The Civic Platform - A Political Journal of Ideas and Analysis

My conversation with an anti-German continues.

Chamberlain published Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts in 1899. My remarks in respect to the general derision which greeted the ideas of palingenic Nazism, especially the Master Race (and in practise it was German, not Nordic), are confined to the years of National Socialist power: 1933 to 1945. The general population had no opinion on Chamberlain whatever. The man had been dead for three decades.

I thought that you were talking about Germans (or simply “Krauts,” as you prefer to call them), no matter the time frame.

In any case, an empirically false and religious idea is not more respectable for being advocated in the 19th century rather than the 20th.

It was a respectable idea held by many Western intellectuals and, in light of numerous German scientific and cultural achievements, empirically sound.

Nineteenth century German prestige

This dark image of a sinister, aggressive, predatory, and militarily regimented Germany only became prevalent in the present century. The English historian, Frederic William Maitland, has described the once characteristic attitude toward the Germans:

… it was usual and plausible to paint the German as an unpractical, dreamy, sentimental being, looking out with mild blue eyes into a cloud of music and metaphysics and tobacco smoke.1

The French writer, Madame de Stael, romantically portrayed for the Napoleonic world of the early nineteenth century a Germany utterly unlike the grotesque image later drawn by the Allied propagandists of two World Wars. Madame de Stael’s Germans were a nation of “Poets and Thinkers,” a race of kindly, impractical, other-worldly dreamers without national prejudices and, strangely, in the light of later propaganda, “disinclined to war.”2

In America too, a similarly warm view of things German predominated. It is difficult to exaggerate the constructive impact of German institutions upon American life and the cordiality of the reception accorded them in the century or so from Frederick the Great to Bismarck. The story of this golden age of German-American relations has been magnificently chronicled by a very thorough and gifted American scholar, Henry M. Adams, in his recently published Prussian-American Relations, 1775-1871.3 In the cultural and intellectual spheres as in the political sphere the relationship was one of immense mutual profit.

The Prussian system of higher education and the cultural flowering which characterized Prussia in the era of regeneration following the Napoleonic wars all left a distinct mark upon America. The list of American scholars and writers — George Tichnor, Edward Everett, Joseph Cogswell, George Bancroft, John Lothrop Motley, Henry E. Dwight, Washington Irving, Henry W. Longfellow, and James F. Cooper, to mention only some — who went to Prussia to secure inspiration for their life’s work is a most impressive one. Thus, to Americans too, “whether seen in their newly united nation or in this country, the Germans were generally regarded as methodical and energetic people” indeed as “models of progress,” while “in their devotion to music, education, science, and technology they aroused the admiration and emulation of Americans.”4

It is evident then that Germans in the nineteenth century ranked quite high in the esteem of their European and American neighbors. Two unrelated historic factors seemed to conspire at the time to give widespread currency to views of this sort.

First, there were the truly monumental achievements of Germans in every sphere of cultural, intellectual, and scientific creativity. It could hardly have seemed amiss to speak of a nation of Dichter und Denker when one thought of the contributions to literature of Goethe and Schiller, the historical works of Ranke and Niebuhr, the philosophical studies of Kant and Hegel, the great scientific achievements of Alexander von Humboldt and Röntgen, and the varied musical achievements of Beethoven, the Strausses, and Wagner.

The second factor which seemed to support this attitude toward the Germans was their military and political weakness before their achievement of national unification in 1871.

One cannot imagine a more vivid contrast than that between de Stael’s Germans and the stereotyped image of monocled, burr-headed, heel-clicking, mindless robots which Hollywood did so much to popularize in the thirties and forties.

Possibly even more difficult to grasp, for those whose thinking has been shaped by the propaganda of recent years, is the fact that throughout the nineteenth century France rather than Germany was cast in the role of international bully and villain.5 Had not Louis XIV and Bonaparte repeatedly made a battleground of Europe? Could anyone forget that French arms had rolled at high tide across the entire continent of Europe, threatening to engulf even the vast empire of the Russian Tsars? Or could anyone forget that it had required the combined resources of Austria, Britain, Russia, and Prussia, assisted by the fortuitous intervention of nature in the form of the Russian winter, to shatter the might of the Corsican conqueror?

Source.

As for this “hatred of Germans” of mine, well … there is something very Jewish in the way you launch a wild and innacurate attack on the morality of a critic. You must know you are not addressing the substantive issue but, instead, calling me your version of “anti-semitic”.

