Triumph of Leni

I’m a huge admirer of the film work of Leni Riefenstahl. I think Triumph of the Will and Olympia two of the most impressive documentaries ever made. People always look at me slightly askance when I make this admission, as if I was identifying with the political message being conveyed. I do not, not for a moment. I also admire D W Griffith's Birth of a Nation, a great milestone in movie-making, though one that conveyed an unpleasant and racist message. So, yes, there are instances where the medium can be separated from the message.

Triumph of the Will is just so good in Riefenstahl’s mastery of direction, the innovative way she makes use of the camera, breaking boundaries never attempted by others. But there is another reason for my admiration which goes beyond her capacity as a film-maker. Quite simply she was able to make here own way in one of the most chauvinist, anti-feminist political systems ever devised by man, and I really do mean man.

To come to the attention of Hitler by virtue of her skills alone was a real achievement. To be accorded the right to make Triumph of the Will and thus get the better of Josef Goebbels, who by 1934 controlled just about all Germany media through the Propaganda Ministry, was an even greater achievement. So, despite the criticisms, despite her associations, she will remain as one of my heroines and avatars.

Nazi Fairy Tales

I’ve been reading about Nazi fairy tales, the spin once put by Joseph Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry on some popular classics in the attempt to draw children towards the regime.

In a film version of Little Red Riding Hood the heroine’s cloak is emblazoned with swastikas. She is shown being saved from the Big Bad Wolf by a man in an SS uniform. In Snow White her father is shown leading an army against the “eastern enemy”, a movie that premièred in October 1939, a month after the invasion of Poland. Both of these examples come from a new study entitled Red Riding Hood in the Third Reich: German fairy tale movies between 1933 and 1945.

Goebbels was a propagandist of genius. He knew what motivated people and what was likely to alienate them. So propaganda in Nazi Germany always had a subtle quality so lacking in the Soviet equivalent. In popular entertainment messages were conveyed without any heavy-handed didacticism. I knew this was Goebbels’ approach to movies made for adults; it’s interesting to discover that it also extended to those made for children. Speaking to Hubert Schonger, a Nazi film producer, he said “Children will see through propaganda quicker than their parents ever could.”

The results of this study are to be published as a book. It should be interesting.

Heidegger and the Nazis

Martin Heidegger, author of Being and Time along with other philosophical works, was deeply compromised by his associations with the Nazis, particularly when he was elevated to the rectorship of Freiburg University, not the most successful period of his career. After the war he wrote The Rectorate 1933-34: Facts and Thoughts, his personal memoir of the period, a work of self-justification, which disguises as much as it reveals.

His rectorship at Freiburg collapsed for of a variety of reasons, including good old-fashioned departmental politics, vicious and treacherous as always, no matter what regime they operate under! Beyond that, one has to take into consideration Heidegger's own political naïveté and his gross over-estimation of his importance, both in the Nazi academic world and the broader scheme of things. One also has to take into account the nature of the Nazi system itself, and its underlying theory and practice. No matter what stress was placed upon the sublime, Nazism was shaped by mediocrity, not excellence. It was the world not of the Superman, but the Supermouse.

In his memoir, Heidegger maintains that his position at Freiburg was undermined by a conspiracy, involving his academic rivals and the district student leader, Dr Gustav Scheel, who later became Reich leader of students and university lecturers, and Gauleiter of Salzburg. Heidegger certainly had opponents at Freiburg, especially in the Law Faculty, though not all were doctrinaire Nazis. The matter, though, went far beyond the confines of the University.

In November 1933 the Nazis created their own structure of leadership within the whole university system, elevating Party mediocrities and time-servers to important positions in the Reich Association of German Universities. It was a clear declaration that Heidegger's bid for leadership of the German university system had failed, and that the Nazis had no real use for him, no matter his international stature. Abandoned by many of his more important colleagues at Freiburg, and snubbed by the government, Heidegger was in a personal, professional and political limbo.

There were also those in the Nazi movement, led by Erich Jaensch, his former colleague at the University of Marburg, who made every attempt to ensure that Heidegger would not be offered a leading position in Prussia or the Reich, because they did not wish him to be seen as 'the philosopher of National Socialism.' Jaensch compiled a memorandum arguing against a proposal that Heidegger be appointed head of the Prussian Academy of University Lecturers. It would be against all reason, he wrote;

...if what is possibly the most important post in the intellectual life of the nation in the weeks and months ahead were to be filled by one of the biggest scatterbrains and most eccentric cranks we have in our university system: a man about whom men who are perfectly rational, intelligent and loyal to the new state argue among themselves as to which side of the dividing line between sanity and mental illness he is on.

And this on one of the best philosophical minds Germany produced in the whole of the twentieth century! Against this background it is no great surprise that his rectorship failed. He finally resigned in April 1934, not February, as he says in Facts and Thoughts.

The Path to Hell

Not so long ago I read Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor Medicine and Power in the Third Reich by Professor Ulf Schmidt. Schmidt has 'reconstructed' the life of Brandt from bottom to top, reaching some surprising and disturbing conclusions in the process. His chief conclusion is that Brandt's actions were formed and conditioned by events, rather than by any deeply held beliefs.

