Eisenhower Had Jewish Blood
West Point yearbook
| | Eisenhower Questioned
West Point was very conscious of any 'Non-White' candidates. It was obvious from Eisenhower's appearance that he was carrying another race's blood. The headmaster quizzed him and he admitted he had Jewish ancestors. His father was a Swedish Jew who married a Swedish gentile woman.
During World War II when Col. Eisenhower was working for Gen. Douglas McArthur in the South Pacific, McArthur protested to his superiors in Washington (DC) that Eisenhower was incompetent and that he did not want Eisenhower on his staff. In 1943, Washington not only transferred Col. Eisenhower to Europe but promoted him over more than 30 more experienced senior officers to five star general and placed him in charge of all the US forces in Europe.
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| | Eisenhower Is A derivative Of Eisenhauer A Jewish Name | | |
| Eisenhower Was Considered Incompetent
During World War II when Col. Eisenhower was working for Gen. Douglas McArthur in the South Pacific, McArthur protested to his superiors in Washington (DC) that Eisenhower was incompetent and that he did not want Eisenhower on his staff. In 1943, Washington not only transferred Col. Eisenhower to Europe but promoted him over more than 30 more experienced senior officers to five star general and placed him in charge of all the US forces in Europe.
| | | | Bernard Baruch was behind Eisenhower
His military promotions on the eve of WWII and during the war are curious to say the least. Zionists found an Army officer who had been a military failure until Bernard Baruch promoted him to General.
His actions and responsibilities during and after the war: direct, personal negotiations with Stalin on the placements of the armies (and the surrender of territory won by Americans, with the ceding of that territory to the Russians).
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| | Eisenhower flaunts his mistress | | | | | | |
West Point was very conscious of any ' Non-White' candidates. It was obvious from Eisenhower's appearance that he was carrying another race's blood. The headmaster quizzed him and he admitted he had Jewish ancestors
"It was clear in 1952 that the Republicans would return to the White House. Harry Truman* had more problems than the Alger Hiss scandal. "Containment" was simply not working. Sicne the concept's origination, hundreds of millions of people had fallen under Communist domination. Americans sensed the need for a strong new leader who could stand up to the Soviets. The favorite of the GOP's rank and file was Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the son of the former President, and an outspoken foe of Communism.
Douglas Macarthur openly supported Taft, who entertained plans to make the general his running mate. It was the Establishment's aversion to this candidacy that brought Dwight D. Eisenhower forward.
In 1941, the year we went to war, Eisenhower or "Ike", was a lieutenant colonel who had never seen a battle in his life. Yet by 1943 he had become a four-star general and supreme commander of the Allied forces in Western Europe...After the war Eisenhower commanded U.S. occupation forces in Germany. He returned home to become US Chief of Staff...Bernanrd Baruch became a close acquaintance. Althihg he had no academic background, Eisenhower was made president of Columbia University in 1948. He joined the Council on Foreign Relations,...
The Establishment knew that to divest Taft and Macarthur of the Republican nomination, they would have to present a candidate who looked incredibly tough and anti-Communist. General Eisenhower, who was still wearing an aura of World War II glory, became their choice.
By no stretch of the imagination was Ike a Republican teaditionalist. In fact, until he ran, he had no party affiliation...At the Republican nominating convention, "dirty tricks" abounded. The rules for selecting delegates were changed; Taft delegations from Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas were thrown out and replaced by Eisenhower's supporters...Once again, the Establishment had succeeded in controlling both parties..."
The SHADOWS OF POWER, by James Perloff. pp. 102-103.
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* Since the inauguration of perpetual peace by the United Notions, only two Presidents, Sheeny Truman (20) and a crook from Texas (21), have had the fun of shipping large numbers of American men to be slaughtered on the other side of the globe, and creating an excuse for massively increased taxation to bleed the boobs some more.
(20. His father was a Sheeny, his mother, a White woman, so he was not a Jew by orthodox standards.)
(21. Johnson, a small-time politician, on whom see J. Evetts Haley, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, was married to and supervised by a Kikess, who probably guided him to power.
His character is adequately shown by the fact that he had or simulated a tantrum when some Vietnamese boats supposedly fired at an American destroyer, but when the Kikes bombed and torpedoed the U.S.S. Liberty, killed many American sailors, and tried to sink the little ship without survivors so that they could blame the Egyptians, Lyndon personally forbade the ships of the U.S. Navy near the scene to go to the assistance of the ship that had been detached from their squadron and personally expressed the hope that the Sheenies would succeed in killing all those stupid American swine on the American naval vessel. He was not impeached, convicted of high treason, and shot.)
http://www.revilo-oliver.com/rpo/Surprise_Surprise.html
"It is noteworthy that Rabbi Gruenewald ignores the fact that Truman's father was a Sheeny. The pious rabbi may have been applying the orthodox criterion that the sons of Jews by White women are not really Jews, or he may have thought it tactless to mention that Americans, with their simplistic notions of heredity, thought Truman half-Jewish but were evidently not alarmed. A little later, he likewise makes no mention of the Jews' share of Franklin Roosevelt.)"
http://www.revilo-oliver.com/rpo/Poor_Old_Ronnie.html
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Eisenhower: JEW/NEGRO ANCESTRY
The following document was faxed to Richard Claypool [Head of U.S. Presidential Libraries, Maryland] on June 16th 2002 , at (301) 837 3218 , concerning Anne Morrow's identity investigation. A slightly modified version was also faxed on this same date to Harold Holt [Executive Director, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library , Kansas] , at (785) 263 4218.
"...Anne Morrow & myself have discovered that the name & spelling of Eisenhower was & has been corrupted from it's original spelling Eisenhauer. Although your establishment discounts Eisenhower's Jewish &/or Negro ancestry [see; http://www.Palatinepress.com/images/teasleyletter2.gif] the corruption of the original spelling , to the existing & publicly embraced & accepted Eisenhower implies the former President's descendents was a Jewish , perhaps even a German bloodline. This further supports Anne Morrow's story & that she in fact descended from "old , old blood out of Europe." Anne Morrow & myself have substantiated that the reason for the Eisenhauer name corruption to Eisenhower was merely for public relations during World War II & through-out the Cold War , & to cloak the true heritage & bloodline of Dwight D. Eisenhower. This corruption was positively reflected & perpetuated most importantly within the confines of education circles.
The names Campbell , Gabbard & Morrow seem to be interlocked & are seemingly different names for the same bloodline , which is intended to hide the heritage & origins of an Eisenhauer (Eisenhower) line which extends back into Europe (under most likely , many other different names)."
http://www.palatinepress.com/ashley_otooole_letter_11june02.html
Dear DJ,
The following document was faxed to Richard Claypool [Head of U.S. Presidential Libraries, Maryland] on June 16th 2002 , at (301) 837 3218 , concerning Anne Morrow's identity investigation. A slightly modified version was also faxed on this same date to Harold Holt [Executive Director, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library , Kansas] , at (785) 263 4218.
It was Anne Morrow who confided in me , many months ago , after I published a non-related article in my independently owned & operated publication , BEACHHEAD , her belief that she was in fact the illegitimiate daughter of former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower & her biological mother may in fact be Dwight D. Eisenhower's former driver , Kay Summersby. Rumours were confirmed in 1975 , when Kay Summersby wrote a book titled; "Past Forgetting; My Love Affair With Dwight D. Eisenhower". It was Mr.Eisenhower's superior General George Marshall who quashed a plan by Dwight D. Eisenhower to divorce his wife Mamie & marry Summersby. It has been stated , General.Marshall threatened to bust Eisenhower out of the military while fighting in Europe [World War II] , if he was to go ahead & marry Summersby & divorce Mamie. As docummented , General George Marshall served in President Truman's Cabinet , as Secretary of State & then as , Secretary of Defense.
Through my own genealogical research I have established a definite link betweeen the names Campbell , Gabbard , Morrow & Eisenhower. However , Anne Morrow & myself have discovered that the name & spelling of Eisenhower was & has been corrupted from it's original spelling Eisenhauer. Although your establishment discounts Eisenhower's Jewish &/or Negro ancestry [see; http://www.Palatinepress.com/images/teasleyletter2.gif] the corruption of the original spelling , to the existing & publicly embraced & accepted Eisenhower implies the former President's descendents was a Jewish , perhaps even a German bloodline. This further supports Anne Morrow's story & that she in fact descended from "old , old blood out of Europe." Anne Morrow & myself have substantiated that the reason for the Eisenhauer name corruption to Eisenhower was merely for public relations during World War II & through-out the Cold War , & to cloak the true heritage & bloodline of Dwight D. Eisenhower. This corruption was positively reflected & perpetuated most importantly within the confines of education circles.
"General DWIGHT EISENHOWER (appropriately named "The Swedish Jew" by fellow West Point cadets) was
promoted over the heads of many more qualified officers for a reason. He agreed, apparently, to exchange America's honor quid pro quo for 5-Stars and glory. After the war, at the dedication of a New York City park honoring the Bernard Baruch family, key-note speaker Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, USA-Ret., admitted: As a young unknown major I took the wisest step of my life. I consulted Mr. Baruch. (General Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. Army), cited by A.K. CHESTERTON, op. cit., The New Unhappy Lords.)
"...it is hard to escape the conclusion that Dwight Eisenhower was a war criminal of epic proportions. His (DEF) [POW camp] policy killed more Germans in peace than were killed in the European Theatre.......one Allied officer compared the American camps to Buchenwald........It is known, and will be documented in my upcoming book in newsprint format, that the Allies had sufficient stockpiles of food and medicine to care for these German soldiers. This was deliberately and intentionally denied them."
Professor Revilo P. Oliver (February 1992):
The real influx of savages began in the administration of the filthy mongrel called Eisenhower, noted for his open and vicious hatred of Germans and dissimulated hatred of other Aryans, and his scrapping of what was left of the American Constitution.
"Canada was thus ready for the next act in her enemies' program, and one is reminded of the trick used so effectively in the United States when the Republican Party was bought to install in the White House "Barney" Baruch's tool, a mongrel named Eisenhower.(5)
(5. Eisenhower's mother was probably a quadroon. His features were distinctly Negroid when he was a cadet at West Point, where he was barely able to "squeak through" to a commission.)
ALSO: " It is noteworthy that Rabbi Gruenewald ignores the fact that Truman's father was a Sheeny. The pious rabbi may have been applying the orthodox criterion that the sons of Jews by White women are not really Jews, or he may have thought it tactless to mention that Americans, with their simplistic notions of heredity, thought Truman half-Jewish but were evidently not alarmed. A little later, he likewise makes no mention of the Jews' share of Franklin Roosevelt" (REVILO OLIVER) http://www.resist.com/Articles/rpo/1987_Poor_Old_Ronnie.html
The issue of "Life" I have cited contains other significant photographs: the father of the disgusting creature named Harry Truman was obviously a Sheeny; the unfortunate mother seems to be a White woman.)
Following WWII, the part negro Eisenhower reclassified surrendering German forces as "unarmed enemy forces", thus removing them from the protection of the Geneva Convention which applied to "prisoners of war". This gave them the latitude to starve to death over one million German "combatants". Read Bacque's Other Losses. There are two printings. Seek the Canadian version as the American version has been tainted by jew sanitization.
Kill the Best Gentiles by James Von Brunn
This new book is available for free download of the first six chapters. This carefully documented treatise exposes the Jews and explains what you must do to protect your White family. Kill the Best Gentiles! Is a must for every concerned parent and a manual for every student of World History.
Surf over and check it out at:
<http://www.holywesternempire.org/page2.html>
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http://www.faem.com/maguire/goodike.htm
15 August 2002
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Dear Mr. Maguire
In your article Elite American Political Leadership you mention Eisenhower's nickname "The Swedish Jew". I am interested to know how he got that nickname. To my knowledge Eisenhower did not have anything to do with Sweden.
Best Regards -- Mr. J. -- Northern Europa
PS! I am an avid FAEM-reader and have been for the last two years. I have read almost everything posted on the site. Dear Mr. J.,
<b>Eisenhower was nicknamed "The Swedish Jew" as a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point. In Ike's time USMA cadets were required to be 100% white and non-negroid, or as close to that as medical doctors and geneological research could then ascertain. Serious official questions arose about Ike's obvious part non-white genetic heritage. These appeared to be negroid in origin. "Ike" explained this away as being due to a Jewish ancestor from Sweden, hence the nickname "The Swedish Jew". </b>
Military Academy cadets and other officer candidates get to know each other extremely well during their schooling, provided it's conducted on an intensive basis as U.S. officer schooling formerly was. Everyone is at close quarters running 24/7. There's no place to hide character traits in those conditions. Cadet nicknames are usually extremely descriptive. And when they're keyed to obvious non-white themes it's a warning signal to look deeper. Here's another example. The U.S. Pacific Fleet commander who allowed himself to be surprised at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, was nicknamed "Mustapha" as a midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. Other "Mustaphas" in Egypt and Syria allowed this to happen to themselves in 1967.
The academy and officer training schools (used?) to take official advantage of that close quarters peer knowledge through an anonymous peer rating mechanism. I knew this as "Top Five/Bottom Five" and it meant what it said. Officer candidates rated their platoon fellows on leadership in rank order from Top One to Bottom x. People who accumulated too many "Bottom Five" rankings were automatically scheduled for periodic official leadership review boards for enquiry into whether they should be dismissed without commission. The presumption of such boards used to be such individuals should be dismissed unless they could prove they were worthy of commission. Very, very few survived such review boards.
Judeo-Marxist Academics like the military scribbler Weigley and the Jew military 'sociologist' Moscowitz are generally extremely hostile to processes like peer rating and also to troop election of officers at regimental level and below. The admixture of females has added feminist hostility to the opposition to such processes. The long-term result is a corps of military leaders who possess less and less confidence where it really counts. That's among their soldiers. This has gone so far that the average U.S. ground combat unit is unusable for its designed purpose.
After long military experience and study the wisdom of both peer ratings and also electing regimental officers in militia and citizen-soldier units seems more and more profound to me. I think the only safeguard needed is a veto power for general officers to remove obvious misfits. You can conduct all the bureaucratic schooling processes you want. But if an officer does not possess the confidence of his troops they will not follow him in combat, obey his orders or stay the course in difficult times. Consequently years of academic training simply go to waste. Electing first and schooling second is probably the best way.
P.S. The leadership qualities required from military leaders and from political leaders are not identical. Some individuals combine these two attribute sets. Hitler did not combine these qualities, at least at the lower infantry unit level. This is proven by the fact he entered the Bavarian Army as a private and emerged after four years of war as a corporal. Despite this many fellow war veterans from his former battalion willingly followed him as a political leader, including his former battalion sergeant-major and some officers.
Nineteenth Century America managed to select many men for high office who did combine both leadership sets in fairly large numbers. This more than anything explains the rapid conquest of the continent. It was not 'luck'. The old American Republic (long since vanished) actually conformed very closely in practice to the ideals of the old Roman Republic in both military process and results. The Roman Republic constitutionally required that political leaders prove themselves as leaders in war. This was an ideal for early Americans but not a definite legal requirement. Had the Founding Fathers mandated this in the Constitution our history would have turned out very differently. Certainly Canada, Mexico and Cuba would not exist as independent states. Whether this would have prevented subsequent miscegenation or the Civil War is another question.
And results (output) are the real measure of military efficiency (or any other efficiency). The military stature and efficiency of a state is not measured by the numbers of troops raised or the percentage of the budget applied to 'military' appropriations; i.e. inputs. The Neo-con pseudo-patriots of the Judeo-Republican Party (non-veterans to a womandman) do think in these Communist terms of inputs. If this measurement were valid then Italy would be one of the military success stories of the 20th Century rather than one of the premier failures. When judged by this standard of results 19th Century America was a resounding success as a military state. Twentieth Century America was a military failure to the point that political loss of territory is now occuring in the Southwest.
P.P.S. Note to the former student of Russell F. Weigley who wrote in to defend him.
In my 1984 edition of Weigley's "History of the United States Army" he devotes about 40 pages to the War of 1812. He dedicates nearly all of this to harping on the relatively small Congressional size authorization and even lower actual personnel fill (about 20,000) of the "Regular Army". In this section Weigley glosses over the militia contribution in the sentence "this number was exclusive of those men from the volunteer and common militias who served for short periods against British raids and invasions in their own districts and who may have numbered in the hundreds of thousands."
Then Weigley reverts back to beating to death obscurities like poor Regular Army horse recruitment and rotten contractor commissary stores. The obscure "Battle of Lundy's Lane" (actually a minor skirmish around Niagara) receives an extensive autopsy. The Battles of Put-in Bay, New Orleans and General Harrison's campaign to reconquer the Northwest are ignored. These large-scale decisive events were commanded by regular officers leading Weigley's ignored militia.
And New Orleans was decisive despite being fought after 'peace' was signed. Anyone who thinks the extermination of Britain's best veteran regiments at the hands of frontier militia didn't exercise a subsequent deterrent effect on British decision-making doesn't understand how governments arrive at war and peace decisions. The British decision to negotiate over "Fifty-four Forty or Fight!" in the 1840s was undoubtedly influenced by that memory.
If Weigley had ever marched even once 20 miles with a 100 pound pack in 100 degree heat he would have understood something. Even 100,000 perfectly trained regulars alone would have resulted in American defeat. In the early 19th Century transport proceeded by foot, by horse or by sea. Since the British had overall naval superiority moving troops by sea convoy was not possible. This left marching on land. The factors of force/space/time applied to North America dictated that the early Republic had to rely on 'militia'. This was especially true when fighting an enemy possessing command of the sea and the choice of where and when to strike with large amphibious raiding parties. There was no possibility of a timely counter-concentration of a central reserve at the tactical level, especially on defense. This comes back to Nathan Bedford Forrest's "he who gets theah fustest with mostest." Overall numbers are irrelevant in such conditions unless you create a 'nation in arms' as was done by the Militia Act of 1792.
Like I said, Weigley's book is worthless garbage that should be collected up and pulped
We are not impressed. The evidence you have presented
would not make a very good case in eugenics court.
College high-jinks remarks are not at all convincing.
You must have something considerably more substantial.
Also, having a Jew find a shabbos goy does not make such
a prot�g� a Jew. Remember Lord Beaconfield's Coningsby?
One need not be a Jew to be a swine (if we may be allowed
to disparage swine in this disrespectful manner).
Sincerely,
DJ
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, January 06, 2006 2:01 PM
Subject: Eisenhower had Jewish blood
Eisenhower had Jewish blood
http://www.rense.com/general19/gmk.htm
One Million German POWs
Killed After WWII By US & France
Environment News Service
1-25-2
Excerpt from - OTHER LOSSES
By James Bacque
Stoddart Publishing
Toronto, Canada
ISBN 0-7737-2269-6
June, 1945 US POW camp in Germany
"Starting in April 1945, the United States Army and the French Army
casually annihilated one million [German] men, most of them in
American camps . . . Eisenhower's hatred, passed through the lens of
a compliant military bureaucracy, produced the horror of death camps
unequalled by anything in American history . . . an enormous war
crime."
--Col. Ernest F. Fisher, PhD Lt.
101 st Airborne Division, Senior Historian, United States Army
Comment
From Stephen R.
1-29-2
I heard this kind of story repeatedly in the late 1940's. Some were
much worse as to numbers involved. I was super patriotic, and told a
kid his relative was a liar.
One Sunday, he came to my house and got me, and I heard a drunken
discourse from his mothers' scarey boyfriend who had been a GI guard.
He became hysterical talking about burying 100's per day. I have no
doubt this was true. He was with some kind of roving death squad.
They arrived at the German POW camps late in 1945, took selected
prisoners from shelters to open fields in mid-Winter. And watched
them in shifts until they were dead.
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2001 21:03:23 -0500
From: dkuehne@erols.com
Subject: Eisenhower's Holocaust: I DON'T like IKE!
From: "Bob Jones"<dragonslayer@lvcm.com>
http://www.nidlink.com/~aryanvic/ikekike.html
IKE, THE KIKE! Eisenhower's Holocaust!
"God, I hate the Germans..." --Dwight David Eisenhower
in a letter to his wife in September, 1944.
