History Recast
SACKS, ALEXANDER
History Recast TO NUMBER OUR DAYS By Pierre van Paassen Scribner's. 404 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by ALEXANDER SACKS Attorney at law; formerly Special Attorney, Department of Justice Readers of...
...He even outlined a technical blueprint for an assault on the Axis by the U.S...
...To Number Our Days, presumably to bring his earlier memoir up to date...
...He castigates the British, French and American policy of non-intervention...
...President of the Federation of Russian War Veterans, had even been the target of a plot to discredit him executed by a Paris correspondent of Pravda and van Paassen...
...He has never hesitated to broadcast his moral judgments...
...Nor will he or his publisher supply any of this information when pointedly asked for it, as I myself have found...
...Repentance for all our infidelities, our idolatries, our worship of false gods...
...But to avoid having to say it he has launched an absurd pro-Soviet, anti-West German tale with a formal military title...
...In his current memoir, as in his previous one, he is articulate to the point of garrulousness about his political likes and dislikes...
...He details the barbarities of the rebels...
...Being an experienced teller of tales, Van Paassen should know that plausibility is an important ingredient of successful fabrication...
...Dropping his voice an octave, his eyes rolling skyward, van Paassen calls on us for "a great act of repentance and a great act of faith...
...And since Berlin is some 110 miles away from the nearest point of the zonal border, a wall in Berlin has no relevance as a deterrent to a West German breakthrough of the zonal border...
...One looks in vain, however, for even a passing reference to the Soviet role in the annihilation of the non-Stalinist Republicans and, finally, of the Spanish Republican cause itself...
...West Germany harbors aggressive atomic intentions toward the Soviet Union (which ardently desires peace...
...The book mentions Hitler's name 117 times (none favorable) and Stalin's four times (none unfavorable...
...There is a further mystery in To Number Our Days...
...He writes abundantly and excitingly about the Spanish Civil War...
...They hadn't even notified the American command of their little maneuver to sow panic amongst the population of the German Democratic Republic...
...formerly Special Attorney, Department of Justice Readers of Pierre van Paassen's best-selling Days of Our Years (1939) remember him as a congenial personality—Christian humanitarian, pacifist, Zionist, friend of the Jews, opponent of Nazis, Fascists and Conservatives...
...Armed Forces...
...A substantial part of the new material is anti-West German propaganda, indistinguishable in style and substance from the Soviet output on the same subject...
...Such repentance is obviously for miserable sinners like us and not for a lecturing memoirist—a political operator to whom the bearing of false witness comes as easily as breathing...
...This gamey morsel belongs with the classics of Nazi and Communist manufacture...
...Miller...
...Van Paassen has been a student of international affairs for nearly half a century, a journalist, writer and lecturer for more than three decades, and an ordained Unitarian minister since 1946...
...The Germans were not out to start a war...
...There is not a word of any of this in To Number Our Days, nothing which might cast light on the fate of Miller and Koutiepov or on the identity of the kidnappers or their accomplices...
...They were like the man who, half-absentmindedly, throws a banana peel in the path of his approaching enemy in the hope that it might do the most good where most needed...
...Yet he remains totally silent on many important moral and political issues which are clearly within his range of interest...
...When the Soviet intelligence learned of the planned coup, a few thousand tanks moved up from the Polish borders and took up a position in and near East Berlin...
...Why...
...If van Paassen were an obscure person, his new book could well be ignored...
...When I entitled the book The Time Is Now...
...The West German newspapers which published the merest hint about Operation Kettle were quickly suppressed and forbidden to reappear...
...The West Germans fully counted on such a Soviet intervention and for that reason intended to withdraw after 48 hours or as soon as the Red forces came into view...
...the German breach of the Treaty of Versailles, the Nazi seizure of the Sudetenland...
...Only 40 pages of the memoir cover the period beyond Days of Our Years...
...After turning facts inside out with unidentifiable quotations and unsupported opinions of minor proSoviet operators, van Paassen delivers a final thrust at the West German Government with a lurid tale about something he calls "Operation Kettle...
...Now, a quarter-century later, with the help of scissors and paste-pot, montage and rewrite, he has produced a sequel...
...The most skillfully executed sevendollar bill would have a hard time passing...
...Assuming the role of minister of the Almighty, van Paassen intones a solemn valedictory against "our inveterate habit of ascribing to God what in essence is but the conceit of the masters of the world game of guile and blood...
