The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  The same argument applies to Belgium. The country’s prime minister formally apologized to the Belgian Jewish community for its role in the Holocaust—but not until 2002. The conclusions of a government-sponsored report, 1,116 pages long and titled Submissive Belgium, were read before Parliament in Brussels in February 2007, concluding that its top civil servants had acted in a way “unworthy for a democracy.” The Belgian government, exiled in London during World War II, had advised its civil servants to work with the occupying Nazis to prevent economic breakdown but in many cases, the report said, that had “deteriorated into collaboration with persecution of the Jews and their deportation to concentration camps.” After the war, it went on, many cases (of reparation) were considered “too delicate to handle” by the military courts and “every responsibility of the Belgian authorities in the persecution and deportation of Jews was rejected.” Again, an inordinate delay.32

  Despite making it illegal to deny the Holocaust as early as 1946, Austria, too, has had a problem in assimilating its role in World War II—and not just because Hitler was, of course, not German but Austrian.* Forty percent of the personnel and most of the commandants of the death camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were Austrian, as were 80 percent of Eichmann’s staff—and Eichmann himself. Despite these unwholesome statistics, the country’s first postwar president, the veteran Socialist leader Dr. Karl Renner, emphasized that there was “no room” for Jewish businessmen in Austria, and he did not think that “Austria in its present mood would allow Jews once again to build up these family monopolies.” In an American survey in 1947–48, nearly a quarter of all Viennese thought that the Jews had “got what they deserved” under Nazism, while 40 percent thought that the “Jewish character” was responsible for anti-Semitism. For decades Austrians presented themselves as “the first victims” of the Nazis and used this argument to rebuff Jewish claims for restitution, many of which they insisted were fraudulent. (Although the notion that Austria was the “first victim” was accepted by the Allies at the Ottawa Conference in 1943, following the Anschluss the SS was “swamped” with Austrian applicants.)

  Perhaps the most ludicrous—and embarrassing—episode of this kind occurred during the filming of The Sound of Music in Salzburg in 1965, when the local authorities refused to allow swastika flags to be hung in the Residenzplatz as a backdrop. They argued that Salzburgers had never supported the Nazis—at least they did until the producers of the film said they would use instead real newsreel footage, after which the city fathers backed down.33

  At least three prominent Austrian politicians—Hans Öllinger, Friedrich Peter, and Kurt Waldheim—were exposed (as often as not by the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who received death threats for his pains) as erstwhile SS or Wehrmacht officers (very junior in Waldheim’s case) and it was not until July 1991 that the Socialist federal chancellor Franz Vranitsky publicly acknowledged Austrian “co-responsibility” for what had happened in the Third Reich—rather late, one might think. The growth in popularity of the radical right Freedom Party (FPÖ) under Jörg Haider’s leadership belied the fact that the country was really attempting to deal with its past. FPÖ propaganda at times verged on Holocaust denial, claiming it was in any case no different from the Soviet Gulag, while the party’s attitude to immigrants resurrected the terms of biological racism so redolent of the Nazis.

  All this was underlined by what happened at Mauerbach. At the end of October 1997, Christie’s Auction House Vienna sold the contents of Mauerbach Monastery, an old Carthusian building in a sleepy village about thirty minutes west of the Austrian capital. Some 8,400 art objects, which had been looted from Austrian Jews, had been stored in the monastery since the 1960s. It was a dismal affair that did the Austrian authorities no credit at all. From 1945 until 1969 the government made no attempt whatsoever to trace any Holocaust survivors. At one stage the man charged with disposing of the art was the very individual who had masterminded its confiscation in the first place. On two other occasions the Austrian government passed strict laws that made it all but impossible for Jews to identify their property—and this at a time when much of this “Holocaust art” decorated Austrian embassies abroad. In one case where the claimant was eventually successful, he was charged $8,000 for years of storage—for a painting that had been confiscated. Only 3.2 percent of works were ever returned to their rightful owners, and it was not until the American magazine ARTnews exposed what was sequestered in Mauerbach that any action was taken.34

  THE CLOSED ARCHIVES OF VICHY

  Although France was one of the more liberal nations in the interwar years, opening its doors to Jewish refugees from Poland, Romania, and Germany, since the war it has fought its own set of demons relating to that difficult time. The classic, but nevertheless defensive statement about France’s role in the Holocaust came from President François Mitterrand in 1992 when, with breathtaking insouciance, he declared that the collaborationist, pro-German Vichy regime that governed unoccupied France from 1940 to 1944 was illegal and “aberrational” and had “nothing to do with France today.” “The French nation was not involved in that,” he said, “nor was the Republic.”35

  As this implies, French collaboration during World War II has had its own memory pattern. Henry Rousso has given it a name, The Vichy Syndrome. Rousso found that his thesis—that the internal quarrels among the French left deeper scars than either the defeat or the German occupation—was “largely confirmed.” Two of his chapters had “Obsession” in the title and in a “temperature curve” of the syndrome, a year-by-year chart of the “temperature” of the obsession with Vichy, as measured by political events, books published, films screened, and so on, he identified an “acute crisis” from 1945 to 1953, relative “calm” from 1954 to 1979, and “acute crisis” ever since (the book was published in 1991).36 This memory pattern is not dissimilar to that for the Holocaust in America.