Brandt's road from a follower of Albert Schweitzer's 'reverence for life' school to a mass killer was caused, in Schmidt's analysis, by a succession of key life events.
First of all, while he was working as a young doctor in the mining town of Bochum he had to deal with patients horrendously injured in accidents, many of whom pleaded for death. There was nothing he could do, for mercy killing was illegal under the Weimar Republic. When the restriction was set aside during the Third Reich, he was already predisposed towards the euthanasia programme, which he took part in from 1939 to 1941.

Second, horrified by his experience at Stalingrad, where he saw many of the soldiers die as a result of diseases exacerbated by malnutrition, he conceived a plan to develop high calorie, low volume artificial foods. These were to be tested on concentration camp inmates.

The third factor was his experience of the Allied fire-bombing bombing of Hamburg in 1943, which left many people terribly burned. Disturbed that many of these people were denied hospital treatment because of bed shortages, Brandt reacted by secretly re-launching the euthanasia programme, abandoned in 1941 under public pressure.

The final stage was his mustard gas experiments in concentration camps, a response to rumours that the allies were planning to use this form of attack on German cities, and intended to find a cure for inhalation.

From beginning to end there were acute forms of moral abdication. Brandt's personal road to hell was one paved with a perverted sense of good intentions

The Day of the Lion

I had a chance to see Uprising recently, a 2001 American-made television drama, directed by Jon Avnet, about the Warsaw Ghetto Rising of April, 1943. So far as I am aware it has never been broadcast in England, which is rather a pity because it’s of a remarkably high quality. It’s reasonably accurate in most regards with close attention to period detail.

There are also some really first rate performances, with Donald Sutherland as Adam Czerniaków, head of the Jewish Council for the Ghetto, Hank Azaria as commander of the Jewish Combat Organisation, David Schwimmer as Yitzak Zuckerman, Sadie Frost as Zivia Lubetkin and John Voight as Major General Jürgen Stroop, the man who led the German assault against the Jewish resisters.

It’s long at over three hours, but I found the whole thing quite compelling. It tells what must have been a fairly typical story throughout the ghettos of Eastern Europe; there is the old establishment represented by Adam Czerniaków, who hopes to mollify the Germans by co-operation and reason, and the young firebrands typified by Mordecai Anielewicz, brilliantly played by Hank Azaria, who see conditions getting worse and believe in the necessity of resistance.

In the end Czerniaków himself recognises that the German demands go beyond all boundaries of reason. In the great deportation of July 1942 he tries to gain and exception for the children of Janusz Korczak’s orphanage. When they refuse he committed suicide, leaving a note saying “They demand me to kill children of my nation with my own hands. I have nothing to do but to die.”

In perhaps the most moving scene of all we see Korczak himself, played by Palle Granditsky, leading the children in perfect order to Umschalgplatz, where they mount the train that will take them to Treblinka and death. Korczak, a prominent pedagogue and writer of children’s fiction, though excused deportation, insists on going with his charges. A witness was later to record of the real life event;

... A miracle occurred. Two hundred children did not cry out. Two hundred pure souls, condemned to death, did not weep. Not one of them ran away. None tried to hide. Like stricken swallows they clung to their teacher and mentor, to their father and brother, Janusz Korczak, so that he might protect and preserve them. Janusz Korczak was marching, his head bent forward, holding the hand of a child, without a hat, a leather belt around his waist, and wearing high boots. A few nurses were followed by two hundred children, dressed in clean and meticulously cared for clothes, as they were being carried to the altar. (...) On all sides the children were surrounded by Germans, Ukrainians, and this time also Jewish policemen. They whipped and fired shots at them. The very stones of the street wept at the sight of the procession.

The film proceeds thereafter to tell the story of the Rising itself, too well known to require a detailed repetition here. In recounting the details of the struggle, of tanks and artillery against opponents mostly armed with light weapons and Molotov cocktails that the director is at his most impressive. The atmosphere and the general tension are all wonderfully recreated, in an almost claustrophobic sense of realism. I knew the outcome, I knew the inevitability of defeat, but, oh my how I admired the courage of these boys and girls who were determined to die as lions, not as sheep.

Death as the Price of Fame

The post war execution of William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw Haw, on a charge of high treason was little better than an act of judicial murder, an opinion I am quite happy to share with A. J. P. Taylor, amongst others. Even Hartley Shawcross, who successfully prosecuted Joyce, was later to write of the case "It remains in my mind the one of which I am least proud."

You see, Joyce was born in New York, and therefore not a subject of the British crown; so he was in essence hanged for making a false statement on his 1933 application for a British passport, the usual penalty for which at the time was a £2.00 fine. He did not, moreover, by his words alone kill any subject of the crown, nor did he recruit for the enemy, unlike John Amery, who was also hanged for treason around the same time.

In essence, Joyce was executed not for what he did but for who he was. Death, for him, was the price of fame, a point made by Mary Kenny in her excellent biography, Germany Calling. There were, after all, other broadcasters for the Nazis, including one Margaret Bothamley, over whose nationality there was absolutely no doubt, released on a suspended sentence for essentially the same offence. But Lord Haw Haw could not be allowed to escape, could he now, not when much of the British press had decided the matter prior to his trail?

The whole business reminds me to some degree of George Orwell's essay Shooting an Elephant, where death is the result of the pressure of 'collective will'; where 'the state' is pushed forward by powers beyond its control. Who, after all, was Joyce that he deserved such special treatment? Was he any more than a rather pathetic individual, or, as Rebecca West put it in her trial report, "A queer little Irish peasant who had gone to some pain to make the worst of himself."

