Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story, by Life Magazine

This is a broad, catch-all category of works that fit best here and not elsewhere. If you haven't found it someplace else, you might want to look here.

Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story, by Life Magazine

Postby admin » Thu Sep 20, 2018 10:01 pm

Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story
by the Editors of LIFE, Vol. 49, No. 22
November 28, 1960, p. 19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Image

THE EDITORS OF LIFE PRESENT A MAJOR HISTORICAL DOCUMENT

EICHMANN TELLS HIS OWN DAMNING STORY


On the following pages LIFE begins its exclusive publication of the confession of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi who engineered the murder of millions of Jews -- and now awaits trial for his crime in Israel.

In this document, Eichmann convicts himself as one of the major Nazi war criminals. Yet he set it down in the belief that his version of the truth would go far to "explain" his actions and even to exonerate him. Several years ago in Argentina, where he had fled after eluding Allied agents and lived under a false name, he began telling his story to a German journalist, talking into a tape recorder for hours at a time.

"Eichmann Confessions" published in Life, November 28 and December 5, 1960: as dictated by him to Danish Nazi officer William Sassen, the summary of which appeared in Life magazine.

-- Perfidy, by Ben Hecht


He had finished the account by last May when, in a dramatic cloak and dagger operation, Israeli intelligence agents found him, captured him and carried him off to Israel.

A month later, LIFE came into possession of the huge transcript of Eichmann's words. After six months of translation, editing and research which confirmed the absolute authenticity of the document, LIFE is now able to present, in two installments, Eichmann's own story of his work.

"I was merely a little cog in the machinery," Eichmann argues. Engaged in an effort that dwarfed the exterminations of Genghis Khan or Tamerlane, he preserved the mentality of a competent bookkeeper, eager to please his superiors. He tells how he himself worked out the timetable for the obliteration of Europe's Jewish population and how his men rounded up Jews and put them on the trains that led to deathly sidings at Auschwitz and Maidanek or to the lime pits in Poland.

The question may be asked: why publish this account?

LIFE does not publish it simply as a reminder of the terrible slaughter of European Jewry. The self-told story of Adolf Eichmann is a major contribution to the history of a horrifyingly brutal era, and it has a bitter relevance in our time. Eichmann gave over his conscience to a totalitarian state out of perverted patriotism and in return for the supposed solidarity and security that the state promised him. His deeds, of course, make him an extreme example. But among the Nazis, the Communists and other totalitarians, past and present, he could find a great deal of company: men who totally abdicate their individual sense or morality in favor of a set of instructions and directives.

The Eichmann story reveals how evil can be rationalized because it has been codified. It is not pleasant reading, but it stands as a warning to every member of the human family.

Image
ADOLF EICHMANN: This man, now a prisoner in Israel, was head of the Gestapo's notorious office for "Jewish affairs." Given the job of rounding up the Jews whom Hitler had sworn to exterminate, Adolf Eichmann became a power in Nazi Germany and was the man more responsible perhaps than any other for carrying out the greatest, cruelest mass murder in history.

Image

'I TRANSPORTED THEM ... TO THE BUTCHER'

EICHMANN'S STORY PART I

Image

By Adolf Eichmann


How much time fate allows me to live, I do not know. I do know that someone must inform this generation and those to come about the happenings of my era. I am writing this story at a time when I am in full possession of my physical and mental freedom, influenced or pressed by no one. May future historians be objective enough not to stray from the path of the true facts recorded here.

I have slowly tired of living as an anonymous wanderer between two worlds, wanted even by the police of my homeland. At Nürnberg, my most trusted subordinate testified against me. So did others. Perhaps these people referred to me to whitewash themselves. But when such a thing goes on for years and everyone joins in, blaming me for the deeds of all, a legend is created in which exaggeration plays a large part.

In actual fact, I was merely a little cog in the machinery that carried out the directives and orders of the German Reich. I am neither a murderer nor a mass-murderer. I am a man of average character, with good qualities and many faults. I was not "Czar of the Jews," as a Paris newspaper once called me, nor was I responsible for all the good and evil deeds done against them. Where I was implicated in the physical annihilation of the Jews, I admit my participation freely and without pressure. After all, I was the one who transported the Jews to the camps. If I had not transported them, they would not have been delivered to the butcher.

Yet what is there to "admit"? I carried out my orders. It would be as pointless to blame [me] for the whole Final Solution of the Jewish Problem as to blame the official in charge of the railroads over which the Jewish transports traveled. Where would we have been if everyone had thought things out in those days? You can do that today in the "new" German army. But with us an order was an order. If I had sabotaged the order of the one-time Fuhrer of the German Reich, Adolf Hitler, I would have been not only a scoundrel but a despicable pig, like those who broke their military oath to join the ranks of the anti-Hitler criminals in the conspiracy of July 20, 1944.

The Order for Annihilation

At the Nurnberg trial the world was given a new interpretation of justice. Not one Russian, no Israeli, no Englishman or North American was punished in even a single instance because he carried out commands given to him while he was in an official position or under military oath. Why should the gallows or the penitentiary be reserved for Germans only?

But I am getting ahead of my story. It is time to outline my rank and duties in the events which I shall discuss, and to introduce myself:

Name: Adolf Otto Eichmann

Nationality: German

Occupation: Lieutenant Colonel SS (retired)

Image
BESEECHING VICTIMS of Nazi executioners kneel before a firing squad in Poland. This picture was taken by one of Goebbels' propaganda photographers.

The area of my section's authority was those Jewish matters within the competence of the Gestapo. Originally this centered on the problems of finding out whether a person was a Gentile or a Jew. If he turned out to be a Jew, we were the administrative authority which deprived him of his German citizenship and confiscated his property. Ultimately we declared him an enemy of the state. After the one-time German Fuhrer gave the order for the physical annihilation of the Jews, our duties shifted. We supervised Gestapo seizures of German Jews and the trains that took them to their final destination. And throughout German-occupied Europe my advisers from my office saw to it that the local governments turned their Jewish citizens over to the German Reich. For all this, of course, I will answer. I was not asleep during the war years.

I began my work with the Jewish question in 1935 in Berlin where I had been transferred after service with one of the early SS training companies. My first assignment there had been extremely dull, sorting what ultimately became a huge card-index of Jews, Freemasons, members of various secret societies and other subversive elements in the Reich. In time, however, my superiors allowed me to start work on the solution of the Jewish problem.

Image
In Argentina, Eichmann confidently leaves house where he brought his family in 1952

Image
THE HUMDRUM BACKGROUND OF A FANATIC

Image
PROUD CHILD of nationalistic Germans, Adolf Eichmann poses for portrait in Austrian city of Linz, where family moved before World War I. His father, who managed electric company, gave Adolf a German soldier's cap to wear to school. He flaunted it before his Austrian classmates.

Image
DREAMY PICNICKER, Eichmann (foreground) enjoys lunch with a teacher and a fellow student from technical school at Linz. He was 18 and an indifferent scholar. Best friend was son of a Jewish druggist.

Image
YOUNG TRAVELER, Eichmann used this passport picture in 1933 when he went to Germany to join Hitler's early SS units.

I must confess that I did not greet this assignment with the apathy of an ox being led to his stall. On the contrary, I was fascinated with it. My chief, General Reinhard Heydrich, encouraged me to study and acquaint myself even with its theological aspects. In the end I learned to speak Hebrew, although badly.

Some of my early work was with the Nurnberg Laws, in force since 1935. Under the formula adopted at that time for “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” the laws were intended to drive Jews out of all phases of German life. My experience in this field was often of a confidential and rather embarrassing nature -– as when I established that the Fuhrer’s diet cook, who was at one time his mistress, was 1/32nd Jewish. My immediate superior, Lieutenant General Heinrich Muller, quickly classified my report as Top Secret.

In 1937, after I had been struggling with Hebrew for two and a half years, I had the chance to take a trip to Palestine. We were most interested in the Palestine emigration, and I wanted to find out at what point a new Jewish state in Palestine might be set up. Unfortunately Palestine was then in turmoil, and the British turned down my application for an extended stay. I did see enough to be very impressed by the way the Jewish colonists were building up their land. I admired their desperate will to live, the more so since I was myself an idealist.

In the years that followed I often said to Jews with whom I had dealings that, had I been a Jew, I would have been a fanatical Zionist. I could not imagine being anything else. In fact, I would have been the most ardent Zionist imaginable.


A Yellow Star on Their Clothing

In those days before the outbreak of the war, the former government of the Reich hoped to solve the Jewish problem by forced emigration. This was easier said than done, since one had to reckon here the difficulty of emigration as a mass project. The Jewish organizations with the widest experience in this had already been closed down as unacceptable to the government. There was also a tendency among many Jews to wait it out on the theory that the Hitler regime would be of short duration. Of the 500,000 avowed Jews who were in Germany in 1933, plus a number who were considered Jews under the Nurnberg Laws, not more than 130,000 managed to leave before 1938.

Image

Image
SS BRIDEGROOM, Eichmann wore his uniform at his Berlin marriage to Veronika Liebl in 1935. First fiancee, an Austrian, had left him, calling Nazis idiots. "Idiots, perhaps," he said, "but they have order."

Image
FAVORITE PHOTO of young husband was this one, which Eichmann gave wife in 1936, inscribed: "To my very honored Mrs. Spouse I present myself at Christmas. Thy dear husband." Eichmann lived very quiet home life, thought himself a good provider.

Image
VISITOR TO PALESTINE. In 1937, Herr Eichmann traveled as German journalist, reported back to Berlin about growing Jewish immigration. He tried to become expert on "Jewish question," even studied Hebrew. First job in SS headquarters was to keep file on Jews and Freemasons.

It may have been the Propaganda Ministry that first thought up the idea of forcing all Jews to wear a yellow star on their clothing. I remember that when Julius Streicher heard about it he whinnied with delight. His newspaper, Der Sturmer, devoted an entire issue to this matter. I naturally took part in the administrative details, since as the department head for Jewish affairs in the Gestapo my countersignature was required. In fact, I recall the day when I received bolts and bolts of yellow cloth to distribute. I issued the cloth to my Jewish functionaries and they trotted off with them.

We did not devise the yellow star to put pressure on the Jews themselves. On the contrary, its purpose was to control the natural tendency of our German people to come to the aid of someone in trouble. The marking was intended to hinder any such assistance to Jews who were being harassed. We wanted Germans to feel embarrassed, to feel afraid of having any contact with Jews.
So our administration was quite happy to distribute these bolts of yellow cloth and to regulate the time limit by which the stars would have to be worn.

There was a Jewish lawyer in Vienna who said to me, “Sir, I wear this star with pride.” This man impressed me. He was an idealist. So I let him emigrate soon afterward.

It was in 1938, at the reunion of Austria with the German Reich, that General Heydrich gave me the order, in my capacity as a specialist in Jewish affairs, to set the Jewish emigration in motion from Vienna.

I found Jewish life in Austria completely disorganized. Most Jewish organizations had already been closed down by the police and their leaders put under arrest. To speed up emigration I called in local Jewish leaders and established a central office for Jewish emigration. It was located in the Rothschild Palace in the Prinz Eugen Strasse.

Image

The Palais Rothschild (at Prinz-Eugen-Straße 26) is a former palatial residence in Vienna, Austria. It was one of five Palais Rothschild in the city that were owned by members of the Rothschild banking family of Austria.

It was the second Palais Rothschild commissioned by Baron Albert von Rothschild, on the same street as his larger Palais Albert Rothschild at Prinz-Eugen-Straße 20-22 (demolished in 1954).

It was designed and built in 1894 by the theatre architects Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer. The building is four storeys high and was designed in a neoclassical style.

Like all Jewish property at the time, it was thoroughly plundered by the Nazis during their occupation of Austria. However, the building survived without structural damage and today serves as the Brazilian embassy in Vienna.

-- Palais Rothschild (Prinz-Eugen-Straße), by Wikipedia


As with the other, similar central offices, the Vienna office permitted emigrating Jews to take household goods with them. For the custody and administration of Jewish property, so-called administrative and accounting centers were later created, which worked with tidy accuracy and correctness. Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, who surprisingly enough often busied himself with the smallest details of the Jewish problem, personally set up the strict administrative standards which were observed in this field. In Vienna alone we were able to prepare as many as 1,000 Jews daily for emigration.

The Jewish SS Sergeant

One of the most useful of the Jewish officials in those days was a Dr. Storfer, a senior civil servant who had been a major in the Austrian army in World War I. I had a weakness for this Dr. Storfer. He never took a pfennig from his racial comrades and he had a very nice, proper way of negotiating. Unfortunately, years later Sorfer made a stupid blunder. He tried to escape. My second in command had never liked him and he had him shot at Auschwitz.

In general we respected Jewish combat veterans of World War I. We even had some Jewish SS men who had taken part in the early struggles of the Nazis – about 50 of them in Germany and Austria. I remember giving my personal attention to a Jewish SS sergeant, a good man, who wanted to leave for Switzerland. I had instructed the border control to let him pass, but when he reached the Swiss border he apparently thought something had gone wrong. He tried to cross illegally through the woods and he was shot. He was a 100% Jew, a man of the most honorable outlook.

Throughout all this period I saw the Jewish problem as a question to be solved politically. So did Himmler and the entire Gestapo. It was not a matter of emotion. My SS comrades and I rejected the crude devices of burning temples, robbing Jewish stores and maltreating Jews on the streets. We wanted no violence. One of my former officers was expelled from the SS for beating up four or five Jews in the cellar of our offices. Barring such exceptions, each of us, as an individual, had no wish to harm the individual Jews personally.

For the sake of the truth I cannot refrain from mentioning a small incident in which I myself violated this code of correctness. One day I called in Dr. Lowenherz, whom I appointed director of the Jewish community in Vienna. He answered by questions with evasions and, I believe, untruth. Owing to a temporary lack of self-control, I hit him in the face. I mentioned this affair to Dr. Lowenherz later in the presence of some of my subordinates and expressed my regrets to him over the matter.

As late as 1940, after we beat the French, we were devising plans for further mass emigration of the Jews to Madagascar. I had my legal experts draft a complete law covering the resettlement of Jews there on territory which was to be declared Jewish. They would live there without restraint, except, of course, that they would be under the protectorate of the German Reich. Unfortunately, by the time the obstacles created by bureaucracy for this plan had been overcome, the scales of victory were balanced in such a way that Madagascar was out of our grasp.

Image
FUGITIVE'S LONG EXILE IN THE ARGENTINE

Image
SURVEYOR in the province of Tucuman in 1952, Eichmann (right), alias Ricardo Klement, relaxes with crew. In Argentina for 10 years, he never learned Spanish well.

Image
FARM MANAGER in Siete Palmas, Eichmann stands with third son Dieter at angora farm he ran in 1953. Owners of farm were Jewish family from Hungary.

Image
ELDEST SON Klaus on the terrace of Eichmann home outside Buenos Aires reads clipping telling how father was abducted from Argentina last May. Married to an Argentine girl, he wears a pistol at belt in constant fear of assault by Israelis.

Image
FAMILY PARTY, with kidnaped Eichmann absent, is given Frau Eichman on Argentine Mother's Day with sons Klaus, 24, Dieter, 18 (right) and Ricardo, 5, who is called Haasl (Little Rabbit). Other son, Horst, 20, is a merchant seaman.

The Final Solution: Liquidation

The continuance of the war finally changed out attitude on emigration entirely. In 1941 the Führer himself ordered the physical annihilation of the Jewish enemy. What made him take this step I do not know. But for one thing the war in Russia was not going along in the Blitz fashion the High Command had planned. The ruinous struggle on two fronts had begun. And already Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the world Zionist leader, had declared war on Germany in the name of Jewry. It was inevitable that the answer of the Führer would not be long in coming.

Soon after the order General Heydrich called me to his office in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse. He told me about Reichsführer Himmler's order that all emigration of Jews was to be prohibited - with no more exceptions. He assured me that neither I nor my men would have anything to do with the physical liquidation. We would act only as policemen; that is, we would round up the Jews for the others.

Image
HEYRICH, "The Hangman," Eichmann SS boss and Himmler aide, was killed by Czechs in 1942

By this time the formula "Final Solution for the Jewish Question" had taken on a new meaning: liquidation. In this new sense we discussed it at a special conference on Jan. 10, 1942 in the Wannsee section of Berlin. It was I who had to bustle over to Heydrich with the portfolio of invitations on which he scribbled his "Heydrich", stroke for stroke. So we sent out the whole thing. A few people declined to participate, on grounds principally of other duties.

Image
FENCE THAT FEAR BUILT guards Haasi Eichmann and his home from the world. In background his mother stands against bare house which Eichmanns built themselves on badly drained flatlands near Buenos Aires. Frau Eichmann believes that house is constantly watched. Her older sons help support her.

Image
END OF THE LINE for Jews Eichmann sent in from countries Hitler conquered was here at the Birkenau extermination camp, largest in Auschwitz. SS camp guards are inspecting trains just unloaded, with piles of victims' belongings still on platform (rear center). In the background are crematoriums.

After the conference, as I recall, Heydrich, Müller and your humble servant sat cozily around the fireplace. I noticed for the first time that Heydrich was smoking. Not only that, but he had a cognac. Normally he touched nothing alcoholic. The only other time I had seen him drinking was at an office party years before. We all had drinks then. We sang songs. After a while we got up on the chairs and drank a toast, then on the table and then round and round - on the chairs and on the table again. Heydrich taught it to us. It was an old North German custom.

But we sat around peacefully after our Wannsee Conference, not just talking shop but giving ourselves a rest after so many taxing hours.

It is not true that Reichsführer Himmler set down in writing anything ordering the annihilation of the Jews. Do you think he sat down to write, "My dear Eichmann, the Führer has ordered the physical annihilation of the Jews"? The truth is that Himmler never put a line in writing on this subject. I know that he always gave his instructions orally to Lieut. General Oswald Pohl, in charge of the economic administration which ran the concentration camps. I never received any order of this sort.

I would like to stress again, however, that my department never gave a single annihilation order. We were responsible only for deportations. In every European country under our jurisdiction it was the job of the Jewish Adviser (the representative of my office) to work through local officials until he had attained our goal: a roundup of the Jews and their delivery to the transports. I had Captain Richter sitting in Bucharest, Captain Wisliceny in Pressburg [Bratislava], Dannecker in Paris, etc. All these Jewish Advisers enjoyed the greatest respect, for each of them was really the long arm of Himmler himself. Although I myself had a relatively low rank, I was the only department head in the Gestapo with my own representatives in foreign countries. If one of my specialists got in trouble with a local commander, I would then have my bureau chief, General Müller, give the necessary orders. Müller was more feared than Reichsführer Himmler.

I carefully set up my timetables for the transports with the Ministry of Transportation, and the trains were soon rolling. But through the years we met many difficulties. In France the French police helped only hesitantly. After its initial enthusiasm for the project, the Laval government itself became more and more cautious. Italy and Belgium were by and large failures. And in Holland the battle for the Jews was especially hard and bitter. The Dutch, for one thing, did not make the distinction between Dutchmen and Jews with Dutch citizenship. A person was either Dutch, they said, or he wasn't. Denmark posed the greatest difficulties of all. The King intervened for the Jews there, and most of them escaped.

Yet we managed after a struggle to get the deportations going. Trainloads of Jews were soon leaving from France and Holland. It was not for nothing that I made so many trips to Paris and The Hague. My interest here was only in the number of transport trains I had to provide. Whether they were bank directors or mental cases, the people who were loaded on these trains meant nothing to me. It was really none of my business.

In general, I found that there were fewer problems with local authorities the farther east you went - with the exception of the assimilated Jews in Hungary. The Romanian operations went off without friction. Captain Richter in Bucharest was a good man. Eager to strike against these parasites, the Romanians astonishingly enough liquidated thousands and thousands of their own Jews. Slovakian officials offered their Jews to us like someone throwing away sour beer. Tiso, the Catholic priest who ran the government there, was an anti-Semite.

Tiso's attitude contrasted with mine. I am no anti-Semite. I was just politically opposed to Jews because they were stealing the breath of life from us.

The chambers at Maidenek

It was in the latter part of 1941 that I saw the first preparations for annihilating the Jews. General Heydrich ordered me to visit Maidanek, a Polish village near Lublin. A German police captain showed me how they had managed to build airtight chambers disguised as ordinary Polish farmers' huts, seal them hermetically, then inject the exhaust gas from a Russian U-boat motor. I remember it all very exactly because I never thought that anything like that would be possible, technically speaking.

Not long afterward Heydrich had me carry an order to Major General Odilo Globocnik, SS commander of the Lublin district. I cannot remember whether Heydrich gave me the actual message or whether I had to draw it up. It ordered Globocnik to start liquidating a quarter million Polish Jews.

Later that year I watched my first execution. It was at Minsk, then recently come under German occupation. I was sent by my immediate superior, General Müller. Müller never stirred from behind his desk at Gestapo headquarters but he knew everything that went on in Europe. He liked to send me around on his behalf. I was in effect a traveling salesman for the Gestapo, just as I had once been a traveling salesman for an oil company in Austria.

Müller had heard that Jews were being shot near Minsk, and he wanted a report. I went there and showed my orders to the local SS commander. "That's a fine coincidence, " he said. "Tomorrow 5,000 of them are getting theirs."

When I rode out the next morning, they had already started, so I could see only the finish. Although I was wearing a leather coat which reached almost to my ankles, it was very cold. I watched the last group of Jews undress, down to their shirts. They walked the last 100 or 200 yards -- they were not driven -- then they jumped into the pit. It was impressive to see them all jumping into the pit without offering any resistance whatsoever. Then the men of the squad banged away into the pit with their rifles and machine pistols.

Image
GESTAPO CHIEF Muller was Eichmann's superior. Brutal but very clever, he disappeared in 1945.

Why did the scene linger so long in my memory? Perhaps because I had children myself. And there were children in the pit. I saw a women hold a child of a year or two into the air, pleading. At that moment all I wanted to say was, "Don't shoot, hand over the child...." Then the child was hit.

I was so close that later I found bits of brains spattered on my long leather coat. My driver helped me remove them. Then we returned to Berlin.

The Gestapo chauffeurs did not like to drive me, principally because I rarely spoke more than 20 words during a 12-hour trip, as for instance the long haul from Berlin to Paris. On this trip back from Minsk I spoke hardly a word. I was thinking. Not that I had become contemptuous of National Socialism after watching this previously unimaginable event. I was reflecting on the meaning of life in general.

Having seen what I had in Minsk, I said this when I reported back to Müller: "The solution, Gruppenführer, was supposed to have been a political one. But now that the Führer has ordered a physical solution, obviously a physical solution it must be. But we cannot go on conducting executions as they were done in Minsk and, I believe, other places. Of necessity our men will be educated to become sadists. We cannot solve the Jewish problem by putting a bullet through the brain of a defenseless women who is holding her child up to us."

Müller did not answer. He just looked at me in a fatherly, benevolent fashion. I never could figure him out.

Later in that same winter Müller sent me to watch Jews being gassed in the Litzmannstadt [Lodz] area of central Poland. I must stress that the gassing was not done on his orders, but Müller did want to know about it. He was a very thorough government official.

Image
AUSCHWITZ ORGANIZER, Oswald Pohl, here seen at Nurnberg in 1945, was SS general in charge of all camps, was executed in 1951.

Image
AUSCHWITZ COMMANDANT, Rudolf Hoess, here pictured at Warsaw trial, was Eichmann friend. He was executed by the Poles in 1947.

Arriving at Litzmannstadt, I drove out to the designated place where a thousand Jews were about to board buses. The buses were normal, high-windowed affairs with all their windows closed. During the trip, I was told, the carbon monoxide from the exhaust pipe was conducted into the interior of the buses. It was intended to kill the passengers immediately.

A doctor who was there suggested that I look at the people inside one bus through a peephole in the driver's seat. I refused. I couldn't look. This was the first time that I had seen and heard such a thing and my knees were buckling under me. I had been told that the whole process took only three minutes, but the buses rode along for about a quarter of an hour.

We reached our destination and hell opened up for me for the first time. The bus in which I was riding turned and backed up before a pit about two meters deep. The doors opened. Some Poles who stood there jumped into the buses and threw the corpses into the pit. I was badly shaken by what I then saw. Another Pole with a pair of pliers in his hand jumped into the pit. He went through the corpses, opening their mouths. Whenever he saw a gold tooth, he pulled it out and dumped it into a small bag he was carrying.

When I reported back to Müller in Berlin, he chided me for not having timed the procedure with a stop watch. I said to him, "This sort of thing can't go on. Things shouldn't be done this way." I admitted I had not been able to look through the peephole. This time, too, Müller behaved like a sphinx. He forgave me, so to speak, for not having looked. Perhaps "forgive" sounds like an odd expression here.

The executions at Litzmannstadt and Minsk were a deep shock to me. Certainly I too had been aiming at a solution of the Jewish problem, but not like this. Of course, at that time I had not yet seen burned Germans, Germans shrunken like mummies in death. I had yet to see the heavy, imploring eyes of the old couple in a Berlin air raid shelter who lay crushed beneath a beam, begging me to shoot them. I couldn't bear to shoot them, but I told my sergeant to do so, if he could. If I had known then the horrors that would later happen to Germans, it would have been easier for me to watch the Jewish executions. At heart I am a very sensitive man. I simply can't look at any suffering without trembling myself.

The Gas Chambers at Auschwitz

I never had anything directly to do with the gas chambers, which evolved from early measures like those at Litzmannstadt. But I did visit Auschwitz repeatedly. It had an unpleasant smell. Even today I do not know how the gassing was carried out. I never watched the entire process. Even a man like Hoess, the commandant at Auschwitz, described the matter to me in a rather rose-colored way.

I knew Hoess well. He did his duty at Auschwitz, as any other man would have done it. It was Hoess who once told me that Reichsfuhrer Himmler, taking a personal look at the entire liquidation action, had declared that this was a bloody fight which our coming generations would need to fight no more. I valued Hoess as an excellent comrade and a very proper fellow. He was a good family man, and he held the Iron Cross from the first World War.

Image
GRIM ROUNDUP of young Jews takes place in Warsaw after conquest of Poland. Germans sent some to ghettos, but the killings had already begun.

Since the war I have read that two and a half million Jews were physically liquidated under Hoess's command. I find this figure incredible. The capacity of the camp argues against it. Many of the Jews confined there were put on work details and survived. After the war the Auschwitzers sprouted like mushrooms out of the forest floor after a rain. Hundreds of thousands of them are today in the best of health.

Along with the liquidation camps we continued to maintain the ghetto system. I would not say I originated the ghetto system. That would be to claim too great a distinction. The father of the ghetto system was the orthodox Jew, who wanted to remain by himself. In 1939, when we marched into Poland, we had found a system of ghettos already in existence, begun and maintained by the Jews. We merely regulated those, sealed them off with walls and barbed wire and included even more Jews than were already dwelling in them.

The assimilated Jew was of course very unhappy about being moved to a ghetto. But the Orthodox were pleased with the arrangement, as were the Zionists. The latter found ghettos a wonderful device for accustoming Jews to community living. Dr. Epstein from Berlin once said to me that Jewry was grateful for the chance I gave it to learn community life at the ghetto I founded at Theresienstadt, 40 miles from Prague. He said it made an excellent school for the future in Israel. The assimilated Jews found ghetto life degrading, and non-Jews may have seen an unpleasant element of force in it. But basically most Jews feel well and happy in their ghetto life, which cultivates their peculiar sense of unity.

The first, Jacob Edelstein, was a Zionist from Prague who cherished youth. After two years of Nazi hell in which everything, absolutely everything, was forbidden to the Jews, he welcomed the birth of Theresienstadt with blind optimism, hoping that the difficult life that awaited them there would prepare them for their future settlement in Palestine.

-- The Last of the Unjust, directed by Claude Lanzmann


Revolt of Warsaw Jews

The uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, however, taught us a bitter lesson about putting excessive numbers of people into these enclosures. Not long after this uprising I received in my office a photo album with an accompanying memo from Reichsfuhrer Himmler. The album showed the phases of that battle, whose severity surprised even the German units fighting in it. I still recall today how we in the SS and the Wehrmacht suffered disproportionately high casualties putting down this revolt. I could not believe, seeing the pictures, that men in a ghetto could fight like that.

During this great blood-letting in Warsaw the order went out to the German occupation authorities to comb the country relentlessly. This was done so thoroughly that after a while there was no more Jewish question in Poland at all.

Elsewhere, even inside the Reich itself, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising had its effect in stringent measures against those Jews still engaged in forced factory labor. It was not in vain that Himmler put his entire weight behind this severity. Previously the directors of the big German factories, even Goring himself, the administrator of the Four Year Plan, had intervened on behalf of sparing Jews for the labor force. Now we in the Gestapo said simply, “Very well, you take the responsibility that things do not come to an uprising like the Warsaw Ghetto.” When we said that, the urge to intervene left them.

The Warsaw Ghetto uprising had an equally strong effect with authorities in the other occupied countries. Every national leadership was anxious to remove factors of unrest. My advisers now had a perfect entrée in the countries where they were assigned. We could and did use the Warsaw example like a traveling salesman who sells an article all the more easily by showing a special advertising attraction.

