Hitler’s War Crimes vs. Those of Churchill & the Americans

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

Third and Final Installment of Ron Unz’s “Understanding World War II” http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-understanding-world-war-ii/

When we want to demonize someone the worst epithet we can think of is to call him a Nazi or compare the person to Hitler, as Hillary Clinton did when she declared Russia’s President Putin “the new Hitler.” This ingrained habit comes from the influence of the massive anti-German World War II propaganda. Revisionist historians who have actually dug up the buried evidence and examined it have made a case that whatever the Nazi crimes, they were rivaled, if not exceeded, by those of Churchill and the Americans.

Unz, a prolific reader with a knack for tying things together reviews some of the true history in what follows. To condition yourself for the coming shock, keep in mind that the same Hitler that is said to have hated Jews and systematically gassed and burnt them, had 150,000 half-and quarter-Jews serving in his armies, “mostly as combat officers, and these included at least 15 half-Jewish generals and admirals, with another dozen quarter Jews holding those same high ranks. The most notable example was Field Marshal Erhard Milch, Hermann Goering’s powerful second-in-command, who played such an important operational role in creating the Luftwaffe. Milch certainly had a Jewish father, and according to some much less substantiated claims, perhaps even a Jewish mother as well, while his sister was married to an SS general.”

When truth-tellers rattle our cages, we get upset over having our comfortable make-believe world disturbed and shout invectives. Rather than condemn the messanger, the more mature response would be to condemn those who lied to us and institutionalized false history into our consciousness. Keep in mind that the few who tell you the truth pay a high price for doing so; therefore, you should refrain from adding your invective to the copious amount heaped on them by the Establishment. Think about it. Which is your true friend, the one who tells you the truth, or the one who controls the explanations you receive in order to advance his own agenda?

I again state my admiration of Ron Unz. He is Jewish. He is highly intelligent. He is a Harvard graduate. He is an entrepreneur who made himself a multi-millionaire. He could have held his fire and risen to the top of the establishment. Instead, he chose to tell us the truth. Ron Unz is the person who should be President. Unlike Trump, Unz would know how to staff a government that would put truth and morality back in charge of our future.

Here is Ron Unz weighing for us the historical evidence on who was the worst war criminal. The emphasis is added:

For most present-day Americans, the primary image associated with Hitler and his German regime is the horrendous scale of the war-crimes that they supposedly committed during the global conflict that they are alleged to have unleashed. But in one of his lectures, Irving made the rather telling observation that the relative scale of such World War II crimes and especially their evidentiary base might not necessarily point in the direction of implicating the Germans.

Although Hollywood and those in its thrall have endlessly cited the findings of the Nuremberg Tribunals as the final word on Nazi barbarism, even a cursory examination of those proceedings raises enormous skepticism. As time passed, historians gradually acknowledged that some of the most shocking and lurid pieces of evidence used to secure worldwide condemnation of the defendants—the human lampshades and bars of soap, the shrunken heads—were entirely fraudulent. The Soviets were determined to prosecute the Nazis for the Katyn Forest massacre of the captured Polish officer corps even though the Western Allies were convinced that Stalin had actually been responsible, a belief eventually confirmed by Gorbachev and the newly-opened Soviet archives. If the Germans had actually done so many horrible things, one wonders why the prosecution would have bothered including such fabricated and false charges.

And over the decades, considerable evidence has accumulated that the Gas Chambers and the Jewish Holocaust—the central elements of today’s Nazi “Black Legend”—were just as fictional as all those other items. The Germans were notoriously meticulous record-keepers, embracing orderly bureaucracy like no other people, and nearly all their archives were captured at the end of the war. Under these circumstances, it seems rather odd that there are virtually no traces of the plans or directives associated with the monstrous crimes that their leadership supposedly ordered committed in such massively industrial fashion. Instead, the entirety of the evidence seems to consist of a tiny quantity of rather doubtful documentary material, the dubious interpretations of certain phrases, and various German confessions, often obtained under brutal torture.

