Today, the Labour party is now a hotbed of antisemitism. Perhaps this is  not so surprising after all.

While uncovering the Nazi past of Austrian Chancellor and former UN General Secretary Kurt Waldheim, the World Jewish Congress discovered “in American records the complete list of 40,000 names of Nazis wanted by the United Nations War Crimes Commission. These files had remained secret for 40 years after the commission was wound up in 1948. Even now, the congress has only the bald index of names.” (Independent, 26  February 1987)

The Home Office has so far refused to take any action against these butchers. The British authorities have good reason to protect their Nazis. Any attempt to bring the SS scum to trial would risk lifting the lid on the squalid history of Britain’s own post-war “rat line”, revealing how the British intelligence services combed the “displaced persons” refugee camps in Europe, seeking to enlist certified Nazi war criminals as “freedom fighters”…

British have always tried to conceal their role in smuggling literally thousands of war criminals into this country.

It was the Labour government of Attlee/Bevin which provided haven for these mass murderers, a policy shared by the American imperialists whose “rat line” rescued thousands of Nazi war criminals, including the infamous Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon”

Workers Hammer No. 103 December 1988/January 1989

Labour government ran Nazi “rat line”

Britain harbours Hitler’s war criminals

A list of 3000 Nazi war criminals said to have been drawn up by British authorities in 1948, acquired from the United Nations, was published last January by MPs from the Parliamentary War Crimes Group. The Soviet Union’s leading legal expert on war crimes visited a month later to press for action. In October 1986, the Los Angeles-based Simon WiesenthaI Center, internationally renowned for its work in -tracking down Nazi war criminals, supplied the British Home Office with a preliminary list of 17 East European Nazi killers known to have found a safe haven in Britain in the aftermath of World War II. Supplementing the already substantial Soviet and East European records, the Wiesenthal Center produced further names, drawn from the archives of the United Nations War Crimes Commission.

For more than 40 years these UN files remained classified information, hidden from those who would see the perpetrators of the unspeakable Nazi Holocaust brought to justice. While uncovering the Nazi past of Austrian Chancellor and former UN General Secretary Kurt Waldheim, the World Jewish Congress discovered “in American records the complete list of 40,000 names of Nazis wanted by the United Nations War Crimes Commission. These files had remained secret for 40 years after the commission was wound up in 1948. Even now, the congress has only the bald index of names.” (Independent, 26  February 1987)

The Home Office has so far refused to take any action against these butchers. The British authorities have good reason to protect their Nazis. Any attempt to bring the SS scum to trial would risk lifting the lid on the squalid history of Britain’s own post-war “rat line”, revealing how the British intelligence services combed the “displaced persons” refugee camps in Europe, seeking to enlist certified Nazi war criminals as “freedom fighters” in the service of the imperialist bourgeoisie’s anti-Soviet war crusade. It is common knowledge that numerous leading Nazis, including Hitler’s chief exterminator Adolf Eichmann and the infamous Auschwitz butcher, Doctor Josef Mengele, escaped to Latin America and Spain, but the British have always tried to conceal their role in smuggling literally thousands of war criminals into this country.

It was the Labour government of Attlee/Bevin which provided haven for these mass murderers, a policy shared by the American imperialists whose “rat line” rescued thousands of Nazi war criminals, including the infamous Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon”. Running Britain’s version of the “rat line” is one of Labour’s major “contributions” in the international field -a fitting dirty job for these lackies of British imperialism.

BRITAIN’S NAZIS

Living in Britain today is Antanas Gecas (Gecevicius), personally reponsible for the murder and torture of thousands of Jews and anti-fascist partisans following Hitler’s invasion of the USSR. Gecas was a member of the Lithuanian auxiliary police battalion serving alongside the SS in the systematic extermination of East European Jewry. The Soviet Justice Department suspects Gecas was involved in the execution of 15,000 in Lithuania. Witnesses recall his participation in the hanging of Soviet , partisans in Minsk and the wholesale butchery of Jews in Minsk, Slutsk, Kaidanov and other places. Members of Gecas’ own battalion have testified to his role in thf’ slaughter. The anti-fascist monthly Searchlight (December 1986), quoted Lithuanian volunteer Yuosas Knimiras:

“In the autumn of 1941, I took part in the hanging of Soviet partisans… a group of people were taken out of the (Minsk) prison, several women amongst them. One of the prisoners had a board on the chest with writing in German and Russian. The victims’ hands were tied behind their backs. Gecevicius appointed some men to act as hangmen. As far as I remember, four men and a woman were hanged in the city park… Before that, myself and other people had received a drink of vodka from Gecevicius. I had about 300 grammes of it. Gecevicius was in charge of the hanging. The victims were left on the gallows for the next three days.”

