West German and ex-Nazi role in Indonesian genocide
Posted by Morrissey on February 4, 2023, 3:43 am
New documentary exposes West German and ex-Nazi role in Indonesian genocide
WEST Germany not only backed and bankrolled Indonesia’s Suharto regime in its massacres of the left in the late 1960s, but deployed ex-Nazis to Jakarta to monitor it, a new documentary has revealed.
Indonesia’s 1965 Genocide: Germany’s unknown war against communism was released by Redfish last Friday and its findings have been reported in the Morning Star’s German sister paper Junge Welt. General Suharto led a coup against Indonesia’s left president Ahmed Sukarno in 1965 with a project of wiping out the country’s left — particularly its powerful Communist Party, then the world’s third-largest with half a million members.
An estimated two to three million people were arbitrarily executed over the next few years — and documents exposed in the new film show Bonn was at the forefront of supplying weapons and communications equipment to the killers.
Every West German ambassador to Indonesia between 1952 and 1970 had established their foreign office careers in the Nazi era under Joachim von Ribbentrop, the investigation shows — Hilmar Bassler, who represented Bonn in Jakarta from 1968-70, had been in charge of Nazi propaganda across east Asia during the second world war, while Werner Otto von Henting, the first West German ambassador to Indonesia, helped spirit the former mufti of Jerusalem, Nazi collaborator Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, out of Berlin in April 1945.
West Germany continued to provide weapons and funds to the regime despite detailed knowledge of the massacres. A report from its military attache in Jakarta, surnamed Meyer, in January 1965, ahead of the coup, says the army tested the water by arresting 1,400 plantation workers “as a precaution and an experiment” to gauge the strength of the Communist Party’s reaction. Mr Meyer’s report says that “400 were later released and the rest buried.”
Other Foreign Office documents studied show instructions to disguise the German origin of pistol grips sent to the Indonesian military, and a 1966 note stating that refusing weaponry orders from it would “weaken the forces we want to support and indirectly work into the hands of remaining communist elements.”
Many former Nazis took high office in West Germany, most notoriously Adolf Heusinger, the Wehrmacht chief of staff under Hitler who became head of Nato in the 1960s.
Perhaps - judging from countless earlier postings here - you'd also like to opine that Germany's evil Green Party warmongers would eagerly support any other communist purge that might happen in the future?
Unlike Glorious Great Britain and their United States of Amnesia puppet-masters ?
And while we're on the subject of communist purges - d'you have anything critical at all to say about Stalin's 1936-1938 Great Purge that killed an estimated 700,000(Old Bolsheviks, Trotskyites etc) ?
In this highly informed salon, Jim, I assume everyone knows that.
1. Perhaps you'd also like to opine that Germany's evil Green Party warmongers would eagerly support any other communist purge that might happen in the future?
No, I think they'd wring their hands and do nothing. They might demand that the killings be carried out in an ecologically sustainable way.
2. Unlike Glorious Great Britain and their United States of Amnesia puppet-masters?
The Greens would fall into line quick smart, just as they have done in the last twelve months of incessant war-mongering by Britain and the U.S.
3. on the subject of communist purges - d'you have anything critical at all to say about Stalin's 1936-1938 Great Purge
I certainly do. I recommend Donald Rayfield's magisterial study of the purges: Stalin and His Hangmen: An Authoritative Portrait of a Tyrant and Those Who Served Him (Viking, 2004)
I took notes on the whole book, and I will post them up in the near future, now that we're on this topic. But these passages give something of the flavour of the book:
157 SHOW TRIALS. Stalin needed a judge and prosecutors able to give credibility to his kangaroo court. Vyshinsky and Krylenko were just the ticket. On any scale of odiousness Vyshinsky ranks high among Stalin’s hangmen. “Confession is the queen of evidence”, he said. He bullied into mute submission defendants he knew to be innocent of trumped-up charges. ...
159 The Soviet public was not yet ready to applaud witnesses like the 12 y.o. boy who demanded his accused father be shot.... Five old bankers were condemned to die. Mandelstam, last keeper of the public conscience, protested, and they were spared. Nobody emulated Mandelstam however. Civic courage in the USSR was dead, and Mandelstam was regarded as mad.
New Zealand is full of pathetic, inept imitators of Vyshinsky.
They did it in Yugoslavia, now in Russia. The world is their oyster : ). Perhaps China will be on their cross-hairs soon, so you will be able to tick the communist box as well.
If the Empire asks them to jump, it will be the standard minion's answer 'How high sir?'
Just by the by, Nazis were ardent environmentalists fwiw
A very interesting twist to that story with ex-Nazis spun in. Thanks. As someone who spent 18 odd months in Indonesia, I have always found it barely believable how these killings have escaped the notice of the rest of the world. Talking to the locals it is still in the living memory of people there. Some vids from my archive on the subject, in case there is interest ..:
Indonesia's forgotten genocide
40 Years of Silence - An Indonesian Tragedy
The Act of Killing: A film that has real life killers to act out their crimes
Thanks Tomski. Joshua Oppenheimer's companion film to "The Act of Killing" is
The Act of Silence and it is even more horrifying. It includes the 1965 NBC report where a 1965 version of Anderson Cooper is told by a local guide that many of those killed had wanted to die and had asked to be killed by the riverside. He also goes on to film slave workers at an American-owned rubber plantation, and relates in a matter-of-fact voice how workers are periodically trucked away to be killed by the army.
on February 4, 2023, 3:43 am