You consistently take an anti-German stand in your posts. Although I have yet to see you use such ethnic slurs as “Nigger” or “Kike”, etc. “Kraut” seems to roll off your tongue regularly and with great ease.

I do not believe you will be able to contribute intellectually or ideologically to a Restoration in any way until you can set aside this driven need you have to snatch a National Socialist victory out of the embers of the 1945 defeat. It is too all-embracing for you and far too irrational. It is in your way, and I don’t like it getting in ours.

I’m exposing the various hoaxes that pass for Third Reich (and W.W. II) scholarship in the West and that you frequently peddle on your little blog. In its anti-German rhetoric, MajorityRights is indistinguishable from Free Republic or Little Green Footballs. Whether you’re conscious of it or not, you’re hawking a Jew-financed worldview.

So you have not heard of The Drive to the East and the Generalplan Ost which sprang from it, and which required 50% of Czechs, for example, 25% of Ukrainians and 25% of Belarusians to be “cleansed”? You know nothing about the regimes which were established in the Baltic States, Eastern Poland and the Ukraine to commence this work? What do you think would have happened there if the Red Army had been defeated, and the Germans had been free to do as they pleased? Do you really believe that Hitler did not intend the Aryan masters to settle the land and rule over the remaining Untermenschen?

Anonymous authority. The above paragraph is fictitious in nature, complete with bogus percentages.

However, we know what actually did take place:

I found this new release in the bookstore today. It’s the first English language source that I have seen since James Bacque’s Other Losses about the postwar Allied occupation of Germany. MacDonogh also reaches the conclusion that millions of German civilians died between the time of V-E Day and the Berlin Airlift.

Friends of mine, even published historians, have often told me that the Germans ‘deserved what they got’ in 1945: it was a just punishment for their behaviour in occupied lands and for the treatment of the Jews at home. This book is not intended to excuse the Germans, but it does not hesitate to expose the victorious Allies in their treatment of the enemy at the peace, for in most cases it was not the criminals who were raped, starved, tortured or bludgeoned to death but women, children, and old men. What I record and sometimes call into question here is the way that many people were allowed to exact that revenge by military commanders, even by government ministers; and that when they did so they often killed the innocent, not the guilty.

MacDonogh, xiii

I’m on page 55 of 618 right now. I want to gag. He obviously wasn’t joking about exposing the brutality of the Allied occupation. Here are a few selections:

In Danzig it was open season for the Russian soldiers once again. They raped, murdered and pillaged. Women between the ages of twelve and seventy-five were raped; boys who sought to rescue their mothers were pitilessly shot. The Russians defiled the ancient Cathedral of Oliva and raped the Sisters of Mercy. Later they put the building to the torch. In the same hospitals both nurses and female doctors were subjected to the same outraged after the soldiers drank surgical spirit. Nurses were raped over the bodies of unconscious patients in the operating theatres together with the women in the maternity ward. Doctors who tried to stop this were simply gunned down. The Poles behaved as badly as the Russians. Many Danzigers took their own lives. The men were rounded up, beaten and thrown into the concentration camp at Matzkau. From there 800 to 1,000 were dispatched to Russia twice daily.

Ibid., 55

Ships fared no better. They were sunk as they left the harbour of Pillau outside Konigsberg. Hundreds of thousands of refugees trekked across the ice that covered the inland seas of the Frisches and Kurisches Haff in heavy laden carts and proceeded toward Danzig. The Russians warned them that they would fire at the ice from their warships on 15 February. The shells ht men and horses. Where the ice was smashed, the trekkers put temporary bridges and persevered. The night was pitch black. All they cold hear war ‘Shooting, screaming and screeching’. When dawn broke they realized the full horror: body upon body, man and horse; and every now and then the chassis of a cart sticking out of the thin ice. Those who succeeded in making it to the thin strip of land that borders Haff and Nehrung had a choice of heading north to the ships at Pillau or south-west towards Danzig.

Ibid., 47

For the Russians, Berlin - even in its ruinous state - was the picture of sophistication. They thought that the light was captured in lightbulbs and unscrewed them to send them home. They were fascinated by lavatories with flushes - and allegedly used them to wash their potatoes in. Little things, like cigarette lighters, were not only new, but utterly enchanting to them. . . .

