Yet even the easy part presented a challenge that would follow me throughout the entire enterprise, to the very last page. Sometime from 1938 on, my narrative met my individual experience and my personal memory: I remembered the monstrous sound of Hitler’s threats against Czechoslovakia in his broadcast speeches of September 1938; I remembered the sense of an ending (if I may use the term) of my truncated first school year; the gas masks; the German troops marching along the Vltava, under our windows; and the swastika flag swaying in the breeze above our terrace. I remembered the preparations for departure, our false start toward the Hungarian border, the night train journey through Germany, the German border and customs police, the crossing of the Rhine, the first French uniforms, the arrival in Paris, and on. I remembered the fear, the all-pervasive fear around me, penetrating and cold. I remembered everything.
Memory goaded me on, but at the same time its impact had to be acknowledged. I wasn’t writing on the moon; I was a Jew writing the history of his time, of his family, of the Jews of Europe on the eve of their extermination. I had to keep constantly aware of my subjectivity, remain on guard against it as much as possible, and show that even the victims “and their descendants” (to use Broszat’s expression) were able to write that history.
I started to write almost at the very time I began teaching at UCLA. In the undergraduate courses, I taught the history I wrote about; it looked simple but was not. From my brief stint in 1982, I knew that Southern California undergraduates knew very little about European history, even if UCLA admitted only the very best that the state’s high schools had produced. These students knew many other things but lived, in fact, in an environment that was not historically minded. As long as the majority of my charges were of European Jewish background, some basic facts were vaguely familiar to them, but even that changed by the mid-nineties. The new cohort of Jewish students, by then mainly of Iranian background, did not have grandparents able to share their memories and experiences of the war; at the same time, by the by, the demographic composition of the two-hundred-plus student body in my lecture courses evolved: soon a growing proportion was of Asian, Latin American, or non-Jewish American background. I had to be very careful in not assuming a basic knowledge that indeed wasn’t there. But as I was a rather experienced teacher by then, all of that was not the major problem.
The real problem that my teaching entailed was by far more personal. When I discussed the conditions of my appointment, I had asked to teach the undergraduate lecture course every second year only. Even in their simplified form, these lectures did leave a trace. In the lecture hall I avoided any appeal to emotions; it didn’t mean, however, that I managed to stay disconnected from what I was explaining, and that took its toll. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that no colleague was ready to alternate with me, and in any case, the only one who would have been capable of doing so (in terms of specific knowledge) was too busy with his own teaching. In short, the department chair had agreed to a request he had not the least intention of fulfilling. Thus, year in, year out, I taught a lecture course that compelled me to give a simplified rendition, and a thoroughly detached one, of events that were far from simple and, as I said, far from leaving me indifferent. Over time, it became quite a burden.
The graduate students, about fifteen to twenty in each seminar, were an entirely different breed, certainly as talented as the best graduates I had had in Geneva, Jerusalem (except for the 1967–68 seminar at the Hebrew University that I described previously), or Tel Aviv. Ironically, one of the most brilliant presentations I remember in a seminar on European intellectuals and fascism was on Carl Schmitt, one of the most contentious on Paul de Man. Almost all these graduates made it to doctorates and many among them advanced well beyond in the academic world.
5
When I think of the early years in Los Angeles, I remember them as somehow wrapped in a thin veil of sadness, as I alluded to at the beginning of this chapter. I felt in exile. But exiled from where and from what? The children came to visit, and I still regularly returned to Israel and had many occasions to stop over in Europe. The sadness probably did not stem from such potentially obvious and definable reasons. It wasn’t a mild depression either, although during that period, among other medicines, I moved to daily Zoloft and Klonopin. Yet a sense of exile persisted. I often attempted to grasp its nature, then and later, always in vain. I probably missed a medley of tiny elements that belonged to several worlds and to diverse phases of the farthest past, those early years that Robert Brasillach called le matin profond (the deep morning). I had always missed it but the blandness of Los Angeles, its real and symbolic distance from familiar domains of sensibility, and, also, the emotional loneliness that I experienced at that time, created the kind of void that allowed for the rise of a low-grade tristesse.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Dilemmas
Mid-January 1994. I was peacefully asleep in the house we had bought just before my surgeries in the posh Bel Air area. It was a very small house, however, on top of the hill, invisible among the estates that define this part of the city.
On that morning I woke up a few minutes before 5 a.m., and while I was wondering about the time, the rumbling of a freight train engulfed the room, the house, everything. Then the world shook and shook hard. I won’t go on describing the Northridge earthquake of January 17, 1994, except that the waves in the pool looked threatening and I needed the help of a neighbor to find where and how to shut off the gas. It was a peculiar awakening, a distinct addition to the charm of Los Angeles.
