The Jews defames Hitler, his Third Reich and his National Socialists with four horrible accusations:
1) Hitler was supposedly a war-loving, racist, genocidal, dictatorial madman
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2) the Holocaust — six million innocent Jews, they say, were murdered, and five million others
3) the SS --they claim, carried out the mass murders and ran the concentration camps
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4) the Gestapo -- they say, tortured prisoners and resistance fighters
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To the best of my knowledge, before Vincent Reynouard no one has EVER logically dismantled the lies against the German police service called the Gestapo!
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Now, here it is!
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I met Klaus Barbie’s daughter in Kufstein, Austria in the 1980s, and I am so glad that her father’s war service — HARSH BUT VITAL — can now be defended.
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Kufstein, Tyrol, Austria
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I got training myself as an interrogator while in the US Marine Corps Reserve 1977-79 (the then 35th ITT, Interrogator-Translator Team, located at the Washington DC Navy Yard and then at Anacostia Naval Air Station).
It is the rankest hypocrisy for the USA, with a LONG HISTORY OF TORTURE ITSELF, which by no means began with Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, or with Guantanamo, or the CIA rendition flights, to point the finger at the Gestapo and the Third Reich over this issue. And both Obama and Bush are FOR torture, as their ACTIONS show.
Dog snarls at hooded, shackled, kneeling Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghraib; Ernst Zündel experienced this in a Tennessee jail!!!!!!
Fed employee Lyndie English and humiliated prisoners
Israeli guard at Abu Ghraib
Some sort of vise-like device
In the British version of Abu Ghraib, prisoners were beaten to death and slit open.
Prisoner smeared with mud and blood must prance about like an opera star.
Guantanamo front gate
Forced-feeding chair with straps
Blindfolded, kneeling, hearing-deprived, and in stress positions
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…..REYNOUARD BRAVELY DEFENDS THE GESTAPO!
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Already kept at home for three months with an electronic bracelet, suddenly Vincent was arrested and taken to this prison in Forest, Belgium for forty days to live alongside the local criminals — White, Arab, Jewish and negro drug dealers and pimps.
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Reynouard spent almost a year in Valenciennes prison 2010-11, but more charges may be piled on, and both he and his companion were arrested again (early 2014), and his video equipment, computer and DVD burner were seized.
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I said no one has touched the Gestapo topic. I wish to promote this work byReynouard very strongly. When I translated about 10 pages into English myself, and put it on this blog, everyone begged for more.
And I find it incredibly courageous of Vincent Reynouard, especially as a Frenchman (just think of how Hollywood via such movies as Casablanca promoted the Resistance) to defend the Gestapo. This is just as brave and principled as his defending of the Waffen-SS over Oradour, where the lie is that the SS men massacred 500 French civilians. Every French kid is brainwashed with Oradour ad infinitum as proof of of le barbarisme nazi…. like American kids are indoctrinated to worship Martin Luther King and see the Confederacy and the Klan as pure evil.
These are two sacred cows of la France resistante specifically, 1) “the Oradour massacre” and 2) the evil Gestapo and its head in France, Klaus Barbie, the “butcher of Lyons,” who supposedly tortured the “Resistance heroes”.
(My second wife, who was French, was a daughter of “résistants de la première heure”, “resistants from the first hour,” i.e., from 1940 on.)
The latest horror is that the French police and Belgian police seem to be fishing for NEW charges to lay on Reynouard. (As I suspected, they did the same with Gerd Honsik, getting him into prison on one charge, then adding two more trials and two more sentences once he was in! Honsik did five years for his WRITINGS!
Reynouard was a brave national socialist from the beginning; here a headline about one of his many arrests: “[Holohoax] Denier in Brussels Arrested”
And it appears that his fellow Austrian, Wolfgang Fröhlich (an engineer like Reynouard), already serving six years, also got two more years added on!
Now you see the full sadism of the Jew, piling on the suffering, higher and higher, who not long ago attempted to have Richard Scutari, a key member of the revolutionary “Order” in the USA, transferred to an ultra-harsh new super-max regime with no visits except from family and no Movement literature DESPITE 25 YEARS OF PERFECT CONDUCT. (It appears that this attempt failed, however.)
