The Yockey-Thompson Campaign against Post-War Vengeance

The American neo-Spenglerian philosopher Francis Parker Yockey has over the past decade enjoyed a revival of interest among the far Right.[1] Now that the Right is less encumbered by the dominant political-financial system’s Cold War rhetoric which saw a range of movements from conservatives to the American Nazi Party[2] lining up to beat the war drums against the U.S.S.R. as ostensibly the major threat to “Western Civilization,” Yockey’s views can be considered in a less-partisan light. Yockey and his followers adopted a pro-Soviet position[3] vis-à-vis the occupation of Europe by the U.S.A., especially after the 1952 Prague Treason Trial,[4] which Yockey regarded as Russia’s declaration of war against Zionism and Judaization under the auspices of U.S. machinations.[5] Likewise, we can now look back on the position of Yockey and his American colleague H. Keith Thompson in regard to the “war-crimes trials” in Germany, and might see the present-day “war-crimes trials” against Serbs and others as being founded on that precedent.

Briefly, in regard to Yockey’s background, he was of Irish-American descent, born in Chicago in 1918, a pianist to concert-performance level, whose education was directed towards law, in which he had exceptional ability. Already as a young man he had turned his attention towards the Right, one of his first articles being “The Tragedy of Youth,” written for Father Charles Coughlin’s popular Depression-era magazine Social Justice.[6]

Among the Hangmen of Europe

In the aftermath of the war Yockey obtained a position as an investigator for the War Crimes Tribunal in order to subvert from within the lynching regime that was being imposed upon Europe and to seek out European Rightists who might be able to revive a European resistance movement.

Reaching Germany in January 1946, Yockey was assigned to the 7708 War Crimes Group at Wiesbaden, Frankfurt as a civilian employee of the U.S. War Department. This unit investigated “lower-level accused war criminals.” Yockey served as a post-trial review attorney evaluating petitions for clemency. He does not seem to have been particularly discreet as, according to Coogan, he obtained a piano and played German anthems in his room.[7]

The head of the post-trial section was Samuel Sonenfield,[8] whose name could only have confirmed Yockey’s suspicions as to the character of the Nuremberg judicial regime.

Yockey was noted for his “absenteeism,” for which he ultimately was dismissed. He spent much of his time searching out German veterans and urging resistance to the Occupation, and writing pamphlets such as “Why the Americans Did Not Go to Berlin.”[9] This was at a time when the Werwölfe underground that had been set up by Goebbels in the final months of the war was still functioning, and scoring some significant hits on the Occupation authorities and their German collaborators.[10] On December 27, 1946 Yockey was fired from his position for “abandonment of position.”[11] Willis Carto, in the “Introduction” to his Noontide Press edition of Imperium, states that when Yockey was called before his superior, presumably Sonenfield, he was told: “We don’t want this type of report. This has entirely the wrong slant. You’ll have to rewrite these reports to conform to the official viewpoint.” Yockey is said to have responded that he was “a lawyer, not a journalist. You’ll have to write your own propaganda.”[12] While there is a discrepancy between the accounts of Yockey’s departure from the War Crimes Commission, Sonenfield might well have left out certain aspects of his recollections of Yockey. Sonenfield was writing to the neo-conservative publication National Review in 1971, which was attacking Carto and his then-relatively effective Liberty Lobby.[13]

* * *

Yockey then travelled through Europe, went to England to seek out Mosleyites and others of like mind, returned briefly to the U.S.A., and left for Ireland in late 1947 to write Imperium.[14]

Yockey spent the next twelve years travelling on numerous passports over Europe, working for the Red Cross, writing anti-Zionist material in Egypt for Nasser’s government, and going back and forth to the U.S.A. despite being tracked by Interpol and the F.B.I..

His first significant action after writing Imperium was to return to England where he sought out Sir Oswald Mosley, who had revived his organization under the name Union Movement in 1947, advocating a post-Fascist united Europe. Yockey hoped that he could persuade Mosley to adopt Imperium as his philosophical basis, even suggesting to Mosley that his name be attached as the author. Mosley was impressed by Yockey’s intelligence, and Yockey was employed briefly as the movement’s liaison officer with other European movements, but Mosley regarded Yockey as eccentric and Yockey did not mince words when it came to the Jewish question. Mosley was in fact dismissive of Yockey’s efforts and did not even read Imperium.[15]

However, during his time with Union Movement, employed by the European Contact Section, Yockey had the opportunity to cultivate further contacts in Britain and Europe. He provided dossiers he had lifted from the Wiesbaden office to Maurice Bardèche, the French literary critic, defender of “collaborationism,” and early critic of the “war crimes” proceedings. Bardèche recalled that the documents were “extremely valuable.” He made use of them in his book Nuremberg 2 or the Counterfeiters.[16] Yockey also sent Bardèche documents to assist with the defense of other accused “war criminals,” including SS Lt. Gen. Otto Ohlendorf, who had commanded an Action Group in the Ukraine[17] mopping up partisans and commissars. Yockey was also “particularly active” in the defense of SS Lt. Col. Fritz Knoechlein, who had executed British soldiers in France after they had raised a white flag but then proceeded to shoot at his men. Yockey had sufficient contacts to secure British Barrister and Labour Member of Parliament Reginald Paget for Knoechlein’s defense. Although Paget successfully defended Gen. Erich von Manstein on “war crimes” charges, he was unsuccessful with Knoechlein, who was hanged in January 1949.[18]

