Midnight in Moscow

ITZIK FEFFER (l) and SHLOMO MIKHOELS(r) with ALBERT EINSTEIN, who wrote preface to Black Book on Nazi crimes. Their trip to West aimed to mobilise support for Soviet war effort, but Kremlin would later accuse them of conspiring with US millionaires.

On August 12, 1952, 13 members of the Jewish People’s Anti-Fascist    Committee were executed in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison. Among them were the poets Itsik Feffer, Leib Kvitko and Peretz Markish, the writers David Bergelson and Shmuel Halkin; Solomon Lozovsky, a former general secretary of the Red Trade Union International and government minister, and Benjamin Zuskin, a leading actor at the Moscoll State Jewish Theatre.

The theatre’s director, and chair of the Jewish People’s Committee, Shlomo Mikhoels, had been murdered on January l3, 1948, in a hit and run accident outside Minsk believed to have been arranged by the secret police.

The Jewish People’s Anti-Fascist Committee was launched with official backing in April 1942 to win worldwide Jewish support for the Soviet war effort.

Stalin approved this turn although he had signed the death warrant for the two men who first proposed enlisting Jewish energies against the Nazis -Victor Alter and Henryk Ehrlich, leaders of the Jewish Workers’ Bund from Poland. Alter and Erlich had defended left wing opponents of Stalinism. But worse, from the Kremlin’s point of view, they were ‘premature anti-fascists’, having proposed anti-Nazi resistance while the Soviet government was loyally maintaining its pact with Hitler.

In 1943, Shlomo Mikhoels and Itsik Feffer toured the United States, Mexico, Canada and Britain, addressing enthusiastic Jewish audiences, Feffer in his full uniform as colonel of the Red Army.  They raised millions of dollars for the Soviet war effort, as well as fervent political support. The Jewish People’s Committee had its own Yiddish newspaper, Eynikayt (Unity). Bergelson wrote regularly for it, and for the NewYork Morgn Frayhayt. Soviet Yiddish writers and poets were published in English too.

Jewish people around the world rejoiced at Soviet military triumphs. The Red Army liberated Auschwitz,’ they told each other. The Jewish People’s Committee persuaded Soviet authorities to provide a list of decorated Soviet Jewish war heroes, both to refute antisemitic jibes and to raise Jewish morale. 

When Foreign Minister Gromyko, referring to Jewish suffering in Europe, gave the Soviet Union’s blessing to Zionist aspirations and the UN’s November 1947 Palestine partition resolution, the rejoicing seemed complete. The USSR was the first power to recognise the new State of Israel in 1948, and helped it with arms.

Yet even during World War II, harsh winds were forming that would blow asunder Jewish hopes in the Soviet Union. From `socialism in one country’, official ideology moved on to waging the `Great PatrioticWar’. Although surviving purged Red Army officers were released to lead their units in battle, old Czarist heroes and generals came back into favour in patriotic literature.


Historians rediscovered that Czarist Russia’s expansion and conquest of subject peoples was ’progressive’. Even while Red Army troops were chasing German invaders out, special detachments were sent to deport peoples like the Crimean Tartars and the Chechens, accused of being ‘collaborators’, and living in the wrong place. 

Call it collective punishment, or 'ethnic cleansing’, it set a brutal precedent, even if the world was too busy celebrating the defeat of Hitler’s fascism to notice its sinister reflections.

In 1946, the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee launched a drive against writers who did not conform. Beginning under party secretary A A Zhdanov, this became a drive against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ accused of grovelling to western culture and belittling Russian achievements.

In 1949 Pravda reported a speech byAnatoly Sofronov of the Writers’ Union, denouncing an anti-patriotic group of theatre critics’, rabid ill-intentioned cosmopolitans, people without kith and kin, who had been undermining the foundations of culture for a long time’ by criticising patriotic plays. In contrast to criminal trial reports where papers always gave the real names’ of the accused, Jev\sh novelist Ilya Ehrenburg was told to make his characters’ names more Russian.

It became obligatory to claim that Russians had made all important scientific discoveries and inventions, and that foreign’ science was inferior. Such ignorant boasting detracted from genuine Soviet achievements, rendered the propaganda ridiculous and obstructed vital work in science and medicine. But it was a golden opportunity for jealous mediocrities and humbugs to rise up, and denounce their colleagues and critics as unpatriotic’.What right had cosmopolitans without kith and kin’ to hold influential positions, barring the way to genuine Russians?


A witch-hunt began, parallel to the anti-Communist witch-hunts in the United States, where coincidentally many of those victimised for alleged un-American activities’ came from the same ethnic background as Russia’s 'rootless cosmopolitans’. Russia’s witch-hunt spread through colleges and factories, army bases and hospitals. People were accused of plots, dismissed from posts, and arrested. Jewish choirs and drama groups were disbanded. Books vanished from shops and library shelves as their writers disappeared from their homes.

In the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan, a vast library of Yiddish works was destroyed. The plates for a Black Book on Nazi atrocities were smashed. The Jewish People’s Committee had published an English edition during the war, but evidently it was for export only.

Unlike blacklisted Americans, many of Stalin’s victims did not live to tell their tale. The Jewish People’s Anti-Fascist Committee was disbanded in November 1948, as were other wartime bodies set up to win support in the West. Not satisfied with liquidating the Jewish Committee, Stalin had 15 of its members arrested, taken to the Lubyanka punishment cells and tortured to make them sign confessions. One, hospital director Boris Shimeliovich, refused to confess to anything despite being given 100 lashes every day for a month.

Yet rather than proceed to a show trial, as they had done with Bolshevik oppositionists and Red Army officers in the 1930’s, the Stalinist authorities took four years trying to break the resistance of the Jewish prisoners before a tribunal behind closed doors.

Everything was stood on its head. Jewish internationalism, once praised by Lenin, and a proven asset to the communist cause, was now ' rootless cosmopolitanism’, a deadly enemy. Mikhoels and Feffer’s tour in the West on the Soviet Union’s behalf was portrayed as a trip to conspire with American millionaires. By extolling the mighty Soviet war effort they had betrayed state secrets! A proposal to settle Jewish Holocaust sulvivors and displaced persons in the Crimea was a Jewish nationalist plot to detach the region from the Soviet Union - the same Soviet Union whose representatives had so eloquently supported Zionist claims to Palestine!

My nationalist tendencies came out in the following ways,’ Feffer told the tribunal: I said that I love my people. Is there anyone who doesn’t love his people? I wanted my people to have what all others had. And when I saw that everything was being closed dowll, everything being eliminated, this pained me and made me rise against the Soviet power. This was what motivated my interest in the Crimea and Birobidzhan.’ He reminded the judges that US President Roosevelt had been to the Crimea (for the Yalta talks) but he did not ask for Mikhoels and Feffer to brief him on the strategic peninsula!

PAUL ROBESON in 1942. When he went to Moscow in 1949 he asked after his Jewish friends. But back home as Cold War threatened to turn hot, Robeson kept quiet about what he had learned.
One American who did ask after his friends Mikhoels and Feffer was black singer and Communist Paul Robeson. When he arrived in Moscow in 1949. Mikhoels was already dead, but Feffer was hastily fattened up, scrubbed, and brought from jail to the singer’s hotel room. Signalling to Robeson that the room was bugged, Feffer managed to convey that Mikhoels had been killed and that he was facing death too.

At his concert, Paul Robeson spoke about his Jewish friends, before singing the Yiddish Partisan Song, Zog nit keynmol az du geytstdem letsten veg. . . .’ Never say that that you are walking your last road. The applause was huge. But on the reissued recording of the concert you call still hear the blip where Soviet censors cut out his little speech about Miklloels and Feffer. Back in the United States, Robeson censored himself, confiding only to his son what he’d been told, and insisting to reporters that he had seen no sign of antisemitism or racism in the Soviet Union. Maybe Robeson’s loyal Stalinism had been disturbed, but he was afraid to say anything that could be used by US warmongers or further endanger his friends.

Maybe if the US government had not taken away his passport. . . As it was, Robeson’s silence did not help his friends.
Paul Robeson's Moscow concert

A book out last year, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom edited by Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir Naumov, evokes the flavour of the hidden trial. Under interrogation one woman had stated that under Lozovsky the [Soviet information bureau} had been turned into a s\lagogue`. But during the trial, prisoners retracted or altered confessions. Lozovsky said his judges knew how confessions were obtained. "You took note of the fact that all of the accused testify using one and the same phrasing. So this means tilat someone conspired to come up with this language. Who? Those under arrest? I don’t think so. That means that it was the investigators who conspired."

He compared General Alexander Cheptsov, who presided over the tribunal, to a Spanish inquisitor. In fact, at the end of the trial Cheptsov asked party leaders to reopen the investigation. Party
Secretary Georgy Malenkov was indignant. "Do you want us to kneel before these criminals?’ he demanded. " Carry out the Politburo’s resolution!’ As one of the five-man defence council which oversaw the Soviet war effort inWorldWar II, Malenkov knew the contribution made by the Jewish People’s Committee. His daughter had married Lozovsky’s grandson, Vladimir Shamberg, and the two men were close. But days before Lozovsky’s arrest, Malenkov rushed through his daughter’s divorce, saying he did not want `a relative of an enemy of the people’ in his house.

After Stalin’s death, Malenkov became party leader, then Prime Minister until was elbowed aside by Khruschev. In 1957, accused of leading an anti-party group’, he was sent off to manage a power station in Kazakhstan - a gentler end to that to which he’d helped consign Lozovsky

Vladimir Shamberg never contacted his ex-father-in-law again, but says of his behaviour: As a human being I cannot approve it, but as a political scientist I understand what he had to do.’

Of the 15 members of the Jewish People’s Committee who had been tried, one died in prison. Another, Latvian-born medical scientist Lina Stern, who had gone to work in the Soviet Union in 1926, was exiled to Kazakhstan. The remainder were executed.

Later that year, Stalin got his show trials in Prague, where former Czech Communist Party general secretary, Rudolf Slansky, and 13 longstanding party members (including three genti1es for good measure) went on trial accused of Zionism, Trotskyism, Titoism. . . All confessed their "guilt". A11 were executed and three sentenced to life imprisonment.

Then on l3th January 1953, the Soviet news agency, TASS announced the arrest of a group of 'killer doctors’, accused of plotting to murder public figures. Referring to 'Trotskyite conspiracies’ including the death of Gorki, it claimed the dead Shlomo Mikhoels had orchestrated a huge terror plot in league with a Zionist espionage agency, 'the Joint’ (the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee).

