Portraits of Adolf Hitler

Part II

Postcards Collection – Der Führer

Part I

The Reich in Photos – The 50-th Birthday of the Führer - 20.04.1939

Part II

 

 

Die Deutsche Wochenschau – Newsreel No. 562 – 11 June 1941

Adolf Hitler Receives Croatia's Head of State Ante Pavelic;

New Alsace SA Units in Strassburg are Sworn-in;

Heavy Bombing Raid on Birmingham;

Port of Canea Captured in Crete;

The Swastika Flies over Crete;

 

Adolf Hitler - Liberty, Art and Nationhood

Three Addresses, delivered at the Seventh National-Socialist Congress

Nuremberg, 1935

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“The Reich is no longer a defenceless plaything. It is no longer at the mercy of foreign predominance. Its defence is assured. We can feel this tranquil sense of security all the more deeply because the German people and their Government have no other object in view than to live in peace and friendship with their neighbours. We look upon our Army as the protective barrier behind which the Nation can work in peace.

Adolf Hitler

“Adolf Hitler, you knew him, what was He like?” - General Léon Degrelle's Memories

Source: http://whiteresister.com/index.php/8-archives/93-adolf-hitler-you-knew-him-what-was-he-like-general-leon-degrelle-s-memories

I have been asked that question a thousand times since 1945, and nothing is more difficult to answer.

Approximately 2000 books have dealt with the Second World War and with its central figure, Adolf Hitler. But has the real Hitler been discovered by any of them? "The enigma of Hitler is beyond all human comprehension" the left-wing German weekly 'Die Zeit' once put it.

Salvador Dali, art's unique genius, sought to penetrate the mystery in one of his most intensely dramatic paintings. Towering mountain landscapes all but fill the canvas, leaving ony a few luminous meters of seashore dotted with delicately miniaturized human figures: the last witness to a dying peace. A huge telephone receiver dripping tears of blood hangs from the branch of a dead tree; and here and there hang umbrellas and bats whose portent is visibly the same. As Dali tells it, "Chamberlain's umbrella appeared in this painting in a sinister light, made evident by the bat, and it struck me when I painted it as a thing of enormous anguish."

He then confided: "I felt this painting to be deeply prophetic. But I confess that I haven't yet figured out the Hitler enigma either. He attracted me only as an object of my mad imaginings and because I saw him as a man uniquely capable of turning things completely upside down."

What a lesson in humility for the braying critics who have rushed into print since 1945 with their thousands of 'definitive' books, most of them scornful, about this man who so troubled the introspective Dali that forty years later he still felt anguished and uncertain in the presence of his own hallucinatory painting. Apart from Dali, who else has ever tried to present an objective portrayal of this extraordinary man who Dali labeled the most explosive figure in human history?

LIKE PAVLOV'S BELL

The mountains of Hitler books based on blink hatred and ignorance do little to describe or explain the most powerful man the world has ever seen. How, I ponder, do these thousands of disparate portraits of Hitler in any way resemble the man I knew? The Hitler seated beside me, standing up, talking, listening. It has become impossible to explain to people fed fantastic tales for decades that what they have read or heard on television just does not correspond to the truth.

People have come to accept fiction, repeated a thousand times over, as reality. Yet they have never seen Hitler, never spoken to him, never heard a word from his mouth. The very name of Hitler immediately conjures up a grimacing devil, the fount of all of one's negative emotions. Like Pavlov's bell, the mention of Hitler is meant to dispense with substance and reality. In time, however, history will demand more than these summary judgements.

STRANGELY ATTRACTIVE

Hitler is always present before my eyes: as a man of peace in 1936, as a man of war in 1944. It is not possible to have been a personal witness to the life of such an extraordinary man without being marked by it forever. Not a day goes by but Hitler rises again in my memory, not as a man long dead, but as a real being who paces his office floor, seats himself in his chair, pokes the burning logs in the fireplace.

The first thing anyone noticed when he came into view was his small mustache. Countless times he had been advised to shave it off, but he always refused: people were used to him the way he was.

He was not tall -- no more than was Napoleon or Alexander the Great.

Hitler had deep blue eyes that many found bewitching, although I did not find them so. Nor did I detect the electric current his hands were said to give off. I gripped them quite a few times and was never struck by his lightening.

His face showed emotion or indifference according to the passion or apathy of the moment. At times he was as though benumbed, saying not a word, while his jaws moved in the meanwhile as if they were grinding an obstacle to smithereens in the void. Then he would come suddenly alive and launch into a speech directed at you alone, as though he were addressing a crowd of hundreds of thousands at Berlin's Tempelhof airfield. Then he became as if transfigured. Even his complexion, otherwise dull, lit up as he spoke. And at such times, to be sure, Hitler was strangely attractive and as if possessed of magic powers.

EXCEPTIONAL VIGOR

Anything that might have seemed too solemn in his remarks, he quickly tempered with a touch of humour. The picturesque world, the biting phrase were at his command. In a flash he would paint a word-picture that brought a smile, or come up with an unexpected and disarming comparison. He could be harsh and even implacable in his judgements and yet almost at the same time be surprisingly conciliatory, sensitive and warm.

After 1945 Hitler was accused of every cruelty, but it was not in his nature to be cruel. He loved children. It was an entirely natural thing for him to stop his car and share his food with young cyclists along the road. Once he gave his raincoat to a derelict plodding in the rain. At midnight he would interrupt his work and prepare the food for his dog Blondi.

