Addendum
Drancy
Drancy camp, located in a northern suburb of Paris, some ten kilometres from the city centre became synonymous with barbarity imposed upon the interred population. Designed in a U shape with five storey buildings surrounding an open yard area, the camp was originally a housing project intended to accommodate seven hundred but during the years of occupation, this number was often as high as seven thousand. The camp became a ‘waiting room’ for Auschwitz and overloaded freight trains from nearby Bobigny station transported thousands to their deaths in horrendous conditions. The French police Gendarmerie who administered the camp until July 1943, were noted for their extreme brutality by layering sadistic measures upon the already suffering inmates.
When SS captain, Alois Brunner became commandant, he elevated merciless severity to a new level. He continued the catalogue of compliance demanded by Berlin to fill the trains with Jews and what the regime regarded as ‘undesirables’. As the camp population swelled, human survival requirements were nonexistent. Overflowing sewage, limited water, straw bedding, no food or medical support of any kind, all ensured that disease, diarrhoea and infections were rampant.
When the Allies, with the support of the French resistance, finally liberated the camp in 1944, the years of German occupation disclosed that eighty thousand, five thousand of whom were children, passed through the camp before final annihilation in Auschwitz and other camps.
The present day memorial sculpture in Drancy by the artist Shlomo Selinger, which marks the horrors that took place there, is appropriately titled ‘The Gates of Hell’.
Heydrich.
SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich.
Heydrich’s mother, Elizabeth, starved to death in Dresden at the end of the war. His younger brother, Heinz, committed suicide. His widow, Lina, made it back to the island of Fehmarn in Schleswig-Holstein where she operated a small hotel business. She successfully took a legal action against the German government to grant her a General’s state pension. She died in 1985. Heydrich’s daughter, Marte, who was born after he was assassinated, has a fashion shop in Fehmarn. His only remaining son, Heider, worked as an engineer in the aircraft industry in Germany. There is no known record or account of the life of the daughter named Silke, she reportedly died some years ago. The magnitude of Heydrichs crimes created certainty that he would have been executed at Nuremberg. Carl Oberg and Helmut Knochen, both SS protégé’s of Heydrich, responsible for terror, torture and mass deportations of Jews from France were found guilty and sentenced to death by military court. Their sentences were subsequently reduced to life imprisonment. Incurring international outrage from the media and resistance groups, President Charles de Gaulle granted them Presidential pardons in 1962. Both died free men. (Oberg 1965:Knochen 2003)
Otto Abetz
The German ambassador to occupied France, Otto Abetz, was sentenced by a French court to twenty years imprisonment in 1949 for crimes against humanity mainly for deportations to Drancy. He was released in April 1954. He was killed in 1958 in an auto accident in Dusseldorf under suspicious circumstances. The speculation was that the French resistance had finally caught up with him.
Carlos Niedermann
Carlos Niedermann, the Manager of Chase Bank in occupied Paris, who rejoiced in the ‘esteemed patronage’ of the Nazi elite and was supported throughout by his New York head office disappeared after the war.
Thomas McKittrick
Thomas McKittrick, the American President of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland from 1940 – ‘46, doing the bidding of the Reich, joined Chase Bank as director and Senior Vice-President after the war, copper-fastening the close relationship between the two banks. He died in 1970.
Bishop Alois Hudal
Alois Hudal.
Bishop Alois Hudal, the Catholic rector of the Collegio Teutonico de Santa dell’Anima (Theological Seminary) in Rome, who embraced the Nazi ideology and was the man who organised the fake documentation for such notorious criminals as Franz Stangl, Commandant of Treblinka Death Camp (Franz Stangl did not even use an alias but travelled under his own name!), Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, Gustav Wagner, Klaus Barbie and also Alois Brunner, to enable them to flee to Syria and South America. These odious and treacherous remnants of humanity were facilitated by his intervention in escaping the justice of the hangman’s rope which the souls of millions of their victims demanded. A very influential figure in Vatican affairs, he was bestowed and elevated to the title of ‘Papal Throne Assistant’. Alois Hudal died in 1963 and is buried in Rome.
