El otro secreto de los papeles de Panamá. Erhard Mossack

ERHARD MOSSACK. Es el primero por la derecha. En noviembre de 1942,
fue adscrito a uno de los escuadrones de las temibles Totenkopf (cabeza de muerto),
cuya insignia era una calavera.

Decían en Panamá que Mossack tenía más poder que el presidente del país, y ahora todos lo ven confirmado...

Ésta es la historia de lo que nadie decía. De él. Y de su padre, espía y nazi. Erhard 'vendía' secretos; su hijo, el paraíso del dinero

MARTÍN MUCHA
@Mart1nMucha
10/04/2016 03:32

Erhard Guenther Mossack (16 de abril de 1924), nacido en Grube-Ericka, el nazi, era un hombre de rostro adusto, 176 centímetros de estatura y varias cicatrices: en los dedos y debajo del brazo izquierdo, donde se cortó la piel para borrar un tatuaje que revelaba su vínculo con las SS. Su oficio: cerrajero y miembro de la temible división Totenkopf (que se puede traducir literalmente como "cabeza de muerto"). Cuando lo atraparon las fuerzas aliadas vendería información para salvarse. A eso se dedicaría el resto de su vida.

Su hijo, Jürgen Rolf Dieter Mossack (20 de marzo de 1948), nacido en Fürth, ciudad de Baviera, unos 178 centímetros, piel sin marcas por heridas a simple vista. Su profesión: abogado creador de empresas offshore, protagonista de los #PanamaPapers. Los 11,5 millones de archivos clasificados, procedentes del bufete que fundó (Mossack Fonseca), se consideran el mayor escándalo de filtración de documentos confidenciales de la historia. Jürgen Mossack, multimillonario, díscolo y vanidoso, buscaba ser una sombra para la sociedad panameña. Lo había aprendido de su padre, el nazi, quien llegaría incluso a ofrecerse como espía para Estados Unidos.

La mansión de Jürgen Mossack en los Altos del Golf, una urbanización en Panamá donde viven expresidentes, diplomáticos y magnates, la misma donde residía el dictador Manuel Antonio Noriega, está protegida. Alrededor circulan berlinas del máximo lujo y vigilantes de seguridad. Las cámaras siempre están grabando. A diferencia de su padre, él tiene varios sobrenombres, le llaman: El alemán, El teutón, El nazi. El último apelativo es más reciente. Desde que se desvelaron sus contactos internacionales ha pasado al escondite.

Antes, si bien apenas ha dado un puñado de entrevistas a lo largo de su existencia, se codeaba con la alta sociedad panameña. Sobre todo para lucir a sus hijas: Nicole y Andrea, ambas jinetes profesionales. Jürgen buscó ocultar el pasado de su padre. Quienes han visitado su ostentosa vivienda no recuerdan ver fotos suyas en las paredes. Cuando hablaba de él no se refería a su pasado como SS ni como agente secreto. "Nosotros pensábamos que era ingeniero", refiere una de nuestras fuentes periodísticas panameñas que no quiere ser citada. "Mossack tiene más poder que el presidente, decían, y yo ahora les creo". Lo que es indudable es que es multimillonario.

Erhard Mossack, el padre nazi, en cambio, tuvo una vida austera. En 1935, según documentos del FBI, con 11 años entró en la Jungvolk, sección infantil de las juventudes hitlerianas. Se fue a vivir con su tío Manfred, en 1938, a Dresden. Mientras iba a una escuela técnica, trabajaba como aprendiz en la empresa de lentes y equipos ópticos Zeiss-Ikon. Por sus habilidades, luego consiguió que le aceptaran en la residencia que tenían para sus trabajadores. Un año más tarde, el quinceañero Erhard volvió a caer seducido por el Führer y su mensaje de dominación mundial. En 1940, volvió a su localidad natal y laboraba en una empresa minera. Con la mayoría de edad se apuntó a las Waffen-SS. En noviembre de 1942, lo transfirieron a una ya disminuida división Totenkopf, de la que un 80% había muerto en Demyansk (Rusia). Al joven Erhard lo enviaron primero a Francia. Después al frente soviético. Sus siguientes destinos: Checoslovaquia, Finlandia y Noruega.

Es capturado por las tropas norteamericanas en marzo de 1945, dos meses antes de la caída del Berlín. Erhard estaba a punto de cumplir los 21 años...

Mucho tiempo después, al cumplir esa edad, su hijo Jürgen estaba estudiando Derecho en la primera universidad privada de Panamá, la Católica Santa María La Antigua. Se graduó algo tarde, en 1973, con 25 años. No tardó mucho en poner rumbo a Londres. Este viaje sería clave para que entendiera las finanzas globales. Fue admitido por la Law Society of England (Consejo de Colegios de Abogados de Inglaterra). Se codeó con lo más alto de los abogados del mundo. Y con los tiburones que forjarían la fama actual de la City. Regresó a Panamá en 1977 ya sabiendo que iba a fundar su propio despacho, Jürgen Mossack Lawfirm, bautizado en inglés. Apuntaba al derecho corporativo, naval, banca, inversiones extranjeras, fideicomisos, fundaciones privadas y gestión de inversiones... No había cumplido los 30 y era el orgullo de papá. Ya entonces Jürgen Mossack era un miembro selecto de la oligarquía panameña.

La escapada de 1945

En diciembre de 1945, junto a otros siete, el nazi Erhard Mossack había robado un camión y escapaba de un campo de prisioneros de guerra en Le Havre (Francia). Se separó de los fugados, tras más de 600 kilómetros de viaje, al llegar a Colonia (Alemania). "Mossack ha tenido una muy extensa pero superficial educación política... Es un típico líder de las juventudes hitlerianas", se lee en el documento enviado desde la embajada de EEUU en Londres con destino al director del FBI, rubricado el 4 de diciembre de 1946 . En este texto, de 20 páginas, se cuenta la historia completa hasta ese momento del exnazi Erhard Mossack, que, un año después de terminada la guerra, se ofrecía como informante. El tono era dubitativo. Los norteamericanos advierten que Erhard "estaba cerca de unirse a una organización clandestina, ya sea de los antiguos nazis ahora convertidos en comunistas... o de nazis no conversos que se encubrían a sí mismos como comunistas... Su oferta de convertirse en informante [la califican] como un posible astuto intento para salir de una situación incómoda". Lo cierto es que, con el tiempo, Erhard terminó en Baviera viviendo en libertad. ¿Ya espía? En la primavera de 1948 nació Jürgen Rolf Dieter Mossack Herzog.

Erhard se había enamorado de Luisa Herzog. Ella, fruto de una relación previa, tenía otro hijo. Su nombre: Horst, hermano mayor de Jürgen. Hoy Horst llena, con su testimonio, algunos vacíos en la vida del nazi, de su padrastro. Entrevistado por The Daily Mail, reconoce lo que sintió su madre por haberlo tenido fuera del matrimonio. "Era una vergüenza en esos días, así que me pusieron en adopción". Pero aporta un dato adicional que revela un acto de generosidad del SS. "Mi madre más tarde se casó con Erhard Mossack. Él me dio su apellido después".

¿Y de su hermanastro panameño, qué dice? Le perdió el rastro cuando estuvo en Londres estudiando. "Lo que ha salido de Panamá es una noticia impactante, sorprendente. Desconcertante, incluso, pero no puedo decir que siento vergüenza porque no tengo conexión en la realidad con él".

Lo más llamativo es que Horst revela que en un momento de su vida el que fuera cabo primero de los cabeza de muerto se hizo periodista. Según su versión, publicó en 1952 -cuando Jürgen tenía apenas cuatro años- un libro titulado Los últimos días de Nüremberg. Una reseña de esta obra señala que "Erhard Mossack describe el calvario de Nüremberg en los últimos meses de la II Guerra Mundial. Como editor de un periódico, amasó un amplio material de origen, en especial el análisis de numerosas declaraciones de testigos. Nos lleva a mirar detrás del telón de fondo histórico... de lo sucedido entre enero y mayo de 1945 allí".

El padre nazi de Mossack narra cómo cayó la ciudad. Son 160 páginas con fotos de edificios destruidos y de unidades militares. ¿Se hizo periodista tras aceptar los servicios secretos de EEUU su oferta de colaboración? ¿O más bien se unió a la inteligencia germana como otros sospechan? Si el propio héroe de guerra nazi Otto Skorzeny, según informaciones recientes del diario israelí Haaretz, terminó de sicario del Mossad, nada suena descabellado.

El nombre de Erhard, por cierto, no es desconocido para el BND (los servicios secretos alemanes), con sede en Pullach, cerca de Múnich. De hecho, han confirmado la existencia de documentos sobre él, aunque no los desclasificarán. Ésta es su respuesta oficial: "Porque podrían dañar a la República Federal de Alemania o alguno de sus estados federados".

DOCUMENTOS PROBATORIOS. Derecha y centro, dos páginas del informe del FBI, de noviembre de 1946, donde describen las acciones del nazi Erhard Mossack. A la izquierda, fichero de la CIA de 1963, sobre los contactos de Mossack con la inteligencia militar de EEUU #PANAMAPAPERS / ICIJ / CRÓNICA / MOSSACK FONSECA

Erhard fue capturado por las tropas estadounidenses en Baviera y en posesión de una lista de nombres de miembros de las unidades los Werwolf (hombres lobo), una fuerza irregular creada por el general nazi Heinrich Himmler, en 1944, para mermar el avance de los aliados con tácticas de guerrilla y actos de sabotaje en las zonas que iban ocupando.

Estas unidades de resistencia, que deben su nombre a una novela escrita en 1914 por Hermann Löns, autor reverenciado por el nacionalsocialismo, llegó a contar con hasta 5.000 hombres reclutados en las juventudes hitlerianas y miembros de las SS. A este movimiento se le atribuyen varias matanzas de civiles. Erhard fue posiblemente un hombre lobo que se batió en retirada con una información que supo utilizar en su favor y que, según los datos que se han ido recabando sobre él, le permitió acortar su cautiverio.

¿Doble espía?