Here is Reynouard on French-Belgian TV in 2007:
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Even without understanding la langue de l’amour you can figure out what is happening. The blue-eyed bimbette is reporting breathlessly that her TV channel is doing a big, brave “exposé” of the “extreme rightwinger” living in their innocent, previously hate-free Belgian capital city of Brussels. (And it is hate-free, except for muslim gangs-raping white women…. If you don’t resent that atrocity, all is wonderful. Have some more Belgian chocolate and drink your strawberry-syrup beer….)
So they go to his door to confront him. (I and Margi have been in and out that very door. We stayed with the nearly saintly VR and his adorable family for almost three days. They had to cook, then a family of eight – now ten — on ONE hotplate, because not enough comrades support them, and washed their dishes in the bathtub! Shame and black karma on all who do not support such heroes!)
Here now is Margaret’s two-part article summarizing the research by Vincent Reynouard in his magazine Sans Concession “in defense of the Gestapo”:
Margi herself is part French-Canadian-Acadian, descended from the Falgouts….
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE GESTAPO, part I
by Vincent Reynouard
“Ge-sta-po.” Three syllables that evoke the shadowy spectre of an omnipresent, omnipotent and arbitrary monster; brutal arrests, violence and torture. Sinister figures – Himmler, Barbie. . .
Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and the German Police
But – does this officially endorsed and endlessly invoked image correspond to reality? Vincent Reynouard wanted to find out for himself. In order to do this, he went to the source: he consulted the transcripts of the Nuremberg Trials and of the trials that took place in France starting in December, 1944, of the “auxiliaries” of the German police in the Occupied Territories.
“Don’t judge before you have heard both sides,” wrote Phocylides of Miletus in the sixth century BC.
“History is only half told when only one side tells it”
….adds an Icelandic proverb. Vincent Reynouard put these wise teachings into practice. He listened to the defense. In doing so he made unexpected discoveries, discoveries that call into question some fundamental tenets of the “official” history.
To share his findings Reynouard published a two-part article in in the December 2006 and February-March 2007 issues of his Revisionist journal Sans Concession, entitled “The Truth about the Gestapo,” which has since been translated into English by Revisionist Carlos Whitlock Porter and can be found in its entirety on his website at http://www.cwporter.com/articles.htm.
A typical issue back then of Sans Concession magazine
The first part, on the subject of the Gestapo in Germany from April 1933 to September 1939, is far shorter (53 pages out of a total of 158) than the second, which deals with the Gestapo in German-occupied France.
That is because, while the situation in the Occupied Territories was extremely complex, requiring in-depth analysis of many factors and a multiplicity of examples, the non-criminality of the Gestapo in the pre-war period is an open and shut case, as Reynouard skilfully demonstrates.
Part I – the Gestapo in Germany 1933 – 1939
At the post World War II International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei = Secret State Police) was one of many organizations collectively indicted under Articles 9 and 10 of the “London Charter,” in which the Tribunal gave itself the power to designate an organization as “criminal” and then indict members merely on the basis of their belonging to said organization.
Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Headquarters)
on Prinz Albrecht St. in the Charlottenburg section of Berlin
In his opening address the United States chief prosecutor Robert Jackson set the tone for six and a half decades (and counting) of anti-Gestapo invective, by declaring:
“Through the police formations that are before you accused as criminal organizations, the Nazi Party leaders. . .instituted a reign of terror. These espionage and police organizations were utilized to hunt down every form of opposition and to penalize all nonconformity.” [IMT II, 128]
His assistant Commander Frank B. Wallis chimed in, denouncing the Gestapo as “. . . the vicious tools used in the extermination of all opposition, real or potential” [IMT II, 193].
Political police forces existed in Germany before 1933
The Gestapo was ably defended at Nuremberg by Rudolf Merkel, who began his defense by dispelling the notion that the Gestapo was a terrorist organization created out of thin air to serve the criminal needs of the Hitler regime, as was frequently claimed — for example, by the left-wing French weekly Le Combat, which wrote in 1939 :
“The Weimar Republic had thought it unnecessary to create a political police force. Hitler’s first concern, upon his accession to power, on 30 January 1933, was to repair this error. [Notre combat, n° 13, 15 December 1939, issue entitled: ”La Gestapo: ses origines, ses chefs, son organization,” p. 1].
