The Scourge of the Swastika Read online

  By the same author:

  THE KNIGHTS OF BUSHIDO

  A Short History of Japanese War Crimes

  The Scourge of the Swastika

  A Greenhill Book

  Greenhill Books

  Published in 2002 by Greenhill Books, Lionel Leventhal Limited

  www.greenhillbooks.com

  This paperback edition published in 2013 by Frontline Books

  an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd,

  47 Church Street, Barnsley, S. Yorkshire, S70 2AS

  www.frontline-books.com

  Copyright © Lord Russell of Liverpool, 1954

  New Introduction © Alistair Horne, 2002

  The right of Lord Russell of Liverpool to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ISBN: 978-1-84832-720-7

  PDF ISBN: 978-1-47387-756-6

  EPUB ISBN: 978-1-47387-755-9

  PRC ISBN: 978-1-47387-754-2

  Publishing History

  The Scourge of the Swastika was first published in 1954 by Cassell & Co Ltd, London. An updated edition with an introduction by Alistair Horne was published by Greenhill Books, London, in hardback (2002) and paperback (2005), and in paperback by Frontline Books, London (2013).

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  CIP data records for this title are available from the British Library

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  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  CONTENTS

  New Introduction

  Preface

  Prologue

  I

  Hitler’s Instruments of Tyranny

  II

  III-Treatment and Murder of Prisoners of War

  III

  War Crimes on the High Seas

  IV

  III-Treatment and Murder of the Civilian Population in Occupied Territory

  V

  Slave Labour

  VI

  Concentration Camps

  VII

  The Final Solution of the Jewish Question

  Epilogue

  Appendix

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Between pages 148 and 149

  Charred bodies found in the church at Oradour

  The slaughter at Autun

  The village of Lidice

  After the massacre at Lidice

  Photograph of a mass execution

  At Birkenau bodies were burnt in pits

  Patriots hanged at Tulle

  The main gateway of Auschwitz Concentration Camps

  One of the crematorium ovens at Buchenwald

  Auschwitz: Polish women’s legs disfigured by operations

  Auschwitz: Artificial limbs taken from victims of the gas chambers

  Ilse Koch, wife of the Commandant at Buchenwald

  Shrunken heads found at Buchenwald

  Josef Krammer’s driving licence

  Thumbscrew used by the Gestapo in Belgium

  A mass grave at Belsen

  Belsen

  Belsen: British troops clear the camp with bulldozers

  A waggon-load of corpses at Buchenwald

  New arrivals in a Concentration Camp being paraded

  ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’

  ‘Selecting victims’

  ‘They were 40,000’

  ‘These were women and children’

  Major-General Stroop

  People driven from a bunker in the Warsaw Ghetto

  The march to the clearing station

  The victims lined up

  NEW INTRODUCTION

  THIS is the only invitation I have ever received to contribute a foreword to a book written by an author who once sued me (successfully) for libel (the first and—touch wood—the last occasion), and therefore some preliminary explanation may be called for. In August 1954, when I was a young foreign correspondent working for the Daily Telegraph in Germany, Lord Russell of Liverpool (then Assistant Judge Advocate General) exploded a bombshell with his publication of The Scourge of the Swastika, heavily backed by Lord Beaverbrook’s then obsessively anti-German Daily Express. A fierce expose of German crimes against humanity under Hitler, it came at a time when the West, gravely menaced by an expansionist Soviet Union, had—in its wisdom—decided to bring Dr. Konrad Adenauer’s Federal German Republic back into the comity of nations. This meant recreating a German Army within the secure framework of NATO. Coming less than a decade after the defeat of Nazism, the proposal had many opponents—in Britain, in Germany itself, and particularly in France, so recently ravaged by the Germans for the third time in her history. The French Government was crucially sitting on the fence, with the German treaties just about to come before the Assembly.

  In London the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, reacted violently; and the Daily Telegraph echoed him. The following year—1955—I published my first book, Back into Power, in which I explored at length the complexity of contemporary German attitudes to war crimes. I felt Adenauer’s Germany was doing a reasonably good job, in circumstances that were far from easy. In this context I condemned Russell’s book as being

  … just the sort of thing which will definitely not amend the German outlook on war crimes…. To the intelligent German [I added], this book, coming many years after the event, appeared solely as the mischievous work of a man with a personal grudge intended to weigh the scales against German rearmament …

  Undoubtedly it was rash and cheeky for a young hack to attack so virulently such a distinguished lawyer and war hero—whose son, Jock Russell MC, was coincidentally a close personal friend of mine. Lord Russell sued for libel—but on grounds of the one sentence which I in my youthful naivety thought perfectly innocuous, where I had described him (in a footnote) as having been ‘forced to resign by the Lord Chancellor’. He was, rightly, able to claim, no, he had been offered a choice. (In later editions, I had to modify the offending passage to: ‘Lord Russell was called upon by the Lord Chancellor either to suppress the book, on the grounds that it would influence contemporary controversial politics, or resign his post. Lord Russell chose to publish and resign …’)

  Nervously I consulted a QC, the famous Helenus (‘Buster’) Milmo, who urged me to fight. I agreed. But, alas, my publisher (now defunct) chose to settle. I had to grovel. Russell, however, was generous enough to demand no damages; Milmo’s charges, certainly by today’s standards, were minimal; his last words, ‘In future, dear boy, try very hard never to libel a lawyer—they always know better!’, were lapidary advice well worth his fee.