The Loss of a World Entire

I wrote a piece earlier this month (A Love Greater than Hate) lamenting the death of Miep Gies, the Dutchwoman who supported Anne Frank and her family when they were hiding in Amsterdam and who later rescued Anne’s now world-famous Diary. Subsequent to that another wartime diary of a gifted Jewish teenager was drawn to my attention, that of Dawid Sierakowiak, who died in the Lodz Ghetto in August 1943, aged nineteen.

I had never heard either of Dawid or his account of life in the notorious ghetto, one of the longest-standing in Eastern Europe. My ignorance has now been made good and I offer this brief assessment of his remarkable day-by-day picture, drawn under the most unimaginably difficult circumstances.

To begin with, I should say that I would not make a direct comparison between the accounts of Anne and Dawid. Anne lived in fear of discovery but her Diary is concerned with so many aspects of life, thought and experience that might be shared by any perceptive teenager. I read Anne’s Diary as a kind of dialogue, with me as the other party. She never knew what lay beyond, and when she did she was no longer able to write.

Dawid did know. His account, therefore, is more of a strict record, an insight, lacking in the same degree of intimacy. But what a record it is; one of despair, occasionally punctuated by hope, only to fall back into even deeper levels of despair. He has a brilliant mind, an acute understanding, giving a painful and detailed record of the degradation and dehumanisation that was such an important part of the Holocaust.

The uncomfortable truth is that the Germans hardly feature at all in Dawid’s Diary. They are mostly a distant threat from over the wall for a community that was effectively sealed off from the world. It’s other Jews who do the Nazis’ work for them; bureaucratic elites that presided over the unequal distribution of an already inadequate supply of food; a ghetto police service which selects those to be sent beyond the wall to their ultimate death in the gas vans of Chelmno. It was a hierarchy all presided over by Chaim Rumkowski, one of the most controversial figures in Jewish Holocaust history. Here are Dawid’s own words from an entry in March, 1943;

Lunatics, perverts, and criminals like Rumkowski rule over us and determine our food allocations, work and health. No wonder the Germans don’t want to interfere in ghetto matters: the Jews will kill one another perfectly well, and, in the meantime, they will also squeeze maximum production out of one another.

One of the most heartbreaking episodes of all was Rumkowski’s ‘Give Me your Children’ plea, urging families to sacrifice all children ten years and younger to be handed over to the Germans. The point is that people did not know how the children –and the elderly – were going to die, but they certainly knew that they were going to die. The ensuing agony is recorded in detail by Dawid, as is the loss of his own elderly mother.

There is a dominant theme to this book – food, and the lack of it. Entry after entry mentions rations, what is available and, more often, what is not. It’s an impossible situation, a race of life against death, the only possibility of avoiding death being an end to the war. News does sometimes seep into the ghetto, snippets of information that make it clear that victory-and life –is hopelessly distant.

Parts of the Diary are missing and it breaks off abruptly in April, 1943. It did not have the same impact on Holocaust literature as Anne’s Diary essentially because the post-war Polish authorities attempted to submerge any document bearing on uniquely Jewish suffering.

I’m so glad I read this, so glad I now know something of the life of Dawid Sierakowiak. It also saddened me, not just his personal tragedy, his death and the death of his mother, his father and his sister. But there is something more; his loss may also have been the world’s loss. I’m thinking here of a passage near the beginning of his record, before the outbreak of the war, written when he was only fifteen;

I read and began to write a work I planned a long time ago about the immanent future of Jewry. The Semite covers a programme of reconciliation and cooperation with the Arabs.

Yes, what possibilities were ended forever in the life of Dawid Sierakowiak? The loss of a single life is the loss of a world entire.

Voyages

I confess I had never heard of Jorge Semprun, a prominent Spanish writer, politician and former government minister, until I picked up The Long Voyage (Le grand voyage), an autobiographical novel based upon his experiences in the Second World War. The voyage itself, a train journey, is the framework around which this astonishing narrative is constructed, as the author moves back through memory to times past and times future, always returning to a times present, a cattle truck packed full of men, a present which itself is only a memory. The Long Voyage is also available under the English title of The Cattle Truck which seems to me to miss the whole point.

I bought this book because I have a particular interest in Holocaust literature; it was simply another one in a series. But the reading was not quite as I expected. Translated from the original Spanish, the prose is simple, undemonstrative and superbly crafted. Still, this is no simple tale. In a sense there is no beginning, just as there is no end: the novel’s fractured chronology sifts from one event to another, back and forward across memory and time. The immediate voyage is a journey to Buchenwald; the longer voyage is a passage through fragments of the author’s life, a cross-section of seventeen years.

Manuel, as Semprun appears in the novel, is a Spanish communist who fled the country after the victory of Franco. He is later involved in the French Resistance against the Nazis under the code name of Gerard. In 1943 he was captured. He is imprisoned first in France before being transported with over a hundred other men to a destination ‘near Weimar.’ The truck is so crowded that the men are unable to sit down, let alone move around. The horror is compounded by the slowness of the journey, through five days and nights, a journey without food or water, a journey where even air is a premium.

During this time Manuel’s closest companion is a man only ever identified as the ‘guy from Semur.’ He seems strong and in control; he seems like a survivor. It comes as a jolt, then, when Manuel, shifting between events, simply says that the ‘guy from Semur’ was ‘left behind’ in the boxcar, that it was there that his particular journey came to an end. Later in the narrative we discover that he died on the last night, as the train approached Buchenwald, his final words to Manuel being “Don’t leave me pal.”

