Heusinger of the Fourth Reich

By Charles R. Allen

“Within a year after Potsdam, this mighty Agreement was given its funeral by the then Secretary of State, Mr. James Byrnes, in his Stuttgart speech. Mr. Churchill, with President Truman at his side, adumbrated the ultimate reversal of our German policy in his Fulton speech which formally started the Cold War. A speech by Herbert Hoover to a small group of Germans whom I had assembled in Stuttgart in January 1947 was also significant: he told them that the U.S. expected their support in the coming struggle with “the atheistic barbarians of the East.”

Looking back on this reversal of policy, it seems to me that the Power Elite’s major problem was to propagandize our people to accept German remilitarization in the defense of “freedom.” Heusinger of the Fourth Reich brilliantly traces step-by-step, with a scholarly documentation which cannot for a moment be challenged, how the American Power Elite has helped this criminal conspiracy, the German General Staff, to return to power with the largest, most powerful military machine in Europe today: the aggressive, Nazi-oriented and Nazi-commanded West German military establishment.

Through this book, the author, Charles R. Allen, Jr., a gifted young political analyst, completely demolishes the official United States myth that the General Staff was something separate and different from Hitler’s murderous Reich; that it was a non-political, purely professional group innocently carrying out its sworn duty to serve the German people and der Führer because the General Staff’s oath was taken “under God.” What blasphemy!”-Introduction

• Language: English
• Publisher: Braunfell Books
• Release date: Jan 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805230335

Book preview

Prologue: The Myth of Hitler’s General in Washington

Comrades! Our fate is dark! We have been set back a thousand years...the political line we must follow is plain. It is clear that we have to go along with the Western Powers...[but] we should make sure that the unity given us by National Socialism is maintained under all circumstances. Only through this [Nazi] unity will it be possible for us to master the coming times...—Farewell Address to German Officers Corps by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, Hitler’s personally appointed successor, May 7, 1945

We must remember our past...Let us stick to the old principles, those principles we used to have.—General Adolf E. Heusinger, Inspector-General of the West German Bundeswehr, to its Officers Corps, September 27, 1958

General Heusinger’s career must be seen as typified at best by a brutal and opportunistic amorality.—American Jewish Congress, 1961

...if political myths, like the truth, depend on evidence, we are safe. But myths are not like truths; they are the triumph of credulity over evidence.—H. R. Trevor-Roper in THE LAST DAYS OF HITLER

The long, low-slung limousine twinkled like a black jewel in the early April sun as it swung slowly, deliberately between long lines of helmeted soldiers standing at rigid attention, and majestically came to an imperceptible halt before the entrance of the new State Department building in Washington, D.C.

John F. Kennedy, the youthful President of the United States, emerged from the luxuriant depths of the Cadillac, smilingly acknowledged shouted commands and salutes, and, as the Marine Corps band played Hail to the Chief, strode quickly and confidently up the steps.

He was met by General L. L. Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States Armed Forces, and, strikingly handsome in his dark blue uniform, the Admiral of the British Fleet, Earl Mountbatten. The three men entered the building. There, joined by an entourage of generals, admirals and air marshals, they marched between lines of Marine Corps Honor Guards down long, polished corridors to a huge, futuristic auditorium.

The hall was filled with the highest ranking military representatives from the fifteen nations belonging to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. On the stage sat the ranking officials of the NATO military alliance, backed by a panoply of flags and honor guards of the member states.

As soon as President Kennedy entered, the entire room filled with applause for the Chief of State of the single most powerful member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The President then formally opened the first 1961 meeting of the Permanent Military Committee of NATO at which its new Chairman was to be installed. The New York Times writer covering the story rightly described the Permanent Military Committee as the highest military authority of NATO. Its new Chairman, therefore, was to exercise one of the most powerful influences in NATO as he would, according to The Times ...be responsible for recommending military measures to carry out NATO policies. In effect, the Chairman would be a primary strategist for the military affairs of NATO comprising the army, navy and air force contributions of all of Western Europe and the United States.