All over the Soviet Union, Jews feared pogroms or the knock on the door from the KGB arranging their 'protective' arrest and deportation to Siberia. But then, on l5th March 1953, came the news that Stalin was dead. The charges against the doctors ~were dropped. The Jewish People’s Anti-Fascist Committee was soon to be admitted innocent too. Khrushchev acknowledged publicly in 1955 that during the war the Committee was 'indispensible to the interests of the Soviet state, our policies and our Communist Party,’ In his 1956 'secret speech’ he attacked Stalin’s persecution of nationalities. It was too late to save the murdered Jewish intellectuals or the victims of the show trials. Nor could references to Stalin’s 'personality cult’ satisfy Jewish people around the world, shocked and disillusioned with the kind of 'socialism’ that could permit such a monstrosity.

A legendary sage, the Baal Shem Tov, said remembrance was the first step to redemption. Without an honest reckoning with the past, we cannot hope to restore faith in a socialist future.

 (first published in Jewish Socialist no.46, Spring 2002)

Opening the Way for Operation Torch

COLETTE ABOULKER decorated with Croix de Guerre
 

ON November 8 1942,  Allied forces invaded North Africa in  Operation Torch. Mongomery's 8th army had defeated Rommel's Afrika Corps at El Alamein and begun driving Axis forces back from the borders of Egypt. Landing in the west, at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers, the Allies would commence a pincer movement,  driving Rommel out through Tunisia, and preparing to invade southern Europe.

The United States hoped the Vichy French, bitterly anti-British since their fleet was sunk at Mers el Kebir, might be won over if Torch was presented as an American operation. The overall commander was General Eisenhower. Secret approaches had been made to senior French commanders.

In Algiers, not everyone relied on these. On the eve of the Allied landings, less than 400 poorly-armed rebels set out to seize strategic buildings, throttle Vichy communications, and open the city to the invaders.  More than half the insurgents  were Algerian Jews. 

Jews had lived in the Maghreb countries of north-west Africa since antiquity. The 14th century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun wrote of mountain Berber tribes that adhered to Judaism.  Later came refugees from Spain,  and merchants from Italy, who  prospered under Ottoman rule.

  The French invasion in 1830 brought destruction and disease to Algeria. The indigenous population declined by nearly a third, but 50,000 Europeans emigrated to Algeria. Settlers obtained land confiscated by the French army. Modern agricultural technique increased  its productivity. But this did not benefit uprooted felaheen.

For Algerian Jews a major change took place after French Justice Minister Adolphe Cremieux  introduced a decree on October 24, 1870
The Israelites native to the departments of Algeria are declared French citizens; consequently, their real status and their personal status shall be, dating from the promulgation of the present decree, regulated by French law, with all rights acquired until this day inviolable.

The Jews of Algeria accepted becoming French as a way to emancipation and progress. But they were by no means embraced by the settlers. Big land owners wanted cheap labour, and opposed anything which raised the aspirations of the natives, Moslem or Jew.  Europeans lower down the scale, a mixture of Italians and Maltese as well as French, cemented their identity with racism, jealously guarding their status with imported hatred against the Jew.

In 1881, on the eve of elections, Europeans attacked the Jewish quarters at Tlemcen.  Jews fought back with sticks and stones. In 1896, antisemites gained control of the city council at Constantine, and sacked Jewish employees. Jewish sick were denied admission to the hospital, and children put out of schools. The explanation was that "The young Israelites bring to school all sorts of contagious diseases and constitute a danger to classmates. "

 In January 1897 rioters attacked Jewish premises in Algiers, killing two men and severely injuring over 100 people. In May there were anti-Jewish pogroms in Oran. The police did little to intervene. In January 1898,  the Dreyfus Affaire divided France, and fuelled antisemitic riots in Algiers. In May that year,  Edouard Drumont, author of Le France Juive, was one of four antisemitic deputies  elected in Algeria.

In the First World War, at least 2,000 Algerian Jews died for France on various fronts. The Algerian Jews organised both religious and secular institutions. A social survey in 1931 found them in varied occupations, from day labourers (1,172) and ordinary workers (18,032) through skilled trades and salaried commercial employees to the professions, and 7,987 employers.

Antagonism began to come from more than one direction. In Constantine on August 5, 1934, a rumour  that Jews had defiled a mosque led thousands of Muslims to attack Jews. The police did nothing to stop them.  Some 25 Jews were killed in this outburst. Besides worsening social conditions, and jealousy of Jews' status, external influences were at work. Nazi propaganda was reaching the Maghreb as well as the Middle East.

The French press presented the Constantine pogrom as an expression of centuries-old hatred between Muslims and Jews. Algerian Jews denied this. Maurice Violette a governor of Algeria told the French senate in 1935  "If there is antisemitism in Algeria, you can be sure that it is the Europeans who activate it".

In the Autumn of 1938 Jacques Doriot, a former Communist turned fascist, toured Algeria and convened a congress of his Parti Populaire Francaise (PPF).  "We have launched the mot d'ordre of abrogation of the Cremieux decree because the mass of Jews are making a bloc with the parties of the Left, imperilling the sovereignty of the colonial French,  the men of Empire".  Doriot solicited funds and weapons from fascist Italy.

From The Fall to Resistance   
 
Following France's surrender on June 22, 1940, its northern half fell under Nazi occupation. Marshall Petain's government at Vichy retained control of the south and overseas territories, including the colony of Algeria and protectorates in Morocco and Tunis. Petain's government adopted the Statut des Juifs in October 1940, aimed at removing Jews from public life and employment.  On October 7, 1940 the Cremieux Decree was abolished.  In August 1941, Xavier Vallat, a member of Action Francaise,  appointed  head of the Commissariat-General for Jewish Questions, arrived in Algiers. A delegation of wounded and decorated Jewish ex-servicemen appealed to him as an old soldier to mitigate the antisemitic policies. To no avail.

On September 15, 1941 it was announced that anti-Jewish legislation would be applied as strictly in North Africa as in metropolitan France.  This was hard to enforce in Morocco and Tunisia, which had fewer colonists and were only protectorates.  Morocco's King Mohammed V announced that the Jews of Morocco were his subjects and not subject to French law.

Vichy's man in North Africa, General Weygand, signed an order excluding Jewish pupils from schools. Some teachers taught Jewish pupils at home. There was even an underground university running courses until the authorities clamped down on it. Some Jewish pupils were accepted at Muslim schools.

Whatever resentment there was towards Jews among the Muslim population,  politically educated Arabs were not impressed by the French measures. Ferhat Abbas, who had once hoped Muslims could obtain equality as French citizens, took  abolition of the Cremieux Decree as confirming that Algerians must seek their own freedom, and not trust the French.

"That which you do to the Jews of Algeria, so perfectly assimilated to French civilisation, is of your own intitative and not that of the enemy who never sought the abrogation of the Cremieux decree. Your racism goes in all directions. Today it is exercised against the Jews. It is exercised every day against the Arabs"


According to Jose Aboulker, a leader of Jewish resistance:
"They didn’t take part in the war. It wasn’t their war. With the Jews, they were perfectly all right. Not only did they refuse to participate in the anti-Jewish abuse the Germans and the Vichy government tried to push them to do, but, while the colonists were fighting over the Jewish possessions, they even resisted the temptation to buy them at low price and make huge profits. The instructions were given in the mosques: the Jews are going through hard times, they are our brothers."

The French authorities blamed  Arab disaffection on Jewish incitement.    In fact, apart from a few communists, and individuals prepared to identify with Arab nationalism, the majority of Jews in Algeria remained French patriots, despite everything they had suffered. But that did not mean they would not fight back.

In October 1940 a group of young Jews who had been demobilised from the French forces acquired a 4.5 ton cutter, intending to sail it to Gibraltar, and enlist with the Free French. Their plan was discovered and the French admiralty seized their boat.  Dr. Raphael Aboulker, a surgeon and son of a leading Jewish family, persuaded them they would be needed in Algeria. This group  would all play their part in the November 8 1942 rising.

Raphael and Maurice Aboulker were members of a Jewish aid committee formed to help those ousted from their jobs or professions. The committee organised its own  schools and services. A former boxer called Geo Gras provided premises for a gymnasium. A self-defence organisation was  set up there, enlisting about 250 Jewish youth. From training as defence squads they turned to modest resistance. "V" for victory signs appeared on walls overnight, followed by anti-Vichy posters. News received by radio from London was transcribed into clandestine leaflets. There were acts of sabotage on the docks.

In Oran, Roger Carcassonne, in trouble in his army unit for distributing De Gaulle's June 18 1940 call for Resistance, was demobbed on August 28. He  set about heading for England via Gibraltar together with his brother Pierre. But the Vichy police and navy had the coast well guarded. So like the young men in Algiers, the brothers turned to forming an underground group. In March 1941, a friend introduced Carcassonne to Henri d'Astier de la Vigerie, a military intelligence officer and former Royalist who had become anti-Nazi and wanted to organise resistance. Then in August, in Algiers, Roger Carcassonne met his cousin, 20 year old medical student Jose Aboulker. They agreed to keep in touch, and to turn from propaganda to preparing armed struggle. 

Carcassonne, diverted funds from his company to the resistance. Jose Aboulker made contact with Roger Maria of  the underground Communist Party of Algeria. Many of its members were in Saharan concentration camps. The party secretary, Kadour Belkaim, had died in a dungeon in July 1940.    Though worried at first that young Aboulker's plan might prove an adventure, the Party promised 60 combattants.

Bernard Karsenty , born in 1920 in Oran, was a soldier in Marseilles when France surrendered. Heeding De Gaulle's appeal in June 1940,  he returned to Algeria in November 1941, hoping to reach Gibraltar from there. Instead he joined the resistance network formed by Roger Carcassonne and José Aboulker.

Uncle Sam Enters the War

The United States, not yet at war when France fell, recognised the Vichy regime as the legitimate government of France. When the Free French navy seized the islands of St.Pierre and Miquelon, off Newfoundland, from Vichy control, on December 24, 1941, the US State Department wanted Canada to restore the Vichyites.  There was a public outcry, and the US backed off. But it still would not trust De Gaulle.

The US consul general in Algiers, Robert Murphy negotiated with the antisemitic governor Weygand, agreeing that United States goods could be shipped  to the Vichy French in Algeria, through the British naval blockade. Murphy complained that the British press was "waging a campaign" against US relations with (Vichy) France.