Yes, a terrible journey, but there are journeys even more terrible. One of Manuel’s experiences was witnessing the outcome of one that a group of Jews were made to take, even more packed and in the middle of winter. When their car is opened they are found mostly dead, either of hunger or of cold. The car is unloaded as if wood was being transported. And there are more terrible ends than that of the ‘guy from Semur’; the end of a group of Jewish children, beaten and torn apart by the SS and their dogs.

There are other conversations in this tapestry in time other than that with the ‘guy from Semur; conversations in the past and conversations in the future; in Spain, in Holland, in France and again in France. In one, after the liberation in April 1945, when the prisoners can wander around freely, Manuel visits an old lady whose house overlooks the camp, with a clear view of the crematoria. He asks her if she could see the flames in the evening, a rhetorical question, because there is no doubt that she could. Clearly frightened the woman tells Manuel that both her sons were killed in the war;

She throws the bodies of her two sons at me for fodder, she takes refuge behind the lifeless bodies of her two sons killed in the war. She’s trying to make me believe that all suffering is the same, that the dead all weigh the same. As a counter-balance for all my dead friends, for the weight of their ashes, she’s offering the weight of her own suffering. But the dead don’t all weigh the same, of course. No corpse of the German army will ever weight as much as the smoke of one of my dead companions.

“I hope so, I really hope they’re dead”…

I haven’t the strength to tell her that I understand her sorry, that I respect her sorrow. I understand that for her the death of both of her sons is the most atrocious, the most unjust thing in the world. I haven’t the strength to tell her that I understand her sorrow, but I’m happy that the German Army is wiped out. I haven’t the strength to tell her all that.

There is power in words, in the strength to use words; there is power in this remarkable book.

Hitler-Power and Beyond

As the truly absurd contention that Hitler was 'democratically' elected tends to appear from time to time the point really needs to be clarified.

At its electoral peak the NSDAP obtained 37.4% of the popular vote in Germany. By November 1932, the last free election to the Reichstag, this had declined to 33.1%. So, even at their most popular the Nazis failed to impress 62.6% of the electorate, and they never achieved an overall majority in the Reichstag. Hitler was only appointed Chancellor by some shady political manoeuvring amongst the cabal surrounding President Hindenburg. More than that, he was appointed precisely because the NSDAP was showing signs of serious electoral decline. The fear shared by Franz von Papen and his reactionary clique, the real power brokers in January 1933, was that former Nazi voters would move en mass to the Communists, a fear given some support in the November elections, which saw the KPD gaining ground, just as the Nazis lost.

The early Hitler ministry, like every other since 1930, had no majority in the Reichstag, and was thus dependant on the continuing use of Artlcle 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which allowed the President to overrule parliament. So, please, please, no more 'Hitler was elected' rubbish. This is the sort of garbage one only ever hears from ignorant old dilettantes. :-))

Now to a broader question: was Hitler a weak dictator? This has been the subject of detailed scholarly debate, and is by no means easy to answer. Hitler's style of dictatorship was so different from, say, that of Stalin or Mussolini in a way that makes comparison all but impossible. For one thing he was personally lazy, a vice for which he had been criticised in the early days of the Nazi movement by Gottfried Feder. Other than the exercise of power for its own sake, the Nazi Party, moreover, had little in the way of an organised programme, more a series of vague goals.

It was also Hitler's practice to appoint people to office with overlapping areas of authority, which turned the Nazi State into a jungle of competing interest groups and personalities. Hitler intervened rarely to sort out the ensuing mess. All of this contributed to Hans Mommsen's contention that Hitler was "in many ways a weak dictator." From the opposite political perspective David Irving even suggests that Hitler was "probably the weakest leader Germany has known this century" (Hitler's War, 1977, introduction). This view conflicts with others, from Alan Bullock to Klaus Hildebrand, who says that Hitler had both a programme and the power to carry it out.

So, what did the people who knew him best think of the Führer and his working habits? You can have this from the Memoirs of Albert Speer, the man who, perhaps, knew him best of all;

I would often ask myself did he really work? Little was left of the day; he rose late in the morning and conducted one or two official conferences; but from the subsequent dinner on he more or less wasted his time until the early hours of the evening. His rare appointments in the late afternoon were imperilled by his passion for looking at building plans. The adjutants often asked me 'please don't show any plans today'.

This lack of a systematic approach to work was made even worse in February 1938, after which cabinet meetings were no longer held. Germany, in a very real sense, ceased to have an effective government machine, with decisions being taken in a manner that allowed civil servants to act. Quite often Hitler was incommunicado in his remote mountain chalet near Berchtesgaden, so that "Ministers in charge of departments might for months on end, and even for years, have no opportunity of speaking to Hitler...Ministerial skill consisted in making the most of a favourable hour or minute when Hitler made a decision, this often taking the form of a remark thrown out casually, which then went its way as an order of the Führer." (J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds.), Nazism, 1919-1945, vol. 2, State Economy and Society, 1933-1939, 1984, p. 200)

The only argument here against the notion of a weak dictatorship is that this lack of system and structure somehow magnified Hitler's personal power; but it still reduced the effectiveness of the whole Nazi system. Charisma is a card that should never be overplayed. Decisions could and were made, sometimes quickly; but these tended to be in areas of immediate concern to the dictator, particularly over matters of foreign policy. However, on the Jewish question, a matter seemingly central to the whole Nazi programme, the policy was marked by muddle and confusion, until very late in the day. The very best that can be said of Hitler is that, if not weak, he was, as Ian Kershaw has argued, not "master of the Reich" in the sense of being all omnipotent.