The President opened the meeting by saying, I am delighted to offer the warm welcome of the United States Government to you. He then made public the decision of his Administration to further extend American contributions of nuclear arms to NATO Although, he said, the precise forms which the NATO nuclear deterrent should take would require principally the recommendations of the Permanent Military Committee and its new Chairman who already had made it quite dear that he wanted nuclear arms for NATO—without American control over the use of hydrogen and atomic bombs.

President Kennedy’s announcement of this basic modification of the established American position—American policy from 1949 had been posited on the principle of not setting up NATO as a fourth nuclear power—touched off prolonged applause by the NATO military chiefs. So let us go forward together in guarding a free community’s peace, he concluded, thanking them for their defense of the free world.

President Kennedy next turned to welcome the recently appointed Chairman of the Permanent Military Committee who, after his official installation, would preside over the rest of the two-day conference. I would like now to turn the rest of the meeting over to your new chairman, the President of the United States said, and I would like especially to welcome him here to the United States. General..., the President beckoned.

The assemblage of the highest military chiefs of the free world then rose and applauded vigorously as a slender, somewhat small man with a slight, erect frame, wearing the light blue uniform of the highest ranking military office of his nation, walked forward to shake hands with the President of the United States. His thin-featured face was broken into lines of smiling appreciation. He bowed his head briefly in recognition of this special installation.{1}

He was General Adolf Ernst Heusinger, the Inspector General of the West German Bundeswehr. Formerly Generalleutnant of the Nazi Wehrmacht, Chief of Operations and Planning of the O.K.H. (Oberkommando des Heeres—all the land forces of Hitler’s armies) and the personal appointee of Adolf Hitler as the last Deputy Chief of the German General Staff during World War II. As of April 1, 1961, he was the Chairman of the Permanent Military Committee of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with offices in Paris and headquarters in Washington, D.C. His suite of offices in the Pentagon was numbered 3-E 180 and was on the same tier as the highest ranking military chiefs of the United States.

As General Heusinger watched the military elite of the Western world standing up to do him homage, he could reflect with satisfaction that he had indeed fulfilled the last Order of the Day of the Nazi government and had mastered the coming times. In his own person he represented the acceptance of the rebirth of the German General Staff, and he might even find a touch of pleasure that a President of the United States was putting the seal of approval on this rebirth despite the judgment of another Chief Executive and former General of the Allied Armies, Dwight D. Eisenhower, that the German General Staff itself must be utterly destroyed.

Well above any personal satisfaction, General Heusinger at this moment was well aware that the whole political past of his nation was being rehabilitated, and that Germany, unclean, unshriven, re-Nazified, was once more assuming a leading position in the world. Many leading Americans understood the symbolism and objected to the Heusinger appointment. Said Senator Wayne Morse, Democrat of Oregon:

...let the State Department thoroughly understand that I do not buy the argument that...we can justify putting a Nazi general in a NATO military position where he will have influence, authority and power in determining the combined military policy to which the United States is a party. This Nazi general (Heusinger) unquestionably must bear his share of the responsibility for the deaths of thousands of American boys...What about our memories? Are they that short?{2}

Senator Morse’s anger was echoed in other capitals of the world where the memories of Heusinger and his deeds were not so short as they seemed to be in Washington. Europe remembered too well, for example, the following atrocity, as related by a German eyewitness, which occurred on October 5, 1942 outside of the town of Dubno in the Ukraine, then a forward section of the Nazi front in Russia. It tells a terrible truth about the life and times of General Heusinger:

"...I went directly to the pits. I heard rifle shots in quick succession from behind one of the earth mounds. The people who had got off the trucks—men, women and children of all ages—had to undress upon the order of an SS man who carried a whip. They had to put down their clothes in fixed places, sorted according to shoes, top clothing and underclothing. I saw a heap of shoes of about 800 to 1,000 pairs, great piles of underlinen and clothing.

"Without screaming or weeping, these people undressed, stood around in family groups, kissed each other, said farewells and waited for a sign from another SS man, who stood near the pits, also with a whip in his hand. During the fifteen minutes that I stood near the pit I heard no complaint or plea for mercy...

"An old woman with snow-white hair was holding a one-year old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight. The parents were looking on with tears in their eyes. The father was holding the hand of a boy about 10 years old and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him.