Según documentos procedentes de los servicios estadounidenses de inteligencia citados por el Süddeutsche Zeitung en el marco de los #PanamaPapers, el padre de Mossack no sólo se prestó a colaborar sino también a recabar información para los aliados. Sorteó el proceso de Nüremberg y comenzó una vida trabajando como redactor para varios medios, incluido el 8 Uhr-Abendblatt de Nüremberg. Este periódico fue fundado en octubre de 1919 por una editorial ultracatólica. Fue, junto al diario del partido nazi, el único periódico que circulaba durante la II Guerra Mundial, entre 1939 y abril de 1945. Fue prohibido por los estadounidenses al terminar la guerra. En 1949 el diario volvió a aparecer, hasta su desaparición, en 2012.

Erhard, en 1960, se va con su familia a Panamá, donde trabajó para Lufthansa, al tiempo que -se especula- colaboró con la CIA desenmascarando comunistas. La pista de Mossack padre se retoma en octubre de 1963. En un documento de la agencia, explican que desde 1961 Erhard ha intentado establecer contacto con la inteligencia militar de EEUU. Su área de acción la sitúan desde Frankfurt, pasando por Panamá, hasta Santiago de Chile y Cuba.

Jürgen era adolescente. Tenía dos hermanos más: Peter, actual cónsul honorario de Panamá en Frankfurt, y Marian, también residente en Alemania... Erhard poco a poco se va desvaneciendo como personaje. Se sabe que regresó a Múnich, cual retiro dorado, durante los 70, para establecerse allí. Era la década en que su Jürgen se iba haciendo fuerte en Ciudad de Panamá y Londres. Su bufete funcionaba. Era el germen inicial de lo que después sería Mossack Fonseca.

La unión con Fonseca

Los propios documentos internos de Mossack Fonseca sitúan el nacimiento de la firma en 1977, cuando no existía como tal sino sólo la Jürgen Mossack Lawfirm. Es en 1986 cuando se establece el nexo que cambia su vida. El teutón se une a Ramón Fonseca Mora, su socio a partir de entonces. Ramón era el perfecto complemento para sus fines. No sólo conocía el mercado internacional. Era el carisma que el hijo del nazi no tenía, las sonrisas que le faltaban.

Le gustaban a Mossack los vínculos que había establecido Fonseca con sus compañeros de la London School of Economics, donde se graduó. Además, su nuevo socio, cuatro años menor que Jürgen, disfrutaba del beneplácito de la clase política panameña. En los tiempos en que Manuel Antonio Noriega, alias Cara de Piña, gobernaba, eso era un filón invalorable. Jürgen ya sabía cuál era el futuro. En 1988, sólo dos años después de su unión con Fonseca, escribió un texto premonitorio: Panamá paraíso fiscal. Padre e hijo Mossack, escritores, ambos contando sus vivencias. Los estragos de la guerra uno. El otro, sus batallas financieras.

La foto en blanco y negro del momento de la firma del acuerdo la conservan en los archivos de Mossack Fonseca. El alemán y Fonseca juntos, con un trago en vaso de tubo en sus manos. Uno con traje con raya diplomática, Jürgen; el otro, con atuendo gris. De esa oficina discreta, a poseer más de 40 sedes en todo el orbe. De Panamá a Niue, una isla remota en Oceanía que Mossack convirtió en paraíso fiscal.

Lo cuenta bien Michael J. Field, autor de Nadando con tiburones: Historias de la primera línea de Pacífico Sur y corresponsal para AFP. Según él, Jürgen buscaba un terreno nuevo, lejos de Panamá, para las empresas. Y descubrió Niue, un estado libre asociado a Nueva Zelanda, no parte de la ONU. Una isla celestial ideal para ser paraíso fiscal. Field, como representante de la prensa en la zona, comenzó a informar de los andares de Jürgen.

Sus informaciones desesperaron al germano de rostro impenetrable. "A finales de 1990 tuve un encuentro con Jürgen Mossack; llegó a Auckland sólo para amenazarme", señala Field. "Me dijo que antes de ese momento nunca había oído hablar de Niue... Quería un lugar fuera del Caribe y en una zona horaria de Asia y el Pacífico...".

Total secreto y anonimato

Era un acuerdo de exclusividad por dos décadas. La isla de 260 km2, 1.200 habitantes, recibía un millón de dólares anuales por las 6.000 empresas que se asentaron. "Mossack Fonseca designó a un agente local para cuidar de los archivos. Su nombre era Peleni Talagi. Su padre, Toke Talagi, es ahora el primer ministro de Niue...". Mossack Fonseca describía las ventajas: "Total secreto y el anonimato... completa privacidad y confidencialidad de negocios". Uno de los que creyó en la publicidad fue el actor español Imanol Arias. O su gestor.

"Arrancó su primer pelotazo televisivo con una sociedad en Niue", titula El Confidencial. El intérprete fue uno de los que apostó por crear una offshore con los Mossack Fonseca, bufete que es la pieza principal de la exclusiva periodística denominada #PanamaPapers, un trabajo del periódico germano Süddeutsche Zeitungy del ICIJ, siglas en inglés del Consorcio Internacional de Periodistas de Investigación, del cual en España forman parte La Sexta y el citado diario online Y no es el único famoso español señalado.

Se añaden a la enorme lista el cineasta manchego Pedro Almodovar; Pilar de Borbón, hermana del rey emérito; miembros de la trama Gürtel; los Pujol; los Domecq; Marina Ruiz-Picasso, heredera del pintor malagueño; el excampeón mundial de motos Alex Crivillé; el hispano-peruano y premio Nobel de Literatura Mario Vargas Llosa... la familia Escarrer (Sol Meliá); los hoteleros Riu y Enrique Martinon; el promotor inmobiliario y expresidente del FC Barcelona José Luis Núñez Clemente; Demetrio Carceller; la familia Thyssen-Bornemisza; el financiero Javier De la Rosa, dos nietos de Franco...

Son, "al menos, 1.200 sociedades, 558 accionistas, 166 clientes intermediarios y 89 beneficiarios con dirección postal española los que aparecen en los documentos secretos", confirma el socio español del ICIJ. Un colofón terrible: "La mayoría de los españoles que aparecen en los papeles de Panamá se acogió a la amnistía fiscal de 2012 y disolvió las sociedades, por lo que no sufrirán consecuencias".

Aparecen más nombres propios vinculados a este destape: Vladimir Putin; Silvio Berlusconi; el presidente argentino Mauricio Macri; Lionel Messi; el dimitido primer ministro islandés, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson; el rey saudí Salman Abdulaziz; Michel Platini, el hijo de Kofi Annan, exsecretario de la ONU; el padre del premier británico David Cameron... Hasta Jackie Chan ha dejado de reír. Ni siquiera se libra el genial Stanley Kubrick...

Jürgen Mossack ha salido en defensa de su bufete, de sus clientes, de su obra. "No vamos a suspender nuestros servicios para ir a sembrar bananas. La gente comete errores. Nosotros también", respondió a Kejal Vyas de The Wall Street Journal, desde la segunda planta de la sede de su compañía, un edificio ubicado en la calle Marbella, en el distrito financiero de Ciudad de Panamá. "Las compañías offshore tienen un montón de usos legítimos, dijo el señor Mossack, incluyendo evitar el pago de los impuestos por duplicado, proporcionar privacidad y la protección de los regímenes criminales y los delincuentes", escribe Vyas. Sobre las 240.000 sociedades fantasma investigadas, con orgullo ario, el hijo del SS afirma: "No habrá consecuencias... Ninguna".

Su escudo: La familia

El jueves 7 de abril, Jürgen Mossack renunció al prestigioso Consejo Nacional de Relaciones Exteriores de Panamá. La familia en pleno ha salido a defenderle en su círculo social. Se apoya en su mujer, la cubana nacionalizada panameña en 2007 Leydelises Pérez de Mossack. En su hija Nicole Mossack Acoca, casada con Tomas Altamirano (fundador de Futurad / Mivtech Inc). Y en la modelo Andrea Mossack Acoca, cuya pareja, Daniel Sessa, trabaja en el Programa Mundial de Alimentos, agencia especializada de la ONU. Estas últimas son hijas de un anterior matrimonio del alemán. Curiosamente, todas ellas figuran en distintas sociedades que aparecen en los registros mercantiles en Panamá.

Así como hizo su padre, Jürgen ha aceptado al hijo de Leydelesis como propio. El adolescente comparte con Nicole y Andrea el gusto por la equitación y ha sido seleccionado, por Panamá, en esta disciplina.

El patriarca de los Mossack murió en los 90, en Múnich. Su mujer, cinco años más tarde. Se llevó a la tumba secretos, de esos que "podrían dañar a Alemania". Jürgen, su querido heredero, tras sobrevivirle, carga con otros, aún más enigmáticos.

- Con información de Carmen Valero (Berlín) / @carmenvalero20 - Los datos de este reportaje se basan en investigación y entrevistas propias; así como en la documentación obtenida por elICIJ, archivos del FBI e inteligencia norteamericana, y los textos periodísticos citados. Jürgen Mossack no aceptó la entrevista con Crónica.

Source: El Mundo (Spain)
http://www.elmundo.es/cronica/2016/04/10/5708b6eee2704eb3678b45ce.html

The System. Two new histories show how the Nazi concentration camps worked

Prisoners break up clay for the brickworks
at Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, in 1939.
Credit Photograph from Akg-Images

One night in the autumn of 1944, two Frenchwomen—Loulou Le Porz, a doctor, and Violette Lecoq, a nurse—watched as a truck drove in through the main gates of Ravensbrück, the Nazi concentration camp for women. “There was a lorry,” Le Porz recalled, “that suddenly arrives and it turns around and reverses towards us. And it lifts up and it tips out a whole pile of corpses.” These were the bodies of Ravensbrück inmates who had died doing slave labor in the many satellite camps, and they were now being returned for cremation. Talking, decades later, to the historian and journalist Sarah Helm, whose new book, “Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women” (Doubleday), recounts the stories of dozens of the camp’s inmates, Le Porz says that her reaction was simple disbelief. The sight of a truck full of dead bodies was so outrageous, so out of scale with ordinary experience, that “if we recount that one day, we said to each other, nobody would believe us.” The only way to make the scene credible would be to record it: “If one day someone makes a film they must film this scene. This night. This moment.”