The Boys, and Girls, from Brazil

Until last weekend I had never heard of Candido Godoi, a tiny agricultural town in southern Brazil. It’s one of those places that is likely to have escaped the notice of most people on this planet but for one odd anomaly: it has the highest rate of twin births on earth. More than that, it has the highest proportion of identical twins.

In the absence of solid evidence for this striking anomaly all sorts of explanations have been offered-that it is down to the local water supply or to minerals in the earth. But the one explanation that is proving most controversial is that the town once hosted Josef Mengele, Der Todesengel von Auschwitz, the Auschwitz Angel of Death, who just happened to be obsessed with…twins.

Candido Godoi is a farming community made up mostly of people of German descent, people with names like Danzler and Finkler who still prefer to speak in a German dialect rather than Portuguese. After escaping from Europe, Mengele lived in various places in South America including, apparently, Candido Godoi in the 1960s. His notorious experiments on twins at Auschwitz were aimed at producing a genetically pure master race, blue-eyed and blonde. According to some sources he continued with his obsession in exile. A former mayor of Candido Godoi claims that Mengele, under the name of Rudolf Weiss, performed tests on local women who subsequently gave birth to twins.

The whole story has been given added impetus by the publication of Mengele: the Angel of Death in South America by Jorge Camarasa, an Argentinean journalist, in which he says that a mobile laboratory was even established to allow the experiments to go ahead in various locations around the settlement.

The Mengele thesis, resting on very tenuous evidence, it has to be said, has been dismissed by Brazilian scientists and historians, but in the absence of a convincing alternative it continues to carry weight, causing a degree of local embarrassment. Previously the town had been proud of its twin reputation, even bottling and selling ‘fertility water’ from the local supply to childless couples from elsewhere in Brazil. Reporters descending on the place in pursuit of the Death Angel are now met with anger. “It’s genetic”, one woman yelled at The Guardian’s correspondent, “Tell the world it wasn’t the Nazi.” Well, there are some things that just can’t be bottled and sold.

Who are the Barbarians?

I have before me the summer issue of Standpoint, a journal of political comment. It's the leader I'm looking at, headed Obama and the barbarians. It's not the main topic that I'm thinking about; rather it's the developing argument about the nature of modern barbarism, which Daniel Thomas, the editor, says comes in many forms, including Diana Mosley interrupting one of her dinner parties calling for a moment's silence in memory of Julius Streicher. It's eccentric, certainly, but was such a gesture barbarous?

Streicher was a repellent man; there is no doubt in my mind at all about that. He was the sort of man who would not be invited to sit down with civilized and cultured people at any decent dinner party. Der Stürmer, the paper he edited, is possibly the most repugnant publication ever, with its relentless cadence of hatred. Even some senior Nazis were repelled by it. Göring refused to have it in his offices and Baldur von Schirach refused to allow its distribution among the Hitler Youth.

Yes, Der Stürmer was ugly and Streicher repellent, but did he deserve to hang for being the editor, because that was effectively the chief charge, the only charge, for which he stood trial at Nuremberg? By any reasonable standard Streicher's anti-Jewish obsessions betoken some kind of deep-rooted psychological problem. The way he presented his defence, the things he said and the way he died give further evidence of this. But he was hanged while Albert Speer, in every way more culpable, survived.

Should people, be hanged, then, for expressing repellent views? Who, then, would stand in that wind? Yes, of course, one has to consider the times, the revelations that came after the Nazi state died. Nevertheless, in retrospect, I just wonder who defines the nature of barbarism. Would it have included Andrey Vyshinsky, the chief Soviet prosecutor at Nuremberg, the man behind the Moscow show trials, in every way bloodier than Streicher?

It's never easy to measure moral dilemmas in absolute terms. Perhaps Mr Thomas might remember this when he next passes judgement on the forms of barbarism

Lebensraum

If one wants to understand the concept of Lebensraum as understood by Adolf Hitler it is best to begin with Chapter XIV in volume two of Mein Kampf, headed Germany's Policy in Eastern Europe. Here is the key to Hitler's thinking on the subject;

Therefore we National Socialists have purposely drawn a line through the line of conduct followed by pre-War Germany in foreign policy. We put an end to the perpetual Germanic march towards the South and the West of Europe and turn our eyes towards the lands of the East. We finally put a stop to the colonial and trade policy of pre-War times and pass over to the territorial policy of the future. When we speak of new territory in Europe today we must principally think of Russia and the border states subject to her.

It was his view that Germany was too vulnerable within its existing borders, the population was too large for the territory it inhabited, and new land in the east was necessary as a guarantee for national security, an outlet for Germany's surplus population, and a way of restoring the balance between industry and agriculture, which had tipped too far in favour of the former.

