Former Auschwitz commander Rudolf Hoess in 1947 as he is readied for execution on gallows constructed near the death camp’s crematorium.

By Gary G. Kohls

The ending of my last column was the powerful Thomas Merton prose poem that gave voice to the infamous international war criminal, the Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess. Merton has Hoess speaking from the gallows with a haunting accusation directed at history’s pro-war presidents, monarchs, dictators, prime ministers and assorted politicians who know that wars always involve the mass murder of defenseless civilians (euphemistically known as “collateral damage”).

The self-admitted war criminal Hoess accuses of war crimes every commanding officer who has ever ordered lethal bombings or artillery attacks that inevitably involve innocent non-combatants. That also would apply in modern times to the U.S. policy of extra-judicial assassinations of suspected “terrorists” by drone warfare as well as to every Apache helicopter crew (and their commanders) who targeted “suspects” in Iraq and Afghanistan. [See the horrifying war crime “collateral murder” video courageously made available to the public by Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0.]

Former Auschwitz commander Rudolf Hoess in 1947 as he is readied for execution on gallows constructed near the death camp’s crematorium.

Hoess seems to be accusing every combat platoon that has ever blindly participated in night raids or mortar attacks in areas where civilians are known to be present. Merton has Hoess say, “Do not think yourself better because you burn friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.”

Merton also accuses the war-profiteering industrialists that bid for the jobs of designing, manufacturing and equipping the camps with increasingly efficient extermination machinery. German ingenuity in action.

Merton’s poem contains actual quotes from some of the documents that were found after World War II had ended. The innovative SS Lt. Col. Hoess was proud of – and well rewarded for – his part in improving the craft of high-tech, industrial-strength mass murder.

He said: “Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chamber to accommodate 2,000 people at one time whereas at Treblinka their 10 gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each.

“The way we selected our victims was as follows: We had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work were sent into the camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work.

“Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to that fact.

“Very frequently women would hide their children under the clothes, but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.”

Hoess and others among the Nazi hierarchy had noticed the terrible psychiatric toll (alcoholism, depression, suicide, etc) that the up-close and personal massacres were having on the common soldiers who reflexively obeyed the illegal orders to kill noncombatants. The decidedly less personal killing methods of starvation, shellings, bombings and gassing was far less traumatizing to the soldiers who were there at the end of the chain of command.

Hoess was hanged in 1947 for his role in the deaths of 3 million people at Auschwitz during his 3½ years (May 1940 to December 1943) as the camp’s commandant. In a postwar affidavit (April 1946), Hoess confesses to his crimes:

“I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000. This figure represents about 70% or 80% of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries.

“Included among the executed and burnt were approximately 20,000 Russian prisoners of war (previously screened out of Prisoner of War cages by the Gestapo) who were delivered at Auschwitz in Wehrmacht transports operated by regular Wehrmacht officers and men. The remainder of the total number of victims included about 100,000 German Jews, and great numbers of citizens (mostly Jewish) from Holland, France, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, or other countries. We executed about 400,000 Hungarian Jews alone at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. …

“It took from 3 to 15 minutes to kill the people in the death chamber depending upon climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. …

“These so-called ill-treatments and this torturing in concentration camps, stories of which were spread everywhere among the people, and later by the prisoners that were liberated by the occupying armies, were not, as assumed, inflicted methodically, but were excesses committed by individual leaders, sub-leaders, and men who laid violent hands on internees.”

In his autobiography, written while he was awaiting his war crimes trial, Hoess wrote: “I want to emphasize that I personally never hated the Jews. I considered them to be the enemy of our nation. However, that was precisely the reason to treat them the same way as the other prisoners. Besides, the feeling of hatred is not in me. … It is tragic that, although I was by nature gentle, good-natured, and very helpful, I became the greatest destroyer of human beings who carried out every order to exterminate people no matter what.”

The Willingness to Kill

One has to ask out loud, given the fact that Germany was an overwhelmingly Christian nation: What kind of Christianity was it that justified, contrary to the teachings of Jesus, cruelty in parenting, hateful attitudes toward the “other,” and the justification of the organized mass slaughter of war? What kind of Christian leadership was it that did not stand up and courageously and prophetically say “NO” to its nation’s manufacture and stockpiling of (and its willingness to use) weapons of mass destruction whose only purpose is to kill humans and scorch the earth?