Given his crucial wartime role in Military Intelligence, John Beaty [The Iron Curtain Over America] was particularly harsh in his denunciation of the proceedings, and the numerous top American generals who endorsed his book add considerably to the weight of his verdict:

He was scathing toward the Nuremberg Trials, which he described as a “major indelible blot” upon America and “a travesty of justice.” According to him, the proceedings were dominated by vengeful German Jews, many of whom engaged in falsification of testimony or even had criminal backgrounds. As a result, this “foul fiasco” merely taught Germans that “our government had no sense of justice.” Sen. Robert Taft, the Republican leader of the immediate postwar era took a very similar position, which later won him the praise of John F. Kennedy in Profiles in Courage. The fact that the chief Soviet prosecutor at Nuremberg had played the same role during the notorious Stalinist show trials of the late 1930s, during which numerous Old Bolsheviks confessed to all sorts of absurd and ridiculous things, hardly enhanced the credibility of the proceedings to many outside observers.

By contrast, Irving notes that if the Allies had instead been in the dock at Nuremberg, the evidence of their guilt would have been absolutely overwhelming. After all, it was Churchill who began the illegal terror-bombing of cities, a strategy deliberately intended to provoke German retaliation and which eventually led to the death of a million or more European civilians. Late in the war, military reversals had even persuaded the British leader to order similarly illegal poison gas attacks against German cities, along with the initiation of even more horrific biological warfare involving anthrax bombs. Irving located these signed directives in the British archives, although Churchill was later persuaded to countermand them before they were carried out. By contrast, German archival material demonstrates that Hitler had repeatedly ruled out any first use of such illegal weapons under any circumstances, even though Germany’s far deadlier arsenal might have turned the tide of the war in its favor.

Although long forgotten today, Freda Utley was a mid-century journalist of some prominence. Born an Englishwoman, she had married a Jewish Communist and moved to Soviet Russia, then fled to America after her husband fell in one of Stalin’s purges. Although hardly sympathetic to the defeated Nazis, she strongly shared Beaty’s view of the monstrous perversion of justice at Nuremberg and her first-hand account of the months spent in Occupied Germany is eye-opening in its description of the horrific suffering imposed upon the prostrate population even years after the end of the war. Moreover:

Her book also gives substantial coverage to the organized expulsions of ethnic Germans from Silesia, the Sudatenland, East Prussia, and various other parts of Central and Eastern Europe where they had peacefully lived for many centuries, with the total number of such expellees generally estimated at 13 to 15 million. Families were sometimes given as little as ten minutes to leave the homes in which they had resided for a century or more, then forced to march off on foot, sometimes for hundreds of miles, towards a distant land they had never seen, with their only possessions being what they could carry in their own hands. In some cases, any surviving menfolk were separated out and shipped off to slave-labor camps, thereby producing an exodus consisting solely of women, children, and the very elderly. All estimates were that at least a couple million perished along the way, from hunger, illness, or exposure.

These days we endlessly read painful discussions of the notorious “Trail of Tears” suffered by the Cherokees in the distant past of the early 19th century, but this rather similar 20th Century event was nearly a thousand-fold larger in size. Despite this huge discrepancy in magnitude and far greater distance in time, I would guess that the former event may command a thousand times the public awareness among ordinary Americans. If so, this would demonstrate that overwhelming media control can easily shift perceived reality by a factor of a million or more.

The population movement certainly seems to have represented the largest ethnic-cleansing in the history of the world, and if the Germany had ever done anything even remotely similar during its years of European victories and conquests, the visually-gripping scenes of such an enormous flood of desperate, trudging refugees would surely have become a centerpiece of numerous World War II movies of the last seventy years. But since nothing like that ever happened, Hollywood screenwriters lost a tremendous opportunity.

I think perhaps the most plausible explanation for the widespread promotion of a multitude of largely fictional German war-crimes at Nuremberg was to the camouflage and obscure the very real ones actually committed by the Allies.

Other related indicators may be found in the extreme tone of some of the American publications of the period, even those produced well before our country even entered the war. For example:

But as early as 1940, an American Jew named Theodore Kaufman became so enraged at what he regarded as Hitler’s mistreatment of German Jewry that he published a short book evocatively entitled Germany Must Perish!, in which he explicitly proposed the total extermination of the German people. And that book apparently received favorable if perhaps not entirely serious discussion in many of our most prestigious media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Time Magazine.