1
Notwithstanding the minor (and not so minor) vicissitudes I mentioned, work on volume one of Nazi Germany and the Jews was progressing apace. It may be remembered that this first part was relatively easy because of the unity of place (Germany, annexed Austria, and Bohemia-Moravia). It could be dealt with as a single entity in regard to anti-Jewish policies, the attitude of various sectors of the surrounding society, particularly of the German intellectual and spiritual elites, and the reaction of the Jews. Within this context, the creation of a unified narrative was not a major problem.
I took a few months of unpaid leave to plunge into the vast collection of microfilms kept at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich. I searched for details in various domains and found far more than I could use. Yet, although nothing in this boundless sea of sadism and stupidity jolted me as much as would be the case later on, while working on The Years of Extermination, I couldn’t help mulling over some marginal yet deeply puzzling issues, like the story of the Jewish Kulturbund (Cultural Association), for example.
Jews were not allowed to perform for Germans, nor were they allowed to attend cultural events of any kind, except within the four walls of their own cultural association, the Kulturbund. This, you would think, was in line with their segregation, their exclusion from German society. But it was just one facet of an overall policy. Soon the audiences of the Kulturbund were forbidden to watch German plays, to have readings of German literature, to listen to German music, and so on. These growing restrictions implied magical thinking: by listening to Mozart or watching a play by Schiller, the Jews were thought to pollute these fonts of German culture. How? Nobody ever explained it, as this was in the realm of sheer voodoo. In my mind, it offers the key to an aspect of the Nazi worldview and practice: the use of bureaucratic measures to enforce magical beliefs.
The first volume of Nazi Germany and the Jews, subtitled The Years of Persecution (1933–1939), was published by HarperCollins in early 1997. The reviews were positive and translations followed. The city of Munich awarded me their Geschwister Scholl Prize (the “Siblings Scholl” prize), established to honor the memory of Hans and Sophie Scholl, who, together with other members of the small White Rose group, spread anti-Nazi propaganda in the Bavarian capital in 1942, particularly at the university. They were caught and beheaded in 1943.
2
Although I was intent on avoiding any chore — apart from my teaching and sundr
y administrative obligations, of course — that would deflect me from concentrating upon the second (and crucial) volume of my project, I had to answer an unexpected invitation. In 1996, I was officially asked in the name of the Swiss Conseil fédéral (the Swiss government) to become a member of the Independent International Experts Commission established upon the recommendation of the Swiss parliament to investigate the relations between Switzerland and Nazi Germany, particularly during the war. I would be the Israeli historian, along with eight colleagues from Switzerland, the United States, and Poland. The president of the commission was the Swiss economic historian Jean-François Bergier, who was the editor of the Revue Suisse d’Histoire in 1963, when they accepted my first strictly scholarly article.
The commission was established in a contentious atmosphere. For several years, Jewish institutions — particularly the World Jewish Congress — were demanding an inquiry into the handling by most Swiss banks of dormant accounts that had belonged to Jews exterminated during the Holocaust; the banks used all available means to avoid restitution of that money to the murdered Jews’ legal heirs. The pressure on the banks escalated in the mid-1990s when U.S. officials — mainly in New York — threatened to limit the American activities of Swiss financial institutions that opposed the inquiry. The banks had no choice but to accept the investigation by a commission presided over by Paul Volcker, a highly respected former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. As I remember him, Volcker had a no-nonsense approach, yet eased by a very friendly personality.
As a necessary sequel, the Swiss parliament, followed by the government, decided to establish the independent historians’ commission to shed light on the overall network of relations between the confederation and the Third Reich. All relevant archives would be opened and no interference with the work of the commission permitted.
A substantial budget allowed for the hiring of excellent researchers in a wide variety of domains ranging from refugee policies to gold transactions, from the deals of Swiss insurance companies in Germany to the sale of weapons to the Reich. The atmosphere within the commission and among the researchers was convivial and essentially nonpolitical; its work, however, encountered suspicion and hostility from influential segments of Swiss society, be they politicians, historians, journalists, or the wider public. Thus, the most influential Swiss newspaper, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, was mostly critical whenever the commission published any of its findings.
One of the most sensitive issues, partly within the commission but mainly in terms of outside reactions, was the Swiss wartime refugee policy. The subject touched me directly, and that did not escape the attention of the external censors. At some stage, after the commission had left me out from the initial comments to the press, at the presentation of the report on the refugees, my relations with my Swiss colleagues underwent a (brief) crisis; I considered the possibility of resigning. The internal issue was cleared up, but in the meantime, Gian Trepp, a journalist of the leftist Wochenzeitung (WoZ), accused me of exercising some kind of “sinister” influence on the work of the commission, particularly regarding the report on the refugees.
The anti-Semitic measures taken by the Swiss authorities from 1938 on were notorious (the Swiss demanded that Nazi Germany stamp all Jewish passports with a red J, which allowed the border police to refuse entry to Jews fleeing the Reich, mainly after the annexation of Austria). It is the number of Jews sent back at the border from mid-1942, when the major deportations to the extermination camps started (the Swiss government knew of the exterminations), that caused intense controversy. While the commission reached the conclusion that over twenty thousand Jews had been driven back, its critics brandished outlandish calculations to “prove” that the number was much lower.