First, I want you to picture something in your
mind. You are a German soldier who survived through the
battles of World II. You were not really politically
involved, and your parents were also indifferent to
politics, but suddenly your education was interrupted
and you were drafted into the German army and told
where to fight. Now, in the Spring of 1945, you see
that your country has been demolished by the Allies,
your cities lie in ruins, and half of your family has
been killed or is missing. Now, your unit is being
surrounded, and it is finally time to surrender. The
fact is, there is no other choice.
It has been a long, cold winter. The German army
rations have not been all that good, but you managed to
survive. Spring came late that year, with weeks of cold
rainy weather in demolished Europe. Your boots are
tattered, your uniform is falling apart, and the stress
of surrender and the confusion that lies ahead for you
has your guts being torn out. Now, it is over, you must
surrender or be shot. This is war and the real world.
You are taken as a German Prisoner of War into
American hands. The Americans had 200 such Prisoner of
War camps scattered across Germany. You are marched to
a compound surrounded with barbed wire fences as far as
the eye can see. Thousands upon thousands of your
fellow German soldiers are already in this make-shift
corral. You see no evidence of a latrine and after
three hours of marching through the mud of the spring
rain, the comfort of a latrine is upper-most in your
mind. You are driven through the heavily guarded gate
and find yourself free to move about, and you begin the
futile search for the latrine. Finally, you ask for
directions, and are informed that no such luxury
exists. No more time. You find a place and squat. First
you were exhausted, then hungry, then fearful, and
now--dirty. Hundreds more German prisoners are behind
you, pushing you on, jamming you together and every one
of them searching for the latrine as soon as they could
do so. Now, late in the day, there is no space to even
squat, much less sit down to rest your weary legs. None
of the prisoners, you quickly learn, have had any food
that day, in fact there was no food while in the
American hands that any surviving prisoner can testify
to. No one has eaten any food for weeks, and they are
slowly starving and dying.
But, they can't do this to us! There are the
Geneva Convention rules for the treatment of Prisoners
of War. There must be some mistake! Hope continues
through the night, with no shelter from the cold,
biting rain. Your uniform is sopping wet, and formerly
brave soldiers are weeping all around you, as buddy
after buddy dies from the lack of food, water, sleep
and shelter from the weather. After weeks of this, your
own hope bleeds off into dispair, and finally you
actually begin to envy those who, having surrendered
first manhood and then dignity, now also surrender life
itself. More hopeless weeks go by. Finally, the last
thing you remember is falling, unable to get up, and
lying face down in the mud mixed with the excrement of
those who have gone before.
Your body will be picked up long after it is cold,
and taken to a special tent where your clothing is
stripped off. So that you will be quickly forgotten,
and never again identified, your dog-tag is snipped in
half and your body along with those of your fellow
soldiers are covered with chemicals for rapid
decomposition and buried. You were not one of the
exceptions, for more than one million, seven hundred
thousand German Prisoners of War died from a deliberate
policy of extermination by starvation, exposure, and
disease -under direct orders of General Dwight David
Eisenhower.
One month before the end of World War 11, General
Eisenhower issued special orders concerning the
treatment of German Prisoners and specific in the
language of those orders was this statement, "Prison
enclosures are to provide no shelter or other
comforts." Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose, who
was given access to the Eisenhower personal letters,
states that he proposed to exterminate the entire
German General Staff, thousands of people, after the
war. Eisenhower, in his personal letters, did not
merely hate the Nazi Regime, and the few who imposed
its will down from the top, but that he hated the
German people as a race. It was his personal intent to
destroy as many of them as he could, and one way was to
wipe out as many prisoners of war as possible. Of
course, that was illegal under International law, so he
issued an order on March 10, 1945 and verified by his
initials on a cable of that date, that German Prisoners
of War be redesignated as "Disarmed Enemy Forces"
called in these reports as DEF. He ordered that these
Germans did not fall under the Geneva Rules, and were
not to be fed or given any water or medical attention.
The Swiss Red Cross was not to inspect the camps, for
under the DEF classification, they had no such
authority or jurisdiction.
Months after the war was officially over,
Eisenhower's special German DEF camps were still in
operation forcing the men into confinement, but denying
that they were prisoners. As soon as the war was over,
General George Patton simply turned his prisoners loose
to fend for themselves and find their way home as best
they could. Eisenhower was furious, and issued a
specific order to Patton, to turn these men over to the
DEF camps. Knowing Patton as we do from history, we
know that these orders were largely ignored, and it may
well be that Patton's untimely and curious death may
have been a result of what he knew about these wretched
Eisenhower DEF camps.
The book, OTHER LOSSES, found its way a few months
ago into the hands of a Canadian news reporter, Peter
Worthington, of the OTTAWA SUN. He did his own research
through contacts he had in Canada, and reported in his
column on September 12,1989 the following, in part:
"...it is hard to escape the conclusion that
Dwight Eisenhower was a war criminal of epic
proportions. His (DEF) policy killed more Germans in
peace than were killed in the European Theatre."
"For years we have blamed the 1.7 million missing
German POW's on the Russians. Until now, no one dug too
deeply ... Witnesses and survivors have been
interviewed by the author; one Allied officer compared
the American camps to Buchenwald."
It is known, and will be documented in my upcoming
book in newsprint format, that the Allies had
sufficient stockpiles of food and medicine to care for
these German soldiers. This was deliberately and
intentionally denied them. Many men died of gangrene
from frostbite due to deliberate exposure. Local German
people who offered these men food, were denied. General
Patton's Third Army was the only command in the
European Theatre to release significant numbers of
Germans. Others, such as Omar Bradley and General
J.C.H. Lee, Commander of Com Z, tried, and ordered the
release of prisoners within a week of the war's end.
However, a SHAEF Order, signed by Eisenhower,
countermanded them on May 15th.
Does that make you angry? What will it take to get
the average apathetic American involved in saving his
country from such traitors at the top? Thirty years
ago, amid the high popularity of Eisenhower, a book was
written setting out the political and moral philosophy;
of Dwight David Eisenhower called, THE POLITICIAN, by
Robert Welch.
This year is the 107th Anniversary of Eisenhower's
birth in Denison, Texas on October 14, 1890, the son of
Jacob David Eisenhower and his wife Ida. Everyone is
all excited about the celebration of this landmark in
the history of "this American patriot." Senator Robert
Dole, in honor of the Commander of the American Death
Camps, proposed that Washington's Dulles Airport be
renamed the Eisenhower Airport!
The UNITED STATES MINT in Philadelphia, PA is
actually issuing a special Eisenhower Centennial Silver
Dollar for only $25 each. They will only mint 4 million
of these collector's items, and veteran's magazines are
promoting these coins under the slogan, "Remember the
Man ... Remember the Times.." Pardon me if I
regurgitate!
There will be some veterans who will not be buying
these coins. Two will be Col. James Mason and Col.
Charles Beasley who were in the U.S. Army Medical Corps
who published a paper on the Eisenhower Death Camps in
1950. They stated in part:
"Huddled close together for warmth, behind the
barbed wire was a most awesome sight-- nearly 100,000
haggard, apathetic, dirty, gaunt, blank-staring men
clad in dirty gray uniforms, and standing ankle deep in
mud .... water was a major problem, yet only 200 yards
away the River Rhine was running bankfull."
Another Veteran, who will not be buying any of the
Eisenhower Silver Dollars is Martin Brech of Mahopac,
New York, a semi-retired professor of philosophy at
Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, NY. In 1945, Brech was an
18 year old Private First Class in Company C of the
14th Infantry, assigned as a guard and interpreter at
the Eisenhower Death Camp at Andernach, along the Rhine
River. He stated for SPOTLIGHT, February 12, 1990:
"My protests (regarding treatment of the German
DEF'S) were met with hostility or indifference, and
when I threw our ample rations to them over the barbed
wire. I was threatened, making it clear that it was our
deliberate policy not to adequately feed them."
"When they caught me throwing C- Rations over the
fence, they threatened me with imprisonment. One
Captain told me that he would shoot me if he saw me
again tossing food to the Germans .... Some of the men
were really only boys 13 years of age .... Some of the
prisoners were old men drafted by Hitler in his last
ditch stand .... I understand that average weight of
the prisoners at Andernach was 90 pounds ... I have
received threats ... Nevertheless, this ... has
liberated me, for I may now be heard when I relate the
horrible atrocity I witnessed as a prison guard for one
of 'Ike's death camps' along the Rhine."
Betty Lou Smith Hanson
Note: Remember the photo of Ike's West Point
yearbook picture when he was dubbed "IKE, THE TERRIBLE
SWEDISH JEW"? By the way, he was next, or nearly so, to
the last in his class. This article was first printed
in 1990, but we thought it was meaningfull to reprint
it now.
(Note: During Cadet Eisenhower's time at West
Point Academy, Eisenhower was summoned to the office of
the headmaster and was asked some pointed questions. At
the time, it was routine procedure to test a cadet's
blood to insure White racial integrety.
Apparently there was a question of Eisenhower's
racial lineage and this was brought to Eisenhower's
attention by the headmaster. When asked if he was part
Oriental, Eisenhower replied in the negative. After
some discussion, Eisenhower admitted having some Jewish
background. The headmaster then reportedly said,
"That's where you get your Oriental blood?". Although
he was allowed to remain at the academy, word got
around since this was a time in history when non-Whites
were not allowed into the academy.
Later, in Eisenhower's West Point Military Academy
graduating class yearbook, published in 1915,
Eisenhower is identified as a "terrible Swedish Jew."
Wherever Eisenhower went during his military
career, Eisenhower's Jewish background and secondary
manifesting behavior was a concern to his fellow
officers.
During World War II when Col. Eisenhower was
working for Gen. Douglas McArthur in the South Pacific,
McArthur protested to his superiors in Washington (DC)
that Eisenhower was incompetent and that he did not
want Eisenhower on his staff.
In 1943, Washington not only transferred Col.
Eisenhower to Europe but promoted him over more than 30
more experienced senior officers to five star general
and placed him in charge of all the US forces in
Europe. Thus it comes as no surprise that General
George Patton, a real Aryan warrior, hated Eisenhower.)
http://www.scripturesforamerica.org/html2/jm0053.htm
WAR CRIMES - U.S.A. (The Final Truth About WW II)
A Book Review on OTHER LOSSES
by Lt. Col. Gordon "Jack" Mohr, AUS Ret.
". . . there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed: and hid that shall not be made known." - Matthew 10:26
The Final Truth About World War II
Is America finally about to be thrown a scrap or two of historical truth? If so, have the Soviet relations of recent months, which has caused its leaders to admit to the murder of millions of their own people, allowed a few rays of truth to filter down and penetrate the Iron Curtain which has been erected over World War II, and which has kept vital facts from our people?
Something out of the ordinary seems to be going on within America's ruling circles. Are we finally to be told the truth about World War II?
Recently a book was written by an eminent Canadian author, James Bacque, of Toronto. It is titled OTHER LOSSES and deserves the widest possible distribution in the United States, especially among our veterans who fought World War II. Although Mr. Bacque's book does not picture America and her allies in a favorable light, it has had an amazing reception in Canada, although the people of the United States, for the most part have been kept in the dark about one of the most heinous episodes of World War II, which revolves around the Supreme Commander of the Allies in Europe, Gen. Dwight David Eisenhower, who was known during his days at West Point as that "terrible Swedish Jew."
I have my own opinions of Dwight David Eisenhower, opinions formed during the early days of World War II, from information I received from officers who knew "Ike" before he became Supreme Commander.
During the days before World War II, "Ike," as he was affectionately called, was noted as a ''ladies man, and the best damned bridge player on the Post." (Quotation not mine.) When anyone would mention Ike as a troop commander, it was met with hilarious, profane skepticism. Then too, my opinions of Ike were formed by the attitude of my Commanding General, Gen. George Patton, who looked on Eisenhower as a "whimp," not worthy of his rank.
As many of you will remember, Ike was promoted to Supreme Commander in Europe. From Lieutenant Colonel, in early 1941, Eisenhower was promoted to full Colonel in March 1941, to Brigadier General (temporary) in September. In February 1942, after he became a favorite of Gen. George Marshall during the Louisiana Maneuvers, he was appointed Assistant Chief of the War Plans Division. About this time, Ike became acquainted with the daughter of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and she introduced her boy friend to "pappa." Evidently F.D.R. recognized in this young officer, a man who would agree with his plans and who would do anything to get promoted. This began a rapid spiral of promotions which by-passed many officers who outranked him and who were much more qualified for the posts he occupied. He became Chief of Operations Division, War Department General Staff (March, 1942), to Commanding General of the European Theater of Operations in June 1942, to Allied Commander in Chief, for the invasion of North Africa (November, 1942), Sicily, (May 1943), Italy (September, 1943) and finally to his ultimate designation by President F.D.R. as Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force for the invasion of Europe.
It was Eisenhower's advise to F.D.R. and Churchill, which caused the war to drag on for two extra years, resulting in millions of deaths on both sides, and hundreds of billions of dollars of profit for Eisenhower's racial brethren, the International bankers, who financed both sides.
In early 1943, General Patton and the British Commander, Gen. Montgomery, presented a plan to Churchill and F.D.R. which called for the invasion of Europe through the "soft underbelly of Europe." This would have liberated all the eastern European countries from Communist control and would have ended the war in 1943.
But Eisenhower's hatred of the Germans, which was openly shown many times during those terrible days of the war, demanded that as many Germans as possible be made to suffer for their part in the war.
It might be well to state here, that as early as 1902, International Jewry had a plan for the destruction of Christianity in Europe.
This called for the destruction, first of Czarist Russia, which took place in 1917, and then for the destruction of Germany. A war chest of some $2-billion was set aside for this purpose, long before a man named Adolf Hitler came on the scene. When Churchill and F.D.R. listened to the advice of Stalin, instead of their two best military leaders, it gave Stalin two years to establish control over all of Eastern Europe, which is now known as the Warsaw Pact Nations.
We can see the further treason in Eisenhower's actions, when in 1945, as Patton's armored forces swept into Germany, they were held back from entering Berlin, and were even ordered to withdraw to the Western borders of Germany, until Soviet troops could enter Germany.
Any military commander "worth their salt," knows that Patton could have ended the war on the Eastern border of Germany and that country would have never been divided. Patton by this time was beginning to realize that a conspiracy existed among the top war leaders, which were keeping him from the victory he so richly deserved. It was a traumatic lesson which was to be later repeated with General Douglas MacArthur in Korea, when he was not allowed to attack enemy positions north of the Yalu River.
The One Worlder's in Washington, D.C., and London had other plans and aided Stalin in his rape of Eastern Europe and Germany.
It was the "terrible Swedish Jew" Eisenhower, whose open hatred of everything German, caused him to promote Operation Keelhaul, at the end of the war, where thousands of anti-Communist fighters, who had surrendered to American forces, were forced at bayonet point, back to the tender mercies of the Communists. Thousands of them were murdered outright, or disappeared into the Gulags of Russia.
Eisenhower returned to the States, made a hero by the controlled prostitute press of America, and his popularity from a populace he had betrayed, was such that he became the 34th President of the United States in 1953.
Eisenhower was quoted at lie war's end as saying: ''I hate war as only a soldier who has lived through it can only as one who has seen it's brutality, it's futility, it's Stupidity" But he did not hate it as much as he hated Germans, and he took a terrible Jewish revenge on over a million surrendered German soldiers and civilians when the war ended. Praised by the media and the ''kept'' historians, this man was directly responsible for one of the most reprehensible acts in the history of civilized warfare. One which should put him in the same class with Atilla the Hun and other barbarians.
The peace which was inflicted on a completely defeated Germany in 1945, was called the Morgenthau Plan. It was promoted by Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, a Jew, who later stated that most of the ideas for this plan had come from Eisenhower.
Now, after a tremendous research of over twenty years, the truth about this Jew Commander of America's forces, who became the 34th President of the United States, can be known.
In 1945, during the post-World War II period, American foreign policy was largely in the hands of a small group of very powerful Zionists based in Washington, D.C. This secret, invisible government, which has controlled America for over fifty years, was headed then by Sen. Herbert Lehman; Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, and Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau. They drew up the "blueprint" for a plan, which the enthusiastic Eisenhower carried out in Europe, which was the most monstrous policy of hate and vengeance known in the annals of civilized history.
This policy is still in operation today, fifty years later, where media pundits, twisting, exaggerating, and even manufacturing historical claims, have hounded, harassed, and had arrested 70 and 80-year old European war veterans for alleged ''war crimes,'' which were supposed to have taken place over fifty years ago.
The following article, entitled THE EISENHOWER DEATH CAMPS, was taken from the January 1990 issue of INSTAURATION, a scholarly American monthly. Every American veteran who served in World War II should know these facts. They are entitled to know how we were lied to and inveigled into a war for the benefits of the Internationalists. Every American Legion and Veteran's of foreign War Post in this country, should have this article read to its them bets, for you see, the same treason was carried out in Korea and then later in Vietnam. It is we, the veteran's of America, who have the right to know the truth, about the traitors who were responsible for the murder of our buddies, and the crippling of hundreds of thousands more, and who are even now laying the groundwork to get your sons and daughters involved in World War Ill.
The National Archives in Washington, (D.C.) contains an official document called the Weekly Prisoner of War and Disarmed Enemy Forces Report for the week ending Sept. 8, 1945. It shows that 1,056,482 German prisoners were then being held by the U.S. Army in the European theater, of whom 692,895 were still classified as POWs (Prisoners of War) and the other 363,587 as DEFs (Disarmed Enemy Forces.)
This latter designation was illegal under international law and completely contrary to the Geneva Convention, to which both the United States and Germany were signatories. A German soldier designated DEF had no right to any food, shelter, or water in fact, to anything. Quite often he did not receive even the basic necessities of life and died within days.
In the first week of September 1945, 13,051 of the 363,587 Germans died and were listed cryptically as "other losses." This was the equivalent of a death rate of 3.6% per week. At such a rate, all the remaining 350,536 DEFs would have been dead within 28 weeks before the end of the approaching winter.
The civilian death rate immediately outside the American camps in Germany was about 2% per year, or nearly 100 times lower, despite the greater proportion of older people. Since adequate supplies were readily available to the American troops at all times, this killing seems to have been deliberate.
As for the 692,895 German soldiers still falsely listed as POWs, the last of them had actually been transferred from POW to DEF status a month earlier on August 4, by order of General Eisenhower. Their death rate quickly quadrupled within weeks, from .2% to .8% per week. Assuming the latter rate for the week ending September 8, about 5,543 of the so-called POWs listed in the report as being alive and in American hands had died that week - all would have died within just over two years.. (The reason this death rate was lower than 3.6% weekly for the longer-term DEFs was simply that the barbaric treatment of the DEFs was cumulative, and that some of the American troops refused to go along with this barbaric treatment.) I recall the winter of 1945, when I was on occupation duty in Japan. A similar order came from our local U.S. military commander who was known for his hatred of all Japanese. It did not come from MacArthur's headquarters in Tokyo. We were not allowed to give food of any kind to Japanese civilians, although many of them were on the verge of starvation. I was commanding a detachment of 28 men, which were guarding a Japanese Quarter Master dump at the little town of Niski'ya'hama, about eighty miles south of Osaka. Food in this storehouse was literally spoiling, yet we were not allowed to share it with the Japanese people. For Christmas rations that year, my detachment received eight sheep carcasses and 28 turkeys, with no refrigeration for storage. Rather than see this food go to waste, I shared it with the starving population, and when word leaked out, I came very close to being court marshaled. It was only the intervention of a high ranking officer from MacArthur's Headquarters which saved me.
The same thing happened over and over again in Germany, and American officers and servicemen were court marshaled, on Eisenhower's orders, for sharing their rations with the starving Germans. If you were a young man, with several small children at home, you know how these enemy children played on the minds of decent Americans who knew what their government was doing was wrong. Enemy children have never been enemies, to big hearted Americans.
But with a man of unbounded hatred for the Germans, his order of August 4th, made it impossible for there to be such a thing as a bona fide German POW in American hands on European soil.
Instead, there were vast concentrations of men (including some women and children) starving to death in open, muddy, disease-ridden fields.
