64 Friday, January 29, 1982 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS The Pledge Betrayed' Exposes Western Leaders' Indifference in Dealing With World War II Crimes In post-war Germany, try, headed up that bank's Nazi criminals were foreign department during reinstated in their insensi- the war. As with other tive positions in post-war German industrialists, Germany, and American many of Deutsch Bank's and British officials failed clients used slave labor in their factories and mines. to prosecute the guilty. DMW drew its slave labor This charge is substan- tiated in one of the most re- from the nearby Dachau vealing books on record concentration camp. I.G. about World War II in Farben built its synthetic which .Tom Bower makes rubber plant next to Au- the accusations in his "The schwitz. Its directors called Pledge Betrayed" (Double- it "I.G. Auschwitz": At least 50,000 inmates died of star- day). Bower charges that of the vation, exhaustion, expo- 150,000 war criminals who sure and torture building were directly implicated in that factory. At the same time Abs was mass murders under Nazism, only 5,000 were asked by the British to help ever brought to trial in the rebuild Germany's banking system after the war, West. "The Pledge Betrayed" American war crimes inves- shows how Gestapo of- tigators were hunting for ficers were appointed Abs as a suspected war chiefs of police; how con- criminal. Karl Blessing, a centration camp doctors member of Himmler's were allowed to resume normal general practice Circle and supremo for and how school teachers Germany's oil industry, who had enthusiastically became president of the preached the theories of Federal Bank. Ludger Westrick, head of radicalism and anti , Semitism continued to Germany's aluminum in- teach in the same schools. dustry, became secretary of state in the Federal Chan- The same pattern re- cellor's office. Ludwig Erhard, a peated itself in government and industry. Herman Abs, member of a secret SS plan- who became chairman of ning organization and fi- Deutsch Bank, now the sec- nance and economics ex- ond largest bank in Europe pert, became chancellor of with controlling interests in the Federal Republic. Roosevelt's one-third of German indus- Despite pledge that Nazism would be eradicated from Ger- many, "The Pledge Bet- rayed" proves that Ameri- can policy was cynically sabotaged by British offi- cials in Germany. Govern- ment documents show that known German murderers and notorious Nazi officials were given sanctuary in the British zone at the same time Britain officially sup- ported U.S. policy. Previously untold be- cause the official records were unavailable and Nazi and Allied decision-makers were unwilling to speak, "The Pledge Betrayed" now firmly establishes the background and harsh facts of how those who had made the sacrifice to remove Nazism were in fact betrayed once their hard-fought victory had been won. "The Pledge Betrayed" is exactly what the book's title asserts, as an indictment of the Churchill-Roosevelt re- gimes, as a post-war de- velopment during which the horrors of the war itself con- tinued in the hatred of Jews, the perpetuation of the anti-Semitic tactics, the fai- lures which accounted for the Holocaust. Bower, whose book ap- peared in serialized form in the London Times, works as a producer on BBC Televi- sion's "Panorama" prog- ram. He produced four major TV programs on the failure of the Allied war crimes and denazification efforts. They have been shown on 20 national TV networks throughout the world. Bower researched and ef- fectively recorded the major historic events that led to the betrayals exposed by him. The Adolf Eichmann story, the plan promulgated by Joel Brand in an effort to exchange trucks for the lives of Hungarian Jews, the concentration camp tragedies and the warnings of the impending mass murders in the crematoria — they are part of the hor- rifying record and they are in the Bower account. The author relates the warnings by Gerhardt Riegner, the World Jewish Congress rep- resentative, of the Nazi aim to commence the mass murder of millions of Jews and the ignor- ing of it, a listing of anti- Semites and the many anti-Semitic incidents appear throughout this volume. The shelving of the Riegner appeal for action, which came in time for rescue but failed to get a response, retains the charge of the Western powers' guilt in the de- struction of European Jewry. Bower's revelations indi- cate also how the anti- Zionist factor enters into the discriminatory ele- ments of the shocking post-war experiences. Bower charges: "Before Pearl Harbor the pro-German lobby in America had been a major factor in limiting support for Britain's lone fight against Hitler. Ethnic German communities were unwilling to believe stories about gas chambers in Po- land. Rather, in 1948, they were convinced that the Kirschbaums and the Pearls (war crimes inves- tigators during the Nurem- berg war crimes trial), Jewish refugees, possibly with leftist ideas, were members of the Zionist con- spiracy still intent on de- stroying Germany." One incident of an anti- Semite who escaped punishment is that of Her- bert Hagen, a French- speaking SS major, who was sent to Paris to speed the negotiations for mass ar- rests and deportations. Bower reveals that Hagen was one of the 1,080 Nazis who were listed for extradi- tion from France as war criminals in 1947. Only 156 actually stood for trial. Bowers notes the follow- ing about Hagen: "Intelligent and sophisticated, Hagen had joined the SS in 1933 and was recruited by Dr. Alfred Six, one of the Nazi party's chief ideologues on Jewish affairs, to write anti-Semitic arti- cles and books. "Amongst his prolific output was: 'World Jewry: Its Organizations, Its Power, Its Politics,' ar `Britain, Hinterland World Jewry.' He was a fre- quent lecturer to party offi- cials on the problems of Jewry and a critical con- noisseur of all anti-Semitic propaganda. Once he com- mented to Eichmann that he found that the latest issue of Der Sturmer lacked its 'usual objectivity.' " This and scores of other references to the anti- Semites and to the indiffer- ences in prosecuting them make the Bower book a sig- nificant addition to the