wmm Information Volume L No. 9 September 1995 £3 (to non-members) Dor)'t miss ... The link between genocide and ethnic cleansing Remembering Richborough p3 Error and trial One man's war p7 Through the eporters who went to Banstead, Surrey, when away country' syndrome - Whitehall lacked the looking glass pi6 84-year-old Szymon Serafimowicz faced pohtical will to do the right and needful thing. Now, R committal proceedings on war crimes charges fifty years later, ghosts that were never laid to rest were told by his indignant neighbours: "Why can't stalk the lanes round leafy Banstead. 'they' leave him alone? He is a nice old man with The Whitehall mandarins' reluctance to do any­ Axis always a smile for the kids". By 'they' the thing about the likes of Serafimowicz and Dr Dering Bansteaders presumably meant the shades of the earlier on is not totally unrelated to the current pu­ partners dead in Belorus, a location which, though it can be sillanimous Western response to Serb aggression. reached by Aeroflot, appears several galaxies distant Ostrich-brained politicians argue that Britain - or oth from Banstead. the West - cannot be expected to carry the burden countries This is the mindset to which Chamberlain had of an increasingly unruly world. They are wrong!! It waged war given voice nearly two generations ago by describing is incumbent upon the West to give leadership; if it B fails to do so the whole human race including West­ Czechoslovakia as a far-away country of which we that brought knew little! ern countries will go to hell. indescribable Alas, no Twentieth Century atlas includes the cat­ And hell is, of course, literally the place to which suffering to their egory 'far-away countries'. Today Srebrenica and Dr Dering (and his ilk) consigned that part of the victims. Both Zepa are in everybody's living-room. And Serb war human race known as European Jewry. saw themselves criminals go about their grizzly business in these kill­ The forthcoming Serafimowicz trial has naturally as a master race. ing fields precisely because they know that many of prompted intense debate - a debate which has their predecessors went unpunished. After the war sometimes, unfortunately, produced rather more Both crashed to the US employed - instead of prosecuting - Nazi heat than light. Critics argue that exposing octoge­ defeat and rose spy chief von Gehlen and rocket designer von Braun; narians to the judicial process is a useless exercise; phoenix-like in Federal Germany an ex-Kommandant of judgment, they claim, should be left to historians. from the ashes. Theresienstadt was allowed to escape detection for (As if historians could be objective - vide the rest of his life; postwar Britain admitted count­ Charmley's Churchill-bashing and Prof Both, denying less anti-Soviet 'refugees' like Auschwitz doctor Hobsbawm's glossing over of Soviet crimes!) guilt, put the end Dering and Szymon Serafimowicz without bothering Hobsbawm's adversarial colleague, Norman Stone, - Dresden, to look into their past. meanwhile contends that it is wrong to punish Nazi Hiroshima - Preoccupied with the Cold War and the postwar atrocities without doing something equivalent about before the labour shortage - but also infected by the 'far Soviet crimes (which is rather like telling doctors: beginning. 'Don't cure cancer unless you can also cure Aids'!) Eventually the The company of anti-trial advocates is surprisingly The Committee of joined by Chaim Bermant, the otherwise cherishable Germans alone Management and Staff scourge of rabid rabbis and Likud bigots. Bermant began to show contends that the doddering dotard Serafimowicz is repentance. The ofthe a different man from the uniformed Nazi auxiliary reason: Hitier AJR of fifty-odd years ago. (Nonsense - as if the 82- notwithstanding year-old Mao Tse-tung, or the 83-year-old General Germany belongs Wish all Members a Franco had been different men from their blood­ to the Western VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR thirsty younger selves!) No, the Serafimowicz trial must go ahead, both for (Judeo-Christian) the sake of the dead of Belorus and of the still-living tradition. in Bosnia.D AJR INFORMATION SEPTEMBER 1995 Profile landfall on the Guinea coast to Lincoln's Act of Emancipation in 1863. More im­ portantly, while the horrors of the Middle Passage and of the plantation system can Bearer of a famous be laid at the White Man's door, the starting point of the whole vicious chain name was Black-on-Black violence in Africa, i.e. inter-tribal warfare. After all, Europeans ertain Jewish surnames - for did not sail to the Guinea coast to capture instance Kissinger, or Feucht slaves, but to buy them from their Black Cwanger - are one word short­ captors (or tribal chiefs). hand for the history of many generations. The figure of 130 million victims is a They indicate