As Merkel pointed out, this claim could not be more wrong. Not only had a very active and effective police existed during the Weimar Republic, but their main focus of attention (with the Communist party a close second) had been the National Socialist Party! The difference between the pre-1933 political police and the Gestapo, as former Gestapo head Karl Best testified at Nuremberg, was merely that, rather than answering to a central authority, these “political police systems . . . in the individual German states . . . were created by the various state governments concerned” [IMT XX, 124].
All that Goering did in April of 1933, in “creating” the Gestapo, was to reorganize and centralize the existing political police forces. In fact, the vast majority of officers in the various branches of the “new” service were simply retained from the Weimar times. Why did Goering do this? As he testified at Nuremberg;
I took a great number of functionaries [into the newly created Gestapo]. who were not political at all, simply because of their knowledge of the technical aspects of the work; at the beginning I chose very few people from Party circles because for the time being I had to attach the greatest importance to professional ability. [IMT IX, 256].
Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering
In support of Göring’s testimony, former local Gestapo head Karl Hoffmann stated that “most” of the members of his service were “employees who had entered the police before 1933 and had been detailed or transferred to the State Police.” The proportion of volunteers who entered after 1933 only reached “at most 10 % or 15 %” of effective staff.”(!)
This is a far cry from the claim in the Nuremberg indictment that the functionaries and agents of the newly-created police force were “selected in accordance with Nazi biological, racial, and political theories, completely indoctrinated in Nazi ideology” [IMT I, 82].
The Gestapo was not an arm of the NSDAP
Thus the Gestapo was not an arm of the NSDAP, as is frequently implied or alleged, but a perfectly ordinary state police force, such as virtually all countries have. Its objective, as set out in the Preamble of the decree reorganizing and unifying the German police, was to: “protect the German people from any attempts at destruction by interior and exterior enemies.”
It is often claimed that members of the Gestapo were members of the SS, as evidence that they were indeed a “Nazi” organization — and it is true that during the war some members of the Gestapo received a post in the SS, with the corresponding rank and uniform. However, as revealed in Nuremberg Trial testimony, the objective was solely to reinforce the authority of ordinary acting officials, and did not imply political or ideological affiliation:
“The reason for this assimilation was the following: . . . civil servants were . . . not particularly respected by the Party. . . because of their political, or non-political, past. In order to strengthen their authority in the discharge of their duties, in particular when acting against National Socialists, they were to appear in uniform.” [IMT XXI, 506]
In fact, their SS rank had no practical effect on the functions of Gestapo members – their duties and the chain of command remained the same. Likewise, when SS members joined the Gestapo, as sometimes happened (contingent upon passing an examination to which all candidates were subject), they were henceforth considered civil servants, and operated within the Gestapo hierarchy.
Why create the Gestapo?
To readers who may be wondering “If the Gestapo was not, in reality, a new agency, why change the structure and give it a new name?” Reynouard responds, “To understand this, one must understand the context of Germany in 1931-1932.” Drawing from contemporary sources, he then spends over a third of “The Truth about the Gestapo, Part I” vividly depicting the relentlessly deteriorating economic situation.
The Leipziger Volkszeitung [= "Leipzig Peoples' News"] wrote, following one of the government’s countless emergency decrees: “. . . the blackest pessimism has once again been exceeded. . .”. There was a chaotic political situation with 19 different governments between 1918 and 1932, and there was an increasing danger of an uprising by the six million Communists in Germany, their numbers swelled by masses of unemployed, which together threatened to destroy Germany if drastic remedies were not applied.
Ernst Thälmann, leader of the gigantic German Communist Party (KPD), who took his orders from Stalin
By 1932 even the Center party wanted a majority government with Hitler, and most of the newspapers were clamoring for the National Socialists to step up to the plate – including, surprisingly, some left-wing publications. For example, the Frankfurter Zeitung wrote on August 7, 1932: “The National Socialists have the imperious duty to participate in governmental responsibility.”
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The National Socialists, however, had no intention of merely “participating” in a government. They were firmly opposed to half-measures. They understood that only a completely new system would be able to turn the situation around, and for that they needed absolute authority and enough time to put the new system firmly in place.
But time was just what the Communists had no intention of giving the National Socialists — being well aware that if Hitler’s government succeeded it would be the death knell of the Communist party in Germany.
The Gestapo: a defensive organization
Just how palpable was the Bolshevik threat at the time of Hitler’s ascension to power?
