web analytics
Categories
Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s

Criminal History, 193

For the context of these translations click here.
PDFs of entries 1-183 (several of Karlheinz Deschner’s
books abridged into two) can be read here and here.

Charles the Fat in a 14th century relief, flanked by a squire and a knight.

 
25 years of Joseph’s marriage – the acid test passed

Like their first husband (or their second?), the high couple did not want to let the adultery sit on them. After only a few days, Charles, therefore, brought his wife Richardis ‘before the Imperial Assembly on the same matter and’, writes Abbot Regino with delight, ‘it sounds marvellous that she publicly confesses that he has never mingled with her in a carnal embrace, although they have been in his company for more than ten years through a lawful marriage’.

More than ten years? Twenty-five years. Because Karl the Fat had already married the daughter of the Alsatian and Breisgau count Erchanger in 862, a quarter of a century of Joseph’s marriage. No, much more beautiful, even purer: ‘She even claims that she has remained free not only of his, but of all male concomitance (omni virili commixtione). She praises the integrity of her courage and confidently offers to prove this, if it pleases her husband, by the judgement of Almighty God, either through a single battle or through the test of the glowing ploughshares; for she was a godly woman.’ This is why, after the divorce, Empress Richardis withdrew to the Andlau monastery in Alsace, which she had built on her estates, no longer for the sake of any men but, says Abbot Regino, ‘to serve God’.

The emperor generously refrained from proving their unimpaired might through judicial duels or glowing ploughshares.

Church propaganda, however, took up the miraculous case of chastity and, with fantastic embellishments, had the empress gloriously pass the fiery ordeal. The Martyrology of Germania (with the imprimatur of 6 May 1939) still holds fast to such a ‘passed trial by fire’. For centuries, a wax shirt was also presented in the Etival monastery which, when ignited at all four ends on the naked body of the tested person, neither destroyed the virgin body of the majesty nor was it damaged. And while the perpetrator atones for the filthy lie on the gallows, poor Richardis (who was not entirely poor; she had already been given several women’s convents at the end of the 70s) distributes ‘everything she still had to the poor and convents’.

And she also went into the convent, living only for the salvation of her soul, humility and prayer; which is why God glorified her tomb through miracles and finally, in 1049, Pope Leo IX elevated her holy body, which was ‘tantamount to canonisation’, writes in his Legend of the Saints the Capuchin priest Wilhelm Auer of Reisbach, ‘with the approval of the Most Reverend Bishop´s Ordinary of Augsburg and the permission of the superiors’. Immediately afterwards, he gives us the Church Prayer: ‘O God, who has freed your Blessed Virgin Richardis from the slander of men and crowned her with eternal glory: we ask you to grant us that we may love our neighbour in word and deed according to her example and through her intercession, so that we may attain the rewards of eternal love. Amen.’

Well said, in passing, to love our neighbour in word and deed according to their example… One must not think of poor Charles the Fat. After twenty-five years of Joseph’s marriage to a saint he is not even beatified! Of course, according to Capuchin priest Wilhelm Auer von Reisbach: ‘He had become weaker and weaker in spirit… and now rejected the noblewoman, even though she declared herself ready for all tests of her innocence and purity.’

Priests don’t know what to do with someone like Charles the Fat, who loses his nerve at every outrage. And historians not much more. Both idolise gentlemen of a completely different ilk, men with a punch above all, yes, with a punch, men of the criminal calibre of Charlemagne I for example; bandits of the state, devourers of nations, scourges of humanity, great leaders who razed hundreds of thousands of square kilometres to the ground and walked over corpses like cannibals of secular stature or world-historical terrorists. This is called Carolingian universal politics, while Charles III the Fat always ‘fails again’ (Handbuch der Europäischen Geschichte), and historians generally abhor nothing as much as weakness and failure, and love nothing as much as strength and success, regardless of the price.

Categories
Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s

Criminal History, 192

For the context of these translations click here.
PDFs of entries 1-183 (several of Karlheinz Deschner’s
books abridged into two) can be read here and here.

Charles the Fat receives the offer of kingship from two West Francian ambassadors.

Bishop Liutward of Vercelli – celebrated and fired

This man, a Swabian from (according to hostile sources) a very lowly family, was a monk at Reichenau, a monastery that only accepted nobles in the 10th century, and Charles’ chancellor during his Swabian reign. The up-and-comer took advantage of his high patron’s career. He became bishop of Vercelli in 879/880, Charles’ arch-chancellor and arch-chaplain, his most influential advisor and finally ‘more honoured and feared by all than the emperor’ (Annales Fuldenses). After all, the clerical upstart had an almost unimaginable wealth and took great care of his relatives. Brother Chadolt became Bishop of Novara in 882, and a nephew with the same name Liutward became Bishop of Como a little later.