He could not bear to eat meat, because it meant the death of a living creature. He refused to have so much as a rabbit or a trout sacrificed to provide his food. He would allow only eggs on his table, because egg-laying meant that the hen had been spared rather than killed.

Hitler's eating habits were a constant source of amazement to me. How could someone on such a rigorous schedule, who had taken part in tens of thousands of exhausting mass meetings from which he emerged bathed with sweat, often losing two to four pounds in the process; who slept only three to four hours a night; and who, from 1940 to 1945, carried the whole world on his shoulders while ruling over 380 million Europeans: how, I wondered, could he physically survive on just a boiled egg, a few tomatoes, two or three pancakes, and a plate of noodles? But he actually gained weight!

He drank only water. He did not smoke and would not tolerate smoking in his presence. At one or two o'clock in the morning he would still be talking, untroubled, close to his fireplace, lively, often amusing. He never showed any sign of weariness. Dead tired his audience might be, but not Hitler.

He was depicted as a tired old man. Nothing was further from the truth. In September 1944, when he was reported to be fairly doddering, I spent a week with him. His mental and physical vigor were still exceptional. The attempt made on his life on July 20th had, if anything, recharged him. He took tea in his quarters as tranquilly as if we had been in his small private apartment at the chancellery before the war, or enjoying the view of snow and bright blue sky through his great bay window at Berchtesgaden.

IRON SELF-CONTROL

At the very end of his life, to be sure, his back had become bent, but his mind remained as clear as a flash of lightening. The testament he dictated with extraordinary composure on the eve of his death, at three in the morning of April 29, 1945, provides us a lasting testimony. Napoleon at Fontainebleau was not without his moments of panic before his abdication. Hitler simply shook hands with his associates in silence, breakfasted as on any other day, then went to his death as if he were going on a stroll. When has history ever witnessed so enormous a tragedy brought to its end with such iron self control?

Hitler's most notable characteristic was ever his simplicity. The most complex of problems resolved itself in his mind into a few basic principles. His actions were geared to ideas and decisions that could be understood by anyone. The laborer from Essen, the isolated farmer, the Ruhr industrialist, and the university professor could all easily follow his line of thought. The very clarity of his reasoning made everything obvious.

His behaviour and his life style never changed even when he became the ruler of Germany. He dressed and lived frugally. During his early days in Munich, he spent no more than a mark per day for food. At no stage in his life did he spend anything on himself. Throughout his 13 years in the chancellery he never carried a wallet or ever had money of his own.

COMPUTER-LIKE MIND

Hitler was self-taught and made not attempt to hide the fact. The smug conceit of intellectuals, their shiny ideas packaged like so many flashlight batteries, irritated him at times. His own knowledge he had acquired through selective and unremitting study, and he knew far more than thousands of diploma-decorated academics.

I don't think anyone ever read as much as he did. He normally read one book every day, always first reading the conclusion and the index in order to gauge the work's interest for him. He had the power to extract the essence of each book and then store it in his computer-like mind. I have heard him talk about complicated scientific books with faultless precision, even at the height of the war.

His intellectual curiosity was limitless. He was readily familiar with the writings of the most diverse authors, and nothing was too complex for his comprehension. He had a deep knowledge and understanding of Buddha, Confucius and Jesus Christ, as well as Luther, Calvin, and Savonarola; of literary giants such as Dante, Schiller, Shakespeare and Goethe; and analytical writers such as Renan and Gobineau, Chamberlain and Sorel

He had trained himself in philosophy by studying Aristotle and Plato. He could quote entire paragraphs of Schopenhauer from memory, and for a long time carried a pocked edition of Schopenhauer with him. Nietzsche taught him much about the willpower.

His thirst for knowledge was unquenchable. He spend hundreds of hours studying the works of Tacitus and Mommsen, military strategists such as Clausewitz, and empire builders such as Bismark. Nothing escaped him: world history or the history of civilizations, the study of the Bible and the Talmud, Thomistic philosophy and all the masterpieces of Homer, Sophocles, Horace, Ovid, Titus Livius and Cicero. He knew Julian the Apostate as if he had been his contemporary.

His knowledge also extended to mechanics. He knew how engines worked; he understood the ballistics of various weapons; and he astonished the best medical scientists with his knowledge of medicine and biology.

The universality of Hitler's knowledge may surprise or displease those unaware of it, but it is nonetheless a historical fact: Hitler was one of the most cultivated men of this century. Many times more so than Churchill, an intellectual mediocrity; or than Pierre Lavaal, with him mere cursory knowledge of history; of than Roosevelt; or Eisenhower, who never got beyond detective novels.

THE YOUNG ARCHITECT

Even during his earliest years, Hitler was different than other children. He had an inner strength and was guided by his spirit and his instincts.

He could draw skillfully when he was only eleven years old. His sketches made at that age show a remarkable firmness and liveliness. He first paintings and watercolors, created at age 15, are full of poetry and sensitivity. One of his most striking early works, 'Fortress Utopia,' also shows him to have been an artist of rare imagination. His artistic orientation took many forms. He wrote poetry from the time he was a lad. He dictated a complete play to his sister Paula who was amazed at his presumption. At the age of 16, in Vienna, he launched into the creation of an opera. He even designed the stage settings, as well as all the costumes; and, of course, the characters were Wagnerian heroes.

More than just an artist, Hitler was above all an architect. Hundreds of his works were notable as much for the architecture as for the painting. From memory alone he could reproduce in every detail the onion dome of a church or the intricate curves of wrought iron. Indeed, it was to fulfill his dream of becoming an architect that Hitler went to Vienna at the beginning of the century.