After the United States entered the war, and accepted British plans to invade north-west Africa, Murphy was instructed to  meet some different Frenchmen. Lieutenant Colonel Germain Jousse was gathering intelligence, and arms, to assist an Allied invasion. His  Committee of Five formed in 1941 to support resistance, included Astier de la Vigery, who was in touch with the Jewish resisters.

On the night of October 22, 1942 the conspirators met at a farmhouse west of Cherchell, on the coast. Bernard Karsenty was responsible for security. They were joined by General Charles Mast, commander of the garrison in Algiers.  Eisenhower's deputy, General Mark Clark, came ashore by kayak from the British submarine Seraph, bringing with him a US carbine that was handed to Bernard Kansenty, with promises of more weapons to come. After this, resisters went down to the beach on several nights, but the supplies never arrived.

Rising up on Saturday Night 

Algiers resisters had been meeting at a store owned by the Calvet brothers. It stood on a flatiron corner between two streets, so people could enter by one entrance and leave by another, confusing surveillence. Guy Calvet-Cohen, a former police officer, was a leading member of their conspiracy.

However the Aboulker family home at 26 rue Michelet was to be the headquarters for the rising on the night of November 7-8. An American technician had installed a radio transmitter. As the volunteers arrived, often needing a rest and a bite to eat before they were briefed, Colette Aboulker, the daughter of the house, her room lined with maps, was like a 'guardian angel' .

The plan was for 800 volunteers to set off in groups to seize strategic buildings, neutralise port defences, and paralyse communications. They would be facing altogether 11,000 Vichy troops plus 2,000 members of the Service de L'Ordre Legionaire militia, and several hundred of Doriot's PPF fascists.

Colonel Jousse had provided VP (civil militia) armbands with which the rebels hoped to confuse the opposition. Jose Aboulker had obtained blank order forms signed by General Mast, on which he typed letters authorising them to take over buildings.  Some old buses would take the rebels to action.

 By zero hour fewer than 600 volunteers had showed up. Many melted away as they realised neither the numbers nor the promised weapons had arrived. In the end about 377 rebels went into action, including  200 Jewish volunteers. Among others who distinguished themselves that night were a detachment of pupils from the Lycee Ben Haknoun, led by a cadet called Pauphilet.

Despite setbacks the operation proceded largely according to plan. Paul Ruff and fifteen men took over the central telephone exchange. Maurice Hayom, a young lawyer, led the group which took the Palais d'Ete, seat of the governor general. Jose Aboulker, with his 20 men, took over the Central Police station.

GUY PILLAFORT
By 3am on Sunday morning Algiers was lagely in the hands of the insurgents. Outside the head post office a Vichy unit under white flag approached Lieutenant Jean Dreyfus, and argued who should surrender to whom. As Dreyfus returned to his side, a Vichy sniper shot him in the back. The man responsible was decorated  with the croix de guerre. At the central police station, Guy Pillafort, a Free French captain who was with Jose Aboulker's group was gunned down from a  passing car by a Vichy colonel.

The Allied forces were delayed.  General Mast had promised his forces would not fight back, but his command did not extend to Oran, or to the navy. Two British destroyers trying to enter Algiers harbour with US rangers came under heavy fire.  Along the coast several US units had landed on the wrong beaches. Colonel Jousse and General Mast met the US 34th Infantry Divsion, urging them to hasten into the city before Vichy forces regained control.

General Henri Giraud was picked up from Toulon by the British submarine HMS Seraph, disguised as a US vessel, and taken to Gibraltar to meet General Eisenhower, who wanted him to assume command of French forces in Algeria.  Giraud stalled, waiting to see what happened. By the time he flew  into Algiers on November 9,  someone else was in charge.

The Admiral and the Duke of Windsor's Friend

Students from the Ben Aknoun lycee had surrounded the Villa des Olives and captured General Alphonse Juin, commander in chief of French forces in north Africa. With him was Admiral Francois Darlan, the number two in the Vichy regime, who was in Algiers to visit his son in hospital.

Robert Murphy brought a message from President Roosevelt inviting General Juin to order surender and come over to the Allies. Juin said they should give this to Darlan. Darlan asked permission to send a message to Marshall Petain, care of Admiral Leclerc. In it he ordered Vichy forces to resist, and to alert the Germans.  Darlan's message was intercepted by the resistance, but Murphy gave him another go. Thus Vichy naval forces received the order to attack US commandos landing in the harbour. Vichy gendarmery recaptured the Villa, freeing Juin and Darlan. It was another two days before Darlan was persuaded to negotiate a surrender, one which let him become governor of Algieria.

Darlan was not the only prize visitor taken that night.  Millionaire industrialist Charles Bedaux, who had introduced the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to Hitler, was in Algiers to supervise construction of a trans-Saharan pipeline for the Germans. Having capured Bedaux, Guy Calvet had all his business papers collected, and photographed. The documents disappeared. US agents who came to take Bedaux, an American citizen, back to the United States admitted they had the originals but insisted Calvet also hand over his copies. Bedaux committed suicide in prison in Miami, Florida, while awaiting a grand jury investigation.

Plus ca change,....

Algeria had changed hands, but anti-Jewish laws remained in place.  On November 15, Giraud ordered conscription of Jewish youth. but only to labour battalions, so they could not bear arms. Jewish children remained forbidden to attend schools, and professionals not alowed to practice. Over 1,000 Jews were in camps, along with Spanish republicans, Algerian nationalists, International Brigaders and communists.

At Hadjerat M'Gull there were 170 prisoners who had suffered forced labour, hunger, disease, torture and murder.  Two of the nine prisoners killed there were Jews, one of them a young refugee from Germany.  His parents, who were in London, committed suicide.

At Djelfa, on an empty plateau 1,100 meters above sea level, under a blazing sun by day and freezing at night, were 4,000 internees, mostly former International Brigaders. Living in tents until huts could be built, most slept in their work clothes because they had nothing else to wear. Insects swarmed around the open latrines, and because of the lack of hygene prisoners had chronic diarrhoea. Many had ulcers on their arms and legs. To make up their lack of food, the prisoners caught rats, but they were punished if caught lighting a fire for heat or cooking. Commandant Caboche ordered machine guns trained on the road after November 8, to hold up American liberators. He needn't have worried.

They did not come.

On the afternoon of December 24, 1942, 20-year old Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle entered Darlan's headquarters in Algiers and shot the Admiral dead. The young man was executed by firing squad on December 26. General Giraud, who took over Darlan's position as Commissioner,  had resistance members, including Jose Aboulker and his father, rounded up, and thrown into the Saharan camps.

Arthur Roseborough, the head of the OSS desk in Algiers, went to see Robert Murphy, begging him to help get them released. "American honour is at stake".
"Art old fellow," Murphy replied, " if you have nothing better to do in Africa than to worry about those Jews and Communists who helped us, why don't you just go home?" 

(Donald Downes, The Scarlet Thread.  Downes was an American journalist working with the OSS in North Africa).

Giraud claimed the "conspirators" had planned to assassinate Robert Murphy too. Fortunately, Colette Aboulker had escaped, and managed to contact  Murphy, who did nothing, but she also spoke to  British journalists in Algiers.  Churchill had already written privately to Roosevelt on December 9, voicing disquiet that fascist organisations remained active in Algeria while Allied sympathisers were imprisoned.

Prisoners in the Sahara camps begged to be freed to join Allied forces. In March 1943 a Red Cross officer came to Djerba, and later US Quakers brought used clothing, rice, sugar, and condensed milk. In April 1943 a British officer, Major Brister was able to get internees released for the Pioneer Corps, among them 65 Jewish internees.  Eventually, as a result of international concern and the replacement of Giraud's regime by De Gaulle's Free French, steps were taken to close the camps, and release the prisoners, and the anti-Jewish measures were gradually phased out.

Was it worth it?

 Unlike fellow-Jews who rose up six months later in Warsaw, those who rose in Algiers were not choosing a martyr's death over extermination. They fought alongside non-Jewish allies in the name of France, and freedom. But by helping the Allies,  they stopped the Nazi genocide spreading, and helped bring its end nearer.

At the Nazis' Wannsee conference in January 1942, North Africa was not directly mentioned. But the figure of 700,000 Jews to be deported from "France, unoccupied territory" indicates that the Jews of the Maghreb were to be included. Theodore Dannecker, head of the Gestapo's anti-Jewish section in Paris, planned to deport the Algerian Jews to Auschwitz, but was thwarted by shortage of transport.
               
In July 1942, a month after Rommel's tanks entered the Libyan port of Tobruk, and threatened Egypt, SS-Standartenführer Walter Rauff, inventor of the mobile gas chamber for killing Jews and partisans on the eastern front, arrived in north Africa  entrusted with a similar mission. 
 When the Nazis were forced back to Tunisia, Rauff's einsatzkommando concentrated its work there. Some 2,500 Tunisian Jews died in slave camps, mainly from typhoid, while the Nazis plundered the Jews of Djerba island and other communities. Had the Nazis not been driven back from the gates of the Middle East and the Maghreb they could have finished what they started.

JOSE ABOULKER
 
What happened to....?

Freed from captivity, Jose Aboulker went to London to join the Free French. In October 1943 he was despatched secretly into occupied France, to organise medical services for the Resistance.  Later, representing the Algerian Resistance in De Gaulle's Provisional Consultative Assembly, Jose Aboulker proposed changing the electoral law in Algeria to allow the election of Muslim deputies, who had never previously been admitted.

Thousands of Muslims fought in de Gaulle's forces and took part in the liberation of France. On May 8, 1945, as Europe celebrated victory over Hitler, Arabs who turned up with their own banners at demonstrations in Setif, Algeria, were fired on by French gendarmes. This led to riots, in which settlers were killed. French forces retaliated by killing thousands of people in the area. Back in France, Jose Aboulker, who joined the French Communist Party, tried to tell people what had happened.  He told the French National Assembly that Algerians wanted independence. Later, Abouker resumed his medical studies in Paris, going on to become a professor of neurosurgery.

Colette Aboulker, having worked in a military hospital in Algiers, was awarded  a Croix de Guerre for her wartime activities. She gained an international reputation in psychology and alternative medicine. Married to a scientist, and with two sons, one of them a professor at the Sorbonne, she died in 2003 in Jerusalem.

Robert D. Murphy held various diplomatic postings after the war, and was President Eisenhower's personal representative during the 1958 Lebanon Crisis.  After a stint at the State Department in 1959,  Murphy was an adviser to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. In 2006, he was featured on a United States postage stamp.

