Book Review of the SS Officer’s Armchair by Daniel Lee

It took me longer to marshal my facts and my thoughts to write my review of this book than it took me to read it. This is because, while I must praise unreservedly the patience, diligence and fairness with which the author researched, travelled and interviewed his way to the completion of his work, I will be putting forward some areas for further inquiry and further thought.

Starting with a bundle of personal documents found hidden in a chair by a Czech emigre in the Netherlands, the author sets out to track down the descendants and investigate the life of one Robert Griesinger, a German bureaucrat in occupied Prague, who seems to have died there in 1945 at the time of the liberation. It turns out, but is not immediately obvious, that Griesinger was a member of the Allgemeine SS and the first thing for the reader to understand is that this organisation, sister to but distinct from the armed paramilitary Waffen SS, was very big and was key in the first instance to making the German state function as a NAZI state, and then to making various annexed and occupied territories function as slave states. (What is also true, but the author doesn’t quite discover, is that civilian Allgemeine SS men, like Griesinger, throughout the NAZI bureaucracy, enabled the Waffen SS to function as a front-line military force. This is because the SS was never a fully-authorised client of the official German ordnance procurement system, especially for small arms, and most of its firepower had to come from sources other than the main German arms factories. Czechoslovakia was an important source of small arms for the SS, ranging from pistols up to the SS41 anti-tank rifle. The Allgemeine SS bureaucrats had to keep certain factories running, no matter what others wanted, to ensure that the Waffen SS was indeed armed. Hollywood films which show SS and Gestapo men with Luger and P38 pistols are very misleading. In the main they would have been supplied with almost everything except Luger and P38 pistols, which were reserved for the Werhmacht. The Radom pistol factory was moved from Poland to France by the Nazis, specifically to equip the Gestapo. Czech “CZ” pistols were supplied to the SS. Some German policemen ended up with stripper-clip-fed Steyr Hahn pistols from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)

The author traces Robert Griesinger’s journey from Stuttgart to Prague, and his father’s journey to Stuttgart via New Orleans. Griesinger did not start out as an SS man in any form: like many career-minded young men he held pretty right-wing views but did not actually join the NAZI party till he had to, in order for his career to progress -and that did not happen till the NAZIs had power, of course. This is why the NAZI Party always drew a distinction between those who joined before they had power, and those who joined afterwards. It was not an arbitrary distinction, either, because the author finds that early and late members of the party were different types of men! Griesinger never really departs from the path of self-advancement and self-promotion, and the system was designed on the assumption that this would be so. The party had no illusion that his generation was serving it from any sort of principle. He was respectful to his wife and kind to his children, but there was an instruction manual telling Allgemeine SS men to be respectful to their wives and kind to their children. A caring party leaves nothing to chance.

The New Orleans connection leads the author to compare Nazi race laws with American ones and the American ones were (in the thirties and forties) more exclusive. (I already knew that even today, the US Government’s definition of “white” for census purposes is more exclusive than that used in Apartheid South Africa. The official American definition of “white” would make President Botha turn quite pale.)

The author describes deep hatred by German people (not necessarily NAZIs) of black people: there’s more in this subject than he appears to think, for two reasons:

It was the policy of the French occupying forces in German after WW1 to subject German citizens under their control to regular humiliations. Not only whenever a citizen had to deal with French soldiers or officials, but during regular parades in all the notable towns under French occupation, where racist caricatures of German people were carried through the streets by French soldiers and citizens simply couldn’t avoid seeing. It was also policy for these humiliations to be largely executed by black colonial soldiers in the French army. (Source: “Travellers in the Third Reich” by Julia Boyd.) By the time the occupation was over, the deliberate humiliation had bred hatred and in 1940 it boiled over onto any black troops, especially black French troops, the Germans captured.