With Hungary we were particularly concerned. The Hungarian Jews had lived through the war relatively untouched by severe restrictions. Now Himmler made it clear that he wanted Hungary combed with a tremendous thoroughness before the Jews there could really wake up to our plans and organize partisan resistance. For this reason, he chose me to lead the march into Hungary in person.

Before dawn on March 19, 1944, I was leading an SS convoy from the Mauthausen concentration camp toward Budapest, on these orders from Reichsfuhrer Himmler to clear the Jews out of Hungary. My men were equipped with a combat gear in case the Hungarians resisted. We had several air-raid warnings along the way. Suddenly my advance guard halted. The column came to a stop. Tipped off probably by one of my assistants, the unit commanders gathered around my personal truck and drank a toast to me with the rum they were issued for the march. It was my 38th birthday, my seventh as an SS officer.

On a Sunday morning in brilliant sunshine we crossed the border into Hungary. Instead of rifle fire or rebellious shouts we were greeted with cheers by the villagers and treated to white bread and wine. We put away our small arms then, because it was obvious there would be no resistance. That afternoon we rolled into Budapest and I immediately set up a small office in a corner of my bedroom in one of the great hotels.

I worked almost all that night putting out decrees calling the Jewish political officials to the first conferences the following day. I had already given orders to collect these Jewish officials in advance. Because I planned to work with them, I wanted to insure that they would not be harmed by any right-wing hysteria.

In Hungary my basic orders were to ship all Jews out of the country in as short a time as possible. Now, after years of working behind a desk, I had come out into the raw reality of the field. As Muller put it, they had sent me, the “master” himself, to make sure the Jews did not revolt as they had in the Warsaw Ghetto. I use the word “master” in quotation marks because people used it to describe me. I did not use it first.

Since they had sent the “master”, however, I wanted to act like a master. I resolved to show how well a job could be done when the commander stands 100% behind it. By shipping the Jews off in a lightning operation, I wanted to set an example for future campaigns elsewhere.

The Shipments to Auschwitz

All told, we succeeded in processing about half a million Jews in Hungary. I once knew the exact number that we shipped to Auschwitz, but today I can only estimate that it was around 350,000 in a period of about four months. But, contrary to legend, the majority of the deportees were not gassed at all but put to work in munitions plants. That is why there are thousands of Jews happily alive today who are included in the statistical totals of the "liquidated." Besides those we sent to Auschwitz, there were thousands and thousands who fled, some secretly, some with our connivance. It was child's play for a Jew to reach relative safety in Romania if he could muster the few pengö to pay for a railroad ticket or an auto ride to the border. There were also 200,000 Jews left in a huge ghetto when the Russians arrived, and thousands more waiting to emigrate illegally to Palestine or simply hiding out from the Hungarian Gendarmerie.

It is clear from statistics, then, that our operation was not a battle fought with knives, pistols, carbines or poison gas. We used spiritual methods to reach our goal. Let us keep this distinction clear, because physical liquidation is a vulgar, coarse action.

Soon after we arrived in Budapest I met a Dr. Lászlo Endre, then a Budapest country official, who was eager to free Hungary of the Jewish "plague," as he put it. One evening he arranged a little supper for me and my assistant, Captain Deiter Wisliceny. Tow or three other Hungarian officials were present and an orderly in livery who stood at Dr. Endre's side. On this evening the fate of the Jews in Hungary was sealed.

As I got to know Dr. Endre, I noticed his energy and his ardent desire to serve his Hungarian fatherland. He made it clear that in his present position he was unable to do positive work toward solving the Jewish question. So I suggested to Major General Winkelmann, the ranking SS officer in Hungary, that Dr. Endre be transferred to the Ministry of the Interior. The transfer took several weeks, which I spent conferring with various Jewish officials and learning about Jewish life in Hungary. Then one day Dr. Endre became second secretary in the Ministry of the Interior, and a certain Lászlo Baky became first secretary.

Over the years I had learned through practice which hooks to use to catch which fish, and I was now able to make the operation easy for myself. It was clear to me that I, as a German, could not demand the Jews from the Hungarians. We had had too much trouble with that in Denmark. So I left the entire matter to the Hungarian authorities. Dr. Endre, who became one of the best friends I have had in my life, put out the necessary regulations, and Bakay and his Hungarian Gendarmerie carried them out. Once these two secretaries gave their orders, the Minister of the Interior had to sign them. And so it was no miracle that the first transport trains were soon rolling toward Auschwitz.

Image
EICHMANN'S HUNGARIAN COLLABORATOR, Laszlo Endre, grins at 1946 execution at Budapest. Colleague, Laszlo Baky (left), had just been hanged.

The Hungarian police caught the Jews, brought them together and loaded them on the trains under the direct command of Lieut. Colonel Lászlo Ferenczy of the Gendarmerie, who came from an old, landed family. If I may digress for a moment, I remember that he invited me once to his country estate, where we had a little Hungarian snack of slices of bacon and onion stuck on sticks and roasted over a fire. We ate them with wine from the lieutenant colonel's vineyards. I since have read that he was hanged after 1945.

I never watched the Jews being loaded onto the trains. It was a minor matter for which I had no time. Since the job was the responsibility of the Gendarmerie, it would have constituted an interference with the internal affairs of Hungary if I had even observed the loadings. After all, the Hungarian government was still a sovereign power, although it had reached certain agreements with the Reich.

Himmler's instructions were for me to comb the Jews out of eastern Hungary first. The two secretaries gave the appropriate orders to the Hungarian police. I was also instructed to send almost all transports to the railroad station at Auschwitz, and I ordered Captain Novak to draw up a timetable and arrange for the necessary trains from the Reich's transportation ministry. To each train I assigned a squad of Orpos - uniformed German police - from the several hundred assigned to me.

My men had as one of their basic orders that all necessary harshness was to be avoided. This fundamental principle was also accepted by the Hungarian officials. In practice they may not have adhered to it 100%. But that did not and could not interest me, because it was not my responsibility.

Inhumanity Among the Hungarians

There were, however, individual cases where my men were shocked by the inhumanity of the Hungarian police. Wisliceny reported to me that the Gendarmes were driving the Jews into the cars like cattle to a slaughterhouse, not everywhere but in some districts. Several times I reminded the Hungarian government in writing – nothing was done orally in my office – that we did not want to punish individual Jews. We wanted to work toward a political solution.

Nevertheless, even our own units were guilty of roughness here and there. I once saw a soldier beat a frail old Jew over the head with a rubber club. I spoke to the soldier, reported him to his commander and demanded he be punished and demoted. Himmler would not stand for that kind of thing. That is sadism.

I would like to add here that when millions of Germans were deported by the Allies after the war from Eastern Europe to Germany, the operation was not carried out the way we did it, with Prussian exactness about provisions and transportation. Although we had the greatest difficulty in obtaining trains, the Jews were always shipped in covered, not open, cars, and always by the quickest possible routes.

In Hungary it sometimes happened that there were too few slop buckets on the trains, too little drinking water or no drinking water at all, or that the provisions were bad or stolen during the loading. The Gendarmes sometimes overloaded the cars to empty the debarkation camp as quickly as possible. You can imagine how it was when the Hungarians peremptorily ordered, “Everybody in, in, in. The border comes in 240 kilometers, and then Germany. Let the Germans finish things up.”

Matters were different on Reich territory where we had full powers. The lieutenant of the guard, for example, could hold the train up until fresh water was provided and the slop buckets emptied and cleaned out, if only to avoid epidemics. After all, we were supposed to bring the material to the concentration camp ready to start work, not sickly and exhausted.

In spite of all our efforts Commandant Hoess at Auschwitz often complained about the condition of the Jews who arrived from Hungary. This proves that Auschwitz was not primarily a death camp. If Hoess simply sent the Jews into the oven, it would not have made any difference to him. He would not have complained to General Pohl, his chief, when a few corpses were lying around in the cars because people had given them too little to eat or drink. And Pohl would certainly not have asked to see me, making the complaints known to me in rather blunt terms. I replied of course that I was not really responsible because the Hungarian government had arranged the details of the loading.

As the transport trains rolled into Auschwitz, sometimes bringing as many as 10,000 units a day, the camp staff had to work day and night. I was on close, comradely terms with Hoess and he told me he could not understand why I showed absolutely no consideration for him and his staff. But how could I? I was just as limited a specialist in my own sector as he was in his. Yet I liked to visit him. He lived with his wife and children in a five-room house on the camp grounds. It was a homey place, clean and simple and furnished in SS-style natural wood.

The Charred Mountain of Corpses

I remember clearly the first time he guided me around the camp. He showed me everything, and at the end he took me to a grave where the corpses of the gassed Jews lay piled on a strong iron grill. Hoess’s men poured some inflammable liquid over them and set them on fire. The flesh stewed like stew meat. The sight made such an impression on me that today, after a dozen years, I can still see that mountain of corpses in front of me.

Hoess may have seen the disgust in my face, but I spoke to him sternly: “When I see your corpses, I think of those charred German bodies in the air-raid shelters in Berlin.”

Once the deportations to Auschwitz were running smoothly, I turned to concentrate on negotiations with the Jewish political and community officials in Budapest. In this I was carrying out the second basic objective of Reichsfuhrer Himmler: to arrange if possible for a million Jews to go free in exchange for 10,000 winterized trucks, with trailers, for use against the Russians on the Eastern Front.

Image
On the road back to Berlin, after witnessing brutal executions at Minsk, Eichmann naps in his car

DEATH BARGAIN AND ESCAPE

In Part II, appearing next week, Eichmann tells the first full story of the Nazis’ cold-blooded proposal to exchange living people for military equipment. After weird negotiations failed with the Hungarian Jews, Eichmann ordered their death march. Later, after the German defeat, he made his escape from U.S. war crimes investigators. Finally, 15 years later, he states his attitude toward the Jews he persecuted.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story, by Life Magazine

Postby admin » Fri Sep 21, 2018 2:15 am

EICHMANN'S OWN STORY: PART II

'TO SUM IT ALL UP, I REGRET NOTHING'


Nazi who had millions of Jews killed tells of cruel barter attempt and a fantastic last stand

Last week, in Part I of Eichmann's own story, the unregenerate Nazi told about his rise to power. As specialist for "Jewish affairs," he helped set up Hitler's extermination system. In the second of two installments he tells how, by March, he personally went to Hungary to handle 500,000 Jews there. The weird bargain which Eichmann and Himmler offered Hungarian Jewish leaders is told in detail for the first time.

by Adolf Eichmann

Image

Only Heinrich Himmler could turn off the liquidation machine. In was in 1944, the year of the assassination attempt on Hitler, when Reichsfuhrer Himmler took over as commander of the Reserve Army, that he authorized me to propose an exchange: one million Jews for 10,000 winterized trucks with trailers. The world Jewish organization could decide for itself what Jews it wanted to choose. We asked only that they get us 10,000 trucks. Thanks to Himmler’s directive, I could assure them, on my word of honor, that these trucks would be used only on the Eastern front. As I said at the time, “When the 10,000 winterized trucks with trailers are here, then the liquidation machine in Auschwitz will be stopped.”

In obedience to Himmler’s directive I now concentrated on negotiations with the Jewish political officials in Budapest. One man stood out among them, Dr. Rudolph Kastner, authorized representative of the Zionist movement.

Image
AS GESTAPO LEADER, Eichmann sometimes wore civilian clothes, making his dread journeys through occupied Europe in search of Jewish victims.

This Dr. Kastner was a young man about my age, an ice-cold lawyer and a fanatical Zionist. He agreed to help keep the Jews from resisting deportation – and even keep order in the collection camps – if I would close my eyes and let a few hundred or a few thousand young Jews emigrate illegally to Palestine. It was a good bargain. For keeping order in the camps, the price of 15,000 to 20,000 Jews – in the end there may have been more – was not too high for me.

Except perhaps for the first few sessions, Kastner never came to me fearful of the Gestapo strong man. We negotiated entirely as equals. People forget that. We were political opponents trying to arrive at a settlement, and we trusted each other perfectly. When he was with me, Kastner smoked cigarets as though he were in a coffeehouse. While we talked he would smoke one aromatic cigarette after another, taking them from a silver case and lighting them with a little silver lighter. With his great polish and reserve he would have made an ideal Gestapo officer himself.

Dr. Kastner’s main concern was to make it possible for a select group of Hungarian Jews to emigrate to Israel. But the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian fascist party, had grown strong and stubborn. Its inspectors permitted no exceptions to the mass deportations. So the Jewish officials turned to the German occupation authorities. They realized that we were specialists who had learned about Jewish affairs through years of practice.

Immensely Idealistic Zionists

As a matter of fact, there was a very strong similarity between our attitudes in the SS and the viewpoint of these immensely idealistic Zionist leaders who were fighting what might be their last battle. As I told Kastner: “We, too, are idealists and we, too, had to sacrifice our own blood before we came to power.”

Exposed in the Kastner case, the Israel politicians do not need to disprove any of the facts in order to prove themselves not guilty. They need only to flash into the eyes of their constituents the "ideal" they served. Who attacks them, attacks Zionism. Who attacks Zionism attacks the finest development in two thousand unhappy years of Jewish history. Tyrants, dictators, and all power-drunk leaders operate always behind the screen of some Ideal. The Ideal exempts them of any guilt for what they do. More, it magically converts their connivings and wicked deeds into proof of how valorously they served the Ideal.

"I understand Kastner," Eichmann writes in his autobiography, published in Life magazine. "He is an idealist like I am." [120]

-- Perfidy, by Ben Hecht


I believe that Kastner would have sacrificed a thousand or a hundred thousand of his blood to achieve his political goal. He was not interested in old Jews or those who had become assimilated into Hungarian society. But he was incredibly persistent in trying to save biologically valuable Jewish blood – that is, human material that was capable of reproduction and hard work. “You can have the others,” he would say, “but let me have this group here.” And because Kastner rendered us a great service by helping keep the deportation camps peaceful, I would let his groups escape. After all, I was not concerned with small groups of a thousand or so Jews.

Gobineau's [unlike Chamberlain's] was an honest Antisemitism, it was, like Nietzsche's, an historical Antisemitism: it had nothing whatever to do with modern Antisemitism, that movement born from fear, envy, and impotence ... [i ]t is an upright, a genuine, a gentlemanly Antisemitism, it is the Antisemitism of the aristocrat, who sees his very blood threatened by revolutionary religions.
-- Oscar Levy, from "Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain", by Dan Stone


At the same time Kastner was bargaining with another SS official, a Colonel Kurt Becher. Becher was bartering Jews for foreign exchange and goods on direct orders from Himmler. A crafty operator, Becher had come to Hungary originally to salvage a stud farm which the SS wanted. He soon wormed his way into dealings with the Jews. In a way Reichsfuhrer Himmler was Becher’s captive: Becher showed me once a gold necklace he was taking to our chief, a gift for a little lady by whom Himmler had a child. There were other agencies, German and Hungarian, which tapped Kastner for foreign exchange in return for Jews, but I held aloof from money affairs and left the material transactions to Becher.

Men under Becher’s command guarded a special group of 700 Jews whom Kastner had requested from a list. They were mostly young people, although the group also included Kastner’s entire family. I did not care if Kastner took his relatives along; he could take them wherever he wanted to.

The Gentleman’s Agreement

This is how most of the illegal emigrations were arranged: a group of special Jews was taken into custody and brought together in a place designated by Kastner and his men, where they were put under SS guard to keep them from harm. After the Jewish political organizations arranged transportation out of the country, I instructed the border police to let these transports pass unhindered. They traveled generally by night. That was the “gentleman’s agreement” I had with Kastner.

After leaving Hungary, the Jews could then travel through neutral foreign countries or stay hidden, usually in Romania, until the necessary steamships arrived to take them on board. When they reached Israel, the ships waited off shore until a few courageous Jews helped the passengers land against the orders of the British mandate authorities. Since the refugees had no valid papers, the Jewish organization must have spent enormous sums of money to bribe Romanian officials, who did not do these favors for nothing. All this went on with Himmler’s permission. I would never have dared dance to my own waltz. If I demanded rigid obedience from my own subordinates, I had to be just as rigid in carrying out my superiors’ orders. Otherwise I would have been a bad SS commander, and I think I was a good SS commander.

By the same token my relationship with Dr. Kastner was strictly correct. He never saw me or my subordinates ever drink a single glass of wine or Schnaps, and there were certainly never any drunken orgies with Jews. If anything like that had happened, I would have heard of it and I would have punished the offenders the way I punished my chauffeur, who once unscrewed a toilet lid from my office because he needed a new toilet seat for his rented room. He was expelled from the SS. Once, when the same man fell asleep while driving my car, I made him march on foot all the way from Dresden to Berlin. That is how I would have treated any of my men who got drunk or even had a drink with a Jews.

All my own agreements with the Jewish officials were more or less side-transactions to the exchange of the million Jews for 10,000 winterized trucks with trailers. Becher and I were twice ordered to Himmler in Berlin to discuss it. Whether Himmler settled the actual terms of the exchange or whether he left it to me, I do not remember. When I think back, though, it seems to me that Himmler may have authorized the offer “for an appropriate number,” and I set the figure at 10,000 to one million, because I was an idealist and wanted to accomplish as much as possible for the Reich.

It was clear that, for lack of numbers, I would never have squeezed a million Jews out of Hungary. But it was obvious that Jews were piled on Jews in Auschwitz and the various other concentration camps. So I assumed that we could easily produce a million Jews -- Jews from Hungary, supplemented with Jews from Germany, from Austria, from wherever they wanted to take them. It would be a tragedy if the international Jewish community was not able or willing to accept them.

Motorize the Divisions

I do remember Himmler’s specifically saying to me, “Eichmann, motorize the 8th and 22nd Cavalry Divisions". This indicated the personal concern of Himmler, who was soon to take over the Reserve Army, in receiving those trucks. They were far more important than the lives of individual Jews. What did he care about a million Jews? His concern was his divisions. He apparently did not want to motorize these two divisions, but rather to equip them for use as a sort of fast-moving task force. It was for this that he gave instructions to Lieut. General Oswald Pohl, who was in charge of the concentration camp system, to kill no more Jews, to save them up, more or less.
After I received Himmler's authorization, I told my assistant Krumey to bring me Joel Brand, a Hungarian Jew whom we had chosen to send to Palestine to take a proposal to the Jewish leaders. Brand left on his trip some time before the grain was high -- as an old country boy I remember the time well. Krumey brought him to Vienna, had him furnished with the proper papers and shipped him by plane to Istanbul, because Turkey was still neutral. When he got as far as Syria, he was arrested by the British, interrogated and imprisoned in Cairo. The Jewish leaders never accepted our proposal [see box page 148].

I knew at the time that Brand was being held by the British, because Kastner was giving me constant reports. But when I let Brand leave the country, I had made sure his family stayed in Budapest so that I could have a guarantee of his return. Then as the weeks went by I said to Kastner, "Kastner, you know what we agreed. Brand's family stays here because he must return. Why doesn't he come back?" And so for the first time I did use family pressure, but I never turned pressure into practice because Dr. Kastner's reports still held out some hope. I never took any steps to keep Brand's family from emigrating illegally. If they had, I would never have known it.

Image
PITIFUL MEMORIAL to Jews executed in Maidanek camp in Poland, this pile of shoes was found by Russian soldiers when they came to camp in 1944.

Meanwhile the deportations had to continue in spite of our pending deal. But the Jews were to a certain extent "put on ice,” held in a camp ready to be moved at any time. Suppose Brand had come back and told me, "Obersturmbannführer, the matter is settled. Five or ten thousand trucks are on their way. Give me a half million or a million Jews. You promised me that if I brought you a positive report, you'd send 100,000 Jews to a neutral country as a deposit." Then it would have been easy for us to ship the Jews off.

Image
GERMAN SOLDIERS LEAD HELPLESS WOMEN CAPTIVES DEEP INTO THE WOODS IN POLAND. MANY WERE EXECUTED

If the deal had succeeded, I believe I could have arranged to ship the first 20,000 Jews in two days via Romania to Palestine or even via France to Spain. If there had been any delay it would have come from the side of the receivers. The plain fact was that there was no place on earth that would have been ready to accept the Jews, not even this one million.

We had a hearty, comradely relationship with the Hungarian secret police until they learned that we were letting Jews emigrate behind their backs. Then the gentlemen reacted strongly. They refused to visit or consult with us, and it became my job to smooth things over. Fortunately I had formed a warm friendship with Dr. Lászlo Endre, the second secretary in the Ministry of the Interior. I had even given him my own machine pistol as a gift (naturally with the approval of my superiors). The two of us managed to restore good relations, and I even spent a few weeks on Dr. Endre's country estate. At the time I was virtually out of work for lack of further numbers to deport.

Meanwhile, as the Russians advanced and the first symptoms of the coming chaos were noticeable, the transports were halted. A series of Allied air raids had torn up the Budapest-Vienna railroad track so that for a time no trains could get through. This made Dr. Endre impatient. He wanted to get on with the solution of the Jewish problem. So I resolved to teach our opponents a lesson, to say, “Look, it does you no good when you bomb out our railroads, because your allies, the Jews, have to endure the consequences." I proposed a forced march of the Jews to the Reich's border. General Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the new chief of the Security Police and the Security Service, gave me orders to that effect.

To Preserve Appearances

As it turned out, the march cost more trouble than if I had sent 100, no, 500 trains to Auschwitz. Hungary was the window that showed the Reich to the neutral foreign countries, and we Germans had accordingly to preserve appearances. "You smashed our transportation routes but we will carry on in the most elegant manner." That was what the trek was for. The actual number of marchers was so unimportant that I have forgotten it. In any case it was less than 20,000.

The plan was for the Jews to march to the border at Burgenland, about 180 kilometers away. Every day a unit of 2,000 Jews began the march, and in ten or twelve days the first of the marchers must have reached the border. Everything possible was done to make the trip hygienic and safe. I drove the route once myself, and on the whole distance I saw only two corpses. They were old people. It is clear, as they say, that where planning goes on, chips will fall. The over-all natural decrease on the trek, however, was only one per cent. When the groups arrived on the border, they were put to work helping German women, children and old people digging tank traps to defend the Reich.

Image
THE AFTERMATH OF TRAGEDY

The two leading figures in Eichmann’s attempt to trade Jews for trucks were Rudolf Kastner (left) and Joel Brand (right). Brand, now living in Israel, has said that desperate Germans might have spared “hundreds of thousands” if even token supplies had been offered them. British refused to bargain, imprisoned Brain in Cairo. In 1955 Kastner, then a candidate for the Israeli parliament, was accused of wartime collaboration because of his contacts with Eichmann. Ultimately, the Israeli supreme court found Kastner innocent. Ten months before its decision, he was killed by a fanatic in Tel Aviv.

Image
RUDOLF KASTNER

Image
JOEL BRAND


So Dr. Kastner is not too disturbed on this March night of the Gaza retreat. His editorial work finished, he straightens his desk, smooths his hair with a pocket comb, and walks into the Tel Aviv night.

A year ago, when the Kluj business and the Kurt Becher business and the parachutist business were first called to the attention of Israel, he might have felt a bit nervous about entering a dark, lonely street. But not on this night. There may be trouble later. Hotheads will start stewing about Kastner again. But this night the hotheads are off on other topics -- the Gaza retreat, the Ben-Gurion salaam to the Americans, the business of Amos Ben- Gurion. This is a night of trouble for David Ben-Gurion, not Rudolf Kastner.

There is also another reassuring fact. After Judge Halevi's verdict, the government had assigned secret police to guard Kastner's life, day and night. They had remained on duty, protecting him for a year and a half. Two months ago the secret police had been relieved on their task. This added to Dr. Kastner's sense of safety. Nobody was after him any longer.

An unruffled Dr. Kastner steps into his parked gray automobile and starts for his home.

I imagine him full of memories. Who had ever more violent and exotic things to remember? The hundred hells of Hungary through which he moved like a favored tourist; the world travels; Nazis, doomed Jews, Hanna Senesh, Becher, Krumey, Himmler, Hoess, Eichmann; plots, perils, conferences, accusations, Kenyermeze, Nuremberg, Kluj, Death Marches, sealed trains -- he had survived them all. A man who can survive German devils and Hungarian ones, and climb to greatness on a million Jewish corpses; who can wriggle out of constant disaster with his hair perfectly combed, must feel a pride in himself, must smile a little smugly at any more enemies to come.

My imaginings end here. The rest is fact.

At midnight, Dr. Kastner steps out of his car in front of his home, 6 Emmanuel Street, Tel Aviv. The air is balmy. The night glows with starlight and history. Dr. Kastner starts across the pavement for his front door.

A young man steps out of the shadows and asks, "Are you Dr. Kastner?"

Kastner answers politely, "Yes, I am."

The young man pulls a gun out of his pocket. Kastner sees the weapon and runs. The young man fires a bullet into Dr. Kastner.

Kastner yells and keeps running. Two more bullets from the young man's gun hit him in his head and body. He drops and lies groaning in the street.

There is a witness to the event. A high ex-Haganah officer happens to be in the neighborhood. He has been calling on his girl and is just leaving on his motorcycle when the shooting starts. He sees the assassin jump into a waiting jeep and go riding off.

The ex-Haganah officer rushes to Kastner, bends over him, hears him gasp a few words. The ex-officer mounts his motorcycle and speeds after the jeep. But he fails to pick up its trail. The assassin escapes.

An ambulance arrives in Emmanuel Street, and Kastner is taken to the hospital. In the hospital, after he is operated on, the bullet-riddled Kastner starts regaining his health. It begins to look as if the assassin's work was in vain.

But after ten days of continued improvement in the municipal hospital, a sudden change takes place. A bulletin announces that Rudolf Kastner has taken a "sudden turn for the worse." Dr. Kastner corroborates the bulletin. He dies on St. Patrick's Day, 1957.

And with his death, Tamir loses his greatest weapon against Ben-Gurion and his clique. Of all who mourn Dr. Kastner's death, Tamir is among the sincerest. All the new evidence -- worthless. All the planned onslaughts on the defenders and colleagues of Kastner -- to be filed away as unfought battles. [181]

There is an impressive funeral for the one-time rescuer of Jews. The government clique is well represented. A proper grief is exhibited.

Also, a number of headaches are cured, although not permanently. The dead Kastner will continue to haunt Israeli politics. The government of Israel and its train-bearing press will work constantly to restore Dr. Kastner's good name, and its own. It will cause the facts of the trial to become vague, to vanish, and even to change from bad into good.

But with all this legerdemain, the truth of Kastner will stay alive. And that sad, foolish and tormented penny-Napoleon from Kluj will become the nation's leading ghost.

I have one more paragraph about Kastner. As a journalist working among Hungarians in Kluj, his name was Dr. Rezo Kastner. When he came to Budapest to work among the Germans, he called himself Dr. Rudolf Kastner. Arrived in Israel and embraced by the government clique as one of their own, he became Dr. Israel Kastner.

Vale, Rezo, Rudolf, Israel --

Three men were arrested, tried, and convicted for Dr. Kastner's murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Two of them were named accessories. [182]

The actual confessed killer was Zeev Eckstein, age twenty-four. [183]

Until a few months before shooting down Kastner, Zeev Eckstein was a paid undercover agent of the Israeli government's Intelligence Service. [184]

-- Perfidy, by Ben Hecht


With the march over, Dr. Endre congratulated me on the splendid fulfillment of the mission, and I must admit, we had a drink to celebrate, a kind of Schnaps called "mare's milk" which I had never drunk before. It was excellent.

With the Russian advance moving closer, conditions in Hungary became more and more chaotic. In Budapest the situation was tense. My old friend and comrade, Major General August Zehender, commander of the 22nd SS Cavalry Division, which we had hoped to motorize, was defending Budapest as the Russians drew near it. Then his artillery ran out of shells. Zehender's position was near a streetcar station on the east side of the city, but his ammunition depot was several kilometers beyond the last streetcar stop to the west. He told me in despair that the Russians were about to attack his division and he had no ammunition for his hundred guns.

A Living Chain For Shells

I proposed a living chain of Jews to carry shells from the depot and load them on streetcars at the west end station. The streetcars could carry them through the center of Budapest to the eastern end of the line where his own units could move them to the front line. My idea worked. We made a living chain of them, six or eight kilometers long, to carry the shells from the depot to the station. Then dozens of streetcars, one after the other, sped across Budapest to meet Zehender's men in the east. The guns blazed away.

As Christmas approached, I had nothing more to do in Hungary but no orders to withdraw. I was having a drink with Zehender one day when he told me that many of his officers had been killed and a whole company had gone over to the Russians.

"Give me a squadron," I told my friend, "and I'll stay here through New Year’s Day." Then, in the presence of my aide, Zehender telephoned Kaltenbrunner, who had replaced Heydrich as Himmler's deputy. I put my head close to his ear to hear what my chief said, but Zehender broke the news: "Kaltenbrunner tells me it's impossible. You are too valuable. Himmler would have his head." And so my last attempt to see some action was reduced to absurdity.