Walter Rauff the Nazi responsible for  killing 100,000 people, escaped justice after the war, and served various governments, including the Syrian secret police and, it is said, MI6 and Mossad. Working for Pinochet's secret police DINA, in Chile, Rauff died there peacefully in 1984.

In the 1950s and 1960s  the Jews of Algeria found themselves caught between French settler intransigeance and the Algerian independence struggle. The Front de Liberation National (FLN) urged Jews to throw in their lot with their fellow Algerians, but  indiscriminate terror attacks, and the adoption of Islam as part of national identity did not encourage confidence. Israeli agents coming to assist Jewish security may have had the opposite effect, particularly when some sided with the settlers' OAS. The great majority of Algerian Jews left the country, ending centuries of history, to try their chances in France or Israel.  Some fared better than others.  But the real loss was to Algeria.

(article previously published in Jewish Socialist  no.65, Winter 2012-2013)  

The Mutiny at Villefranche de Rouergue

"THEY FELL FAR FROM HOME" Memorial to Bosnians and Croats in Villefranche de Rouergue
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photo Mitras

VILLEFRANCHE de Rouergue is a small town in the Aveyron valley, in the south of France. In the Summer of 1943 it did not look as though much was going to happen there.

On 14 July the Resistance called demonstrations in Lyons, Grenoble, Marseilles and Montpellier.  Students in Villefranche held a procession to the war memorial and sang the Marseillaise as they passed by the military prison on the other side of the River Aveyron.

The police, torn between subservience to the Vichy regime and uncertainty about the     future, did not intervene. Some of the young people marching that day were later to distinguish themselves as Resistance fighters.

On 25 September, the local weekly newspaper Le Narrateur attacked Allied bombing of French towns; explained that German forces on the Eastern Front were 'regrouping to more defensible lines', and denied that Corsica had been abandoned to the Allies.

It briefly reported the arrest of some "terrorists" on 21 September for the sabotage of mines and electricity pylons in the region, and said cafes in Villefranche de Rouergue had been closed "because of events which had taken place".

These events, which the citizens of Villefranche knew about but the newspaper was not supposed to mention, had so shocked the Nazi occupation regime in fact that after brutally suppressing those involved it wanted the affair quickly forgotten.

The Nazis had suffered a revolt in their own armed forces. Not of Germans, it was true, but of soldiers from the Reich's Balkan empire.

Like any colonial power, Nazi Germany used a policy of 'divide and rule' among its subject peoples. In addition, long-term racial ideology had to contend with pressing military needs when it came to recruitment.

In 1943, Hitler ordered the SS Prinz Eugen Division, mainly ethnic Germans, to raise a new division in Croatia, which under its stooge Ustashe regime had been allowed to incorporate much of Bosnia. Himmler proposed recruiting Bosnian Muslims.

Some Muslim leaders had already approached the German government asking that Croat Ustashe operations on Bosnian soil be stopped, and offering to raise a Muslim force to protect the country. Besides Ustashe attacks, over 2,000 Muslims had been killed by Serb Chetnik forces in eastern Bosnia. Another 9,000 people, mainly old people, women and chidren were massacred in February 1943.


Once Berlin gave the go-ahead for a Muslim division, the Muslims' desire to lay hands on firearms and be trained to use them probably played as much part in recruitment as the visit of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseini, in April 1943, urging a Muslim-German alliance. (The Mufti had been one of the leaders of the 1936-39 Arab revolt in Palestine).

Muslim clergy helped recruitment. The l3th Handzar division as it would be called (after aTurkish dagger) was to have a young mufti attached to each unit for spiritual guidance.

Some 12,000 men were quickly enlisted, most of them more or less volunteers. But disillusionment soon set in. The officers were mostly ethnic Germans - no nonsense about equality. And while many Bosniacs might have hope they were getting a territorial home guard, the force was sent for training in Germany and France, and there were rumours it was being prepared for the Russian front.

Besides, other contenders were starting to attract young Muslims. The new star on the horizon was red. Already some had joined the partisans and seen action against the Axis forces. Could this revolt infect those serving with the enemy?

At the 13th Division training headquarters near Dresden, discontented soldiers gathered around 25-year old Ferid Dzanic from Bihac. Dzanic had studied railway engineering at Belgrade, been called up to the Yugoslav army in 1941, then joined the partisans in the Autumn of 1942, becoming political commissar of his battalion. Captured in an ambush in March 1943, and sent to a prison camp near Sarajevo, Djanic evidently persuaded his captors to release him, and perhaps his railway engineering skills helped, to as they thought, serve their side. 

 Djanic confided his ideas for revolt to Bozo Jelinek, a 23-year old Croat from Slavolina.  Jelinek had been imprisoned for Communist Party membersip in Zagreb in 1941. After his release the party sent him on a mission to Zenica, from where in 1943 he was taken into the army and sent to Dresden.

There was unrest among both Bosnians and Croats, some conscripted against their will, at having to do navvying work for the Germans, and at Nazi racism and ill-treatment.

When Bosnians and a unit of Croat sappers were sent to Villefranche de Rouergue in August for further training, Djanic and Jelinek were joined on the train by 19-year-old sub-lieutenant Nikola Vukelic, originally from Gospic in western Croatia. He'd written home to say he'd "had enough of Dresden, and of Germany". `


In Villefranche, through the good offices of Maurice Delclaux, restaurant manager of the Hotel Moderne, the conspirators were put in touch with an officer of the Resistance.


There was already at least one Yugoslav, Milan Ralafatic, alias 'Fernand', and a Brazilian, Apolino de Carvalho ('Edmond') who had fought in Spain, leading underground fighters in the region.

On the night of 16-17 September the mutineers struck. At ten past midnight, Lieutenant Kirschbaum the battalion commander was taken prisoner, and along with other officers, brought before a rebel tribunal, condemned to death and shot.

A Colonel Eck was only wounded, and managed to get away. Sub-Lieutenant Schweiger a medical officer from Carniola persuaded the rebels that he was a compatriot, and that they should let him go. he was able to raise the alarm and come back with loyal Nazi troops.

By 4 am the rebels had taken over the gendarmerie post and railway station.  Some 200 armed themselves and made off for the country. Others hesitated, not speaking the French language or knowing the local terrain. Shots could be heard.

Hodja Halim Malhe, the muslim chaplain, urged the soldiers to give up their rebellion and surrender to the Germans. Mutineers burned the battalion's papers, so reprisals could not be taken against their families.

Villefranche's mayor, Jean Baudin, had been woken by shots. H elooked out to see a detachment of troops led by an SS corporal who shouted "The communists have attacked us!"

Schweiger, clutching a sub-machine gun, and highly agitated, said he must announce a state of siege. Baudin reminded him that he was only a doctor, not a military commander, and said only German officers were qualified to call a siege. Schweiger ran to 'phone frantically for a German officer.

Dzanic took a group of 40 men and tried to break hrough the German forces now encircling Villefranche.At the Haut-Guyenne roundabout he was killed in  a gun-battle. In the town centre Vukelic was wounded. He was later captured, and after three days of torture by the SS he was shot.

German reinforcements arrived. Guided by a Vichy military police man, SS units moved into the narrow streets of the old part of town, where some of the mutineers had spread out, hoping to hide and make for the countryside later.

Grenades and machine guns were used, as the Yugoslavs, though short of ammunition, would not give themselves up easily. By late afternoon there 30 or 40 bodies in the streets. The manhunt for escaped Yugoslavs went on for a week. As well as the town, SS units with armoured machine gun carriers scoured surrounding villages and fields. Over a 100 of those recaptured were executed, lined up before a pit and machine-gunned.

Many rebels were helped to get away by local people, and joined the Resistance. Marie Regoud, an elderly widow, saw a man hiding behind a pile of logs under the railway bridge near her home.
There was an SS guard at the other side of the bridge. Mme Regoud made a sign to the fugitive, and came back past the SS man with some old clothes in her shopping basket. She stood watch while the Croat got changed, shoved his uniform in her basket, then returned home past the SS guard, delighted that she had got one over the Nazis.

Mlle Plo, a bank clerk, and her neighbour, M.Vidal, hid a man in the attic for three days, obtaining clothes for him. After consulting the priest they moved their man to the church belfry, where she continued taking food, and M.Vidal slipped him some tobacco.

About a week later, a nearby farmer was aske if he could use a labourer. A couple of months later, with new clothes and papers, Bozo Jelinek was taken to Toulouse. As 'Lieutenant Leopold' he earned a Croix de Guerre with the French maquis.

On 18 September proclaiming martial law and a curfew in Villefranche, the Nazis took the mayor to look at the bodies of the German officers. They voiced suspicion that "the niggers"-North African soldiers in the local hospital - were accomplices of their fellow-Muslims.

They took away the manager and staff of the Hotel Moderne for interrogation and torture at Montpelier. The SS ransacked homes.

It became a matter of pride for the people of Villefranche that in those hard times, they had fed and clothed the rebels, and that nobody was betrayed. Local historian Louis Erignac adds that the events made them aware of "the community of combat between different peoples". *

At the end of 1944, with 600 compatriots, Jelinek arrived back in Yugoslavia to join the partisans.

In Villefranche de Rouergue, where local women had defied the Nazis to lay wreaths on the grave of the dead rebels, a memorial was put up in 1950: "ICI REPOSANT LES COMBATTANTS YOUGOSLAVES QUI TOMBERENT LOIN DE LEUR PATRIE SOUS LES BALS DE L'ENNEMI NAXI A LA SUITE DE L'INSURRECTION DE VILLEFRANCHE DE ROUERGUE DU 17 SEPTEMBRE 1943'

In September 1968, Captain (Retired) Bozo Jelinek of the Yugoslav People's Army returned to Villefranche de Rouergue, to honour his dead comrades, visit local families who helped, and attend  civic banquet commemorating the rebellion.

 (previously published as "The Revolt in Hitler's Army", Workers Press, October 21, 1995)

* La Révolte des Croates » par Louis Erignac. Imprimerie Guibert - 12200 Villefranche de Rouergue – 1980. .

http://www.cronet.org/actualites/villefranche.htm

http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2009/09/18/675230-en-memoire-du-sacrifice-des-revoltes-de-septembre-43.html

Triangle Fire. The tragedy that goes on.

BODIES ON THE SIDEWALK.  Over a century ago in New York. But around the world workers lives remain cheap, so the tragedy goes on.


