Purely Commentary
Important chapters are being added constantly to the
history of the Nazi terror. Two of them are embodied
in the demoniacal roles of lijalmar Schacht and Rudolf
Hess.
An arch Nazi died, yet no one said anything about
Hjalmar Schacht's past. Only a letter to the New York
Times from Roger Alden of New York pointed out that—
Not only did Schacht line up Ruhr industrialists for
Hitler in 1932, but he collected S1,000,000 from business-
men for the Nazi campaign;
Although Schacht was "inexplicably acquitted as a
war criminal," his role as a financial wizard for Hitler
"was fully documented by Justice Robert Jackson, the
American prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trial";
Schacht "acquiesced in the genocidal assaults on the
Jews."
Not all the knowledgeable people were silent in deal-
ing with Schacht or in commenting upon his "career" as
a cohort of Nazism.
There was a warning that Schacht be watched in a
statement made in the U. S. House of Representatives
before the end of World War II. In the Sept. 11, 1944,
issue of the Congressional Record appeared the follow-
ing warning made in a declaration by Congressman
Emanuel Celler of New York:
Mr. CELLER. Mr. Speaker, the race is on. Who will
get to Berlin first? Russia or the United States? Cher-
niakovsky or Patton?
This is certain. The Red Army will spend precious
little time parading
Enter Den Linden. Drum head
court martial, the hangman's rope, the firing squad,
the executioner's ax will be Stalin's orders of the day.
Hitler, his Murder, Inc., and the Gestapoites will be
treated like the rats they are.
We on the other hand—as in the last war—might
become softies. Our diplomats then joined with the
Japanese—of all people—and objected to any trial and
punishment of any Boche for an international crime.
We and Nippon denied any such crime. Thus the Kaiser
was permitted to suffer a comfortable exile in Holland
as the Squire of Doorn. Von Tirpitz, Von Hindenburg,
Von Ludendorf, Von Bismarck, and some 900 more
eons and Huns went unwhipped of justice. They were
permitted to blueprint and plot the balance of the sec-
ond Thirty Years' War-1914-1944.
One of the canniest of these plotters was the Nazi.
Dr. Hjalmar Schacht—a financial fox. Ile presumably
stands on the sidelines in neutral Switzerland. Actually
he still juggles figures for his Fuehrer. Ile will wear an
air of injured innocence and claim he was opposed to
nazidom from the beginning. Liar. He has always been
part of Hitler's "palace guard." He was part of the
clique that kept Hitler in power. He supplied the money
through a combination of plunder, extortion and finan-
cial wizardry.
Sumner %%'elles, in his The Time for Decision, shows
how Schacht prostituted his talents to serve Hitler and
willingly became part of his criminal machine.
Schacht came to the United States in 1931 seeking
reduction of reparations, and again in 1934. Ile made
no bones of his espousal of the Nazi cause; boasted
of it, and "heiled" Hitler. He made a profound im-
pression upon certain big businessmen and cartelists.
Many of them are still his friends despite his crimes.
Dr. Hjalmar Schacht loose in Switzerland, Spain,
or Argentina would again assure adequate finances to
another Schickelgruber astride a cannon top. A gibbet
five times higher than Haman's should be his fate. But
his banking friends and cartelists will move heaven
and earth to save him. They will make him appear a
martyr and propagandize his lily-white innocence,
despite a record almost as black as Hitler's. They would
pull the wool over America's eyes. They will encourage
the country, offering him refuge, to refuse extradition.
When Schacht's memoirs were published in 1948, the
World Jewish Congress issued an expose of the Hitlerian
financial wizard by C. C. Aror.sfeld of London, in which
the background of the Nazi was fully delineated. Arons-
feld then wrote that Schacht's effort at "settling accounts"
in his reminiscences was "a congenial pastime for one
whose record earned him the flattering designation of
'Hitler's financial genius.' " He pointed out that the
Schacht contention that he was "settling" with Hitler
and his acquittal at Nuremberg because at the trial they
"could find no actionable blemish on him" did not tally
with facts and that: "There are more things in heaven
and Germany than are dreamt of in our democracy."
Aronsfeld's charges while dissecting the Schacht
memoirs were:
He had never,'had he? heard the vultures screech
from the housetops, "Perish Judah". lie was ignorant,
was he?, of the SS toughs and SA thugs strutting
about the streets and screaming, under the very noses
of a craven democracy: "When Jew blood spurts from
the knife . . . " he had heard very vaguely of a book
entitled "Mein Kampf" and steadfastly declined to get
excited when Dr. Goebbels, his colleague in the gang
called Cabinet, declared Jews to be human beings only
inasmuch as lice were animals—both fit to be extermi-
nated.