Surely any such similar book published in Hitler’s Germany that advocated the extermination of all Jews or Slavs would have been a centerpiece at Nuremberg, and any newspaper reviewers who had treated it favorably would probably have stood in the dock for “crimes against humanity.”

Meanwhile, the terrible nature of the Pacific War fought in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor is suggested by a 1944 issue of Life magazine that carried the photo of a young American woman with the skull of a Japanese soldier her boyfriend had sent her as a war souvenir. If any Nazi magazines ever featured similar images, I doubt the Allies would have had any need to fabricate ridiculous stories of human lampshades or soap.

And remarkably enough, that grotesque scene actually provides a reasonably accurate indication of the savage atrocities that were regularly committed during the brutal fighting of the Pacific Theater. These unpleasant facts were fully set forth in War Without Mercy, an award-winning 1986 volume by eminent American historian John W. Dower that received glowing accolades by leading scholars and public intellectuals.

The unfortunate truth is that Americans typically massacred Japanese who sought to surrender or who had even already been taken as prisoners, with the result that only a small slice—during some years merely a tiny sliver—of Japanese troops defeated in battle ever survived. The traditional excuse publicly offered for the virtual absence of any Japanese POWs was that their Bushido code made surrender unthinkable, yet when the Soviets defeated Japanese armies in 1945, they had no difficulty capturing over a million prisoners. Indeed, since interrogating prisoners was important for intelligence purposes, late in the war U.S. commanders began offering rewards such as ice cream to their troops for bringing some surrendering Japanese in alive rather than killing them in the field.

American GIs also regularly committed remarkably savage atrocities. Dead or wounded Japanese frequently had their gold teeth knocked out and taken as war-booty, and their ears were often cut-off and kept as souvenirs, as was also sometimes the case with their skulls. Meanwhile, Dower notes the absence of any evidence suggesting similar behavior on the other side. The American media generally portrayed the Japanese as vermin fit for eradication, and numerous public statements by high-ranking American military leaders explicitly claimed that the bulk of the entire Japanese population would probably need to be exterminated in order to bring the war to a successful conclusion. Comparing such thoroughly-documented facts with the rather tenuous accusations usually leveled against Nazi political or military leaders is quite revealing.

During the late 1980s evidence of other deep wartime secrets suddenly came to light.

While visiting France during 1986 in preparation for an unrelated book, a Canadian writer named James Bacque stumbled upon clues suggesting that one of the most terrible secrets of post-war Germany had long remained completely hidden, and he soon embarked upon extensive research into the subject, finally publishing Other Losses in 1989. Based upon very considerable evidence, including government records, personal interviews, and recorded eyewitness testimony, he argued that after the end of the war, the Americans had starved to death as many as a million German POWs, seemingly as a deliberate act of policy, a war crime that would surely rank among the greatest in history.

For decades, Western propagandists had relentlessly barraged the Soviets with claims that they were keeping back a million or more “missing” German POWs as slave-laborers in their Gulag, while the Soviets had endlessly denied these accusations. According to Bacque, the Soviets had been telling the truth all along, and the missing soldiers had been among the enormous numbers who had fled westward near the end of the war, seeking what they assumed would be far better treatment at the hands of the advancing Anglo-American armies. But instead, they were denied all normal legal protections, and confined under horrible conditions where they rapidly perished of hunger, illness, and exposure.

Without attempting to summarize Bacque’s extensive accumulation of supporting material, a few of his factual elements are worth mentioning. At the close of hostilities, the American government employed circuitous legal reasoning to argue that the many millions of German troops that they had captured should not be considered “prisoners of war” and therefore were not covered by the provisions of the Geneva Convention. Soon afterward, attempts by the International Red Cross to provide food shipments to the enormous Allied prison camps were repeatedly rejected, and notices were posted throughout the nearby German towns and villages that any civilian who attempted to smuggle food to the desperate POWs might be shot on sight. These undeniable historical facts do seem to suggest certain dark possibilities.