  The actual extent—and even enthusiasm—of French collaboration was finally and fully exposed in the landmark 1981 study by Michael R. Marrus and Robert Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, which established, “virtually beyond doubt,” that the Vichy government went well beyond even what the Germans required of it in its persecution of the Jews. Some 75,000 Jews were deported from France during the war, the great majority seized by French police. Only 3,000 survived.

  Then, in November 1991, Serge Klarsfeld, a French Nazi hunter and president of the organization Sons and Daughters of the Jewish Deportees of France, claimed to have discovered the so-called Jewish file in the basement of the French Veterans Ministry. These documents, allegedly compiled by the Paris police following the census of October 1940, were supposedly used to identify all Jews living in France. A commission of professional historians later confirmed that the real file had been destroyed in 1948, but the case raised doubts about public access to official documents relating to the Vichy regime, doubts that were sharpened in 1994, when Sonia Combe, in her book, Archives Interdites (Closed Archives), accused the French government archival service of restricting public access to historical documents about Vichy. She alleged that a combination of insufficient funding and a “specific effort to avoid scandal” had combined to limit access to wartime documents.37

  None of this was eased by the four trials that took place in France in the early 1990s for “crimes against humanity.” Klaus Barbie, former head of the Gestapo in Lyon, went on trial in 1992 for the arrest and deportation to Auschwitz of forty-four Jewish children. In 1994, Paul Touvier, one of the leaders of the French militia, was tried in Versailles for organizing the killing of Jewish men in Rieux-la-Pape, near Lyon. In 1998, Maurice Papon, who oversaw the deportation of 2,000 Jews from the Bordeaux region, was eventually tried and convicted. In the meantime he had enjoyed a successful career in public life. No trial received more attention than that of René Bousquet, accused of coordinating with the Gestapo to organize the infamous roundup of Jews in Paris in July 1942, when 13,000 were gathered in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ bicycle sta
dium and shipped to transit camps in France and then on to Auschwitz. Not the least controversial aspect of this case was the fact that Bousquet’s role in the roundup had been reported as early as 1978, but it took the French legal system twelve years to do anything about it. Bousquet was assassinated in 1993 before his trial.

  There was also the scandal that surrounded the French president, François Mitterrand himself. In a 1994 biography of the president, Pierre Péan revealed that Mitterrand had been both a civil servant in the Vichy regime and a leader in the French Resistance—indeed, he had held both positions at the same time for several months in 1943. Mitterrand had always denied his participation in the Vichy regime, so this was embarrassing—more than embarrassing—all around. The revelations certainly put his comments about Vichy not being the true France into a sanctimonious light. It was not until 1995 that the French state apologized for its role in the Holocaust—half a century after the events themselves and a delay longer even than that in Austria and Germany.38

  Against this background, there was a series of cases filed in U.S. courts in the mid-1990s, targeting French companies that had profited from the plight of Jews during World War II (such as the state railway, SNCF, and a number of banks). This case followed the similar suit filed in U.S. courts against Swiss banks holding Holocaust-era assets. The French cases were thrown out, but in March 1997 the French government under Alain Juppé responded to these concerns by setting up the Mattéoli Commission, to investigate the allegations. The commission hired 120 researchers, at state expense, and produced twelve reports on Jewish experiences during Vichy. As a result, a Foundation of Remembrance was announced in 2000, endowed with 2.4 billion francs ($342 million), the estimated total value of assets that have not yet been returned to their Jewish owners. It is the largest charitable foundation in the country.39

  Finally, in Europe, we may mention Poland where, in the general election of 2007, the Second World War was an issue, or made an issue, by the Kaczynski twins, Lech and Jaroslaw, who, as president and prime minister, had set their country on an ultranationalist course, picking fights with both Germany and Russia and trying to use its new membership in the European Union to, as one observer put it, “mop up all the unfinished business of the Second World War.” In particular, they claimed that the Polish population would have been substantially larger had not the Nazis murdered so many people and that therefore Germany “had a moral duty to give ground” in regard to reparations claimed.40 Likewise the massacre of several hundred Jews in May 1941 at Jedwabne in Poland by their fellow citizens, even classmates, which had been the subject of a trial in 1949, was brought to the attention of the world only in 2000, with the publication of Jan Gross’s book Neighbours. Again, the same memory pattern.

  As all of these recent events confirm, Hitler, Nazism, and the Holocaust have disobeyed all the normal rules of historical forgetting and assimilation. Official apologies, reparations, and trials of former Nazis have been more in evidence since 1990 than before.