"At that moment the SS man at the pit shouted something...(another SS) counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound...I well remember a girl, slim and with black hair, who, as she passed close to me, pointed to herself and said: ‘twenty-three years old.’

"I walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave. People were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some of the people were still moving. Some were lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were still alive. The pit was already two-thirds full. I estimated that it contained about a thousand people. I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an SS man, who sat at the edge of the narrow end of the pit, his feet dangling into the pit. He had a tommy-gun across his knees and was smoking a cigarette.

"The people, completely naked, went down some steps and clambered over the heads of the people lying there to the place to which the SS man directed them. They lay down in front of the dead or wounded people; some caressed those who were still alive and spoke to them in a low voice. Then I heard a series of shots. I looked into the pit and saw that the bodies were twitching or the heads already lying motionless on top of the bodies that lay beneath them. Blood was running from their necks.

"The next batch was approaching already. They went down into the pit, lined themselves up against the previous victims and were shot.

I saw about thirty nailed people lying near the pit. Some of them were still alive...Later the Jews still alive were ordered to throw the corpses into the pit. Then they themselves had to lie down in this to be shot in the neck...I swear before God that this is the absolute truth.{3}

Let it be clearly understood that Generalleutnant Heusinger was not physically at the scene of this Einsatzgruppen crime; he was comfortably situated miles to the rear at Vinnitsa, the Headquarters of the Wehrmacht where he was in charge of all operational matters on the Eastern Front, deputy only to Hitler himself.

Neither General Heusinger nor Adolf Hitler squeezed the trigger of a single one of the machine guns which murdered the innocents of that Ukrainian village.

For both fit the role of Bernard Shaw’s militarists in his essay On War and Its Great Men: Killing by deputy makes killing easier. Hitler...has never killed anybody. Other people have done his killing for him. Torquemada never burnt a Jew...nor did King James turn the rack on Guy Fawkes. They had other people do it for them.{4}

Before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg after World War II, General Heusinger, during the course of admitting the dominant role that Hitler’s Wehrmacht had in the terrible Einsatzgruppen operations on the Eastern Front (in which eventually more than 1,400,000 Jews and twice that many Slavs were slaughtered), asserted that he merely transmitted the orders for these operations. This was his plea.

There is no blinking the facts of Heusinger. Even The New York Times (which has never objected to his presence in the United States nor to his ranking NATO post) noted that he was in almost daily association with Hitler from the start of World War II; that he did his job well...and carried out the orders of ‘the boss’ (Hitler) to the very end.{5}

In April of 1961 while he was being installed, in the approving presence of the President of the United States, as the head of the highest military authority of NATO in Washington, D.C., he could well think back to another April just 16 years before, in 1945. The guns were about to stop firing and a strange but welcome silence would settle over Europe for the first time since September of 1939.

In a concrete bunker deep under the city of Berlin—falling to the Russian armies—the suicide of Adolf Hitler was about to take place. Der Führer—reduced to a trembling, haggard old man—was afflicted with spasmodic twitches of his head. Together with his mistress, Eva Braun, whom he had just hastily married, he bid farewell to the retinue of servants and handful of paladins, including the gaunt, gnome-like club-foot, Joseph Goebbels, who himself would follow Hitler in suicide.

After shaking hands with his followers, Hitler and his mistress returned to their suite. The muffled sound of Russian artillery was heard high above the bunker. The few in the passage waited tensely. Suddenly a single shot was heard. After a moment, they entered Hitler’s room. There, sprawled across the sofa, lay Hitler, soaked in the blood coursing out of his shattered head. He had shot himself through the mouth. Eva Braun had taken poison.

Two SS wrapped the bodies in blankets and carried them up long flights of stairs, outside to a yard off the entrance to the Führer-bunker. The funeral procession of Nazi fanatics, SS, Wehrmacht generals and servants watched as the corpses were placed side by side and saturated with gasoline.

One of the Nazi mourners dipped a rag in gasoline, stepped forward and threw it out onto the corpses. Hitler and Eva Braun at once were enveloped in a sudden sheet of flame. At this moment, Russian shells began to land closer to the eerie cremation of the dictator. The mourners, at a signal from Goebbels, briefly came to attention, gave the Hitler salute, shouted Heil Hitler, and, as shells burst ever closer, scattered to the safety of the bunker.

