-Caveat Lector- An excerpt from: The Last Nazi – The Life and Times of Dr. Joseph Mengele Gerald Astor©1985 Donald I Fine, Inc ISBN 0-917657-46-2 305 pages ----- .... the skull and crossed bones. KZ [concetration camp] guardians proudly labeled themselves members of Death's Head units.
“… this morning that we are at anus mundi. " The concentration camp (KZ in the vernacular) German style, first appeared in 1933 at Dachau, about thirty miles from Munich. Herding together alien peoples did not originate with Nazis. Ghettos were an ancient tradition in Europe. In the United States indigenous Indians were taken off to reservations and in the Soviet Union, dissidents and criminals were and still are dispatched to Gulags. Dachau was started by the SA(Brownshirts) as a place to put kidnap victims, a convenient place to terrorize and kill opponents. Gustav von Kahr, head of the Bavarian state government which suppressed Hitler's 1923 Putsch, was hacked to death with pickaxes and his body discarded in a swamp near Dachau. The KZ seemed like such a good idea that once the Nazis took power fifty of them mushroomed around Germany. Initially, the camps were deemed a temporary measure. Hitler himself announced a Christmas Eve amnesty for 27,000 inmates in 1933, but Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler ignored the directive and freed only a few persons. Following the murder of Rohm and the decline of the SA, Himmler and the SS received control of the camps. Smaller, inefficient operations closed down. The Nazis constructed Buchenwald near Weimar, Sachsenhausen near Berlin, while Ravensbrucke in the vicinity of Mecklenburg was reserved for women. Dachau expanded, and after the .4nschluss absorbing Austria, the SS erected Mauthausen near Linz. At first the camps held alleged political leftists, particularly communists, clergymen who voiced opposition, editors whose papers were perceived as anti-Nazi and a group lumped together as undesirables. These included homosexuals and some common criminals. In the beginning Jews as a group were not indiscriminately thrown into concentration camps. An SS thug named Theodor Eicke was commissioned as the first inspector of the KZs. He instilled a twisted esprit de corps. Recruits to the staff underwent a series of humiliations and physical hazings. Eicke forced them to watch floggings and tortures of prisoners. Any sign of compassion or revulsion was considered a dereliction of duty. He created a new insignia, the Totenkopfverbande, the skull and crossed bones. KZ guardians proudly labeled themselves members of Death's Head units. Eicke and his cadre trained the men to accept merciless treatment of prisoners as evidence of high devotion to the cause. The guards, though, were also taught that however brutally they behaved their acts should bear a surface legality. Discipline and professionalism were to be hallmarks of KZ warders. In perverse theory, the concentration camps were to rehabilitate inmates, show them the errors of their thinking, and convince them to support the regime. The "rehabilitation" employed primitive behavioralist training-negative reinforcement to the extreme. Eicke decreed hanging for anyone who "politicizes, holds inciting speeches and meetings, forms cliques, loiters around with others, who for the purpose of supplying the propaganda of the opposition with atrocity stories, collects true [author's italics] or false information about the concentration camp; receives such information, buries it, talks about it to others, smuggles it out of the camp into the hands of foreign visitors . . ." He also announced execution on the spot for anyone attacking an SS representative, for refusing to obey or work, or for "bawling, shouting, inciting or holding speeches while marching or at work." Critical remarks in a letter home could be worth two weeks of solitary confinement and twenty-five lashes. (Some similarities in approach show up in the camps created by the Vietnamese and the Cambodians for the "re-education" and indoctrination of those considered insufficiently supportive of the regimes of the 1970s.) By the time World War Il began, the concentration camps were a going series of operations. To be sure, the men entitled to sport the Death's Head insignia were not the elite of the SS. Many were drawn from a pool of SS rejects. The conquest of Poland offered the Nazi hierarchy more than territory and economic gains. It could provide the opportunity to make Western Europe and particularly Germany, Judenrein — free of Jewish inhabitants. The subject peoples of Poland and the Soviet Union—for the Germans recognized that war with Stalin was inevitable—would serve as slave labor. The Polish real estate could house factories exploiting the local population and absorb the Jews shipped east. pps 33-35 ==== The first concern of the Americans was that in Joseph Mengele they had another Klaus Barbie case, wherein a known war criminal was hired by U.S. intelligence for espionage against the Red menace. Allan Ryan, Neal Sher's predecessor in the Office of Special Investigation, has said that of the 10,000 war criminals who managed to enter the United States after World War II, fewer than 100 were brought to court and of these only a handful were deported. Investigation might only emphasize this performance by immigration authorities and the Justice Department. One immediate action of the U.S. team had been to shut off information, the Attorney General silencing all government sources. Requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act brought such stock answers as: "This agency has been instructed by the Department of Justice at this time not to release any information directly or indirectly involving Mengele or the government's present criminal investigation of Mengele." Or: "In our view the release of any information concerning Mengele from any time period, including information dating to the period of World War II, would interfere with and potentially impede investigation." Such a closed door position was an open invitation for further misinformation and disinformation. p. 256 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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