Reinhard Kops’

Peace, War, and “Peace”

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II. WAR (cont.)

In Occupied and Unoccupied France

Joan of Arc, burned alive by the English at the stake, gazes down at me from her statue before the Compiègne town hall. The city’s few main streets are familiar from my first visit. The District Command sits close to the center, on the Rue de Paris, overseeing the Arrondissement of Oise—a slice of the Somme Department, anchored by its capital, Amiens, where the higher Field Command resides. Unlike that earlier trip, I am not here to mingle with German soldiers; instead, I am tasked with tackling the issues—ours and the French civilians’ alike—stemming from Germany’s occupation, at a tiny, almost trivial outpost. The field-gray uniforms that crowded my journey here, from stations in Aachen, Maastricht, Liège and Laon, even on the leave train itself, no longer define my world—now it is the civilian populace. I had become more a clerk than an officer. This shift felt smoother since I had ridden this same rail line in peacetime, recalling effortlessly how this land looked without German troops. And the spirit of the German occupation authority here seemed custom-fit to me—utterly unlike the harsh tones of their counterparts in the East. This was a clear effort to soften the blow of an unintended Franco-German war and its aftermath, sparing all needless cruelty. Even Adolf Hitler himself endorsed this French-friendly stance, greeting the fallen Marshal Pétain with, “I regret meeting you under these circumstances.” Thus, we can assume every German official named here felt more like a guest in a friend’s land than a foe’s.

Not so on the French side in every case. Petty chauvinism from military men, stung by their swift, total, self-wrought defeat, soon fed into the hands of outsiders—nearly always Jews—bent on sparking an underground resistance to shatter the fragile harmony. So our task, mine included, proved less simple than it first appeared. At times, firm action was needed; still, stretching that grip to the vast majority of French folk would have been a dire misstep. The key lay in forging personal trust with those we faced, building open teamwork to root out the agitators together.

In that very spirit, the District Command in Compiègne had gained ground. Its commander—my new superior, Captain Doernte, a merchant from Hamburg-Wandsbek—was a master at this game. A true, heartfelt friendship tied him to Compiègne’s mayor and the local gendarmerie commander, Captain Maréchal. I was glad that the warm rapport among these three soon colored my own ties with them.

My superior awaited me already. Work, though, was not the first order of business—I was to meet everyone I would be dealing with instead. They assigned me a fine, spacious room in the castle-like building on the Rue de Paris, home to all the command’s gentlemen. I got to know them over the dining table:

• Captain Fehler, a senior teacher from Hamburg and the district commander’s right hand—a polished, classically trained man who could steer the gravest debate with a kind smile,

• First Lieutenant Rahm, the adjutant, rarely seen in the thick of real work, his role mostly spent wrangling German bureaucracy,

• the hunting officer, also a first lieutenant, doubling as a district forester in Compiègne’s sprawling woods, partly to stock the command with game,

• the gendarmerie officer, charged with guiding French police work—a jovial old criminologist who had learned never to blow small matters out of proportion,

• our paymaster,

• a female secretary, later mine, who had to hustle tirelessly as the paperwork piled up.

The mood was predictably hearty and collegial—only the adjutant lingered a bit on the edges.

The centerpiece of this first lunch was a wild boar roast, a delicacy deftly conjured onto the table by the hunting officer. The French had been relieved of all their weapons. In the commandant’s office, a spacious room brimmed with hunting rifles, each one neatly numbered and tagged with its owner’s name and address. With the hunters no longer present, it fell to the hunting officer to keep the game population in check. Our stomachs, in turn, took on the noble burden of preventing greater damage to the fields. Around the same time, I learned of several fine sources where one could procure this or that treat to round out our dining pleasures. In the days that followed, Captain Fehler and I visited a mushroom farm, a cheese factory, fruit orchards and wine cellars. The art of living well was certainly held in high esteem among this circle.

As a jurist, I was soon handed everything that went beyond the usual scope of duties. Since I had to decide matters largely on my own, yet personally face my superior’s scrutiny whenever something went awry, this work proved a formidable school for the rest of my life. And from it, I came to see how, say, the British Empire drew its capable young talent for the India Office: straight from the crucible of practice itself. Empires, after all, cannot be summoned from thin air. Even a Greater Germany would need years before its initial crop of brown-shirted leaders could give way to abler figures. In the whirlwind of the 20th century, that was a daring gamble. Time and again, my mind drifted back to what was being planned in the East—some of it already set in motion. Take, for instance, Hinrich Lohse, the Gauleiter of Schleswig-Holstein, who was named Reich Commissar there; we knew him in Altona, where he had managed to rechristen the local Königsstraße as Hinrich-Lohse-Straße in 1933. To France, they sent a different sort. Chief among them was Otto Abetz, once the France specialist for the Reich Youth Leadership, an elementary school teacher and ardent admirer of French culture, who rose to become ambassador in Paris. Under him, German-French cultural policy rested with figures like Ernst Achenbach, Karl Epting, Friedrich Grimm and Friedrich Sieburg. On the French side, the vast majority of publishers and writers engaged with them. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and Louis Ferdinand Céline, among many others, rose up against a tide of mostly Jewish feuilletonists who had stirred the pot in cultural circles, editorial offices and literary societies with their usual vigor—only to pack their bags after the victory won with American arms, not just to mock the sincere push for German-French rapprochement in print, but to snuff it out, brutally and bloodily, in a wave of terrorist massacres new even to France, as the last of their so-called “intellectual weapons.”

The departure of French legionnaires to fight in the East marked a bid to stamp out the last of their “spiritual weapons.” Otto Abetz was cast into prison; Pierre Laval, brutally murdered. Yet this grim end to our generation’s earnest, oft-distorted efforts toward a “New Europe” was not something I could foresee back then. People still greeted us with genuine warmth wherever we appeared. The French had not yet been riled up by radio broadcasts from London and Dover.

From the wealth of cases brought before me, I would like to single out a few now.

Chantilly, famed for its racecourses, fell within our administrative domain. In the roomy gatehouse of a stud farm, a German noncommissioned officer from a veterinary unit had set up quarters. But the cost of electricity had to be settled with the French authorities. One day, to his shock and dismay, an official from the Chantilly municipality uncovered that this rogue NCO had quietly tapped into a power line—lights burning bright, unmetered by the German Wehrmacht. The French complainant took a train to Compiègne to see me in person; within a few sentences, I sensed he was blowing the matter out of proportion. Clearly, he aimed to stir some trouble for the boches. After his initial visit, I spoke with the NCO in question and learned this had been going on for a year and a half. Still, the unit was willing to pay for the power. I summoned the accuser back and asked how much electricity he reckoned had been used. He could not say. So, moved by a fervent wish to spare Chantilly’s community—heaven forbid—any harm from such an extravagant German NCO, I proposed they install a meter at the gatehouse, wait another year and a half to match the time elapsed, then double the recorded usage and send us the bill. He signed off on it and, no doubt, later found a more direct, amicable way to deal with the Germans.

In Senlis, our captain—not for nothing a senior study director—Dr. Fehler, uncovered a priceless library in a private home, its residents having fled the Germans and not yet returned. Dr. Fehler drove to the military commander in Paris to secure Wehrmacht protection for the vulnerable collection. He later recounted the peak of his trip: “I was ushered to an archive councilor. A door swung open. Steel helmet tucked under my arm, in regulation uniform, I stepped into a grand, splendid room. At its far end, behind a desk, sat a young slip of a lad who waved a weary hand, signaling me to wait. I stood there, heels clicked together at the door, for about two minutes as he flipped through a book. Then I turned and walked out.” Captain Fehler bore the Iron Cross First Class from the Great War.

One day, I ordered the school inspectors of the district to report to me. Five turned up—older gentlemen entrusted by France with the education of this region’s children. You could see it in them: a touch of fear trembling in their knees, yet a flicker of surprise at this summons, braced to keep the occupying power out of their work. And why not? What had these good citizens not heard about the Germans? All were old enough to have lived through the anti-German fervor of the First World War, when newspapers daily accused us of shooting defenseless women and hacking off children’s hands—papers then being the germ-carriers, a role now played by Holocaust films. That distance shone through in our first few exchanges. Then I got to the point, delivering a short speech I still have before me: “Rest easy; we Germans will leave France one day—tomorrow, perhaps, or the day after. This occupation is a passing phase. It will fade, even if you do not resist it in your classrooms. (Worried nods: We would not dream of it.) Nor should you forget we never wanted to come. You declared war on us; we did not seek it. We have made no territorial claims against you—none then, none now—though we easily could. So, amid all these field-gray uniforms in your streets, do not lose sight of the real threats to our shared European culture. Use these years—when we will never meddle in your teaching—to guide the children in this spirit: to see past the awful tragedy of German-French conflict and learn to uphold Europe’s broader interests against the materialism of East and West.” My French was not flawless for a topic demanding such a range of feeling. All the more astonishing, then, was the impact of my words. I had hit the mark! All five burst out in eager chorus, overlapping as they told me I had spoken straight from their hearts. They were relieved a German had talked to them so “openly” at last. I doubled down on my pledge never to oversee their lessons, stressing they had full freedom from me on that score—no history book would be banned, and we would trust wholly in the teachers’ wisdom and the goodwill of these inspectors before me. We parted as friends. Later chats with French acquaintances confirmed there was no cause for grievance in our district. Even in the darkest hours after the Anglo-Saxon invasion, no war crimes against German soldiers marred the Compiègne region—not even in an industrial hub like the Creil railway junction.

A rotating leave schedule ran for the commandant’s staff. Weeks ahead, you knew whose turn was next. For weeks, the lucky one gathered goods, packages stacking up in their quarters. Our military pay came in French francs, letting us buy what was on offer. Bringing in German currency was banned by the military administration to avoid “selling out” France. So our shopping mostly stayed within bounds.

Abuse could be punished. Yet even those not directly involved bought things. People handed packages to other soldiers on leave to take with them. Thus, a leave train heading home looked quite colorful, and all the compartments were regularly filled to the brim. As long as the French population did not complain—and in fact, they were not at all dissatisfied with this trade, for the currency remained stable—there was no reason for us to intervene against individual soldiers. The flow of these goods spread so widely across the Reich that one could say the homeland as a whole felt its impact.

Still, one could go too far, and unfortunately, there were German soldiers and officers in occupied France who soon saw sending packages home as the sole purpose of their existence—not even to help or bring joy there, but to engage in outright profiteering. Among those I have in mind was our adjutant. No man in our unit left without being laden with packages by him. Frontline soldiers from the First World War, like Captain Doernte and Captain Fehler, openly despised him and shunned him socially. They tried to find out with what funds he made these purchases, but they could not prove him guilty of currency violations. So he remained the black sheep of the community.

For those of us who survived the war, a comparison naturally comes to mind with the occupying powers we later experienced in our own homeland. I vividly remember Kaiserstrasse in Frankfurt. On the second corner to the left, coming from the station, was one of those infamous exchange shops. In its spacious window stood entire sets of Meissen porcelain, offered in exchange for so many cartons of cigarettes. Outside in the gutter sat the wives of American officers, waiting for the shop to open. I cannot for the life of me recall ever seeing or hearing of similar looting in the France we occupied.

A very old lady came to me, accompanied by a pretty young woman—I almost said princess. And indeed, she was a real princess, Princess Liven. They had lived here in Compiègne since the October Revolution of 1917, far from their Russian homeland. Now they inquired, even though the possibility existed that they might return to their homeland. I consoled them, advising them clearly not to submit any requests in that direction to any German or French authorities until after the war. I met these two fine people several times on various occasions. Above all, I was able to procure some money for them. They lived in the bitterest poverty without complaint. Then they moved to Paris, and I lost sight of them.

Alouette. It was during a duty visit to the local command in Chantilly that I met her. By my standards, she was very beautiful, and we quickly became friends. She worked there as an interpreter, and after a conversation about the society of retired high-ranking officers (her father was one of them) in this town, I asked if she could show me the Château de Chantilly. We crossed the old castle bridge into the courtyard, where large moss-green carp swam in the wide moat. We had a key and wandered through the unfortunately mostly empty rooms. Nothing was prepared for viewing; the furniture had been hidden somewhere from the Germans. What remained was covered under large linen sheets. We admired the colorful tapestries, and Alouette explained to me what the paintings meant. After we had seen everything, we said goodbye, and Alouette promised to visit me in Compiègne. She came several times over the weekends. During one of these visits, I learned that she had obtained a position as a secretary with Fernand de Brinon in Paris. So we saw each other again in the capital, where I had to go twice a week for the radiation treatment of my arm. My train left Compiègne in the dark of night. In these ordinary trains, there were compartments reserved for the German Wehrmacht. Unfortunately, they were always empty. I would have liked to talk with the locals during the journey. The stationmaster blew his whistle, and the train set off, stopping at all the small stations and not arriving in Paris until around noon. Sometimes a peasant would mistake the door. When he then climbed the steps to the compartment and saw me, he would startledly exclaim, “Pardon, Monsieur!” and could not be persuaded to stay, disappearing as quickly as possible. I could not figure out how or by whom these simple country folk were being incited against us. I sat in the corner of the compartment and heard the calls outside: Pont Sainte-Maxence, Verneuil, Creil, Saint-Maximin and all the other station names.

That there was agitation, one could sense here and there. One day, an anonymous tip landed on my desk, claiming that in La Croix Saint-Ouen, a small hamlet in the middle of the Compiègne forest, a woman named N.N. was sheltering escaped English agents. Normally, I paid no attention to such anonymous tips, or rather, I had to force myself not to investigate, for the temptation was great: perhaps this time there was something to it. In this case, I was surprised that such a specific claim came from such a hidden corner. So I rode there. The place consisted of four or five small farmhouses and a larger, castle-like building; the latter was the address given. A younger man, about 35, of the Saint-Cyr type, opened the door, and I told him about the tip I had received. He laughed, understood my official duty, and offered to show me the entire house immediately, especially to introduce me to the lady mentioned in the tip. He led me to his grandmother. She sat in a precious armchair, smiled at me, and obviously, in her senility, did not understand what it was all about. I was compelled to approach her, kiss her hand, and apologize to the grandson, who stood silently beside her. I was glad I had not burst in rudely. Yet throughout the whole charade, I had the distinct feeling that something was not right. I apologized, the young gentleman bowed, and I returned to my horse. Two weeks later, we surrounded the house and found an English officer inside.

The great forest was magnificent. I rode over an evergreen forest floor covered with crocuses and other flowers. There were secluded little spots far removed from all the turmoil of that time. A dog barked as one approached, the horse was tied to the fence, and mademoiselle laughed. It was all so carefree.

When I was in Paris, I was done with the treatment in about an hour. The doctor had ordered me to always wear my arm in a sling, but back then, I mostly did so only within his sight. Since I traveled to the city in civilian clothes, an arm in a sling looked too much like a wound, like a German officer. In the city center, Alouette waited for me around noon. She knew the best (but also the most affordable) restaurants; she knew about good concerts. I went with her to the exhibition that Thierak held with his colossal figures in the Orangerie at the Place de la Concorde. The postwar attitude of the scribblers, always finding fault with everything German, did not spare Thierak either. But back then, I heard many French people who “found something in it.” And the French are different from the Germans; they are not afraid to criticize if they do not like something. They have a more established taste and are less likely to be talked into things. In this case, it also helped that our French circle of acquaintances in Paris was by no means among the die-hard collaborators.

Our circle also included Major Beumelburg, who had become known in wider circles through his novels about the First World War. He was the liaison officer between the military commander and Fernand de Brinon, the Vichy ambassador in Paris. His French was not always up to the task. So he came to Alouette and had her draft in French what he needed to present in that language. Since the girl translated absolutely correctly and never thought of exploiting this connection for dishonest advantages for the French side, it all went smoothly without ever causing a stir, even though one would not usually involve the opposing party in such matters. More annoying, however, was that the Major was rarely sober on these occasions. Otto Abetz repeatedly and unsuccessfully requested the replacement of this man, who obviously could not handle the rear area well. His case was not unique. Apart from a well-chosen German intellectual elite, the French too often encountered boorish Germans. I witnessed (as did thousands of French who took that route) Luftwaffe auxiliaries sitting in their underwear on a long balcony on the first floor of a building on the Rue de Rivoli, opposite the Tuileries, sunbathing in the afternoon sun. Perhaps the Americans later offered even more inappropriate sights, but it shocked us.

The quaint town of Beauvais also belonged to our military district. How rich France is! My visit was purely official, for there a paymaster was at work who had not forgotten the gravity of our times. In ever-expanding facilities, he had potatoes and all sorts of other vegetables, which he bought from the surrounding area, dried, and these preserved foods were sent eastward by the trainload. On his own initiative, he had begun this work after recognizing the agricultural wealth of this region. Thus, a not-to-be-underestimated contribution to feeding the troops at the other end of Europe soon emerged here. My visit was intended to offer the support of the district command in procuring labor and transportation, but the resourceful man had already arranged everything skillfully. He had become a welcome source of income for many farmers in the area.

I had little left to do but to take a tour of the operation.

That day, we traveled by car from Beauvais via Creil to Chantilly. There, not only was Alouette based, but also a landscape painter, Gaston Durel. He made his living selling his paintings, especially those with North African motifs, to well-off German officers. I acquired four paintings, sent one of them to my Arabic teacher, Professor Strothmann in Hamburg, as a sign of life, and the other three home. Now, as I write this, they hang here in my study, having undergone an almost miraculous odyssey around the globe. Less fortunate was the art-loving Major Koch of a veterinary unit in Chantilly. He invested his entire military pay in these oil paintings and hung them in his apartment on Grindel in Hamburg. A British bombing raid destroyed the entire neighborhood in a single night. Not a single painting was saved. “To add insult to injury, the same gangsters then built a group of high-rise apartment buildings on their scene of destruction and boasted of this business-savvy crowning achievement as a great social deed in postwar Hamburg.”

Not only did I acquire these three paintings as lasting mementos of Compiègne, but also a beautiful, large black briefcase. It later traveled with me over the Alps, swam with me across the ocean, and served me for the first 10 years as an accountant in Bariloche until it had truly outlived its usefulness. Yet it was far from being discarded. As a keepsake from a time when everything still proceeded without disruption for me, as a faithful (almost the only) companion during the years of great transition, it still comes into its own in emergencies and must now fetch vegetables, apples and pears from the market.

It was at my post in Compiègne that my eyes were opened to a particular technique of the French who were hostile to us. I crossed the tracks when the station master approached me and pointed out an order from the German military government that this was strictly forbidden. I had no choice but to take a long detour and even thank the red-capped man for his friendly hint. “Beating the boches at their own game” was the name of this technique.

It has already been mentioned that in these suburban towns north of Paris, many former officers led their secluded lives. No wonder they expressed their anger over the humiliation of 1940 in small circles, basking in the glory of their past honors. One day, such a gentleman came to my office, aged about 70. He walked with a cane and had only one arm left. His last rank was Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force. He owned a house in Chantilly that was occupied by an Air Force unit. As a severely war-wounded man, he asked me to release his house. Rightly, he could point out that other equally suitable houses stood empty nearby. I took up his case. After various written and telephone efforts, I received a personal reply from the Reich Marshal himself that a release was out of the question. After informing the French Lieutenant Colonel of this, I shook his hand, bowed a little more than usual, and offered him another building through the local command in Chantilly. I could do no more than bow, for what I thought of such a Reich Marshal, I could not easily tell him.

Troops quartered in Compiègne were assigned their lodgings through us. Due to the inspection of such accommodations, I came into contact with wide circles in the town and its surroundings. I cannot say that I ever encountered open reluctance or resistance in this regard. We paid the billeting fees and also settled any possible complaints from French billet providers arising from the quartering. Such complaints were extremely rare, for the unit leaders concerned naturally made every effort to leave everything in order upon departure to avoid complications with the military administration. We were known for being strict in the cases brought to us. I recall having a private punished with three days of arrest because he had taken a bedside lamp from a billet. I only hope that the French did not later forget to make comparisons with the American troops.

Even in my time, the English began their nocturnal flights, either to drop sabotage teams or to drop bombs. So we sometimes drove out at night to check the ordered blackout. Especially the eastern parts of the district with the large estates were the target of these trips. Darkly, the woods stood in large patches between the fields as we approached Crépy-en-Valois one such night. Bright light shone from a farmhouse into the sky. But in vain, we waited quietly until dawn for a possible descending parachute. Then, as we approached, we saw that the door had been left open while a sick person was being cared for inside.

It was inevitable that I then had an officer’s coat made for me in Paris from particularly fine, heavy fabric. This was done in an originally French uniform tailor shop, to which gradually all German officers and special leaders from the near and far surroundings made their pilgrimage, thereby completing the files of the Allied intelligence service. It mattered little that I, as an exception, gave incorrect name and unit details. In addition, from another source, I received a leather coat that could be worn lined. It became especially valuable to me in the cold Balkan winters; and an elegant uniform trouser, which 20 years later met its end, cut up as polishing rags on the parquet floor of our house in Bariloche in Patagonia.

Naturally, I also visited those people and places in Paris where I had been before the war. I asked the concierge at Rue de Richelieu No. 5 about Claude’s whereabouts. He had fallen in a reconnaissance operation on the German border soon after the French declaration of war. “I remember you well,” said the concierge. “You also got something,” she added with a glance at my arm in the sling. “You should visit the parents. They live quite nearby, on the Avenue de l’Opéra.” I noted the address but explicitly asked her to convey my regards and did not go to see General Guilhermet. It would have been utterly impossible to avoid awkward topics. Claude belonged to the Anglophile war party, but France had just lost a large part of its fleet in an English attack at Mers-el-Kébir, and Guilhermet had been the military commander in Algiers at that time. What might this old French officer have said—if he lived to see it—when, after the defeat of the bravely fighting Vichy French in Syria, Morocco, Madagascar and Indochina, France lost all its overseas territories under Anglo-Saxon pressure! For what and for whom had his son fallen?

