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And here we come to another point. I am dead certain that at the turn of the century, historians will try to find out the answer to two crucial historic questions:
- What caused the United States to withdraw its armies immediately after the armistice form all parts of the world? Was the clamor "Let's send the boys home" somewhat organized?
- What prevented the United States – as sole atomic power between the years of 1945 and 1948 – from using its deadly monopoly to "ease" the Soviets out of their ill-gotten gains? A war never would have been necessary. The mere threat would have been sufficient. Panic on an unprecedented scale would have been the immediate result.
Of course the answer is tragically simple: A "democracy" rests on the "fermentation" of the people. It merely hits back if attacked and is more perplexed by victory than by the task of defending itself (which belongs to the military hierarchy and not to amateurish politicians).
The Armistice [141] was not only conditioned by the preliminary arrangements and agreement concluded at Teheran and Yalta but also by military moves determined by these talks. It is perhaps true that Vienna could not have been occupied by the Western Allies in the last stages of the war, but why, then, had it been savagely bombed on the anniversary of the Anchluss -- and act of revenge facilitating the Russian conquest?[142]
Neither Prague nor Berlin, two European key cities, need have been left to the Red army. They were given to the Soviets, staunch Nazi collaborators between 1939 and 1941, on a platter. The Americans and the British stopped at the Elbe [143] and later even surrendered all of Thuringia to the Soviets while Berlin could easily have fallen into American hands. [144]
The same is true of Prague: The Americans under General Patton had advanced as far as Pilsen when they were ordered back.[145] Clearly, all important places in Eastern and Central Europe according to leftist ideas were to be handed over to the Soviets leaving to the Western world a mere toehold on the Continent. The craziest arrangements were those concerning Berlin and Vienna. In these two cities, the Western Powers were to control mere sectors and no stipulations were made as to the accesses leading to them.[146]
Mr. Roosevelt is said to have been opposed to discussing these details because he thought that only a complete show of confidence and trust would soften the Soviet regime and would create an atmosphere of "fellowship" and "goodwill." Soon, the Americans were "undeceived" and the airlift had to be organized at great cost in money and even human lives.
The worst result of the Potsdam meeting were the stipulations concerning the mass transfer of the German population from east of the Oder-Neisse Line, [147] from Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary and Yugoslavia. No less than 13 to 14 million people had to be removed under enormous hardships and this created tensions, hatred, demands and counterdemands from which even a de-Sovietized Europe could hardly recover. These brutal transfers, accompanied by atrocities and spoliations continued all through the winter of 1945-1946 and ended only in 1947.
Poles from Eastern Poland were dumped into East Germany, a process by which people from underpopulated areas were "massaged" into overpopulated ones – the height of perversity. Yet no legal title over Eastern Germany as given to the Poles. [148] Vast tracts of land remained uncultivated (as in Bohemia-Moravia) and on the trek from East to West millions of people perished. [149]
What were the Western Allies to do with the part of Germany they were given for occupation? It is interesting to note that the western army leaders went into a huddle to discuss what they should do if there should be any resistance or sabotage. They decided they would take hostages and shoot them – perhaps the only thing they could "reasonably" do, but the Germans had been vilified for having acted the same way in the same predicament.[150].
As to the political order and cultural institution, the American left (thanks to its preoccupation with foreign affairs) had a field day in West Germany.
Professor Wilhelm Röpke, an outstanding German neoliberal, exiled in Constantinople and later in Geneva, had written a memorandum about the necessity of a monarchical restoration which, by the way, we find in the program of practically all of the heroes of the Twentieth of July. Nobody in his right mind and with any sense of history planned to revise parliamentary democracy, already obsolete by 1919 and tragically terminated by 1933.
Yet the American left naturally thought about a Constitutional development which would give the forces of the left a frame for a free development. Had not the English demanded the democratic republic as the ideal form of government, conducive to the victory of Marxism? [151]
Above all, the Soviet Union had a true "vested interest" in the establishment of democracy in preference to forms of government in which parties could not develop freely, gain victories and take over the government.
What the leftist establishment did in Germany is most notable. In many parts of the country, in Bavaria, for instance, it put into power Social Democrats (i.e., Socialist) governments which had by no means the backing of the majority of the population. The prevailing idea in the civilian sector of the occupation authorities was that "Clericals" were reactionary, backward and "Fascist," but that Marxians were "progressive."
Dorothy Thompson had already told us that what Germany needed was not less, but "more socialism" (though not exactly "national socialism"). [153] Now the Germans got it at the expense of the American capitalist system duly milked to provide for socialism and socialization all over Europe from Land's End to the Iron Curtain.
There was a special bias against German nobility, many of whose members had courageously opposed Hitler, but here folklore and leftism against combined against genuine American interests. [154]
The famous Fragebogen, the questionnaire prescribed by the American authorities, that had to be filled out by all those Germans who wanted to do anything more than just work in a factory or in the fields, contained questions which in their content or their wording revealed the whole leftist bias and betrayed the sure little hand of Marx. (One of the questions aped the Nuremberg Racial Purity Laws: "Did any of your or your wife's four grandparents have a title of nobility?") [ 155]
For a time, the American leftists in the military administration could work hand in glove with the British occupation, directed by the Labour government in London which was also determined to create a leftist Germany – a "national socialist" Germany under the rather demagogical Social Democrat Schumacher, but minus racism.