From where in the human soul comes the willingness to kill, wound, torture, enslave or starve another human or even cooperate with the evils of state-sponsored homicide or genocide, whether your militarized nation is fascist Germany or “democratic” America?

Harshness in childrearing is one of the realities that can easily result in the willingness to obey illegal orders to kill. Rudolf Hoess was a victim of cruelty in childrearing, a violent, xenophobic culture, a vicious anti-Semitism and an aberrant form of Christianity that was silent on or supportive of its militaristic nation’s glorification of war.

Being a part of the inhumane society that Hoess was raised in, he never had a chance to be all that he could have been. He was hanged on April 16, 1947, at the age of 45 on a gallows built near the Auschwitz death camp’s crematorium in Poland.

Gary G. Kohls, MD, is a founding member of Every Church A Peace Church (www.ecapc.org) and is a member of a local non-denominational affiliate of ECAPC, the Community of the Third Way.

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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Gore Vidal: 1925 - 2012(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Daily Banter headline grab (from the LA Times):

Gore Vidal, the iconoclastic writer, savvy analyst and imperious gadfly on the national conscience, has died. He was 86.

Vidal died Tuesday at his home in the Hollywood Hills of complications of pneumonia, said nephew Burr Steers.

Vidal was a literary juggernaut who wrote 25 novels, including historical works such as “Lincoln” and “Burr” and satires such as “Myra Breckinridge” and “Duluth.” He was also a prolific essayist whose pieces on politics, sexuality, religion and literature — once described as “elegantly sustained demolition derbies” — both delighted and inflamed and in 1993 earned him a National Book Award for his massive “United States Essays, 1952-1992.”

Threaded throughout his pieces are anecdotes about his famous friends and foes, who included Anais Nin, Tennessee Williams, Christopher Isherwood, Orson Welles, Truman Capote, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Eleanor Roosevelt and a variety of Kennedys. He counted Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Al Gore among his relatives.

He also wrote Broadway hits, screenplays, television dramas and a trio of mysteries under a pseudonym that remain in print after 50 years.

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In a landmark ruling, an international tribunal found former Liberian President Charles Taylor guilty Thursday of aiding and abetting war crimes in neighboring Sierra Leone.

It was the first war crimes conviction of a former head of state by an international court since the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders after World War II.

Prosecutors, however, failed to prove that Taylor had direct command over the rebels who committed the atrocities, said Justice Richard Lussick of the Special Court for Sierra Leone.

Taylor remained stoic throughout the reading of the verdict. Dressed in a charcoal gray suit , a white shirt and a burgundy tie, he stood quietly as the judge delivered the guilty verdict.

The mood was decidedly different in Freetown, the Sierra Leone capital, where, as one resident described it, every television set was on.

“Relief. Relief,” said Jennifer Harold, national director of the charity World Vision. “Everybody is thrilled.”

Harold said Taylor’s conviction was a big psychological victory for his victims.

“People can be very cynical about justice,” she said. “But now you have someone finally getting caught, finally getting justice.”

A three-judge panel issued a unanimous decision that Taylor was “criminally responsible” for aiding and abetting crimes during a protracted and notoriously brutal civil war. He was accused of murder, rape, sexual slavery, conscripting children under the age of 15 and mining diamonds to pay for guns.

The former warlord maintained his innocence and pleaded not guilty to all 11 charges against him. A sentencing hearing is set for May 16.

Read more at CNN…

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Norwegian gunman Anders Breivik has insisted he would massacre 77 people all over again, calling his rampage the most “spectacular” attack by a nationalist militant since the Second World War.

Reading a prepared statement in court, the anti-Muslim extremist hit out at Norwegian and European governments for embracing immigration and multiculturalism. He claimed to be speaking as a commander of an anti-Islam militant group he called the Knights Templar – a group that prosecutors say does not exist.

Maintaining he acted out of “goodness, not evil” to prevent a wider civil war, Breivik vowed, “I would have done it again.”

