
and other nonviolent tactics to win better treatment for
workers, the Soviets brutally crushed all
opposition, leading to worldwide recognition -- even among socialists
-- that the Soviet regime's claim to represent "workers" was
absurd. Stefan Brant, "The East German
Rising" (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1957) covers the history
of the largely nonviolent 1953 struggle. The Hungarian uprising in
1956, while generally considered a military
struggle, contained strong nonviolent elements, including a general
strike, mass demonstrations, and the formation of a parallel
government. Again, the Soviets harshly repressed it, though it is worth noting
that the nonviolent resistance (for example the general strike in Budapest)
held out longer than the Hungarian military. On this, see
Ferenc Vali, "Rift and Revolt in Hungary:
Nationalism versus Communism" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1961) and George Mikes, "The Hungarian Revolution" (London: Andre Deutsch,
1957).
The Czech
struggle of 1968 is a final tragic chapter in the history of resistance
to the Soviets. Remarkably, the Czechs used nonviolent means almost exclusively
and, consequently, lasted considerably longer than did
the Hungarians. The Dubcek government ordered its
soldiers to remain in their barracks, the state news agency
refused to announce that its government had "requested" the
invasion, and the Czech Congress condemned Soviet
actions and demanded a release of its kidnapped officials.
Other forms of resistance included short-term general strikes, transportation
obstruction, and the use of radio to rally the people against Soviet invaders.
Even though the invasion was a complete military success, the Soviets
decided that the political situation made it unwise to replace the Dubcek government
with collaborators. Instead, after some compromise on reforms, they
released the kidnapped Czech leaders and restored them to their previous
positions. The liberal reformers retained power for eight
more months, at which point the Russians replaced
them with their own favorites. This ended Czech reforms. On the
1968 struggle see Robert Littell, ed., "The Czech Black Book"
(New York:
Frederick A. Praeger, 1969); Robin Alison Remington, ed.,
"Winter in Prague" (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969); and Philip
Windsor and Adam Roberts, "Czechoslovakia" 1968 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1969).
It would be
easy to draw deeply pessimistic conclusions from this long string of
suppressed attempts to liberalize communist nations. Not only did history support
the pessimistic conclusion of Jeane Kirkpatrick and other conservatives,
but it, a priori, also made sense. Violent revolution in
a totalitarian system seemed futile. The ruling
elite might fight amongst itself, but they had no intention of giving
up power voluntarily. And, nonviolence proved clearly useless against
conscienceless dictators.
Or did it?
As Sharp emphasized, nonviolence can win by converting opponents
and neutrals and by creating divisions within ruling groups. In a way,
that was happening for decades under communism. Not only
the people, but also subgroups within the ruling
elite itself gradually came to see the evil and inherent contradictions
within their own system. Circulation of illegal literature, smuggled
videotapes, and infiltration of Western cultural influences slowly eroded
confidence. It is a mistake to look at communist nations over the
past few decades and conclude that all resistance had been crushed;
rather, it had been occurring covertly, slowly
undermining all of the claims of communist governments
of legitimacy.
The move for
liberalization began with the Solidarity movement in Poland. One
readable journalistic history of Solidarity is Timothy Garton Ash's,
"The Polish Revolution: Solidarity
1980-1982" (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983). Ash emphasizes
that the election of a Polish pope marked the beginning of rising
expectations in Poland. By highlighting the role of
non-state institutions, John Paul's election tended
to make people more conscious of the distinction between society and
state. Ash describes one of the pope's Polish appearances: "For
nine days the state virtually ceased to exist,
except as a censor doctoring the television coverage. Everyone saw that
Poland is not a communist country -- just a communist state" (Ash,p. 29).
The
chief tactic of Solidarity was the strike, which it used both to
highlight particular grievances and to attain broader reform. Peter Raina's
"Poland 1981: Towards Social Renewal"
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1985) details the history of Solidarity's
tactics, demands, and compromises that critical year. The author analyzes
the precise text of reform bills on independent trade
unions, worker self-management, censorship, and higher education. For a
broader history, see Jadwiga Staniaszkis, "Poland's
Self-Limiting Revolution" (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1984). This work gives a solid account of the crucial 1980 through 1982
period -- the height of Solidarity's influence --
but it also discusses moderate reforms during the 70's, the Polish
people's rising expectations prior to Solidarity, and the early period
of Soviet occupation after World War II.
The
Solidarity movement and student and peasant associations expressed discontent
and struggled for reform despite harsh persecution. Their limited
successes inspired dissidents in other communist nations to push harder
for reform and frightened communist leaders into mild
compromises. One work documenting the spread of the
"Polish virus" is Elizabeth Teague's "Solidarity and the
Soviet Worker" (London: Croom Helm, 1988) which discusses the
influence of the Solidarity movement on Soviet politics. The Politburo
clearly feared the growth of the ideas of the
Solidarity movement and made concessions to workers in the early
1980s to prevent this. While Teague found little Polish influence upon
ethnic Russians, the Solidarity movement frequently
influenced other ethnicities within the USSR to push
peacefully for reforms in their own republics.