But that hatred was not universal: not all Germans hated all black people; even Hitler had courteous dealings with some. An African-American scholar, Dr Milton S. J. Wright, did his Economics PhD at Heidelberg University, where he found himself an object of curiosity rather than hatred. When he had lunch with his friends at a hotel where Hitler was staying, he was invited by two SS men to meet Hitler and several hours of debate (over tea) ensued. Dr Wright found Hitler a bit disturbing, but not threatening or unfriendly, and Hitler would later make Dr Wright’s thesis required reading for German officials engaged, like Robert Griesinger, in economic work. (Source, again, “Travellers in the Third Reich”. I must commend Julia Boyd’s work to readers of “The SS Officer’s Armchair”, not out of some PC-requirement for “balance” but for the sake of a more complete understanding of the world in which Robert Griesinger grew up and found himself drawn into the NAZI party by his own self-interest.)

The author also notes, prominently, that Griesinger and many of his SS peers came from Protestant backgrounds. You wouldn’t go out of your way to state that nearly all of Mussolini’s men had been brought up as Catholics, or that many of Stalin’s thugs had Orthodox Christian roots. The significant thing is, and the author misses this, that the NAZIs saw Christianity in ANY form as a rival for the love and loyalty of the Germany people, and proceeded to infiltrate and take over the Protestant Church in order, not to make it the official religion of NAZI Germany, but to make it extinct (altars were desecrated, bibles replaced by Mein Kampf, pastors sent to concentration camps if they failed to accept blasphemous doctrines and so on.) Georg Elser and Sophie Scholl were also from a protestant background, and, like Robert Greisinger they were born in Wurttemberg. In different ways they did their best to oppose Hitler (or do him in, in Elser’s case). What more could they have done, other than what they did do and which the NAZIs executed them for?

I am not finding fault, I am urging the reader to look at the subject of SS bureaucrats in a wider and deeper way than this book, by itself, allows. And the reason why I want this is because the holocaust-related mantra of “never again” has failed and once more we see a vast and powerful militarised bureaucracy building and populating concentration camps, destroying religions in detail, putting the image of the party leader above the altar in the churches, herding blindfolded victims in their hundreds onto trains departing for unknown destinations. The parallel between the Allgemeine SS and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps is actually pretty strong, and so many people have already compared the “610 Office” to the Gestapo that it’s almost superfluous to make the point. We need to know exactly how Robert Greisinger and the other SS bureaucrats functioned, because there is another bureaucracy: the same thing, but bigger and stronger with technological tools that Himmler could only dream of, that needs to be defeated if we are not to imminently witness another holocaust, both bigger and more technologically-advanced than that of 1942-1945.

Published by Jonathan Cape on the 1^st of October 2020.

Book Review of “We Are All the Same in the Dark” by Julia Heaberlin

This is a compelling psychological thriller, which is well-researched and also does well on local colour in its Central Texas setting. The novel primarily sets out to show how "life changing injuries" as the police describe them when they are inflicted on someone, actually change lives.

The author mostly manages to avoid careless stereotypes, although the psychologist character is seriously bonkers (that may be based on experience rather than prejudice and I am not finding real fault there) and the Baptist Minister is not only described as being like something out of the Handmaid’s Tale by one of the other characters: the character does indeed seem to hail from there.

This book is being offered to a British readership and whilst American readers may presumably take it as read that a Baptist minister is going to be a snake oil and brimstone phoney, “Baptist Minister” is one of those terms which has a much more positive meaning in the United Kingdom than it appears to have in the United States. Unless the negative view is something unique to the author or some faction which she represents. The positive image has a lot to do with John Bunyan, who preached and wrote, in England after the Pilgrim Fathers had sailed.

The suspense lasts until the end of the book, though the mystery frankly does not.

Published in the UK by by Michael Joseph on 6/8/2020

Book Review of Hidden Hand by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg

Portrait of Xi Jingping flanked by CCP slogans replaces Christian images in a Catholic Church

Review based on an E-book copy obtained directly from Optimum Publishing International.

This is an excellent, if somewhat remorseless study of the unprecedented and ongoing campaigns of global influence and intelligence-gathering operated by the Chinese Communist Party. It names names, and goes on to name very many names indeed, of individual and corporate CCP collaborators in many Western countries. It deserves to be read for that alone, and any credible journalist should keep a copy handy, to consult prior to interviewing any member of their own country’s great and good on any matter pertaining to China, the CCP or “foreign influence.” Especially to determine if anyone frequently crying “foul” about his opponent’s alleged ties to Russia or the Ukraine, for example, has equally juicy ties of his own to the brutal totalitarian dictatorship that is the CCP.

