The Ruling Elite

by Deanna Spingola

  United States Responsibility (14)

  The United States will have full military and civilian representation on all commissions established for the execution of the German program. However, the military forces of Germany’s continental neighbors shall assume the responsibility for policing Germany and for civil administration in Germany. Specifically, this should include Russian, French, Polish, Czech, Greek, Yugoslav, Norwegian, Dutch and Belgian soldiers. Under this program, the United States could withdraw its troops within a relatively short time. 1643

  Germany had absolutely opposed Communism. Yet, on July 2, 1949, Truman appointed McCloy as High Commissioner. McCloy had been Assistant Secretary of War when Truman signed an executive order to abolish policies to prevent Communists from working in the War Department. McCloy, testifying before Congress about Communist agents in the War Department, said that Communism was not an issue in deciding whether to grant a man an army commission. His atrocious record and his behavior towards the Germans after the war justifiably led to German hostility against America. 1644

  Allegedly, the Soviet-inspired Morgenthau Plan was to prevent the Germans from ever threatening world peace again. However, a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, in September 1946, revealed the plan’s other objective—the communization of the nation. The article stated, “The best way for the German people to be driven into the arms of the Soviet Union, was for the United States to stand forth as the champion of indiscriminate and harsh misery in Germany.” In 1953, much too late, J. Edgar Hoover identified Harry Dexter White as a Soviet agent. Secretary Morgenthau approved of White and his colleagues in their construction of the proposition for the “permanent elimination” of Germany as a “world power.” The Morgenthau Plan incalculably benefited the Soviet Union. An impoverished Germany would mean a vulnerable depressed Europe. 1645

  Publicizing the German Camps

  On February 22, 1933, in New York, Alfred Cohen, the president of B’nai B’rith held a special meeting with fifteen of the most prominent Jewish leaders to plan how to wage economic warfare against Germany. The American Jewish Congress (AJC) advocated public protests in America and elsewhere. 1646 On March 12, AJC leaders met again for three hours to plan a national program of protests, parades, and demonstrations. 1647 Jewish people and organizations elsewhere, including those within Germany, began conspiring to destroy Germany’s NS government.

  After International Jewry declared economic war on Germany, officials felt it imperative to incarcerate people who swore to destroy the country. On March 21, Munich Police Chief Heinrich Himmler, in a press release said, “On Wednesday the first concentration camp is to be opened in Dachau with an accommodation for 5,000 persons. All Communists and, where necessary, Reichsbanner and Social Democratic (SD) functionaries who endanger state security are to be concentrated here, as in the long run it is not possible to keep individual functionaries in the state prisons without overburdening these prisons, and on the other hand these people cannot be released because attempts have shown that they persist in their efforts to agitate and organize as soon as they are released.” 1648

  Dachau

  On April 4, The New York Times confirmed that the Germans were going to use the abandoned Dachau munitions works, about a half hour from Munich, as a camp for political prisoners such as communists. 1649 Dachau inmates worked in various jobs and received money, usable within the camp. 1650 Two-thirds of the inmates were political prisoners and nearly one-third were Jewish. There were also German and non-German criminals, ranging from the lowest to the highest social strata. At Buchenwald, another camp, there were habitual criminals like Frenchmen Léon Blum and Julien Cain, and Czechs like Klement Gottwald and Richard Blank. German inmates included Werner Hilpert and Eugen Kogon. Even Princess Mafalda was there. Another group, those who opposed national socialism, remained unrestricted in Germany, and many made spurious post-war claims. 1651

  Germany had two classifications of prisoners, Jews they had identified as enemy aliens and civilians deported from various countries, people they viewed a danger to the State or to occupation forces. 1652 According to numerous accounts, including those of Paul Rassinier, the communists, the first criminals that they incarcerated, ultimately controlled the inmates, especially at Buchenwald. Rassinier, a former inmate there and at Dora, and the author of Crossing the Line said that Germany concentrated the enemies of the NS state in camps as a “gesture of compassion” where they could not do damage to the new regime and where “they could be protected from the public anger.” According to Rassinier, camp policy protected the anti-social elements and helped to rehabilitate them and “bring them back to a healthier concept of the German community” where they could be “more productive.” 1653 In all probability, communist agents operated within every camp. 1654

