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.' • "