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On the night of his inauguration, January 30 – 31, 1933, the Communists carried out a “symbolic” double assassination to show their determination: the murder of police agent Zaunitz and the commander of the 33rd assault company of Berlin, Maïkowicz, who were returning from a victory parade. [Source: Documentation Catholique, n° 656, April 29 1933, col. 1040].
In response, Hitler announced in his speech of February 1, 1933:
[The national government] will conduct . . . a pitiless war against nihilist tendencies in the moral, political and cultural sphere. Germany must not sink, and will not sink, into anarchic communism [Source:“Declaration du government national…” op cit.].
Writes Reynouard,
“For the National Socialists, whose grip on power was still weak (many people thought they would not last more than a few weeks), the danger was therefore real of seeing the Reds attempt a revolutionary uprising.”
At Nuremberg, under direct examination by his attorney, Göring summed up the matter as follows:
“It was a matter of course for us that once we had come into power we were determined to keep that power under all circumstances. We did not want power and governmental authority for power’s sake — rather we needed power and governmental authority in order to make Germany free and great. We did not want to leave this any longer to chance. . . but we wanted to carry out the task to which we considered ourselves called.” [IMT IX -250].
In short, as Karl Hoffmann testified at Nuremberg, in response to Dr. Merkel’s question, “the Gestapo was not an aggressive, but a defensive organization.”
The deceptive figure of 75, 000 Gestapo agents
But what of the “reign of terror” spoken of by Justice Jackson at the Nuremberg Tribunal? A sceptical reader might ask: aren’t we told that the Gestapo agents — granted, as a “defensive” measure – set up networks of informants who constantly spied on the population in order to “hunt down every form of opposition and to penalize all nonconformity?”
It is true, replies Reynouard, that Rudolf Merkel, at Nuremberg, gave the number of Gestapo employees at, 75,000 at the time of its greatest expansion, but as he went on to explain, this figure is deceptive, because only approximately 20% of Gestapo personnel were actually in the field as agents.
“I estimate the number of its staff, during the period when it was numerically strongest, at approximately 75, 000. The executive officials, numbering approximately 15, 000 men, therefore constituted only 20 percent of the total strength. If we deduct from that the 5 or 6 thousand men belonging to the Counter-Intelligence and Frontier Police, there remain 9 or 10 thousand executives, or 12 to 13 percent of the total strength.” [IMT XXI 543, final summation of Dr. Merkel]
Since Germany had about 72 million inhabitants in 1937, there would have been approximately one Gestapo agent for every 7, 200 persons.
This fact makes it abundantly clear that for the Gestapo to have set up a surveillance network to spy on the “entire population” would have been impossible.
According to Karl Best at Nuremberg:
BEST: It is not true. . . that the Gestapo had a net of spies and information agencies which kept track of the entire people. With so few officials. . . anything like that could not be carried out [IMT XX, 128].
The Gestapo and concentration camps
On February 28, 1933, the German government issued a law authorizing “preventive detention,” which permitted the sending of suspects to concentration camps, and which was then used for detaining thousands of Communists. At Nuremberg the indictment declared:
“In order to make their rule secure from attack and to instil fear in the hearts of the German people, the Nazi conspirators established and extended a system of terror against opponents and supposed or suspected opponents of the regime. They imprisoned such persons without judicial process, holding them in “protective custody” and concentration camps.”[IMT I - 32]
Reynouard makes three main points about the concentration camps. First, as Barnes Review readers undoubtedly know, concentration camps were the invention, not of the Germans, but of the British, who used them to imprison and starve to death Boer women and children in South Africa until their men-folk were forced to surrender (a favorite British tactic — later used to force the German delegation at the Versailles conference to assume guilt for World War I, by making blockaded Germany into a gigantic concentration camp of starving women and children).
Lizzie Van Zyl, one of many Boer children whom the British deliberately starved in what the British called (their word) “concentration camps.”
Fewer readers may know about the World War I French concentration camps in which 35,000 Austro-Germans resident in France were interned.
Moreover, even in Germany, the concept and practice of “protective custody” did not originate with Hitler’s regime. Dr. Merkel, in his final summation, recalled:
“In Germany, too, protective custody existed prior to 1933. At that time both Communists and National Socialists were arrested by the Police.” [IMT XXI, 518]
Reynouard’s second point is that, contrary to the myth of “arbitrariness,” Gestapo agents were not authorized to send people to concentration camps on their own initiative. As Dr. Merkel explained:
[…]. The individual member of the Gestapo was concerned only with the investigation. After the completion of the investigation . . . the file was sent to the central headquarters in Berlin (which later became Amt IV of the RSHA (Reichs Sicherheitshauptamt=Office of State Security), which alone could make a decision. [IMT XXI, 517].
