* * *¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter argues that the Belsen Trial, while ostensibly a reckoning with Nazi atrocities, serves primarily to expose the inherent barbarism of capitalism itself. The author contends that the horrors revealed in the courtroom—the systematic exterminations, tortures, and beatings—were not aberrations of German national character but the logical expression of a social system that breeds and unleashes vile elements when its privileges are threatened. The real criminals, the chapter insists, are not the SS guards in the dock but the bankers, capitalists, and landowners who financed, armed, and installed the Nazi Party as a bulwark against the German working class. These masters disdained the dirty work but orchestrated the terror.
The chapter draws on the historical context of pre-war class struggle in Germany, where the Nazi regime served as a counter-revolutionary force. It extends its indictment beyond German industrialists to their counterparts in France, America, and Britain, who also supported the Nazis. The claim that Nazi barbarism is uniquely German is refuted by the wartime recruitment of hundreds of thousands of SS members from occupied territories including France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ukraine, and Hungary, proving the germs of this affliction are international.
A sharp polemic is directed at the hypocrisy of the capitalist class and its labour and Stalinist lackeys. The horror expressed at Belsen is dismissed as sham, given that British imperialism allowed famine in India to reduce entire provinces to Belsen-like conditions and is preparing mass graves for the German people that winter. The Stalin regime is condemned for deporting millions of Germans from Eastern Europe in approved Nazi fashion, causing tens of thousands of deaths. The chapter also attacks the pre-war suppression of truth about concentration camps by British masters who sought agreement with Hitler, warning that they will resort to the same methods if their system is threatened again.
The core narrative thrust is that Belsen is a signpost: capitalism must be overthrown by socialist revolution before it reduces the entire world to a Belsen world. The concentration camps, initially and always peopled by German revolutionary workers, are presented as the permanent potential of a system that will not hesitate to repeat such methods.