  THE EXECUTIONERS’ SONG

  No better example of the muddy waters surrounding Holocaust remembrance is provided than by Daniel Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, published in 1996. This title, a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic, put forward what its author claimed was “an entirely new answer to the question of how it was that Germans rather than some other European people turned anti-Semitic prejudice into mass murder.” The Germans did so, he argued, “not because they were forced to, nor because German traditions of obedience enabled a handful of fanatics at the top to do whatever they liked, nor because they were succumbing to peer-group pressure from their comrades-in-arms, nor because they were ambitious careerists, nor because they were acting automatically, like cogs in a machine, nor because they faced death themselves if they refused to obey the order to do so.”41 Instead, Goldhagen said the Germans killed millions of Jews because they enjoyed doing so and they enjoyed it because “their minds and emotions were eaten up by a murderous, all-consuming hatred of Jews that had been pervasive in German political culture for decades, even centuries past.” He identified a “simmering hatred” of the Jews as a “cultural norm” in Germany in the nineteenth century and found that it was given social expression “as a matter of routine.” He discovered nineteen publications produced in Germany between 1861 and 1895 that called for the physical extermination of the Jews and himself “reconceptualised” modern German anti-Semitism into a new framework that envisaged anti-Semitism as “deeply embedded in German cultural and political life and conversation, as well as integrated into the moral structure of society.”42

  In a postscript written for the paperback edition of his book, published in 1997, Goldhagen set out some of the reactions to the hardback. He said his book had been the subject of vitriolic attacks, by both journalists and academics but that their arguments “consisted almost wholly of denunciations and misrepresentations of the book’s contents…The critics presented no serious argument and no evidence to support their contentions…They did not do so because such arguments and evidence do not exist.” On the other hand, he said, the public had embraced the book, it had become a number one best seller in Austria and Germany, and he maintained that on a series of panel discussions called to discuss his thesis his critics conceded many points. 43

  It is one thing to select the best sentences from reviews when seeking to embellish the cover of a paperback edition: the function of a jacket is to sell the book. It is quite another matter, when discussing the substantive issues in a serious argument, to ignore cogent and substantial criticisms that have been leveled. There is no question that, in connection with Daniel Goldhagen and his book, his sins of omission are considerable, evincing a serious disregard of inconvenient data.

  The first thing that professional historians pointed out was that Goldhagen’s theories were, despite his claims, emphatically not new. A central aspect of his book was an examination of the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, mostly older German men who had moved through occupied eastern Europe carrying out mass shootings of at least 38,000 Jews over a considerable period of time. In 1992, not so very long before Goldhagen’s book was published, Christopher Browning of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in Ordinary Men, had studied this self-same unit, arriving at very different conclusions. Browning observed that “ordinary men” were indeed involved in the killing but went on to describe how these police reservists were shocked and surprised by their orders to kill Jews when they first received them. Their commanding officer, Major Wilhelm Trapp, was so unnerved that he allowed those who preferred not to take part to pull out of the operation; as a result, one of Trapp’s own officers obtained a transfer.44

  Goldhagen’s further argument, that Germany had been deeply anti-Semitic since the Middle Ages, was also torn apart. As Richard Evans, one of Goldhagen’s sternest, best-informed, and fair-minded critics, wrote: “If the German population and elite were so deeply anti-Semitic, as Goldhagen says, why did Jews actually gain civil equality by legislative enactment all over Germany in the course of the nineteenth century?” Fritz Stern described “the ascent of German Jewry” in the nineteenth century as “one of the most spectacular social leaps in European history.” Before World War I, both France and Russia were more anti-Semitic than was Germany. In France, the Dreyfus affair sparked anti-Semitic riots in more than thirty towns and in Russia there were 690 documented pogroms with over 3,000 reported murders and 100,000 made homeless. In tsarist Russia, Jews were made to live in a “Pale of Settlement.” In contrast, Evans records one telling vignette—that the pub-and-inn surveillance reports from Hamburg in the late 1920s revealed “virtually no” anti-Semitic feeling by rank-and-file supporters of the Social Democrats. More to the point, anti-Semitism was not an important factor in generating votes for the Nazis in the elections of 1930–33. William Allen, who carried out an in-depth study of one German town, Northeim, found that, from 1928 on, Nazi pr
opaganda actually played down the anti-Semitic aspects of the party’s ideology, for the very good reason that it was unpopular with the electorate. Why did Heinrich Himmler need to keep the “Final Solution” secret if ordinary Germans were as murderous as Goldhagen insists? Why did Himmler complain at one point that “every German has a Jew they wish to protect”?45

  Goldhagen cites as compelling evidence for popular German anti-Semitism the recurrence of “ritual murder” accusations against Jews and quotes this sentence from Peter Pulzer’s The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany: “In Germany and the Austrian Empire twelve such trials took place between 1867 and 1914.” But this was not the complete sentence; Goldhagen leaves out the remainder, which reads: “eleven of which collapsed although the trials were by jury.”46 Goldhagen referred to Thomas Mann who, he said, though a long-standing opponent of the Nazis, “could nevertheless find some common ground with [them]” when he wrote: “…it is no great misfortune…that…the Jewish presence in the judiciary has been ended.” Fritz Stern pointed out that Mann was married to Katia Pringsheim, the daughter of a prominent Jewish family, and in the very next sentence to that quoted above, which Goldhagen omitted, Mann expressed his distaste at his own thoughts, characterizing them as “secret, disquieting, intense.”47