Sebastian P. Breit's Blog, page 25
June 21, 2011
Kaiserfront - Auf Deutsch
Review - Kaiserfront 01: Die Schwarze Macht
Nachdem ich bereits ein Review dieses Schmonzes in Englisch verfasst habe poste ich hier dann mal auch die Bewertung, die ich bei Amazon eingestellt habe.
* * *
Titel: Bleichmittel fürs Hirn
"Warum tu ich mir das nur an?"
Das fragte ich mich immer wieder, nachdem ich die erste Seite dieses vollkommen überteuerten "Romans" aufgeschlagen hatte.
"Warum nur?"
Naja, ich weiß warum: weil es deutschsprachige "Alternate History" nunmal nicht grade gibt wie Sand am Meer; da kann man nicht so arg wählerisch sein (es sei denn man bleibt bei den weitaus besseren, englischsprachigen Autoren). Und die Hintergrundidee ist ja auch interessant: Was wenn das Kaiserreich den WK 1 gewonnen hätte? Die Idee hat soviel Potenzial für Irrungen und Wirrungen. Vielleicht hat die Michaelsoffensive von 1918 funktioniert? Vielleicht waren die Italiener bündnistreu? Vielleicht hat Österreich-Ungarn seine Probleme in den Griff bekommen?
Natürlich nicht. Wär ja auch zu plausibel und interessant gewesen. Der Kaiser dankt 1917 zu Gunsten seines Sohnes ab, der erschafft die "Kastrup", eine Truppe die im Grunde genommen nichts als die SS fürs Kaiserreich ist und in den kommenden zwei Jahren sozialistische Arbeiterstreiks und Aufstände mit einer Brutalität niederkämpft, an der selbst Vlad Tepesz seine wahre Freude gehabt hätte.
Die Hochseeflotte läuft gegen die Royal Navy aus und zerstört 90% von ihr, wobei sie glorreich bei eigenen Verlusten von 100% untergeht. Warum die ganze Royal Navy bei England rumschwirrt und nicht die ohnehin schon zahlenmäßig überlegene Homefleet? Keine Ahnung, "Heinrich von Stahl" war sich offensichtlich nicht bewusst, dass es da einen Unterschied gibt. Und dass dann einfach die zahlenmäßig ebenfalls überlegene USN die Lücke füllen würde wohl ebenfalls nicht.
Naja, "von Stahl" kann dadurch dann die Seeblockade ignorieren, und 1919 schafft es dann das Heer im Westen den Sieg zu erringen, u.a. durch den Einsatz von K-Wagen (Panzern). Wie das möglich sein soll, wo doch im tatsächlichen Deutschland schon Kirchenglocken eingeschmolzen wurden, nur um Eisen für Gewehre zu erhalten, und wo doch in der Realität nur wenige Panzer produziert wurden, weil die Industrie nicht mehr konnte, darüber schweigt sich "von Stahl" aus. Genauso, wie er sich darüber ausschweigt, wie denn ein Heer, dass spätestens seit der fehlgeschlagenen Michaelsoffensive auf dem letzen Loch pfiff, 1919 den Sieg erringen kann, obwohl es einer um hunderttausende angewachsenen Streitkraft mit de facto unendlicher Versorgung gegenübersteht.
Und von da an gehts munter weiter im hirntoten Stechschritt; zu weit, um hier alles zu sezieren.
Schwachsinnskategorie 2 stellt dann die Technik dar. Für jemand, der AH schreibt, kennt sich "von Stahl" erbärmlich wenig mit Kriegsgerät aus. Streubomben auf befestigte Industriekomplexe? Maus-Panzer? Eine Horten B1 mit 10,000 Kilometer Reichweite, die von Island aus Silverlake bombardiert (Distanz in *eine* Richtung: 7,000 Kilometer)? Eine Monstrosität wie LK-1, bei der sogar Hitler mit den Augen gerollt hätte?
Und dann: Aliens! Als ob der Plot nicht ohnehin schon lächerlich genug wäre, nein, außerirdische Artefakte in der sudanesichen Wüste, dass hat noch gefehlt (muß ich echt noch anmerken wie total schwachsinnig die ganze Szene im Sudan war, mit 20,000 Briten in einem schwer befestigten Wüstenfort, die von 2,000 Mann Kastrup geschlagen werden? Wohl bisschen zuviel "Eben Emael" gekuckt, Herr "von Stahl"?!)!
Abgesehen davon ist das ganze Konzept einfach nur faul. Echte AH kann man hier dann auch mit Lupe & Pinzette suchen gehen.
Warum zum Beispiel sind die internationalen Staatsoberhäupter Churchill, Truman und Stalin, wenn die Vorgeschichte, die zu ihrem Aufstieg führte nie stattgefunden hat?
Warum ist die ganze Technik ein 1-1 Abklatsch von Waffensystemen des WK 2 (und von Seiten wie Luft46.com) wenn der Grund für die Entwicklung - die realen 30er Jahre & WK 2 - nie stattgefunden hat?
Und zu guter letzt der Preis. Also echt, nur knapp 185 Seiten Fließtext, Schriftgröße 12? Das sind grade mal 53,000 Wörter!
Es ist erbärmlich, wie hier eine gute Grundidee zerhäxelt wird & man dafür auch noch gutes Geld bezahlen darf. Wer gute AH lesen will, soll sich an Robert Conroy und Konsorten halten. Wenn ich könnte, hätte ich "Null Sterne" vergeben!
Nachdem ich bereits ein Review dieses Schmonzes in Englisch verfasst habe poste ich hier dann mal auch die Bewertung, die ich bei Amazon eingestellt habe.
* * *
Titel: Bleichmittel fürs Hirn
"Warum tu ich mir das nur an?"
Das fragte ich mich immer wieder, nachdem ich die erste Seite dieses vollkommen überteuerten "Romans" aufgeschlagen hatte.
"Warum nur?"
Naja, ich weiß warum: weil es deutschsprachige "Alternate History" nunmal nicht grade gibt wie Sand am Meer; da kann man nicht so arg wählerisch sein (es sei denn man bleibt bei den weitaus besseren, englischsprachigen Autoren). Und die Hintergrundidee ist ja auch interessant: Was wenn das Kaiserreich den WK 1 gewonnen hätte? Die Idee hat soviel Potenzial für Irrungen und Wirrungen. Vielleicht hat die Michaelsoffensive von 1918 funktioniert? Vielleicht waren die Italiener bündnistreu? Vielleicht hat Österreich-Ungarn seine Probleme in den Griff bekommen?
Natürlich nicht. Wär ja auch zu plausibel und interessant gewesen. Der Kaiser dankt 1917 zu Gunsten seines Sohnes ab, der erschafft die "Kastrup", eine Truppe die im Grunde genommen nichts als die SS fürs Kaiserreich ist und in den kommenden zwei Jahren sozialistische Arbeiterstreiks und Aufstände mit einer Brutalität niederkämpft, an der selbst Vlad Tepesz seine wahre Freude gehabt hätte.
Die Hochseeflotte läuft gegen die Royal Navy aus und zerstört 90% von ihr, wobei sie glorreich bei eigenen Verlusten von 100% untergeht. Warum die ganze Royal Navy bei England rumschwirrt und nicht die ohnehin schon zahlenmäßig überlegene Homefleet? Keine Ahnung, "Heinrich von Stahl" war sich offensichtlich nicht bewusst, dass es da einen Unterschied gibt. Und dass dann einfach die zahlenmäßig ebenfalls überlegene USN die Lücke füllen würde wohl ebenfalls nicht.
Naja, "von Stahl" kann dadurch dann die Seeblockade ignorieren, und 1919 schafft es dann das Heer im Westen den Sieg zu erringen, u.a. durch den Einsatz von K-Wagen (Panzern). Wie das möglich sein soll, wo doch im tatsächlichen Deutschland schon Kirchenglocken eingeschmolzen wurden, nur um Eisen für Gewehre zu erhalten, und wo doch in der Realität nur wenige Panzer produziert wurden, weil die Industrie nicht mehr konnte, darüber schweigt sich "von Stahl" aus. Genauso, wie er sich darüber ausschweigt, wie denn ein Heer, dass spätestens seit der fehlgeschlagenen Michaelsoffensive auf dem letzen Loch pfiff, 1919 den Sieg erringen kann, obwohl es einer um hunderttausende angewachsenen Streitkraft mit de facto unendlicher Versorgung gegenübersteht.
Und von da an gehts munter weiter im hirntoten Stechschritt; zu weit, um hier alles zu sezieren.