As a result of his progressive hereditary illness, the emperor increasingly left governance to Liutward. In the end, he held most of the strings in his hands, led all important delegations and, in particular, organised all negotiations with the Pope from the very beginning. In short, the bishop stood as ‘the all-powerful minister next to the weak ruler’, was ‘virtually the head of Charles III’s policy’ (Schur) and ‘the key figure of his reign’ (Fleckenstein).

Gradually, however, Bishop Liutward increasingly incurred the wrath of wider circles. Not only because he sought to oust everyone from the emperor’s side, not only through his concessions to the Normans in Elsloo, where he is said to have been bribed by them but also through his greed, his nepotism and his infamous clan politics in general, whereby he had girls from the noblest families from Swabia and Italy stolen to give them to relatives as wives. He even ordered a break-in at the nunnery of St Salvatore in Brescia to extract a daughter of Margrave Unruoch of Friuli for a nephew, a granddaughter of Louis the Pious on her mother’s side: a splendid match. ‘But the nuns of this place turned to prayer and asked the Lord to avenge the dishonour inflicted on the holy place; their request was immediately granted. The one who wanted to consummate the marriage with the girl in the usual way died that night and the girl remained untouched (intacta). This was reported to a nun from the above-mentioned convent’ (Annales Fuldenses).

The abrupt death of the bishop’s nephew on the night of the bride seemed too little for the uncle of the bridegroom, Margrave Berengar of Friuli. He hurried to Vercelli, ‘and once there, he stole as much of the bishop´s belongings as he wished’. Not enough, Liutward was also accused of ‘heresy’, namely ‘belittling our Saviour by claiming that He is One through the unity of substance, not of person’ (Annales Fuldenses). He was also accused of adultery, even with the empress herself—all of which was publicly brought up in the summer of 887 at the Imperial Diet in Kirchen (near Lörrach).

Charles the Fat, however, was not only comfortable and unambitious by nature, he was also ill, physically and perhaps mentally. In the spring, in the Palatinate of Bodmann, his favoured region of Lake Constance, he had his head ‘incised in pain’ (incisionem): a mistranslation, it is now thought, not a trepanation, less dramatic.

Nevertheless, the emperor was almost incapable of ruling (admittedly the fate of many rulers). And in this fatal situation, he also exposed his first man to general anger and disappointment. Without any dialogue with Liutward, he stripped him of many fiefs ‘and drove him out of the palace in disgrace as a heretic hated by all. But the latter went to Baiem to Arnulf and discussed with him how he could rob the emperor of his rule’.

Categories
Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s

Criminal History, 191

For the context of these translations click here.
PDFs of entries 1-183 (several of Karlheinz Deschner’s
books abridged into two) can be read here and here.

 

Domestic politics: until the genitals were cut off, ‘that no trace of them remained’

In 882, a bloody feud broke out between the Saxons and the Thuringians: between Poppo, the Count of Sorbenmark, and the Frankish Count Egino, whereby we do not learn the reason for the war, but only that ‘Poppo was defeated by the Thuringians with heavy losses’. The next year, too, the same source only laconically reports ‘a cruel war’, which Poppo lost again, ‘as was usual before’. He escaped ‘barely with a few men, while all the others fell’. On the other hand, he was very successful against the Slavs in 880, against Daleminzians, Bohemians, Sorbs ‘and the other neighbours all around, trusting in God’s help, he defeated them in such a way that none of this great multitude remained’ (Annales Fuldenses). He lost his life in 892.

In the Ostmark, Count Aribo raged against the descendants of his predecessors, the sons of the margraves William and Engilschalk, who had fallen in battle against the Moravians in 871, in a two-and-a-half-year slaughter, whereby the marchio even joined forces with the Moravian duke Swatopluk, the vassal of the empire, who supported him militarily on several occasions. After Aribo’s expulsion in 882 by the margrave’s sons, Swatopluk repeatedly raided the Ostmark and killed ‘inhumanly and bloodthirstily like a wolf’. In 884, Pannonia was plundered up to the Raab, most of the country ‘devastated, destroyed and annihilated with fire and sword’. Indeed, the Moravian invaded here a second time in the same year, ‘in order, if anything had remained before, to devour it completely now as in the wolf’s raven’. All the possessions of the margrave’s sons were also burnt down. The two eldest of them, Megingoz and Poppo, drowned in the Raab while fleeing. But Werinhar, one of Engilschalk’s sons, and his relative, Count Wezzilo, were mutilated, their right hands and tongues cut off, as well as ‘their private parts and genitals, so that no trace of them remained. Some of their men also came back without right and left hands. Servants and maidservants with their children were killed… All this happened without a doubt through the mercy or wrath of God’ (Annales Fuldenses).

