Word: crankshaw
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GESTAPO: INSTRUMENT OF TYRANNY (275 pp.) - Edward Crankshaw - Viking...
...memoirs of statesmen and generals or the official regimental histories and the reminiscences of Panzer generals, are embedded the true nature of Naziism and the cause of World War II. Of the many valuable historical works that have drawn on these sources in recent years the latest is Edward Crankshaw's Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny, a chillingly felt, warmly told, and concise study of the main lever of Nazi power...
...authority on Soviet affairs, Journalist (London Observer) and Author (Cracks in the Kremlin Wall) Crankshaw has had ample occasion to study political terror. But when he turned from the Communists' MVD to the Nazis' Gestapo, he found a vast difference in attitudes. There was a mechanical ingenuity to Gestapo methods of torture (a small machine for crushing testicles), and a pseudo-scientific slant to many of their regular duties (victims with perfect teeth were withheld from the incinerators in order to provide the Nazis with perfect skulls for paperweights; the heads of dead Jewish Communist commissars were pickled...
...money or political advantages. In Poland and the Ukraine, where there were not enough tank ditches, and natural ravines were used to pack in the naked bodies of millions of massacred men, women and children, the SD Action Groups were full of self-pity for their exacting task. Crankshaw notes that volunteer groups from Lithuania and the Ukraine were only too ready to help out the SS, and he demolishes the argument that the Wehrmacht knew nothing of this hideous slaughter...
...Pravda admits that the agricultural goals were not fulfilled. But the new plan demands 100% greater productivity on collective farms by 1960, which Western specialists think is an impossible target. "This new and dangerous stage in the attempt to assimilate Soviet agriculture," says the London Observer's Edward Crankshaw, "can mean nothing less than an unspoken declaration of war on the mass of the peasants...