When one sees the hundreds of paintings, sketches and drawings he created at the time, which reveal his mastery of three dimensional figures, it is astounding that his examiners at the Fine Arts Academy failed him in two successive examinations. German historian Werner Maser, no friend of Hitler, castigated these examiners: "All of his works revealed extraordinary architectural gifts and knowledge. The builder of the Third Reich gives the former Fine Arts Academy of Vienna cause for shame."

In his room, Hitler always displayed an old photograph of his mother. The memory of the mother he loved was with him until the day he died. Before leaving this earth, on April 30, 1945, he placed his mother's photograph in front of him. She had blue eyes like his and a similar face. Her maternal intuition told her that her son was different from other children. She acted almost as if she knew her son's destiny. When she died, she felt anguished by the immense mystery surrounding her son.

HUMBLE ORIGINS

Throughout the years of his youth, Hitler lived the life of a virtual recluse. He greatest wish was to withdraw from the world. At heart a loner, he wandered about, ate meager meals, but devoured the books of three public libraries. He abstained from conversations and had few friends.

It is almost impossible to imagine another such destiny where a man started with so little and reached such heights. Alexander the great was the son of a king. Napoleon, from a well-to-do family, was a general at 24. Fifteen years after Vienna, Hitler would still be an unknown corporal. Thousands of others had a thousand times more opportunity to leave their mark on the world.

Hitler was not much concerned with his private life. In Vienna he had lived in shabby, cramped lodgings. But for all that he rented a piano that took up half his room, and concentrated on composing his opera. He lived on bread, milk, and vegetable soup. His poverty was real. He did not even own an over-coat. He shoveled streets on snowy days. He carried luggage at the railway station. He spent many weeks in shelters for the homeless. But he never stopped painting or reading.

Despite his dire poverty, Hitler somehow managed to maintain a clean appearance. Landlords and landladies in Vienna and Munich all remembered him for his civility and pleasant disposition. His behavior was impeccable. His room was always spotless, his meager belongings meticulously arranged, and his clothes neatly hung or folded. He washed and ironed his own clothes, something which in those days few men did. He needed almost nothing to survive, and money from the sale of a few paintings was sufficient to provide for all his needs.

SEARCH FOR DESTINY

Impressed by the beauty of the church in a Benedictine monastery where he was part of the choir and served as an altar boy, Hitler dreamt fleetingly of becoming a Benedictine monk. And it was at that time, too, interestingly enough, that whenever he attended mass, he always had to pass beneath the first swastika he had ever seen: it was graven in the stone escutcheon of the abbey portal.

Hitler's father, a customs officer, hoped the boy would follow in his footsteps and become a civil servant. His tutor encouraged him to become a monk. Instead the young Hitler went, or rather fled, to Vienna. And there, thwarted in his artistic aspirations by the bureaucratic mediocrities of academia, he turned to isolation and meditation. Lost in the great capital of Austria-Hungary, he searched for his destiny.

During the first 30 years of Hitler's life, the date April 20, 1889, meant nothing to anyone. He was born on that day in Braunau, a small town in the Inn valley. During his exile in Vienna, he often thought of his modest home, and particularly of his mother. When she fell ill, he returned home from Vienna to look after her. For weeks he nursed her, did all the household chores, and supported her as the most loving of sons. When she finally died, on Christmas eve, his pain was immense. Wracked with grief, he buried his mother in the little country cemetery. "I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief," said his mother's doctor, who happened to be Jewish.

A STRONG SOUL

Hitler had not yet focused on politics, but without his rightly knowing, that was the career to which he was most strongly called. Politics would ultimately blend with his passion for art. People, the masses, would be the clay the sculptor shapes into an immortal form. The human clay would become for him a beautiful work of art like one of Myron's marble sculptures, a Hans Makart painting, or Wagner's Ring Trilogy.

His love of music, art and architecture had not removed him from the political life and social concerns of Vienna. In order to survive, he worked as a common laborer sided by side with other workers. He was a silent spectator, but nothing escaped him: not the vanity and egoism of the bourgeoisie, not the moral and material misery of the people, nor yet the hundreds of thousands of workers who surged down the wide avenues of Vienna with anger in their hearts.

He had also been taken aback by the growing presence in Vienna of bearded Jews wearing caftans, a sight unknown in Linz. "How can they be Germans?" he asked himself. He read the statistics: in 1860 there were 69 Jewish families in Vienna; 40 years later there were 200,000. They were everywhere. He observed their invasion of the universities and the legal and medical professions, and their takeover of the newspapers.

Hitler was exposed to the passionate reactions of the workers to this influx, but the workers were not alone in their unhappiness. There were many prominent persons in Austria and Hungary who did not hide their resentment at what they believed was an alien invasion of their country. The mayor of Vienna, a Christian-Democrat and a powerful orator, was eagerly listened to by Hitler.

Hitler was also concerned with the fate of the eight million Austrian Germans kept apart from Germany, and thus deprived of their rightful German nationhood. He saw Emperor Franz Josef as a bitter and petty old man unable to cope with the problems of the day and the aspirations of the future.

Quietly, the young Hitler was summing things up in his mind.

First: Austrians were part of Germany, the common fatherland.

Second: The Jews were aliens within the German community.

Third: Patriotism was only valid if it was shared by all classes. The common people with whom Hitler had shared grief and humiliation were just as much a part of the fatherland as the millionaires of high society.

Fourth: Class war would sooner or later condemn both workers and bosses to ruin in any country. No country could survive class war; only cooperation between workers and bosses can benefit the country. Workers must be respected and live with decency and honor. Creativity must never be stifled.