Rose Friedman died in Los Angeles on February 16,2001, aged 107, the last survivor of a tragedy that lives in the memory of working people in America. As a young girl Rose worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company’s factory in New York. The shirtwaist, a blouse to go with a skirt, was essential fashion for ‘free’ 20th century women, going to work in office or factory. The Triangle factory fire symbolised their slavery.

It was late on Saturday afternoon, March 25, 1911. Workers at the factory, on the top floors of the Asch building, were getting ready to go home. Within minutes fire swept through the floors. Before it was over, 146 of the 500 employees were dead.

Many Triangle workers were young women from Jewish and Italian immigrant families, some still in their teens, struggling to survive in a strange country, battling slum conditions and ruthless exploitation. Jobs at the factory offered regular work - sometimes from seven in the morning till nine at night, with no overtime pay. Some workers had joined the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, but Triangle was not a union shop. It was hard organising when you were desperate to keep your job. to help your family. A shirtwaist workers strike in 1909 was beaten. Employers hired thugs to attack pickets. Strikers were sacked and replaced by newcomers. The union's unsuccessful demands had included adequate fire and safety precautions. New York employers held a meeting on Wall Street to block city fire legislation.

The Triangle factory’s one fire escape, in an inner yard, buckled and twisted under the weight of those who managed to reach it. Others struggled through narrow aisles between machines, amid blazing cloth, only to be trapped and burned behind locked doors. Many leapt desperately from ninth-floor windows, and died on the sidewalk. Firefighters stretched out a safety net, but two women crashed through it. The firefighters’ ladders could not reach the top floors, nor could the water from their hoses.

Eye-witness William Shepherd would always remember the thud as people hit the pavement. He saw a young man at the window help three young women out.

‘They were as unresisting as if he were helping them onto a streetcar instead of into eternity. Undoubtedly he saw that a terrible death awaited them in the flames, and his was only a terrible chivalry. Then came the love amid the flames. He brought another girl to the window. Those of us who were looking saw her put her arms about him and kiss him. Then he held her out into space and dropped her. But quick as a flash he was on the windowsill himself. His coat fluttered upward - the air filled his trouser legs. I could see that he wore tan shoes and hose. His hat remained on his head. Thud-dead, thud-dead- together they went into eternity. I saw his face before they covered it. You could see in it that he was a real man.  He had done his best.

We found out later that, in the room in which he stood, many girls were being burned to death by the flames and were screaming in an inferno of flame and heat. He chose the easiest way and was brave enough to even help the girl he loved to a quicker death, after she had given him a goodbye kiss. He leaped with an energy as if to arrive first in that mysterious land of eternity, but her thud - dead came first.

The firemen raised the longest ladder. It reached only to the sixth floor. I saw the last girl jump at it and miss it. And then the faces disappeared from the window. But now the crowd was enormous, though all this had occurred in less than seven minutes, the start of the fire and the thuds and deaths.

I heard screams around the corner and hurried there. What I had seen before was not so terrible as what had followed. Up in the [ninth] floor girls were burning to death before our very eyes. They were jammed in the windows. No one was lucky enough to be able to jump, it seemed. But, one by one, the jams broke. Down came the bodies in a shower, burning, smoking-flaming bodies, with dishevelled hair trailing upward. They had fought each other to die by jumping instead of by fire. On the sidewalk lay heaps of broken bodies. A policeman later went about with tags, which he fastened with wires to the wrists of the dead girls, numbering each with a lead pencil, and I saw him fasten tag no. 54 to the wrist of a girl who wore an engagement ring. A fireman who came downstairs from the building told me that there were at least 50 bodies in the big room on the seventh floor.

Another fireman told me that more girls had jumped down an air shaft in the rear of the building. I went back there, into the narrow court, and saw a heap of dead girls... The floods of water from the firemen's hose that ran into the gutter were actually stained red with blood. I looked upon the heap of dead bodies and I remembered these girls were the shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike of last year in which these same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies were the answer’.

Some workers did escape down the stairs before the flames spread, or across the roof to the neighbouring building. Survivors were dazed, shocked, and traumatised. They suffered nightmares for years. In the weeks after the blaze, people tried to identify charred bodies at the morgue, and the ILGWU worked with the Red Cross to trace families, local 25 draped its headquarters in black, and proposed an official day of mourning. Hundreds of thousands marched in a dignified funeral procession, in teeming rain. Victims’ families urged the union to seek prosecution of the factory owners.

The Triangle Company offered to pay one week's wages to the families of the dead girls- ‘as though it were summer and they are giving them a vacation!’, workers commented. Three days after the fire an advert appeared in the trade papers:

NOTICE, THE TRIANGLE WAIST CO. beg to notify their customers that they are in good working order. HEADQUARTERS now at 9-11 University Place.

The day after they had moved in to the new premises the New York City building department found 9-11 University Place was not fireproof, and access to the one fire escape was obstructed by two rows of sewing machines.

On April 2,1911, Rose Schneiderman, one of the leaders of the 1909 strike, told a memorial meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House:

I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today; the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high- powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.

This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death.

We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us. Public officials have only words of warning to us - warning that we must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back, when we rise, into the conditions that make life unbearable.

I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.

Eight months after the fire a jury acquitted Blanck and Harris, the factory owners, of any wrongdoing. Trade unions continued fighting for better conditions and fire safety, winning legislation. But around the world, lives remain cheap, and property sacred.


May 10,1993: fire at the Kader toy factory near Bangkok, Thailand. kills 187 people, injures 500, mostly young girls. Doors at the factory were locked to stop them stealing dolls.

November 25, 2000  Garment Workers Die After Being Locked in Burning Factory.
At least 45 workers including 10 children burned to death in a devastating fire at Sagar Chowdhury garment factory on Dhaka-Sylhet highway in Bangladesh....sparked from electrical short cicuit...fire soon engulfed the entire building...

December 14, 2010, (Guardian)
Dozens of workers jumped to their deaths and more than 100 were injured when a fire swept through a Bangladeshi factory that makes clothes for high street retailer Gap today.
Witnesses said the blaze – at the factory just outside Dhaka – engulfed the multistorey building, forcing some of those trapped inside to leap from the windows. The fire comes after repeated warnings about fire safety at factories making clothes for western retailers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/14/bangladesh-clothes-factory-workers-jump-to-death

The struggle goes on.

Armenian Holocaust

ISMAIL ENVER PASHA, Germany's ally, when Armenians massacred.





ORHAN PARMUK , Nobel prizewinning author, not safe in Turkey.

"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?".

Thus Adolf Hitler is alleged to have assured his senior military commanders of impunity, in a speech on August 22 1939, a week before the invasion of Poland, when he urged them to be ruthless in wiping out civilians, so as to create lebensraum for Germans.

Whatever Hitler said, he was wrong.

His speech itself, said to have been recorded in unofficial notes by Admiral Canaris, is the subject of denial, Turkish officials claiming the remark was invented by Armenian propagandists. Almost a century after the events in May 1915, which led to the death of over a million Armenians, and spurred the flight of refugees to form the bulk of today's Armenian diaspora, the Armenian tragedy remains the subject of fierce controversy.

In the United States, leading Jewish organisations lobbied against the official recognition of the Armenian genocide, it was said because of threats to Turkey's Jewish community, but a more likely reason was their taking a lead from Israel, which valued Turkey as an ally in the Middle East, as did the United States of course. It may be a coincidence, but only since the Mave Marmara incident has the Congress Foreign Affairs committee been persuaded to describe the 1915 massacre as genocide.

Many Armenian refugees settled in Iran, now home to 100,000 Armenians. The former Soviet Armenia and Iran have important trading relations, including a pipeline, supplying Iranian natural gas. The Islamic Republic has been supportive of Armenia in its conflict with Azerbaijan. But remarks by Iranian Vice President Hamid Baghaei, that the Turkish deportation of Armenians in 1915 amounted to genocide, upset the Turkish government, and caused strains in Iran itself. President Ahmadinejad needed to reassure Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, and other government MPs, anxious to maintain and build on good relations with Turkey. While it suits Ahmadinejad to play tension with the West to counter unrest within Iran, his regime presumably feels safer if it can count on Turkey not to be the bridgehead for a threatened attack. Both governments share an interest in keeping down the Kurdish people in between.

It was Winston Churchill, then of course making war on Turkey, who used the Greek word Holocaust - originally meaning a sacrifice by fire - to refer to reported burning of Armenians in a pit, and thus gave the word its modern meaning of genocide.

In Cardiff's Garden of Peace, a memorial to the Armenians was vandalised on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day in 2008. In November the previous year some 300 Turks had been bused to protest at the inauguration of the monument.

On September 21, 2010, the European Court of Human Rights issued a ruling that Turkish authorities failed to protect journalist Hrant Dink, a Turkish citizen of Armenian descent, who was murdered outside his newspaper's office in Istanbul in 2007. The Court found that the authorities violated Dink's rights in 2005 when they prosecuted him for "denigration of Turkishness", because he raised the Armenian issue. The journalist was subjected to a hate campaign by the nationalist right, but the authorities failed to act on information they received that could have prevented his murder, the court says, and failed to investigate the role of state officials in his death.

Best-selling writer Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 2005, the first Turkish citizen to win a Nobel, brought a storm on his head when he told a Swiss interviewer: "Thirty thousand Kurds have been killed here, and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares to mention that. So I do." Pamuk's books were burned at right-wing rallies, and the government brought in a new law, Article 301, which states: "A person who, being a Turk, explicitly insults the Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly, shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months to three years."

When the attempt to prosecute Pamuk retroactively failed, partly because of international reaction, the far Right plotted to assassinate him along with other enemies. Orhan Pamuk has not retracted anything he said, but he no longer resides and works in his homeland.

It has been the contention of Turkish governments and their apologists that the May 1915 deportations and killings were just part of the war, in which Armenians sided with Russia and fought against Turkish rule, and atrocities were committed on both sides; that the numbers of Armenian dead have been exagerated; and that Armenians today are just raising the issue for gain, or from malice against Turkey. Why they should do so, or why Turkish people today should feel responsible for the deeds of a long-gone regime, is not obvious. Reading the more aggressive writings of Norman Stone, a British historian (and former adviser to Mrs.Thatcher), who has made Turkey his home, and denial his business, one is reminded of David Irving in a bad mood.