Beyond Mein Kampf one can find much more detail on this whole subject in the manuscript of a second book he wrote specifically on foreign policy. Unpublished during his life-time, it subsequently appeared after World War Two as Hitler's Secret Book. In this he identifies four options: first of all, Germany could do nothing, in which case the initiative would pass to other nations with disastrous consequences; second, the country could strengthen itself through trade, but this would inevitably mean a clash with the British Empire; third, it could attempt to re-establish the borders of 1914, but this is dismissed as "...insufficient from a national standpoint, unsatisfactory from a military point of view, and impossible from a racial standpoint"; and lastly, Germany could go to war, with the aim of expanding towards the east, which is the favoured course. Hitler argues that Germany requires at least 500,000 square kilometres in the east, which would more than compensate for the 70,000 square kilometres lost by the Treaty of Versailles.

The third source is a book called Hitler Speaks, a memoir written by Hermann Rauschning, a former Nazi who turned against the movement. This is a text that has to be treated with a high degree of critical detachment, and is considered so suspect that it is dismissed altogether by some, including Ian Kershaw, the author one of the best recent biographies of Hitler. Even so, some of what Rauschning 'reveals' is fully in keeping with what we already know in general outline from Mein Kampf and the Secret Book. Germany would colonise Bohemia and Moravia, western Poland and the Baltic States. The unwanted Slav population, those not retained as serfs, would be deported eastwards, towards Siberia.

This is as specific as it gets, though there are other sources for Hitler's expansionist mentality, including, surprisingly enough, the 'westerns' of Karl May, which he continued to admire all of his life, with their depictions of white settlers colonising vast open spaces and fighting off the redskins in the process. Political sources for Hitler's notions of the 'eastern' include the pre-War Pan-German League, which had argued for German expansion into the Ukraine and the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire.

This view was taken up by two Baltic Germans, Alfred Rosenberg and Ludwig Maximilian Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, both of whom became close associates of Hitler from the earliest days of the NSDAP. Other possible sources of inspiration include Erich Ludendorff, another early associate, who during the War had advocated German settlement in Poland, the Baltic States and the Ukraine. Through Rudolf Hess, Hitler also became aware of the new school of 'geopolitics', especially the work of Karl Haushofer, a professor of geography at Munich University. Haushofer believed that whoever controlled the Eurasian heartland could control the world. He was to draw maps in which Leningrad, Moscow, the Ukraine and the Volga valley all appear as 'German' territory.

Hitler's views on the matter, like his views on most things, were never to be reduced to a single blueprint, and to a large extent remained open-ended, without defined limits and specified ends. It was only after the outbreak of the War, especially after the commencement of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, that one can detect some more precise contours. Towards the end of 1941 the RSHA, the main Reich security office, drew up a plan for the whole of the occupied east, which focused on the Germanisation of the Baltic States, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the Ukraine and White Russia. The long-term intention, extended far into the future, was to turn the whole of this area into a home for 600 million Germans. More immediately, some 45 million Slavs would be removed to make way for German settlers. It is almost certain that such a detailed set of proposals could only have emerged as yet another of the Führer's 'visions'.

War Crimes

The trial of the major Nazi war criminals at Nürnberg is a subject over which I have always had mixed feelings: was it justice or was it vengeance; in the circumstances of the time was there any alternative to vengeance? My sense of unease has been amplified somewhat on reading After the Reich: From the Liberation of Vienna to the Berlin Airlift by Giles MacDonogh.

War crimes did not end with the fall of the Nazis. It's not just the usual stuff over which most of us have some awareness, like the mass rape of German women of all ages, but the dreadful crimes inflicted, for instance, on the Sudeten Germans by the Czechs, quite as appalling, in many cases, as those on the Nürnberg indictment. Some of men at Nürnberg were acquitted, yes, but they should never have been there in the first place. Hans Fritzsche was merely a substitue for Josef Goebbels, and where was the justice in that? Alfred Jodl was executed, though any of the Allied commanding officers could have been hanged for similar crimes. And even Julius Streicher, a hateful man of low intelligence, was essentially executed for 'crimes of expression'. The suave and persuasive Albert Speer was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment, whereas Fritz Sauckel was hanged, even though he only serviced the apparatus created by Speer, to whom he was subordinate. Speer's 'confession', properly considered, was never more than a series of abstractions and generalisations; he was never to admit his personal guilt. Rudolf Hess was considered mentally unfit to stand trial by the British, though he was brought to Nürnberg to allay Soviet suspicions that he was being deliberately withheld. He was not even in office when most of the crimes were committed, though that did not stop him serving out his natural life in prison.

Consider also the hypocrisy of the whole process. The bombing of civilian targets was dropped from the indictment in June 1945, because the Allies, particularly the British and Americans, were far more culpable than the Germans. Consider also the 'crime of waging aggressive war.' Well, the Soviets had attacked both Poland and Finland in 1939, the first in partnership with the Germans. Any German defence should, therefore, have allowed full discussion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, but this was specifically forbidden. Russian prosecutors, moreover, were instructed to shout down any attempts by the accused to question the moral credentials of Stalin's dictatorship.

Yet I suppose in the end the trials, imperfect as they were, had a cathartic purpose, more than anything else. The crimes were so awful that something had to be done, and seen to be done. It was Herman Göring who said in October 1945 that "the victors will always be the judge and the vanquished the accused." A year later, though, he admitted that the process had served a wider purpose. Shortly before the verdicts were delivered he told the prison psychiatrist that once the German people learnt all that had been revealed at the trials they would lose all sympathy for Hitler, "He has condemned himself." In the end that is probably the chief justification for an imperfect process.

