Holocaust Considerations

Most people who now encounter the Holocaust have no direct experience with it. They may be deeply affected by having lost one or many of their relatives, having heard one of the few remaining survivors, or having shuddered at the horrific tales written down long ago of what was perpetrated by some people on other people. When my generation of children and grandchildren of the 1930s and early 1940s dies in the not-too-distant future, the voices of the last few who lived with and heard from (or of) individuals will fade as well.

Every person who faces the Holocaust reacts differently to it; these reactions reach from those who lived it, to those who met individuals who did, to others who must personally deal with its aftereffects, and even to those who deny it. My own dealing with it was somewhat unique in that I suspected for several decades that my father was one of the perpetrators. Although I had good memories of him from my childhood in Northern Italy, he had served as a German diplomat with the obligation to persuade the German speakers of the South Tyrol, a former Austro-Hungarian territory, to come “back” into cohesive and contiguous German territories. As part of enhancing his negotiating position and that of other staff members, he was placed in the 88 (Schutzstaffel) as a first lieutenant in early 1940. My doubts about his role intensified after I taught European history for many years and then met Jewish colleagues who lost family members and survivors of concentration camps. I even dreamt of a concentration camp and published about this experience in these pages (December 2004). My fears were largely dissolved during the spring of 2006 when I discovered from a collection of documents that he was not one of “those” Germans.

But the long search for the “truth” opened uncomfortable realities about the 1930s and 1940s. One of them is that even the most intelligent and well-educated individuals were all too easily caught up in a group fantasy that allowed them to ignore what they would have valued under “normal” circumstances. Another is that all too many contemporaries bought into the group fantasy and either went along with it or “looked away” when their neighbors were placed in harm’s way. Still another is that some of the ideas that aimed at solving a major perceived geographic problem turned out to be deadly for Poles, Jews, and others who were in the way of its realization in Eastern Europe.

Regarding “civilized” people getting caught up in a group delusion, David Redles showed recently how, given the explosive mix of economic and social circumstances in post-WWI Germany, a vibrant millennial fantasy emerged. Hitler used it to inspire desperate men and women in the 1920s with his realistic-seeming concepts about the wrongs of Versailles, a supposed link between Germany’s plight and an international Jewish conspiracy, a massive moral decline that was expressed in modem art, and the need to resurrect Germany’s greatness (David Redles, Hitler’s Millennial Reich: Apocalyptic Belief and the Search for Salvation, 2005).

In regard to contemporaries’ buying into the group fantasy, scholars and others believed since the publication of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners that ordinary Germans readily cooperated with the National Socialist (NS)-Regime from its first days in office. Many Germans were indeed caught up in the fantasy of the moment, while others simply paid no attention, and some looked the other way. We know now also that some of those Germans who did not cooperate with the NS Regime were immediately taken to police or Gestapo offices to be threatened and “reeducated;” others lost their jobs or were imprisoned. (Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, 1996. Compare, however, Fritz Stem, Einstein’s German World, 1999, pp. 272-288).

Finally, a “new” geographic understanding

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and a concept that is often ignored today emerged at places like the University of Leipzig, which my father attended in the late 1920s and early 1930s. They aimed at resolving “problems” created by the multiethnic state of the eighteenth century. It suggested that all German ethnics, wherever they were living in Europe, be relocated into “traditional” German areas, that is, come home into the Reich, without initially saying much about the fate of the non-Germans, for example Poles and Jews, who already lived in these areas. Thus a group of geographers proposed a state that included only Germans and hoped in this fashion to solve the perceived reasons for the defeat of the Central Powers and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires.

My father was caught up in all three of these trends. In addition, like Hitler, he hailed from one of the areas of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. In his case it was the small German-speaking enclave Gottschee, below Ljubljana (formerly Laibach). In addition, both men emerged from the families of small Austrian bureaucrats, in my father’s case a teacher, made their way in Germany proper, in my father’s case through a doctoral degree in journalism, and despised the Versailles Treaties that destroyed the empire of their childhoods and harmed their acquired fatherland of Germany. In contrast to the other Austrian-German, my father realized as early as late 1942 that the relocation of German speakers from Italy was flawed in itself, that non-Germans were being forcibly dislocated (and in many cases placed in labor or concentration camps and/or killed) in parts of Eastern Europe, that the war into which Hitler had dragged Germany, and practically the entire globe, was no longer winnable, that the men with whom he worked in Italy and Berlin held distinctly different values than he, and that Germany was being betrayed by the upper level of the Nazi hierarchy (Peter Petschauer, Der Vater und die SS [The Father and the SS], 2007).

Due to his early death in 1977, I do not know if his conclusions about the period or regimes, like the NS-Regime, overlap with mine, but the review of his life brought me to at least three “lessons.” First, the most horrid leaders can attain political power through legitimate democratic elections, if they can gain a sufficient following in the electorate with appropriate nationalist and other slogans. Once in power, the regime can show its “true” colors and bend more people to its wishes. The NS-Regime did so through perfectly laudable programs, like the building of the Volkswagen and the autobahn, and by providing a positive message about the present and the future of the country. It also encouraged people to re-concentrate on work, home, and children. Additionally, it inspired apprehension by arresting protesters, frightening others in other ways, and then isolating the non-desirables, like Jews, homosexuals, and others through laws and provocations like the infamous Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Crystal). Not least, it enabled the general public to ignore the plight of neighbors who were being isolated, harassed, and taken into “custody.” Then, it offered aggressions, including a major war that appealed to patriots among Germans and ostracized those who were deemed “unpatriotic.”

Second, a dictatorial regime can emerge from the political right or political left. The Stalinist regime in Russia, an area then known as the Soviet Union, with its massive industrialization, obvious tactics of fear and concentration camps, and then a supreme war effort against a foreign aggressor, is recognizably similar to that of Germany. Including, by the way, in that it persecuted ethnic groups, like the Ingush, Chechen, and German ethnics that it determined to be enemies.

Third, and sadly, our supposedly mature, developed society is not capable of empathizing with our own blighted fellow citizens and, in somewhat connected fashion, those of other societies whom it attacked in its effort to revenge the individuals killed in the tragedy of 9/11. The lesson I learned is that my thinking about the American reaction to 9/11 matches that of Judith Butler in Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (2004). She argues that until we understand better our own miseries of declining health, accidental misfortunes, and family deaths, and those of friends and colleagues, and see them as similar to the miseries of those who are dislocated, bombed, wounded, and killed because of some ideology, we will not gain empathy for them. Yes, the origins of these miseries are distinctly different, but, as Amo Gruen puts it so well, it is morality when we empathize with the plight of others by understanding our own (Amo Gruen, Verratene Liebe Falsche Gotter, 2003).

Understanding somewhat the plight of the suffering of my Jewish friends and colleagues, and

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teaching many years, has led me, oddly, to understand my father better and to gain insight into how he was caught up in the NS-Regime and its appeal. One can only understand the pain of others, that is, their suffering, even their trying to sort out their association with a horrid regime, whether it is inflicted by others or caused by nature, if and when one realizes that it is hardly different from our own. Surely life is sufficiently difficult for most of us, reiterating Buddhist, Christian and Muslim beliefs, not to want others to experience what we rather not experience. By contrast, revenge brings only more revenge.

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