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Autobiography Beethoven

My father’s tale

I’ll be busy for a few days and won’t post articles until I finish a course. But I would like to leave these lines during my absence. The thing is, when reading Karlheinz Deschner’s chapter on Pope Gregory I came across this sentence:

Archbishop Maximus did public penance in July 599, prostrate after hours in a street and shouting: ‘I have sinned against God and blessed Gregory’.

The anecdote reminded me of a story that my father told me decades ago. A king had to humble himself for days at the doors of the pope’s residence because he feared for the salvation of his soul: begging the Vicar of Christ to forgive him (I think the pope’s name was Gregory). Finally the pope deigned to open the doors and forgive him. My father told me this with enthusiasm, in the sense that even the most powerful king had to humble himself before the headperson of the Roman Catholic Church. The lad I was didn’t like that story, but only much later did I begin to understand my father’s mind.

One of the milestones in understanding why he was so destructive to me was Silvano Arieti’s book that I have already talked about in Day of Wrath. In Father, the sixth book of my series of eleven I quote some passages from Arieti that astonished me and I’m going to explain them with my own examples. Think of the baby monkeys that are sold as pets, how they cling to the owner as if she were a mother (the instinct is hard-wired in the creature as it’s vital not to fall from the trees). The point is that some adults deal with childhood trauma like these young pets do with their owners: by desperately clinging to authoritarian figures.

Arieti mentions his patients who, to use my example, hung themselves like little apes onto substitute images of their parents: a church, a political party, and even their own spouse. In Father I analyse how, in repressing his childhood traumas, he clung to no less than three defensive mechanisms: religion, nationalism, and his wife. But we are talking about pathological levels of hanging onto the surrogate parent, like an ape who never grows. The example that comes to mind is a biographer of Mary Baker Eddy who recounted that one of her most faithful disciples declared that even if she had seen Mrs. Eddy commit a crime, she wouldn’t believe her own eyes!

That is the level of co-dependent subjugation my father wielded regarding his church, the nationalist myths of the country where he was raised, and his wife. So when in my adolescence my mother went crazy my father went crazy too: what in my books I’ve called the captive mind or folie à deux.

I am not going to explain here everything I said in my sixth book in Spanish. The English speaker can order a copy of my first book to get an idea (see Letter to mom Medusa on the sidebar). What I want to get to is that some insecure people tend to fall into a state of folie à deux not only with the wife, but with the church or political party to which they belong. Analogous cases of Eddy’s disciple are endemic, for example, when I try to argue with those who cannot conceive that Mesoamerican Indians ate their children despite the overwhelming evidence from the first ethnologist of the American continent.

Once the defence mechanism is established, for instance the nationalistic pride of some Mexicans, the subject is capable of the most irrational scepticism before the evidence for the simple fact that what he is doing is protecting a worldview, his ego or substitute parent. From this angle we can understand why even some Jew-wise racialists, as we saw in my post yesterday, don’t tolerate that one fails to honour the god of the Jews. That powerful archetype functions like a surrogate parent.

Arieti’s book is entitled Interpretation of Schizophrenia and, although it deals with psychiatric cases, as I read it I realised that it could apply equally to an enormous number of people who have never been diagnosed psychiatrically.

My father comes to mind. He was enthusiastic about the pious tale of the pope who made a king humble himself in Rome. Now many Americans, equally childish, desire a powerful father in the form of the State and are excited that the country of the First Amendment will soon repudiate that amendment. It doesn’t matter whether the defence mechanism is religious or political: the psychological need is the same. Just as Eddy’s disciple wouldn’t believe her eyes as Mrs. Eddy became a god-like figure, I have met people who deny the historicity of Lenin’s and Stalin’s crimes.

The drive that compels us—to quote the lyrics of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—to believe in ‘a loving Father behind the starry vault’ means that Beethoven had a drunken father who, as a child, often beat him. We are mammals and, as the monkey of the anecdote, the unconscious need to have a surrogate father once our dad fails is infinite: a Christian attempt to heal childhood traumas. But it is deceptive magic because Yahweh is not our father, he’s our enemy.

Those who haven’t read my essay ‘God’, a page from one of my eleven books, could read it now.

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Racial right

On Anon’s comment

The reason whites are dying out can be seen in what an Occidental Dissent commenter said about me today, using not my real name but the nickname one of my nephews used with me when he was six:

‘Chechar is a christophobic, godless, insane fool. Avoid him’.