The Nazi Bismarck

Is it possible to say anything positive about Hitler's 'Bismarck'? If the Nazi regime was a disease then Joachim von Ribbentrop was one of the symptoms. He was shown at his most ridiculous at the Nuremberg Trial. Under questioning from Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, Ribbentrop denied having bullied President Hácha of Czechoslovakia into accepting German occupation. "What further pressure could you put on the head of a country except to threaten him that your army would march in and your air force bomb his capital?" To which Ribbentrop replied, "War, for instance."

Hitler was always impressed by Ribbentrop's suave manners and social contacts, once telling Herman Göring that he knew Lord this and Lady that. Göring, who had little time for the Foreign Minister as a man or a diplomat, quickly responded, "Yes, but they know Ribbentrop." Even Hitler took the point.

Why was he ever appointed Foreign Minister? For the simple reason that Hitler distrusted the old establishment, represented above all by Konstantin von Neurath, the Foreign Minister he had inherited from the last stages of the Weimar Republic. Ribbentrop, moreover, was always keen to offer the kind of radical solutions that Hitler favoured. He won Hitler's respect by the two great coups of Nazi diplomacy: the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 and the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. The first undermined both the provisions of the Versailles Treaty, and the whole concept of collective security supposedly embodied in the League of Nations, by allowing Germany to expand its navy in a bi-lateral agreement with England. The second allowed Hitler to go to war with Poland, free from possible repercussions by the Soviets. But in both cases Ribbentrop did no more than push at doors that were already partially opened. The agreement with the Soviets, moreover, undermined the Anti-Comintern Pact, another of Ribbentrop's triumphs, angering the Japanese, and thus doing much to ensure that they stood aside in any future German war with Russia.

I suppose, in the end, the principle reason Ribbentrop became Foreign Minister, despite being a complete failure when he was German Ambassador in London, was because he was a useful cipher. Hitler already had a programme: he simply wanted men in place who were able to fulfil his vision. But for Ribbentrop failure followed hard upon the heels of triumph. He had assured Hitler that Britain and France would not go to war over Poland; and when they did, the Nazi Bismarck's star slowly began to sink. In the last stages of his active ministry he attempted to play a degenerate form of the 'Great Game', not fully understanding that, for Hitler, rapprochement with Russia was but a temporary expedient.

After the collapse of France in 1940 Ribbentrop worked actively towards the creation of a four-power pact against England, embracing Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy and Japan, while at the very same time Hitler was working towards Barbarossa. As the war progressed Ribbentrop had less and less to do, other than become one of the minor architects of the Holocaust. Amongst the Nazi elite he was treated with diminishing respect, and even Hitler encouraged Walther Hewel, a diplomat attached to the Führer's headquarters, to make fun at his expense. As a final insult he was replaced as Foreign Minister in Hitler's will by Arthur Seyss-Inquart, even though Ribbentrop, unlike Göring and Himmler, had been guilty of nothing but absolute loyalty.

The real answer to the question how such a man could become Foreign Minister of an important world power is, paradoxically, yet another question: how was a man like Hitler ever in a position to appoint him in the first place?

A Good Nazi

I saw Good earlier this year, a movie directed by Vicente Amorim and starring Vigo Mortensen as one John Halder, a professor of literature in a German university in the 1930s. It's based on the play of the same name by Cecil Philip Taylor.

Before proceeding let me just say that I have a particular interest in the process of moral corruption, the manner in which people are compromised by association with evil though not in themselves necessarily evil. It's not that long since I finished reading Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, in which the author tries to determine by what process an ordinary man becomes part of an apparatus of murder. I have to say that I thought this book was grossly over-praised for what it offered, particularly in the way of literary skill, but the idea behind it was intriguing and sound. It rests, perhaps, on one key question: what would you, yes, you, have done if you had lived in Nazi Germany? Would you be the one in a hundred thousand who had the courage to say no or, would you have drifted along, like so many others, for the sake of your family, your friends, your colleagues, or simply for the sake of your career? It's not a question that I personally can answer with any true certainty.

So back to Good which tells the story of a 'good' German, an unassuming man, a family man, a teacher of literature and a lover of Proust, shocked by the barbarism of the new Reich. He refuses to join the Party despite the urging of his Nazi father-in-law. He has a Jewish friend, a psycho-analyst, with whom he served in the same regiment during the First World War. Taking nothing seriously, the good professor believes that the nightmare will pass, as he assures Maurice, his Jewish friend, played by Jason Isaacs.

Halder undergoes, I suppose, what was referred to at the time as 'internal emigration', namely he retreats into himself, into his personal world. During this period he happens to write a novel, a romance, which touches at the end on the subject of assisted suicide, the supreme act of love. That's it, he doesn't think any more on the subject until some years later he is summoned to the Reich Chancellery, there to meet none other than Philipp Bouhler, played by Mark Strong in one of the movie's better performances, who tells him that the Fuhrer himself has been impressed by the message offered by the novel he wrote all those years before.

So, Halder, essentially a man with little strength of character or moral resolution, at first frightened by the invitation and unsure of what was wanted of him, is flattered, showing no reluctance to prepare a paper on the subject of 'mercy death.' He even receives rank in the SS, shocking Maurice as much as it pleased his Nazi-sympathising mistress. From this point forward his career takes off and his novel is turned into a movie, with the final scene showing a loving husband holding his dying wife in his arms.

