Berlin: In the Underground War against Russia and China (III)
Commentary by Hans-Rüdiger Minow
When, during the war on Korea, a nuclear strike against Peking (and Moscow) had been relocated (site of deployment Guam, max. 34 Mark 4 atomic bombs), the successor of the Nazi espionage (Organization Gehlen) in Munich, ensured direct contacts with the Kuomintang. Following the dropping of the atomic bombs, Kuomintang troops were supposed to march, as occupying forces, through contaminated terrain towards Peking. To support the offensive of Kuomintang tanks, considered necessary by Chiang Kai-shek, Gehlen could offer specialists from Munich: from the Reichswehr and Nazi military. They had accumulated experience - in the suppression of riots and strikes during the Weimar Republic and subsequently during extermination operations and Nazi massacres in the East ("Operation Barbarossa"). Gehlen extended the bloody trail of war crimes committed in Europe to China.
BND Personnel
Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg was working with the Organization Gehlen, which, in 1956 became West Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (BND). The Nazi General, who, as hero of the Nazi tank divisions' advance towards Moscow, had been awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, was now in action for Taiwan and the Kuomintang in the battle against Peking. He personally instructed the staffs of the nationalist forces with original documents of the Nazi's "Operation Barbarossa." He was personally answerable to Chiang Kai-shek.
Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg's comrade-in-arms, Oskar Munzel, also seemed to be of value to Gehlen and the BND, because of his experience in tank combat (3rd Nazi tank division, offensive against Moscow). Tank combat was central to Taiwan's military plans to raze Peking. During the planning of a nuclear strike (April 1951), Munzel was active in Africa - as counsel to the feudal Farouk regime in Cairo, which was seeking Munzel's advice for its planned combat at Egypt's eastern border.
Munzel knew the enemies, Cairo was worrying about. Munzel had constantly encountered them during the advance on Moscow: the Jews, ordered to be summarily liquidated, now being tracked down by Munzel and 70 other West German Nazi experts in Cairo - during the planning for wars with Israel.
His career brought Munzel to Münster, to the tank troops of the Bundeswehr (1956). Following his probation, he commanded a BND clandestine mission in the underground war against China.
Operation "Ming Teh"
In Taiwan, Munzel's BND group, disguised as a delegation of DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service, Bonn) received Chiang Kai-shek's son Wego, formerly a cadet in the Nazi military, now an armaments expert with connections to the West German war industry. Chiang Wego's assignment was comprehensive and clear: to train new recruits for the offensive against Peking by drawing on the German experience gained during "Operation Barbarossa" (followed by Munzel's testing in Cairo) - and to provide the appropriate weapons.
Via Munzel's BND group, which linked its own office in Taiwan to structures of the President's intelligence service (codename "Ming Teh"), these weapons came from West Germany - with the approval of the West German foreign minister: tank shells from Bölkow (later MBB), bazookas from Diehl, "Mars" propellants and warheads, explosives and chemicals from Dynamite Nobel.
Under the disguise of being German faculty members at Taiwan's cultural college, the West German officers of the "Ming Teh" group expanded their influence. The front directed against Peking was reinforced and now also became visible. While Munzel, under BND command, set up a secret "experimental battalion" against China (1968), staff officers of the Taiwan dictatorship studied at the German Armed Forces Staff College in Hamburg, quite officially.
Stimulus for Murder
The armament projects for a war against China were in line with extermination concepts, which revived the colonial stereotype of the "yellow peril" in imperial disguise ("red dragon") and were not averse to an ethical mandate in their pursuit of defense. The Nazi propaganda's imaginary projection of a people, weaker than "inner Asians," who still had maintained their purity and must be protected was seamlessly transmitted. The notorious SS-produced film ("Geheimnis Tibet," "Secret Tibet," 1943) about Aryan genes in the Himalayan Highlands returned to the big screen of the movies.
The West German state was barely a year old, and a nuclear strike against Peking was in the planning stages (1950), when graphically identical cinema posters promoted the relaunch: "The original film about the German Tibet expedition." The film contains scenes with the Auschwitz criminal Bruno Beger (see Part II). The scenes with Beger, who measures the heads and bodies of the indigenous people comparing them to those of Aryans, conveys racism as a stimulus for murder, seemingly harmless and interchangeable: sometimes as the purity of a people which must be protected from tarnishing by Jews, and at other times, as the Aryan heritage in Tibetan Asia, threatened with dilution by the yellow peril (from the Chinese state and Han Chinese). The brighter the appearance of the original figure, the bleaker the shadow of its antithesis deserving liquidation.
As soon as Peking had reaffirmed its claim to Tibet, the West German film industry gave its stamp of approval ("FSK" - Voluntary Self Regulation) to the SS-film: since June 5,1950 approved for age 12 and older; (extension of the approval in 1956; in its new version since January 5, 2000 approved for all ages).
