The Scourge of the Swastika is a hard book to read and hard to review. Author Lord Russell of Liverpool served in the British war crimes trials held after WW2.

The theme of this book is that we can attribute the Nazi horrors directly to the “Master Race” theory, and further to National Socialism’s subsumption of individuals to the state. The Nazi regime treated harshly any Germans who stepped out of line; was it any wonder they treated people from “inferior races” or “subhumans” with no care whatsoever? People deported from occupied countries for slave labor were treated so as to extract maximum work at minimum expenditure, i.e., worked to death.

Lord Russell makes his point by starting from conditions in Germany, the totalitarians at the country, district, county and down to the city block level who ran everything, controlled everything, and restricted speech, property rights, religion. As Russel notes, “It is only when one recalls what was done in Germany between 1933 and 1939 that one can see…the crimes committed during the war in occupied territories.” Hitler used Germany as a test run for the rest of Europe.

From here Lord Russell shows the crimes against prisoners of war, naval crimes such as torpedoing neutral passenger-carrying ships. Until I read this I knew that Germans did not obey the Geneva convention with Russian POWs and had carried on unrestricted submarine warfare, but had not realized the extent of either. The German leadership ordered naval captains to not rescue any passengers or crew who escaped sinking vessels, and later to shoot helpless crew in lifeboats.

The next parts, covering the occupied countries, slave labor, concentration camps and Holocaust, are more familiar to any who have read about WW2. Russell shows the occupiers treated the people in the conquered countries as basically worthless, murdering entire villages, killing 10 or 100 random civilians in reprisals, starving the population. He makes it clear that the Germans knew that these actions were illegal and immoral – or would be viewed that way by impartial outsiders – because they took care to do many of the killings out of sight or to obfuscate the number of dead.

The book includes quotations from Hitler and others that clearly direct these horrors. Hans Franck in charge of Poland saw his duty as to turn Poland’s “economic, cultural and political structure into a heap of rubble”, and that Hitler would commend him if he “annihilated another 150,000 Poles.” Hitler wanted to free his people from “the humiliating restrictions imposed by the chimera of conscience and morality”, and it’s obvious that he succeeded with all too many, and those people found places in the SS and other units.

The British government tried to suppress The Scourge of the Swastika, to keep it from being published. I found comments that it was unbecoming for Lord Russell to make money from work he had done in while in service, but the more telling comments make it clear the British wanted to quell some of the anti-German feeling and re-incorporate West Germany into the European family. This was in 1954 when the Cold War was freezing over.

I would recommend this to anyone interested in how National Socialism operated inside and outside Germany or in totalitarian rule and how it descends into barbarism. If you wonder how a country so cultured as to bring us Beethoven can bring us Nazism, then read this. Read this but do not expect entertainment.

5 Stars