It happened without any demand for atonement from the emperor. The Moravian’s homage and his oath ‘never to invade the empire with an enemy army as long as Charles lives’ were enough for him.

In the meantime, the monarch’s star had sunk ever lower, and his great fortune at the beginning of his career had increasingly turned into the opposite. After the death of King Boso of Vienne on January 9, 887, Provence, the last country still outside the empire, had formally submitted itself to the emperor’s feudal sovereignty again in the spring of 887, for which he adopted Boso’s underage son Louis (by the daughter of King Louis of Italy). But this was of little importance in view of his behaviour towards the Normans, his generally resented retreat from Paris, his abandonment of Burgundy and the continued devastation caused by the privateers, not least in view of the scandalous events in his immediate environment, above all the fall of his archchancellor Liutward (d. 899).

Categories
Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s

Criminal History, 190

For the context of these translations click here.
PDFs of entries 1-183 (several of Karlheinz Deschner’s
books abridged into two) can be read here and here.

 

Divine providence operates in a murderous manner: the end of Norman rule in Friesland

Sometimes there were triumphs.

For example, against Gottfried. Through his agreement in 882 with Charles Christian, husband of King Lothar II’s daughter Gisla (fathered by Waldrada), he became ruler of the area that is roughly present-day Holland. When he was accused of conspiring against the empire with his brother-in-law Hugo, King Lothar II’s illegitimate son and Gisla’s brother, ‘God was against it,’ and ‘the Lord gave him the reward he deserved’ (Annales Fuldenses).

Divine providence did not operate openly.

The emperor – Gottfried’s godfather – had him murdered by one of his accusers, the East Frankish Count Henry, Poppo’s brother. Henry, ‘a very clever man’, who apparently concocted the plot, and Willibert, ‘the venerable bishop of Cologne’ (Regino von Prüm), meet the unsuspecting Gottfried ‘in the year of the divine incarnation 885’ on the island of Betuwe (between the Lower Rhine and the Waal). On the second day of the ‘negotiations’, Bishop Willibert summons Gottfried’s wife Gisla from the island in order to ‘stir up her zeal for peace’ elsewhere, while Henry’s companions secretly stab the king during the bishop’s pacifist endeavours elsewhere. As if that wasn’t enough, ‘all his companions, all the Normans who found themselves on the Betuwe, were also massacred.’

And only a few days later, Hugh, ‘who behaved imprudently in the emperor´s realm’ (Annales Fuldenses), was also lured to Gondreville, to the imperial court, on the advice of the same Henry, had his eyes gouged out by the same noble count and all his followers were deprived of their fiefs. Later, in the monastery of Prüm, where his grandfather Emperor Lothar I had already ended up as a monk, Hugo was shorn by Abbot Regino, who reported all this, and died after a few years, while his sister Gisla, Gottfried’s widow, ended her life in the nunnery of Nivelles near Namur.

A pious family.

The Norman regiment in Friesland came to an end at the time. They were defeated in battle with the Frisians near Norden ‘and many of them were killed’. And in the year of Gottfried’s death, the Fulda yearbooks again report:

Finally, the Christians raged against them with such bloodshed that few remained of such a large crowd. Then these same Frisians stormed their ships and found so many treasures of gold and silver, together with various implements, that everyone from the lowest to the highest became rich.

The old dream of mankind, including Christians: treasures of silver and gold! As if a camel wouldn’t go through the eye of a needle… But be that as it may, ‘Norman rule in Friesland ended without leaving any tangible traces’ (Blök).

Now the ‘men of the north wind’ had come to many countries in the early Middle Ages, including Iceland and Greenland, Spain, Morocco, Russia and Byzantium, and the Church fought them far and wide, bloodlessly and bloodily, through annalists, authors, bishops and popes. However, when the Normans, in the 11th and 12th centuries, provided the best cavalry armies in Europe, the bravest knights, and the most modern fortress builders (they developed the castle with ramparts and moat in the middle of the 11th century), when they also had a strong navy in Sicily, one of the most capable admirals of the Middle Ages in George of Antioch took the lead militarily, the papacy went over to them. They played a major role not only in the Crusades. ‘A people accustomed to war’, as William of Malmesbury said, who could ‘hardly live without war’, they were just right for the representatives of Christ.

