Thread by @ThetaNought

Excerpts from, “The Splendid Blond Beast” by a true American hero, Christopher Simpson (Pictured)

“According to psychologist Ervin Staub, genocidal societies usually go through an evolution during which the different strata of society literally learn how to commit group murder.

The ideologies of such parties as the Nazis or the Ittihad can vary in important respects, but they are nonetheless often similar in that they create unity among “in-group” members through dehumanization of outsiders.

For much of the German economic elite, their cooperation in atrocities was offered to Hitler’s government in exchange for its aid in maintaining their status. #genocide

To claim that study if the Holocaust must be separate from all other inquiries “romanticizes evil and gives it mythic proportions,” contends Ervin Staub, who is himself a survivor of the Jewish ghetto at Budapest. #Holocaust #genocide

The tendency in some quarters to mystify the Holocaust can actually rob it of significance, according to Yehuda Bauer, head of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University. #Holocaust #genocide

Discussion of the Holocaust with other atrocities does not mean they are simplistically equivalent, Bauer insisted.

Instead, it is appropriate to compare events accurately, including instances of genocide, and to discern the differences among them on the basis of facts.

Genocidal societies also show a marked tendency toward what psychologists call “just world” thinking: Victims are believed to have brought their suffering upon themselves and, thus, to deserve what they get. #Genocide

By dividing up responsibility for extermination into explicable, functional parts, the Nazi party and SS enlisted and united the German state and most of German society into the countless little tasks necessary to conduct mass murder. #genocide

The SS did not fool German bureaucrats into cooperation. Rather, the Wannsee conference illustrates how Nazi-dominated society created a social consciousness that both facilitated the extermination program and denied its existence. #genocide

The evidence shows that, despite later denials, much of the corporate elite of Germany was well aware of the Nazis’ extermination programs. Thousands of German corporate directors and senior managers knowingly contributed to murders carried out by their institutions. #genocide

Industrial barracks became de facto concentration camps, w/barbed wire, searchlights & armed guards hired by the companies. Managers from Krupp, IG Farben & Daimler Benz enforced regulations under which laborers were punished by beatings, hangings, or deportation to death camps.

Krupp kept 1,100 French prisoners of war in dog kennels at Noeggerathstrasse in Essen, where each 6 ft wide, 3 ft hugh enclosure provided sleeping space for five inmates. There was no running water at Noeggerathstrasse.

In the end, German industry worked several million of these men and women to death, and permanently injured millions more.

Kennan was out of step with FDR’s hard-line policies towards the Nazis, but he was not alone.

The public pattern of Nazi crimes fell outside the realm of what these men considered criminal. For them, Germany’s forced labor seemed little more than a particularly harsh solution to problems that were common to US and German elites. #genocide

The USSR’s relentless drive to destroy Nazism root & branch reflected a desire for justice, to be sure, but it was also a national security strategy that exploited the weaknesses of its opponents.

Thus, the Soviets saw a hard Western line on Nazi crimes as an indication that the alliance with the USSR was solid.

They interpreted Western waffling on this issue, on the other hand, as a warning that some new intrigue against the USSR might be afoot. [my note: it was.]

There was more to this than Machiavellian politics. By early 1942, the Nazis had wreaked destruction in the USSR that went well beyond the understanding of most in the West. They killed millions of Soviets, looted everything from machines to the gold from the mouths of the dead.

Like the Nazis, Stalin & his security forces may have also learned genocide by doing it, considering the earlier purge trials & famine in Ukraine. But the NKVD’s crime in Katyn & Stalin’s refusal to take responsibility for it seriously undermined Allied unity against Nazi Germany

at a time when the survival of the USSR itself was at stake. The atrocity helped lay the groundwork for the cold war, and in time became an enduring symbol of Soviet-Polish enmity.

The destinies of the world were handed them on a plate in 1920. Their piglike rush for immediate profits knocked over the whole feast in nine years. These are the people, with an ignorance equalled only by their impudence, who set themselves up as leaders of the country. -H. Pell

Herbert Pell, FDR’s US representative to the UNWCC, warmed that German business cartels had been instrumental in Hitler’s rise to power and the execution of the war, and unless this seeming monolith was dismantled, it would provoke yet another war after Hitler was gone.

