Prime Minister Theresa May will trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty before the end of March, the starting process by which the United Kingdom will exit the European Union. The Parliamentary Bill has now received Royal Assent from Her Majesty The Queen.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, a key player in Mrs May’s Government, will be expected to keep the tax rate low to attract new trade deals following Britain’s departure from the European Union.
REVIEW
No Wall Too High: One Man’s Extraordinary Escape from Mao’s Infamous Labour Camps
Synopsis: Life in Mao’s labour camps was so brutal, its inmates longed for death. One captive broke free – to tell his heart-stopping story.
HIS arms lashed lightly behind his back, squeezed between two soldiers and prodded mercilessly with rifle butts, he was paraded through the streets and into the square where more than 10,000 hate-filled faces were screaming abuse and obscenities at him.
Xu Hongci was experiencing the sharpest edge of the terrible witch-hunts that masqueraded as justice in the China of mad revolutionary Chairman Mao.
He was hauled up onto a table, his slumping head grabbed by the hair and forced upwards to face the baying mob. Quotations from Mao’s Little Red Book echoed from loudspeakers as he was denounced as a counter-revolutionary, an imperialist, and a criminal. He was sentenced to . . .
Xu fully expected the next word to be ‘death’, and he welcomed the prospect. He had been a prisoner for 12 years, serving the hardest time imaginable in the laogai, China’s chain of brutal slave-labour camps for those considered enemies of the state.
Virtually with his bare hands, he’d built dams, dug mines, quarried mountains, worked in paddy fields for 19 hours a day, all on starvation rations of gruel and husks. He’d been shackled in irons, whipped, beaten and humiliated.
To be pinned to the ground and finished off with a bullet in the back of the neck – as he had seen done to countless others – would be a release.
Instead, the voice on the loudspeaker pronounced “20 years’ imprisonment”.
Xu’s extraordinary tale of endurance – handwritten by him 20 years ago, and published for the first time in the West – is a rarity. Historians numbered the butchered and starved-to-death casualties of Mao’s 30-year regime at 60 million, outstripping Hitler (30 million) and Stalin (40 million) as the worst murderer in history.
BUT while there have been notable victim’s accounts of Nazi and Soviet atrocities, there has largely been silence from those who suffered at first hand the worst of Red China’s astounding inhumanity to its own people.
And that’s what makes Xu’s moving account a must-read. His is a story that must not be buried, but confronted.
The irony for Xu, born in Shanghai in 1933, is that he was a fervent Communist and a revolutionary, who as a teenager worshipped Mao. As a student activist, he rose up through the party ranks.
Then he made the mistake of taking Mao at his word. In 1957, as the Communist world fretted over developments in the Soviet Union, the Great Leader invited constructive criticism of his regime. “Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend,” he declared.
At the college where he was studying medicine, Xu offered his ideas to make the Communist party more democratic and less dictatorial, only for Mao to spring his trap.
Xu had outed himself. He was denounced as a “Rightist” and disgraced, along with millions of others who had dared speak their mind. Even his girlfriend turned against him.
He was exiled to a remote labour camp for “re-education”. With Orwellian irony, this hell on earth went by the name of the Eternal Happiness Farm. He was worked to within an inch of his life. Twice he escaped, but surveillance was so tight in Mao’s police state that he was caught and hauled back.
That he survived at all is probably down to the fact his medical training gave him a valued position in what passed for hospitals in the prison farms and penal labour colonies.
Not that life on the outside of Mao’s gulag was much better. The Great Leader ordered a Great Leap Forward and pretty well overnight millions of peasants were forced off the land to work in factories. With no rice to sustain them, those millions starved to death.
Through all this, Xu bided his time in captivity, hoping for release. And it seemed near – until another of Mao’s initiatives, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, unleashed a further round of bloody persecution.
With his record of dissent and refusal to kowtow, Xu was an obvious target, hence his humiliating appearance in front of the howling mob and his new sentence to another 20 years.