One or two days before Christmas Eve, 1944, all the German police units were ordered to withdraw, except for one Gestapo group which stayed behind as a gesture to the Hungarians. They were all killed. So was my comrade Zehender, shot as he fought off the enemy with his machine pistol. I left Budapest at 3 p.m. on Christmas Eve, the last member of the German police to leave the city. As my Mercedes raced westward, the road was already under Russian artillery fire. A great flood of refugees streaming toward Vienna had choked the highway for days, but now it was suddenly empty. It was as though the road had died.

I made my last report to Himmler less than a month before the final surrender of Germany. The Reichsführer had been for some time negotiating with Count Bernadotte about the Jews. He wanted to make sure that at least 100 of the most prominent Jews we could lay our hands on would be held in a safe place. Thus he hoped to strengthen our hand, for almost to the end Himmler was optimistic about making separate peace terms. "We'll get a treaty," he said to me, slapping his thigh. "We'll lose a few feathers, but it will be a good one." It was then mid-April 1945.

Himmler went on to say that he had made some mistakes. "I'll tell you one thing, Eichmann," he said, "if I have to do it over again, I will set up the concentration camps the way the British do. I made a big mistake there." I didn't know exactly what he meant by that, but he said it in such a pleasant, soft way that I understood him to mean the concentration camps should have been more elegant, more artful, more polite.

During those last days I called my men into my Berlin office in the Kurfürsten Strasse and formally took leave of them. "If it has to be," I told them, "I will gladly jump into my grave in the knowledge that five million enemies of the Reich have already died like animals." ("Enemies of the Reich," I said, not "Jews.") I spoke these words harshly and with emphasis. In fact, it gave me an extraordinary sense of elation to think I was exiting from the stage in this way.

My immediate superior, General Müller, had just said to me: "If we had had 50 Eichmanns, then we would have won the war." This made me proud even though, ironically, he spoke on the same day that I learned all was finally lost. By that time my department was one of the few offices which were not burned out from the bombing. I had set my subordinates like bloodhounds on the trail of every falling incendiary bomb. I helped them myself. So the office was in good condition. Later the whole Gestapo head office moved in and squeezed me out.

Image
AUSCHWITZ SURVIVORS shown here in camp uniforms, released by Soviet troops in 1945, bear marks of malnutrition and brutality. Eichmann in his story exaggerates number of survivors, whom he called “Auschwitzers.”

Each one of the Gestapo officials was now out to select a civilian firm for which he could say he had worked during the last few years. He could receive employment certificates, "instructions" or correspondence from the company -- in a word, anything that would permit him to hide his real job from postwar investigators. There were hundreds of civilian letterheads on file in that office, and if a particular one was not available, we could always have it printed.

You could see how closely they crowded around the official in charge, who made detailed notes on how each man wanted his faked papers to read. The press was so thick that Müller and I had a large space in the back of the room to stand by ourselves. It was the same room where I used to play music with my subordinates. (I had played second violin; my sergeant played first violin -- he was a far better musician than I.) "Well, Eichmann," Müller said, "what's the matter with you?" Since my return from Hungary I had carried a Steyr army pistol. I said to Müller, indicating the gun: "Gruppenführer, I don't need these papers. Look here, this is my certificate. When I see no other way out, it is my last medicine. I have no need for anything else."

This is the truth: of all the Gestapo department heads in Berlin, I was the only one who spat on these false certificates. Müller must have known I was a regular guy.

Resistance in the Alps

My last journey was to Prague, where I visited Karl Hermann Frank, the SS commander there. He told me I could not go back to Berlin. "Nothing is left in Berlin," he said, "the Russians have broken through somewhere."

I was finally able to get through to Kaltenbrunner. He ordered me to proceed to the resort town of Altaussee in the Austrian Alps. I arrived there, accordingly, at about the beginning of May and went directly to the slopes of the Loser, the mountain above the village. In one of the tidy summer villas on the Loser's slope, the chief of the Security Service was quartered.

I was received by his aide, an old and trusted friend of mine, Major Scheidler. I walked into the next room to report and found Kaltenbrunner himself sitting behind a table, clothed in the uniform blouse of an SS general and some wedge-shaped ski pants tucked into some wonderful ski boots. It was an odd costume for the "Last Days of Pompeii" feeling that then oppressed us all -- at least it did me. It was after lunch and he was playing solitaire, with a small cognac on the table. I asked him how things had come out. "It's bad," he said, "the solitaire, I mean."

He had Scheidler bring me a cognac -- the usual orderly was not around. The white snow of the Loser slope gleamed through the window. It had snowed heavily in the region, which would not be clear of snow until the end of May. The room was comfortably warm. The cognac tasted awfully good despite my gloomy mood.

"What are you going to do now?" Kaltenbrunner said. You must realize that this was not like those occasions when I had been ordered to report in the line of duty. Now the die had been cast and all these matters had become of secondary importance. One's brain was in a sense only half present. It was hard to concentrate on what was happening at the moment. This was the beginning of that nervous shock which a few days later hit me like a hammer. For it was now a fact that the Reich, for which we had feared and cared so much, was smashed in pieces.

Answering Kaltenbrunner's question, I told him that I was going into the mountains. "That's good," he said. "Good for Reichsführer Himmler, too. Now he can talk to Eisenhower differently in his negotiations, for he will know that if Eichmann is in the mountains he will never surrender, because he can't."

So we concluded our official business and I went off to become a partisan chief in Austria. I took my leave formally without any personal overtones, as did Kaltenbrunner. He remained sitting at his solitaire, only his expression revealing a certain friendliness to me. Just before I left I heard him say quietly, "It's all a lot of crap. The game is up." These were the last words I ever heard from my good friend Kaltenbrunner.

Image
LAST BOSS of Eichmann was Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Himmler aide who was executed after trial in 1946.

I had quartered my people at one of the large resort hotels in Altaussee. The hotel proprietor years afterward kept railing against "that dog Eichmann" who requisitioned his hotel and let his gang run it, inflicting all sorts of fancied damages. The complaint was merely something rooted in his wretched shopkeeper's mind. By no means did we wreck everything in his hotel. On the contrary, I finally yielded to the pressure of the doctor in charge of the neighboring field hospital, who had tearfully begged me to take my combat troops out of Altaussee so that he might declare it an open city. So we evacuated. Before my troops left, I personally saw the Red Cross nurses scrubbing and cleaning up, room by room, since the overcrowded hospital had to expand into this pig's hotel. It was set up as a hospital annex. The beneficiary of all this clean-up operation was thus enabled to feather his own nest.

Since Kaltenbrunner had given his orders, I collected all the heavy equipment we had there and set out to organize a resistance movement in the Totes Gebirge, above the town. The whole thing had now been dumped in my lap. Besides, the regularly assigned people in my department, I had some groups of Waffen SS soldiers and a wild bunch from Schellenberg's Intelligence Section of the SS. Schellenberg's crowd had been burned out of the Kremsmünster monastery. I think they set it on fire themselves, but they managed to get a few truckloads out with them. In the trucks were scattered piles of uniforms, all kinds of uniforms except winter equipment and ski gear. Instead they had down sleeping bags and emergency rations -- chocolate, hard sausage, etc. -- of the sort we hadn't seen for a long time. They also bought a small chest full of dollars, pounds and gold coins.

Snow on the Mountain

I decided to head for the Blaa-Alm, a stretch of mountain pastureland about an hour’s march from Altaussee. Suddenly it began to snow heavily. I had the Burgermeister order out 150 of the Hitler Youth – they were all we had – to shovel the snow out of our path. It was already one or two meters deep in spots. At least we could get through with the vehicles.

There was only one inn on the Blaa-Alm, and I requisitioned a room from the innkeeper to store the weapons and the uniforms. An old Party man in the town had warned me about the innkeeper. He said I would do well to have the traitorous anti-Nazi clerical done in, and I decided to do so. (It was the time when everybody was doing everybody else in.) But when I saw him, a little sausage of a man, I said to myself: “No, you don’t need to do away with him.” And so we didn’t.

The SS boys had brought a barrel of wine with them from the Kremsmunster storehouse. I set it up on the street so that all the soldiers coming up to the mountain could stop for a few glasses before going on. I allowed each man only a five-minute stop. The barrel was soon empty.

At sun-up on the first day after we reached the mountain, one of the officers from the Intelligence Section came up to get some emergency rations “by order of Obergruppenfuhrer Kaltenbrunner.” He was a fresh, arrogant fellow, and my Captain Burger said to me, “Shall I rub him out?” I told the man he could have half a case and no more. “Otherwise,” I said, “I’ll have you done in.” So he took off somewhere with a half suitcase full of chocolate and hard sausage, perhaps to Switzerland.

Image
LAST STRONGHOLD of Nazis was in these mountains of Austrian Alps near Altaussee, where Eichmann led troops in frantic, foolish attempt to keep up resistance against the Allies. Then SS boss Himmler ordered general cease-fire.

Another SS man came four or five times with a note saying that we should deliver a quantity of gold to him. The signature was always Ernst Kaltenbrunner’s. I knew the writing and it seemed genuine to me, although I had no reason to test its authenticity. In any case gold or money meant nothing to us in the mountains, while bread and emergency rations were everything. Although I was harsh to this fellow at first, I finally had Hunsche, who was acting as our paymaster, pay out the gold that he requested, thus translating Kaltenbrunner’s wish into fact.

The next morning I heard loud noises and confusion outside my window. There was Burger boxing a civilian’s ears. Through an orderly I ordered Burger to report to me in my room. He told me the man was a teacher from one of the villages in the valley who was trying to make off with the supply of lard in one of the trucks. Burger was giving him a tangible answer for his conduct. I told Burger that an officer never hits anybody. If the man was looting, he should be hauled before a court martial and shot but never beaten up.

Fighting a War on the Blaa-Alm

What a bunch of good-for-nothings you have here, I said to myself. There were guys from the Waffen SS, who probably were just out of the hospital and at the disposal of almost any unit, rounded up and turned over to me by the Security Police; this absolutely insubordinate gang from the Intelligence Section, a few women, my own men. And add to this 150 of the Hitler Youth. Then there were some Romanians on my neck, too. With this I was supposed to fight a war.

I had plenty of the most modern weapons, however, I had never before seen assault rifles, and now I had piles of them. I had never seen as much ammunition as I had up here -- bazookas lying in heaps. Nevertheless I gave the order to evacuate the Blaa-Alm and go farther away to the Rettenbachalm, which lies even higher.

Burger, who was my best skier, I sent on patrol ahead of us to investigate snow conditions and the chances for finding lodging. Meanwhile I had all the weapons we were not using thrown in a stream. I had decided the release the majority of the men. Discipline had suffered irreparably. I had 5,000 Reichsmark paid out to each one against his signature. I was hard and brusque with them. Each man, on hearing he was no longer needed, gladly took off down the mountain without further formalities. I was even hard on a little SS girl, an office worker, who had begged and implored me to take her along. Scorning all her feminine wiles, I said, "Pay out 5,000 marks. Dismissed."

While we were moving, an orderly arrived from Kalternbrunner with a directive from Reichsführer Himmler ordering us not to shoot at Americans or Englishmen. I countersigned it and the boy rushed off back to the valley. I later conveyed this order to the men. It looked like the end. The Americans were now sitting in Bad Ischl, not very far away, and we heard that our girls were already dancing with the Americans in the marketplace. Even the huntsmen were hostile to us. Gangs of them -- home guardists they called themselves -- were crawling around us in the hills, all of them punks. They were probably people who had shouted themselves hoarse yelling Heil Hitler in 1938. Now they prowled about us, with weapons of course. Whether or not my men shot at them I did not know, nor do I know now if they ever did. There was shooting everywhere at that confused time.

My driver Polanski asked me if I would give him a car and a truck or two so that he might go off and set up a peacetime trucking concern on his own. It occurred to me that I no longer needed any cars, so I decided to fulfill his wish. After all, he had served me loyally for many years. "Take a truck for yourself," I told him, "or whatever you need from the Blaa-Alm, and make off with my Fiat Topolino."

I later heard that he abandoned the Fiat in a ditch, but he did succeed in taking off with one truck. I wish him success in his trucking business.

Ultimately, even my trusty Burger sought me out for a private conversation. "Obersturmbannführer," he said, "you are being sought as a war criminal. The rest of us are not. We have thoroughly discussed this matter. We feel that you would be doing your comrades a great service if you would leave us and appoint another commander."

I had already decided the answer myself. "Men," I said, "I will leave you alone on the Rettenbachalm. The war is over. You are not allowed to shoot at the enemy any longer. So take care of yourselves."

Lieutenant Jaenisch, my aide for many years, asked if he might accompany me. We drank a last Schnaps together.

There was only one thing I regretted. If I had not been in a state of shock at this time, I would have done more for my wife and children. Unfortunately I did not make provision for them ahead of time, unlike the gentlemen from the Intelligence Section of Schellenberg's, the so-called kid-glove boys of the SS. I, too, could have had my family securely wrapped in a very comfortable cocoon of foreign exchange and gold. In fact, I could easily have sent them on to the farthest, the most neutral of foreign countries. Long before the end, any of the Jews I dealt with would have set up foreign exchange for me in any country I had named, if I had promised any special privileges for them.

As it was, I was able to give my wife only a briefcase full of grapes and a sack of flour before going into the mountains from Altaussee. I had also given them poison capsules, one for my wife and one for each child, to be swallowed if they fell into the hands of the Russians.

A corporal named Barth

I gave myself up to the Americans under an assumed name. I knew the Allied investigators were searching for Eichmann, but luckily I was always just a shade more clever than the CIC officer who interrogated me. I started off in one small American prison camp, posing as a Luftwaffe corporal named Barth.

After studying the psychology of the American CIC, however, I changed my rank from corporal to second lieutenant in the SS. Lieutenant Eckmann, Otto Eckmann, became my name. I moved my birthdate back one year to March 19, 1905, and the place to Breslau. I did this so I could remember the figures more easily, avoiding the fiasco of a momentary lapse of memory when I was filling out their forms.

Ultimately I was transferred to the large POW collection center at Weiden. By coincidence, my former aide, Lieutenant Jaenisch, had been sent to the same place. I volunteered to head a work detail and in this capacity I was moved to Oberdachstetten in Franconia. It was then August, 1945. I remained there until the beginning of January, 1946.

In these months we were being interrogated by the CIC office in Ansbach. I knew that if the interrogations continued I might come under suspicion. So I decided to escape. Due to the fear of reprisals, there existed an unwritten code of honor that no officer could escape from a camp without his fellow officers' approval. Since there were about ten officers in the camp, I asked the camp leader, a major, to call an officers' meeting.

I had revealed to the major my real name, rank, and official position. “My dear comrade Eckmann," he said, “I have known that for a long time. Your Lieutenant Jaenish told me about it in confidence. As long as you said nothing to me, I kept the information locked in my heart."

At the officers' meeting I explained merely that I was probably wanted by the Americans because I had been politically active. Nobody asked many questions in those days, and the major, as camp leader, gave his approval. It was simply a matter of form. After all, I could hardly imagine that any group of SS officers would have withheld their approval, knowing that one of their leaders found it necessary to get away.

After leaving the prison camp, I managed to procure papers which gave my name as Otto Henninger. I lived on one of the wooded heaths in the Celle area, and it was there that I was shown a pile of newspapers with articles about me. They were under headlines like “Mass-murderer Eichmann" or “Where is ‘Lieutenant Eckmann’ hiding out?" The articles noted that I had escaped from the camp.

I started to think about who could have given the name Eckmann to the CIC. There seemed to be only two possible sources for the information. One was my Lieutenant Jaenisch. The other possibility, which seemed highly unlikely, was that the CIC had interrogated the major, who probably reasoned that I was far enough away by then to be safe. I rather think it was Jaenisch who told them. He had a type of pigheadedness peculiar to Lower Saxons.

Through the intervening years since then people searched for me in vain. I would like to find peace with my former opponents. And I would be the first to surrender myself to the German authorities if I did not always feel that the political interest in my case would be too great to lead to a clear, objective way out.

If there had been a trial in 1945, I would have had all my subordinates with me. Today I am not so sure. Some of them may be serving with the new police. Others may have had a hard life through these years, each damning the stupidity that led him to become a Nazi in the first place. And prosperity and democratic re-education have borne their fruit in Germany, so I would not know today what witnesses an attorney for the defense might properly call. I believe, in fact, that if I brought on Jews as witnesses for the defense, I would come out almost better with them than with my own men as witnesses, sad though it may sound. Dr. Kastner, Dr. Epstein, Dr. Rottenberg, Dr. Baeck, the entire Council of Elders in Theresienstadt ghetto -- all of them I would have to summon. After all, there were also relatively harmless actions which took place under the general heading “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem."

But to sum it all up, I must say that I regret nothing. Adolf Hitler may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German army to Führer of a people of almost 80 million. I never met him personally, but his success alone proves to me that I should subordinate myself to this man. He was somehow so supremely capable that the people recognized him. And so with that justification I recognized him joyfully, and I still defend him.

TODAY, A PRISONER IN ISRAEL

Adolf Eichmann, captured by Israeli agents in Buenos Aires on May 12, 1960, is closely guarded prisoner in Israel. In spring, 1961 he will stand trial in Jerusalem, charged with “crimes against the Jewish people,” a statute written into Israeli law to cover such crimes as his. The penalty is death.


I will not humble myself or repent in any way. I could do it too cheaply in today's climate of opinion. It would be too easy to pretend that I had turned suddenly from a Saul to a Paul. No, I must say truthfully that if we had killed all the 10 million Jews that Himmler's statisticians originally listed in 1933, I would say, "Good, we have destroyed an enemy." But here I do not mean wiping them out entirely. That would not be proper -- and we carried on a proper war.

Now, however, when through the malice of fate a large part of these Jews whom we fought against are alive, I must concede that fate must have wanted it so. I always claimed that we were fighting against a foe who through thousands of years of learning and development had become superior to us.


I no longer remember exactly when, but it was even before Rome itself had been founded that the Jews could already write. It is very depressing for me to think of that people writing laws over 6,000 years of written history. But it tells me that they must be a people of the first magnitude, for lawgivers have always been great.

Image
MEMORIAL WITH NAMES OF JEWISH DEAD FROM NAZI VIOLENCE, ONE OF MANY SUCH IN EUROPE, COVERS WALL OF PRAGUE’S PINKAS SYNAGOGUE
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story, by Life Magazine

Postby admin » Sat Sep 22, 2018 8:53 pm

Journalist Who Tape-recorded Eichmann Confessions is Ex-nazi Officer
by Jewish Telegraphic Agency
December 1, 1960

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


The journalist who tape-recorded in Argentina the confessions of Adolf Eichmann, Nazi expert on Jewish affairs who directed the mass-killing of 6,000,000 Jews in Europe -- and sold these confessions to Life magazine in New York -- is a Dutchman turned Nazi. He is reported to have been sentenced to death for war crimes in Belgium, and is now under indictment for war crimes in Holland, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency established today.

Life magazine -- which publishes in this week’s issue the second of a two-part serial of Eichmann’s confessions, in which he admits committing the crimes for which he is to face trial in Israel next March -- identified the man from whom it bought the Eichmann tape-recorded statements as a German journalist, Wilhelm Sassen.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency established today, through Dutch newspapers, that Wilhelm Sassen is Willem S. Sassen, a Dutch journalist who collaborated during the war with the Nazis occupying Holland. The information was revealed in articles in the Algemeen Handelsblad, of Amsterdam; Het Vrije Volk, of Amsterdam; and the Rotterdamsche Courant, of Rotterdam.

According to the Dutch press, Sassen was for a short time, in 1944, Nazi-appointed editor of an Amsterdam newspaper, de Telegraf. After Holland was liberated from the Nazi regime, the district attorney of the small Dutch town of s’Hertogenbosch, in the province of Brabant, obtained an indictment of Sassen, charging him with war crimes for which, presumably, the sentence upon conviction might have been death. However, the man disappeared and the warrant was never served.

REPORTED ADMITTING THAT HE HAD ESCAPED TO ARGENTINA

According to another newspaper, De Standard, of Brussels, Belgium, Sassen was tried in absentia by a military court in Belgium. In that trial he was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death.

Het Vrija Volk reports that, in a telephone conversation with Sassen, who lives in Buenos Aires, the man admitted that he was the former Willem S. Sassen, that he was an officer in the SS, Hitler’s Elite Guard, and that he had escaped from Holland to Argentina in 1947.


The Dutch press states that Sassen renounced his Dutch citizenship and became a German national during the Nazi occupation of Holland. The Rotterdam Courant declares that Sassen “could have obtained German nationality only by becoming a member of the SS.” It is pointed out that Eichmann’s own rank in the Nazi regime was as a colonel in the SS.

The Rotterdam Courant declares: “We cannot congratulate Life for employing a collaborator with such a background. We have said before that the publication of Eichmann’s memoirs, while the case is sub-judice, is objectionable. Our objections are stronger, now that we know who this so-called German journalist Wilhelm Sassen, really is.”

LIFE MAGAZINE SAYS IT DID NOT KNOW HE WAS A NAZI COLLABORATOR

Life magazine, questioned about the Dutch reports, today told the JTA; “Life, which had no illusions about Wilhelm Sassen, who persuaded Eichmann to tape-record his confessions, currently appearing in the magazine, was not aware, as Dutch newspapers have reported, that he is Dutch, not German, and was sentenced to death in absentia by a Belgian military court for Nazi collaboration.

“Whatever a full revelation of Sassen’s war-role may show. however, the authenticity of the Eichmann papers has been established through six months of thorough documentation, to the complete satisfaction of the editors of Life.”

The Life magazine refused to reveal the price paid to Sassen for the publication of the Eichmann memoirs. Reports both in Germany and in Israel have intimated that the costs of Eichmann’s defense are being met from the proceeds of Eichmann articles sold to a large American magazine.

In the Life series, Sassen quotes Eichmann as saying, among other things: “If we had killed all the 10,000,000 Jews that Heinrich Himmler’s statisticians originally listed, in 1933, I would say: ‘Good, we have destroyed an enemy.'”

EICHMANN’S LAWYER, STUNNED BY HIS CONFESSIONS, MAY DROP DEFENSE

Robert Servatius, the Cologne attorney who is to defend Adolf Eichmann in the Israel trial slated to start March 6, said today that if the memoirs of the Nazi mass executioner in Life magazine were true, any defense “would be a waste of time.”

He told the United Press International that if the memoirs were genuine, he would withdraw as defense attorney.
He said his hair “stood on end” when he read a section in the articles citing Eichmann as saying he had no regrets for his role in the execution of 6,000,000 European Jews and that even if 10,000,000 had been killed, he would simply have regarded this as destruction of the enemy.

The attorney said he planned to ask Eichmann’s brother, Robert, who lives in Linz, Austria, whether the memoirs were genuine and added that if he was so informed, “I will give up the defense on the spot.”
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story, by Life Magazine

Postby admin » Sat Sep 22, 2018 9:07 pm

Willem Sassen
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/22/18

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Wilhelmus Antonius Sassen (born 16 April 1918 – died 2002) was a Dutch collaborator, Nazi journalist and a member of the Waffen-SS. He became widely known around 1960 as the interviewer of Adolf Eichmann.

Biography

Willem Sassen was born in Geertruidenberg, Netherlands. He grew up in a traditional Roman Catholic family in North Brabant and attended a gymnasium in Neerbosch near Nijmegen and in Breda. His father was impressed by the fascist ideas of the Zwart Front (literally 'Black Front'). Sassen decided not to become a priest but to study law in Leuven and Gent instead. As a student, Sassen became a member of the German-Flemish workers' group DeVlag. When Sassen visited the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, his admiration for Hitler and Nazi Germany grew. Because of Sassen's pro-Nazi political activities, the authorities expelled him from Belgium, so he could not finish his law studies.

In 1938 Sassen became a recruit in the Dutch army and was trained as an artillerist. When Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940, Sassen was a member of the 7th Field Artillery regiment and was taken prisoner by the Germans for a short time.

Sassen married Paula Fisette in 1940, divorced, and later married Miep van der Voort, with whom he had two daughters. Their eldest daughter is Saskia Sassen (born 1947 in The Hague), the internationally known American sociologist and professor of economics. Sassen's third wife was Els Delbaere, the daughter of a Flemish artist who, because of his own Nazi past, had also fled to Argentina.

Nazi and SS career up to 1945

On 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa), and Sassen volunteered for the German Eastern front. He became a member of the first Netherlands PK ("Propaganda Kompanie"). Because he had been working for Radio Bremen for some time already, he could start his work as a war correspondent after a short cut training. He was a "Wort-und Funkberichter" with the SS-division "Wiking" in the southern sector of the front and in the spring of 1942 witnessed the offensive in the Caucasus. On 26 July 1942, Sassen was wounded near Rostov and during the following eight months recovered in hospitals in Kraków, Munich and Berlin. In April 1943 he was promoted to SS-Unterscharführer (the lowest rank of non-commissioned officer, comparable to a US Corporal) and assigned to an SS armoured division near Kharkov. In the summer of 1943, he followed another training course on war correspondence and propaganda together with Dutch colleagues in Villach, Austria.

From August 1943 to June 1944, together with his Flemish colleague Jef Desseyn, Sassen formed the permanent editor team of Radio Brussels (Zender Brussel). The team was also responsible for training courses for war correspondents.
On 6 June 1944 (D-Day), Kriegsberichter Sassen was at the front in Normandy reporting the battles around Caen, Bayeux, Saint-Lô, Avranches, Falaise and Lisieux. On 1 September 1944, Zender Brussel was ordered to be evacuated to Germany. Sassen remained in the Netherlands, reported the airborne landings around Arnhem and became the editor of the newspaper Het Nieuws van den Dag in Amsterdam. On 23 October 1944, Sassen in his newspaper called upon the hungry and cold of Amsterdam to go robbing food and fuel in the districts of the more rich and wealthy people; this was too much even for the Germans, and on pressure of the Sicherheitsdienst police, Sassen was dismissed.

Willem Sassen was sent to Doetinchem where he was active in the black propaganda Aktifpropaganda, Skorpion West. There he published Het Laatste Nieuws. At the beginning of 1945 Sassen was asked to participate in a Werewolf [Werwolf] organisation in case the allied forces overran the German army in the Netherlands. He became the leader of Neurop (Neu Europa). The group was to pass on military intelligence on allied troop movements and to commit sabotage.


The German army capitulated sooner than was expected, and Willem Sassen fled together with his younger brother Alfons to Alkmaar. Former members of the Dutch resistance offered them a refuge; Willem Sassen had aided certain members of the Dutch resistance during the war, including Anthony Mertens, an old prewar friend.

Escape to and second career in Argentina

On 5 June 1945, Sassen was arrested in Alkmaar by British Field Security and interned in Fort Blauwkapel near Utrecht. On 15 December he fled with two other inmates. He first went to his girlfriend Miep van der Voort (Utrecht) and later to his friend Anthony Mertens. For two years Sassen went into hiding in Antwerp, Brussels and Amsterdam. With the help of his friends, among whom were Mertens and former SS member Karl Breyer, Sassen managed to obtain a passport. In May 1947 he flew in a KLM plane to Dublin, Ireland. There he met up with some of his old comrades, before setting off to Argentina. Together with his girlfriend Miep van der Voort, their daughter Saskia Haremaker (The Hague 1947), and some former SS men and collaborators, he departed in the coastal vessel The Eagle under the command of former U-boat captain Schneider to Buenos Aires. On 3 November they arrived at the docks of Darsena Norte in Buenos Aires. Three days later they were allowed to disembark. The Sassen family lived first in Ciudad Jardín Lomas del Palomar (Greater Buenos Aires), where their second daughter was born. Willem Sassen started to work as a journalist, translator and as a ghost writer for Hans Ulrich Rudel and later Adolf Eichmann.

Around 1960, Willem Sassen was recruited by Georg Mertins. He was asked to represent Merex AG, which was a cover for the illegal arms trade controlled by the German secret service Bundesnachrichtendienst. Other representatives in Latin America were Klaus Barbie (Bolivia), Friedrich Schwend (Peru), his brother, Alfons Sassen (Ecuador) and, in Madrid, Spain, Otto Skorzeny.

In the 1970s, Sassen among others worked as a PR-consultant for Chile's dictator Pinochet and Paraguay's dictator general Alfredo Stroessner.


The Eichmann interviews

In 1957, Sassen interviewed Adolf Eichmann about his involvement in the Nazis Final Solution. Parts of the interviews were published in two articles in Life magazine. It is assumed that the transcripts of the interviews are much more realistic and personal than the autobiography Eichmann wrote while in prison in Israel, possibly attempting to place himself in a better light and alter the outcome of the trial. In 1980 the Sassen documents or Sassen tapes, consisting of approximately 600 pages of material from the interviews, were transferred to Eichmann's widow, Veronika.

Sassen himself was interviewed in an edition of the British World in Action (Granada/ITV, 1978) about his connections in Argentina with Josef Mengele; the Auschwitz concentration camp physician was still alive and on the run at the time.