One of the early victims of this combine was Dr. Konrad Adenauer, who immediately after liberation had become Lord Mary (Oberburgermeister) of Cologne. One nice day he was ejected by the British from his office under the (written) pretext "that he lacked the qualifications to run a city as large as Cologne." This egregious piece of nonsense der Alte kept as his most cherished souvenir.[156]
"Reeducation" also ran into a few snares. Luckily the leftist plans never came to fruition but what they would have been like one can guess form the "Zook Report" published in parts by the New York Times (October 16, 1946). Dr. George F. Zook, head of a mission of nine men and women (among them a Catholic priest!) sent to Germany by the State and War Departments , declared that the goal of democracy is a "democratic man."
This commission found the main ills of Germany to be "discipline in the family" and the high-school college, which begins at the age of 10. "The survival of democracy would warrant an invasion of the German home," the report suggested.
It referred to the "stern German parental authority" that produced Freudian ambivalence, or a clash of tenderness and hostility in children, undermining individual self-reliance, if not also self-respect, while women were confined to cooking, children and churchgoing, thus converting "worthy enough functions into antidemocratic sterilities."
The report went on to say that to "shun the majority rule principle was to play into the hands of a Hitlerian 'superman'." Ninety percent of the Germans went to vocational schools and "this separation of children at an early age was an important factor in developing the superiority complex of the privileged class and the subservience of the trade class which has led Germany to totalitarianism and war."
A most amusing light is thrown on this report by the fact that the Nazi movement had been basically a youth movement against the older generation, that the Nazis wanted to radically revamp the educational system to eliminate the classically educated elites, that they had tried with all means at their disposal to undermine parental authority. In other words, most of the propositions of the Zook Report were entirely in keeping with Nazi ideas, and Nazism was represented in retrospect was a conservative and patriarchal movement: Hitler appeared to the signatories as some sort of Patriarcha and not at all as Big Brother whom he actually represented. [157]
The Zook Report and the various efforts to "democratize" German education in an intellectual sense were partly of a temporary nature.[ 158] As soon as West Germany recovered some sovereignty, most of the various leftist experiments were given up. As we all know, a "reinfection" took place in the mid-1960s when the New Left, the student revolt and hippieism invaded Germany via the Free University of West Berlin and the University of Frankfurt where the various aspects of this particular disease were abetted by part of the German press and a number of intellectuals with a distinctly American background. [159]
No wonder, because there was a field in which the American occupation authorities were able to achieve a permanent victory for leftism: in the "Fifth Estate".
After 1945 the license for the publication of a newspaper and books had to be obtained from the occupying powers and here was an opening wedge for the leftist returnees and for their friends. Later it became extremely costly to start a new paper. The conservative forces, viewed with great suspicion by the leftist establishment, thus were the Johnnies-come-lately and to this day from a journalistic point of view, they have not overcome this handicap.
It is important, however, to remember that the left in Europe was soon to turn anti-American and that the anti-American propaganda profited from the support it had been given earlier by the very country it was later to attack.
It is difficult to enumerate the calamities enacted in the years immediately following the Armistice. There were serious diplomatic mistakes such as the pressure exercised upon Switzerland to surrender the German assets to the Allies (whereas the Swiss had not even been approached by the Nazis to surrender emigrant savings and investments).
There were the Nuremberg Trials which definitely ought to have been handled by the Germans themselves [ 160] and which were totally mismanaged. The notion of "legal precedent" is Anglo-Saxon:[161] Even American generals were horrified by the trial (thinking of their difficulties in World War III): and the very idea that the assassins of Katyn sat in judgment over the assassins of Auschwitz is tragicomic.
Points of accusation like the wanton attack on Norway, an accusation per se justified, make no sense if one remembers that Mr. Churchill admittedly prepared an attack on Norway himself.[162]
The thing to do would have been to have the Nazis tried by German courts simply for common crimes according to the Code of Penal Law. The principle Nullen crimem sine lege was as much ignored as that of the impartiality of the judges – for instance, when the Russians condemned the German attack against Poland in which they themselves had participated.
Even worse were the following minor Nuremberg Trials, almost completely based on Marxist principles: An effort was made to implicate German industry and high finance.[ 163] No less infamous was the Krupp Trial in which Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach [164] was place don the bench of the accused instead of his gravely ill father.[165]
Here again Marxism, financed by American taxpayers' money, was celebrating orgies.
In the writ of accusation against Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and his ten codefendants of the same firm we find the words:
The origin, the development, and the background of the crimes committed by the defendants, and the criminal plans, in which they participated, can be traced back to 100 years of German militarism and 133 years—four generations—of the manufacturing of arms." [166]
Apart from the fact that the Krupp works normally produced arms on the average of only one-fifth of their total output, one recognizes in this sentence and, even more clearly in other passages of the accusation, the Marxian verbiage.