IBM
The Hollerith Punch Card System, custom designed and constantly updated, supplied and serviced by IBM, provided the technology to the Nazis enabling them to identify all Jews and what they considered other undesirables throughout the Reich. There were in excess of 2000 (two thousand) machines in Germany, compiling knowledge and interpreting facts, also there were thousands more machines in the occupied countries. The cross-tabulation of these systems provided the information to efficiently recognise individuals and determine their complete profile. All the trains, which transported millions to their deaths, ran on IBM technology. IBM having carried out the ‘Racial Census', continued to print the cards, aware of their malicious intent. They were profiled in great detail; one description read sondorbohandlung, meaning ‘special treatment’, which was a one-way route to the gas chamber.
Initially, the tattoos in Auschwitz were Hollerith (IBM) numbers, to enable slave labour workers to be efficiently recorded and traced. Krakov in Poland was a massive central facility for the Hollerith system enabling the policy of plunder to fill the ghettos and work camps. Millions of punch cards provided and serviced by IBM’s subsidiary ensured the functioning of this process. It is estimated that 1.5 Billion cards were printed annually during the war.
These systems were not just a one-off alliance with Nazi Germany; the machines had to be continually programmed. Their automation provided the opportunity to fuel the Holocaust and swell the death camps. Confronted with the evidence and accusations in recent years the response from IBM was obfuscation, claiming they had no records of the period. The best explanation offered was ‘We are a technology company, not historians!’
It should be noted that there was no ideological motive for IBM to support the Nazis, they were not anti-semitic. Their agenda was purely about the money and the substantial commissions that could be generated. The Holocaust would nevertheless have taken place without the assistance of IBM, but there is no doubt that their technological support enabled the process to operate with greater speed. The company DEHOMAG (Deutsche Hollerith – Maschinen Gesellschaft) which was the facilitator of the Holocaust merely changed its name after the war to IBM Germany.
The author wrote to IBM requesting them to comment “specifically on the company’s participation in facilitating the National Socialist policies in Europe”. No response to this query was forthcoming.
Chase Bank
Chase Bank was probably the only prominent American international bank to remain open in occupied Paris throughout the war. It benefited from the monetary bounty resulting from the plunder of Jewish assets in cash, property and artworks seized by the Germans. The Bank complied with enforcing legislation against Jewish assets and froze funds owned by Jews. The main stockholder was John D Rockefeller Jnr., also of Standard Oil. Foreign exchange transactions through Chase enabled the Nazi’s to convert Reichmarks into dollars, a function denied them by other financial institutions. Walter Funk was President of the Reichsbank and a Director of the Bank for International Settlements. He was convicted of war crimes at Nuremburg where he was noted as being the ‘Banker of gold teeth’ (referring to the plunder from camps) and served a prison sentence which was for life. On his release because of ill health, he applied for an American visa and gave Chase Bank as a reference, further confirming the close ties between the organisations.
The author’s letter requesting a response from Chase Bank justif
ying their support for the ‘odious regime’ of the Nazis and their role in plunder received no response.
Standard Oil
The American oil company, Standard Oil, had an alliance with Nazi Germany through its link up with I.G Farben (The company that supplied Zyklon B to annihilate the Jews in gas chambers), providing patents that enabled the Germans to extract fuel from coal. Standard Oil was the largest petroleum company in the world at the time of the war – its bankers were Chase. Standard Oil manufactured and supplied the patents for tetraethyl (fuel additive) without which the Luftwaffe could not fly. In defiance of Allied concerns, Standard Oil re-registered oil tankers under Panamanian flags and shipped fully loaded oil tankers to neutral Spain (Tenerife) where transfers took place to empty German ships for dispatch to Hamburg, to assist the Axis war effort. A subsequent committee of the U.S. Senate, headed by Harry Truman (later President), described the behaviour of Standard Oil as ‘treasonable’.