Thirdly, a quick look at the numbers shows the ludicrousness of the claim that all opponents of the government were rounded up and thrown into concentration camps. Comparing the number of political prisoners in 1939 Germany, which Dr. Merkel estimated at about 40,000, with the total number of Germans, it is clear that there is a huge discrepancy. “It is therefore completely incorrect,” writes Reynouard, “to claim that under Hitler, the mere fact of having expressed opposition to the regime or having criticized it in a conversation on the street would have had you sent to a concentration camp by the order of an all-powerful Gestapo
[Footnote: See also the article, “The Facts About the Origins of the Concentration Camps and Their Administration” in The Barnes Review, Jan./Feb. 2001, pp. 11-16. (the Concentration Camp Money special “All-Holocaust” issue)]
The Gestapo was not above the law.
The Gestapo, like – in theory – most police forces, was not above the law. Appeals could be filed against its methods. In 1935, an administrative journal of the Reich wrote:
“Since the Law on the Gestapo of November 30, 1933 became effective, orders of the Gestapo Office can no longer be contested according to the provisions of the Law on Police Administration. The only remedy against them is a complaint through investigation channels.” [IMT XXI, 283]
In other words there had been, and continued to be, measures that could be taken if the Gestapo broke the law.
Before 1939 many police forces throughout the world collaborated with the Gestapo.
During the trial, Dr. Merkel introduced two sworn statements (Gestapo affidavits nos. 26 and 89) which recalled that before the war very many police organizations had collaborated with the Gestapo, and that delegations from other countries had undergone periods of practical training on Gestapo premises. In his final summation he stated, reasonably:
“It never even occurred to Gestapo officials. . . that they might be accused from abroad of acting arbitrarily. . . If foreign countries had objected to the aims pursued by the Gestapo, it would not have been conceivable for numerous foreign police systems to have worked in close collaboration with the German Gestapo. . . with the intention of learning from it.” [IMT XX, 510]
The Nuremberg tribunal vindicates Dr. Merkel
Despite all its attempts, the Nuremberg prosecution was incapable of refuting these arguments. So much so, that at the end of the trial the Tribunal naturally declared the Gestapo a criminal organization, but only starting on September 1, 1939. In the judgment, one reads:
…this group declared criminal cannot include, therefore, persons who had ceased to belong to the organizations enumerated in the preceding paragraph prior to September 1, 1939 [IMT X, 273].
Writes Reynouard:
“This is proof that the Tribunal did not consider the activities of the Gestapo during peacetime criminal. It cannot be repeated often enough: until 1939, the Gestapo was a perfectly ordinary political police force, such as exists in all so-called ‘civilized’ countries… Unless the existence of armed clandestine networks or espionage groups was suspected, its methods of investigation were minimal; out of ten denunciations, nine were tossed in the waste basket…”
Why conceal this fact?
The decision of the judges at Nuremberg is very rarely mentioned correctly. Most of the time, it is merely said that at Nuremberg the Gestapo was declared criminal, without elaboration, as if this statement were valid for its whole existence.
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Why hide the fact that the Gestapo was declared to be criminal only from the date of September 3, 1939? “Because,” writes Reynouard, “this fact disproves once again the notion that the National Socialists plunged Germany into terror starting in February 1933 in order to maintain their hold on power.”
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The fact is that the National Socialist government was popular and remained popular, even after the adoption of its first “anti-democratic” measures, since the German people knew that these measures were aimed, not against the masses, but against individuals who, incapable of overcoming their ideological or philosophical prejudices, risked impeding the promised work of national elevation.
In this climate, the Gestapo was a simple tool of protection of the State against subversive minorities. It did not think of sending hundreds of thousands of people to the camps, or of instituting a reign of terror, for the good and simple reason that the immense majority of people followed Hitler voluntarily.
Hence the fact that at Nuremberg, the judges gave up attempting to declare the Gestapo criminal before 1939. It was impossible, since the evidence showed that the prosecution evidence was fallacious.