This time he would be properly behind bars, in a seemingly impregnable high-security prison surrounded by a high wall and an electric fence, with guards and their dogs on constant patrol, a communist Colditz.
But just as the inmates of the German prison were determined to find a way out, so Xu began to plan his escape – the thrilling climax of this book and as gripping as any World War II prisoner-of-war epic.
Over the next three years, he made his preparations. In the prison factory, which made agricultural tools, he secretly carved wooden blocks for the stamps he would need on the travel documents he was forging.
He explored the prison for weak spots, a point out of sight of the spotlights and the sentries in their towers where he could climb the wall.
He hoarded parcels of food. He plotted his route once outside. He made and hid the components of a ladder. He also prepared a phial of poison from nicotine in cigarettes.
If his attempt failed, he would put an end to his misery.
In August 1972, he got his chance. Blackouts were common, but on this day the electricity went out at 10am and, the convicts were told, would not come back on until the next morning.
After roll-call that night, he hid in the prison yard, then climbed up and over the wall, into the factory, out through a window, with a final heave across the dead electric fence. His luck held. He had six hours until his absence would be discovered.
Xu headed up into the mountains, keeping on the move for 40 hours before daring to rest. He took trains when he could – those travel documents passed muster – before ending up in the Gobi Desert. Thirty days after escaping, he crossed the border into Mongolia.
As far as anyone knows, he is the only person to escape from Mao’s deadly labour camps and live to tell the tale. After Mao’s death, Xu returned to Shanghai in 1984, two years after his case was reviewed and his convictions quashed, anxious to see his mother again.
He brought his wife, whom he’d married in Mongolia, and their three children. He worked as a management instructor for a petrochemical company until his retirement in 1993, when he began to write this extraordinary and powerful memoir. He died in 2008, aged 75.
He left a warning. Mao’s problem he says was that, steeped in the mentality of ancient China, he was unable to listen to dissenting opinions. It’s a thought that today’s rulers in Beijing, with their authoritarian approach to human rights, would do well to keep in mind.
– No Wall Too High by Xu Hongci is published by Rider for £20
Crony: Speer with Hitler in 1938.
Intro: Albert Speer saved himself at the Nuremburg War Trials from hanging by claiming ignorance of the Holocaust – then made a fortune from his memoirs in prison.
ALBERT SPEER cut a lonely figure, pacing the grounds of West Berlin’s Spandau Prison. Obsessed by numbers, the former Nazi minister calculated that during his 20 years incarcerated there, he clocked up a staggering 31,816 km.
He also said he read 5,000 books in that time; a questionable claim given he spent six hours a day gardening and two hours walking. But then, Speer was always liberal with the truth.
He lied to save his life at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals, he lied to the German people, he even lied to Hitler. And, as Martin Kitchen’s superb and surely definitive biography of the man who ran Germany’s war economy shows, most of all he lied and deceived himself.
Born in 1905, Speer followed his wealthy architect father into the business. His big break came in 1933 while site manager on the renovation of the Chancellery in Berlin.
Adolf Hitler visited the works daily and was immediately impressed by the young man’s polite manner and precise, direct answers to his questions.
Speer was soon a regular at the daily lunches Hitler gave for his closest cronies, and established the nearest thing to a friendship Hitler ever had.
Significantly perhaps, the self-conscious, aloof, narcissistic, ruthlessly ambitious Speer had no intimate friends himself. He even remained distant from his wife and six children.
In January 1938 Hitler appointed Speer as Berlin’s Inspector General of Building, tasked with rebuilding the city (which was to be renamed Germania) as a ‘world capital’.
Speer lacked creativity and originality as an architect, but he had one great asset: he twigged what Hitler liked in his architecture – a kitsch combination of ornate late 19th-century Viennese and the modern ‘cruise liner’ style seen in the Hollywood movies of the time. Above all, everything had to be big.
Take the new Chancellery that Speer built for Hitler. It was ridiculously grandiose. Visitors had to undergo a long walk through several rooms to reach the Fuhrer, the last a 146m-long hall.
