Another world war? Not anytime soon

With all the saber-rattling going on in the Crimea with Russia effectively having rolled back the clock to 1968 by invading the eastern part of the Ukraine, a place with wonderfully exotic and dangerous sounding names that trip the literary tongue up – Sevastopol, Donetsk, Makeyerka, Kharkov, Kramatorsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Dnepropetrovsk – Dnipri, Dnepropetrovsk F.C. incredibly recently got to the Europa League finals against Spain’s Sevilla.

Talk of different types of football, the nuclear football, is once again fashionable.

Folks, please stand up and say ‘hallo’ to 1968. He is the gentleman in the grey Cold War army overcoat.

But before we join the table where warmongers and conspiracy theorists are saying Vladimir Putin is plotting to take Russia to war with Nato and the USA – a war in which this newspaper you are reading will be on fire as your fingers congeal around it in uranium up till your cranium and the mushroom cloud over the Earth can be picked up by satellites near Uranus - let us consider what the last world war, that ended seventy years ago, looked like.

Richard J. Evans in his near one 1,000-page tome, ‘The Third Reich at War,’ (which this writer picked up at the Dachau death camp bookshop on a visit to the site last year) gives us a paradoxically broad yet microscopically intimate look at a global conflagration (World War II) that lasted six years (1939–1945) and took with it 100 million lives by the time it ended in May, 1945.

To put it into its terrible perspective, that is 100,000 lives for every one life that was in our PEV! On September 1, 1939, the first of nearly one and a half million men from the German Warmacht army crossed the border and into Poland, posing only long enough to allow newsreel cameramen from Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda ministry to film them as they raised the Customs’ barriers into Poland - and began World War II.

Shortly thereafter, Polish moments and street signs were destroyed, bookshops and cultural centers closed down indefinitely, and half a million Poles imprisoned, many of them soon to be executed.

Active lay members of the Catholic Church, aristocrats, landowners, bankers, industries, hoteliers and restrainers and restaurateurs and ‘persons who have travelled abroad’ were especially targeted by the Bolsheviks in Poland, as the Soviet bear was by then still in league with Germany Nazis. Back in the Third Reich Germany state under Adolf ‘The Leader’ Hitler as then known, Jews were being disposed of property, and forced into deportation and ration systems and squalid ghettos.

SS construction experts like Albert Wildman, 30, were already experimenting with the first gas chambers that would end up killing three million Jews by the end of the war; lined with tiles and made to look like shower rooms to dull the apprehension of the victims bought into them ‘to shower.’

In Norway, by April 9, 1940, the Nazis had invaded installed a puppet regime led by a chap called Quisling. As one Phillip Ochieng will let you know, even today, to be a quisling. In  literally terms that means one who is a treacherous turncoat against his/ her cause or people.

But Spain under the dictatorship of the short and brutal General Franco, refused to join Germany’s global war, and Hitler told his Italian ally Bennito Mussolini later that he’d rather have “three or four teeth taken out, than suffer another nine such hours of negotiations with Franco.”

Naked bodies

At 3.30am on June 22, 1942, Hitler, nonetheless, stabbed Soviet dictator Iosif Stalin in the back by attacking Russia, throwing three million men into the vast front of Russia in an operation called ‘Barbarossa’ that was to be Hitler’s eventual undoing. Genocide against Jews in places like Korno/Kaunas in Lithuania began almost pronto.

There were pogroms against Jews as rampaging mobs dragged them out of their houses and clubbed them to death on the streets, scenes that would be repeated in Rwanda half a century later. Kurt Werner, a member of the SS execution squad, confessed later in Nuremberg to his war crimes: We stood behind the Jews and killed them with a shot to the neck. Each successive group of Jews had to lie down, face first, on top of the naked bodies of those we had already shot.

Visiting the Vilna ghetto in November 1941, propaganda boss of the Nazis, Goebbels, noted: the Jews are squatting amongst one another, horrible forms not to be seen, let alone touched. They are the lice of civilized humanity. Somehow, we have to exterminate them forever.

The Wan See conference, convened by the Holocaust architect, Heinrich Himmler, was held shortly thereafter at which the solution was reached to ‘Exterminate all the Jews of Europe.

‘Afterwards, these genocidal German  top-brasses stood around, drinking brandy and cognac, smoking cigars                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        and congratulating themselves on a successful seminar’s work.

The German firm Topf and Sons of Erfurt were commissioned by the Third Reich for the genocide effort.

They supplied the killing apparatus to Auschwitz and other death camps, including the gas, Zyklon B. Afterwards, the corpses were dragged to a room for gold teeth to be removed, prosthetics, women’s hair cut off. It makes human wigs.

The bodies were then loaded into elevators that took them to the crematoria to be burnt. But by the middle years of the war (1942-1943) with Japan – Germany’s ally, having dragged the USA into WW II through the bombing of Pearl Habour in December, 1941, the allies (Britain, Russia and America) were out producing the axis powers (Germany, Japan and Italy), in armaments by the factor of two/three–to–one.