Schwachsinnskategorie 2 stellt dann die Technik dar. Für jemand, der AH schreibt, kennt sich "von Stahl" erbärmlich wenig mit Kriegsgerät aus. Streubomben auf befestigte Industriekomplexe? Maus-Panzer? Eine Horten B1 mit 10,000 Kilometer Reichweite, die von Island aus Silverlake bombardiert (Distanz in *eine* Richtung: 7,000 Kilometer)? Eine Monstrosität wie LK-1, bei der sogar Hitler mit den Augen gerollt hätte?
Und dann: Aliens! Als ob der Plot nicht ohnehin schon lächerlich genug wäre, nein, außerirdische Artefakte in der sudanesichen Wüste, dass hat noch gefehlt (muß ich echt noch anmerken wie total schwachsinnig die ganze Szene im Sudan war, mit 20,000 Briten in einem schwer befestigten Wüstenfort, die von 2,000 Mann Kastrup geschlagen werden? Wohl bisschen zuviel "Eben Emael" gekuckt, Herr "von Stahl"?!)!
Abgesehen davon ist das ganze Konzept einfach nur faul. Echte AH kann man hier dann auch mit Lupe & Pinzette suchen gehen.
Warum zum Beispiel sind die internationalen Staatsoberhäupter Churchill, Truman und Stalin, wenn die Vorgeschichte, die zu ihrem Aufstieg führte nie stattgefunden hat?
Warum ist die ganze Technik ein 1-1 Abklatsch von Waffensystemen des WK 2 (und von Seiten wie Luft46.com) wenn der Grund für die Entwicklung - die realen 30er Jahre & WK 2 - nie stattgefunden hat?
Und zu guter letzt der Preis. Also echt, nur knapp 185 Seiten Fließtext, Schriftgröße 12? Das sind grade mal 53,000 Wörter!
Es ist erbärmlich, wie hier eine gute Grundidee zerhäxelt wird & man dafür auch noch gutes Geld bezahlen darf. Wer gute AH lesen will, soll sich an Robert Conroy und Konsorten halten. Wenn ich könnte, hätte ich "Null Sterne" vergeben!
June 17, 2011
Review - Kaiserfront 01: Die Schwarze Macht
Oh, fuck me, why the hell do I keep doing this?
That's what I've been asking myself since the very first moment I opened this book's cover. Well, I know why... but still, why?! Alternate history in German is a genre producing a rather scarce supply for the German market, so I chose to take what I could get. And, in fact, the basic idea behind the book is as simple as it is intriguing for an alternate history scenario: what if the German Empire won the Great War, and what if there's still a Kaiser in power in 1949? There's so much potential in that idea, so much space for the butterflies to play in. Perhaps 1918's Michael Offensive worked? Maybe the Italians didn't switch sides? Maybe Austro-Hungary remained united and started somehow solving its problems?
Of course not. In 1917, the Kaiser abdicates in favor of his son, who creates "Kastrup", which is basically the SS only for Imperial Germany. Over the coming two years, they shoot socialist workers left and right, beat down strikes, and generally make sure that any attempt of a socialist/democratic revolution in Germany drowns in its own blood. Because that works so well, Germany starts a spring offensive in 1919 (Home Fleet has lost 90% of its strength in a last grand battle with the High Seas Fleet, which it annihilated), breaking through the lines with new armored fomations. By April, France has surrendered, monarchy is restored, with Louis I sweaing fealty to the Kaiser. In July, Italy surrenders. Austro-Hungary is merged with the Reich in November.
In 1921 the Kaiserreich lands 800,000 men in Egypt, beginning the conquest of the whole of British Africa, which is finalized in 1924. In 1926 the Nordic League is founded, soon encompassing basically the whole of northern and central Europe under Germany's leadership. The year 1941 sees the detonation of the first nuclear bomb in German-Lybia.
And all the while I thought: If I had posted such a timeline on AH.com, they'd have ripped me to shreds, and with good reason.1949. Well, the story starts with a German bomber squadron sent out from Iceland to destroy the American nuclear facilities in California (because only Germany can be trusted with nuclear weapons) while a German moon mission is underway. Each of their Horten B1s can carry 50 tons of bombs, and the are to drop 450 tons of cluster bombs on the Silverlake installations. Naturally, they succeed, but witness that almost at the same time someone firebombs the nearby town of Rosamond, killing most of the 10,000 inhabitants. One of the German bombers gets shot down, the crew captured.
Chestbeating macho-monarchists that they are, the Kastrup and the Reich come up with an ingenious plan: bomb the crap out of the base the prisoners are held, land paratroopers there to break them free, then return to Germany. Naturally, they succeed. Again.
Meanwhile, the fleet of the Nodric League (Germany & its clients) is in international waters to pick up the returning moon capsule (whose retro-thrusters haven't fired). But the Soviet fleet appears on the scene. prompting the Germans to launch a first strike lest the Reds get too close to their retrieval mission. Naturally, they succeed. Again. Spectacularly, without even losing a ship of their own.
Logically, the Russians don't take too kindly to such things and amass their forces along the border, despite German warning that should they commence hostilities, they would nuke the troops concentrations.
Alas, the Germans want no war, and the Kaiser hopes a demonstration of their new weapons system will deter the Russians: their new land cruiser. Guys, I know this all sounds as if I'm making this up as I write, but I'm not. The LK-1 land cruiser is a nuclear-powered vehicle, 45 meters long, seveteen wide and thirteen high. It's armed with a dual 38cm turret, a single 12.8cm turret, 8 dual 8cm AA guns, "additional secret systems for air defense" and 12 machine guns against infantry. And yeah, it weighs 2,200 tons and can drive under water...
The Germans also are the only ones with a nuclear deterrent,... but the German deterrent fails because the son of a worker shot in the 1918 riots becomes part of the failsafe program and creates a backdoor in the German nuclear authorization program that deactivates all warheads on his command.
The UK, the USA and the USSR all declare war against the Kaiserreich. 6 million men of the Red Army with 30,000 tanks cross the eastern border (and into Finnland). The British use 1,800 "Lancaster" bombers to annihilate the German nuclear center in the Lybian desert (they succeed, but lose *all* their bombers). It seems all is lost.
The novel ends with the leader of Kastrup driving to a secret base where he is only allowed entrance after a genetic sample is taken and tested to prove his identity...
* * *
You know, there's 'wank' and then there's 'wank'. There's your average Trekkie wanking the power of the Enterprise. There's Karen Traviss wanking to the idea of sweet, sweet Mandalorian man-juice. And then there's Kaiserfront. In the league of wanking, Kaiserfront is the leader of the "Oh my god, my hands are burning and my wiener is a glowing lump of charcoal"-category.
Almost everybody of the German protagonists - and I mean everybody - is a member of the nobility. I swear, the whole cast is made up of "von XYZ"s. Then there's the whole issue of Nordic mythology and Nordic ethnic solidarity whoch really wasn't a thing in the Kaiserreich at all. All those military operations have names like "Wiking"; the airbase on Iceland is called Midgard, and so on.
Ah, but there's more! Just when you thought it couldn't get any more ridiculous, Kaiserfront 01 keeps on giving, and it gives us...Aliens! Because, as we learn through flashbacks, in 1925, after the Germans had conquered the whole African colonial Empire, the British were dug in with 20,000 men (!) in a fort in the Sudanese desert. So Kastrup takes the fort in a combined glider & tank assault with a force of less than 2,000 men, and beneath the fort, in a hall "measuring at least 4x10 kilometers" the British have been studying Alien spaceships!
Regardless of the absolutely ridiculous plot it's the astonishing lack of imagination and seriousness that pisses me off.
Why are the international leaders of Great Britain, the United States and the USSR in this alternate 1949 reality Winston S. Churchill, Harry S. Truman and Josif Stalin?
Why is all equipment a virtual copy of the historical WW2 designs and concepts, which came only into being because of WW2?
Why is there a Guderian leading panzers, why is there a von Braun in charge of a space program?
Then there's the actual quantity of written words you get for your money. When "Wolf Hunt" is finally ready (sorry, that much self-promotion's got to be, got the manuscruipt back from my editor today), it'll be ~390 pages in a 6x9 inch format and 10.5 script coming in at around 178,000 words – for $16.99. Kaiserfront, on the other hand, is script size 12, book format 7.5x4.8 inches at roughly a hundred and eighty-five pages of written text. I bought Kaiserfront via Amazon.de at its standard price of €12.90, which, depending on the exchange course, is between 18.50 and 19 greenbacks. For 53,000 words. To put that into perspective for the forums, at 53,000 words you're barely out of the prologue of LightningCount's "Dilgar War" epic.