When Hitler later said that he had formed his social and political doctrine in Vienna, he told the truth. Ten years later his observations made in Vienna would become the order of the day.

Thus Hitler was to live for several years in the crowded city of Vienna as a virtual outcast, yet quietly observing everything around him. His strength came from within. He did not rely on anyone to do his thinking for him. Exceptional human beings always feel lonely amid the vast human throng. Hitler saw his solitude as a wonderful opportunity to meditate and not to be submerged in a mindless sea. In order not to be lost in the wastes of a sterile desert, a strong soul seeks refuge within himself. Hitler was such a soul.

THE WORD

The lightning in Hitler's life would come from the word.

All his artistic talent would be channeled into his mastery of communication and eloquence. Hitler would never conceive of popular conquests without the power of the word. He would enchant and be enchanted by it. He would find total fulfillment when the magic of his words inspired the hearts and minds of the masses with whom he communed.

He would feel reborn each time he conveyed with mystical beauty the knowledge he had acquired in his lifetime.

Hitler's incantory eloquence will remain, for a very long time, a vast field of study for the psychoanalyst. The power of Hitler's word is the key. Without it, there would never have been a Hitler era.

TRANSCENDANT FAITH

Did Hitler believe in God? He believed deeply in God. He called God the Almighty, master of all that is known and unknown.

Propagandists portrayed Hitler as an atheist. He was not. He had contempt for hypocritical and materialistic clerics, but he was not alone in that. He believed in the necessity of standards and theological dogmas, without which, he repeatedly said, the great institution of the Christian church would collapse. These dogmas clashed with his intelligence, but he also recognized that it was hard for the human mind to encompass all the problems of creation, its limitless scope and breathtaking beauty. He acknowledged that every human being has spiritual needs.

The song of the nightingale, the pattern and color of a flower, continually brought him back to the great problems of creation. No one in the world has spoken to me so eloquently about the existence of God. He held this view not because he was brought up as a Christian, but because his analytical mind bound him to the concept of God.

Hitler's faith transcended formulas and contingencies. God was for him the basis of everything, the ordainer of all things, of his Destiny and that of all others.

Die Deutsche Wochenschau – Newsreel No. 561 – 04 June 1941

Rommel Meets with Italian General Gariboldi at the Tobruk Front;

Tank Battles in Cyrenaica;

Luftwaffe Units Prepare to Invade Crete (Operation Mercury);

German Paratroops invade Crete;

German Mountain Infantry and Paratroopers Pursue the Enemy;

Luftwaffe General Student Salutes Victorious Paratroopers;

David Irving's verdict: Hubris, hypocrisy, tragedy

Nuremberg: The Last Battle. A Review

Source: http://codoh.com/library/document/481/

By Stephen J. Sniegoski

Published: 1998-04-13

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Nuremberg: The Last Battle by David Irving. Focal Point Publications, 1996. 377 + x pp.

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As stated in the title of by David Irving's book, the Nuremberg Trial was the last battle of World War II in Europe. Nazi Germany had already been physically destroyed by the superior military power of the Allies. The purpose of Nuremberg was to demonstrate to the world the unparalleled evil of Nazism and, consequently, the fact that the Allied military victory constituted the triumph of superior morality.

In the words of the chief prosecutor, Robert Jackson, "We want to prove to Germany and to the world that the Nazi regime was as wicked and as criminal as we have always maintained." (p. 166) The trial, its adherents fondly believed, would do far more than terminate the war; it would also fulfill the idealistic war aims that the Allies had preached during the war. It would create the legal framework to prevent aggression and atrocities from occurring in the future; in the international realm, violence would be replaced by the rule of law. Although the Allies were all-powerful, while the Germans in Irving's words were "unarmed and had few friends," this last battle would prove something less than a decisive victory for the trial's supporters.

Irving provides an overview of the Nuremberg Trial of Germany's major war criminals, which lasted from November 1945 until October 1946. (There were other war-crime trials at Nuremberg conducted exclusively by the United States, but this trial of the principal figures of the Third Reich conducted by the International Military Tribunal [IMT] — the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union — is what is usually meant by "Nuremberg Trial.") During the war, the Allies had repeatedly stated their intention to punish German leaders for their heinous crimes. How this punishment would be effected, however, was in question. Churchill and the British government sought summary executions of the high-ranking Germans. The Soviets mentioned both summary executions and trials, meaning "show trials" that would have propaganda value.

In the United States, both the trial and summary-execution positions had their proponents. The advocates of the Morgenthau Plan, who sought to mete out a harsh collective punishment to the German people, identified with swift executions. The contrary idea of a judicial trial conducted by an international court was pushed by the War Department headed by Henry Stimson. President Roosevelt never firmly committed himself to either position, though he leaned toward a judicial trial. Harry Truman, upon becoming president after Roosevelt's death in April 1945, opted firmly for a trial. That the German leadership would be given a trial, however, does not mean that there was any question about the outcome. Encapsulating Truman's view, Irving writes, "The Germans should be given a fair trial first — and then hanged." (p. 32)

To represent the United States in negotiations with its allies for the international trial, Truman chose Robert Jackson, a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; Jackson would later serve as the trial's chief prosecutor. Irving describes him as "an idealist endowed with clearly defined notions of justice and fair play" (p. 61) and dubs him the "architect of a new international law." (p. 67) Jackson's fundamental goal was to have the trial set the foundation for a new kind of international law that would prohibit wars of aggression.