Although initially released by an obscure publisher, Bacque’s book soon became a sensation and an international best-seller. He paints Gen. Dwight Eisenhower as the central culprit behind the tragedy, noting the far lower POW losses in areas outside his control, and suggests that as a highly ambitious “political general” of German-American ancestry, he may have been under intense pressure to demonstrate his “harshness” toward the defeated Wehrmacht foe.

Furthermore, once the Cold War ended and the Soviet Archives were open to scholars, their contents seem to have strongly validated Bacque’s thesis. He notes that although the archives do contain explicit evidence of such long-denied atrocities as Stalin’s Katyn Forest massacre of Poland’s officer corps, they show absolutely no signs of any million missing German POWs, who instead had very likely ended their lives in the starvation and illness of Eisenhower’s death camps. Bacque points out that the German government has issued severe legal threats against anyone seeking to investigate the likely sites of the mass graves that might hold the remains of those long-dead POWs, and in an updated edition, he also mentions Germany’s enactment of harsh new laws meting out heavy prison sentences to anyone who merely questions the official narrative of World War II.

Bacque’s discussion of the new evidence of the Kremlin archives constitutes a relatively small portion of his 1997 sequel, Crimes and Mercies, which centered around an even more explosive analysis, and also became an international best-seller.

As described above, first-hand observers of post-war Germany in 1947 and 1948 such as Gollanz and Utley, had directly reported on the horrific conditions they discovered, and stated that for years official food rations for the entire population had been comparable to that of the inmates of Nazi concentration camps and sometimes far lower, leading to the widespread malnutrition and illness they witnessed all around them. They also noted the destruction of most of Germany’s pre-war housing stock and the severe overcrowding produced by the influx of so many millions of pitiful ethnic German refugees expelled from other parts of Central and Eastern Europe. But these visitors lacked any access to solid population statistics, and could only speculate upon the enormous human death toll that hunger and illness had already inflicted, and which would surely continue if policies were not quickly changed.

Years of archival research by Bacque attempt to answer this question, and the conclusion he provides is certainly not a pleasant one. Both the Allied military government and the later German civilian authorities seem to have made a concerted effort to hide or obscure the true scale of the calamity visited upon German civilians during the years 1945-1950, and the official mortality statistics found in government reports are simply too fantastical to possibly be correct, although they became the basis for the subsequent histories of that period. Bacque notes that these figures suggest that the death rate during the terrible conditions of 1947, long remembered as the “Hunger Year” (Hungerjahr) and vividly described in Gollancz’s account, was actually lower than that of the prosperous Germany of the late 1960s. Furthermore, private reports by American officials, mortality rates from individual localities, and other strong evidence demonstrate that these long-accepted aggregate numbers were essentially fictional.

Instead, Bacque attempts to provide more realistic estimates based upon an examination of the population totals of the various German censuses together with the recorded influx of the huge number of German refugees. Based upon this simple analysis, he makes a reasonably strong case that the excess German deaths during that period amounted to at least around 10 million, and possibly many millions more. Furthermore, he provides substantial evidence that the starvation was either deliberate or at least enormously worsened by American government resistance to overseas food relief efforts. Perhaps these numbers should not be so totally surprising given that the official Morgenthau Plan had envisioned the elimination of around 20 million Germans, and as Bacque demonstrates, top American leaders quietly agreed to continue that policy in practice even while they renounced it in theory.

Assuming these numbers are even remotely correct, the implications are quite remarkable. The toll of the human catastrophe experienced in post-war Germany would certainly rank among the greatest in modern peacetime history, far exceeding the deaths that occurred during the Ukrainian Famine of the early 1930s and possibly even approaching the wholly unintentional losses during Mao’s Great Leap Forward of 1959-61. Furthermore, the post-war German losses would vastly outrank either of these other unfortunate events in percentage terms and this would remain true even if the Bacque’s estimates are considerably reduced. Yet I doubt if even a small fraction of one percent of Americans are today aware of this enormous human calamity. Presumably memories are much stronger in Germany itself, but given the growing legal crackdown on discordant views in that unfortunate country, I suspect that anyone who discusses the topic too energetically risks immediate imprisonment.

