One of the British Army’s top legal officers resigned today rather than obey a government order to withdraw a book he wrote exposing atrocities committed by the Nazis against Jews.
Lord Russell, of Liverpool, wounded and decorated veteran of World Wars I and II, submitted his resignation as Assistant Judge Advocate General. The action came because of official opposition to his new book. “The Scourge of the Swastika.” scheduled for publication in England August 19. Foreign Office quarters opposed the book because of fear that it might offend German military officers who are being urged by the Western powers to remilitarize Germany as a buffer against Communism.
This afternoon, a Foreign Office spokesman said: “The Foreign Office has never seen the book and has given no ruling on it. The action taken on the book has been taken entirely on the Lord Chancellor’s responsibility. “However,” the spokesman added, “the Lord Chancellor did first consult the Foreign Office as to its general practice in cases where a member or former member of the Foreign Office wished to publish a book of a controversial nature. The Lord Chancel or was then told by the Foreign Office that the practice was not to permit such publication.
Lord Russell, who served as a senior staff officer during World War II in France, North Africa and Italy, was said by friends to have been deeply moved by the torture inflicted on European Jewry by the Nazis. He drew on his experiences as a frame r of allied military legal policy in World War II to shed new light on the crimes committed by Germany against the Jews. He participated as British Representative on Allied War Crimes tribunals, and wrote in the new book of his discoveries at Belsen and other Nazi death camps.
Efforts to censor the book in order to avoid offense to the sensitivity of ex-Nazis was described by the London Daily Express as a “monstrous act of censorship.” The newspaper said the book is “strictly factual, a cold recital of dreadful historical events. It tells of the concentration camps at Belsen and Buchenwald, of Warsaw Ghetto, of the massacres of Lidice and Oradour, and of the extermination of 6,000,000 Jews.”
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