Under Charles III the Fat, however, the ruler was not only criticised for his lack of fighting spirit towards them. Increasing insecurity at home, everyday highway robbery, notorious plundering, years of clan feuds, even and especially now in the East Frankish kingdom, none of this strengthened the emperor’s prestige.

Categories
Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s

Criminal History, 189

For the context of these translations click here.
PDFs of entries 1-183 (several of Deschner’s books
abridged into two) can be read here and here.

 

De bellis Parisiacis or ‘Nothing that would have been worthy of imperial majesty’

In November 885, the invaders’ Great Army appeared off Paris. Allegedly with countless small ships and 700 larger ships as well as a force of 40,000 men, they travelled up the Seine—possibly an act of revenge for the treacherous murder of their king, Gottfried, in May of the same year, in which Hugo was also blinded.

Together with Count Odo of Paris, the future king, Bishop Gauzlin (from the noble Rorgonid dynasty, once one of Charles the Bald’s closest confidants and archchancellor, chief shepherd of Paris from 884) initially took command of the encircled city, whose famous siege was described by an eyewitness, the monk Abbo, in his epic poem De bellis Parisiacis. When Bishop Gauzlin fell ill and died another clerical warhorse, Abbot Ebolus of St. Germain-des-Prés, led the defence, which became increasingly difficult, especially as the only East Frankish army sent to relieve the city under the notorious Count Henry withdrew without having achieved anything. The Normans had long since pillaged the surrounding countryside according to all the rules of the ‘art of war’ and did not shy away from cruelty in their assaults on the city. They are even said to have slaughtered their prisoners and filled the moats with their corpses. In any case, ‘many were killed on both sides, even more were incapacitated by wounds’. The Normans ‘continued their assault day after day’, they harassed Paris ‘without ceasing with the most diverse armoury of weapons, machines and wall-breakers. But as they all cried out to God with great fervour, they were always saved; and the battle lasted about eight months in various ways before the emperor came to their aid’ (Annales Vedastini).

It did not help, neither that of various count’s troops nor that of the church—Walo of Metz, ‘who took up arms against the holy precept and his episcopal dignity and went to war’. He fell ‘in the year of our Lord 882’ while fleeing from the Normans. Again and again, we read that there was no help at all, no resistance (nemine sibi resistente), or that if military action was taken, ‘nothing happy or profitable’ came of it (nil prospere vel utile), that ‘nothing memorable’ (nihil dignum memoriae) was accomplished. ‘And they accomplished nothing profitable there but returned to their homeland with great dishonour. For instead of striking a fortunate blow, they barely escaped in disgraceful flight, most of them being captured and killed’ (Annales Vedastini).

The emperor was also disappointing.

It was not until October that he finally arrived and encamped on the heights of Montmartre. The army was formidable, but the commander, Count Henry, himself an accomplished treacherous murderer and slayer fell with his horse into a Norman pit and, abandoned by his own, was killed in it. Charles could not make up his mind to do anything. For weeks he remained inactive and ‘did nothing in this place that would have been worthy of imperial majesty’. When it was even rumoured that a relief army under king Siegfried was already approaching the Seine, he bought off Paris and gave the Normans the territories on the other side of the Seine ‘for plundering because the inhabitants of the same would not obey him’ (Regino von Prüm).

Charles also left Burgundy to be plundered by the enemy but remained in the west for the time being. However, King Siegfried had already invaded the Oise and followed Charles, ‘devastating everything with fire and sword. When the emperor learnt of this—and the fire brought him certain news—he quickly returned to his country.’ Siegfried then continued his work of destruction. In the following year, 887, they ‘continued their usual raids as far as the Saone and the Loire and turned the country into a desert by burning and murder’ (Annales Vedastini). King Siegfried, however, turned to Friesland in the autumn, where he was killed.

Categories
Evil Summer, 1945 (book) Thomas Goodrich

1945 (XI)

By mid-May, 1945, the Allied conquerors had laid claim to virtually all of what was once the Third Reich—the Americans, British and French in the west, the Soviets in the east. Behind the Red Army lines, the final pockets of resistance also surrendered.

At the Courland enclave on the Baltic, over two hundred thousand German soldiers and Latvian volunteers laid down their arms, then joined the defenders of Berlin on the long, one-way march to Siberia. After seventy days of desperate, heroic struggle, the besieged garrison of Breslau also lowered its flag and these men too began their Siberian death march. And also after surrender, the already haggard females of Breslau began pondering “whether life had not been sweeter during the worst days of the siege.” Remembered one girl:

Rape began almost immediately and there was a viciousness in the acts as if we women were being punished for Breslau having resisted for so long… Let me say that I was young, pretty, plump and fairly inexperienced. A succession of Ivans gave me over the next week or two a lifetime of experience. Luckily very few of their rapes lasted more than a minute. With many it was just a matter of seconds before they collapsed gasping. What kept me sane was that almost from the very first one I felt only a contempt for these bullying and smelly peasants who could not act gently towards a woman, and who had about as much sexual technique as a rabbit.