his- tory of the era under his re- view. He has even included the relevant experiences contributed to the issue by McCarthyism. Combined, "The Pledge Betrayed" emerges as an inerasable indictment of indifference to the war crimes. —P.S. Revisionism: Neo-Nazis, Soviets Have Common Target By REV. FRANKLIN LITTELL Special to The Jewish News JERUSALEM — From time to time the question of historical "revisionism" bobs up in conversation about Holocaust studies. Indignant voices arise. How can such things be? On sec- ond thought the answer is clear: like the Communists. who also deny the facts of the Holocaust, neo-Nazis and their pseudo- intellectual fellow- travelers also have a politi- cal agenda that requires them to attempt to re-write history. The agenda of the histori- cal "revisionists" is not scholarly: it is political. Both the Communists and the Fascists hate the idea and the fact of a con- tinuing Jewish people. And the malice which leads the Soviets to deny that the vic- tims at Babi Yar were Jews has the same quality as the malice that leads the neo- Nazis to publish tracts — some of book size — denying that 6,000,000 of Hitler's victims were Jews. The Russians, tough and Hatred of a surviving Jewish people has inten- aggressive, know what they sifted as a restored Israel want: a bigger empire. The has demonstrated that a western politicians, cynical significant sector of the and luxury-loving, serve Jewish people is no longer those with money to feed weak or totally dependent their appetites and, like the upon the tender mercies of a weaklings of the French an- "civilized" Christendom or cien regime before the Revo- Islam to make for them the lution, comfort themselves choice of life or death. with a dying generation's The Marxist USSR has slogan, "Apres moi la De- major military treaties luge!" In the total picture, the ef- with Syria, Libya, South forts of a few pseudo- Yemen and Ethiopia, and to revise the his- is arming those dictator- historians ships and others in the torical record of the 20th Arab League under less Century, the Age of direct control for one Genocide, seems relatively purpose: to destroy Is- unimportant. And the task rael. Israel alone stands the most quixotic of them, a in the way of Russian retired Roman Catholic takeover of the world's teacher named Austin App, has defined for them is truly major oil fields. beyond the possible. App's position is con- And so-called Christian nations, capitulating to the sistent and clear. In "The Six Million Swindle" he pressure of the oil cartels and the moral cowardice of wrote: "The truth is that their politicians, abandon in World War II the Third the Christians of Lebanon Reich fought for justice, to the PLO and Syrian in- and the Allies fought to vaders and vie with the prevent justice . .." Russians in arming gov- Again: "Allied crimes ernments at war with Is- were 10 times worse than those of the Third Reich" rael. ("History's Most Terrify- ing Peace"). And again: "The unhappy mission of the Revisionists will have to be to show that we got unjustly into both World Wars against Germany ." (The Journal of His- torical Review). App's writings show that he hates Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt with equal passion, and that he believes the Balfour Dec- laration and the record of the Holocaust are both re- sults of the "Zionist conspi- racy." - Although "The Journal of Historical Review" is the major continuing effort of the historical "revisionists" to deny the historical re- cord, on its "Editorial Coun- cil" there are no profes- sional historians and only two individuals with aca- demic positions of any kind. App, before he retired some years ago, attained the rank of associate profes- sor at LaSalle College in Philadelphia. Arthur Butz, whose book "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century" ex- cited a flurry of public de- bate and became a bestsel- ler in Nazi circles, is an associate professor of elec- trical engineering at Northwestern University. The other academic is a professor of chemistry at the University of Califor- nia at San Diego. Serious scholars will not spend much time on "re- visionism," except eventu- ally to assign research pap- ers and dissertations to analyze its origins, finan- cial support and political purpose. The answer to the denials of fact and wild speculations of the histori- cal "revisionists" was given by the International Sur- vivors' Congress in Israel last June and the Interna- tional Liberators' Confer- ence in Washington, D.C. last October. Scientists do - debate with members of -S Flat Earth Society, and historians do not debate with members of the histor- ical "revisionist" group. Survivors Mark Wannsee Date VIENNA (JTA) — Mem- bers of Austrian Inmates of Auschwitz, an organization of death camp survivors, held a press conference to testify to the reality of the Holocaust, its origins and the methodical way it was carried out. The occasion was the 40th anniversary of the meeting in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, where Reinhard Heydrich, who was chief of security of the SS, Adolf Eichmann, and a number of other Nazi bureaucrats decided how to implement the "final solu- tion." Herbert Langbein, a writer and former inmate of Dachau and Auschwitz, ex- plained that the press con- neo-Nazi activities increase ference was organized be- because the victims have cause there can never be an been silent too long and end to discussion of Nazi Nazi propaganda finds an horrors. "We have to speak audience, especially the out because nowadays there very young, who are open to is much confusion about all the suggestion that the hor- this, especially among rors of the Holocaust could young people," he said. not have happened and, Langbein added that therefore, did not. License Ban for Nazi Initials BONN (JTA) — The city of Trier has decided to ban auto license plates bearing letters alluding to the Nazi era and organizations formed by the Nazis. The mayor of the city, Felix Zimmerman, said that in recent months car owners have demanded plates car- rying letters such as "HJ" (Hitler Jugend), "KZ" (the German abbreviation for concentration camp), "NS" (National Socialist Party), and "SS." ii ( )