When I returned from Paris, it was late at night, but on other days, my duties often ended in the late afternoon, and I had time to devote to my private language studies. I always carried a small notebook with me to immediately jot down new expressions and idioms that caught my attention. From this, I later compiled a collection of French phrases. Alternating with these language studies, I once again went through pure legal textbooks. It is said that one must forget something three times before it truly sticks. And as I sat there studying, sometimes Private Jäckel would come up from the kitchen and let me try some new experiment of his excellent cooking. And down in the garden, I could hear my secretary giggling with her Lieutenant Commander, who conspicuously often arrived from Paris.

Through this Lieutenant Commander, I came to know Captain Hasslauer. He was the Reich’s military-political eye on French colonial possessions. His office was located in the Madagascar delegation, not far from the Madeleine. Select Malagasy sculptures accompanied the way up to his study. His work was quite different from what one might imagine then and even today. It was never about laying our hands on those French possessions. That was neither necessary nor possible. In almost all overseas territories, French politicians and military men stood obediently by Marshal Pétain. They first had to be defeated in open battle everywhere. Sometimes, the English military effort went to the limit of what was available. In particular, Madagascar itself offered the toughest resistance for months against British landing attempts. There were only a few Frenchmen on other continents who did not already recognize that behind the European war lay the Anglo-Saxon intention to destroy an independent France. Even to a De Gaulle, who then appeared in Algiers as the most zealous fulfillment politician, this theme was by no means unfamiliar. Hasslauer had recently been at the Führer Headquarters and, at the end of his presentation, had pointed out to the Supreme Warlord the dangers of our Eastern policy, telling him bluntly that we needed to change course with the Russians and Ukrainians. Adolf Hitler replied to him verbatim: “It is now too late for that.” Before Hasslauer could say anything in response, Bormann had approached and led the Führer away for some trivial reason. I later published this incident in Der Weg during Hasslauer’s lifetime, and he subsequently confirmed to me again in writing from his southern German residence that the account was accurate. Much later, in 1986, and due to my mention of Hasslauer in my ninth book, Dr. De Roussel, then a minister in Pétain’s cabinet, informed me that he had personally known the captain. He had been a pronounced advocate of French global influence and, in this regard, always had full agreement from his superiors in Berlin.

Hasslauer introduced me at the Colonial Ministry on Rue d’Oudinot. I had spoken to him about my interest in gaining insight into the legal administration of those territories, citing academic reasons. There, in the ministry, a larger room was assigned to the German liaison officers. From there I could freely use the material archived in the ministry. It seemed right to confine myself to one concrete, much-discussed matter: the labor service obligation of the natives. Back then, it had been labeled here and there—and especially after decolonization—as mere slavery. In its effects, it was anything but that. By frequently consulting the (secret) reports of the general inspectors (former governors or governor-generals), I tried to grasp this complex issue.

Another matter I tackled there was clarifying the situation in the Sahara at that time. Where exactly lay the limit of Vichy’s direct influence? Along the coast, this zone even encompassed Dakar; but what about the interior? A German special officer had already taken it upon himself to gather material on the “Free” French advances coming from the south, out of Equatorial Africa. At that point, they had not yet reached Fort Lamy in Chad. Yet that place was a linchpin for all of Northwest Africa’s hinterland. I hit upon the idea that an operation to occupy this outpost would be a worthy aim, and I began collecting documents to support it. Special Officer Dr. Abel aided me in this; I first knew him as the author of a slim booklet, German-Tuareg for Official Use, before meeting him in person in Berlin. He, too, believed “Operation Lamy” could succeed if launched soon. Naturally, we kept these plans tightly under wraps from our French friends. Time and again, young Frenchmen would slip away from France to Algiers, eager to serve somewhere in Africa.

Paris swarmed with German officers, especially special officers. It was so obvious that a joke made the rounds: Two lions meet—one gaunt, the other plump. “Well,” says the thin one, “how’d you get so fat?” The other replies, “Oh, I lie in wait outside the military commander’s headquarters and gobble up a special officer each day. They have not even noticed any are missing yet.”

My last big task in Compiègne was organizing the town against enemy paratroopers. I encountered units there we had never even known existed. Everyone had to be brought under one helmet; through a series of ever-widening exercises, we roused many from a deep Sleeping Beauty slumber. It took effort—tinged with humor—to shape this ragtag bunch into a somewhat battle-ready force, capable of holding Compiègne until reinforcements arrived.

Then, overnight, an order came that stunned us all: our office was to be dissolved. Command posts had to be set up across the vast eastern territories we had seized. This expanded our duties in France. District command posts vanished, and field command posts took over entire departments. The news struck like lightning in a henhouse. Last-minute purchases piled up in a frenzy, and our adjutant raced to Paris repeatedly, desperate to shield his precious hide from the eastern chill. Captains Doernte and Fehler, seasoned by years, watched this young man’s antics with disdain, unaware he would actually secure an order to stay in balmy France.

He was reassigned to one of the remaining command posts. They must have been thrilled to have him. I was the other who stayed. With my paralyzed arm still unhealed, and at the urgent request of the field commander in Amiens—who needed me as an intelligence officer—I headed north with all my gear. I seized the chance to detour to the vital airfield under construction at Montdidier, set to be our long-range reconnaissance base and a key asset in my new role. As I left, I snapped a final photo of my comrades at the loading ramp, bound for the Donets region. What became of them, I do not know.

Amiens looked starkly plain, no match for the charming, tree-lined Compiègne. That sense grew sharper for anyone arriving via Montdidier. Gray factories, sprawling rail yards, long treeless streets flanked by small, uniform brick houses stretched out. The only color came from garish ads for this or that aperitif, draped over big, drab walls. The center near the Somme lay blasted by bombs, rubble heaped along the roadsides long ago. From this chaotic pile of stones rose the cathedral, unscathed: precision work by the Stukas, just as in Beauvais, Rouen, Caen and countless other places. Near this core were our offices. Right beside the field command post stood the prefect’s palace; across from it, the casino.

General Genée was not the prefect but my field commander. A short, sprightly man of retirement age—well-read, cultured, kind yet Prussian-precise—we clicked right away. His bridge to me was plainly one of friendliness toward the French. From the start, he offered me boundless trust. I had free rein in all things. I suspect this stemmed from an evaluation Captain Doernte likely gave. His first officer, Captain Feige from Hamburg, poured me a welcoming cognac and sorted out my quarters. I took over my duties from him, as this department had lacked an intelligence officer until now. The tense local mood, dense population and coastal stretch tied to the area made it essential. My job boiled down to one question: “What’s the enemy up to?”

So there I sat in a roomy office, a telephone before me, gazing out at a gray sky. I was the one tasked with figuring out who in this province bore us ill will and what they might be plotting. Unlike in Compiègne, here I faced a broad mission, requiring me to anticipate whatever came my way. First off, there were the English across the Channel, then those here who dreamed of restoring their past glory on their terms. They stood united against the wicked German invaders, Vichy and any German-French friendship at all. So far, they had not shown themselves—no active resistance like the franc-tireurs of the First World War existed. In 1942, nothing hinted that would change. Most French locals were too taken with the proper conduct of German soldiers and officers to risk themselves for some English-paid escapade. Above all, there lingered a hefty grudge against England for dragging France into this pointless war. I saw it myself: Frenchmen voicing sheer amazement to me that Hitler let the English slip away unhindered at Dunkirk.

The few eager for civil war against the occupiers struggled to find allies. “Enemies,” then, could only be a handful of chauvinists—stubborn, inflexible types lacking mental agility. Yet these were often the ones in powerful posts, wielding subtle tools, Freemasonry-style, to quietly, invisibly nudge the wheel of history toward their dark ends. If a citizen griped, they would whisper it was the Germans’ fault—never mentioning who had brashly declared war and invited us in. My next question: Who were these influentials? How, in my German uniform amid wartime, could I pierce their circles? I had deliberately skipped visiting old Paris friends from peacetime, avoiding the taint of pushy propagandist. I believed facts would forge a new Europe tighter than any political chatter could. I missed then how brutal terror and a deluge of twisted tales could split French and Germans again, warp our generation’s goodwill, and paint us as villains. So, not rushing in, I waited watchfully for French contacts. Luck struck. Here came one: Chief Public Prosecutor Mueller, moved from our-occupied Strasbourg to Amiens. “I hear you, a jurist, will now handle judicial matters here,” he said. I had never considered it before, but the notion did not displease me. “That’s true,” I replied warmly, “and I’m glad you’ve come—it eases my start!” I asked about his office hours and workload, requesting a visit. I paired this with a sincere plea: could he kindly assemble a small file of forms used in a typical French criminal case, from investigation to verdict or acquittal? “For my private studies,” I added honestly. Those forms, well-worn, still sit in my bookcase today. Pleased to do me this “little favor,” the tall, bony man left. Alone again, I mused. Why had he come? An investigating judge—his targets were in jail. No sooner had I thought this than I called the young lieutenant leading Amiens’ field gendarmerie. We drove to the prison, a hulking, overcrowded pen. A German guard gave us an extra soldier, and we went cell to cell. “Why are you here?” I asked the first. “Stole bread from a German office.” “How long?” “Three weeks.” I jotted it down, then moved on. The replies built a long list. Patterns emerged as I wrote. I tucked the notepad away and headed to the casino—dinnertime. For now, the general and others did not need to know where I had been that afternoon. Be punctual, though! Who had told Mueller I was a jurist? Who had he spoken to? That needed clearing up too. Who in the field command post was his friend? Who trusted him enough to share personal tidbits about our officers? Questions piled up that first evening. I felt like Poirot in an Agatha Christie mystery.

Dinner at the officers’ mess passed without fuss. Folks were glad the two soldiers posted near the Somme estuary had sent another batch of smoked eels. The general showed off some darling children’s shoes, a gift from his generous friend Madame Reyvaux, a shoe factory owner known for her pro-German bent. Most officers there seemed familiar with her as a source of such treats. Later, I lingered with the field gendarmerie lieutenant, swapping internal service tales. Troop discipline here was solid; trouble came only from certain officers who had forgotten Europe was at war. I spent the evening sifting through those prison statements for the first time.

It was several days before I could take a stroll to the courthouse. There, I met the Chief Public Prosecutor in his office. He had already prepared a small booklet of court forms for my use. I expressed my gratitude and requested that he share some insights into judicial practices, particularly those cases that might interest the occupying authorities and relate to wartime conditions. “I’ve long anticipated a visit from someone at the Field Command,” he said. “That’s why I’ve arranged these documents so you can gain a quick overview. After all,” he added, “it will surely matter greatly to you that my office supports your efforts.” He handed me several criminal case files. Among them, I recognized a few I had heard about while in prison. I set aside the ones that caught my interest and, in closing, asked if I might borrow them for a few days. With gracious courtesy, he granted my request.

In the quiet of my private quarters, I pored over the files, weighing crimes against their punishments, and arrived at a striking, unmistakable conclusion: a worker at a German airfield, for instance, faced weeks in prison for the slightest misstep, whereas the same offense in a purely French setting often led to acquittal on grounds of triviality.

The following morning, I drove to Montdidier to inspect the operations at the large airfield. The senior engineers informed me that progress was painfully slow, hampered by a shortage of workers. Thefts and similar offenses, they admitted, occurred repeatedly, yet few dared report them anymore—harsh penalties from a staunchly pro-German judiciary left the culprits languishing uselessly in prison for weeks. The pattern was now clear.

Herr Mueller was no simpleton; getting the better of him was no easy task. At first, I hesitated to level an outright accusation. Instead, I pointed out the labor shortage in Montdidier—“a fact he must surely know”—and urged a shift toward fines where possible. Mueller seemed taken aback; he had genuinely believed harsh punishments served our cause. It struck me as somewhat contrived when, mid-conversation, an elegant, statuesque woman entered. Playing the part of the startled host, Chief Public Prosecutor Mueller kissed her hand and introduced her as Madame Reyvaux, “a prominent lady from Amiens, renowned for her goodwill toward Germans—and well aware of my own stance as an Alsatian.” She promptly echoed his sentiments with animated words, then announced her intent to visit my office regarding a trip to unoccupied France.

It fell to me to secure the necessary travel permits. Applications, accompanied by my assessment, were sent to the commander in Paris for approval. Sure enough, she appeared at my office the next morning. Her first act was to place a bottle of cognac—”over a hundred years old”—on my desk. That, however, was a blatant misstep.

I accepted the “small token” with thanks, and we turned to business. She explained she needed to purchase leather, requiring a trip to Lyon as she had done before. In mere minutes, I completed the paperwork. I assured her I would send it to Paris through official channels that very day. As an exceptional favor, I handed her one of my business cards, enabling her to collect the permit directly from the Paris office. This would allow her journey to begin within days.

The permit was dispatched to Paris by courier as promised, though I attached a request: keep an eye on this woman—who would present my card at the office—and scrutinize her more closely at a suitable point, perhaps the railway border station. Doubts had crept in; why seek leather from the Midi when Normandy and Brittany teemed with cattle?

On Aug. 19, 1942, the British launched their landing at Dieppe. It kept me busy, as Dieppe fell within our jurisdiction. The captured British troops were taken prisoner, while French officials and locals unequivocally aligned with the Germans. Our Field Command noted remarkable details: no German approach routes were “accidentally” obstructed by farm vehicles; no observations were withheld from advancing troops. Quite the opposite—soldiers were tipped off to terrain advantages, alerted to troublesome ditches, and guided to bridges and paths. Homes were bolted shut against the invaders. Local authorities offered their full staff to support the German advance without hesitation. French volunteers rode alongside, pointing the way. It is worth recalling that, as a result, the German Chancellor abruptly freed thousands of French prisoners of war. Such was the tenor of those times—a stark rebuttal to later boasts of French resistance.

Naturally, this drew me to the coast myself. En route, I stopped by our modest eel smokehouse in Abbeville, my thoughts drifting to Rommel’s 1940 tank sweep down the Somme, then northward along the coast in his bold, triumphant push from south to Dunkirk. That lightning war had left scant traces. On the Atlantic shore, construction of the Atlantic Wall was underway. The massive fortifications of later years were still unfinished, yet the outline of Europe’s defense was taking shape. Europe sought its own path to contentment.

Upon my return to Amiens, a letter from Dijon awaited. Madame Reyvaux had been searched at the border. Prewar postcards of Amiens, marked in ink with the locations of German offices, were found in her possession.

The culprit sat in prison, awaiting trial as an Allied spy. I arranged for her transfer to Amiens. She was escorted into my office; soon after, on my orders, the Chief Public Prosecutor joined us. I invited him to sit. They regarded each other with grave composure.

Our discussion lasted less than half an hour. I made it plain they had both forfeited their lives—no need to dwell on specifics. Yet I also underscored the absurdity of their actions in the grand scheme. The botched Dieppe raid should have shown them the people’s true leanings; they were outcasts no one would mourn if I sent them to the gallows. Still, I acknowledged an Allied victory remained possible—though even then, their sordid deeds would not have tipped the scales, only the might of non-European powers would. I concluded: “Here’s my offer. The charges against you will be shelved. You may return home. Neither of you will ever again receive a permit to unoccupied France. In exchange, you will ensure no attacks or assassinations target German soldiers or offices in Amiens or the broader Somme region. You will sever all ties with British agents, block outsiders from the maquis infiltrating Amiens, and report any change of residence to the gendarmerie. I will hold you both personally accountable for any strikes against the Wehrmacht. Can you uphold such a pledge?” They agreed. I added a final note: “I expect no espionage for Germany, nor denunciations of Frenchmen. I know your antiquated views, your resistance to the New Europe, your hopes pinned on Washington. That’s your burden to bear. But I warn you against spreading such folly.” I shook their hands as they departed.

I sipped the “over 100-year-old” cognac and, the moment they left, hastened to General Genée. I recounted my actions. “You’ve a knack for presentation,” he remarked first. That seemed trivial to me. He concurred, secured the documents I had brought, and asked me to keep this deal from the other officers. Naturally, perks like fine children’s shoes were now a thing of the past.

In the chapter “Albania,” I include a map from the North American intelligence archives. It confirms what followed in Amiens: no attacks on Germans occurred until the Allied landings.

Listening to the people, I soon grasped what fueled our adversaries’ support. “They’re buying France dry” was a common refrain. Though the German military administration curbed this, outrageous abuses persisted. It was my duty to act. One midday, the field gendarmerie lieutenant reported detaining a large truck and trailer. A Luftwaffe Major Otto, the commanding passenger, claimed the cargo—choice alcoholic spirits—belonged to the Reichsmarschall. We acted swiftly. As Otto phoned a Luftwaffe office in Paris beside me, the vehicles were driven into the Field Command courtyard. I can still picture those hefty crates. The gendarmerie distributed the contents among Amiens’ three soldiers’ homes. This time, General Genée disapproved of my initiative, irked by our weakness against a figure like Hermann Göring. We faced calls from top Luftwaffe brass, telegrams from Paris—but, as the saying goes, possession is nine-tenths of the law—the goods were gone. No court-martial came, despite Genée’s fears, and we earned chuckles across Paris. Our move set a precedent. Over the wire, we tipped off comrades in Laon; those trucks would likely try their luck there in weeks. They stood ready.

Why should I not spend my vacation in southern France? Why should I not, in this way, explore the cities and villages of this beautiful country—places I had never been, far beyond the reach of my wallet, yet so vivid in the books and magazines I had been devouring lately? Unoccupied France was, for us, a foreign land. True enough. But it was still France, and I figured that as a member of the military administration, I ought to be able to swing a vacation there.

I started by asking the General and Captain Feige. Neither had any objections; in fact, they endorsed the idea, citing official benefits. It could only broaden my horizons. So I drafted a request for a travel permit to the military commander in Paris and, without any hassle, received it within days. The plan was to travel from Lyon to Marseille, then along the Mediterranean to Narbonne, cutting inland parallel to the Pyrenees through Toulouse to Bordeaux, and finally looping back via Tours and Orleans to Paris. Naturally, I went in civilian clothes. That did not stop me from slipping a pistol into my pocket.

The first-class railway carriage made for a pleasant ride. We were nearing Dijon when a German officer passed through. He glanced at my travel permit and said only, “Les français contrôleront après Dijon.” I gave a quick thanks, and the train rolled on into the night. Then a French officer appeared. We had crossed into unoccupied territory, it seemed. I showed him my permit too. With a curt salute, he told me I would get it back from a colonel at Lyon station. That caught me off guard. I explained I had no plans to stop in Lyon—I meant to push straight through to Marseille. He shrugged: “C’est l’ordre pour tous les officiers.” Fine, if it was an order, I disembarked at Lyon. A train officer was already there, ready to escort me to the station commander. I sank into a big leather armchair, feeling more like a prisoner than a traveler. A colonel strode in. “Vous êtes sous-lieutenant?” he asked, eyeing me as if he outranked me. “Oui, mon colonel, de l’armée allemande,” I replied, standing. He looked stunned. Then he pressed me on how I had gotten this permit. It was an odd spot to be in. What did this man from a nation we had beaten care? Still, why not stay civil? Say something harmless. His response floored me: “You’ve been issued a permit as a member of the French army.” The penny dropped. I smiled. He did not. “I must send you back on the next train!” That lit my fuse. I demanded immediate contact with the German Armistice Commission in Lyon. They made the call, and a captain was summoned to the station.

When he arrived, I introduced myself briskly as “Ic of the Field Command in Amiens.” His eyes flashed a warning to shut up. He turned, told the colonel I would be going with him to the German offices—housed in a grand hotel just across the station square—and that was that. On the way, I summed it up: with my superiors’ blessing, I was off on a purely personal vacation to the south. He found it hard to swallow—said he had never heard of such a thing. He asked me not to mind if he locked me in one of the hotel’s office rooms while he phoned Amiens to check. Late that night, he poked his head in: he had spoken to Captain Feige himself. All clear. I could head to Marseille at 6 a.m. the next morning.

But nothing was clear. The real trouble was just starting. It hit me fast—neither the Germans nor the French bought a word of my story. Both sides pegged me as a threat, each in their own way. Crossing the square to the station in the dim, waning night, I saw a shadow peel away from a tree and tail me. In the nearly empty station hall, as I bought my ticket, a little line formed behind me—two men, also booking first-class tickets to Marseille. So the other side had not missed their train either.

My Lyon captain had recommended a good hotel. For reasons all my own, I made a beeline for it: somewhere along the line, I had picked up a flea. My stomach itched like mad, spoiling any joy in the green poplar walls flashing by outside, stretched across the Rhône valley like stage sets. We slipped from scene to scene, then plunged into a rocky tunnel, only emerging at the sight of the deep blue Mediterranean. There we were, in a mussel shell of a city, brimming with gray stone blocks, cradled by the elegant defenses of Vauban.

In my hotel room, I shook out my underwear over a massive, gleaming bathtub. Sure enough, a hefty flea hopped in. No water in the tub. The critter bounced along the white walls, putting on a grand show of its talents, but it could not clear the rim. My bites were too raw to let it off easy. I left it to its antics and stepped out to see the city.

