Volume LII No. 8 August 1997 £3 (to non-members) Don't miss... Dr Wiener's monument /s /t possible to be equidistant from good and evil? Anthony Grenville p.4 New Holocaust Research Project Culpable neutrality Ronald Channing p 13 hat is the moral worth of a neutrality out its entire being like a stick of seaside rock. Be­ based on equidistance from the combat­ sides, it requires less effort of the imagination to W ants in a struggle of good versus evil? envisage the Mosleys making Britain judenrein than (Para)normal For an answer to this question one need look no to see Jessica Mitford as a Madame Ceausescu clone. life further than Switzerland which, thanks to the In Nazi-occupied Britain deportations would have pressure of world opinion, is daily made more aware been the task of the SS, dubbed the 'black corps' on aranormal - of how reprehensible its wartime conduct had been. account of their fear-inspiring uniforms. Das dictionary But for all the tumbling of skeletons out of the Schtvarze Korps was the organ of the SS and like definition P cupboards of the wartime neutrals - the Swiss, the Der Stiirmer, reached millions of readers via display 'beyond normal Swedes, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the Vatican cases up and down the country. explanation' - is - indifference to moral issues has by no means van­ the appropriate term Unlike Der Stiirmer's Julius Streicher, who was ished from the contemporary world. for describing hanged at Nuremberg, Schivarze Korps editor A case in point is the high esteem in which Ernst the fact (see p. 16) Giinther d'Alquen now lives in comfortable retire­ that the Allianz Jiinger is held on both sides of the Rhine. Jiinger ment in the Bundesrepublik. His readiness to supply Versicherungs- had, after distinguished service in the Great War, academic researchers with information shows gesellschaft insured written the martial epic In Storms of Steel which Alquen's ability to distance himself from his pre- the contents of Nazi abounds in observations like 'The lust of blood 1945 incarnation when his typewriter was a lethal concentration camps. lowers over war like a red sail above a black galley; weapon on a par with Einsatzkommando rifles. It was already in its boundless ardour it is akin only to love'. In the current issue of History Today Prof William known that In Weimar days this coldblooded aesthete of Combs of Western Illinois University shows his own instruments of Armageddon had kept an equal distance from equidistant approach to moral absolutes and to torture and gas unheroic democracy and plebeian Nazism. World d'Alquen's amour propre: he commends the ex- chamber installations War Two saw him as a Wehrmacht officer in Paris operative in Goebbels' lie factory for his used in the selfsame providing a cultural veneer for the occupation by 'graciousness' in agreeing to be interviewed for an camps bore contacts with French literati. article. Thus docs culpable neutrality live on D manufacturers' Nonetheless, earlier this year Chancellor Kohl and names and logos. President Chirac concluded a Franco-German sum­ One can only mit with a pilgrimage of homage to the rural retreat conclude that to of the centenarian Jiinger - a less than happy respectable German augury for the spirit of the new Europe. society it seemed the In Britain the notion of equidistance was cited by most natural thing Peregrine Worsthorne in one of his last pieces before in the world to retiring from the Daily Telegraph. Apropos of a integrate Nazi memorial service for the late Jessica Mitford, barbarism into its Worsthorne asked rhetorically if the same number of daily business mourners would have turned out for the Communist routine. The malady Jessica's Fascist sister Diana, Lady Mosley. Answer­ lingered on. In the ing his own question in the negative, he chided the 1950s apartments mourners for their failure to remain equidistant whose Jewish from the twin evils of Communism and Fascism. occupants had been Worsthorne's polemic rested on crude over-sim­ deported were plification; the fact is that although both isms shed popularly referred to oceans of blood. Communism was the - admittedly by the cryptic term bastard - offspring of the humanist Enlightenment, Judenivohnimgen D whereas Fascism had inhumanity stamped through­ The newly unveiled Innsbruck memorial. (See page 3) AJR INFORMATION AUGUST 1997 period of intense frustration. Although Profile some Special Force colleagues - see Walter Freud's article in AJR Infor­ mation, June 1994 - were being dropped The epic of behind enemy lines, his own turn hadn't come when the Austrian front collapsed. indefatigable Eric After VE Day he was posted back to ric Sanders was born Ignaz Schwarz Blighty, where he acted as interpreter and into a