Portrayal of Foreign Peoples
Colonial racism which provokes emotions in the underground war, and, using an ethical pretext, diverts attention from the hunt for prey (the resources and markets, the landscapes and lives), was revived on West German television. Archaic pictures of remnants of indigenous peoples, threatened with early death by market competition, obscured the focus on the aggressive maneuvers aimed at "Red China" by BND espionage, military staff and arms industry.
As if Radio Free Europe (RFE) and its Munich BND agents had needed help, the public television's first (ARD) channel provided a gigantic stage for several decades (1963 - 2009), to its foreign peoples series - with focus on Tibet.
Imperial
In the evening program millions learned how, several years earlier, the omnipresent TV moderator and alpinist hero had met the Dalai Lama - as the godly king in Lhasa, Tibet, who had offered his friendship to the white man from distant Europe and who now finds himself on the run from "Red China" - without his indigenous people. The white visitor, the omnipresent TV moderator was Heinrich Harrer, former SS Oberscharfürer. He had joined the SA during the underground struggle for an Aryan Germany, had been received by Adolf Hitler as the conqueror of mountains, sent to the peaks of the Nanga Parbat (for "athletic training for the impending war," 1939). Harrer embodied the white mission: transcend all barriers of the world with robust forces, a friend to harmless races, and invincible to competing powers.
In an ethnological TV series, (with more than 50 ARD telecasts of 45 minutes, accompanied by radio and press features) colonial racism reached a higher imperial level: Portrayal of Foreign Peoples (with TV focus on Tibet) in the underground war against resistance to the market (PR China).
Clandestine Reinforcements
When parties in Bonn rewarded an insurgency of the Tibetan nobility (1987) with open attacks against Peking ("human rights violations in Tibet"), and demanded an increase in the number of scholarships for Tibetan exiles in Germany, Munich's agents on the foreign peoples front had long since made headway: for scholarship applicants of another people that could infringe on the national cohesiveness of the People's Republic, to the extent that its Turkish-Muslim separatism became violent: Uighurs from Tibet's neighboring region, the autonomous region Xinjiang.
Following the example of "Ming Teh," the group of BND military smuggled in through DAAD, the Uighur milieu in the Bavarian capital was provided clandestine reinforcement - legally financed from the usual funds of the exquisite association for academic exchange.
USW Biblis
The new Uighur generation traveled via Turkey and filled the Muslim ranks of Gehlen's agents in Munich, who had made their living for decades at Radio Free Europe (RFE), the intelligence operation in the Oettinger Strasse. The radio station - in the meantime expanded to include another pillar of the US financiers (Radio Liberty) - was appealing, from German soil, in its Uighur program (USW Biblis and Lampertheim) for resistance against the influx of Chinese citizens, the alien-blooded Han, who are liquidating the purity of the ethnic majority population in Xinjiang ("genocide"), for Muslim law and "identity" in a separate nation.
Great Turkestan, Tibet, Hong Kong
The elders of the Uighur community in Munich (today the World Uyghur Congress, WUC) are very familiar with the blood propaganda, through their service in the "Eastland-Legions" of the Waffen SS (Turkestan 162nd Infantry Division). Berlin had promised them their own nation with the inclusion of Xinjiang ("Great Turkestan"), "identity," and Muslim law, to be able to position the great German "Reich" at China's borders with Turkmen help. With the defeated rest of the SS division stranded in Bavaria, they still had their hopes and are once again used against China - as the Nazis had used the indigenous inhabitants in the Himalayan Highlands, whose region of settlement (Tibet) and the region of the Uighurs (Xinjiang) make up a third of China's territory.
If Hong Kong is included, it seems that the western side has several levers at its disposal for use in the fight against China: first, internal disintegration (ethnic-based insurgency movements at China's periphery, social dislocation in metropolitan areas) and second, external military intervention (having Chinese from the base in Taiwan fight Chinese.)
Leading Role
In the underground war, the second option has gained new importance since the EU, under German influence has intensified its Taiwan policy against Beijing. This permits Berlin to use, the politically developed, ideologically elaborated special relationship with the Kuomintang - which has been maintained since the days of the Reichswehr and Wehrmacht - to play a leading role in the western alliance against China.
Nuclear War
In all phases of China's emergence, German global policy advancing eastward has been on the side of China's enemies. When, with the founding of the People's Republic, (1949) the emergence seemed irreversible and a nuclear war was planned against China, Western Germany aided with clandestine reinforcements and military know-how. Still in the ruins left by the Nazi regime, the global policy of the successor state resorted to the historical heritage of the colonial crimes committed in China: to stand up to the criminal potency of its wartime competitors in the struggle for Greater Asia - even with nuclear war.
It remains worthy of this reputation.
Please take note of our video column "War Against China" and of Berlin: In the Underground War against Russia and China (I) as well as Berlin: In the Underground War against Russia and China (II).