...But he is neither obscure nor inactive on the public scene, and the tissue of inaccuracies, omissions and pointed inventions which pervades this sequel makes it necessary to examine the image of its famous author more closely...
...Van Paassen seems chronically incapable of saying even a word which is critical of Kremlin policy, practice or persons...
...The Ulbricht regime enjoys complete immunity from van Paassen's criticism...
...The targets of his anger, criticism, calumny and falsification are, by curious coincidence, the familiar targets of Moscow polemic...
...Yet in his new book he writes: "I hadn't said a word about bringing America into the war...
...Germain-en-Laye...
...The reader of the current volume will not be surprised, then, to find van Paassen justifying the NaziCommunist pact with explanations which are the standard baggage of Soviet apologetics...
...I meant that the time had come to reflect, to take stock and ponder . . ." And further: ". . . in The Time Is Now...
...It gives rise, in fact, to the question: Who is Pierre van Paassen, and what is his game...
...A fairly large colony of White Russian emigres lived there too, and van Paassen knew many of the emigres personally...
...In the '30s van Paassen lived a good deal in France, in the Paris suburb of St...
...Thus van Paassen, whose compassion for the Jews and hostility toward British anti-Zionism are expressed at great length and frequently, avoids all reference to systematic anti-Semitism and antiJewish genocide in the Soviet Union...
...These are, among others: the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture, the Moscow Trials, the Katyn Forest Massacre, the anti-Semitic purges in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Soviet seizure and exploitation of Eastern Europe, the Soviet breach of its wartime agreements for Eastern Europe, the suppression by fraud of the Polish Revolution and by force of the Hungarian Revolution...
...West Germany suffers from a "sagging economy...
...The answer is this: The Russians got wind of the preparations for Operation Kettle.' Under Operation Kettle, a highly mobile section of the Bundeswehr, about five armored divisions, was to take the East German Army by surprise, pounce on East Germany's frontiers and make a gap about 50 kilometers wide...
...The truth is that the Wall was constructed to prevent the flight of Soviet Zone Germans...
...I referred to the Nazi-Communist pact as 'the work of the two greatest scoundrels of world history, Hitler and Stalin.' " But there is no such statement about Hitler and Stalin in The Time Is Now...
...Van Paassen knows this...
...It is implausible to the edge of fantasy that the West German Government should have risked war with the Soviet to facilitate the escape of Soviet Zone Germans to the West when these Germans, in great numbers, were already using an excellent escape route to freedom just by riding the U-Bahn or walking across Potsdamerplatz or a score of other streets in Berlin...
...I quote it in full: "Why did the Russians in August, 1961, order Walter Ulbricht to put up a wall between East and West Berlin...
...The gap was to be kept open for 48 hours to give the East German population an opportunity to stampede into West Germany, while the troops, of course, created all the havoc they could possibly make in blowing up railway stations, harbor installations, warehouses, governmental buildings and so forth...
...He does not tell us what West German newspapers "were quickly suppressed and forbidden to reappear" nor the name of "one of the banned newspapers" nor the dates of the alleged suppression...
...If van Paassen could supply even a jot of evidence that "Operation Kettle" ever existed, he would astound the intelligence services of all the major powers...
...But he somehow manages to miss a story about two of these Russians although they practically lived on his block and their fate excited world-wide attention: the neverexplained kidnapping (the evidence pointed to Soviet secret agents) and complete disappearance of Generals Koutiepov and Miller, leaders of the White Russian community, both well-known to van Paassen...
...These omissions are in strange contrast to van Paassen's belaboring of Anglo-French imperialism, his justified concern over the treatment of Negroes in our Southern states, his perturbation over the oppression of national minorities in the free world (Catalan, Basque, Alsatian, Breton, Flemish, etc...
...Van Paassen has waited more than 10 years after Stalin's death to utter a syllable criticizing Stalin, and he performs this feat retroactively with a spurious selfquotation...
...Now, throughout the book van Paassen never misses an opportunity to spin interesting new yarns or new versions of old yarns...
...He devotes four chatty pages to them...
...In the spring of 1941, when Nazi-Soviet relations were rapidly deteriorating, van Paassen, though a confirmed pacifist and an adherent of a pacifist group, wrote a militaristic book, The Time Is Now...
...In it he strongly urged the United States to go to war against Hitler...
...One of the banned newspapers in its final edition printed this remark: 'We publish the story of "Operation Kettle" in the hope and with the wish that it may open thousands of sleeping eyes before German military and political adventurism once again plunges the world into unspeakable disaster...
Vol. 47 • August 1964 • No. 16
