I've been dithering for the best part of two weeks trying to figure out how to present this. Right off the top I am not going to go one way or the other on present day Israel. I suspect that the founders of that nation might not be too happy with the results of over sixty years of nearly contstant warfare ranging from low level hit and run attacks to actual invasions. There's plenty of blame to go around. Face it. If there was no oil in the Middle East I doubt if anyone would have cared how much land was purchased for Jewish settlement.
We have to face the brutal truth. Before, during and after the war no country really opened their doors to the European Jews despareate to escape or the survivors of Hitler's murder machine. The US sure as hell didn't. The quota for Jewish immigraion was rediculously low in the first place and never filled in any year even after the death camps were revealed.
Anyway just blasted my way through the novel Exodus in search of a certain piece of information. Midway through there's like two lines referring to three army or SS doctors who performed medical experiments in Auschwitz and a prisoner doctor who helped them. In the first edition the author, Leon Uris, named the prisoner doctor. Anton Dering, a Pole imprisoned as a member the resistance. Uris claimed Dering had performed nearly seventeen thousand surgeries. Surgeries intended to discover how fast to you could castrate a man or tie the tubes on a woman.
Dr. Dering who ended up in England after the war managed to dodge extradition back to Poland as a war criminal and was released. He joined the Colonial Medical Service and opened a clinic in Hargesa in what was then British Somaliland. By all reports he did an outstanding job and was rewarded with a knighthood. Be patient with me I'm getting there.
He returned to England and opened on clinic on the North end of London. Again doing a good job. His patients loved him, Then the novel was released and someone brought that little sentence on page 155 his attention."Here in Block X Dr. Wirths used women as guinea pigs and Dr. Schumann sterilized by castration and X-ray and Clauberg removed ovaries and Dr. Dehring performed 17,000 'experiments' in surgery without anesthetics." Dering promptly sued Uris, his publishers, and the printers for libel. The printers settled for five hundred pounds and an apology. " Uris and William Kimber admitted the words at issue were defamatory against Dering, but pleaded that the words were true in substance and in fact, save for some particularized exceptions.." From the Wickipedia entry about the trial. Wirths was arrested after the war and committed suicide. The other two were not tried immediately but were finally brought to book. Served some time in prison.
Dering insisted on going to trial. The Times printed large excerpts of testimony on the front page. In the end Uris agreed to omit the number surgeries. (he had been working from outside sources for the numbers) but did not remove Derinings name from future editions. The jury found that Dr. Dering had inded been libeled and awarded him one half penny, then the smallest coin in the realm, for the damage to his reputation.
So where am I going with this? Leon Uris turned around and wrote a novel based on the libel case, QB VII. The name of the courtroom where the trial, in the novel, is held. If you are curious the Internet Archive has several copies of the book. If you poke around you can find a copy with a fourteen day borrow.
Anyway this is the long way aaround to what got this post bouncing around the old brain box. QB VII was made into a mini series with a fantastic cast including a young Anthony Hopkins doing a fantastic turn as the doctor with a past he'd managed to rewrite never imagining he'd have to face witnesses to the atrocities he'd commited. Again the one half penney award for the "damage to his reputation." Outside the courtroom the author of the novel in a novel. Titled the Holocaust BTW has these final words.
"The men and women of
this jury have played back to us what Europe has learned over the bodies of its
millions of dead. That those who hate and starve and bomb other people because
they fear the color of their skins because it is different from theirs, or their
politics because they are different from theirs, or their religion because it
is different from theirs are evil men. That if there is any common meaning to
the words "good" and "evil" it lies in the difference
between such men and ourselves. So long as we allow them to rule nations, to
command armies, to minister to sects, we will continue to be their
victims.
Am I satisfied? It's a word that can't be used in connection with the issues this trial has touched upon. Because what happened in Europe between 1939 and 1945 is still happening in half a dozen countries around the world and it will continue to happen as long as evil men remain organized, and good and gentle men are deceived and put upon and paralyzed by them."
It's still happening. Two steps forward, one step back and one step sideways. Hell we watched it play out in front of and in the Capital building, In this country. With evidence that the president of this country was and is guilty of treason, still walking free, playing golf.
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