The Woman saw her liberators discard a collection of classical 78s, including Lohengrin and Beethoven’s Ninth, in favour of a record playing an advertising jingle from C&A in the Spittalmarkt. . . .

The Russian inability to master anything technical was ‘an inexhaustible chapter’. They stole all the bicycles they could find. The Woman saw them take them up to a street near the Hasenheide where they practised riding them. They sat ’stiff on the saddles like chimpanzees in the zoo’. They frequently fell off before they mastered the use of the two-wheeled beast.

Ibid, 97

Rape was most common amongst the Russians and French, less so amongst the Americans and British, in that order. I spent last night reading about the unbelievable savagery of the Czechs.

The resistance had been wiped out as early as the autumn of 1941, and was unable to re-form until 1943 and 1944, when there was an uprising in Slovakia. Nazi brutality was measured: apart from the massacre at Lidice - provoked by the British-masterminded assassination of the deputy protector Reinhard Heydrich - there were no startling atrocities. The country was hardly touched by the aerial bombardment that struck terror into the rest of Europe. The French bore far worse, and behaved better towards the defeated Germans; but then again, the French were not considered to be racially inferior. . . .

The insurgents captured the radio station and began broadcasting the slogan ‘Smrt Nemcum! Smrt vsem Nemcum! Smrt vsem Okkupanten!’ (Death to the Germans! Death to all Germans! Death to all occupiers!). There was to be no mercy for old men, women or children - even for German dogs. Margarete Schell’s was stoned by Czech children and had to be shot. It was the first day of the Revolution …

Women too were forced to were forced to clear the barricades. Helene Bugner was first beaten by the porter of her block of flats, then a Professor Zelenka drove her and twenty other women off to clear the streets. ‘Here, I have brought you some German sows!’ said the professor. Both men and women died from the beatings. A large crowd of Czechs stood by and cheered whenever a woman was struck or fell. At the end of their work they had to tread on a larger picture of Hitler and spit on it. Margarete Schell saw people being forced to eat pieces of such pictures as she too was put to work on the barricades. As they were driven off, one woman heard a Czech tell another, ‘Don’t hit them on the head, they might die at once. THey must suffer longer and a lot more.’ When Helene Bugner returning that evening she was unrecognizable to her children.

Marianne Klaus saw her husband alive for the last time on the 9th. She received his body the next day - the sixty-six-year-old had been beaten to death by the police. On the same day she saw two SS men suffer a similar fate, kicked in the stomach until blood spurted out; a woman Wehrmacht auxillary stoned and hanged; and another SS man hung up by his feet from a lamppost and set alight. Many witnesses attested to the stringing up and burning of Germans as ‘living torches’, not just soldiers but also young boys and girls. Most were SS men, but as the Czechs were not always too scrupulous about looking at the uniforms, a number of Wehrmacht soldiers perished in this way too. …

The Ministry of Education, the Military Prison, the Riding School, the Sports Stadium and the Labor Exchange were set aside for German prisoners. The Scharnhorst School was the scene of a massacre on the night of the 5th. Groups of ten Germans were led down to the courtyard and shot: men, women and children - even babies. THe others had to strip the corpses and bury them. Alfred Gabauer saw female SS employees forced to roll naked in a pool of water before they were beaten senseless with rifle butts. There were as many as 10,000-15,000 Germans in the football stadium in Strahov. Here the Czechs organized a game where 5,000 prisoners had to run for their lives as guards fired on them with machine guns. Some where shot in the latrines. The bodies were not cleared away and those who had used the latrines later had to defecate on their dead countrymen. As a rule all SS men were killed, generally by a shot in the back of the heard or the stomach. Even after 16 May when order was meant to be restored, twelve to twenty people died daily and were taken away from the stadium on a dung wagon. Most had been tortured first. Many were buried in mass graves at Pankrac Prison where a detachment of sixty prisoners was on hand to inter the corpses. Another impromptu prison was in a hotel up in the hills. This had been the Wehrmacht’s brothel. A number of Germans were locked up in the cellar, and the whores and their pimps indulged in a new orgy of sadism and perversity. German men and women had to strip naked for their treatment. One of them was Professor Walter Dick, heard of a department at the Bulovka Hospital. He was driven insane by his torturers and hanged himself on a chain.