Fast-forward to 2005, and it emerged that Knoechlein was one of many German prisoners tortured under British captivity, at Kensington Palace Gardens. Three plush houses, during 1940 to 1948, served as the London office of the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre, known colloquially as the London Cage. This was run by MI19, responsible for extracting testimony from prisoners of war. A recent report in The Guardian, drawing on the National Archives, found that 3,573 P.O.W.s went through The Cage, of whom “1,000 were persuaded to give  statements about war crimes. […] The brutality did not end with the war, moreover: a number of German civilians joined the servicemen who were interrogated there up to 1948.”[19] When the commander of The Cage, Lt. Col. Alexander Scotland, intended to publish his memoires in 1950 he was threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, and Special Branch raided his retirement home. Cobain comments:[20]

“An assessment by MI5 pointed out that Scotland had detailed repeated breaches of the Geneva Convention, with his admissions that prisoners had been forced to kneel while being beaten about the head; forced to stand to attention for up to 26 hours; threatened with execution; or threatened with ‘an unnecessary operation.'”

Scotland’s memoirs were published in 1957,[21] after much had been expunged. Of Knoechlein, The Guardian’s Cobain found in the National Archives:[22]

a long and detailed letter of complaint from one SS captain [sic], Fritz Knoechlein, who describes his treatment after being taken to ‘The Cage’ in October 1946.

Knoechlein alleges that because he was ‘unable to make the desired confession’ he was stripped, given only a pair of pyjama trousers, deprived of sleep for four days and nights, and starved.

The guards kicked him each time he passed, he alleges, while his interrogators boasted that they were ‘much better’ than the ‘Gestapo in Alexanderplatz.’ After being forced to perform rigorous exercises until he collapsed, he says he was compelled to walk in a tight circle for four hours. On complaining to Scotland that he was being kicked even ‘by ordinary soldiers without a rank’, Knoechlein alleges that he was doused in cold water, pushed down stairs, and beaten with a cudgel. Later, he says, he was forced to stand beside a large gas stove with all its rings lit before being confined in a shower which sprayed extremely cold water from the sides as well as from above. Finally, the SS man says, he and another prisoner were taken into the gardens behind the mansions, where they were forced to run in circles while carrying heavy logs.

‘Since these tortures were the consequences of my personal complaint, any further complaint would have been senseless,’ Knoechlein wrote. ‘One of the guards who had a somewhat humane feeling advised me not to make any more complaints, otherwise things would turn worse for me.’ Other prisoners, he alleged, were beaten until they begged to be killed, while some were told that they could be made to disappear.”

While the War Office took the allegations seriously, they considered that an investigation would delay Knoechlein’s execution. After The Cage had been mistakenly identified to the Red Cross and its cover exposed, with a Red Cross representative unsuccessfully trying several times to inspect the houses, its work was moved to internment camps in Germany, where conditions were even worse. A 27-year-old German journalist who had been held by the Gestapo said that his treatment as an inmate at one British internment camp was far worse.[23]

From the Belly of the Beast

Yockey was among the first to question the judicial methodology and “atrocity propaganda” being used against the German defendants. While his bias was predisposed to be in their favor, what his detractors discount is that he was also a lawyer of brilliance who had been an assistant prosecutor, and a cum laude Notre Dame Law School graduate, who had also studied at the prestigious School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.[24]

Prof. Deborah Lipstadt in her critically acclaimed book on “Holocaust denial” refers to Yockey as having “laid the essential elements of Holocaust denial,” twenty years prior to the formation of the Institute for Historical Review.[25] What Lipstadt cites is a paragraph from Imperium, which we can safely assume was based on Yockey’s first-hand observations and study of primary sources; an inconvenience that Lipstadt prefers to address by means of ad hominem. Indeed, while Lipstadt proceeds over several pages to critique Yockey and Imperium she does not appear to have actually read Imperium, but apparently relied on a magazine article.[26]

Yockey alludes in Imperium to what he presumably saw, and the reports he had read as a reviewer at the war crimes office at Wiesbaden. Yockey therefore might be considered a primary witness to events, regardless of quips about him as an “American Hitler” put about under the guise of “scholarship.” Hence as early as 1948 Yockey wrote in a chapter entitled “Propaganda,” that the propaganda used to push the USA into war against Germany was nothing compared to “the massive, post-war, ‘concentration camp’ propaganda of the Culture-distorting regime based in Washington.”[27] He continues:[28]

“This propaganda announced that 6,000,000 members of the Jewish Culture-Nation-State-People-Race had been killed in European camps, as well as an indeterminate number of other people. The propaganda was on a world-wide scale, and was of a mendacity that was perhaps adapted to a uniformized mass, but was simply disgusting to discriminating Europeans. The propaganda was technically quite complete. ‘Photographs’ were supplied by the millions of copies. Thousands of the people who had been killed published accounts of their experiences in these camps. Hundreds of thousands more made fortunes in post-war black markets. ‘Gas-chambers’ that did not exist were photographed, as a ‘gasmobile’ was invented to titillate the mechanically-minded.”