Pressed by prosecutors to explain what he meant, he compared his attacks to the US dropping atomic bombs on Japan to bring the Second World War to an end. “They did it for something good, to prevent further war,” Breivik said.

Breivik has five days to explain why he set off a bomb in Oslo’s government district last July, killing eight people, and then gunned down 69 others, mostly teenagers, at a Labour Party youth camp outside the Norwegian capital. He denies criminal guilt, saying he was acting in self-defence, and claims the targets were part of a conspiracy to “deconstruct” Norway’s cultural identity.

“The attacks on July 22 were a preventive strike. I acted in self-defence on behalf of my people, my city, my country,” he said as he finished his statement, in essence a summary of the 1,500-page manifesto he posted online before the attacks. “I therefore demand to be found innocent of the present charges.”

He compared Norway’s Labour Party youth wing to the Hitler Youth and called their annual summer gathering an “indoctrination” camp. But he later told prosecutors he would have preferred to attack a conference of Norwegian journalists instead, but was not able to carry out that “operation”.

Read more at GoogleNews…

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March 25 - Greece Independence Day (Photo credit: Aster-oid)

By Ben Cohen: Europe has bailed out Greece (again) in a historic deal that guarantees the bankrupt nation 130 million euros. From the NY Times:

Greece finally secured its second giant bailout early Tuesday after euro zone finance ministers agreed to save it from bankruptcy in exchange for severe austerity measures and strict conditions.

After more than 13 hours of talks, the ministers approved a new bailout of 130 billion euros, or $172 billion, under which  private investors in Greek debt will take even steeper losses than expected to help stave off the country’s imminent default.

The Times article is worth reading in full as it gives a broad outline of the negotiated deal. The austerity measures are extremely severe, and given the country’s history of trade unionism and generous welfare state, it won’t go down well at all. The article continues:

According to a detailed agreement for the bailout, Greece will make big spending cuts, including reducing pharmaceutical expenditures by more than $1.3 billion in 2012 through increased use of generic medicine, cutting overtime pay for hospital doctors by at least $66 million, saving $396 million in military procurement and saving nearly $40 million by reducing the number of deputy mayors and their staffs.

The 50-page agreement also lays out in detail the changes to be made to Greece’s notoriously weak tax collection system.

Reforming the tax collection system is obviously a good idea – particularly if it targets Greece’s ultra wealthy (who pay little to no tax at all), but the huge cuts across the board will ensure the economy stays depressed for many years to come.

We’ve seen this game before; country goes into recession and has trouble paying its debts, creditors come in with money and force country to slash its budgets and privatize everything, country goes through massively prolonged depression.

The IMF and World Bank did this to Latin America during the 1970′s and 1980′s, Margaret Thatcher did it to Britain under her rule, David Cameron is doing it to Britain now, the American economy has performed dismally due to an insufficient stimulus etc etc. Why anyone thinks the results will be different in Greece is baffling beyond belief. We know how to restore a country to economic health. The US did it after World War II where the Marshall plan gave Europe the funding to restore its industries and create a growing and broadly integrated economy. It is happening in China where government spending has created the fastest growing economy on earth. It isn’t rocket science yet modern governments, no doubt in collaboration with global financial institutions, insist crippling countries with debt and austerity measures. In the short term, this works for the creditors, but in the long term, everyone suffers as countries like Greece fall way short of their potential and cannot create sustainable wealth for themselves or anyone else.

Obviously the Greek bailout is better than no bailout, but it could have been done fairly with some long term objectives in mind. But in the modern global economy, no one cares about the long term. There simply isn’t much immediate profit in it.

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Robert Scheer ridicules John Boehner's stance on the debt ceiling:

Boehner’s slogan, “I’ve always believed, the bigger government, the smaller the people,” is downright bizarre coming from someone who supported the Bush tax cuts for the rich, the banking bailout and the highest war spending since World War II, all of which is what caused government to get this big. Was it job stimulus spending that kept GM jobs in this country that made people smaller, or the loss of their homes and jobs as a result of the policies that are at the core of the Republican program?

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