  James G. McDonald, president of the American Foreign Policy Association, the first U.S. Ambassador to Israel, visited Dachau and published an atrocity story in The New York Times, dated September 11, 1933. On July 23, 1948, Truman would appoint him as the Special Representative to Israel, an appointment that Defense Secretary James Forrestal opposed. The real atrocity at Dachau would actually occur towards the end of the war. Allied bombing caused widespread famine during which about 25,613 prisoners perished with another 10,000 dying in the sub-camps, typically from disease, malnutrition and suicide. There was also a typhus epidemic at Dachau in early 1945, which left the survivors looking like walking cadavers.

  The government established camps near factories or industry; essentially these functioned as labor camps for German corporations. They built roads, worked in gravel pits, and later in armaments production. On May 20, 1940, the Germans founded a camp at the site of a compound of two-story well-built brick barracks in Auschwitz, a town founded by Germans in 1270. In 1939, the town had a population of about 12,000 and was the site of one of Europe’s largest railroad hubs. Austrians had built the barracks in 1916, later used by the Polish Army. 1655

  German Prince Philipp of Hesse, who joined the NSDAP in 1930, married Princess Mafalda on September 23, 1925, the daughter of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, giving him the opportunity to act as liaison between the two governments. On September 8, 1943, the German government arrested him and withdrew his NSDAP membership, dismissed him from the Luftwaffe and sent him to Flossenburg camp and incarcerated his wife in Buchenwald. On September 20, camp leaders placed her in the camp brothel under a false name. 1656 The Germans gave each prisoner at Buchenwald a certain number of marks each week to buy cigarettes or other items at the camp canteen, to visit the camp brothel, or to credit to a savings account. All the camps issued currency to the inmates. 1657

  The Allies bombed the large munitions factory close to Buchenwald, killing about eighty and wounding 300 other guards. The bombing also killed approximately 400 prisoners and wounded about 1,450, with 600 seriously injured, including Princess Mafalda. The camp hospital was unable to give her adequate care. 1658 She died on August 27, 1944, because of her injuries. 1659 Surely, the Americans did not intend to bomb a prison camp. The camps were probably the safest place for people, especially the Jews. They were away from the bombing and public outrage.

  Regarding the bombing of camps, on June 18, 1944, Jacob Rosenheim, of the Agudas Israel World Organization (New York), sent a letter to Henry Morgenthau, asking that the United States bomb the rail lines going into Auschwitz. He claimed that the Germans were using them to deport Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz gas chambers. On August 9, A. Leon Kubowitzki, head of the Rescue Department of the WJC in New York wrote to the War Department requesting that America bomb Auschwitz’s crematoria. This is odd, given that it would certainly have killed many prisoners. John J. McCloy, Assistant War Secretary, responded, “Such an operation could be executed only by the diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations elsewhere.” 1660

  Deaths in the camps

>   On October 2, 1944, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had alerted German officials of the imminent destruction of the transportation system which would cause inevitable starvation throughout Germany. ICRC delegates found absolutely no evidence in the camps in Axis-occupied Europe of any calculated policy to exterminate the Jews. The ICRC’s 1,600 page report makes no reference to a gas chamber or chambers cunningly disguised as shower facilities or any deliberate extermination. The delegates inspected the bath, shower and laundry facilities at the camps. Admittedly, the Jews, like others, suffered during the war. The ICRC worked with Vatican representatives and both entities, unlike many others, refused to engage in “the irresponsible charges of genocide.” 1661