Yockey then stated that the purpose of this propaganda was to “create a total war in the spiritual sense,” in order to accustom the masses to the next phase in the annihilation of Western Civilization, adding with emphasis: “it was designed to support a war after the Second World War, a war of looting, hanging, and starvation against defenseless Europe.”[29]

What Yockey was referring to was the policy that became known as the “Morgenthau Plan,” named after the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and drafted by Treasury officials Harry Dexter White, Harold Glasser and Frank Coe, all of whom would be classifiable in Yockeyan parlance as “culture-distorters.”

Ironically, Lipstadt, who seems to have coined the term “Holocaust denial,” indulges in “denial” herself when she alludes to the Morgenthau Plan as “never put into effect,” the claims of “Holocaust deniers” to the contrary.[30] According to Lipstadt, the Morgenthau Plan is of such interest to “Holocaust deniers” because they are anti-Semites, and Morgenthau was Jewish. She rationalizes the wholesale barbarity inflicted upon Germany after World War Two as “shortcomings in Allied policies,” and that “there was no starvation program in Germany.”[31] Interestingly, Lipstadt chose not to cite any references for her “denial” in regard to the Morgenthau Plan.[32]

Yockey was writing about what he saw, and he was in a better position than most of those from the Allied states to comment on the situation in Germany in the aftermath of the war, and the manner in which the judicial proceedings were planned and enacted. He commented on the mentality of the Allied Occupation that vengeance is something taken by the victors of an alien culture upon their defeated foes, and does not occur between belligerent nations of the same High Culture.[33] The latter attitude we might readily call “Chivalry.” Defeated leaders had generally been treated with honor,[34] not tortured and hanged. The treatment meted out in Europe after World War Two by the Allies indicated to Yockey that alien interests were dominant in post-war policies, which seem more akin to the Old Testament than to the ethos of the Medieval Knight. Yockey wrote of this:[35]

“Thus when, after the Second World War, a huge and inclusive program of physical extermination and politico-legal-socio-economic persecution was instituted against the defenseless body of Europe, it was quite clear that this was no intra-Cultural phenomenon, but one more, and the most transparent and admonitory, manifestation of Culture-distortion.”

* * *

Yockey and over a hundred supporters left the Mosley movement and founded the European Liberation Front, issuing a periodical called Frontfighter and a manifesto, The Proclamation of London.

The activities of Yockey were of a more covert than an agitational character; not surprising considering he was working to “liberate Europe.” F.B.I. reports state of Yockey’s time in Mosley’s movement that he and his circle of friends seem to have functioned already as a separate group. He worked with Union Movement’s German adviser Lt. Col. Alfred Franke-Gricksch, head of the Bruderschaft, Waffen SS veteran’s organisation.” [36] F.B.I. Agent Bogstat commented that Yockey in his work in 1946 for the War Department “had created unfavorable attentions in Germany when interceding on behalf of the German war criminals who had been sentenced to death.”[37]

Yockey was arrested in San Francisco and held on excessive bond for “passport fraud” in 1960.[38] Yockey feared that he would be subjected to psychiatric torture, which would destroy his brain. A news report states that a psychiatric examination had been ordered by the court. Yockey told a fellow inmate that he feared he would be forced to divulge information about the people he cared about. Consequently, he committed suicide with cyanide from an unknown source.[39]

We now know that this was not a worry to be scoffed at as a paranoid delusion. At the time the C.I.A. was funding psychological experiments that reduced subjects to vegetative and suicidal states.[40] Psychiatry was also being used against political, dissidents, most notably Ezra Pound, who rotted for many years in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital without being diagnosed, and the segregationist leader Gen. Edwin Walker.[41] Given what was taking place around that time, and for many years after, it would be surprising had there not been an intention to destroy Yockey’s brain.

Harold Keith Thompson Jr.