There was a tram line that looped through Marseille like a proper tour. I squeezed onto the packed front platform and rode it to the end. We rolled into deserted outskirts first, passengers trickling off one by one. Soon, it was just me—and two men, oddly enough, also on the front platform. The game was still on. But who was the German tail, and who was the French? Gazing at the gently foaming Mediterranean below, the sparse deep-green trees clinging to rocky cliffs along the road, I casually asked one if he knew Marseille. Both jumped in at once: if I was new here, they would love to show me around. I gushed thanks, praising that famous Southern French charm. Said I was from Belgium—people had told me before my accent sounded Belgian. Besides, they surely knew by now I was a German officer (on some shady errand), so my little lie only fed their sense of righteous duty. No expense spared, clearly. We were gliding back along the Corniche toward the city. I peered out at the sea and asked if that island out there was visitable—the famous Château d’If, the Count of Monte Cristo’s enigmatic prison. The Lyon captain had said it was Marseille’s highlight, a romantic fortress, off-limits now despite holding no military secrets. I braced for a brush-off—hardly worth it, they would say. Instead, one piped up that he could arrange it. The third got looped into the invite (a nod I owed the Lyon captain). I did not mind. Four German eyes could spot any secrets, even if my eager pal thought he had roped in a buddy from a sister service.

A sharp motorboat cut through the waves, carrying the German “master spy” and his two top-tier shadows. It was perfect vacation weather, and I soaked up the glorious air, sprawling back on a bench, staring skyward, my Leica resting on my stomach, one hand poised to snap. I did not hide my delight from them. Yet the more carefree I acted—cheerful, even charming—the more I sensed them hunting for something off. I raised the camera a few times but never clicked. Kept peering through—at the island, at the shore—and they would study the same view, grim-faced, echoing me: “A very beautiful picture.” “But not worth snapping.” Each time I lined up a shot, their necks swiveled in sync, exchanging knowing nods. Only when I shut my eyes to bask in the sun did theirs stay wide open, relentless. I invited them to stretch out too. No dice.

No one noticed that we had been announced on the island. Everything seemed makeshift: a soldier at the landing called his superior. He appeared delighted by the visit of a few holidaymakers and showed us the casemates and the cell where the Count of Monte Cristo was said to have dwelt. Again and again, they asked if I would like to see more, the picture of politeness and eagerness, ever ready to reveal it all. There were no secrets here—and why would there be, when France no longer harbored political ambitions? As a Belgian, I surely knew well enough that Germany had now shouldered all duties to safeguard Europe. I nodded knowingly, adding that politics did not concern me, at which my two friends murmured their hearty agreement. It was a glorious afternoon, and we parted on the Cannebière like lifelong friends, not before I invited them to Brussels after the war. With great ceremony, they jotted down the charming address—both fully aware it was a complete fabrication, not a jot of truth in it.

The next stop was Sète. That evening, I had put the poor flea out of its misery and run water into the bathtub; its leaps had grown noticeably feebler. Later, I dined in the grand hall, delighting in the sight of the Italian and German armistice commissions eating at separate tables, their meals punctuated by boisterous chatter. At the bar, a “Radio Monte Carlo” announcer I met regaled me with countless tales of how these allied factions vied for mistresses’ favors and black-market spoils, no doubt spying on each other with suspicion. He pointed out the Secret Service agent and the “American,” inevitable fixtures in this colorful crowd. It felt like a preview of the intrigue at Istanbul’s Pera Palace Hotel. Here, as there, the real “goods” changed hands elsewhere, in far less conspicuous settings.

It was a fine, sprawling hotel on the quay, overlooking the lively harbor traffic, where the Sète armistice commission’s commander had set up quarters. Only there did I learn he existed. A towering, rough-hewn merchant from Hamburg, he was just the man for this key North African import hub. Wine barrels lined the warehouses, and the bustle rivaled peacetime, or so my contact told me. Wine, above all, flowed from Algiers. We ambled down the harbor street—a scene straight out of a peaceful century past. The costumes, if you could call work overalls and tall boots that, had not changed, nor had the mustaches. You would swear a circus lion was on display somewhere near Tarascon, judging by those sly grins. It dawned on me that the Mediterranean here united more than it divided, its western basin French by nature. More than the port itself, this hinted at what lay ahead tomorrow. That night, over a hearty game of Skat with my gracious host and an assigned corporal, I mused aloud about the star guiding my travels. He confessed no one had warned him of my arrival, but we soon devised a cunning plan to throw off the French rivals at least.

Come morning, we drove his car to Aiguesmortes in the Rhone delta. Amid this pebbled wilderness, known as the singular Camargue, sits the city Saint Louis built, launching his crusade against infidel Tunis. Once a port, its sturdy walls—still standing—met the sea’s waves. Now, the Rhone winds past in countless pebbly arms, meeting the Mediterranean nearly 100 kilometers south. For centuries, the town has stood apart from political storms. No one bothered conquering it, leaving it pristine, a living open-air museum. Stout towers and walls encircle it; only the original gates lead inside even today. Not a single house has sprouted beyond its founding footprint, not one roof peeks past its thick defenses. We lunched at a market-square restaurant, impeccably run for thriving tourism. Soon after, an old car rolled in, and a young couple settled under the next restaurant’s awning. You could not fault the other side’s creativity. We exchanged smiles, pleased to have gifted them this scenic outing on the state’s dime.

We headed back to Montpellier. In those years, like Toulouse, this university city was a nerve center of resistance against the occupiers. Whatever remained “honest” in France converged here, professors seizing every chance to drill national duty into the youth. Yet none could chart a path forward. Pétain’s cronies clung to a bare minimum—family, authority, purity and faith—but it never grew into real political action here. After strolling the city and peering into bookstores brimming with worthy new titles (pushed by clerks and lauded by passersby for their patriotic weight), I bought a few slim volumes—long forgotten now, mere echoes of the restless, leaderless French youth of the day. Together, we reached the platform for the southbound train. Our wartime scheme sprang to life. We lingered by a carriage door, feigning farewells. Conductors urged us aboard, the platform cleared, and I played at a final goodbye to my host. But as the train rolled off, I slammed the door and leapt clear; we slipped away from the station.

Straight into our car and onto the road toward Sète we went. To our right, the railway stretched arrow-straight, the train in sight. Our route, though, looped in wide arcs—now far ahead, now swinging back, watching anxiously as the train gained ground. “The big hitch will be the railroad bridge at the harbor mouth. We’ve got to cross it first,” the captain warned. “Did you catch that other fellow jumping from the moving train back there?” I asked. He just laughed: “Right on cue.” We sped on, the foe trailing somewhere behind—if they had even snagged a ride that fast. We made it just in time; the bridge guards waved us through. I caught the train as it prepared to leave again. No one else boarded. I rode on to Narbonne, near the Spanish border. The captain waved me off with a flourish, handkerchief aloft.

From Narbonne, another train took me to Carcassonne. No one else on the journey seemed to care about me. We skirted the Pyrenees’ foothills, treading history-laden soil. Visigoths raised Carcassonne’s first walls; six centuries later, its counts added the second ring. This was the era of the Albigensian Crusade, staining the papacy’s name with blood. The medieval city, restored, housed a Luftwaffe unit at the Hotel zum Löwen in the Cité—where else for such a spot? They had space for me two nights. Decades later, I saw firsthand how the Midi’s big questions linger unresolved. How could brute force or pyres settle matters of faith? My books lent voice to De Sedes and others across German-speaking Europe. Such esoteric queries inevitably drew crude speculators here and there. Yet, amid this grand past, the Luftwaffe lads lived untouched by the era’s din—a paradise mid-war. I did not envy them, though a little turnabout would not have hurt back then.

The train then left me in Toulouse. After Carcassonne’s medieval hush, here was France’s pulsing political heart. As in Montpellier, I glimpsed fresh writings in the bookstores’ wooden-framed windows—sprawling inside across endless shelves—echoing Fichte’s calls to the nation, Arndt’s fervor, Schleiermacher’s zeal. France’s publishers knew their duty under foreign rule. Scant critique of past heroes, no divisive rifts, no jabs at yesterday’s vanquished or dawdling allies. Self-discipline, personal and national, shone through history’s greats, proving a shared calamity half-vanquished when borne as one. I stepped into a shop and picked up a few titles. The range was vast. You could sense the fire in so many stirred French souls, aching to aid with words at least. The young clerk, a fine champion of his fine cause, beamed to tell me, his Belgian neighbor, that books were flying off the shelves. Television did not exist back then.

Even these experiences I had to recall later with bitterness, when I witnessed how the German people responded to the occupation, how they passively accepted the victors’ gravest crimes and even managed to whitewash and justify them. Does one believe that a sufficient number of electronic print heads can replace moral weakness? That the ongoing removal of the responsible and the substitution of biological standards with nihilistic shadows permit the creation of an artificial foundation on which life remains possible in the long term? I remember the healthy and innocent reaction of the French youth to the first blows this century struck against their fatherland, yet also the distinct feeling back then that with such youth, Europe still had a future. It seemed to me that it mattered little whether one volunteered with the Legion to fight in Russia or rejected Vichy; what counted was the shared standard upheld on both sides: above all, the nation! But how this very stance was then increasingly opposed and tarnished across generations! It was through this that France truly lost the war, in the so-called “peace” that followed. This fact is recognized today, and yet again less along the banks of the Seine than on the Garonne.

From the train, I saw once more the beautiful cathedral towers rising like sugarwork into the sky. On the opposite side of the train, one could sense the Pyrenees’ wall looming beyond the rising hills. Thus, we reached the zone border, for Germany had drawn it so that the entire Atlantic coast, threatened by England, remained under German control. An older couple shared my compartment—fine people, it seemed to me, who wished to return to Bordeaux. At the border, we had to disembark and pass through customs with our belongings. Right afterward, I realized I had left my fine pigskin gloves on the customs table. I went back. A French customs officer told me that madame had taken them. I asked her as the train was already pulling away. An astonished look: “But no, monsieur!” So this was how profiteers acted, those who traded across zone borders with their own fatherland. The stolen gloves led me to this reflection, rendering all prior conversation with the pair worthless.

Bordeaux offered little of interest. It was a merchant city. To me, it seemed only business mattered here. A diligent and shrewd bourgeoisie had mastered turning the surrounding vineyards’ yield into ringing coins. There was no war damage. As is well known, the Germans arrived so swiftly that even the secret files piled up at Paris’s Gare d’Orsay, including those of the Grand Orient, had not been moved. They could still be seized and examined in Paris itself.

A car trip into the vast pine forests to the west was something extraordinary. Here, turpentine was harvested; beyond the forests stretched the sea, with the most beautiful bathing beaches I had encountered in Europe—Biarritz, the most renowned, lying far to the south.

In Tours, I stepped off the train again. The city had seen the final stand against the advancing Germans. Many ruins bore witness to this desperate resistance, yet it was equally striking that the countless historical buildings of this city—so significant throughout French history—had been preserved. One could see once more how keenly the German military leadership felt its duty toward historical landmarks, a deep-rooted sense of responsibility that marked not just the leadership but the entire army. It remains easily provable today that the English and Americans, from the Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino to Rouen’s cathedral, had no regard for European tradition, ruthlessly trampling whatever stood in the path of their brutal warfare.

From Blois, with its world-famous spiral staircase in its splendid Renaissance château, I took a detour to the tranquil Montoire. It was here that Adolf Hitler had offered his hand to the defeated Marshal of France, and we hoped fervently for a lasting brotherhood between these two great European partners in fate. Yet it all remained merely a beginning. The Marshal did not accept the invitation to Paris for the transfer of the Duke of Reichstadt’s remains. His chauvinistic entourage had convinced him he would be arrested there by the Gestapo. But I am getting ahead of myself:

In 1958, I visited the Panthéon in Paris with my wife. The guide, a French student, told the listening group: “And here lies Napoleon’s son, the Duke of Reichstadt. We owe it to Adolf Hitler, who had him brought from Vienna to Paris.” Untouched by the clamor of the day, the little town of Montoire lay quiet. Reeds and water lilies covered its green ponds, ivy draped over ancient walls. Montoire slumbered in the summer heat, and it will go on slumbering. No bronze plaque marks the meeting of those two figures here; modern history books either omit it or question the sincerity of the intent. Yet all those—hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen—who gave their lives for a more beautiful, purer Europe, they were and are reviled as vile beasts, as “collaborators” with Satan; their wives and children were publicly butchered with knives, or, after having their hair shorn, chased naked through the gutters or locked in lion cages at the Paris Zoo. This is what became of our lofty ideals! And we are expected to swallow the curse that rises to our lips?

Via Orleans, my journey took me back to Paris, and the speed of that trip made clear why German troops could mention Orleans in the Wehrmacht report so soon after Paris. For the Loire stretches far north, and just an hour’s train ride separates the two cities. By noon, I sat again at a café table on a bustling boulevard. The summer sun filtered through the trees, and cheerful crowds animated the streets. German uniforms mingled casually among them, as if they had always been part of the scene. Many of these German officers and soldiers carried themselves with ease, as though born in Paris. So naturally and brightly everything blended on those boulevards. A picture might capture this mood.

Captain Feige greeted me with a relieved sigh. He informed me that, as a German officer, I would never have been granted permission for my vacation trip “abroad.” I owed it solely to a clerical error at the pass office and our unfamiliarity with the paperwork. Those in Paris had not even considered that the applicant might be a German officer, since such requests were handled only by the OKW itself, in coordination with the Foreign Office. “I was half afraid,” he added, “that you’d take a little side trip to Spain from Narbonne.”

German experiences with our paratroopers were applied to the situation in France. One had to anticipate the enemy attempting to seize the country from within via airborne troops. Thus, offices in all larger towns were organized into defense units—in Compiègne, I had already had to oversee this myself. The highest-ranking officer became the defense commander. Yet often, with these rear-line units, this was an older man who had gained no further experience in the Second World War. The real task of effectively organizing such defenses usually fell to his younger aides. I was one of these in Amiens. I started by compiling a list of all units in the area—surprisingly, quite a few came together. Then came drafting an alert plan, designating alert and defense zones, and, through various drills, discreetly acquainting the personnel of different offices with one another, all as unnoticed as possible by the populace. I observed nearly everywhere how eagerly officers and men embraced these plans. They felt somehow more secure again in this foreign setting.

Still, I held no high opinion of these units’ military worth. An airborne force armed with modern weapons would make short work of field post offices, OT units, field command posts, vehicle repair shops and the like.

Even during my time in Amiens, I had to keep up my hospital visits in Paris, though less often. The final state of my paralysis became clear: I could now make some movements with my upper arm, but not lift it upward. With my forearm and hand, I could perform all movements again.

Alouette visited me a few times on weekends in Amiens. We would have a ready-made meal delivered from the town’s best restaurant, paired with a fitting bottle of red wine. During one such visit—the world is so small—she mentioned a certain Herbert Sahling, whom she had met at her office with De Brinon. It was my old study friend from Hamburg. I learned he lived in Paris with his wife, a Frenchwoman. I visited him and was shaken by the fate I encountered there. He had met her before the war, during her vacation trip to Hamburg. They had gotten engaged shortly before the war broke out. She returned to Paris as the war began, and her family and friends insulted her as the fiancée of a German. Then they marched in victorious, and the grim mask of the “terrible boche” fell away. Herbert was posted to an office in Paris and could marry her. Want to know how it ended? Herbert was transferred to Germany, taking his wife along. Air raids forced them apart, and she went to his parents’ home on Puettkampsweg in Hamburg-Hochkamp. He fell on April 12, 1945, near Aub in Lower Franconia. Ordered out of Germany by the English, she returned to Paris an outcast and took her own life. These were the cornerstones of the New Europe! Long live the noble spirit of the victors of 1945!

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BASIL:1

The Lie of the Six Million

Today, every child born in Germany enters the world saddled with a moral and material debt so heavy that he is virtually sentenced to life imprisonment. Why? Because a handful of powerful men, relentless in their hatred and insatiable in their hunger for the power needed to export the experiment so successfully tested in Germany to the whole planet, willed it so. There will always be those who call what we say a lie, who insist these are baseless insinuations, because “everyone” and “public opinion” have long since confirmed the German people’s guilt and the justice of the punishment they now endure for an atrocity as unique as the murder of the “six million Jews.” Has public opinion said so? Which public opinion? The one manufactured daily by radio, cinema, theater and the press? Dangerous in the extreme when every one of those channels is monopolized and steered by unscrupulous hands. The consequences become almost incalculable once the well-known propaganda method is applied systematically: first the “drumming,” then the “hammering in.” In other words, beat the drum to spread the claim, then hammer it into the skulls until the individual can no longer think critically and simply accepts whatever improbable story is fed to him.

When the First World War ended, Germany lay blockaded, broken, impoverished and starving. Its finest sons had been sacrificed; an entire vigorous young generation had vanished. In that moment of “total liquidation of a nation,” a strange eastern invasion began. From the West, they swept in like vultures over a battlefield, wave after wave of Jewish immigrants. They came hurrying not to share the labor of a hungry people but to seize the “new opportunity” to grow rich on still greater misery and hunger. And they did not merely enrich themselves on the suffering of the true masters of the house; very soon they began to carry themselves with an arrogance that became unbearable. Having exploited the “total German liquidation” in the most outrageous way, they showed not the slightest tact or delicacy, never troubling to hide from the Germans that they had stripped them bare and virtually taken possession of the whole country through their international connections, the foreign currency smuggled in, and the black market they themselves had invented. Faced with this, even the Germans—a people of philosophers and workers, always ready to “try to understand the enemy,” champions of “be ye all embraced, brothers”—saw that the Jews, that “select” minority never more than 4 percent of the population, by then controlled over 90 percent of commerce, industry and banking. They saw them entrenched in every key position of economic and political life, dominating the universities to the point that in some faculties 70 percent or more of the chairs were in Jewish hands, while genuine German youth found every door slammed shut. Germans watched in stunned silence as Jewish artists, in literature, painting and music, mocked their own baleful influence on the host nation’s mind, boasted of intellectual superiority, and in their poems took open pride in having seduced German women while the women’s fiancés and husbands died in the trenches or wasted away in prisoner-of-war camps. When matters had reached that pitch, did the betrayed people finally answer with vengeance, terror, murder and massacre? Not at all. The only result the Jews achieved was that the German people, in disciplined fashion and in completely free elections, brought to power the single party and the single man who promised to free them from that intolerable yoke.

Nationalism triumphs. What catastrophe does this spell for the foreign thieves? Will their property be seized, will they be thrown into prison? Nothing of the kind. As a simple measure of self-defense, the new regime controls their activities—only up to a point and in a fairly liberal manner—while still allowing them to leave freely and even helping them do so, letting them take their goods with them. Who has not met those recent arrivals from Germany who, within weeks, have opened their own shop, factory or business? What the Third Reich actually does is remove the oppression the intruders had imposed.

And what was the Jewish response? They assassinated the official representatives of the Reich in Switzerland and France and quietly sowed intrigue against Germany across the entire world, preparing the climate for the next war. Only days before the second world conflict erupted, the Zionist Congress meeting in Geneva, speaking through the Grand Rabbi and Supreme Head of Jewry, declared war on Germany in the name of every Jew on earth. What then did the Reich do when Jewry was already in a state of war, when those living on German soil could and should have been interned under the Law of Nations as a simple act of legitimate defense, when every Jew might rightly have been treated as belonging to an openly hostile side? Did the Reich act as the law would have allowed? Fortunately for its own conscience, it did not. Only in the final phase, under the pressure of a war that no longer knew mercy and that, in a single night, turned more than 200,000 German women and children into living torches in Dresden, were stricter measures introduced. The hard fact remains that Jewish losses inside the Reich, including those in the camps, were proportionally lighter than the losses the German people themselves endured. Former camp inmates themselves confirmed this when they said it was safer to live in a concentration camp than in Berlin or any other German city.

So when and where exactly were those six million Jews killed—the ominous six million that underpin not only the extravagant Israeli claims but also the pariah status, the Morgenthau Plan, and the life sentence handed to every German, already born or yet to be born? Auerbach, a German Jew and prominent postwar figure who later took his own life in 1952 after repeated fraud and other crimes, first declared that “the number of Jews murdered reached eleven million.” That figure, which at first seemed useful precisely because it was so large and impressive, was later abandoned by other, more “prudent” Jews and quietly reduced to six million.

This figure of six million, repeated to us daily in one form or another and now accepted as historical fact thanks to the “drumming” and the “hammering in,” rests on what foundation? On a single venal, bribed witness who told the famous Nuremberg Tribunals he had “heard such a figure.” No one can claim that those Tribunals showed excessive kindness; no one can imagine they failed to seek every possible supporting testimony. Yet they produced not one additional witness—despite methods that were far from scrupulous. And so both the accusations of that time and the claims still made today continue to rest on the “declarations” of that solitary false witness.

Someone may object that a single voice is enough to speak the truth. Let us therefore hear the other side, the other voice, on the “greatest crime in history.” According to several experts, including an unimpeachable source such as the Revista Geográfica Argentina [“Argentine Geographical Review”, No. 66, March 1939], the total Jewish population in 1939 stood at 16,651,000. The New York Jewish weekly Der Aufbau [“Reconstruction”] reported in 1949 that the world Jewish population had reached 18,000,000. Let the reader do the arithmetic. What people could survive a blood-letting of six million—let alone the original eleven million—without shrinking? Yet the Jewish people not only failed to shrink; within a mere ten years they showed a demographic increase of roughly two million.

It is time the world learned the truth. It is time the lie of the six million walking dead was finally laid to rest, and time to repeat the familiar, ironic saying here: “The dead you thought you killed are alive and well.” So that German children may once again be born as free as any others, and so that the world may learn to guard itself against similar surprises wherever they may appear.

Original Title: La mentira de los seis millones

Attributed Author: BASIL

“Der Weg” Issue: Volume 8, Issue 9 (Sept. 1954)

Page(s): 604-605 [Scan LINK]

Der Weg - El Sendero is a German- and Spanish-language magazine published by Dürer-Verlag in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by Germans with ties to the defeated Third Reich.