The sad thing is: Kaiserfront wants to be great. It wants you to take it serious. It's like a twelve year old who programmed his first web page and now thinks he's the second coming of Bill Gates' – when in fact he's just lousy teenager with a website full of junk.There's even a fake Folder for the Media (use Google Translate), which was included in the book as its own little booklet, its content more or less repeated in this book trailer (watch it; even if you don't know German, this tells you all you need to ever know about Kaiserfront).
With all the shoutouts to historic personalities, to supposed Nazi Germany Wunderwaffen, to things you'll only find on speculative pages like Luft46.com it comes across as incredibly lousy and lazy, an impression only deepened by the unbelievably bad prose. Even the Landserhefte - dubious dime novels about WW2 - tend to have a better prose than Kaiserfront. I've got to know, I actually bought one to compare them... As for the author, Heinrich von Stahl (yeah...right...). Let's just say its almost 100% certain that it's just another pseudonym for the guy who wrote an really thinly-veiled Nazi series a couple of years ago under the nome de crap Torn Chaines. Compared to that guy, Tom Kratman - SPACE MARINE! - writes subtle prose. Having read "Watch on the Rhine", I mean that.
How anyone can in all honesty write stuff like that - and even more, how he can find a publisher for it - is beyond me. I feel like part of my belief in justice as well as part of my brain have died reading this. It's just that astonishingly bad.
Verdict: 1/5 How anyone can read and like this is beyond me. It's lazy and totally overpriced shit.
That's what I've been asking myself since the very first moment I opened this book's cover. Well, I know why... but still, why?! Alternate history in German is a genre producing a rather scarce supply for the German market, so I chose to take what I could get. And, in fact, the basic idea behind the book is as simple as it is intriguing for an alternate history scenario: what if the German Empire won the Great War, and what if there's still a Kaiser in power in 1949? There's so much potential in that idea, so much space for the butterflies to play in. Perhaps 1918's Michael Offensive worked? Maybe the Italians didn't switch sides? Maybe Austro-Hungary remained united and started somehow solving its problems?
Of course not. In 1917, the Kaiser abdicates in favor of his son, who creates "Kastrup", which is basically the SS only for Imperial Germany. Over the coming two years, they shoot socialist workers left and right, beat down strikes, and generally make sure that any attempt of a socialist/democratic revolution in Germany drowns in its own blood. Because that works so well, Germany starts a spring offensive in 1919 (Home Fleet has lost 90% of its strength in a last grand battle with the High Seas Fleet, which it annihilated), breaking through the lines with new armored fomations. By April, France has surrendered, monarchy is restored, with Louis I sweaing fealty to the Kaiser. In July, Italy surrenders. Austro-Hungary is merged with the Reich in November.
In 1921 the Kaiserreich lands 800,000 men in Egypt, beginning the conquest of the whole of British Africa, which is finalized in 1924. In 1926 the Nordic League is founded, soon encompassing basically the whole of northern and central Europe under Germany's leadership. The year 1941 sees the detonation of the first nuclear bomb in German-Lybia.
And all the while I thought: If I had posted such a timeline on AH.com, they'd have ripped me to shreds, and with good reason.1949. Well, the story starts with a German bomber squadron sent out from Iceland to destroy the American nuclear facilities in California (because only Germany can be trusted with nuclear weapons) while a German moon mission is underway. Each of their Horten B1s can carry 50 tons of bombs, and the are to drop 450 tons of cluster bombs on the Silverlake installations. Naturally, they succeed, but witness that almost at the same time someone firebombs the nearby town of Rosamond, killing most of the 10,000 inhabitants. One of the German bombers gets shot down, the crew captured.
Chestbeating macho-monarchists that they are, the Kastrup and the Reich come up with an ingenious plan: bomb the crap out of the base the prisoners are held, land paratroopers there to break them free, then return to Germany. Naturally, they succeed. Again.
Meanwhile, the fleet of the Nodric League (Germany & its clients) is in international waters to pick up the returning moon capsule (whose retro-thrusters haven't fired). But the Soviet fleet appears on the scene. prompting the Germans to launch a first strike lest the Reds get too close to their retrieval mission. Naturally, they succeed. Again. Spectacularly, without even losing a ship of their own.
Logically, the Russians don't take too kindly to such things and amass their forces along the border, despite German warning that should they commence hostilities, they would nuke the troops concentrations.
Alas, the Germans want no war, and the Kaiser hopes a demonstration of their new weapons system will deter the Russians: their new land cruiser. Guys, I know this all sounds as if I'm making this up as I write, but I'm not. The LK-1 land cruiser is a nuclear-powered vehicle, 45 meters long, seveteen wide and thirteen high. It's armed with a dual 38cm turret, a single 12.8cm turret, 8 dual 8cm AA guns, "additional secret systems for air defense" and 12 machine guns against infantry. And yeah, it weighs 2,200 tons and can drive under water...
The Germans also are the only ones with a nuclear deterrent,... but the German deterrent fails because the son of a worker shot in the 1918 riots becomes part of the failsafe program and creates a backdoor in the German nuclear authorization program that deactivates all warheads on his command.
The UK, the USA and the USSR all declare war against the Kaiserreich. 6 million men of the Red Army with 30,000 tanks cross the eastern border (and into Finnland). The British use 1,800 "Lancaster" bombers to annihilate the German nuclear center in the Lybian desert (they succeed, but lose *all* their bombers). It seems all is lost.
The novel ends with the leader of Kastrup driving to a secret base where he is only allowed entrance after a genetic sample is taken and tested to prove his identity...
* * *
You know, there's 'wank' and then there's 'wank'. There's your average Trekkie wanking the power of the Enterprise. There's Karen Traviss wanking to the idea of sweet, sweet Mandalorian man-juice. And then there's Kaiserfront. In the league of wanking, Kaiserfront is the leader of the "Oh my god, my hands are burning and my wiener is a glowing lump of charcoal"-category.
Almost everybody of the German protagonists - and I mean everybody - is a member of the nobility. I swear, the whole cast is made up of "von XYZ"s. Then there's the whole issue of Nordic mythology and Nordic ethnic solidarity whoch really wasn't a thing in the Kaiserreich at all. All those military operations have names like "Wiking"; the airbase on Iceland is called Midgard, and so on.
Ah, but there's more! Just when you thought it couldn't get any more ridiculous, Kaiserfront 01 keeps on giving, and it gives us...Aliens! Because, as we learn through flashbacks, in 1925, after the Germans had conquered the whole African colonial Empire, the British were dug in with 20,000 men (!) in a fort in the Sudanese desert. So Kastrup takes the fort in a combined glider & tank assault with a force of less than 2,000 men, and beneath the fort, in a hall "measuring at least 4x10 kilometers" the British have been studying Alien spaceships!
Regardless of the absolutely ridiculous plot it's the astonishing lack of imagination and seriousness that pisses me off.
Why are the international leaders of Great Britain, the United States and the USSR in this alternate 1949 reality Winston S. Churchill, Harry S. Truman and Josif Stalin?
Why is all equipment a virtual copy of the historical WW2 designs and concepts, which came only into being because of WW2?
Why is there a Guderian leading panzers, why is there a von Braun in charge of a space program?
Then there's the actual quantity of written words you get for your money. When "Wolf Hunt" is finally ready (sorry, that much self-promotion's got to be, got the manuscruipt back from my editor today), it'll be ~390 pages in a 6x9 inch format and 10.5 script coming in at around 178,000 words – for $16.99. Kaiserfront, on the other hand, is script size 12, book format 7.5x4.8 inches at roughly a hundred and eighty-five pages of written text. I bought Kaiserfront via Amazon.de at its standard price of €12.90, which, depending on the exchange course, is between 18.50 and 19 greenbacks. For 53,000 words. To put that into perspective for the forums, at 53,000 words you're barely out of the prologue of LightningCount's "Dilgar War" epic.
The sad thing is: Kaiserfront wants to be great. It wants you to take it serious. It's like a twelve year old who programmed his first web page and now thinks he's the second coming of Bill Gates' – when in fact he's just lousy teenager with a website full of junk.There's even a fake Folder for the Media (use Google Translate), which was included in the book as its own little booklet, its content more or less repeated in this book trailer (watch it; even if you don't know German, this tells you all you need to ever know about Kaiserfront).
With all the shoutouts to historic personalities, to supposed Nazi Germany Wunderwaffen, to things you'll only find on speculative pages like Luft46.com it comes across as incredibly lousy and lazy, an impression only deepened by the unbelievably bad prose. Even the Landserhefte - dubious dime novels about WW2 - tend to have a better prose than Kaiserfront. I've got to know, I actually bought one to compare them... As for the author, Heinrich von Stahl (yeah...right...). Let's just say its almost 100% certain that it's just another pseudonym for the guy who wrote an really thinly-veiled Nazi series a couple of years ago under the nome de crap Torn Chaines. Compared to that guy, Tom Kratman - SPACE MARINE! - writes subtle prose. Having read "Watch on the Rhine", I mean that.
