Olga von Barényi in 1945.
1,456 words
The following essay was published in Colin Jordan’s The National Socialist in the early 1960s.
PDF of the original printing here [1]
For the last twenty years, a vicious propaganda has been shamelessly carried on to “prove” that we National Socialists are the Devil’s own brood. The average man — the gullible newspaper-reader and voter — has accepted practically anything, against evidence, against logic, and which is more often, against what should have been righteous patriotic indignation, in order to continue feeling, as he had been repeatedly told to feel, that “Hitler was a monster or a mad man,” and that the “poor Jews,”‘ and all those who fought on their side, including Britain’s once “gallant allies,” the Communists, were right — had at least been right up till 1947.
He has accepted the false version of the mass-murder of several thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn forest. He has accepted the faked films supposed to picture “Buchenwald atrocities” which were in reality photographs of Anglo-American atrocities perpetrated at Dresden on 13th February, 1945 (see the report of the Catholic Herald, 29.10.48). He has accepted that the Jews were right, had to be right, even when bombing British men, women and children to bits; and the film Exodus, glorifying such crimes against humanity when they are the handiwork of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, has been running for weeks and weeks without a single outburst of patriotic wrath on the part of the British public.
It is therefore all the more praiseworthy on the part of a singlehanded woman to raise her voice — to keep on raising her voice — all these years in favour of truth and justice in such a world. Such a woman is the half-Hungarian half-German writer, Olga von Barényi, a life-long devoted fighter against Communism, and the talented author of many books before and after the war.
The Author’s Ordeal
Here is one who has sacrificed everything to stamp out lies, and official lies at that, and to warn our world against the danger that it has brought upon itself by not supporting Adolf Hitler’s Germany wholeheartedly when there was yet time. She has not done this for honours or advantages. She is one of the few, very few people who were offered membership of the National Socialist Party — the glorious NSDAP — without their being full Germans in recognition of their services. But she did not join the Party, maintaining that “a writer should remain outside politics” if he wishes to be convincing. She courageously fought against Communism “underground ” in Czechoslovakia: a dangerous struggle that landed her into the hands of the most ruthless of her (and our) enemies. She underwent torture at the hands of the Communists. Her back was burnt, bit by bit, a little further after every refusal of hers to “speak.” It is now but one scar. Still she stood it to the end, and finally managed to reach West Germany where she now lives in extreme poverty and continually attacked by those whose interest it is that truth concerning the anti-Nazi western world’s “glorious allies” should not come out.
Campaign of Suppression
Everything was done so that no publicity at all be made around her three staggering post-war books: Der Prager Totentanz, Das Tote Geleise, and Der Tote Briefkasten. The first two describe the hell of Communist terror in Prague after the end of the war. The third one, perhaps the most disquieting of all, deals with Communist infiltration into the American Information Services of West Germany, and political murders which remain undetected and unpunished today under our eyes in the same alleged “free” country.
And when one found out that nothing could be done to stop some people at least from reading them, then the author was pointed out as “insane,” and had to fight a case against that false accusation. This was in 1961, when I first met her, after reading the first of her latest books.
“I am writing the truth because I have promised the dead that I shall do so. It is my duty towards them,” she told me: a duty to which she has devoted her life.
Czech Atrocities
I asked her whether her imagination had played a part in the atrocious scenes that she describes in Der Prager Totentanz and Das Tote Geleise. The scenes of torture at the hands of the Communists, under the order of a sinister Communist Jew. The scenes of mob cruelty: a young SS man of 17 tied upon a table and cut to pieces alive, bit by bit, with a knife and a pair of scissors, vinegar being poured into each wound. Germans, including women, drenched in petroleum and burnt alive against street lamp-posts. 130 sick German children dragged out of their beds in hospital, and walled-in alive in a cellar. And all the abominable treatment meted out by Czechs to animals — dogs and cats, having been owned by Germans, or to unfortunate horses, having belonged to the Wehrmacht. Those scenes, I say, seemed to be too horrid to be true even in a country in which many people hated Germans in general and German “Nazis” in particular.
“Every single word of those nightmarish descriptions is true,” replied Olga von Barényi. “I saw those horrors myself. and shall be haunted by the memory of them as long as I live.”
Balanced Judgement
One of the main qualities of Olga von Barényi’s books is that they do not systematically blacken “the enemy.” No. There are sympathetic, and some downright pathetic individual Czechs and even Jews (the musician Heldenstern and the cinema owner Elvira Blumenstein) in those books; just as there are abominable ones (“Professor” Hora; Emil, the Jewish Commissar; and others). The hero of the first two books (Martin Novak) is a Czech and, moreover, a Czech who fought the Germans during the war in an underground organization, but who repudiates that organisation and the abominable characters at the back of it when he sees with his own eyes what the ” revolution of liberation ” has led to. One need not necessarily be a National Socialist to be shattered at the amount of horror shown in those books by an eye-witness of the days immediately preceding the entry of the Red Army into Prague. One merely needs to have natural feelings for innocent people (unconcerned with any politics), for children, for animals (that cannot be “for” or “against” any cause). And that is the value of the books. They could have reached the widest public had they only been allowed to: had they been properly reviewed and given one tenth of the publicity the most worthless sex novels are generally given.
One, however, Der Prager Totentanz, has been translated into French and published De Meyere’s, rue de Brabant, in Brussels, under the title Tuez-les Tous! (“Kill them all!”). It is indeed the story of how over a hundred thousand Germans, including civilians, were murdered in Prague in early May, 1945, in cold blood within three days or so.
The Range of Responsibility
Failing an international war crime tribunal, when shall that immanent justice that we call divine mete out to the culprits the fate they deserve? But first are the local Czechs, and the local Jews the only culprits? Or have not all those who, directly or indirectly, helped Communism by siding against Adolf Hitler and his gospel of Aryan regeneration their part, and a great part in the responsibility for those yet unpunished “crimes against humanity ” and crimes against Life?
I have said that Olga von Barényi’s latest book, Der Tote Briefkasten, about the net of Communist activities in the very services supposed to be working on behalf of American interests in the German Federal Republic, is even more disquieting. It is not memories of 1945. It is facts of today: facts that let us foresee, in case of a future advance of Communism, the return of such horrors as those described in the two firstmentioned books. Not only every National Socialist, but every honest and freedom-loving person with an open mind should read those books: and if possible help the valiant single-handed fighter (whose health has been giving way little by little under untold hardships and gnawing constant anxiety) to live, and continue a struggle which is not merely hers and that of the unknown dead of 1945 and of all the victims of Communism and international Jewry, but that of the survival of Aryan man — ours.
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The German editions of Olga von Barényi’s books are published by: — Schild-Verlag, München-Lochhausen, W. Germany.
The French edition, Tutez-les Tous!, is obtainable from: — Le Livre Artistique, 16 rue Descartes, Paris 5, France.
Letters for Frau Barényi, sent to The National Socialist inside another envelope and with adequate postage for transmission from Britain to W. Germany, will be forwarded.