Der Weg ran monthly issues from 1947 to 1957, with official sanction from Juan Perón’s Government until his overthrow in September 1955.

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---

Jérôme and Jean Tharaud’s

When Israel is no longer King

Chapter 6

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Everything that may seem of another age and wholly unreasonable in these antisemitic furies appears here perfectly natural and part of the landscape, like the bricks, the sun and the water. The German of the people has always had a native aversion to the Jew, comparable to the American’s repugnance for the Negro. The aristocrat likes him no better: the proof is that, despite the great number of Jews settled beyond the Rhine, the nobility there is incomparably less mixed with Jewish blood than the English or the French. Finally, this feeling, which this time gives its reasons, is found perhaps still more vivid in the University and among the thinkers who represent the deepest genius of Germany than among the people and the aristocrats.

Without going back to the Flood, it is Goethe who, despite his admiration for Baruch Spinoza, revolted at the thought that marriages between Christians and Jews might one day no longer be forbidden by law.1

It is Herder, his friend, who declares in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit [“Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity”]:

“A ministry in which a Jew governs, a household in which the Jew holds the keys to the cashbox and the wardrobe, an administration in which the principal functions are entrusted to Jews, a university in which they are tolerated as brokers and moneylenders to the students: so many Pontine Marshes to be drained! For according to the old proverb: where there is a carcass, the vultures gather; where there is rot, the worms swarm.”

It is Kant who writes:

“The Palestinians who live among us have, by their spirit of usury, brought upon themselves a reputation as cheats well founded in the great majority of cases. To tell the truth, it seems strange to imagine an entire nation of thieves, but it is equally strange to imagine a nation composed exclusively of traders who disdain the honor of living as the other people of the country that receives them do, and find it more advantageous to dupe the inhabitants.”

It is Hegel who classifies the races as superior and inferior, and casts the Jews into the latter category, as incapable of rising above an entirely materialist conception of the world.

It is Fichte who proclaims:

“A powerful and hostile state extends across almost every country in Europe, living in continual war with all the others and weighing frightfully upon the citizens: it is Judaism. I do not believe it is so terrible solely because it forms an isolated, separatist, tightly united state, but because that state is founded on hatred of the entire human race [...]

“You utter the honeyed words of tolerance, of the rights of man and of the citizen? Do you not see that the Jews, who are, without you, citizens of a state more solid and powerful than all the others, will, if you also grant them the right of citizenship in your state, enjoy a double protection, and that they will thus crush your fellow citizens entirely under their feet? They want the rights of man, though they refuse them to us, as one sees in the Talmud; but if we wish to give those rights to them, we must first, in a single night, cut off all their heads and set other heads upon their shoulders, in which there would not be a single Jewish idea.”

It is Bismarck who cries out in the Prussian Chamber:

“I feel myself deeply humiliated at the mere thought that a Jew might be chosen as a representative of the Sacred Majesty of the King.”

As for Schopenhauer, who for 30 years walked every day through the Frankfurt ghetto to reach the hotel where he took his meals as an old bachelor, he too loathed the Jews for all sorts of reasons, metaphysical, physical and moral.

“They are God’s chosen people,” he used to say. “That is quite possible. But tastes differ. They are not my chosen people.”

He pursued them with sarcasms even into Jehovah, whom he irreverently called “the Old Jew,” “the Thing-in-itself,” “Monsieur of the Absolute,” or else, in his hours of gaiety—he was the least morose of men—“the Lord of the cuckoo-clock house in the clouds.” All of Voltaire’s old jokes about His jealous, irritable, ferocious character seemed to him benign, and he added yet another unexpected reproach: he blamed Jehovah for being the God of the least religious of all religions. For after all, what is a religion? he would say. It is a reverie that gives you the hope that nothing ends with life. Now, in the Bible there is never any question of a future life, nor of the resurrection of the soul, nor of pain or reward in a supernatural world, not even of metempsychosis! All that Jehovah promises you if you obey His commandments is this thing, the flattest of all, a stupidly prolonged life. And it is only with great difficulty and by a genuine piece of sleight of hand, he added, that Christianity managed to plug that enormous hole.

He also claimed that Yahweh, having foreseen in His wisdom that the Jews would be dispersed, had given them all a specific odor by which they might recognize one another and find one another everywhere, the foetor judaicus [“Jewish stench”]. And he professed for King Nebuchadnezzar, who had carried them off into slavery, an admiration without bounds, reproaching him only with having spared them too much.

And indeed, how could this philosopher who did not like women—which does not mean that he had morals against nature!—have failed to despise the race of Israel, the most feminine of all? How could this distant, discreet man, of a refined politeness, to whom fame, even glory, had come late, and who fled before it, he said, as in a theater the candle-lighter flees as soon as the curtain rises, have failed to hate in the Jews “that spirit of getting on, that avidity to seize everything, that absolute lack of discretion, that absence of verecundia [“modesty”], by which one succeeds far better in the world than by positive qualities”? How could this man who adored nature, who every day, in every weather, took his walk in the outskirts of the city in order to see something other than men, have endured people whom necessity, it is true, had shut into their quarter, but who had ended by taking nature in horror? How could he, who adored animals and his dog in particular, his handsome white spaniel Atma, the soul of the world, have had the least sympathy for those recluses of the ghetto who cannot endure animals, dogs above all, who return the feeling in kind?2

How could this philosopher who saw in existence only a sinister farce, from which an elementary wisdom would command one to tear oneself away as quickly as possible, have failed to detest that people of Israel, which has always held life to be the first of goods, the only good, the supreme good, and has always considered that the great punishment of God was to take it from you?

How could this pessimist have failed to disdain those born optimists who, despite the most constant misfortune, always imagine that one can improve the world and make it habitable?

How, as he crossed those filthy streets of the ghetto, could the abjection spread before his eyes not have made that attachment to life, so contemptible in itself, appear more contemptible still?

He who saw in asceticism the only reasonable morality, because the only one that led to the end of the species: what feelings could the fecundity of Israel have inspired in him?

He, finally, who hated every revolution as he hated cholera, and who left his fortune “to the soldiers, defenders of order in the days of ’48,” could he have failed to execrate their messianic spirit, always ready to set fire to the four corners of the world?

He therefore declared that one had to make an end of these dangerous personages. And for so desirable a result he saw only one means. It was, contrary to Goethe’s opinion, to multiply mixed marriages and at last drown Jewish blood in Christian blood. At the end of 100 years, Ahasuerus [“the Wandering Jew”] would no longer recognize his race.

“But in no case,” he said, “should any political right be granted to people at home nowhere, strangers nowhere, having no other fatherland than the other Jews of the universe, and always ready to fight for them as pro aris et focis [“for altars and hearths”]. To allow them to take part in the Administration and the Government would make them more Jewish than ever, more infatuated with themselves, more Jews con amore [“with love”]: which was precisely what had to be prevented.”

He remarked further:

“There is no idea more superficial or more false than to regard the Jews simply as a sect, a religious confession. That is only a calculated stratagem to falsify the true notion of things. The use of such an expression should not be permitted: it is the Jewish nation that one must say.”

One day the Jews of Germany had, after all, to be granted the same rights as everyone else. But despite legislation that since 1848 gave them equal rights, never, until 1914, or rather until 1918, were the Jews regarded in Germany as ordinary citizens. In the time of William II, a few of them did enjoy the imperial favor and were among his intimate counselors:

• Albert Ballin, the great moving spirit of German overseas commerce;

• Carl Fürstenberg, founder of the Berliner Handelsgesellschaft;

• Emil Moritz Rathenau, who made the electrical trust;

• Bernhard Dernburg, who became Secretary of State for the Colonies;

• Friedrich Viktor Friedlaender, reputed to be the richest man in Berlin, magnate of the mines of Upper Silesia, whom William II introduced into the House of Lords;

• Paul Hermann von Schwabach, director of the Bleichröder Bank, whom the same William, not without difficulty, moreover, succeeded in having admitted as a reserve captain in the Guard Cuirassiers.

A few other Israelites who became familiars of the Kaiser might still be cited, but one could count them on one’s fingers.

These brilliant exceptions only brought out more clearly the unfavorable situation in which Israel found itself in German society. A Jew could become neither an officer, nor a magistrate, nor a diplomat, nor, in a general way, occupy a post in a state administration. And it is, in short, to this regime that Hitler is returning today, only in an even harsher form.

Before the war, indeed, Jews were left entirely free to exercise their activity in literature, the newspapers, the theater, the bar, medicine and even the university. These liberal professions were abandoned to them all the more readily because families of the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie preferred to direct their children toward those military or civil functions to which Jews had no access. Hence the abundance of Jewish lawyers, doctors, professors, journalists, men of letters, actors and musicians so characteristic of modern Germany. It was a current joke to imagine Berlin waking one fine morning without its Jews. No more newspapers, no more concerts, no more theaters, no more clinics, and so on. No one suspected that one day, not far off, that fancy would become a reality and take on the dramatic character one sees in it today.

What, then, had happened?

After the war, Germany had been turned upside down: everyone was under the wreck. The German, great or middling, remained dazed for a long time. He understood nothing of what had just happened. He had flattered himself to the end that victory would restore the well-being and the power to which he was accustomed, and would add still more. The awakening was hard! He found himself under the machine, beaten, humiliated and ruined, prostrate, without strength to react. The Jew too was under the machine. He too had received a hard blow on the head. But at once he opened an eye, made sure that he was intact and that he had all his bones. That was the essential thing. The rest did not matter. Briskly he got to his feet, ran to the shop, to trade, to the bank, to journalism, to the cinema, took up again everywhere his prewar positions, and used the occasion to conquer new ones.

The occasion was a good one. The new regime, issued from defeat, from the Revolution and from the Weimar Assembly, represented nothing for the intelligence, or for the imagination, or for the sensibility of a German. Long accustomed to being governed, he never thought that one might govern oneself. Never has he been passionate for political life as the Englishman or the Frenchman is. Never has he had the concern to exercise a control over his Government, and never has his Government troubled itself about what he might think. Someone reminded me, on this subject, of a very characteristic fact: from the Sarajevo assassination to the declaration of war, not a single piece of information was supplied by the Government to the deputies of the Reichstag. If parliamentarians accepted being treated in that way, one may imagine the indifference of the rest of the population.

What the German prized above all in those who used to lead him was precisely that they relieved him of every public care and left him wholly to his little personal affairs. A democratic republic gave him neither the idea of the State as he had always conceived it, nor the feeling, so necessary to the peace of his mind, that he was being governed. Above all he despised the new regime because, issued from defeat, that regime was obliged to seek support from those foreign democracies that had vanquished Germany. That such a system could last seemed to him implausible. No one believed in it, apart from the Social Democrats, and their faith was not great! So the old officials resigned in a body. The others were dismissed.

In this upheaval the Jews showed neither these disgusts nor these scruples. They rushed into the vacant posts, happy to conquer situations that had escaped them until then, and that the republican regime let them take all the more willingly. It found in these Jews, republicans and liberals by interest and by temperament, natural defenders.

There was another important fact, which the Germans likewise failed at first to notice. At the end of the war, months and months passed during which, the Russians having been driven far from Warsaw, there was no longer a frontier between Prussia and Poland, which had become a German province. Under cover of that state of things, many of those Jews without a defined profession, Galicians and Poles, always ready to set off here or there in search of fortune, such as one sees so many of in Eastern Europe, crossed a frontier that had ceased to exist; and these “wild Jews” began to manage with the fresh energy of men escaped from the ghetto, and that knack of arranging to live where others die of hunger. They bought everything, sold anything, the old and the new, the rare or the common, gold, lead, old banknotes, the diamond or glass beads, the music hall, the theater, the cinema and the newspapers.

When the German, crushed by his disaster, pulled himself out from under the wreck, he saw with astonishment that the Jews had conquered in the State an exceptional influence, which singularly reinforced the influence they had long had in so many other domains. His anger was extreme. And it was on that feeling, of a man stripped, and by his own fault—which added to the rancor—that Hitler’s antisemitic campaign rested from the outset—and on the horror of Bolshevism as well.

For a German, Bolshevism is not at all, as it is for a Frenchman, I know not what abstract phenomenon, an experiment pursued in a lost country, thousands of kilometers away, and on which we are informed only by newspapers and books. In Germany it is quite otherwise. Twenty-four hours less travel; frontiers very close—at one point, almost contiguous—that changes the aspect of a problem. Germans who have traveled in Russia are beyond counting; beyond counting, too, the engineers, the foremen, the workers who have worked there; and the accounts of all these people, who have come back to Germany, have another accent than that of the book or the newspaper. It is another thing to be informed by an inanimate text or by the living speech of a witness, a neighbor, a man you know well, in whom you have confidence, and who tells you what he has seen. These conversations from door to door, from café to café, from beer hall to beer hall, have not spread in Germany much taste for Sovietism.

And yet, despite this horror, is there not in the Germans a secret slope that might draw them toward that conception they detest? Between the German, especially the German of the East, and the Slav, are there not certain affinities? Is a Prussian, a Pomeranian, anything other than a Germanized Slav? The German knows this kinship. He hides it, but he is afraid of it. He knows that he is, like the Russian, infinitely sensitive to the system, to the abstract idea, to the watchword all-powerful over a diffuse sensibility. He is conscious of his docility, and how, stiff as he may seem, he is changing and malleable. He apprehends obscurely that if circumstances favored it, little would suffice for him to go over to Bolshevism, and that he would follow a Lenin as he followed the Emperor, as he follows Hitler today. This deep fear of himself throws him at the feet of his Führer.

“Protect me from myself,” he cries to him in anguish, “you who know me better than I know myself!”

And the other answers him:

“Be at ease, my son . . . And first let us begin by protecting you from the Jews, for you know well, Jewry and Bolshevism are one and the same.”

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Reinhard Kops’

Peace, War, and “Peace”

Frieden, Krieg und „Frieden“

Table of Contents

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Dan Rouse’s Note: I’ll link to this page from each new entry in this series. It’s a work in progress and will be updated regularly as I release this translation.

FOREWORD

“The twelve years from 1933 to 1945 do not belong to German history.”

— Dr. Sonnenhol, Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany, on September 1, 1969, in Johannesburg.

When I released my ninth book, With Joy, Pride, and Melancholy, in early 1986, I made a promise to my readers. Responding to their many requests, I pledged to share my personal experiences as both an author and a publisher. That promise is fulfilled here. Yet, I soon felt it right to broaden this account, stretching it across the full span of my life and weaving in further reflections on events I’d touched upon in their earliest forms. Some of what follows will only make sense if you’ve read my earlier works. For that reason, I point you to the publisher’s note at the end of this book.

As you’ll see in these pages, my life has carried me through distinct roles: from a curious observer learning the ways of the world, to an active participant shaping it, and later to a thoughtful witness of my era. Through struggle, I earned the ability to sift the significant from the trivial, the truthful from the false, and to trace—even amid the rush of events—how the web was spun that ensnared us. So, within these pages, my own story intertwines with moments of contemporary history and philosophical musings on the past, naturally linking diverse chapters of human experience. In the earliest of those chapters, we had no hint of the altered future ahead. Like every generation, we sought footing in the past, using it as a yardstick for the world around us.

When recounting an earlier life—our life—there’s a tendency to lean on ready-made assumptions. Too often, we rely on voices cherry-picked to prop up the justifications that today’s wreckers demand. Recognizing this matters, for the vast upheaval of our world today comes hand in hand with a colossal effort to twist the past, shifting blame on a scale just as grand. This book seeks to stand against such distortions. Finding a voice to say so, though, was no small feat!

J.M.

SECTION I

Peace

Preparation for Life

SECTION II

War

On the Way to the Front

In the Russian Steppe

• In Occupied and Unoccupied France (p.87)

• From the Infantry to Military Intelligence (p.116)

• The Colorful World of Bulgaria (p.130)

• In the Gorges of Albania (p.145)

• On the Adriatic Sea (p.179)

• Secrets in the Puszta (p.223)

• Slovenia, the Last European Bastion (p.237)

• Behind Barbed Wire (p.252)

• In Hiding in Occupied Europe (p.287)

SECTION III (~166 pages)

“Peace”

• Buenos Aires, Meeting Point of the Secret Services (p.333)

• In Magnificent South Africa (p.347)

• New Beginning in Southern Argentina (p.364)

• Freemasonry and Endured Democracy (p.408)

• Freemason States All Around (p.425)

• Freemason Economy (p.449)

• Freemason Society (p.454)

• Freemason Science (p.463)

• Adolf Hitler and Freemasonry (p.467)

• Our World (p.497)

SECTION IV

Appendix

• Afterword (p.511)

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Jérôme and Jean Tharaud’s

When Israel is no longer King

Chapter 5

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As long as they could, until silence became unavoidable, the Jews fought the Führer ardently.

They loathed in him the furious demagogue who made antisemitism the first point of his program, and they despised him besides, because these born intellectuals naturally made the error of not valuing the dark, instinctive, sentimental forces at their true worth, forces that are nowhere more active than in Germany. In this, moreover, they showed that it is unusually difficult for a Jew, even one long established in Berlin, Munich or Hamburg, to enter into a German’s sensibility.

Every morning Hitler repeated in vain that, as soon as he was in power, the Jews would no longer have the rights of citizens nor access to public office; that they could not be called before a court or sit on any jury; that every marriage between a German and a Jew would be held null; that schools and universities would be closed to their children; that they would be excluded from the magistracy, the bar and the hospitals; that they would be expelled from the banks, the newspapers and the theaters; that everything they might write would be carefully censored, and so on and so on. They listened to all of this without believing it, persuaded as they were that if, contrary to their expectation, Hitler were to triumph in the end, he would “fold,” as they say, and that necessity, prudence and universal opinion would compel him to renounce the barbarous solutions he announced with such a clamor.

Now Hitler gives up nothing at all. The Jews now see with stupefaction this antisemitism—which they were inclined to regard as a piece of foolishness impossible to realize, an empty bravado—carried out one by one in all its threats. A cold pogrom, more dangerous than the acts of violence, is being organized. The plan is to give the Jews, as not long ago, a special status and to shut them up in a kind of moral ghetto. And that is far more formidable than all the brutalities, for brutality is necessarily passing, whereas a legal status—good heavens—can last a long time.

Already yesterday, in Frankfurt, the mayor, who was Jewish; the prefect of police, who was Jewish; the governor of the province, who was Jewish as well; the two theater directors, who were Jewish, of course—but why on earth had the Jews been allowed to install themselves everywhere like this!—; and a whole lesser crowd of Israelite officials were removed from their posts, without any other form of trial.

Throughout the Reich, Jewish magistrates have just been barred from the courts, or more exactly, the Minister of Justice has demanded their resignation, specifying that if they persist in sitting they will be liable to prosecution in the criminal court for trespass. The number of Jewish lawyers who, in Berlin, for example, represented about 80 percent of the bar, will be reduced to 1 percent—which is the exact proportion of the Jewish population to the German population, 650,000 Jews against 65 million Germans.

As for the notaries, the percentage will be the same; and some newspapers even hold that the seal of the State should in no case be affixed by Jewish hands.

The same rigor is applied toward the physicians. The Jews, who compose 75 percent of the German medical profession, are dismissed from all the hospitals. Christian doctors must send away their assistants and their Jewish male and female nurses. As for the social-insurance funds, they have just warned their members that they will not reimburse those who have themselves treated by a Jew.

Henceforth no Jew will belong to any popular court, any criminal jury or any chamber of commerce. Only the bankers have been left alone. Did they buy this favor? Or was there a fear of attacking a power too international, too bound to the rest of the world and too bound to the German economy, for it to be struck at without bringing down the whole edifice?

Nothing is said, either, of the Jewish professors or the Jewish students of the University, but they will lose nothing by waiting. At this moment the students and the professors are on holiday. There is enough to do with those present without occupying oneself with those who are absent. Their turn will come in due time, when the vacation has ended. And certainly, for many, it will be their last hour! In the meantime, in the primary schools of Berlin and elsewhere, most of the Jewish schoolteachers have been dismissed.

To all these ousted officials, to all these people of the liberal professions thrown out onto the street, one must still add the crowd of employees dismissed overnight, and without any compensation, by the firms, Jewish or not, in which they worked. A Nazi cell, created in every important firm, sees to it that not one Jew escapes the rigor of the law.

What inhumanity! you will say.

I am of your opinion.

To which a Nazi answers me:

“There are among us 10 million unemployed and 100,000 university students, true Germans, those out of work. We pull a few of them out of misery to install them in the places where the Jews had been lolling for years and years. Where do you see in that, I ask you, any inhumanity?”

Jewish humor alone still keeps its rights, and it has already invented this little fable to mock its own distress.

Two Jews meet. Lévy says to Jacob: “Blessed be the Lord! My son has just obtained a place.”

— “In France?” Jacob asks.

— “In Kœnigsberg,” Lévy answers.

— “In Kœnigsberg? Is it possible!”

— “He has just been named rabbi.”

— “What!” cries Jacob with that old irony that so helps the race to live, “so they are still taking Jews to make rabbis of them!”

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Biography of Johann von Leers

Table of Contents

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Dan Rouse’s Note: I’ll link to this page from each new entry in this series. It’s a work in progress and will be updated regularly as I release this translation.

SECTION 1 Omitted from Translation.

