Sometimes the briefest stories tell it all! Today's shall be brief - for I want to sear into your memory the implications of the following:
Ever more frequently I receive memoirs from old people, Germans and non-Germans alike, who now reassess the Second World War in the light of the Kosovo war.
Last night, a Revisionist friend and I went through some very old, yellowed papers left by the former British-Australian prison warden of the "War Crimes" prison of Werl.
His son, a committed Revisionist, who (I presume) cannot read German, shipped them to me, knowing that they had historical value, not realizing, I am sure, the emotional impact these yellowed, brittle sheets of paper would have on a German.
One of the papers in the collection was a speech or lecture delivered by this British-Australian on 4/10/1938 to British "Probationer" officers - in other words, prison guards in the Bermudas. It is a magnificent speech.
It talks about how to treat prisoners - with firmness but courtesy and dignity. It reads like the SS Camp guard code Ernst once unearthed in the archives in Washington.
There was a list of German men condemned to die in Werl as "war criminals", their names checked off by blue ink check marks, obviously indicating they had been "dealt with." This material, the paper trail, was out there for 50 years in some attic in a box in Australia!
What shocked me to the core was a terse note dated 20. January 1948 - three years ***after*** the war. It was titled "Body Receipt" and said the following:
"Received on this date the LIVE BODY . . . (name deleted by me)" of a woman who had been arrested on security grounds earlier by British agents!
There were also original documents in the collection signed by the infamous "British" Colonel Draper who was involved in extorting confessions from Rudolf Hoess, the badly tortured one-time commandant of Auschwitz.
No doubt this Australian man who kept the papers all these years was troubled by what he saw and heard. He must have known these records would be valuable.
Why else would he have bothered keeping them in his attic for more than half a century?
We are now studying these papers. The truth is out there. So are the facts. All we have to do is find them - and let the world know!
Thought for the Day:
"Capital punishment has always been a religious punishment."
(Albert Camus)
Back to Table of Contents of the May 1999 ZGrams