A Top Secret telegram was then sent to Flemsburg, near the Finnish border, where Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz was waiting:

In place of the former Reich-Marshal Göring the Führer appoints you, Herr Grand Admiral, as his successor. Written authority is on its way. You will immediately take all such measures as the situation requires. (signed Goebbels)

Dönitz immediately acknowledged: I shall continue this war to an end worthy of the unique, heroic struggle of the German people.

The Führer’s successor did not have too long to wait for that end. On May 8, 1945, the Nazi armies signed the instrument of Unconditional Surrender at Rheims. The war in Europe was over.

But from Flemsburg, the last tenuous capital of what remained of Nazi Germany, Dönitz delivered the farewell address to the Nazi Officers Corps:

"Comrades! It must be clear to all of us that we are now fully in the enemy’s hands. Our fate before us is dark. What they will do with us we do not know, but what we have to do we know very well. We have been set back for a thousand years in our history. Land that was German for a thousand years has now fallen into Russian hands. Therefore, the political line we must follow is very plain. It is clear that we have to go along with the Western powers and work with them in the occupied territories in the West, for it is only through working with them that we can have hopes of later retrieving our land from the Russians...

"The most important thing is that we keep a zealous watch over the greatest boon that has been given us by National Socialism—our unity. Despite today’s complete military breakdown, our people are unlike the Germany of 1918. They have not yet been split asunder. Whether we want to create another form of Nazism, or whether we conform to the life imposed upon us by the enemy, we should make sure that the unity given to us by National Socialism is maintained under all circumstances.

The personal fate of each of us is uncertain. This, however, is unimportant. What is important is that we maintain at the highest level the comradeship amongst us. Only through this unity will it be possible for us to master the coming difficult times and only in this manner can we be sure that the German people will not die.

Hitler’s successor concluded:

We must all do our duty and above all we must not resign ourselves. That would be the worst that we could do because nothing could be accomplished thereby—only injury would result. Let us use all our strength for Germany!{6}

Thus the last official declaration to the German Armies by its Commander-in-Chief was a most political one: the state within a state—the historic German General Staff—would be maintained, even as it was following the defeat of World War I. World War II would be no different in this regard: the Nazi Officers Corps was to return home, and go over to the Western Powers; the bearers of the bloody traditions of Scharnhorst, Clausewitz, Moltke and Seeckt were to bide their time patiently and, as only they knew how, prepare against the day when they would return to power stronger than ever before; to place primary reliance in their newest and greatest boon—National Socialist unity, and to wait upon the march of events when they would join former enemies in the West in retrieving by force our land from the Russians; above all, they were not to resign themselves to defeat.

One of the first of the Nazi General Staff to carry out the letter and spirit of what was, in effect, the final Order of the Day for the German Officers Corps was Generalleutnant Adolf E. Heusinger. According to his own account, he sought out and surrendered to advancing American troops in early May of 1945.

His surrender of course was no ordinary capitulation by a mere field officer. Heusinger had, it must always be kept in mind, directed what historians call the brain and genius of the German General Staff: the Operations & Plans Section of the Army High Command: the precise pinnacle where all of the talent, know-how, erudite military technology and centuries-old experience of the Great German General Staff during World War II fused into the person and office of its Chief, Heusinger. Moreover, consider the most profound political nature of his position: Heusinger was the single officer who from 1938 to 1945 conceived, directed and, especially for three years on the Russian Front, implemented the strategy and tactics of Hitler’s plan to Nazify all of Europe and Soviet Russia.

His inestimable value, as a Soviet expert, to the strategists of the Cold War cannot be underestimated. Indeed his worth may well explain the fact that although, in 1944, he had been listed as a prima facie war criminal by some members of the United Nations War Crimes Commission, his name, after his 1945 surrender, was never placed on the lists of those to be tried for war crimes.

