Bonn or Landsberg? Part 2/2
[Der Weg 1951-07] An original translation of "Bonn oder Landsberg?"
Title: Bonn or Landsberg? [de: Bonn oder Landsberg?]
Author: Eberhard Fritsch
“Der Weg” Issue: Year 05, Issue 07 (July 1951)
Page(s): 483-492
Dan Rouse’s Note(s):
Der Weg - El Sendero is a German and Spanish language magazine published by Dürer-Verlag in Buenos-Aires, Argentina by Germans with connections to the defeated Third Reich.
Der Weg ran monthly issues from 1947 to 1957, with official sanction from Juan Perón’s Government until his overthrow in September 1955.
Source Document(s):
[LINK] Scans of 1951 Der Weg Issues (archive.org)
The SS Yesterday and Tomorrow
(Second Part of "Bonn or Landsberg?")
Born of the Occidental spirit, the German will to forge anew, and the dire need and despair of the age, the GERMAN REVOLUTION arose after the First World War. Its awakening was an effort to answer the 19th century’s shattering of the prevailing worldview, a helpless groping for a new and meaningful order to overcome the chaos sown by Marx and the forces of internationalism. It is social, aiming to elevate and unshackle the masses—that modern spawn of industrialization and population surge—to free once more the individuals within them. It is national, in the sense of an open-hearted, generous, and unzealous nationalism. It is völkisch, seeing in the peoples the biologically, spatially, and historically matured elements of order for future supranational communities. It is conservative, raising the preservation and care of both tribal-ethnic and individual diversity to the purpose of wise leadership. It is European, striving to shift the continent’s center of gravity naturally back to its heart—from which it was torn in 1789—and to build a binding bridge between East and West rather than a divisive choice. It is Germanic, in its deep longing for the Reich as a comprehensive principle of order, one to cradle Central Europe’s diversity and meld it into a higher unity. It is Occidental, pledging itself to the bonds of the "Universal Unity," in opposition to liberalism’s rootlessness, whose analytical intellect it seeks to surpass through a synthesis of all life’s values and forces. The revolutionary essence of its vision lies in the myth of blood, which it awakens and to which it ties its fate.
The first state experiment of the German Revolution, founded on untried ground, was smashed to pieces. The realization of its tenets faltered. Yet this failure does not diminish the significance or purity of its striving, nor the excellence of its ideals—at most, it questions the soundness of its methods and reveals the shortcomings of its principles and the inconsistency of its deeds.
Every true renewal rests on nobility as the bearer of a higher humanity. The struggle to bring the German Revolution to triumph demanded, with unrelenting force, the concentration of all energies, compulsion, and severity to overcome countless barriers. Yet this very demand set tight bounds on the free unfolding and influence of truly noble individuals within the revolution. That this danger was seen—though the course could not be controlled—is proven by the creation of the SS. It stands as an attempt to establish a new order, one to unite human nobility with political calling. Nobility is essence; elite is selection. Though the SS remained an elite, it is still the most vital step toward a new nobility, sustained by an enduring ideal-driven vigor. The mission that exalted it, the spirit that bound its core members, and the distant goal it pursued allow us to see in it the nobility meant to anchor the German Revolution. From this arises its timeless, unbreakable duty.
Defending the SS, as some have ventured here and there, is neither necessary nor justified. What is necessary—and urgently vital for European integration—is a clear reckoning of what formed the substance and meaning of the lives and deaths of countless of Europe’s finest:
The SS was founded in 1925 by Adolf Hitler as a special detachment of the SA—in 1929, Heinrich Himmler was charged with its leadership as Reichsführer SS—in 1934, it was raised to an independent entity. Its charge was, to sum it up once more:
To embody the principle of a spiritual and biological order within the German Revolution, harnessing its forces centrally and wielding them with effect.
Free of conventional ties and qualms, to secure the revolution’s drive even within lawful bounds, guarding against the idea’s distortion by compromise or the movement’s stagnation.
To stand as an "anti-Bolshevik combat force" and bearer of a pan-European consciousness, rejecting all internationalisms and collectives.
As a stalwart order of racial, moral, and intellectual selection, to safeguard the völkisch renewal, aspiring to a way of life rooted in Nordic-Germanic heritage and reaching toward a new human nobility.
Honor and loyalty shaped their sworn bond; voluntarism and devotion to the order defined each member’s life, beyond mere command or law. Their independence from party and state—SS members were strictly barred from holding party offices—and their own jurisdiction ensured actions answerable only to their people’s future, the revolution’s guiding idea, and the biological forces shaping the West.
In the Waffen-SS, that guard of European volunteers, the German Revolution found a spiritual expansion into the European sphere, overcoming the dogmatic narrowness that, in many ways, confined it under the Third Reich. Yet the chance for this European awakening to ripple back to the continent’s states was halted in 1945 by the victory of its intellectual foes.
From the Nuremberg Trials to today, repeated attempts have sought to warp the image of the SS. These distortions rest on this: the primacy of war thrust additional tasks onto certain SS members or units—tasks their order’s discipline made them apt for, yet alien to their true nature. Moreover, the dual roles of some senior SS leaders, who took on state duties tied to the war, drew the SS’s scope into contact with events and developments later used, in the most arbitrary way, to burden the entire SS.
Against every effort to cloud or falsify, let us here distinctly set apart:
The Allgemeine SS was the bearer of the revolutionary mission and the order’s defining ethic;
The Waffen-SS was European youth’s reply to the call to defend the West against Bolshevism. Within it, a shared European identity took root;
The police units were arms of the state’s executive, linked to the SS only by war’s necessity and in name. In no way did their essence or duties align with the SS.
Yet it was precisely this deliberate entanglement of the SS with the wartime acts of specialized police units that underpinned its condemnation at Nuremberg as a "criminal organization." This came after plans for a separate SS trial were dropped for lack of solid evidence. Another pillar was the infamous Malmedy Trial, which, through sadistic and perverse torture, wrung false confessions, ending on July 16, 1946, with forty-three death sentences, twenty-two life terms, and eight prison sentences of ten, fifteen, or twenty years. Leaning on this and similar trials, Nuremberg presumed to break the SS entirely. The verdict’s reasoning states: "It is proven that shooting unarmed prisoners of war was common practice in some Waffen-SS divisions." None of this holds up legally, yet Nuremberg’s sophistry deduced: "Common practice" equals proof of criminal mentality, justifying the extermination of its bearers.
Two years later, the Malmedy Trial’s dealings surfaced, stirring uproar in the U.S. Congress. Fierce protests from senators spurred multiple investigative panels. The whole edifice of the Malmedy Trial, built with such toil and depravity, fell apart legally. Still, neither its verdicts nor Nuremberg’s were revisited, nor has any new proceeding begun to this day. Only under U.S. public pressure did "acts of clemency" from 1948 ease some sentences or free prisoners. But by then, at Landsberg Prison, two hundred seventy-seven death sentences from other trials—whose flaws went unseen too long—had been carried out. By 1951, twenty-eight death sentences held: six from the Malmedy Trial, three for killing Allied airmen, three from concentration camp trials, fourteen from the Einsatzgruppen Trial, and two from the Oswald Pohl Trial. Of these, twenty-one were lifted by another "clemency act" forced by rising outcry, but seven stood—executed, after four delays, on the night of June 6-7, despite clear proof of legal wrong.
This essay neither can nor aims to dissect each charge and counterclaim. Instead, note these telling figures:
Allgemeine SS: At war’s start, 240,000 members; over the war, more than 200,000 were drafted, some 40,000 to the Waffen-SS. Home-front duties: social welfare, victim care, increasingly handled by non-SS staff and women aides.
Waffen-SS: Beyond the Allgemeine SS, the SS-Verfügungstruppe stood in 1939 with 18,000 men, trained mainly for combat. It seeded the Waffen-SS, tasked solely with military roles—100,000 strong at its 1940 founding, 580,000 by war’s end. Through it passed some 950,000 from nearly all European nations.
Guard Units: In 1939, six concentration camps held 21,300 prisoners, watched by SS-Totenkopfverbände, then 8,000 strong. Of these, 6,500 formed the Waffen-SS "Totenkopf" field division; the rest stayed guards. By war’s end, camp guards numbered 35,000, fewer than 6,000 from the Allgemeine or Waffen-SS. Their structure and tasks stood wholly apart from the Waffen-SS, answering not to its high command but as a separate arm of the RSHA.
Nuremberg’s defense proved beyond doubt that many crimes pinned on the SS involved no Allgemeine or Waffen-SS members—or, in some cases, only a few. On key charges: in Jewish extermination actions, at most two per thousand; in concentration camp guard roles, at most five per thousand; against prisoners of war, none at all. The Nuremberg branding of the whole SS as a "criminal organization" rested plainly on forged accusations and buried or withheld exonerations.