SECTION 2 (~45 pages)

Formative Years: “Living in völkisch ideas since my youth”

SECTION 3 (~76 pages)

Entry into the Political Arena: “Recognition and combating of the Jewish world plague”

SECTION 4 (~160 pages)

Positionings: Fields of action of a völkisch networker

Coming Soon:

SECTION 5 (~52 pages)

Antisemitic Agitation: “The Jewish Question Almost Became My Main Field of Study”

• 5.1 The “Jewish Question” as Subject (p.325)

• 5.2 From Idea to Practice: The “Solution” of the “Jewish Question” (p.341)

SECTION 6 (~23 pages)

Appointment to Jena: “[U]niquely Suited”

• 6.1 As “Nazi Theorist” at the University of Jena (p.377)

• 6.2 From Lecturer to Full Professor: The Lightning Career (p.382)

• 6.3 Teaching and Research in the Context of “Militant Scholarship” (p.384)

• 6.4 Points of Contention: “Peasant Research” and “Imperial Policy” (p.387)

SECTION 7 (~90 pages)

Boundary Drawing, Marginalization, Omnipresence: “[P]roductive like a Carp That Spawns 10,000 Eggs”

• 7.1 Boundary Drawing in the Academic-Publishing Sphere (p.400)

• 7.2 Marginalization, Alienation, Distance (p.424)

• 7.3 Omnipresent Agitation: Propagandist of the Second Rank (p.431)

• 7.4 Genocide as an “Open Secret” (p.438)

• 7.5 The Rationalization of the Crimes of the Executors of the “Final Solution” (p.450)

• 7.6 “Cultural Transfer”: Antisemitism as Export Commodity (p.454)

• 7.7 Expertise at the Interfaces of Scholarship and Worldview (p.483)

SECTION 8 (~120 pages)

Old Comrades, New Networks: “[T]his wonderful, free Argentine”

• 8.1 “The Jew Is to Blame”: Final Chords (p.490)

• 8.2 “We Freeze at Night and Go Hungry”: Internment 1945/46 (p.495)

• 8.3 “Uncle Hans”: Traces and Contours of Illegality since 1947 (p.505)

• 8.4 On the Way “to Freedom”: Flight, Emigration, Migration (p.527)

• 8.5 “[T]his wonderful, free Argentine”: Old Comrades, New Networks (p.546)

SECTION 9 (~224 pages)

Final Destination Egypt: “[B]ulwark against jewish-zionist imperialism”

• 9.1 “Flotsam of the Third Reich”: The German Colony on the Nile (p.610)

• 9.2 From Buenos Aires to Cairo (p.614)

• 9.3 “Antisemitic International”? Contours of a Propaganda Network (p.652)

• 9.4 Worldview: Annihilation, Liberation, Redemption (p.689)

• 9.5 Paths into Insignificance (p.703)

• 9.6 Dynamics of Public Scandalization: “SS Meeting Place Cairo” (p.763)

• 9.7 “Public Enemy No. 1”: The Failed Return to the Federal Republic (p.809)

• 9.8 Epilogue: The Struggle over Interpretive Authority (p.826)

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Johann Von Leers Propagandist Im Dienste Von Hitler, Perón Und Nasser

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Jérôme and Jean Tharaud’s

When Israel is no longer King

Chapter 4

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One cannot say that this day of boycott was a success for the Jews—that would truly look like irony—and yet, all things considered, it comes to something fairly like one.

Today I see Hitler’s maneuver clearly.

To that Nazi who, all day long, from one end of the Reich to the other, paced arrogantly up and down before Jacob’s shop and Levy’s store, Hitler gave the immense satisfaction of having held, for a moment, from 10 in the morning until six in the evening, all the Jews of Germany under his heel. But that satisfaction remains entirely illusory. This arrogant Nazi is in reality a dupe. He dreamed of nothing but brutality and pillage, and by sleight of hand Hitler made a policeman of him. The Jew is humiliated, but he is protected; the Nazi’s pride is exalted, but his victory is limited to vain pleasure, when in his heart of hearts he wanted more tangible results. Most of those Brownshirts who stood guard at the door would have been far better satisfied if they had been given leave to enter the shop and wreck everything in it.

Another ruse of Hitler’s.

He had announced with great fanfare that this boycott would last a whole week, and in the end he reduced it to a single day, under the vague threat of resuming it on Wednesday if the campaign that Jews abroad were waging against Germany did not cease at once. Now this single day is, as if by chance, a Saturday, an English-style working day on which trade stops at noon; also a Sabbath, when the religion of Jehovah puts commerce into low gear. This famous boycott was confined, all told, to two hours, from 10 o’clock to noon. It is a minute of silence in the course of business. And Sunday, as is only proper, following Saturday, comes just in time to make one forget this snag in everyday life.

It is not badly played. To prolong the boycott was all but impossible: it would have disrupted trade, slowed production, worsened unemployment, made a multitude of contracts unenforceable, risked bringing down banks, and finally injured the pure Germans themselves, so inextricably are Jewish and Christian businesses intertwined. The hard part was to convince the Nazis they had won the battle without delivering it. But it seems that no miracle is impossible to Hitler. From yesterday on, the official press—there is, besides, no other left, and when you have read one newspaper you have read them all—presented this boycott not as a measure directed against Jewish commerce, but as a threat “intended solely to answer the calumnies of the foreign press concerning the so-called acts of violence inflicted upon Israel”; and they hastened to add—what could one have known of it so soon?—that this threat having sufficed to produce the result the Government hoped for, this show of severity would be limited, once and for all, to a single day. Thus victory was announced before the fight was joined.

Thanks to the orders given and the discipline strictly imposed on all the shop sentries, the day of the boycott was to pass without brawls, as indeed it did. Hitler can say to the whole world, without risk of being contradicted:

“See! I have taken the matter in hand. Not one act of violence, not one act of pillage. But cease, I beg you, your campaign of calumnies. You have seen what I can do. We could, if the occasion arose, be far less harmless.”

Forced by the Government, the great Jewish firms agree to send dispatches to the foreign houses with which they deal, in which they beg them to use all their influence to calm the press of their respective countries, unleashed against antisemitic violence in Germany. It is always the same refrain:

“Do not concern yourselves with us! Leave us to settle our own affairs ourselves. Your intervention only makes things more painful. […]”

Ah! it is the first time one sees persecuted Jews begging that no one come meddling to their rescue.

The newspapers that formerly represented Jewish and liberal opinion in Germany now show themselves the fiercest in celebrating the merits of the new Government, so much so that Goering can write with cruel irony:

“The Jewish press of Berlin has changed its attitude toward us. The editors of Der Angriff [“The Attack”]—the most violent of the Hitlerite papers—must turn pale with jealousy on reading the articles inspired by the purest nationalism to be found in the paper of Messrs. Lachmann-Mosse, owners of the Berliner Tageblatt [“Berlin Daily Paper”], the great liberal republican newspaper. But these gentlemen must not believe that they are going to win us over. We attach no value to their praises; we prefer their criticisms. Let them harbor not the slightest illusion on this score. We have told them often enough that we mean to forget nothing.”

That is the tone before which one bows. When word went around that the Berliner Tageblatt had ceased to belong to its owners—which might have explained the paper’s about-face—Messrs. Mosse and Lachmann lost no time in informing the public that the Tageblatt still belongs to them!

On the newspaper banners I read in large letters:

“Triumph all along the line […]

“The Jewish gutter press reduced to silence […]

“The dogs outside have stopped barking […]

“A damper on the calumnies about German atrocities […]”

This reminds me of what used to happen during the war, when so often, to mask a setback, the communiqué announced, “All our objectives have been attained.” In truth, I do not see that the attacks of the foreign press have slackened in the least. But it must be said and made believed; and, as one might have foreseen, the Government announces, with the magnanimity of a victor, that the lesson having proved sufficient, next Wednesday the boycott will not be resumed.

Was I not right to say that Israel has scored a point? This success is not negligible, since the 600,000 Jews of Germany are almost all tradespeople. Their interests have not been seriously touched by that Saturday. Or at least, if there is a crack, the crack remains as yet invisible. The whole question is whether the Germans en masse will make it a point of pride no longer to frequent the Jew’s shop. And until proof to the contrary, one is entitled to doubt it. How not to go back to the Jew? He sells everything, and cheaper. And then he is so obliging! Once more, will habit not prevail over a racial hostility so instinctive and so ancient that one almost ends by forgetting it and no longer taking it into account?

Nor is there any lack of people who seem little disposed to submit blindly to the Nazis’ law. Women of the aristocracy and the upper bourgeoisie have made a point of going to shake hands with their Jewish suppliers. I am told of a Countess Bismarck who, on that famous Saturday, pushed aside the two Hitlerites standing guard at the door of a Jewish shop. She went in, made her purchases and came out. At that moment the two Nazis, who did not know who she was, struck up, to shame her, a song in honor of Bismarck, whose anniversary fell that very day, April 1. “Ah!” she said to them, to their astonishment, “I see with pleasure that you honor my family!”

Another rather comic detail. A schoolteacher, a Christian, tells me that on the eve of the boycott, having gone to see her doctor, who happened to be Jewish, she met in the waiting room two men wearing swastikas. Taking them to be charged with barring entry to the doctor’s apartment, she said to them naively:

“But I thought the boycott didn’t begin until tomorrow?”

“That’s exactly why,” they answered, “we’ve come to get ourselves treated today.”

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Édouard Drumont’s

Jewish France (1890)

Table of Contents

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Dan Rouse’s Note: I’ll link to this page from each new entry in this series. It’s a work in progress and will be updated regularly as I release this translation.

BOOK 1

BOOK 2

BOOK 3

BOOK 4

Coming Soon:

BOOK 5: Jewish Paris and French Society (~130 pages)

• Chapter I (p.265)

• Chapter II (p.271)

• Chapter III (p.286)

• Chapter IV (p.299)

• Chapter V (p.313)

• Chapter VI (p.330)

• Chapter VII (p.343)

• Chapter VIII (p.362)

BOOK 6: The Jewish Persecution (~128 pages)

• Chapter I — The Freemasons (p.395)

• Chapter II — The Jews (p.417)

• Chapter III — The Jews (continued) (p.439)

• Chapter IV — The Jews (continued) (p.463)

• Chapter V — The Jews (end) (p.494)

CONCLUSION (p.523)

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Jérôme and Jean Tharaud’s

When Israel is no longer King (1933)

Quand Israël n’est plus roi

Table of Contents

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Quand Israël Nest Plus Roi

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Ezra Pound’s

Guide to Kulchur (1938)

Part 5, Serialized by Dan Rouse

Part III, Section VI, Chapters 22-26

SECTION VI

[0:00:00] 22. SAVOIR FAIRE

[0:15:39] 23. THE NEW LEARNING: PART TWO

[0:32:34] 24. EXAMPLES OF CIVILIZATION

[0:38:16] 25. BOOKS “ABOUT”

[0:54:02] 26. ON ANSWERING CRITICS

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Jérôme and Jean Tharaud’s

When Israel is no longer King

Chapter 3

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An idyllic German Sunday! Marguerite walks on the arm of Doctor Faust along the Main, lined with its old houses, while the church bells ring under a clear sky in which graceful architectural forms of the most fanciful invention stand out with the sharpness of an Épinal print. What sweetness, what serenity! How well one understands Goethe’s saying:

“If I were asked what place I should have chosen for my cradle, as best fitted to my ideas as a citizen and my conceptions as a poet, of all the cities of Germany I should name Frankfurt.”

It is true that, as soon as he could, Goethe left this ideal city, so well made for him, and returned to it as little as possible. That is what we nearly always do with those places of our childhood that we say we love best.

Today’s papers report that throughout Germany yesterday only incidents of no gravity occurred: people photographed entering a Jewish shop, whose image was projected that evening at the cinema; others marked on the cheek by a rubber stamp with I know not what ridiculous sign; others—young girls or young women—on whose scalp a swastika was drawn with the clippers. All detestable jokes, but worse might have been feared.

“Ah! you call that a joke!” a schoolfellow from the École Normale, several years my senior, an Israelite by origin, wrote to me a few days later. “But the day, monsieur, when, in revolution, the Bolsheviks arrest your wife, your daughter or your mistress and draw a hammer and sickle on her skull with the clippers, you would hold that this was not a joke, even a detestable one, but a vile and filthy brutality, such that anyone who can speak of it without feeling and without expressing his profound horror and his infinite disgust is dishonored. Define yourself. And dare no longer speak of a Péguy. . . .”

A little calm, if you please! Let us look at things with sang-froid. Germany is in revolution. One does not readily grasp it, and for this reason. For us, a revolution, the Russian or our own, for example, is first of all a crisis in which blood flows in torrents, and which, by a singular paradox, finds in its very excesses its justification, for it ends by appearing as a convulsion of nature, to which the moral rule is wholly inapplicable. Judge it as one will, the Hitlerian revolution has not this sanguinary character, and it is precisely for that reason that it does not appear as an authentic revolution, and that one perhaps forgives it its excesses less than any other.

But in speaking imprudently of the hammer and sickle, my pedagogue is ill-inspired! Does he happen not to know that, in drawing the Nazis behind him, Hitler set out first to ward off the peril of the communist revolution, which, rightly or wrongly, he believed imminent and fomented by the Jewish spirit? Now, the day Bolshevism installed itself in Germany or in France—you know it, my dear schoolfellow—it is not with clippers that the executions would be carried out . . .

Still on the same subject, another Israelite writes to me:

“I should have preferred the Nazis to knock those young persons on the head, rather than inflict on them this humiliation of a swastika on the head.”

Yes, my dear sir, perhaps you would have preferred it for the needs of propaganda, but let me say to you in my turn, as your coreligionist did a moment ago:

“Put yourself a little in their place. The point of honor is a fine thing, but when one begins to have one, one must not exaggerate. . . .”

Mlle Rachel, agrégée of letters—everybody knows how to read in Israel!—takes up her pen and writes me a note which flatters me, evidently, because it proves that she has read all my works, but which also causes me pain—I exaggerate in my turn—because it is clear that she loathes them . . . And a few Jewish friends—I have some, and excellent ones—cry to me from afar:

“Do leave us in peace, and give up at last the strange mania of interesting yourself in this Jewish question so full of perils, since one never knows, even when one speaks to a Christian, whether one is not speaking to a Hebrew!”

To these slighting remarks and these counsels of prudence, ah! how I preferred the tone of my friend, that fabulous being of a double nature, half human and half animal, that Prince of Israel turned into a beast of burden by the spells of Asmodeus, whom I met last year in the Ghetto of Warsaw, and whose story I told in la Jument Errante [“The Wandering Mare”]! . . . Where are you, old Wandering Mare? Where do you drive your cart, which has come like you from the depths of the ages, and in which a red-haired fellow in an English cap and a yellow raincoat dispensed to the crowd gathered around him a treasure of hope in the filthy form of little lottery tickets? Between the Oder and the Vistula, are you carrying, at this hour, some Jew of Germany terrified by Hitler’s men, as his fathers once were by the Cossacks of Chmielnicki? . . .

How I should like to see you again and talk with you of all that is happening in this Frankfurt of which you know every stone and every feeling. I think of that Saturday evening when, the two of us following the sidewalk of the sad suburb, you told me of the long journey which, across many countries, many centuries and many sorrows, had brought you from the banks of the Rhine into that Warsaw ghetto, so different in aspect but at bottom so like those you have always known . . . With your coreligionists, no conversation is possible! As mute and crouched in their terror as I see them here, so arrogant and unleashed they show themselves elsewhere, in meetings, in the press and in the letters they write you! If you do not speak as they do, if you use measured terms to tell their misfortune, they cover you with insults, treat you as a barbarian and a savage beast thirsting for the blood of Israel. With a word they nail you to the pillory, by calling you an antisemite, imagining thereby that they cast you at a stroke outside intelligence, into the Middle Ages of chains, yellow robes and pointed caps . . . They have found a way—does it surprise you?—of exploiting their misfortune and making a triumph of it! All the denominations gather to inveigh against the brute who threatens them with his whip. They are welcomed, they are embraced, one prays for them in the churches, they are cheered at the cinema. It is a deafening concert of protests and complaints, whose echo, wherever you are, must reach you, and I see you from here pricking your peeled ears and lifting your lips over your old yellow teeth, in your strange ironic smile. At whom are you laughing? At the Christians or at the Jews? . . .

To you alone I could speak, old Prince of Israel, victim of a sad metamorphosis, unmerited or not, I do not know; to you alone I could speak in this shadow and this light of the present and the past that are dear to us both. But alas, one has not the luck to meet you twice in a lifetime, dear old beast! And it is, as always, for I know not what unknown reader that I continue this narrative, in which so often, in thought, I shall climb into your cart . . .

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Ezra Pound’s

Guide to Kulchur (1938)

Table of Contents

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Dan Rouse’s Note: I’ll link to this page from each new entry in this series. It’s a work in progress and will be updated regularly as I release this audio version.

To

LOUIS ZUKOFSKY and

BASIL BUNTING

stragglers in the desert

This book is not written for the over-fed. It is written for men who have not been able to afford an university education or for young men, whether or not threatened with universities, who want to know more at the age of fifty than I know today, and whom I might conceivably aid to that object.

I am fully aware of the dangers inherent in attempting such utility to them.

PREFACE

In attacking a doctrine, a doxy, or a form of stupidity, it might be remembered that one isn’t of necessity attacking the man, or say “founder”, to whom the doctrine is attributed or on whom it is blamed. One may quite well be fighting the same idiocy that he fought and whereinto his followers have reslumped from laziness, from idiocy, or simply because they (and/or he) may have been focussing their main attention on some other goal, some disease, for example, of the time needing immediate remedy.

The man who builds dykes is not of necessity an anti-irrigationist.

It is my intention in this booklet to COMMIT myself on as many points as possible, that means that I shall make a number of statements which very few men can AFFORD to make, for the simple reason that such taking sides might jeopard their incomes (directly) or their prestige or “position” in one or other of the professional “worlds”. Given my freedom, I may be a fool to use it, but I wd. be a cad not to.

PART I

PART II

PART III

Soon:

PART IV (~64 pages)

Section VII (~6 pages)

• 27. MAXIMS OF PRUDENCE (p.177)

• 28. HUMAN WISHES (p.178)

Section VIII (~36 pages)

• 29. GUIDE TO KULCHUR (p.183)

• 30. THE PROOF OF THE PUDDING (p.188)

• 31. CANTI (p.194)

• 32. THE NOVEL AND SO FORTH (p.200)

• 33. PRECEDENTS (p.207)

• 34. ON ARRIVING AND NOT ARRIVING (p.209)

• 35. PRAISE SONG OF THE BUCK-HARE (p.211)

• 36. TIME-LAG (p.214)

• 37. THE CULTURE OF AN AGE is what you can pick up and/or get in touch with, by talk with the most intelligent men of the period? (p.217)

Section IX (~22 pages)

• 38. EDUCATION OR INFORMATION (p.219)

• 39. NEO-PLATONICKS ETC. (p.222)

• 40. LOSSES (p.227)

• 41. ODES: RISKS (p.232)

• 42. GREAT BASS: PART TWO (p.233)

• 43. TONE (p.235)

PART V (~58 pages)

Section X (~26 pages)

• 44. GOVERNMENT (p.241)

• 45. THE RECURRING DECIMAL (p.249)

• 46. DECLINE OF THE ADAMSES (p.254)

• 47. ROYALTY AND ALL THAT (p.257)

Section XI (~32 pages)

• 48. ARABIA DESERTA (p.267)

• 49. RUNG (p.272)

• 50. CHAUCER WAS FRAMED? (p.280)

• 51. HAPPY DAYS (p.284)

• 52. THE PROMISED LAND (p.290)

PART VI (~52 pages)

Section XII (~47 pages)

• 53. STUDY OF PHYSIOGNOMY (p.299)

• 54. AND THEREFORE TENDING (p.304)

• 55. PERGAMENA DEEST (p.342)

• 56. WATCH THE BEANERIES (p.344)

Section XIII (~5 pages)

• 57. EPILOGUE to balance the frontispiece (p.346)

• 58. TO RECAPITULATE (p.347)

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Memoirs of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem

Muhammad Amin al-Husayni

A Brief Biography

Published in the magazine Filistin [“Palestine”], Issue 161, August 1974.

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Sayyid Muhammad Amin al-Husayni was born in Jerusalem in 1897. He received his primary and secondary education in Jerusalem and also studied religious sciences, Arabic, and French with private tutors. He then enrolled at al-Azhar Mosque in Egypt and at the School of Preaching and Guidance, founded by the late scholar Muhammad Rashid Rida, owner of al-Manar [“The Beacon”]. During that period, he attended lectures and courses in the Faculty of Arts at the Egyptian University, which has now become Cairo University. While studying in Egypt, he remained in constant contact with leading figures and leaders of the Arab and Muslim worlds, listening to them, learning from them, and exchanging views on the affairs of the Arab nation and the Islamic world and on what would lead to their renaissance, freedom, and deliverance from foreign colonialism. When he returned to Palestine, he continued to maintain close contact with the leading figures of the Arab nation and the Islamic world. During the First World War, he graduated from the Ottoman army in Istanbul and joined the 46th Division, stationed in the province of Izmir. When the war ended, he returned to Palestine to welcome a new era of struggle, to fight for his homeland of Palestine and his Arab nation, upon which brutal European colonialism had fallen, to work for the formation of scientific, cultural, and political societies and clubs, foremost among them the Arab Club and the Rawdat al-Ma‘arif College in Jerusalem, to spread the spirit of renaissance and freedom among the Arab youth, especially to resist the British Mandate and the Balfour Declaration, which stipulated that Palestine should become a national home for the Jews, to lead the Palestinian national movement amid the dangerous currents of foreign politics, and to resist Zionism and world Jewry with a resistance that knows no leniency and yields to no influences or inducements.