Le Porz’s remark was prophetic. The true extent of Nazi barbarity became known to the world in part through the documentary films made by Allied forces after the liberation of other German camps. There have been many atrocities committed before and since, yet to this day, thanks to those images, the Nazi concentration camp stands as the ultimate symbol of evil. The very names of the camps—Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz—have the sound of a malevolent incantation. They have ceased to be ordinary place names—Buchenwald, after all, means simply “beech wood”—and become portals to a terrible other dimension.

To write the history of such an institution, as Nikolaus Wachsmann sets out to do in another new book, “KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), might seem impossible, like writing the history of Hell. And, certainly, both his book and Helm’s are full of the kind of details that ordinarily appear only in Dantesque visions. Helm devotes a chapter to Ravensbrück’s Kinderzimmer, or “children’s room,” where inmates who came to the camp pregnant were forced to abandon their babies; the newborns were left to die of starvation or be eaten alive by rats. Wachsmann quotes a prisoner at Dachau who saw a transport of men afflicted by dysentery arrive at the camp: “We saw dozens . . . with excrement running out of their trousers. Their hands, too, were full of excrement and they screamed and rubbed their dirty hands across their faces.”

These sights, like the truck full of bodies, are not beyond belief—we know that they were true—but they are, in some sense, beyond imagination. It is very hard, maybe impossible, to imagine being one of those men, still less one of those infants. And such sights raise the question of why, exactly, we read about the camps. If it is merely to revel in the grotesque, then learning about this evil is itself a species of evil, a further exploitation of the dead. If it is to exercise sympathy or pay a debt to memory, then it quickly becomes clear that the exercise is hopeless, the debt overwhelming: there is no way to feel as much, remember as much, imagine as much as the dead justly demand. What remains as a justification is the future: the determination never again to allow something like the Nazi camps to exist.

And for that purpose it is necessary not to think of the camps simply as a hellscape. Reading Wachsmann’s deeply researched, groundbreaking history of the entire camp system makes clear that Dachau and Buchenwald were the products of institutional and ideological forces that we can understand, perhaps all too well. Indeed, it’s possible to think of the camps as what happens when you cross three disciplinary institutions that all societies possess—the prison, the army, and the factory. Over the several phases of their existence, the Nazi camps took on the aspects of all of these, so that prisoners were treated simultaneously as inmates to be corrected, enemies to be combatted, and workers to be exploited. When these forms of dehumanization were combined, and amplified to the maximum by ideology and war, the result was the Konzentrationlager, or K.L.

Though we tend to think of Hitler’s Germany as a highly regimented dictatorship, in practice Nazi rule was chaotic and improvisatory. Rival power bases in the Party and the German state competed to carry out what they believed to be Hitler’s wishes. This system of “working towards the Fuhrer,” as it was called by Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw, was clearly in evidence when it came to the concentration camps. The K.L. system, during its twelve years of existence, included twenty-seven main camps and more than a thousand subcamps. At its peak, in early 1945, it housed more than seven hundred thousand inmates. In addition to being a major penal and economic institution, it was a central symbol of Hitler’s rule. Yet Hitler plays almost no role in Wachsmann’s book, and Wachsmann writes that Hitler was never seen to visit a camp. It was Heinrich Himmler, the head of the S.S., who was in charge of the camp system, and its growth was due in part to his ambition to make the S.S. the most powerful force in Germany.

Long before the Nazis took power, concentration camps had featured in their imagination. Wachsmann finds Hitler threatening to put Jews in camps as early as 1921. But there were no detailed plans for building such camps when Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany, in January, 1933. A few weeks later, on February 27th, he seized on the burning of the Reichstag—by Communists, he alleged—to launch a full-scale crackdown on his political opponents. The next day, he implemented a decree, “For the Protection of People and State,” that authorized the government to place just about anyone in “protective custody,” a euphemism for indefinite detention. (Euphemism, too, was to be a durable feature of the K.L. universe: the killing of prisoners was referred to as Sonderbehandlung, “special treatment.”)

During the next two months, some fifty thousand people were arrested on this basis, in what turned into a “frenzy” of political purges and score-settling. In the legal murk of the early Nazi regime, it was unclear who had the power to make such arrests, and so it was claimed by everyone: national, state, and local officials, police and civilians, Party leaders. “Everybody is arresting everybody,” a Nazi official complained in the summer of 1933. “Everybody threatens everybody with Dachau.” As this suggests, it was already clear that the most notorious and frightening destination for political detainees was the concentration camp built by Himmler at Dachau, in Bavaria. The prisoners were originally housed in an old munitions factory, but soon Himmler constructed a “model camp,” the architecture and organization of which provided the pattern for most of the later K.L. The camp was guarded not by police but by members of the S.S.—a Nazi Party entity rather than a state force.

These guards were the core of what became, a few years later, the much feared Death’s-Head S.S. The name, along with the skull-and-crossbones insignia, was meant to reinforce the idea that the men who bore it were not mere prison guards but front-line soldiers in the Nazi war against enemies of the people. Himmler declared, “No other service is more devastating and strenuous for the troops than just that of guarding villains and criminals.” The ideology of combat had been part of the DNA of Nazism from its origin, as a movement of First World War veterans, through the years of street battles against Communists, which established the Party’s reputation for violence. Now, in the years before actual war came, the K.L. was imagined as the site of virtual combat—against Communists, criminals, dissidents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Jews, all forces working to undermine the German nation.

The metaphor of war encouraged the inhumanity of the S.S. officers, which they called toughness; licensed physical violence against prisoners; and accounted for the military discipline that made everyday life in the K.L. unbearable. Particularly hated was the roll call, or Appell, which forced inmates to wake before dawn and stand outside, in all weather, to be counted and recounted. The process could go on for hours, Wachsmann writes, during which the S.S. guards were constantly on the move, punishing “infractions such as poor posture and dirty shoes.”

The K.L. was defined from the beginning by its legal ambiguity. The camps were outside ordinary law, answerable not to judges and courts but to the S.S. and Himmler. At the same time, they were governed by an extensive set of regulations, which covered everything from their layout (including decorative flower beds) to the whipping of prisoners, which in theory had to be approved on a case-by-case basis by Himmler personally. Yet these regulations were often ignored by the camp S.S.—physical violence, for instance, was endemic, and the idea that a guard would have to ask permission before beating or even killing a prisoner was laughable. Strangely, however, it was possible, in the prewar years, at least, for a guard to be prosecuted for such a killing. In 1937, Paul Zeidler was among a group of guards who strangled a prisoner who had been a prominent churchman and judge; when the case attracted publicity, the S.S. allowed Zeidler to be charged and convicted. (He was sentenced to a year in jail.)

In “Ravensbrück,” Helm gives a further example of the erratic way the Nazis treated their own regulations, even late in the war. In 1943, Himmler agreed to allow the Red Cross to deliver food parcels to some prisoners in the camps. To send a parcel, however, the Red Cross had to mark it with the name, number, and camp location of the recipient; requests for these details were always refused, so that there was no way to get desperately needed supplies into the camps. Yet when Wanda Hjort, a young Norwegian woman living in Germany, got hold of some prisoners’ names and numbers—thanks to inmates who smuggled the information to her when she visited the camp at Sachsenhausen—she was able to pass them on to the Norwegian Red Cross, whose packages were duly delivered. This game of hide-and-seek with the rules, this combination of hyper-regimentation and anarchy, is what makes Kafka’s “The Trial” seem to foretell the Nazi regime.
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Even the distinction between guard and prisoner could become blurred. From early on, the S.S. delegated much of the day-to-day control of camp life to chosen prisoners known as Kapos. This system spared the S.S. the need to interact too closely with prisoners, whom they regarded as bearers of filth and disease, and also helped to divide the inmate population against itself. Helm shows that, in Ravensbrück, where the term “Blockova” was used, rather than Kapo, power struggles took place among prisoner factions over who would occupy the Blockova position in each barrack. Political prisoners favored fellow-activists over criminals and “asocials”—a category that included the homeless, the mentally ill, and prostitutes—whom they regarded as practically subhuman. In some cases, Kapos became almost as privileged, as violent, and as hated as the S.S. officers. In Ravensbrück, the most feared Blockova was the Swiss ex-spy Carmen Mory, who was known as the Black Angel. She was in charge of the infirmary, where, Helm writes, she “would lash out at the sick with the whip or her fists.” After the war, she was one of the defendants tried for crimes at Ravensbrück, along with S.S. leaders and doctors. Mory was sentenced to death but managed to commit suicide first.

At the bottom of the K.L. hierarchy, even below the criminals, were the Jews. Today, the words “concentration camp” immediately summon up the idea of the Holocaust, the genocide of European Jews by the Nazis; and we tend to think of the camps as the primary sites of that genocide. In fact, as Wachsmann writes, as late as 1942 “Jews made up fewer than five thousand of the eighty thousand KL inmates.” There had been a temporary spike in the Jewish inmate population in November, 1938, after Kristallnacht, when the Nazis rounded up tens of thousands of Jewish men. But, for most of the camps’ first decade, Jewish prisoners had usually been sent there not for their religion, per se, but for specific offenses, such as political dissent or illicit sexual relations with an Aryan. Once there, however, they found themselves subject to special torments, ranging from running a gantlet of truncheons to heavy labor, like rock-breaking. As the chief enemies in the Nazi imagination, Jews were also the natural targets for spontaneous S.S. violence—blows, kicks, attacks by savage dogs.

The systematic extermination of Jews, however, took place largely outside the concentration camps. The death camps, in which more than one and a half million Jews were gassed—at Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka—were never officially part of the K.L. system. They had almost no inmates, since the Jews sent there seldom lived longer than a few hours. By contrast, Auschwitz, whose name has become practically a synonym for the Holocaust, was an official K.L., set up in June, 1940, to house Polish prisoners. The first people to be gassed there, in September, 1941, were invalids and Soviet prisoners of war. It became the central site for the deportation and murder of European Jews in 1943, after other camps closed. The vast majority of Jews brought to Auschwitz never experienced the camp as prisoners; more than eight hundred thousand of them were gassed upon arrival, in the vast extension of the original camp known as Birkenau. Only those picked as capable of slave labor lived long enough to see Auschwitz from the inside.