How anyone can in all honesty write stuff like that - and even more, how he can find a publisher for it - is beyond me. I feel like part of my belief in justice as well as part of my brain have died reading this. It's just that astonishingly bad.
Verdict: 1/5 How anyone can read and like this is beyond me. It's lazy and totally overpriced shit.
June 15, 2011
Hitler's First Antisemitic Writings
In May 2011, the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center bought what is believed to be the first written statement that Hitler made with regards to his position on the Jews. While this by itself would have been an intriguing event, the article reporting about it in the Canadian Globe & Mail is sadly less than accurate in many ways. 
Known as the Gemlich letter, the document has long been known to scholars and was certified as authentic in 1988 by handwriting expert Charles Hamilton, who had revealed the infamous "Hitler Diaries" to be fabrications.Indeed, digging through the web revealed that the content of the letter was quoted verbatim as early as 1968 when it appeared in Ernst Deuerlein's Der Aufstieg der NSDAP in Augenzeugenberichten (The Rise of the NSDAP according to the Reports of Eyewitnesses). The Globe & Mail article tries hard to make this letter into some form of devilish early accusation of tendencies which would supposedly cumulate in the Holocaust twenty-three years later, but - in truth - it cannot deliver. [image error] Hitler's signature under the 1919 letter.
The date is 1919 and, decades before the Holocaust, the 30-year-old German soldier – born in Austria – penned what are believed to be Hitler's first written comments calling for the annihilation of Jews.The only problem with this assessment of the letter is that it is blatantly false. Given what I've written in TBA: Wolf Hunt, there isn't much of a chance to color me as an apologist for Hitler or as an anti-semite. So understand that I'm writing this for the sake of the truth, not for the sake of Hitler's reputation: Nowhere in the actual document does Hitler call for the annihilation of the Jews. Sadly, I don't have any English language links to the content of the document. For those of you with some capacity in German, here is the link to a PDF-file of the letter. From the letter:
"Sein letztes Ziel aber muß unverrückbar die Entfernung der Juden überhaupt sein."In the context of the letter this means, at worst, deportation, but not extermination. Given later Nazi policies, "discriminate against the Jews so they leave Germany" also fits. The claim is even funnier in light of the fact that the article itself provides a translation for this passage lateron:
[I]ts final aim, however, must be the uncompromising removal of the Jews altogether.Also, omission is the eternal enemy of any objective truth:
In one section, Hitler said that a powerful government could curtail the so-called "Jewish threat" by denying their rights.What the article omits - and the letter blatantly states - is that here Hitler is not talking about denying the Jews equal rights, it is about curtailing and abolishing what he thought were practices of giving Jews special rights! It's irrelevant whether there really were special rights or not. Hitler, at least, seemed to think that the young republic was in a stranglehold of Jewish special interests, and that its leaders were financially dependent on that ominous group. It becomes clear from the letter that he thought Germany could not recover its status as an independent power while this supposed influence remained in place.
Hitler signed his letter, "Mit vorzueglicher Hochachtung," meaning with deepest esteem.Which is nothing special. In fact, it is the contrary, especially given the social etiquette of the day and age. This type of addressing a superior officer within an official function - writing a letter which we would nowadays label a brainstorming document - would have been completely ordinary. The article itself is thin on actual information. I would have hoped to read more than translation mistakes and obvious sloppy writing like this:
Adolf Gemlich created propaganda for the German army. Hitler wrote the letter to him at the suggestion of Captain Ulrich Mayr, to help popularize the notion that someone was responsible for Germany's defeat in the Second World War.It would have been great to see a scan of the actual letter itself - not because I suspect some kind of malpractice here, but because these kinds of historical documents really interest me. It would also be a great and easy way to gather further publicity (and counteract the inevitable few who will claim it to be a forgery no matter what). Either way, if you're interested in primary sources, take a look at the above linked PDF. If nothing else, it remains an insightful document about Hitler's thoughts about Jews and the situation of Germany in 1919.
June 14, 2011
A Marshall-Plan for Greece?
Greece is bankrupt, and nothing the European nations (mainly Germany) have done so far has provided a solution to the Greek dilemma. How then, I have to ask myself, could a "Marshall-Plan for Greece" be a success?
As I said, what's been done so far hasn't worked out. But maybe the crux of the matter lies in the preparation? Most recipients of actuall Marshall-Plan funds never managed to create an "economic miracle."
Alas, the correct preparation would be something like this:
Kill 20% of all Greeks, turn every significant town into a heap of rubble, hand over half the country to the Macedonians and Bulgarians, and herd the remaining Greek as refugees into the other half.
You mean that sounds evil? Why? That approach worked great on Germany!
Sorry, I'm a bit cynical right now. Of course I don't advocate anything like the above mentioned. But when your on country is bankrupting itself and its citizens to bail out the Greeks who have nothing better to do than protest the fact that they'll no longer be able to retire from work at the age of 52 while being paid from the EU, violent fantasies have a tendency to develop on their own...
As I said, what's been done so far hasn't worked out. But maybe the crux of the matter lies in the preparation? Most recipients of actuall Marshall-Plan funds never managed to create an "economic miracle."
Alas, the correct preparation would be something like this:
Kill 20% of all Greeks, turn every significant town into a heap of rubble, hand over half the country to the Macedonians and Bulgarians, and herd the remaining Greek as refugees into the other half.
You mean that sounds evil? Why? That approach worked great on Germany!
Sorry, I'm a bit cynical right now. Of course I don't advocate anything like the above mentioned. But when your on country is bankrupting itself and its citizens to bail out the Greeks who have nothing better to do than protest the fact that they'll no longer be able to retire from work at the age of 52 while being paid from the EU, violent fantasies have a tendency to develop on their own...
June 11, 2011
Review - 1939: Countdown to War
Review - 1939: Countdown to War
Yes, I'm trying my best to avoid finishing "Kaiserfront". You'll understand why once I do my review...First things first: Overy's "1939 - Countdown to War" isn't a bad book by any meaning. It's written in that great essayist style I've come to love from anglophone authors, a style that distinguishes them positively from most German authors in the field of non-fiction books. "1939" isn't a grand scale history of WW2, and it doesn't want to be that. Overy's book looks at the fateful days between August 24 and September 3, 1939, and tries to give the reader an overview about who the actors were and in what kind of a relationship they stood towards each other. There is some interesting information to be found in there, for example as to how the British saw the Swedish negotiator Birger Dahlerus, who - as a friend of Göring - tried via shuttle diplomacy between London and Berlin to prevent the outbreak of war. Another example is the strenous relationship between the French Prime Minister and his Foreign Minister, Bonnet.
That being said, the book does have obvious shortcomings. It merely *describes* events rather than trying to *explain* them while in the same breath criticising the conclusions of some other authors' works who *did* try just that. "1939" is also limited in more than just one way. Describing a "Countdown to War" while - consciously - leaving out the very steps that ignited said countdown makes for an exercise in disjointed reading. It's hard to get to terms with events when the actions that lead to them - the British guarantee of spring 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact & and Soviet-Allied discussions preceeding it - are pretty much ignored.
Secondly, "1939", even though it consciously limits itself to a very short period of time - adds little in the way of new information that works on a larger scale have not already presented in even more detail and in better context. For those who have read Schultze-Rhonhof or even Buchanan, "1939" is - simple regarding the amount of information given to the reader - a significant step back. And at a tad bit fewer than 35,000 words, Overy's book - hardcover or not - is severly overpriced at (at the date of this review) €15,99 (on Amazon.com it's listed with a bargain price at the moment!).
Final Verdict: 3/5 If you haven't read anything beyond school book literature about the outbreak of WW2, Overy's "1939 - Countdown to War" is a good but expensive start. If you've however already read Schultze-Rhonhof or others of the same calibre you might just as well save yourself the money and the time.
June 9, 2011
Should I get a Website?
Since the manuscript to Wolf Hunt is in the hands of my editor, I've been thinking. While TBA is taking place during WW2, this blog probably isn't the best way to showcase the novel, thematically cluttered as it is. It may also be for the better to make a distinction between my story-writing activities on the one hand, which won't be restricted to the topic of WW2, and my commentary and reviews on the other. Another point I've considered therein is that my writings are imminently better marketable if I present them in an environment reserved just for them. Giving Wolf Hunt and its successors webspace might allow me to aggregate possible sales channels (EStore, Kindle, Amazon, Smashwords...) in one place, and add an online shop of my own, allowing me to bypass the "semi-publishers" to sell without a cut. Given the massive webspace one can get nowadays for less than 5 Euros, it also isn't a question of money. The only hurdle is that I've got no idea how to build a webpage, but I could learn that. There are certainly enough helpful programs for that out there.