The one flaw in this book is that it conflates “Brexit” with “CCP influence” despite the fact that it also details many, many examples of influence and intelligence-gathering within EU-related bodies and the governments of ALL EU member states. (Germany seems to be the most compromised state of all, possibly because the CCP programme to compromise German politicians is firmly rooted in the mighty German car industry.) Furthermore, the long and dispiriting list of great and good Britons who have proved to be entirely in the CCP’s pocket, includes a former Prime Minister, a former Northern Ireland Secretary and a former First Secretary and President of the Board of Trade, all three of them much better known for their unswerving devotion to the EU project in all its forms and at every level. Possibly the only obvious Brexiteer actually mentioned in the book as being influenced by China is Boris Johnson, currently leading the charge against the CCP over Hong Kong and the Uighurs, even as the aforementioned trio of the great and good persist in denying that there are any human rights abuses in China.

Boris aside, pretty well every Briton the book actually names as a red-flag-waving collaborator is also a blue-flag-waving Remainer and there is an obvious reason for this: these people have all chosen to support the CCP at a visceral rather than a sentient level, because they tend to either disparage democracy or only pay it lip-service whilst undermining it in practice and they are instinctively authoritarian with a Communitarian outlook on social and political affairs. Those are also the hat-measurements for unquestioning support for the European Project so it is almost inevitable that people who buy into the one should buy into the other. It’s like this: if you order “Federal European Utopia” on Amazon, your order confirmation will helpfully tell you that people buying this also purchased “world domination by the Chinese Communist Party.”

The reason why the CCP feels it needs to dominate the world is that it is convinced (again, somewhat like the Eurocrats), that it is perfect and that problems can only come from “outside” or a”tiny minority” (always 5% or less) of its own subjects. The global influence and intelligence-gathering campaign is ultimately intended to ensure that there is no “outside” to the CCP in this world, and the equally well-funded campaign by the CCP’s “610 Office” against all forms of religious practice and belief, both within China and outside, too, is similarly intended to make sure that there is no “outside” to the CCP in the world beyond. This is why images of the CCP’s core leader are now replacing images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary in churches and Uighurs are being blindfolded and herded onto trains carrying them who knows where.

Read this book, but do not do so unthinkingly. And do bear in mind that “unprecedented” usually means that there’s a very good reason why nobody has done this before.

Book Review of Idle Hands by Cassondra Windwalker

This is a novel about a mother trying to cope with an abusive husband and protect her children from ALL harm. The husband is portrayed in a way which fits fairly well with the sociopathic ex-partners of some women that I know. The twist is that the narrative is interspersed with passages in italics ostensibly giving the Devil’s view of proceedings and humanity in general. At the beginning of “The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis the author warns the reader that the Devil is by nature a liar and nothing he says can be relied upon. “Idle Hands,” with its female Devil, contains no such warning. Readers looking for insight and guidance about the human condition need to give this book a few cautious pokes with a long stick first because there is a very subtle and clever spin on this subject throughout, which gets stronger towards the end. (The Devil denies responsibility for humans behaving devilishly in a manner that’s worthy of Tony Blair.)

It is a good book, but not recommended to the unsceptical reader.

Idle Hands is Published by Agora Books on 23/7/20.

Book Review of The Resident by David Jackson

This is a compelling tale of Thomas Brogan, a self-described “serial killer” who is, technically speaking, more of a spree killer. Despite the somewhat nightmarish content, it is strangely easy to read, which is a bit disturbing in itself.

The main plot device is a row of terraced houses with interconnecting loft spaces, and this works very well and is quite plausible, because I can remember a junior school classmate who exploited just such a situation to commit his own little crime spree: in that case, the long row of 1960s terraced houses had a communal loft space which gave access to the tops of stud walls all the way along. My classmate exploited this situation to steal all sorts of things from all sorts of places, and hide them by tying bits of string to each valuable item and hanging them down inside the stud walls, where even police searches of the loft failed to find them. The masterplan was ruined, however, when one of the stolen items proved to be an alarm clock, which my classmate neglected to disarm before lowering it into its hiding place.

