World Events1
Since Otto John only carried out his “resettlement” after this issue was already in print, we were unfortunately only able to take a brief position on it. You will find a detailed report on the background of this case, as well as of further impending cases, in the next issue!
GERMANY
Half-heartedly and wearily, a Volksbewegung für die Wiedervereinigung [“People’s Movement for Reunification”] has been founded in the Federal Republic. Word from leading CDU circles is that Dr. Adenauer views this founding “with concern.” The odd movement, in which nothing moves, has Messrs. Jakob Kaiser, Ollenhauer, and the chairman of the German Trade Union Federation, Freitag, as its patrons. As if those who encouraged and welcomed the collapse of the Reich in 1945 would ever seriously work to restore it!
For the so-called defense of the Federal Republic, it will spend 12B DM in the fiscal year, 44.5 percent of the entire budget, or 67 DM per head. Even the Social Democratic deputy Dr. Erler said in the budget debate: Now comes the decisive point: Will we be defended? Do these enormous outlays, which make up 44 percent of our entire financial volume, guarantee our security? Disturbing news keeps reaching us. Grünther said a fortnight ago that the German divisions should form the screen under which the Americans could pull back. Grünther says the next war will be fought on German soil. The military men say it is an old experience that war starts again where it left off. Read American and English magazines and you can shudder at the openness and sometimes the cynicism with which these things are discussed and the role of the Germans is portrayed. We are, after all, the only country in the Western world that has accepted atomic cannons being set up west of the Rhine, aimed east, able to fire from here 40 km into Federal Republic territory. The same speaker then pointed to the British headquarters being moved from Bad Oeynhausen—at German expense!—behind the Rhine, showing that most of West Germany is now seen by Western Allied leadership as not worth defending. Europe’s situation has grown even more threatening now that France under the Sephardic-Jewish Prime Minister Mendes-France has swung onto the Soviet line.
When on 20 July in West Berlin the betrayal, which the 20 July 1944 has become the symbol of, was celebrated, the phrases of the “Christian conscience” and the “obligation before humanity” rang out conspicuously loud in every speech. That the Federal President joined these remarks with deep sympathy is understandable, given his close family ties to Fritz Elsas, the former Jewish district mayor of Berlin, Goerdeler’s commissioner and protector. But Prince Louis Ferdinand’s own profession of the spirit of betrayal was clumsy; he thereby lost any claim to the throne. What patriotic German would want a traitorous prince at the head of his country? The people still hold the truth that was shamefacedly left unsaid at those West Berlin “celebrations”: “traitors always remain traitors and are always betrayed again.” How sharply those old truths cut to the heart of the matter was shown soon afterward by Dr. Otto John, president of the West German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. He used the West Berlin profession of betrayal to follow the law that lives inside every betrayal, committed fresh betrayal, and slipped away to the Soviet Zone.
This 45-year-old Wiesbaden lawyer earned his first traitor’s spurs in 1938, when he misused his post as legal counsel for German Lufthansa to betray military and political secrets of his fatherland to England in collaboration with the English agent Admiral Canaris. He himself was a close friend of Pastor Bonhoeffer, who even during the war prayed in Geneva for his fatherland’s defeat; of the Social Democratic deputy Leber; and, above all, of Arvid von Harnack, who, along with Schulze-Boysen, headed the “Red Orchestra,” which steadily fed military secrets from the Air Ministry to the Soviets. These left-wing ties did not come to John by accident; he is a textbook case of how closely the “resistance fighters” worked not only with the enemy in general but especially with Soviet Russia. While John’s brother was executed after the July 20 attempt, John himself managed to flee via Spain to England.