So, what do you guys think? Should I make the step and get a webpage?
So, what do you guys think? Should I make the step and get a webpage?
June 6, 2011
Status Update - TBA "Wolf Hunt"
Well, put your women on a leash, lock your kids up in their rooms, it's party time! Last evening I put the finishing touches on the manuscript of "The Burning Ages: Wolf Hunt". That is, after I tried in vain to format the damn thing for Smashwords and for Amazon's Kindle. Anyway, the actual writing part is done, and I'm looking at the semi-finished product of ~174,800 words with a sense of relief and great pride.
Now, what remains to do?
[image error] I've sent the good people at Everything Indie a sample for editing, and depending on how that works out I'll also use their services to format "Wolf Hunt" for Smashwords and Kindle. I've also cobbled together something for CreateSpace so that I can get my novel published in print, though what I've sent them so far is more a proof of concept for me than anything else. I also can't make any comments on the cost of the print version until I've checked out the results of what I sent them. Right now, at a format of 6"x9", "Wolf Hunt" is just about 390 pages at a font size of 10.5. You can see the final cover on the right.
Either way, I'm a big step closer to actually getting my novel published, and as such have begun with some preliminary work on other projects, including the sequel. Yes, a sequel. While "Wolf Hunt" works well enough on its own, I've placed more than enough hooks in it to setup a longer story (which was the idea all along). This preliminary work mostly includes storyboarding and reading background material when I'm not reading or watching things I'd like to review on this blog as it is (upcoming titles include Kaiserfront 1: Die Schwarze Macht by Heinrich von Stahl (yeah, right^^) and Hitler's War by Harry Turtledove). We'll see how soon I get to them. I guess it all depends on how well the work on "TBA: Clash of Eagles" and my side-project, the character-driven, supernatural meets WW2-themed "Witch Fire" comes along.
Now, what remains to do?
[image error] I've sent the good people at Everything Indie a sample for editing, and depending on how that works out I'll also use their services to format "Wolf Hunt" for Smashwords and Kindle. I've also cobbled together something for CreateSpace so that I can get my novel published in print, though what I've sent them so far is more a proof of concept for me than anything else. I also can't make any comments on the cost of the print version until I've checked out the results of what I sent them. Right now, at a format of 6"x9", "Wolf Hunt" is just about 390 pages at a font size of 10.5. You can see the final cover on the right.
Either way, I'm a big step closer to actually getting my novel published, and as such have begun with some preliminary work on other projects, including the sequel. Yes, a sequel. While "Wolf Hunt" works well enough on its own, I've placed more than enough hooks in it to setup a longer story (which was the idea all along). This preliminary work mostly includes storyboarding and reading background material when I'm not reading or watching things I'd like to review on this blog as it is (upcoming titles include Kaiserfront 1: Die Schwarze Macht by Heinrich von Stahl (yeah, right^^) and Hitler's War by Harry Turtledove). We'll see how soon I get to them. I guess it all depends on how well the work on "TBA: Clash of Eagles" and my side-project, the character-driven, supernatural meets WW2-themed "Witch Fire" comes along.
June 4, 2011
The Fall of Fort Eben Emael
Well, hardly on time since the deed had its 71st anniversary on the tenth of last month, but I thought there is no harm in posting something when I find it. The above is a documentation about the assault on and the fall of the Belgian fortress of Eben Emael by a small detachment of airborne troops. Eben Emael was the lynchpin of the first Belgian line of defense, the largest and most modern fortress at the time. It was deemed impregnable - and was put out of action by a force of less than 100 men, only armed with infantry weapons, hand grenades, and a new sort of hollow charge explosive.
June 1, 2011
Iraq's "Kristallnacht": Seventy Years Later
Iraq's Kristallnacht: Seventy Years Laterby Robert S. Wistrich
Seventy years ago, on June 1, 1941, the most dramatic and violent pogrom in the Arab Middle East during World War II took place in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. Known in Arabic as the Farhūd, this devastating pogrom left approximately 150 Jews dead, hundreds more wounded, and led to the ransacking of nearly 600 Jewish businesses. The grim events of June 1-2, 1941 were the Iraqi Arab equivalent of the mass violence on Kristallnacht, which had taken place some two and a half years earlier across Nazi Germany. The anti-Jewish riots were mainly led by Iraqi soldiers (bitter and frustrated by their defeat at the hands of the British Army), some members of the police and young paramilitary gangs, swiftly followed by an angry Muslim population that went on the rampage in an orgy of murder and rapine.
The pogrom struck at what was the most prosperous, prominent and well-integrated Jewish community in the Middle East — one whose origins went back more than 2,500 years — long before there was any Arab presence in the country. The 90,000 Jews of Baghdad, it should be said, played a major role in the commercial and professional life of the city. However, in the 1930s they already found themselves confronted by an increasingly virulent anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist propaganda in the Iraqi press and among nationalist political groups. This agitation treated the intensely patriotic Iraqi Jews as an alien, hostile minority who had to be ejected from all the social, economic and political positions it held in the Iraqi state.
Iraqi Arab nationalists, like their counterparts in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt, had been much influenced in the 1930s by the rise of Nazi Germany. Hitler's National Socialism attracted them as a spectacular, authoritarian model for achieving Iraqi national unity and a wider union of Arabs in the region. It was no accident that the pro-German ideologue of pan-Arabism, Sati al-Husri, exerted a major influence on Iraqi education after arriving in Baghdad in 1921, or that Michel Aflaq, the chief theoretician of the Iraqi and Syrian Ba'athists had also absorbed German national-socialist ideas while studying in Paris between 1928-1932. The Director General of the Iraqi Ministry of Education in the 1930s, Dr. Sami Shawkat, was another fanatical ideologue, especially active in instilling a military spirit (resembling the German Nazi model) in Iraqi youth. He also developed radically anti-Jewish ideas which were heavily indebted to Nazi anti-Semitism. In a book published in Baghdad in 1939, These Are Our Aims, Shawkat openly called for the annihilation of the Jews in Iraq, as a necessary prerequisite for achieving an Iraqi national revival and fulfilling the country's "historical mission" of uniting the Arab nation.
Significantly, it was also in Baghdad that the first official Arabic translations of parts of Hitler's Mein Kampf appeared in 1934. In order not to offend Arab sensibilities the final translation "edited" out Hitler's racial theories about inferior "Semites" — making it clear that anti-Semitism related only to Jews, not to Arabs. The Iraqi translator of Hitler's "magnum opus" was Yūnus al-Sab'āwī, a young Nazi enthusiast and extreme anti-Semite. A close confidant of nationalist officers in the Iraqi army, Al-Sab'āwī came to play an important role in Iraqi politics. From April to June 1941 he even served as Iraqi Minister of Economics. Al-Sab'āwī was indeed one of the architects of the Farhūd in which his anti-Semitic para-military youth group also took part. Al-Sab'āwī had earlier established a close connection with Nazi Germany's Ambassador to Iraq in the late 1930s, Dr. Fritz Grobba. The latter was a distinguished Orientalist (fluent in Arabic, Persian and Turkish) who eventually convinced Hitler that helping Arab nationalists to throw off British control of Iraq should be part of German strategy. Grobba also contributed much through the networks he had established in Iraq, towards spreading the idea that Iraqi Jews were a "fifth column" of Great Britain — sworn enemies of Germany and of the Arab nation. Equally, Palestinian nationalists, led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini (who had fled to Baghdad in the late 1930s), conducted an especially vicious campaign to incite a jihad among the local Arab population against Great Britain, Zionism and the Jews of Iraq. The Mufti — a close ally of Hitler during the four years he spent in Berlin between 1941 and 1945 — would also exert a particularly toxic influence on the pro-Nazi politician Rashid Ali al-Kailani, whose successful anti-British coup had forced the unpopular Hashemite Regent Abd al-Ilāh to flee the country. The coup brought to power on April 1, 1941 some of the most rabid Jew-baiters in Iraq. Anti-British and anti-Semitic propaganda now reached a zenith that greatly contributed to the violence that burst forth two months later.
Ironically enough, it was the decisive victory of the British and the return of the Regent on June 1 that immediately provoked the pogrom, an act of unparalleled revenge by the Muslim masses against the Jews of Baghdad that expressed their deep disappointment at the fall of the popular Rashid Ali regime. The British Army, now encamped on the outskirts of Baghdad, could easily have intervened but it chose not to do so, dubiously claiming this would have damaged the prestige of the (pro-British) Regent in the eyes of his own people. The British behaved in a similar fashion on several occasions in Mandatory Palestine, in Libya (November 1945) and in Aden (December 1945) — standing by as Arab mobs killed defenseless Jews. In fact, for most Iraqi Muslims in 1941, the British were perceived as oppressive colonizers, the Jews as their "agents" and the German Nazis as "anti-imperialist" saviors! But German military assistance, when it finally came, was too little and too late to save the Rashid Ali regime.