Although the subtitle of Occidental Dissent now reads ‘Nationalism, populism, reaction’, a few years ago it read ‘Western cultural and racial preservation’. But the truth is that the Christians who comment there are not preserving their race: they are attacking it. If they were defending it they wouldn’t use adjectives like christophobic, which implies that it is irrational to feel a phobia towards the son of the god of the Jews. This is analogous to the hackneyed tactic of the left in labelling ‘phobias’ healthy mental states such as homophobia or Islamophobia.

The same can be said of John Anon’s adjective about calling me godless. Remember the culminating part of the masthead of this site, the essay on how Judea seized the spirit of Rome through Christian subversion. After Emperor Theodosius II, only Christianity and Judaism—religions of Semitic origin—were allowed. Everything inherently Aryan or that came from classical culture was forbidden throughout the empire.

The anonymous commenter calls me godless as if I didn’t admire the archetypes that represented the gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon, or the gods of the Germanic peoples who should have conquered Rome instead of being conquered by Rome. (Remember, in a recent instalment of the Christianity’s Criminal History series, how the proud Visigoths had already succumbed to one form of Christianity before they were reconverted to another type of the same religion, Catholicism.)

According to the theology of John Anon, and I suppose of other commenters of that forum for American racialists, one must only honour the god of the Jews (or they call us godless), and follow the precepts of his son Yeshu (or they call us christophobic and fools). But who are really the fools?

The point is that American racialists practice doublethink by claiming to be aware of the Jewish problem when, figuratively, they continue to kiss Yahweh’s feet (see the footnote of my previous post).

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Catholic religious orders Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 135

– For the context of these translations click here –

 
Left, Mass of St. Gregory, c. 1490, attributed to Diego de la Cruz, oil and gold on panel (Philadelphia Museum of Art).

From Gregory I, the humble servant of servants, until the 20th century it is well known that the popes had their feet kissed. The peculiarities were regulated by the ceremonial books. But, as we also know, the one who was actually being kissed was not his foot, but God’s. That is why all the emperors, including Charles V, also regularly performed this ugly rite on the portico of St. Peter’s basilica.

It is understood that Gregory’s personal conscience was marked by the origin, career and status of his character. He always made himself respected by both the clergy and the laity. In modern parlance it could be said that he was a Law-and-order type, a person of order, a former prefect of police, a judge of the criminal who strongly insisted on obedience and discipline, especially by monks and nuns, taking a special interest in their morality—or immorality—as well as in the observance of their vow of poverty.

Gregory used to call his clerics and officials, whose influence was decisive in the Roman municipal administration, ‘soldiers of Peter’ and also ‘soldiers of the Roman Church’ (milites beati Petri, milites Ecclesiae romanae). The first monk elevated to the pontifical throne administered the Lateran almost in the manner of a monastery, populating it in any case with monks, whom he elected to high offices. But he, who adopted the humble monastic catchphrase of ‘servant of the servants of God’—which after his death became an official title of the popes—naturally wanted to be ‘the first servant in the Church of God’ (Altendorf).

Gregory never used the name of St. Peter without the tag ‘prince of the apostles’. He strictly forbade subjects (subditi) to dare to pass judgment on the life of prelates or superiors (praepositi). Even if they were unworthy and justly deserved to be censured, they should not be reproached. Rather, one had to voluntarily embrace the yoke of reverence.

 
The man of double standards

Where he had power, Gregory exercised it without regard, very proud of his justice in front of his subordinates. Archdeacon Lorenzo, who for his sake was preferred in the papal succession and who could not hide his disappointment, lost his post. A year later, Gregory burned him in a solemn ceremony and in the presence of all the clergy ‘for his pride and other crimes’.

Yet more significant is the following event. The monk Justus, a doctor at the Monastery of Saint Andrew, who cared for the increasingly ill pope, confessed to brother Copious that he had hidden three gold coins. When Gregory found out, he rigorously forbade anyone to treat Justus, that no one from the monastery should visit him on his deathbed or assist him. And after his death his corpse had to be thrown with the three coins into a dunghill while the assembly shouted: ‘To hell with you and your money!’