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All this, however, must be hidden from the masses. This is why sixty years after the verdict at Nuremberg our public controllers continue to conceal the fact that at the end of the Nuremberg Trial, the Gestapo was never declared “criminal” for the period from 1933 to September 1939.
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE GESTAPO, part 2
The Gestapo in the Occupied Territories, and Particularly France,
Hidden revelations of the post-war trials
By Vincent Reynouard
Having established in Part One that the Gestapo in Germany up until September 1, 1939, far from being an instrument of terror, was merely a means of protecting the state from enemies within and without, Reynouard proceeds to deal with the thornier question of its wartime conduct in the territories occupied by Germany.
He imagines a reader saying, “The fact that the Gestapo did not have to persecute the German population, since the Germans accepted the Nazi dictatorship, means very little. However, during the war they showed their true colors when they sowed terror in the occupied territories, arresting, deporting, torturing, shooting. . . They acted in accordance with the racist Hitlerian doctrine, according to which anyone who was not ‘pure German’ was subhuman and thus could be could be vilified, humiliated, killed . . .”
Since this argument is a very strong one, writes Reynouard, he will spend some time answering it.
The real purpose of the Allied crusade, and its consequences for Germany
Reynouard places this topic first for good reason: as he reminds us, all the actions of the Gestapo in the occupied territories must be placed in the context of the fact that the war declared on Germany on September 3, 1939 was a war of extermination. Even according to Christian morality, self defense is permitted: according to Thomas Aquinas, “If . . . one kills someone to defend one’s life, one is not guilty of homicide.”
“Well,” writes Reynouard, ”what is true of a man is also true of Germany.” By 1940 it had become amply clear that the war was not about defending Poland, but about the total destruction of Germany. Thus, the actions of the Gestapo in France: “. . . were precise actions dictated solely by the necessities of the moment to protect its exixtence. One cannot, therefore, recognize in these acts the result of any ideology. When one defends his life, one no longer acts according to one’s philosophical principles, but rather according to the instinct for self-preservation.
If one wishes to judge National Socialism (or more particularly the Gestapo) one must judge it in times of peace, not in wartime — and above all not during the two last years of the war, when everything was collapsing in Germany, faced with an enemy which destroyed its cities one by one, exterminated its women and children and which promised to continue until unconditional surrender.” (And beyond, I might add, since as we know the postwar death toll for Germans was much higher than the wartime body count.)
Bombed German cities
In other words, what the victors chose to call “Nazi barbarism” or the result of a “racist police state” was, in the vast majority of cases, the consequence of the war of extermination declared by the Allies against the Reich on September 3, 1939. At Nuremberg, towards the end of his summation, defense counsel Dr. Rudolf Merkel had the courage to say the following:
“One last point, however — perhaps the most profound — must not be overlooked in this connection. The German soldier, the German civil servant, the German working man, and every German man knew that the world had placed us in a situation which meant a life-and-death struggle. In the course of the war it gradually became appallingly clear that it was a question of existence or extermination. Indeed, you would be misjudging the soul of the German people if you overlooked the fact that every decent German, when he realized this horrible truth, felt himself under an obligation to do everything that was expected of him in order to save his country. And when we judge the behaviour of the German people and its political police we must take these factors into consideration in order to do them justice.” [IMT XXI, 540]
Moreover, the growing organized resistance to the occupying forces, and the growing resentment by the French people as a consequence of the reprisals by the Germans against partisan atrocities, took its toll on the mood of the Gestapo, even as the overall situation became more desperate.
Having thus placed in context the arguments that are to follow, Reynouard proceeds to specifics.
On the omnipresence and omnipotence of the Gestapo in the occupied territories.
Writes Reynouard:
“If one believes the stories of the Resistance members, the Gestapo was everywhere in the occupied territories. An illegal arms cache is discovered? It’s the work of the Gestapo! A search is conducted? It’s the Gestapo! A network is dismantled: The Gestapo! Resistance members are deported? Gestapo! Innocent people arrested? It’s the arbitrary power of the Gestapo! In sum, from 1940 to 1945, the Gestapo is said to have been a monster with immense power, present everywhere at once to cause a reign of terror in the occupied territories.”
This image is, of course, very far from the truth. The Gestapo simply did not have the capability. The war had caught them unprepared, and they did not have reservists to call on, as the regular police did — they were also short of arms, trucks, radio equipment, etc. for the occupied territories.