Armenians had lived under Ottoman Turkish rule for centuries, but the 1915 catastrophe was not the first massacre. Towards the end of the 19th century, the Turkish empire had lost most of its Balkan lands to national freedom struggles, which were backed by Tsarist Russia, and marred by massacres of Muslims, while Christians were slaughtered in turn when the empire unleashed its irregular bashi bazouks. Faced with the expanding Russian Empire taking Armenia under its wing, and Armenians within Turkey demanding civil rights, Sultan Abdul Hamid II declared that the Christian world was out to destroy his empire, and he did not distinguish between Armenian militants and Armenian citizens in general. In eastern Turkey an armed band known as the Hamidiye was set up in 1890, formed of Kurdish irregulars who were told to "deal with the Armenians as they wished."

While some coveted the Armenians' land or assumed wealth, the authorities hit them with heavy taxes provoking unrest which brought a military response. In some places the Armenians fought off the forces sent against them and in 1895 they brought their plight to the attention of the Great Powers who were interested in Ottoman affairs. The Sultan signed reforms, but his police broke up an Armenian rally, and he unleashed a series of pogroms and massacres in which at least 100,000 Armenians were killed. In some places, Muslim Turks defended their neighbours, but at Urfa Ottoman troops set fire to the cathedral in which 3,000 people had sought sanctuary. In Istanbul, where Jews had sheltered Armenians in their homes the mob stormed a synagogue on Yom Kippur in 1897.

In 1908, Abdul Hamid was forced to step down when part of the Army threatened to march on the capital, and the 'Young Turks', or Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), took over the country. The new leaders were secularists, including men of Jewish origin. Their government was committed to modernising the state, and it was welcomed by Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Jews and Arabs alike, glad to see the back of the Sultan. A counter-coup by more reactionary officers of the military who wanted the Sultan back, supported by Islamic theological students who wanted sharia law, led to new attacks on the Armenians. Thousands were killed in Adana. But the CUP managed to suppress the rising, and court-martial its leaders. In 1912 the sultan, self-claimed defender of the Faith, was sent off to Salonika.

That year the opposition Liberal Union took office, with support from Armenian and other minority parties opposed to the CUP's centralised power. But the CUP came back with a vengeance, in 1913, executing or exiling its opponents. By 1914, when Turkey entered the First World War, and the following year when its government launched their onslaught on the Armenians, it was being run by a triumvirate - War Minister Enver, Interior Minister Talat, and Navy minister Cemal - the three pashas. Western investment and influence had been growing for some decades, and these three were allied to one particular European power.

Mass killings are as old as the hills, mentioned and even exhorted in the Bible, and we need only think of those who suffered and died in the Atlantic slave crossing to put other ordeals in perspective. But it was in supposedly enlightened, modern times that states gave themselves the right to deport entire populations, and acquired the means to organise mass slaughter, even turn it, as we know, into an industry.

Genocide in South West Africa

Neither Jews nor Armenians were the first victims of 2oth Century genocide. That honour belongs to the Herero and Namaqa poples of what is now called Namibia. In 1904 they rose up against the growing German colonisation of their country, where they faced loss of their land and cattle, being forced into reservations or working in bondage to the settlers. The Herero leader Chief Samuel Maharero told his warriors to avoid killing Englishmen and Boers, or women and children in general.

In contrast, the German commander General Trotha wrote a letter before the battle of Waterburg against the Herero:
“ "I believe that the nation as such should be annihilated, or, if this was not possible by tactical measures, have to be expelled from the country...This will be possible if the water-holes from Grootfontein to Gobabis are occupied. The constant movement of our troops will enable us to find the small groups of natives who have moved backwards and destroy them gradually.".

Jan Cloete, who had been acting as a guide for the German troops, witnessed what happened. "After the battle all men, women, and children who fell into German hands, wounded or otherwise, were mercilessly put to death. Then the Germans set off in pursuit of the rest, and all those found by the wayside and in the sandveld were shot down and bayoneted to death. The mass of the Herero men were unarmed and thus unable to offer resistance. They were just trying to get away with their cattle." ”

Some Herero managed to cross the desert and reach Botswana. But General Trotha deployed his troops to prevent Herero in the desert from reaching wells, and even poisoned some well water. Up to 100, 000 Herero and 10,000 Nama were killed. Many were also herded into concentration camps, where without adequate food, they were worked to death, and some were used in medical experiments. Skulls were sent to German universities, displayed in scientific lectures on the superiority of the white race.

Namibia wrested its independence from South Africa in 1990. In 2001 Hereros filed a lawsuit in the United States demanding reparations from the German government and the Deutsche Bank, which financed the German government and companies in Southern Africa. On August 16, 2004, at the 100th anniversary of the start of the genocide, Germany's Minister of Economic Development Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, officially apologized, :
“ We Germans accept our historical and moral responsibility and the guilt incurred by Germans at that time."

Germany arrives at the table

Having come late to the table, Imperial Germany had obtained only scraps in the struggle for overseas colonies. But without overcoming British naval supremacy it could turn elsewhere, expanding its domain without necessarily having to raise its flag.

At the 1878 Congress of Berlin the Powers sought to limit Russian expansion but extend influence over Turkey. Within four years the first German military mission arrived in Constantinople, with then Major, later Field Marshall, Von der Goelz as instructer to reform the Turkish army, and Krupp to supply the hardware.

At Heidelberg, Professor Aloys Sprenger, who had travelled widely in the East, including India, and written on "The History of Military Science among the Muslim Peoples", produced a new tract in 1886: "Babylonia, the Richest Land of the Past, and Most Remunerative Field of Colonisation in the Present". Later an artillery officer, Kannenberg, wrote on "Asia Minor's Natural Riches".

The importance of Middle East oil was just dawning. Russia had opened the Baku oilfields for exploration in 1872, and in 1901 an Englishman called D'Arcy started prospecting in Iran. But German geo-strategists had a bigger picture. In 1878, Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia and Hercegovina, and in 1882 Germany and Austria-Hungary became allies. It only remained to bring Turkey on side. In 1888 the Sultan awarded a railway contract to a German company, In 1898, discussions began on the Baghdad railway. With finance arranged by the Deutsche Bank, this would run from Berlin to Baghdad, ennabling oil and mineral ores to be sent back to Germany, while a spur extended to Basra would bring German power and manufactured goods to the Gulf. The British in India, still playing the Great Game of spying and intrigue against their Russian rivals in Asia, began to realise they might face a new foe in common, one that could both sidestep and threaten the Suez canal. .

In 1889 and again in 1898 Kaiser Wilhelm II paid visits to Turkey. Some people in Germany protested the pogroms against Armenians in Turkey, but they did not have any influence on foreign policy. Chancellor Bismarck dismissed the "hypocrisy" of Russia and Britain in raising the issue. A theologian accompanying the Kaiser on his trips, Friedrich Naumann, observed that German interests required "our political indifference to the suffering of Christians in the Turkish Empire, piainful as these must be to our private feelings."

In both Istanbul and Jerusalem in 1898, the Kaiser was visited by a Viennese journalist called Theodor Herzl, soliciting his support for the Zionist project. Nothing came of the meetings, though Herzl used them to boost his prestige. In Damascus, the Kaiser proclaimed himself the champion of the world's 200 million Muslims.

In 1901, Herzl got the audience he had been seeking with the Sultan. The founder of political Zionism promised - on what basis we don't know - that Jewish finance would pay Turkey's national debt if the Sultan blessed the Zionist project in Palestine. Abdul Hamid told him "if one day the Islamic State falls apart then you can have Palestine for free, but as long as I am alive I would rather have my flesh be cut up than cut out Palestine from the Muslim land."

Kaiser Wilhelm called Abdul Hamid " a blessing for his subjects -except for a handful of Armenians", and later complained about the Young Turks "they dethroned my friend the sultan". It was said a secret wireless link had been set up from the sultan's Yildiz palace to Berlin. Abdul Hamid was allowed to send his agents to Berlin to counter reports of massacres. German embassies in Russia, Britain and France collected information on Armenian nationalist activities so the Ottoman authorities could be informed. When the sultan was deposed the links remained.

On August 3, 1914, Enver Pasha signed the secret treaty allying Turkey with Germany. On the Mediterranean, early on August 4, Rear-Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, commanding the German warships Goeben and Breslau, which had been assigned to attack French transports from Algiers, received orders from Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz:: "Alliance with government of CUP concluded August 3. Proceed at once to İstanbul."

On August 16, having slipped past the Royal Navy ships which had orders to tail but not attack, the Goeben and Breslau reached Constantinople. The Turkish government was still bound by official neutrality not to allow belligerents through the Straits. In a small ceremony, the German crews donned Turkish fezzes, and their ships were transferred to the Turkish flag, becoming the Yavuz Sultan Selim and the Midilli. Admiral Souchon remained in command, and on September 23 he was appointed commander in chief of the Ottoman Navy.

At the end of October the Goeben, Breslau and a squadron of Turkish warships sailed to attack the Russian Black Sea ports of Novorossiysk, Odessa and Sevastopol. At Novorossiysk the Breslau's guns sank 14 steamers in the harbour, and set 40 oil tanks on fire, sending streams of burning petroleum through the streets. Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire on November 2, France and Britain following on November 5. Thus two ships began the events of war that would topple the Ottoman empire, along with its Russian enemy, and entirely change the map of the Middle East.

Between Tsar and Kaiser

Before the war, the Russian government had been preparing an international conference on Armenia, and urged the Armenian nationalists to show restraint, so they would appear as victims rather than revolutionaries. But in the Summer of 1914, as well as sending Armenian conscripts to its western front in Europe, the Russian imperial army set up Armenian volunteer units to fight in the Caucasus. The Armenian national liberation movement also formed partisan units. In December, Tsar Nicholas II visited the Caucusus and was received by the head of the Armenian Church and Armenian nationalists in Tiflis, the Georgian capital. There he proclaimed:

"From all countries Armenians are hurrying to enter the ranks of the glorious Russian Army, with their blood to serve the victory of the Russian Army... Let the Russian flag wave freely over the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, Let your will the peoples [Armenian] remaining under the Turkish yoke receive freedom. Let the Armenian people of Turkey who have suffered for the faith of Christ receive resurrection for a new free life..."

Many Armenians must have felt a wry contempt for this glorious 'Christian' liberator annexing their freedom struggle just as his regime had annexed their land. In 1905-7 the Tsarist regime had responded to strikes and unrest in the Baku oilfields with its usual divide and rule methods, encouraging Muslim Azeri pogroms against the Armenians, just as in Odessa its mob targeted the Jews.

