In Europe

by Geert Mak

  For years Bodelschwingh's successors stymied all attempts to use the clinic's archives for research into the history of ‘resistance’ at Bethel. As one of them explained most frankly in 1964, such research posed the danger of making public a ‘murky history of failure in many Christian circles’. He was right about that. Bodelschwingh was, as we say in the Netherlands, a typical ‘wartime mayor’. He was anything but principled, he was also no hero, and at Bethel these days that heroic commemoration is simply one more burden to bear. His greatest objection to the campaign had to do with its legal basis, not with its ethics. And he was not alone in that; there were even Nazis who felt that the euthanasia campaign required special legislation.

  Still, with all his weaving and dealing, this director-clergyman finally achieved his goal: he won time, and he was left alone. In Westphalia, in summer 1941, another twenty-seven hospital transports took 2,890 patients to the gas chambers at Hadamar. Bethel was spared. In late August, on Hitler's orders, the programme was stopped – for the time being. The protest from the churches, unrest such as that at Bethel, the Führer did not need that. In any case, the Nazis’ original plan had already been almost completely carried out: at that point, exactly 70,273 German handicapped persons had been ‘fumigated’. The T-4 civil servants calculated that the programme had saved the German people 885,439,800 marks in future medical care. The leaders of the German churches had watched it happen, with eyes wide open.

  It was from that same building at Tiergartenstrasse 4, the unassuming villa in the neat Berlin neighbourhood of Tiergarten, and with the same bureaucratic calm, that the Endlösung for the Jews and Gypsies of Europe began after summer 1941. Of the 400 members of the T-4 staff, just under 100 were selected to provide leadership for ‘Aktion Reinhardt’, the campaign to exterminate the Polish Jews. The gas chamber at Schloss Hartheim which had been developed for the handicapped ran almost constantly from November 1941, to accommodate political prisoners from Mauthausen. The technology used there was adopted by all the other concentration and death camps. The hardened workers from the crematoria, the Brenner, became much sought-after employees.

  The euthanasia project served as the experimental plot for the industrial extermination of millions that followed. It paved the way in psychological terms as well. The Nazis realised all too well that this was a sensitive issue. Their amazement was therefore all the greater when it turned out that only ten per cent of all patients’ families had registered a protest. The mass majority of the German population, they could correctly conclude, would look the other way when something like this happened, even when it involved members of their own family. The road was clear.

  Chapter EIGHTEEN

  Munich

  MEANWHILE, AS I TRAVEL NOW THROUGH MY OWN TIMES, THERE HAS been a war going on for weeks, a real war. Europe and the United States have joined forces to free Kosovo from the Serbs. Rumours abound concerning bloody acts of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, and at least 750,000 refugees are wandering through the region, hundreds of thousands of Albanians are appearing at the borders of Western Europe. The rest of Europe looks on in alarm, but no one is feeling particularly combative, certainly not in Germany. Only in the field of foreign policy, it seems, do we Europeans still dare to think in terms of social change being susceptible to popular opinion. The Balkans, clearly, are not susceptible. What is more, no Western soldier these days is prepared to die for an ideal. That, too, severely limits the possibilities.

  In 1933, the situation was the exact opposite. The real fighting had yet to begin, but in manners and language the war had been raging for a long time. Today, in 1999, half of Europe has joined the fray, but there are no slogans, uniforms or behaviour to show that you are driving through countries at war. There are no military convoys on the autobahn, only cars pulling pleasure boats. In the air one sees only the white vapour trails leading to and from holiday destinations. No, here the war is being fought in newspaper headlines, on TV, in late-night musings, and around the tables of roadside restaurants.

  Significant too is the lack of European unity, even though the war is being carried out on behalf of a united Europe. There is not an atom of team spirit, or any form of European patriotism. In Amsterdam, despite the blazing headlines, I had observed a remarkable lethargy. For the first time in half a century the Netherlands was at war, in an offensive role no less, but the prime minister did not even deem it necessary to announce that to parliament in person.

  Everywhere I go here in Germany, the subject of the new war is brought up within the first fifteen minutes. The Dutch-German border suddenly turns out to be a deep chasm, a vast sea separating two worlds. According to one survey, more than half of all Germans believe that we are on the brink of a major European war. At a pavement café I begin a conversation with an older couple from Düsseldorf. They have trouble sleeping, they tell me, Kosovo stirs up old memories. ‘Entire families wandered the streets at night, my father sometimes took them in,’ she tells me. ‘At home I still have the bicycle I used to save my own skin back then, racing along on wooden wheels just ahead of the advancing Russian Army. Everyone of my generation fled at some point, and almost everyone went through a bombardment.’ Her husband, a retired contractor, says: ‘The conviction that there must never be another war is etched in our souls.’ His father froze to death on the Eastern Front.

  A weekend in Nuremberg, city of cuckoo clocks, toys, racial laws, the NSDAP's national rallies, the war crimes tribunal and the world's biggest bratwurst hall. The city has its Altstadt, and fake trams for the tourists everywhere. In reality, there is almost not a single piece of cement here older than fifty-five years. The entire old city centre of Nuremburg was bombed off the face of the earth, yet most local history books grant no more than a page or two to the war. The tribunal building is now used to try everyday criminals. The Nazis’ huge parade grounds have been preserved in part as a living memorial. The rest has been filled with inexpensive public housing.