With such severity Gregory understood the monastic vow although, personally, everything that he hadn’t given to his monasteries he sold, distributing the money among the poor. As a monk he was so wealthy that in 587 he was able to make another donation to the Monastery of Saint Andrew (to which with the expression of owner he called ‘my monastery’). Furthermore, at least thirteen years after becoming a Benedictine monk, he still possessed many rustic goods.

Undoubtedly, the pope was also a man of compromise and double standards. As hard as he was always with the defrocked monks and nuns, forcing them to return to the monastery, in the case of nobles he could make exceptions.

Venantius, a patrician of Syracuse and probably a friend of Gregory, left his monastery in contempt of the ecclesiastical precept. He took home the beautiful and dominant lady Italica who made him the father of two girls, also becoming the epicentre of a circle of anti-monastic literati. But Gregory didn’t force him to return to the monastery. He only tried with great effort to convince him to do it voluntarily, although in vain. What is more, he aided the children born of that anti-canonical marriage, proving once more—as Jeffrey Richards, his modern and often benevolent biographer says—‘that in Gregory’s image of the world was a law for the rich, and another for the poor’…

One last example about Gregory’s double standards: When Bishop Andrew beat a poor woman who lived off ecclesiastical charity so barbarically that she died shortly after, the pope simply forbade him to celebrate Mass for two months—perhaps to the satisfaction of the bishop himself. On the contrary, Gregory had ‘all carnal sinners’ locked up in the prisons of the monasteries, so that a modern researcher (Grupp) writes that this ‘evokes the old slaveholders’, taking such crowds into those monastic houses of repression that according to the monk John Climacus—a contemporary of Gregory, somewhat younger than him—they ‘could hardly take a step’.

______________

Editor’s note. ‘But, as we also know, the one who was actually being kissed was not his foot, but God’s’.

This means that even proud kings had to symbolically kiss the feet of the god of the Jews, since the god of the New Testament is the same as the god of the Old Testament.

When will American white nationalists see something so obvious? Or is it that they don’t realise that the Christian religion of our parents is somehow connected with the empowerment of Jewry?

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Evil Racial right

Bleeding Germany dry, 4

‘These facts must be made public so that the balanced moral under­ standing of justice—this being in a state of uncertainty and wavering within the German population from decades of rabble-rousing and lies—shall be restored to the German people’. —Erich Kern

 

Allied violations of international law

The first Germans who were to suffer from ‘liberation’ were the indigenous ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) living in Yugoslavia. In the principal areas of German settlement, that is Banat, Batschka, Baranya and Syrmia, mass executions began already in October 1944 and spread to the Lower Styria (Untersteiermark) region in May 1945.

These mass shootings and other killings were originally planned at the illegal Second Communist Convention of the so-called Anti­ Fascist Council of the National Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ), during the presidency of Ivan Ribar in Jajce, from 29 to 30 November 1943.

The wire-puller of these planned exterminations was the Stalinist Moshe Puade, an underground Communist who, at this conference, demanded the liquidation of all Germans.

The principal doer and the person chiefly responsible was Josip Broz, who entered the annals of terror under the name of Tito. The actual executioners of the mass shootings, in addition to partisans and private local people, were primarily the so-called Peoples’ Liberation Councils, the secret police (OZNA), the peoples’ courts and the execution units of the Aktion Intelligenzija. The aim of the torturing and the shootings, which also claimed the lives of people in the Yugoslav opposition, was to intimidate the masses through terror while destroying their leadership at the same time, thus rendering them vulnerable.

The nature and extent of the unbelievable atrocities equalled in every way those of the Polish, Czech and Soviet crimes, and in Yugoslavia the actual dirty work was often carried out by gypsies. Erich M., a former member of the Wehrmacht, tells of the first foretaste he got during the retreat from Greece through Yugoslavia in the autumn of 1944. He reported seeing

in the region of Welis and Stib, ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) whose tongues were nailed to the table in their homes. The eyes had been gouged out beforehand. Ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) at another place reported that many of their neighbours had been herded into a school. The partisans then doused the school with gasoline and set it on fire. All the peoples, who attempted to escape through the windows, were shot by the partisans. In Stib, Serbia, we found 40 murdered German soldiers in a tile-making factory, who had been stripped naked. Their eyes had been gouged out, and some of them had their genitals cut off. Nearby lay fifteen or twenty female communications personnel, whose genitals had been cut away and stuffed into their mouths.