  On November 18, McCloy wrote to John W. Pehle, the director of the WRB, in response to Pehle’s request of November 8. McCloy said that the War Department could not authorize the bombing of Auschwitz, a task that would require precision bombing in order to halt the reported gassing of the Jews. Two eye-witnesses related stories about the gassings at Auschwitz and Birkenau. In late November, because of the imminent arrival of the Soviet army, the Germans purportedly ordered the destruction of the “killing machinery” at Auschwitz. The Americans “repeatedly declined” the request to bomb Auschwitz, an “example of “a deaf ear being turned to the Jews.” Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum, authors working with the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum (USHMM), claim that it was evidence of insensitivity and prejudice. The authors state that there were people in the State Department who “were unwilling to prioritize Jewish concerns.” 1662

  The ICRC distributed relief to 183,000 Romanian Jews until the Soviets occupied Romania and then stopped all assistance. The ICRC “never succeeded in sending anything whatsoever to Russia.” This termination of aid also occurred in many of the German camps after their Soviet “liberation.” The ICRC distributed vast amounts of food to Auschwitz until the Soviet occupation and before Germany evacuated many of the internees to the west. It attempted to send relief to the remaining internees but the Soviets prohibited it. However, the ICRC was able to continue sending food to those former Auschwitz inmates who the Germans transferred to other camps such as Buchenwald and Oranienburg. 1663

  The ICRC Report explains the main cause of death in the camps towards the war’s end. It states, “In the chaotic condition of Germany after the invasion during the final months of the war, the camps received no food supplies at all and starvation claimed an increasing number of victims.” On February 1, 1945, concerned German officials spoke with the ICRC President about the dire, catastrophic situation in the camps. In March, SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner authorized continued ICRC food distribution and the installation of one ICRC delegate to remain at each camp. The ICRC declared that the food supplies stopped due to the Allied bombing of the German transportation system. On March 15, in the interest of the Jewish internees, the ICRC protested against “the barbarous aerial warfare of the Allies.” The ICRC report states that Germany used most of the Jewish doctors from the camps to fight typhus on the eastern front. Thus, they were absent when typhus erupted in the camps in 1945. 1664 Interestingly, the allies would indict and try Kaltenbrunner at the first Nuremberg Trial where they found him guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Allies executed him on October 16, 1946.

  During the war, the JDC of New York and other Jewish organizations collected money that they used for relief services. The German Government allowed the JDC to have offices in Berlin until the U.S. Government, top-heavy with Marxist agents, entered the nation. Thereafter, the strict Allied blockade of all of Europe prevented the ICRC from fully implementing its massive relief distribution operation. They then purchased most of the relief food in Romania, Hungary and Slovakia. The last time that ICRC delegates visited Theresienstadt was on April 6, 1945 when they found favorable conditions. The camp, used exclusively for Jews, held about 40,000 deportees from various countries. The Germans allowed the inmates to administer this camp as an almost autonomous town. 1665

  In late 1944 and early 1945, because of the allied advancement into Germany, they relocated thousands of prisoners to Bergen-Belsen in Northern Germany. This created a serious situation because of the dwindling food supply. In July 1944, there were about 7,300 prisoners there. In December, that population had doubled and by February 1945, there were 22,000 inmates. The overcrowding, poor sanitation, inadequate food and water created the perfect environment for typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and dysentery, causing thousands of deaths. On April 15, British forces liberated the camp and discovered about sixty thousand sick and dying inmates and thousands of unburied dead bodies. 1666During the American Civil War, for every battle-related death, two men died from disease. Up through World War II, more soldiers died of disease than combat. 1667 During World War I, German and Austrian officials determined that regular bathing and the steam disinfection of their clothing minimized the occurrence of typhus among the soldiers, which could have also affected the civilian population. 1668