“For four years [Propaganda Minister, Joseph] Goebbels kept telling us that the Russians were rapists, that they would violate, murder, rob and pillage us,” explained one woman. “Such propaganda did not shock us and we looked forward to being liberated by the Allies… We could not bear it when Goebbels turned out to be right.”

“Red soldiers during the first weeks of their occupation raped every women and girl between the ages of 2 and 60. That sounds exaggerated, but it is the simple truth…,” a stunned American reporter revealed. “Husbands and fathers who attempted to protect their women folk were shot down, and girls offering extreme resistance were murdered.”

Although frantic females tried numerous stratagems to stop the attacks, nothing they did seemed to slow, much less halt, the Soviet sexual assaults-not age, not looks, not illness, nothing.

“A young Russian with a pistol in his hand came to fetch me,” a mother of two small children reminisced. “I have to admit that I was so frightened (and not just of the pistol) that I could not hold my bladder. That didn’t disturb him in the least.” When this same woman later went with her sister to see a Soviet military physician, far from helping the females, the doctor and another officer raped them both. The young mother herself was on her menstrual cycle; her sister was in the late stages of pregnancy.

Far from being sanctuaries, houses of worship were some of the first stops for the Red Army. In addition to the mass rape of females who sought shelter in churches and cathedrals, nuns likewise suffered the same. In one Silesian city alone, Soviet soldiers brutally raped nearly two hundred Catholic sisters leaving sixty-six pregnant nuns in their wake.

Although German women were naturally their favorite targets, virtually any female in the path of the communist army would do. Thousands of women of all nationalities held in German and Polish labor camps were not merely liberated when the Soviets arrived.

“I waited for the Red Army for days and nights,” admitted one Russian female. “I waited for my liberation, but now our soldiers treat us far worse than the Germans did. They do terrible things to us.”

At devastated Dresden, Chemnitz and other cities in eastern Germany that now for the first time experienced Soviet occupation, the situation was the same. Encouraged by the Jewish propagandist, Ilya Ehrenburg, Soviet soldiers were not merely encouraged to rape and kill all Germans they encountered, they were all but ordered to do it; it was the Red soldier’s “patriotic duty,” insisted Stalin’s murderous mouthpiece.

“Kill them all, men, old men, children and the women, after you have amused yourself with them!” demanded Ehrenburg. “Kill. Nothing in Germany is guiltless, neither the living nor the yet unborn… Break the racial pride of the German women. Take her as your legitimate booty. Kill, you brave soldiers of the victorious Soviet Army.”

Although front-line troops-Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians committed their share of savage atrocities, it was the rear echelon—Mongolians, and other Asiatics—that were responsible for perhaps not just the greatest number of crimes but also the greatest degree of crimes. To most Germans, however, all were known simply as “Russians,” or “Ivans.”

“There were no limits to the bestiality and licentiousness of these troops…,” remembered a pastor from Milzig. “Girls and women were routed out of their hiding-places, out of the ditches and thickets where they had sought shelter from the Russian soldiers, and were beaten and raped. Older women who refused to tell the Russians where the younger ones had hidden were likewise beaten and raped.”

When groups of fleeing refugees were overtaken by the Soviets the rapes and murders took on a massive, mechanical quality.

Typically, all captured females—old, young, sick, pregnant, mothers and their children included—were forced to lie by the sides of roads while the laughing Soviet soldiers lined up, then lowered their trousers. One after another, the attacks continued. Generally, as more passing troops arrived, the lines got longer, not shorter. Those females who lost consciousness from blood loss were dragged to the side or rolled into a ditch. Any mother who tried to save her daughter was automatically shot. Even those soldiers who would have otherwise avoided such sadistic crimes were compelled, “without exception,” to join in by “grinning officers” who stood at the head of each line.

Like the case above, whenever possible commissars made certain that German men—fathers, husbands, priests, soldiers—were forced to watch the rape of German women be it inside homes, schools, churches, in parks, on sidewalks, or by the roadsides.

With machine guns trained on them, one large group of surrendering German soldiers, including the famous air ace, Erich Hartmann, were forced to look on as a mob of drunken Soviets threw captured women and girls to the ground, tore off their clothes, then, amid howls and laughter, began their violent sexual attacks.

