DAILY      DRONE

LORD DRONE’S MIGHTY FLEET STREET ORGAN,

 THE WORLD’S GREATEST ONLINE NEWSPAPER 

FOR 20 GLORIOUS YEARS

CONTACT THE DRONE



**

As anti-Semitism grows across the globe, we must never let 

the Holocaust happen again

In a fairly long and rackety life I have had the inevitable ups and downs and have made as many poor decisions as the right ones. There has been a measure of good fortune along the way, the best being brought up to hate unfairness of any kind. And my time growing up in and, for two happy years, working in Northern Ireland quickly made me realise what prejudice and unreasoned hatred does for society.


But nothing had prepared me for discovering the true nature of real evil. Not the opposite of goodness as dictionaries have it but real, unmitigated, deep-seated evil. The type that faced me when researching Ravensbruck women’s concentration camp for my biography of Toto Koopman, Vogue model turned Allied spy and mistress of Beaverbrook.


Most of us accept that Hitler remains atop the heap as the most potent and lasting symbol of absolute evil. But his terrible ideology of exterminating every single Jew from Europe could not have got so far during his 12 years in power had it not been for the support, first of his brutal cabal, then a large and approving section of the German populace and, finally, those evil men and women who made the Holocaust happen, German soldiers ‘only obeying orders’, the SS and Gestapo thugs who glorified in utter horror and depravity, and the vile enthusiasts who ran their master’s concentration camps.


It was Holocaust Memorial Day on Monday and we have all become familiar with the obscenities of Auschwitz and Dachau but they were just two of 44,000 — yes 44,000 — built from 1933 when he became Chancellor. Not all were death camps, though the conditions in them usually made any formal classification irrelevant.

.

More than one million Jews died in Auschwitz alone before it was finally liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945. A further 100,000 Poles, Russians, Romas, gays, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the disabled did not come out alive because they didn’t meet the picture of Aryan perfection. In all, six million Jews were ‘eliminated’ in the six years of the war. It may have been the sick vision of one man but it could only have happened with the fanatical and disciplined brutality of the legions of his faithful.


In the case of Ravensbruck, when Toto Koopman arrived there after capture in Venice in 1944 (she had been with the Italian Resistance), it was a far cry from the original dream of Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Holocaust. When it was built in 1938 it was to his specification. In the words of one early prisoner, it looked like a holiday camp, all manicured lawns, flowers and linden trees and a lake lined by boat houses. It was built to house 900 women. Six years later when Toto set foot in it, there were 22,000 female prisoners ranging from the sick to the crawling dead.


Each long shed in which they were housed consisted of rows of wooden bunks in layers of three. Some women had no option but to sleep, if sleep they could, on the cold concrete floor which was usually covered in human waste. The first thing she saw when she got there was a woman miscarrying in agony, never to be seen again. Toto, brought up in grand Dutch colonial splendour, the darling of Paris society and the smartest London salons, had endured hardships when constantly on the move in Italy, but this was much worse than even her worst nightmares.


The camp had two of the most notoriously brutal guards in the whole of Hitler’s system, both young and undeniably attractive, but whose looks belied their absolute wickedness. They were Dorothea Binz and Irma Grese, both in their 20s and the pair revelled in outdoing each other for cruelty. Grese was called the Beautiful Beast by prisoners who had witnessed her bayoneting a baby, whipping an elderly crippled woman and setting one or both of her German Shepherd dogs to tear apart her charges ‘just for the show’.


In the case of Binz, her vicious sadism was so well known that when she came into view the women would fall silent and tried not to catch her gaze. They knew that one look from her would mean execution by gas, gun or by being beaten to death. Just for the hell of it. Literally. Who could not argue that they personified evil? That they too were responsible for the Holocaust? They followed their Fuhrer to the end, no matter the circumstances (which by 1947 was death at the end of Albert Pierrepoint’s rope. Grese was only 22 and Binz 27).


And were not the thousands of so-called foot soldiers evil too, they who would relish shooting prisoners in the back of the head, then make others dispose of the bodies in pits they had dug.


Everything in the Nazi system was evil except the poor bloody people targeted because Hitler said so. Ten years ago we were in Belarus, as godforsaken a place these days as you could imagine, led by Putin ally Alexander Lukashenko, president since 1994 despite all those ‘democratic’ elections. Thirty miles outside Minsk is what was once the village of Khatyn. On March 22,1943 a battalion of the German army rounded up every man, woman and child in Khatyn  and several other nearby hamlets, ordered them into a barn, and locked the doors. Troops covered the building with straw and set it alight. Within minutes 149 people were dead.


They are remembered by a beautiful memorial on the spot where the barn once stood and every hour a bell rings from one of the 26 obelisks which represent each  house in the village. It was moving in the extreme and, unusually for most things post-Soviet, it is a place of great taste and solemnity. It is monument to the evil that otherwise seemingly ordinary men can and did commit.


So Hitler was not alone in being evil, all those who followed his orders, no matter the consequences of disobedience, must fall into the same terrible category. Without their blind underpinning, he might have remained just a fanatic with a silly moustache. The fact that he didn’t is down to the wickedness that so many men and women do. And if we ever forget that then history will repeat itself, over and over and over.


At the opposite end of the spectrum is Mala Tribich who helped me with my research about Ravensbruck. She is now 94 and could pass for a beautiful woman in her elegant 60s. Mala, a Polish Jew, arrived at the camp mercifully late, in November 1944, five months before liberation. She was 14-year-old Mala Helfglott at the time and in 2019 told me: ‘’I had been in a Jewish ghetto, then a labour camp and when we got to Ravensbruck after four and  half days in a cattle truck, we were made to strip naked and have all our hair shaved. And hand over all our belongings, however worthless. Some of the guards were leering at us.’’


This remarkable woman was at the Auschwitz commemoration this week and doubtless will soon be back talking to schools and community groups which she does tirelessly. Speaking about her experience and how why they must never be repeated.


We live in a world of astonishing change, not all of it for the better. Anti-Semitsm is on the rise and not because of Netanyahu who thought the only way to meet an atrocity by Hamas was to commit one of his own. When anti-Semitism got its shiny new jackboots on in 1933 it eventually brought  about the slaughter of six million Jews and the deaths of at least 70 million non-Jews.


We knew about Kristallnacht, we knew about the labour camps and we even knew about Auschwitz from two escapees. We did nothing. It was only when 70 million lay dead did we discover the extent of the evil that emanated from one man who infected a nation and then consumed the world.


It must be the last time. Because the next time really will be the last.


A documentary on the life of Toto Koopman is currently being made to be followed by a streaming series based on the book Toto and Coco: Spies, Seduction and the fight for Survival 


ALAN FRAME


30 January 2025