These communal loft spaces predictably turned out to be a lethal fire risk, however, especially in more modern terraces with stud walls as described above, and local councils made efforts to get them all fire-walled in the seventies and eighties. So it is also quite plausible that such a loft-space would be partitioned in the course of the story. I am not sure if any still exist in England, in fact: they may do, but they shouldn’t, for reasons that have nothing to do with serial killers.

The story is narrated largely by Brogan arguing with a voice in his own head, which lays the back story out nicely.

However, the one fault with this novel is that the author allows himself to fall into the trap of thinking that the back story of a serial killer has to include a real-life horror scene of some kind, for them to want to inflict similar horrors on others. This isn’t necessarily true. Often, the actual triggers are so banal that investigators think they must have missed something more significant. The biggest risk is not a horror scene in early childhood: young children undoubtedly suffer from such experiences, but without being turned into monsters. What creates the monsters is instability at home affecting male children between nine and eleven years old, or children in that age range being subjected to unremedied bullying in any setting. The lack of remedy or resolution matters, and the absence of a stable, preferably loving, relationship with a male parent or authority figure. This is not meant to be an attack on single Mums, it is an observation that absent or abusive fathers or carers can create threats to society as a whole. The author gets this bit pretty much right, but only after he’s put in the seemingly obligatory nightmare scene in early childhood, which confuses the issue.

There is a good surprise ending to the book. 

The Resident by David Jackson is published by Serpent’s Tail/Profile Books on 16/7/2020

Book Review of The Phone Box at the Edge of the World by Laura Imai Messina

This is an excellent novel about a community forming around a Japanese garden -and a phone box- that allows the bereaved to talk to those whom they have lost. None of the modern Western cliches: “closure”, “coming to terms”, “moving on” or the new one: “life affirming” really apply. Japanese people do not move on from dead loved ones, nor do they wish to close them off from their present and future lives and, instead of coming to terms with their loss, they communicate with those they have lost and, in this novel, those whom they have gained.

The setting is between a terrible Tsunami and a massive Typhoon, but some of the bereavements are the consequence of individual illness or accident, including a stupid accident. One of them isn’t strictly speaking a bereavement at all. There is an extraordinary amount of kindness and respect in this book and there is no religious exclusivity: the characters are interested in each other’s insights regardless of where they get them from. I commend this book to all readers; atheists may have to work at it to some extent, but the small effort involved will be worth it.

The Phone Box at the Edge of the World is published on 25/6/2020 by Manilla Press.

Book Review of Dark Waters by G.R. Halliday

Scottish Noir isn’t as well defined in the public consciousness as Nordic Noir but most people will know when they see it, especially when they read this book. Someone once wrote in The Guardian (it must have been Nancy Banks-Smith) apropos of a BBC wildlife documentary, that a Scottish Wildcat was a Tabby with knuckledusters. G.R. Halliday is sort of John Fowles with knuckledusters, even though no actual knuckleduster is referenced in the text. The author is properly Scottish and there would be Hell to pay if an English author wrote Scottish characters quite like this.

Everyone is flawed and taboos of all sorts are broken, though not trivial ones. A Scottish biker-gang leader widely believed to be responsible for a Manson-family type double murder proves to be one of the more helpful characters which the heroine, Detective Inspector Monica Kennedy, encounters. Tension is maintained throughout and the police find that the available leads do not build a case so much as a nightmare. Even once the heroine knows what is actually going on, she is consigned to helplessness by the situation she uncovers. And some matters remain unresolved. Perhaps for future novels, perhaps forever.

This is a good and compelling read, but it is unlikely that Tourism Scotland are going to happily endorse it for sale in souvenir shops and there are shocks as well as mysteries, and some very disturbing ideas and images are conveyed by the text. Spike Milligan couldn’t think of a fate worse than death: G.R. Halliday has a brave and bold try at inventing one.

Dark Waters is published by Random House, Vintage Publishing on 16/7/2020