In short, the United States was the driving force behind the international trial, which embodied America's somewhat naive and self-righteous brand of idealism — a description on which Irving and I agree. Because of its power and prestige, the United States was able to drag along the other major Allies — Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Considerable squabbling broke out between those countries regarding the specifics of the proposed trial, but finally the London Agreement was concluded on August 8, 1945, setting up the International Military Tribunal and defining its procedures. Ironically, that occurred during the same week as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Statute drew up four counts of crimes for which the German leadership would be tried. The first count involved conspiracy — conspiring to engage in the other three counts. That charge was pushed by Jackson but not understood by the jurists from the other countries. (The conspiracy charge is rather intriguing, since the Establishment generally ridicules the idea of conspiracies.)

Count two was "crimes against peace" — the actual planning, preparing, and waging of aggressive war. That count was generally interpreted as criminalizing the waging of war to alter the status quo. Thus, the Germans could not use the unfairness of the Versailles Treaty to justify making war to bring about its revision.[1]

The third count was "war crimes" — a category that included killing and mistreating soldiers and civilians in ways not justified by military necessity.

Count four consisted of "crimes against humanity," which was a new idea, dealing with inhuman actions committed against civilians. Included in count four was the mass murder of Jews.

The London Statute called for the indictment of the major war criminals, and, after much debate, the IMT came up with a list of 24 names, 22 of whom would, in the event, be tried. Among those listed were Herman Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Admiral Karl Dönitz, General Alfred Jodl, Alfred Rosenberg, Albert Speer, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Hans Frank, and Julius Streicher. Martin Bormann, who is now believed to have died prior to the indictment, would be tried in absentia. Also indicted were the leading organizations of the Third Reich — the Reich Cabinet, the Nazi Party leadership, the SS, the Gestapo, the General Staff, and the SA.

Nuremberg was not a show trial along the lines of those perfected by Joseph Stalin. The defendants were allowed to defend themselves and were given lawyers. But the scales of justice were weighted heavily against the defense, a fact long recognized by commentators on the trial. Contrary to the traditional American concept of justice, the Germans were being judged by ex post facto laws — being tried for violating laws that did not exist at the time of the actual offenses. The retroactive nature of Nuremberg troubled many legal minds of differing political persuasions, including William O. Douglas on the Left and Robert Taft on the Right. Also, the Statute prohibited the accused from offering the defense of having obeyed orders from a superior. Furthermore, the defendants were interrogated before the trial with no lawyer present, and, Irving says, "they were never cautioned as to their rights, because they had none." (p. 141) Irving shows that interrogators used blackmail threats and sometimes even physical torture to gain incriminating evidence from witnesses (though the defendants themselves were not tortured).

The defendants had lawyers who sincerely worked for their interest, but the defense had no access to the archives of documents used by the prosecution. They could get hold of documents only through the offices of the prosecution, and documents that would aid the defense were routinely concealed from them. The London Statute prohibited the defense from challenging the impartiality of the judges, who openly fraternized with the prosecution.

Probably the most embarrassing feature of the trial was that there were few crimes for which the Germans were convicted that were not also committed by the Allies. In light of the likely comparison, the London Statute specifically prohibited the "tu quoque" defense — "you did it too." However, it is revealing to compare crimes for which the Germans were convicted with analogous Allied actions. Regarding the crime of aggressive war, the Soviet Union attacked Poland and also Finland. A secret protocol of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact had turned over much of Eastern Europe to Soviet control, and, in fact, it was that agreement that initiated World War II. The British violated Norwegian neutrality and occupied Iceland, Persia, Madagascar, and French North-West Africa. The Soviets murdered thousands of Polish officers in Katyn Forest (although the Germans were indicted for that crime at Nuremberg) and murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians in the areas of Eastern Europe that they took over in 1939-40. At the end of the war, the Western Allies repatriated to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia millions of soldiers who would be murdered by the Communists. At Dachau, the Americans murdered German soldiers after they had surrendered and been disarmed. The Americans and the British engaged in the intentional bombing of civilian populations, and Churchill had made plans to equip the bombers with mustard gas and anthrax.[2]

Although mainstream commentators have acknowledged some of those Allied atrocities, Irving stands virtually alone in pointing out that the Allied crimes did not cease with the war's termination. The Soviets and the new pro- Soviet governments of Eastern Europe, for example, were engaging in the ethnic cleansing of Germans from areas turned over to Poland and Czechoslovakia, and were communizing Eastern Europe by homicidal means. Both the Soviets and the Western Allies mistreated German prisoners and required forced labor from the conquered civilian populace. In essence, at the same time the Germans were being condemned at Nuremberg, the Allies were engaging in similar criminal acts themselves that took the lives of millions of people. It was apparent from the outset that the Allies did not intend to abide by the high moral standards they so piously preached and by which the Germans were judged.

Irving acknowledges that the Allied crimes do not mitigate the crimes of Nazi Germany. "It is pointless to weigh, one against the other, such catalogues of horrors and atrocities," he writes. "The deeper lesson is that war itself is a crime — and that the real crime of war is not genocide but the far broader bestiality which embraces genocide, and which we can label Innocenticide, the Slaughter of the Innocents." (p. 39) Today, of course, it is the Holocaust that stigmatizes Nazi Germany as the epitome of iniquity — the Holocaust being portrayed as a crime infinitely worse than anything the Allies (or, for that matter, anyone else in history) committed. Thus, failure to acknowledge the unparalleled nature of Nazi Germany's atrocities is to engage in what Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt labels "immoral equivalency" — a crime only one step less heinous than outright "Holocaust denial."[3]

Yet as Irving points out, Nuremberg did not focus on the killing of Jews. Representatives of influential Jewish organizations, including Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, had attempted to pressure Jackson to concentrate on the Nazi persecution of Jews, but Jackson would have none of it. Instead, he responded, "we are prosecuting these Nazis not because they killed Jews, but because they killed men and women." (p. 90) It was essential, Jackson believed, to prevent the trial from being seen as a "Jewish trial" engaging in vengeance.