Ibid, 125-134

It goes on like this for thirty more pages and becomes even more graphic. I haven’t gotten to the part about the POW camps or the expulsions from Poland yet.

National Socialist Germany was not our spiritual friend or political teacher, and it had to be defeated.

Happily, Guessedworker’s views are in the minority among conservative British and American authors (i.e., purportedly his ideological camp). The prevailing sentiments of that cadre correspond to those of Professor John Charmley:

Charmley’s scholarship…finds Churchill’s early years powerful and compelling, but believes that Churchill’s alternative to appeasement was unrealistic and his actions as Prime Minister in World War II were a failure. The resulting collapse of the British Empire and the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union Charmley sees as disastrous in all three areas. While Charmley never states outright that as Prime Minister Churchill should have allied with Nazi Germany in 1940, he believes it to have been possible to do so honourably and that it would have safeguarded the British Empire better than an alliance with the anti-colonial U.S. President Roosevelt. Charmley does outright recommend “disengaging” from the war against Germany, and letting Stalin and Hitler whittle away each other’s power rather than risk Britain’s resources.

Britain and France went to war with Germany because they had no political options remaining. Hitler was implacable in his will to Drive to the East, and the old powers were bound to try to prevent Germany from developing into a powerhouse fueled by land-theft and slavery.

This is false. Britain and France didn’t declare war on Germany because of “land-theft and slavery” or because of a fictitious “Ostplan.”

[T]he British Government agreed: Danzig should be returned. For of all the amputations of German lands and peoples at Versailles, European statesmen, even Winston Churchill, regarded Danzig and the Polish Corridor that sliced Germany in two as the most outrageous. The problem was the Poles, who refused to discuss Danzig.

Then, in March, Czechoslovakia suddenly began to fall apart. The Sudetenland had been annexed by Germany. Hungary had taken back its lost lands, and Poland had annexed the disputed region of Teschen. Slovakia and Ruthenia now moved to declare independence, and Prague began to march on the provinces.

Hitler intervened to guarantee the independence of Slovakia and gave Hungary a green light to re-annex Ruthenia. Czech President Hacha then asked to see Hitler, who bullied him for three hours into signing away Czech sovereignty and making his nation the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. [This is false, David Hoggan quotes Hacha's daughter after the war to the effect that her father was very well treated and with consideration by German authorities and that no undue pressure was put on him at any time.]

Chamberlain, now humiliated, mocked by Tory back-benchers, panicking over wild false rumors of German attacks on Romania and Poland, made the greatest blunder in British history. Unasked, he issued a war guarantee to Poland, empowering a Polish dictatorship of colonels that had joined Hitler in dismembering Czechoslovakia to drag the British Empire into war with Germany over a city, Danzig, the British thought should be returned to Germany.

It was not Munich. It was the war guarantee that guaranteed the war that brought down the Empire, and gave us the Holocaust, 50 million dead and the Stalinization of half of Europe.

Source.

There is no parallel with the deeds of the Wehrmacht in the East,

What are the chances that Guessedworker has bothered to read the following works?:

Joachim Hoffmann, Stalin’s War of Extermination 1941-1945. Planning, Realization, Documentation.

Franz W. Seidler, Crimes Against the Wehrmacht (2. vols.)

Walter Post, The Defamed Wehrmacht.

Nil. Of course.

The British Empire was not run along the brutal lines of, say, the Germans in East Africa or the French in the North and the Belgians in the East. On a day-to-day basis the Raj scarcely involved the British, who found it eminently more agreeable to support princes, where possible, than to fight them.

“It says so in this book I’ve read written by an apologist of the British Empire!” Guessedworker engages in deception and self-deception. Who out of those people that the British Empire exploited, raped, and murdered for decades and centuries would want the British yoke back? I don’t hear the natives clamouring for a return of glorious Raj, do you?

The historic benevolence and magnanimity of the British in exotic and far away places is well known to the world. Caveat: we’re talking about White people here, not wogs:

The British Army created the concentration camps as part of a campaign against Boer guerrillas fighting against the takeover of their independent republic. Civilians were herded into the camps from their farms, but the insanitary conditions cost many their lives as hunger and disease ran rampant. Between June 1901 and May 1902, of the 115,000 people in the camps, almost 28,000 died, about 22,000 of them children. The death toll represented about 10 per cent of the Boer population. About 20,000 black people also died in other camps.

Source.