A young German woman, mother of a twelve-year-old girl, knelt at the feet of one Soviet and begged that he and the others take her, not the child. Ignoring her tearful pleas the man strode away, a mocking grin on his face. “Damned fascist pig!” yelled a soldier nearby as he kicked the mother in the face then shot and killed her. With that the killer dragged the dead woman’s daughter behind a nearby tank. He was joined by others and for half an hour only the screams of the little girl and laughter of the men was heard. Then, their hate and lust sated , the rapists finally withdrew. Completely naked and unable to stand, the bloodied child crawled slowly back to her dead mother. An hour later the sobbing little girl at last stopped crying and joined her mother in death.

At the same time as the above was transpiring, eight- and nine­ year-old children were also being raped and sodomized repeatedly by the Soviets. Mothers who tried to protect their daughters were beaten unconscious and dragged to the side where they themselves were savagely raped and killed.

“Kill! Kill!” urged the blood-thirsty propagandist , Ilya Ehrenburg. “In the German race there is nothing but evil; not one among the living, not one among the yet unborn but is evil!… Stamp out the fascist beast once and for all in its lair! Use force and break the racial pride of these German women… Kill! As you storm onward, kill, you gallant soldiers of the Red Army.”

“Fear is always present,” young Regina Shelton admitted. “It flares into panic at tales of atrocities—mutilated nude bodies tossed by the wayside—a woman nailed spread-eagle to a cart and gang-raped while bleeding to death from her wounds-horrible diseases spread to their victims by sex-drunken Mongolians.” Those frustrated rapists too drunk to physically conclude their act instead used the bottle they were drinking from to symbolically continue the savagery with even more hideous damage done to the victim.

Certainly, not every soldier in the Soviet army was a drunken, sadistic monster. Some officers protected helpless German victims. Other upright soldiers placed their own lives on the line to defend the defenseless. A few, like the poet, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, were haunted for the rest of their lives by the things they had seen… and haunted by the things they had perhaps even done:

Twenty-two Hoeringstrasse. It’s not been burned, just looted, rifled. A moaning by the walls, half muffled: the mother’s wounded, half alive. The little daughter’s on the mattress, dead. How many have been on it? A platoon, a company perhaps? A girl’s been turned into a woman, a woman turned into a corpse… The mother begs, “Soldier, kill me!”

No, not all Soviet soldiers were child-killing rapists… but enough were. Ilya Ehrenburg:

Break the racial pride of the German women. Take her as your legitimate booty. Kill, you brave soldiers of the victorious Soviet Army.

 
______________

Note of the Editor: Here you can request an item of the ‘Hellstorm Holocaust’ package (the biggest secret in modern history: the Allied genocide of Germans after 1945), and here you can order Tom Goodrich’s other books.

Categories
Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s

Criminal History, 187

For the context of these translations click here.
PDFs of entries 1-183 (several of Deschner’s books
abridged into two) can be read here and here.

 

Charles the Fat, to whom everything falls

The youngest son of Louis the German, Charles III (839-888), who was only given the nickname ‘the Fat’ (Crassus) in the 12th century by historians who probably wanted to express his meagre energy, was the heir to the smallest part of the empire—Alemannia and Alsace—and was initially unusually successful. But he was simply lucky. Without ambition, thirst for action or lust for power, everything fell to him as if by magic: Italy in 880, the imperial crown in 881, then the whole of East Franconia.

Having initially only ruled over the small Swabian kingdom since 876, he reigned after the death of his brothers, the ailing Bavarian King Carloman, who had renounced in favour of Charles in his last charter in 879, and King Ludwig III the Younger, who died on January 882 in Frankfurt without heirs. And after the death of the two West Frankish kings, Louis III, the victor of Saucourt, on 5 August 882, and his brother Carloman in December 884—the former lord of the north, the latter of the south of the Western Empire—Charles III was also recognised as emperor there. In 885, all secular and spiritual rulers submitted to him in the Palatinate of Ponthion, thus restoring the Frankish Empire.

However, he did not fight the Saracens, as the Pope had expected, but the Normans, as he had been constantly urged to do north of the Alps. And of course, he fought in his way; on his return from Italy, he first paid homage in Bavaria, then in Worms, before he surrounded the Norman camp in Asselt (Elsloo) on the lower reaches of the Meuse in July 882 with a huge army, including Lombard troops. But even when a lucky chance came to his aid when a terrible thunderstorm broke a breach in the walled fortifications, he did not storm off. He began to negotiate with the Normans after twelve days and bought their withdrawal with major concessions.