The persecution of Jews was only one of many "crimes against humanity" charged against the Germans. Irving writes: "In retrospect it may seem remarkable that the Nazi 'factories of death' played a much smaller part in the Nuremberg trial than did the shooting of a number of R.A.F. officers who had escaped from the prisoner-of-war camp at Sagan, and the conditions under which Speer's slave-labourers worked in the munitions industry." (p. 235)

Although Nazi mass murder of Jews did not become a central focus of the trial, prosecutors did deal with the issue. Jackson charged the Germans with killing 5.7 million Jews, a figure that sounded more precise than the round 6 million being claimed by Jewish authorities.[4] Even those commentators who acknowledge Nuremberg's legal shortcomings credit the trial with uncovering, documenting, and making known to the world the heinous German effort to exterminate European Jewry.[5] In the conventional view, Nuremberg revealed the Nazi persecution of Jews with a degree of clarity and precision not available with respect to other instances of mass killing. Thus, while historians differ dramatically on many aspects of the Turkish slaughter of Armenians or the Soviet mass murder of various classes and nationalities, there is a basic consensus on the Holocaust.

It is here that Irving strays the farthest from historical respectability (and, in some European countries, from legality) by denying that such evidence was clear-cut or conclusive. First, he points out that evidence on the alleged Nazi death camps was supplied largely by the Soviet Union, hardly noted for a devotion to objective truth.[6] And for the United States much of the information was gathered by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was likewise noted for disseminating propaganda.[7] Moreover, torture and blackmail appear to have been used on occasion to induce witnesses to confess or provide evidence.

Some of the evidence was contradictory and patently incorrect. Testimony accepted as factual at Nuremberg included such atrocity legends as gas chambers at Dachau, mass killing by steam, and the making of soap from the remains of victims — tales now rejected even by Establishment historians. Overall, the information presented to the court had been selectively chosen to incriminate the Nazis for pursuing a systematic policy of Jewish extermination.[8] Information that might have served to exonerate them was left out, such as a 1942 statement by Dr. Hans Lammers, chief of the Reich chancellery, that Hitler would take care of the Jewish problem after the war.

Finally, the Allied prosecutors read into the documents more than was there: for example, the Wannsee Protocol, which was alleged to be the "key document" outlining the systematic policy for extermination, actually makes no explicit reference to killing Jews.[9] The fundamental purpose of the whole Nuremberg undertaking, as it emerges in Irving's account, was not to arrive at truth but to convict and demonize Nazi Germany.[10]

In contrast to a common contention of Holocaust historians that the Nuremberg defendants did not deny the existence of the crimes but merely denied their own culpability, Irving points out that the defendants seemed unaware of the crimes against the Jews and were ashamed for their country when informed of those deeds.[11] What had the greatest emotional impact on the defendants was an OSS documentary film on the concentration camps, based on pictures taken by military photographers as the American and British armies advanced through Germany. That documentary evidence, of course, did not deal with the "death camps," which were in areas occupied by the Soviet Union. The British and Americans, Irving writes, had "found and photographed for posterity disturbing scenes of death from starvation and pestilence — scenes which should not, in retrospect, have surprised the Allied commanders who had spent the last months bombing Germany's rail distribution networks and blasting the pharmaceutical factories in order to conjure up precisely these horsemen of the Apocalypse." (p. 50)

What all the Nuremberg material on the German persecution of Jews should have done, but definitely did not do, was absolve the German people of complicity in the crime. For, as Irving points out:

"Nowhere in the Allied archives, which contain mountains of intercepted cipher messages and the reports on bags of mail captured from enemy ships or from overrun enemy positions, is there the slightest evidence that such atrocities were commonly known to the German public at large."[12]

On the German mass killing of Jews, Irving concludes: "The whole of the Nazi drive to liquidate their enemies had proceeded in such a ramshackle, haphazard, and disorganised manner that it is difficult even now to state with certainty precisely what happened and what did not. The historian's task is not eased by the laws imposed, fifty years after the event, by some European countries specifically stifling informed conjecture and investigation." (p. 236)

Ultimately the Nuremberg court acquitted three of the defendants. Twelve were sentenced to death by hanging. Three were sentenced to life imprisonment, and four were sentenced to imprisonment for terms ranging from 10 to 20 years.

Irving goes over the specifics of the cases of the individuals, bringing out some of the anomalies. For example, Julius Streicher received a death sentence although he played no role in the German government from 1939 onward and consequently could have had no direct responsibility for its wartime actions. In essence, Streicher was sentenced to death for publishing anti-Semitic views. Also uninvolved in government policies was Rudolf Hess, who did not engage in war planning and had departed Germany in May 1941 before the onset of the killing of the Jews. Hess had been imprisoned by the British after flying to Scotland to seek a negotiated peace. Yet he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Admiral Karl Dönitz had not acted in a military capacity any different from that of Allied naval leaders, yet he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The American judge at Nuremberg, Nicholas Biddle, acknowledging that "Germany waged a much cleaner war than we did" (p. 259), would have acquitted Dönitz.