To a considerable extent, this historical ignorance has been heavily fostered by our governments, often using underhanded or even nefarious means. Just like in the old decaying USSR, much of the current political legitimacy of today’s American government and its various European vassal-states is founded upon a particular narrative history of World War II, and challenging that narrative might produce dire political consequences. Bacque credibly relates some of the apparent efforts to dissuade any major newspaper or magazine from running articles discussing the startling findings of his first book, thereby imposing a “blackout” aimed at absolutely minimizing any media coverage. Such measures seem to have been quite effective, since until eight or nine years ago, I’m not sure I had ever heard a word of these shocking ideas, and I have certainly never seen them seriously discussed in any of the numerous newspapers or magazines that I have carefully read over the last three decades.

Even illegal means were employed to hinder the efforts of this solitary, determined scholar. At times, Bacque’s phone-lines were tapped, his mail intercepted, and his research materials surreptitiously copied, while his access to some official archives was blocked. Some of the elderly eyewitnesses who personally corroborated his analysis received threatening notes and had their property vandalized.

In his Foreword to this 1997 book, De Zayas, the eminent international human rights attorney, praised Bacque’s ground-breaking research, and hoped that it would soon lead to a major scholarly debate aimed at reassessing the true facts of these historical events that had taken place a half-century earlier. But in his update to the 2007 edition, he expressed some outrage that no such discussion ever occurred, and instead the German government merely passed a series of harsh laws mandating prison sentences for anyone who substantially disputed the settled narrative of World War II and its immediate aftermath, perhaps by overly focusing on the suffering of German civilians.

Although both of Bacque’s books became international best-sellers, the near-complete absence of any secondary media coverage ensured that they never entered public awareness with anything more than a pinprick. Another important factor is the tremendously disproportionate reach of print and electronic media. A best-seller may be read by many tens of thousands of people, but a successful film might reach tens of millions, and so long as Hollywood churns out endless movies denouncing Germany’s atrocities but not a single one on the other side, the true facts of that history are hardly likely to gain much traction. I strongly suspect that far more people today believe in the real-life existence of Batman and Spiderman than are even aware of the Bacque Hypothesis.

Many of the elements presented above were drawn from my previous articles published over the last year or so, but I believe there is some value in providing this same material in unified form rather than only separately, even if the total length necessarily becomes quite considerable.

World War II dominates our twentieth century landscape like a colossus, and still casts huge shadows across our modern world. That global conflict has probably been the subject of far more sustained coverage, whether in print or electronic media, than any other event in human history. So if we encounter a small handful of highly anomalous items that seem to directly contradict such an ocean of enormously detailed and long-accepted information, there is a natural tendency to dismiss these few outliers as implausible or even delusional. But once the total number of such discordant seemingly yet well-documented elements becomes sufficiently large, we must take them more seriously, and perhaps eventually concede that most of them are probably correct. As was suggested in a quote widely if doubtfully attributed to Stalin, “Quantity has a quality all of its own.”

I am hardly the first individual to gradually become aware of this sweeping and cohesive counter-narrative of the Second World War, and a few months ago I happened to read Germany’s War, published in 2014 by amateur historian John Wear. Drawing from sources that substantially overlap with the ones I have discussed, his conclusions are reasonably similar to my own, but presented in a book length form that includes some 1,200 exact source references. So those interested in a much more detailed exposition of these same issues can read it and decide for themselves.

When intellectual freedom is under attack, challenging an officially enshrined mythology may become legally perilous. I have seen claims that thousands of individuals who hold heterodox opinions about various aspects of the history of World War II are today imprisoned across Europe on the basis of those beliefs. If so, that total is probably far higher than the number of ideological dissidents who had suffered a similar fate in the decaying Soviet Bloc countries of the 1980s.

World War II ended nearly three generations ago, and few of its adult survivors still walk the earth. From one perspective the true facts of that conflict and whether or not they actually contradict our traditional beliefs might appear rather irrelevant. Tearing down the statues of some long-dead historical figures and replacing them with the statues of others hardly seems of much practical value.