In November 1945, Eisenhower returned to Washington. A month later, a slight relaxation went into effect. Men of conscience such as General George Patton, had no qualms about killing German soldiers in combat, but he drew a line at the deliberate policy of murder which was advocated by Eisenhower. I firmly believe this was one of the reasons he met his untimely death The truth which is now coming out of old records, show that "war crimes" was by no means a German monopoly, and the "good war," the Jewish media and historians called it in the United States, was as evil as any conflict in world history.
Bacque's careful calculations forced hty o conclude:
Eisenhower had deplored the German's useless defense of the Reich in the last months of the war because of the waste of life. At least ten times as many Germans - undoubtedly 800,000, almost certainly 900,000, and quite possibly a million died in the French and American camps as were killed in all the combat on the Western front in northwest Europe from America's entry into the war in December 1941, through April 1945."
Bacque was ably assisted in his research by Col. Ernest F. Fisher, a senior historian for the U.S. Army, as well as by other highly placed members of the American military. One of them, Co!. Philip S. Lauben, Chief of the German Affairs branch of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force), stated that, in late 1945, "the Vosges (northeast France) was just one big death camp (for Germans)."
In spite of everything which has been written about Eisenhower which makes him out to be a hero, there seems little question that Dwight Eisenhower meets all the qualifications of a certified war criminal, even if Bacque's figures are off a bit. (If Germany had been the winner, there is little doubt he would have been tried and found guilty of the most heinous crimes against mankind.)
Many veterans will get upset with this appraisal of a man they looked on as a "bona fide" American hero. But the proof for these accusations can be found in what happened to those Germans who were fortunate enough to surrender to the British and the Canadians some two million of them. The evidence shows that "almost all continued in fair health and many were quickly released and sent home or transferred to the French, to help in the post-war work of reconstruction.
Bacque specifically commends General Patton for behavior towards his POWs it a civilized manner. His Third Army freed vast numbers of German captives during May 1945, to the dismay, no doubt, of the Zionists who controlled Washington
Both General Omar Bradley and J. C. H. Lee, Communications Zone (ComZ) Europe, ordered the release of prisoners within a week of the war's end. This SHAEF order was countermanded by Eisenhower on May IS, 1945.
While German soldiers from the British and Canadian zones were quickly regaining manr strength and were helping rebuild Europe, Germans taken by the Americans were dying by the hundreds of thousands - emaciated figures in diarrhea smeared clothing, huddling pitifully in watery holes with perhaps a scrap of cardboard over their heads and a rotten potato for supper. At times many of them were reduced to drinking urine and eating grass.
Did all this happen because of one supremely unprincipled and influential man named Eisenhower? Or was Ike in turn influenced by a small circle around him or by his superiors in Washington? Historians will be probing this question for decades to come.
Here are the principle dates by which this infamy will live:
1944: Eisenhower told the British ambassador to Washington that the 3,500 officers of the German General staff should be ''exterminated.'' He also favored the liquidation of perhaps 100,000 prominent Germans. Soon after, he wrote to his wife, Mamie: "God, I hate Germans! Why? Because the German is a beast!" Eisenhower said he was ashamed to bear a German name.
August 1944: The North American wheat surplus was create greater than at any time in history, nearly one billion bushels. The U.S. corn surplus and potato crop also reached a new high.
March 10, 1944: A message sent from Eisenhower to the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) of Britain and the U.S. recommended the creation of an entirely new class of prisoners, Disarmed Enemy Forces or DEFs. At a press conference in Paris, this same day, Ike said: "If the Germans were reasoning like normal beings, they would realize the whole history of the United States and Great Britain is to be generous towards a defeated enemy. We observe all the laws of the Geneva Convention.''
March 19, 1945: Eisenhower's special assistant, General Everett Hughes, visited the American supply depots at Naples and Marseille. In both places, he writes, there are ''more stocks than we can ever use. (They) stretch as far as eye can see.''
Spring 1945: The International Red Cross had over 100,000 tons of food stockpiled in Switzerland. At one point, it sent two trainloads into the American Zone of Germany, but the food was sent back. The Morgenthau Plan for a ''Carthaginian Peace'' in Germany, to use the words of Military Governor Lucius Clay, is implemented through the directive JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) 1067, which specifies to Eisenhower the policy he must adopt towards every institution in Germany. The directive is largely the work of three of Henry Morgenthau's underlings in the Treasury Department Harry Dexter White, Frank Coe, and Harry Glasser. White and Glasser were both Jews and all three were Communist ''fellow travelers.''
April 11, 1945: On the eve of his death, FDR told Morgenthau in Warm Springs, GA: "Henry, I am with you l00%" When Truman took over, he continued Morgenthau's "Carthaginian Policy" towards conquered Germany.
April 17, 1945: The Americans opened their enormous Rheinberg Camp, six miles in circumference, with no food or shelter whatsoever. As in the other big "Rhine meadow" camps, opened in mid-April, there was initially no latrines and no water. In some camps, the men were so crowded they could not lie down. Meanwhile, at Camp Kripp, near Remagen, the half-American Charles von Luttichau determines that his German comrades are receiving about 5% as much food as their captors." Complaining to the camp commander, HE SAID: ''Forget the Geneva Convention. You don't have any rights."
Late April 1945: Heinz Janssen, a survivor of the Rheinberg camp, described conditions as they were at the time. "Amputees slithered like amphibians through the mud , soaking and freezing. Naked to the skies day after day and night after flight, they lay desperate in the sand of Rheinberg or sleep exhaustedly into eternity ill their collapsing holes.''
April 26, 1945: The Combined Chiefs of Staff sent a message to Eisenhower, urging him not to take any more German prisoners after VE Day. He ignored it. The CCS approved of Ike's proposed DEF status, but only for certain types of German prisoners. The British refused to go against the Geneva Convention. The CCS orders the illegal DEF status to be kept strictly secret. By this date, Eisenhower's Quartermaster General of ASHAEF, Gen. Robert Littlejohn, has already twice reduced the rations to German prisoners. A message to Gen. George C. Marshall, signed by Ike, mandated: ''No shelter'' for German prisoners, despite an unusually cold and wet March and April.
May 4, 1945: The first German POWs were transfer-red to DEF status. Mail to and from all German prisoners was banned for more than a year.
May 8, 1945: Germany surrendered unconditionally. The U.S. State Department wasted no time dismissing Switzerland as the official Protecting Power for German prisoners, contravening the Geneva Convention. State also informed the International Red Cross that, with no Protecting Power to report to, there is no point in sending delegates to the camps. From this day forward, prisoners held by the U.S. Army had no access to any impartial observer. The British and Canadians also removed the Swiss protectors, but continued treating their POWs decently.
May, 1945: The American Red Cross reported that more than 98% of Americans captured by the Germans will be coming home safely, thanks in part to the food parcels sent to them during the war, which were promptly delivered by the Germans.
May 15, 1945: Eisenhower and Churchill talked about further reducing the rations for the German POWs. Churchill was informed that the POWs have been getting 2,000 calories per day (compared to 4,000 for American troops) and that 2,150 was regarded as an absolute minimum required for sedentary adults living under shelter. Eisenhower failed to tell Churchill that the U.S. Army was not even feeding many DEFs, and that they were feeding others, much less than 2,000 calories per day.
Mid-May 1945: The Bingen camp, near Bad Kreuznach in the Rhineland, was now holding between 200,000 and 400,000 German POWs, with no shelter, food, water, or medicine. The death rate for prisoners in these U.S. camps were now about 30% per year, according to a U.S. medical survey.
June 2, 1945: The European Theater Provost Marshal issued two reports. One, the last in a series of daily reports, logged 2,870,400 POWs on hand. The other, the first report in a weekly series, dated the same day, logged only 1,836,000. At one point in mid-June, the prisoner strength on the ration list is given as 1,421,559, despite the evidence of Gen. J.C.H. Lee and others that there were about 4 million. This bizarre bookkeeping persisted throughout 1945 in all branches of the occupying army. The apparent purpose was to obscure the death toll by means of an indecipherable mass of conflicting Statistics. (One of Bacque's greatest coups has been to decipher them.)
Mid - June, 1945: British "Tommies" took over the huge Rheinberg camp from the Americans, saving many thousands of German lives. The final act of the ''Yanks" before the British took charge, was to bulldoze one section flat while the men were still living in their holes in the ground. Meanwhile, a team of doctors from the U.S. Army Medical Corps completed a survey of some of the smaller Rhineland camps, holding some 80,000 POWs (not DEFs). They found a death rate 80 times higher than anything they have known in their professional career.
July, 1945: Eisenhower becomes military governor of the U.S. Zone in Germany. He continued to turn back all relief teams from Switzerland, the U.S. and elsewhere.
July 10, 1945: A French Army unit under Gen. Rousseau, took over the Dietersheim camp (near Mainz) from the Americans. He found 32,000 men and women of all ages in a moribund (dying) State. Another French officer Capt .Julien, was taking command 17 days later and found a vast mire ''peopled with living skeletons, male and female, huddling under scraps of wet card board ." Horrified, Julien wrote: 'This is just like the photographs of Buchenwald and Dachau.
July 20, 1945: Gen. Littlejohn received a memo stating, "These men, German POWs are authorized a maximum of 1,150 calories for the non-workers and 1,850 for workers.'' (Remember, it takes 2,000 calories of keep a sedentary adult alive.
July 26, 1945: The International Red Cross proposed restoring mail service to German POWs. Fearing that the reality of the death camps might come to light, the U. S. War Department rejected the idea.
August 4, 1945: Eisenhower ordered that all remaining German POWs be stripper of their rights, thus reducing them to DEF status.
August 27, 1945: In a long memorandum, Gen. Littlejohn informed Eisenhower that 1,550,000 Germans who supposedly were getting U.S. ARMY RATIONS, WERE RECEIVING NOTHING. Ike turned a deaf ear to his report and the death rate continued to climb.
August 30, 1945: Max Huber, head of the International Red Cross, wrote a stinging letter to the U.S. State Department about American interference in efforts to save starving Germans. Some months later, an evasive response, signed ''Eisenhower,'' arrived in Washington, falsely claiming that giving Red Cross food to enemy personnel was forbidden. Thousands of train cars loaded with decaying food were sent back to Geneva arid to sources in Paris and Brussels. Huber apologized for tying up the French rail system because of the food which was being returned by the Americans.
By this time, more than 2-million German men had been discharged into American custody, including thousands of priests, ministers, doctors, and professors. Not one single camp commander or guard was questioned by the Allied press corps and the controlled media of the U.S. concerning conditions in these hell holes.
It might be well, to stop right here and ask this question: ''Is anyone who reads this horrifying account, so naive as to believe that the American people would have put up with these barbaric actions by its chief military men if they had known about it? Do you think that the politicians who were in the forefront of those who kept these facts from Americans would have lasted very long in office, if the truth had been known? Do you think that millions of Americans would show such concern for the Holocaust of the Jews, if they knew that it was Jewish hatred for their fellow kinsmen, that were killing over a million Germans? I sincerely doubt it! That's why these facts have been kept from the American people for almost fifty years.
Late Summer, 1945: Jean-Pierre Pradervand, head of the International Red Cross delegations in France, told Henry W. Dunning, an American Red Cross official, that conditions in the French camps are worse, in many instances, than anything seen in the former Nazi camps. Pradervand showed Dunning pictures of the living skeletons. Dunning explained all this to the American Red Cross in Washington, which informed key government officials. Nevertheless, the cover-up continued. Pradervand also informed Charles De Gaulle that one-third of the prisoners handed over to France by the Americans will die soon without a radical change in treatment. De Gaulle showed no interest and the prisoners continued to die.
September 27, 1945: Pradervand's pictures of German living skeletons were shown to Eisenhower in his office.
September 30, 1945 - October 1: The French newspaper, Le Monde, ran a story which began: "As one speaks today of Dachau, in ten years people throughout the world will speak about camps such as Saint Paul d'Egiaux.''
October 11,13, 14, 15, 20: The New York Times ran a cover-up report of the death camps by star newsman Drew Middleton. Interviewed by Bacque in 1988, Middleton admitted that he never actually visited any of the 50 U.S. camps located within 40 miles of his Frankfurt desk, but was only 'driven by,' as he was being debriefed by the military."
December 1945: Eisenhower returned to the States and the U.S. Army allowed the first relief shipment to enter the American sector.
1947 - 1950's: Nearly all the surviving records of the Rhineland death camps were destroyed. The West German government concluded that 1.7-million German soldiers were alive at the wars' end, and who were known to have been in fair health, and disappeared. The Western Allies pinned virtually all the blame on the Soviets.
1950: The first German edition of ALLHERERTE KRIEGSVERBRECHEN is published. Never translated into English, the book gives eye-witness descriptions of the conditions which prevailed in the American camps.
1960s - 1972: The West German Foreign Office, under Willy Brandt subsidized books denying the atrocities in American POW camps and the high death rate.
1980: The International Committee of the Red Cross refuses to open its archives to James Bacque and other investigators into Allied atrocities. To this day, the ICRC has remained silent on the subject, despite the visits of Pradervand and other Red Cross delegates to many methhe camps.
September 1989: James Bacque's book on the American death camps, "Other Losses," published by Stoddard, a Canadian Publishing House, was released, after being refused by more than 30 American publishers. Saturday night, one of Canada's most respected magazines. simultaneously published a summary of this book as its lead story and within days Canada was buzzing about Gen. Eisenhower's war crimes. Why is it that we have heard little or nothing of this in the United States?
As American citizens, many of us who served in the American Armed Forces during World War II, and a great many of us who are of German heritage, should demand of our leaders in Washington, D.C. that the truth about this War be made known.
With accurate information of what really happened, instead of Zionist propaganda, just possibly we might be able to avert World War III, which is now being planned by these same One Worlders.
It is interesting to note, that it has been proven in recent years, that many of the pictures taken in Germany during WW II, purporting to be Jewish victims of ''racial extermination,'' were actually pictures of German civilians who had died under American war criminals.
(Most of the information in this article came from the March 1990, CANADIAN INTELLIGENCE SERVICE. Their mut Wly intelligence newsletter is available from the above address)
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/EasternGermany/Gotha/
Gotha
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/EasternGermany/Gotha/Gotha06.jpg
City Hall & Market Square in Gotha
The city of Gotha is mostly known to Americans, if at all, as the first headquarters of the American Army, set up by General Eisenhower in April 1945, and as the site of one of the Prisoner of War camps where captured German soldiers were treated in a barbaric fashion with total disregard to the rules of civilized warfare. Eisenhower mentioned Gotha in his book "Crusade in Europe," as the nearest city to the "horror camp" at Ohrdruf-Nord, the first concentration camp to be discovered by American soldiers in April 1945, but he failed to mention his own notorious POW camp located near Gotha.
On March 10, 1945 as World War II was coming to an end, General Eisenhower signed an order creating the status of Disarmed Enemy Forces for the German Prisoners of War who would soon be surrendering to the Americans. This order was a violation of the Geneva Convention because it allowed Eisenhower to disregard the rules for the treatment of Prisoners of War. It allowed him to starve the German POWs, deny them the right to send and receive letters, receive Red Cross packages or packages from Germany civilians. All these rights were enjoyed by the prisoners in the Nazi POW camps and even in the notorious concentration camps. Eisenhower signed this order before he had even seen the horrors of the concentration camps, which so affected him.
James Bacque wrote in his book Other Losses: "There were no tents in the Gotha DEF camp, only the usual barbed wire fences round a field soon churned to mud. On the first day, they received a small ration of food, which was then cut in half. In order to get it, they were forced to run a gauntlet. Hunched over, they ran between lines of guards who hit them with sticks as they scurried towards their food. On April 27, they were transferred to the U.S. camp at Heidesheim further west where there was no food at all for days, then very little."
On May 8, 1945 the German army surrendered to General Eisenhower, who refused to shake hands with the German General, as is customary. The neutral country of Switzerland was removed as the Protecting Power for German prisoners, which violated the Geneva Convention. General Patton quickly released the prisoners who had surrendered to his Third Army, but General Eisenhower held his POWs until the end of 1946, forcing them to live on starvation rations. Red Cross packages sent to the POW camps were returned. The POW camps had no barracks or tents. The German prisoners were forced to dig holes in the ground for shelter, as the picture below shows. Even though the American army had plenty of tents, the prisoners lived for months in their holes. When it rained, the holes collapsed and the prisoners died.
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/EasternGermany/Gotha/POWcamp.jpg
German POWs had to dig holes for shelter
After 1947 most of the records of the POW camps were destroyed by the U.S. government, according to James Bacque who wrote Other Losses. The Germans determined that 1,700,000 soldiers who were alive at the end of the war and had surrendered to the Allies, never returned home. All of the Allied countries denied responsibility, and the families were never told what had happened to their loved ones.
Ironically, Gotha also holds a place in history as the birthplace of the Socialist Worker's Party of Germany in 1875. The very house, called the Haus am Tivoli, where August Bebel and others got together to form this new leftist political party, is at the intersection of Cosmartstrasse, but it is closed to tourists. A plaque was placed outside the house by the Communist East German government, commemorating this as the place where a "glorious moment in the history of the German working class" took place. Karl Marx wrote a scathing paper called "Critique of the Gotha Programme" in which he criticized the new party as a sell-out of the proletariat and the Communist party, which he had popularized in 1848 with his "Communist Manifesto." In 1890, the name of the party was changed to the Social Democratic Party, which is still one of the largest political parties in Germany today.
It was the Social Democrats who declared a Republic in Germany on November 9, 1918, forced the Kaiser to abdicate, and then signed the Armistice which ended World War I. The Nazis referred to the Social Democrats as the "November Criminals" and called their actions the "Dolchstoss" (Stab in the Back). The claim that Germany had lost World War I on the battlefield was called "The Big Lie" by Hitler in his book, "Mein Kampf." The harsh peace treaty signed by the Social Democrats at Versailles insured that another war would soon follow.
http://netjunk.com/users/library/ike.htm
Eisenhower's Starvation Order
James Bacque
[Allied POW Camp] http://netjunk.com/users/library/camp.jpg
Never had so many people been put in prison. The size of the Allied captures was unprecedented in all history. The Soviets took prisoner some 3.5 million Europeans, the Americans about 6.1 million, the British about 2.4 million, the Canadians about 300,000, the French around 200,000. Uncounted millions of Japanese entered American captivity in 1945, plus about 640,000 entering Soviet captivity. [Above: A U.S. Army soldier stands guard over thousands of German POWs at Sinzig-Remagen, spring 1945.]
As soon as Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945, the American Military Governor, General Eisenhower, sent out an "urgent courier" throughout the huge area that he commanded, making it a crime punishable by death for German civilians to feed prisoners. It was even a death-penalty crime to gather food together in one place to take it to prisoners ... The order was sent in German to the provincial governments, ordering them to distribute it immediately to local governments. Copies of the orders were discovered recently in several villages near the Rhine ... The message [which Bacque reproduces] reads in part: "... under no circumstances may food supplies be assembled among the local inhabitants in order to deliver them to the prisoners of war. Those who violate this command and nevertheless try to circumvent this blockade to allow something to come to the prisoners place themselves in danger of being shot...."
Eisenhower's order was also posted in English, German and Polish on the bulletin board of Military Government Headquarters in Bavaria, signed by the Chief of Staff of the Military Governor of Bavaria. Later it was posted in Polish in Straubing and Regensburg, where there were many Polish guard companies at nearby camps. One US Army officer who read the posted order in May 1945 has written that it was "the intention of Army command regarding the German POW camps in the US Zone from May 1945 through the end of 1947 to exterminate as many POWs as the traffic would bear without international scrutiny."
... The [American] army's policy was to starve [German] prisoners, according to several American soldiers who were there. Martin Brech, retired professor of philosophy at Mercy college in New York, who was a guard at Andernach in 1945, has said that he was told by an officer that "it is our policy that these men not be fed." The 50,000 to 60,000 men in Andernach were starving, living with no shelter in holes in the ground, trying to nourish themselves on grass. When Brech smuggled bread to them through the wire, he was ordered to stop by an officer. Later, Brech sneaked more food to them, was caught, and told by the same officer, "If you do that again, you'll be shot." Brech saw bodies go out of the camp "by the truckload" but he was never told how many there were, where they were buried, or how.