Yockey’s primary colleague in the U.S.A. was H. Keith Thompson Jr. a Yale graduate in naval science and history, he had been a publisher and a literary agent for an interesting array of personalities. His varied career had included participation in Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s Antarctic Expedition. He represented Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, in the sale of her son’s letters; and was in communication with Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, naval commander at Pearl Harbor; and many notable people such as Otto Strasser, Luigi Vilari, Goebbels’s Deputy Wilfred von Oven; Cuban president Batista (to whom he facilitated the supply of weapons, and acted as literary agent); Charles Tansill, Harry Elmer Barnes; H. L. Mencken, Dr. Kurt Waldheim, Franz von Papen, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, leftist artist Rockwell Kent, and leftist publisher Lyle Stuart, et al. Thompson served as U.S. correspondent for the German émigré periodical in Argentina, Der Weg; and was particularly associated with Hans Rudel and the marketing of his book Stuka Pilot. In the U.S.A. Thompson was closely associated with George S. Viereck, the German-descended American poet and novelist, who served as publicist on behalf of Germany in the U.S.A. during World War One, and was jailed during World War Two.[42]

In particular Thompson worked in the U.S.A. with Frederick C. Weiss, who had served on the Kaiser’s staff during World War One, and had established Le Blanc Publications in the U.S.A. Weiss adopted a pro-Soviet position during the Cold War, which was noted by the U.S. authorities, particularly because of Weiss’s contacts in Occupied Germany. Thompson and Yockey were introduced via Weiss, and Thompson was one of the main funders of Yockey’s projects.[43]

In an article intended as a condemnation of Thompson, which Thompson stated was nonetheless mostly accurate, David McCalden, a disaffected former director of the Institute for Historical Review, states that Thompson was a cousin of the last German charge d’affaires in Washington, Dr. Hans Thomsen, and both worked together to keep the U.S.A. out of the war.[44]

In 1952 Thompson registered as the U.S. agent for the Socialist Reich Party in Germany, the most well-known leader of whom was Major General Otto E. Remer. Thompson relates that he “also represented the leadership cadres of ‘survivors’ of the Third Reich scattered throughout the world… a great deal of that data will die with me…”[45]

Thompson will be remembered among revisionists particularly as co-author of Doenitz at Nuremberg.[46] The preface was written by William L. Hart, Supreme Court Justice of Ohio. The book is comprised of a remarkable collection of comments repudiating as a travesty the concept of “war-crimes trials” contrived to jail or hang the defeated leaders and soldiers of Germany after World War Two. The comments were obtained from “400 leading personalities in the military, the law, arts, diplomacy, philosophy, history and religion.”[47] The scope of the book indicates the influential contacts Thompson was able to maintain.

When Grand Admiral Doenitz was released from Spandau in 1957, Thompson initiated a campaign in defense of his reputation. The campaign was successful in that it forced the West German government to pay Doenitz his full pension rights.[48] After Doenitz was released from Spandau, he thanked Thompson for his support.[49] The letters of support garnered from eminent people later formed the basis of the book Doenitz at Nuremberg.

Thompson served as a mercenary in Rhodesia during the 1970s, gaining the ire of Black militants in the U.S.A. During the 1960s “at least one Mossad agent is said to have met with a sticky end after confronting HKT.”[50]

Yockey and Thompson’s Campaign on Behalf of European Veterans

Yockey and Thompson therefore made a formidable team after the two met in New York.

When the Socialist Reich Party (SRP) was founded in 1952 Yockey sought out the leadership and became a political adviser. Yockey wrote a sequel to Imperium in 1953 specifically for the instruction of the leadership, Der Feind Europas (The Enemy of Europe) which was funded by Thompson.[51] However the German edition was quickly seized by the authorities and destroyed. An English translation by Walther von der Vogelweide was serialized in the Yockeyan journal Trud in 1969 by John Sullivan, also a columnist for the paper Common Sense, and Douglas T. Kaye, from a German manuscript provided by Frederick Weiss’s widow Maria.[52] The English translation was finally published as a single volume in 1981.[53]

In 1952 Thompson, Yockey and Viereck founded the Committee for International Justice, and with the jailing of Otto Remer, the Committee for the Freedom of Major General Remer, to campaign for the legal and civic rights of Germans prosecuted under the Nuremberg regime and for political prisoners such as Remer.

As early as 1947 Thompson and his “friends in the [Mosley] Union Movement in England” were working for the release of Field Marshall Albert Kesselring, top German commander in Italy during World War Two, who had been arrested in 1945 as a “war criminal” and held in Werl Prison, Germany “on vague charges.” Thompson’s Committee for International Justice established contact with Kesselring in 1952 while he was a patient at a private hospital in Bochum, Germany. Kesselring “warmly” endorsed Thompson’s Committee. [54]

After Kesselring’s release he was pressured into repudiating Thompson. The Bonn government sent Baron von Lilienfeld of the West German Foreign Office to New York to lobby the press into not publicizing the Committee’s work.[55]

We now know from Coogan’s biography, and from the release of Military Intelligence reports, that Yockey and his colleagues were cultivating contacts throughout Europe with the view to European resistance against the Occupation, including collaboration with the U.S.S.R. to throw out the more virulent regime of Culture-distortion.

This latter point of guerrilla resistance to U.S. occupation of Europe with possible assistance from the U.S.S.R. was the factor that particularly worried the Occupation authorities and the Washington regime, at a time when the Occupiers of the Western zones were trying to “re-educate” Germany to accept its role as part of the Western Alliance against the Soviet Union. It is for that reason that the Morgenthau Plan was not put into full effect and was reversed after several years of imposed misery upon the Germans. There was a less-than-enthusiastic reaction among the nationalist Right and even among relatively mainline German conservatives to becoming a U.S. cat’s-paw against the U.S.S.R.