Many of the horrors associated with Auschwitz—gas chambers, medical experiments, working prisoners to death—had been pioneered in earlier concentration camps. In the late thirties, driven largely by Himmler’s ambition to make the S.S. an independent economic and military power within the state, the K.L. began a transformation from a site of punishment to a site of production. The two missions were connected: the “work-shy” and other unproductive elements were seen as “useless mouths,” and forced labor was a way of making them contribute to the community. Oswald Pohl, the S.S. bureaucrat in charge of economic affairs, had gained control of the camps by 1938, and began a series of grandiose building projects. The most ambitious was the construction of a brick factory near Sachsenhausen, which was intended to produce a hundred and fifty million bricks a year, using cutting-edge equipment and camp labor.

The failure of the factory, as Wachsmann describes it, was indicative of the incompetence of the S.S. and the inconsistency of its vision for the camps. To turn prisoners into effective laborers would have required giving them adequate food and rest, not to mention training and equipment. It would have meant treating them like employees rather than like enemies. But the ideological momentum of the camps made this inconceivable. Labor was seen as a punishment and a weapon, which meant that it had to be extorted under the worst possible circumstances. Prisoners were made to build the factory in the depths of winter, with no coats or gloves, and no tools. “Inmates carried piles of sand in their uniforms,” Wachsmann writes, while others “moved large mounds of earth on rickety wooden stretchers or shifted sacks of cement on their shoulders.” Four hundred and twenty-nine prisoners died and countless more were injured, yet in the end not a single brick was produced.

This debacle did not discourage Himmler and Pohl. On the contrary, with the coming of war, in 1939, S.S. ambitions for the camps grew rapidly, along with their prisoner population. On the eve of the war, the entire K.L. system contained only about twenty-one thousand prisoners; three years later, the number had grown to a hundred and ten thousand, and by January, 1945, it was more than seven hundred thousand. New camps were built to accommodate the influx of prisoners from conquered countries and then the tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers taken prisoner in the first months after Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the U.S.S.R.

The enormous expansion of the camps resulted in an exponential increase in the misery of the prisoners. Food rations, always meagre, were cut to less than minimal: a bowl of rutabaga soup and some ersatz bread would have to sustain a prisoner doing heavy labor. The result was desperate black marketing and theft. Wachsmann writes, “In Sachsenhausen, a young French prisoner was battered to death in 1941 by an SS block leader for taking two carrots from a sheep pen.” Starvation was endemic and rendered prisoners easy prey for typhus and dysentery. At the same time, the need to keep control of so many prisoners made the S.S. even more brutal, and sadistic new punishments were invented. The “standing commando” forced prisoners to stand absolutely still for eight hours at a time; any movement or noise was punished by beatings. The murder of prisoners by guards, formerly an exceptional event in the camps, now became unremarkable.

But individual deaths, by sickness or violence, were not enough to keep the number of prisoners within manageable limits. Accordingly, in early 1941 Himmler decided to begin the mass murder of prisoners in gas chambers, building on a program that the Nazis had developed earlier for euthanizing the disabled. Here, again, the camps’ sinister combination of bureaucratic rationalism and anarchic violence was on display. During the following months, teams of S.S. doctors visited the major camps in turn, inspecting prisoners in order to select the “infirm” for gassing. Everything was done with an appearance of medical rigor. The doctors filled out a form for each inmate, with headings for “Diagnosis” and “Incurable Physical Ailments.” But it was all mere theatre. Helm’s description of the visit of Dr. Friedrich Mennecke to Ravensbrück, in November, 1941, shows that inspections of prisoners—whom he referred to in letters home as “forms” or “portions”—were cursory at best, with the victims parading naked in front of the doctors at a distance of twenty feet. (Jewish prisoners were automatically “selected,” without an examination.) In one letter, Mennecke brags of having disposed of fifty-six “forms” before noon. Those selected were taken to an undisclosed location for gassing; their fate became clear to the remaining Ravensbrück prisoners when the dead women’s clothes and personal effects arrived back at the camp by truck.

Under this extermination program, known to S.S. bureaucrats by the code Action 14f13, some sixty-five hundred prisoners were killed in the course of a year. By early 1942, it had become obsolete, as the scale of death in the camps increased. Now the killing of weak and sick prisoners was carried out by guards or camp doctors, sometimes in gas chambers built on site. Those who were still able to work were increasingly auctioned off to private industry for use as slave labor, in the many subcamps that began to spring up around the main K.L. At Ravensbrück, the Siemens corporation established a factory where six hundred women worked twelve-hour shifts building electrical components. The work was brutally demanding, especially for women who were sick, starved, and exhausted. Helm writes that “Siemens women suffered severely from boils, swollen legs, diarrhea and TB,” and also from an epidemic of nervous twitching. When a worker reached the end of her usefulness, she was sent back to the camp, most likely to be killed. It was in this phase of the camp’s life that sights like the one Loulou Le Porz saw at Ravensbrück—a truck full of prisoners’ corpses—became commonplace.

By the end of the war, the number of people who had died in the concentration camps, from all causes—starvation, sickness, exhaustion, beating, shooting, gassing—was more than eight hundred thousand. The figure does not include the hundreds of thousands of Jews gassed on arrival at Auschwitz. If the K.L. were indeed a battlefront, as the Death’s-Head S.S. liked to believe, the deaths, in the course of twelve years, roughly equalled the casualties sustained by the Axis during the Battle of Stalingrad, among the deadliest actual engagements of the war. But in the camps the Nazis fought against helpless enemies. Considered as prisons, too, the K.L. were paradoxical: it was impossible to correct or rehabilitate people whose very nature, according to Nazi propaganda, was criminal or sick. And as economic institutions they were utterly counterproductive, wasting huge numbers of lives even as the need for workers in Germany became more and more acute.

The concentration camps make sense only if they are understood as products not of reason but of ideology, which is to say, of fantasy. Nazism taught the Germans to see themselves as a beleaguered nation, constantly set upon by enemies external and internal. Metaphors of infection and disease, of betrayal and stabs in the back, were central to Nazi discourse. The concentration camp became the place where those metaphorical evils could be rendered concrete and visible. Here, behind barbed wire, were the traitors, Bolsheviks, parasites, and Jews who were intent on destroying the Fatherland.

And if existence was a struggle, a war, then it made no sense to show mercy to the enemy. Like many Nazi institutions, the K.L. embodied conflicting impulses: to reform the criminal, to extort labor from the unproductive, to quarantine the contagious. But most fundamental was the impulse to dehumanize the enemy, which ended up confounding and overriding all the others. Once a prisoner ceased to be human, he could be brutalized, enslaved, experimented on, or gassed at will, because he was no longer a being with a soul or a self but a biological machine. The Muselmänner, the living dead of the camps, stripped of any capacity to think or feel, were the true product of the K.L., the ultimate expression of the Nazi world view.

The impulse to separate some groups of people from the category of the human is, however, a universal one. The enemies we kill in war, the convicted prisoners we lock up for life, even the distant workers who manufacture our clothes and toys—how could any society function if the full humanity of all these were taken into account? In a decent society, there are laws to resist such dehumanization, and institutional and moral forces to protest it. When guards at Rikers Island beat a prisoner to death, or when workers in China making iPhones begin to commit suicide out of despair, we regard these as intolerable evils that must be cured. It is when a society decides that some people deserve to be treated this way—that it is not just inevitable but right to deprive whole categories of people of their humanity—that a crime on the scale of the K.L. becomes a possibility. It is a crime that has been repeated too many times, in too many places, for us to dismiss it with the simple promise of never again.

By Adam Kirsch
2015_04_06

Source: The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/the-system-books-kirsch

Arendt on Trial. New Book About Eichmann Trial Challenges Hannah Arendt's Criticism of Jewish Council

Arendt on Trial
Michelle SieffMarch 14, 2011Image: Nextbook/Schoken

The Eichmann Trial
By Deborah Lipstadt
Nextbook/Schocken, 272 pages, $24.95

In 1961, the young state of Israel tried and executed the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Hannah Arendt covered the trial for the New Yorker, an account that was published in 1963 as “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” Arendt did not set out to write a journalistic trial narrative. Instead, she articulated a series of provocative and critical judgments about the trial, the wartime role of Europe’s Jewish Councils (the infamous Judenrats) and Eichmann’s motives. The book ignited a firestorm of controversy that, 50 years later, still crackles. Her book remains the lens through which people view the Eichmann trial.
Challenging Arendt: Deborah Lipstadt, the author of ?The Eichmann Trial.?

Image: Nextbook/Schoken

Challenging Arendt: Deborah Lipstadt, the author of ?The Eichmann Trial.?

With her new book, “The Eichmann Trial,” historian Deborah Lipstadt attempts to refute Arendt’s main arguments. On the cover is an iconic image of Arendt — pearl-bedecked and pensive, a cigarette dangling from her fingers — and an entire chapter of the book discusses her arguments. Although other scholars have re-examined the Eichmann trial — most notably the Israeli historian Hannah Yablonka, in a book published in English in 2004 as “The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann” — Lipstadt aims to reach a wider audience.

Especially when compared to Arendt, who was more concerned with the whys and wherefores than the whats, Lipstadt has written a reliable guide to the basic facts of the trial. Lipstadt succinctly describes the key events in chronological order: Israel’s abduction of Eichmann in Argentina; the selection of the prosecutor, defense attorney and judges; the media response to the trial; the prosecutor’s chilling opening statement; the testimony of the survivor witnesses; Eichmann’s testimony; the judgment and the impassioned debate over the death sentence.

Arendt bitterly criticized the Jewish Councils for helping the Nazis compile lists of Jews to be deported. This observation was the one that sparked the violent outrage in American Jewish circles because of her insinuation that the Nazi authorities and Jewish Councils were equally culpable. Lipstadt vehemently challenges Arendt’s argument, noting that the Einsatzgruppen murdered thousands of Jews in the Soviet territories, which had no Jewish Councils. In her mind, this proves that Arendt exaggerated the importance of the Jewish Councils.

True. But Lipstadt has the advantage of 50 years of historical research, much of which was spurred by Arendt’s provocative argument. And, ironically, Lipstadt’s narrative ultimately persuades me that Arendt’s spotlight on the actions of the Jewish Councils was justified at the time. Lipstadt vividly describes how, during the testimony of a Hungarian Jewish Council member, Pinchas Freudinger, a spectator began shouting and accused Freudinger of being responsible for the death of his family. It was a Holocaust victim in the courtroom who accused the Jewish Councils of moral culpability. Arendt’s contribution was to analyze a complicated moral issue — raised by a Holocaust victim at the trial — with her characteristic erudition, seriousness and fearlessness.