... The prisoner Paul Schmitt was shot in the American camp at Bretzenheim after coming close to the wire to see his wife and young son who were bringing him a basket of food. The French followed suit: Agnes Spira was shot by French guards at Dietersheim in July 1945 for taking food to prisoners. The memorial to her in nearby Buedesheim, written by one of her chidren, reads: "On the 31st of July 1945, my mother was suddenly and unexpectedly torn from me because of her good deed toward the imprisoned soldiers." The entry in the Catholic church register says simply: "A tragic demise, shot in Dietersheim on 31.07.1945. Buried on 03.08.1945." Martin Brech watched in amazement as one officer at Andernach stood on a hillside firing shots towards German women running away from him in the valley below.
The prisoner Hans Scharf ... was watching as a German woman with her two children came towards an American guard in the camp at Bad Kreuznach, carrying a wine bottle. She asked the guard to give the bottle to her husband, who was just inside the wire. The guard upended the bottle into his own mouth, and when it was empty, threw it on the ground and killed the prisoner with five shots.
Many prisoners and German civilians saw the American guards burn the food brought by civilian women. One former prisoner described it recently: "At first, the women from the nearby town brought food into the camp. The American soldiers took everything away from the women, threw it in a heap and poured gasoline [benzine] over it and burned it." Eisenhower himself ordered that the food be destroyed, according to the writer Karl Vogel, who was the German camp commander appointed by the Americans in Camp 8 at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Although the prisoners were getting only 800 calories per day, the Americans were destroying food outside the camp gate.
James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950, pp. 41-45, 94-95. Crimes and Mercies can be purchased from The Institute for Historical Review, PO Box 2739, Newport Beach, CA 92659. $18.95 postpaid (CA sales tax $1.31)
http://home.arcor.de/kriegsgefangene/usa/vae_victis.html
http://home.arcor.de/kriegsgefangen/photos/rheinwiese.gif
Vae Victis - Blow to the loser After the transport over the Atlantic, many prisoners where locked in "cages". It were extremely bad conditions there. In the book "Other losses" written by James Bacque he claimed, that Eisenhower was primarily responsible for the catastrophe in the cages. Eisenhower let the German soldiers starve despite sufficient reinforcements, just due to his feelings of personal revenge. General Eisenhower was in his own words on a "crusade in Europe". The Canadian Bacque estimates, that about 1 million soldiers died in US custody. The anthology by Bishop and Ambrose tries to refute the thesis of James Bacque. They doubt that there where 1 million casualties. How many men exactly died in the cages, fact is that the SHAEF had with 5 million prisoners a considerable problem at the end of the war. An objective report, of the 11 to 12 million German prisoners of war in 20 custody states, is a publication of the "scientific commission for the documentation of the destiny of the German prisoners of the second World War". With up to 16 employees and important scientists, that commission became 400.000 statements of men returned from captivity, 50.000 reports as well and own interviews, published in 22 volumes at more than 10.000 printed pages. After ten years work, when the study had been finished, the (socialist) Westgerman chancellor Herbert Frahm, better known under his pseudonym "Willy Brand", ordered that this report had to be closed and prohibited publishing. He wanted to avoid a public discussion in Germany or even worst in the foreign countries. In his opinion people could get the impression, that a crosscheck would be opened about the injustice of the Allies against the injustice of the Nazis. He was scared that this could endanger the foreign policy turned toward reconciliation. However, it cannot be that the wrong of one site is discreet and the wrong of the other site get accused again and again. <http://home.arcor.de/kriegsgefangen/photos/rheinwiese.gif> In this air picture of the "Rheinwiesenlager" represents every dot a German soldier sitting on the bare field for month. They graved holes to be protected of the wind at least. Some drowned in their foxhole when it rained strongly because they were too weak to creep out, died by their war wounds, by diarrhea, starved..... A horrible catastrophe. The viable prisoners where obliged to forced labor in France and England for many years. To this the Americans submitted to the French powers approx. 800.000 men. The need of the prisoners was particularly great in France. This doesn't have to be explained by revenge, hate or prejudices but we must consider, that large portions of France were destroyed and the Frenchmen had to suffer under a lack of food also. On 8-21-1945 the ICRC wrote a memorandum, that the life of 200.000 German POW's in French custody where immediately endangered, 2000 would hardly recover, 2000 could take no food and had to be fed artificially and 600.000 men had only inadequate accommodations what dangers their life in the approaching winter. Like on a slave market, farmers chose their workers. Thigh, arms and teeth were examined but the soldiers had not to be naked during that procedure like in Russia. A speedy dismissal was offered to soldiers who voluntarily reported for mine clearing commands in view to their highly dangerous job. But, the explanation was even given in writing, the soldiers who risked their life day for day were sent to the coal mines later. That made the prisoners so brittle that some recruited to the Foreign Legion either and died for France on battle-fields in Alger or Indochina, mutilated their self or tried an escape like 171.029 POW did.
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http://abbc.com/nj/e2001/history/german_holocaust.htm
THE WORST ATROCITY OF
WORLD WAR II
By CHRISTIAN BORLEIS
As soon as World War II ended, the United States began shipping food to the hundreds of millions of people acing starvation as a result
of the war. Unprecedented in world history; this massive program fulfilled the highest ideals. Our generosity seemed to have no limit. We fed former enemies Italy and Japan as well as a new enemy, the Soviet Union. Only Germany was left out.
It is well known that for the next 50 years the Allies hanged and incarcerated Nazis for their alleged crimes, the murder of 6 million Jews and their alleged criminal conduct of war. The crimes against the Jews seemed to be well documented but were a concoction. The verdict of guilty was a requisite of hanging the political and military leadership and also to justify the ravaging of the vanquished enemy.
Far worse than the crimes against the Jews and the pretended general war crimes by the Germans was in fact the National Socialist philosophy, which was intolerable to the international bankers. National Socialism stood against the international capitalism of the West and the communism of the East. Between those superpowers National Socialism emerged, forged by a determined leader to liberate a demoralised country
The cruelty imposed on defeated Germany was nothing new to the Germans. They had experienced a hunger blockade after World War I. During those eight months eight hundred thousand people died. The Allies didn’t even allow the German fishing fleet to go to sea.
<http://abbc.com/nj/images/muknd.gif> This child looks at you, and to all those who enjoyed the terrible slaughters of Germans as "the only just war of the century"!
He doesn't need words - the little face says it all
The above foto was taken in Bromberg (West Prussia) on January 22, 1945. It shows a German mother with her little boy. The two were unable to flee Ehrenburg's genocidal Red troops (Morgenthau raged in the west). Ehrenburg's hordes then proceeded to liberate the helpless boy's mother from Hitler. This liberating orgy of rape also "liberated her of her life". For three days and nights the sobbing child clung to his dead mother's hair, until the last strength left his exhausted little body. Heads together, the two, united forever, lay on scorched German earth.
The occupying Allied armies carved 25 percent of Germany’s most fertile land (Silesia, Pomerania, East Prussia and Bohemia) and placed it under Russian and Polish control, forcibly expelling at least 8 (and some claim 12) million people into what remained of Germany It has been forgotten that the Allies kept millions of prisoners in forced labour camps. International charitable aid to Germany was banned for another year, then restricted for more than one year. When it was permitted, it came too late for millions of people.
The Allies slashed production of oil, tractors, steel and products essential to an industrial nation. They cut fertiliser production by 82 percent They undervalued German exports, depriving Germans of
cash needed to buy food. During the next three years following the end of the war Germany’s industrial production fell by 75 percent. The loss of fertile land and the drop in fertiliser supplies caused agricultural production to fall by 65 percent Sixty million people began to starve.
The mass expulsions from one part of Germany to another, approved at the Allied victory conference at Potsdam in July and August 1945, were enforced with a maximum of brutality. In the West, the plan to dismantle German industrial capacity began at the headquarters of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower in August of 1944. Eisenhower prescribed a treatment for Germany that would be "good and hard," giving as his reason that "the whole German population is synthetic [sic] paranoid."
With 13 percent of Germany’s heavy industry destroyed during the war, an additional 3 percent was dismantled afterward, according to German statistics.
But it was the Jewish World Organisation and the Zionist World Congress which saved Germany from this fate of industrial destruction. It was thought that the Germans could be made to pay restitution for the "enormous crime of genocide." In order to commit them to that task they would need to keep the remaining industry intact. The German industrial capacity was restored to aid Israel.
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Nov. 11, 1944 young German Josef Wende was murdered by the Allied-Armies for wearing a German uniform.
The government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer conducted a massive survey about the deaths of German prisoners of war in Allied camps. It was found that some 1.4 million died in captivity. The fall of the Soviet empire in 1989 provided a spectacular test of the truth; the KGB archives were opened for historical scrutiny and the reports from KGB Col. I. Bulanov revealed that 460,000 German POWs had died in Soviet camps alone. In addition, the KGB records show that the Soviets had also imprisoned hundreds of thousands of German civilians, of whom thousands died.
Documents from the National Archives in Ottawa, Moscow, Washington and Stanford, Conn., recently revealed that the Allies not only destroyed most major industry but also reduced German food production.
A comparison of German censuses of 1946 and 1950 shows the effect of food shortages. The 1950 census showed 5.7 million people fewer than there should have been according to the number of people recorded in the 1946 census, minus officially reported deaths, plus births and "immigrants" (people expelled from the east and returning prisoners) in the period from 1946 to 1950. The total tally of unacknowledged deaths among prisoners, refugees and non-expelled civilians comes to about nine millionpeople between 1945 and 1950, far more than the number who died during the war itself. All of these deaths were surplus to those actually reported. Moreover, those deaths occurred in peacetime while the world media did not bother to report of them.
Courtesy of THE DECKERT-DISPATCH, P.O. Box 101117, D-69451 WEINHEIM, GERMANY
The Torah-True-Jews proclaim: "[The Zionists] provoked and increased anti-Semitism in Europe which led to the Second World War ... The world-wide boycott against Germany in 1933 and the later all-out declaration of war against Germany, initiated by the Zionist leaders and the World Jewish Congress ... The Role of Zionism in the Holocaust ... The Zionist leaders: 'Spiritually and Physically Responsible'." (www.jewsnotzionists.org)
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v10/v10p161_Brech.html
In 'Eisenhower's Death Camps': Part I -- A U.S. Prison Guard's Story
Martin Brech
In October 1944, at age eighteen, I was drafted into the U.S. army. Largely because of the "Battle of the Bulge," my training was cut short. My furlough was halved, and I was sent overseas immediately. Upon arrival in Le Havre, France, we were quickly loaded into box cars and shipped to the front. When we got there, I was suffering increasingly severe symptoms of mononucleosis, and was sent to a hospital in Belgium. Since mononucleosis was then known as the "kissing disease," I mailed a letter of thanks to my girlfriend.
By the time I left the hospital, the outfit I had trained with in Spartanburg, South Carolina was deep inside Germany, so, despite my protests, I was placed in a "repo depot (replacement depot). I lost interest in the units to which I was assigned and don't recall all of them: non-combat units were ridiculed at that time. My separation qualification record states I was mostly with Company C, 14th Infantry Regiment, during my seventeen-month stay in Germany, but I remember being transferred to other outfits also.
In late March or early April 1945, I was sent to guard a POW camp near Andernach along the Rhine. I had four years of high school German, so I was able to talk to the prisoners, although this was forbidden. Gradually, however, I was used as an interpreter and asked to ferret out members of the S.S. (I found none.)
In Andernach about 50,000 prisoners of all ages were held in an open field surrounded by barbed wire. The women were kept in a separate enclosure I did not see until later. The men I guarded had no shelter and no blankets; many had no coats. They slept in the mud, wet and cold, with inadequate slit trenches for excrement. It was a cold, wet spring and their misery from exposure alone was evident.
Even more shocking was to see the prisoners throwing grass and weeds into a tin can containing a thin soup. They told me they did this to help ease their hunger pains. Quickly, they grew emaciated. Dysentery raged, and soon they were sleeping in their own excrement, too weak and crowded to reach the slit trenches. Many were begging for food, sickening and dying before our eyes. We had ample food and supplies, but did nothing to help them, including no medical assistance.
Outraged, I protested to my officers and was met with hostility or bland indifference. When pressed, they explained they were under strict orders from "higher up." No officer would dare do this to 50,000 men if he felt that it was "out of line," leaving him open to charges. Realizing my protests were useless, I asked a friend working in the kitchen if he could slip me some extra food for the prisoners. He too said they were under strict orders to severely ration the prisoners' food and that these orders came from "higher up." But he said they had more food than they knew what to do with and would sneak me some.
When I threw this food over the barbed wire to the prisoners, I was caught and threatened with imprisonment. I repeated the "offense," and one officer angrily threatened to shoot me. I assumed this was a bluff until I encountered a captain on a hill above the Rhine shooting down at a group of German civilian women with his .45 caliber pistol. When I asked, Why?," he mumbled, "Target practice," and fired until his pistol was empty. I saw the women running for cover, but, at that distance, couldn't tell if any had been hit.
This is when I realized I was dealing with cold-blooded killers filled with moralistic hatred. They considered the Germans subhuman and worthy of extermination; another expression of the downward spiral of racism. Articles in the G.I. newspaper, Stars and Stripes, played up the German concentration camps, complete with photos of emaciated bodies; this amplified our self-righteous cruelty and made it easier to imitate behavior we were supposed to oppose. Also, I think, soldiers not exposed to combat were trying to prove how tough they were by taking it out on the prisoners and civilians.
These prisoners, I found out, were mostly farmers and workingmen, as simple and ignorant as many of our own troops. As time went on, more of them lapsed into a zombie-like state of listlessness, while others tried to escape in a demented or suicidal fashion, running through open fields in broad daylight towards the Rhine to quench their thirst. They were mowed down.Some prisoners were as eager for cigarettes as for food, saying they took the edge off their hunger. Accordingly, enterprising G.I. "Yankee traders" were acquiring hordes of watches and rings in exchange for handfuls of cigarettes or less. When I began throwing cartons of cigarettes to the prisoners to ruin this trade, I was threatened by rank-and-file G.I.s too.
The only bright spot in this gloomy picture came one night when.I was put on the "graveyard shift," from two to four A.M. Actually, there was a graveyard on the uphill side of this enclosure, not many yards away. My superiors had forgotten to give me a flashlight and I hadn't bothered to ask for one, disgusted as I was with the whole situation by that time. It was a fairly bright night and I soon became aware of a prisoner crawling under the wires towards the graveyard. We were supposed to shoot escapees on sight, so I started to get up from the ground to warn him to get back. Suddenly I noticed another prisoner crawling from the graveyard back to the enclosure. They were risking their lives to get to the graveyard for something; I had to investigate.
When I entered the gloom of this shrubby, tree-shaded cemetery, I felt completely vulnerable, but somehow curiosity kept me moving. Despite my caution, I tripped over the legs of someone in a prone position. Whipping my rifle around while stumbling and trying to regain composure of mind and body, I soon was relieved I hadn't reflexively fired. The figure sat up. Gradually, I could see the beautiful but terror-stricken face of a woman with a picnic basket nearby. German civilians were not allowed to feed, nor even come near the prisoners, so I quickly assured her I approved of what she was doing, not to be afraid, and that I would leave the graveyard to get out of the way.
I did so immediately and sat down, leaning against a tree at the edge of the cemetery to be inconspicuous and not frighten the prisoners. I imagined then, and still do now, what it would be like to meet a beautiful woman with a picnic basket, under those conditions as a prisoner. I have never forgotten her face.
Eventually, more prisoners crawled back to the enclosure. I saw they were dragging food to their comrades and could only admire their courage and devotion.
On May 8, V.E. Day, I decided to celebrate with some prisoners I was guarding who were baking bread the other prisoners occasionally received. This group had all the bread they could eat, and shared the jovial mood generated by the end of the war. We all thought we were going home soon, a pathetic hope on their part. We were in what was to become the French zone, where I soon would witness the brutality of the French soldiers when we transferred our prisoners to them for their slave labor camps.
On this day, however, we were happy.
As a gesture of friendliness, I emptied my rifle and stood it in the corner, even allowing them to play with it at theirs! request. This thoroughly "broke the ice," and soon we were singing songs we taught each other or I had learned in high school German ("Du, du liegst mir im Herzen"). Out of gratitude, they baked me a special small loaf of sweet bread, the only possible present they had left to offer. I stuffed it in my "Eisenhower jacket" and snuck it back to my barracks, eating it when I had privacy. I have never tasted more delicious bread, nor felt a deeper sense of communion while eating it. I believe a cosmic sense of Christ (the Oneness of all Being) revealed its normally hidden presence to me on that occasion, influencing my later decision to major in philosophy and religion.
Shortly afterwards, some of our weak and sickly prisoners were marched off by French soldiers to their camp. We were riding on a truck behind this column. Temporarily, it slowed down and dropped back, perhaps because the driver was as shocked as I was. Whenever a German prisoner staggered or dropped back, he was hit on the head with a club until he died. The bodies were rolled to the side of the road to be picked up by another truck. For many, this quick death might have been preferable to slow starvation in our "killing fields."
When I finally saw the German women in a separate enclosure, I asked why we were holding them prisoner. I was told they were "camp followers," selected as breeding stock for the S.S. to create a super-race. I spoke to some and must say I never met a more spirited or attractive group of women. I certainly didn't think they deserved imprisonment.
I was used increasingly as an interpreter, and was able to prevent some particularly unfortunate arrests. One rather amusing incident involved an old farmer who was being dragged away by several M.P.s. I was told he had a "fancy Nazi medal," which they showed me. Fortunately, I had a chart identifying such medals. He'd been awarded it for having five children! Perhaps his wife was somewhat relieved to get him "off her back," but I didn't think one of our death camps was a fair punishment for his contribution to Germany. The M.P.s agreed and released him to continue his "dirty work."
Famine began to spread among the German civilians also. It was a common sight to see German women up to their elbows in our garbage cans looking for something edible -- that is, if they weren't chased away.
When I interviewed mayors of small towns and villages, I was told their supply of food had been taken away by "displaced persons" (foreigners who had worked in Germany), who packed the food on trucks and drove away. When I reported this, the response was a shrug. I never saw any Red Cross at the camp or helping civilians, although their coffee and doughnut stands were available everywhere else for us. In the meantime, the Germans had to rely on the sharing of hidden stores until the next harvest.
Hunger made German women more "available," but despite this, rape was prevalent and often accompanied by additional violence. In particular I remember an eighteen-year old woman who had the side of her faced smashed with a rifle butt and was then raped by two G.I.s. Even the French complained that the rapes, looting and drunken destructiveness on the part of our troops was excessive. In Le Havre, we'd been given booklets warning us that the German soldiers had maintained a high standard of behavior with French civilians who were peaceful, and that we should do the same. In this we failed miserably.
"So what?" some would say. "The enemy's atrocities were worse than ours." It is true that I experienced only the end of the war, when we were already the victors. The German opportunity for atrocities had faded; ours was at hand. But two wrongs don't make a right. Rather than copying our enemy's crimes, we should aim once and for all to break the cycle of hatred and vengeance that has plagued and distorted human history. This is why I am speaking out now, forty-five years after the crime. We can never prevent individual war crimes, but we can, if enough of us speak out, influence government policy. We can reject government propaganda that depicts our enemies as subhuman and encourages the kind of outrages I witnessed. We can protest the bombing of civilian targets, which still goes on today. And we can refuse ever to condone our government's murder of unarmed and defeated prisoners of war.
I realize it is difficult for the average citizen to admit witnessing a crime of this magnitude, especially if implicated himself. Even G.I.s sympathetic to the victims were afraid to complain and get into trouble, they told me. And the danger has not ceased. Since I spoke out a few weeks ago, I have received threatening calls and had my mailbox smashed. But its been worth it. Writing about these atrocities has been a catharsis of feeling suppressed too long, a liberation, and perhaps will remind other witnesses that "the truth will make us free, have no fear." We may even learn a supreme lesson from all this: only love can conquer all.