Traditional conservatives did not see the U.S.A. as a paragon of Western Civilization, and regarded U.S. occupation as having a more pervasive impact on European culture than the brute force of the Russians. Professor Paul Gottfried points out in a current essay that “Anti-Americanism has had a long-standing tradition in European society and has appealed to the traditional Right even before it became a staple of far leftist propaganda.” Professor Gottfried states that in Germany while the Christian Democrats based their ideology on a rejection of Communism and Nazism as “twin totalitarian movements” and were committed to the U.S. cause during the Cold War, “This however was not a rightwing or nationalist argument.” The “real German Right,” represented by figures such as Carl Schmitt and Hans Zehrer” hated the Americans for imposing their will upon a prostrate Europe for what they thought was vulgarizing German society. Many German nationalists were calling for “a less pro-American foreign policy and for playing off the Americans against the Soviets.” The famous German legal theorist Carl Schmitt stressed the advantage of playing the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. off against each other.[56] The term for such a line during the Cold War was “neutralist,” and caused the U.S. regime particular worries.

Apologists and collaborators for the Occupation attempted to portray the “neutralist” line of the German Right as serving the interests of “Communism.” However, an anti-Communist campaign had certain inherent dangers for the Washington regime lest it encourage the re-emergence of American nationalism and isolationism. That is why there was a focus on opposing the U.S.S.R. and Stalinism, but not on opposing Communism per se. When Senator Joseph McCarthy undertook a more pointed crusade against Communism he found himself, to his eventual ruin, not so much against Communists as against the Washington regime and Big Business.[57] Hence when the pro-McCarthy publicist Freda Utley went to Germany in 1954, warning that the Occupation was infested with Reds, and that most of the “Red Morgenthau boys” who had been fired by General Lucius Clay had been reinstated, her anti-Communist rhetoric was being condemned together with the “neutralist” position of the German Right.[58] Only certain types of “anti-Communism” were ever acceptable to the Washington regime during the Cold War, specifically anti-Stalinism, while the U.S.A. cultivated the support of Trotskyites and other Leftists.[59]

An influential circle of German conservatives formed around Miss Utley’s friend, the lawyer Dr. Ernst Achenbach, a leader of the Free Democratic Party (F.D.P.) who, according to Taylor, had contact with Sen. McCarthy via Miss Utley.[60] Achenbach was associated with former Goebbels functionary Dr. Werner Naumann, head of the so-called “Naumann Circle” which was alleged to have conspired to overthrow to the Adenauer Government.[61] Naumann and others were arrested in the British Zone and alleged to have planned to take over the F.D.P., of which Naumann had been foreign-policy spokesman, with the aim of establishing a liberated Western Germany, “oriented toward the Soviet Union.”[62] In a new slant on conspiracy theories, Taylor described influential contacts cultivated by Achenbach as a leading corporate lawyer, in what was called “a world-wide fascist-communist conspiracy,” which was in the U.S.A. centered on Frederick Weiss,[63] the mentor of Yockey and Thompson. Taylor commented that the Bonn authorities kept close tabs on Weiss’s writing, the old German veteran having been an early advocate of “neutralism” for Germany during the Cold War. Taylor states that Weiss adopted a vigorous line against anti-Soviet propaganda in the USA, despite his support for Sen. McCarthy.[64] Weiss saw the Prague treason trial against mainly Jewish functionaries of the Communist Party, who were hanged for being agents of Zionism and Israel, as a declaration of war by the U.S.S.R. against Jewish-run America, and predicted that anti-Soviet propaganda would intensify.[65] This was the line also of Yockey, who wrote a seminal article on the subject.[66]

Within this world-wide conspiracy explained by Taylor, Yockey (a.k.a. Ulick Varange, a.k.a. Frank Healy) was an important figure in “international fascism.” Taylor pointed out that Yockey was advocating “anti-Americanism” and “the avoidance of any anti-Soviet policy.”[67]

What Taylor neglected to state in his 1954 article was that in 1953 Dr. Naumann had been released by a Federal Court on the grounds that “no suspicion of criminal intent” had been proven against him, despite British High Commissioner Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick having commented to the New York Herald Tribune that British agents had found evidence that the “Naumann Circle” “were plotting to seize power,” although he was “not completely certain what they were up to.”[68] However, the proceedings did prevent Naumann from entering the Bundestag, and he lost his position in the F.D.P.

The “neutralist” position among the radical Right was represented in the Socialist Reich Party, for which H. Keith Thompson acted as the registered American agent, at the same time registering with the U.S. State Department as personal agent for S.R.P. leader Dr. Rudolf Aschenauer.[69] Despite the close association of the S.R.P. with National Socialism, the fact that the party gained two seats in the Bundestag indicated that “re-education” had a long way to go, and where persuasion was ineffective more forceful means would have to be continued. This resulted in the banning of the S.R.P. and the jailing of its most widely known figure, Maj. Gen. Remer.