There, he entered the British Intelligence Service, tried to recruit German prisoners of war to fight against their own fatherland, supplied the British with material for “war-crimes trials” against German generals, and especially backed the British prosecution in the scandalous trial of Field Marshal von Manstein. For these services to democracy, Dr. Otto John was made head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution in 1950. At 41, he could thus step to the top of one of the most important authorities of the West German state and turn it into one of the most infamous institutions of the Bonn democracy. Every attempt by nationalist circles to organize and build a defense against communist agents infiltrating Germany was hunted down with hatred by the Federal Office. John invented the most repulsive methods for this, as tens of thousands of persecuted and damaged Germans can testify. The skillful communist work of going underground and seeping into other organizations in West Germany was not hindered by the Office; it was shielded. When John was recently in Washington, he received many highly confidential pieces of information, especially about the secret service. As a former member of the British Intelligence Service, he remained closely tied to it as well. After taking part in the celebration for the traitors and assassins of July 20, John made his way to the Soviet Zone.
The John case proves to even the skeptic how readily the so-called resistance fighters are still at any moment to betray our people to communism. National Germany must therefore demand that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the state offices be dissolved, that the ramifications of John’s traitor organization be laid bare, and that a new political police be built from proven enemies of communism and its hangers-on—excluding Reich traitors, deserters, and enemy agents. Another international conclusion arises from the John case for every upright friend of the German Volk and every advocate of an honorable, sensible alliance policy: watch carefully whom you call a “German partner.” For “he who says A must also say B”: anyone who negotiates or makes alliances with a man shameless enough to betray his fatherland or to help such betrayal must also bear the consequences of that infamy for himself and his agreements. Just as one would never form a commercial company with partners proven to have behaved dishonorably in business, one should not enter into political dealings with men and powers who have shown their character to be unworthy in political action.
FRANCE
When the fall of the Laniel government in Paris and the appointment of the new Prime Minister Mendès-France became known at the Geneva Conference, the hour of America’s second defeat struck after the poor draw in Korea that Truman, Marshall, and Baruch had caused. Mendès-France stands at the head of the so-called “New Left,” a parliamentary group with two clear goals: end the war in Indochina and block any rearmament of West Germany. Behind this floats the vision of close collaboration with the Soviet Union, all of them having come out of the Résistance. The first result was an armistice with the Vietminh under which all of Tonkin and large parts of Annam, plus Hanoi and the port of Haiphong, are to be given up. In two years, a vote is to be held throughout Indochina, in fact divided, to form a new common government; talks on this begin only in July 1955. The French Left has reached its goal—defeat by the communists. The communists will force their part of the country thoroughly onto their side, and the still-free parts, convinced France will not defend them in a second fight, will drop into the communists’ lap without resistance. France’s defeat, “the greatest military defeat after 1940 and the first great defeat in France’s colonial history,” as Maurice Bardèche writes in Défense de l’Occident [“Defense of the West”], is complete. Bardèche adds:
“The circumstances of this defeat are such that one cannot even draw useful lessons from it. There is no organized national opposition capable of claiming power, no civilian or military leader who could rouse the country by popular vote against the regime, not even a sufficiently energetic officer who could march troops on Paris. With no means of rescue, the regime will continue. Decay and rot will only worsen. France under Mendès-France is a potential ally of the Soviets against the U.S. That nothing more can come of Adenauer’s EDC cannot be denied.”
Understandably, John Foster Dulles refused any American share in the Geneva Agreement that British diplomacy had worked so hard to secure. France’s breakaway has devalued the American alliance system; John’s flight to the Soviets shows that the resistance circles in West Germany lean toward communism, just as those in Paris around Mendès-France do.
If the U.S. does not want to lose Europe, it must bring the extreme anti-communist right-wing circles to the helm.
FAR EAST
The communist revolution in China has taken up several national goals for a nation plundered and trampled for a century: it is the national victories, not the communist doctrine, that today give Mao Tse-tung his strong prestige among his people. The “unequal treaties” have been broken, foreign gunboats have vanished from Chinese rivers, foreign settlements in the old treaty ports have been abolished, and the missionaries against whom the Boxer uprising of 1900 still fought so desperately have been driven out. China today numbers 600 million people—and its giant armies of poorly armed but fanatically fighting peasant soldiers have thrown back the best North American intervention divisions in Korea, delivered the final blow that brought down French military power in Indochina, occupied Tibet, and stand ready today to take Formosa, Burma, or Malaya. Mao Tse-tung holds power like the greatest emperors of old China, like Kang-hsi or Ch’ien-lung in the 18th century; the “communist dynasty” has “given China face again.” The communist doctrine will be digested and become Chinese in China exactly as every other foreign doctrine has—yet the fact that China has become an expansive great power will shape the decades ahead.