Arendt’s book is most notorious for its portrait of Eichmann’s motives. Based on her analysis of his statements and testimony, Arendt contended that Eichmann was not motivated by a fanatical hatred of Jews. Other than a desire to advance his career and obey his superiors, he had no real motives at all, she maintained. Arendt concluded that Eichmann’s “sheer thoughtlessness” revealed the “banality of evil.”

Lipstadt argues that, to the contrary, Eichmann was a committed anti-Semite. Sometimes Lipstadt’s prose has the whiff of a dogmatic rant; but she also marshals some compelling evidence, some of which was not part of the trial and hence not available to Arendt. She points to Eichmann’s speech to his men, in which he declared he would go to his grave fulfilled because he had murdered millions of Jews. Lipstadt also invokes as evidence a memoir written by Eichmann during the trial, which was sealed in Israel’s archives but released to assist Lipstadt in her own trial in 2000 against Holocaust denier David Irving.

Though she doesn’t provide details, Lipstadt contends that the memoir proves that Arendt “was just plain wrong about Eichmann.” In a fascinating description of Judge Benjamin Halevi’s questioning of Eichmann, she also recounts how Eichmann compromised his defense that he was just following orders by admitting he exempted several Jews from deportation.

Even if Lipstadt is correct about Eichmann — and in his 2004 biography of Eichmann, historian David Cesarani precisely documented Eichmann’s anti-Semitism — Arendt was still onto an important idea. The bloody post-Holocaust history of genocides provides ample evidence of the “banality of evil.” Some very chilling evidence appears in the book “Machete Season,” by French journalist Jean Hatzfeld. Hatzfeld conducted extended interviews with a group of imprisoned Rwandan genocidaires. Throughout the book, they speak of the killing as a business and a job, without any reference to moral considerations.

In her conclusion, Lipstadt argues that the decision by the prosecutor, Attorney General Gideon Hausner, to include survivor testimonies, despite no direct legal need for it, was the most important aspect of the trial. Drawing on the empirical work of other scholars, she argues that, by allowing victims to tell their stories publicly, the trial changed the perception and status of Holocaust victims in Israeli society. In Lipstadt’s mind, this was the trial’s greatest legacy. Her conclusion also challenges an Arendtian judgment. Arendt had criticized Hausner for injecting political goals into the trial. She specifically criticized the focus on Jewish suffering and the victim testimonies: “For this case was built on what the Jews had suffered, not on what Eichmann had done,” she lamented.

Arendt’s view was based on a doctrine — which she made explicit — about the purpose of trials, even trials of war criminals. “The purpose of a trial is to render justice, and nothing else,” she maintained. By defending the trial on the grounds that it integrated victims into Israeli society, Lipstadt assumes that war crimes trials can and should further more expansive goals, such as the political objective of nation-building. Since the Eichmann trial, in the wake of the bloody conflicts of the 1990s, war crimes trials have proliferated. Modern human rights groups have defended these trials on the grounds that they further classic political goals, such as peace and democratic consolidation.

Our contemporary discussions about what law scholar Ruti Teitel named “transitional justice” are often muddled, because there is little explicit philosophical debate — let alone consensus — about the appropriate goals and standards by which such trials should be assessed. This conceptual miasma might be one reason there are so few empirical studies on the impact of war crimes trials. This is a shame, since these trials are a tremendous experiment in virtuous politics. Arendt criticized the Eichmann trial because it injected politics into law. By defending the trial because of its political consequences, Lipstadt lays out an alternative doctrine. Who’s right? For anyone concerned about the legacy of Eichmann and the future of war crimes trials, it’s an essential question.

Michelle Sieff is a research fellow at the Yale Initiative for the Study of Antisemitism.

Source: Forward/Haaretz
http://forward.com/culture/136127/arendt-on-trial/
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/new-book-about-eichmann-trial-challenges-hannah-arendt-s-criticism-of-jewish-council-1.349203

Father of Koch Brothers Helped Build Nazi Oil Refinery, Book Says

By NICHOLAS CONFESSOREJAN. 11, 2016

The father of the billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch helped construct a major oil refinery in Nazi Germany that was personally approved by Adolf Hitler, according to a new history of the Kochs and other wealthy families.

The book, “Dark Money,” by Jane Mayer, traces the rise of the modern conservative movement through the activism and money of a handful of rich donors: among them Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Mellon banking fortune, and Harry and Lynde Bradley, brothers who became wealthy in part from military contracts but poured millions into anti-government philanthropy.

But the book is largely focused on the Koch family, stretching back to its involvement in the far-right John Birch Society and the political and business activities of the father, Fred C. Koch, who found some of his earliest business success overseas in the years leading up to World War II. One venture was a partnership with the American Nazi sympathizer William Rhodes Davis, who, according to Ms. Mayer, hired Mr. Koch to help build the third-largest oil refinery in the Third Reich, a critical industrial cog in Hitler’s war machine.

David H. Koch, left, and Charles G. Koch
Paul Vernon/Associated Press; Bo Rader/The Wichita Eagle, via Associated Press

The episode is not mentioned in an online history published by Koch Industries, the company that Mr. Koch later founded and passed on to his sons.

Ken Spain, a spokesman for Koch Industries, said company officials had declined to participate in Ms. Mayer’s book and had not yet read it.

“If the content of the book is reflective of Ms. Mayer’s previous reporting of the Koch family, Koch Industries or Charles’s and David’s political involvement, then we expect to have deep disagreements and strong objections to her interpretation of the facts and their sourcing,” Mr. Spain said.

Ms. Mayer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, presents the Kochs and other families as the hidden and self-interested hands behind the rise and growth of the modern conservative movement. Philanthropists and political donors who poured hundreds of millions of dollars into think tanks, political organizations and scholarships, they helped win acceptance for anti-government and anti-tax policies that would protect their businesses and personal fortunes, she writes, all under the guise of promoting the public interest.

The Kochs, the Scaifes, the Bradleys and the DeVos family of Michigan “were among a small, rarefied group of hugely wealthy, archconservative families that for decades poured money, often with little public disclosure, into influencing how the Americans thought and voted,” the book says.

Many of the families owned businesses that clashed with environmental or workplace regulators, come under federal or state investigation, or waged battles over their tax bills with the Internal Revenue Service, Ms. Mayer reports. The Kochs’ vast political network, a major force in Republican politics today, was “originally designed as a means of off-loading the costs of the Koch Industries environmental and regulatory fights onto others” by persuading other rich business owners to contribute to Koch-controlled political groups, Ms. Mayer writes, citing an associate of the two brothers.

Mr. Scaife, who died in 2014, donated upward of a billion dollars to conservative causes, according to “Dark Money,” which cites his own unpublished memoirs. Mr. Scaife was driven in part, Ms. Mayer writes, by a tax loophole that granted him his inheritance tax free through a trust, so long as the trust donated its net income to charity for 20 years. “Isn’t it grand how tax law gets written?” Mr. Scaife wrote.

In Ms. Mayer’s telling, the Kochs helped bankroll — through a skein of nonprofit organizations with minimal public disclosure — decades of victories in state capitals and in Washington, often leaving no fingerprints. She credits groups financed by the Kochs and their allies with providing support for the Tea Party movement, along with the public relations strategies used to shrink public support for the Affordable Care Act and for President Obama’s proposals to mitigate climate change.

The Koch network also provided funding to fine-tune budget proposals from Representative Paul D. Ryan, such as cuts to Social Security, so they would be more palatable to voters, according to the book. The Kochs were so influential among conservative lawmakers, Ms. Mayer reports, that in 2011, Representative John A. Boehner, then the House speaker, visited David Koch to ask for his help in resolving a debt ceiling stalemate.

“Dark Money” also contains revelations from a private history of the Kochs commissioned by David’s twin brother, William, during a lengthy legal battle with Charles and David over control of Koch Industries.

Ms. Mayer describes a sealed 1982 deposition in which William Koch recalled participating in an attempt by Charles and David to blackmail their fourth and eldest brother, Frederick, into relinquishing any claim to the family business by threatening to tell their father that he was gay.

David Koch has since described himself as socially liberal and as a supporter of same-sex marriage.

By NICHOLAS CONFESSOREJAN. 11, 2016

Correction: January 12, 2016
An earlier version of a capsule summary for this article misspelled the surname of the author of a new book about the history of the Koch family. She is Jane Mayer, not Meyer.

Source: New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/us/politics/father-of-koch-brothers-helped-build-nazi-oil-refinery-book-says.html

More:
Koch Executive Disputes Book’s Account of Founder’s Role in Nazi Refinery (NY Times)
Review: Jane Mayer’s ‘Dark Money,’ About the Koch Brothers’ Fortune and Influence (NY Times)

Michael S. Bryant. Confronting the "Good Death": Nazi Euthanasia on Trial, 1945-1953

Unpunished and Unreformed

Michael S. Bryant's Confronting the "Good Death" is a legal history of the postwar Nazi euthanasia trials conducted from 1945 until 1953 by U.S. and German courts in what would become the Federal Republic of Germany. In the Nazi context, euthanasia, of course, meant the murder of mentally and physically ill people without their request or consent. Meaningful legal confrontation after the war, Bryant shows, was short-lived and seriously flawed. His thesis is that the reason for the failure of various courts to punish the killers lies in the fact that "[f]or both Americans and West Germans, concerns about preserving or recuperating sovereign power consistently bedeviled the neutral quest for justice" (p. 2).

In the first chapter, Bryant provides a concise history of the Nazi euthanasia program and its administration. The chapter begins by describing the ways in which competition for scarce material and human resources during the First World War devalued the lives of mental patients, and extends beyond the Nazi killing of the mentally ill and weak to the elimination of any "life unworthy of life," including German women traumatized by allied bombing, tubercular Russian laborers, Jews, and Gypsies. This background chapter, based on existing historiography, emphasizes continuities in personnel, technologies of killing, victim control techniques, and rationalization processes that extended the moral possibility of mass murder from euthanasia to the Holocaust.