Nuremberg standards were not applied equally to the defendants. Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler's economic czar, was acquitted because of support from influential bankers, although Jackson saw him as a key figure in the development of the Third Reich. In Jackson's opinion, Schacht was "the most contemptible of all the defendants. He had provided the finance for the spectacular rise and rearmament of Hitler's Germany. More than any other, this man's financial genius had paved the way for the violation of the Versailles Treaty." (p. 102)

Albert Speer, who ran German war industry in the latter part of the conflict, received a 20-year sentence instead of a harsher penalty because of his urbane character and his efforts to portray himself as Hitler's opponent. Irving points out that the German war industry relied on brutalized slave labor and that Speer had evicted Jews from Berlin, "which became the first stage of the expulsion of those Jews from Germany to uncertain fates in the eastern territories and at Auschwitz." (p. 231) By Nuremberg standards Speer deserved execution.

Irving shows strong antipathy for those who, like Speer, tried to divorce themselves from Hitler and his actions, and shift the blame to others. In contrast, Herman Göring, who took responsibility for and defended German actions, emerges as a heroic figure. His heroism culminated in his successful avoidance of a humiliating death by hanging when he ingested a cyanide pill.[13] As Irving depicts it: "There is no doubt that Hermann Göring's 'escape' — for that is how he at least had regarded it — sent a thrill through Germany at a time when starvation stalked the ruined streets and prison camps, and the humiliation of defeat and the rigours of the Allied occupation were barely being endured." (p. 297)

In summary, Irving points out that "the world saw Nuremberg as the old- fashioned practice of the victors putting the vanquished to the sword, behind a facade of retroactive law and elegant speeches." (p. 312) The evidence in the book clearly brings that out. An impartial application of the Nuremberg standards would have led to the punishment of many leaders of the Allies, not just Soviet but American and British as well.[14] The critical fact was not that the individual Germans had committed crimes of an unparalleled nature but rather that they had lost the war. Moreover, Nuremberg did not achieve its promise. It failed to set a precedent for international law, since its principles were never codified. Quite obviously, it failed to prevent future wars of aggression, which have been launched even by such purportedly impeccable countries as Israel.[15]

But Irving's assessment of Nuremberg is not completely negative. The Nuremberg Trial, he maintains, compared favorably with other war-crime trials conducted in the same period. For example, although witnesses were tortured, Nuremberg did not feature the savage beatings that were routinely used to get prisoners to sign false confessions in U.S. Army trials at Dachau. "All the defendants agreed they would have suffered far greater indignities at the hands of their fellow-countrymen, had they been put before German courts," he writes. (p. 280) And most significantly, Irving holds that the punishment meted out to most of the defendants was justified: "In most cases, the basic justice of the sentence passed at Nuremberg was undeniable: German courts would have disposed of many of the defendants for their actual responsibility for known murders — the killings after the Röhm putsch, the widespread liquidation of political enemies or racial groups, the murder of enemy prisoners-of-war." (p. 280)

It would have been helpful if Irving had more thoroughly developed his point about the "basic justice" of the Nuremberg sentences. Undoubtedly, some of the defendants deserved their severe punishment, but the connection between more than a few of the defendants and "known murders" seems at best tenuous.

Irving gives his account of the Nuremberg trial the aura of a Greek tragedy. It was a tragedy for the American proponents of the judicial trial, since its promise of world order based on law was never realized. And that was a rather unexpected defeat, given America's overwhelming power and moral prestige. But in a sense, Irving contends, the defeat was deserved because of America's hubris and self-righteousness.

Irving sees the tragedy of Nuremberg as being embodied in the career of Robert Jackson: "If this story needs a hero, then he is Jackson." (p. vii) Jackson was an individual of integrity who fought to make the trial legitimate and not simply a show trial based on cooked-up evidence, which was the aim of the OSS.[16] Irving writes:

Through his absence [from the U.S. political scene while] at Nuremberg, he had lost his chance of becoming chief justice of the United States, perhaps even president, and through his sponsoring of the trial he had become a figure of controversy. His motives were misunderstood; he was linked in many eyes with the scandalous series of war crimes trials held concurrently with his own, by the military authorities. Worst of all his dream of establishing a precedent for the prosecution of aggressive warmongering went unfulfilled. (p. 310)

But Irving's depiction of Nuremberg's negative impact on Jackson's career is exaggerated. It does not seem to be based on secondary accounts of Jackson's life, nor does Irving make a significant effort to prove his point. It is not apparent that Jackson would have become chief justice: he had vehement and influential enemies on the Supreme Court. It seems even less likely that he would have become president, given the fact that the Supreme Court has never been a springboard for the presidency. Moreover, Jackson (a Democrat) died in 1954, so he would have been able to run only in 1952, and Dwight Eisenhower was a very formidable Republican opponent.

Irving's rather cavalier assumption that the Nuremberg Trial was a failure also is unwarranted. It can be judged a failure only in the sense that it did not accomplish the august goals of its original proponents. Most later accounts, however, have portrayed it as at least a partial success, arguing that the trial succeeded in punishing evildoers and, even more important, in documenting the unparalleled crimes of Nazi Germany.[17]

Given the prevalence of those favorable accounts of Nuremberg, it would be valuable to have a revisionist work that directly countered their arguments. Irving's work does not even attempt such a refutation. A debate with other historians is precluded by Irving's historical methodology, whereby he focuses almost entirely on documentary rather than published secondary sources.[18] In many of his works, Irving's primary-source-oriented methodology has enabled him to make use of unexploited materials. But it is of limited success in the present book.