Quite to the contrary, Heusinger subsequently showed up at the Nuremberg Trials as a witness for the American prosecution. In his several appearances before the International Military Tribunal, he comported himself in his customary, finely honed ambivalence in which he never really committed himself to a position in an unqualified way. This behavior was typical of the fastidious little man who was standing beside Hitler that fateful day on July 20, 1944 when the bomb meant to kill der Führer exploded. Heusinger, though grievously wounded from the blast—in fact, his body shielded Hitler from its full effect—survived and was awarded with a specially struck Silver Medal of 20th July by a grateful Hitler personally.

All of the Nazis at Nuremberg knew of Heusinger’s closeness to Hitler. It explains why they laughed with scorn and contempt when Heusinger appeared with other Nazi officials of the Army and SS to offer testimony in return for not being subject to prosecution themselves.

Hermann Göring, the top Nazi in the Nuremberg dock, cursed General Heusinger the day his testimony was offered in court; he denounced Heusinger along with an SS General (who had admitted in his testimony that in order to carry out Einsatzgruppen operations, the SS first had to clear the murders with Heusinger’s office): It makes me sick to see Germans selling their souls to the enemy, Göring raged.

Why that dirty, bloody, treacherous swine! That filthy skunk! Goddam! Donnerwetter! The dirty sonofabitch!!! He was the bloodiest murderer in the whole godddamned setup! The dirty, filthy Schweinehund, selling his soul to save his stinking neck!!{7}

The doomed General Alfred Jodl, Heusinger’s immediate superior in the Nazi military hierarchy, was purple with rage when the testimony by Heusinger and the SS general were offered: Ask him, Jodl yelled at his attorney, ask him if he knows that Hitler held him up to us as a model anti-partisan fighter! Just ask the dirty pig that!

(For entirely different reasons, of course, an American national organization, after carefully reviewing his career and personality, would in 1961 remark on these characteristics of Heusinger and conclude that ...General Heusinger’s career must be seen as typified at best by a brutal and opportunistic amorality.{8})

In fact at Nuremberg, General Heusinger easily abandoned his former superiors and personal colleagues—General Jodl and Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel—while at the same time sedulously ingratiating himself with his captors, Keitel and Jodl were charged with having promoted the accession to power of the Nazi conspirators and the consolidation of their control over Germany...(for promoting) preparations for war...participating in the military planning and participation of the Nazi conspirators for wars of aggression...(for having) authorized, directed and participated in war crimes...in crimes against humanity...{9}

For these crimes, both were hanged. But not their subordinate. He went on to military and political heights greater than Keitel and Jodl ever scaled.

His first assignment after the war was with the notorious Gehlen Bureau in West Germany where he was secretly employed. The Gehlen Bureau was set up after World War II by the American State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It was composed exclusively of former highly placed Nazi politicians, intelligence operatives, Gestapo agents and SS leaders, and several, carefully selected Wehrmacht generals, admirals and Luftwaffe marshals.

Here Hitler’s General industriously worked on the time-consuming planning involved in the assembling of a new German General Staff High Command. Although this patently was in violation of all Allied Agreements at the end of World War II to dissolve the German General Staff and its armies, for Herr General such work was quite familiar. He had done the same thing during the 1920’s when he was selected personally by von Seeckt to train illegally to be a German General Staff officer while the Germans were secretly building an army in violation of World War I’s Versailles Treaty.

Herr General had participated as a young Staff Officer in the secret build-up of the German armies for the Third Reich and now, twenty-five years later, he was to lead the reorganization and re-establishment of all the armed forces—army, navy and air force—of a Fourth Reich. West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, early named him the chief of the new Wehrmacht, now called the Bundeswehr. In 1957 Heusinger became West Germany’s first Inspector General of all the Armed Forces, a post equivalent to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States Armed Forces and the highest military office in West Germany.

He led a handful of former Hitler militarists and politicians in exploiting to the fullest the vulnerable position of American policymakers because of their commitments to the Cold War. The New York Times put it bluntly when it reported that "In the opinion of General Adolf Heusinger...it will be impossible to recruit desirable officers for West Germany...unless a substantial number of war criminals are released..."{10}

Among the war criminals for whom he demanded freedom was the former head of the entire Nazi concentration camp system which had slaughtered millions throughout Europe during World War II. Heusinger got his way: most of them were released!

