Torturing Arabs and Nazis
Nuremberg, Guantanamo and
the Construction of Guilt
A
commentary by Michael Robeson 1 November 2012 Following
the Nuremberg trials, some critics claimed that much of
the German’s self-incriminating testimony presented
to the Court was obtained through questionable methods
including horrific torture. Then Senator Joe McCarthy was
one of those critics. Mainstream commentators labeled
them Nazi apologistes and anti-Semites. But a recent
article in a British newspaper entitled: How
Britain Tortured Nazi POWs by historian Ian Cobain shows
that McCarthy and his “ilk” were on the mark.
Torture had been widely used by the Allies to make the
German prisoners “willing executioners” of
themselves. Considering the current controversy over U.S.
intelligence Agency’s torture of suspected
“terrorists”, Cobain’s research reveals a
disconcerting historical connection to their current
practices. His entire article can be found here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2223831/How-Britain-tortured-Nazi-PoWs-The-horrifying-interrogation-methods But for
more interesting reading, here are some excerpts from
Cobain’s article accompanied by my comments that
readers might otherwise miss: It was in
2005 during my work as an investigative reporter that I
came across a veiled mention of a World War II detention
centre known as the London Cage. It took a number of
Freedom Of Information requests to the Foreign Office
before government files were reluctantly handed over.
From these, a sinister world unfolded — of a torture
centre that the British military operated throughout the
Forties, in complete secrecy….Thousands of Germans
passed through the unit that became known as the London
Cage, where they were beaten, deprived of sleep and
forced to assume stress positions for days at a time. So, how can
we be sure about the methods used at the London Cage?
Because the man who ran it admitted as much — and
was hushed up for half-a-century by an
establishment fearful of the shame his story would bring
on a Britain that had been fighting for honesty, decency
and the rule of law. That man
was Colonel Alexander Scotland, an accepted master in
techniques of interrogation. After the war, he wrote a
candid account of his activities in his memoirs, in which
he recalled how he would muse, on arriving at the Cage
each morning: ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here.’…As
was customary, before publication Scotland submitted his
manuscript to the War Office for clearance in 1954.
Pandemonium erupted. All four copies were seized. All
those who knew of its contents were silenced with threats
of prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. What caused
the greatest consternation was his admission that
the horrors had continued after the war, when
interrogators switched from extracting military
intelligence to securing convictions for war crimes.
What Cobain does not spell out is this: The interrogators,
that is the torturers, began working for the post war
prosecutors in Nuremberg whose job was to secure German
guilt in its conspiracy for world domination and its
genocidal policy, specifically against European Jews.
Historians conducting further research into Cobain’s
revelations could potentially discover facts that would
significantly alter the narrative of the “Good
War” not to mention significantly undermine the
Holocaust narrative. During his Nuremberg court
appearance, the Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf
Hoess, testified that about 4 million Jews were killed in
his camp, most of them by gassing. Hoess was hung at
Nuremberg after signing his testimony made in English, a
language he did not speak. It was his testimony that
provided the foundation for the narrative of 6 million
Jews being killed during the war. By the early 1980’s,
historians understood that Hoess’s testimony was
wildly incorrect and that less than one million people
died in Auschwitz. The memorial plaque at the entrance to
the camp was then quietly changed to reflect the new
reality. But mainstream Western acceptance of the
Holocaust numbers game has not changed. Who today
would accept testimony from Guantanamo prisoners
extracted by torture as valid in a court of law, much
less in public opinion, other than Neanderthals like Bush,
Cheney, Obama and their willing functionaries? Well,
considering that testimony was similarly wrung out of
Nazis at Nuremberg and at other post war trials and was
used to convict them for all time of ghastly slaughters
of Jews, are all of us who unquestioningly accept this
narrative willing to change our perspective so as not to
be numbered among those Neanderthals? ….Alexander
Scotland, of course, denied allegations of torture, going
into the witness box at one trial after another to say
his accusers were lying. It was all the more surprising,
then, that a few years later he was willing to come clean
about the techniques he employed at the London Cage. In his
memoirs, he disclosed that a number of men were forced to
incriminate themselves. A general was sentenced to death
in 1946 after signing a confession at the Cage while,
in Scotland’s words, ‘acutely depressed after
the various examinations’. Appalled by
the embarrassment his manuscript would cause if it ever
came out, the War Office and the Foreign Office both
declared that it would never see the light of day. Two years
later, however, they were forced to strike a deal with
him after he threatened to publish his book abroad. He
was told he would never be allowed to recover his
original manuscript, but agreement was given to a
rewritten version in which every line of incriminating
material had been expunged. A heavily
censored version of The London Cage duly appeared in the
bookshops in 1957. But officials at the War Office, and their successors at the Ministry of Defence, remained troubled. Years later,
in September 1979, Scotland’s publishers wrote to
the Ministry of Defence out of the blue asking for a copy
of the original manuscript by the now dead colonel
for their archives. The request
triggered fresh panic as civil servants sought reasons to
deny the request. But in the end they quietly deposited a
copy in what is now the National Archives at Kew, where
it went unnoticed — until I found it a quarter of a
century later. Is there
more to tell about the London Cage? Almost certainly.
Even now, some of the MoD’s files on it remain
beyond reach. Which means that far worse evidence
about torture being used to force false testimony at
Nuremberg and other trials is still being concealed. Also,
it means that a group of people in positions of power are
preventing a true and accurate understanding of WWII and
the “Holocaust” from being made known. Why, we
may wonder, would they want to prevent that? ….With
complaints soaring, a British court of inquiry was
convened to investigate what had been going at Bad
Nenndorf. It concluded that former inmates’
allegations of physical assault were substantially
correct. Stephens and four other officers were arrested
while Bad Nenndorf was abruptly closed. But there
was a quandary for the Labour government. The political
fallout could be deeply damaging. There were other
similar interrogation centres in Germany. From the very
top, there were urgent moves to hush things up. Stephens’
court martial for ill-treatment of prisoners was heard
behind closed doors. He did not deny any of the horrors.
His defence was that he had no idea the prisoners for
whom he was responsible were being beaten, whipped,
frozen, deprived of sleep and starved to death. This was
the very defence that had been offered —
unsuccessfully — by Nazi concentration camp
commandants at war-crimes trials. But he was acquitted Below, is one example of how
the Germans were forced to falsely testify against
themselves and to help the Allies create the deception of
the “Good War” being fought against the
“evil Nazis.” What caused the greatest
consternation was his (Scotlands) admission that the
horrors had continued after the war, when interrogators
switched from extracting military intelligence to
securing convictions for war crimes. In his
memoirs, he disclosed that a number of men were forced to
incriminate themselves. A general was sentenced to death
in 1946 after signing a confession at the Cage….The
London Cage was part of a network of nine
‘cages’ around Britain run by the Prisoner of
War Interrogation Section (PWIS), which came under the
jurisdiction of the Directorate of Military
Intelligence. Of 3,573
prisoners who passed through Kensington Palace Gardens,
more than 1,000 were persuaded to sign a confession or
give a witness statement for use in war crimes
prosecutions….Fritz Knöchlein, a former lieutenant
colonel in the Waffen SS, was one such case. He was
suspected of ordering the machine-gunning of 124 British
soldiers who surrendered at Le Paradis in northern France
during the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940. His defence was
that he was not even there. At his trial, he
claimed he had been tortured in the London Cage after the
war….Nor was he the only one. He said men were
repeatedly beaten about the face and had hair ripped from
their heads. A fellow inmate begged to be killed because
he couldn’t take any more brutality. All
Knöchlein’s accusations were ignored, however. He
was found guilty and hanged. Let us
be clear about this: over 1,000 Germans, like Knoechlin,
were tortured to either make self incriminating testimony
at Nuremberg and other post war trials, or to give false
testimony that could be used against other Germans at
those trials. This means that more than one thousand
testimonies were used to fabricate the narrative of
America’s “Good War” or used, in ways yet
unknown, to create the Holocaust narrative of six million
Jews and gas chambers, were obtained almost solely by
torture. In the current war against the Arab world and
the demonization of Moslems, U.S. police and intelligence
agencies have used torture in order to obtain testimony
that has been used in courts and that is later, after the
defendants are convicted, found to have been false. Most
of these convictions have been overturned. Yet, it would
be heresy to suggest, in light of our present knowledge,
that the post WWII trials should be fundamentally
reconsidered with many of the convictions obtained
through torture overturned. For doing so would require a
radical revision in how the two main moral beneficiaries
of that war – the U.S. and Israel, think of
themselves as justified in doing whatever it takes to
spread freedom and democracy around the world and to
prevent another Holocaust. Finally,
even the courageous author of the article, Ian Cobain,
must bow to the social pressure that requires almost all
of us to tiptoe around in the historical deception.
In the passages below, Cobain functions much as the
liberal journalist Joe Klein recently has in his
defending President Obama for killing Arab children with
his drone program. The relevant statements are underlined:
Of
course, it is crucial to put these events into context.
When the gloves first came off at Britain’s
interrogation centres — the summer of 1940 —
German forces were racing across France and the Low
Countries, and Britain was fighting for its very survival.
The stakes could not have been higher. The first
of the German spies who arrived in Britain in September
1940 were taken there. Vital information about a coming
German invasion was extracted at great speed. This
indicates the use of extreme methods, but these were
desperate days demanding desperate measures. In the
following years, large parts of Britain’s cities
were left in ruins, hundreds of thousands of service
personnel and civilians died, and barely a day passed
without evidence emerging of a new Nazi atrocity. Little
wonder, perhaps, that it was felt acceptable for German
prisoners to suffer in British interrogation centres. And it should also be said that whatever went on within their walls, it paled into insignificance compared with the horrors the Nazis visited on millions of prisoners. Seems reasonable, right? Well, what would the reaction be to a German historian who would write the following: “Of
course, it is crucial to put alleged Nazi atrocities into
context. When the gloves first came off at Germany’s
interrogation centres — the spring of 1944 —
Russian forces were racing across Eastern Europe, and
Germany was fighting for its very survival. The stakes
could not have been higher….these were desperate
days demanding desperate measures. “In
those years, large parts of Germany’s cities were
in ruins, hundreds of thousands of service personnel and
civilians died, and barely a day passed without evidence
emerging of a new Allied bombing atrocities and their
leaders demand for unconditional surrender. Little wonder,
perhaps, that it was felt acceptable for Allied prisoners
to suffer in German interrogation centres. “And
it should also be said that whatever went on within their
walls, it paled into insignificance compared with the
horrors the Russians visited on millions of German women
and civilians during their rapacious invasion of Germany
and their over forty year occupation.” If one shudders to think of themselves living in a moral universe in which such sentiments would be found acceptable, start shuddering. For as Cobain’s extracts show, we have been living in such a universe for quite some time and we are quite comfortable with it. And the masters of that morality – the moral beneficiaries of the “Good War” are fast at work making sure that there is no alternative to it. |