Bryant underscores the economic rationale behind the destruction of those who euthanasia proponents regarded as "useless eaters." This was indeed a critical consideration, particularly in connection with allocating resources in anticipation for and during war. However, since both the allied and German courts took pains to consider the motivations behind the perpetrators' actions, it would have been helpful if Bryant had given more attention to the larger racial ideology behind eugenics. The mentally ill and retarded were deemed not only useless, but also genetically dangerous, and this was important to the medical killers who saw themselves as physicians to the nation first and to the individual patient only secondly. Racial ideology, not merely "uselessness," was even more of a factor in the deaths of other groups that Nazis marked for mass murder. A more extensive treatment of ideological motives could have set the stage for a useful discussion of comparisons between racial hygiene programs targeting "worthless" Germans and those aimed at perceived racial outsiders. Most outsider groups were, as Bryant points out, able-minded and able-bodied who could, and often did, contribute useful work to the Nazis and their war effort.

Bryant's own research forms the basis of chapters 2 through 5, which treat the U.S. euthanasia trials from 1945 through 1947 and the German trials in three different phases from 1946 through 1953. The study focuses narrowly on a close reading of the texts created by the trials themselves--transcripts and verdicts--in search of evidence of extrajudicial influences on their outcomes.

Bryant describes two sets of U.S. euthanasia trials. The United States Army conducted the first set in October 1945 against members of the medical staff of the Hadmar killing center in Hesse-Nassau. The second set was part of the Nuremberg medical trials between November 1946 and August 1947. In both instances, the defendants were charged with war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity. The last category was not defined until the Allies created and agreed to the London Charter in August 1945. Unlike German courts that began trying euthanasia cases in 1946, U.S. courts apparently had few qualms about invoking an ex post facto law against Nazi murderers. However, they were extremely hesitant to put Germany's internal domestic affairs on trial, because, Bryant claims, they did not want to establish a precedent that in the future could subject the United States to a similar international tribunal which would undermine its sovereignty. To get around the sovereignty issue, the United States interpreted euthanasia (as well as other National Socialist atrocities) as an extension of aggressive war by claiming that disabled persons were killed in order to dedicate medical supplies, hospital spaces, and personnel to a grand plan of subjugating the people of Europe. To attach this war-related motive to individual perpetrators, they then adopted the questionable tactic of holding all members of criminal organizations (like the Nazi Party) jointly and severally liable for the same grand conspiracy against peace.

Bryant's thesis is difficult to prove with the types of sources he uses. None of the trial records or the correspondence between various actors actually states that the main reason for the circuitous prosecution strategies chosen was to preserve or regain state sovereignty. However, it is plausible enough in the American case, given the U.S. history of avoiding such challenges to its autonomy from international organizations. It is less convincing for the Germany, where there were simply too many additional motives, and too many personal and group interests militating against conviction to assign precedence to national sovereignty. Among other factors, the author lists confusion over investigative and court jurisdictions, statutes of limitations, the feeling among many Germans that Allied war crime trials were enforcing a mere "victor's justice," the desire of both Germans and Americans to tie Germany firmly to the West during the Cold War, and Konrad Adenauer's insistence on reintegrating former Nazis into the German civil service, including the judiciary.

Reservations aside, Confronting the "Good Death" is an important book that deserves a wide readership. Despite the fact that Americans and Germans started out determined to see Nazi atrocities revealed and punished, both quickly abandoned vigorous prosecution. The contorted legal logic that ultimately led courts to exonerate and even commend men and women, who in some cases had murdered hundreds of helpless patients with their own hands, is astounding. Anyone interested in broad issues surrounding the administration of international justice; medical ethics; human rights; tensions between morality, law, and politics; or the ways that societies retrospectively deal with wartime atrocities will find a compelling case study in Bryant's work.

Michael S. Bryant. Confronting the "Good Death": Nazi Euthanasia on Trial, 1945-1953. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005. x + 269 pp. (cloth), ISBN 978-0-87081-809-7.

Reviewed by Lora Knight (Department of History, Southern Virginia University)
Published on H-Eugenics (January, 2008)

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.

Citation: Lora Knight. Review of Bryant, Michael S., Confronting the "Good Death": Nazi Euthanasia on Trial, 1945-1953. H-Eugenics, H-Net Reviews. January, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14041

Source: H-Net/H-Eugenics
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14041

How a new edition of 'Mein Kampf' hopes to debunk Hitler's lies

A mesh of "half-truth and outright lie" in Adolph Hitler's memoir-manifesto, "Mein Kampf," prompted scholars to spend three years completing a new edition chock-full of fact-check annotations, according to The New York Times.

That's to "defang any propagandistic effect while revealing Nazism," Alison Smale wrote for The Times. The work's copyright expires Dec. 31, which made the academics' efforts possible.

The Times noted why the release of the edition, which includes 2,000 pages and 3,500 academic annotations, wasn't possible until now.

"Not since 1945, when the Allies banned the dubious work and awarded the rights to the state of Bavaria, has Hitler's manifesto, 'Mein Kampf,' been officially published in German," The Times reported. "Bavaria had refused to release it. But under German law, its copyright expires Dec. 31, the 70th year after the author's death."

This time around, the work will "dismantle the core doctrines" Hitler deployed to justify the Holocaust, Marie Solis wrote for Mic.

The bottom line: "Scholars want to disrupt a narrative of hate," according to Mic.

Still, some argue in regards to whether reprinting such a controversial text is a good idea.

Svati Kirsten Narula wrote for Quartz many scholars and librarians view "Mein Kampf" — translated in English to "My Struggle" — as a "toxic and dangerous text."

And German authorities refused to allow reprintings of the book in fear it would incite hatred, according to BBC News. Because of that, officials indicated they'll limit the public's access to the new "Mein Kampf" edition "amid fears that this could stir neo-Nazi sentiment."

However, Caroline Mortimer wrote for The Independent that the team of academics said a scholarly version to refute Hitler's lies is an appropriate way to reprint the book.

Christian Hartmann, lead of the team, told David Charter for The Times they created a "very reader-friendly edition."

"We firmly connect Hitler's text with our comments, so that both are always on the same double page. I could describe it in martial terms as a battle of annihilation — we are encircling Hitler with our annotations," Hartmann said, according to The Times. "Our principal was that there should be no page with Hitler's text without critical annotations. Hitler is being interrupted, he is being criticised, he is being refuted if necessary."

According to The Independent, many Jewish leaders remain opposed to the reprint.

"I am absolutely against the publication of 'Mein Kampf,' even with annotations," The Independent quoted Levi Salomon, spokesman for the Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against Anti-Semitism, as saying. "Can you annotate the Devil? Can you annotate a person like Hitler? This book is outside of human logic."

Mic reported the edition will cost $63 and hits bookstore shelves in January.

Payton Davis is the Deseret News National intern. Send him an email at pdavis@deseretdigital.com and follow him on Twitter, @Davis_DNN.

Source: Deseret News National
http://national.deseretnews.com/article/6921/How-a-new-edition-of-Mein-Kampf-hopes-to-debunk-Hitlers-lies.html

Erich von Manstein and the War of Annihilation

Operational Genius and Master Myth-Maker: Erich von Manstein and the War of Annihilation

On May 7, 1953, the Swabian village of Allmendingen prepared for a festival. The mayor had roused the village inhabitants early in the morning, school was cancelled, the town was festively decorated and, according to a member of the media who was present, nearly every child wore a bouquet of flowers. A brass band provided musical accompaniment. The few villagers initially unaware of the reason for the unusual events were quickly informed: Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, the most celebrated of Hitler's military commanders and most controversial of the postwar military internees, had been released from captivity and was coming to the village. When Manstein addressed the crowd, he thanked them for their support and exclaimed, "We no longer want to think about the difficulties of the past, but only of the future" (p. 260). Following his brief remarks, children approached Manstein and his wife, presented them with lilacs, and burst into song. The illustrated paper, Das Neue Blatt, described the scene to its readers in an issue adorned with two photos: one of Manstein as a decorated soldier and the other of him shaking the hands of children presenting him with flowers. The message was clear: Hitler's "most brilliant strategist" was ready to enter West German society.

In this timely, impressively researched study, Oliver von Wrochem describes this "idyllic Heimat" occasion as "simultaneously a historical/political signal and a memory/cultural event" (p. 260). Manstein's release symbolized the rehabilitation of the men who had served in Hitler's Wehrmacht, though this rehabilitation was primarily due to the efforts of high-ranking officers to produce their own version of the war, a process in which the former Field Marshal was intimately involved. Wrochem also details the complicity of western governments, particularly the British, in covering up the unsavory aspects of Nazi Germany's war against the Soviet Union to ensure West German support for remilitarization. The truism that the exigencies of the Cold War superseded the quest for postwar justice is starkly illustrated in his account. Finally, Wrochem examines the evolution of German public opinion (both East and West) regarding the fate of Manstein and other Wehrmacht commanders in Allied and West German trials and the influence of veteran organizations in guiding popular memories and understanding of the war.

The author divides his study into four sections. The first deals with Manstein's life through the end of the Second World War, with special emphasis on his participation in the Vernichtungskrieg against the Soviet Union. One of Wrochem's primary themes is Manstein's relationship with Hitler and the Nazi regime. In a manner similar to that of many of his peers reared during the Kaiserreich, Manstein welcomed the new regime and its commitment to mobilizing German society in support of restoring a greater German Reich. This dedication, however, did not lead to an unqualified support for the NSDAP; according to Wrochem, Manstein maintained a distance from the upper echelon of the political leadership, one that eventually provoked blatant hostility from powerful party figures such as Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler. While Manstein's maintenance of a traditional Prussian military ethos kept him from completely identifying with Nazi ideological precepts and goals (unlike, as Wrochem notes, Ferdinand Schörner, the rabidly Nazi Field Marshal of the later stages of the war), his focus on military professionalism was paradoxically a major influence on his role as accomplice in the war of annihilation directed against both Soviet citizens and Jews.

Wrochem analyzes the occupation policies of Manstein's Eleventh Army, which operated in the Crimea from late 1941 through mid-1942. Those seeking for a comprehensive examination of Eleventh Army's occupation practices will want to look elsewhere; the author is more concerned with examining several wartime events in detail and then following them throughout the series of postwar trials. This approach allows for a much more precise reconstruction of these events and Wrochem makes good use of it. He examines the responsibility and actions of various levels of Eleventh Army, focusing on the lower levels of occupation: the Secret Field Police, the Field Gendarmerie sections, the Ortskommandanten, and the commandants of the rear Army areas. In agreement with the prevailing historical consensus, Wrochem concludes that the Army worked very closely with the SS Einsatzgruppen in liquidating "enemies" both real and perceived. Here, the division of labor initially identified by Dieter Pohl certainly functioned smoothly. And, as Wrochem notes, "no level of authority stood against the murder, but in contrast frequently drove it forward" (p. 70).