It was therefore with what must have been a certain sense of historic mockery that General Heusinger—one of the first to carry out the final orders of Hitler’s successor: To maintain the unity given to us by Nazism—himself ordered the first Officers Corps of the new Wehrmacht on September 27, 1958: We must remember our past...Let us stick to the old principles, those principles we used to have!{11}

Moreover, when Heusinger in 1961 appeared in Washington, D.C. at the side of the President of the United States to take over the post of Chairman of the NATO Permanent Military Committee, there was not a voice raised questioning the event let alone protesting the ensconcing of Hitler’s General in the capital of the United States.

Oh, to be literally accurate, there had been isolated and random objections. A few liberal weeklies and progressive newspapers had published materials documenting Heusinger’s Nazi career when news of his selection for the NATO policy post had been originally made in November of 1960. A national Jewish organization, the American Jewish Congress, was alarmed to some extent but hid its anxiety by confining its disquiet to memoranda circulated among its own staff. Memoranda, by the way, which contained valuable data about the Heusinger appointment and which should have been published for the general public.

I had been gathering materials and publishing them in numerous outlets here and abroad, although it must be conceded that much more attention was given to my writing about Heusinger abroad than at home, I had also been in extensive correspondence with several United States Congressional figures on the Heusinger matter particularly as it touched on the German question in regard to our foreign policy.

In fact, during this time, the State Department and I had, on several occasions, crossed swords, as it were, on the Heusinger issue. Several U.S. Senators cited my published writings and lectures in recording their own objections and the protests of constituents about the Heusinger appointment. By late 1961 such protests reached a stage that the State Department had prepared five different sets of official replies (called evaluations in the parlance of government circles) to downgrade and dismiss my work. All documents...used by Mr. Allen, U.S. Senator Paul Douglas (D-Ill.) was told, are publicly available and have been for years, These evaluations would be sent out by the Department whenever a citizen or a U.S. Congressman would make an inquiry or protest based on my own published materials on the Heusinger matter.

Even when as influential a United States Senator as Wayne Morse, Democrat of Oregon, a ranking member of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, took the floor of the upper chamber on April 16, 1961 and delivered a lengthy, fully documented (and damning) indictment of the Heusinger appointment to NATO, no one paid any attention.

From any objective standpoint, Senator Morse’s address was major news: here was a powerful member of the U.S. Senate charging the American State Department with knowingly employing a Hitler General and war criminal to implement policy. But the mass communications industry in this country did not give his speech a line in the press, nor a word over radio or television.

There then occurred a dramatic event which forced the issue on the American public. It was a sensational, worldwide uproar which broke through even the tacit conspiracy of silence behind which this Nazi General was securely operating in his Pentagon offices.

At a huge press conference in Moscow on December 12, 1961 attended by the entire world press, radio and TV news corps, the Soviet Union announced that, in a diplomatic note just handed to the United States, it had demanded the arrest and extradition of General Adolf E. Heusinger as a war criminal to stand trial for his wartime activities on the Russian Front.

The terms of the Soviet demand for Heusinger’s extradition were based on American-Russian World War II agreements which are still in full force today. There was no denying the immediate and electrifying effect of the Russian action.

That very day, the United States State Department rejected the Soviet note, characterizing the demand for extradition as a crude and ludicrous propaganda exercise...unworthy of dignifying with any comment.

As might be expected, the bulk of the American press, radio and TV media loudly parroted the State Department line. Prominence was given to the State Department’s lengthy assertions that General Heusinger had been cleared of all such charges, that he was not only never a member of the Nazi Party but was indeed a hero of the historic July 20th, 1944 attempt to kill Hitler and that any criticisms of Heusinger were Communist-inspired to sabotage NATO.

While one is free to dismiss the Soviet Union’s demand for General Heusinger’s extradition as propaganda, one, particularly if he is an American, cannot treat the official American government position on the Heusinger matter so cavalierly. The State Department’s official pronouncements are more than whitewash. They are the careful, calculated mouthings of those who are busily at work managing the news. According to well-known Kennedy Administration doctrine, in times of crisis the United States government has what one of its spokesmen called the right to lie. This piece of patent amorality was voiced frankly during the 1962 Cuban crisis when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear hell.