When questioned at Nuremberg on the number of Gestapo personnel in occupied France, Ernst Kaltenbrunner said he believed he had heard a figure of around 800(!) [IMT XI-408]. If the proportion of bureaucrats to field officers was, as in peacetime Germany, 80/20, one is left with the incredibly puny figure of 200 active Gestapo agents in all of occupied France! Moreover, these few agents were divided among four different services, including suppression of the black market and tracking of German deserters — leaving only a few dozen for tracking down Jews or fighting the Resistance.
So much for the Gestapo as an “omnipresent, omnipotent monster in the occupied territories.”
Gestapo as Scapegoat
As a result of their lack of manpower and means, the Gestapo were forced to rely on auxiliaries recruited from the occupied territories, many of whom were not trained for police work, and some of whom were of dubious character.
The deeds of the latter were, of course, blamed on the Gestapo, as were the actions of other branches of German law enforcement in the occupied territories.As Dr. Merkel explained at the Nuremberg Tribunal:
Klaus Barbie
“It was customary to ascribe to the Gestapo all police measures, terror acts, deprivations of freedom, and killings, as long as they had any police connection at all. It became the scapegoat for all misdeeds in Germany and the occupied territories, and today it is made to bear responsibility for all evil. . . . the error arises from the fact that the whole police system, whether Criminal Police, Wehrmacht Police, Political Police, or SD, . . . are considered Gestapo.” [IMT XXI-500].
Post “Liberation” trials of Auxiliaries in France
Reynouard bases “The Truth about the Gestapo, Part II” mainly on the transcripts of four French trials of the “auxiliaries of the Gestapo” in France that took place between 1944 and 1947 — in some cases contrasting the testimony at these trials with the distorted versions used at the Nuremberg Tribunal. The records of the trials are available at the Bibliotheque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine (BDIC), located at Nanterre, France. The four trials were:
Trial of the “Bonny-Lafon gang” (PBL= Proces Bonny-Lafon) December 1944,
Trial of “Georgia Gestapo” (PGG) July 1945
Trial of “Gestapo of Neuilly” (PGN) November 1945
Trial of French auxiliaries of the Gestapo (PAFG) February-March 1947
The previous histories of some of their leaders give some idea of the composition of these police units. For example, Henri Lafon (photo), of the Bonny-Lafon group (real name Henri Chamberlin) had had an unfortunate childhood, orphaned and homeless at the age of 11, and was later convicted of various petty crimes.
Many of his group were recruited among men he knew from his stretches in prison. His partner, Pierre Bonny (photo), was a former chief inspector of police who had been fired as a result of a couple of serious scandals.
The head of the “Georgia Gestapo,” Chalva (or Chaliko) Odicharia was a troubled adventurer from Kloni, Georgia, a refugee in France since the 1920s.
An exception was Georges Collignon, born in 1917 of a respectable family, well educated, and working as a broker in a commissions agency at the beginning of the occupation. He joined the “Georgia Gestapo” for reasons of conscience, because he saw the havoc being caused by Resistance actions and the resultant German reprisals, after what had been previously a relatively peaceful occupation:
COLLIGNON. – It was necessary to prevent the cases which were occurring [i.e., Communist sabotage and assassinations], because the Germans threatened to carry out mass deportations and executions, as at Chateaubriand. It was a question of preventing, to a certain extent, in my view, assassination attacks and bombings against the army, either the occupying forces or any other, which could place French people in almost hopeless situations [...] I’m not talking about ideals. I have said that I am an advocate of order.
Reboul: What order?
COLLIGNON: That order prevails, that our lives are not constantly in danger. . .
Not surprisingly, the defendant was ultimately sentenced to death. “Personally,” writes Reynouard, “I take my hat off to him. I salute you, Georges Collignon.
Was the Gestapo in France RACIST?
One of the establishment’s favorite claims about the Gestapo, as we have seen, is that they were the enforcement arm of a “racist police state.” However, a look at the records of the postwar trials reduces this thesis, in Reynouard’s words, to a nullity.”
His first example is in the person of the number two man in the “Georgia Gestapo,” Henri Oberschmuckler, who was –- a Jew! Born in 1902, at Kerch (Crimea), he volunteered for the French army while residing in France in 1939. Captured by the Germans in 1940, far from being deported to a concentration camp, he was made “general interpreter” for the Stalag. Freed as a war wounded at the end of 1941, he returned to Paris in April 1942 and later enlisted with the “Georgia Gestapo,” under the German Military Police, where he soon rose to head of the searches and confiscations office. In August 1944 he left with the Germans, taking with him his savings of 800,000 francs.