The first revolution broke out in April 1920, led by His Eminence at the head of a group of the youth of Jerusalem and the mass of the Palestinian people during the Nabi Musa celebrations. A British military court convened to try those accused of instigating it, and a sentence of 10 years’ hard labor was passed against him in absentia; but he had succeeded in escaping the grasp of the colonialists. He then contacted the leaders of the tribes and the chiefs of the clans—Banu Sakhr, the Huwaytat, Banu Atiyya, the Fayiz, the Tarawina, the Jali, and others—to unify action in defense of Palestine. He next moved to Syria at the beginning of its independence, where the field of action for the Palestinian cause was wider. He joined a number of Palestinian leaders in the Syrian-Palestinian Congress, which convened in Damascus and proclaimed Syria’s independence.

When the French occupied Syria with armed forces and ended its independence, His Eminence took refuge in the Syrian desert, where he lived for a time and worked to establish contact with the leaders of the Arab tribes until his sentence was annulled. He then returned to Palestine and, in 1921, assumed the post of Mufti, succeeding his late brother, Sayyid Muhammad Kamil al-Husayni.

In 1922, His Eminence was elected President of the Supreme Islamic Sharia Council to oversee the affairs of the awqaf and the Islamic sharia courts. He reformed their administration, organized their affairs, and worked to protect Palestine’s lands from passing into the hands of the covetous Zionists. He resisted colonial policy and Jewish ambitions with the utmost resolve, took on the full burden of the Palestinian national movement, and worked to convene Palestinian and Islamic congresses, form executive committees, and send political delegations abroad and Islamic delegations to Islamic countries. He himself led numerous delegations to Arab and Islamic countries—Egypt, Iraq, Syria, the Gulf emirates, Iran, and Afghanistan—to acquaint the Arab and Islamic worlds with the injustice done to Palestine and to rouse energies for its rescue from the Jewish danger and British colonialism. He took the initiative in restoring the Blessed al-Aqsa Mosque, which was in danger of collapse; when the restoration was completed, an official celebration was held in the presence of delegations from the Arab and Islamic worlds.

In 1930, His Eminence traveled with the Palestinian delegation to London, met with the English government and several of its political figures, and discussed the Palestinian question with them.

His Eminence worked diligently to take the Palestine question out of the narrow local sphere in which British-Jewish policy sought to confine it and to place it within the scope of the Arab and Islamic worlds, making it the cause of the entire Arab and Islamic worlds. To that end, he called for the General Islamic Congress in Jerusalem in 1931, which was attended by delegates from all the Islamic countries to examine the threat facing Palestine from the Jews’ religious ambitions regarding the Blessed al-Aqsa Mosque and their political ambitions aimed at turning Palestine into a Jewish state. This congress was the first of its kind to bring together a large number of leading figures of the Islamic world from various countries: Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, the Muslims of Europe in the Balkan countries such as Bosnia and others, Turkey, the Muslims of Russia and Turkestan, the Muslims of India, Indonesia, China, and some of the Islamic countries of Africa. When the Palestine revolt of 1929 broke out, His Eminence the Mufti established before the British Commission of Inquiry under Sir Walter Shaw that the Jews had tried to bribe him with half a million pounds to make him abandon rights that were not theirs in the place of the Noble Buraq. The Jews at that time demanded that he be tried and regarded him as responsible for the successive revolts that the Palestinians were carrying out against them.

In 1934, the year war broke out between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen, His Eminence, in his capacity as President of the Islamic World Congress, was invited to form a mission comprising the President of the Syrian Republic, Prince Shakib Arslan, and Dr. Abd al-Rahman Azzam (may God have mercy upon them). His Eminence himself took part in the mission to stop the war and reconcile the two Arab Islamic states. The mission proceeded to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and then to the Kingdom of Yemen; its efforts were crowned with success, peace was concluded between them, and bloodshed was prevented.

When the Great Palestine Revolt of 1936 occurred, all the parties of Palestine elected him president of the Arab Higher Committee, which directed the course of the revolt in the country during the most dangerous period. He took upon himself the full burden; the revolt continued for six months and ended with the appeal of the Arab kings and princes, as is well known—an appeal they addressed to His Eminence, in which they promised that Britain would work to do justice to the Arabs.

Afterward, the British commission under Lord Peel issued its report recommending the partition of Palestine between the Arabs and the Jews. The revolt was renewed in 1937, and the British authorities attempted to arrest His Eminence with a large force of British troops and police, surrounding the house of the Arab Higher Committee in Jerusalem; they failed to arrest him. God granted him deliverance and refuge in his house within the walls of the Noble Sanctuary of Jerusalem for four months. During that time, the British authorities arrested some members of the Arab Higher Committee and deported them to the Seychelles Islands, but His Eminence succeeded in escaping once more: he left Palestine secretly in a small seagoing boat and took refuge in Lebanon.

When the Second World War broke out in 1939 and Britain pressed France to expel him, he became aware of this and left Lebanon for Baghdad, where he remained for about a year and a half (at the head of a number of the leading Palestinian fighters who had taken refuge in Iraq), continuing to work for the Palestine question and for Arab and Islamic causes until the Iraqi revolt of 1941 against British military intervention broke out.

When the English were on the point of occupying Iraq, His Eminence was compelled to leave for Iran with the leaders of the Iraqi revolt and a number of the fighters from Palestine, Syria, and Iraq. When British and Russian forces occupied Iran, the British authorities pursued him, and Marshal Wavell announced a reward of £20k for whoever captured him. He managed to travel in disguise to Europe after Turkey, under English pressure at the time, refused to accept him as a political refugee.

His Eminence remained in Europe throughout the war and succeeded in obtaining recognition of the independence of Palestine and the other Arab countries from the Axis powers, until the French authorities arrested him after he left Germany following its collapse.

The colonial Zionist organizations sought to bring His Eminence before the Nuremberg Tribunal and accused him of inciting the Nazi authorities in Germany during the war to exterminate the Jews. The Yugoslav government likewise attempted to bring a similar charge against His Eminence on the grounds of his work in forming armed military units from the Muslims of Bosnia. The truth is that the Nazis had no need of incitement from anyone to take revenge on the Jews, who had betrayed Germany in the First World War and had colluded with Britain and its allies in carrying out acts of sabotage and spreading harmful propaganda against Germany at that time.

As for the other charge, its cause was that His Eminence had helped the Muslims of Bosnia form two military divisions from among the people of Bosnia to defend themselves against the attacks of the Serbian bands, which, under the leadership of General Mihailović, were slaughtering the people of Bosnia without justification, killing tens of thousands of their men, women, and children in indiscriminate massacres because of religious fanaticism and out of greed to seize their property and to confirm the permanent annexation of Bosnia to the land of the Serbs.

The efforts of the Zionists and the Yugoslavs against His Eminence failed because of the condemnation of these wicked efforts by Muslim leaders and by Arab and Islamic public opinion.

At last, His Eminence succeeded in returning from France to Egypt in 1946. His sudden arrival there in the aftermath of the Second World War, despite every means of prohibition and surveillance, was an important event in the Arab and Islamic worlds and beyond.

An agreement was reached with the Palestinian political organizations on the formation of the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine to lead the national movement. The Political Committee retained for His Eminence the Mufti the presidency of the Arab Higher Committee while His Eminence was still detained in France.

The British authorities hastened to demand his arrest and to bar him from political activity, but the Egyptian authorities at the time received him with honor and granted him freedom of action. Soon, the leading figures of Palestine gathered around him, and the leaders of the Arab and Islamic countries welcomed his arrival; His Eminence’s house became a meeting place for the leaders of the national movements in the Arab and Islamic worlds.

After assuming the actual presidency of the Arab Higher Committee, His Eminence began to organize the ranks of the Palestinians and to work for the resumption of the struggle to liberate Palestine. When the Palestine war between the Arabs and the Jews broke out at the end of 1947, following the issuance of the United Nations resolution on the partition of Palestine on Nov. 29 of that year, His Eminence began to direct the Palestinian struggle, continuing the work night and day. He formed the “Army of the Holy Struggle” under the command of the martyr leader Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni and contacted a number of Arab states to supply the Palestinian struggle with arms and technicians. The Palestinians performed well in their struggle, which lasted six months; during it the Palestinians won most of the battles that took place between them and the Jews, despite the scarcity of arms in the hands of the Palestinian fighters compared with the abundance of supplies the Jews possessed from the colonial powers that were helping them and providing them with everything they needed.

A difference of opinion arose over the Palestine question, and because of the pressure the great powers were exerting on the Arab governments in favor of the Zionists, the catastrophe of Palestine occurred. A million Palestinian Arabs were displaced, and “Israel” arose in the heart of the Arab homeland, as is well known. After the catastrophe that befell the Palestine cause, His Eminence continued to work strenuously to mitigate its effects, remaining in contact with the Islamic and Arab states in defense of the Palestine question and in preparation for the means and resources for the liberation of the usurped homeland.

In 1951, His Eminence was invited to preside over the Islamic World Congress, which convened in Karachi and was attended by representatives of 41 Islamic states and Islamic peoples. In 1952, His Eminence presided over the Congress of Muslim Religious Scholars, which also convened in Karachi and was attended by a large number of Muslim scholars. In 1955, His Eminence attended the Bandung Conference at the head of a delegation, and his efforts had a prominent effect in inducing the Asian-African Conference to adopt the Palestine question.

In the years that followed, His Eminence continued his struggle at the head of the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine and the Islamic World Congress, working to raise the Palestine question in international forums and among the public. He sent several delegations to the United Nations, to Asian and African countries, and to various European states in support of the Palestine question. The late Sayf al-Din founded the Islamic University in the city of Aleppo; at this stage, His Eminence received a large number of Islamic personalities invited to attend the inauguration ceremony of the said university. He visited Pakistan and discussed with its leaders convening an Islamic World Congress to support the Palestine question; he then visited the Hijazi lands during the pilgrimage season and contacted the leaders of the Islamic world to discuss the Palestinian question and other issues facing the Islamic world.

In November 1961, His Eminence, at the head of a Palestinian delegation and at the invitation of the Tunisian government, visited Tunisia and discussed the Palestine question.

In May–June 1962, His Eminence presided over the Islamic World Congress, whose fifth session convened in Baghdad and was attended by delegates from 32 Islamic countries. He was re-elected president of the congress.

His Eminence also participated in the Congress of the Islamic League, which convened in Mecca in 1962, in his capacity as one of the League’s founders.

In November 1962, His Eminence visited Algeria at the head of a Palestinian delegation in response to an invitation from the government of the newly independent Algeria to celebrate the eighth anniversary of the proclamation of the Algerian revolution.

In 1963, His Eminence visited the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Syria. In February 1964 (during the month of Ramadan), His Eminence traveled to Malaysia in response to the invitation of the Regional Conference of the Muslims of Malaysia.

In 1964–1965, His Eminence presided over the Islamic World Congress, whose sixth session convened in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, from Dec. 27, 1964, to Jan. 2, 1965.

In April 1966, His Eminence presided over the meeting of the Executive Council of the Islamic World Congress, which convened in Mecca.

In 1966, His Eminence continued his blessed work in the cause of the Palestine question and in alerting Arab and Islamic public opinion to the colonial Zionist conspiracy to liquidate it.

At the beginning of March 1967, His Eminence returned to the Palestinian homeland after an emigration that had lasted 30 years, minus a few months, during which he had spent time as a fighter in the cause of the Palestine question, and he was received with the greatest honor.

On April 22, 1967, His Eminence presided over the meeting of the Executive Council of the Islamic World Congress, which convened in Karachi.

On Sept. 11, 1967, His Eminence presided over the emergency session of the Islamic World Congress convened in Amman, especially concerning the Palestinian question, because of the new catastrophe that had befallen the Arab and Islamic worlds with the occupation of Palestine by the Israeli forces, supported by them, and its destruction.

In the following years, His Eminence participated in the meetings of the General Council of the Muslim World League in Mecca, continuing his work as president of the Islamic World Congress and the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine, striving with all his effort for the unity of the word of the Muslims and the Arabs and for strengthening the bonds among them, especially for the defense of the Palestine question in international, Islamic, and Arab forums, until God chose him to Himself on the afternoon of Thursday, July 4, 1974. The masses of the Palestinian people and of the Arab and Islamic worlds were affected by his death; they recognize in the great departed his sincerity, steadfastness, and constancy, as well as his self-sacrifice and his immense achievements in awakening the Arabs and the Muslims to the dangers of colonialism and Zionism, and in his insistence on confronting the alien Zionist entity, uprooting it from Palestine, and rescuing the Holy City and its Blessed al-Aqsa Mosque from the clutches of the criminal Jews.

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Original Title: Mudhakkirat al-Hajj Muhammad Amin al-Husayni

مذكرات الحاج مُحَمَّد أَمِين الحُسَيْنِي

First edition 1999

Author: Abd al-Karim al-Umar, Secretary of the Executive Office of the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine

عبد الكريم العمر أمين سر المكتب التنفيذي للهيئة العربية العليا لفلسطين

Page(s): 15-23 [Scan LINK]

Memoirs of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem

Muhammad Amin al-Husayni

Introduction

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The cause of this land is sacred. Throughout, I have been exposed to inducements and persuasion at times, and to threats and terror at others. For the sake of its good and the welfare of its Arab people, I have been compelled to endure the hardship of walking difficult, rugged paths and to bear the misery of life in the most dangerous and terrifying circumstances. Together with my brotherly fighters, I have borne the trust of this cause with all the sincerity, devotion, and spirit of self-sacrifice that our consciences contain. It is neither in my character nor within my power to neglect this trust and hand it over to those who wish to waste it and sell it cheaply to the enemies, nor to renounce the chosen elite of the righteous martyrs who freely gave their pure souls and shed their pure blood upon the sacred soil of Palestine. I shall not close my life by betraying this nation in its national cause, despite everything I anticipate and the first signs I have seen of the plots and intrigues that the enemies and their agents are weaving against my patient and sincere brothers and against me. God is the best of witnesses, and He is sufficient for us and the best of trustees.

Muhammad Amin al-Husayni

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Original Title: Mudhakkirat al-Hajj Muhammad Amin al-Husayni

مذكرات الحاج مُحَمَّد أَمِين الحُسَيْنِي

First edition 1999

Author: Abd al-Karim al-Umar, Secretary of the Executive Office of the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine

عبد الكريم العمر أمين سر المكتب التنفيذي للهيئة العربية العليا لفلسطين

Page(s): 11 [Scan LINK]

Memoirs of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem

Muhammad Amin al-Husayni

Introduction

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This book contains pages from the memoirs of the leader of the Palestinian national movement, His Eminence the late pilgrim Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, Grand Mufti of Palestine, Chairman of the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine, President of the Supreme Islamic Sharia Council and President of the Islamic World Congress. The volume also includes a documentary appendix of official international, Arab and Palestinian texts relating to the Palestinian question and certain Arab and Islamic issues, together with a number of rare historical maps and photographs. All of these cast light upon a portion of the career of this great historical leader.

Part One contains a summary of the life of His Eminence the Mufti and of his forced emigration from his homeland of Palestine, where the British Mandatory authorities pursued him and surrounded his house near the Blessed al-Aqsa Mosque with military forces in an attempt to arrest him and thereby halt his struggle and fight for the freedom and independence of his country.

He left for Lebanon and returned to Palestine on the morning of Wednesday, March 1, 1967, when the aircraft carrying His Eminence landed at Jerusalem Airport after departing from Beirut, so that he might resume his struggle and fight for the liberation of Palestine.

In Part Two, I have divided the book into three chapters:

Chapter One covers his struggle from the time he left Jerusalem in 1937 until the end of the Second World War, including his departure from Germany after its fall to the Allies and his subsequent detention in Paris, France.

Chapter Two covers the events, developments and circumstances that affected the Palestinian question from his return to the Arab homeland, his escape from imprisonment in Paris, and his subsequent move to Cairo in 1946.

Chapter Three covers the events of the Palestinian people’s struggle and fight from the Mufti’s return to Egypt until the catastrophe of 1948.

The memoirs end with the final battle in the city of Safad and its fall to the enemy on May 10, 1948.

The Mufti began publishing his memoirs in the periodical Filastin [“Palestine”], a monthly review supervised by the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine and serving as its official organ. They appeared in successive monthly installments; the first installment was issued on May 1, 1967, in issue number 94.

He opened his memoirs with the account of his forced emigration from Palestine, saying:

“Emigration from Palestine was not part of my plan, nor did the thought of leaving Jerusalem or any other city or region of the homeland ever occur to me—although all the Arab countries are a homeland for the Arabs—because I believed that combating the enemies inside the country was preferable and more effective, and that a fighter may not abandon his homeland or withdraw from the field of his struggle except under compulsion and when forced to do so for a reason that serves the cause for which he is fighting.”

The total number of installments published was 75; they ended in the double issue 171–172 of June–July 1975.

May God have mercy upon him: he would write his memoirs in his own hand, prepare them for publication, send them to be typed, then return to check them a second time and mark them with his signature before they were sent for publication. It was his custom to transfer to paper what he had earlier recorded in abbreviated form in a small notebook he carried in his pocket, in which he carefully noted his appointments and the events or matters connected with his national duties. He prepared his memoirs in this manner, taking into account the sequence of the installments previously published in the aforementioned review and keeping additional installments ready for publication in case he was unable to send material to the press.

The late pilgrim Muhammad Amin al-Husayni passed to the mercy of his Lord on July 4, 1974. The review Palestine had issued its number 160 on July 1, 1974, containing the 65th installment of his memoirs. The Arab Higher Committee for Palestine continued to publish the installments left by His Eminence the late pilgrim Amin al-Husayni that bore his signature; there were 10 such installments, ending in the double issue 171–172, as I have already indicated.

We note that the last installment of the memoirs, number 75, contained the final entries he himself recorded concerning the battle for the city of Safad; the city fell on the morning of May 10, 1948. With that, the authenticated documents of the great departed came to an end. In other words, the Mufti recorded in his own hand material covering the period from the day he left Jerusalem on Oct. 13, 1937, until the battle of Safad and its fall into the hands of the enemy on May 10, 1948, before the declaration of the establishment of the enemy entity (Israel) on May 15, 1948.

This does not mean that His Eminence the Mufti confined his memoirs to a strict chronological sequence from 1937 to 1948; he digressed to explain whatever was relevant to the course of the events he lived through or to those connected with his national cause. From beginning to end, the memoirs record the Palestinian people’s struggle.

I have taken the utmost care to transmit everything concerning his life, his biography, and his memoirs with complete accuracy and fidelity, without any intervention, addition, or omission, except for a few explanatory footnotes required by the necessities of publication and the passage of time.

Out of concern for this honorable and valuable heritage, and for the struggle of the people of Palestine and its national movement under the leadership of the late pilgrim Amin al-Husayni, lest it disappear with the passage of time, and in order to illuminate the path for those who have not had the opportunity to become acquainted with it, I have collected these memoirs and published them in this book.

I do not claim to have gathered everything about the great man. In addition to his memoirs, I have collected the largest possible number of documents concerning the Palestinian national movement during the Mufti’s presidency and direct leadership. All of them illustrate his struggle and fight on the Palestinian, Arab, and Islamic levels, and they will, God willing, find their way to publication in the future.

I am certain that collecting the Mufti’s heritage is the collection and preservation of the heritage of Palestine and of the Arab and Islamic nation, and that it ought to be undertaken by a group of sincere and devoted researchers and historians who will compile his complete history and works, covering a period of struggle lasting more than 50 years for the sake of right, freedom, and independence. The Mufti’s notebooks and documents still await systematic collection for documentation and historiography; there is an urgent need to gather this heritage through trustworthy specialists and to investigate every fact concerning it.

He stands in no need of praise or immortalization; he is a source of pride for Palestine, for Arabs and Muslims, and for all the free people of the world. May God have mercy upon him: he was, and will remain, the noblest among those who worked with sincerity and seriousness to ward off the dangers threatening Palestine and the Arab homeland; he was, and will remain, the man who most deeply understood the true nature of the Zionist danger and was the most effective in the struggle against those dangers.

I myself took part, for several decades, in bearing my modest share of the struggle with the Palestinian national movement, and I had the honor of struggling alongside the Shaykh of the Mujahidin, Chairman of the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine, the late pilgrim Muhammad Amin al-Husayni. By virtue of my position in the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine, I was close to the great leader and sincere fighter. I knew him as a modest, noble leader of elevated manners, with a face that bore an expression of gentleness. The masses of the Palestinian people used to sing and chant “Sayf al-Din al-Hajj Amin”; he was a song on the lips of young men and women, the hope that played upon the imagination of men, and everyone around him sincerely called him “Father.”

I knew him personally and lived with him for many years. I shall not speak of his national positions, his steadfastness, and his courage—much has been written about him and much has been said—but I feel it my duty, out of loyalty to his fragrant and honorable memory, now that his struggle and fight have nearly been forgotten, to recall him, to praise his merits and patriotism, and to praise his pleasant companionship, the refinement of his character, and his intense care and attention to the private and public affairs of the people, so that he may remain in the minds and memories of the people.

The late Mufti was known as an organized, organizing man, precise to the utmost degree; he supervised administrative affairs and followed them closely, regarding administration and order as two fundamental pillars in the conduct of the struggle. May God have mercy upon him: he was civilized, highly cultivated, a deep thinker, and dignified; his library contained books on the various sciences, cultures, religions, and languages; he was an athlete and a horseman who loved horses and was skilled in marksmanship, and until the last days of his life he practiced sports daily.

In this difficult circumstance, in days of apostasy from the sound national origin and the clear truth of our people and our Arab nation, in a time when loyalty to the free men of the nation has grown scarce, in a time of neglect, division of word, weakness, and surrender to the enemies, and in a time of relinquishing rights of sovereignty over the land, I present the Grand Mufti of Palestine as an example for the free generations who have set aside fear and look toward freedom and independence; shame, disgrace, and the curse of history upon the tyrants, the forgers, and the surrenderers.