The top German agent in the Middle East, Max Freiherr von Oppenheim, who may have inspired the Kaiser's speech as 'protector of Islam', had also urged that in the event of war the Turkish government must proclaim jihad. The CUP had been materialists, with little time for religion, but now Enver Pasha persuaded the Sultan, still head of the Caliphate, to declare jihad. The aim was to stir Muslim revolt against Britain and its allies, but there were implications for non-Muslim minorities within Turkey. Some religious Muslims resented the use of their religion to cloak political aims, seen when converts to Islam were not exempt from persecution by the state.

Enver Pasha blamed Armenian resistance and sabotage for the defeat of Turkish forces in the Caucasus at the end of 1914 nd beginning of 1915. He might just as well have blamed the mountain winter, for which his forces were ill-fed, ill-clad and unprepared.

On February 25, 1915, Enver ordered that all Armenians serving in the Ottoman forces should be disarmed and sent to labour bttalions, the ameles. Thus those conscripted were neither able to defend their home towns and families or themseves.

Special units, many of them recruited from convicts, were formed for action against the Armeninians. At Van, where the Armenians were in a majority, they resisted after nearby towns and villages had been cleared, holding out from April 20, for three weeks until they were relieved by the arrival of Russian forces under Genberal Yudenich.

On April 24, Interior minister Mehmed Talat passed the order claiming that the Armenians had rebelled against his government. Some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Istanbul were taken from their homes and placed in special holding centres. Elsewhere, Armenians were being forced on long marches, without food or water, into the Syrian desert. The guards who escorted them were often from the special detachments, and only too ready to attack, dob and rape those they were guarding.

Satisfied that "the deportation of the Armenians has been decided", General Fritz Bronsart von Schellendorf at army GHQ., thought he understood the way these helpless people were being treated:

"...the Armenian is just like a Jew, a parasite outside the confines of his homeland, sucking of the marrow of the peoples of the host country. Year after year they abandon their native land -just like the Polish Jews who migrate to Germany -to engage in various activities. Hence the hatred which was,in a medieval form, unleashed itself against them s an unpleasant entailing their murder. "

In fact there is evidence the hatred was neither spontaneous nor universally shared. A secret order, revealed at a post-war court martial, said that "any Muslim who dares to harbour an Armenian will be hanged in front of his house". It also warned any official or officer who broke ranks with the policy they would be stripped of their rank and court-martialed.

From Erzurum, in June, officers reported that young Armenian men had either been conscipted for labour battalions or shot. No bombs or weapons had been found in house to house searches , and there was no sign that the Armenians were preparing am uprising. Bronsart still insisted on the "military necessity" of deporting women, children and old men.

On June 17, 1915 German ambassador Wangenheim informed Berlin that Armenians from Dyarbakir who were supposed to be deported to Mosul "were en route to be slaughtered".

On June 29 he testified "The deportees are being set upon and butchered"

On July 7, he concluded that " the manner in which deportees being treated...shows that the government is in fact pursuing the goal of annihiliating the Armenian race in Turkey".

The forces sent to remove the Armenians sometimes found shorter ways than taking them on long marches. The Italian consul at Trabzon in 1915, Giacomo Gorrini, writes: "I saw thousands of innocent women and children placed on boats which were capsized in the Black Sea". An affidavit presented in post war trials in Trabzon described how Armenian villagers were burned. "The shortest method for disposing of the women and children concentrated in the various camps was to burn them." ... "Turkish prisoners who had apparently witnessed some of these scenes were horrified and maddened at remembering the sight. They told the Russians that the stench of the burning human flesh permeated the air for many days after."


US ambassador Henry Morgethau tried unsuccessfully to intercede with the Turkish authorities for the Armenians, and reported to Washington what was being done. "Early in July 2,000 Armenian "ameles" were sent from Harput to build roads. ...practically every man of these 2,000 was massacred".

Some Germans were shocked by what they saw. Dr.Walter Rossler, the consul in Aleppo, said he could not believe his eyes when he read an official document referring to "temporary relocation" of Armenians. He relayed to the Chancellor in Berlin the account of a German cavalry captain who had witnessed the slitting of throats of young Armenians in a labour battalion, and seen hundred of corpses by the roadside in September 1915.

But Colonel Felix Guse, IIIrd Army chief of staff described the Armenians as a people deserving "punishment". The official line was that the Turkish authorities were protecting themselves and their country from Armenian insurrection. The German Foreign Office made sure that 191 Reichstag deputies were unable to see a report on anti-Armenian atrocities

Lieutenant Colonel Boettrich, chied of railway services at Ottoman GHQ, ordered the deportation of Armenian railway workers, engineers and clerks who had been engaged in construction of the Baghdad railway. The Armenian workers were "despatched with the knife". The Baghdad Railway which had seemed so important to the war was now delayed because so many workers and technicians had been killed

General Bronsart attacked "agitators " and "the Jew Morgenthau", for interfering. In August 1916 he put in a request to his superior, General Lyman von Sanders, for the deportation of Greeks from Turkey's coastal areas..

The Three Pashas escape trial, but not justice
Immediately after the war there trials at Harput and Trabzon, for what had
been done to the Armenians. But the big three Turkish leaders - Enver, Talat, Cemal - were among seven whom Bronsart von Schellenburg and Lt.General Seekkt assisted to escape trial, if not justice of a sort.

Talat was assassinated with a single bullet on 15 March 1921 as he came out of his house in Hardenbergstrasse, Charlottenburg. His assassin was a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) from Erzurum, Soghomon Tehlirian..

Cemal was assassinated on July 21, 1922, in Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia, by Stepan Dzaghikian, Bedros Der Boghosian and Ardashes Kevorkian, all members of the ARF. His body was returned to Turkey for burial, also at Erzurum.

Enver Pasha seemed to enjoy a second and even third life, owing to his chutzpah, but it was not to last. He showed up at the Congress of Peoples of the East in Baku in 1920, supposedly representing revolutionaries in the Maghreb, Egypt and India, and denouncing imperialism. The following year he was entrusted with a mission to Bokhara to help suppress anti-Soviet Basmachi rebels. Switching to the rebel side, he became their commander, reorganising them with Turkish officers.

On August 4, 1922, near Dushanbe, his headquarters were attacked by Red Army Bashkir cavalry, and Enver was killed by machine gun fire . As luck would have it, the raiders were commanded by Yakov Melkumov , aka Agop Melkumian, an Armenian.

Yet the book remains open on the true significance of the Armenian tragedy, and so do the wounds. We have seen how some leaders take such enormous crimes not as a warning from history but an encouragement to do it again. We have a duty to uncover and recover the truth, if 'Never Again' is to mean, as it should, never again to anyone.

(first published in Jewish Socialist No.61 Winter 2010)

The Black Book

SALOME. Aubrey Beardsley illustration for Oscar Wilde's 1896 play.




PASSCHENDAELE

By the Winter of 1917 the British Army had lost more than a quarter of a million men in a few months of hell in the shell-ravaged quagmire of Passchendaele. On 10 February, 1918 a small ad appeared in the Sunday Times, announcing two private performances of Oscar Wilde's Salome at the Prince of Wales Theatre, starring the dancer Maud Allan.

One might be hard put to make a connection be­tween these events other than on a surrealist canvas. But the conspiracy theorists could; and though Wilde's depiction of bloody sadism from lust might resonate strangely with the slaughter for greed in Flanders, that wasn't the connection made, or wanted. If the war wasn't going well, someone must be blamed.

The politicians could blame the generals. The generals blamed the politicians. But people like Arnold White, Marie Corelli, Pemberton Billing MP, Hamilton Beamish and Harold Spencer concocted a much more ingenious theory. There was a Hidden Hand at work undermining Britain. It was the Jews. Them and the urnings. The urnings?

Pemberton Billing had set up a paper called The Imperialist with financial help, it is said, from Beaverbrook. When the wily Canadian press lord joined Lloyd George's government and his right-wing Tory allies felt cheated, The Imperialist became The Vigilante, and carried on campaigning; Beaverbrook joined its foes.
Arnold White was an antisemite, who had cam­paigned against Jewish immigration (albeit not averse to taking Jewish money to explore other places for Jews to settle — as far from these shores as possible).

Now he was concerned about prominent Jews in government circles. But an article by him in the right-wing English Review at the end of 1917, reproduced in The Vigilante, raised another danger. Entitled "Efficiency and Vice", it claimed that most German men were homosexuals. As evidence, White cited a book by Otto Weininger extolling love between men, and the campaign to repeal Clause 175 of the German Penal Code which made sexual acts between men an offence. "How does all this German garbage, which I am forced to quote, affect the course of the war?" asked White, as well he might. Not that he was in any-real doubt. Not only were the German troops raping women, as every English newspaper reader knew, but they were out to spread homosexuality among English­men, to undermine national efficiency.

But if homosexuality so sapped a nation's spirit, how come all those homosexuals — urnings was the German expression White borrowed to show his erudition — hadn't already weakened Germany itself? Don't get logical now; we have entered the strange realm of conspiracy theory! "The English conception of their national life is that the home is the unit of the nation...," White explained, "but if the conception of home life is replaced by the Kultur of the urnings, the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon world wilts and perishes..."

If the 70-year-old White's fear of wilting wasn't enough, he went on to warn of "the systematic seduc­tion of young British soldiers by the German urnings and their agents..." and "a great cancer, made in Germany" eating at the heart of civilisation. "Every father and mother in the British Empire should know" that legalisation of homosexuality was one of the aims of the German Empire, to restore Sodom and Gomorrah, and "infect clean nations with the Hunnish erotomania".

"When the blond beast is an urning, he commands the urnings in other lands. They are moles. They burrow. They plot. They are hardest at work when they are most silent. Britain is only safe when her statesmen are family men..."

White made one serious mistake. He suggested that even the Kaiser's family and the other great German houses were "tainted with the inherent vices of the Huns...". Moutbatten (Battenburg) had been treated as a suspect alien; Margot Asquith might be whispered about as an alleged lesbian; but attributing a tainted inheritance to the relatives of the British Royal Family was going too far.

The Black Book

On 26 January 1918, however, The Imperialist had carried another sensational tale: "The First 47,000", written by Captain Harold Spencer, which began: "There exists in the cabinet noire of a certain German prince a book compiled by the Secret Service from the reports of German agents who have infested this
country for the past 20 years, agents so vile and spreading debauchery of such a lasciviousness as only German minds could conceive and German bodies execute."