Irving does inject new material (or, at least, material adduced only by revisionists) when dealing with the Holocaust and the Allies' treatment of Germany. I regard that information as the book's greatest contribution. However, Irving only briefly touches on those issues. (That this review has given considerable attention to them is not indicative of the actual coverage in the book.) Instead of focusing on those controversial subjects, Irving has striven for inclusiveness. Much of his work rehashes information and issues that have been covered at length by mainstream historians. And Irving does not really present as clear a picture of those issues as do some other recent works on the subject. Although Irving's Nuremberg is in many respects a valuable work, it falls short of being what this reviewer would envision as an ideal revisionist account of the subject.

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Notes

[1] The criminalizing of war to alter the status quo was ironic, since the fundamental doctrine of Communist Russia was revolution against the status quo.

[2] According to today's media, Saddam Hussein's possession of chemical and biological weapons makes him the world's greatest monster.

[3] Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: The Free Press, 1993), pp. 212-15\.

Although seemingly contradicting the bulk of the evidence he has marshaled, Irving at one point does identify with the orthodox view of unparalleled German evil when he writes that "Hitler's soldiers committed crimes on a scale that beggared all comparisons in history." (p. 54)

[4] Irving writes with skepticism about the 6 million figure: "Given the turmoils and tragedies of a war-torn Europe ravaged by bombs and plagues, it was not a data basis on which a statistician would properly have relied. Where were the shifting frontiers? Who, indeed, was a Jew? These were questions about which cartographers, ethnographers, religious fanatics, and politicians are still at each other's throats. Six million? By sad but extraordinary coincidence, the American Jewish community had raised a similar outcry about a 'holocaust' a quarter of a century earlier, after World War One. In a 1919 speech the governor of New York, Martin Glynn, had claimed that 'six million' Jews were being exterminated." (p. 62)

[5] For example, Joseph E. Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial (New York: Viking Penguin, 1994) writes: "The one indisputable good to come out of the trial is that, to any sentient person, it documented beyond question Nazi Germany's crimes. To those old enough to remember personally the first horrifying film images of piles of pallid corpses being bulldozed into mass graves, it is hard to believe that this evidence of our eyes would ever be challenged." (p. 441)

[6] Truth from the Soviet Marxist-Leninist perspective was simply that which advanced the Soviets' own interests.

[7] Irving does not mention this fact, but the OSS was riddled with Communists and Communist sympathizers.

[8] Irving discusses the testimony of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss at some length (pp. 240-46), pointing out its contradictions and other discrepancies, and the fact that Höss had undergone torture before initially providing such information. (Höss provided an affidavit and was called upon to testify as a defense witness for Kaltenbrunner.) Höss gave the most detailed account of the gassing policy, and it usually features in overall accounts of Auschwitz.. Regarding the much-cited testimony of SS officer Dr. Wilhelm Höttl — that Adolf Eichmann in August 1944 had told him of a report he had presented to Heinrich Himmler documenting the killing of 6 million Jews — Irving points out that no such German report ever surfaced. Moreover, Höttl gained release from American confinement, despite his background in the murderous activities of the SS. Irving implies that his testimony induced that favorable treatment. (pp. 236-38)

[9] P. 91. Orthodox Holocaust historians focus on what they regard as code words and euphemisms to prove the systematic extermination policy.

[10] Establishment academia has considered partisanship as a rationale for rejecting the validity of extensive eyewitness testimony in certain cases — e.g., Communist infiltration of the United States government during World War II and the illegal actions of William Jefferson Clinton, especially in Arkansas. This reviewer regards much of the evidence used at Nuremberg to be more tainted than that dealing with the aforementioned subjects.

[11] Of course, it is impossible to prove a negative — that some alleged event never took place. The most that can be said is that one has no knowledge of it.

[12] P. 168. The ideas that the German people were complicit in the crimes against the Jews and that the Nazis went to extreme lengths to conceal their extermination process would seem to be a major contradiction in Holocaust orthodoxy. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's controversial Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 1996) significantly revised the Holocaust story to emphasize the direct role of ordinary Germans in the killing process.

[13] Göring would have accepted execution by a firing squad, which he considered an honorable death.

[14] That does not mean that there was any possibility or desire to establish an impartial court to objectively judge the activities of the belligerents of World War II. It is understandable that the Allies would punish the leaders of the defeated. Germany probably would have acted likewise.

[15] Israel initiated war in 1956 and in 1967. By the Nuremberg standard, Israel would be judged guilty of making aggressive war. Of course, standards applied to other countries are generally not applied to Israel.

[16] Irving writes: "It soon became clear that the O.S.S. had intended all along to stage-manage the whole trial along the lines of an N.K.V.D. show-trial, with Jackson little more than a professional actor." (p. 150) The OSS, whose agents were skilled in propaganda, still played a significant role in gathering information for the trial. Holocaust revisionist Arthur Butz claims that the OSS played a major role in the creation of the "Holocaust hoax." See The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (Torrance, Calif.: Institute for Historical Review, 1976), pp. 93-94.

[17] Among histories favorable to the Nuremberg Trial, in addition to Persico's, are: Robert E. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg (New York: Harper & Row, 1983); Airey Nave, On Trial at Nuremberg (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978); and Ann Tusa and John Tusa, The Nuremberg Trial (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1983).

[18] For example, in Hitler's War (New York: Viking Press, 1977, 1-vol. ed.), pp. xxii, Irving writes: "I eschewed as far as possible all published literature...."