The compromises continue from this point forward. Halder preserves something of his old 'decency' in continuing attempts to help Maurice, though his efforts are never very forceful. Maurice finally disappears during the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938. Years later, on a visit to what I take to be Auschwitz, Halder, now resplendent in his black SS uniform, comes across Maurice in a kind of tableaux from hell. He observes and he drifts with the same bewilderment that has pursued him throughout.

As a movie Good is not that good. It most definitely suffers in comparison with The Reader: it's anaemic where that latter was full-blooded. But the moral dilemmas explored are interesting, as Halder remains 'good', if perplexed, right to the end. The essential problem with Nazism, of the whole Nazi experience, was not evil in itself; for few people are truly evil. No, it was moral cowardice.

Go East, Young Man

I was wryly amused by the story about Fritz Darges, the last surviving member of Hitler’s inner circle, who died recently aged ninety-six. As the last SS adjutant to the Führer he was present at all major conferences and social engagements, so hopefully his memoirs, which he instructed should be published after his death, may reveal some interesting secrets. Not that that is the source of my amusement.

Darges, who first met Hitler in 1934, described him in a press interview as ‘warm-hearted.’ He was to find out, to his personal cost, just how ‘warm-hearted’ he was. I can’t quite make up my mind if Darges possessed a sardonic wit-not a noted German quality-or a death wish, but he cracked a kind of joke at one the strategy conferences at the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia.

It was July 1944, just two days before von Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt. A fly was buzzing around, landing on Hitler’s shoulder and then the map he was looking at. Annoyed, he told Darges to ‘dispatch the nuisance.’ His response was that since this as an ‘airborne pest’ the task should be delegated Nicolaus von Below, the Luftwaffe adjutant. Maybe he was just a stickler for protocol! Oh, but Hitler did not like this at all. In a temper he shouted “You’re for the eastern front.” And to the eastern front he went.

Still, he continued to love his boss, right to the end of his life.

Nazis and Zionists

Few people now have ever heard of Leopold von Mildenstein, once involved in an attempt to construct a working political 'partnership' between the Nazi state and Zionist movement. Now, could any subject be more loaded than that?!

I have to move carefully here, and will try to be as objective as I can. The chief point to hold in mind is that the aim of Nazi policy for much of the pre-war period was to encourage as much Jewish migration from Germany as possible. Inevitably, whatever political and ideological differences existed, this aim overlapped, to a significant degree, with similar aims by the Zionists, anxious to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

One has to remember that when the Nazis came to power in January 1933 they had no agreed solution on how the perceived 'Jewish problem' was to be tackled. There were those, of course, like Julius Streicher, who advocated an immediate expulsion of all Jewish people from German territory, though more moderate influences were quick to point out the implications of such a move for the German economy, still in deep depression. Beyond approving limited gestures, like the one-day boycott of Jewish businesses in April 1933, Hitler gave no clear lead in the matter, which left the way open to initiatives by agencies within the state; agencies like the SS, which began to research possible policy options. And from the midst of the SS came Baron Leopold Itz von Mildenstein, a self-appointed 'expert' on the Jewish question.

Mildenstein, who was born in Prague in 1902, had taken an early interest in Zionism, even going so far as to attend Zionist conferences to help deepen his understanding of the movement. He actively promoted Zionism as a way out of the official impasse on the Jewish question; as a way, in other words, of making Germany Judenrein (free of Jews).

The Zionists, whose movement had grown tremendously in popularity among German Jews since Hitler came to power, were keen to co-operate. On April 7 1933 the Juedische Rundschau, the bi-weekly paper of the movement, declared that of all Jewish groups only the Zionist Federation of Germany were capable of approaching the Nazis in good faith as 'honest partners.'

The Federation then commissioned one Kurt Tuchler to make contact with possible Zionist sympathisers within the Nazi Party, with the aim of easing emigration to Palestine. Tuchler approached Mildenstein, who was asked to write something positive about Jewish Palestine in the Nazi press. Mildenstein agreed, on condition that he was allowed to visit the country in person, with Tuchler as his guide. So, in the spring of 1933 an odd little party of four set out from Berlin, consisting of Mildenstein and Tuchler with their respective wives.

Mildenstein's experiences were later reported in twelve instalments in Der Angriff, Goebbels' own paper, beginning on 26 September 1934, under the title Ein Nazi faehrt nach Palestina ( A Nazi travels to Palestine). Perhaps the most curious aspect of this whole bizarre affair is that Der Angriff even commissioned a medal to celebrate this journey, with a Swastika on one side and a Star of David on the other.

On his return, Mildenstein's suggestion that the solution to the Jewish problem lay in mass migration to Palestine was accepted by his superiors within the SS. In 1935 he was put in charge of the Jewish Desk in the RSHA-Section 11/112-, under the overall control of Reinhardt Heydrich. SS officials were even instructed to encourage the activities of the Zionists within the Jewish community, who were to be favoured over the 'assimilationists', said to be the real danger to National Socialism. Even the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 had a special Zionist 'provision', allowing the Jews to fly their own flag.

In the end Mildenstein fell out of favour, because migration to Palestine was not proceeding at a fast enough rate. His departure from the RSHA after ten months in office also saw a shift in SS policy, marked by the publication of a pamphlet warning of the dangers of a strong Jewish state in the Middle East. It was written by another 'expert', who had been invited to join Section 11/112 by Mildenstein himself. His name was Adolf Eichmann.