While the lower levels frequently carried out the shootings, the Eleventh Army leadership also acted as the driving force behind at least one episode of mass execution. The strained supply system that plagued the entire Eastern Army also affected troops in the Crimea. In order to avoid starvation-driven revolts, Eleventh Army began directing the machinery of murder towards population groups whose annihilation was already foreseen. The 13,000 Jews in Simferopol constituted the first pool of victims. Contacted by Eleventh Army's quartermaster to initiate the killing, Einsatzgruppe D had to decline due to lack of manpower and capacity. The quartermaster then offered troops to cordon off the area and guard the Jews during transport, trucks for the transport itself, and munitions to the SS unit. By the time the first phase of the action ended in late December, some 9,500 Jews had been murdered. Wrochem states that no order signed by Manstein authorizing the action exists; he also makes clear that it is nearly inconceivable that such an action could have been initiated by the army staff without his approval.

The remaining three sections of the study focus on how Manstein and other high-ranking members of the Wehrmacht defended themselves against war crimes charges while simultaneously sanitizing their version of the war in the East and thereby generating an acceptable narrative of the war for West Germans. Three separate strands formed the basis of this re-writing of the war. First, many former high-ranking officers, including Manstein, formed an advisory committee to "coordinate witness statements" regarding the initial charges against the German General Staff (p. 111). Coordination included destroying the credibility of officers whose statements diverged from the accepted story. This initial grouping of officers expanded into much larger networks of former soldiers and their supporters who worked tirelessly to provide German defendants with resources for a proper defense. By the time Manstein himself was put on trial in August 1949, this network had also made large inroads into the media, providing him with a pool of public support.

This reservoir of public support, both in West Germany and Great Britain, was steadily increasing due to the growing tensions of the Cold War. Manstein and other former officers exploited fear of communism in two ways. First, Manstein struck up a correspondence with the British military commentator, B. H. Liddell Hart. Liddell Hart had long opposed proceedings against members of the Wehrmacht and became the most powerful advocate for Manstein and his peers in Great Britain. He portrayed Hitler's generals as cool professionals who fought as clean a war as possible against the Soviet Union and omitted the Wehrmacht's enormous crimes from his presentation of the Second World War.

The pro-German propaganda espoused by Liddell Hart and others of his political persuasion was complemented by the ways in which Manstein explained the war in the East. Here, the vocabulary utilized by the Nazis (though shorn of its overt racism) was employed to legitimate the German-Soviet war. Manstein spoke of the "European mission" behind the war, a reference to the rescue of western Christendom from "Asiatic" Bolsheviks (p. 131). Such notions carried special weight during the early days of the Cold War. The offensive launched by Manstein and his peers and their supporters effectively minimized the Army's crimes in the East, as it appeared self-evident that if any of the combatants had committed atrocities during the war, it was the "barbaric" East, not the "civilized" West. By referring to the war as essentially defensive, Manstein pointed to the absurdity of prosecuting him for a war that the West was preparing to fight all over again.

While these two strategies played well in the court of public opinion, within the actual court of law, Manstein and his peers developed a different strategy to absolve themselves of responsibility for their conduct. They tried to separate the war against the Soviet Union into two different campaigns: a military one, in which they exercised authority, and an ideological effort, which they had no power to influence. This dual strategy most concretely manifested itself in the Army's attempts to disassociate itself from the Einsatzgruppen. While preparing for the General Staff's defense during the initial Nuremberg Trial, Manstein wrote, "the thought that military leaders were connected with the measures of the S.D. in certain areas constitutes a completely unjustified burden on the military leadership" (p. 110). This question became one of the central issues of Manstein's own trial, and as Wrochem persuasively argues, the names Manstein and Otto Ohlendorf (the former commander of Einsatzgruppe D) assumed powerful symbolic weight both within and outside of the courtroom, with the former standing for the "clean" Wehrmacht and the latter for the criminal SS.

As Wrochem makes clear, the strategies employed by Manstein and his peers found a wide-ranging resonance in West German public opinion and during the 1940s and 1950s, support for the interned Wehrmacht elite remained strong. Adenauer himself recognized the groundswell of support reserved particularly for Manstein and was able to link his discharge to the inclusion of a re-militarized West Germany in the Western Alliance. Wrochem tirelessly reconstructs the negotiations between Bonn and London concerning Manstein's release as an aspect of the re-admittance of West Germany to western society. He also convincingly argues that Manstein's release in the Federal Republic carried hefty symbolic weight, as it signaled the welcome of all former Wehrmacht soldiers into the new state. The past was now forgotten or sanitized and re-worked to such an extent that it bore little relation to the reality of the war of annihilation.

Wrochem has provided an extremely important and detailed study of how the German Vernichtungskrieg in the East was waged and then how a neutered version of this conflict was transmitted to West German society. He has effectively tied together several very important issues into one generally readable work. At times, his detail becomes a bit overpowering and Manstein himself periodically disappears from the book, but these minor caveats fail to detract seriously from a major contribution to field.

Reviewed by Jeff Rutherford (Department of History, Wheeling Jesuit University)
Published on H-German (April, 2008)

Oliver von Wrochem. Erich von Manstein: Vernichtungskrieg und Geschichtspolitik. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2006. 431 S. EUR 39.90 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-506-72977-4.

Source: H-Net
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14445

Top Holocaust Scholar Blasts 'Holocaust-abuse' by U.S., Israeli Politicians

Deborah Lipstadt lambasts 'unhealthy and embarrassing' pandering of Republican presidential candidates; says U.S. envoy Gutman’s comments on Muslim anti-Semitism were 'stupid.'
Chemi Shalev Dec 16, 2011 1:03 PM

Prof. Deborah Lipstadt, Jan 11, 2000.AP

Full Interview with Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt
Hilary Swank to star as Deborah Lipstadt in biopic about Holocaust denier's trial

Renowned Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt says that American and Israeli politicians who invoke the Holocaust for contemporary political purposes are engaging in “Holocaust abuse”, which is similar to “soft-core denial” of the Holocaust.

“I think it is dangerous, just plain dangerous. It’s a distortion of what Israel is all about, what Zionism is all about,” said Lipstadt, who has just published a retrospective book “The Eichmann Trial” on the 1961 Jerusalem trial of the infamous Nazi criminal.

“When you take these terrible moments in our history, and you use it for contemporary purposes, in order to fulfill your political objectives, you mangle history, you trample on it,” she said.

In a hard-hitting interview with Haaretz, Lipstadt also lashed out at the "over-the-top pandering" of Republican presidential candidates, describing their fawning support for Israel as "embarrassing" and "unhealthy." Of last week’s appearance of the top Republican candidates at a Washington forum organized by the Republican Jewish Committee, she said: “It was unbelievable. It made me cringe. I couldn’t watch it.”

“You listen to Newt Gingrich talking about the Palestinians as an ‘invented people’ – it’s out-Aipacking AIPAC, it’s out-Israeling Israel,” she said. .”There’s something about it that’s so discomforting. It’s not healthy. It’s a distortion,” she said.

She also used the word “despicable” to describe settlers who use the term “Nazi” against IDF soldiers. “And it’s so inaccurate. And it’s such an abuse of history. The people who started it know it’s not true, but the kids, the yeshiva kids, and the high school kids – they don’t know it’s not true. And so when real Nazism comes around - no one will recognize it.”

Lipstadt, who is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Atlanta’s Emory University, became a hero of American Jewry after she singlehandedly inflicted a devastating blow on Holocaust-denial in the West in her famous London courtroom victory in 2000 over master-denier David Irving, who had sued Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, for libel. The London Times said of Lipstadt's victory: "History has had its day in court and scored a crushing victory."

Lipstadt described US Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman’s controversial comments about the causal connection between the Arab-Israeli conflict and Muslim anti-Semitism as “stupid”, adding that “he sounded as if he was rationalizing anti-Semitism.” But, she said, the reaction to his statements had also been “over the top."

Lipstadt decried the “hysteria” and “neuroses” of many Jews and Israelis who compare the current situation in Europe and in the Middle East to the Holocaust era. “People go nuts here, they go nuts. There’s no nuance, there’s no middle ground, it’s taking any shade of grey and stomping on it. There are no voices of calm, there are no voices of reason, not in this country, not in Israel. "

“This is the kind of thing that scares me,” she said. “Jews have always been neurotic – I mean everyone’s neurotic, we just recognize it more – but we’ve raised our neuroses to a level that’s not healthy. We should eschew hysteria, but we don’t. Hysteria is never useful."

The New York-born Lipstadt said that President Barack Obama’s “flatfooted” handling of Israel at the beginning of his term “gave an opening to Republicans in America and to ‘Republicans’ in Israel.” She said that “more and more Jews are scared and here’s someone [the Republicans, CS] who is going to protect them. It’s so over-the-top irrational.”

Lipstadt rebuffed suggestions that what she describes as the “unhealthy neuroses” of the Jews in 2011 is a direct outgrowth of the legacy of the Eichmann trial. “The Eichmann trial was a pivotal moment in the history of Israel, in the history of Zionism. It personalized the Shoah, and it was the beginning of change in the Israeli attitude toward Shoah survivors.”

One of the more controversial chapters in Lipstadt’s new book deals with Hannah Arendt, whose own book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was immensely popular in the West in the years following the trial but was roundly condemned by Jews and Israelis. Though Lipstadt demolishes Arendt’s main theses that Eichmann was but a bureaucratic cog in the Nazi machine and denounces here criticism of the Judenrats in Nazi-occupied Europe - she does find some positive points in Arendt’s coverage of the trial, including her observation that “for the first time since the year 70, when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, Jews were able to sit in judgment on crimes committed against their own people."

Arendt, says Lipstadt, “was mean and cruel, but she captured something very essential about the trial.”

Read the full transcript of the interview here.