Thompson-Yockey Correspondence with U.S. State Department

Thompson had founded two committees in regard to the prosecution of Germans, one of which dealt specifically with the Remer case. They had an exchange of letters with the U.S. State Department on the trials of “war criminals” and on the imprisonment of Remer. For four months during 1951-1952 Remer had been jailed for his criticism of the Bonn regime and for insulting Chancellor Adenauer. While in jail Remer was also tried and convicted for making “defamatory remarks about the Twentieth of July Conspirators”[70] whose coup against Hitler in 1944 had been stymied due to the actions of Remer and the Berlin garrison under his command. On October 23, 1952, the S.R.P. was outlawed, and Remer was denied the right to vote and hold public office.[71]

“Well, at the time I was a registered foreign agent, representing Generalmajor Otto-Ernst Remer and his party, the Sozialistische Reichspartei (SRP), a very strong post-war German political party. And as a registered agent I was at the time drafting a letter to Acheson on behalf of the prisoners incarcerated at Spandau, and I was in Yockey’s presence at the time as I recall, and he made some amends and suggestions as to wording, and things that might be added, all of which I incorporated into the final draft. Yockey knew that I was required by law to mention anyone who assisted me in the furtherance of my activities as a registered foreign agent. So I did so in my foreign agent’s registration reports: reported that I had been assisted by one ‘Frank Healey,’ which was the name that Yockey was using in New York at the time.”

Thompson wrote to Dean Acheson, Secretary of State, in regard to Remer’s arrest, in a letter dated June 16, 1952. Henry B. Cox, Officer-in-Charge, Division of German Information, Office of German Public Affairs, wrote back briefly and stated that this was a German domestic matter outside the jurisdiction of both the U.S.A. and the U.N.O.[73]

Given that West Germany was overseen by an allied High Commission until 1955, and did not achieve full sovereignty until 1991[74], the State Department reply to Thompson was disingenuous.

Thompson again addressed himself to Acheson, this time appealing to him as a fellow Yale graduate, who was presumably as such well-versed in international affairs and history, commenting that an honest exchange between Yale alumni is “never out of order.” At the time there were 1,045 Germans being held as “war criminals,” not only in Germany but elsewhere in Europe. In addition, there were the seven highest-ranking officials being held at Spandau and “countless German ‘prisoners of war’ held by the Soviet Union.” Thompson stated that German soldiers cannot be expected to support a Western alliance when their officers and fellow soldiers are being incarcerated for “war crimes.” It was a move designed to play on the very real fears of the U.S.A. that Germany would not be a reliable ally in the Cold War. Thompson wrote:[75]

“I respectively submit to you, Mr Secretary, the following considerations: that the position of the future German military officer is made exceptionally difficult by the war crimes convictions; that a German cannot justifiably be asked to fight for or with an alliance of which other members are holding Germans as prisoners for war-time acts (World War Two) which the Germans believe the Allies also have committed; that the presence of Soviet ‘judges’ at the Nuremberg proceedings tend to render such proceedings invalid in view of subsequent disclosure concerning the Soviets (particular reference is made to the matter of the Katyn Forest Massacre); that when men act as agents of a Government representing the collective will of a nation, there is a definite incongruity involved in later convicting such men as individual ‘war criminals.'”

Thompson stated that many young people in both Germany and the U.S.A. had no confidence “in the humbug formulae which have served as the basic orientations of official thought and propaganda lines in the matter of ‘war criminals.’” To most Germans the “war criminals” remained the leaders of a great “national effort.” It was therefore urgent that the U.S. release all “war criminals” and the Spandau inmates, as a matter of “good faith.”[76] Thompson then introduced the issue of the suppression of the S.R.P.:[77]

“I have viewed with growing concern the matter of the apparent persecution of minority political parties, of the anti-communism Right, by the Government of Federal Republic of Germany. The particular, but not the exclusive, target has been the Socialist Reich Party of which Major General Remer is an official. The history of the actions of the Bonn Government, and local administrators, and the SRP is too lengthy to set forth in this letter. I take the liberty of enclosing a partial history of such actions. This has been followed in recent weeks by an injunction prohibiting the SRP from conducting public meetings, distributing its publications or otherwise bringing its case to the people. As a climax, the Bonn government is placing a legal ban against this party, contrary to the interests of the United States in that it (1) is indicative of an attempt within Germany to restrain free speech and freedom of political expression and (2) tends to destroy unity amongst the conservative political parties which will be our strongest sources of strength in any anti-communist endeavor. I submit that the United States has responsibilities in Germany in view of the presence of our troops there and in view of the extent of United States influence, direct and indirect, in German affairs.”