Not primarily communist, but nationalist effects have also been released by the victories of Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-tung over France: India demands the return of the French colonies on the Indian coast, and Indian free corps have occupied an exclave (Dadra) of the Portuguese colony of Damão. Collaboration between Mao Tse-tung and Nehru is unmistakably close; the visit of the very skillful Chinese Foreign Minister Chou En-lai to India was a complete success. The U.S. is now working to build SEATO (Southeast Asia Organization), meant to include Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, the Philippines, perhaps Japan and Great Britain. England would rather see the individual states conclude non-aggression pacts with China. The contrasts between the two Anglo-Saxon powers thereby work to China’s advantage. Burma and Indonesia, both governed from the Left—in Burma the ruling party is even called the “Anti-Fascist People’s League”—are likely the next states to go over to the communist side. Of Southeast Asia’s 1,360 million people, 625,800,000 are now under communist rule, 244,800,000 under Western rule, 489,600,000 neutral. If these too pass to the Red Chinese side, Red China will command a billion human beings and the world’s greatest mineral resources.
NORTH AFRICA
In Tunis, resistance by the oppressed Arab population against French colonial rule is so fierce that no Arab wants the office of prime minister; the Bey has to appoint the French citizen Georges Dupoizat. In Morocco, the French commandant of Marrakesh is murdered. The defeat in Indochina intensifies agitation for independence throughout the French colonial empire.
NEAR EAST
As if intent on driving the embittered Arabs even closer to the Chinese-Russian bloc, the state of Israel, kept alive by North American money, launched a fierce nighttime attack on the Arab sector of Jerusalem at 7:30 p.m. on June 30; it only died down the next morning after heavy mortar fire on the area between the Jaffa Gate and the David Gate. Border incidents along the armistice line never cease, and in most cases the guilt clearly lies on Israel’s side.
The Grand Mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini has published his memoirs of the Palestine struggles in the Egyptian paper Al Misri [“The Egyptian”]. He stresses above all how greatly England furthered the imperialist aims of the Jews and speaks in a chivalrous and noble way of his friendship with Adolf Hitler. Upright Germans thank the Grand Mufti, this lion of his people, for the loyal friendship he has always kept with the German nation.
CENTRAL AMERICA
In Central America, the struggle for Guatemala is outwardly over after 11 days: Arbenz Guzmán has been overthrown and has taken refuge in the Mexican legation, as have most of his ministers and collaborators. Colonel Castillo Armas’ government is now publishing lists of crimes and murders said to have been committed by the Arbenz government, especially by its police chief, Jaime Rosenberg. It therefore refuses the asylees in the embassies free passage out of the country. Serious fighting continues along the Mexican border in Guatemala against Arbenz partisan groups. Even more serious is that in northern Mexico, a “sympathy demonstration” saw large masses of Indian workers attempt an attack on the North American employees’ settlement of the Anaconda Copper Co. Here it becomes clear that the communist veneer on Arbenz and his people only covered a far deeper, more genuine layer of national enmity against the colossus of the North. The danger remains that one day an Indian Mao Tse-tung will appear who, as in China, will ride to victory in Central America on the waves of Indian national resentment against the U.S.
Original Title: Das Weltgeschehen
Attributed Author: unattributed.
“Der Weg” Issue: Volume 8, Issue 8 (August 1954)
Page(s): 595-598 [Scan LINK]
Der Weg - El Sendero is a German- and Spanish-language magazine published by Dürer-Verlag in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by Germans with ties 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.
See the end of this article for source details.