But Schacht will say, indeed he does say, that he
joined the gang precisely because he was an anti-Nazi;
his was "the opposition from within", for in no other
way could reason hope to be effectively asserted. And
so, of course, say all of them- Yet he also tells .us, that
2 — Friday, July 24, 1970
• 'THE' DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Demoniacal Role of Two Nazi Criminals,
Their Backgrounds and Prejudices . . . Hess
and Schacht Exposed in Their Hitlerism.
Hitler was never open to reason, "unfit for patient argu-
ment"; what impressed him was power and ruthless,
resolute action. Schacht knew that long before the war—
yet he never drew the consequences. He was consistent
in standing by his statement of March 1935 that he
would "say and do nothing that had not the Fuehrer's
consent".
What a fine, rousing moment, giving comfort to the
enemies of Hitler everywhere, it might have been if
Schacht's "accounts" had been settled 10 years earlier
in one of those free countries which would glady have
received the settler. lie would have stood forth in a
blaze of only slightly tarnished glory. He would by his
valor have exalted that civilization which by his ter-
giversations he helped to defile and disgrace, albeit
unwittingly if we are to believe him. But actually,
"Schacht was merely a financier without conscience",
writes Dr. Kelly, the American psychiatrist who ex-
amined each one of the rogue's gallery at Nuremberg;
his considered opinion is that Schacht's "reaction to-
ward persecution was not based on any feeling for the
persecuted but rather on how the financial status of
Germany, and consequently himself, would be affected.
Dr. Schacht proved, and still proves, his Nazi quality
simply by denying the truth that Jew and "Aryan" are
one before the incorruptible arbitrament of justice. Cer-
tainly no Nazi could have found fault with the opinion
which he says he always held that it is "a mistake for
Jews to be so keen in hankering after cultural key
positions." It's all there, even now—the prejudice-
ridden jargon, the brazen insinuation and the sneaking
dishonesty: no more is needed to enforce the whole of
the Nazi heresy. Everything else is commentary, varia-
tion by degree, and finally, Auschwitz. The doctor has
truly learnt nothing, though how much he has forgotten
is difficult to say. But as one reads his own defense
of his anti-Jewish prejudice. "Kultur has its roots in
religion, and the religion of the Germans is Chris-
tianity", it seems almost impossible not to perceive, in
this sorry record of irresolution, presumption and moral
incompetence, that arrant "folly" which Steele says
"takes away all dignity from distress and makes even
calamity ridiculous".
It may be said that since Schacht is dead, it is useless
to dig up old crimes. But his crimes were his condoning
of Nazism and being a collaborator, and since Nazism is
not totally dead it is essential to remember what the
criminals did as a protection against the rebirth of the
Hitler age of terror. The fact that the views of Rudolf
Hess still play a role in reconstructing the Nazi story
proves the validity of remembering Schacht and his
cohorts.
•
•
•
Rudolf Hess' Insanity
It's libelous to call anyone insane. But in the instance
of Rudolf Hess we might be sued for libel by the insane
for linking them with Hess. The man still imprisoned at
Spandau—the only one still
held prisoner there—has re-
corded such incredible ideas
that he emerges more amaz-
ing than ever in his "last mes-
sage." The eminent historian
of the Nazi era, Hugh Trevor-
Roper revealed the story in a
special article in the Sunday
London Times. The British
writer relates about a "revela-
tion" Hess was to make at the
Nuremberg Trial but instead
addressed the full document to
Sir Oswald Mosley, the British
fascist. Mosley never received
it and Trevor-Roper analyzed
it in his special article.
A
The historian said Hess, the
Hess
solitary political prisoner at
Spandau, had, in the 30 years of imprisonment, "amply
atoned" for his crimes. Trevor-Roper describes the spell
that was imposed on Hess by Adolf Hitler. It was a
dog-like loyalty to Hitler.
Then Trevor-Roper comes to the root of Hess' paranoia.
Hess had an explanation for Britain's anti-Hitler position:
"Britain's leaders were bewitched: bewitched by the
Jews." In his explanation of the message Hess prepared,
to be sent to Mosley, Trevor-Roper explains Hess' inten-
tions to overcome the bewitching of Britain by the Jews:
"Cutting his way equally through the wicked Jewish
clique which had bewitched Churchill's Britain, he would
address himself directly to the representatives of the j;, , d
Nordic Britain and by explaining the simple facts of life,
persuade them to call off the meaningless, fratricidal war."
Hess' "fantasies," analyzed by Trevor-Roper, are in
the document that Mosley has not received. The outline of
the Hess delusion, his conviction that Jews did the be-
witching, are explained by the British historian of Nazism
as follows:
Typed out, on the typewriter lent to him by the
American prison authorities; it filled forty-nine pages.
At the head of it he wrote, in English and German,
"To be transmitted in the most secret way to Sir Os-
wald Mosley in London. A very high gratification will
be granted later on." This promise was signed "Rudolf
Hess."