This "Black Book", he claimed, contained instruc­tions for "the propagation of evils which all decent men thought had perished in Sodom and Lesbia". But the book also listed, according to Spencer, "the names of 47,000 English men and women... Privy Councillors, youths of the chorus, wives of Cabinet Ministers.
dancing girls, even Cabinet Ministers themselves, while diplomats, poets, bankers, editors, newspaper proprie­tors and members of His Majesty's household follow each other with no order of precedence..."

This veritable London phone book, however, also contained details "of the unnatural defloration of children who were drawn to the parks by the summer evening concerts..." German bands, perhaps? And if the worthy readers of The Imperialist weren't already salivating, there was more: "Wives of men in supreme positions were entangled. In lesbian ecstasy the most sacred secrets of State were betrayed." One can just imagine it, that insistent throaty whisper at the height of passion: "Cynthia, about the secret clauses of the Sykes-Picot agreement concerning the Dardanelles..."

Well, perhaps romantic novelist Marie Corelli could swallow it, being an antisemite and devotee of con­spiracy theory. On 10 February, seeing the advertise­ment for Maud Allan's performance, Miss Corelli promptly clipped it and sent it to the office of The Vigilante, as Pemberton Billing's paper had just been re-named. She enclosed a note:

Dear Mr Billing,

I think it would be well to secure a list of subscri­bers to this new "upholding" of the Wilde "cult" among the 47,000.

Yours sincerely Marie Corelli.

PS Why "private"performances?

The reason they were private was simple, as Corelli should have known. The Lord Chamberlain had banned public performances of Salome.

Captain Spencer was first to see Marie Corelli's billet doux, and although The Vigilante was about to go to press, he felt inspired to include the following little item:

'The Cult of the Clitoris

To be a member of Maud Allan's private perfor­mances in Oscar Wilde's Salome one had only to apply to a Miss Valetta, of 9 Duke Street, Adelphi, WC. If Scotland Yard were to seize the list of these members, I have no doubt they would secure the names of several thousand of the first 47,000'.

On trial

Encouraged by her producer, Jack Grein, Maud Allan decided to sue Pemberton Billing for "obscene libel", treating his headline as an allegation of lesbianism. The trial, which opened on 29 May 1918, must rank as one of the most bizarre in British legal history, with strange witnesses for the defence, attempts to drag in the names of the famous, and the most jumbled pseudo-expertise on "sexual perversions" interspersed with readings of Wilde's purple prose, like "thy mouth like the vermilion that the Moabites find".

Curiously, as David Rose discovered ( "Secrets of a Closed Society". Guardian Weekend, January 7, 1989), there is still a file in the Public Record Office at Kew listed as "The Black Book mentioned in the criminal libel action against Mr.Pemberton Billing MP". It's in "HO (the Home Office) 144/364780, 1918. And it is "closed for 100 years".

Pemberton Billing's mode of defence ws to step up his attack, making little distinction between Maud Allan and the character she portrayed on stage, and imputing lesbianism, sadism and necrophilia, as well as reminding the court that Salome was under age! He argued that unless Maud Allan had a medical education the fact that she understood the word "clitoris" was itself proof of her immorality! And he was allowed to bring up the little known, and irrelevant, fact that a brother of Maud Allan had been hanged for murder in Canada, declaring that this showed a hereditary evil in her family.

Turning his attack to the play's producer, Jack Grein (who, besides being a foreigner and a Jew, was a protege of the now hated Beaverbrook), Billing now brought up the "Black Book" and the famous 47,000. He called as witness a Mrs Eileen Villiers-Stuart, who claimed to have been shown the Book by two officers, now unfortunately killed in action in Palestine. But that wasn't all. She had seen some of the names in it. "Is Mrs Asquith's name in the book?" (The former prime minister's wife had aleady been mentioned for having invited Maud Allan to tea at Downing Street before the war.) Both Mr and Mrs Asquith were listed, claimed Mrs Villiers-Stuart. "And Lord Haldane?" Him too. And, to put the final cherry on the cake, the witness was able to testify that Mr Justice Darling, who was hearing the case, was in the "Black Book" too!

Special witnesses

A former mistress of Neil Primrose, government Chief Whip and son of Lord Roseberry, who was one of the officers killed in Palestine, Villiers-Stuart implied both that he had let the "Black Book" get back to Germany, and that he had been killed for what he knew. Nothing if not patriotic, she had since married first one, then another, soldier, and was later to face charges of bigamy. At the time of the trial, she was claiming to have been employed as a secret agent to discredit Pemberton Billing, but to have switched to his side.

Captain Harold Spencer, who claimed to have seen the"Black Book" while on special service in Albania, said he had been warned by senior officers in military intelligence that to publicise it "would undermine the whole fabric of the government". He had come to fear that "the Germans had such a grip on our affairs
that nothing could be done". But then, through meeting Henry Hamilton Beamish at a meeting of the National Party he had been introduced to Pemberton Billing.

Besides giving details of German plots and naming some names, the author of "The First 47,000" was able to enlighten the court on such matters as sadism, and the meaning of "orgasm", explaining also that he had obtained the word "clitoris" from his village doctor. What Captain Spencer was less forthcoming
about was his own medical discharge from the forces on grounds of "delusional insanity".

A Dr Cooke, Tuberculosis Officer for Lambeth, was brought in as an authority on Kraft-Ebbing and sexuality to testify that, in his belief, Jack Grein must be a sadist and a "sodomist"; that anyone connected with Oscar Wilde's play must have "a perverted mind"; and that the phrase, "The Cult of the Clitoris", was legitimate as a heading.

While judge and jury were struggling to swallow, if not digest, all this erudite information, a character from an earlier case was brought in for a touch of class — none other than Lord Alfred Douglas, once Oscar Wilde's friend "Bosie", now ready to call Wilde "the greatest force for evil that has appeared in Europe during the last 350 years ... the agent of the devil in every possible way".

Regretting his part in translating Salome, "a most pernicious and abominable piece of work", he agreed that it could only appeal to perverts — and Germans. "Bosie" was cheered from the public gallery when the case ended — with Pemberton Billing's acquittal and a homily from Justice Darling against Wilde's play and Maud Allan's immodest costume on stage.

This trial, in which the editor of The Vigilante was able to turn the plaintiffs into the accused, and make the court a platform for his campaign demagogy and fanaticism, puts on show the ignorant bigotry and political corruption of its period. But more than that: the evidence suggests that Maud Allan was targeted so viciously simply because she had innocently strayed on to the battlefield of a dirty political war. There was indeed a "Hidden Hand": that of a powerful right-wing faction among the ruling class, backing, using and protecting the fanatical Pemberton Billing and his crew. '

Jingoism and bigotry

In March 1914, just months before world war broke out, the British government had faced revolt. The Ulster Unionists armed against Home Rule, the British Army officers staged their "Mutiny at the Curragh" (telling the King they would refuse orders to march against Ulster), and the mighty in the land gathered at country houses to cheer right-wing rebellion. At West­minster the prime minister was shouted down, Margot Asquith commented that she had "never known the Tories so vile". The ever-patriotic Daily Express said the PM deserved "neither respect nor a hearing".

The government backed down.

The war brought no respite from internal conflict. In 1916, the Right hoped Asquith's fall would bring the Ulster Unionist, Carson, and imperialist, Lord Milner, into office. Disappointed, they had turned on Lloyd George and Beaverbrook. Now, in 1918, with rumours that the Hague negotiations on prisoners of war might lead to peace moves, it was the military and the extreme Right who backed Pemberton Billing, crusading against "traitors".

Mixing patriotic hysteria with sexual anxiety, jingo­ism and bigotry, moral panic and paranoia, Pemberton Billing and his associates stirred a potent and poison­ous brew. But it was not their only weapon. Hatred of the "alien" and, specifically, the Jew, was a persistent theme with them.

On 23 March 1918 as a German counteroffensive drove the British back in Flanders, The Vigilante "ex­plained" that the Germans and "the Ashkenazim" had"complete control of the White Slave Traffic", and blamed Jewish-controlled prostitutes for deliberately spreading disease among the British troops.

Earlier, an article thought to be by H H Beamish had suggested that Beaverbrook's family name, Aitken, might be "derived from an original name of Isaacs. If this is true, he belongs to the same tribe as our Lord Chief Justice..."

As for another paper saying that the writing was on the wall for Germany because revolution loomed, Beamish warned: "The real writing on the wall is in German but the characters are Hebrew and the decep­tive whole is known to the world as Yiddish, the camouflaged tongue of the Bolsheviks."

The last issue of The Vigilante appeared on 9 Feb­ruary 1919. A few months later, Henry Hamilton Beamish founded the Britons society, which was joined by Lord Sydenham of Coombe and others including Victor Marsden. Morning Post correspon­dent and translator of the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The "Britons" became publishers of the Protocols and Beamish became a strong Nazi sympathiser in later years.

Between 1920 and 1923 Lord Alfred Douglas and Captain Harold Spencer ran a weekly called Plain English. Their pet theory was that Jews had contrived the death of Lord Kitchener when his ship went down in 1916, and had also profited in some way from the Battle of Jutland, with the help of Winston Churchill. It all seems so long ago and far away, and yet... And yet in 1988, seventy years after Pemberton Billing presented homosexualitv as a conspiracy, the Conser­vative government inserted a clause in its Local Government Act outlawing the "promotion" of lesbianism and homosexualitv. In the autumn of that year, Choice, published by the Dowager Lady Birdwood, featured Victor Marsden's version of the infamous Protocol as a genuine document.

And, as though to prove that nobody learns any­thing from history, a Jew, Sir Alfred Sherman, consorts with the French fascist leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who thought the gas chambers "a mere detail", then writes in the Jewish Chronicle (23 December 1988) attacking left-wingers, not least fellow Jews, for "the promotion of unnatural vice"; blames "disaffected ethnic minorities who abuse our tolerance" and "sexual perverts" of being alike part of a conspiracy to overturn "ordered society".

From his defence of "order" to conspiracy theory, from his espousal of "Christian values" to indignation against disaffected minorities; what a pity a mere detail of ancestry must inhibit the next logical step of endorsing some edition of the Protocols. And how the Pemberton Billings and Beamishes must be laughing, somewhere in hell.

Further reading

Sex Scandals by Keeler and Meadley (Xanadu, 1985)

Salome's Last Veil by Michael Kettle (Granada, 1977). This gives a full acount of the trial and background.

British Fascism edited by Lunn and Thurlow (Groom Helm, 1980). Particularly important is the chapter by Gisela C Lebselter on Beamish.

Fascism in Britain by Richard Thurlow (Basil Blackwell, 1987).

(this article first appeared in Jewish Socialist no.16, Spring 1989)