  In retrospect, I still think Eden, the Daily Telegraph and I were right to castigate Russell’s book, given the context at the time. If nothing else, since then half a century of a model Germany with an outstanding record of democracy and human rights, a model even among its Western allies, has to date proved this. But the flattering invitation from Russell’s family to write a foreword to this reissue of The Scourge of the Swastika has made me think deeply about the whole hideous subject of crimes against humanity, with which the past century will forever be blackly associated. As the twenty-first century dawns, the target of such a book lies no longer in Germany, wh
ere two whole new generations have grown up, their hands totally untainted by any association with war crimes of the Hitler era. The true targets lie elsewhere.

  In the years since 1945, genocidal murder—and one must never forget that it was not only the Jews but also Russians, Poles, Yugoslavs, Dutch and French, and Germans themselves, who were murdered by hecatombs in the Nazi ‘Holocaust’—has been embarked upon in other parts of the world far from Germany. There have been the various genocides of Central Africa; the terrible ‘Killing Fields’ of the gentle Cambodians, where an estimated one-third of the population was liquidated by Pol Pot; the millions of Tibetans and Chinese killed in the Cultural Revolution; and the Soviet death camps, which continued even after the demise of the arch-murderer Stalin. Between them Mao and ‘Uncle Joe’ killed far more innocent civilians than did Hitler. Vile tortures were perpetrated by the civilised French during the Algerian war, and by Chileans under Pinochet. And then, uncomfortably much nearer home, the horrible phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’, was brought into common usage by Slobodan Milosevic and his henchmen. One hesitates to mention the racist undertones contained within the Islamic terrorist onslaught of II September 2001, with its suggestions of much worse to come. It is these peoples and their leaders who should now have The Scourge of the Swastika on their reading lists, for it is a book of merit that has stood the test of time.

  And what about ourselves, so smug in our belief that ‘it just can’t happen here’. Can’t it, though? As one tries, perennially, to answer the conundrum of how a civilised nation like the Germans should have fallen under the sway of satanic demon like Adolf Hitler, one looks at the distorted faces of the soccer fans on the British football terraces—in a society of full employment, affluence and comfort—and one wonders … One learns on television of the torture and murder of children—and one just wonders.

  In his most disturbing novel, La Peste (The Plague), that great French writer and humanist, Albert Camus, describes with devastating effect how a rat-carried plague decimates a modern city. The peste is in fact a parable for the agglomerate evils of mankind’s worst self, of totalitarianism and despotism. At its end—though, temporarily, it seems to have been defeated—he warns us ‘that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years’, until once more the rats are roused up again, and sent forth ‘to die in a happy city’.

  Yes, la peste is always there waiting to escape, looking for a suitable breeding ground. That is why there is a good case for the re-publication of The Scourge of the Swastika in the context of AD 2002.

  Alistair Horne

  2002

  PREFACE

  IN his opening speech at the trial in Nuremberg of the major German war criminals Sir Hartley Shawcross, Chief Prosecutor for Great Britain and Northern Ireland, said this:

  Apologists for defeated nations are sometimes able to play upon the sympathy and magnanimity of their victors, so that the true facts, never authoritatively recorded, become obscured and forgotten. One has only to recall the circumstances following upon the last World War to see the dangers to which, in the absence of any authoritative judicial pronouncement, a tolerant or a credulous people is exposed. With the passage of time the former tend to discount, perhaps because of their very horror, the stories of aggression and atrocity that may be handed down; and the latter, the credulous, misled by perhaps fanatical and perhaps dishonest propagandists, come to believe that it was not they but their opponents who were guilty of that which they would themselves condemn. And so we believe that this Tribunal acting, as we know it will act notwithstanding its appointment by the victorious Powers, with complete and judicial objectivity, will provide a contemporary touchstone and an authoritative and impartial record to which future historians may turn for truth and future politicians for warning.

  As everyone knows, the ‘authoritative judicial pronouncement’ of which Sir Hartley spoke has been given. There have been numerous other war crime trials* the proceedings of which have been published and are there for all to read. But many have no time to do so, and many would not wish to if they had.

  This book is intended to provide the ordinary reader with a truthful and accurate account of many of these German war crimes. It has been compiled from the evidence given and the documents produced at various war-crime trials, and from statements made by eye-witnesses of war crimes to competent war-crime investigation commissions in the countries where they were committed.