Another issue threw a particularly lurid glare on the confederation’s wartime behavior: its banks’ — particularly its Central Bank’s — gold transactions with the Reich’s Central Bank. The Swiss bought considerable amounts of German gold, thus allowing the Reich to use vast sums in Swiss francs to acquire raw materials and other essential goods. Thereby, not only did the Swiss significantly help the German war effort, but in buying German gold they knew that they were acquiring gold looted from the central banks of occupied countries and probably ingots smelted from gold teeth, wedding rings, and other personal possessions of Germany’s murdered victims.
Bergier became the main target of vicious attacks, mainly once our final report was published. He was an utterly honest scholar and, not being a specialist of twentieth-century European history and even less so of the Third Reich, he may have been taken aback by some of the information uncovered by the commission. Yet, although he was a Swiss patriot of the traditional mold, he never made the least attempt to influence the publication of the commission’s findings. He stood behind the report and the accompanying monographs, although some of it may have wounded his feelings. In a way, he was too sensitive for the job, and I know that he suffered considerably from the hostility he encountered. For many a Swiss conservative nationalist, Bergier was a traitor. He wrote me a very touching letter a few years after the end of our task and I planned to visit him on a forthcoming trip to Europe. He died quite suddenly of cancer in October 2009, before I had a chance to meet him again.
I often think of Bergier’s death. And, although our friendship was merely professional, I remember him with emotion, possibly because he was treated so unjustly. Other members of our commission are not alive anymore: Sybil Milton, a font of knowledge about the Shoah and the Nazi persecution and extermination of the Sinti and Roma; and Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, one of those heroic Poles who actively helped Jews during the war, at the risk of his life, and who later supported the change of regime, becoming a highly respected public personality (for a time the foreign minister of Poland).
3
I hate to admit that even before I was done with the Swiss commission, I accepted another invitation of the same kind, this time to chair a commission set up to investigate the history of the Bertelsmann publishing company during the Third Reich. Why did I accept? I trusted — correctly — that as in the case of the Swiss commission, I would be able to pursue my work on volume two and get a better insight into the business world of the Third Reich. Moreover, as the subject was a publishing company, I hoped to get further knowledge about the channeling of Nazi propaganda via the book industry.
Incidentally, the rumor spread that I was offered a substantial honorarium; it was offered indeed and I refused it, as it could have put in question the objectivity of the entire inquiry. I asked for myself and for the members of the commission to be paid exactly as I had been for the Swiss commission: a salary equivalent to that of a senior Swiss civil servant. And so it was.
Like the Swiss, Bertelsmann’s owners, the Mohn family, took the initiative of setting up the inquiry following growing allegations about the collaboration of the company with the Nazi regime, particularly during the war. Clearing up the issue proved essential once Bertelsmann became massively present in the American book market, after the acquisition of Random House and a string of other U.S. publishers.
The CEO of the company, Thomas Middelhoff, asked me to accept their offer sometime in 1998. I chose the three other members of the group, who in turn chose the researchers. Our historian was my friend Norbert Frei, at the time professor at the Ruhr University in Bochum, an outstanding specialist of the Third Reich and postwar Germany; Norbert had been Broszat’s main assistant but kept his total independence of mind. I had known him since 1983, when Broszat delegated him to a conference I had organized in Tel Aviv about the comparative history of twentieth-century “seizures of power” (remember that 1983 was fifty years after the Nazi accession to power).
This time the commission needed a theologian, as Bertelsmann had for a long time been essentially a publisher of religious books and remained rooted in and later still influenced by Pietism. Several colleagues recommended Trutz Rendtorff, one of the most respected theologians in Germany; he accep
ted. Reihard Wittmann became our media and book trade specialist; I knew him from a conference in Hamburg and as member of the Scholl Prize committee. We established our “headquarters” in Munich and, although we all were in constant contact on the Internet, I had to fly to Germany several times a year and, at the final stage, stay in Munich for a few months.
The research progressed apace as we had full access to the company’s archives for the Nazi years and before. The difficulties we encountered were minor: at times, we had to remind Thomas Middelhoff not to use bits and pieces of our work to prove, mainly in his speeches in the States, how wonderfully transparent Bertelsmann had become regarding its past.
Ultimately, we showed in great detail how Heinrich Mohn, the owner of the company during the Hitler years and, soon after 1933, honorary member of the SS, aligned it with the demands of the regime. Bertelsmann became the largest publisher of books for the Wehrmacht, with some well-known Nazi propagandists among its authors. The company also used slave labor, including Jewish slave labor, in its production infrastructure. It was closed in 1944, not due to some political opposition on its part, but following the discovery of shady dealings with the paper stock allocated to it (the use of paper was severely limited in Germany during the last years of the war).
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