For his services to Hitler’s Third Reich, his leadership of a fascist Jagdcommando (hunting commando), Gecas was awarded the Iron Cross. Today he lives peacefully in Edinburgh, protected by the British government.

Another enjoying this protection is Paul Reinhards, director of the Latvian “Labour Department” responsible for running the Nazi slave labour schemes. Over 280,000 Jews were deported to Germany by Reinhards’ administration. For years this “captive nations” war criminal has been at the head of the exile Latvian community in Britain, issuing Latvian passports recognised by Britain and the US. Antas Derzinskas is another Lithuanian Nazi living here, responsible for deporting Jewish women and children to the death camps.

In a calculated affront to the millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, Soviet citizens and others who perished in the Holocaust, Home Secretary Douglas Hurd has categorically insisted that none of the Hitlerite mass murderers currently residing in Britain would face deportation to the Soviet Union where their crimes were committed. Like their US counterparts who in 1987 fought desperately (and unsuccessfully) to “save” Estonian Nazi butcher Karl Linnas from Soviet justice, Britain has repeatedly denied Soviet extradition requests. They complain that courts in the USSR do not mete out “fair justice”. As if the British rulers know the meaning of the word “justice”! In the Soviet Union, where 20 million people died to liberate all of Europe from the Nazi nightmare, the survivors of Hitler’s genocide had the grim satisfaction of avenging their dead. Nazi mass murderers who fell into the hands of the Red Army at the end of the war were hanged. In 40 years not a single prosecution for war crimes has been brought in this country. (Although it’s safe to assume that some of the British intelligence agents set up by masterspy Kim Philby in Albania were of this ilk and got theirs.)

ANTI-SOVIETISM AND FASCIST TERROR

When Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, his objective was the restoration of capitalist wage slavery in the homeland of the October socialist revolution. In the process the Nazis were determined to impose their “final solution” on all those considered Untermenschen (subhuman). In the Ukraine, Byelorussia and the Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania where anti-Semitism was rife and integrally linked to anti-Communism, the German forces were rapidly augmented by thousands of native fascists, enthusiastically enlisting in the” police battalions attached to the SS forces and the infamous Einsatzgruppen, mobile death squads whose sole task was the mass murder of Jews and anti-fascist partisans. The Croatian Ustashi carried out their grisly task of genocide with indescribable brutality, repelling even their German Nazi overlords. It was the Ukrainian Einsatzcommandos who forced some 50,000 Jews out of their homes in Kiev and marched them to the mass grave at Babi Yar. The sadism and mass slaughter perpetrated by the German Nazi imperialists and their East European allies is unparalleled in human history. Yet after the war the thwarted nationalist ambitions and fervent anti-communism of these swine became marketable commodities to the British and American imperialists.

The Soviets smashed the Third Reich, planting the hammer and sickle flag over the Reichstag on 1 May 1945. With Germany conquered -the Allied imperialists geared up for the Cold War against the USSR. Even before the Nazi surrender the American Army’s Counter .Intelligence Corps (CIC) and British Intelligence were falling over each other to recruit Nazi scientists and technicians for work on secret military research projects. Chief among the beneficiaries of Britain’s own “rat line” were those East European collaborators who managed to keep one step ahead of the Soviet Red Army as it forced the fascist invaders back to Berlin.

At this time the US space agency got the slavemasters Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph. Hitler’s anti-communist specialists were also up for grabs; a report in the Guardian (11 November 1988) details the attempts of the British and American imperialists to enlist well-known warcriminals in the anti-Soviet spy agencies:

“A panel headed by Sir Charles Darwin of the National Physics Laboratory drew up a list of 152 men to be traced and brought to Britain to work on civil industry and secret defence projects. “Fifteen of the scientists had been working for German firms which used concentration camp inmates as slave labour. One man on the list, Dr Walter Reppe, was awaiting trial in Nuremberg. Another, Dr Leo Casagrande, had been a high-ranking SS officer and had used slave-labour during the war. “In March 1946, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Jowitt, said of the several hundred German scientists brought to Britain: ‘I am willing to risk their being Nazis -and I think they probably are -so long as they are highly skilled technicians who will teach our people something which they primarily did not know.'”

US General George Patton, upon hearing of complaints from the Soviets about footdragging in disarming the Nazis, snapped: “What do you care what those goddam Bolshies think? We’re going to fight them sooner or later. Why not now while our army is intact and we can kick the Red Army back into Russia? We can do it with my Germans…. They hate those Red bastards” (New Times [Moscow], March 1983).