  For their kind offices in obtaining access for me to sources of official information in their respective countries, my grateful thanks are due to His Excellency Monsieur René Massigli, GGVO, KBE, the French Ambassador; His Excellency Monsieur le Marquis du Parc Locmaria, GVO, the Belgian Ambassador; and Doctor D. V. Stikker, Ambassador for the Netherlands.

  I am also greatly indebted to Violette Lecoq, now Madame Rougier-Lecoq, for permission to reproduce some of her remarkable sketches of life and death in Ravensbrück Concentration Gamp; to Major Peter Forest, formerly Chief Interpreter in the War Crimes Group, British Army of the Rhine for editing the footnotes regarding German terms, ranks, and titles; and last but not least to Mr. Anthony Somerhough, OBE, QG, formerly Head of the British War Grimes Group in Germany for the loan of certain photographs and many helpful suggestions.

  * In the British Zone of Occupation in Germany alone, 356 war crime trials were held involving more than 1,000 war criminals. The Judge Advocate General of the Forces, Sir Henry MacGeagh, GCVO, KCB, KBE, QC, who was head of the United Kingdom National Office of the United Nations War Crimes Commission was responsible for the trial of all enemy war criminals brought before British Military Courts.

  PROLOGUE

  BEFORE 1939 there had been regrettable incidents in modern wars between civilized nations amounting to war crimes. In Belgium and France in the early stages of the First World War many excesses were committed by German troops during their rapid advance towards Paris. Towns and villages were looted and set on fire, women were raped, and innocent people murdered. Although these crimes were more than mere sporadic outbursts of ‘frightfulness’ on the part of isolated units or single divisions, they were not part of an organized campaign of terrorism planned before the outbreak of hostilities and faithfully carried out in obedience to orders.

  During the Second World War, however, war crimes were committed by the Germans on an unprecedented scale. They were part and parcel of the Nazi conception of total war and were carried out in pursuance of a preconceived and preconcerted plan to terrorize and exploit the inhabitants of invaded and occupied territories and to exterminate those elements among them who might be found most inimical to German conquest and Nazi domination.

  Before the war, the Nazis had created in their own country under the ‘Führerprinzip’ a tyranny almost without equal in history. They encouraged and fostered racial hatred by the principle of the ‘master-race’ with its ultimate and inevitable objective of world hegemony. They set brother against brother, children against parents, Gentile against Jew. They endeavoured to debauch a whole nation and those who refused to be debauched they terrorized and finally threw into concentration camps.

  It is only when one recalls what was done in Germany between 1933 and 1939 that one can see in their true perspective the crimes committed during the war in occupied territories.

  The suppression of free speech including freedom of the Press, the control of the judiciary, the confiscation of property, the restrictions on the right of peaceful assembly, the censorship of letters and telegrams, the monitoring of telephone conversations, the regimentation of labour, the denial of religious freedom: these are the bonds with which a tyrant binds his subjects. If Hitler thought so little of the ‘master race’, is it surprising that he should have regarded as less than vermin the peoples of the countries which his Armies invaded?

  That the German people did not all yield easily, or willingly accept the Nazi doctrine and programme, is not disputed. Had they done so there would ha
ve been no SS,1 no SD,2 and no Gestapo. It was only by fear, torture, starvation and death that the Nazis eliminated at home the opponents of their regime, and it was in this way that these organizations of oppression gained the experience and the training, later put into practice abroad with such thoroughness and brutality, that made them the nightmare and the scourge of Occupied Europe.

  The crimes which are described in this book were not haphazard; that must be self-evident from their very magnitude. The enslavement of millions and their deportation to Germany, the murder and ill-treatment of prisoners of war, the mass executions of civilians, the shooting of hostages and reprisal prisoners, and the ‘final solution’ of the Jewish question were all the result of long term planning. This has been proved beyond doubt and the Germans themselves have provided unchallengeable evidence in the records, returns, inventories, orders, and other documents, all carefully preserved, which fell into Allied hands after the surrender of the German forces in Europe.

  For when they employed prisoners of war on prohibited work the Germans rendered returns to the appropriate army formation; when they looted they made immaculate inventories of their booty; when they gassed Jews and others they sent detailed reports to RSHA1; when they shot hostages they posted up lists on public buildings ‘pour encourager les autres’; when they conducted painful and disgusting experiments on unwilling inmates in their concentration camps they made careful case-notes. As fast as they committed these crimes so, with characteristic thoroughness, they collected and tabulated documentary evidence of them.

  In Mein Kampf Hitler had written years before, ‘A stronger race will drive out the weaker ones, for the vital urge in its ultimate form will break down the absurd barriers of the so-called humanity of individuals to make way for the humanity of Nature which destroys the weak to give their place to the strong.’ That is the law of the jungle: little wonder that it brought in its train so much misery, agony, destruction and death.