Eisenhower was nicknamed "The Swedish Jew" as a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point. In Ike's time USMA cadets were required to be 100% white and non-negroid, or as close to that as medical doctors and geneological research could then ascertain. Serious official questions arose about Ike's obvious part non-white genetic heritage. These appeared to be negroid in origin. "Ike" explained this away as being due to a Jewish ancestor from Sweden, hence the nickname "The Swedish Jew".
Military Academy cadets and other officer candidates get to know each other extremely well during their schooling, provided it's conducted on an intensive basis as U.S. officer schooling formerly was. Everyone is at close quarters running 24/7. There's no place to hide character traits in those conditions. Cadet nicknames are usually extremely descriptive. And when they're keyed to obvious non-white themes it's a warning signal to look deeper. Here's another example. The U.S. Pacific Fleet commander who allowed himself to be surprised at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, was nicknamed "Mustapha"as a midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. Other "Mustaphas" in Egypt and Syria allowed this to happen to themselves in 1967.
The academy and officer training schools (used?) to take official advantage of that close quarters peer knowledge through an anonymous peer rating mechanism. I knew this as "Top Five/Bottom Five" and it meant what it said. Officer candidates rated their platoon fellows on leadership in rank order from Top One to Bottom x. People who accumulated too many "Bottom Five" rankings were automatically scheduled for periodic official leadership review boards for enquiry into whether they should be dismissed without commission. The presumption of such boards used to be such individuals should be dismissed unless they could prove they were worthy of commission. Very, very few survived such review boards.
Judeo-Marxist Academics like the military scribbler Weigley and the Jew military 'sociologist' Moscowitz are generally extremely hostile to processes like peer rating and also to troop election of officers at regimental level and below. The admixture of females has added feminist hostility to the opposition to such processes. The long-term result is a corps of military leaders who possess less and less confidence where it really counts. That's among their soldiers. This has gone so far that the average U.S. ground combat unit is unusable for its designed purpose.
After long military experience and study the wisdom of both peer ratings and also electing regimental officers in militia and citizen-soldier units seems more and more profound to me. I think the only safeguard needed is a veto power for general officers to remove obvious misfits. You can conduct all the bureaucratic schooling processes you want. But if an officer does not possess the confidence of his troops they will not follow him in combat, obey his orders or stay the course in difficult times. Consequently years of academic training simply go to waste. Electing first and schooling second is probably the best way.
P.S. The leadership qualities required from military leaders and from political leaders are not identical. Some individuals combine these two attribute sets. Hitler did not combine these qualities, at least at the lower infantry unit level. This is proven by the fact he entered the Bavarian Army as a private and emerged after four years of war as a corporal. Despite this many fellow war veterans from his former battalion willingly followed him as a political leader, including his former battalion sergeant-major and some officers.
Nineteenth Century America managed to select many men for high office who did combine both leadership sets in fairly large numbers. This more than anything explains the rapid conquest of the continent. It was not 'luck'. The old American Republic (long since vanished) actually conformed very closely in practice to the ideals of the old Roman Republic in both military process and results. The Roman Republic constitutionally required that political leaders prove themselves as leaders in war. This was an ideal for early Americans but not a definite legal requirement. Had the Founding Fathers mandated this in the Constitution our history would have turned out very differently. Certainly Canada, Mexico and Cuba would not exist as independent states. Whether this would have prevented subsequent miscegenation or the Civil War is another question.
And results (output) are the real measure of military efficiency (or any other efficiency). The military stature and efficiency of a state is not measured by the numbers of troops raised or the percentage of the budget applied to 'military' appropriations; i.e. inputs. The Neo-con pseudo-patriots of the Judeo-Republican Party (non-veterans to a womandman) do think in these Communist terms of inputs. If this measurement were valid then Italy would be one of the military success stories of the 20th Century rather than one of the premier failures. When judged by this standard of results 19th Century America was a resounding success as a military state. Twentieth Century America was a military failure to the point that political loss of territory is now occuring in the Southwest.
P.P.S. Note to the former student of Russell F. Weigley who wrote in to defend him.
In my 1984 edition of Weigley's "History of the United States Army" he devotes about 40 pages to the War of 1812. He dedicates nearly all of this to harping on the relatively small Congressional size authorization and even lower actual personnel fill (about 20,000) of the "Regular Army". In this section Weigley glosses over the militia contribution in the sentence "this number was exclusive of those men from the volunteer and common militias who served for short periods against British raids and invasions in their own districts and who may have numbered in the hundreds of thousands."
Then Weigley reverts back to beating to death obscurities like poor Regular Army horse recruitment and rotten contractor commissary stores. The obscure "Battle of Lundy's Lane" (actually a minor skirmish around Niagara) receives an extensive autopsy. The Battles of Put-in Bay, New Orleans and General Harrison's campaign to reconquer the Northwest are ignored. These large-scale decisive events were commanded by regular officers leading Weigley's ignored militia.
And New Orleans was decisive despite being fought after 'peace' was signed. Anyone who thinks the extermination of Britain's best veteran regiments at the hands of frontier militia didn't exercise a subsequent deterrent effect on British decision-making doesn't understand how governments arrive at war and peace decisions. The British decision to negotiate over "Fifty-four Forty or Fight!" in the 1840s was undoubtedly influenced by that memory.
If Weigley had ever marched even once 20 miles with a 100 pound pack in 100 degree heat he would have understood something. Even 100,000 perfectly trained regulars alone would have resulted in American defeat. In the early 19th Century transport proceeded by foot, by horse or by sea. Since the British had overall naval superiority moving troops by sea convoy was not possible. This left marching on land. The factors of force/space/time applied to North America dictated that the early Republic had to rely on 'militia'. This was especially true when fighting an enemy possessing command of the sea and the choice of where and when to strike with large amphibious raiding parties. There was no possibility of a timely counter-concentration of a central reserve at the tactical level, especially on defense. This comes back to Nathan Bedford Forrest's "he who gets theah fustest with mostest." Overall numbers are irrelevant in such conditions unless you create a 'nation in arms' as was done by the Militia Act of 1792.
Like I said, Weigley's book is worthless garbage that should be collected up and pulped.
[1990] A U.S. PRISON GUARD AT ONE OF "IKE'S DEATH CAMPS"
By Martin Brech
FORTY-FIVE years ago, I witnessed an atrocity: the deliberate starvation of German POWs by our own army. History, written by the victors, suppressed all news of this atrocity until James Bacque, a Canadian author, published his brilliant expose, OTHER LOSSES. This book is a best seller in Canada, a sensation in Europe, yet is virtually unavailable (censored?) in the U.S. Our major booksellers told me their distributors are not handling it. When I prevailed upon a small, independent bookstore to order direct from Canada, the publisher told them they would be the only store in New York State to carry the book. This in 'the land of the free'?"
Fortunately, Pat Buchanan called attention to OTHER LOSSES in his January 10, 1990 column. He wrote:
"Conclusion: the U.S. Army killed ten times as many Germans in POW camps as we did on battlefields from Normandy to V.E. day. (German POWs) had their rations cut below survival level until they were dying at rates up to 30% of exposure, starvation and neglect... Red Cross food trains were turned back and U.S. food shipments sat on the docks...One French officer said the U.S. camps reminded him of Dachau and Buchenwald...The book blames Eisenhower. 'The German is a beast,' Ike had written... But that was not how the Canadians and British felt, who treated their prisoners justly...It was not the view of General Mark Clark, nor of Patton...Ignoring the book is not enough."
Pat Buchanan's courageous column inspired me to help end the cover-up of the atrocity I had witnessed. I wrote letters to several newspapers which were, of necessity, short and incomplete. Now I would like to finally free more of my painful memories, hoping to be heard, so that this will help us to acknowledge our share in the "banality of evil", cleansing ourselves with the truth. Perhaps we as a nation may then put this behind us with some integrity and with some hope for redemption.
In October 1944, at age eighteen, I was drafted into the army while a student at the NYS College of Forestry. Largely due to the "Battle of the Bulge", my training was cut short, my furlough cut in half, and I was then immediately sent overseas. Upon arrival in Le Havre, France, we were quickly loaded into boxcars and shipped to the front. By the time we reached it, I had developed mononucleosis severely enough to be sent to a hospital in Belgium.
By the time I left the hospital, the unit I had trained with in Spartenburg, South Carolina was so deeply into Germany that I warn placed in a "repo depo" (a replacement depot) despite my protests. I then lost interest in which units I was assigned to because non-combat units were generally not respected. My separation qualification record states that I served mostly with the 14th Infantry Regiment, during which time I guarded prisoners of war and served as an interpreter. During my seventeen month stay in Germany, I was transferred to other outfits also.
In late March or early April 1945, I was assigned to help guard a POW camp near Andernach along the Rhine. I had four years of high school German, so I was able to talk to the prisoners, although this was forbidden.
Gradually, however, I was used as an interpreter and asked to ferret out the S.S. (I found none.)
In Andernach, between 50,000 and 65,000 prisoners, ranging in age from very young teens to very old men, were crowded together in an open field surrounded by barbed wire. The women were kept in a separate enclosure which I did not see until later. The men I guarded had no tents or other shelter, no blankets and many had no coats. Inadequate numbers of slit trenches were provided for excrement, and so the men lived and slept in the mud and increasing filth during a cold, wet spring. Their misery from exposure alone was evident.
It was even more shocking to see them eating grass, sometimes throwing it into a tin can containing a thin soup. They told me they did this hoping to ease their hunger pains. Soon their emaciation was evident. Dysentery raged and, too weak and crowded to reach the slit trenches, they were increasingly sleeping in excrement. I saw no sign of provision for water, so the thin soup was their food and water for the day. Some days there was bread, less than a slice each. Other days there was nothing.
The sight of so many men desperate for food and water, sickening and dying before our eyes, is indescribable. Even now, I can only think of it momentarily.
We had ample food and supplies that could have been shared more humanely, and we could have offered some medical assistance, but did nothing. Only the dead were quickly and efficiently taken care of: hauled away to mass graves.
My outrage reached the point that I protested to my officers, but I was met with hostility or bland indifference. When pressed, they explained they were under strict orders from "higher up". No officer would dare to systematically do this to over 50,000 prisoners if he felt he was violating general policy and subject to court martial. The term "war criminal" was just beginning to come into fashion.
Realizing my protests were useless, I asked a friend working in the kitchen if he could slip me some extra food for the prisoners. He too repeated that they were under strict orders to severely ration the prisoners' food, and that these orders came from "higher up". But he said they had more food than they knew what to do with and would sneak me some.
When I threw this food over the barbed wires to the prisoners I was caught and threatened with imprisonment. I repeated the "offense", and one officer threatened to shoot me. I naturally assumed this was a bluff, but I began to have some doubts after I encountered a captain on a hill above the Rhine shooting down at a group of German civilian women with his .45 caliber pistol. When I asked, "Why?" he mumbled, "Target practice," and fired until his pistol was empty. I saw the women running for cover, but, at that distance, couldn't tell if any had been hit.
This is when I more fully realized I was dealing with some cold-blooded killers filled with moralistic hatred. They considered the Germans sub-human and worthy of extermination; another expression of the downward spiral of racism. Articles in the G.I. newspaper, Stars & Stripes, played up the Nazi concentration camps, complete with photographs of emaciated bodies; this amplified our self-righteous cruelty and made it easier to imitate behavior we were supposed to oppose. Also, I think, soldiers not exposed to combat were trying to prove how tough they were by taking it out on the prisoners and civilians. At least, many combat soldiers told me later they would not have tolerated this, for they combined hatred with respect for a courageous enemy.
The prisoners I spoke to were mostly simple farmers and workingmen, as ignorant, albeit nationalistic, as many of our own troops. I heard many versions of "my country, right or wrong, my country," which we still hear in our own country today.
As time went on, many of them lapsed into a Zombie-like state of listlessness. Others, maddened by thirst, tried to escape in a desperate or suicidal fashion, running through open fields in broad daylight towards the Rhine to quench their thirst. They were mowed down.
Some prisoners were extremely eager for cigarettes, saying they took the edge off their hunger. Accordingly, some enterprising G.I. "Yankee traders" were acquiring hordes of wrist watches and rings in exchange for handfuls of cigarettes or less. When I began throwing cartons of cigar-ettes to the prisoners to ruin this trade, I found myself threatened by rank-and-file G.I.s also. At least this taught me an indelible lesson: how wrong majorities and authorities can be.
A bright spot in this gloomy picture came, oddly enough, one night when I was put on the "graveyard shift", from two to four A.M. Actually, there was a graveyard on the uphill side of this enclosure, not many yards away. My superiors had forgotten to give me a flashlight and I hadn't bothered to ask, being disgusted with the whole situation by that time. It was a fairly bright night and I soon became aware of a prisoner crawling under the wires to the graveyard. We were supposed to shoot escapees on sight, so I started to get up to warn him to get back. Suddenly I noticed another prisoner crawling from the graveyard back to the enclosure. They were risking their lives to get to the graveyard for something; I had to investigate.
When I entered the gloom of this shrubby, tree-shaded cemetery, I never felt more vulnerable, but somehow curiosity kept me going. Despite my caution, I tripped over the legs of someone in a prone position. Whipping my rifle around while stumbling and trying to regain composure of mind and body, I soon was relieved I hadn't reflexively fired. The figure sat up, moving erratically. Gradually I could see the beautiful but terror-stricken face of a woman with a picnic basket nearby. German civilians were not allowed to feed, nor even come near, the prisoners, so I quickly assured her I approved of what she was doing, not to be afraid, and that I would leave the graveyard to get out of the way, telling no one.
I left the graveyard as quickly as possible and sat down, leaning against a tree at the edge CF the cemetary to be inconspicuous and not frighten the prisoners. I imagined then, and often since, what it would be like to be a prisoner under those conditions and meet a beautiful woman with a picnic basket. I never saw her again, but I have never forgotten her face.
While I watched, more prisoners crawled to and from the enclosure. I saw they were dragging food back to their comrades and could only admire their courage and devotion. As I walked back to my quarters at the end of my shift, a nightingale and I were singing -- both felt a touch of spring.
(I originally did not intend to reveal the following incident, for it moves into a realm termed "mystical". However, for me, it was an extremely significant experience, changing my life, providing a light no darkness can extinguish. It must be told, hoping it will foster understanding.)
On May 8, V.E. day, I decided to celebrate with some prisoners I was guarding who were baking bread, meager amounts of which the other prisoners occasionally received. This group had all the bread they could eat, and shared the jovial mood generated by the end of the war. We all thought we would be going home soon, a pathetic hope on their part. We were in what was to become the French zone, and I later witnessed the brutality of the French soldiers when we transferred our prisoners to them for their slave labor camps (see below).
However, on this day we were happy.
After chatting with them about the potentials of peace for the rest of our lives, I decided to risk a gesture of trust that objectively would seem foolish. I emptied my rifle and stood it in the corner. They tested me further by asking to play with it, and I agreed. Intuitively I felt I could rely on their sense of honor not to attack me, for they knew they too were being tested. This thoroughly 'broke the ice', and soon we were singing songs we taught each other or I had learned in high school German ("Du, du, liegst mir im Herzen"). Out of gratitude, they secretly baked a small sweet bread and insisted I take it, explaining it was the only possible gift they had left to offer. Expressing my gratitude with a lump in my throat, I put it in my tight "Eisenhower jacket" so I could sneak it back to my barracks. I later found an opportunity to eat it outside.
Never had bread tasted more delicious, nor conveyed to me a deeper sense of communion while eating it. A wonderful feeling pervaded me, gently opening me to an intimation of the Oneness of all Being. Through those prisoners I sensed the ~cosmic presence of what has been called the Christ, Buddha-nature, or, perhaps most aptly, the Ineffable: cosmically present, but hidden and apparently separate, until revealed in the wholeness of the giving of the self. Even within the horror humans had created, I was taught a path to redemption may open by taking a first, tentative step in the direction of love, understanding and forgiveness. This above all the prisoners taught me: not only are we all potentially humane humans, there is divinity within us waiting for us to dissolve the defensive shield of ego. I was pleased to discover later the words of Matthew 25:34-46, expressing the potential within prisoners and all who are at our mercy.
Shortly after this experience I was plunged into even greater horror. Some of our weak and sickly prisoners were being marched off by French soldiers to their camp. The truck we were on first passed another truck picking up bodies along the side of the road, and then came up behind a slowly moving column of men. Temporarily we slowed down and remained behind, perhaps because the driver was as shocked as I was. The French soldiers were apparently incensed at the poor condition of our prisoners, not only for labor but for marching to another camp. Whenever a prisoner staggered or dropped back, the French clubbed him to death and then dragged him to the side of the road. For many, this quick death might have been preferable to their prolonged suffering. Even gas would have been more merciful than our murder by neglect in our slow 'killing fields'.
When I saw the German women held in a separate enclosure, I asked why we were keeping them. I was told they were "camp followers", selected as breeding stock for the S.S. to create a super-race. We provided them with tents but they were extremely hungry. I spoke to some and must say they were still spirited and attractive. However, I believe I was objective enough when I told all concerned that I didn't think they deserved our treatment.
As an interpreter, I was able to prevent some particularly unfortunate arrests. One somewhat amusing incident occurred during a pre-dawn raid we conducted on a town to discover Nazis or arms. An old farmer was being dragged away by some soldiers. I was told he had a "fancy Nazi medal", which they showed to me. Fortunately, I had a chart identifying such medals. He had been awarded it for having five or more children! Perhaps his wife was somewhat relieved to get him "off her back", but I didn't think one of our 'death camps' was a fair punishment for his contribution to Germany. The soldiers agreed and released him to continue his "dirty work".
Famine was spreading amongst German civilians also. It was a common sight to see German women up to their elbows in our garbage cans looking for something edible -- that is, when they weren't chased away.
When I interviewed mayors of small towns and villages, I was told their supply of food had been taken away by "displaced persons" (foreigners who had worked in Germany), who packed the food on trucks and drove away. When I reported this, the response was a shrug or an expression of helplessness.
Although the Red Cross coffee and doughnut stands were available everywhere for us, I never saw any Red Cross in the prison camps or helping the civilians. While my girlfriend had all the "contraband" doughnuts she could eat, most Germans had to share their meager hidden stores and wait until the next harvest.
This hunger undoubtedly made many German women more "available", but, despite this, rape was incredibly prevalent and often accompanied by additional violence. I particularly remember a charming eighteen year old girl who had several unsuccessful suitors and was "just friends" with me, who had the side of her face smashed with a rifle butt and was then raped by two G.I.s. The casual shooting of German civilians also continued, usually by drunken soldiers who would tell of this as something amusing. All too many G.I.s gave the impression they were 1ike animals released from cages, free to do what they liked because they were dealing with yet a lower species of animal, a reverse racism, inflamed by our propaganda. However, even the French complained to me that our rape and drunken destructive behavior in their country was excessive. When we had arrived in Le Havre, we had been given booklets instructing us that the Germans had maintained a high standard of behavior with French civilians who were peaceful, and that we should do the same. In this we failed miserably.
So what? we might still say. The enemies' atrocities were worse than ours. Certainly my experiences were only of the last phases of the war, when we were already clearly the victors. The Nazi opportunity for atrocities had faded and ours was unleashed. But we might have learned the simple lesson that two wrongs do not make a right. Perhaps we might even have broken the cycle of vengeful retaliation and unbridled hatred, fed by racism, that has plagued human history and blighted human potential all to long. Instead, we committed our own atrocities and now are clinging to a cover-up. That is why I am speaking out now, forty-five years after the crime. We can never prevent individual war crimes, but we can, if enough of us speak out, influence government policy. We can reject government propaganda that depicts our enemies as subhuman and encourages the kinds of outrages I witnessed. We can protest the bombing of civilian targets, which still goes on today. (I will never forget the sickly sweet smell of rotting human flesh rising from the shattered remains of the cities and towns I entered.) And we can refuse ever to condone our government' s murder of unarmed and defeated prisoners of war.