  A Picture Is Worth More than the Truth

  Before the allies even liberated the camps, people made unsubstantiated claims. Joachim Hoffmann, in Stalin’s War of Extermination, 1941-1945, provides a copy of a newspaper page, the Soviet War News, dated December 22, 1944, wherein Ilya Ehrenburg announced that the Germans had killed 6,000,000 Jews at Auschwitz, which the Soviets liberated, over a month later, on January 27, 1945. Ehrenburg stated “In regions they seized, the Germans killed all the Jews, from the old folk to infants in arms. Ask any German prisoner of war why his compatriots’ annihilated six million innocent people and he will simply answer: Well, they were Jews.” He reiterated the claim on January 4, 1945, in the same Soviet newspaper, and again on March 15. 1669

  April 11, 1945, Heinrich Himmler relinquished Bergen-Belsen. The British 11th Armoured Division liberated it on April 15, and found approximately 53,000 prisoners. Up to 35,000 inmates died of typhus in the first few months of 1945, before and after the liberation. Thus, the allies did not need a lot of creative imagery at Belsen because, with the Allied bombing, the overcrowding, and the lack of food and water due to that bombing, there were thousands of unburied dead bodies. Therefore, they did not need to haul in dead Germans from Eisenhower’s enclosures. The Allied bombing transformed the camp into a gruesome catastrophic scene of disease, starvation, and death.

  General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces (SHAEF), heard reports about Buchenwald and stories about stolen treasures in Thüringen. On April 12, he, along with Generals George S. Patton and Omar Bradley, visited the underground salt mine at Merkers-Kieselbach, where the Germans had stashed gold, foreign currency, and art treasures. While in the vicinity, his group toured Ohrdruf-Nord, a small camp near Gotha established in November 1944, part of the Buchenwald camp network. On the evening of April 13, Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton discussed the camps with Hodges. Eisenhower said, “The only speck of optimism I can see is that I really don’t think that the bulk of the Germans knew what was going on.” Patton reported that the mayor of Gotha and his wife committed suicide after seeing the horrors of Ohrdruf-Nord. 1670

  The Buchenwald Gate

  At the close of World War II, Americans were understandably outraged and horrified by film footage of the emaciated survivors, the dead and the dying at Buchenwald, liberated by the Third U.S. Army on April 11. Hermann Pister was the camp commander (1942-1945) which was near Weimar, Thuringia. Troops from the U.S. Eightieth Infantry Division arrived there on April 12. 1671 On April 15, Eisenhower notified General Marshall, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He wrote, “But the most interesting, although horrible, sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha… The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick… I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first hand evidence of these th
ings if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.” 1672

  Colonel Donald B. Robinson, the Chief Historian of the U.S. Military Government in Germany, wrote an article, Communist Atrocities at Buchenwald, in the October 1946 issue of American Mercury. On April 11, 1945, U.S. troops liberated Buchenwald, soon turning it over to the Soviets who converted it into a camp to house their enemies. Robinson noted some interesting details in an Army report at Eisenhower’s headquarters. Apparently, about 300 communists, through the Labor Office, seized and controlled the camp’s self-government and then dominated the 60,000 inmates until the war’s end, determining those they would allow to either eat or starve to death. Robinson said that the official report emphatically stated “the communist trustees were directly responsible for a large part of the brutalities committed at Buchenwald.” He said that, in addition to the Labor Office, which dispensed work assignments and sent inmates to hard-labor camps, the German communists controlled and completely staffed the camp hospital. It catered to German communists and reserved the scarce drugs for communist patients. 1673

  On April 18, The New York Times (editor: Arthur Sulzberger) reported that four million people died at Auschwitz. Apparently, the Times and the Soviets used the same sources. According to a Soviet announcement on May 7, four million of the reported six million, “died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.” Rudolf Höss, former Auschwitz commander, would later admit that the Germans had deliberately exterminated four million Jews there. The Allies would arrest him on March 11, 1946, and after three days of brutal torture, he finally confessed. British Military Intelligence Sergeant Bernard Clarke, a Jew, and four British soldiers extracted his confession. 1674 His testimony was the basis for the claim that the Germans systematically exterminated the Jews, especially in gas chambers. 1675