Josef Kampf, chairman of agricultural organizations in Deutsch­Zerne, witnessed shootings in his home village. He described these events as follows: On 24 October 1944:

Shootings were carried out in all the German settlements. We were witnesses to executions in Zeme. Sixty-eight men and women were bound with strong ropes and led to the place of execution. Behind each column came gypsy escorts armed with clubs. During the march the gypsies were allowed to attack the victims any way they wanted, and this they did beyond all measure, knocking out the eyes of the bound prisoners and smashing their noses, heads and chins, etc. In the process, the gypsies set great store by tormenting the people just at the moment when they were led past their former homes. When someone lost consciousness, he would be dragged along by the rope by the others and beaten by the gypsies, until he was on his feet again. Every so often, when someone could not go on anymore, he would be thrown onto a wagon and hauled to the execution site.

For sheer mockery, all the church bells were ringing. Mounted Serbian men and boys also rode alongside the procession, ringing cowbells in a cacophonic accompaniment. At the execution site the victims were forced to undress, and those who were unable to do so were stripped by the gypsies. Then they were lined up next to the mass grave, in groups of five or six, and shot from behind with submachine guns, but also with single shot rifles. On the meadow next to the place of torment, hundreds of Serbs gathered to watch. Each group following on had to push the previous shot victims into the hole, insofar as these had not fallen in by themselves after being shot. Many in the grave were still alive, attempting to raise themselves and turning in their death­ throes. This was met with laughter from the onlookers, with some of them remarking that those executed were still performing gymnastics. Two days later, there was still movement detected in the mass grave. They did not cover the bodies with earth, as there had to be space available for the next victims.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s note: This needs to be repeated after every instalment of this book by Claus Nordbruch until it is understood: The main webzines of white nationalism are almost irrelevant because they omit a central fact of the 20th century: the German holocaust. If the story that we have been telling ourselves for the last decades is false (whites only talk about what happened with Jewry in World War II, and this has been grossly exaggerated), the result is what we see now in the West.

Without putting the above historical facts to the fore, all discourse on racialist-run American webzines becomes hot air. (Again, study the links in the sticky post to grasp what we mean.)

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Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Third Reich

Michael’s schizophrenia

I use the term ‘schizophrenia’ in its popular sense of a divided mind, not in the psychiatric sense.

A week ago I honoured the retired revolutionary ideologue Michael O’Meara in the context that, unlike him, white nationalists are merely reactionaries.

Today I came up with the idea to look in the discussion threads of the webzine where O’Meara used to post his articles to see when was the last time O’Meara discussed one of his articles with the commenters. I found out it was a reply to a commenter in one of the threads from September 2012:

No offense taken. I was pleased that someone had commented on the Catholic aspect of the piece. Another take on religion is my ‘Only a God Can Save Us’, archived here at C-C.

O’Meara refers to his article on Nietzsche originally published in The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 2 (Summer 2008), which Greg Johnson later republished in Counter-Currents on July 1, 2010. This means that O’Meara wrote his article before the Spaniard Evropa Soberana published his long essay on Judea vs. Rome, which I later translated and adopted as the masthead of this site.

O’Meara’s last comment in Johnson’s webzine reminds me that, in another of his articles, O’Meara said things about Hitler that denoted a critical spirit towards what, in my opinion, has been the apex of western history to date: the Third Reich.

Years ago I asked a question in one of the discussion threads of this site. I didn’t understand why Solzhenitsyn, who so longed for the destruction of the USSR, had not sided with the Nazis who wanted to destroy Bolshevism even after writing his two non-fiction books: The Gulag Archipelago and 200 Years Together. How was this possible, taking into account that Solzhenitsyn was a hawk during the Vietnam War (insofar as he wanted to prevent communism from spreading)? Roger, a British commenter with great sensitivity to why we should reject the degenerate music of the past decades, replied that it was due to Solzhenitsyn’s Christianity.

The Briton hit the nail. It was Solzhenitsyn’s orthodox Christianity that made him ‘schizophrenic’ in the sense of not siding with the good guys during the greatest conflagration between Good and Evil in Western history (check out my most recent sticky post).