Hitler insisted it had a highly polished stone floor, whose slipperiness would unsettle visitors as they approached the huge double doors of his office, a room 27m long, 14.5m wide and 9.75m high.
Hitler was never photographed in it because its inhuman scale would have dwarfed him into insignificance.
Stone for Speer’s projects was quarried by 10,000 concentration camp slaves in unimaginable conditions. When this was mentioned to Speer, he replied: ‘The Yids got used to making bricks while in captivity in Egypt.’
****
WHEN dwellings had to be demolished for his projects, Speer seized 23,000 Jewish apartments to rehouse the displaced inhabitants, which meant 75,000 evicted Jews were ‘resettled’, a euphemism for being sent to death camps.
In 1942, three years into World War II, Hitler appointed Speer as Minister for Armaments, recognising both his talents as a brilliant organiser and his utter loyalty to the Fuhrer.
At first Speer produced what he called ‘a miracle’. Production rose as he reshaped the system, but the task became increasingly difficult.
Hitler constantly meddled in details of tank or aircraft design and frequently changed his mind. He had to be fed encouraging production statistics.
Eventually the only way to do this was to churn out vast numbers of obsolete models on existing production lines – like the Messerschmitt Me109 fighter – at the expense of building new factories to make jet aircraft that might have made a difference to the war.
As the Russians advanced and Allied bombing intensified, Speer lost vital factories, raw materials, and oil supplies.
By 1944, the war obviously lost, he was battling vainly to maintain output.
Now Hitler put his faith in ‘miracle weapons’, chiefly the V1 flying bombs and V2 rockets. Their factories were moved underground to protect them from bombs.
Slave labourers worked under appalling conditions, living in tunnels with no latrines, surrounded by their own filth, their clothes infested with lice.
Working 72 hours a week on a daily diet of 1,100 calories, 160 slaves dropped dead every day. But after visiting the factory, Speer wrote to congratulate the manager, seemingly unaffected by the workers’ plight.
Not so some members of his staff, who were so traumatised after witnessing this living hell that they had to take sick leave.
Speer could genuinely claim one thing to his credit. When Hitler issued his infamous Nero Decree, ordering the destruction of Germany’s industry and infrastructure, Speer countermanded it, travelling the country to successfully preserve things for the country’s post-war reconstruction, in which he naively believed he would play a part.
He was shocked to find himself put on trial at Nuremburg, but he mounted a brilliant defence – he accepted full responsibility for his actions but claimed ignorance of the mass murder of Jews. His calm, educated demeanour contrasted with the ranting and fanaticism of other leading Nazis and impressed the judges.
He escaped the hangman’s noose and got 20 years in Spandau.
Ever a loner, he wasn’t too unhappy in jail. His wealthy acquaintances smuggled in luxuries. Always sure of his entitlement, Speer complained if the champagne wasn’t up to scratch or the caviar not the best.
After his release in 1966 he published his memoirs. The book was a phenomenal success. Readers lapped up fascinating details of Hitler’s private life. It earned Speer a fortune.
Its portrait of him as the ‘Good Nazi’ absolved a whole generation of Germans of Nazi war guilt. For if, it was argued, this mover and shaker, a member of Hitler’s innermost circle, didn’t know about the Holocaust, how could an ordinary person be expected to?
****
SPEER was deceiving the German people and, in his failure to admit his guilt himself.
Since his death in 1981, the evidence against Speer has mounted. His eviction of Jews from Berlin. His brutal use of slave workers. His presence at a speech given by Heinrich Himmler in which the SS leader said it was not only necessary to exterminate the Jews but their children, too, to prevent future revenge.
Kitchen’s exhaustively researched, detailed book nails, one by one, the lies of the man who ‘provided a thick coat of whitewash to millions of old Nazis’. It’s a fascinating account of how the moral degradation of the chaotic Nazi regime corrupted an entire nation as well as being a timely warning for today.
– Speer: Hitler’s Architect by Martin Kitchen is published by Yale for £14.99