I realized it's difficult to admit witnessing a crime of this magnitude, especially if implicated oneself. Even G.I .s sympathetic to the victims told me they were afraid to oppose so massive a policy that would surely seek to cover its tracks. I never heard this directly from an officer, but it was the belief of the rank-and-file G.I.s I spoke to that we were not to "talk" because, first, no one would believe us, and second, we would surely get into trouble. They all insisted it was better not to talk, and slowly I too realized it would be futile and dangerous. That is, until now, thanks to James Bacque and Pat Buchanan. This is not to say the danger has passed. Since I "spoke out" recently, my mailbox has been smashed and I have received threatening phone calls. But I believe it is worth the risk. Writing about these atrocities has been a atharsis of feelings suppressed too long, a liberation, and perhaps will remind other witnesses and citizens -that "the truth shall make us free, have no fear." And, in any case, "the truth shall out".
We may even learn a supreme lesson from all this: Hate is self- destructive; only love can conquer and evolve all as One.
Martin Brech (Adjunct Professor, Philosophy & Religion, Mercy College; Ex-G.I., Finally Free)
Ike and the Disappearing Atrocities New York Times Book Review, February 24, 1991
Seldom has the publication of a historical monograph on a subject ordinarily of interest only to a few specialists - the treatment of prisoners of war - received so much attention or excited so much anger as James Bacque's "Other Losses." Published in 1989 in Canada, it was the subject of a cover story in the popular Canadian magazine Saturday Night, of a British Broadcasting Corporation documentary, of two German television documentaries and of a coming Canadian Broadcasting Network documentary. (The Canadian book, I should say immediately, carries a jacket blurb from me that was taken out of context and used without permission) It has been discussed on American television, in Time magazine and in many other news media outlets. In its German edition, it was a runaway best seller. The British edition elicited major reviews in the Times Literary Supliment and elsewhere. Prima Publishing of California intendes to publish the book in May, which could fan the flames in the United States.
The reason for the notoriety is the author's conclusion that Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, as head of the American occupation of Germany in 1945, deliberately starved to death German prisoners of war in staggering numbers. Mr. Bacque charges that "the victims undoubtedly number over 800,000, almost certainly over 800,000 and quite likely over a million. Their deaths were knowingly caused by army officers who had sufficient resources to keep the prisoners alive."
Eisenhower's method, according to Mr. Bacque, was simple: he changed the designation of the prisoners from "Prisoners of War" (P.O.W.), required by the Geneva Convention to be fed the same rations as American G.I.'s, to "Disarmed Enemy Forces" (D.E.F.), which allowed him to cut their rations to starvation level. Mr. Bacque says the D.E.F. were also denied medical supplies and shelter. They died by the hundreds of thousands. Their deaths were covered up on Army records by listing them as "other looses" on charts showing weekly totals of prisoners on hand, numbers discharged and so forth.
So outraged is Mr. Bacque by his discovery of this heinous crime that he has been quoted in a wire service interview as saying Americans "should take down every statue of Eisenhower, and every photograph of him and annul his memory from American history as best they can, except to say, 'Here was a man who did very evil things that we're ashamed of.'" Questions immediately arise. If there were a million dead, where are the bodies? Did Eisenhower have such vast power that he could order starvation on a mass scale and keep it a secret? Was the undoubted suffering in the camps, especially the transit camps along the Rhine, the result of Eisenhower's policy or the result of the chaotic conditions that prevailed in Europe in the spring and summer of 1945?
Mr. Bacque, a Canadian novelist with no previous historical research or writing experience, says in his introduction: "Doubtless many scholars will find faults in this book, which are only mine. I welcome their criticism and their further research, which may help to restore to us the truth after a long night of lies." Last December, the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans invited some leading experts on the period to examine the charges. The conference participants, including me, plan to publish the papers in book form.
Our first conclusion was that Mr. Bacque had made a major historical discovery. There _was_ wdiespread mistreatment of German prisoners in the spring and summer of 1945. Men were beaten, denied water, forced to live in open camps without shelter, given inadequate food rations and inadequate medical care. Their mail was withheld. In some cases prisoners made a "soup" of water and grass in order to deal with their hunger. Men did die needlessly and inexcusably. This must be confronted, and it is to Mr. Bacque's credit that he forces us to do so.
Our second conclusion was that when scholars do the necessary research, they will find Mr. Bacque's work to be worse than worthless. It is seriously - nay, spectacularly - flawed in its most fundamental aspects. Mr. Bacque misuses documents; he misreads documents; he ignores contrary evidence; his statistical methodology is hopelessly compromised; he makes no attempt to look at comparative contexts; he puts words into the mouth of his principal source; he ignores a readily available and absolutely critical source that decisively deals with his central accusation; and, as a consequence of these and and other shortcomings, he reaches conclusions and makes charges that are demonstrably absurd.
Apart from its assessment of Mr. Bacque's findings, however, the conference - along with the book itself - raises a larger issue: how are readers who are not experts to judge a work that makes new, startling, indeed outrageious, claims? Without the knowledge or the time to investigate, how are they to know if an author has finally revealed the truth "after a long night of lies," or is simply misleading an unwary public?
As for Mr. Bacque's claims, the most immediate question is that of Eisenhower's motive: why on earth would Ike do such a thing? Mr. Bacque answers that Eisenhower hated the Germans. Now it is absolutely true that in the spring of 1945, Eisenhower's anger at the Germans was very great. He never attempted to hide these feelings. In "Crusade in Europe," published in 1948, he wrote, "In my personal reactions, as the months of conflict wore on, I grew constantly more bitter against the Germans." He relates that he signed tens of thousands of letters of condolence to the wives and mothers of his fallen men, and he wrote, "I know of no more effective means of developing an undying hatred of those responsible for aggressive war than to assume the obligation of attemption to express sympathy to families bereaved by it." The uncovering of the concentration camps added to his emotion.
Eisenhower was an enthusiastic supporter of denazification, but not because he hated the Germans or believed in collective guilt. To the contrary, he believed that there were Germans who were committed to democracy and that the task of the occupation was to find them and bring them to the fore. In a speech in Frankfurt in 1945, he declared "The success or failure of this occupation will be judged by the character of the Germans 50 years from now. Proof will come when they begin to run a democracy of their own and we are going to give the Germans a chance to do that, in time." This does not sound like a man who simultaneously was directing the death by starvation of one million young Germans.
Mr. Bacque completely misunderstands Eisenhower's position and activity in the occupation. He puts full responsibility on Eisenhower for every policy decision, never recognizing that he had superiors from whom he took policy directives and orders - specifically, the Army Chief of Staff, the European Advisory Commission, acting in the name and with the authority of the British, Soviet and American Governments, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Combined Chiefs of Staff, that is, the American Joint Chiefs and the British Chiefs of Staff; and the heads of the British and American Governments. The report at the New Orleans conference on the diplomatic background, by Brian Villa of the University of Ottawa, noted that the policy of Eisenhower's superiors was to impress upon the Germans the fact of their defeat, the fact that they had brought it on themselves and in other ways to "treat 'em rough." Denazification was one aspect of that policy. Another was that German prisoners would not be fed at a higher level than German civilians, than the civilians of the liberated nations, or than the displaced persons (DPs).
An assertion that is central to Mr. Bacque's accusation is his contention that there was no European food shortage in 1945. He points to warehouses in Germany full of food. He says that the Red Cross had food available. One of his most daming pieces of evidence is that a train from Geneva loaded with food parcels sent by the Red Cross to feed German prisoners was forced to turn back.
This is shocking - food was available, men were hungry and American officers ordered the train to return to Geneva. But there was a reason: the Allied Governments had decided that Red Cross food parcels would be used to feed displaced persons, of whom there were more than two million in Germany, and the orders to Eisenhower on this policy were explicit. So DPs got those food parcels. It is painful beyond description to have to set food priorities in a hungry world, but it had to be done, and who could argue with the decision?
In his conference report on the food situation in Germany, James Tent of the University of Alabama - Brimingham says there was no question that there were severe shortages. Still, as Mr. Tent points out, there was food stocked in warehouses that was not distributed to prisoners living on a near-starvation diet. Again, this is shocking, until the reason is noted. The Allied Governments were fearful of famine in the winter of 1945-46, and they were stockpiling food. Even with the reserves, they barely got through the winter, and it was three years before the European foot shortage was overcome.
Mr. Bacque's myth was Eisenhower's nightmare. No food shortage? Eisenhower wrote the Chief of Staff, Gen. George C. Marshall, in Februayr 1945: "I am very much concerned about the food situation... We now have no reserves on the Continent of supplies for the civil population."
And here is Eisenhower writing to the Combined Chiefs of Staff on April 25, 1945: "Unless immediate steps are taken to develop to the fullest extent possible the food resources in order to provide the minimum wants of the German population, widespread chaos, starvation and disease are inevitable during the coming winter."
These - and many, many similar messages - went out before the surrender. After the first week of May, all of Eisenhower's calculations as to how many people he would be required to feed in occupied Germany became woefully inadequate. He had badly underestimated, for two reasons. First, the number of German soldiers surrendering to the Western Allies far exceeded what was expected (more than five million, instead of the anticipated three million) because of the onrush of German soldiers across the Elbe River to escape the Russians. So too with German civilians - there were millions fleeing from east to west, about 13 million altogether, and they became Eisenhower's responsibility. Eisenhower faced shortages even before he learned that there were 17 million more people to feed in Germany than he had expected.
No food shortage? This is the report of the Military Governor for Germany in July 1945: "The food situation throughout Western Germany is perhaps the most serious problem of the occupation. The average food consumption in the Western Zones is now about one-third below the generally accepted subsistence level." The September report declares, "Food from indigenous sources was not available to meet the present authorized ration level for the normal consumer, of 1,550 calories per day."
Mr. Bacque says that the prisoners were receiving 1,550 calories a day, and he contends that such a ration means slow starvation. He apparently never looked at what civilians were getting, in Germany or in the liberated countries. In Paris in 1945, the calorie level was 1,550 for civilians. It was only slightly higher in Briatin, where rationing continued. It was much lower in Russia, where rationing also continued. As noted, the official ration for German civilians was 1,550, but often not met. In Vienna in the summer of 1945 the official ration sometimes fell to 500.
There is such a thing as common sense. Anyone who was in Europe in the summer of 1945 would be flabbergasted to hear that there was no food shortage.
According to Mr. Bacque, Eisenhower personally, secretly, and with sinister intent changed the status of surrendered German soldiers from prisoners of war to disarmed enemy forces. In fact, the change in designation was a policy matter. The decision was made not by Eisenhower but by his superiors, specifically by the European Advisory Commission. Nor was any attempt made to keep it secret. All those involved acted with the authority of the British, Russian and American Governments, and they were perfectly straightforward about the reason for the change in status.
What happened is simple enough: the Allies could not afford to feed the millions of German prisoners at the same level at which they were able to feed German civilians, not to mention the civilians of the liberated countries of Western Europe, and not to mention as well the displaced persons. But the United States and other Allied nations had signed the Geneva Convention, which had the force of a treaty. They did not wish to violate it, so they used the new designation of "Disarmed Enemy Forces." The orders to the field commanders were straighforward: do not feed the DEF's at a higher scale than German civilians.
With regard to another of Mr. Bacque's conclusions, he arrives at his sensational figure of one million dead through a system of analysis that has left almost everyone who has tried to check his statistics and methods befuddled. He did make one mistake because of a typing error by a clerk. He saw a figure of 70,000 prisoners in an Army medical report and then calculated the total death rate for all prisoners in American hands on the basis of that number and the 21,000 deaths also mentioned in the report. That is, he arrived at his most basic conclusion, a death rate in all camps of 30 percent, by dividing the 21,000 deaths by the 70,000 prisoners. However, the 70,000 figure should have been 10 times higher. All other figures in the document make it clear that the correct number of prisoners was 700,000. This would make the death rate not 30 percent but 3 percent.
In fact, as Albert Cowdrey of the Department of the Army's Center of Military History reported to the conference, the overall death rate among German prisoners was 1 percent.
Mr. Cowdrey's conclusion, strongly supported by another conference participant, Maj. Ruediger Overmans of the German Office of Military History in Freiburg (who is writing the final volume of the official Germany history of the war), is that the total death by all causes of German prisoners in American hands could not have been greater than 56,000.
Finally, there is the matter of the column of figures in the weekly reports of the United States Army Theater Provost Marshal entitled "Other Losses." It is here that Mr. Bacque finds his "missing million."
What were the "other losses?" Mr. Bacque interviewed Philip S. Lauben, a retired Army colonel who was a member of the German Affairs Branch of Eisenhower's headquarters in 1945. He writes that Colonel Lauben told him "other losses" meant "deaths and escapes."
"How many escapes?" Mr. Bacque asked.
"Very, very minor," Colonel Lauben replied. Mr. Bacque says they were less than one-tenth of 1 percent, with no explanation of how he arrived at such a figure.
Neil Cameron, the producer of the BBC documentary about "Other Losses," told the conference that he had obtained from Mr. Bacque the tape of the interview. It seemed clear to Mr. Cameron that Mr. Bacque had got an old man to agree with words that Mr. Bacque used and then put in his mouth. Mr. Cameron did his own on-camera interview with Colonel Lauben; in it, Colonel Lauben said he was misled by Mr. Bacque and was wrong about the meaning of the term "other losses."
David Hawkins of CNN wanted to do an interview with Colonel Lauben. Colonel Lauben turned him down, explaining in a letter "I'm not being difficult. I am 91 years old, legally blind, and my memory has lapsed to a point where it is quite unreliable. Furthermore I am under regular medical care. Often during my talk with Mr. Bacque I reminded him that my memory had deteriorated badly during the 40 odd years since 1945.
"Mr. Bacque read to me figures...It seemed to me that, after accounting for transfers and discharges, there was nothing left to make up the grand total except deaths and escapes, i.e. the term 'Other Losses.' I was mistaken."
Thus, Mr. Bacque's only witness for the charge that "other losses" was a cover-up term for deaths has twice repudiated what Mr. Bacque maintains that he said.
What then were the "other losses?" In many cases they were transfers from one zone to another, something that was regularly done for a variety of reasons, none of them sinister, and all duly recorded in footnotes on the weekly reports.
But the greatest number of "other losses" is revealed in the August 1945 Report of the Military Governor. (These monthly reports are in the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kan., in the National Archives in Washington and elsewhere; they are a basic source on every aspect of the occupation, including food shortages and prisoners. Mr. Bacque did not cite them and there is no evidence he examined them.) The August report lists the numbers of disarmed enemy forces discharged by American forces and those transferred to the British and French for forced labor.
The report continues: "An additional group of 663,576 are listed as 'other losses,' consisting largely of members of the Volksturm [Peoples' Militia], released without formal discharge."
It takes little imagination to see what happened here. The People's Militia consisted of older men (up to 80 years of age, mainly World War I veterans) and boys of 16 or sometimes less. American guards and camp authorities told the old men to go home and take care of their grandchildren, the boys to go home and return to school. Along with the transfers to other zones that Mr. Bacque ignores, these people account for all the "missing million."
In short, Mr. Bacque is wrong on every major charge and nearly all his minor ones. Eisenhower was not a Hitler, he did not run death camps, German prisoners did not die by the hundreds of thousands, there was a severe food shortage in 1945, there was nothing sinister or secret about the "disarmed enemy forces" designation or about the column "other losses." Mr. Bacque's "missing million" were old men and young boys in the militia.
Nevertheless, Mr. Bacque makes a point that is irrefutable: some American G.I.'s and their officers were capable of acting in almost as brutal a manner as the Nazis. We did not have a monopoly on virtue. He has challenged us to reopen the question, to do the research required, to get at the full truth. For that contribution, he deserves thanks. But as to how he presented his discovery, I turn again to Albert Cowdrey: "Surely the author has reason to be satisfied with his achievement. He has no reputation as a historian to lose, and "Other Losses" can only enhance his standing as a writer of fiction." There remains, finally, the larger issue. It took a conference of experts to challenge Mr. Bacque's charges. Individual scholars have hesitated to take him on because to do so required checking through his research - in effect, rewriting his book. Instead, many of them have said in their reviews in Britain, France, Germany and Canada that they cannot believe what Mr. Bacque says about Eisenhower is true, but they cannot disprove it. Mr. Bacque has all the paraphernalia of scholarship; it looks impressive enough to bamboozle even scholars. Under these circumstances, what is a lay reader to do? I suggest that he or she trust common sense. As when confronting the Holocaust-never-happened school, ask the obvious questions. If the answers aren't clear, the charges have not been proved. In Mr. Bacque's case, two such questions are: Where are the bodies? and Is this book consistent with our picture of Eisenhower's character as we know it from innumberable other sources? Ultimately, in cases such as this one, it is often the obvious questions that bring us closest to the truth.
Post-World War I Germany yields two significant examples of the effective use of nonviolence. In 1920, a pro-monarchist faction led by Dr. Wolfgang Kapp attempted to seize control of the Weimar government. German generals, sympathetic to the coup, refused to assist the civilian government, and many police actively sided with Kapp's forces. In response, President Theodor Ebert called a general strike and bureaucratic non-cooperation. While the military eventually came to the aid of the elected government, nonviolent resistance acted as the chief obstacle to Kapp's seizure of power.
A second instance of the use of nonviolence came during the so-called Ruhrkampf from 1923 to 1925. When Germany defaulted on its war reparation payments, French and Belgian troops entered the Ruhr -- one of Germany's chief industrial centers -- to extract the payments by force. Strikes and civilian and bureaucratic obstruction made the occupation so costly that the French and Belgians withdrew without net gain.
… some of the most famous cases of nonviolent resistance were carried out against foreign powers: colonial North America and India against the British [[would British government agree that it was a “foreign power”]]; Germany against France and Belgium in the Ruhrkampf; and Hungary against the rule of the Austrian Empire.
Humane Studies Review Volume 9, Number 1 Summer 1994 THE LITERATURE OF NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE AND CIVILIAN-BASED DEFENSE by Bryan Caplan
… one neglected but useful perspective comes from the tradition of nonviolent resistance. While almost exclusively associated with Gandhi, the idea has a long history of theory and practice. This bibliographic essay outlines the contours of this tradition, beginning with its roots in the more general theory of resistance to tyranny; it then explores the theory and practice of nonviolent resistance and its implications for classical liberal social theory.
***Resistance Thought: Violent and Nonviolent
An excellent survey of the history of theories justifying resistance to tyranny is Oscar Jszi and John D. Lewis, "Against the Tyrant: The Tradition and Theory of Tyrannicide" (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957). While it focuses on the question of tyrannicide, it actually covers a much wider ground. Unsurprisingly, the concepts of tyranny and justified resistance to authority simultaneously arose in ancient Greece. Plato and Aristotle discussed tyranny without commenting on the permissibility of resistance to the state, but the histories of Xenophon and Herodotus openly sympathized with instances of tyrannicide. Romans also considered tyrannicide. Cicero, Plutarch, Seneca, and Polybius explicitly endorsed it. Presumably, they would have endorsed less drastic resistance to authority as well. Christian philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham endorsed a limited right to resistance against tyranny. Finally, during the Italian Renaissance, the revival of classical authors led to a parallel revival of interest in the right of resistance against unjust government.
The question of resistance appeared in its modern form and won profound practical significance during the Protestant Reformation. While Martin Luther and John Calvin denied the right of resistance in any form, their intellectual heirs -- especially Calvin's -- questioned the doctrine that all "powers that be are ordained of God" (Romans 13:1) and considered justifications for rebellion against political and religious persecution.
British Calvinists radicalized first. John Ponet, successively Bishop of Rochester and of Winchester, defended resistance and tyrannicide in his book "A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power" (1556; reprinted in Winthrop S. Hudson, "John Ponet" (1516?-1556), Advocate of Limited Monarchy [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942]). The Scottish Calvinist John Knox turned radically against passive resistance and defended the right to establish the true religion by force if necessary. Knox's English compatriot Christopher Goodman took a similar line.