The Farhūd has been incomprehensibly ignored or downplayed both in Zionist historiography and even more in general histories of the Middle East. Arab historians have been silent or else falsified the facts and there are even Israeli and Jewish writers who have unconvincingly tried to dismiss its importance. Yet this traumatic event was indeed of seminal importance. It proved beyond reasonable doubt the strength of Arab nationalist anti-Semitism and of Nazi-style incitement on a Muslim population that had come to see in its patriotic Jewish minority "the enemy within." The Jews of Iraq, seventy years ago, suddenly found themselves in the crossfire of three converging forms of murderous anti-Semitism — that of the German Nazis, the Palestinian exiles in Baghdad led by Amin el-Husseini, and Iraqi pan-Arab nationalists. Ten years later, the government of Iraq under the pro-British Nuri es-Said, expropriated, dispossessed, disenfranchised and brought about the forced emigration of nearly 120,000 Iraqi Jews, thereby cruelly terminating the oldest of all Diaspora histories. This was not only a crime against humanity but an insufficiently acknowledged part of the history of the Holocaust. The Farhūd exposed with shocking clarity just how vulnerable the Jews in Arab lands really were and what their fate was likely to be under any decolonized Arab regime in the future, especially if there was a breakdown of law and order.
Despite the "Arab Spring" not much has changed for other minorities in the Middle East in the last 70 years. As for the Jews, from Morocco to Iraq and Iran they would be "ethnically cleansed" after 1945 by their Muslim rulers. The Farhūd already represented the writing on the wall for those willing to read it. The reinforcement of a strong Israel was and still remains the only viable long-term answer to the repetition of such horrific atrocities in the future.
* * *
Prof. Robert S. Wistrich is the director of The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (Random House, January 2010). This article is a condensed version of a recent lecture on the 1941 pogrom in Baghdad hosted by the Center in Jerusalem.
Seventy years ago, on June 1, 1941, the most dramatic and violent pogrom in the Arab Middle East during World War II took place in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. Known in Arabic as the Farhūd, this devastating pogrom left approximately 150 Jews dead, hundreds more wounded, and led to the ransacking of nearly 600 Jewish businesses. The grim events of June 1-2, 1941 were the Iraqi Arab equivalent of the mass violence on Kristallnacht, which had taken place some two and a half years earlier across Nazi Germany. The anti-Jewish riots were mainly led by Iraqi soldiers (bitter and frustrated by their defeat at the hands of the British Army), some members of the police and young paramilitary gangs, swiftly followed by an angry Muslim population that went on the rampage in an orgy of murder and rapine.
The pogrom struck at what was the most prosperous, prominent and well-integrated Jewish community in the Middle East — one whose origins went back more than 2,500 years — long before there was any Arab presence in the country. The 90,000 Jews of Baghdad, it should be said, played a major role in the commercial and professional life of the city. However, in the 1930s they already found themselves confronted by an increasingly virulent anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist propaganda in the Iraqi press and among nationalist political groups. This agitation treated the intensely patriotic Iraqi Jews as an alien, hostile minority who had to be ejected from all the social, economic and political positions it held in the Iraqi state.
Iraqi Arab nationalists, like their counterparts in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt, had been much influenced in the 1930s by the rise of Nazi Germany. Hitler's National Socialism attracted them as a spectacular, authoritarian model for achieving Iraqi national unity and a wider union of Arabs in the region. It was no accident that the pro-German ideologue of pan-Arabism, Sati al-Husri, exerted a major influence on Iraqi education after arriving in Baghdad in 1921, or that Michel Aflaq, the chief theoretician of the Iraqi and Syrian Ba'athists had also absorbed German national-socialist ideas while studying in Paris between 1928-1932. The Director General of the Iraqi Ministry of Education in the 1930s, Dr. Sami Shawkat, was another fanatical ideologue, especially active in instilling a military spirit (resembling the German Nazi model) in Iraqi youth. He also developed radically anti-Jewish ideas which were heavily indebted to Nazi anti-Semitism. In a book published in Baghdad in 1939, These Are Our Aims, Shawkat openly called for the annihilation of the Jews in Iraq, as a necessary prerequisite for achieving an Iraqi national revival and fulfilling the country's "historical mission" of uniting the Arab nation.
Significantly, it was also in Baghdad that the first official Arabic translations of parts of Hitler's Mein Kampf appeared in 1934. In order not to offend Arab sensibilities the final translation "edited" out Hitler's racial theories about inferior "Semites" — making it clear that anti-Semitism related only to Jews, not to Arabs. The Iraqi translator of Hitler's "magnum opus" was Yūnus al-Sab'āwī, a young Nazi enthusiast and extreme anti-Semite. A close confidant of nationalist officers in the Iraqi army, Al-Sab'āwī came to play an important role in Iraqi politics. From April to June 1941 he even served as Iraqi Minister of Economics. Al-Sab'āwī was indeed one of the architects of the Farhūd in which his anti-Semitic para-military youth group also took part. Al-Sab'āwī had earlier established a close connection with Nazi Germany's Ambassador to Iraq in the late 1930s, Dr. Fritz Grobba. The latter was a distinguished Orientalist (fluent in Arabic, Persian and Turkish) who eventually convinced Hitler that helping Arab nationalists to throw off British control of Iraq should be part of German strategy. Grobba also contributed much through the networks he had established in Iraq, towards spreading the idea that Iraqi Jews were a "fifth column" of Great Britain — sworn enemies of Germany and of the Arab nation. Equally, Palestinian nationalists, led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini (who had fled to Baghdad in the late 1930s), conducted an especially vicious campaign to incite a jihad among the local Arab population against Great Britain, Zionism and the Jews of Iraq. The Mufti — a close ally of Hitler during the four years he spent in Berlin between 1941 and 1945 — would also exert a particularly toxic influence on the pro-Nazi politician Rashid Ali al-Kailani, whose successful anti-British coup had forced the unpopular Hashemite Regent Abd al-Ilāh to flee the country. The coup brought to power on April 1, 1941 some of the most rabid Jew-baiters in Iraq. Anti-British and anti-Semitic propaganda now reached a zenith that greatly contributed to the violence that burst forth two months later.
Ironically enough, it was the decisive victory of the British and the return of the Regent on June 1 that immediately provoked the pogrom, an act of unparalleled revenge by the Muslim masses against the Jews of Baghdad that expressed their deep disappointment at the fall of the popular Rashid Ali regime. The British Army, now encamped on the outskirts of Baghdad, could easily have intervened but it chose not to do so, dubiously claiming this would have damaged the prestige of the (pro-British) Regent in the eyes of his own people. The British behaved in a similar fashion on several occasions in Mandatory Palestine, in Libya (November 1945) and in Aden (December 1945) — standing by as Arab mobs killed defenseless Jews. In fact, for most Iraqi Muslims in 1941, the British were perceived as oppressive colonizers, the Jews as their "agents" and the German Nazis as "anti-imperialist" saviors! But German military assistance, when it finally came, was too little and too late to save the Rashid Ali regime.
The Farhūd has been incomprehensibly ignored or downplayed both in Zionist historiography and even more in general histories of the Middle East. Arab historians have been silent or else falsified the facts and there are even Israeli and Jewish writers who have unconvincingly tried to dismiss its importance. Yet this traumatic event was indeed of seminal importance. It proved beyond reasonable doubt the strength of Arab nationalist anti-Semitism and of Nazi-style incitement on a Muslim population that had come to see in its patriotic Jewish minority "the enemy within." The Jews of Iraq, seventy years ago, suddenly found themselves in the crossfire of three converging forms of murderous anti-Semitism — that of the German Nazis, the Palestinian exiles in Baghdad led by Amin el-Husseini, and Iraqi pan-Arab nationalists. Ten years later, the government of Iraq under the pro-British Nuri es-Said, expropriated, dispossessed, disenfranchised and brought about the forced emigration of nearly 120,000 Iraqi Jews, thereby cruelly terminating the oldest of all Diaspora histories. This was not only a crime against humanity but an insufficiently acknowledged part of the history of the Holocaust. The Farhūd exposed with shocking clarity just how vulnerable the Jews in Arab lands really were and what their fate was likely to be under any decolonized Arab regime in the future, especially if there was a breakdown of law and order.