The Sassen "Interviews" are documented in detail in Eichmann Before Jerusalem by Betttina Stangneth, Vintage Press, 2015. Sassen sold some of the material to Life Magazine.

References

• Gerard Groeneveld: "Kriegsberichter", Nederlandse SS-oorlogsverslaggevers 1941–1945. Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2004. ISBN 90-77503-09-9 (in Dutch language) p. 356–368
• Jochem Botman: "De intriges van de gebroeders Sassen, De collaboratie, het verzet, de ontsnapping en de reünie met oude SS-kameraden in Latijns Amerika. Soesterberg: Aspekt, 2014. ISBN 9789461533579
• Jame Botman, Nazis to the Core, the Sassen brothers and their anti Bolshevik crusade in Latin America (Soesterberg, Holland, Publisher Aspekt, December 2015)ISBN 9789461538239
Stangneth, Bettina, Eichmann Before Jerusalem: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014

External links

• Christopher R Browning "Evidence for the Implementation of the Final Solution," Part IV (Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington, 2000). [hosted by the University of the West of England, Bristol].
• Review by Paul de Schipper of the book by Gerard Groeneveld: "Kriegsberichter", Nederlandse SS-oorlogsverslaggevers 1941–1945. Nijmegen: Uitgeverij Vantilt ISBN 90-77503-09-9 in Dutch language.
• go2war2.nl (in Dutch)
• sur.infonews.com (in Spanish)
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story, by Life Magazine

Postby admin » Sat Sep 22, 2018 9:14 pm

Werwolf [Werewolf]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/22/18

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Not to be confused with Werewolf, a mythological shapeshifter, or Werwolf, one of Hitler's military headquarters, or Werwolf, the 1970 live album by The Fourth Way.

Image
Werwolf pennant[1]

Werwolf (pronounced [ˈveːɐ̯vɔlf], German for "werewolf") was a Nazi plan, which began development in 1944,[2] to create a resistance force which would operate behind enemy lines as the Allies advanced through Germany. Ultimately, Werwolf's propaganda value far outweighed its actual achievements.

Nomenclature

The name was chosen after the title of Hermann Löns' novel, Der Wehrwolf, first published in 1910.[3] Set in the Celle region (Lower Saxony) during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), the novel concerns a peasant named Harm Wulf. After marauding soldiers kill his family, Wulf organises his neighbours into a militia who pursue the soldiers mercilessly and execute any they capture, while referring to themselves as Wehrwölfe. Löns wrote that the title was a dual reference to the fact that the peasants put up a fighting defence (sich wehren, see "Bundeswehr" – Federal Defense) and to the protagonist's surname of Wulf, but it also had obvious connotations with the word Werwölfe in that Wulf's men came to enjoy killing.[4] While Löns was not himself a Nazi (he died in 1914), his work became popular with the German far right, and the Nazis celebrated it. Indeed, Celle's local newspaper began serialising Der Wehrwolf in January 1945.[5]

Note that in 1942 Adolf Hitler named the OKW and OKH field headquarters at Vinnitsa in Ukraine "Werwolf",[6] and Hitler on a number of occasions had used "Wolf" as a pseudonym for himself.
(The etymology of the name "Adolf" itself carries connotations of noble (adal; Modern German Adel) wolf, while Hitler's first World War II Eastern Front military headquarters were labeled Wolfsschanze - commonly rendered in English as "Wolf's Lair", literally "Wolf's Sconce".)

Operations

Image
Obergruppenführer Hans-Adolf Prützmann (right) meets with Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, during Himmler's visit of the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking in Ukraine, September 1942.

In late summer/early autumn 1944, Heinrich Himmler initiated Unternehmen Werwolf (Operation Werwolf), ordering SS Obergruppenführer Hans-Adolf Prützmann to begin organising an elite troop of volunteer forces to operate secretly behind enemy lines. As initially conceived, these Werwolf units were intended to be legitimate uniformed military formations trained to engage in clandestine operations behind enemy lines in the same manner as Allied Special Forces such as Commandos.[7] Prützmann was named Generalinspekteur für Spezialabwehr (General Inspector of Special Defence) and assigned the task of setting up the force's headquarters in Berlin and organising and instructing the force. Prützmann had studied the guerrilla tactics used by Soviet partisans while stationed in the occupied territories of Ukraine, and the idea was to teach these tactics to the members of Operation Werwolf.[8]

Propaganda

Rumors of a secret Nazi guerrilla organization began to surface soon after the Allied invasion of Normandy. TIME magazine ran an article containing speculation that the Germans would try to prolong the war indefinitely by going underground after their defeat.[9] The January 27, 1945 issue of Collier's Weekly featured a detailed article by Major Edwin Lessner, stating that elite SS and Hitler Youth were being trained to attack Allied forces and opening with a 1944 quote from Joseph Goebbels: "The enemy (invading German territory) will be taken in the rear by the fanatical population, which will ceaselessly worry him, tie down strong forces and allow him no rest or exploitation of any possible success."[10]

On March 23, 1945, Goebbels gave a speech known as the "Werwolf speech", in which he urged every German to fight to the death. The partial dismantling of the organised Werwolf, combined with the effects of the Werwolf speech, caused considerable confusion about which subsequent attacks were carried out by Werwolf members, as opposed to solo acts by fanatical Nazis or small groups of SS.

The Werwolf propaganda station "Radio Werwolf" broadcast from Nauen near Berlin, beginning on 1 April 1945. Broadcasts began with the sound of a wolf howling, and a song featuring the lyrics, "My werewolf teeth bite the enemy / And then he's done and then he's gone / Hoo, hoo hoo."[11] The initial broadcast stated that the Nazi Party was ordering every German to "stand his ground and do or die against the Allied armies, who are preparing to enslave Germans.[12] Every Bolshevik, every Englishman, every American on our soil must be a target for our movement ... Any German, whatever his profession or class, who puts himself at the service of the enemy and collaborates with him will feel the effect of our avenging hand ... A single motto remains for us: 'Conquer or die.' "[13]

British and American newspapers widely reported the text of Radio Werwolf broadcasts, fueling rumors among occupation forces.[14] Armed Forces Radio reminded American soldiers that


Every friendly German civilian is a disguised soldier of hate. Armed with the inner conviction that the Germans are still superior ... [they believe] that one day it will be their destiny to destroy you. Their hatred and their anger ... are deeply buried in their blood. A smile is their weapon by which to disarm you ... In heart, body and spirit every German is Hitler.[15]


Recruits

Gauleiters were to suggest suitable recruits, who would then be trained at secret locations in the Rhineland and Berlin. The chief training centre in the West was at Hülchrath Castle near Erkelenz, which by early 1945 was training around 200 recruits mostly drawn from the Hitler Youth.[16]

Image
Hülchrath Castle near Erkelenz


Werwolf originally had about five thousand members recruited from the SS and the Hitler Youth. These recruits were specially trained in guerrilla tactics. Operation Werwolf went so far as to establish front companies to ensure continued fighting in those areas of Germany that were occupied (all of the "front companies" were discovered and shut down within eight months). However, as it became clear that the reputedly impregnable Alpine Fortress, from which operations were to be directed by the Nazi leadership if the rest of Germany was occupied, was yet another delusion, Werwolf was converted into a terrorist organisation in the last few weeks of the war.


Weaponry and tactics

Werwolf agents were supposed to have at their disposal a vast assortment of weapons, from fire-proof coats to silenced Walther pistols but in reality, this was merely on paper; Werwolf never actually had the necessary equipment, organisation, morale or coordination.[17] Given the dire supply situation German forces were facing in 1945, the commanding officers of existing Wehrmacht and SS units were unwilling to turn over what little equipment they still had for the sake of an organization whose actual strategic value was doubtful.

Attempts were made to bury explosives, ammunition and weapons around the country (mainly in the pre-1939 German–Polish border region) to be used by Werwolf in resistance fighting after the defeat of Germany, but not only were the quantities of material to be buried very low, by that point the movement itself was so disorganised that few actual members or leaders knew where the materials were. A large portion of these "depots" were found by the Russians, and little of the material was actually used by Werwolf.[18]

The tactics available to the organisation included sniping attacks, arson, sabotage, and assassination. Training was to cover such topics as the production of home-made explosives, manufacturing detonators from everyday articles such as pencils and "a can of soup", and every member was to be trained in how to jump into a guard tower and strangle a sentry in one swift movement, using only a metre of string.

In the early months of 1945, SS Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny was involved in training recruits for the Werwolfs, but he soon discovered that the number of Werwolf cells had been greatly exaggerated and that they would be ineffective as a fighting force. Knowing, like many other Nazi leaders, that the war was lost, he decided that the Werwolfs would instead be used as part of a Nazi "underground railroad," facilitating travel along escape routes called "ratlines" that allowed thousands of SS officers and other Nazis to flee Germany after the fall of the Third Reich.[19]

Wartime capture of Werwolf personnel

On April 28, 1945, Staff Sergeant Ib Melchior of the US Counter-Intelligence Corps captured six German officers and 25 enlisted men dressed in civilian clothes, who claimed to constitute a Werwolf cell under the command of Colonel Paul Krüger, operating in Schönsee, Bavaria. The group was captured while hiding in a tunnel network which contained communications equipment, weapons, explosives and several months' food supplies. Two vehicles were hidden in the forest nearby. Documents discovered in the tunnels listed US military commanders as targets for assassination, including General Dwight D. Eisenhower.[20][21] Krüger stated that in 1943 a school was created in Poland to train men in guerrilla warfare. On 16 September 1944, it was relocated to the town of Thürenberg, Czechoslovakia.[22] Krüger claimed that a total of 1,200 men completed Werwolf training in the school in less than two years. On 1 April 1945, the school was moved to Schönsee and a subterranean base was constructed. The students were instructed to "stay behind, evade capture, and then harass and destroy supply lines of United States troops ... Special emphasis was put on gasoline and oil supplies."[23] According to the G-2 report:

Operations were to begin three or four weeks after being overrun by US troops. The plan was for each unit to receive designated targets from the headquarters. Bands of from 10 to 20 men were then to be sent out to destroy the target and to return immediately to their unit. No targets were to be located nearer than fifteen kilometers to the unit. Secrecy and camouflage were relied upon for security and all personnel had strict orders to conceal themselves if US troops came into their area and under no circumstances to open fire in the bivouac area. No routes of escape had been planned. Members of the unit usually wore the Wehrmacht uniform, but a few members disguised themselves as foresters and were used as outposts to report any approaching danger. Their ordnance supplies consisted of mortars, machine guns, sub-machine guns, rifles, and various types of side arms. Each man was issued a Liliput pistol which could be very easily concealed on the person. The ammunition supply for each type weapon was ample for four months of ordinary operations. The unit had one civilian type sedan and one Wehrmacht motorcycle which were well hidden in the woods, and 120 horses which were dispersed on farms throughout the vicinity. Food consisting of canned meat, biscuits, crackers, chocolate, and canned vegetables was sufficient for over four months. Additional food supplies such as bread, potatoes, fresh vegetables, and smoked sausages were obtained from local sources. The unit was supplied with water by a brook passing through the area. Dugouts were constructed in such a manner as not to destroy the live trees around them. The dugouts were located on the slope of a hill which was densely covered with fir trees ... The entrance to the dugout was a hole approximately 24 inches in diameter and four to five feet deep. Approximately two feet down, this hole extended horizontally to a length of eight to ten feet. The dugout has a capacity of three men and has a wooden floor and a drainage ditch. Walls and roof are reinforced with lumber.[23]


The following day a CIC unit led by Captain Oscar M. Grimes of the 97th Infantry Division captured about two hundred Gestapo officers and men in hiding near Hof, Bavaria. They were in possession of American army uniforms and equipment but had decided to surrender.[24][25][26]

In May 1945 CIC Major John Schwartzwalder arrested members of a Werwolf cell in Bremen whose leader had fled. Schwartzwalder believed that the Werwolf never constituted a threat to Allied personnel:

...the Bremen group of the Jugend had received its orders to organize as a Werwolf cell only about four days before the fall of the city. By that time the Wehrmacht had taken all but the halt and the lame, and the Volkssturm had taken most of the rest. Nevertheless an organization had been started using the younger boys but it had not progressed to accumulating either weapons or supplies before the entry of the Allied troops...The only remaining fraction of the Werwolf that was of any importance was a residue of veterans of the last war who were physically ineligible for service in this one and who had weapons concealed here and there. These were not too hard to dispose of.[27]


Misconceptions

Image
9 March 1945: Goebbels awards a 16-year-old Hitler Youth, Willi Hübner, the Iron Cross for the defence of Lauban

After it became clear, by March 1945, that the remaining German forces had no chance of stopping the Allied advance, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels seized upon the idea of Werwolf, and began to foster the notion, primarily through radio broadcasts, that Werwolf was a clandestine guerrilla organization comprising irregular German partisans, similar to the many insurgency groups which the Germans had encountered in the nations they occupied during the war. Despite such propaganda, however, this was never the actual nature of Werwolf, which in reality was always intended to be a commando unit comprising uniformed troops. Another popular myth about Werwolf is that it was intended to continue fighting underground even after the surrender of the Nazi government and the German military.

No officially recognized effort was ever made by the Nazi leadership to develop an insurgency to continue fighting in the event of defeat, in no small measure because Adolf Hitler, as well as other Nazi leaders, regarded anyone who even discussed the possibility as defeatists and traitors. As a result, no contingency plans to deal with defeat were ever authorized in the official, public record. However, as a result of Goebbels' efforts, Werwolf had, and in many cases continues to have, a mythological reputation as having been an underground Nazi resistance movement, with some even claiming that Werwolf attacks continued for months, or even years, after the end of the war—-in particular, sources cited by West Coast radio broadcaster Dave Emory, for instance in this archived program on audio, following a brief first segment. Its perceived influence went far beyond its actual operations, especially after the dissolution of the Nazi regime.[8]

Assessment by historians

Historians Antony Beevor and Earl F. Ziemke have argued that Werwolf never amounted to a serious threat, and furthermore propose that the plan barely existed. This view is supported by the RAND Corporation, which surveyed the history of US occupations with an eye to advising on Iraq. According to a study by former Ambassador James Dobbins and a team of RAND researchers, there were no American combat casualties after the German surrender.[28]

German historian Golo Mann, in his The History of Germany Since 1789 (1984) also states that "The [Germans'] readiness to work with the victors, to carry out their orders, to accept their advice and their help was genuine; of the resistance which the Allies had expected in the way of 'werwolf' units and nocturnal guerrilla activities, there was no sign."[29]

Perry Biddiscombe has offered a somewhat different view. In his books Werwolf!: The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944–1946 (1998)[8] and The Last Nazis: SS Werwolf Guerrilla Resistance in Europe, 1944–1947 (2000), Biddiscombe asserts that after retreating to the Black Forest and the Harz mountains, the Werwolf continued resisting the occupation until at least 1947, possibly until 1949–50. However, he characterizes German post-surrender resistance as "minor",[30] and calls the post-war Werwolfs "desperadoes"[31] and "fanatics living in forest huts".[32] He further cites U.S. Army intelligence reports that characterized Nazi partisans as "nomad bands"[33] and judged them as less serious threats than attacks by foreign slave laborers[34] and considered their sabotage and subversive activities to be insignificant.[35] He also notes that: "The Americans and British concluded, even in the summer of 1945, that, as a nationwide network, the original Werwolf was irrevocably destroyed, and that it no longer posed a threat to the occupation."[36]

Biddiscombe also says that Werwolf violence failed to mobilize a spirit of popular national resistance, that the group was poorly led, armed, and organized, and that it was doomed to failure given the war-weariness of the populace and the hesitancy of young Germans to sacrifice themselves on the funeral pyre of the former Nazi regime. He concludes that the only significant achievement of the Werwolfs was to spark distrust of the German populace in the Allies as they occupied Germany, which caused them in some cases to act more repressively than they might have done otherwise, which in turn fostered resentments that helped to enable far right ideas to survive in Germany, at least in pockets, into the post-war era.[8]

Nevertheless, says Biddiscombe, "The Werewolves were no bit players";[37] they caused tens of millions of dollars of property damage at a time when the European economies were in an already desperate state, and they were responsible for the killing of thousands of people.[37]

Alleged Werwolf actions

Image
Franz Oppenhoff's grave in Aachen

A number of instances of resistance have been attributed to Werwolf activity:

• 25 March 1945 – Franz Oppenhoff, the newly appointed mayor of Aachen, was assassinated outside his home by an SS unit which was composed of Werwolf trainees from Hülchrath Castle. They were flown in at the order of Heinrich Himmler.[38]
• 28 March 1945 – The burgomeister of the eastern Ruhr town of Meschede was assassinated, even though Meschede was still behind German lines and was not overrun until mid-April. Werwolf Radio later announced that the assassination had been carried out by Werwolf agents.[39]
• 30 March 1945 – Radio Werwolf claimed responsibility for the death of Major General Maurice Rose, commander of the US 3rd Armored Division,[40] who was in reality killed in action by troops of the 507th Heavy Panzer Battalion.[41]
• 21 April 1945 – Major John Poston, Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery's liaison officer was ambushed and killed by unidentified assailants shortly before Germany's surrender; in reality Poston died in an ambush by regular troops.[42]
• 22 April 1945 – Radio Werwolf claimed that a Werwolf unit composed of German citizens from Leuna and Merseburg had entered the Leuna synthetic petroleum factory and set off explosives, destroying four factory buildings and rendering it inoperable.[43]
• 28 April 1945 – The Penzberg Murders: Werwolf operatives were allegedly responsible for the murder of the mayor of Penzberg, Bavaria, and fourteen others, because of their actions in freeing prisoners and preventing the destruction of property.
• 5 June 1945 – It has been claimed that the destruction of the United States Military Government police headquarters in Bremen by two explosions which resulted in 44 deaths[44] was a Werwolf-related attack. There is, however, no proof that it was due to Werwolf actions rather than to unexploded bombs or delayed-action ordnance.
• 16 June 1945 – Colonel-General Nikolai Berzarin, Soviet commandant of Berlin is often claimed to have been assassinated by Werwolfs, but actually died in a motorcycle accident.[45]
• 31 July 1945 – An ammunition dump in Ústí nad Labem (Aussig an der Elbe), a largely ethnic German city in northern Bohemia ("Sudetenland") exploded, killing 26 or 27 people and injuring dozens.[46] The explosion was blamed on the Werwolf organization and resulted in the "Ústí massacre" of ethnic Germans.

Allied reprisals

According to Biddiscombe "the threat of Nazi partisan warfare had a generally unhealthy effect on broad issues of policy among the occupying powers. As well, it prompted the development of draconian reprisal measures that resulted in the destruction of much German property and the deaths of thousands of civilians and soldiers".[47] Ian Kershaw states that fear of Werwolf activities may have motivated atrocities against German civilians by Allied troops during and immediately after the war.[48]

The German resistance movement was successfully suppressed in 1945.[49] However, collective punishment for acts of resistance, such as fines and curfews, was still being imposed as late as 1948.[50] Biddiscombe estimates the total death toll as a direct result of Werewolf actions and the resulting reprisals as 3,000–5,000.[51]

Soviet reprisals

In the Soviet occupation zone, thousands of youths were arrested as "Werwolves".[52][53] Evidently, arrests were arbitrary and in part based on denunciations.[52] The arrested boys were either "shot at dawn" or interned in NKVD special camps.[52] On 22 June 1945, Deputy Commissar of the NKVD Ivan Serov reported to the head of the NKVD Lavrentiy Beria the arrest of "more than 600" alleged Werwolf members,[54] mostly aged 15 to 17 years.[55]

The report, though referring to incidents where Soviet units came under fire from the woods,[54] asserts that most of the arrested had not been involved in any action against the Soviets, which Serov explained with interrogation results allegedly showing that the boys had been "waiting" for the right moment and in the meantime focused on attracting new members.[55] In October 1945, Beria reported to Joseph Stalin the "liquidation" of 359 alleged Werwolf groups.[52] Of those, 92 groups with 1,192 members were "liquidated" in Saxony alone.[52] On 5 August 1946, Soviet minister for internal affairs Sergei Nikiforovich Kruglov reported that in the Soviet occupation zone, 332 "terrorist diversion groups and underground organizations" had been disclosed and "liquidated".[52] A total of about 10,000 youths were interned in NKVD special camps, half of whom did not return.[53] Parents as well as the East German administration and political parties, installed by the Soviets, were denied any information on the whereabouts of the arrested youths.[52] The Red Army's torching of Demmin, which resulted in the suicide of hundreds of people, was blamed on alleged preceding Werwolf activities by the East German regime.[56]

US Army reprisals

Eisenhower believed he would be faced with extensive guerrilla warfare, based on the Alpine Redoubt.[47] The fear of Werwolf activity believed to be mustering around Berchtesgaden in the Alps also led to the switch in U.S. operational targets in the middle of March 1945 away from the drive towards Berlin and instead shifted the thrust towards the south and on linking up with the Russians first.[57] An intelligence report stated "We should ... be prepared to undertake operations in Southern Germany in order to overcome rapidly any organised resistance by the German Armed Forces or by guerrilla movements which may have retreated to the inner zone and to this redoubt".[57] On March 31 Eisenhower told Roosevelt, "I am hopeful of launching operations that should partially prevent a guerrilla control of any large area such as the southern mountain bastions".[57]

Eisenhower had previously also requested that the occupation directive JCS 1067 not make him responsible for maintaining living conditions in Germany under the expected circumstances; "... probably guerrilla fighting and possibly even civil war in certain districts ... If conditions in Germany turn out as described, it will be utterly impossible effectively to control or save the economic structure of the country ... and we feel we should not assume the responsibility for its support and control."[47] The British were "mortified by such a suggestion", but the War Department took considerable account of Eisenhower's wishes.[58]

British reprisals

In April 1945 Churchill announced that the Allies would incarcerate all captured German officers for as long as a guerrilla threat existed.[58] Hundreds of thousands of German last-ditch troops were kept in the makeshift Rheinwiesenlager for months, "mainly to prevent Werwolf activity".[58] In addition, civilians held by the U.S. climbed from 1000 in late March to 30,000 in late June, and more than 100,000 by the end of 1945.[59] Conditions were often poor in the camps for civilians.[59]

Prior to the occupation SHAEF investigated the reprisal techniques the Germans had used in order to maintain control over occupied territories since they felt the Germans had had good success.[60] Directives were loosely defined and implementation of reprisal was largely left to the preferences of the various armies, with the British seeming uncomfortable with those involving bloodshed.[60] Rear-Admiral H.T. Baillie Grohman for example stated that killing hostages was "not in accordance with our usual methods".[60] Thanks to feelings such as this, and relative light guerrilla activity in their area, relatively few reprisals took place in the UK zone of operations.[60]

Similar organizations

Within Germany


From 1946 onward, Allied intelligence officials noted resistance activities by an organisation which had appropriated the name of the anti-Nazi resistance group, the Edelweiss Piraten (Edelweiss Pirates). The group was reported to be composed mainly of former members and officers of Hitler Youth units, ex-soldiers and drifters, and was described by an intelligence report as "a sentimental, adventurous, and romantically anti-social [movement]". It was regarded as a more serious menace to order than the Werwolf by US officials.[15]

A raid in March 1946 captured 80 former German officers who were members, and who possessed a list of 400 persons to be liquidated, including Wilhelm Hoegner, the prime minister of Bavaria. Further members of the group were seized with caches of ammunition and even anti-tank rockets. In late 1946 reports of activities gradually died away.[15]


Within Denmark

In 2015 Danish police uncovered files in their archives outlining the Danish part of Operation Werwolf under the command of Horst Paul Issel who was caught in Germany in 1949 before being handed over to Denmark.[61] A total of 130 stashes of weapons and explosives were placed around Denmark and personnel were inserted into strategically important parts of society.

Within Yugoslavia

The remains of some military organizations which collaborated with Axis forces continued with raid activities like Crusaders (guerrilla) (until 1950), Balli Kombëtar (until 1947) and Chetniks (until 1946).

Second Iraq War

The history of Werwolf was compared to the Iraqi insurgency by the Bush Administration and other Iraq War supporters.[62][63] In speeches given on 25 August 2003 to the Veterans of Foreign Wars by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld parallels were drawn between the problems faced by the coalition's occupation forces in Iraq to those encountered by occupation forces in post-World War II Germany, asserting that the Iraqi insurgency would ultimately prove to be as futile in realizing its objectives as had the Werwolfs.[64]

Former Clinton-era National Security Council staffer Daniel Benjamin published a riposte in Slate magazine on 29 August 2003, entitled "Condi's Phony History: Sorry, Dr. Rice, postwar Germany was nothing like Iraq"[65] in which he took Rice and Rumsfeld to task for mentioning Werwolf, writing that the reality of postwar Germany bore no resemblance to the occupation of Iraq, and made reference to Antony Beevor's Berlin: The Downfall 1945 and the US Army's official history, The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany 1944–1946,[66] where the Werwolf were only mentioned twice in passing.[67] This did not prevent his political opponents from disagreeing with him, using Biddiscombe's book as a source.[68]

See also

• Anti-Soviet partisans
• Alpine Fortress
• Japanese holdout
• Ratlines
• Operation Paperclip
• Stille Hilfe
• ODESSA
• HIAG
• Nero Decree
• Operation Gladio
• Operation Unthinkable
• Auxiliary Units

