The Scourge of the Swastika - Lord Russell of Liverpool
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 'Fuhrerprinzip' 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 have been no SS, no SD, 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 RSHA; 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 int 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.
Fuhrerprinzip - (leader principle: government policies, decisions and officials all served to realize his will)
SS - Schutzstaffel (nazi paramilitary organization)
SD - Sicherheitdienst (nazi intelligence service)
pour encourager les autres - (to encourage the others)
RSHA - Reichssicherheitshauptamt - (reich security head office)
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.
And how were these criminal plans put into execution? The German High Command and the General Staff cannot escape all responsibility.
When old Marshal von Hindenburg so suddenly and unexpectedly called Hitler to power in 1933 many of these men doubtless looked down their noses at him. But it was not long before most of them became his accomplices; and those who did not, like von Fritsch, were got rid of in characteristically shameless fashion. Thenceforth the full weight of the pyramid of the German Officer Corps, with that military Yes-man Keitel at its summit, was right behind Hitler. These men aided and abetted him in planning and waging aggressive war, and in committing war crimes and crimes against humanity without number. Only when the tide of Nazi success was clearly ebbing did critical whisperings first begin to echo through the corridors of the German War Ministry.
The International Military Tribunal for the trial at Nuremberg of the major Germans war criminals declined to declare the General Staff and High Command a criminal organization. Nevertheless, in their judgment they said of these men:
They have been responsible in large measure for the miseries and suffering that have fallen on millions of men, women, and children. They have been a disgrace to the honourable profession of arms. Without their military guidance the aggressive ambitions of Hitler and his fellow Nazis would have been academic and sterile . . . they were a ruthless and military caste. . . . Many of these men have made a mockery of the soldier's oath of obedience to military orders. When it suits their defence, they say they had to obey; when confronted with Hitler's brutal crimes which are shown to have been within their general knowledge, they say they disobeyed. The truth is that they actively participated in all these crimes, or sat silent and acquiescent, witnessing the commission of crimes on a scale larger and more shocking than the world has ever had the misfortune to know.
But it was the Leadership Corps, the Gestapo, The SD, and the SS, who were the principal instruments of tyranny which Hitler used.
They were the organizations that carried out these dreadful crimes: the mass murders of the concentration camps; the murder and ill-treatment of prisoners of war; the impressment of foreign workers for slave labour; the inquisitorial interrogations; the tortures; the experiments on human guinea pigs.
These dreaded 'black coats', with Heinrich Himmler at their head, hung over Occupied Europe for five long years like a black thundercloud pregnant with sudden death.
The opening chapter of this book describes the origin, establishment, and organization of these bodies and the sadistic cruelty which was their stock-in-trade.
WAKE UP AMERICA! BEFORE EVIL SWALLOWS YOUR LIBERTY, BONES & ALL. . . .
The Scourge of the Swastika (1955), a Short History of Nazi War Crimes, by Lord Russell of Liverpool - legal adviser to the Commander-in-Chief in the British-occupied zone during the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg.
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