The same with Michael O’Meara, whose parents I guess were Irish Catholics. Although O’Meara was far more courageous than today’s white nationalists in suggesting that only revolutionary thinking can save us, he fell short in not appreciating the greatest mental revolution of our day, embodied in the figure of Hitler. And since unlike Roger most American racialists are sympathetic to Christianity, they will remain as schizophrenic as Solzhenitsyn and O’Meara until they stop idealising everything related to the god of the Jews.

Michael’s ‘Only a (((God))) can save us’ is truly schizophrenic if he has in mind the god of his Catholic parents (triple parenthesis added).

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Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 134

– For the context of these translations click here –

 

CHAPTER 7

Pope Gregory I (590-604)

A 1627 interpretation of Gregorio
Magno by Francisco de Zurbarán

‘Just and loving was Gregory, both with the poor and the economically weak, as with the slaves, the heretics and the Jews.’ —F.M. Stratmann, Catholic theologian

‘The history of the Church has not produced many characters who have rightfully carried the nickname of The Great’. —Heinrich Kraft

‘Nor was it the worst that he advised proceeding against the recalcitrant with whipping, torture and jail, but with naive cynicism he recommended the increase in taxes as a means of conversion: those who converted had to be relieved of the established taxes, and those who were reluctant had to be softened with tax pressure’. —Johannes Haller
 

The flight from the world and the desire to make a career

Of the more than 260 popes, only Leo I and St. Gregory I (590-604) are the pontiffs who, in addition to the title of Doctors of the Church, bear the appellation of ‘The Great’ (San Gregorio Magno). He came from the ‘big world’. The first monk who reached the supposed chair of Peter was of the senatorial lineage of the Anicius; that is to say, of the high and rich Roman nobility, de senatoribus primis. All ecclesiastical writers emphasise the ‘noble’ or rich origin of their heroes. Even in the purely external aspect of him it was the ‘miracle of his time’ for being a man of average height, with small, yellowish eyes, a discreet aquiline nose, and four miserable little curls, and a powerful, almost bald skull: a miracle in himself, and not only in his time. Well, that truly extraordinary head multiplied and, like a holy relic, it could be in many cities at the same time: Constance, for example, possessed the head of Gregory, as did Prague, Lisbon and Sens.

By 573 Gregory was praefectus urbis, the highest civil office in Rome. Decked out in precious stones and flanked by an armed personal guard, he resided in a sumptuous palace because, although he was ‘already driven by the yearning for heaven’, as he confesses, he was interested in beautiful appearances, in their ‘external standard of living’ and without excessive disgust he served ‘the earthly world’.

The family was wealthy with possessions in and around Rome, and especially in Sicily. He even had contacts in Constantinople, and also apparently was intensely religious. Wealth and religion are not excluded in any way. Quite the contrary: whoever God loves makes him rich, and despite the camels and the needle eyes, he gets to heaven. The powerful bloodline of Gregory had already given the world two popes: Agapetus I and Felix III, whom he himself calls his ancestor (atavus). And the Church also canonised his mother Silvia…

Already between his election and consecration on September 3, 590, Gregory, who because of his weakness almost always lay in bed, had called to fight the bubonic plague from Egypt, to which even his predecessor Pelagius II had succumbed on February 8, 590.

Of course, Gregory declared the plague as punishment from God, as revenge for the sins of the Lombards, the ‘pagans’, the ‘heretics’ and demanded their conversion ‘to the true and upright Catholic faith’ through repentance, penance, prayers and songs of Psalms for three days, ‘while it is still time for tears’.

He also set in motion among the ruins of the destroyed city a spectacular seven-round procession—with it Ferdinand Gregorovius begins History of Rome in the Middle Ages—with pitiful choral songs and tedious invocations to all possible martyrs, including those who never had existed but were invented in the bloody comedy of the doctor of the Church, St. Ambrose of Milan. The success was tremendous but an eyewitness told St. Gregory of Tours that then ‘in the space of an hour, while the people raised their voices in prayer to the Lord, eighty men collapsed and fell dead’. In any case, in Constantinople, by God’s inscrutable design, between 542 and 544 the plague had claimed the lives of 300,000 people.