Jewish family eking out a editor of the camp newspaper at a POW living from a grocer's shop on a camp. Finally, still in uniform, he spent a E year in Vienna as a translator attached to Viennese council estate. At Realschule his classmates called him 'Nazi' - a the British-Austrian Legal Unit. diminutive of Ignaz - while routinely Demobbed, he went to an Emergency beating him up as a Jewboy; eventually he Teachers' Training College (where he met learnt to hit back. He compensated for his wife). Over the years he rose through indifferent progress at school by honing the ranks of the profession to become his rudimentary pianistic skills, fondly First Master at a large Comprehensive envisaging a future in Tin Pan Alley. He school. He retired at the age of sixty-one. also spent much time at the Maccabi club Proud of the fitness acquired in the army, Eric Sanders house, while his younger brother joined even as a retiree he would go back to his Betar. the incessantly bombed London Docks. last school for weekly football games with After the Anschluss the latter escaped Their subsequent chores comprised some­ ex-colleagues half his age. Hubris pro­ - illegally - to Palestine; the rest of the what less dangerous manual labour: tree voked nemesis: a bare year into his family came to England. Here Eric felling, road building and the construction retirement a footballing accident robbed worked first as a messenger boy at of nissen huts on army camps. him of the sight in his left eye. Bloomsbury House, then as a farm lab­ Halfway through the war Eric volun­ However, this impairment has not ourer. Early in 1940 he joined the Pioneer teered for the Austrian special unit cramped Eric's style. Busy both in poli­ Corps, and within months found himself engendered by the SOE in pursuance of tics and the arts, he has been short-listed in France. After the German break­ Churchill's directive 'Set Europe for a Euro MP candidacy, has composed a through his company was the last to be Ablaze'. He underwent Commando-style school musical, translated some of evacuated from St. Malo. training, received instruction as a radio Grillparzer's plays, written war memoirs Back in England news of his father's operator and was flown to Italy. (one for this journal), and read short internment awaited him. More dramati­ By coincidence his brother, a volunteer stories on LBC radio. He has even cally, he and his unit had to dig trenches in the Jewish Brigade, was also in Italy. scripted a part-Arabic TV documentary for troops preparing to repel the appar­ The two arranged to meet - but, en about President Nasser which awaits ently imminent invasion. Only weeks route to the meeting place, the brother transmission. Rising 78, he's looking for later, they were billeted in an East End died in a car crash. fresh challenges. school, assigned to clearing debris from For Eric this trauma was followed by a DRG casional letters continued during my serv­ ages. After a long conversation we ex­ Closing a 50-year gap ice in the Royal Navy, and then in 1947 I changed addresses. I have already written ne day early in the war - I was was demobbed and an airmail letter ar­ that letter I owed her. about 12 at the time - my father rived informing me that my friend had It just shows that it never does to give Owas walking home from work emigrated to North America. Fate then up on tracing past friends and I am, ot and came across two young girls in the played a nasty trick: her return address, course, extremely indebted for the help 1 company of two anxious-looking ladies. on the flap of the envelope, was acciden­ received from the kind persons I con­ Sensing that they had a problem, he tally destroyed and I could not write a tacted in the Jewish community and the enquired if he could be of help. Told that return letter. This had been on my mind relative in London who saw my advert the ladies had been allocating accommod­ for many years, particularly lately and 1 and sent it on to Canada. ation to young evacuees and were left decided to try and find her. I started by with the girls, who being cousins would ringing the synagogue at Northampton Wellingborough, Northants O Peter Bland not be split, he invited them home, where where a helpful gentleman suggested sev­ he consulted my mother. As a result, our eral addresses, including that of AJR already large family grew by two Information. 1 tried this first and at the AJR MEALS ON WHEELS additional girls. After a year or more they Editor's suggestion put an advertisement eventually returned to London. in Missing Persons. Hearing nothing for If you live In North or North West The older of the two girls was a refugee several weeks, I thought my efforts London and wish to take advantage of from Germany of about my age who oc­ wasted.