This "testament" of Rudolf Hess never reached Sir
Oswald Mosley. It was intercepted by the American
deputy commandant, who carried it back with him to
America. It has now come to light, and can be added
to the other. documents in the case-history of the most
passiVe and credulous of the Nazi "war-criminals": the
most typical representative,
By Philip
Slomoyitz
perhaps, of the passive,
credulous German masses.
In this document Hess repeats the long, lunatic ver-
sion of his own experiences in England, the .experiences
from which he now deduced the state of the whole
world.
He tells how he was subjected to "a truly infernal
system" of perscution. His captors were determined
to kill him by "unimaginable sufferings." He was given
glass-splinters in his stewed fruit. His coffee was drug-
ged. Acid was slipped into his food. He was massaged
with sinister powders. He was fed on pills to stop his
bowels and close his bladder. His heart and brain was
poisoned. "Alleged antidotes only made things worse."
The doctors said that his pains were nervous, but of
course, they were lying. A psychiatrist was called in—
a "grotesque" expedient, for the psychiatrist "really
should have been his own patient." He was glassy-eyed
and palpably hypnotized, but quite unaware of the fact:
"when I told him, he did not believe me but regarded it
as a bad joke." The psychiatrist was the late Dr. J. R.
Rees who afterwards, with Hess's approval, published
his papers as "The Case of Rudolf Hess."
HOW DID HESS SURVIVE these torments? "I can
explain this," he answers. "It is my rock-firm conviction
that the Almighty gave me the strength to survive
those five-and-a-half years in order that, one day, I
might reveal to the world the knowledge which had
been granted to me." That knowledge was, of course,
that the whole world was bewitched by the Jews.
"So I came," Hess declares, "to the events in the
German concentration camps.' He does not deny the
atrocities nor that prisoners were tortured and murder-
ed, that their skins were made into lampshades, that
horrible experiments were carried out on living men.
But this was not done by responsible people. The Ger-
mans are an exceptionally virtuous race and the SS
were the most virtuous of all Germans, Therefore, to
do these things, the SS must have been bewitched. They
must have been bewitched also to allow themselves
to be found out. Everyone who resisted Hitler's heroic
efforts to break the Jewish spell must, by definition,
have been bewitched: the generals who opposed him,
the allies who deserted him, the Englishmen who pre-
ferred Stalin to him.
In the end the Nazis themselves were bewitched:
how else could Goebbels, Bormann, Ilimmler, with his
"frank, open manner," have made such mistakes? They
were bewitched into losing the war, how else could it
have been lost?
The last triumph of the Jews was to bewitch Hitler
himself and make that saintly character, who in the
past had been so humane even to Jews, commit the
tactical error of sending the Jews to the gas chambers.
. . . This does indeed seem a powerful and perverse
bewitchment.
How did "the criminals in the background" succeed
in bewitching the whole world in order, through war,
to ruin Germany? Hess admits that he does not know
their secret charm: "I only know for certain that it
exists and what its effect is.' He also knows, "from my
own observation," that those who are so bewitched
can be used as agents, without their own knowledge,
to bewitch others, even at a distance, in foreign coun-
tries. Thus, by a "chain-effect," one innocent person
bewitches another until the original "criminals," having
made all men their tools, can retreat, invisible, into
the "background."
HAVING ONCE ESTABLISHED that the whole world
is controlled by the Jews, Hess has no difficulty in
applying his theory to solve every problem. In the sec-
ond part of the proposed speech be uses it to interpret
European history from 1914 to 1945. All the troubles of
those years, he says, were deliberately fomented by
the Jews who, by bewitching the statesmen and peoples
of Europe, engineered two world wars for the weaken-
ing of the Nordic race.
This, he claims, is the real meaning of the European
tragedy. This is what renders the Nuremberg Trials not
merely unfair but irrelevant. The real "criminals," the
real authors of "crimes against humanity," "crimes
against peace," etc., are not the defendants in the dock.
They remain in "the background," "in no danger of
being unmasked.' But Hess, triumphantly, now at last
steps forth to unmask them. This is the substance of
his "revelation." He ends his long, undelivered harangue
with the words, "in the name of all humanity I ac-
cuse the Jews."
Such was the last message of Rudolf Hess, uttered
(as he said) "as a loyal German, a National Socialist,
and a true follower of the Fuehrer," before he with-
drew into the long silence of Spandau.
Those who read it may say that the Russians, who
insist on keeping him in prison are not mistaken in
regarding him as an incorrigible Nazi. But they must
also add that he has only preserved his Nazism by
retreating into a world of such total fantasy that the
normal rules of responsibility can hardly be said to
apply to him. His proper place, wherever it may be,
is not in prison.
Hugh Trevor-Roper's revelation thus becomes a part
of the history of Nazism. It is a significant expose, an
important chapter added to the story of the era of crime
that turned so many Germans into beats. Schacht con-
dones the bestialities. Hess believed they were a result of
witchery practiced by Jews. The simplest explanation
for all—Nazism, the Hitler clique, Schacht and'Hess—is
that it was mass insanity.' • "