Follow me on Twitter @ChemiShalev
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Chemi Shalev
Haaretz Correspondent

Source: Haaretz (Israel)
http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/west-of-eden/top-holocaust-scholar-blasts-holocaust-abuse-by-u-s-israeli-politicians-1.401821

Los nazis querían otorgar la independencia a Euskadi

Plato alemán con una escena de cesta punta

Los rasgos arios de los vascos encandilaron a los jerarcas de Hitler, que pretendían crear una Europa racialmente pura articulada en etnias y no en estados

Anje Ribera

15 julio 2015 10:11

Euskadi fascinaba a los nazis. La obsesión por la pureza de la raza que caracterizó al régimen de Adolf Hitler depositó su mirada en los vascos, a su entender uno de los pueblos europeos menos contaminados gracias a su aislamiento. El Tercer Reich consideraba que nuestra tierra podría constituir uno de los pilares sobre los que sustentar su sueño de generar una nueva organización territorial para el Viejo Continente, en la que también estarían incluidas otras etnias como la catalana, la bretona, la escocesa, la valona, la flamenca, la gallega o la irlandesa, según recogen diferentes documentos que estaban en poder de los aliados y que, tras ser desclasificados, son ya analizados por historiadores.

Sobre todo, eran el idioma y la cultura del País Vasco los factores que atraían a la jerarquía nazi, que trató de desarrollar un proyecto diseñado en los laboratorios del Instituto Geopolítico Alemán y que preveía la independencia de Euskadi una vez que las tropas germanas dominaran todo el territorio europeo. Los estrategas nazis elucubraron sobre la estructura del continente bastante antes de que las botas de la Wehrmacht consiguieran dejar su huella en todos los países que lo integraban.

Euskadi era para Berlín un espejo en el que mirarse. Hasta recogió la vieja reivindicación nacionalista para que el nuevo mapa contemplara, asimismo, territorios que consideraba perdidos a lo largo de la historia. Se refería a comarcas que se encontraban bajo administración francesa, con las que se erigiría una nueva nación para los vascos y, al mismo tiempo, no sólo rompería la integridad del Estado galo, sino que también crearía una cuña entre los gobiernos de París y Madrid.
Soldados nazis en San Sebastián

Soldados nazis en San Sebastián

Según testimonios documentales, los estrategas nazis llegaron a realizar numerosos pasos para llevar a cabo su plan. Fueron maniobras oscuras que se desarrollaron en 1940 y 1941, una vez finalizada la Guerra Civil española, pero con la contienda mundial aún en curso, pese a que la maquinaria bélica francesa ya había sido eliminada con la misma facilidad con la que se tumba un castillo de naipes.

Ello impulsó a los nazis a cargarse de euforia con respecto al proyecto. Para ello tomaron contacto con vascos exiliados en territorio galo. Los agentes del Tercer Reich buscaban un apoyo moral entre la oposición a Franco de todas las tendencias, aunque finalmente centraron su interés en gentes cercanas al PNV y propicia a escuchar los cantos alemanes, una verdad que a menudo ha ofendido a los jeltzales. Defienden los actuales rectores del partido creado por Sabino Arana que, si se negoció con Alemania, fue para obtener información que pudiera ayudar a los aliados.

Ese nuevo País Vasco independiente hubiera funcionado bajo la tutela alemana, aunque con la dirección de unos políticos obnubilados por las glorias momentáneas del Ejército nazi y que vieron en este proyecto la solución anhelada de, por fin, liberarse del yugo español reforzado con el triunfo de Franco. No importaba que la independencia llegara de la mano de otro totalitarismo.

Los políticos nacionalistas que se unieron a la iniciativa germánica consideraban que había que obtener la libertad nacional fuera como fuera y viniera de donde viniera. Confiaban en que los alemanes, más adelante, se adaptarían a la manera de ser y querer del pueblo vasco.

El ideólogo

El interés del régimen de Berlín por los vascos surgió inicialmente en la mente de Werner Best, más adelante responsable de la llamada 'solución final' para acabar con los judíos. Este oficial de las SS estimaba que los estados no pasaban de ser creaciones artificiales carentes de fuerza. Contra ello, defendía la condición natural de las etnias, únicos elementos capaces de constituir una Europa sana en la que las fronteras serían sustituidas por la pureza racial.

Para él, el ejemplo vasco era de tal entidad que encargó la confección de un informe de la situación cultural y política en el territorio. La conclusión del estudio fue clara: la vasca era una sociedad de total fiabilidad y, por tanto, susceptible de formar parte de la hipotética Europa ideal del argumentario nazi.

Best incluso envió a Euskadi al realizador Herbert Brieger para que filmara un documental etnográfico que tuviera como protagonistas a nuestros antepasados. El producto que surgió de aquel viaje se tituló 'Im lande der Basken' (En la tierra de los vascos), que hoy finalmente se puede ver después de pasar medio siglo en paradero desconocido.

La voz en off afirma: "¿De dónde viene esta gente? Nadie lo sabe. Puede que provengan de los constructores de la Torre de Babel, de los fenicios, de los habitantes del mar Atlántico, de los fineses o los mongoles... Sin embargo, la teoría más extendida es que son descendientes de los íberos". Doce minutos entrañables en los que no se muestran ciudades, sino mucho campo, remarcando el carácter rural de nuestra tierra. Eran también abundantes los lauburus, entonces muy parecidos a las esvásticas.

In Landen der Basken from R.C. on Vimeo.

Las imágenes de la Vasconia idílica encandilaron a los jerarcas del Tercer Reich. De inmediato, Ulrich Friedrich Wilhelm Joachim von Ribbentrop, ministro de Asuntos Exteriores de la Alemania nazi, otorgó poderes a Best y a Karl Bouda, otro experto en asuntos raciales, para estudiar la viabilidad de ampararse en criterios de diferenciación racial y conseguir que los vascos pudieran separarse tanto de Francia como de España.

El Gobierno vasco en el exilio, pese a haber mostrado en repetidas ocasiones su rotunda inclinación por el bando aliado "porque no se podía permitir que aquellos que habían bombardeado Gernika dominaran el continente", abrió pronto sus oídos a la idea. El entonces lehendakari, José Antonio Aguirre, autorizó a destacados dirigentes del PNV para que sondearan el escenario a través de contactos con los alemanes.

Es más, la dirección jeltzale hizo llegar a Berlín un documento que transmitía a los aliados del régimen de Franco que "a Alemania le interesa la pacificación de España y no puede escapar a su recto sentido que no hay pacificación posible sin una solución favorable a los vascos. Nacionalistas vascos, se entiende".

El PNV de 1941 llegó a señalar que creía en "el talento político y en el alto espíritu de comprensión" del Führer para que "el problema vasco sea tenido en cuenta"

El Euzkadi buru batzar de la época, que ya antes había insinuado al mando aliado sus ansias independentistas, señaló en un informe de 1941 que creía en "el talento político del Führer, en su sagacidad, en su alto espíritu de comprensión" para que "en el nuevo orden a establecer en Europa, y particularmente en España, el problema vasco sea tenido en cuenta". Incluso los jeltzales llegaron a redactar un proyecto de estatuto para unificar la región de la Vasconia insertada en la Europa nazi, gracias a un estatus especial bajo el paraguas protector de los que se suponía serían los nuevos dueños de Europa.

También el sindicato jeltzale ELA-STV se posicionó al señalar que el régimen de Hitler era "un totalitarismo culto, frente al soviético", que calificó de "grosero y criminal. Euskadi y Alemania están condenadas a entenderse", añadió.

Las loas de Aguirre

El propio Aguirre, que gracias a un pasaporte falso realizó un viaje por Alemania en su ruta hacia el exilio en Sudamérica, se mostró cercano al régimen de Berlín. Algunas fuentes dicen que, sin éxito, allí intentó ser recibido por el almirante Wilhelm Canaris y por el propio Von Ribbentrop.

En su diario, conservado en la biblioteca del Congreso de Estados Unidos desde 1954, el primer lehendakari vasco escribía por aquella época la frase "cómo se equivocan los que juzgan la obra de Hitler". Mostraba su simpatía hacia el régimen nacionalsocialista con descripciones de su estancia en la capital teutona. "He visto pasar al ministro de Exteriores japonés Matsuoka, precedido y seguido de gran acompañamiento. Iba con él el general Oshima".

"He llegado hasta la cancillería, donde un numeroso público esperaba la salida de Hitler y del ministro japonés después de su entrevista. Ha durado dos horas y media. He esperado, firme en pie, con intenso frío, el momento. Salen al fin Hitler, Van Ribbentrop y Oshima. Yo estaba a 50 metros. Tenía en mi mano unas banderolas nazis y japonesas que nos han repartido gentilmente unos miembros de las SS. He disfrutado mucho".

José Antonio AguirrePrimer lehendakari
de la historia, desde 1936 hasta 1960
"Cómo se equivocan los que juzgan
la obra de Hitler"

La benevolencia de Aguirre hacia ciertas actuaciones del Tercer Reich quedó también reflejada en otros escritos. "Se podrá no compartir sus ideas, pero se comprende bien que ciertos procedimientos de gobierno sean necesarios en algunos países tumultuarios".

Sin embargo, aquellas reuniones nunca llegaron a plasmarse en un acuerdo, porque la cúpula del PNV finalmente las desautorizó cuando comenzaron a conocerse en el bando aliado y en el régimen que surgió de la Guerra Civil española.

Muchos años después, cuando al PNV se le criticó su estrategia, algunos de sus dirigentes reconocieron el error, pero lo justificaron porque "había que jugar a ganador alguna vez" y porque "existía cierta esperanza de que los nazis nos apoyaran frente a Franco".

Además, la apuesta por los nazis hubiera resultado perdedora. La condición indispensable para que el plan fructificara era que los alemanes se impusieran en la guerra, pero esa premisa fue, precisamente, la que al final falló.

Para los interesados en profundizar en la historia que se ha tratado de desarrollar más atrás cabe recomendar el documental 'Una esvástica sobre el Bidasoa', que toca tangencialmente el plan nazi para el País Vasco. Fue dirigido por Alfonso Andrés y Javier Barajas en 2013, con la coproducción de Televisión Española.

Source: El Diario Vasco (España)
http://www.diariovasco.com/sociedad/201507/15/nazis-querian-otorgar-independencia-20150715094856.html