In return for an oath of allegiance and the promise of their leader Gottfried to become a Christian [emphasis by Editor], Charles ceded the province of Friesland to him. Gottfried, probably related to the Danish royal dynasty and often called king in the sources, was personally ‘raised from the holy spring’ by the emperor and allowed to marry Gisla, Lothar II and Waldrada’s illegitimate daughter. However, the attempt to integrate the prince into the Carolingian dynasty failed. And King Siegfried and the other Normans, reports Abbot Regino again, received ‘an immense amount of gold and silver: several thousand pounds of silver and gold’ (Annales Bertiniani), confessing that the pious emperor ‘had taken them from the treasury of St Stephen at Metz and other saints, and allowed them to remain, as they have done ever since, to devastate his and his cousin’s part of the empire’.

At the time, the emperor’s archchancellor, Bishop Liutward of Vercelli, was openly accused of having been bribed by the enemy and of having brokered the settlement together with one Count Wikbert. (In 887 the same ecclesiastical prince sued for adultery with the empress, and lost his court offices, whereupon he switched to Charles’ opponent Arnulf of Carinthia; in 899 the Hungarians slew him.)

Of course, the Norman misery did not end with all this, least of all in the Western Empire.

Categories
Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s

Criminal History, 186

For the context of these translations click here.
PDFs of entries 1-183 (abridged translations)
can be accessed in the featured post.

 

Death of princes in East and West Franconia

From nearby Frankfurt, the terminally ill King Louis III, the victor of Andernach, sent an army against the invaders. But when he died on 20 January 882 ‘for the church and the realm’, as it is said, ‘after a life without gain for himself’ (Annales Bertiniani), his troops, already standing in front of the fortified camp in Elsloo, turned back, pursued by the Normans, who cheered Louis’ death, scorched and burned their way to Koblenz and then turned up the Moselle. On 5 April, ‘on the day of the Most Holy Supper of the Lord’, they attacked Trier, which they plundered and ‘burnt completely, having partly chased away and partly killed the inhabitants’ (Annales Fuldenses). When they marched against Metz, the local bishop Wala ‘fell in battle’ (Regino von Prüm).

In the west, Louis III, the victor of Saucourt, was already on his way to stop further enemy troops in the Loire region, but died on 5 August 882, only about twenty years old (because, as the Annales Vedastini reveal, he allegedly ran into the lintel of a girl on horseback and crashed too hard into the door of her father’s house). Although his brother Carloman continued the battle, with varying success and an enormous payment of 12,000 pounds of silver, he died in December 884, only eighteen years old, in a hunting accident in the forest of Bezu (near Andelys)—not by a boar, as was initially rumoured, but, the annalists assure us, ‘involuntarily’, by a fellow hunter, one of his servants, ‘who wanted to help him’. Both kings were buried in St Denis. Louis II had another son by his second wife Adelheid. However, as this son, the future Charles III the Simple, was still a five-year-old child, the greats of the country hoped for help from Charles III the Fat and invited him to West Franconia.

Categories
Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s

Criminal History, 184

For the context of these translations click here.
PDFs of entries 1-183 (abridged translations)
can be accessed in the featured post.

 

Emperor Charles the Fat in the Chartularium monasterii Casauriensis, ordinis S. Benedicti.


 

Volume V, chapter 5:

Norman plight and
Charles III The Fat

‘But Charles, who held the title of emperor, marched with a great army against the Normans and reached their fortifications; but then his heart sank and, through the mediation of others, he obtained by a treaty that Gottfried and his own were baptised and took Friesland and the other estates which Rorich had possessed as fiefs again.’

Annales Bertiniani

‘When the emperor became aware of their cunning tricks and the collusion of their machinations, he negotiated with Henry, a very clever man, with the secret intention of using a ruse to get rid of the enemy he had let into the far end of the empire. He decided to try it more by cunning than by force, so he sent off the envoys with an unclear message and let them return to Godefrid with the assurance that he would answer his messengers to all matters of their mission, as befitted both him and Godefrid, just so that he would continue to remain loyal. Thereupon he sent Henry to that man and with him, to conceal the deceit at work, Willibert, the venerable bishop of Cologne. Indeed Godefrid dies after first Everhard had struck him with a blow and then Henry’s companions had pierced him, and all the Normans who found themselves on the Betuwe are massacred. Only a few days later, on the advice of the same Henry, Hugh is lured to Gondreville by promises and deceitfully captured; on the emperor’s orders, his eyes are gouged out by the same Henry. He is then sent to Aiamannia to the monastery of St Gallus. Finally, he was shorn by my hand in the monastery of Prüm at the time of King Zwentibolch.’