Finally, in presenting to the honorable reader this book, which I have gathered from scattered papers that nearly vanished and over which decades have passed, and for which I have exerted every effort to preserve them, and out of increased solicitude for them, I have resolved to publish them so that the flame of the struggle may remain alight, God willing.

I can only express my recognition and pride in the efforts of all the brothers who encouraged me to undertake this work or contributed to its completion, with the brother, friend, and fighter Dr. Talal Naji at their head, and in the appreciated efforts of those who contributed to the long and arduous preparation of this book, especially the friend and researcher Hamid Majid al-Rabi‘i and the engineer Fu’ad Yusuf.

God is the One behind the intention.

Abd al-Karim al-Umar

Secretary of the Executive Office

of the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine

Damascus, July 5, 1999

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Original Title: Mudhakkirat al-Hajj Muhammad Amin al-Husayni

مذكرات الحاج مُحَمَّد أَمِين الحُسَيْنِي

First edition 1999

Author: Abd al-Karim al-Umar, Secretary of the Executive Office of the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine

عبد الكريم العمر أمين سر المكتب التنفيذي للهيئة العربية العليا لفلسطين

Page(s): 5-9 [Scan LINK]

Memoirs of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem

Muhammad Amin al-Husayni

Table of Contents

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Dan Rouse’s Note: I’ll link to this page from each new entry in this series. It’s a work in progress and will be updated regularly as I plan and release this translation. The Introduction states that the memoirs are a compilation of 75 individual releases in the magazine Filistin [“Palestine”], but they are not clearly marked as such in this 1999 compilation, and I have not been able to locate scanned copies of the magazine.

Part Two: Memoirs of Muhammad Amin al-Husayni (p.25)

Section One:

1. The Exodus from Palestine (p.25)

2. The Great Palestine Revolt and its Historic Strike 1936–1939 (p.34)

3. The Great Palestine Revolt and its Historic Strike 1936–1939

4. In Lebanon (p.48)

5. In Iraq (p.51)

6. In Iraq

7. In Iraq

8. In Iraq

9. In Iran (p.80)

10. In Iran

11. In Europe – Italy and Germany (p.93)

12. In Europe – Italy and Germany

13. In Europe – Italy and Germany

14. In Europe – Italy and Germany

15. In Europe – Italy and Germany

16. In Europe – Italy and Germany

17. Contribution to the Support of the Muslims of Bosnia (p.129)

18. Contribution to the Support of the Muslims of Bosnia

19. Contribution to the Support of the Muslims of Bosnia

20. Contribution to the Support of the Muslims of Bosnia

21. The Nazi Stance towards the Jews (p.155)

22. The Nazi Stance towards the Jews

23. The Nazi Stance towards the Jews

24. The Nazi Stance towards the Jews

25. Efforts Exerted for Indonesia to Obtain its Independence (p.178)

26. Efforts Exerted for Indonesia to Obtain its Independence

27. Jewish Immigration to Palestine (p.188)

28. Jewish Immigration to Palestine

29. Jewish Immigration to Palestine

30. The Martyr Dr. Mustafa al-Wakil (p.203)

31. Meetings and Positions (p.206)

32. Meetings and Positions

33. Meetings and Positions

34. The End of World War II in Germany (p.223)

35. In Paris (p.230)

36. In Paris

37. In Paris

38. In Paris

Section Two:

1. Return to the Arab Homeland (p.257) / In Egypt (p.259)

2. In Egypt

3. Resumption of Activity (p.268)

4. Events of the Palestinian Cause (p.272)

5. The Jews and their Military and Political Activity (p.279)

6. The Jews and their Military and Political Activity

7. The Jews and their Military and Political Activity

8. The Role of Britain and America in the Palestine Catastrophe (p.294)

9. The Role of Britain and America in the Palestine Catastrophe

10. The Role of Britain and America in the Palestine Catastrophe

11. The Role of Britain and America in the Palestine Catastrophe

12. The Role of Britain and America in the Palestine Catastrophe

13. The Role of Britain and America in the Palestine Catastrophe

14. The Stance on Partition (p.331) / Arab Unity and the League of Arab States (p.336)

15. Arab Unity and the League of Arab States / The League of Arab States and the Palestine Question (p.343)

16. The League of Arab States and the Palestine Question

Section Three:

1. Events of the Struggle of the Palestinian People and their Jihad (p.353) / Efforts Exerted to Recruit Palestinians (p.355)

2. Efforts Exerted to Recruit Palestinians

3. Efforts Exerted to Recruit Palestinians

4. Efforts Exerted to Recruit Palestinians

5. Efforts Exerted to Recruit Palestinians

6. Efforts Exerted to Recruit Palestinians

7. Efforts Exerted to Recruit Palestinians

8. Efforts Exerted to Recruit Palestinians

9. Efforts Exerted to Recruit Palestinians

10. Efforts Exerted to Recruit Palestinians

11. Events of the Struggle in the Period 1947–1948 (p.419)

12. Events of the Struggle in the Period 1947–1948

13. Events of the Struggle in the Period 1947–1948

14. Events of the Struggle in the Period 1947–1948

15. The Battle of Haifa (p.443) / Logistics / Supply (p.445)

16. The Death of Commander al-Hunayti, Surur Barham and their Comrades (p.447)

17. British-American Collusion and the Role of the Security Council (p.452)

18. British-American Collusion and the Role of the Security Council

19. British-American Collusion and the Role of the Security Council

20. The Fall of Acre (p.475) / The Fall of Tiberias (p.484) / The Fall of Jaffa (p.486)

21. The Fall of Nazareth (p.494) / The Fall of Safed (p.503)

INDICES AND APPENDICES

• Index of Proper Names (p.511)

• Index of Places, Battles and Massacres (p.524)

• Appendix of Documents and Photographs (p.527)

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Original Title: Mudhakkirat al-Hajj Muhammad Amin al-Husayni

مذكرات الحاج مُحَمَّد أَمِين الحُسَيْنِي

First edition 1999

Author: Abd al-Karim al-Umar, Secretary of the Executive Office of the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine

عبد الكريم العمر أمين سر المكتب التنفيذي للهيئة العربية العليا لفلسطين

[Scan LINK]

To my wonderful subscribers,

Since the last “State of”, we listened to several hours of Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur, from the Introduction to Chapter 21.

We also covered my original translations and various audio versions of:

• Der Weg June-July 1954

• Book 3 of Édouard Drumont’s Jewish France

• Book 4 of Édouard Drumont’s Jewish France

• Der Weg August 1954

I created three new songs from poetry in Der Weg. I have both a Bandcamp and YouTube page for the music I’ve made. The direct links are in the Linktree button below.

I’ve also teased that I’m working on the first English translation of Memoirs of Muhammad Amin al-Husayni (Grand Mufti of Palestine) from Arabic. I’m ~80,000 words in. This coming week I’ll publish:

• “Introduction to the Memoirs” by Abd al-Karim al-Umar, Secretary of the Executive Office of the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine

• Muhammad Amin al-Husayni’s “Covenant and Pledge”

• “A Brief Biography of Sayyid Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, Grand Mufti of Palestine”

I will hold back from launching into the 75 articles that compose al-Husayni’s Memoirs until I have consistent terminology and possibly a complete translation.

On Sep. 1st, we’ll begin Der Weg of Sept. 1954.

All articles published since “State of the Yew-Fire 2026-06-30” are linked below, as well as previous “State of —” articles.

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Since the last “State of the Yew-Fire”:

Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur

Der Weg of June-July 1954

Édouard Drumont’s Jewish France

Book 3

Book 4

Der Weg of August 1954

Music

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• ★☆☆☆☆ Eugen Budde and Peter Lütsches: The 20th of July

• ★★☆☆☆ Helmut Gollwitzer: And Lead You Where You Do Not Want to Go

• ★★★★★ Karl Springenschmid: Six Against Napoleon

• ★★★☆☆ Agne Hamrin: The Nile Rises

• ★★★★★ Bernhard Kummer: The Royal Path of Sverrir Unasson

• ★★★★★ Dr. K. M. Herrligkoffer (Editor): Under the Spell of Nanga Parbat

Previous:

Das Buch (August 1954, Pt.2)1

Eugen Budde and Peter Lütsches:

Der 20. Juli

The 20th of July

A Documentary Report on the Cause and Significance of the 20th of July Based on Original Documents

Verlag H. Raven; Düsseldorf. 1952.

152 pages, 33 pictures. Cloth. DM 12.80.

Review by Dr. v. L.

This showily dressed-up book is the opposite of any genuine love of historical truth. Such a love would demand that one also grant the opponent his due justice and not suppress the essential facts.

The authors fail on both counts. National Socialism is branded a “diabolical heresy” in the afterword; the wholly secondary constitution of West Germany—the Basic Law foisted on it by foreign generals—is praised. The text declares:

“Nevertheless many Germans have still not grasped what this constitution has given them. There are still adherents of National Socialism. They even dare to profess their National Socialist ideas in public once more.”

And so it goes on in the same vein.

Worse still, the authors cheat. They conceal the crucial point that the decisive men of the 20th of July had, before the war, intrigued with foreign politicians hostile to Germany (Churchill, Vansittart) against Volk and Reich—so possessed by their hatred of Hitler that they tried to thwart the liberation of the Sudeten Germans and even promised England that, in the event of war, Hitler would be arrested at once by his own generals—thereby first giving England the courage to go to war. It is not true that the 20th of July was an uprising of patriotic officers who rose against Hitler’s false military direction of the war and against the needless harshness he inflicted on other peoples. That holds only for a few young officers drawn into the enterprise later by their superiors (Klausing, Bernardis). The real brains of the undertaking—Hoeppner, v. Witzleben, Olbricht and the rest—were the old clique of intriguers who, fanaticized by the “Confessing Church,” had worked against the Reich and kept up unbroken contact with hostile foreign powers. Deliberately, therefore, the authors also suppress what is now plain from Jan Colvin’s book on Canaris (Chief of Intelligence), from Fritz Max Cahen’s Men against Hitler, and from Weisenborn’s own admissions in Der lautlose Aufstand [“The Silent Revolt”]: that the core figures of the unjustly glorified “20th of July” were, for the most part, outright traitors to their country.

The authors are so lost in their hatred that they supply the pictures with mendacious, spiteful captions. They lay the Allied destruction of Mainz at Adolf Hitler’s door, as if he himself had sat in the bombers and dropped the bombs!

But the final infamy is committed by Budde and Lütsches in the remark on page 137:

“The last battle was won by German democracy a year after the 20th of July, thereby giving the 20th of July its constitutional meaning.”

Well, one year after July 20, 1944, Germany had been conquered and partitioned by the enemy, millions of Germans driven from their homes, and thousands hanged and tortured to death by the enemy. And in the face of this desecration, trampling-down, and tearing-apart of our volk, the authors dare to write:

“One might object that what happened a year later was the Allies’ affair. I believe that in the name of the German volk we should protest against this and, clearly, distinctly, and with pride (!!!), declare ourselves for our resistance fighters, who since 1933 went through the concentration camps and fought for the restoration of the rights of freedom (!!!!), for the basic rights (??) and human rights in Germany. The people in the concentration camps and those outside them sowed the seed of the new democracy. The Allies merely removed the stone that kept that seed from rising into the light. But when the Allies removed the stone, the seed grew. That seed was not sown by the Allies; it was sown by the German resistance fighters.”

This shameless statement by the democratic Attorney-General Bauer during the trial of General Remer is quoted with approval by Lütsches and Budde. In doing so, they retrospectively label the “resistance people” as helpers and allies of the enemy.

Helmut Gollwitzer:

Und führen, wohin du nicht willst

And Lead You Where You Do Not Want to Go

Account of a Captivity.

Chr. Kaiser Verlag Munich. 1952.

345 pages. Cloth, DM 12.50; paperback, DM 10.—.

Review by W. SE

The Bonn professor of systematic theology has written a book that cannot be judged after a single reading. So much fine intellectual work and outright refinement is scattered throughout it that one sometimes skims past a detail that later takes on an uncanny weight. Our only honest conclusion is that we do not know “Where He is leading us.” It begins with the fact that the professor, who spent the war as a medic, meets only touchingly human Czechs and friendly, laughing Russians after the capitulation in Czechoslovakia. And it belongs to the picture, as a little dog belongs to a Dürer or a naked backside to a Breughel, that in the right foreground Field Marshal Schörner is shown as a shuffling coward who, thus costumed, walked through the gate of Camp 27/1 near Moscow. This is stated not as conjecture but as fact, even though the author admits in parentheses that he himself passed through that same gate only two years later.

Yet such details on the first 30 pages are not what matters. What follows is incomparably more important. Still, this is the sole moment in the whole bulky book when atmosphere and tendency stand out in clear relief. One soon forgets that tendency again—and therein lies the magical power of the author’s influence—when he turns, for instance, to the philosophical origins of communism. The diary form, which this clever writer certainly did not choose by accident, gives him the further advantage that, however deep he digs and however richly he spreads the most varied factors before the reader, he can stop exactly where it suits him. In that respect, he is a model pupil of Marxist dialectic and its practical application. The basic idea of the book is a dangerous one: to awaken “understanding” for communism and the Soviet Union, then, five minutes to twelve, reject both. The professor of systematic theology and long-time prisoner of war ought to know that communism is every bit as totalitarian as Christ’s word: “He who is not for me is against me.” Even the most harmless intellectual play with Satan and his bride is life-threatening.

Karl Springenschmid:

Sechs gegen Napoleon

Six Against Napoleon

Tyrolean Boys 1809

Preface by Franz Karl Ginzkey.

Verlag Das Berglandbuch. Salzburg, 1952.

309 pp. Cloth. DM 8.—

Review by Basil.

“Better die Tyrolean than go rotten Welsch.”

That there are people who think so straight in our time gives fresh courage. That there are poets who, in our age of compromise-ridden realpolitik, can give that thinking such a clear voice shows how young, how unspent and unbroken the spiritual marrow of our volk still is—despite everything. In Springenschmid’s book, there is nothing sickly, no sentimental gush, no hurrah-soaked slogan-mongering. His Tyroleans of 1809—from the shepherd boy to the old white-bearded farmer—reach for the rifle, the scythe, and the morning-star because they cannot do otherwise. The same herder lads who only yesterday bloodied one another’s noses in boyish scrapes grow overnight into the great part of those dying for their little land; they lie in the shooting-pit beside their father and calmly reach for the “freed rifle.” With the same matter-of-factness, Tyrolean mothers give their own flesh and blood; women take the plough, and, after the youngest and last have marched out, they themselves swing the scythe in the ripening corn—for the little land, for the Tyrolean Lord God, with or without their emperor, but “better die Tyrolean than go rotten Welsch.”

Agne Hamrin:

Trans. by Ingeborg and Helmut Henning:

Der Nil steigt

The Nile Rises

Akros Verlag G.m.b.H., Hamburg. 1953.

248 pages, 14 plates. Cloth. DM 12.50.

Review by Dr. v. Leers.

The value of this work by a Swedish journalist lies in his attentive observation of conditions in Egypt and the Sudan. Since Mr. Hamrin does not command Arabic, he has at least tried to compensate for the lack by conducting a great many interviews with leading men of both countries, so that the reader hears almost every political personality of any standing speaking from his pages. The first part of the book deals with Egypt, the second with the Sudan—and given the scarcity of good literature on the Sudan, this rounded account is of high value; the author knows how to deliver gripping, lively descriptions. Mr. Hamrin is a sharp observer. The sole weakness of the book is that, caught up in “progressive,” “democratic” ideologies, he often lacks understanding of the hot national urge for freedom among the Egyptians; he has no regard for nationalism at all and shows a conspicuous preference for British power. In this way, one never reaches the soul of the modern Orient—despite all the keen observation of outward circumstances.

Bernhard Kummer:

Der Königsweg des Sverrir Unasson

The Royal Path of Sverrir Unasson

A Life Portrait from Norway’s Past

Verlag Hohe Warte. Franz von Bebenburg Pähl. 1953.

474 pages. Cloth. DM 17.40.

Review by Willy Wesch

Prof. B. Kummer retells the old Icelandic Sverrir Saga in this book, as he puts it in his preface: “to see history from the Volk and to write for the Volk.”

Others before him have sketched Sverrir’s kingship, yet no one has written his full life story for us Germans until now. In this substantial volume, marking the 750th anniversary of the king’s death (Sverrir lived from 1152 to March 9, 1202), the author has traced that royal path in a language that still carries the austere ring of the northern sagas. The speeches of King Sverrir, recorded by his chroniclers in the saga, are inserted by Kummer word for word; he keeps strictly to the course of the saga and allows his imagination only limited play where the flow would suffer. In a vivid, lifelike depiction, we meet the man and king Sverrir, his age, and the struggle he wages to unite his people. It is the time of the Crusades; Pope Innocent III begins his reign as the enemy of heretics and guardian of kings; Walther von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eschenbach are writing, and on Iceland Snorri Sturluson gathers the heroic songs of the past. Two hundred years after the baptism of the northern peoples, 300 years before the Reformation—thus Sverrir stands between Valhalla and Wittenberg, a medieval king who, ringed by constant treachery, acts according to the words “[…] as we forgive our debtors.” He conquers and dies under the ban of Rome among his friends. Only God, and no mediator, does he name as his judge.

His name would have been lost to history because of the ban and the desecration of his grave had his faithful friends not acted by the Edda word:

“No memorial stone stands at the road’s edge unless a kinsman sets it there.”

Dr. K. M. Herrligkoffer (Editor):

Im Banne des Nanga Parbat

Under the Spell of Nanga Parbat

Picture volume of the German-Austrian Merkl Memorial Expedition 1953.

J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, Munich. 1953.

80 pages with full-page pictures. Cardboard. DM 7.20.

Review by Willy Wesch

In 80 splendid full-page photographs the mountain world of the Himalaya appears to the viewer as the members of the 1953 Nanga Parbat Expedition saw and lived it. With the best pictures from every participant and a preface by Dr. Herrligkoffer, author of the authentic expedition book Nanga Parbat 1953, it forms a wonderful companion to that work.

Original Title: Das Buch

Attributed Author: multiple.

“Der Weg” Issue: Volume 8, Issue 8 (August 1954)

Page(s): 601-602 [Scan LINK]

Der Weg - El Sendero is a German- and Spanish-language magazine published by Dürer-Verlag in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by Germans with ties to the defeated Third Reich.

Der Weg ran monthly issues from 1947 to 1957, with official sanction from Juan Perón’s Government until his overthrow in September 1955.

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• ★★★★★ August Kubizek: The young Hitler I knew

• ★★★★☆ Friedrich Christian Prince of Schaumburg-Lippe: Between Crown and Prison

• ★★★★★ Hendrik de Man: Massification and Cultural Decline

• ★☆☆☆☆ Vladimir Dedijer: Tito. Authorized Biography

• ★★★★★ Curt Bondy—Klaus Eyferth: Unattached Youth

• ★★★★★ Alfred Bornhardt: The Janus Face of German Social Democracy

Previous:

Das Buch (August 1954, Pt.1)1

August Kubizek:

Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund

The young Hitler I knew

Leopold Stocker Verlag, Graz und Göttingen. 1953.

352 Pages. Full Cloth.

Review by Basil.

Let’s get this clear from the start: every decent, upright person owes real thanks to both Kubizek and Stocker. — To Kubizek, because far from any “exposé literature” or political twisting and distortion, he painted a picture of the young Adolf as only he, the one close friend from their youth, could; to Stocker, because he took on the thankless task of producing a truthful book about the most damned figure of recent times. No one can deny it—not even the most hate-filled opponent among the victors—that this simple, plain book breathes absolute truth. Just as there are pompous or deliberately plain works that try in their own way to hide or expose what should stay unknown, Kubizek’s book about his youthful friend stands as the complete opposite of all such productions. — Beyond that, it shines as a vivid sign of the friendship and loyalty that have become scarce in our “realpolitik” age. Written in historical and personal loyalty for people whose minds even now have not been, or are no longer, thrown off course by blind hatred, it comes with the warmest recommendation to them all.

Friedrich Christian Prince of Schaumburg-Lippe:

Zwischen Krone und Kerker

Between Crown and Prison

Limes Verlag, Wiesbaden. 1952.

Clothbound. 440 pages. DM 15.50.

Review by W. SL

A book you read from first page to last with growing interest. People have made it sound as if the Lippes were nothing more than Biesterfelds. Prince Friedrich Christian shows, in his own person and fate, that a prince from a tradition-rich German house could throw himself into the cause of national ascent as National Socialism embodied it. He touches openly on the darker sides of the Third Reich, yet never turns venomous. With real humor, he describes how, after years of service in the Propaganda Ministry, some intrigue forced him to produce his Aryan certificate. On a huge sheet in tiny handwriting, he put together a family tree covering roughly a thousand years and handed it to Dr. Goebbels, who looked it over, gave a slight bow, and returned the big sheet with the words:

“Please, Prince Schaumburg, may I return your ancestors—we would rather spare the personnel office this embarrassment.”

The book also has a serious side and does not shrink from cutting into its own flesh. So when Goebbels tells the prince in the war’s last days:

“It is not our idea that has failed, but those who had the duty to put it into practice. We are losing the second war because of the intelligentsia’s betrayal. This war was a matter of faith and intellect. The idea will not be lost, but Germany is breaking, and our poor people will be terribly struck. Diplomats, generals, ministers, Gauleiter—traitors sit everywhere.”

It is only too understandable that the prince gives Himmler a wide berth, for he never had the chance to know him better and felt only the effects of certain necessarily hard measures in his own person. Against that stands the fact that the SS itself included numerous members of the German nobility. And by that we mean, God knows, not only Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld.