Despite the "Arab Spring" not much has changed for other minorities in the Middle East in the last 70 years. As for the Jews, from Morocco to Iraq and Iran they would be "ethnically cleansed" after 1945 by their Muslim rulers. The Farhūd already represented the writing on the wall for those willing to read it. The reinforcement of a strong Israel was and still remains the only viable long-term answer to the repetition of such horrific atrocities in the future.
* * *
Prof. Robert S. Wistrich is the director of The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (Random House, January 2010). This article is a condensed version of a recent lecture on the 1941 pogrom in Baghdad hosted by the Center in Jerusalem.
May 30, 2011
The Third War Against Germany
The following text was originally published in German on the conservative blog Vaterland, then translated and reposted by Manfred Kleine-Hartlage on German Views. I added a few parts which did not make it into the original translation but are part of the essay, and changed the translation where I thought mine was stylistically better. Since I have neither read the original essay Vaterland cites from nor the books mentioned in the article, I'm posting this for the sake of discussion. The content of the article does not necessarily mirror my own views. The Re-education of the Germans as a Part of Psychological Warfare: The Third War against Germany Hans-Joachim von Leesen
"We will extinguish the entire German tradition" After the war Deputy US Secretary of State Archibald McLeesh, who had in 1939 founded the Institution of Psychological Warfare in the USA, defined at the Potsdam Conference the aim of reeducation: to change the character and the mentality of the German nation, so that Germany could, finally, be permitted to lead a life without supervision. This inevitably required a treatment of Germans comparable to that of a criminal in modern prison. "We will extinguish the whole German tradition." At the end of this process, a German "Self Reeducation" would have to stand (detailed in Schrenck-Notzing, Charakterwäsche, as well as in Mosberg, Reeducation). "General psychic inferiority of the German human" In the "Report of a Conference on Germany after the War", worked out in Summer 1944 by the "Joint Committee on Post-War-Planning" at Columbia University, New York City, the timetable was established for the re-education of the Germans which then became an official directive for the American post-war policy (reported in Mosberg, Reeducation). It was developed by scientists from the faculties of medicine, psychology, sociology etc. The Swiss psychoanalyst C. G. Jung who belonged to its spiritual fathers had warned against making a difference between "decent and indecent" Germans (cited in Mosberg, Reeducation). The Germans are "collectively guilty". The reason for this is a "general psychic inferiority of the German (hu)man". In his view the Germans were "degenerated". The only effective therapy was for the Germans to recognise their guilt, and for them to publicly confess being guilty over and over again. The Stuttgart guilt confession of the Protestant church of GermanyOne of the first steps to achieve this aim was the Stuttgart confession of the Protestant church of Germany (EKD). As the leaders of the German Protestant church which had belonged predominantly to the "Confessing Church" [Bekennende Kirche; a group of anti-Nazi theologians] tried to join the World Council of Churches being built up at that time, the condition was that they had to confess German guilt publicly. Secretary general of the World Council of Churches was of the Dutch Visser't Hooft who had belonged to the British Secret Service during the war. On the 18th/19th of October, 1945 the leaders of the German Protestants, from Bishop Lilje and Pastor Martin Niemöller to Dr. Dr. Gustav Heinemann, declared the desired confession, not only for the Protestant church, but for the German people as a whole, so, for example, also for the Catholics and those without denomination (en detail: the Kiel theology professor Walter Bodenstein in „Ist nur der Besiegte schuldig? Die EKD und das Stuttgarter Schuldbekenntnis von 1945/Is only the defeated guilty? The EKD and the Stuttgart confession of 1945"). The staff of radio stations was dismissed, leading journalists and publishers were imprisoned in internment camps. The German media were first replaced by radio stations of the allied military governments. What they had to publish was delivered by the occupying powers and their news agencies, in the US zone the DANA, later DENA, in the British under the direction of Sefton Delmer, a leading man of the PSW, the German news service = GNS. Newspapers and radio stations in German language were forbidden to publish anything but what these agencies provided.
After some time the hiring politicy was loosened and journalists who were no emigrants, but were neutralised in the third Reich for political reasons were also hired. After one to two years the first editors trained by the occupying powers started working (an impressive picture is delivered by the German first hour journalists Richard Tüngel and Hans Rudolf Berndorff in their book "Auf dem Bauche sollst Du kriechen" that appeared in 1958). The campaign in the US zone was headed by Leon Edel, later Eugene Jolas. The head of the press officers was the Intelligence Officer Alfred Rosenberg.
Strict supervision
German journalists worked under strict American or British control. They had to implement a strategy founded in psychological warfare. The crucial purpose was for the Germans to "confess their collective guilt, and that they were persuaded of their inferiority", as Helmuth Mosberg writes in "Reeducation – re-education and licence press in the post-war Germany", his dissertation that also appeared as a book. "Every journalist had to be a reeducator".
The German character is washed
In the long run, one could not just only feed the Germans with newspapers and radio programs provided solely by the allied military authorities. Thus the search for Germans who seemed suitable to run the newly founded newspapers began. Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing reported on that already in 1965 in his basic work Charakterwäsche which appeared again and again in new editions and recently in a revised version. The new German newspaper and magazine publishers should represent "the other Germany", i.e. be people who clearly differed from the present Germans. Compared to character traits, competence was secondary.The victorious powers assumed that most Germans had a "wrong character" because they had been shaped by their authoritarian families.
The kind of men which had to belong to the new élite had been worked out by a professional group of scientists under the direction of Max Horkheimer (we will meet him again as one of the mentors of the 68th revolt) and been presented in a 5-volume work Studies in Prejudice , among whose authors were e.g. Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, R. Nevitt Sanford. They wanted to uncover and to exterminate the prejudices from which the Germans allegedly suffered. Literally: "Extermination means re-education which is academically planned." Through reeducation "potentially fascistic individuals" were to be uncovered.
Thus one searched for people in whose personalities the "typical German values", like "externally correct behaviour, diligence, ability, physical cleanness, health and uncritical behaviour" did not exist, because these qualities supposedly hid "a deep weakness of the own ego".
[No, this is not a translation mistake! The allied considered just such men qualified for position of leadership of the German media who did not have these qualities. M.K.-H.]
The considered persons were asked, among other things, how the relation between them and their parents was. Men with broken relationships to their parents were preferred, i.e. those who were not formed by the authoritarian German family. And they went forward with good conscience, as they regarded the Germans as ill, as patients who had to be cured of their paranoia. The new newspaper publishers and editors in chief were submitted to suitable tests, and if they turned out to have such broken characters, they were shortlisted.So to speak, as a reward they received the licence for a newspaper or magazine, of course still supervised by the press officers. The new newspaper publishers avoided offending against the given rules, otherwise they would have lost the licence or their position. Most worked as requested, and even real beliefs played a role, as most people prefer being on the winnig side.
It goes without saying that the trials against the German ruling class and against supposed and real war criminals played a major part in the reeducation. The trial in the international military tribunal in Nuremberg against the leaders of the Reich, as well as the next ones of the American military justice were reported by the newspapers of the allied military governments. They had to make clear the collective guilt to the German population in all details, and at the same, to justify the allied war crimes like the aerial war against the civilian population.
Every journalist has to be an Re-educatorAll these measures were in harmony with the main demand of psychological warfare : to separate the enemy people from its leaders, its elite. This had already been an aim of the allies in the First World War when the Kaiser was allegorized as a monster dripping with blood. All newspapers as well as the broadcasting companies were subject to the principle that every journalist had to be an reeducator. If journalists did not obey, they ran the risk of losing their jobs. This explained not least the line loyalty of publishers and editors (in detail Mosberg, Reeducation). When in 1949 the Federal Republic of Germany was founded, the licensing of the press by the military government came to an end. But in the years from 1945 to 1949 one had indoctrinated a younger generation which had passed through the school of the reeducators supervised by the military governments.
This explains why today, German journalists - though free in their judgment on single subjects - have to agree on some basic statements, e.g. German collective guilt and Germany's exclusive responsibility for the Second World War.
[The original translation ends here. What follows are the remaining paragraphs of the excerpt from von Leesen's essay.]
Radio and the film industry were restructured by the reeducators in the same way as the print media had been.(many movies are banned until even today). At first, films made in Germany till 1945 were completely prohibited. Later, chosen entertainment movies were made available again. Cinemas at first only showed films in Russian or English with German subtitles until domestic productions made according to the instructions of the reeducators became available (examples: "Rotation", "The Murderers are Among Us", "Film Without Title").