As another example of the lack of racism of the Gestapo in France, Reynouard introduces readers to the figure of Mohamed El Maadi, a North African Arab Berber from a noble family, a knight of the Legion d’Honneur, holder of the Médaille Militaire and the Croix de Guerre. living in Paris under the Occupation. In 1943 El Maadi founded a monthly newspaper entitled Er Rachid, in which he wrote numerous editorials giving his opinion of the occupation, the Germans, and of the latter’s attitude toward and treatment of the North African population.
Both his opinions of the “racist” Germans and his interactions with them contradict the standard thesis. From the first issue of Er Rachid, he clearly announced his objective: the struggle for the liberation of North Africa, alongside the Germans:
Our duty is to free ourselves from the Judeo-Anglo-Saxon ascendency. . . Alongside the European armies, we must undertake the struggle for liberation of our territory. [Er Rachid, January 1, 1943] [XXX "Er Rachid-6"].
El Maadi had some choice words to say on the behavior of the “Liberators” and the “Crusaders for Civilization,” compared to that of the Germans:
The Germans had hardly disembarked in Tunisia when they hired a native work force. . . at salaries identical to those paid to workers in France, Germany and Norway, while on the other hand the “Liberators,” when they deigned not to pay in ‘monkey money’, offered 10 to 18 francs for 12 hours work. . . In Tunis [under the German occupation] the public transports were open to everyone, elsewhere the natives traveled in special coaches” [XXX "Er Rachid-9]
After the first few issues, El Maadi had a difficult time obtaining paper on which to print his publication, so he went to the „French Gestapo,“ aka the „Bonny-Lafon gang“ and spoke with Henri Lafon. Did Lafon tell the „sand nigger“ to get lost? No, he helped him. El Maadi ended up getting the paper he needed and Er Rachid was printed on the presses of the major „collaborationist“ newspaper, Paris Soir.
As a result of their relationship with El Maadi, the Germans decided to recruit North Africans, as they had previously recruited Georgians (the „Georgia Gestapo“). Eventually, five sections of thirty to fifty men were set up as the LVF (Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism).(PBL, 1, p. 59-60).
So much for the „racist doctrines“ that were said to have motivated the Gestapo.
Was the Gestapo in France arbitrary?
On a simple, unverified denunciation, without previous investigation. . . masses of arbitrary arrests took place in every occupied country” [IMT V-401].
So claimed François de Menthon, French prosecutor at Nuremberg, in his opening summation January 17, 1946, thus setting the tone for the official history of the past 65 years. However, testimony given during the French trials studied by Reynouard reveals that, in fact the opposite was true. He makes the following points:
First of all, many denunciations were not followed up. Owing to their shortage of manpower and means, the German police forces and their auxiliaries simply could not act upon every denunciation that was made. In order to take action they required that clear evidence be produced and therefore, if their preliminary investigation failed to turn up such evidence, the case would be dropped. Other denunciations were ignored because the alleged crimes were not serious enough to justify further action, and still others just fell between the cracks
Furthermore, an investigation did not always result in an arrest – again, strong evidence of guilt was required. People who were arrested and who had done nothing wrong were usually released, while others who were guilty, but against whom no proof was found, were frequently given the benefit of the doubt and released.
There was, in fact, a required procedure that severely limited the possibility of arbitrary action by the auxiliaries: after a denunciation had been received and a preliminary investigation carried out, a report was sent “upstairs” to the German agency to whom the auxiliary force was accountable. Only after the officials at the Rue de Saussaies (Gestapo headquarters), Avenue Foch (Sicherheitsdienst) or the Hotel Lutetia (Military Police) had evaluated the report and given orders could the auxiliaries proceed to action.
Moreover, assuming that strong evidence of guilt was found, the agents had no power to determine punishment – the accused still had to go before a judge, who would decide their guilt or innocence and, if they were found guilty, sentence them.
And how does one categorize the case of Bernard Humbert? After going before a judge and being acquitted for lack of evidence, he was nonetheless held as a hostage because of Communist attentats that had just been committed. However, 10 days later:
. . . on 14 November [1941], my mother and my wife, who was about to give bir