Mary Bell Archive   |   Trotskyist Writers Index  |   ETOL Main Page


Mary Bell

Advisors and Sponsors of Nazis
Now Advise Allied Military Gov’t

(April 1945)


From Labor Action, Vol IX No. 16, 16 April 1945, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).



wo types of news items appearing this week on Germany are of vital interest to Labor Action. The first type, which everyone has seen, read or turned away from out of sheer nausea, are the atrocity stories of Nazi enslavement and criminality. We have no doubt that many of them are true. We doubt that all of them are, since in the last war so many atrocity tales proved false. We do not doubt the Allied side has its atrocities, ranging from the “looting” by U. S. soldiers already described in the press to Russian maintenance of the infamous Nazi camp of Maidanek in Poland, and the enslavement of German labor.

Where the authors of crimes on the part of the Germans are revealed, it is always the SS troops, the Nazi Elite Guard, or some, of the other specialists in brutality and murder that are involved. It has nowhere been demonstrated that the German people as a whole took part in or in many cases were even aware of these outrages. Even Nazi partisans, when paraded past some of the scenes of Nazi carnage, expressed disbelief. A burgomeister committed suicide after viewing one of the scenes.

But none of the stories traces the atrocities to their source. And herein lies the pertinence of the second type of new item.
 

Who Are the Criminals?

An Associated Press dispatch from Frankfurt-on-the-Main disclosed that Dr. Rudhard Duisberg, manager of Handels-Kammer, and W.C. Boehnert, an official of the vast I.G. Farben enterprises,” were cooperating with AMG in its reconstruction program.

The second item of this same type is a story by Pertinax in the New York Times of April 11, which tells of the “Locarno” spirit living among certain sets of British bankers.

“The ‘Locarno’ bankers,” he writes, “who provided short-term loans for Germany, twenty years ago, have retained a hold on political circles and on the press. They loudly protested against the decision arrived at in the Bretton Woods conference to do away with the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, whose assets had long been frozen in Germany.”

Britain, it must be remembered, will be in control of Germany’s industrial heartland, the Ruhr.

The I.G. Farbenindustrie was the backbone of Hitler’s support. This most powerful unit in the world-wide Nazi business network, through cartel organization intertwined with U.S. and other firms, provided the money to uniform, equip and educate the Hitlerites. In return, the Nazis stamped out all the workers’ and socialist organizations in Germany. Officials in such enterprises are now being used by the Allied Military Government to “advise” them in their “reconstruction” program! The real guilty are going unreconstructed!

The rain of stories of Nazi crimes has one main purpose. It is to condition the people for the acceptance of the harshest possible peace terms – harsh for the German little people. The stories are all captioned, Why We Can’t Like the Germans, We Can’t Permit a Soft Peace, etc. Thus are the crimes of a few, sponsored by the German industrialists, made to appear the crimes of a nation. Thus are the American workers made ready to accept a hard peace, the levy of reparations, or de-industrialization – all of which will be paid for by their German working class brothers.

A glance backward at the occupation of Italy shows the design of Allied imperialism. After the Italian workers joyously threw out Mussolini, the AMG put into office an old fascist campaigner, Marshal Badoglio. They did not purge the guilty elements readily enough to suit the Italian masses. Fascist officials were left in power all over Italy. A genuine mandate of the people has never been taken.

The handwriting on the wall could be seen in 1918. With the necessary changes being made, a repetition of Allied behavior is seen today. Then, however, the German revolution produced soldiers’ and workers’ councils. The system of councils is based on the fundamentally democratic principle of gradual election from the ranks up to the top of the state structure.

In the Germany of 1919 the revolution could have swept away all the representatives of the old powers. It could have nationalized industry, distributed the landed estates of the Junkers among the small peasants, liquidated the war criminals. Along with the latter, it would have gotten rid of a few hundred nationalistic agitators, including Adolf Hitler.

However, one of the first decrees of AMG of 1919 was to bar all soldiers’ and workers’ councils in the occupied Rhineland. By doing this, the Allies provided the current tools of the industrialists, the social democratic leaders, with the opportunity of dealing all the more ruthlessly with the revolutionary councils. Backed by the Allies, the social democrats crushed the German revolution, and hence paved the way for Hitler.
 

A New Nazi Movement?

The Nazis are not unaware that the Allies are as anxious as they to prevent a new attempt at a workers’ revolution. Reports from many sources, including the British Secret Service indicate that the Nazis are forming underground cells, are infiltrating their lesser known but trustworthy members into strategic positions so that they may escape a purge and be able to deal with the Allies. There is no reason to believe from their behavior in present-day Italy, or now in Germany that the Allies will not sponsor and support these formations to prevent revolutionary upheavals.
 

A New Hitler?

The German workers were first victims of Nazism. The industrialists have been its sponsors. Only the German workers can cleanse Germany of Nazism. To take reparations, indemnities, and slave labor means to penalize again the first victims of fascism and to allow the real criminals, the Nazi big business men and their international collaborators, to go free to fight another day. This new enslavement of the German workers may give rise to a super-Hitler.


Mary Bell Archive   |   Trotskyist Writers’ Index  |   ETOL Main Page

Last updated: 10 June 2016