This verdict aims to erase knowledge of the SS’s true nature and purpose as the German Revolution’s torchbearer, pre-marking any revival of like ideas as criminal. Future currents of thought, unbent to Moscow’s or Washington’s lines, are to be crushed efficiently and "lawfully."
Further, this verdict crafts a legal tool for the thorough disgrace, pursuit, and mental and physical ruin of SS members as a true European elite. The savagery meted out to SS men in German, Dutch, French, Belgian, Danish, and American camps—not to mention Bolshevik ones—and the frenzied purge of so-called collaboration in France bear bloody witness to this Old Testament will to destroy.
Finally, this verdict seeks to fix, unyieldingly and for all time, a "legal" tenet: any elite, of any kind or aim, not in power, faces total annihilation—wrecking, too, any foothold for a European rebirth or any organic order at all.
In Nuremberg, Voltaire’s battle cry triumphed: "Écrasez l’infâme!" ("Crush the vile!"). So did the "modern beast"—that twisted intellect whose offspring froze many a "conservative" in dread. The tortures of the Malmedy Trial, the deliberate "technical failures" in the main trial’s executions—where German generals and statesmen choked miserably—the lingering sadism at Landsberg Prison… can a people ever forget such things?
The Danish paper Berlingske Tidende, on February 15 this year, probed what most damned each of the last seven "red jackets," writing: "Frich Naumann, raised to general for his loyalty and absolute obedience." It unwittingly touched the code these seven men paid in blood that night of June 6-7.
Seven men had to die for Nuremberg, so that—despite all proof of its "justice" crumbling—the "symbol" and its might might endure. Their gallows deaths were to seal the "criminality of the SS." A sevenfold judicial murder—a term weighty with meaning and consequence—was decreed. "By this new word, I mean the murder of an innocent, done willfully and with all the pomp of sacred justice…" wrote August von Schmölzer, who coined it long ago. Yet Bonn stays silent.
The U.S. Supreme Court did not just reject the defense’s appeal; thrice, it refused even to hear it. For it knows a serious look today would topple Nuremberg’s whole frame. The "ethics of Nuremberg"—that cloak of higher justice flung over the victor’s raw revenge—is rent apart. Left behind is only the stark, unerasable vision of a vast bloodbath. Nuremberg fell for good at Landsberg Prison. Its aftermath, though, defies measure. It will prove tragic for all caught in it—not just the Germans, perhaps least of all them.
THE GREAT POWERS
Morgenthau’s hatred ordained the “agrarianization” of Germany, Kempner’s vindictiveness delivered hundreds to the executioner, Auerbach’s thirst for retribution—someone dubbed him the “High Commissioner of the Fifth Occupying Power”—relentlessly demanded the fulfillment of every death sentence, and the bloodlust of Felix Frankfurter and Pearlman drove even the last seven from Landsberg to the gallows. Are these wretched souls the ones whose unquenchable hatred shaped the “post-war” era? Or were they, too, mere agents of greater powers?
At the outset of our essay stood that saying of Roosevelt, declaring that events do not merely occur—they are planned. Only those who know more than others can plan rightly—and here, the planning was “rightly” done. Yet who could, from their own experience, discern the vital forces and the generative dynamics of ideas that were largely sensed, rarely defined, and scarcely realized? Who could, with such knowledge, forge a will that denies the wisdom of centuries? Who could, amid an unfathomable, globe-spanning concentration of power, pursue their designs with ruthless consistency?
Whoever has learned to peer behind the curtain of events and speak the truth can name three groups that—though distinct in essence—each hold some, and together all, of the qualities described. They are: World Freemasonry, the Jesuit Order, and Orthodox Jewish high finance. From shared knowledge sprang common insights, and prudence compelled them to act as one.
Among these powers, the Orthodox Jewish one is deemed the most knowing, its sworn unity—unmatched in history thus far—born of a mystification of blood exalted as the supreme commandment. From this welled all the currents of its strength, and it alone forged, beyond all death, an unconquerable might.