—Abbot Regino of Prüm

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 45

Right at the end of October 192 3, the Völkisch and paramilitary leaders assembled in Röhm’s Reichswehr office in Munich and began preparations for armed action. Their concern was at least as much to head off any separatist tendencies in the Bavarian leadership as it was to support them in joint action against Berlin. It was expected that Kahr would announce his plans for a coup against the Berlin government at a meeting scheduled for 8 November at the Bürgerbräukeller. If Hitler and his co-conspirators were going to forestall Kahr, and his suspected separatist agenda, or co-opt him for their own plans, this would be an excellent opportunity to catch all the major protagonists in one place.

Hitler struck in an evening of high drama. He burst into the Bürgerbräukeller, fired his pistol into the ceiling and announced to general applause that the Bavarian government of Knilling and the Reich government in Berlin were deposed. Hitler ‘suggested’ Kahr as regent for Bavaria and Pöhner as minister president thereof. He promised that a ‘German national government’ would be announced in Munich that same evening. He ‘recommended’ that he himself should take over the ‘leadership’ until accounts had been settled with the ‘criminals’ in Berlin. Ludendorff was to be commander of a new national army; Lossow Reichswehr minister, and Seisser German minister of police. Attempting to marry Bavarian local pride and the pan-German mission, Hitler said that it was the task of the provisional government to march on the ‘den of iniquity in Berlin’. In a considerable concession to Bavarian sensibilities he vowed ‘to build up a cooperative federal state in which Bavaria gets what it deserves’. Kahr, Lossow and Seisser were held captive and prevailed upon to support the coup.

The putschists now swung into action. Their ‘Proclamation to all Germans’ announced that the nation would no longer be treated like a ‘Negro tribe’. Hanfstaengl was detailed to inform and influence the foreign press; he tipped off Larry Rue of the Chicago Tribune that the coup was about to begin and appeared in the Bürgerbräukeller with a group of journalists from other countries. The offices of the pro-SPD Münchener Post were smashed up by the SA, but there was no ‘white terror’ on the streets of Munich; Hitler’s main anxiety was the Bavarian right, not the left. One of the few detentions was that of Count Soden-Fraunhofen, a staunch Wittelsbach loyalist who was accused of being a ‘hireling of the Vatican’. Winifred and Siegfried Wagner, who were almost certainly aware of the plot in advance, were due at the Odeon Theatre immediately after the coup, where Siegfried was to direct a Wagner concert, intended perhaps as a celebration. Hitler announced melodramatically that ‘the morning will see either a national government in Germany or our own deaths’.

The morning brought the sobering realization that the putschists were on their own. There was no general national rising across the Reich. Kahr, Lossow and Seisser, who had given their ‘word of honour’ under duress to support the coup, slipped away and began to mobilize forces to restore order. Hitler’s worst fears were confirmed: he was now fighting not merely red Berlin, but reactionary separatist forces in Munich. A bitter Nazi pamphlet rushed out that day announced. that ‘today the [November revolution] was to have been extinguished from Munich and the honour of the fatherland restored ‘. ‘This,’ the pamphlet added, invoking Hitler’s rhetoric, ‘would have been the Bavarian mission.’ Kahr, Lossow and Seisser, alas, had betrayed the cause. Behind them, the pamphlet continued, stood ‘the same trust of separatists and Jews’ who had been responsible for the treasonous Armistice in 1918, the ‘slave treaty of Versailles and the despicable stock-exchange speculation’ and all other miseries. It concluded with a call to make one last effort to save the situation. What was striking about this document was the far greater stress laid on the separatist-clerical and capitalist danger than on the threat of Bolshevism [emphasis by Ed.].

Hitler and his co-conspirators set out mid morning 9 November for central Munich in a column numbering about 2,000 men, many of them armed. Strasser, who had turned up from Nuremberg with a contingent of followers, was particularly belligerent. Their plan was unclear, but it seems to have been to wrest the initiative back from Kahr; Hitler may also have intended to go down fighting as he had vowed the night before. Outside the Feldherrenhalle at the Odeonsplatz, they encountered a police cordon. Hitler linked arms with Scheubner-Richter and the column marched straight at the police lines, weapons at the ready.

It is not clear whether he was seeking death as a blood sacrifice to inspire future generations or whether he was trying to imitate Napoleon’s famous confrontation with Marshal Ney, when the emperor marched slowly towards his old comrades, who refused to shoot. Shots were exchanged, leading to fatalities on both sides. Hitler himself escaped death only narrowly, injured his arm and fled the scene. Before the day was out, Kahr issued a proclamation announcing the failure of the ‘Hitler­ Putsch’. The great drama had ended in complete fiasco.