References

Notes


1. Rundschau; Deutsches Schneiderfachblatt für das Gesamte Schneidergewerbe
2. Mark Mazower, Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe, at 546 (The Penguin Press 2008)
3. Beevor, Antony (2002). The Fall of Berlin 1945. Penguin. p. 173. ISBN 0-14-200280-1.
4. Watt, Roderick H. (October 1992). "Wehrwolf or Werwolf? Literature, Legend, or Lexical Error into Nazi Propaganda?". The Modern Language Review. The Modern Language Review, Vol. 87, No. 4. 87 (4): 879–895. doi:10.2307/3731426. JSTOR 3731426.
5. Neumann, Klaus (2000). Shifting Memories: The Nazi Past in the New Germany. University of Michigan Press. p. 50. ISBN 0-472-08710-X.
6. Warlimont, Walter (1964). Inside Hitler's Headquarters, 1939–45. F.A. Praeger. p. 246.
7. Klemperer, Victor; Roderick H. Watt (1997). An Annotated Edition of Victor Klemperer's LTI, Notizbuch eines Philologen. E. Mellen Press. p. 305. ISBN 0-7734-8681-X.
8. (Biddiscombe 1998, p. 464)
9. Foreign News: War Without End? TIME 28 August 1944
10. Major Erwin Lessner, "Hitler's Final V Weapon: The Nazis are carefully building a program for a guerrilla blitzkrieg," Collier's Weekly, January 27, 1945, p. 14.
11. "Hoo, Hoo, Hoo,' Lily the Werewolf Sings on Radio," The Washington Post, Apr 6, 1945; p. 1.
12. "NAZI UNDERGROUND IN ACTION, FOE SAYS: German Radio Asserts It Is Fighting in Occupied Areas, Issues 'Do or Die Order,'" The New York Times, Apr 2, 1945; p. 7.
13. "Werwolf and Colonel Biu Tin: lessons in the psychological aspects of war." Posted Thursday, May 25, 2006.
14. "Werewolves' Nuisance Value May Be Great," The Washington Post, Apr 10, 1945; p. 2.
15. Fritz, Stephen G. (2004). Endkampf: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Death of the Third Reich. University Press of Kentucky. pp. 218 – 219. ISBN 0-8131-2325-9.
16. Dearn, Alan; Elizabeth Sharp (2006). The Hitler Youth 1933–45. Osprey Publishing. p. 16. ISBN 1-84176-874-X.
17. Gilbert, James L., John P. Finnegan and Ann Bray. In the Shadow of the Sphynx: A History of Army Counterintelligence, History Office, Office of Strategic Management and Information, US Army Intelligence and Security Command, Fort Belvoir, Virginia, Dec 2005; p. 63. ISBN 1234461366 (This file might take time to load.)
18. Beevor, Antony (2002). The Fall of Berlin 1945. Viking. p. 490. ISBN 978-0-670-03041-5.
19. Rob Vest, "Otto Skorzeny: The Scar-Faced Commando."
20. George Dyer, XII Corps: Spearhead of Patton's Third Army, XII Corps History Association, 1947; Chapter 16, section 4.
21. Melchior, Ib. Case by Case: A U.S. Army Counterintelligence Agent in World War II. Presidio, 1993; Chapter 8, pp. 135–153.
22. Counter Intelligence Corps History and Mission in WWII, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, PA (undated); p. 51.
23. "G-2 Periodic Report No. 262, 3 May 1945, XII Corps HQ,"reproduced in full in Order of Battle: Hitler's Werewolves, by Ib Melchior, epilogue, pp. 900–917..
24. Kurt Frank Korf, quoted in Patricia Kollander, I Must be a Part of this War: A German American's Fight against Hitler and Nazism, Fordham University Press, 2005; ISBN 0-8232-2528-3; p. 109.
25. Obituary: Oscar M. "Mel" Grimes Jr., 80, Catonsville Times, 14 May, 2001.
26. "Bemedaled Ex-Nazi Youth Home from Europe Wars," The Salt Lake Tribune, 16 July 1945, p. 6.
27. John Schwartzwalder, We Caught Spies: Adventures of an American Counter Intelligence Agent in Europe. Duell, Sloan & Pierce, Inc. New York, 1946; pp. 262-63.
28. Dobbins, James; McGinn, John G.; Crane, Keith; Jones, Seth G.; Lal, Rollie; Rathmell, Andrew; Swanger, Rachel M.; Timilsina, Anga. "America's Role in Nation-Building From Germany to Iraq" (PDF). RAND Corporation. Retrieved 2007-08-03.
29. Mann, Golo (1984). The History of Germany Since 1789. Vintage/Ebury. p. 560. ISBN 978-0-7011-1346-9.
30. (Biddiscombe 1998, p. 275)
31. (Biddiscombe 1998, p. 151)
32. (Biddiscombe 1998, p. 80)
33. (Biddiscombe 1998, p. 197)
34. (Biddiscombe 1998, p. 152)
35. (Biddiscombe 1998, p. 115)
36. (Biddiscombe 1998, p. 51)
37. Biddiscombe, The Last Nazis, p. 8.
38. Rempel, Gerhard (1989). Hitler's Children: The Hitler Youth and the SS. UNC Press. p. 244. ISBN 0-8078-4299-0.
39. (Biddiscombe 1998, p. 40)
40. (Biddiscombe 1998, p. 139)
41. Miller, Edward G. (2007). Nothing Less Than Full Victory. Naval Institute Press. p. 254. ISBN 1-59114-494-9.
42. Whiting, Charles (2002). Monty's Greatest Victory. Leo Cooper. p. 83.
43. "Hitler Admits His Western Armies Have Been Reduced to Guerrillas," The New York Times, Apr 23, 1945; p. 1.
44. Roehner, Bertrand M. "Relations between allied forces and the population of germany" (PDF). Retrieved 2007-08-03.
45. "Voice of Russia: Commandant of Berlin". Retrieved 2007-08-03.
46. The Blast at the munitions depot in Brezno and the massacre of the German population, 31 July 1945. Massacre description in Czech by Vladimír Kaiser.
47. (Biddiscombe 1998, p. 252)
48. Kershaw, Ian. The End: Hitler's Germany 1944-45, Allen Lane, 2011. ISBN 0-7139-9716-8
49. (Biddiscombe 1998, p. 263)
50. (Biddiscombe 1998, p. 265)
51. (Biddiscombe 1998, p. 276)
52. Weber, Petra (2000). Justiz und Diktatur: Justizverwaltung und politische Strafjustiz in Thüringen 1945–1961. Veröffentlichungen zur SBZ-/DDR -Forschung im Institut für Zeitgeschichte. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag. p. 99. ISBN 3-486-56463-3.
53. Fruth, Pia (7 May 2010). "Die Lüge vom Werwolf. Warum Tausende Jugendliche in sowjetischen Lagern landeten" (PDF). Südwestdeutscher Rundfunk 2 (in German). Retrieved 16 May2010.
54. Reif-Spirek, Peter; Ritscher, Bodo (1999). Speziallager in der SBZ (in German). Ch. Links Verlag. p. 138. ISBN 3-86153-193-3.
55. Reif-Spirek, Peter; Ritscher, Bodo (1999). Speziallager in der SBZ (in German). Ch. Links Verlag. p. 139. ISBN 3-86153-193-3.
56. Vernier, Robert (1995-05-08). "Tragödie an der Peene" (in German). Focus. Retrieved 2010-08-20.
57. (Biddiscombe 1998, p. 267)
58. (Biddiscombe 1998, p. 253)
59. (Biddiscombe 1998, p. 254)
60. (Biddiscombe 1998, p. 257)
61. Varulvene – et uhyggeligt netværk under Anden Verdenskrig
62. Rumsfeld, Donald H (2006-07-19). "DefenseLink Speech: Veterans of Foreign Wars". Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defence. US Department of Defence. Retrieved 2008-08-12.
63. Rice, Condoleezza (2003-08-25). "National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice Remarks to Veterans of Foreign Wars". Office of the Press Secretary. White House. Retrieved 2008-08-12.
64. Carafano, James (September 23, 2003). "A Phony "Phony History"". Heritage Foundation. Retrieved 2008-07-08.
65. Benjamin, Daniel (2003-08-29). "Condi Rice's phony history". Slate Magazine. Retrieved 2008-08-12.
66. Earl F. Ziemke (1990). "Army Historical Series: The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany," United States Army Center of Military History, CMH Pub 30-6.
67. Benjamin, Daniel (2003-08-29). "Condi's Phony History". Slate magazine. Retrieved 2008-07-08.
68. Marek, Ed (September 1, 2003). "The occupation of Germany, the occupation of Iraq, many parallels". Talking Proud!. Archived from the original on September 28, 2007. Retrieved 2008-07-08.

Further reading

• Hellmuth Auerbach, Die Organisation des "Werwolf"
• Arno Rose, Werwolf, 1944–1945
• Klaus-Dietmar Henke, Die amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands
• Charles Whiting, Hitler's Werewolves
• James Lucas, Kommando (part 4)

Bibliography

• Biddiscombe, Perry (2004). The Last Nazis: SS Werewolf Guerrilla Resistance in Europe 1944-1947. Tempus Publishing. ISBN 0-7524-2967-1.
• Biddiscombe, Perry (1998). Werwolf!: The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944–1946. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-0-8020-0862-6.

External links

• Review of Werwolf! The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944–1946 Canadian Journal of History, Dec 1999 by Lawrence D Stokes
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story, by Life Magazine

Postby admin » Sat Sep 22, 2018 10:51 pm

Saskia Sassen's Missing Chapter
by Marc Parry
The Chronicle of Higher Education
December 5, 2014

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Image
Saskia Sassen, a professor of sociology at Columbia U., has had to reckon with her father’s relationship with Adolf Eichmann.

The mass murderer visited on Sundays. Nearly 60 years later, Saskia Sassen can still picture his arrival. A gaunt man in a raincoat and dark hat, with a face that seemed paralyzed in a bitter smirk, the visitor would disappear behind closed doors with her father and a tape recorder. They remained there for hours.

Sassen—now a professor of sociology at Columbia University, then a girl of about 10 growing up in Argentina—didn’t know who the visitor was. She didn’t know what he and her father were talking about. She knew only that her mother detested the guest, whose visits triggered hysterical arguments between her parents.

"I wanted to find out what this was," she says. "I just needed to know."

The visitor, she eventually learned, was Adolf Eichmann. And what the Nazi fugitive was doing in her home is detailed in a new book that is changing how scholars view one of the chief architects of the Holocaust.

In the late 1950s, Eichmann discussed the Holocaust in a series of recorded talks with Sassen’s Dutch-born father, Willem Sassen, who had been a Nazi SS volunteer and propagandist in World War II. Bettina Stangneth, a philosopher based in Germany, draws on these and other records in Eichmann Before Jerusalem (Knopf). Her book challenges Hannah Arendt’s famous depiction of Eichmann as an unthinking, nonideological bureaucrat who had simply been following orders.

But while reviews and news coverage have stressed the showdown-with-Arendt angle, Stangneth’s book also illuminates another story: the little-known family history of an eminent scholar.

Saskia Sassen, 67, is an authority on globalization whose books have been translated into more than 20 languages. Her classic 1991 work, The Global City (Princeton University Press), showed how changes in the world economy were transforming major urban centers. The scholar’s influence extends beyond the academy: Corporate elites listen to her, as do activists for social and political change; she socializes with celebrities from journalism (The Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger), philosophy (Jürgen Habermas) and the arts (the late Susan Sontag). Sassen’s Twitter account, followed by 24,000, chronicles an itinerary of media and conference appearances that rivals a secretary of state’s.

Image
Courtesy Saskia Sassen. Dublin, 1948. Saskia Sassen and her parents, Willem and Miep, lived in Ireland between his SS service during World War II and the family’s settling in Argentina.

Her friend and Columbia colleague Ira Katznelson, president of the Social Science Research Council, says Sassen has "altered the agenda" in the social sciences and is "well known and influential on every major populated continent." Another friend, Craig Calhoun, director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, praises her ability to synthesize and make sense of issues cropping up around the world. "If you wanted to say, ‘Where does Saskia Sassen do fieldwork and research?’—she does it in the business-class seats of international air travel, talking to the people who happen to sit next to her."

One topic that Sassen has struggled to talk about is her father’s past. She excised it from autobiographical writing. She refrained from discussing it with friends and colleagues. "This is not the subject that I am really wanting to talk about," she says. But in recent years Sassen has found herself repeatedly confronting this missing chapter of her biography, as archival records emerge and scholars, journalists, and filmmakers seek her participation in projects connected to her father’s history. She declined most of the film requests. When she does talk about her Argentina years, as she did with me recently, her eyes at times moisten with emotion.

The roots of Sassen’s public reckoning with her father’s history date back, in part, to a prominent documentary that aired on German television in 1998. Adolf Eichmann: The Exterminator recounted Eichmann’s role in organizing the deportation of European Jewry. But what caught the attention of Stangneth was its use of rediscovered recordings from Eichmann’s talks with Willem Sassen in Argentina. Stangneth decided to investigate further.

At the heart of her book is a question. How did Eichmann—whose notoriety had been reflected in nicknames like Caligula, Czar of the Jews, Manager of the Holocaust—come to be seen as a cog in the Nazi machine? To answer that, Stangneth burrows into the thicket of records he left behind during his postwar years living under a false identity in Argentina. She emerges with a portrait of Eichmann as a master manipulator of his image—and an unrepentant murderer.

Eichmann Before Jerusalem has attracted international media attention since it first came out in German in 2011, including a September New York Times profile timed to the book’s U.S. debut. That interest keeps growing. When I reached Stangneth at home in Hamburg recently, she was busy with more interviews for the release in Australia.

Stangneth corresponded with Saskia Sassen during her research, and Eichmann Before Jerusalem amounts to a minibiography of her father. It reads like spy fiction. War correspondent, novelist, actor, demagogue, bon vivant: Wilhelmus Antonius Maria Sassen played all of those roles. "If there was one constant in Sassen’s life," Stangneth writes, "it was his fascination with National Socialism."

Sassen was no murderer. During the war, he joined an SS propaganda unit whose writers and broadcasters reported from the front lines of combat. In 1948 he escaped with his family to Argentina, where he linked up with a circle of local and refugee Nazis who harbored ambitious plans to "foment a revolution in Germany," Stangneth writes. One of their ventures was a kind of perverted academic symposium. Participants convened in Sassen’s living room, where they debated books, gave lectures, and tried to redeem Nazism. They were particularly obsessed with discrediting what they saw as enemy propaganda about the Holocaust.

Enter Eichmann. He was invited to participate in the project because of his knowledge of Jewish affairs. But over the course of the discussions, which were recorded in 1957, Eichmann didn’t help the Sassen circle distance Nazism from the Holocaust. Instead, Stangneth writes, he made a confession.

"If of the 10.3 million Jews … we had killed 10.3 million, I would be satisfied, and would say, Good, we have destroyed an enemy," Eichmann told the group. He added, "We would have fulfilled our duty to our blood and our people and to the freedom of the peoples, if we had exterminated the most cunning intellect of all the human intellects alive today."

During these talks, Sassen felt horrified by the bloody details he learned about the concentration camps, Stangneth writes. But he was sure that Eichmann had been manipulated into organizing such crimes. Sassen’s project, out of which he had hoped to write a book, eventually collapsed. Then, in 1960, Israeli agents abducted Eichmann. Rumors spread in Argentina that Sassen had betrayed him. "The German community thought, after Eichmann’s kidnapping, that knowing Sassen could be a risk for your own life," Stangneth says.


On a Monday afternoon in late October, a doorman ushers me to Saskia Sassen’s 12th-floor apartment overlooking New York’s Washington Square Park. With her gray hair, loose blouse, and patterned skirt, she looks more like an aging hippie than an economic expert whose ideas shape the thinking of global corporate elites. After some preliminaries—coffee served, seats taken at a long wooden table at the end of her living room—we are back in Argentina, and before long back to the chaos that followed Eichmann’s capture.

"I was not dominated by fear," Saskia Sassen says. "I was dominated by the fact—aha! I knew it!" She delivers three quick knocks on the table. "I knew that there was something weird going on. Because, remember, for so long I had been trying to understand why this person was coming."

Soon after his kidnapping, Eichmann’s sons turned up at Sassen’s house in the middle of the night. They were frantic to find their father, as Neal Bascomb relates in his 2009 book, Hunting Eichmann. They were also armed. Saskia Sassen’s memories of that moment bubble up in fragments: Her mother trying to keep her away from the scene. Her trying to get back. Ringing phones. Other Nazis alerted. Hysteria.

Her mother, terrified, wanted to take the kids to Europe. Her father refused. The Sassen home became an epicenter of activity. What happened? Who betrayed? What’s next? "To me it was like adventure central," Saskia Sassen says. "I never slept. I can’t remember even going to school in that period. … After that kind of experience, a lot of these things that academics worry about—their safety, or their conditions of work—it’s like child’s play."

Eichmann was eventually tried in Jerusalem and hanged in 1962. Willem Sassen sold pieces of the Eichmann interviews to Life magazine. But Sassen cleverly camouflaged his relationship with Eichmann, Stangneth says, portraying himself as a journalist who met the mass murderer by chance in a pub.


At home, Sassen didn’t hide his political views from his precocious daughter. Father and daughter discussed the war, politics, things that weren’t taught in school. Saskia Sassen proclaimed herself a Communist at age 12. "We were like two little titans having a lot of political debates," she says. "When it came to politics, we disagreed completely. And he was part of my political education, clearly."

Willem Sassen believed in a strong state. He spoke in terms of the workings of political systems, not personal beliefs. "That probably is now present in my work," Saskia Sassen says. "I’m very interested in systems."

From an early age, she was also very interested in leaving home. In 1970 she set out for the University of Notre Dame, where, despite being an illegal immigrant with no college degree, she intended to pursue graduate work. She earned a Ph.D. in economics and sociology and, over time, a reputation for producing audacious scholarship.

Sassen’s first major book, The Mobility of Labor and Capital (Cambridge University Press, 1988), focused on international migration. At the time, globalization research was in its infancy, says William I. Robinson, a sociologist of globalization at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who has written an overview of Sassen’s career. Economists and sociologists studied how companies were becoming multinational. Separate researchers focused on the migration of people, Robinson says, attributing those flows to forces like the pull of better wages. Sassen connected those two domains of scholarship. She demonstrated how foreign investment can disrupt local communities—think, for example, of Mexican peasants displaced when a multinational firm sets up an agribusiness plantation on their land—which then generates a flow of migrants, Robinson says. And the migrants tend to move to the country or region from which the investment originated.

Sassen didn’t just study migrants; she also tried to improve their lives. She got involved with Cesar Chavez’s organizing of farmworkers and helped set up a child-care center for the children of migrant laborers in South Bend, Ind. That was one piece of a life active in various left-wing causes dating to the 1960s: Vietnam protests, the McGovern campaign, the Central American solidarity movement. Her exploits, like her father’s, crackle with adventure. The time she was blindfolded to meet a dubious character who had been connected to the Weathermen. The time a mob stoned her bus in Colombia. The time she smuggled evidence of napalm bombings out of El Salvador.


All of those experiences—plus her nocturnal forays into performance art­—are narrated in an autobiographical essay she contributed to a 2005 book called The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the Sixties (University of Chicago Press). But, as she wrote there, Sassen seldom discussed her political activities with academic colleagues.

By the early 1990s, what fellow scholars saw was the next phase of her intellectual ascent. Her second major book, The Global City, examined how global economic changes were altering urban life. It focused on three hubs—New York, London, and Tokyo—that had emerged as "command centers" of the global economy.

Cities, Sassen observed, should diminish as commercial centers with the rise of technology that allows instant long-distance transactions. They hadn’t. Major cities became important marketplaces for investment banking and financial trading, as well as business-to-business services like law, consulting, accounting, and advertising. The global dispersal of manufacturing and production, Sassen argued, seemed to necessitate the simultaneous centralization of certain financial operations and services. Those agglomerated in major urban centers.

When the book came out, in 1991, "everybody thought decentralization is happening—everything was leaving major cities," says Susan S. Fainstein, a senior research fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. "But she argued that no, they weren’t, actually, in terms of these cities that played this kind of function."

Sassen’s book—a multilayered argument that unfolds over 447 chart-packed pages—caused "a whole body of research to follow in its tracks," says Fainstein. Articles and books examined the global-cities phenomenon. Conferences popped up with "Global City" in their titles. Sassen found herself in demand as a public speaker, invited to address audiences as diverse as big-city mayors and scholars of literature.

Yet even as her public profile rose over the years, she continued to wrestle privately with Willem Sassen’s legacy.

There were the arguments: father-and-daughter battles that continued until shortly before his death, in 2001. At the same time, making her way in New York presented more-practical challenges.

Saskia Sassen began her academic career at Queens College, where many Orthodox Jews studied and taught. She also joined the New York Institute of the Humanities, which brought together intellectuals from a variety of backgrounds, like Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky, the Russian émigré poet. The people around her knew history. They knew, in particular, Hannah Arendt.

In 1963, Arendt had published Eichmann in Jerusalem, her much-debated account of Eichmann’s trial. Willem Sassen, whose interviews came up at the trial, appears in the book. (What’s more, Sassen’s husband, Richard Sennett, a prominent sociologist, had studied under Arendt.)

Sassen felt on guard. She avoided mentioning Buenos Aires.

"I tried not to have too many very personal friends," she says. "Because I knew that then I would have to get into histories that I didn’t want to talk about."


One day, probably some time in the mid- or late 1980s, Susan Sontag asked her directly, "So what is your story in Argentina?"

Sassen paused. She had been prepared for such a question. But she wasn’t ready to talk.

"Complicated," she said.

Sontag died in 2004. In the decade since, the relationship between Willem Sassen and Eichmann has attracted fresh scrutiny from researchers. As a result, Saskia Sassen has answered Sontag’s question in a series of film and print interviews. One of the most prominent of these projects, a 2010 German docudrama called Eichmann’s Fate, even features an actress depicting Saskia Sassen as a child. The film cuts between a contemporary interview with Sassen and a historical re-enactment showing the child actress opening the door of her home to the strange man in the dark hat.

Sassen’s appearances have elicited a slew of messages via email and social media, some of them innocuous ("Oh, I didn’t know"); others more sinister (one person, alluding to a poison used in Nazi death camps, told Sassen she should take a "Zyklon shower").

"I find her very brave to make these interviews," says Bettina Stangneth, who worked on the Eichmann’s Fate movie. "It’s not easy to talk about such things with a camera in front of you."

But, to my surprise, Sassen hasn’t seen that movie. Nor has she read Stangneth’s book. And the longer I speak with Sassen about her father, the clearer it becomes that her account clashes with Stangneth’s.

Willem Sassen, in his daughter’s description, is a more palatable figure. A bit of a fanatic, yes. A journalist aligned with the Nazis, yes. But a man whose great passions were theater and journalism.

In Eichmann Before Jerusalem, Stangneth describes how Willem Sassen grew infatuated with Hitler in his youth. She tells me how, after Eichmann’s capture, Sassen protected the murderer by manipulating the transcripts of their discussions and never going public with the original recordings. (Stangneth found no evidence that Sassen had betrayed Eichmann to the Israelis.) Stangneth’s book also describes how, in a 1991 interview on Argentine TV, Sassen continued to justify Josef Mengele’s "experiments" on Auschwitz victims.

By contrast, Saskia Sassen tells me that her father "did not like the Nazis." She emphasizes how he clashed with Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister. "My father detested Hitler," she says. "He detested him."

And the Argentina circle? The dreaming of Nazi restoration? Willem Sassen’s attempt to discredit "propaganda" about the Holocaust?

"That’s not what I remember," she says. In her telling, Willem Sassen comes across as a mouthpiece for local Nazis. He wrote for them but ranted about them at home. The "ridiculous texts" he produced were "to have an income," she says. At another point in our conversation, Sassen says, "My father was more a journalist—a journalist wants to discover stuff—than he was pro-Nazi, actually." It’s not that Stangneth is lying in her portrayal, she tells me. "But she was dealing with archives. … She doesn’t understand, in my home, what I experienced."


After our interview, Sassen resumes her hectic public schedule with a succession of appearances at events in Paris and Berlin, plus a lecture in Chicago about her latest book, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard University Press).

Meanwhile, I try to make sense of her private and public lives, and how they might connect, by talking with people who know her. The person best positioned to help, Richard Sennett, won’t discuss her family past much, except to play down its significance. "I wouldn’t be so determinist about this," her husband says. "She made her own life. That’s to me the story of her in her youth—that she left the moment she legally could and made a life for herself."

Susan Fainstein, who has known Sassen since her Queens College days, does see a connection between her background and her work: "I think her concern with people who are emigrants, who don’t belong in any particular location, comes out of the peculiarities of her childhood."

The Harvard scholar also gives me a sense of how quiet Sassen had kept her family history. Fainstein considers Sassen a good friend. She even had Willem Sassen to dinner (a "charming elderly gentleman," as she recalls). Yet Sassen didn’t tell her about his history. Only later, in part through reading about Eichmann Before Jerusalem, did Fainstein, who is Jewish, come to appreciate its significance. "I wish she had told me," Fainstein says, "and given me the option of inviting him to dinner or not on that basis."


As Craig Calhoun puts it, "Most of her life, Saskia compartmentalized this a lot."

She still tries to, as I soon learn in a series of emails that reveal a different side of the scholar who had greeted me so warmly in her apartment. Yes, Sassen will play the role of Willem Sassen’s daughter in Eichmann projects. But, by writing about her father at length in an article focused on her, it’s as if I have crossed an invisible boundary.

The problems begin with a list she sends me of possible interviewees. Sassen tells me that she has not discussed her father with these people. They are "major public figures," she writes, and Willem Sassen "is not the subject to bring up" with them.


She informs me that the "real story" is how she managed "to become a worldwide famous scholar in spite of unusual hardships."

Stangneth, for her part, empathizes with Sassen. Germans have a lot of experience with such family stories, she says. A child can grow up loving Grandpa, a nice man who brings gifts, only to learn that he led a death camp.

"I cannot imagine what it means to be the daughter of Willem Sassen and to be a person of such public interest like Saskia," she says.

But Stangneth also defends her depiction of Willem Sassen. She tells me that he spent most of 1960 trying to write a book about Eichmann. A few years ago, after her own book had already come out, she discovered a copy of this unfinished manuscript.

The contents were tough going. Willem Sassen had tried to convince the world that Jews weren’t the real victims of German history. Eichmann was.


Marc Parry is a senior reporter at The Chronicle.

Saskia Sassen wrote a letter in response to this article. Read it here.


December 10, 2014

Truly a ‘Missing Chapter’?
To the Editor:

I’ve now had a chance to read “Saskia Sassen’s Missing Chapter,” (The Chronicle Review, December 12) by Marc Parry, which refers to my relation to my father, Willem Sassen, who became a Nazi in World War II, and thereafter connected with Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. I have never denied this nor tried to hide it.

Since Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) put the relations between the two men into the public realm, I have been over the years asked about them, and about my own relations to my father. Far from being a “missing chapter” in my life, it’s one which I’ve tried to speak out on as well as I can.

Most recently, I did an in-depth interview this summer with J.B. Silvers on the subject for a WNET and PBS documentary, “Past Reckoning,” now being edited. In 2010, a film about my father and Eichmann, made by Raymond Ley (Eichmann’s End), in which an actress plays me as a child and I do an interview as myself, was shown at the New York Film Festival, where it won a silver medal. My own Wikipedia site of course mentions my father and Eichmann.

Those of your readers who read German might like to consult an interview I gave, at the time widely reproduced, about my father and Eichmann in the June 16th, 2011 issue of Freitag Magazine. Long before that, I gave a long TV interview to Roelf van Til in 2005; he was by then known as the maker of the film, The Man who Sold Eichmann and Mengele, referring to the interviews my father published in Time and Life magazines.

I was interviewed by Willi Winkler in 2006 for his book Der Schattenmann, appearing in 2011, and have been interviewed by and corresponded with Bettina Stangneth for her book of 2011 which has just appeared in English. Let me conclude by thanking her for help on clarifying various aspects of my father’s history.

Saskia Sassen

Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology
Department of Sociology and
Co-Chair, Committee on Global Thought
Columbia University
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story, by Life Magazine

Postby admin » Sat Sep 22, 2018 11:25 pm

Castle Hülchrath
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/22/18

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Image
Schloss Hülchrath, view of the Hochschloss from northeast

Castle Hülchrath is a former kurkölnische country castle in Grevenbroicher district city ​​Hülchrath in the Rhine district Neuss . The moated castle on Gillbach goes back to a castle of the 12th century and has preserved a large part of its medieval fabric.

The history of the complex illustrates very well the typical development of a noble residence in the Rhineland : Through continuous growth, a wooden moth changed over a two-part moated castle in the Renaissance to a palace complex , which was destroyed in the 17th century at the beginning of the 20th century in the style of Neo-Gothic was rebuilt. In the Middle Ages, the Hülchrather plant was one of the most important provincial castles in the Cologne territory. [1]

The palace complex is now privately owned and is partly used for residential purposes. An inside inspection is not possible. The courtyard area of ​​the outer bailey and the grounds are accessible to visitors free of charge.

Castle and place Hülchrath stand as a monument area under monument protection . In addition, the castle has been protected since 27 March 1985 as a monument . [2]

History

The Beginnings


When exactly the first castle Hülchrath emerged in the marshy lowlands of the Gillbach, a tributary of the Erft , is still not clear. It was presumably the seat of the Counts of Gillgau , who were appointed provincial counts by the ruler, the archbishop of Cologne , and administered the district for him. From 1122 this task was performed by the Counts of Saffenberg , who probably came to the office through the marriage of Adolf von Saffenberg with Margaretha von Schwarzenburg, the niece of the Archbishop Friedrich I von Schwarzenburg . Already in 1120 Hülchrath was first mentioned by name as Holkerode in a document and was described there as castellum vetustissimum et munitissimum [6] ( German very ancient and heavily fortified castle ). The plant stood near an old Roman road that led from the former Roman camp in Grimlinghausen near Neuss to Kaster . Early on, a settlement would have formed around the castle, the 1321 was designated [8] as oppidum . When Adolf's son Hermann died around 1175, Hülchrath came to the counts of Sayn , because Hermann's daughter Agnes had married Henry II of Sayn in 1173. 1202 was the son of the couple, Henry III. , Lord of Hülchrath. Under him, the celestial sovereignty over the castle apparently lost temporarily, because in a document from the year 1206, she was referred to as his allod . In his time as lord of the castle was probably also the first major expansion of the plant, this being surrounded by a polygonal ring wall with flanking towers .

As Henry III. 1247 died without descendants (his daughter had died before him), Hülchrath came to his nephew Simon von Sponheim , who exchanged it in 1248 against other areas with his brother Heinrich , Herr von Heinsberg . This pledged castle and rule temporarily to William IV , the Count of Jülich , it later redeemed, because when Heinrichs daughter Adelheid (also Aleidis) on September 22, 1255 married Dietrich , later Count of Cleves , came the castle as a dowry to the Klever counts. After the death of Dietrich V Hülchrath came to his son Dietrich Luf II , who called himself from 1296 Count of Hülchrath. In 1298 he sold the county and castle to his brother Dietrich VI. von Kleve and got her back as an after-loan . 1305 followed him as the owner of Hülchrath his eponymous son from the marriage with Elizabeth of Virneburg. Eight years later he had to give the Cologne archbishop a right of first refusal at the castle, which took Henry II of Virneburg on 12 June 1314 to complete. For 30,000 Cologne Mark [12] moved castle and county to the Cologne cathedral chapter . However, only 15,000 marks were payable because many of the lands belonging to Hülchrath were pledged. [13] Dietrich Luf III. should keep the county until full payment. This was the case after many delays in late 1331, but as early as 1323 Hülchrath became a Kurkölnische office. [14]

Kurkölnische Landesburg

Kurköln had the Hülchrather weir built in the 14th and 15th centuries strong. It was then one of the most massive castles in the Rhineland and was designed for demonstration of power and representation at the same time. As a regional castle Hülchrath fulfilled the same functions as the kurkölnischen plants in Linn , Zülpich , Lechenich , Kempen and Zons . Particular importance was attached to it as a strategically important base against the largest territorial adversary Kurkölns in this area, the Duchy of Jülich, because the neighboring Grevenbroich belonged since 1307 to the Jülich possessions. In 1499, troops of the Jülich Duke besieged the castle but were unable to capture it. The settlement was also unscathed, contrary reports result from a misreading of the Cologne Chronicle Johann Koelhoff the Younger . [16]

Image
The Siege of Hülchrath in the Truchsess War, engraving by Frans Hogenberg

During the Truchsess War Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg fled with his wife Agnes von Mansfeld-Eisleben behind the protective walls of the Hülchrather castle, whereupon imperial troops besieged them under the leadership of the choirmaster Friedrich von Sachsen-Lauenburg , drained their moats and shot at them with cannons , After thirteen-day cannonade, the lock crew finally gave up and handed over the facility to the besiegers on March 16, 1583. [17] [18] Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg and his wife were previously escaped through a secret passage . The place Hülchrath was then destroyed, the castle heavily damaged. In the same year they went to eliminate the damage, with stones of the previously looped upper monastery were used at Neuss . After the cathedral chapter had ceded the meantime converted into a castle complex 1605 to the archdiocese of Cologne, the then coadjutor and later Elector Ferdinand of Bavaria in 1608 so began to fix Hülchrath again. The ruined place was newly founded and created on schedule in the northeast of the castle. Previously, he had located in the southeast of the plant. Subsequently, the village was combined with the outer bailey and the high castle to a closed fortification system with bastions , ramparts and moats. She took over the function of a second outer bailey. The work lasted until 1612. [22]

Image
Figure of Hülchrath Castle in Matthäus Merian's Topographia Germaniae , 1646

Also during the Thirty Years' War Hülchrath was besieged in the Hesse War . After five days of shelling Hessian-weimar troops were able to take place and castle in 1642, but were only a short time later expelled by imperial and Bavarian soldiers. In the French-Dutch War , the castle complex on October 26, 1676 met the same fate, this time there were soldiers of the Prince Bishopric of Osnabrück , who besieged the castle and took. In 1688, the fortifications erected eighty years before were demolished, leaving only the outer bailey and the prison in the high castle. The castle was still inhabited, but due to lack of maintenance followed a gradual decline.

The castle to the present time

When after the Peace of Lunéville in 1801 the existing since 1798 four left-bank departments were recognized as French territory, in 1802 the secularization was carried out. As a result, the French government sold in 1803 the castle for 4929 francs to the last Kurkölnischen bailiff Heinrich Joseph von Pröpper. His descendants lived in the castle until the end of the 19th century, but had already sold it in 1874 to Prince Alfred zu Salm-Reifferscheidt. He sold it in 1901 to Heinrich Maas, with which the castle first came into civil hands. After six years, the plant changed again the owner, because in 1907 it acquired the Duesseldorf-based Freiherr Enno Rudolf von Bennigsen and had the ruins rebuilt in the historically-romantizing style of the Neo-Gothic. However, he did not resort to existing buildings, but let the renaissance-temporal games lie down and build completely new buildings in the northern part of the Hochschlosses along the ring wall. Other owner changes followed. Among the temporary owners of the castle Hülchrath belonged among other things a Mr. Queckenberg as well as in the 1920s four manufacturers from Rheydt. [27]

After the buildings had belonged to the Landbauernschaft Rheinland in 1930, [28] followed in the Third Reich, the National Socialists as users. From 1937 on, the facility served as a small NS-Ordensburg, in which, among other things, members of werewolf groups were trained to carry out sabotage after the occupation of the German Reich by the Allies. From there, for example, the assassination of Aachen Lord Mayor Franz Oppenhoff was organized. After the Second World War, the castle buildings were used temporarily as accommodation for war refugees from the former German eastern territories. In 1954, the Mönchengladbach family Wennmacher bought the plant and had the war damage repaired until 1959.
Today, the outer bailey is used for residential and commercial purposes. The Hochschloss is home to a restaurant, which also hosts numerous events on the grounds of the castle. In addition to knight's meals and concerts, there is also a medieval market every year.

Architectural History and Architecture

Development


Castle Hülchrath went through seven construction phases in its history, which - with one exception - are still legible on today's condition.

Image
Hülchrath on a drawing by the Walloon artist Renier Roidkin

The roots of today's plant lie in a high medieval moth, which bears much resemblance to Linn Castle. The Moth Hill was probably surrounded in the 13th century [30] with a polygonal ring wall with three flanking towers. After the Cologne cathedral chapter had taken over the plant in the first quarter of the 14th century, it was extensively expanded in the style of the Gothic style and strongly fortified. Presumably at that time, the Romanesque keep of the Motte was eliminated. The extensions end of the 14th / beginning of the 15th century included, for example, the newly built Palas on the southern ring wall and an elevation of the same, which thus received a coat wall- like appearance. During the expansion of the castle, the gate tower received the fortification function of the old, central main tower, which is why it is often mistakenly referred to as a keep. In addition, the foundation stone was laid for today's forecourt with its commercial buildings and its gate tower. It was separated from the main castle by a moat , which could be overcome by a drawbridge , [31] and even secured by a upstream, second moat. South of the palace was built in the 15th century to secure a kennel .

In 1608, Ferdinand of Bavaria erected the bastion tower east of the gate tower in the high castle. At the same time, a new entrance gate was built between the two towers, while the old one was walled up. The medieval Palas received in the same year rich architectural jewelry in the forms of the Renaissance . All these changes took place in the context of work that united the Hochschloss, the outer bailey and the newly founded at that time settlement Hülchrath to a closed defense system.

Image
Courtyard of the castle on a painting by F. A. Reuters

In a fifth phase, the fortified complex in the 17th century was transformed into a castle in the style of the Italian Renaissance . The style had made its way to the Rhineland via the Spanish Netherlands . The result was a building wing along the northwestern ring wall, which had two-story arcades to the courtyard. At its western end stood a slender tower designed for astronomical observation, with stone-walled porches , windows, and cornices . The renaissance-era elements are no longer extant today, but were detailed in four gouache frescoes by F. A. Reuter dating from 1795, which have disappeared today.

At the time of the Baroque changes were made in the Vorburg area. On the northeastern side, a new gate construction with a stone access bridge was built. He was in flight with the high-rise entrance, according to the architectural taste of the time. The old Gothic gate tower of the bailey at the south end was meaningless and was abandoned. The seventh and final construction phase consisted of the romanticizing reconstruction of the high castle at the beginning of the 20th century, in which, however, the medieval basic structure of the plant was largely preserved.

Description

Image
Floor plan of the castle of Ludwig Arntz

Schloss Hülchrath is a two-part complex consisting of a high castle and a north-eastern forecourt. The high castle has the form of a ring castle , because the 1.75 meter [33] thick enclosure wall looks at first glance circular, but in reality is polygonal. Their shape reflects the layout of the high medieval predecessor, and even today the moth mound and the surrounding ditch can be seen in the terrain. The ring wall was increased in Romanian times with bricks , so that these new lots differ greatly from the older substructure. This consisted in the lowest part of horizontally layered basalt and Liedberger sandstone with leveling layers of tuff . Above it rose masonry of tuff. In the enclosure wall west of the gate tower are still good to see the old, 0.7 meters high [33] high battlements of the low ring wall. Her heiress had a protruding battlement , which was supported by a pointed-arched sandstone consoles frieze . He is still recognizable today from the outside. The ring wall had three semicircular shell towers as flanking. Near the southeast of them seems to have been the castle chapel . [30] The northeastern one of them is called Hexenturm and reminds of a dark episode of the Hülchrath plant. This became famous in the 17th by numerous witch trials , in which the so-called water sample was performed in the moat. In 1629 in Hülchrath 13 women were burned as alleged witches at the stake . [34] A saying of the population at that time said: "Who in Hülchrath goes over the bridge, rarely or never returns." [35] Another half-open tower is in the northeastern part of the ring wall. The so-called bastion tower was built there only in the 17th century.

In the middle of the area enclosed by the ring wall stands the stump of an old round tower with a diameter of 8.5 meters. These are the rebuilt remnants of the former motto tower. So far it has not been clarified whether it was a keep or a residential tower . However, the assumptions of historians go because of the small size in the direction of a keep. In the southern part of the castle courtyard, the ruins of the well over 35 meters long [30] long palace, where the ring wall and the two southern shell towers were included in the construction. Numerous bar holes on the inside of the ring wall still point to the basement housing construction. On the ground floor was a large two-nave hall with barrel vault , which served as Dürnitz in the Middle Ages. [36]

Image
Hochschloss, view from the east

The most striking component of the Hochschloss is the 64 meter [19] high gate tower on the north side. The five-storey building was the tallest tower in the complex and not only fulfilled a defense-related but also a symbolic function. The lower part of its masonry consists mainly of basalt, while the higher parts consist of tuff. He has a high, slated pyramid roof , as it was typical of the Gothic period. The top floor of about 8 × 9 meters [3] measuring tower consists of a cantilevered battlements with four pentagonal Scharwachttürmchen . The floor rests on a round arch frieze, which is supported by trachyte consoles. Some of these have Hebrew inscriptions, because there are recycled grave stones of the old Jewish cemetery Judenbüchel Cologne, devastated in the plague year of 1349 by angry Cologne citizens and his grave stones were misappropriated as a building material. [35] At a courtyard-side corner of the gate tower stands a slender staircase tower with a wooden spiral staircase . The windows are framed by trachyte stones and are therefore made of the same material as the gurney of the arched main portal. [27] [38]

Image
The southern part of the outer bailey including today's gate

The Hochschloss is connected to the outer bailey by a bridge-like earth rampart. The former separating moat is now drained but still clearly visible as a deep terrain sink. The two-storey outer bailey can be reached from Hülchrath via a wide nine-arched brick bridge over the moat. It consists of three brick walls with slated roof pitches . At the corners of the buildings there are round towers with eight-sided helmets . The two floors of Vorburgtrakte are clearly separated from each other by a block frieze. The corner towers and the field-side outer walls and the former gate tower at the southern end of the outer bailey date back to the 14th century. Around the middle of the northeast wing is today's castle gate with stepped gable . The round-arched passage with house entrances is flanked by two pilasters . Above his architrave is a balcony with a wrought-iron railing.

The southern end of the outer bailey is formed by the former gate tower from the Gothic period. Its three storeys rise on an approximately 8.5 × 8.5 meters [3] measuring floor plan. Behind the arcade portal on the outside there was a barrel vaulted passage, but the portal is walled up today. The still existing, framing aperture testifies to a portcullis , which was previously embedded in the gate. On the outside of the top floor remains of a pointed arch frieze with Maschikulis are recognizable. Above it was a battlement with Wurferker . This served at the same time as a groove for the chain of the fall grid. Until the year 1810 [39] the weir-building-ground had turret towers at the corners, but these were demolished, so that today only their console-stones are preserved. After being used as a barn in the 19th century, [40] it now serves as a dwelling.

In 1995, the parks of the castle were redesigned for the Landesgartenschau . In them you can still find remnants of the former trench system, some of which are pond-like and are fed by the Gillbach, as well as a valuable stock of trees. In addition, there are still some relics of arcades from hornbeams to see. [34]

Literature

• Paul Clemen : The art monuments of the district Grevenbroich (= The art monuments of the Rhine Province, Volume 3, Dept. 5). L. Schwann, Dusseldorf 1897, pp. 43-51 ( digitized ).
• Georg Dehio : Handbook of German Art Monuments . North Rhine-Westphalia, Part 1: Rhineland . Deutscher Kunstverlag , Munich / Berlin 2006, pp. 444-445.
• Brigitte and Walter Janssen: Castles, palaces and court festivals in the district of Neuss . Neuss district administration, Neuss 1980, ISBN 3-9800327-0-1 , pp. 120-139.
• Hans Kisky: Hülchrath (= Rheinische Kunststätten, issue 9). Neusser printing and publishing house, Neuss 1964.
• Hans Kisky: Castles and manors in the Rhineland . Weidlich, Frankfurt am Main 1960, p. 41-43.
• Werner Meyer: German castles, palaces and fortresses . Volume 1. Flechsig, Würzburg 2002, ISBN 3-88189-469-1 , p. 137-141.
• Gregor Spohr, Ele Beuthner: How nice to dream here. Castles on the Lower Rhine . Pomp , Bottrop / Essen 2001, ISBN 3-89355-228-6 , P. 46-49.
• Theodor Wildeman : Schloß Hülchrath on the pictures of Paretz . In: Arnold Mock (Hrsg.): Lower Rhine yearbook . Volume 4. Association Left Lower Rhine , Krefeld 1959, ISSN 0549-1665 , pp. 73-74.
• Christian Wiltsch: Neukirchen-Hülchrath (= Contributions to the History of the City of Grevenbroich, Volume 18). 1st edition. History Society for Grevenbroich and surroundings, Grevenbroich 2006, pp. 99-106.
• Jens Wroblewski, André Wemmers: Theiss Castle Guide Lower Rhine . Konrad Theiss , Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-8062-1612-6 , S. 78-81 .

Web links

Commons: Schloss Hülchrath - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files
• Website of the castle
• Entry by Karin Striewe to Hülchrath Castle in the EBIDAT , the scientific database of the European Burgeninstitut
• Schloss Hülchrath in the Burgerbe blog

Item Details and Notes

1. Hanns Ott: Rhenish water castles. History, forms, functions . Weidlich, Würzburg 1984, ISBN 3-8035-1239-5 , p 146.
2. Brief description of the monument authority on limburg-bernd.de , accessed on 4 July 2014.
3. Entry of Karin Striewe to Hülchrath Castle in the EBIDAT , the scientific database of the European Burgeninstitut
4. C. Wiltsch: Neukirchen-Hülchrath , 2006, p. 99.
5. C. Wiltsch: Neukirchen-Hülchrath , 2006, p. 100.
6. J. Wroblewski, A. Wemmers: Theiss castle guide Niederrhein , 2001, p. 78.
7. J. Wroblewski, A. Wemmers: Theiss Castle Guide Niederrhein , 2001, p. 79.
8. G. Dehio: Handbook of German Art Monuments. North Rhine-Westphalia, Volume 1: Rhineland . Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich / Berlin 1967, p. 496.
9. Walther Zimmermann, Friedrich von Klocke (ed.): North Rhine-Westphalia (= Handbook of Historical Sites of Germany, Volume 3). Kröner, Stuttgart 1963, p. 306.
10. Theodor Joseph Lacomblet : document book for the history of the Lower Rhine . Volume 2. Wolf book printing, Dusseldorf 1846, No. 1011 ( digitized ).
11. Hermann Aubin (ed.): The Weistümer the Electorate of Cologne. Volume 1: Amt Hülchrath . Reprint of the 1913 issue. Droste, Dusseldorf 1996, ISBN 3-7700-7593-5 , p. 309.
12. According to C. Wiltsch: Neukirchen-Hülchrath , 2006, p. 101. According to other sources, the purchase price was 30,000 pounds of silver or 30,000 guilders.
13. C. Wiltsch: Neukirchen-Hülchrath , 2006, p. 101.
14. C. Wiltsch: Neukirchen-Hülchrath , 2006, p. 102.
15. A Corneel Voigt , Stefan Frankewitz : Flight over the Rhineland . Pomp, Bottrop / Essen 1996, ISBN 3-89355-138-7 , p. 28.
16. C. Wiltsch: Neukirchen-Hülchrath , 2006, p. 457, note 32.
17. Friedrich Everhard von Mering : History of castles, manors, abbeys and monasteries in the Rhineland and the provinces of Jülich, Cleve, Berg and Westphalia . Volume 7. Lengfeld, Cologne 1844, p. 114 ( digitized ).
18. C. Wiltsch: Neukirchen-Hülchrath , 2006, p. 103.
19. Ludger Fischer : The most beautiful castles and castles on the Lower Rhine . 1st edition. Wartberg, Gudensberg-Gleichen 2004, ISBN 3-8313-1326-1 , p 36.
20. B. and W. Janssen: castles, palaces and court festivals in the circle Neuss , 1980, p. 129.
21. P. Clemen: The monuments of Grevenbroich , 1897, p. 44.
22. G. Dehio: Handbook of German Art Monuments. North Rhine-Westphalia, Volume 1: Rhineland , 2006, p. 444.
23. Heinrich Hubert Giersberg: History of the parishes of the deanery Grevenbroich (= history of the parishes of the archdiocese of Cologne, volume 12). Bachem, Cologne 1883 ( online ).
24. Wilhelm Janssen, Small Rhenish History, Dusseldorf 1997, pp. 261-264.
25. G. Spohr, E. Beuthner: How nice to dream here. Castles on the Lower Rhine , 2001, p. 47.
26. In the literature, these two different details can be found throughout.
27. Käthe Maas-Krickelberg: Hülchrath Castle . In: Bergisch-Jülich history sheets. Monthly magazine of the Bergisch History Association for the Duchies of Berg and Jülich . 6, no. 6, 1929, p. 118.
28. Chronicle of the castle on schlosshuelchrath.com ( Memento of 4 March 2016 in the Internet Archive )
29. Volker Koop: Himmler's last contingent. The NS organization "werewolf" . Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar 2008, ISBN 9783412201913 , p. 128 ( digitized ).
30. J. Wroblewski, A. Wemmers: Theiss Castle Guide Niederrhein , 2001, p. 80.
31. H. Kisky: Hülchrath , 1964, p. 6.
32. J. Wroblewski, A. Wemmers: Theiss Castle Guide Lower Rhine , 2001, p. 81.
33. P. Clemen: The monuments of the district Grevenbroich , 1897, p. 50.
34. Ferdinand GB Fischer : Excursion destinations on the Lower Rhine. Beautiful castles, palaces and moths from the Alps to Zons. Pomp, Bottrop / Essen 1998, ISBN 3-89355-152-2 , p. 28.
35. Karl Emerich Krämer : From Brühl to Kranenburg. Castles, palaces, gates and towers that can be visited . Mercator, Duisburg 1979, ISBN 3-87463-074-9 , p 34.
36. W. Meyer: German castles, palaces and fortresses , Volume 1, 2002, p. 138.
37. G. Dehio: Handbook of German Art Monuments. North Rhine-Westphalia, Volume 1: Rhineland , 2006, p. 445.
38. P. Clemen: The art monuments of the district Grevenbroich , 1897, p. 49.
39. Harald Herzog: Rhenish palace buildings in the 19th century (= Landeskonservator Rheinland, Arbeitshefte, Volume 37). Rheinland-Verlag, Cologne 1981, ISBN 3-7927-0585-0 , p 66.
40. P. Clemen: The art monuments of the district Grevenbroich , 1897, p. 48.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story, by Life Magazine

Postby admin » Sun Sep 23, 2018 7:01 pm

Part 1 of 2

New Order (Nazism) [die Neuordnung Europas (the New Order of Europe)] [Neurop] [Neu Europa]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/23/18

"New Order (political system)" redirects here. For other political organizations called "New Order", see New Order (disambiguation) § Politics.

At the beginning of 1945 Sassen was asked to participate in a Werewolf organisation in case the allied forces overran the German army in the Netherlands. He became the leader of Neurop (Neu Europa). The group was to pass on military intelligence on allied troop movements and to commit sabotage.

-- Willem Sassen, by Wikipedia


The New Order (German: Neuordnung), or the New Order of Europe (German: Neuordnung Europas), was the political order which Nazi Germany wanted to impose on the conquered areas under its dominion. The establishment of the New Order had already begun long before the start of World War II, but was publicly proclaimed by Adolf Hitler in 1941:

The year 1941 will be, I am convinced, the historical year of a great European New Order.[1]


Among other things, it entailed the creation of a pan-German racial state structured according to Nazi ideology to ensure the supremacy of an Aryan-Nordic master race, massive territorial expansion into Central and Eastern Europe through its colonization with German settlers, the physical annihilation of the Jews, the Slavs (especially Poles and Serbs), Roma ("gypsies") and others considered to be "unworthy of life" and the extermination, expulsion or enslavement of most of the Slavic peoples and others regarded as "racially inferior".[2] Nazi Germany's desire for aggressive territorial expansionism was one of the most important causes of World War II.

Historians are still divided as to its ultimate goals, some believing that it was to be limited to Nazi German domination of Europe, while others maintain that it was a springboard for eventual world conquest and the establishment of a world government under German control.[3]

The Führer gave expression to his unshakable conviction that the Reich will be the master of all Europe. We shall yet have to engage in many fights, but these will undoubtedly lead to most wonderful victories. From there on the way to world domination is practically certain. Whoever dominates Europe will thereby assume the leadership of the world.

— Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda and close associate of Hitler, 8 May 1943[4]


Origin of the term

Image
The New Order in Europe: German and other Axis conquests in Europe during World War II.

The term Neuordnung originally had a different and more limited meaning than in its present usage. It is typically translated as New Order, but a more correct translation would actually be more akin to reorganisation. When it was used in Germany during the Third Reich-era it referred specifically to the Nazis' desire to essentially redraw the contemporary state borders within Europe, thereby changing the then-existing geopolitical structures. In the same sense it has also been used now and in the past to denote similar re-orderings of the international political order such as the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the Vienna Congress in 1815, and the Allied victory in 1945. The complete phrase which was used by the Nazi establishment was actually die Neuordnung Europas (the New Order of Europe), for which Neuordnung was merely a shorthand.

According to the Nazi government this goal was pursued by Germany to secure a fair rearrangement of territory for the common benefit of a new, economically integrated Europe,[5] which in Nazi terminology meant the continent of Europe with the exclusion of the "Asiatic" Soviet Union.[6] Nazi racial views regarded the "Judeo-Bolshevist" Soviet state both as a criminal institution which needed to be destroyed as well as a barbarian place as yet lacking any actual culture that would give it a "European" character.[7] Neuordnung was therefore hardly ever used in reference to Soviet Russia since theoretically there weren't even any actual structures that could be re-organized along National Socialist designs.

The actual objective was to ensure a state of total post-war continental hegemony for Nazi Germany.[8] This was to be achieved by the expansion of the territorial base of the German state itself, combined with the political and economic subjugation of the rest of Europe to Germany. Eventual extensions of the project to areas beyond Europe as well as on an ultimately global scale were anticipated for the future period in which Germany would have secured unchallenged control over her own continent first, but Neuordnung did not carry this extra-European meaning at the time.

Through its wide use in Nazi propaganda it quickly gained coinage in Western media. In English-language academic circles especially it eventually carried a much more inclusive definition, and became increasingly known as a term used to refer to all the foreign and domestic politics and war aims of the Nazi German state as well as its dictatorial leader Adolf Hitler. It therefore holds approximately the same connotations as the term co-prosperity sphere did in Japanese circles in reference to their planned imperial domain. Nowadays it is most commonly used to refer to all the post-war planning and policies both in and outside of Europe that the Nazi government expected to implement after an anticipated victory for Germany and the other Axis powers in World War II.

Ideological background

Racialist doctrine

Further information: Master race

The Nazis claimed to scientifically measure a strict hierarchy of human race; the "master race" was said to be the most pure stock of the Aryan race, which was narrowly defined by the Nazis as being identical with the Nordic race, followed by other sub-races of the Aryan race.[9] The Nazis said that since Western civilization, created and maintained they asserted mostly by Nordics, was obviously superior to other civilizations, then the "Nordic" peoples were superior to all other races and thus, the Nazis believed, they were entitled to world domination. This concept is known as Nordicism.[10]

Geopolitical strategy
Further information: Geopolitik § Hitler's geostrategy

Hitler’s ideas about eastward expansion that he promulgated in Mein Kampf were greatly influenced during his 1924 imprisonment by his contact with his geopolitical mentor Karl Haushofer.[11] One of Haushofer’s primary geopolitical concepts was the necessity for Germany to get control of the Eurasian Heartland in order for Germany to attain eventual world domination.[12]

Anticipated territorial extent of Nazi imperialism
Further information: Nazi Foreign Policy (debate)

In a subsequently published speech given at Erlangen University in November 1930 Hitler explained to his audience that no other people had more of a right to fight for and attain "control" of the globe (Weltherrschaft, i.e. "world leadership", "world rule") than the Germans. He realized that this extremely ambitious goal could never be achieved without an enormous amount of fighting.[13] Hitler had alluded to future German world dominance even earlier in his political career. In a letter written by Rudolf Hess to Walter Hewel in 1927, Hess paraphrases Hitler's vision: "World peace is certainly an ideal worth striving for; in Hitler's opinion it will be realizable only when one power, the racially best one, has attained complete and uncontested supremacy. That [power] can then provide a sort of world police, seeing to it at the same time that the most valuable race is guaranteed the necessary living space. And if no other way is open to them, the lower races will have to restrict themselves accordingly".[14]

Heinrich Himmler discussed the territorial aspirations of Germany during his first Posen speech in 1943. He commented on the goals of the warring nations involved in the conflict, and stated that Germany was fighting for new territories and a global power status:[15]

[T]he Seven Years' War brought Prussia's confirmation as a great European power. That war was carried on for seven years to ensure that the already conquered province of Silesia would remain part of Prussia. This war will ensure that everything annexed to the German Reich, to Greater Germany, and then to the Germanic Reich in the years since 1938, will remain ours. This war is being carried on to keep the path to the East open; so that Germany may be a world power; to found the Germanic World Empire (Germanisches Weltreich).


Implementation in Europe
See also: European Confederation

Image
Polish resistance satirical poster - "New European Order" (German: Die Neuordnung Europas) - Polish reaction to Hitler's plans to establish a "new order" in Europe, under the domination of Nazi Germany. In the middle: Adolf Hitler; background: imprisoned European nations (France, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Belgium, Greece, Poland, Hungary)

Military campaigns in Poland and Western Europe

The initial phase of the establishment of the New Order was:

• First, the signing of the German–Soviet non-aggression agreement on 23 August 1939 prior to the invasion of Poland to secure the new eastern border with the Soviet Union, prevent the emergence of a two-front war, and to circumvent a shortage of raw materials due to an expected British naval blockade.

• Second, the Blitzkrieg attacks in northern and western Europe (Operation Weserübungand the Battle of France respectively) to neutralize opposition from the west. This resulted in the conquest of Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, all of which were under German rule by the early summer of 1940.

Had Britain succumbed to Germany, the political re-ordering of Western Europe would have been accomplished.
There was to be no post-war general peace conference in the manner of the one held in Paris after the First World War, merely bilateral negotiations between Germany and her defeated enemies.[16] All still existing international organizations such as the International Labour Organization were to be dismantled or replaced by German-controlled equivalents. According to captured German documents, the commander-in-chief of the German Army, Walther von Brauchitsch, directed that "The able-bodied male population between the ages of 17 and 45 will, unless the local situation calls for an exceptional ruling, be interned and dispatched to the Continent." This represented about 25% of the surviving population. The United Kingdom was then to be plundered for anything of financial, military, industrial or cultural value,[17] and the remaining population terrorised. Civilian hostages would be taken, and the death penalty immediately imposed for any acts of resistance.[18]

The deported male population would have most likely been used as industrial slave labour in areas of the Reich such as the factories and mines of the Ruhr and Upper Silesia. Although they may have been treated less brutally than slaves from the East (whom the Nazis regarded as sub-humans, fit only to be worked to death), working and living conditions would still have been severe.[19]

In late February 1943 Otto Bräutigam of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories claimed he had the opportunity to read a personal report by General Eduard Wagner about a discussion with Heinrich Himmler, in which Himmler had expressed the intention to kill about 80% of the populations of France and England by special forces of the SS after the German victory.[20] In an unrelated event, Hitler had on one occasion called the English lower classes, descendants of Anglo-Saxons—a Germanic people, "racially inferior".[21]

By annexing large territories in northeastern France, Hitler hoped to marginalize the country to prevent any further continental challenges to Germany's hegemony.[22] Likewise, the Latin nations of Western and Southern Europe (Portugal, Spain and Italy) were to be eventually brought into a state of total German dependency and control.[22]

Establishment of a Greater Germanic Reich
Further information: Greater Germanic Reich

Image
Boundaries of the planned "Greater Germanic Reich" based on various, only partially systematised target projections (e.g. Generalplan Ost) from state administration and SS leadership sources.[23]

One of the most elaborate Nazi projects initiated in the newly conquered territories during this period of the war was the planned establishment of a "Greater Germanic Reich of the German Nation" (Grossgermanisches Reich Deutscher Nation).[24] This future empire was to consist of, in addition to Greater Germany, virtually all of historically Germanic Europe (except Great Britain), whose inhabitants the Nazis believed to be "Aryan" in nature. The consolidation of these countries as mere provinces of the Third Reich, in the same manner in which Austria was reduced to the "Ostmark", was to be carried out through a rapidly enforced process of Gleichschaltung (synchronization). The ultimate intent of this was to eradicate all traces of national rather than racial consciousness, although their native languages were to remain in existence.[25][26]

Establishment of German domination in Southeastern Europe
Further information: Nazi rule over the Danube River

Immediately prior to Germany's invasion of Soviet Russia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia (including the German-dominated autonomous area of Banat) were already satellites of Nazi Germany. Montenegro was a satellite of Italy while Albania had been annexed by Italy. Greece was under direct German-Italian military occupation because of the growing resistance movement. Although technically in the Italian sphere of influence, Croatia was in reality a condominium puppet state of the two Axis powers, with Italy controlling the southwestern half, and Germany the northeastern half. Hitler observed that permanent German bases might be established in Belgrade (possibly to be renamed to Prinz-Eugen-Stadt) and Thessaloniki.[27]

Conquest of Lebensraum in Eastern Europe
Further information: A-A line, The Ural mountains in Nazi planning, and Hunger Plan

“And so we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre-War period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in the east. At long last we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-War period and shift to the soil policy of the future. If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states.”

— Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf on Lebensraum in the East.[28]


Image
Offensive plan for Operation Barbarossa.

Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf argued in the chapter "Eastern Orientation or Eastern Policy" that the Germans needed Lebensraum in the East and described it as a "historic destiny" which would properly nurture the future generations of Germans. Hitler believed that "the organization of a Russian state formation was not the result of the political abilities of the Slavs in Russia, but only a wonderful example of the state-forming efficacity of the German element in an inferior race." Hitler spoke on 3 February 1933 to the staff of the army and declared that Germany's problems could be solved by "the conquest of new living space in the east and its ruthless Germanization".[29] His earlier invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland can be directly resonate from his desire of Lebensraum in Mein Kampf.

Implementation of the long term plan for the New Order was begun on June 22, 1941 with Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the USSR. The goal of the campaign was not merely the destruction of the Soviet regime—which the Nazis considered illegitimate and criminal—but also the racial reorganization of European Russia, outlined for the Nazi elite in the Generalplan Ost ("General Plan for the East").[30] Nazi party philosopher Alfred Rosenberg (who, incidentally, protested against the inhumane policy shown toward the Slavs[31]) was the Minister for the Eastern Territories, the person nominally in charge of the project, and Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, was assigned to implement the General Plan for the East which detailed the enslavement, expulsion, and extermination of the Baltic peoples and Slavic peoples.

Furthermore, Hitler hoped to turn Germany into a total blockade-proof autarky by exploiting the vast resources lying in Soviet territories: Ukraine was to provide grain, vegetable oil, fodder, iron ore, nickel, manganese, coal, molybdenum; Crimea natural rubber, citrus fruit and cotton; the Black Sea fish, and the Caucasus crude oil.[32]

By 1942 the quasi-colonial regimes called the General Gouvernment in Poland, the Reichskommissariat Ostland in the Baltic states and Belarus, and the Reichskommissariat Ukraine in the Ukraine had been established. Two more administrative divisions were envisaged: a Reichskommissariat Moskowien that would include the Moscow metropolitan area and vast tracts of European Russia, and a Reichskommissariat Kaukasus in the Caucasus. This policy was accompanied by the annihilation of the entire Jewish population (the Final Solution) as well as the enslavement of their Slavic inhabitants, who it was planned would be made slave laborers on the estates to be granted to SS soldiers after the conquest of European Russia. Each of these SS "soldier peasants" were expected to father at least seven children.[33]

German women were encouraged to have as many children as possible to populate the newly acquired Eastern territories. To encourage this fertility policy, the lebensborn program was expanded and the state decoration known as the Gold Honor Cross of the German Mother was instituted, which was awarded to German women who bore at least eight children for the Third Reich. There was also an effort by Martin Bormann and Himmler to introduce new marriage legislation to facilitate population growth, which would have allowed decorated war heroes to marry an additional wife.[34] Himmler envisaged a German population of 300,000,000 by 2000.

Rosenberg viewed that the political goal of Operation Barbarossa was not merely the destruction of the Bolshevik regime, but the "reversing of Russian dynamism" towards the east (Siberia) and the freeing of the Reich of the "eastern nightmare for centuries to come" by eliminating the Russian state, regardless of its political ideology.[35] The continued existence of Russia as a potential instigator of Pan-Slavism and its suggestive power over other Slavic peoples in the fight between "Germandom" and "Slavism" was seen as a major threat.[36] This was to be solved by exploiting ethnic centrifugal forces and limiting the influence of "Greater Russiandom" (Großrussentum) by promoting segmentation in the manner of divide and conquer.

In a memorandum sent to Rosenberg in March 1942, Nazi anthropologist Otto Reche argued for the disappearance of 'Russia' both as an ethnic and political concept, and the promotion of a new plethora of ethnicities based on medieval Slavic tribes such as the Vyatichs and Severians.[36] Even White Ruthenia, and in particular the Ukraine ("in its present extent") he deemed to be dangerously large.[36]

The Vyatichs or more properly Vyatichi or Viatichi (Russian: вя́тичи) were a tribe of Early East Slavs who inhabited a part of the Oka basin. The Primary Chronicle names a certain tribal leader Vyatko as the forefather of the tribe. The Vyatichi were mainly engaged in farming and cattle-breeding. Between the 9th and 10th centuries, the Vyatichi paid tribute to the Khazars and later Kievan princes.

-- Vyatichi, by Wikipedia


The Severians or Severyans or Siverians (Russian: Северяне; Ukrainian: Сiверяни; Belarusian: Севяране; Bulgarian: Сeверяни) were a tribe or tribal union of early East Slavs occupying areas to the east of the middle Dnieper river, and Danube. They are mentioned by the Bavarian Geographer (9th century), Emperor Constantine VII (956-959), by Khazars ruler Joseph (c. 955), and in the Primary Chronicle (1113).

The etymology of the name of Severians is uncertain. One theory propose derivation from the Slavic word for "north" (sěver; men of the north[1])...

The other Severians had as neighbours the Radimichs, Krivichs and Vyatichs in the north, and the Derevlians and Polianians tribes in the west. Those tribes along the Polianians and the Viatichians in 859 had to pay tribute to the Khazars in the form of squirrel and beaver skin. This suggests they lived in or near the north forests.

-- Severians, by Wikipedia


Heinrich Himmler had already advocated for such a general policy towards Eastern Europe in 1940.[37] A top-secret memorandum in 1940 from Himmler entitled "Thoughts on the Treatment of Alien Peoples in the East" expressed that the Germans must splinter as many ethnic splinter groups in German-occupied Europe as possible, including Ukrainians, "White Russians" (Belarusians), Gorals (see Goralenvolk), Lemkos, and Kashubians and to find all "racially valuable" people and assimilate them in Germany.[37] The Eastern Ministry responded that Reche's emphasis on the plurality of ethnic groups in the Soviet Union was correct "in itself", but was skeptical about his proposal to resurrect obscure and extinct nationalities.[36] He defended his proposal by arguing that "[sic] in the area of ethnicity much has already been successfully brought back to life!", but inquired as to whether names connected with the main towns in each area might serve this role instead.[36] A memo date written by Erhard Wetzel from the NSDAP Office of Racial Policy administration, on April 1942 details the splitting up of Reichskommissariat Moskowien into very loosely tied Generalkommissariats.[38] The objective was to undermine the national cohesion of the Russians by promoting regional identification; a Russian from the Gorki Generalkommissariat was to feel that he was different from a Russian in the Tula Generalkommissariat.[38] Also, a source of discussion in the Nazi circles was the replacement of the Cyrillic letters with the German alphabet.[39] In July 1944, Himmler ordered Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the head of the RSHA, to begin the exporting of the faith of the Jehovah's Witnesses to the occupied east.[40] Himmler considered the Jehovah's Witnesses of being frugal, hard-working, honest and fanatic in their pacifism, and that these traits were extremely desirable for the suppressed nations in the east[40] — despite some 2,500 and 5,000 Jehovah's Witnesses becoming victims of the Holocaust.

A series of "semantic guidelines" published by the Reich Interior Ministry in 1942 declared that it was permissible to use the word 'Russia' only in a reference to the "Petersburg empire" of Peter the Great and its follow-ups until the revolution of 1917.[36] The period from 1300 to Peter the Great (the Grand Duchy of Moscow and the Tsardom of Russia) was to be called the "Muscovite state", while post-1917 Russia was not to be referred to as an empire or a state at all; the preferred terms for this period were "bolshevik chaos" or "communist elements".[36] Furthermore, historic expressions such as Little Russia (Ukraine), White Russia (Belarus/White Ruthenia), Russian Sea (for the Black Sea), and Russian Asia (for Siberia and Central Asia) were to be absolutely avoided as terminology of the "Muscovite imperialism".[36] "Tatars" was described as a pejorative Russian term for the Volga, Crimean, and Azerbaijan Turks which was preferably to be avoided, and respectively replaced with the concepts "Idel (Volga)-Uralian", "Crimean Turks", and Azerbaijanis.[36]

Re-settlement efforts
Further information: Heim ins Reich and Wehrbauer

Image
A German map produced after the defeat of Poland in 1939 calling for German-descendant settlers in eastern Europe to return to the Warthegau

By 1942, Hitler's empire encompassed much of Europe, but the territories annexed lacked population desired by the Nazis.[41] After Germany had acquired her Lebensraum, she now needed to populate these lands according to Nazi ideology and racial principles.[41] This was to be accomplished before the end of the war by a "reordering of ethnographical relations".[41] The initial step of this project had already been taken by Hitler on 7 October 1939, when Himmler was named the Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of Germandom (Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums) (RKFDV) (see also Hauptamt Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, VoMi)[41] This position authorized Himmler to repatriate ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) living abroad to occupied Poland.[41] Himmler's jurisdiction as the guardian of the Volksdeutsche re-settlement efforts was increased to other occupied territories to be Germanized as the war continued. To make room for the German settlers, hundreds of thousands of Poles and French living in these lands were transferred across borders.[42] The great majority of Himmler's Volksdeutsche were acquired from the Soviet sphere of interest under the German–Soviet "population exchange" treaty.[42]

Image
Gauleiter Greiser greeting the millionth German of Reichsgau Wartheland, 1944

At the end of 1942 a total of 629,000 Volksdeutsche had been re-settled, and preparations for the transfer of 393,000 others were underway.[42] The long-term goal of the VoMi was the resettlement of a further 5.4 million Volksdeutsche, mainly from Transylvania, Banat, France, Hungary and Romania.[42] The immigrants were classified either as racially or politically unreliable (settled in Altreich), of high quality (settled in the annexed eastern territories) or suitable for transit camps.[42] Himmler encountered considerable difficulties with the Volksdeutsche of France and Luxembourg, who often wished to retain their former status as citizens of their respective countries.[42]

Settlement/resettlement figures on 1 June 1944[43]

Territory of origin / Total / Re-settled in annexed eastern territories


Estonia and Latvia / 76,895 / 57,249
Lithuania / 51,076 / 30,315
Volhynia, Galicia, Narew / 136,958 / 109,482
Eastern Government-General / 32,960 / 25,956
Bessarabia / 93,342 / 89,201
Northern Bukovina / 43,670 / 24,203
Southern Bukovina / 52,149 / 40,804
Dobruja / 15,454 / 11,812
Romania, Regat / 10,115 / 1,129
Gottschee and Ljubljana / 15,008 / 13,143
Bulgaria / 1,945 / 226
Residual Serbia / 2,900 / 350
Russia / 350,000 / 177,146
Greece / 250 / --
Bosnia / 18,437 / 3,698
Slovakia / 98 / --
South Tyrol / 88,630 / Reich, Protectorate, Luxembourg: 68,162
France / 19,226 / Alsace, Lorraine, Luxembourg, Reich, Protectorate: 9,572
Total / 1,009,113 / 662,448


Spain and Portugal

Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco contemplated joining the war on the German side. The Spanish Falangists made numerous border claims. Franco claimed French Basque departments, Catalan-speaking Roussillon, Cerdagne and Andorra.[44] Spain also wanted to reclaim Gibraltar from the United Kingdom because of the symbolic and strategic value. Franco also called for the reunification of Morocco as a Spanish protectorate, the annexation of the Oran district from French Algeria and large-scale expansion of Spanish Guinea. This last project was especially unfeasible because it overlapped German territorial ambition to reclaim German Cameroon and Spain would most likely be forced to give up Guinea entirely.[45] Spain also sought federation with Portugal on common cultural and historical grounds (such as the Iberian Union).[46]

After the Spanish refusal to join the war, Spain and Portugal were expected to become puppet states. They were to turn over coastal cities and islands in the Atlantic to Germany as part of the Atlantic Wall and to serve as German naval facilities. Portugal was to cede Portuguese Mozambique and Portuguese Angola as part of the intended Mittelafrika colonial project.[47]

Plans for other parts of the world outside Europe
Further information: Nazi foreign policy debate

Plans for an African colonial domain
Further information: NSDAP Office of Colonial Policy and Reichskolonialbund

Image
Approximate location of Mittelafrika in medium blue and dark blue, with pre-World War I German colonies in dark blue. Possible inclusions (Portuguese colonies) appear in light blue.

Hitler's geopolitical thoughts about Africa always occupied a secondary position to his expansionist aims in Europe itself. His public announcements prior to outbreak of the war that Germany's former colonies be returned to it served primarily as bargaining chips to further territorial goals in Europe itself. Africa was nevertheless expected to fall under German control in some way or another after Germany had first achieved supremacy over its own continent.[48]

Hitler's overall intentions for the future organization of Africa divided the continent into three overall. The northern third was to be assigned to its Italian ally, while the central part would fall under German rule. The remaining southern sector would be controlled by a pro-Nazi Afrikaner state built on racial grounds.[48] In early 1940 Foreign Minister Ribbentrop had communicated with South African leaders thought to be sympathetic to the Nazi cause, informing them that Germany was to reclaim its former colony of German South-West Africa, then a mandate of the Union of South Africa.[49] South Africa was to be compensated by the territorial acquisitions of the British protectorates of Swaziland, Basutoland and Bechuanaland and the colony of Southern Rhodesia.[49] On the division of French African colonies between the Spanish and Italian governments Hitler refused to provide any official promises during the war, however, fearful of losing the support of Vichy France.

In 1940 the general staff of the Kriegsmarine (navy) produced a much more detailed plan accompanied by a map showing a proposed German colonial empire delineated in blue (the traditional color used in German cartography to indicate the German sphere of influence as opposed to the red or pink that represented the British Empire) in sub-Saharan Africa, extending from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean.[50] The proposed domain was supposed to fulfill the long-sought territorial German goal of Mittelafrika, and even further beyond. It would provide a base from which Germany would achieve a pre-eminent position on the African continent just as the conquest of Eastern Europe was to achieve a similar status over the continent of Europe.

In contrast to territories that were to be acquired in Europe itself (specifically European Russia), these areas were not envisaged as targets for extensive German population settlement. The establishment of a vast colonial empire was to serve primarily economic purposes, for it would provide Germany with most natural resources that it would not be able to find in its continental possessions, as well as an additional nearly unlimited supply of labor. Racialist policies would nevertheless be strictly enforced on all inhabitants (meaning segregation of Europeans and blacks and punishing of interracial relationships) to maintain "Aryan" purity.

The area included all pre-1914 German colonial territories in Africa, as well as additional parts of the French, Belgian and British colonial holdings in Africa. These included the French and Belgian Congos, Northern and Southern Rhodesia (the latter going perhaps to South Africa), Nyasaland, southern Kenya with Nairobi (northern Kenya was to be given to Italy), Uganda, Gabon, Ubangui-Chari, Nigeria, Dahomey, the Gold Coast, Zanzibar, nearly all of Niger and Chad, as well as the naval bases of Dakar and Bathurst.[51]

A second part of the plan entailed the construction of a huge string of fortified naval and air bases for future operations against the Western hemisphere, spanning much of the Atlantic coastline of Europe and Africa from Trondheim in Norway all the way down to the Belgian Congo, as well as many off-lying islands such as Cape Verde and the Azores. A less extensive but similar initiative was intended for the east coast of Africa.

Division of Asia between the Axis powers
Further information: Axis power negotiations on the division of Asia during World War II

Image
The Yenisei River in Siberia was the agreed division point of Eurasia between Japan and Nazi Germany[52]

In 1942, a secret diplomatic conference was held between Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire in which they agreed to divide Asia along a line that followed the Yenisei River to the border of China, and then along the border of China and the Soviet Union, the northern and western borders of Afghanistan, and the border between Iran and British India (which included what is now Pakistan).[52] This treaty, of which a draft was presented to the Germans by ambassador Hiroshi Ōshima, was rejected by the German Foreign Office and the Navy, as it allocated India to Japan and limited the Kriegsmarine's operations in the Indian Ocean.[53] Hitler, however, found the treaty acceptable, leading to its signing on 18 January 1942.[53]

The treaty proved to be detrimental for Axis strategic cooperation in the Indian Ocean, as crossing the boundary line required tedious prior consultation.[53] This made any joint German-Japanese offensive against British positions in the Middle East impossible.[53] Japanese operations against Allied shipping lines during the Indian Ocean raid had been highly successful along with the attack against Ceylon, but these were not followed due to the non-existent German-Japanese strategic cooperation.[54] The Germans vigorously maintained watch on the demarcation line, and objected to any Japanese incursion to the "German sphere" of the Axis-divided world.[54] Thus the Japanese were forced to cancel a planned massive attack against Madagascar, as the island had been delegated to Germany in the treaty.[54]
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story, by Life Magazine

Postby admin » Sun Sep 23, 2018 7:08 pm

Part 2 of 2

Concession of Oceania to Japan
Further information: Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere

Germany's former colonial possessions in the Pacific (German New Guinea and German Samoa), which had been allocated to Japan after World War I as C-Class Mandates according to the Treaty of Versailles, were to be sold to Japan (both Weimar and Nazi-era Germany never relinquished claims to their pre-war colonial territories) at least temporarily in the interest of the Tripartite Pact, its alliance with that country.[55] Australia and New Zealand were designated as future Japanese territories, although Hitler lamented his belief that the white race would disappear from those regions.[56] He nevertheless made it clear to his officials that "the descendants of the convicts in Australia" were not Germany's concern and that their lands would be colonized by Japanese settlers in the immediate future, an opinion also shared by Joseph Goebbels, who expressed his conviction in his diary that the Japanese had always desired "the fifth continent" for emigration purposes.[57] In his only recorded lengthy discussion on the subject he argued that its people still lived in trees and had not yet learned to walk upright.[58] Historian Norman Rich stated that it can be assumed that Hitler would have attempted to recruit the Anglo-Saxons of these two countries as colonists for the conquered east; some of the English were to share the same fate.[56][59]

Middle East and Central Asia
Further information: Führer Directive No. 30 and Fritz Grobba

Image
Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and Adolf Hitler, December 1941

After the projected fall of the USSR, Hitler planned to intensify the war in the Mediterranean.[60] The OKW [Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, "High Command of the Armed Forces," was the High Command of the Wehrmacht (armed forces) of Nazi Germany during World War II] produced studies concerning an attack against the Suez Canal through Turkey, an offensive towards Baghdad-Basra from the Caucasus (most of which was already under German occupation as a result of Fall Blau) in support of revolting Arab nationalists, and operations in Afghanistan and Iran directed against British India.[61] Hitler did not envision German colonization of the region, and was most likely to allow Italian dominance at least over the Levant.[62][63][64] The Jews of the Middle East were to be murdered, as Hitler had promised to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in November 1941 (see Einsatzgruppe Egypt).[63]

Turkey was favoured as a potential ally by Hitler because of its important strategic location on the boundaries of Europe, Asia, and Africa, as well as its extensive history as a state hostile against the Russian Empire and the later Soviet Union.[65] To assure that Germany wanted to work with them on a long-range basis, the Turks were guaranteed an equal status in the German-dominated order, and were promised a number of territories which they might desire for reasons of security. These encompassed Edirne (Adrianople) and an expansion of Turkish frontiers at the expense of Greece, the creation of buffer states in the Caucasus under Turkish influence, a revision of the Turkish-Syrian frontier (the Baghdad Railway and the State of Aleppo) and the Turkish-Iraqi frontier (the Mosul region), as well as a settlement of "the Aegean question" to provide Turkey with suitable protection against encroachments from Italy.[65] The Black Sea (which Hitler derided as "a mere frog-pond")[66] was also to be conceded to Turkey as part of its sphere of influence, for this would negate the need of stationing a German navy in the region to replace the Soviet Black Sea Fleet.[65] Crimea (tentatively dubbed Gotenland by the Nazis) was nevertheless to be fortified to ensure permanent German possession of the peninsula, and the Black Sea exploited as an "unlimited" resource of seafood.[67]

Allied-occupied Iran was also to be drawn into the Axis camp, possibly by the means of an uprising.[61] The possibility of Iran as an anti-Soviet bastion was already considered in the 1930s, and coincided with Hitler's declaration of Iran as an "Aryan state" (the name Iran literally means "homeland of the Aryans" in Persian). The changing of Persia's name to Iran in 1935 was done by the Shah at the suggestion of the German ambassador to Iran as an act of "Aryan solidarity".[68] However the Iranians had always called their country "Iran", a name that predated the rise of Nazi Germany by more than a thousand years.[69] On the eve of World War II Germany was already Iran's single-biggest trading partner, followed by the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States.[68]

During pre-war diplomatic maneuvers, the NSDAP Foreign Affairs Office took special interest in Afghanistan, believing that the German Empire had failed to exploit the country diplomatically during the First World War despite the Niedermayer-Hentig Expedition.[70] The objective was to ensure that the country would remain neutral during a possible German-British conflict, and even use it militarily against British India or Soviet Russia.[70] Despite the NSDAP Foreign Office's good relations with the Afghan government, the Foreign Ministry under Ribbentrop favored overthrowing the current government and restoration of the rule of Amānullāh Khān, who had been living in exile since 1929.[71] Hitler eventually came to support Rosenberg's office on this issue.[71]After the German-French armistice of 1940, the Kabul government tried to question Berlin on German plans concerning the future of Afghanistan.[72] Of special interest were the post-war borders of the country - the Afghan government hoped to see the liberation of 15 million ethnic Afghans living in British India, and the securing of the northern Afghan border so that an expansion towards the Indian Ocean became possible (See Pashtunistan).[72] As the Nazi–Soviet Axis talks of October–November were then underway (and the possible expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence in south-central Asia and India was on the table), Berlin was reluctant to give any binding offers to Kabul.[73]

The Third Saudi State under Ibn Saud was seen as a natural ally, and was to be given territorial concessions in south-west Arabia and Transjordan.[74] Also, a post-war satellite Greater Arab Union was discussed.[62]

Although initially intending to concede Italy control of the region, after that country had defected to the Allied camp in 1943 Hitler came to regard the Islamic countries and the Pan-Arab movement increasingly more as the natural ally of National Socialist Germany, as opposed to the "treacherous" Italians.[75] On 17 February 1945 in particular he explained to his entourage his regrets that Germany's prior alliance with its southern neighbour had prevented her from pursuing a more revolutionary policy towards the Arab world, which would have also allowed its exit from the British and French spheres of influence in the area:[75]

In the nature of things, this territory was becoming an Italian preserve and it was as such that the Duce laid claim to it. Had we been on our own, we could have emancipated the Moslem countries dominated by France; and that would have had enormous repercussions in the Near East, dominated by Britain, and in Egypt. But with our fortunes linked to those of the Italians, the pursuit of such a policy was not possible. All Islam vibrated at the news of our victories. The Egyptians, the Iraqis and the whole of the Near East were all ready to rise in revolt. Just think what we could have done to help them, even to incite them, as would have been both our duty and in our own interest! But the presence of the Italians at our side paralyzed us; it created a feeling of malaise among our Islamic friends, who inevitably saw in us accomplices, willing or unwilling, of their oppressors.


Hitler's plans for India
Further information: Indische Legion and Azad Hind

Hitler's views on India were disparaging.[76] He considered the British colonial rule of the subcontinent as an exemplary one and intended the German rule in the occupied East to resemble it.[76] Hitler thought little of the Indian independence movement, declaring the freedom fighters to be racially inferior "Asiatic jugglers".[76] As early as 1930 he spoke of the Indian freedom movement as the rebellion of the "lower Indian race against the superior English Nordic race", and that the British were free to deal with any subversive Indian activists as they liked.[77] In 1937 he told the British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax that the British should "shoot Gandhi, and if this doesn't suffice to reduce them to submission, shoot a dozen leading members of the Congress, and if that doesn't suffice shoot 200, and so on, as you make it clear that you mean business."[77] During the same discussion Hitler reportedly told Halifax that one of his favorite films was The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, because it depicted a handful of "superior race" Britons holding sway over an entire continent.[78]

Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg stated that although the Vedic culture was Aryan in origin, any Nordic blood had long since been lost due to racial mixing.
[76] Like Hitler, he viewed the British rule in India as being desirable.[76] Asit Krishna Mukherji, with support of the German consulate, published The New Mercury, a National Socialist magazine and was lauded by Baron von Selzam in a "communiqué to all German legations in the Far East that no one had rendered services to the Third Reich in Asia comparable to those of Sir Asit Krishna Mukherji's."[76] Savitri Devi, who would later marry him, shared his beliefs "in the pan Aryan revival of India", as well as in Hindu nationalism, and once World War II started, both "undertook clandestine war work on behalf of the Axis powers in Calcutta."[76]

During the first years of the war in Europe, as Hitler sought to reach an arrangement with Britain, he held the notion that India should remain under British control after the war, as in his mind the only alternative was a Soviet occupation of the subcontinent.[76] As Britain had rejected German peace offers, Hitler ordered on 17 February 1941 to prepare a military study for a post-Barbarossa operation in Afghanistan against India. The goal of this operation was not so much to conquer the subcontinent, but to threaten British military positions there to force Britain to come to terms.[60] A week later the Afghanistan operation was the subject of a discussion between head of the Army General Staff Franz Halder, Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres Walter von Brauchitsch and chief of the Operationsabteilung OKH Adolf Heusinger.[79] In an assessment produced on 7 April 1941, Halder estimated that the operation would require 17 divisions and one separate regiment.[79] A Special Bureau for India was created with these goals in mind.

Image
The division of India into two parts administered by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan respectively

Indian revolutionary Subhas Chandra Bose escaped from India on 17 January 1941 and arrived in Berlin via Moscow. There he proposed organizing an Indian national government in exile and urged the Axis to declare their support for the Indian cause.[80] He eventually managed to extract such promises from Japan after the Fall of Singapore and later on from Italy as well, but the Germans refused.[77] Bose was granted an audience with Benito Mussolini, but Hitler initially refused to see him, although he did acquire access to Joachim von Ribbentrop after much difficulty.[77] The German Foreign Ministry was sceptical of any such endeavours, as the German goal was to use Bose for propaganda and subversive activity, especially following the model of the 1941 pro-Axis coup in Iraq.[81] These propaganda measures included anti-Raj radio broadcasts and the recruitment of Indian prisoners of war for the "Free India Legion".[82] Bose eventually met with Hitler on 29 May 1942.[83] During the discussion, which mostly consisted of Hitler monologuing to Bose,[77] Hitler expressed his scepticism for India's readiness for a rebellion against the Raj, and his fears of a Soviet takeover of India.[83] He stated that if Germany had to do anything about India it would first have to conquer Russia, for the road to India could only be accomplished through that country,[77] although he did promise to financially support Bose and help relocate him to the Far East.[83] Bose later described the encounter by stating that it was impossible to get Hitler involved in any serious political discussion.[77]

On 18 January 1942, it was decided that the Indian subcontinent was to be divided between the Axis powers. Germany was to take the part of British India roughly corresponding to the western part of modern day Pakistan, while the rest of British India, along with Afghanistan, was marked for Japan.[84][85]

Hitler's plans for North America
Further information: American Theater (World War II) § German operations, Amerika Bomber, Consequences of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Zweites Buch, and If Day

Before completing the expected German conquest of Europe, the Nazi leadership hoped to keep the United States out of the war.[86] In an interview with Life in the spring of 1941, Hitler stated that a German invasion of the Western Hemisphere was as fantastic as an invasion of the moon, and was a lie promoted by American big business hoping to gain from war profiteering.[87]

American pro-Nazi movements such as the Friends of the New Germany and the German-American Bund played no role in Hitler's plans for the country, and received no financial or verbal support from Germany after 1935.[88] However, certain Native American advocate groups, such as the fascist-leaning American Indian Federation, were to be used to undermine the Roosevelt administration from within by means of propaganda.[89][90] In addition, in an effort to gain Native American support, the Nazis classified the Sioux, and by extension all Native Americans, to be Aryans,[89] a theory echoed in the sympathetic portrayal of the Natives in German westerns of the 1930s such as Der Kaiser von Kalifornien. Nazi propagandists went as far as declaring that Germany would return expropriated land to the Indians, while Goebbels predicted they possessed little loyalty to America and would rather rebel than fight against Germany.[89] As a boy, Hitler had been an enthusiastic reader of Karl May westerns[9] and he told Albert Speer that he still turned to them for inspiration as an adult when he was in a tight spot;[91] the Karl May westerns contained highly sympathetic portrayals of American Indians.

Approximately nine months before the United States joined the Allies, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt made a reference to the New Order in a speech he gave on March 15, 1941, recognizing Hitler's hostility towards the United States and the destructive potential it represented, about which Roosevelt was quite acutely aware:

...Nazi forces are not seeking mere modifications in colonial maps or in minor European boundaries. They openly seek the destruction of all elective systems of government on every continent, including our own. They seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers who seize power by force.