Alliances among such secretive, power-hungry rivals typically emerge under the strain of a peril threatening all. Thus, the Jesuit Order and Freemasonry, foes for nearly four centuries, struck a rational peace in Aachen in 1928, facing a “new danger menacing all.” By contrast, Freemasonry and Orthodox Jewish high finance had been entwined for almost two centuries. Founded in London in 1717, Freemasonry rejected the order of blood, folk, and state for a vague universalism. Soon, internationally minded Jewish forces joined in growing numbers, swiftly dominating it and transforming it into a deftly veiled tool of the equally global high finance—for instance, in 1848, the French minister and Masonic Grand Master Crémieux established the “Alliance Israélite Universelle,” soon uniting the Rothschilds, Gambetta, and others. This potent alliance, active everywhere, finds clear expression in the purely Jewish Masonic orders: the Order of the Maccabees, B’nai Abraham, and the elite B’nai B’rith (Sons of the Covenant), which seeks “the advancement of the highest interests of the Jews and the flourishing development of Judaism’s intellectual and moral character.”
This triple international alliance, anti-revolutionary and anti-social by nature, stands as the sole victor of the recent armed struggle; it orchestrated the self-mutilation of Europe’s peoples, its will branded the German Revolution and the bearers of its “myth of blood” as the most perilous adversaries—for they knew too much. And should its shielded anonymity succeed in steering the nations into yet another armed conflict—wherever it may be, under whatever banners—this too will serve not to establish a just order, but only to diminish or eradicate the creative essence.
The aim, in every case, is the world republic—the “United States of the World.” Universal Freemasonry, Orthodox Jewish high finance, the Second Socialist-Marxist International, the Third Communist International, Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-European movement, the League of Nations under Freemason Woodrow Wilson, the UN—all point to this lofty end. Though opposed in their drives and divergent in their visions, they share one trait: a greed for the exclusive despotism of one over the subjugation of all. Herein lies the global peril of all internationalisms: in the boundless aggression of their messianic power-fanaticism, in the sadistic negation of all organic growth and vital forces, in the reckless exploitation of all life, and in the mission-drunk denial of any rights beyond their own creed.
Let no word here be spoken for “antisemitism” or any broad generalization; nor should the Jew, the Freemason, or the Jesuit be spurned. Yet unyieldingly condemned is this: that the fates of peoples and generations, nations and continents, are governed from centers where they have neither voice, nor sight, nor sway. Condemned is this: that spirits worldwide are subdued, talents exploited, and energies exhausted for aims that are never those of the doers or the sacrificed, but solely those of a domineering, faceless, international minority!
Shortly after the First World War, on March 5, 1920, General Erich Ludendorff—then the most esteemed and weighty voice of Germany’s national camp—offered this to the British chargé d’affaires in a Berlin meeting: England should recognize Germany as a British dominion and permit its army to swear fealty to the King! (The English government later declined.) Could the will to the West, woven through Germany’s history and then blinding the general, ever find a more absolute voice? In the clash between Germany’s tireless readiness for the West and the West’s steadfast rejection lies a tragedy of Europe’s unfolding. Then, after the Great War, it led to the German Reichswehr’s pact with the Red Army and German heavy industry’s role in building Soviet war machinery—effects reaching through the Seydlitz Committee into our present. Today, a fanatical East German youth, pledged to communism, marches on, as last year’s Pentecost gathering starkly showed. What was not “Prussian militarism turned East” then is not “German-Soviet amity” now—it is, as ever, the West’s squandered chance!
The West we believed in, “our” West, has been muted. “That other” West proves itself a thrall to the corrupt claims of wealth, a lackey to the mightiest knot of anti-European interests. The United States, now the West’s foremost champion and “guardian of the occidental grail,” is also the power and nerve-center of that covenant spoken of in the Bible:
And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee. And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, […] for an everlasting possession […] And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you. (KJV Genesis 17:7-11)
The lust for mastery of this “bastion of the circumcised” threatens ever-widening circles, forcing its mindset even on those unbound by shared blood: the Georgian Stalin weds by Jewish rite; the youngest English heir, Prince Charles, is circumcised in 1949 by Jewish rite; political ascent in the U.S. hinges on lodge membership; only those German voices are heeded who brazenly demand their kin’s execution. The “internationalisms” steer the world’s course, toying with a Europe whose order they shattered, whose roots they severed, whose folk they stripped into modern nomads. The bond between the U.S., the policy-shaping West, and an unbroken Europe rests on higher interests—neither graspable nor rationally defensible. The masterfully staged farce of “good versus evil” nears its close. But who would still dispute where one will alone now reigns?
