SS
Colonel Jochen Peiper’s life and career in the Nazi era, his trial for war
crimes and violent death in a French village in the 1970s; FDR’s role in
America’s transition from Isolationism to a war footing and the Geoffrey
Morton-Avraham Stern battle of wills in the Holy Land all present an appetising
brew of reading as summer approaches.
When
has the corpus of what is known as history which grows incrementally from what
for a period of time is considered the present and contemporary ever known of
an era of political and social pacification?
War
and terror continue to be used as instruments pursuant to the creation of new
state borders and the engineering of social transformation.
As
the subject matter of these books show, the creation of the League of Nations in
the early 1920s failed in the ambitious aim of ‘abolishing war’ for all times.
And as recent events in the Ukraine and the Middle East demonstrate, the
Fukuyamian idea of the ‘End of History’ continues to elude human civilization.
In
the Ukraine, Bandera worshipping groups of the far Right facilitated the
overthrow of a democratically elected president, and in the subsequent civil
strife between the Western and Eastern parts of the nation, militias modelled
on the regiments that composed the Waffen-SS actively recruit Western Europeans
to fight a ‘racial war’ in the East.
In
the Middle East, Wahabbi extremists of the Sunni denomination under the banner
of the Islamic State seek to create a puritan Muslim state at the expense of the
secular modelled states of Syria and Iraq.
It
is unlikely in the former case that the typically indoctrinated volunteer of
the Ukrainian Azov Brigade would be unfamiliar with the life stories of
Waffen-SS officers such as the Belgian Leon Degrelle and, of course, Joachim
‘Jochen’ Peiper who continues to be revered as a poster-boy for the brave and
fanatically disposed SS-man.
Peiper
has not only been the subject of biographers of the Second World War, his craft
as a practitioner of tank warfare and abilities as a leader of men has been the
subject for researchers in military colleges.
Some
years ago, I discovered a paper written by a Dutch military officer studying at
the US Army Command and General Staff College. Entitled The Beginning of the End: The Leadership of SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer
Jochen Peiper, the thesis sought to appraise the capabilities of Peiper as
a military leader notwithstanding the notoriety garnered by the Waffen-SS
during the Second World War and the designation of the SS as a whole as a
criminal organisation.
Peiper
is perhaps best known as one of the main defendants at a military commission
which tried him for responsibility of the massacre of captured and unarmed US
troops at Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge. Peiper claimed that he gave
no orders to shoot the Americans and was unaware of any general orders not to
take prisoners alive.
However,
as the leader of the panzer group from which the killers were attached, he
accepted ultimate responsibility and was condemned to death; a verdict which
was later commuted to life imprisonment.
He
was later released but would continue to be threatened by those who wished to
deprive him of earning a livelihood and those who wished for him to be tried
for war crimes.
His
past caught up with him in a small French village when his identity was
discovered and he was murdered by suspected French communists when his home was
firebombed in the early hours.
With
over 400 pages representing years of research, Danny S. Parker’s Hitler’s Warrior: The Life and Wars of SS Colonel
Jochen Peiper promises new insights into Peiper’s time as Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich
Himmler’s adjutant, his battles in ferocious encounters on the Eastern and
Western fronts, his trial and his post-war life.
The
subject of Patrick Bishop’s The Reckoning
has as its backdrop, the dream of political Zionists to carve out a Jewish
homeland in the United Nations mandate territory of Palestine which was
governed by Britain.
Among
the most virulent of opponents of British rule was Avraham Stern, a Jewish
émigré from Poland who was a poet, philosopher and exponent of political
terrorism. Stern was a militant disciple
of Ze’ev Jabotinsky whose extremism made him break ranks with the Zionist
leadership who suspended their collective agitation against British rule in
order to support the pressing matter of defeating Hitler’s Germany.
While
members of the Palmach, the Haganah and even the Irgun joined the war effort,
Stern stubbornly held out for an alliance first with Mussolini’s Italy and then
the German Reich in the quest for the creation of a Jewish state.
His
efforts were rebuffed.
The
book centres on the contest of wills between Stern and British policeman
Geoffrey Morton who finally cornered Stern in an apartment in Tel Aviv. Stern’s
subsequent shooting by the Englishman was and continues to be shrouded in
controversy. Was it an act of self-defence? Or was it a cold blooded murder?
Today
the killings continue in the Middle East with the focus being on the attempts
to create an Islamic State by fanatics who are sustained by huge reserves of
resources and an effectively managed propaganda arm which emphasises
mercilessness toward captured enemies via means that have included high
production value videos featuring staged beheadings.
For
those who refute any analogy between the barbarity of the Islamic State and the
tactics employed by the Zionist terror groups such as the Irgun and the Stern
Gang, one only has to wonder what distinctions can be made between the
beheading of captured Syrian soldiers defending their land from an invasion of
largely foreign sponsored mercenaries and the hanging of British policemen by
wire in booby-trapped orange groves?
For
while there is approval –secret or publically expressed- of IS murders of
Shias, Christians and recalcitrant Sunnis by some Muslim residents in the
Western nations, the sentiments of some Zionists in the West at the time of
violent anti-British agitation in Palestine such as that expressed by Hollywood
playwright Ben Hecht, bears reminding.
“Every
time a British soldier dies”, Hecht proclaimed, “the Jews of America make a
little holiday in their hearts.”
Terrorism
as the historian Niall Ferguson has argued is the original sin of the Middle
East.
And
while Stern was condemned for criminal acts of robbery and gruesome murders,
Bishop’s book appears to promote the view that his killing created a martyr who
proved more influential in death than he did as a marginalised figure in life
in achieving the creation of a Jewish state.
Nicholas
Wapshott’s book, The Sphinx chronicles
and analyses President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s policy of persuading America
to break with its isolationist position into one of intervening in a violent
European conflict.
The
subtitle of his effort, ‘Franklin Roosevelt, the Isolationists and the Road to
World War II’ gives an indication of Roosevelt’s reputation as a wily political
operator who was schemer par excellence.
A
perusal of the jacket cover and the preface provides examples of some of the
influential personalities he was up against.
Father
Coughlin, the firebrand Roman Catholic priest who initially supported
Roosevelt’s New Deal policies but who later turned against FDR was one who was
famously neutralised by the machinations of the president who obtained the help
of the Vatican to silence a priest who boasted of a large radio audience in the
1930s.
Another
figure was Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch of the Kennedy family, who as
ambassador to the Court of St. James earned the reputation as a supporter of the
‘appeasement’ of Nazi Germany. Those familiar with some of the numerous
biographies of his sons as well as personal biographies such as Ronald
Kessler’s The Sins of the Father,
will know of how FDR manipulated a manipulator into diffusing the threat
Kennedy posed to his leadership of the Democratic Party with appointments in
Wall Street and his role as an ambassador.
The
other prominent figure from the isolationist camp covered by Wapshott is the
famous aviator, Charles A. Lindburgh.
All
three it should be noted garnered a reputation for anti-Semitism for
publically, declaring that intervening in a European war served “Jewish
interests” and not that of America.
They
all shape up to be fascinating reads.
Adeyinka
Makinde (2015)
Hitler’s Warrior: The Life and Wars of
SS Colonel Jochen Peiper by Danny S. Parker is published by Da
Capo Press.
The Reckoning: How the Killing of One
Man Changed the Fate of the Promised Land by Patrick Bishop
is published by William Collins.
The Sphinx: Franklin Roosevelt, the
Isolationists, and the Road to World War II by Nicholas
Wapshott is published by Norton Books.