that families took the name fiction that bears no relation to the scale of the South West German village in of inter-tribal conflict, contemporary which they had lived, generally as cattle shipping capacity, or West African popu­ or corn dealers, before moving into town. lation estimates for previous centuries. (In The geographical move was often ac­ East Africa the population of Kenya, for instance, increased from 2 million before companied by other changes. Though Edgar Feuchtwanger Edgar Feuchtwanger's grandfather was a the British takeover to 13 million at Inde­ Torah treu disciple of Samson Raphael ing visits to the Californian Villa Aurora pendence.) Hirsch he sent his two ablest sons to Mu­ where Lion's widow Martha guarded the Demographic statistics can, in fact, nich University. The eldest became the famous 30,000 volume library. He also show amazing variations over relatively renowned author Lion Feuchtwanger maintains his long term involvement with short periods. In 1750 the French out­ (whose prestige among Left 1930s intel­ the Leo Baeck Institute on whose Board numbered the Enghsh; by 1850, thanks to lectuals was such that Stalin asked to be he serves. Last, but not least, he is a mem­ the Industrial Revolution, the situation interviewed by him). Edgar's father be­ ber of AJR and an attentive reader of its was reversed. came a publisher of scholarly works by journal. What about Jewish population figures? the likes of Werner Sombart; in addition URG These showed a steady and - later - in­ he edited, from 1930, the Bayrisch - cremental increase from a very low base Israelitische Gemeinde Zeitung. Edgar of just over a million in 1700 (conse­ was thus reared in a cultivated environ­ quence of the Chmelnitzki pogroms). ment, albeit under the lengthening Nazi Over the next two centuries numbers dou­ shadow. In 1939 aged fourteen, he arrived bled and trebled, reaching a global in England to stay with a doctor's family Demagogy and pre-Holocaust total of 18 million. What in Cornwall. (His parents came over sepa­ lay behind this (shortlived) fulfilment of rately.) He attended Winchester Public demography the Biblical prophecy? Some were general School, read history at Cambridge and European, others specifically Jewish, fac­ completed a PhD. Thereafter he worked n Zumbi, currently playing at tors. The former included the in adult education at Southampton and Stratford's Theatre Royal, a character continent-wide abatement of epidemics later joined the university faculty. He I says: 'The Jews lost 6 million in the (such as the plague), as well as a slow, but taught, and published books on Holocaust - we Blacks lost 130 million steady, rise in living standards. Among the Gladstone and Disraeli, as well as on Wei­ through the slave trade.' The inference to latter the Judaic laws on hygiene - mar Germany. be drawn from juxtaposing the two fig­ handwashing before meals, mikva attend­ As an additional string to his bow he ures is not spelt out. I suppose the most ance etc. - and on diet, as well as the initiated research on defence studies at innocuous inference would be that, given low incidence of alcoholism and of sexual Southampton. The latter project brought the Jews' grief over their loss. Blacks are promiscuity deserve mention. him into contact with a WW2 fighting entitled to feel commensurately more ag­ Plentiful progeny, which nowadays Brigadier whose doctor daughter he mar­ grieved. A less innocuous reading is that, marks out the orthodox, was in those pre- ried. They have three children. The seeing the number of Holocaust martyrs birth control days a feature of practically youngest daughter is, like her mother, an dwarfed by the victims of slavery, what all Jewish as well as non-Jewish families accomplished horsewoman; on many Sun­ on earth are the Jews bleating about? (although gentiles probably had a higher days our profilee hitches a horsebox I would not ascribe the latter malevo­ rate of infant mortality for the aforemen­ trailer to his car and drives to a nearby lent view to the playwright - but I do tioned reasons). horseshow. charge him with plucking mindnumbing Today, despite fifty years of post-war Another daughter is a journalist. The figures out of thin air and drawing mean­ prosperity, demographically we are still son teaches German exile literature at a ingless comparisons in his quest for several million below our pre-Holocaust Californian campus. His choice of subject dramatic effect. total. The indications, alas, are that world shows that the past still exerts a pull on The Holocaust was compressed into Jewry will be hard put to maintain even the British-born Feuchtwangers. As for three and a half years - mid-1941 to the current figure - but that's another Edgar, he is a rich repository of family winter 1944 - while White (as distinct less-than-edifying story.