In 1905, Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. granted Japan three vast loans to wage war on Russia; in 1917, Kuhn, Loeb & Co. humbled a loan-dependent England until it signed the Balfour Declaration for a “State of the Jews”; that same year, Schiff handed millions to Leon Trotsky in Finland, fueling his and Lenin’s Russian Revolution—cheered most eagerly by the U.S. President; the Kremlin’s banker then became Olav Aschberg, now funding Europe’s “Cold War” as agreed between Professor Jessup in Washington and Jacob Malik in Moscow; in Korea, Americans bleed while Bernard Baruch, Wall Street’s envoy for “aligning mutual highest interests” between Washington and Moscow, shuttles back and forth; at Yalta, Roosevelt paid Moscow tribute with 450 million Chinese and a Generalissimo; in 1950, Truman did so by recalling General MacArthur—the lines of interest between Baruch and Beria held firm; as the U.S. bankrolls Tito’s “Trotskyist” communism, occupying powers in Germany smuggle hundreds of railcars of war-vital goods into “neutral” Czechoslovakia…
Be it GPU or MVD, Comintern or Cominform, “Zionist Congress” or “Jewish World Congress,” UNRRA or Morgenthau’s “International Joint,” atomic espionage or Rathenau’s “300 families”—names are but sound and smoke. Senator Langer proclaimed in the U.S. Senate on December 18, 1950:
“These Nuremberg Trials were, in essence, no different from the show trials Stalin staged in 1930, when Vyshinsky purged his foes through treason charges. Nearly the entire U.S. staff comprised men who… revealed themselves as communists or members of communist fighting units… They decided who the enemies were.”
Perhaps Korea will one day teach Americans what Nuremberg and Landsberg taught the Germans:
Here, the sworn front of the internationalists—there, the sworn front of the nationalists! The one near the peak of their might, the other in deep powerlessness. Yet both equally aware, both equally driven to prevail. Bridging, balancing, blending seem impossible—it hastens toward a reckoning…
History is not written by the timid or the despairing, even now: the more unyielding the will, the more resolute and purposeful—thus, the more meaningful the deed. Its morality springs from self-assurance, not from “submit to the authorities,” for true unity demands respect and nobility on both sides; all else is subjugation. Lest any forget, a verdict recalls it to mind: in recent “war crimes trials” in Luxembourg, German soldiers were sentenced to death for suppressing Luxembourg’s resistance under occupation. This was a “war crime”; the “right to resist occupying powers” was expressly upheld—though, historically, occupying powers are not always the obvious ones, perhaps least of all.
Meaningful action demands unity and solidarity. At the Nuremberg Trials, when the verdict against defendant Böhm of the Blohm & Voss shipyard was to be read, he was told to rise. As one, every shipyard worker in the courtroom stood with him, showing they felt the judgment against their leader struck them all, each personally.
Step by step, the path leads to that “League of Nationalists.”1 Never in history has the persecution of idea-bearers snuffed out their ideals—not with the Christians, nor the Puritans, nor the Huguenots, nor “antisemitism”—and today?
Should the internationalists’ front, the alliance of great powers, triumph in our time’s struggle, Hitler’s dire prophecy would come true: the nationalists—and with them the prior guardians of order—would have to yield and fade. Though this would not disrupt the rhythm of the vast cosmic order, the meaning and substance of our lives and thoughts would dim for ages. The next generations would endure a life without purpose or light, unable to fulfill creation’s charge—growth and ripening—doomed to a world dark in their eyes. They would curse our departure and us—yet they are our own children and grandchildren, our blood and spirit… Should this stream break, no mending or patching would avail: we would die a thousand deaths in our progeny! This, at last, is what drives us! For them, the far-off generations, we seek to forge a homeland through our acts!
In 1945, as Germany’s last hopes of victory waned, some senior SS leaders pressed the Reichsführer to swiftly extend the blood-group markings—meant to identify SS members to foes—to concentration camp inmates, too. This would let SS men slip underground, sparing them expected persecution and destruction. Despite fierce urging, Himmler firmly refused: one cannot disown ties and causes to which one has wholly given body and soul; honor must never bend for fleeting convenience; and as for persecution, it could only deepen their sworn bond. The survivors now hold the floor…
A near future will reveal whether the SS, and all who dared reach for the stars of a new worldview, earned the hatred and persecution that marked them. The verdict will not fall for Europe alone, but for the entire Western-shaped world.
Stronger than human deeds is the law that sets each age its task. May the challenge of the time we approach find its discerning and bold, its fearless souls. Then every event, every personal fate, every tragedy gains its purpose. True strength shines not in submission, but in this awareness: all that happens is needful and meaningful, if only we are great enough to embrace it. Here lies final wisdom, final solace, final might. In affirmation alone rests victory.
see Der Weg Year 04 Issue 12 (December 1950)