Thompson then addressed the contention raised by Henry B. Cox of the State Department, who claimed that the U.S.A. has no jurisdiction over German affairs. Thompson referred to the Austrian parliament having just passed a law restoring property and civil rights to 34,000 “former Nazis.” He directed Acheson’s attention to a telegram that had been sent to the Secretary of State by the President of the American Jewish Committee, Jacob Blaustein, where Blaustein states that the U.S.A. still had “responsibility in Austria” and should apply pressure to have the new law repealed. In response to the Jewish demand, on July 26, 1952:[78]

“[…] the United States State Department made public its disproval of the Austrian laws in question. Mr Lincoln Waite, a State Department spokesman said that the State Department has communicated ‘its fairly strong’ views on the subject to the Acting High Commissioner for Austria.”

Thompson contended that if this action could be taken in response to a demand by the American Jewish Committee, why couldn’t the State Department make such a protest, conversely, to restore the rights of German politicians and veterans?:[79]

“Apparently the United States State Department is willing to intervene in the affairs of another country when urged to do so by the ‘American Jewish Committee,’ but will not intervene in the interests of justice in the case of General Remer, the persecuted rightist political parties of Germany, and the 1,045 ‘war criminals.’ The United State has far more at stake in intervening in the aforementioned cases than in serving the cause of international Jewry by adversely interfering in a small administrative matter restoring rights to persons plainly entitled to hold such rights.”

Perry Laukhuff, Acting Deputy Director, Bureau of German Affairs, replied that the views of Thompson were so much at variance with the policy of the U.S.A. towards Germany that there was no point in replying in detail. Laukhuff contended that the U.S. attitude to the prisoners was based on judicial principles of Anglo-Saxon law, and that it has the support of “important elements of the new Germany,”[80] which of course it did since the law was designed to protect the collaborationist Bonn regime. In regard to the issue of Remer and the S.R.P., Laukhuff responded:[81]

“Here again it is obvious that there is little or no common ground for a discussion of the issue. You apparently feel that Herr Remer leads a worthy cause and is being persecuted for it. You also consider that support for him and his party would greatly advance the cause of anti-communism and United States policy in Europe. You are well aware, however, that the State Department holds entirely different views. From Remer’s speeches, from the known views held by him and the other leaders of the SRP, and from other information available to the Department, there seems to be every indication that this man and his movement are neo-nazi in character. You make the common mistake of considering that because a man is not a communist, he is a good democrat. Far from being in league with anti-communist parties, Remer and his partners are bitterly hostile to the moderate democratic forces in Germany. Under these circumstances, the Department can scarcely be expected to intervene with the German Government on Remer’s behalf, even if it has the technical right to do so. It is no part of American policy to assist Nazism to arise once more in Germany.”

It might be noted that Laukhuff is less obfuscationist than Cox: that it is not so much a matter of the U.S. being unable to intervene than that the U.S. supports the measures taken against Remer and the S.R.P., which of course would not come as a surprise to Thompson or Yockey. Laukhuff was after all merely outlining the raison d’etre of the Occupation. Finally, Laukhuff rejected Thompson’s reference to U.S. attempts at intervention in the Austrian matter to appease Jewish interests, claiming that it is simply a matter of justice and restitution for “the victims of National Socialism.” This, however, is surely a euphemism for – Jewish interests.

The apparently final letter sent to the State Department over Thompson’s name, as Executive Secretary of The Committee for International Justice and The Committee for the Freedom of Major General Remer, is the lengthiest of the correspondence and includes a great deal of Yockeyan ideology.

The letter begins by stating that the campaign for the release of Remer was not based on a personal commitment but a “superpersonal Idea” in support of what Remer represents. The letter was written to explain the Committee’s world-view, and was presumably written with the view to a wider audience than trying to convert functionaries of the State Department. Turning first to the matter of “war crimes,” Thompson/Yockey write:[82]

“In the democratic Germany you mention, the authoritarian Adenauer regime has found it necessary to make it a criminal offense for anyone publicly to write the word “war criminal” in quotation marks. This was necessary because, generally speaking, all Germans regard the use of the word “criminal” in connection with their political and military heroes of the War as a cowardly and vile slander by a dishonorable victor, and because the Adenauer regime, supported only by American bayonets, is necessarily obliged to enforce, by all possible means, the internal policy relayed to it through you. Until the forces you represent are able to pass similar legislation here, we shall continue at all times to write this phrase in the manner which is forbidden in democratic Germany.”

The concept of “war crimes” is explained as an illicit maneuvre by the victors who contrived a law that did not exist at the time of the alleged “crimes.” On the other hand, the code of conduct of soldiers was already set forth and known by them. This code was not, and is not now, the basis of “war crimes” charges. In the case of the “war-crimes terror” in Germany, no such laws had existed, and the defendants were not being tried under American or German laws, nor under the terms of the Geneva Convention for Prisoners-of-War. The “international law” that was contrived for the purpose of prosecuting the German leadership was at variance with the traditional concepts of “international law” that had hitherto been practiced on the basis of ethics rather than “mock trials.”