Franois Hotman's "Francogallia" (1573; trans. J. H. M. Salmon and ed. Ralph E. Giesey, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1972; Julian H. Franklin, trans. and ed., "Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century: Three Treatises by Hotman, Beza, and Mornay" [New York: Pegasus, 1969], 47-96) initiated the genre of French Calvinist resistance -- or "monarchomach" -- literature. In it he argued that historically, the French monarch had been limited, subject to both election and deposition by the people. "It has been sufficiently demonstrated, we believe," Hotman concludes in the third edition, "that the kings of France have not been granted unmeasured and unlimited power by their countrymen, and cannot be considered absolute" ("Constitutionalism and Resistance," 90).
Theodore Beza's "Right of Magistrates" (1574; "Constitutionalism and Resistance," 97-135) gave this historical critique a firmer theoretical background.
Fearing individual rebellion, he gave special weight to the right of lesser magistrates to rebel against a tyrant. He countenanced individual rebellion only against tyrants without legitimate titles -- but, only if the resistance of lesser magistrates failed.
Philippe du Plessis-Mornay, in his "Defence of Liberty Against Tyrants" (1579; "Constitutionalism and Resistance," 137-99) essentially drew the same conclusions, emphasizing that the people, not the king, are properly the owners of the kingdom. Julian Franklin has abridged and commented upon all three works in his Constitutionalism and Resistance. Franklin emphasizes that the Calvinist resistance literature needed to avoid radical conclusions to convince moderate Catholics to join the Huguenot cause. Quentin Skinner's "The Foundations of Modern Political Thought," vol. 2, "The Age of Reformation" (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978) contains an extensive discussion of Hotman, Beza, and Mornay, as well as lesser-known Calvinist authors and comments on their Lutheran, Catholic Scholastic, and humanist predecessors. For a general treatment of Huguenot thought, see Michael Walzer, "The Revolution of the Saints" (New York: Atheneum, 1965).
The radical Calvinists' interest in the right of resistance spread to broader religious circles.
The humanist thinker George Buchanan defended the right to resist tyranny not on partisan religious grounds but on the basis of social contract theory and Aristotle's politics."Powers of the Crown of Scotland" (1579; trans. C. F. Arrowood, Austin: Texas University Press, 1949) is his most famous book; I. D. McFarlane, in his "Buchanan" (London: Duckworth, 1981), offers a more detailed treatment of his thought. At the same time, Catholics like Juan de Mariana and Francisco Surez validated the right of resistance against tyranny. Using state of nature theory and the idea that rulers' power is delegated rather than inherent, both of these Jesuit thinkers justified some form of the right of resistance. Surez stood behind the classical distinction between the usurper and the tyrant-by-conduct. While it was permissible to use violence against a usurper, such could be justified against a tyrant-by-conduct in only the most extreme situations. Mariana took a more extreme view; he bypassed the dichotomy between the two types of unjust rulers and argued for every individual's right to kill a tyrant. Most of Surez's thought on resistance is in his "Tractatus de legibus" (1612; translated in "Selections from Three Works of Francisco Surez" [New York: Oxford University Press, 1944]). Mariana's chief work in this area is "The King and the Education of the King" (1599; ed. and trans. George Albert Moore, Washington, DC: Country Dollar Press, 1948).
It should be emphasized that the monarchomachs chiefly justified resistance as such, rather than nonviolent resistance. Their principal contemporary critics are Jean Bodin and William Barclay.
See Bodin, "On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from 'The Six Books of the Commonwealth’ and Barclay, "The Kingdom and the Regal Power". Both argue that this was more likely to lead to endless bloodshed and further tyranny than anything else.
In this context, Etienne de La Boetie's "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" (1577; trans. Harry Kurz, 1942; reprinted as "The Politics of Obedience: 'The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude'" [New York: Free Life Editions, 1975]) appeared, promoting the efficacy of nonviolent resistance. Anticipating David Hume's "Of the First Principles of Government" (1777; reprinted as "Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary", ed. Eugene F. Miller, rev. ed.[Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987], 32-36), La Boetie saw that the rule of a tiny minority over society was possible only if the majority voluntarily accepted it.
Taking it one step further, La Boetie argued that the social consensus theory implied that it could overthrow tyranny peaceably if the majority withdrew its consent. "It is therefore," he wrote, "the inhabitants themselves who permit, or, rather, bring about their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit they would put an end to their servitude" (La Boetie, 50).
While La Boetie's arguments for mass civil disobedience seem more moderate than the Huguenot justification for violent resistance, he is, in every other respect, far more radical. All tyrants, he argued, whether by inheritance, force of arms, or elections, are equally bad and, therefore, equally permissible to resist. Perhaps most significant, La Boetie justified resistance not through custom or national tradition but because "freedom is our natural state" (La Boetie, 57).
La Boetie explained the oppressed state of mankind with a theory of ideology and caste exploitation. The former, he contended, suppresses humanity's natural urge for freedom; the latter develops as a tyrant fortifies power by privileging a pyramid of followers.
Despite the originality of La Boetie's theory, it exerted little influence on subsequent theorists who continued to equate resistance with violence. Thus, the three pillars of seventeenth-century British resistance theory -- Locke, Sidney, and Milton -- focused chiefly on violent revolution. John Locke, in his "Essay concerning Civil Government," the second of the "Two Treatises of Government" (1689; student ed., ed. Peter Laslett, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), not only justified rebellion against tyranny but also assumed that physical force existed as the necessary means to subdue a tyrant. While more moderate than Locke on many questions, Algernon Sidney in his "Discourses concerning Government" (1698; reprint, ed. Thomas G. West, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1990) militantly advocated violent revolution against tyrants. And John Milton in his book "The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates" (1649; reprinted in "Political Writings," ed. Martin Dzelzainis [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 1-48), defended the right of the people to execute a tyrant if the established watchdogs failed to manage him effectively.
The nineteenth century produced two significant theorists of nonviolent resistance: Henry David Thoreau and Count Leo Tolstoy.
In Thoreau's famous essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849; reprinted in "On Civil Disobedience: American Essays, Old and New,' ed. Robert A. Goldwin [Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969], 11-31), he argued that the individual had a moral duty to resist unjust acts of government. While not primarily a work on collective action, Thoreau noted that "[i]f the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. . . . When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished" ("On Civil Disobedience," 21). One can find Tolstoy's arguments on nonviolence in the compilation "Tolstoy's Writings on Civil Disobedience and Non-Violence" (New York: Bergman, 1967). Unlike Thoreau, who largely treated his conclusions as simply the consistent application of Jeffersonian principles, Tolstoy based his condemnations of violence on the philosophy presented in the New Testament. His most notable essays on the issue of non-violence include "Patriotism, or Peace?" which argued that the general renunciation of patriotism was a precondition of international peace and his "Notes for Officers" and "Notes for Soldiers", which argued that members of the military had a duty to resign their posts and obey their consciences rather than the state. For more on Tolstoy's political thought, see his "The Law of Violence and the Law of Love" (New York: Rudolph Field, 1948), in which he favorably cited the work of La Boetie on the efficacy of nonviolent struggle against tyranny.
Tolstoy's "A Letter to a Hindu: The Subjection of India -- Its Cause and Cure" in "Tolstoy Centenary Edition," vol. 21, "Recollections and Essays" (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937) significantly influenced the twentieth-century's preeminent exponent of nonviolence, Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi began his lifetime interest in nonviolence when, as a lawyer in South Africa, he used nonviolence to help repeal governmental discrimination against the Indian minority. He later acquired world fame for his leadership of the nonviolent struggle for Indian independence from the British. One can find a good sampling of Gandhi's writings in his "Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha)" (New York: Schocken Books, 1951). While Gandhi's advocacy of nonviolence was chiefly religious and deontological, he also defended its practicality. Not only will nonviolence win more public support than violence, he argued, but it also has a greater chance to convert one's opponents and succeed with minimal casualties. In a typical passage, Gandhi wrote that a "civil resister never uses arms and hence is harmless to a State that is at all willing to listen to the voice of public opinion. He is dangerous for an autocratic state, for he brings about its fall by engaging public opinion upon the matter for which he resists the State" (Gandhi, 174). Elsewhere, echoing La Boetie, Gandhi stated that in "politics, its [power's] use is based upon the immutable maxim that government of the people is possible only so long as they consent either consciously or unconsciously to be governed" (Gandhi, 35).
Gandhi makes for difficult reading because he mixed religious ideas with more practical observations. Gene Sharp does a good job of disentangling these two strains in his "Gandhi as a Political Strategist" (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1979). If one ignores Gandhi's religious views and focuses on his discussion of practical strategic questions, one finds a shrewd and insightful thinker in the tradition of La Boetie. Several of Sharp's interpretive essays -- especially "Gandhi on the Theory of Voluntary Servitude" -- bring together the bits and pieces of Gandhi's theory of nonviolent resistance. For further writings on Gandhi's philosophy which emphasize his mystical side, see Raghavan N. Iyer, "The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi"
***Nonviolent Resistance: Theory and History
There can be little doubt that today's foremost thinker sympathetic to nonviolent resistance is Gene Sharp. With an eye toward practical strategy rather than philosophy, his major work "The Politics of Nonviolent Action" (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973) covers virtually every aspect of the theory and history of nonviolent resistance to government. In the opening of the book, Sharp carefully crafts his arguments as an extensive discussion of the nature of power. He draws on the long tradition of thinkers who argue that ideology and consent -- whether grudging or enthusiastic -- rather than brute force are the ultimate basis of political power. If a large enough segment of the population refuses to comply with the government, it will lose its ability to rule. Merely the threat of non-compliance is often serious enough to provoke the government to redress grievances. Moreover, when governments use violence against protesters who are clearly committed to nonviolence, they undermine their ideological foundations and often make uncontested rule even more difficult. He cites such diverse thinkers as Auguste Comte, Etienne de La Boetie, David Hume, Gaetano Mosca, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Max Weber, Jeremy Bentham, Montesquieu, and Niccol Machiavelli.
Sharp distinguishes between three stages of nonviolence: protest and persuasion; social, economic, and political non-cooperation; and nonviolent intervention. Normally a movement begins with the first stage and gradually escalates until the government meets its demands or agrees to compromise. As examples of protest and persuasion Sharp lists public speeches, petitions, distribution of literature, public demonstrations, and fraternizing with low-ranking soldiers and other government enforcers.
Nonviolent resisters bring more serious sanctions to bear when they resort to social, economic, and political non-cooperation. Here Sharp offers as examples social boycott, excommunication, student strikes (social non-cooperation); consumers' boycotts, workers' strikes, refusal to pay fees, rent, or interest, refusal to accept a government's money (economic non-cooperation); and the boycott of legislative bodies and elections, draft resistance, tax resistance, deliberate bureaucratic inefficiency, and mutiny (political non-cooperation). Unlike protest and persuasion, many of these tactics could pressure a government into changing its policies without actually changing anyone's mind.
Sharp's final category, nonviolent intervention, includes the most radical forms of resistance against authority. Some examples include fasting until death (Gandhi's famed tactic), sit-ins, occupying or surrounding critical government buildings, blocking of roads, setting up alternative markets and transportation systems (such as black markets), overloading administrative systems, and forming a parallel government.
Sharp documents a number of examples for each category. While not all of them have met with success, the historical effectiveness of nonviolent action is surprising. One familiar but neglected example is colonial resistance to Britain before the American Revolution from 1765 to 1775. For further details on the nonviolent stage of colonial resistance, see Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, "The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution" (New York: Collier Books, 1963); Lawrence Henry Gipson, "The British Empire Before the American Revolution" (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961-1965); Arthur Schlesinger, "The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution" (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966); Lawrence Henry Gipson, "The Coming of the American Revolution" (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962); and Murray Rothbard, "Conceived in Liberty," vol. 3, "Advance to Revolution, 1760-1775" (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1976). The famous boycotts of tea and other British imports, refusal to pay taxes such as those required by the Stamp Act, and ostracism of the Tories imposed serious costs upon the British government, leading to desperate action to preserve British authority in the colonies. Fewer works on later American tax resistance exist. See, however, Dall W. Forsythe's "Taxation and Political Change in the Young Nation, 1781-1833" (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), and James Ring Adams, "Secrets of the Tax Revolt" (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), both of which David T. Beito discusses at length in 'Tax Revolts in American History,' "Humane Studies Review" 4 (Winter 1986-87). Beito's major work in this area, "Taxpayers in Revolt: Tax Resistance during the Great Depression" (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), offers a broad discussion of the largest tax rebellion in modern America; he emphasizes the tax resistance in Chicago during the New Deal era.
Post-World War I Germany yields two significant examples of the effective use of nonviolence. In 1920, a pro-monarchist faction led by Dr. Wolfgang Kapp attempted to seize control of the Weimar government. German generals, sympathetic to the coup, refused to assist the civilian government, and many police actively sided with Kapp's forces. In response, President Theodor Ebert called a general strike and bureaucratic non-cooperation. While the military eventually came to the aid of the elected government, nonviolent resistance acted as the chief obstacle to Kapp's seizure of power.
For more details on the Kapp putsch, see Erich Eyck, "A History of the Weimar Republic" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).
A second instance of the use of nonviolence came during the so-called Ruhrkampf from 1923 to 1925. When Germany defaulted on its war reparation payments, French and Belgian troops entered the Ruhr -- one of Germany's chief industrial centers -- to extract the payments by force. Strikes and civilian and bureaucratic obstruction made the occupation so costly that the French and Belgians withdrew without net gain.
Wolfgang Sternstein, 'The Ruhrkampf of 1923: Economic Problems of Civilian Defense,' in "Civilian Resistance as a National Defense," ed. Adam Roberts (Harrisburg, PA: Stockpole Books, 1968) discusses the Ruhrkampf instance at great length.
We must turn back to the Indian struggle for independence from Great Britain, the most famous and successful twentieth-century nonviolent movement. While Indian independence quickly sparked ethnic violence and failed to deliver prosperity and freedom to ordinary Indians and Pakistanis, the struggle compares favorably to violent colonial outbreaks such as in Algeria. Sharp estimates that if one takes India's population into account, Algerian-level casualties would have left India with three million to three and a half million people dead. The number of Indians actually killed while taking part in nonviolence was about eight thousand. (See Sharp, "Gandhi as a Political Strategist," 7.)
Indians tried virtually every nonviolent tactic -- tax resistance (such as the famous salt march), boycotts of British goods, failure to support the British war effort, and fasting -- during the independence movement. For more details on the history of the Indian struggle with the British, see Michael Edwardes, "The Last Years of British India" (London: Cassell, 1963); Ram Gopal, "How India Struggled for Freedom: A Political History" (Bombay: Book Centre, 1967); Francis Hutchins, "India's Revolution: Gandhi and the Quit India Movement" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973); and R.P. Masani, "British in India: An Account of British Rule in the Indian Subcontinent" (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960).
The most famous nonviolent struggle in recent American history has been the civil rights movement. A few of the many histories of the combat for legal equality for blacks -- fought largely with nonviolent tactics -- are: Arthur I. Waskow, "From Race Riot to Sit-in: 1919 and the 1960's" (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966); James Farmer, "Freedom -- When?" (New York: Random House, 1954); and Alan F. Westin, ed., "Freedom Now: The Civil-Rights Struggle in America" (New York: Basic Books, 1964). Martin Luther King Jr.'s theories of nonviolent resistance should not be overlooked. Besides 'Letter from the Birmingham Jail' (Goldwin, ed., "On Civil Disobedience", 61-77), King's other works on nonviolence and the civil rights movement include "Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story" (New York: Ballantine Books, 1958) and "Why We Can't Wait" (New York: New American Library, 1964). For a broader look at the struggle of black Americans, most of it nonviolent, see Joan Grant, ed., "Black Protest: History, Documents, and Analyses, 1619 to the Present" (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1968); Carleton Mabee, "Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 Through the Civil War" (New York: Macmillan, 1977); and John Hope Franklin, "From Slavery to Freedom," 6th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1988).
Sharp lists many historical examples of both nonviolent struggles and violent struggles with a large nonviolent component. His examples include: Hungarian resistance to the Austrian empire from 1850 to 1867; the Belgian suffragist enlargement strikes in 1893, 1902, and 1913; Finland's opposition to Russian rule from 1898 to 1905; and the Russian Revolution of 1905 and 1906. Anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa were also often nonviolent. They included China's boycotts against the Japanese between 1906 and 1919; the struggle of the Indian minority in South Africa against discrimination from 1906 to 1914 and again in 1946; and Samoan resistance against New Zealand from 1919 to 1936.
See Gene Sharp, "Social Power and Political Freedom" (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1980) for a comprehensive list. Sharp finds a common pattern throughout the history of nonviolent resistance. After a movement for social change acquires any sort of influence, it typically meets with repression. While badly organized movements collapse as soon as resistance begins, the inculcation of solidarity and discipline (akin in some ways to the training of normal soldiers) can hold a movement together long enough to win attention and score some victories. Moreover, the very fact that the protesters remain committed to nonviolence even as the government turns to repression to combat them tends to win over previously neutral parties, arouse dissent among the repressing group, and inspire and involve other members of persecuted groups. Sharp refers to this as "political jiu-jitsu" -- jiu-jitsu being a style of martial art that uses an opponent's aggressiveness and ferocity against him. Sharp is far from a Panglossian advocate of nonviolence; indeed, it is precisely because of the possibility of failure that he is interested in studying the mechanics of nonviolent struggle. But, insofar as it succeeds, it usually does so by converting opponents, making repression too costly to continue, and threatening the very ability of the government to maintain power.
END PART ONE
Humane Studies Review Volume 9, Number 1 Summer 1994 THE LITERATURE OF NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE AND CIVILIAN-BASED DEFENSE by Bryan Caplan
PART TWO
Among Sharp's other works in the area of nonviolence are "Exploring Nonviolent Alternatives" (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1971); "Social Power and Political Freedom: Making Europe Unconquerable" (London: Taylor and Francis, 1985); "National Security Through Civilian-Based Defense" (Omaha, NE: Association for Transarmament Studies, 1985); and "Civilian-Based Defense: A Post-Military Weapons System" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). These books overlap one another to a significant extent, but, taken together, they detail the benefits of nonviolent action as a substitute for violence. Sharp generally utilizes a comparative institutions approach. For example, he compares the effectiveness of real-world violence to real-world nonviolence rather than ideal violence to real- world nonviolence as critics often do. As Sharp puts it, "Comparative evaluations of nonviolent and violent means must take into consideration that political violence is often defeated also. By conventional standards, does not one side lose in each international war, civil war and violent revolution? Such defeats have usually been explained as resulting from certain weaknesses or inadequacies, such as lack of fighting spirit, insufficient or poor weapons, mistakes in strategy and tactics, or numerical inferiority. Comparable weaknesses may also lead to defeat in nonviolent action. The common practice of explaining defeats of political violence in terms of such specific shortcomings while blaming defeats of nonviolent action on the presumption of its universal impotence is both irrational and uninformed" (Sharp, "The Politics of Nonviolent Action," p. 756).
With this in mind, he first notes that violence is usually ineffective. The ability of the government to use violence greatly exceeds that of the rebels. Indeed, violent rebellion often strengthens oppressive regimes which can plausibly claim that rebel violence necessitates repression. Government's comparative advantage lies in violent action. The comparative advantage of the people, in contrast, lies in their ability to deny their voluntary cooperation without which it is nearly impossible for government to persist. Consider the deadliness to a government of tax strikes, boycotts, general strikes, and widespread refusal to obey the law. While these tactics are nonviolent, their universal and unyielding use should terrify any government.
Nonviolence has other advantages as well. Because it seems less dangerous and radical than violence, it more easily, as mentioned above, wins broad public support. The costs of participation are lower, so more people are likely to participate. Traditional noncombatants like children, women, and the old can effectively participate in nonviolent struggle. It is more likely to convert opponents and produce internal disagreement within the ruling class. It generally leads to far fewer casualties and material losses than violence. And since it is more decentralized than violent action, it is less likely to give rise to an even more oppressive state if it succeeds.
