ZGram - 8/28/2001 - "Revisionism going mainstream in Britain"

[Ingrid Rimland]

Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

August 28, 2001

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Below is quite an astonishing, rather lengthy book review carried in
London's Daily Mail which I spotted at David Irving's website,
http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/

(A STRANGE Enemy People: Germans Under The British 1945-50, by Patricia
Meehan, will be published by Peter Owen Publishers in September at GBP
17.99)

Of course the reviewer feels dutybound - don't they all? - to preemptively
smear the Germans by loading his write-up up front with all kinds of horror
images to be laid at the feet of the enternally wicked Nazis - but
disregarding that, and getting into the meat of the matter, namely solid
***mainstream*** Revisionism about World War II and its atrocious
aftermath, we are already one step closer to an intelligent assessment of
what really happened after World War II - and not what your yammering
yarmulkes dream up in their faverish brains.

I'll give you first the book review, followed by a brief Ernst Zundel commen=
t.

{START}

Daily Mail

London, Augfust 25, 2001

UNDER THE BRITISH JACKBOOT

 Rape, torture, execution and the horrors of interrogation camps. A new
book paints a chilling picture of Germany under British rule in the
aftermath of World War II

 By Christopher Hudson

  TRY to imagine Britain occupied by a victorious Germany after World War
II. A young boy is executed for displaying a picture of Churchill on his
birthday.

 Theft carries the death penalty, so does possession of any kind of firearm.

 Firing squads are expensive. Hanging wastes time. The Nazi Penal Branch
asks permission to use the guillotine, which can carry out six single
executions in 14 minutes.

 Meanwhile, internment camps have sprung up across the country. Almost
40,000 British civilians and prisoners of war, men and women aged 16-70
have been swept up into these camps and are held without charge or
expectation of a trial.

 They include not only 'war criminals', profiteers and anti-Nazi agitators,
but anyone who 'ridicules, damages or destroys' German culture, along with
any persons 'considered dangerous to the Occupation or its objectives',
even if they have not committed any offence.

 One English mother of four has been imprisoned for a year because she hid
in a ditch to snatch a word with her husband who was out on a working
party.

 Conditions in these camps are brutal. Inmates sleep in their clothes,
packed five at a time like sardines on beds constructed from old pieces of
wood.

 There is so little to eat that the majority of them are emaciated.

 Family visits are restricted to 30 minutes every three months.

 Internees are frequently kept in dark cellars to prepare them for
interrogation. According to a report compiled by a courageous German
bishop, they are 'terribly beaten, kicked, and so mishandled that traces
can be seen for weeks afterwards.

 'The notorious Third Degree methods of using searchlights on victims and
exposing them to high temperatures are also applied.' All this really
happened -- but in reverse. It happened in Germany, and we, the British
occupying forces, carried it out.

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 According to a new book by Patricia Meehan, historian and former BBC TV
producer and documentarist who worked in Germany in 1945, the first few
years of our Occupation were tarnished by deeds which would not have seemed
out of place in Hitler's Third Reich.

 Besides internment centres and holding camps for returned prisoners of
war, there were also secret camps known by the initials DIC -- Direct
Interrogation Centres.

 One day in February 1947, two of the inmates of No.74 DIC (Bad Nenndorf)
were dumped at an Internee Hospital. One patient was skeletal, suffering
from frostbite, unable to speak; the other was unconscious, with no
discernible pulse -- cold, skeletal and covered in 'thick cakes of dirt;
frostbite to arms and legs'.

 BOTH men died within hours. A third, who had been arrested on suspicion of
drug trafficking, committed suicide while undergoing interrogation. The
resulting investigation uncovered horror stories of deprivation amounting
to torture. Men were treated for injuries without anaesthetic.

 One prisoner, after eight days of solitary confinement, was put in an
unheated punishment cell in midwinter. Buckets of cold water were thrown
into the cell which the prisoner had to mop up with a rag.

 His jacket and boots were removed, and he had to stand with bleeding feet
for about ten hours in extreme cold on a concrete floor. Finally he had to
crawl on hands and knees to interrogation.

 The Camp Commandant, Medical Officer and three interrogators were
suspended and charged. But charges were dropped or reduced to negligence.

 All three courts-martial, including the Commandant's, petered out, and the
men were allowed to leave the service.

 True, Bad Nenndorf was an extreme case, which made the headlines. And
after fighting Germany in two world wars, it was hardly surprising if there
were outbreaks of vindictiveness among British officers who had fought and
suffered in them.

   CERTAINLY Hitler and Himmler would not have concerned themselves with
the legality of such crimes.

 Nevertheless, the very fact that this barbarism could have gone unnoticed
or neglected by higher authorities for nearly two years is evidence of the
chaos which engulfed defeated Germany, upon which no number of bureaucrats
and administrators could at first impose order.

 After Germany surrendered in May 1945, it was divided into sectors, with
Russians in the east, Americans in the south, French in the west and the
British occupying the northwest, from Bonn to Hamburg.

 Millions of Germans were on the roads -- women, children and old people,
pushing bicycles, prams and carts, or crowding into cattle wagons, to
escape the Red Army which was killing and raping as it advanced, laying
waste to millions of homes and driving soldiers and civilians alike back to
forced labour in the USSR.

 Meanwhile, thousands of Displaced Persons -- Germany's slave labourers
from the East -- were roving the countryside, raping and pillaging, driven
by hunger and vengeance.

 Hatred for the Germans knew no bounds. Thousands of them died in Polish
camps. In Czech camps, babies were drowned in latrines while their mothers
were made to watch; German doctors were made to crawl and eat human
excrement.

 Hence the panic-driven migration to the western sectors, where 50 million
Germans crowded into territory where 38 million had lived before the war.

 Britain inherited the most heavily populated zone. Hamburg, the second
biggest city after Berlin, lay in ruins. From July 24 to 29, 1943, five RAF
raids had created a firestorm which rose two and a half miles above the
city.

 In those five nights, most of Hamburg was destroyed. Some 750,000 people
were made homeless, and up to 150,000 killed -- many more than died from
air raids in Britain in the whole of World War II.

 When the occupying forces arrived in Hamburg, they discovered a land of
cave-dwellers.

 Thousands of people were living in windowless concrete air-raid shelters;
thousands more crammed into cellars under the rubble or else climbed a
ladder into rooms suspended in some teetering ruin, amid falling masonry.

 Water supply was a standpipe in the ruins for a few hours a day, for those
lucky enough to have a receptacle which could hold liquid. There were no
knives, forks, pots, pans, needles, scissors, shoelaces, soap or household
medicines.

 Urban Germany had become a nation of rag-and-bone people, dragging little
trailers after them in case they spotted something in the rubble, and
rooting in dustbins for food which the newly-arrived occupying forces had
thrown away.

 The human response of British servicemen might have been one of sympathy,
but by order of the London government, the C-in-C of the British Zone,
=46ield Marshal Montgomery, was ordered to enforce a strict policy of
'non-fraternisation'.

 'You must keep clear of Germans -- man, woman and child -- unless you meet
them in the course of duty,' he instructed. 'You must not walk with them or
shake hands or visit their homes.' There was to be no smiling, no playing
with children; (soldiers were put on a charge for 'permitting children to
climb on an Army vehicle').

 General Eisenhower, in the U.S. sector, thought this self-defeating -- how
were the Allies supposed to influence the Germans if they could not speak
to little children?

 It took Montgomery three months to persuade London of the sense of this,
and it was another three months before the Cabinet cancelled the
non-fraternisation order.

 Relations immediately eased between the conquerors and the conquered,
although a system of apartheid remained in place.

 British and Germans travelled in separate carriages on the Under- ground.
They did not worship together, or see films together, or sit together to
listen to music. Officers' wives attending dances would have to be warned
in advance if Germans were present.

 It was unnatural; more than that, it put a brake on every aspect of
administering Germany.

 In May 1947 a new instruction was handed down: 'We should behave towards
the Germans as the people of one Christian and civilised race towards
another whose interests in many ways converge with our own and for whom we
no longer have any ill-will.' The trouble was that it had been drummed into
British personnel going out to the British Zone that the Germans were a
race of pariahs.

 In November 1945, the Foreign Office had set out the principles by which
Germany should be governed: 'The primary purpose of the JACKBOOT Occupation
is destructive and preventive, and our measures of destruction and
prevention are only limited by consideration for (1) the security and
wellbeing of the forces of Occupation, (2) prevention of unrest among the
German people, (3) broad considerations of humanity.' The consequence was
that in the early years all Germans were regarded as equally guilty, except
by a handful of German specialists.

 Ignorance started at the top. The new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, had
not forgotten his time as an infantry officer in the trenches of World War
I.

 He once confided in the late Lord Longford that he had always disliked
Germans very much, but that he and his wife had once had a nice German
maid.

 His Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, explained: 'I try to be fair to them
but I 'ates them, really.' Neither of them ever visited the British
Occupied Zone.

 British attitudes towards Germans had hardened since the pre-war maxim
that: 'All Germans are intelligent, honourable and pro-Hitler, but never
more than two of these three.' Media hostility played its part.

 Several newspaper correspondents in Germany were under tacit instructions
not to send back reports which were complimentary to the Germans -- a line
which did not really change until the Queen's visit in 1965.

 Three factors contributed to the failure of the British administration to
get to grips with the situation in the Occupied Zone despite the efforts of
the native population to help.

 The first was a diktat laid down to the Allies by President Roosevelt that
all Nazi party members were to be excluded from public office and from
important positions in private enterprise.

  He was told that party membership had been virtually a condition of
employment in most of the German civil service, and that whole new
departments would have to be recruited and trained up. But Roosevelt was
unyielding.

 The second was that the existence of a genuine opposition to Hitler within
Germany, which had culminated in the failed July 1944 plot on his life, had
been concealed from the British public for propaganda reasons during the
war; it was easier to rally arms against an undivided evil.

 Nor did people recall the 20 million Germans who had voted against Hitler
in the last election before the war. This left the Zone administrators with
no more sophisticated a view of the German people than was provided in a
booklet handed out to all new arrivals.

 Entitled The German Character, it explained how the Germans 'stress
fanatical willpower, work and sacrifice' and described their sadism,
fatalism and sentimentality, warning that to 'try and be kind or
conciliatory will be regarded as weakness'.

 Thoughtful British officials might have raised an eyebrow at this, but --
which was the third factor -- recruits to the central administration of the
British Zone, known as the Control Commission Germany (CCG), tended not to
be of high calibre.

 They included demobbed servicemen with nowhere to go, officers who could
not find a good job in 'civvy street', and in the words of a Foreign Office
memo, 'retired drain-inspectors, unsuccessful businessmen and idle
ex-policemen'.

 Very few of them could speak German. Encouraged to believe that non-Nazis
were as dangerous as Nazis, they kept all Germans at arm's length.

 No one could apply for public employment who had not been de-nazified,
which meant they had to fill in a form demanding their record of employment
and income, and their memberships of every party, group, club, union or
institute since Hitler came to power.

 More than one million of these forms were issued. Checking them became a
nightmare for the CCG officials, who knew no German and could not conceive
the reality of life under a dictatorship.

 Anybody who had not risked death by openly resisting the Nazi authorities
became liable to dismissal or even internment. The process meant that
Germans with invaluable knowledge and experience were being removed from
their posts.

 The Germans joked about Hitler's 1,000-year Reich -- 12 years of Nazism
and 988 years of de-nazification. The CCG took the point. Soon it was no
longer necessary to de-nazify all the typists, only the head typist.

 Finally, in October 1947, the task was handed over to the German Lander or
local government areas, to sort out properly.

 There was plenty left to administer. It was a condition of the peace
treaty that swathes of German industrial plant had to be dismantled and
equipment destroyed.

 Meanwhile the CCG regulated matters which even the Nazis had never
interfered with. And even songs came under scrutiny in case they had links
to the Nazis.

 By the end of 1946, the CCG numbered 24,785 personnel, their American
opposite numbers merely 5,008.

 Overmanning brought boredom, drunkenness and corruption to the CCG as well
as to servicemen. They were, after all, living in a country where
everything could be bartered.

 German food rations averaged 1,500 calories a day: too much to die on but
not enough to live comfortably. Cigarettes were the only viable currency
and all sales were black market.

 Even girls from good families found that they had nothing to offer except
their bodies -- either that or join the 'rubble ladies' who cleared the
roads and ruins and emptied basements of half-decomposed corpses.

 There were three women to every man. In Berlin, by December 1946, half a
million women were selling sex for Western goods.

 In the British zone, where one cigarette was worth five marks and troops
had a free weekly allowance of 50 (plus chocolate and soap), 80 per cent of
the girls suffered from VD, and penicillin had to be flown in from Britain.

 On the grounds that the standard of morality of German women was so low,
the British Army and Government agreed that troops should officially be
excused from paying maintenance for any offspring that they conceived.

 The Army C-in-C responded to the scandal by organising 'Leadership
Courses' and early morning runs.

 So much negligence, and so much callousness. But it has to be weighed
against the loathing that existed for all things German -- a loathing which
was being deepened by revelations of Nazi atrocities.

 Newsreel of the death camps had been seen across the Western world.

 Unlike eastern Europeans, the British in occupied Germany had no bloodlust
for revenge.

 AND their behaviour, even the worst of it, has to be set against the plans
Hitler had for Occupied Britain, which decreed that Britain's entire
able-bodied male population aged 17-45 would be dispatched to the
Continent, thus bringing the UK effectively to a standstill.

 And, slowly, some of the right decisions were made.

 With a gigantic effort, German education in the British Zone was put back
on its feet and the years of Nazi indoctrination overcome.

 In June 1948 the three Western allies introduced the new currency, the
Deutschmark, thus in a stroke destroying the black market and allowing
shopkeepers to put goods on their shelves for sale in real money.

 Finally, in July 1951, after six years, came the formal announcement of
the end of 'the state of war with Germany'. The Army stayed on, but the
Occupation was at an end.

[END]

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Ernst Z=FCndel comments:

Apart from the usual, premptive, knee-jerk excusing of Allied brutality
because of what the Germans had allegedly done, or planned to do - such as
the ludicrous idea of wanting to ship all able-bodied Brits to the
Continent, after Hitler's Wehrmacht had conquered England - this book is
obviously an important first step of Britain, for once, coming to terms
with its past.  Don't hold your breath, however, in seeing war crimes
actions opened against the British torturers and murderers of Germans!

Even where charges were brought at the time, they petered out.  Nobody was
demoted or stripped of their rank - nobody!  Not for torture leading to
death, or multiple gang rape of girls, or simply robbing and beating a
German to death!  Nobody was ever tried or convicted by American, French,
British or Russian courts.  Germans were "demons" - and you could do
anything you liked to a demon.

The book reviewer, and possibly the authoress, are blatantly wrong when
they claim the Germans - naming Hitler and Himmler by name - "would not
have concerned themselves with the legality of such crimes as were
committed by the camp commandant, medical officer and three interrogators
in Bad Nenndorf.  The historic facts are:

Hitler heard of rumors about irregularities in the camp administrations, as
did Heinrich Himmler, who promptly took action by setting up a special
office, headed by SS-Judge Morgan, who vigorously investigated the cases
broght to his attention.  Minor infractions lead to the "Degradierung" -
that is, a reduction in rank - a demotion of SS camp guards or personnel,
an entry in their service record of the investigated event and the
punishment that followed etc.  SS soldiers guilty of mistreating prisoners
were sent as punishment to the Russian front - for instance, for slapping
an inmate or booting them in the rear, as happened on occasion, since
cruelties are part of any war, and World War II was no exception.

Moreover:

Several SS Camp Commanders and staff were tried by Judge Morgan's office
for more serious infranctions - and by Himmler's orders, ***executed with
all the camp inmates assembled to watch the execution by Nazi authorities
of SS Camp Commandants*** who had abused their power over the prisoners and
had broken strict camp regulations and discipline, which was harsh and
strict but did not permit the abuse, torture, murder or even theft from
prisoners!

And to come back to the silly claim that Hitler wanted to deport all
able-bodied Brits etc. - Listen:  Germany had conquered most of France, all
of Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Poland, the Baltic states, the
Balkans, the Ukraine, to name a few - did they deport "all the able-bodied
men" back to the Reich?  To claim that they had such plans for a conquered
England is a ludicrous idea!

It is simply one more kick at the Nazis in order to offset the very real
and carried-through Allied acts of brutality, torture, murder and ethnic
cleansing agreed to in Yalta, Teheran and Potsdam!

That's why the world needs Revisionists!

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If you would like to learn more what life was really like in post-war
Germany, the Zundelsite sells a booklet, "Gruesome Harvest:  The Costly
Attempt to Exterminate the People of Germany" by Ralph Franklin Keeling.
Send $15 to Ingrid Rimland, 3152 Parkway, Suite 13, PMB 109, Pigeon Forge,
TN 37863, USA.

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Thought for the Day:

"Why not, to use Churchill's phrase, collar the lot."

(Robert Fisk, speaking of ***all*** war criminals)=0B