Yockey and Thompson referred specifically to the Malmedy Trial as an example of the nature of the post-war prosecutions. This is a matter in which they had first-hand knowledge. They referred to the trial in 1946 of Waffen-SS men and officers accused of killing American soldiers who had surrendered in 1944 at Malmedy during the “Battle of the Bulge,” describing the trial as “a foul process … a hideous caricature of the American constitutional principle of separation of powers… a satanic debauch.”[83]

Thompson and Yockey referred to the Congressional investigation of the trial methodology undertaken by Texas Supreme Court Judge Gordon Simpson, after the defendants’ lawyer, Lt. Col. William M. Everett, Jr., who had conducted a vigorous defense, filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court claiming the defendants had been subjected to torture to extract confessions. A member of the tribunal investigating in 1948 the methods of the prosecution, Judge Edward LeRoy Van Roden, examined the records of one thousand “war crimes” cases and concluded that the entire process was wrong. In 1952, a small book was published in Germany on the trial in which it is stated that the prisoners were confined in dark cells in solitary confinement, deprived of daily exercise, spat at, prevented from sleeping, hit with fists and metal bars, kicked in the testicles and shins, forced to stand with hands raised for hours, subjected to mock trials and death sentences, subjected to fake hangings until strangled to unconsciousness. They were given promises of lenient treatment should they confess, and  threatened with reprisals against family.[84]

Additional to Yockey’s personal experiences with the post-war Occupation, Thompson knew van Roden, and the Judge was instrumental in getting Sen. Joseph McCarthy to examine the Malmedy case.[85]

While Yockey’s left-wing biographer Coogan attempts to put doubt upon the credibility of Van Roden, the Judge was continuing to insist in his statement published in Doenitz at Nuremberg that his conclusions were based on the examination of a mass of documentation, many interviews and “careful consideration” by all the members of the Simpson Commission, enabling him to “secure a first-hand knowledge of this far-reaching ‘experiment’ of War-Crimes Trials.” The trials were “contrary to civilized ideals and principles of legal justice.” He referred to the Malmedy case as being “devoid of any competent evidence.” He regarded the whole “war crimes” business as shameful, and thought that Doenitz and other “enemy patriots” should receive “a humble apology.”[86]

The position Yockey and Thompson put to Acheson on the morality and legality of the “war-crimes trials” was therefore backed by a considerable weight of opinion from influential diplomatic, military and legal authorities, much of which was to be published in the Thompson/Strutz book in 1976. They next raised the issue of the jailing of Remer, the banning of the S.R.P. and the prosecution of numerous others, including Frau Heinrich Himmler, as proof that the Bonn regime was imposed and maintained by American bayonets, only allowing an “opposition” that substantially agrees with the regime. It was now disingenuous for the U.S.A. to mention anti-communism and state that Gen. Remer et al are not “genuine anti-communists” when Remer and others that were then being prosecuted, had fought the U.S.S.R. while the Allies were backing the Soviet invasion of Europe.[87]

Yockey and Thompson conclude with philosophical themes that are fundamental to Yockey’s Imperium, namely:[88]

“The German National-Socialist Movement was only one form, and a provisional form at that, of the great irresistible movement which expresses the spirit of the Age, the Resurgence of Authority. This movement is the affirmation of all the cultural drives and human instincts which liberalism, democracy, and communism deny. General Remer’s movement is a current expression of the irresistible Resurgence of Authority in the Western Civilization.”

It seems unlikely that such sentiments would have been understood by Acheson, or more specially the desk-jockey who was allotted the task of reading the letter, which does not seem to have been answered. The conclusion is a clarion call for European unity and destiny:[89]

“The Resurgence of Authority has both its inner and outer aspect. The inner has been touched upon in the preceding paragraph. Its outer aspect is the creation of the European- Imperium – State – Nation, and therewith the reassertion of Europe’s historically ordained role, that of the colonizing and organizing force in the entire world.”

They reiterate that the U.S.A. is dominated by Jewish interests, and outline the beliefs of their Committees, which go beyond freeing and rehabilitating German “war criminals,” the support for Remer being seen as backing the individual and the party which seemed then the most promising sign of a renascent Europe. The anti-Soviet character of the Yockey/Thompson correspondence was that year to take a sharp turn in seeing the Russians as potential allies in the liberation of Europe from the deeper malaise of the “regime of the culture-distorter,” a pro-Russian line that was also to be embraced by Remer who retained it for the rest of his life.

Conclusion

As we now look with hindsight upon the post-war world we might see that the present regime of the “new world order” is legally predicated on the definitions and laws contrived to wreak vengeance upon defeated Germany. Now, as then, the political and military leaders of a defeated state are liable to be brought before an international court and charged with “war crimes” and “human rights violations.” Behind the rhetoric stands the reality that such maneuvres were then, and are now, a legalistic façade to dispose of those who do not conform to the interests of what is now called “globalization.” The key word to define the process is: humbug.

Notes: