[Note: Here is a brief connection to Part 1: Bernt Engelmann (1921-1994) wrote a book, ‘In Hitler’s Germany’, in 1986, in which he presents what life was under Hitler’s Germany. Part 1 stops at the point where Engelmann meets his compatriot named Richter]
Richter was a GESTAPO Commissar [GESTAPO = GEheime STaats Polizei = Secret State Police. The initials that formed the word ‘Gestapo’ were chosen during Hitler’s ‘reign’ by a lowly German postal employee to facilitate his sorting of the incoming mail. In Greece even today, 77 years after the Nazi occupation, we use the word ‘Gestapit’ to denote that a person is not only a barbarian also cruel.]
The meeting of Engelmann with Commissar Richter is very revealing concerning their quality as humans, of not only the German members of Gestapo but also of the policemen all over our planet.
The Greek word gymnos [pronounced yeemnos, accent on bold o] means naked. The school where the kids in classical Athens were exercising their bodies was called gymnasion as they were exercising naked. For a strange reason, in our time, the Greeks and the Germans use the word gymnasion or gymnasium (with a Latin ending) as a name for high school. The term high school was adopted in 1828 in America. Was the original name gymnasion even in America?
When Engelmann graduated from the gymnasium instead of waiting to be drafted in the Army he volunteered for Hitler’s Luftwaffe (Air Force). The reason: First he had to serve only twelve months and second, “most important”, by volunteering he would prove his family’s “national loyalty” (i.e. that they were pro-Nazi). His father and his mother were both anti-Nazi.
So, in November 1938, 10 months, before the beginning of Hitler’s World War II on September 1, 1939, the young Engelmann left his family “for the town where (he) was to be garrisoned” and stayed at the local hotel of “his parents’ friends”, uncle Franz and aunt Kaethe, his wife. Uncle Franz was pro-Nazi. Aunt Kaethe was anti-Nazi.(Aunt and Uncle being a ‘charming’ way for young people to call all older people in many countries, especially in the provinces of these countries.)
Aunt Kaethe confided to Engelmann that she was hiding Mr. Kahn, a Jewish businessman and asked Engelman not to stay in the hotel but instead to stay with Mr. Kahn in the “hunting cabin” that belonged to the hotel, about 20 minutes drive away. Aunt Kaethe did not tell Uncle Franz about Mr. Kahn.
As expected, in the cabin Mr. Kahn and Engelmann started a conversation. At some point Mr. Kahn asks: “Are you familiar with Buchenwald?” Engelmann replied that he “had heard of it-it was a concentration camp near Weimar”. The German Jew said: “Yes not far from the Weimar of Goethe and Schiller”. We must keep in mind that this conversation took place in Germany in November of 1938!
[Note: In the mid-1960s I accompanied my brother and his wife to Hamburg, in Germany, where she had a serious kidney operation. After the operation she was taken to a room where there was one more patient, a very sympathetic and sweet German woman in her late thirties, who had undergone the same operation. Talking to her I asked her if the German people knew about the concentration camps during Hitler’s time. She answered that they did not know. Even today, about 82 years after the conversation between Engelmann and Mr. Kahn, most Germans will answer as the sympathetic lady in Hamburg. End of Note]
In the Hitler Air Force Engelmann was assigned to radio communications and was stationed in the Nazi occupied French Normandy at the coast opposite England to monitor the English air planes heading for Germany.
While in France he visited Paris. During such a visit a comrade of his witnessed the execution of a German youth of 18, as a deserter, by a German officer and described it to Engelmann. Engelmann forty-one years later discovered the identity of the ‘elegant’ officer who executed the German youth. He was the German writer Ernst Juenger, who in 1982 (!) was given the Goethe Prize, of Frankfurt, for his literary work. Juenger when explaining the executions stated that he had been “interested in observing how a person reacts to death under such circumstances”.
To his credit Engelmann included in his book the words of the sick mind of an intellectual honored by a culturally advanced society. A fact that is useful in our Trumpish epoch.
Engelmann, the volunteer of November 1938, was released from Hitler’s Air Force in October 1942.
With the help of the Desh team he immediately got a job with Wrobel & Co. Mr. Wrobel not only was an anti-Nazi, but he was a rabid one. The task of the Wrobel Company was to submit “weekly reports for a very small, select group in (the Nazi) government and (the Nazi) industry”. The task of Engelmann was to translate the American, The British, and the French press, especially the Economist and the Wall Street Journal. Which Engelmann considered a joke.
In March of 1944 Engelmann was arrested by the Gestapo. The ‘Sturmbannfuherer’, a colleague of the one in Aunt Annie’s bakery, who ‘processed’ Engelmann, said to him: “Bad, very bad – might cost your head. And for what? For a filthy louse of a Jew!” Engelmann had handed to Dr. Bernstein, a prominent lawyer and a Jew, his passport to escape from Hitler’s Germany.
Engelmann was held in strict solitary confinement and after about a month a Gestapo agent, Kommissar Richter, took Engelmann to another building for interrogation. As they walked to the other building, they started to talk together. By that date, April 1944, it was apparent that Hitler had lost the war and the Russians and the Americans with their allies were going to occupy Germany. Richter knew that Engelmann worked for Wrobel & Co. So, at some point Richter said: “… you intelligence boys have your foreign contacts and your Jewish protégés, nothing can happen to you … And meanwhile the little guys like me will really catch hell. They’ll string us all up.” As their conversation went on Richter asked Engelmann: “But where will I find you when I need you?”
The instinct of survival, given to us by the Benevolent and Almighty God, brought Richter so far that at some point he let Engelmann see … his Gestapo file! Thus Engelmann learnt that Dr. Bernstein was arrested and committed suicide before they could find something out of him. However a note on him led to the arrest of Engelmann.
[Note: All governments on our planet keep files for all their citizens. Are these files useful for us in certain instances? Yes. For example they tell us who of our neighbors are crypto-Nazis, as they are recorded in the files as great admirers of the Police. End of Note].
Finally, Engelmann was liberated from Dachau concentration camp (!), in April 1945, by General Patton’s Third Army.
At this point let us examine Nazism in a more ‘detailed’ manner.
First we have to explain what the initials SS mean. The German words are: Schutz-Staffel. Schutz means Home security and Staffel means Squadron. That is a military organization dedicated to the protection of the Home, ‘sacred’ for all animals, hence also for us humans.
So, in Dachau Himmler, a German patriot, who had the sacred duty to protect the German Home, following the orders of Hitler, ordered the SS, the guardian angels of the Dachau camp “not to allow a single prisoner to fall into Allied hands alive”.
On their side the prisoners were trying to figure out how the SS was going to kill such an enormous number of humans at once. There were 4 options:
1 To kill them by aerial bombardment.
2 To kill them by using machine-guns and flamethrowers
3 To gas the prisoners in situ.
4 To kill them by putting poison in their soup.
Fortunately, the SS fled with all the stuff they could carry. But where did they flee to?
However, the next step for us is to find out who was Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945), the chief of the SS, the chief of the Gestapo, and the Number 2 Nazi after Hitler. “He was the son of a pious authoritarian Roman Catholic schoolmaster…” He was a “small man who looked more like a humble bank clerk than Germany’s police dictator… he suffered from psychosomatic illness, severe headaches and intestinal spasms…” and “showed ‘exquisite courtesy’.” Here are some excerpts from a speech he gave in 1943 to the SS Group Leaders: “What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs, is a matter of utter indifference to me…Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging an {anti}-tank ditch interests me only so far as the {anti}-tank ditch is completed for Germany…Most of you know what it is to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. (Robert Wistrich, “Who’s Who in Nazi Germany”, 1982, p. 141).
We humans are strange animals. In the ZNet Commentary of February 11, 2006 with the title; “The US and the Nazis” we read: “The true number of Nazis planted in the US is impossible to know until the CIA opens its files. There were various programs with assorted code names (‘Overcast’, ‘Paperclip’, etc) designed to smuggle Nazi scientists (by the thousands) and (inexplicably) Nazi SS regulars (by the tens of thousands).”
[Note: Unfortunately for the SS men in the US they lost the ‘facilities’ of the Lebensborn program concocted by Himmler, which offered to the SS men blond girls and blond young women with the strict orders to produce superhuman babies. In the strict religious, Euanggelical (‘original’ Greek spelling!) American society this constitutes a terrible … sin, etc! End of Note]
Yet, the Nazi monstrosity gave birth to a unique positive development: the Nuremberg Tribunal, the idea that all the people of the entire planet should judge and punish the Nazi-type criminals.
In Nuremberg the Americans offered two valuable contributions: I. The valuable and important contribution of Robert H. Jackson (1892 – 1954) of the US Supreme Court and 2. The demystification of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. the ‘saint’ of the US Supreme Court, by the act of the Nazis to offer for their defense the eugenic ideas of Holmes!
Gudrun (Norwegian female name). (Part 3 to follow!)
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