The Germans resorted to using forced labour from the countries they had conquered. The SS supervised and guarded these labour detachments, making sure they worked in inhumanly hard and long hours for merge cloths, food and accommodation and why the most basic of medical assistance.

Hang himself

While the Jews were exterminated and the slaves suffered as slaves of the Nazis, the situation in Scandinavian countries like Denmark was relatively calm. Hitler considered the Scandinavians to be Aryans and besides Denmark’s, commanding a significant stretch of the coast opposite England, was vital. But by 1943, even in the capital of Berlin, food rations for normal Germany was getting wee dire. Nine kilos of bread per month per family, 600 grams of cereals per child, 1.85 kilos of meat per month per man, and less than a kilo of fats for the female.

Many clothes were made of inferior synthetic materials, and women were walking around in wooden clogs because of the shortage of leather.

A joke went thus: ‘a man who is tired of life (in Germany) tries to hang himself in vain. Impossible.

The rope is made of synthetic fiber. He tries to jump into the river but floats – because his suit is made from wood. Finally he succeeds. After two months existing off his food ration card, he has starved to death.’

Then came the dreaded fire bombing of German cities like Berlin, Cologne and Dresden by the British air force under the command of a natural born arsonist called ‘Bomber Harris.’

By the September of 1943, Germany original ally Italy had signed an armistice with the allies, fascist dictator Mussolini was deposed and eventually executed alongside his mistress by a mob that hang them upside down on the streets.

In Russia, the Germans lost the great man-to-man battle for Stalingrad, then the tank battle of Kursk, where the red army hurled two and a half million infantry 35,000 pieces of artillery and 4800 tanks cavalry against the German Panzers – eventually beating them pants down Back in Germany, the killing of innocent non-combatants was still going on as the war went south, literally and metaphorically. At an orphanage called Hadamar, kids of mixed race (German/Jewish) heritage, were given lethal injections by female nurses who told them they were inoculations against typhus.

But many decent German citizens, especially the older ones, were appalled at how the Third Reich Germany was treating the Jews, and greeted them on the street with unusual politeness, came up to them and apologized for the government, or even offered them their seats on the tram. This at a time where Nazis’ propaganda against the Jews could seem all pervasive and inescapable corralling a supine nation into its destruction and that of an entire continent.

Medical charlatans like Dr. Joseph Mengele were given a free hand and so having a field day with human victims in their concentration camp ‘hospital,’ gleefully violating the Hippocratic oath by treating, no pun, humans like lab mice. Kurt Gutzuit a medical expert was incorporated, straight from his honeymoon, to Auschwitz to inject eleven young Jews with hepatitis and then perform liver punctures on two of them to see if they had caught the infectious disease. They had not.

A conspiracy by the army in 1944 to assassinate Hitler and get Germany out of the war ran into serious trouble as its members began to come to the attention of the German secret police, the Gestapo!

When a bomb (plot) eventually failed to kill Hitler, they would be army putschists, including the legendary spy Canaries, were hauled off to by the Gestapo, swiftly tried in kangaroo Nazi courts at night and by dawn stripped, nailed and left to die cruelly after being hang on meat hooks. There is a good film, Valkeryie, on the topic that one can pirate from the local bootlegger and watch. Next door in Burundi, it is to be hoped one Nkuruzinza does not follow example and go ‘Hitler’ on his over-throwers.

In countries like Romania and Hungary, the local clergy allied to fascist militias like the Ushatashe, were daemonic in their hatred of the Jews, blaming them for the death of Jesus Christ, 1940 years before.

One of them, Father Kun, a catholic priest, even led a militia called the Arrow Cross and was in the habit of shouting at his firing squads. ‘ In the name of Christ, fire!’ as they slew Jews.

In the Vatican, Pope Benedict maintained a strange silence in the name of neutrality, scared of offending the Nazis. After all, in human affairs as in football, God does not take sides. After Hitler’s suicide in his Reich chancellery bunker on April 29, 1945, as the red armies of Russia stormed and swarmed and shot their way into the burning capital, Berlin, Magda Goebbels, alongside her husband Joseph, poisoned their six young children with morphine injections and phials of prussic acid fed into their mouths after lining them up.

Then the Goebbels’ couple killed themselves. Wrote Magda in her final diary testament on the day she murdered her own children- “the world that will come after the leader and National Socialism (Nazism) will not be worth living in and therefore I have taken my children away ...”

Well, Magda G, guess what? Here we are, 70 years later, in a world post the hell you and your husband and Hitler brought to the world, and it is a world still well worth living in; and preserving.

So that if in the Kremlin, there is a general or a colonel or a spook contemplating the prospects of starting World War III, perhaps at 3.30am after a good dinner, and tough-guy talk with cigars and that third bottle of Petrozavodsk vodka is empty, and the idea of dropping a mushroom on NATO or KIEV looks Einsteinian, then perhaps it is time to take a cigar break.

And walk into that long library in the Kremlin And pick up Richard J. Evans The Third Reich at War off the shelf.

By 6.25 am, the whole woeful idea of World War III will seem far less appealing, woolly headed. Tony Mochama visited the Dachau memorial camp in Germany, last year, and is editing a documentary on the same for KTN