Amid such gloomy feelings, visions and realities of worldly decay—not only was the plague raging: ancient temples were also being razed, and even the papal granaries and churches—, Gregory, who has been called ‘the last Roman’ and ‘the first medieval pope’, surprisingly started his career knowing exactly what he wanted…

In 590 Gregory ascended the pontifical throne despite his ailments and, naturally, supposedly against his will. This was part of the etiquette and until the 20th century it has been part of clerical hypocrisy. In his time, however, even the humblest ecclesiastical offices were so coveted that in 592 or 593 Emperor Maurice forbade soldiers from entering monasteries and civil servants from embracing the clerical state. And Gregory knew very well that ‘someone who strips off his worldly garments to immediately occupy an ecclesiastical office only changes places, but doesn’t leave the world’.

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Miscellany

Required readings

Hellstorm (review)
Worst generation
Judea vs. Rome

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Quotable quotes Real men

Mexican proverb

‘The brave man lives until the coward wants’.

Categories
Evil

Bleeding Germany dry, 3

‘The action of the victors shut out all hope for the future. Outlawed, without any rights, Germany was a colony of the Allies; the British especially treated Germans as they did formerly with the natives of their colonies’ said Rolf Koseik, in Deutschland in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 1995. Erich Hentschel, publisher of the highly recommended special edition of Heimatbrief Saazerland (letter to my Saazerland Homeland), in commenting on the thoughts in connection with the 8 May 1945, quite rightly states that this historic date and its consequences are experienced within Germany in several, quite different, ways:

In the first place there were the inmates of prisons and concentration camps, then there were prisoners of war and forced labourers, also volunteer foreign workers and, indeed, true believer fighters in resistance too, all of whom would have welcomed the end of the Third Reich as liberation, rightly so from their point of view. For the great mass of the German population, however, the end of the war is associated with humiliation, deprivation of rights and hopelessness. It meant the loss of identity and all traditional values, persecution, rape, imprisonment, torture and often also death.

The citizens in the German Eastern provinces especially had to suffer terrible persecutions. For twelve and a half million East Germans the end of the war meant flight and expulsion, confinement in refugee camps, maltreatment and rape amidst orgies of indescribable violence and murder… When, during commemorations of the war’s end, the people in the Federal Republic are persuaded by the politicians, media, bishops and various other ‘personalities’ that they should consider themselves, if you please, as having been ‘liberated’, this is sheer cynicism and utter contempt, if not to say ignorance and stupidity.

There were also a few rays of hope during the ‘liberation’. Not all members of other nations were opportunistic or showed fundamental hostility towards the Germans. Concerning the relationship between the foreign civilian population and the native German population, it must be emphasised, first and foremost, that in an almost chivalrous fashion the people of Latvia and Lithuania above all others assisted the suffering Germans, as much as they possibly could.

The Latvians’ and Lithuanians’ selfless hospitality and willingness to help are documented in many of the essays based on personal experience. Käthe Dell, who was fifteen years old at the time, still remembers with gratitude: ‘The Lithuanians always helped us, even if it meant sharing their last crust of bread’.

Martha Kurzmann, a seamstress who was driven from her home in Konigsberg, agrees wholeheartedly: ‘That country with its selfless hospitality, innate generosity and love of everything German saved the lives of countless thousands of East Prussians’, and Frau L. Freiheit takes the same line. Facing starvation, she made her way with her only surviving child to Lithuania, ‘where we were accepted everywhere with great humanity and love’.

(Left, a German family annihilated in the Allied bombing raid of Kassel, October, 1943.) Furthermore, the Lithuanians aided the starving Germans at great risk and danger to themselves: ‘The Lithuanians and Latvians helped us whenever they could. Even though it was forbidden to help us, even though the Russians threatened them with heavy fines and deportation to Siberia if they gave us food or shelter, they assisted us anyway.’

In remembrance of the countless Europeans fighting alongside Germany during the war, it must be mentioned that in almost all the European countries severe persecution was taking place, following their ‘liberation’ by Allied troops. After the ceasefire hundreds of thousands of people were hounded down, tortured, hauled before tribunals on charges of ‘collaboration’ and ‘treason’, often condemned to death, while huge numbers of women and men were murdered in the streets by mobs. Bloody retribution was meted out by self-appointed judges, jailers and executioners in Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway and France.

One of the most tragic events in this connection has to be the British handing over of the Cossacks and their families to the Soviets at Lienz on 1 June 1945, as well as Sweden’s handing over of German and Baltic soldiers to the Soviets in December 1945. Illegal under international law, these decisions were tantamount to a gruesome death sentence—dreadful scenes were taking place there.