Reeducation in Schools and Universities
The reeducation in schools and universities was a parallel process. All existing and past school books were prohibited. To print new ones the publishers needed a license of the Military Government. There was a high demand for new ones: The Allied Control Council had banned 34,645 books. Additionally, a ban on books about the Olympic Summer Games of 1936 as well as one on books regarding World War 1 was established. Together, this amounted to roughly three to four times as many books as the Nazis themselves had banned (Befehl Nr. 4 des Alliierten Kontrollrates, 13. 5. 1946 „Betreffend Einziehung von Literatur und Werken nationalsozialistischen und militaristischen Charakters" sowie „Liste der auszusondernden Literatur" mit drei Nachträgen; reprinted by Uwe Berg Verlag, Toppenstedt 1983/1984).
"We will extinguish the entire German tradition" After the war Deputy US Secretary of State Archibald McLeesh, who had in 1939 founded the Institution of Psychological Warfare in the USA, defined at the Potsdam Conference the aim of reeducation: to change the character and the mentality of the German nation, so that Germany could, finally, be permitted to lead a life without supervision. This inevitably required a treatment of Germans comparable to that of a criminal in modern prison. "We will extinguish the whole German tradition." At the end of this process, a German "Self Reeducation" would have to stand (detailed in Schrenck-Notzing, Charakterwäsche, as well as in Mosberg, Reeducation). "General psychic inferiority of the German human" In the "Report of a Conference on Germany after the War", worked out in Summer 1944 by the "Joint Committee on Post-War-Planning" at Columbia University, New York City, the timetable was established for the re-education of the Germans which then became an official directive for the American post-war policy (reported in Mosberg, Reeducation). It was developed by scientists from the faculties of medicine, psychology, sociology etc. The Swiss psychoanalyst C. G. Jung who belonged to its spiritual fathers had warned against making a difference between "decent and indecent" Germans (cited in Mosberg, Reeducation). The Germans are "collectively guilty". The reason for this is a "general psychic inferiority of the German (hu)man". In his view the Germans were "degenerated". The only effective therapy was for the Germans to recognise their guilt, and for them to publicly confess being guilty over and over again. The Stuttgart guilt confession of the Protestant church of GermanyOne of the first steps to achieve this aim was the Stuttgart confession of the Protestant church of Germany (EKD). As the leaders of the German Protestant church which had belonged predominantly to the "Confessing Church" [Bekennende Kirche; a group of anti-Nazi theologians] tried to join the World Council of Churches being built up at that time, the condition was that they had to confess German guilt publicly. Secretary general of the World Council of Churches was of the Dutch Visser't Hooft who had belonged to the British Secret Service during the war. On the 18th/19th of October, 1945 the leaders of the German Protestants, from Bishop Lilje and Pastor Martin Niemöller to Dr. Dr. Gustav Heinemann, declared the desired confession, not only for the Protestant church, but for the German people as a whole, so, for example, also for the Catholics and those without denomination (en detail: the Kiel theology professor Walter Bodenstein in „Ist nur der Besiegte schuldig? Die EKD und das Stuttgarter Schuldbekenntnis von 1945/Is only the defeated guilty? The EKD and the Stuttgart confession of 1945"). The staff of radio stations was dismissed, leading journalists and publishers were imprisoned in internment camps. The German media were first replaced by radio stations of the allied military governments. What they had to publish was delivered by the occupying powers and their news agencies, in the US zone the DANA, later DENA, in the British under the direction of Sefton Delmer, a leading man of the PSW, the German news service = GNS. Newspapers and radio stations in German language were forbidden to publish anything but what these agencies provided.
After some time the hiring politicy was loosened and journalists who were no emigrants, but were neutralised in the third Reich for political reasons were also hired. After one to two years the first editors trained by the occupying powers started working (an impressive picture is delivered by the German first hour journalists Richard Tüngel and Hans Rudolf Berndorff in their book "Auf dem Bauche sollst Du kriechen" that appeared in 1958). The campaign in the US zone was headed by Leon Edel, later Eugene Jolas. The head of the press officers was the Intelligence Officer Alfred Rosenberg.
Strict supervision
German journalists worked under strict American or British control. They had to implement a strategy founded in psychological warfare. The crucial purpose was for the Germans to "confess their collective guilt, and that they were persuaded of their inferiority", as Helmuth Mosberg writes in "Reeducation – re-education and licence press in the post-war Germany", his dissertation that also appeared as a book. "Every journalist had to be a reeducator".
The German character is washed
In the long run, one could not just only feed the Germans with newspapers and radio programs provided solely by the allied military authorities. Thus the search for Germans who seemed suitable to run the newly founded newspapers began. Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing reported on that already in 1965 in his basic work Charakterwäsche which appeared again and again in new editions and recently in a revised version. The new German newspaper and magazine publishers should represent "the other Germany", i.e. be people who clearly differed from the present Germans. Compared to character traits, competence was secondary.The victorious powers assumed that most Germans had a "wrong character" because they had been shaped by their authoritarian families.
The kind of men which had to belong to the new élite had been worked out by a professional group of scientists under the direction of Max Horkheimer (we will meet him again as one of the mentors of the 68th revolt) and been presented in a 5-volume work Studies in Prejudice , among whose authors were e.g. Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, R. Nevitt Sanford. They wanted to uncover and to exterminate the prejudices from which the Germans allegedly suffered. Literally: "Extermination means re-education which is academically planned." Through reeducation "potentially fascistic individuals" were to be uncovered.
Thus one searched for people in whose personalities the "typical German values", like "externally correct behaviour, diligence, ability, physical cleanness, health and uncritical behaviour" did not exist, because these qualities supposedly hid "a deep weakness of the own ego".
[No, this is not a translation mistake! The allied considered just such men qualified for position of leadership of the German media who did not have these qualities. M.K.-H.]
The considered persons were asked, among other things, how the relation between them and their parents was. Men with broken relationships to their parents were preferred, i.e. those who were not formed by the authoritarian German family. And they went forward with good conscience, as they regarded the Germans as ill, as patients who had to be cured of their paranoia. The new newspaper publishers and editors in chief were submitted to suitable tests, and if they turned out to have such broken characters, they were shortlisted.So to speak, as a reward they received the licence for a newspaper or magazine, of course still supervised by the press officers. The new newspaper publishers avoided offending against the given rules, otherwise they would have lost the licence or their position. Most worked as requested, and even real beliefs played a role, as most people prefer being on the winnig side.
It goes without saying that the trials against the German ruling class and against supposed and real war criminals played a major part in the reeducation. The trial in the international military tribunal in Nuremberg against the leaders of the Reich, as well as the next ones of the American military justice were reported by the newspapers of the allied military governments. They had to make clear the collective guilt to the German population in all details, and at the same, to justify the allied war crimes like the aerial war against the civilian population.
Every journalist has to be an Re-educatorAll these measures were in harmony with the main demand of psychological warfare : to separate the enemy people from its leaders, its elite. This had already been an aim of the allies in the First World War when the Kaiser was allegorized as a monster dripping with blood. All newspapers as well as the broadcasting companies were subject to the principle that every journalist had to be an reeducator. If journalists did not obey, they ran the risk of losing their jobs. This explained not least the line loyalty of publishers and editors (in detail Mosberg, Reeducation). When in 1949 the Federal Republic of Germany was founded, the licensing of the press by the military government came to an end. But in the years from 1945 to 1949 one had indoctrinated a younger generation which had passed through the school of the reeducators supervised by the military governments.
This explains why today, German journalists - though free in their judgment on single subjects - have to agree on some basic statements, e.g. German collective guilt and Germany's exclusive responsibility for the Second World War.
[The original translation ends here. What follows are the remaining paragraphs of the excerpt from von Leesen's essay.]
Radio and the film industry were restructured by the reeducators in the same way as the print media had been.(many movies are banned until even today). At first, films made in Germany till 1945 were completely prohibited. Later, chosen entertainment movies were made available again. Cinemas at first only showed films in Russian or English with German subtitles until domestic productions made according to the instructions of the reeducators became available (examples: "Rotation", "The Murderers are Among Us", "Film Without Title").
Reeducation in Schools and Universities
The reeducation in schools and universities was a parallel process. All existing and past school books were prohibited. To print new ones the publishers needed a license of the Military Government. There was a high demand for new ones: The Allied Control Council had banned 34,645 books. Additionally, a ban on books about the Olympic Summer Games of 1936 as well as one on books regarding World War 1 was established. Together, this amounted to roughly three to four times as many books as the Nazis themselves had banned (Befehl Nr. 4 des Alliierten Kontrollrates, 13. 5. 1946 „Betreffend Einziehung von Literatur und Werken nationalsozialistischen und militaristischen Charakters" sowie „Liste der auszusondernden Literatur" mit drei Nachträgen; reprinted by Uwe Berg Verlag, Toppenstedt 1983/1984).
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