4.0 out of 5 stars
History of attacks on Masonry from the Nazis onwards
Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2011
Most people know that when Nazi Germany began the campaign of persecution against the Jews which was to culminate in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, they started by forcing them to wear an identifying badge. Rather fewer people know that Hitler's regime also required the other groups they were trying to make scapegoats for Germany's problems, such as gays and masons, to wear similar distinguishing badges.
The Red Triangle was the badge which the nazis ordered freemasons to wear. (Jews had to wear a yellow triangle, gays a pink one).
That's the sort of detail you will pick up in this book, written by the Curator of the Grand Lodge of Scotland.
The author was clearly provoked into writing this book by the campaign of vilification of Freemasonry by the British and particularly Scottish press which followed the Dunblane massacre. (For those who have not heard of this sickening tragedy, a lone gunman walked into a school and shot dead a teacher and most of a class of small children.) This book is to some extent a response to that those attacks.
The author is manifestly (and justifiably) furious about the fact that within a few days of the Dunblane tragedy it was (wrongly) suggested in a newspaper that the murderer had been a freemason, that within days of that suggestion half the British media were repeating this suggesion as if it had been a fact and putting forward a narrative that the murderer had been protected by fellow-masons in the local police, and that this was used as pretext for an orgy of verbal mason-bashing.
This narrative contained not one shred of truth: the offical inquiry confirmed that the murderer, Thomas Hamilton was not and had never been a freemason - in fact the masons were one of the (many) groups against whom he had an axe to grind.
(The killer did have a relative by the same name who had been a mason, and it is not quite impossible that some of those who put forward the allegation that the murderer had been protected because he was a mason had confused the two men).
Mr Cooper's sense of anger and injustice at the barrage of criticisms which were launched against Freemasonry as a result of this misapprehension comes through very strongly in the book. It might have been slightly more effective, particularly from the perspective of non-masons, if in one or two places the author had taken a step back, thought about how an unbiased but not necessarily well-informed outsider might see things, and taken a little more time to calmly explain precisely why some of the allegations made by the modern press are unfair. I write this as a mason myself, and one who agrees with most of what he writes. But I suspect a completely neutral and fair-minded observer would find it difficult to argue with Mr Cooper's contention that some critics of masonry had judged the organisation guilty before making any attempt to assess the evidence, or to give fair opportunity for a reply.
This book neither is not claims to be a comprehensive account of prejudice against masons, but it does include the best account I have read of the aspects of the Nazi holocaust which were directed against European masonry.
The fact that Hitler murdered six million Jews, and a similar number of gypsies, in his insane attempt to eradicate two entire races has naturally and rightly attracted a huge amount of attention.
There were other campaigns of mass murder which were part of the same process, and which entailed an amount of death and suffering which would normally cause them to be remembered in their own right among the worst crimes in history, but because the number of victims was one or two orders of magnitude smaller than the numbers of Jews and Gypsies who died in the "Final Solution," these further crimes have tended to be overlooked or subsumed in the overall tragedy.
One such campaign was the attempt by the Nazis to exterminate Freemasonry, an organisation which they condemned because it brings men of all races and different religions together, and this was offensive to Nazi racial and nationalist views. The nazis also associated Masonry with the mythical worldwide "Jewish conspiracy".
It is impossible to be certain how many masons were murdered by the Nazi regime and those of their fascist allies such as Franco and Mussolini, but it was certainly in the tens of thousands, and the estimate of 80,000 quoted in this book is probably as close to accurate as anyone can hope to get.
Each time the nazi regime conquered another country, one of the first things they did was move against all those citizens of that countries who they considered their enemies, including Jews, trade unionists, Communists, and freemasons. All too many of their victims in all those categories ended up dead. Plans for the occupation of Britain drawn up by Hitler's regime in 1940 and found by the allies after the war prove that if the nazis had won the Battle of Britain the same would have happened in the United Kingdom. Masons figured prominently on the lists of British people who the Nazis had marked down as hostile elements to be arrested in the event of a successful German invasion.
I learned from this book that the administrator of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, began his career in the Nazi Security service (SD) by collecting intelligence on Freemasons, and later employed some of the experience he gained by monitoring masons when he moved to the department which monitored Jewish people and ultimately organised their mass murder.
In this context it is hardly surprising that from the time of the Second World War until memories of the Nazi persecution began to fade about 50 years later, masonry in many European countries including Britain went through a period of being rather more secretive than had hitherto, or has subsequently, been the case.
In Britain this secrecy was deliberately abandoned in the mid 1990's. Freemasonry today cannot be described by any reasonable and informed person as a "secret society" - which unfortunately does not stop that allegation from being made.
If anyone reading this has a problem with the statement that Freemasonry is not a secret society, ask yourself this.
How many secret societies have a headquarters which is openly described on any decent map of London or Edinburgh, which they rent out to bodies like the Royal Opera House for public events, and of which they offer the general public daily tours? Or for that matter a huge memorial building in the American capital which is one of the most prominent buildings on the skyline of Washington D.C. and which is also open to the public? (I refer to the George Washinton masonic memorial building, which includes a tower which gives arguably the best view of the capital city.)
How many secret societies have a website which anyone can access? What sort of secret society publishes yearbooks with lists of their officers, and a directory of lodges and chapters which anyone can buy online, listing all branches and where and when they meet? How many secret societies are listed in the phone directory?
All these things are true either of the United Grand Lodge of England, the Grand Lodge of Scotland, and mostly both. My impression is that very much the same applies to Masonry in the United States.
This book is written partly from a British perspective and partly from a Scottish one. It begins with the Dunblane murders, and the suggestion in the press that the killer, Thomas Hamilton, might have been a mason. It continues with a fairly detailed account of the torrent of press and political attacks on masonry which followed.
As mentioned, "The red triangle" does not claim to be a comprehensive survey: it concentrates mostly on the holocaust and on political and press opposition to masonry in Europe and Britain. If you want to read a book which complements this, you may be interested in "A Pilgrim's Path: Freemasonry and the Religious Right" by the late US historian John Robinson which concentrates on religious opposition to masonry, particularly but by no means exclusively in America.
Overall "The Red Triangle" is a reasonably well written study which should be of interest both to anyone who wants to learn about a little-known aspect of the Holocaust, or is making a study of how groups can become the target of a media "feeding frenzy." It isn't really an answer to anti-masonic books like "The Brotherhood" but it will give the reader an idea of how books like that appear to people on the receiving end.
https://www.amazon.com/Red-Triangle-History-Anti-Masonry/dp/0853183325