But if we gradually conclude that the story that all of us have been told during our entire lifetimes is substantially false and perhaps largely inverted, the implications for our understanding of the world are enormous. Most of the surprising material presented here is hardly hidden or kept under lock-and-key. Nearly all the books are easily available at Amazon or even freely readable on the Internet, many of the authors have received critical and scholarly acclaim, and in some cases their works have sold in the millions. Yet this important material has been almost entirely ignored or dismissed by the popular media that shapes the common beliefs of our society. So we must necessarily begin to wonder what other massive falsehoods may have been similarly promoted by that media, perhaps involving incidents of the recent past or even the present day. And those latter events do have enormous practical significance. As I pointed out several years ago in my original American Pravda article:

Aside from the evidence of our own senses, almost everything we know about the past or the news of today comes from bits of ink on paper or colored pixels on a screen, and fortunately over the last decade or two the growth of the Internet has vastly widened the range of information available to us in that latter category. Even if the overwhelming majority of the unorthodox claims provided by such non-traditional web-based sources is incorrect, at least there now exists the possibility of extracting vital nuggets of truth from vast mountains of falsehood.

We must also recognize that many of the fundamental ideas that dominate our present-day world were founded upon a particular understanding of that wartime history, and if there seems good reason to believe that narrative is substantially false, perhaps we should begin questioning the framework of beliefs erected upon it.

George Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s and discovered that the true facts in Spain were radically different from what he had been led to believe by the British media of his day. In 1948 these past experiences together with the rapidly congealing “official history” of the Second World War may have been uppermost in his mind when he published his classic novel 1984, which famously declared that “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

Indeed, as I noted last year this observation has never been more true than when we consider some of the historical assumptions that govern the politics of today’s world, and the likelihood that they are entirely misleading:

Back in those late Cold War days, the death toll of innocent civilians from the Bolshevik Revolution and the first two decades of the Soviet Regime was generally reckoned at running well into the tens of millions when we include the casualties of the Russian Civil War, the government-induced famines, the Gulag, and the executions. I’ve heard that these numbers have been substantially revised downwards to perhaps as little as twenty million or so, but no matter. Although determined Soviet apologists may dispute such very large figures, they have always been part of the standard narrative history taught within the West.

Meanwhile, all historians know perfectly well that the Bolshevik leaders were overwhelmingly Jewish, with three of the five revolutionaries Lenin named as his plausible successors coming from that background. Although only around 4% of Russia’s population was Jewish, a few years ago Vladimir Putin stated that Jews constituted perhaps 80-85% of the early Soviet government, an estimate fully consistent with the contemporaneous claims of Winston Churchill, Times of London correspondent Robert Wilton, and the officers of American Military Intelligence. Recent books by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Yuri Slezkine, and others have all painted a very similar picture. And prior to World War II, Jews remained enormously over-represented in the Communist leadership, especially dominating the Gulag administration and the top ranks of the dreaded NKVD.

Both of these simple facts have been widely accepted in America throughout my entire lifetime. But combine them together with the relatively tiny size of worldwide Jewry, around 16 million prior to World War II, and the inescapable conclusion is that in per capita terms Jews were the greatest mass-murderers of the twentieth century, holding that unfortunate distinction by an enormous margin and with no other nationality coming even remotely close. And yet, by the astonishing alchemy of Hollywood, the greatest killers of the last one hundred years have somehow been transmuted into being seen as the greatest victims, a transformation so seemingly implausible that future generations will surely be left gasping in awe.

Today’s American Neocons are just as heavily Jewish as were the Bolsheviks of a hundred years ago, and they have greatly benefited from the political immunity provided by this totally bizarre inversion of historical reality. Partly as a consequence of their media-fabricated victimhood status, they have managed to seize control over much of our political system, especially our foreign policy, and have spent the last few years doing their utmost to foment an absolutely insane war with nuclear-armed Russia. If they do manage to achieve that unfortunate goal, they will surely outdo the very impressive human body-count racked up by their ethnic ancestors, perhaps even by an order-of-magnitude or more.

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