BOOK
The Password Is Courage
Castle
$1.75
About this product:
...Coward was
a witness in the Holocaust denial case of Canadian Nazi Ernst Zundel.
It might serve as a point of reference today in the dispute about the
status of detainees in Guantanamo's Camp X-Ray.
A Google search for Coward brought up only a few mentions, one for
the Zundel testimony and one for a review of this book. The others
were in other languages.
Briefly, Coward was a British army regimental sergeant major who was
taken prisoner by the Germans in 1940. By insisting that the Germans
treat him in accordance with the Hague and Geneva conventions, he won
favorable treatment as a senior non-commissioned officer and as a
trusty. He constantly escaped, citing his rights under the convention
for the right of escape and pointing out that the conventions limit
punishment to a month of solitary confinement.
He took it upon himself to assert the rights and privileges of his
men to the Germans.
Held first at a Stalag at Lamsdorf, he was, at last, assigned to Auschwitz.
During his frequent walks into town under supervision of a German
NCO, he managed to buy guns and explosives which were intended for
the Polish resistance but which Coward decided to hand over to the
Jews in Birkenau. (Coward's account of these trips to town completely
baffled the unbelieving German defense lawyers at a later war-crimes
trial.)
He also worked out a scheme whereby he would buy Jewish corpses from
the Germans which he used to help an equal number of live Jews to
escape. The currency for all this was coffee, cigarettes, and other
things that he persuaded his British comrades to give up for a good
cause.
He complained through his chain of command about IG Farben's
mistreatment of Jewish slave laborers and later testified at the
war-crimes trial of the Farben criminals against Dr. Duerrfeld (who
was acquitted because he knew nothing about gas chambers,
extermination, slave labor, or anything else).
Apparently, although this is not clear in Castle's book, he was
elected to Parliament after the war and was also named a Righteous
Gentile by Yad Vashem.
According to Castle, Coward drew much satisfaction in the nickname he
was given in Auschwitz, the "Count of Auschwitz."
I am mystified by a few things in the book, chiefly a run by American
bombers that dropped leaflets on Auschwitz warning the inmates that
they were about to be bombed. (One wonders what they were supposed to do, dig air-raid shelters?) And tales of the actual bombing of
Auschwitz made me wonder about Coward's accuracy.
Finally, I was surprised by Coward's successful entry into the
extermination camp at Birkenau for a day while he searched
unsuccessfully for a British naval surgeon who was supposedly held
there. I had only heard previously of Jews who had smuggled
themselves into Auschwitz to confirm its horror. (I have written
about that in "Mala's Last Words," which is available from me.)
But above all, I was taken aback by German observance of the treaties
concerning the treatment of POWs, although Castle does describe the
special harassment of Canadian POWs, who were first bound and then
shackled from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. in retaliation for the Dieppe raid.
Castle says this was because the Germans wanted the Allies to treat
their own POWs well. This does not tally with the events at Malmedy
in which the Germans deliberately mowed down American prisoners;
events on Juno Beach, where the SS killed Canadian prisoners, or with
the mistreatment of Allied prisoners in Mauthausen where at least 31
Allied flying officers are known to have been murdered on the Stairs
of Death and where other Allied prisoners were forced to dig the
tunnel through the Alps at the Loibl Pass.