The accusation was presented by General Taylor, U.S.A., formerly of the Federal Communications Commission, then 40 years old. His aides were Mr. Joseph Kaufmann from New York and later Mr. Raggland from Texas. The director of the Chief Trial was Mr. H. Russell Thayer who had been Assistant Secretary of the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy during the Spanish Civil War. The basic notion of the trial was to prove in the best Leninist fashion that "big business" (especially in the form of "monopoly capitalism") creates and fosters wars. [ 167]
All of the accused were condemned and later released and the confiscations annulled. In retrospect, the trial appears too preposterous.
On the other side of the ocean, we had the Yamashita Trial, a travesty of justice. [168]. When Yamashita's lawyer, Frank A. Reel [ 169] published a book about his tragically innocent defendant, the rather conservative director of the publishing company, the Chicago University Press, lost his position.
Leftist forces mismanaged the world situation practically everywhere. Working through the occupation authorities, where the much saner military were unable to interfere with the civilians, they set up a witchhunt against monarchists in Austria (thus continuing Nazi policies!) and they also prevented the return of the South Tyrol to Austria:
For this the British Labour government was mainly responsible. Self-determination was obviously only desirable if it benefited leftist issues, but the South Tyrolians, being mostly conservative agrarians would, once returned to Austria, have prevented a full Socialist victory. [ 170] The damage done by the dinamitardi, the tortures committed by the caribinieri, the wall of hatred between Austrians and Italians—this only "bleeding border" left in Free Europe we owe first to Mr. Wilson, then to Mr. Bevin [171]—and to the Soviets who supported Mr. Bevin, and thus incidentally ratified the Hitler-Mussolini Agreement of 1939 pertaining to the iniquitous Brenner Border.
It seems that Nazi decisions, Nazi thought, Nazi mentality, and Nazi institutions in many ways are here to stay.
True, other people, other groups, fared much worse than the Austrians. the !50,000 cases of rape perpetrated by the Red Army in Eastern Austria was perhaps only a practical demonstration of "sexual democracy." [173] (Let us remember Mr. Henry Wallace's charming formula: We have political democracy, they have economic democracy.")
Many Austrians were deported, some returned, others disappeared forever. Still, it was on Austrian soil, in the East Tyrol, that large numbers of Russians and Cossacks who had fought against Communism were clubbed half dead, packed into box cars and sent back as "unpatriotic traitors."
A British major (Davis) had given his word of honor that England did not think to surrender the Cossacks and Russians to the Soviets. When the truth leaked through, the disarmed anti-Communists resisted His Majesty's soldiers in the services of bolshevism: Many Russians were killed on the spot, [174] fifteen more were killed during the transport while trying to escape, six committed suicide, seventeen succeeded in disappearing during the transport to the Russian occupation zone.
There were twelve generals in that group handed over to the USSR by that great conservative Winston Churchill to placate, to mollify, to befriend his Communist comrade-in-arms. But even this act of prostitution did not buy their friendship and less than a year later this Epimetheus of European politics utters the Great Warning in his famous Fulton speech.
An Austrian eyewitness has described the scenes in Lienz, worthy of Brueghel's brush. (He estimates that about three hundred the number of Cossacks who hanged themselves in the Lienz woods after being surrounded by the 8th Brigade.) With bayonets and clubs, these men and many women were subdued. A Russian who escaped to tell the tale, S. G. Korolkov, now living in the United States, has painted the memorable scene of the "Hell of Lienz." [ 175]
And while Mr. Churchill perpetrated such wonderful deeds, the Americans, apparently, could not stay behind. The New York Times reported the ghastly scenes that took place in Dachau when the Russians who had fought against Communism were made "ready" to be "shipped" eastward.
The long somber report ended with the description of the evacuation of the second Russian barrack.
The inmates … barricaded themselves inside and set the building afire. Then all tore off their clothing, apparently in a vain effort to frustrate the guards and, linking arms, resisted the pushing and shoving of the Americans and Poles trying to empty the place. The soldiers then tossed in tear bombs and rushed the building.
Some prisoners, they discovered, were already dead, having cut their own throats, while others had used pieces of cloth to hang themselves. [ 176]
One can easily imagine what confidence in the United States and Britain these actions engendered inside the USSR, but hatred and suspicion against the West were precisely the feelings which not only the Soviets but also their faithful collaborators the American leftist establishment wanted to create.
And it ought to be remembered that the American heirs of the Nazis in Dachau (of all places!) perpetrated these horrors three-quarters of a year after the end of the war—and this in accordance with the agreements made at Yalta, at least half of which the Soviets had already broken.
Remembering the American tradition in regard to political refugees throughout the ages, one cannot but be aghast at the betrayal of such trust, such a noble tradition.
The so frequently followed British example, too, was at times exceptionally evil. The Austrians have seen not only the "Hell of Lienz" but also the bestial surrender of the Domobranci, the Catholic Slovene Home Guard, which had protected Slovenes against the depredations of Tito's partizani. Thousands of them were rounded up, shipped over the Karavanken Mountains to be mowed down in masses and their corpses used as natural fertilizer for the fields.
One should never forget that Sadism is the outstanding characteristic of the entire left.
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