The Soviets were first to put Nazi collaborators and SS on trial for the murder of Jewish civilians. Unlike the other Allies, they didn’t simply let most of them go free.

The collaborators used fake Red Cross vans to lure their victims.

#genocide

“Too many people here and in England hold the view that the German people as a whole are not responsible for what has taken place—that only a few Nazi leaders are responsible. That unfortunately is not based on fact.

The German people as a whole must have it driven home to them that the whole nation has been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization.” —FDR

Under U.S. criminal law, prosecutors have the option of bringing an additional charge of conspiracy anytime two or more persons act “by concerted action to accomplish an unlawful purpose,” that is, to work together to violate a law.

In Aachen, “Under the nose of the US Military Government,” Saul Padover concluded, the new administration was “setting up the framework of an authoritarian, hierarchical, bureaucratic, corporate fascism—a type of Staendestaat that even the Nazis had rejected.”

At Aachen the town and its surroundings had been in the hands of a coalition government made up of left-centrists, Social Democrats, and Communists for most of the decade prior to Hitler’s assumption of power.

One of the first public opinion surveys conducted by US forces in Germany found that 70 percent of the women and 83 percent of the men interviewed at random said that they would cote for Social Democrat or Communist candidates if elections were held.

Theoretically, at least, the citizens of Aachen would have elected a more democratic and anti-Nazi administration had the military government permitted elections to be held.

Shortly before he took up his OSS post in Berlin, Allen Dulles guaranteed de facto asylum to SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff—the highest-ranking SS officer to survive the war—and to a collection of Wolff’s most senior aides.

The details of Dulles’s deal with this particular Nazi have remained buried in classified U.S. government files for more than forty years.

But the record is clear. Whether Dulles intended it or not, his strategy for exploiting former Nazi leaders to advance purported US interests had sweeping implications for US-Soviet/German relations, for war crimes prosecutions and the UNWCC, and even for world peace.

Senior US and British military commanders in Italy concluded that the Sunrise project wad little more than a desperate SS effort to fracture Allied unity, and told Dulles to cut off all contact with Wolff and his emissaries.

The US-British Chiefs of Staff are known to have opened an investigation into Dulles’s dereliction of duty & refusal to obey orders in connection with the Wolff rescue but the records of this inquiry have disappeared from OSS & military files & have yet to be rediscovered.

What can be seen, then, was a tough policy on paper useful for pacifying public opinion in the West, for making promises to the Soviets, and for general public relations purposes. Meanwhile the upper echelons of the US occupation government

agreed as early as the summer of 1945 that a thorough denazification and decartelization of theGerman economy would never be attempted, regardless of what might be said for public consumption.

The “subsequent proceedings“ trials at Nuremberg, prosecuted under the command of General Telford Taylor (pictured), proved to be one of the most comprehensive efforts to prosecute the perpetrators of genocide. His efforts were ultimately undermined by Allen Dulles and others.

Opposition within the US to denazification and decartelization in Germany was led almost exclusively by the corporate and foreign policy elite that had been most active in the US-German financial relations during the 1920s and 1930s.

The US gov cut off funding for the prosecution staff at Nuremberg in mid-1948, bringing the Subsequent Proceedings to an abrupt end. Less than 2.5 years after that, the US high commissioner, John McCloy, granted clemency to every industrialist who had been convicted at Nuremberg.

The US abandonment of denazification and decartelization was not a product of the cold war—it was a cause of it, and a considerably more important cause than was recognized in the West at the time.

The present world order supplies stability and rationality of a sort for human society, while its day-to-day operations chew up the weak, the scapegoats, and almost anyone else in its way.

It is individual human beings who make the day-to-day decisions that create genocide, reward mass murder, and ease the escape of the guilty.

But social systems usually protect these individuals from responsibility for “authorized” acts, in part by providing rationalizations that present systematic brutality as a necessary evil.

@threadreaderapp please unroll