Yes, these men and their hypnotized followers call this a "New Order." It is not new, and it is not order. For order among nations presupposes something enduring, some system of justice under which individuals over a long period of time are willing to live. Humanity will never permanently accept a system imposed by conquest, and based on slavery. These modern tyrants find it necessary to their plans to eliminate all democracies—eliminate them one by one. The nations of Europe, and indeed we, ourselves, did not appreciate that purpose. We do now.[92]


Hitler actually held the American society in contempt, stating that the United States (which he consistently referred to as the "American Union") was "half Judaized, and the other half Negrified"[93] and that "in so far as there are any decent people in America, they are all of German origin".[94] As early as 1928, he had maintained that National Socialist Germany must prepare for the ultimate struggle against the USA for hegemony.[95] In mid-late 1941, as Axis victory against the USSR and Britain seemed certain, Hitler began planning an enormous extension of the Kriegsmarine, projected to include 25 battleships, 8 aircraft carriers, 50 cruisers, 400 submarines and 150 destroyers, far exceeding the naval expansion that had already been decided on in 1939's Plan Z.[96] Historian Gerhard L. Weinberg stated that this super-fleet was intended against the Western Hemisphere.[96] Hitler also considered the occupation of the Portuguese Azores, Cape Verde and Madeira and the Spanish Canary islands to deny the British a staging ground for military actions against Nazi-controlled Europe, and also to gain Atlantic naval bases and military airfields for operations against North America.[97][98] Hitler desired to use the islands to "deploy long-range bombers against American cities from the Azores", via a plan that actually arrived on Hermann Göring's RLM office desks in the spring of 1942 for the design competition concerning such an aircraft.[99] In July 1941, Hitler approached Japanese ambassador Ōshima with an offer to wage a joint struggle against the USA[100]—Japan's own Project Z aircraft design program was one possible manner in which such a goal could be accomplished, all during the timeframe that the USAAC had itself, on April 11, 1941, first proposed a competition for airframe designs for the same sort of missions against the Axis forces, the Northrop XB-35 and the Convair B-36, flying directly from North American soil to attack Nazi Germany.

In this final battle for world domination, Hitler expected a defeated Britain to eventually support the Axis forces with its powerful navy.[98] He stated that "England and America will one day have a war with one another, which will be waged with the greatest hatred imaginable. One of the two countries will have to disappear."[101] and "I shall no longer be there to see it, but I rejoice on behalf of the German people at the idea that one day we will see England and Germany marching together against America".[102]

The actual physical conquest of the United States was unlikely, however,[103] and the future disposition of American territories remained cloudy in Hitler's mind.[104] He perceived the anticipated battle with that country, at least under his own rule, to be a sort of "battle of the continents"—possibly along the lines of then-contemporary American thought, such as the opening text from the second film in Frank Capra's Why We Fight series, illustrating one American viewpoint of what Hitler could have thought on such matters while viewing the crowds at the 1934 Nuremberg rally[105]—with a Nazi-dominated Old World fighting for global dominance against the New World, in which Germany would attain leadership of the world rather than establish direct control over it.[106] Further decisions down the line were left up to future generations of German rulers.

Canada featured fairly little in Nazi conceptions of the post-war world. Because Hitler's political objectives were primarily focused on Eastern Europe before and during the war — in contrast to his own opinions towards the United States from 1928 in his unpublished volume, Zweites Buch[107]—Hitler considered the United States a negligible political factor in the world, while Canada interested him even less.[108] He politically grouped the country together with the United States in an American-dominated North America, and considered it equally as "materialistic, racially bastardized, and decadent" as its southern neighbour.[108] In 1942, when expressing his fear of an imminent collapse of the British Empire which he preferred to remain intact, Hitler believed that the United States would seize and annex Canada at the first opportunity,[109] and that the Canadians would be quick to welcome such a move.[108]

This lack of policy direction from the top meant that Nazi politicians concerned with representing Germany's interests and relations with Canada had to resort to an improvised line of policy which they believed to be in accordance with Hitler's wishes.[108] The country was noted for its abundance of natural resources, and because of its great geographic size coupled with a low population density was characterized as "a country without people", in contrast to Germany which was considered "a people without space".[108] In his 1934 travelogue account of Canada, Zwischen USA und dem Pol (Between the USA and the North Pole), German journalist Colin Ross described Canadian society as artificial because it was composed of many different parts that weren't tied together by either blood or long-standing traditions (highlighting the differences between the French and English Canadians in particular), and that for this reason one could not speak of either a Canadian nation or Volk.[110] As a result the country's political system was also considered mechanic and non-organic, and that Ottawa did not constitute "the heart of the nation". Because of both these factors the Canadians were deemed incapable of comprehending "true culture", and German immigration in Canada was considered a mistake because they would be forced to live in an "empty civilization".[111]

Plans for economic domination in South America

Neither Hitler nor any other major Nazi leader showed much interest towards South America, except as a warning example of "racial mixing".[112] However, the NSDAP/AO was active in various South American countries (notably among German Brazilians and German Argentines), and trade relations between Germany and the South American countries were seen as of great importance.[113] During 1933–1941, the Nazi aim in South America was to achieve economic hegemony by expanding trade at the expense of the Western Powers.[114] Hitler also believed that German-dominated Europe would displace the United States as the principal trading partner of the continent.[115] Long-term Nazi hopes for political penetration of the region were placed on the local Fascist movements, such as the Integralists in Brazil and right-wing nationalists in Argentina, combined with the political activation of the German immigrant communities.[116][117] Hitler also had hopes of seeing German immigrants "returning" from the Western Hemisphere to colonize the conquered East.[118] Despite being occasionally suspicious of the South American Germans of adopting a "South attitude towards life", top Nazis believed that their experience working in underdeveloped areas would make them ideal settlers for the annexed eastern territories.[119]

On 27 October 1941 Roosevelt stated in a speech "I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler's government, by planners of the new world order. It is a map of South America and part of Central America as Hitler proposes to organize it" into five countries under German domination. The speech amazed both the United States and Germany; the latter claimed the map was a forgery. While British Security Coordination indeed forged the map and arranged for discovery by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it likely was based in part on a real, public map of boundary changes German agents used to persuade South American countries to join the New Order.[120][121][122]

Future wars against Asia
See also: Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere

Although pursuing an alliance based on Realpolitik with Imperial Japan in the battle against the "Western Plutocracies" and Soviet Bolshevism, the Nazi leadership ultimately considered this cooperation only temporary in nature. The racial ideology of Nazism predicted that the fate of human civilization depended on the ultimate triumph of the Germanic-Nordic peoples, and in fact the populous Asian continent was seen as the greatest threat to hegemony of the white race. The Japanese people were characterized as 'culture-bearers', meaning they could make use of the technological and civilizational achievements of the Aryan race and by so doing maintain an advanced society, but could not truly create 'culture' themselves.[123] Gerhard Weinberg asserts that the historical evidence points to the conclusion that Hitler, like he had done with the Soviets in the 1939–1941 period, employed a tactic of conceding to the Japanese whatever they desired until they in turn could be defeated in a subsequent war.[124] In early 1942, Hitler is quoted saying to Ribbentrop: "We have to think in terms of centuries. Sooner or later there will have to be a showdown between the white and the yellow races."[125]

In July 1941, as plans were being laid out for post-Barbarossa military operations, the Wehrmacht's naval top-level command, the Oberkommando der Marine was not ready to exclude the possibility of a war between Germany and Japan.[126] In 1942, NSDAP official Erhard Wetzel (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories) predicted that "the self-determination of the numerically strong Asian peoples after this war" would challenge German-controlled Europe with Japanese instigation, and stated that "a Greater Asia and an independent India are formations that dispose over hundreds of millions of inhabitants. A German world power with 80 or 85 million Germans by contrast is numerically too weak".[127] Wetzel further pondered on Germany's choices on the population policies in occupied Russia: if the Russians were restricted to having as few children as possible in the interest of German colonization, this would further "weaken the white race in view of the dangers of Asia".[127]

As the Japanese were conquering one European colonial territory after another in Asia and Oceania, and seemingly poised to take over Australia and New Zealand as well, Hitler further believed that the white race would disappear altogether from these regions, which he viewed as a turning point in history.[128] He was relieved that Japan had entered the war on Germany's side, however, as he had long hoped to use that country as a strategic counterweight against the United States, but also because Japanese hegemony in East Asia and the Pacific would guarantee both countries' security against other powers. Looking into the future, he remarked that "There's one thing Japan and Germany have in common; both of us need fifty to a hundred years for purposes of digestion: we for Russia, they for the Far East".[128]

During his speech at the meeting of SS major-Generals at Posen on 4 October 1943, Heinrich Himmler commented on the future conflicts between Nazi-controlled Europe and Asia:

[W]e will create the necessary conditions for the whole Germanic people and the whole of Europe, controlled, ordered and led by us, the Germanic people, to be able, in generations, to stand the test in her battles of destiny against Asia, who will certainly break out again. We do not know when that will be. Then, when the mass of humanity of 1 to 1½ [billion] lines up against us, the Germanic people, numbering, I hope, 250 to 300 million, and the other European peoples, making a total of 600 to 700 million – (and with an outpost area stretching as far as the Urals, or, a hundred years, beyond the Urals) – must stand the test in its vital struggle against Asia. It would be an evil day if the Germanic people did not survive it. It would be the end of beauty and "Kultur", of the creative power of this earth. That is the distant future. It is for that that we are fighting, pledged to hand down the heritage of our ancestors.[129]


Himmler addressed this apocalyptic vision in an earlier speech given to SS generals at the University of Kharkiv, Ukraine in April 1943. He first spoke on the necessity of the war against the USSR and Jewry:

These clashes are the only evolutionary possibility which will enable us one day, now that Fate has given us the Führer Adolf Hitler, to create the Germanic Reich. They are the necessary condition, for our race, and our blood to create for itself and put under cultivation, in the years of peace, (during which we must live and work austerely, frugally and like Spartans), that settlement area in which new blood can breed, as in a botanical garden so to speak. Only by this means can the Continent become a Germanic Continent, capable of daring to embark, in one or two or three or five or ten generations, on the conflict with this Continent of Asia which spews out hordes of humanity.[130]


End of the New Order project

Image
Areas still under German control in March 1945.

After the decisive German defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad on 2 February 1943, Germany was forced onto the defensive and was no longer able to actively pursue implementation of the New Order in the Soviet Union, although the genocide against Jews, Romani, and other minorities continued. Following the subsequent failure of the 1943 summer offensive to regain the territories lost to the Soviets earlier that year, the Wehrmacht was no longer able to mount an effective large-scale counter-attack on the Eastern Front. In a discussion with Joseph Goebbels on 26 October 1943 Hitler opined that Germany should conclude a temporary armistice with the Soviet Union and return to its 1941 border in the east.[131] This would then give Germany the opportunity to defeat the British forces in the west first (no mention was made of United States's part in the Allied alliance) before resuming a new war for Lebensraum against the Soviet Union at a later point in time. Hitler thought that his future successor might have to carry out this later war, as he believed himself to be too old by then.[131]

Late in the war, after the failure of the final Ardennes offensive and the Allied crossing of the Rhine into Germany itself, Hitler hoped that a decisive victory on the Eastern Front might still preserve the Nazi regime, resulting in Operation Spring Awakening.[132] He believed that, with the conclusion of a separate peace-treaty with the Soviet Union, a division of Poland might still be realized and leave Hungary and Croatia (the former still under German occupation at the time, the latter a Croatian fascist puppet-state) under German control.[132] Hitler only acknowledged Germany's imminent defeat mere days prior to his suicide.[133]

See also

• Areas annexed by Nazi Germany
• Greater Germanic Reich, the domain which the Nazis tried to create by merging all the Germanic-populated countries in Europe into one state.
• Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the envisioned Japanese economic equivalent to the New Order and the Greater Germanic Reich.
• A-A line
• Jewish settlement in the Japanese Empire
• SS State of Burgundy
• The Ural Mountains in Nazi planning
• Wehrbauer
• Imperial Italy (fascist), the Fascist Italian project for securing dominion over the Mediterranean area.
• Axis power negotiations on the division of Asia during World War II
• Grossdeutschland
• Drang nach Osten ("The Drive Eastward")
• Lebensraum
• Generalplan Ost
• Lebensborn
• Final solution
• The Holocaust
• European theatre of World War II
• German-occupied Europe
• New world order (international relations theory)
• Posen speeches – In two notable speeches given in October 1943, Himmler details the tasks of the SS in implementing the New Order.
• Hegemony
• Hypothetical Axis victory in World War II

Citations

1. Adolf Hitler speech at Berlin Sportpalast. [1]
2. Gumkowski, Janusz; Leszcynski, Kazimierz (1961). Poland Under Nazi Occupation. Polonia Pub. House. [2]
3. Lee, Stephen J. (1987). The European Dictatorships, 1918–1945, p. 196. Cambridge University Press.
4. The Goebbels Diaries, 1942–1943, p.359
5. Spielvogel, Jackson J. (2006). Western Civilization Since 1789, Volume 3. Clark Baxter, p. 855. [3]
6. Martin Bormann’s Minutes of a Meeting at Hitler’s Headquarters (July 16, 1941). German History in Documents and Images. Retrieved 5 June 2011. Quoting Hitler: The Führer emphasized that we had to understand that the Europe of today was nothing but a geographical term; in reality Asia extended up to our frontiers.
7. Rich, Norman (1972). Hitler's War Aims: Ideology, the Nazi State and the Course of Expansion, p. 212.
8. Haffner, Sebastian (1979). The Meaning of Hitler. Macmillan Publishing Company Inc., p. 100. [4]
9. Hitler, Adolf Mein Kampf
10. Rosenberg, Alfred Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, 1930 ("The Myth of the 20th Century")
11. Geopolitics and Globalization in the Twentieth Century By Brian W. Blouet (2001):
12. Derwent, Whittlesey German Strategy for World Conquest New York:1942 Farrar and Rinehart
13. Weinberg, Gerhard L (2005). Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders. Cambridge, England, United Kingdom. Cambridge University Press, p. 8-9. [5]
14. . Weinberg, G.L. (1996), Germany, Hitler, and World War II: essays in modern German and world history, p. 28, ISBN 0-521-56626-6.
15. Heinrich Himmler's Posen Speech from 04.10.1943
16. Weinberg, A world at arms (2005), p. 175
17. Shirer, p. 943
18. Shirer, p. 782
19. Shirer, p. 949
20. Otto Bräutigam: „So hat es sich zugetragen...“ (Holzner Verlag, Germany 1968, p. 590)
21. Adolf Hitler: table talk November 5th, 1941 (in: Hitler's Table Talk, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953)
22. Lipgens, Walter (1985). Documents on the History of European Integration: Continental Plans for European Union 1939-1945. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 12–13. ISBN 3-11-009724-9.
23. "Utopia: The 'Greater Germanic Reich of the German Nation'". München - Berlin: Institut für Zeitgeschichte. 1999.
24. Rich, Norman (1974). Hitler's War Aims: the Establishment of the New Order, p. 26. W. W. Norton & Company Inc., New York.
25. Rich (1974), pp. 24-25, 140.
26. Welch, David (1983). Nazi Propaganda: The Power and the Limitations, p. 145. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 0-389-20400-5.
27. Kroener et al (2003), p. 165
28. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris, p.263
29. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris, p.472
30. Pinkus, Oscar (2005). The War Aims and Strategies of Adolf Hitler. McFarland. p. 175. ISBN 0-7864-2054-5.
31. Padfield, Peter (1990) Himmler New York, Henry Holt. See under Rosenberg in index
32. Kroener, Bernhard R.; Müller, Rolf-Dieter; Umbreit, Hans (2000). Germany and the Second World War:Organization and mobilization of the German sphere of power. Wartime administration, economy, and manpower resources 1939-1941. Oxford University Press. p. 101. ISBN 0-19-822887-2.
33. Padfield, Peter, Himmler: Reichsführer-SS (Macmillan, 1990), p. 317
34. Fest, Joachim C. (1973). Hitler. Verlagg Ulstein. p. 686. ISBN 0-15-602754-2.
35. Förster 1998, p. 489.
36. Burleigh, Michael (1988). Germany turns eastwards: a study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich, 8:1991. CUP Archive. pp. 224–227. ISBN 0-521-35120-0.
37. (German) Reinhard Kühnl (1978). Der deutsche Faschismus in Quellen und Dokumenten, 3rd Edition, p. 328. Einige Gedanken über die Behandlung der Fremdvölkischen im Osten. Köln.
38. Gumkowski, Janusz; Leszcynski, Kazimierz (1961). Poland Under Nazi Occupation. Polonia Pub. House. [6]
39. Dallin, Alexander (1981). German rule in Russia, 1941-1945: a study of occupation policies. Westview. p. 185.
40. Longerich, P. (2008), Heinrich Himmler, p. 267, ISBN 0-19-161989-2
41. Kroener, Bernhard R.; Müller, Rolf-Dieter; Umbreit, Hans (2003). Germany and the Second World War:Organization and mobilization of the German sphere of power. Wartime administration, economy, and manpower resources 1942-1944/5. Oxford University Press. p. 250. ISBN 0-19-820873-1.
42. Kroener et al (2003), p. 251
43. Kroener et al (2003), p. 252
44. Stanley G. Payne, Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II
45. Norman Rich, Hitler's War Aims: Ideology, the Nazi State and the Course of Expansion
46. Glyn Stone, The Oldest Ally: Britain and the Portuguese Connection, 1936-1941: Britain and the Portuguese Connection, 1936-41 (Royal Historical Society Studies in History)
47. Gerhard L. Weinberg, Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders
48. Weinberg 2005, p. 14.
49. Rich (1974), pp. 500-501.
50. Padfield (1990), p. 309
51. Stegemann & Vogel 1995, p. 295.
52. Weinberg 2005, p. 13.
53. Martin, Bernd (2006). Japan and Germany in the modern world. Berghahn Books. pp. 267–268. ISBN 1-84545-047-7.
54. Martin (2006), p. 271.
55. Weinberg (2005), p. 13
56. Rich (1974), p. 415
57. People Against Nazism, Communism, and Authoritarianism. Nazi plans for Australia. Retrieved 2 January 2011. [7]
58. Weinberg (2005), p. 15-16.
59. Fest, Joachim C. (1973). Hitler. Verlagg Ulstein. p. 685. ISBN 0-15-602754-2.
60. Stegemann & Vogel 1995, p. 625.
61. Stegemann & Vogel 1995, p. 631.
62. Schwanitz, Wolfgang (2004). Germany and the Middle East, 1871-1945. Markus Wiener Publishers. pp. 94–95. ISBN 1-55876-298-1.
63. Weinberg (2005), p. 19
64. Stegemann & Vogel 1995, p. 178.
65. Rich (1974), p. 402.
66. Hitler (2000), p. 208.
67. Rich (1974), p. 383.
68. Hiro, Dilip. Iran under the ayatollahs. Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc., p. 296. [8]
69. Iran's etymology.
70. Stegemann & Vogel 1995, p. 162.
71. Stegemann & Vogel 1995, p. 163.
72. Stegemann & Vogel 1995, p. 164.
73. Stegemann & Vogel 1995, p. 165.
74. Stegemann & Vogel 1995, p. 591.
75. Hitler's Last Will and Political Testament, 17 February 1945
76. Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas (2000). Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism. NYU Press. pp. 65–72. ISBN 0-8147-3111-2.
77. Ghose, Sankar (1992). Jawaharlal Nehru, A Biography, pp. 138-139. Allied Publishers Limited.
78. David Faber (2009). Munich, 1938: Appeasement and World War II. Simon and Schuster. p. 40. ISBN 143913233X.
79. Kuhlmann, Jan (2003). Subhas Chandra Bose und die Indienpolitik der Achsenmächte. Verlag Hans Schiler. p. 78. ISBN 3-89930-064-5.
80. Stegemann & Vogel 1995, p. 607.
81. Stegemann & Vogel 1995, p. 608.
82. Goodrick-Clarke (2000), p. 85.
83. Getz, Marshall J. (2002). Subhas Chandra Bose: a biography. McFarland. p. 65. ISBN 0-7864-1265-8.
84. Osborne, Richard E. (2001). World War II in Colonial Africa. Riebel-Roque Pub. ISBN 9780962832451.
85. Weinberg (2005), p. 13.
86. Rich 1972, pp. 237–246.
87. "Hitler on Americas", Life, 9 June 1941
88. American Bund: The Failure of American Nazism: The German-American Bund’s Attempt to Create an American “Fifth Column”
89. Franco, Jere Bishop (1999). Crossing the pond: the native American effort in World War II. University of North Texas Press. p. 21. ISBN 1-57441-065-2.
90. "American Indian Federation" at the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History & Culture Archived October 18, 2010, at the Wayback Machine.
91. Grafton, Anthony, "Mein Buch", The New Republic, December 2008
92. Speech by FDR to the White House Correspondents' Association on U.S. involvement in the war in Europe [9]
93. Hitler (2000) p. 188
94. Hitler (2000) p. 282
95. Duffy, James P. (2004). Target America: Hitler's plan to attack the United States. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 16. ISBN 0-275-96684-4.
96. Weinberg, Gerhard L. (1981). World In The Balance: Behind the Scenes of World War II. University Press of New England. pp. 89–90. ISBN 0-87451-216-6.
97. Stegemann & Vogel 1995, p. 211.
98. Hildebrand, Klaus (1973). The Foreign Policy of the Third Reich. University of California Press. pp. 100–105. ISBN 0-520-02528-8.
99. Duffy (2004), p. 17
100. Stegemann & Vogel 1995, p. 632.
101. Hitler (2000) p. 14
102. Hitler (2000) p. 26
103. Stoakes, Geoffrey (1986). Hitler and the Quest for World Dominion. Berg, p. 221-222. [10]
104. Weinberg 2005, p. 15.
105. Frank Capra (1943). Why We Fight — The Nazis Strike(YouTube). Public Domain Free Movies. Event occurs at 3:15 to 6:58. Archived from the original (YouTube) on January 20, 2014. Retrieved April 7, 2014.
106. Stoakes, p. 235.
107. Hillgruber, Andreas. Germany and the Two World Wars, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1981; pages 50–51
108. Wagner, Jonathan Frederick (1981). Brothers beyond the sea: national socialism in Canada, p. 23-24. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario.
109. Frye, Alton (1967). Nazi Germany and the American Hemisphere, p. 183. Yale University Press.
110. Wagner (1981), p. 25.
111. Wagner (1981), p. 26.
112. Leitz, Christian (2004). Nazi Foreign Policy, 1933–1941: The Road to Global War. Routledge. p. 114. ISBN 0-415-17423-6.
113. Leitz (2004), p. 115
114. Leitz (2004), pp. 118-119
115. Friedman, Max Paul (2003). Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign against the Germans of South America in World War II. Cambridge University Press. p. 45. ISBN 0-521-82246-7.
116. Historia de las Relaciones Exteriores Argentinas. Las actividades del nazismo en la Argentina. http://www.argentina-rree.com/9/9-027.htm. Retrieved 03/09/2013 (spanish)
117. Weinberg, Gerhard L. (2005). A world at arms:a global history of World War II. Cambridge University Press. p. 506. ISBN 0-521-61826-6.
118. Rich (1974), p. 329.
119. Friedman (2003), p. 46
120. Cull, Nicholas John (1995). Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign against American "Neutrality" in World War II. pp. 170–173. ISBN 0-19-508566-3.
121. "Imperial German Territorial Aspirations - Latin America".
122. "Hitler's amazing map that turned America against the Nazis: A leading novelist's brilliant account of how British spies in the US staged a coup that helped drag Roosevelt to war".
123. Rich, Norman (1973). Hitler's War Aims: Ideology, the Nazi State, and the Course of Expansion, 224. W. W. Norton & Company, New York.
124. Weinberg (2005), p. 10.
125. ^Echternkamp, Jörg. ed. Germany and the Second World War Volume IX/I: German Wartime Society 1939–1945: Politicization, Disintegration, and the Struggle for Survival (2008). p. 331
126. Stegemann & Vogel 1995, p. 636.
127. Ben Kiernan (2007), Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-10098-1, p. 455
128. Rich (1974), p. 415.
129. [11]
130. [12]
131. Weinberg 2005, p. 35.
132. Weinberg 2005, p. 37.
133. Joachim C. Fest (2005). Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich. Margot Bettauer Dembo.

References

• Stegemann, Bernd; Vogel, Detlef (1995). Germany and the Second World War: The Mediterranean, South-East Europe, and North Africa, 1939-1941. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-822884-8.
Further reading[edit]
• Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich at War (2009) pp 321–402
• Förster, Jürgen (1998). "Operation Barbarossa as a War of Conquest and Annihilation". In Boog, Horst; Förster, Jürgen; Hoffmann, Joachim; Klink, Ernst; Müller, Rolf-Dieter; Ueberschär, Gerd R. The Attack on the Soviet Union. Germany and the Second World War. IV. Translated by McMurry, Dean S.; Osers, Ewald; Willmot, Louise. Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (Military History Research Office (Germany) ). Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 481–521. ISBN 0-19-822886-4.
• Fritz, Stephen G. Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East (2011)
• Longerich, Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life (2012)
• Lund, Joachim. "Denmark and the 'European New Order', 1940-1942," Contemporary European History, (2004) 13#3 pp 305–321,
• Mazower, Mark. Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (2009)
• Mazower, Mark. "Hitler's New Order, 1939-45," Diplomacy and Statecraft (1996) 3#1 pp 29–53,
• Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010)
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story, by Life Magazine

Postby admin » Sun Sep 23, 2018 11:04 pm

Otto Reche
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/23/18

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Image
Otto Reche.

Otto Carl Reche (24 May 1879 – 23 March 1966) was a Nazi German anthropologist and professor from Glatz (Kłodzko), Prussian Silesia. He was active in researching whether there was a correlation between blood types and race. During the Second World War he openly advocated the genocide of ethnic Poles. Once a member of the Nazi Party, he remained active in anthropological issues following the downfall of Nazi Germany.

Education and career

Reche was educated at the University of Breslau (now the University of Wrocław), the University of Jena and the University of Berlin.[1]

In his career, Reche served as the director of the Departments of Anthropology at the University of Vienna and then the University of Leipzig,[1] and also taught at the University of Hamburg. Among the organizations he was involved in were the Nazi Party and the German Society for Blood Group Research (which he founded along with Paul Steffan). In 1928, Reche and Steffan founded Zeitschrift für Rassenphysiologie, a magazine on the subject.[2]

Blood type research and conclusions

Reche's work with blood types, involving studies in northwestern Germany, was an attempt to prove a correlation between which blood type a person had and whether they were of German ancestry. He claimed that the three blood types, A, B, and O, were each originally attached to European, Asian, and Native American races, but that interracial marriage had diluted this over the centuries.[2]

Support for the genocide of Poles

Reche justified the invasion of Poland in 1939 in a letter to Albert Brackmann by stating:

we need Raum but no Polish lice on our fur. I am absolutely of the opinion that the racial-scientific side is determinative in the solution of all these questions since we do not want to build a German people in the East in the future that would only be a linguistically germanised, racial mish-mash, with strong asiatic elements, and Polish in character. That would be no German Volk, nor a corner stone [sic] for a German future!...Since I also know the anthropological conditions in Poland and know what is racially and hereditarily useful in this people and what at all events is to be driven out of the German settlement area, I believe I have gathered together in the course of many years several ideas which should now be used for the general good and for our future.[3]


During the Second World War Reche became director of Institute for Racial and Ethnic Sciences in Lipsk. In this position he wrote about ethnic Poles that they "unfortunate mixture" consisting among others of Slavs, Balts and Mongolians and that they should be eliminated to avoid possible mixing with the German race.[4]

Life after the war

On April 16, 1945, Reche was arrested by American forces for membership in the Nazi Party but was released after sixteen months of detainment.[1]

In 1959, Reche was chosen by a German court investigating the claims of Anna Anderson that she was Anastasia Nikolaevna, a Russian royal thought to have been murdered along with the rest of the royal family. He concluded that Anna Anderson was either the Grand Duchess herself or an identical twin.[5] After Anderson's death, however, it was concluded based on DNA evidence that she was not Anastasia.

Reche died near Hamburg in 1966.[1]

See also

• Albert Brackmann
• Scientific racism

References

1. Geisenhainer, Katja (2002). "Rasse ist Schicksal" Otto Reche (1879–1966) – ein Leben als Anthropologe und Völkerkundler (in German). Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt. ISBN 3-374-02015-1.
2. Proctor, Robert N. (1988). Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-74578-7.
3. Anton Weiss Wendt (2010). Eradicating Differences: The Treatment of Minorities in Nazi-dominated Europe. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 66–67. ISBN 1443823686.
4. Tomasz Ceran, The History of a Forgotten German Camp: Nazi Ideology and Genocide at Szmalcowka, page 40, I.B.Tauris, October 2014
5. Lovell, James Blair (1998). Anastasia: The Lost Princess. Robson. ISBN 0-86051-807-8.

Further reading

• Arthur L. Caplan, ed. (1992). When Medicine Went Mad: Bioethics and the Holocaust. Humana Press. p. 359. ISBN 0-89603-235-3.
• Neugebauer, Wolfgang. "Racial Hygiene in Vienna 1938". Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes. Archived from the original on 2012-12-21. Retrieved 2007-07-13.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Next

Return to Articles & Essays

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot] and 17 guests

cron