5 The ‘T4’ programme will be explored in greater detail in Book One, Chapter Thirteen, ‘The Doctors of Wannsee Meet in a Villa by the Lake’.
8 ‘Lord take my soul, but the struggle continues’
1 Cited in Amnesty’s 2017 report A Criminal Enterprise? Shell’s Involvement in Human Rights Violations in Nigeria in the 1990s, page 18.
2 A two-year study by the United Nations Environment Programme (Environmental Assessment of Ogoniland, published in 2011) found that ‘oil contamination in Ogoniland is widespread and severely impacting many components of the environment’, creating conditions so polluted, ‘environmental restoration … may take 25 to 30 years’ and cost up to $1 billion. It also found that many of the people living in the Niger Delta had been exposed to severe health risks for decades as a result of hydrocarbon contamination.
3 For a description of how Shell is alleged to have paid Okuntimo directly, in cash, see the evidence of Mr Ejiogu, in the Independent, 5 December 2010: ‘Ken Saro-Wiwa was framed, secret evidence shows’.
4 Quotation from Amnesty’s 2017 report A Criminal Enterprise?, page 10.
5 See chapter notes for Birnbaum’s further thoughts on the tribunal.
6 Quotation taken from The Next Gulf by Andrew Rowell, James Marriott and Lorne Stockman.
From a Desk in Waterloo to a Cell in Port Harcourt For a long time now an imaginary film has been playing in my head. And with the passing of time, this imaginary film becomes ever more
1 Testimony of Bariture Lebe and Popgbara Zorzor, of the Ogoni Twenty, interviewed in Africa Today, ‘To Set the Captives Free’, November 1998.
2 Brian Anderson, Shell Nigeria managing director, speaking in 1996 about Shell’s strategy of ‘non-intervention’ in the case of nineteen jailed Ogoni activists.
10 The Invisible Corporation
1 Michael Birnbaum QC’s highly respected report, ‘Nigeria: Fundamental Rights Denied. Report of the Trial of Ken Saro-Wiwa and Others’, had been published by Article 19 in association with the Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales and the Law Society of England and Wales in June 1995, five months before the executions.
2 ‘Shell to Pay $15.5 Million to Settle Nigerian Case’, New York Times, 8 June 2009.
3 A Criminal Enterprise? is available online at: https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/AFR4473932017ENGLISH.PDF
4 From Challenger to Joint Industry Leader, 1890–1939: A History of Royal Dutch Shell, Volume 1 by Joost Jonker and Jan Luiten van Zanden.
5 With Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, Schacht once again became president of the Reichsbank, and from 1934, also the minister of economics. In these capacities he and Montagu Norman negotiated critical loan arrangements for the Nazi government – deals which drew sharp criticism from some sources at the time. The Daily Herald wrote that ‘Mr Montagu Norman’s financial support for the Nazi regime raises questions of the utmost political importance.’ And Norman’s biographer, John Hargrave, later wrote that ‘it is quite certain that Norman did all he could to assist Hitlerism to gain and maintain political power, operating on the financial plane from his stronghold in Threadneedle Street’ (Montagu Norman: A Biography, 1967).
6 Information on the consular briefings from Doing Business with the Nazis: Britain’s Economic and Financial Relations with Germany 1931–1936 by Neil Forbes, 2000.
7 The oil loan is also confirmed by Anthony Sampson in Company Man – ‘In 1935 he [Deterding] negotiated with the Nazis to give them a year’s oil reserves on credit.’
8 Both quotations from A Century In Oil: The Shell Transport and Trading Company, 1897–1997, by Stephen Howarth, 1997.
11 A Hillside in Grosseto; A Dream of My Father
1 I explore the disproportionate gender balance in desk killers, and what the clinical psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen terms the ‘extreme male brain’, in the second volume of I You We Them.
12 A Pool in East London
1 In conversation with Bill Schwarz at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, February 2007.
2 Later revealed to be Dr Hans Münch, interviewed by Gitta Sereny, ‘The Man Who Said No’, in The German Trauma.
3 Delmotte committed suicide in 1945.
13 The Doctors of Wannsee Meet in a Villa by the Lake
1 See chapter notes for further details on the T4 programme, and the subsequent Aktion 14f13.
2 It took until 2017 for the first detailed work on the men of the Wannsee Conference to be published: Die Teilnehmer (‘The Participants’), edited by the German historians Hans-Christian Jasch and Christoph Kreutzmüller, seventy-two years after the minutes of the meeting were first discovered.
3 The Unwritten Order is also the title of a book by the historian Peter Longerich, in which he examines Hitler’s central role in the ‘Final Solution’.
4 ‘Pg’ is an abbreviation of ‘Parteigenosse’, i.e. fellow party member.
5 David Cesarani, in his biography Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, titles both Kritzinger and Luther as ‘Dr’. In fact neither had doctorates; Luther did not even complete his secondary-school examinations.
6 See their chapter on Kritzinger in The Participants: The Men of the Wannsee Conference (ed. Jasch and Kreuzmüller).
7 Comments made by Heydrich’s protégé, Walter Schellenberg, quoted in the opening chapter of The Killing of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich by Callum Macdonald.
8 I will return to Eichmann’s tour of the sites of mass murder in Book Four – ‘Arendt in Jerusalem’.
9 A Nazi concentration camp situated just north-east of Berlin which opened in 1933, primarily to hold political opponents of the regime, including many communists.
10 When I met Claude Lanzmann, in March 2000, we talked about my early research into the ‘desk killers,’ and specifically the Wannsee Conference. I asked whether he had tried to contact any of the surviving participants when he was making Shoah. He pointed to a picture of Klopfer – ‘I almost managed to interview him’. ‘In Ulm?’ ‘Yes, I was there. I tried to film him on the street but he escaped me.’ For further details see chapter notes.
14 Carpathian Days
1 Later on, reading Ian Thomson’s biography of Levi, I learn about the reason for the Fossoli camp’s growth from 200 to 700 Jews in early 1944 – which was mainly attributable to the organisational zeal of a former lawyer from Wuppertal, Friedrich Bosshammer, then SS chief of Jewish operations in Italy. It was he who ensured that there was an ‘economically viable’ number of Jews in the Fossoli camp to make a transport to Poland possible. His deputies did the paperwork that enabled the necessary co-operation between the SS and the Italian State Railways. Based at his grand headquarters in Verona, the lawyer Bosshammer was the quintessence of the Schreibtischtaeter – murdering thousands without moving from his desk.