The Record of Nazi Germany:

...The events recounted here are a matter of record...

...Prolonged and undiminished hatred is unquestionably evil...

...It is a volume of only 259 small pages, but its impact is appalling beyond description...

...He has based this work on the assumption that very few English-speaking readers have had the time, opportunity or fortitude to examine the vast materials--running into hundreds of published volumes--which contain the full documented record of the crimes committed by some thousands of Germans against millions of Europeans before and during the recent world war...

...No one who claims to have faith in Man can despair of seeing the Germans rise once again to the humanity and dignity of which they are capable...

...Lord Russell is satisfied that the deeds speak for themselves and need no analysis or condemnation...

...Reviewed by Robert Bass Former history instructor, Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges LODR RUSSELL of Liverpool has produced what is perhaps the most terrifying book of horrors ever written...

...Whatever the author's motives, he cannot be accused of exaggeration or distortion...

...He has not imagined things which did not happen, and the fact that they are no longer happening should not cause the repression of all recollection of them...

...publication of this slender volume caused something close to a sensation in England and cost the author his official position in the British armed forces...

...On the eve of the German Federal Republic's official reintegration into the society of free nations, it can be taken as a rude reproach which is no longer timely or relevant...

...After nearly a decade of fervent hope for the German people's speedy recovery from the Nazi pestilence, this book may seem a gratuitous act of malice...

...No one who has followed the evolution of West Germany over the past nine years can fail to be impressed by the orderly growth of its democratic government and institutions...

...But it does not follow that a short memory is therefore a virtue, either political or moral...

...After a summary description of the agencies devised by Hitler and his henchmen for the execution of their savagery, the account moves on as relentlessly as the Panzer divisions once did...

...Clearly, this recapitulation of German bestiality has achieved notoriety because it is now "politically inopportune...

...Yet, this much being said, who will be so complacent as to forget--or, remembering, reject--these words of Goethe: "Die Botschaft hor ich wohl, allein mir fehlt der Glaube...

...The full range of atrocities passes in review: against prisoners of war, passengers and crews of sunken ships, civilian populations under German occupation, forced labor, concentration-camp inmates and European Jewry...

...The author served as Deputy Judge Advocate General in the British Army and as legal adviser on war-crimes trials to the British Commander-in-Chief in Germany...

...They show that the atrocities were not isolated occurrences or improvisations but were carried out on specific orders from the very top, that they were not confined to the Jews but were perpetrated against all the captive peoples, that they were practiced with special ferocity on Poles and Russians, that they were not committed only by members of the Nazi party, and, finally, that they were known not only to the civilian authorities and military commanders but to the general German public as well...

...No one who realizes the military power of the Communist bloc can question the importance of a German contribution to Western defense...

...He has drawn on the many trial transcripts and his personal experience to produce a sickening concentrate which affords not so much as one sentence of respite from the principal theme...