In the American and British zones of occupied post-war Germany, measures were taken to protect criminals like Professor Nikolai Poppe, smuggled to the US and subsequently “lost” at the behest of the British authorities. After the war Britain employed SS Major Emil Hoffman to recruit former Gestapo and SS agents. One of its targets at that time was Barbie, but the Americans got there first. Documents relating to Britain’s dealings with Barbie have never been declassified on account of their “sensitive nature”. The same is true of papers relating to Josef Mengele. Was Britain trying to recruit this grisly mass murderer? One American journalist has already pointed out Mengele’s potential appeal to the imperialists:

“How could NASA not be interested in Mengele’s meticulous notes on how long it takes a naked human being to freeze to death or burn to death, his research on organ transplants and skin grafts?” (L.A. Weekly, 15 21 February, 1985)

Certainly, the British did get one Dr Vladislav Dering -a camp “doctor” at Auschwitz who conducted sadistic “experiments” -including sterilisation without anaesthetic. Dering died in 1964 -after serving in the Colonial Services in Somalia and being awarded an OBE.

Citing information from the autobiography of former MI6 officer Anthony Cavendish, now banned by the Thatcher government, Searchlight (March 1988) has also reported that British agents were active in training and equipping Latvian SS members after the war: “Many of these were returned home, at the behest of British Intelligence and with the blessing of Labour’s right-wing Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, to run infiltration and sabotage operations against Britain’s erstwhile ally.” Cavendish is an associate of George Kennedy Young, a Monday Club activist implicated up to his neck in the right-wing plot to bring down the Wilson government in the 1970s.

In addition to espionage the British were also anxious to recruit for labour schemes. In 1947, against the advice of the Home Office and with the blessing of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Attlee authorised the transportation to Britain of virtually the entire membership of the XIV Waffen SS Infantry Division (Galician). Composed of Ukrainian collaborators led by German SS officers, the Galician Division was employed in the bloody suppression of the 1944 Warsaw uprising, and in the massacre of Polish villagers at Huta Pienacka. They surrendered en masse to the British in 1945 following defeat at the hands of the Red Army in the Battle of Brody in 1944 and were subsequently moved to a refugee camp at Rimini in Italy. Within two years many of them were working as farm labourers in the Midlands, or slipped back out of the country to Canada and Australia whose governments were duly instructed in a 1948 telegram from Clement Attlee that there were to be no further prosecutions for war crimes. Members of the Latvian SS were resettled in Britain and given work in the mines. According to the Guardian (16 November 1988):

“…their tell-tale Waffen SS blood group tattoos [signifying that only “pure Aryan” blood could be given in the case of transfusion] were offending workers. The National Coal Board and the Government agreed the men should be employed on tasks where they would not need to remove their shirts.”

British imperialism perpetuates the self-serving myth that the Second World War was all about fighting fascism. In fact, Mussolini’s blackshirts and Hitler’s SA had fervent admirers among the British ruling class, including its “royal family”. Only a few years ago the government tried to hush up the scandal that followed revelations of the SS past of the father of Princess Michael of Kent, and the enthusiasm of Edward VIII, Duke of Windsor and his wife Mrs Simpson for the Nazi fuhrer is well-known. Winston Churchill, a notorious anti-Semite, declared in Rome in January 1927 that:

“Italy has shown that there is a way of fighting the subversive forces which can rally the masses of the people, properly led, to value and wish to defend the honour and stability of civilized society. She has provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison. Hereafter no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against the cancerous growth of Bolshevism.” (quoted in Robert Black, Stalinism in Britain)

Jews fleeing the Nazi Holocaust were denied entry to Britain. Many who managed to get here were rounded up and deported on board the tramp steamer Dunera bound for a concentration camp in Australia.

As for the Labour Party, it was Attlee, Bevin and the rest who made Britain safe for the perpetrators of the Holocaust in the service of the US-British anti-Soviet war drive. Bevin was also one of the architects and founders of the anti-Soviet NATO alliance. The start of the Korean War in 1950 saw the virtual doubling of military expenditure by the Labour Cabinet. In bringing Nazi war criminals not to justice but to safety, the Labour Party was doing its job as an anti-communist bulwark, a social democratic enemy of the people. The Nazi killers should have been executed decades ago by the workers tribunals of a victorious Europe-wide socialist revolution! We say: Extradite Gecas, Reinhards, Derzinskas and all the Nazi war criminals to the scene of their crimes to be tried by their surviving victims!

At Nuremburg the losing side in the imperialist carnage of World War II was put on trial by the victors. But those who fire-bombed Dresden have no place passing judgment on mass murder. The British, American and French imperialists were guilty of heinous crimes against humanityfrom Churchill’s murder by starvation of millions of Bengalis during the war to Truman’s atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today, the imperialists prepare for a new antiSoviet holocaust using the services of the technicians and executioners of the last one. The homegrown fascists and skinhead filth who terrorise blacks, Asians, Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies and leftists are the “final solution” decaying capitalism keeps in reserve. It will take international workers revolution to avenge the victims of all the imperialists and wipe from the face of the globe the fascist filth spawned and protected by this rotting system.•