The Heusinger matter is a major example of managed (that is, suppressed, censored, deliberately misrepresented or withheld) news.

It was not until weeks after the December 12, 1961 Moscow press conference that I was able to examine the evidence which the Soviet Union released in support of its war crimes charges against Heusinger. All of my writings had been based solely on data from American, British, French and Nazi archives, principally the Nuremberg Trial data and the secondary scholarly works which have flowed out of that mighty source. However, the battle documents which the Soviets released are authentic and clearly conclusive: Truth is truth no matter where it might be or in what form it might appear or under whose auspices. For the Heusinger issue goes far beyond any individual’s anger—no matter how justified (and my anger on this has been steady since I’ve examined the issue)—over the misrepresentation of the facts of General Heusinger’s sordid career at the side of the most bloodthirsty dictator in world history.

I share Senator Morse’s anger and indignation as an American. He was very belligerent when he told the State Department that he didn’t buy its arguments about Heusinger and the need to place him in a high NATO policy-making position.

This Nazi General unquestionably must bear his share of the responsibility for the death of thousands of American boys, Senator Morse declared. What about our memories? Are they that short? he asked nearly in anguish as much as in fury.

For the most fundamental criminal act which could be perpetrated after World War II would be for us to forgive and to forget the Nazis’ crimes; to forgive and forget those still living who were responsible for them; and to allow a repetition of the causes which spawned a Hitler Germany.

Senator Morse has announced that as a senior member of the powerful Senate Committee on Foreign Relations he intends to follow with exceeding care the policies of my government in respect to the position it has taken in connection with elevating Nazi generals to positions of military power in NATO.

I am concerned, he said, about the direction in which NATO is going.

So am I. For the distortions practiced by the State Department in rationalizing their elevating Hitler’s General Heusinger do not delimit themselves to mere facts. The way facts are put together carry an historic meaning well beyond the mere question of the truth or falsity of an event or happening.

For once one takes up and pierces the Heusinger matter, he promptly is confronted by a massive structure whose several related parts are, despite their enormity, quite less than the whole. In examining the policy which the United States government has established on the employment of a Hitler General one is forced to consider, for example, the pioneering conceptual achievements in the realm of international law on the ancient questions of war crimes and crimes against the peace of humanity; moreover, one is forced to consider what our own country’s role and moral involvements mean in view of our participation in the creation and covenants of this new international law.

We played a prominent role in the creation of the London Agreement of 1945 and in the history of the United Nations War Crimes Commission; and in the agreements we struck with our Allies at Moscow, at Yalta and, especially, at Potsdam on the matter of war crimes, war criminals, crimes against humanity and crimes against the peace. We solemnly agreed to certain quite specific procedures which we swore on our honor would be taken against the German General Staff and the revival of Nazi militarism in order to protect the world community.

In analyzing the misrepresentations of the State Department about a General Heusinger, one is further forced to make his assessment in the light of the history of what is essentially one of the most enduring political institutions established by modern industrial capitalism: the German General Staff. If the German sociologist, Max Weber, were here to comment on the second rebirth of the Great German General Staff in preparation for the Fourth Reich, what insights we would be provided.

He would no doubt tell us of the grave political risks we run through a deliberate policy of re-establishing this institution (especially within the context of today’s West Germany) and by giving it the most destructive armed force of any power in Western Europe, That we have done so despite the obvious fact that such a policy flies directly in the face of our own democratic tradition is bad enough; but that we have done so in the face of the strong tide of history compounds the error. For the re-emergence of the Heusingers and the German General Staff mentality rearmed is utterly at odds with the vast, basic historical, political and moral commitments which the people of the world made when they fought and died to destroy the German General Staff and everything it stood for.

When General of the Armies, Dwight David Eisenhower, said in 1945 that The German General Staff itself must be utterly destroyed, he was not merely expressing individual military opinion but the intense wishes of the peoples of the Grand Alliance.

The continued presence in power of the remnant Nazi General Staff not only runs counter to the flood tide of history but the policymakers responsible for creating and sustaining this egregious anachronism have—to justify this policy—fashioned a political mythology about German militarism. The State Department has constructed a detailed myth about the person, career and role of General Adolf Ernst Heusinger.

It is the purpose of this book