In addition to Sharp's impressive and far-reaching "Politics of Nonviolent Action," one should examine other works, including Richard B. Gregg's "The Power of Nonviolence" (New York: Fellowship Publications, 1944), which combines a theoretical discussion with a partial history of Gandhi's struggle for Indian independence. Gregg's theoretical approach is roughly equivalent to Sharp's -- albeit in a less detailed systematic form. A. Paul Hare and Herbert H. Blumberg's "Liberation Without Violence: A Third-Party Approach" (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977) offers a collection of largely historical essays on the use of nonviolence in India, the United States, Africa, and Cyprus. V.K. Kool, ed., "Perspectives on Nonviolence" (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990) collects thirty essays on various topics relating to nonviolence, including a keynote address by Kenneth Boulding. Leroy Pelton, in "The Psychology of Nonviolence" (New York: Pergamon, 1974), takes a psychological approach, focusing on the ability of nonviolent resistance to change minds while avoiding a vicious spiral of escalating violence.
***Civilian Based Defense
If nonviolent action can effectively force one's government to change its policies or abandon power, then plausibly similar tactics might succeed against a foreign invader. And, since most nonviolence has historically been sporadic and unorganized, it might bepossible to increase its effectiveness through training and strategic and tactical planning. These two possibilities have sparked interest in "civilian-based defense" -- the self-conscious use of nonviolent means for the goal of national defense. Sharp defines civilian-based defense as "a projected refinement of the general technique of nonviolent action, or civilian struggle, as it has occurred widely in improvised forms in the past. This policy is an attempt deliberately to adapt and develop that technique to meet defense needs, and thereby potentially to provide... deterrence to those particular forms of attack" (Sharp, "Social Power and Political Freedom," p. 233).
While this may appear intuitively impractical at first, on closer examination the argument may have strong appeal. From the outset, one should note that some of the most famous cases of nonviolent resistance were carried out against foreign powers: colonial North America and India against the British; Germany against France and Belgium in the Ruhrkampf; and Hungary against the rule of the Austrian Empire.
Quoting Kenneth Boulding, Sharp writes "What exists, is possible." More fundamentally, nonviolent resistance never had any of the advantages that military resistance does. Usually the military has years to train, strategize, prepare arsenals, test weapons, stockpile necessary resources, and study the past for lessons. But, nonviolent struggles have almost always been carried out without the benefit of personnel training or tactical and strategic planning. What would happen if countries spent as much energy preparing for a nonviolent struggle as they do for a military struggle? This is a question that Sharp and other authors sympathetic to civilian-based defense have tried to answer.
As with most scholarship on nonviolence, the work of Gene Sharp dominates the area of civilian-based defense. "Social Power and Political Freedom," a collection of essays on topics relating to nonviolence, contains two well-written introductory essays to the theory of civilian-based defense: "The Political Equivalent of War' -- Civilian-Based Defense,"and "Popular Empowerment.""The Political Equivalent of War," criticizes traditional solutions to the problem of war: removing its "causes,"; pacifism and unilateral disarmament; world government; and negotiated general disarmament.
He also discusses the history of nonviolence, with examples from the Montgomery boycotts, the Soviet prison camp resistance at Vorkuta, and German and Norwegian opposition to Nazi policies.
These introductory examples provide a springboard for an extensive discussion of civilian-based defense. Sharp insists that deterrents are not limited to standard military ones. Rather, it is merely necessary for nonviolence to make occupation so difficult that the costs of conquest exceed the benefits. Massive tax resistance, boycotts, incitement of desertion, and strikes might accomplish this. And, if a would-be conqueror realized that nonviolent techniques might make the costs of occupation skyrocket, he might be deterred from trying. Sharp considers specific ways to prepare effective civilian-based defense: general education and training in the techniques of nonviolence, as well as a "West Point" for training specialists; the wide-spread dissemination of publishing and broadcasting equipment to prevent invaders from seizing all of the means of communication; and local stockpiles should exist to ease the pain of a general strike. Lastly, Sharp considers questions of strategy. He contrasts a "nonviolent Blitzkrieg" -- a policy of total non-cooperation, a general strike, and massive protests -- with the less dramatic but more sustainable "selective resistance" -- targeting specific institutions for protection and defense and certain enemy policies for defiance and protest.
"Popular Empowerment" offers another telling point. While standard military defense is easy for a government to use against its own people, civilian-based defense is not. Civilian-based defense is a positive check against the abuse of power. If the government acts improperly, the same techniques that the citizenry can wield against foreigners can be turned on its own leaders. National defense, properly understood, shields society from all oppression, both foreign and domestic.
"Making Europe Unconquerable" was Sharp's attempt to apply his theory of civilian-based defense to the protection of Western Europe against a Soviet invasion. While the subject is perhaps passe, the work is useful because it investigates a fairly specific issue in detail. Moreover, those who doubted the efficacy of nonviolence against the Soviets may find it a more plausible tool against the less serious threats that European nations face today. "Exploring Nonviolent Alternatives," one of Sharp's shorter pieces, applies the analysis to the question of national defense. "National Security Through Civilian-Based Defense," a long pamphlet, does nearly the same. "Civilian-Based Defense," Sharp's most recent book, summarizes his lifetime of scholarly research on nonviolence. It also contains fascinating treatments of the use of nonviolence in the final overthrow of communism in EasternEurope. Short, clear, and wide-ranging, "Civilian-Based Defense" is the best single piece to read on the topic.
Some of the most interesting scholarship on civilian-based defense by authors other than Sharp appears in Roberts, ed., "Civilian Resistance as a National Defence." Notable essays include Sir Basil Liddell Hart's "Lessons from Resistance Movements -- Guerrilla and Nonviolent"; Theodor Ebert's "Nonviolent Resistance Against Communist Regimes?"; Jeremy Bennett's "The Resistance Against the German Occupation of Denmark 1940-5"; Magne Skodvin, "Norwegian Nonviolent Resistance During the German Occupation"; and Wolfgang Sternstein, "The Ruhrkampf of 1923: Economic Problems of Civilian Defense." One should also see T.K. Mahadevan, Adam Roberts, and Gene Sharp, eds., "Civilian Defense: An Introduction" (New Delhi: Gandhi Peace Foundation, 1967).
For other books on civilian-based defense, see Sir Stephen King-Hall, "Defence in the Nuclear Age" (London: Victor Gollancz, 1958), which argues that Britain should unilaterally give up its nuclear weapons stockpile, since the possession of nuclear weapons makes Britain a more likely target for a hostile nuclear attack; he recommends civilian-based defense. Norman Freund, in "Nonviolent National Defense: A Philosophical Inquiry into Applied Nonviolence" (New York: University Press of America, 1987), summarizes many of the main arguments for civilian-based defense, as does Krishnalal Shridharani, "War Without Violence: A Study of Gandhi's Methods and Its Accomplishments" (New York: Garland, 1972). A Quaker organization, the American Friends Service Committee, defended civilian- based defense in "In Place of War: An Inquiry into Nonviolent National Defense" (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1967). Anders Boserup and Andrew Mack, "War Without Weapons" (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), overlaps with Sharp's work; its main innovation is its explicit attempt to integrate the theory of nonviolence with classical strategic theory as formulated by Clauswitz. In so doing, Boserup and Mack open the door for the application of both rational choice and game theories to the question of nonviolence.
**"It Can Only Work Against the British" -- Nonviolence against Totalitarian Regimes
Almost everyone will concede that nonviolence can work against "civilized" nations. But what about the hard cases? What about totalitarian governments utterly lacking in moral scruples and prepared to kill as many people as necessary to cement their rule? Intuitively, the case against nonviolence in such circumstances is strong. Yet preliminary research into the history of nonviolent resistance against Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia casts doubt on this intuition. While nonviolence may be less useful against amoral or immoral tyrants, it is far from futile.
Danish, Norwegian, and Dutch resistance to Nazism from 1940 to 1945 was pronounced and fairly successful. In Norway, for example, teachers refused to promote fascism in the schools. For this, the Nazis imprisoned a thousand teachers. But, the remaining teachers stood firm, giving anti-fascist instruction to children and teaching in their homes. This policy made the pro-fascist Quisling government so unpopular that it eventually released all of the imprisoned teachers and dropped its attempt to dominate the schools. Other forms of struggle included ostracism, the refusal to speak to Nazi soldiers and intense social hostility to collaborationists.
Nonviolent struggle in the Netherlands was also fierce. The Dutch organized two general strikes in Amsterdam; one in 1941 protested mistreatment of Jews, and a second in 1943 opposed the Nazi plan to intern Dutch war veterans in Germany. In Copenhagen, Danes used a general strike to liberalize martial law.
Gene Sharp's sources include Jeremy Bennett, "The Resistance Against the German Occupation of Denmark 1940-5," in Roberts, pp. 154-172; Magne Skodvin, "Norwegian Nonviolent Resistance During the German Occupation," in Roberts, pp. 136-153; Bjarne H�ye and Trygve M. Ager, "The Fight of the Norwegian Church Against Nazism" (New York: Macmillan, 1943); and Werner Warmbrunn, "The Dutch Under German Occupation 1940-1945" (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1963). For a general treatment of resistance to Nazism, see International Conference on the History of the Resistance Movements, "European Resistance Movements, 1939-1945 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1960).
But, surely the most amazing but widely neglected case of nonviolent resistance against Nazi Germany was the protection of Jews and other persecuted minorities from deportation, imprisonment, and murder. In "The Lesson of Eichmann: A Review-Essay on Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem" in "Social Power and Political Freedom," Gene Sharp shows how the nations which nonviolently resisted National Socialist racial persecutions saved almost all of their Jews, while Jews in other Nazi-controlled nations were vastly more likely to be placed in concentration camps and killed.
The effort to arrest Norway's seventeen hundred Jews sparked internal resistance and protest resignations; most of the Norwegian Jews fled to Sweden. In Belgium, police refused to cooperate with the Germans, and railroad workers sabotaged trains transporting imprisoned Jews. Apparently no Belgian Jews died at Nazi hands, and about half of all foreign Jews living in Belgium survived occupation. While Vichy France helped deport foreign Jews, it refused to cooperate in the deportation of French Jews; in consequence, eighty percent were saved. Even though Italy was a German ally, Italians did not share Hitler's anti-Semitism. As a result of bureaucratic resistance and non-cooperation, ninety percent of Italian Jews were saved.
When Himmler tried to crack down on Danish Jews, the Danes thwarted his efforts. Not only did the Danish government and people resist -- through bureaucratic slowdowns and noncooperation -- but, surprisingly, the German commander in Denmark also refused to help organize Jewish deportations. This prompted Himmler to import special troops to arrest Jews. But, in the end almost all Danish Jews escaped unharmed. In Bulgaria, the parliament refused to assist the German anti-Jewish measures, and Bulgarians held public demonstrations against the persecution of Jews. As far as can be known, no Bulgarian Jews were killed or deported by the Nazis.
For more on this, see Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" (New York: Viking Press, 1963). The omnipresent pattern that Arendt finds and that Sharp emphasizes is that totalitarian governments are not omnipotent. They need the cooperation of the ruled to exert their will. If a people denies cooperation, even a government as vicious as Hitler's, bound by few moral constraints, might be unable to get what it wants.
The history of nonviolent struggle against the Soviet Union has, until recently, been much more bleak. When, in 1953, East Germans used the general strike and other nonviolent tactics to win better treatment for workers, the Soviets brutally crushed all opposition, leading to worldwide recognition -- even among socialists -- that the Soviet regime's claim to represent "workers" was absurd. Stefan Brant, "The East German Rising" (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1957) covers the history of the largely nonviolent 1953 struggle. The Hungarian uprising in 1956, while generally considered a military struggle, contained strong nonviolent elements, including a general strike, mass demonstrations, and the formation of a parallel government. Again, the Soviets harshly repressed it, though it is worth noting that the nonviolent resistance (for example the general strike in Budapest) held out longer than the Hungarian military. On this, see Ferenc Vali, "Rift and Revolt in Hungary: Nationalism versus Communism" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961) and George Mikes, "The Hungarian Revolution" (London: Andre Deutsch, 1957).
The Czech struggle of 1968 is a final tragic chapter in the history of resistance to the Soviets. Remarkably, the Czechs used nonviolent means almost exclusively and, consequently, lasted considerably longer than did the Hungarians. The Dubcek government ordered its soldiers to remain in their barracks, the state news agency refused to announce that its government had "requested" the invasion, and the Czech Congress condemned Soviet actions and demanded a release of its kidnapped officials. Other forms of resistance included short-term general strikes, transportation obstruction, and the use of radio to rally the people against Soviet invaders. Even though the invasion was a complete military success, the Soviets decided that the political situation made it unwise to replace the Dubcek government with collaborators. Instead, after some compromise on reforms, they released the kidnapped Czech leaders and restored them to their previous positions. The liberal reformers retained power for eight more months, at which point the Russians replaced them with their own favorites. This ended Czech reforms. On the 1968 struggle see Robert Littell, ed., "The Czech Black Book" (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969); Robin Alison Remington, ed., "Winter in Prague" (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969); and Philip Windsor and Adam Roberts, "Czechoslovakia" 1968 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969).
It would be easy to draw deeply pessimistic conclusions from this long string of suppressed attempts to liberalize communist nations. Not only did history support the pessimistic conclusion of Jeane Kirkpatrick and other conservatives, but it, a priori, also made sense. Violent revolution in a totalitarian system seemed futile. The ruling elite might fight amongst itself, but they had no intention of giving up power voluntarily. And, nonviolence proved clearly useless against conscienceless dictators.
Or did it? As Sharp emphasized, nonviolence can win by converting opponents and neutrals and by creating divisions within ruling groups. In a way, that was happening for decades under communism. Not only the people, but also subgroups within the ruling elite itself gradually came to see the evil and inherent contradictions within their own system. Circulation of illegal literature, smuggled videotapes, and infiltration of Western cultural influences slowly eroded confidence. It is a mistake to look at communist nations over the past few decades and conclude that all resistance had been crushed; rather, it had been occurring covertly, slowly undermining all of the claims of communist governments of legitimacy.
The move for liberalization began with the Solidarity movement in Poland. One readable journalistic history of Solidarity is Timothy Garton Ash's, "The Polish Revolution: Solidarity 1980-1982" (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983). Ash emphasizes that the election of a Polish pope marked the beginning of rising expectations in Poland. By highlighting the role of non-state institutions, John Paul's election tended to make people more conscious of the distinction between society and state. Ash describes one of the pope's Polish appearances: "For nine days the state virtually ceased to exist, except as a censor doctoring the television coverage. Everyone saw that Poland is not a communist country -- just a communist state" (Ash,p. 29).
The chief tactic of Solidarity was the strike, which it used both to highlight particular grievances and to attain broader reform. Peter Raina's "Poland 1981: Towards Social Renewal" (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1985) details the history of Solidarity's tactics, demands, and compromises that critical year. The author analyzes the precise text of reform bills on independent trade unions, worker self-management, censorship, and higher education. For a broader history, see Jadwiga Staniaszkis, "Poland's Self-Limiting Revolution" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). This work gives a solid account of the crucial 1980 through 1982 period -- the height of Solidarity's influence -- but it also discusses moderate reforms during the 70's, the Polish people's rising expectations prior to Solidarity, and the early period of Soviet occupation after World War II.
The Solidarity movement and student and peasant associations expressed discontent and struggled for reform despite harsh persecution. Their limited successes inspired dissidents in other communist nations to push harder for reform and frightened communist leaders into mild compromises. One work documenting the spread of the "Polish virus" is Elizabeth Teague's "Solidarity and the Soviet Worker" (London: Croom Helm, 1988) which discusses the influence of the Solidarity movement on Soviet politics. The Politburo clearly feared the growth of the ideas of the Solidarity movement and made concessions to workers in the early 1980s to prevent this. While Teague found little Polish influence upon ethnic Russians, the Solidarity movement frequently influenced other ethnicities within the USSR to push peacefully for reforms in their own republics.
Eventually the accumulated effects of resistance penetrated the Soviet Politburo itself. Gorbachev announced that Soviet forces would not quell reforms in Eastern Europe. At this point, the unself-conscious tactics of nonviolent resistance went public. A half million East Germans demonstrated in Berlin for democratic elections and civil liberties on 4 November 1989. A half million Czechs and Slovaks protested the phony reforms of communist bosses in Prague three weeks later. Thousands of protesters in Leipzig forced state security headquarters to submit to public inspection.
As Sharp writes, repression often rebounded against the repressors: "Czechs and Slovaks erected shrines at the main sites of the beatings, raising those injured to the stature of heroes. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets daily following the police actions. As one student put it, the beatings were �the spark that started the whole movement'" (Sharp, "Civilian-Based Defense," pp. 58-59). Success was contagious -- once East Germany's neighboring communist regimes fell, the East Germans began to flee to West Germany by way of their government's former allies. In the final chapter, communism within the Soviet Union itself collapsed, and the last-ditch attempt of hard-line communists to seize power was foiled with no small thanks to mass demonstrations, fraternization with soldiers, and other nonviolent tactics.
While there has been some overlap between the classical liberal tradition and the theory and practice of nonviolent struggle, they remain virtual strangers to one another in scholarship. There is, however, no intrinsic reason for this. While nonviolence is compatible with many viewpoints, some of the best arguments in its favor have a rather classical liberal flavor. The analysis of political power and civil obedience put forth by nonviolence theorists closely resembles classical liberalism. Similarly, the observation that violent revolution often serves only the interests of a new elite fits comfortably into the classical liberal tradition. The nonviolence literature contains few explicit references to spontaneous order, but the idea is often present nonetheless, especially in Gene Sharp's work. The idiom of the nonviolence literature is initially foreign, but frequently it is a difference chiefly of style, not of substance.
Classical liberals interested in the issue of nonviolence will find several gaps in the existing literature waiting to be filled. First of all, the notion of spontaneous order in general, along with rational choice and game theories, rarely appears. But, these tools could shed considerable light on the feasibility of nonviolence; they might also help answer the objection that centrally planned resistance is necessarily more effective than civilian-based defense. Second, classical liberals may be able to draw on a broader range of historical examples than the current literature does. The self-conscious resistance movements are its primary focus; but aren't there many voluntary institutions whose result is to check state power even though that is no part of the intention of the participants?
Thus, the informal economy is rarely a form of ideological protest, but it is nevertheless a decentralized and nonviolent check upon the abuse of governmental power. A third insight that classical liberals might introduce and expand is the role of markets and economic freedom as a nonviolent check upon the state. Since contemporary advocates of nonviolence tend to be suspicious of capitalism, they often ignore typically liberal observations. Classical liberals may learn from -- as well as contribute to -- the nonviolence literature. Besides its intrinsic interest, it may point the way to answers to several difficult issues within the classical liberal tradition. Despite their distrust of state power and interventionist foreign policy, classical liberals have had a difficult time envisioning specific alternatives to violence to combat tyranny. The literature of nonviolent resistance is filled with penetrating insights in this area. And, while classical liberals frequently long for alternatives to both electoral politics and violence, specific suggestions have been sparse. These are merely a few gaps that the nonviolence literature may fill. On a more aesthetic note, many of the historical examples of nonviolence are beautiful illustrations of the power of voluntary institutions to supplement or replace the role of the state.
Finally, the role of civilian protest and direct action in recent anti-communist revolutions lends a new credibility to the idea of nonviolent resistance. It would go too far to attribute the demise of communism purely to nonviolent resistance. But it was one important and neglected factor in the greatest triumph of freedom in the twentieth-century. Classical liberals should study the lessons that it teaches. In particular, they should learn how freedom may be defended against tyrannical governments. A central lesson here is that even when the government has the weapons, there is something that it cannot seize: the voluntary compliance of its citizens. Without it, maintaining power becomes costly or even impossible. But, as we have seen, governments almost instinctively sense this risk and strive to prevent it from arising. As La Boetie explains, "it has always happened that tyrants, in order to strengthen their power, have made every effort to train their people not only in obedience and servility toward themselves, but also in adoration" (La Boetie, 75). All that is necessary to prevent tyranny is to let the citizenry come to know its own strength. Or, in the timeless words of La Boetie, "From all these indignities [of tyranny], such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces" (La Boetie, p. 53).
Bryan Caplan is a graduate student in Economics at Princeton University
| Modified Saturday, March 11, 2017
Copyright @ 2007 by Fathers' Manifesto & Christian Party |
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