Hendrik de Man:

Vermassung und Kulturverfall

Eine Diagnose unserer Zeit

Massification and Cultural Decline

A Diagnosis of Our Time

A. Francke A. G. Verlag, Bern. 1951.

207 pages. Price sFr. 8.—. Bound 11.50.

Review by Dr. v. L.

With Hendrik de Man, killed in a car accident in Switzerland at the end of June 1953, one of Europe’s finest and sharpest minds was taken from us. Born in 1885 in Ghent to a well-to-do family, he studied in Leipzig and Vienna, then spent 11 years at the University of Frankfurt. That Eugen Diederichs published his books (Die Psychologie des Sozialismus [“The Psychology of Socialism”], Der Kampf um die Arbeitsfreude [“The Struggle for Joy in Work”], Die sozialistische Idee [“The Socialist Idea”]) speaks for him, as does his unusual life: a Social Democrat in Belgium who moved beyond Marxism, loyal to his king in both world wars, eyed with suspicion by the Secret State Police after the 1940 occupation of Belgium, and sentenced by a “court” of the hate-foaming Belgian resistance to 20 years in prison for “collaboration” (he had simply taken certain good and intelligent ideas of National Socialism as his own). This finest mind of Belgium and of the European labor movement died in Switzerland.

Massification and Cultural Decline is a serious book that shows, with complete openness, how Europe’s decay follows from massification—yet it refuses, unlike Spengler, to treat the downfall as inevitable. It teaches instead that, once the causes are seen and a conscious turn is made, the chance always remains to change the course of fate. That is the deepest reason for the Left’s furious hatred of de Man: the believers in “progress” toward their dark and disastrous goals do not want someone who knows their own camp from the inside to stand up and say that “progress” does not run deterministically in the direction they want. As Hendrik de Man puts it:

“When the fate of everyone is at stake, what matters is that each person does what conscience dictates as duty; the rest does not lie in our hands.”

This serious and good book can be warmly recommended.

Vladimir Dedijer:

Tito. Autorisierte Biographie

Tito. Authorized Biography

Verlag Ullstein. Berlin. 1953.

With 16 plates, 440 pages. Clothbound DM 14.80.

Review by Dr. v. L.

The political fairy-tale book has been a rare genre until now. Here we have one—and what a specimen! How touching it reads, the rise of Tito from a poor peasant boy living in hardship to a young fighting worker and secret leader of the Yugoslav Communist Party. Unfortunately, no documents are offered for this early history—instead, Tito appears early on linked with his mentor, the Jew Moshe Piyade. Service in the First World War, time in Russia, work in the Comintern—everything is cast in such strange half-light that every possible clue for further inquiry seems deliberately removed. The accounts of his time as partisan chief fighting German troops in the Second World War look better documented—though even here, a comparison with German and Italian records of the same battles would be needed.

Then the enormous memory gaps begin. The book says not a word about the slaughter of the entire Croatian army of 140,000 men handed over by the British to Tito’s partisan general Koča Popović. The diabolical wiping out of the large German ethnic group in Yugoslavia (superbly told by Leopold Rohrbacher in Ein Volk ausgelöscht [“A People Extinguished”], Salzburg, self-published, Harrerstraße 2)—surely one of the most gruesome crimes of the mass murderer Tito—is never mentioned. The atrocities of the “OZNA,” Tito’s secret police, go unspoken. The—naturally colored—account of the Tito-Stalin conflict is interesting, at least showing the gangster methods Communists use against one another. Taken as a whole, the book has to be seen as a sophisticated propaganda piece—80 percent swindle and memory gap, 20 percent unavoidable truth! That it appears in West Berlin only proves once more how thin the opposition between democracy and Communism is and how strong the connecting lines remain.

Curt Bondy—Klaus Eyferth:

Bindungslose Jugend. Eine sozialpädagogische Studie über Arbeits- und Heimatlosigkeit

Unattached Youth. A Social-Pedagogical Study of Worklessness and Homelessness

Edited by the Guild of Social Work.

Verlag Wilhelm Steinbach, Munich-Düsseldorf. 1952

80 pages, paperbound. DM 2.20.

Review by G. B.

Well-known figures have written about the distress of our homeless and unemployed young people. This book, however, deserves unreserved admiration, especially because Bondy and Eyferth offer everyone who works with youth a social-pedagogical study that not only outlines the dangers facing young people but also clearly shows how to address that distress and the pull of massification. In the “Introduction,” the authors discuss problems that make it clear how decisive the direct personal relationship and the living example of the home director or educator are for any real care. Surprising is the finding that the principle of placing married couples in charge of homes is theoretically sound yet often fails in practice. Equally interesting is the idea of the “artificial” couple: alongside an unmarried or married director whose wife does not take part, a single, maternal woman shares the work of care.

Forming a fully rounded, inwardly harmonious human being requires, alongside the development of body and mind through sport and study, at least equal attention to the spiritual and soulful—what the authors call “musal” [lit: of the Muses] care. The home must become a “Musal Place of Formation” where purposeful music that reaches the young person’s soul is paired with amateur drama, folk dance, painting, and handicraft, all given proper encouragement.

Closeness to nature—forest, field, meadow, sunshine, rain, the roar of the storm—awakened on shared journeys and hikes, eases the resolution of the problems the young person carries.

What has been gathered here in insight and experience is worth not only reading but also teaching. For this same problematic situation appears not only among so-called “unattached youth”; it appears wherever young people come together.

Alfred Bornhardt:

Das Janusgesicht der deutschen Sozialdemokratie. Eine wehrpolitische Auseinandersetzung

The Janus Face of German Social Democracy. A Military-Political Confrontation

2nd edition,

Süd-West-Verlag, Stuttgart 1953,

219 pages, Din A 5. Paperbound. DM 4.80.

Review by Dr. Behn.

The book offers an excellent account of the SPD’s stance on German military policy from its beginnings to the present, quoting numerous official party statements verbatim. It also shows how two-faced and characterless the SPD has always been on military questions. In the old Social Democracy, there were a few clear-sighted men who, seeing the German people’s constantly threatened position, ringed in the heart of Europe by highly armed neighbors, argued for a strong enough army, in the plain recognition that a lost war would also worsen the lot of the broad masses. Characteristically, those men were regularly disciplined by the parliamentary leadership or the party executive.

It becomes clear that the old honest socialists who cared only about social reforms, and the narrow Marxist dogmatists, were soon—especially after 1900—pushed aside by a third, highly active and unscrupulous group: the Ostjuden [Eastern Jews] who had come into Germany from the Russian-Polish ghettos, posed as “representatives of the working class,” stamped the SPD forever as the party of high treason and national betrayal, and worked to force through their dictatorship (“dictatorship of the proletariat” means, as everyone knows, “dictatorship of the Jews over the proletariat”). The author’s remarks on pages 30 and 63-66 are unfortunately cautious, because these questions may not be spoken of in the Western “free” world.

The present SPD leadership is rightly accused by the author of being no better than its predecessors. During the First World War, the SPD committed high treason and national betrayal from Switzerland (p. 73); during the Second, under the present party chief Ollenhauer, from England, where in December 1941 the criminal “Association of German Socialist Organizations in Great Britain” declared, among other things:

“We regard the complete military disarmament of Germany, which must follow military defeat and must cover all military organizations, as a first necessary step toward the pacification of Europe.” (p. 147)

Striking is the shamelessness with which Severing, in the Nuremberg show trial, falsely claimed to blacken the “defendants” that on Jan. 30, 1933, it had been clear to him that Hitler’s rule meant war—although on May 17, 1933, for example, he and the entire SPD parliamentary group in the Reichstag still expressed confidence in Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler when Hitler set the Reichstag the choice “disarmament or rearmament” (p. 145).

Typical of the SPD’s character and of its late party chief, Dr. Kurt Schumacher, is this: the SPD paper Neuer Vorwärts (license holder Dr. Schumacher) printed on September 18, 1949, a “poem” titled Das ist der Ruhm der Soldaten [“That Is the Glory of the Soldiers”], which includes the lines (p. 158):

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

“They stood in France and Poland,  
They stood at the Volga and the Don,  
They robbed and stole  
And now know nothing of it.  
That is the glory of the soldiers,  
Heroes in revelry and riot,  
And everything they did  
We now have to spoon up.”

In the same typically Social-Democratic spirit this Dr. Schumacher wrote in his key pamphlet Grundsätze sozialistischer Politik [“Principles of Socialist Policy”]:

“We Social Democrats are in agreement that the entire German war potential be destroyed” (p. 20);

and in March 1950, in the pamphlet Ruhr Statute and Security, which he issued in English (!), among other things:

“To make soldiers of the Germans again would be the surest way to start a war in Europe” (p. 171).

Yet suddenly, this great SPD chief, Dr. Schumacher, reversed himself and declared at a meeting of the party executive in September 1950:

“We are ready to bear arms again […]”

What anonymous forces may have conjured this sudden about-face? Perhaps English industry, which has an interest in German rearmament so that German industry will offer less competition in peaceful goods? Reference should also be made to the boundless insults to German soldiery from SPD deputies such as Dr. Beck and Dr. Gurland (pp. 163, 177). The substantial book fully justifies the author’s statement (p. 9):

“Whoever has made every patriotic attitude look ridiculous and placed it under ban, yet today, in a shameless reversal, wants to drive German youth back into the barracks, had better keep silent before the wrath of that youth sweeps him away.”

But does the same not also apply to considerable parts of the Center Party, now camouflaged as the CDU?

I wish this highly interesting book the widest possible circulation.

Original Title: Das Buch

Attributed Author: multiple, attributed in-line.

“Der Weg” Issue: Volume 8, Issue 8 (August 1954)

Page(s): 599-601 [Scan LINK]

Der Weg - El Sendero is a German- and Spanish-language magazine published by Dürer-Verlag in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by Germans with ties to the defeated Third Reich.

Der Weg ran monthly issues from 1947 to 1957, with official sanction from Juan Perón’s Government until his overthrow in September 1955.

Subscribe now

linktr.ee/yewdanrouse

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World Events1

Since Otto John only carried out his “resettlement” after this issue was already in print, we were unfortunately only able to take a brief position on it. You will find a detailed report on the background of this case, as well as of further impending cases, in the next issue!

GERMANY

Half-heartedly and wearily, a Volksbewegung für die Wiedervereinigung [“People’s Movement for Reunification”] has been founded in the Federal Republic. Word from leading CDU circles is that Dr. Adenauer views this founding “with concern.” The odd movement, in which nothing moves, has Messrs. Jakob Kaiser, Ollenhauer, and the chairman of the German Trade Union Federation, Freitag, as its patrons. As if those who encouraged and welcomed the collapse of the Reich in 1945 would ever seriously work to restore it!

For the so-called defense of the Federal Republic, it will spend 12B DM in the fiscal year, 44.5 percent of the entire budget, or 67 DM per head. Even the Social Democratic deputy Dr. Erler said in the budget debate: Now comes the decisive point: Will we be defended? Do these enormous outlays, which make up 44 percent of our entire financial volume, guarantee our security? Disturbing news keeps reaching us. Grünther said a fortnight ago that the German divisions should form the screen under which the Americans could pull back. Grünther says the next war will be fought on German soil. The military men say it is an old experience that war starts again where it left off. Read American and English magazines and you can shudder at the openness and sometimes the cynicism with which these things are discussed and the role of the Germans is portrayed. We are, after all, the only country in the Western world that has accepted atomic cannons being set up west of the Rhine, aimed east, able to fire from here 40 km into Federal Republic territory. The same speaker then pointed to the British headquarters being moved from Bad Oeynhausen—at German expense!—behind the Rhine, showing that most of West Germany is now seen by Western Allied leadership as not worth defending. Europe’s situation has grown even more threatening now that France under the Sephardic-Jewish Prime Minister Mendes-France has swung onto the Soviet line.

When on 20 July in West Berlin the betrayal, which the 20 July 1944 has become the symbol of, was celebrated, the phrases of the “Christian conscience” and the “obligation before humanity” rang out conspicuously loud in every speech. That the Federal President joined these remarks with deep sympathy is understandable, given his close family ties to Fritz Elsas, the former Jewish district mayor of Berlin, Goerdeler’s commissioner and protector. But Prince Louis Ferdinand’s own profession of the spirit of betrayal was clumsy; he thereby lost any claim to the throne. What patriotic German would want a traitorous prince at the head of his country? The people still hold the truth that was shamefacedly left unsaid at those West Berlin “celebrations”: “traitors always remain traitors and are always betrayed again.” How sharply those old truths cut to the heart of the matter was shown soon afterward by Dr. Otto John, president of the West German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. He used the West Berlin profession of betrayal to follow the law that lives inside every betrayal, committed fresh betrayal, and slipped away to the Soviet Zone.

This 45-year-old Wiesbaden lawyer earned his first traitor’s spurs in 1938, when he misused his post as legal counsel for German Lufthansa to betray military and political secrets of his fatherland to England in collaboration with the English agent Admiral Canaris. He himself was a close friend of Pastor Bonhoeffer, who even during the war prayed in Geneva for his fatherland’s defeat; of the Social Democratic deputy Leber; and, above all, of Arvid von Harnack, who, along with Schulze-Boysen, headed the “Red Orchestra,” which steadily fed military secrets from the Air Ministry to the Soviets. These left-wing ties did not come to John by accident; he is a textbook case of how closely the “resistance fighters” worked not only with the enemy in general but especially with Soviet Russia. While John’s brother was executed after the July 20 attempt, John himself managed to flee via Spain to England.

There, he entered the British Intelligence Service, tried to recruit German prisoners of war to fight against their own fatherland, supplied the British with material for “war-crimes trials” against German generals, and especially backed the British prosecution in the scandalous trial of Field Marshal von Manstein. For these services to democracy, Dr. Otto John was made head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution in 1950. At 41, he could thus step to the top of one of the most important authorities of the West German state and turn it into one of the most infamous institutions of the Bonn democracy. Every attempt by nationalist circles to organize and build a defense against communist agents infiltrating Germany was hunted down with hatred by the Federal Office. John invented the most repulsive methods for this, as tens of thousands of persecuted and damaged Germans can testify. The skillful communist work of going underground and seeping into other organizations in West Germany was not hindered by the Office; it was shielded. When John was recently in Washington, he received many highly confidential pieces of information, especially about the secret service. As a former member of the British Intelligence Service, he remained closely tied to it as well. After taking part in the celebration for the traitors and assassins of July 20, John made his way to the Soviet Zone.

The John case proves to even the skeptic how readily the so-called resistance fighters are still at any moment to betray our people to communism. National Germany must therefore demand that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the state offices be dissolved, that the ramifications of John’s traitor organization be laid bare, and that a new political police be built from proven enemies of communism and its hangers-on—excluding Reich traitors, deserters, and enemy agents. Another international conclusion arises from the John case for every upright friend of the German Volk and every advocate of an honorable, sensible alliance policy: watch carefully whom you call a “German partner.” For “he who says A must also say B”: anyone who negotiates or makes alliances with a man shameless enough to betray his fatherland or to help such betrayal must also bear the consequences of that infamy for himself and his agreements. Just as one would never form a commercial company with partners proven to have behaved dishonorably in business, one should not enter into political dealings with men and powers who have shown their character to be unworthy in political action.

FRANCE

When the fall of the Laniel government in Paris and the appointment of the new Prime Minister Mendès-France became known at the Geneva Conference, the hour of America’s second defeat struck after the poor draw in Korea that Truman, Marshall, and Baruch had caused. Mendès-France stands at the head of the so-called “New Left,” a parliamentary group with two clear goals: end the war in Indochina and block any rearmament of West Germany. Behind this floats the vision of close collaboration with the Soviet Union, all of them having come out of the Résistance. The first result was an armistice with the Vietminh under which all of Tonkin and large parts of Annam, plus Hanoi and the port of Haiphong, are to be given up. In two years, a vote is to be held throughout Indochina, in fact divided, to form a new common government; talks on this begin only in July 1955. The French Left has reached its goal—defeat by the communists. The communists will force their part of the country thoroughly onto their side, and the still-free parts, convinced France will not defend them in a second fight, will drop into the communists’ lap without resistance. France’s defeat, “the greatest military defeat after 1940 and the first great defeat in France’s colonial history,” as Maurice Bardèche writes in Défense de l’Occident [“Defense of the West”], is complete. Bardèche adds:

“The circumstances of this defeat are such that one cannot even draw useful lessons from it. There is no organized national opposition capable of claiming power, no civilian or military leader who could rouse the country by popular vote against the regime, not even a sufficiently energetic officer who could march troops on Paris. With no means of rescue, the regime will continue. Decay and rot will only worsen. France under Mendès-France is a potential ally of the Soviets against the U.S. That nothing more can come of Adenauer’s EDC cannot be denied.”

Understandably, John Foster Dulles refused any American share in the Geneva Agreement that British diplomacy had worked so hard to secure. France’s breakaway has devalued the American alliance system; John’s flight to the Soviets shows that the resistance circles in West Germany lean toward communism, just as those in Paris around Mendès-France do.

If the U.S. does not want to lose Europe, it must bring the extreme anti-communist right-wing circles to the helm.

FAR EAST

The communist revolution in China has taken up several national goals for a nation plundered and trampled for a century: it is the national victories, not the communist doctrine, that today give Mao Tse-tung his strong prestige among his people. The “unequal treaties” have been broken, foreign gunboats have vanished from Chinese rivers, foreign settlements in the old treaty ports have been abolished, and the missionaries against whom the Boxer uprising of 1900 still fought so desperately have been driven out. China today numbers 600 million people—and its giant armies of poorly armed but fanatically fighting peasant soldiers have thrown back the best North American intervention divisions in Korea, delivered the final blow that brought down French military power in Indochina, occupied Tibet, and stand ready today to take Formosa, Burma, or Malaya. Mao Tse-tung holds power like the greatest emperors of old China, like Kang-hsi or Ch’ien-lung in the 18th century; the “communist dynasty” has “given China face again.” The communist doctrine will be digested and become Chinese in China exactly as every other foreign doctrine has—yet the fact that China has become an expansive great power will shape the decades ahead.

Not primarily communist, but nationalist effects have also been released by the victories of Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-tung over France: India demands the return of the French colonies on the Indian coast, and Indian free corps have occupied an exclave (Dadra) of the Portuguese colony of Damão. Collaboration between Mao Tse-tung and Nehru is unmistakably close; the visit of the very skillful Chinese Foreign Minister Chou En-lai to India was a complete success. The U.S. is now working to build SEATO (Southeast Asia Organization), meant to include Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, the Philippines, perhaps Japan and Great Britain. England would rather see the individual states conclude non-aggression pacts with China. The contrasts between the two Anglo-Saxon powers thereby work to China’s advantage. Burma and Indonesia, both governed from the Left—in Burma the ruling party is even called the “Anti-Fascist People’s League”—are likely the next states to go over to the communist side. Of Southeast Asia’s 1,360 million people, 625,800,000 are now under communist rule, 244,800,000 under Western rule, 489,600,000 neutral. If these too pass to the Red Chinese side, Red China will command a billion human beings and the world’s greatest mineral resources.

NORTH AFRICA

In Tunis, resistance by the oppressed Arab population against French colonial rule is so fierce that no Arab wants the office of prime minister; the Bey has to appoint the French citizen Georges Dupoizat. In Morocco, the French commandant of Marrakesh is murdered. The defeat in Indochina intensifies agitation for independence throughout the French colonial empire.

NEAR EAST

As if intent on driving the embittered Arabs even closer to the Chinese-Russian bloc, the state of Israel, kept alive by North American money, launched a fierce nighttime attack on the Arab sector of Jerusalem at 7:30 p.m. on June 30; it only died down the next morning after heavy mortar fire on the area between the Jaffa Gate and the David Gate. Border incidents along the armistice line never cease, and in most cases the guilt clearly lies on Israel’s side.

The Grand Mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini has published his memoirs of the Palestine struggles in the Egyptian paper Al Misri [“The Egyptian”]. He stresses above all how greatly England furthered the imperialist aims of the Jews and speaks in a chivalrous and noble way of his friendship with Adolf Hitler. Upright Germans thank the Grand Mufti, this lion of his people, for the loyal friendship he has always kept with the German nation.

CENTRAL AMERICA

In Central America, the struggle for Guatemala is outwardly over after 11 days: Arbenz Guzmán has been overthrown and has taken refuge in the Mexican legation, as have most of his ministers and collaborators. Colonel Castillo Armas’ government is now publishing lists of crimes and murders said to have been committed by the Arbenz government, especially by its police chief, Jaime Rosenberg. It therefore refuses the asylees in the embassies free passage out of the country. Serious fighting continues along the Mexican border in Guatemala against Arbenz partisan groups. Even more serious is that in northern Mexico, a “sympathy demonstration” saw large masses of Indian workers attempt an attack on the North American employees’ settlement of the Anaconda Copper Co. Here it becomes clear that the communist veneer on Arbenz and his people only covered a far deeper, more genuine layer of national enmity against the colossus of the North. The danger remains that one day an Indian Mao Tse-tung will appear who, as in China, will ride to victory in Central America on the waves of Indian national resentment against the U.S.

Original Title: Das Weltgeschehen

Attributed Author: unattributed.

“Der Weg” Issue: Volume 8, Issue 8 (August 1954)

Page(s): 595-598 [Scan LINK]

Der Weg - El Sendero is a German- and Spanish-language magazine published by Dürer-Verlag in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by Germans with ties to the defeated Third Reich.

Der Weg ran monthly issues from 1947 to 1957, with official sanction from Juan Perón’s Government until his overthrow in September 1955.

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