Eventually
the accumulated effects of resistance penetrated the Soviet Politburo
itself. Gorbachev announced that Soviet forces would not quell reforms in
Eastern Europe. At this point, the unself-conscious
tactics of nonviolent resistance went public. A half
million East Germans demonstrated in Berlin for democratic elections
and civil liberties on 4 November 1989. A half million Czechs and Slovaks
protested the phony reforms of communist bosses in Prague
three weeks later. Thousands of protesters in Leipzig
forced state security headquarters to submit to public inspection.
As Sharp
writes, repression often rebounded against the repressors: "Czechs
and Slovaks erected shrines at the main sites of the beatings, raising
those injured to the stature of heroes. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets
daily following the police actions. As one student put it, the beatings
were �the spark that started the whole
movement'" (Sharp, "Civilian-Based Defense," pp. 58-59).
Success was contagious -- once East Germany's neighboring communist
regimes fell, the East Germans began to flee to West
Germany by way of their government's former allies. In
the final chapter, communism within the Soviet Union itself collapsed, and
the last-ditch attempt of hard-line communists to seize power was
foiled with no small thanks to mass demonstrations,
fraternization with soldiers, and other nonviolent tactics.
While
there has been some overlap between the classical liberal tradition and
the theory and practice of nonviolent struggle, they remain virtual
strangers to one another in scholarship. There is,
however, no intrinsic reason for this. While nonviolence
is compatible with many viewpoints, some of the best arguments in its
favor have a rather classical liberal flavor. The analysis of political
power and civil obedience put forth by nonviolence
theorists closely resembles classical liberalism. Similarly,
the observation that violent revolution often serves only the interests
of a new elite fits comfortably into the classical liberal tradition.
The nonviolence literature contains few explicit references to
spontaneous order, but the idea is often present
nonetheless, especially in Gene Sharp's work. The idiom of the nonviolence
literature is initially foreign, but frequently it is a difference chiefly
of style, not of substance.
Classical
liberals interested in the issue of nonviolence will find several gaps
in the existing literature waiting to be filled. First of all, the
notion of spontaneous order in general, along with
rational choice and game theories, rarely appears. But, these
tools could shed considerable light on the feasibility of nonviolence;
they might also help answer the objection that centrally planned
resistance is necessarily more effective than
civilian-based defense. Second, classical liberals may be able to
draw on a broader range of historical examples than the current literature
does. The self-conscious resistance movements are its primary focus;
but aren't there many voluntary institutions whose
result is to check state power even though that is no part
of the intention of the participants?
Thus, the
informal economy is rarely a form of ideological protest, but it is
nevertheless a decentralized and nonviolent check
upon the abuse of governmental power. A third insight that classical liberals might
introduce and expand is the role of markets and economic freedom as a nonviolent check
upon the state. Since contemporary advocates of nonviolence
tend to be suspicious of capitalism, they often ignore typically liberal
observations. Classical liberals may learn from -- as well as contribute to
-- the nonviolence literature. Besides its intrinsic
interest, it may point the way to answers to several difficult
issues within the classical liberal tradition. Despite their distrust
of state power and interventionist foreign policy, classical liberals
have had a difficult time envisioning specific
alternatives to violence to combat tyranny. The literature of
nonviolent resistance is filled with penetrating insights
in this area. And, while classical liberals
frequently long for alternatives to both electoral politics and
violence, specific suggestions have been sparse. These are merely a few
gaps that the nonviolence literature may fill. On a more
aesthetic note, many of the historical examples of
nonviolence are beautiful illustrations of the power of voluntary
institutions to supplement or replace the role of the state.
Finally, the
role of civilian protest and direct action in recent anti-communist
revolutions lends a new credibility to the idea of nonviolent resistance.
It would go too far to attribute the demise of communism
purely to nonviolent resistance. But it was one
important and neglected factor in the greatest triumph of freedom in
the twentieth-century. Classical liberals should study the lessons that
it teaches. In particular, they should learn how
freedom may be defended against tyrannical governments.
A central lesson here is that even when the government has the weapons,
there is something that it cannot seize: the voluntary compliance of
its citizens. Without it, maintaining power becomes costly or even
impossible. But, as we have seen, governments almost
instinctively sense this risk and strive to prevent
it from arising. As La Boetie explains, "it has always happened that
tyrants, in order to strengthen their power, have made every effort to
train their people not only in obedience and servility
toward themselves, but also in adoration" (La Boetie, 75). All
that is necessary to prevent tyranny is to let the citizenry come to
know its own strength. Or, in the timeless words of La Boetie,
"From all these indignities [of tyranny], such as the very beasts of
the field would not endure, you can deliver
yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing
to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do
not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but
simply that you support him no longer; then you will
behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has
been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces"
(La Boetie, p. 53).
Bryan Caplan
is a graduate student in Economics at Princeton University
|
                          | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
No comments:
Post a Comment