Alois Brunner
Alois Brunner.
Adolf Eichmann described him as ‘’my most valuable and best man’’. A major figure in the implementation of deportations and exterminations, known for his exceptional brutality and ardent anti Semitism.
Alois Brunner took a long time to recover some semblance of his former being. He was a shambling dishevelled figure boarding a freight ship bound for the Middle East from the Port of Genoa with fake Red Cross documentation provided by Catholic Bishop Alois Hudal. In Damascus Syria, he was protected by the dictator, Hafez al-Assad for many years, where he continued his perfidious lifestyle. He is ‘credited’ with designing the ‘German chair’, an instrument of torture resulting in paralysis used against opponents of the regime. By all accounts, he suffered an ignominious end in Syria, being held in squalid conditions, having outlived his usefulness to that country’s intelligence chiefs.
Vatican
The Concordat of 1933, being the first interstate document signed by the Third Reich, guaranteed the religious freedom for Catholics but demanded that there would be no interference in political matters from the Vatican. This agreement was an endorsement of Fascism and gave recognition and approval (however tacit) that German State policy was anti-semitic, effectively guaranteeing church silence to the future brutal policies that followed. It was at very best incongruous that one of the basic tenets of Catholicism whereby all souls are equal, should sign up to an agreement that promoted Aryan superiority over all other races.
The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 extinguished Jewish rights in the Third Reich. Inter marriage with Ayrans was prohibited and they were excluded from the professions such as medicine and law, while also being barred from positions in the civil and public service. Jews were not even permitted to fly the German flag or even wear the colours of the Reich. Finally, realising the intentions of the regime, the church reacted during the papacy of Pius X1 with a document titled ‘Mit Brennender Sorge’ (with burning concern), secretly smuggled into Germany for fear of censorship. It was read in Catholic churches on Palm Sunday 1937, criticising Nazi policies and stating that humanity and rights derived from God and not from a ‘mad prophet’. But it was ‘too little, too late’. They were already committed through the Concordat of 1933. The attitude of the Vatican was a paradigm of indecision.
The Jesuit magazine, La Civilta Cattolica, had a long history of publishing anti-semitic articles and some of these were reported in Hitler’s pamphlets and the Nazi weekly Der Sturmer. Endorsing these sentiments, the Jesuitical dictat Decree de Generer banned, until 1946, all Jewish converts from entering the Jesuit order.
The silence of Pope Pius X11 during the war gave rise to contentious debate Ref. John Cornwell’s book, Hitler’s Pope. Pius XII was from an upper-class Italian background and had an ascetic personality which appeared to elevate him above world issues closer to his celestial deity. The Catholic newspaper Orizzonte, quoted Pius X11 on his opinion of Mussolini, ‘’He is the greatest man I have ever met, and is unquestionably the most deeply good man’’. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, this statement was never retracted. There is no record of any papal mass being said after the war for the victims of the Holocaust. As Pope, he never recognised the state of Israel, an omission he justified on theological issues.
The Vatican’s reaction to the charges of indifference and ambiguous attitude to the horrors of the Holocaust are well illustrated in voluminous recordings on the subject. The indictment stands that not one member of the SS, despite being labelled a criminal organisation and with approximately 35% of their make-up being Catholic, was excommunicated by the Vatican. The Wehrmacht displayed on their belt buckles ‘Gott mit uns’ (God with us), while the SS had ‘Meine Ehre Heist Treue’ (My Honour is Loyalty)
The savagery of the SS, particularly on the Eastern Front where their barbarity was given a ‘free hand’, should have been anathema to the values of the Catholic Church, and resulted in their censure. But the priorities of the religious heirarchy’s reaction to these revulsions are questioned when they thought it necessary to ban books by Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, yet permitted Mein Kampf which clearly and unequivocally set out its damning intentions in over seven hundred pages frequently referring to the Jewish Peril and the bloody process to purge them. In this context, the ex-communication of the propaganda minister Josef Goebbels from the Catholic Church, not as a result of his mendacious propaganda, but because he married a divorced Protestant, also raises issues as to where on their ‘scale' of values was the distinction between the horrors of the Holocaust and so-called Christian adherence.
Bank for International Settlements (BIS)
The BIS, based in Basel, Switzerland, has historically been questioned concerning its role with the advance and aims of National Socialism and its close association with German financiers/industrialists of that period. The original purpose of the bank was to facilitate reparation payments from Germany brought about as punishment for First World War crimes. It was created by international treaty and serves as financial agent for global agreements.
Many publications and articles have addressed the issue of some of the gold deposits made in the BIS during the war, particularly as to its source and whether it was plundered from victims of the concentration camps. The German influence on the Board of Directors over the years was very strong. Hjalmar Schacht, ex-Reichsbank President was a director, also Walter Funk, a major war criminal. Paul Hechler, member of the Reichsbank and member of the German Trade Delegation to South America, (always signed his correspondence Heil Hitler) was also a senior executive of BIS.; Hans Luther, former President of Reichsbank and former ambassador to Washington was a board member. A high profile director of the BIS board was the economist Emil Puhl, formerly with the Reichsbank, who was sentenced to imprisonment at Nuremberg for war crimes primarily for plundering gold from concentration camp victims.
Probably one of the greatest ‘stains' on the history of the BIS was its complicity in transferring twenty three tons of gold from German-occupied Czechoslovakia held in its accounts to ultimately end up in Berlin in the vaults of the Reichsbank. Looted gold from occupied European countries from the Reichsbank found its way to the BIS and what amount of this gold originated from victims of the ‘Final Solution' has provoked debate and created suspicion. In a detailed publication at the London Conference (2-4 Dec. 1997) on the subject of ‘Nazi Gold', an address on the subject confirmed that "The BIS insisted that in receiving gold from the Reichsbank, the bank had always acted in good faith, asking the Reichsbank for assurances that the gold delivered to the BIS originated from the Reichsbank's pre-war gold reserves. Such assurances, however, were only given orally, never in writing". In many instances, Jews who had spent years following various financial trails in an effort to trace plundered money from victims of the Holocaust were confronted with the cynical query, ‘have you a death certificate from Auschwitz’?. The author corresponded with the BIS who did suggest that they would ‘talk off the record’. This offer was not availed of.
The Red Cross humanitarian organisation with the assistance of the Vatican issued visas to SS criminals fleeing Europe to safe havens in South America and the Middle East. Travel documents were provided to mass murderers and ironically a lot of them exited through the port of Genoa on board various ships also being used by surviving Jews seeking a new life overseas, unknowing that they were side by side with their tormentors. Thousands of these travel documents were issued to genuine refugees, but amongst them were the Nazi criminals. This period will forever remain a dark stain on the history of the Red Cross.
Madelaine Bridon
Madelaine is a fictional character whose personality is reflective of a female Resistance fighter occupying a key position in a corporate firm enabling her to obstruct and hinder the objectives of the occupying National Socialists.
The heroism and self-sacrifice displayed by members of the French Resistance is uplifting to the human spirit as documented in activities of the SOE (Special Operations Executive) and portrayed in the lives of brave women typified by Violet Szabo, aged twenty three, (tortured mercilessly by the Gestapo, but never revealed her mission or named comrades) and the New Zealander Nancy Wake (honoured by both France and England). Wake, was nick named ‘The white mouse’ by the Gestapo and was number one on their wanted list. Many of these young women were prepared to risk and forfeit their lives for their belief in freedom and democracy. Their courage and idealism live on in their triumph over appalling adversity, and the part they played in preserving a heritage free from oppression for future generations. Despite the recognition given to female resistance fighters, France only brought into legislation women’s suffrage (Vote) in 1945.
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