  That evening I sit in the grandstand at those parade grounds, one of the few elements left of the Nazi complex. It is one of those quiet, mild spring evenings full of promise. The author Gitta Sereny, who would one day write a biography of Albert Speer, ended up here by mistake in 1934, in the midst of a Nazi rally. She was ten at the time, a prim schoolgirl on her way to visit her mother in Vienna. Later she would write down her impressions; she did not understand then what it was about, but she was overwhelmed by the drama, the theatrics, ‘the symmetry of the marchers, the joyful faces all around, the rhythm of the sounds, the solemnity of the silences, the colours of the flags, the magic of the lights.’

  Those parts of the immense meeting hall still standing are now lifeless stone and peeling concrete. Hitler and Speer planned to make it a stadium for 400,000 spectators, twice the size of the Circus Maximus in Rome, half a kilometre long, more than 400 metres wide, the highest tier almost 100 metres from the ground. This would be the future site of all Olympic Games. In imitation of Kaiser Wilhelm, Speer said, they would ‘reignite the sense of national grandeur’, of which ‘the monuments of the forefathers’ were to be the ‘most persistent tokens’. It was up to Hitler and Speer themselves, in this case, to create that ‘bridge of tradition’: they wanted to construct their monuments in such a way that, hundreds of years later, after the buildings had collapsed and were covered in ivy, they would still have their own unique merit as ruins. Fantasy drawings were even made of the Nuremberg grandstands after centuries of neglect.

  That phantom merit is already becoming highly visible. Before me lies the unfinished ‘Great Way’. The six-lane road, built for the great Wehrmacht victory parades that were sure to come, runs on for kilometres. Today it serves as a kind of car park. This week, all the way at the back, a fair is being held; a huge fair, in fact, complete with a six-loop roller coaster, a skyscraping light-blue Ferris wheel, two haunted houses, a dining hall for at least 300 sausage-lovers, and countless stands, gambling halls and candy kitchens.

  The gr
eat tribune too, once the focal point of Leni Riefenstahl's spectacular Nazi film Triumph of the Will is steadily decaying. The pseudo-classical walls are covered in black and green mould, there is grass growing everywhere, some of the steps are coming loose. Up at the top a group of young people with shaved heads are drinking beer in the twilight. Blackbirds are singing. People are jogging around the old parade grounds. Beside me, four boys are practising with a skateboard, baggy pants, baseball caps turned back to front, tearing across the tribune's weathered benches, jumping from one tier to the next, dancing on this deeply charged concrete.

  Stretching diagonally across Europe, from Holland through Friesland and Denmark and reaching all the way south to Austria, lies a gigantic triangle of order and cleanliness. I am driving now along its southern flank, from one Bavarian village to the other, through a landscape of green pastures and rolling hills, here and there a church with an onion-shaped steeple. The God who rules this almost heavenly piece of Europe is fond of discipline: no path is left unraked, every patch of grass is neatly mown and manicured, every house stands sprightly and foursquare. I go by way of Eichstätt and Markt Indersdorf, and then suddenly I find myself at an exit for Dachau, and there is Dachau itself: another neat little town tucked up against the sprawl of Munich.

  The concentration camp, as it turns out, is just a part of the local industrial estate, no one has ever tried to disguise that, it was a part of the city's commercial life. When it was built, the Dachaer Zeitung spoke of new ‘hope for Dachau's trade and industry’, an ‘economic turning point’ and the ‘start of happy times’ for the town. Shortly afterwards, one reads, the first twelve prisoners were killed. The paper reported that the guards had acted ‘in self-defence’ and that the victims ‘had sadistic tendencies anyway’.

  Today, some sixty-six years later, the local press reports on a council meeting in Waakirchen, a village south of Munich. In early May a memorial service will be held there for the ‘death marches’ from Dachau, in which a great many prisoners died just before the camp was liberated. Two former inmates have been invited to the ceremony. The request to pay for their lodging has been refused by the town council. ‘We have already generously allocated municipal ground for a memorial,’ says Mayor Peter Finger. ‘And don't forget, we'll also have to plant new flowerbeds for this memorial service.’

  Dachau sees the camp's remains primarily as a public-relations project. Emphatically absent here are the names of European sister cities, something one sees everywhere else in Europe. No one wants to be friends with this town.

  In the 1950s, a number of attempts were made to raze the old complex, and the first temporary exhibition there was actually removed by the police. According to the mayor of that day – who had been deputy mayor of the town in wartime – all the excitement was completely exaggerated: the camp had been occupied primarily by common criminals and ‘political subversives’. Today, at the camp's exit, there are large signs drawing the visitor's attention to Dachau's true attractions: a lovely church, an old castle, pleasant restaurants.

  But other voices are also heard: ‘I am probably the only one of you who actually saw the death marches and the emaciated concentration camp prisoners with their linen uniforms and their wooden shoes,’ Waakirchen SPD councillor Michael Mair said. And Sepp Gast of the CSU actually became emotional: his own father had been in Dachau. The two men have announced that they will pay part of the guests’ expenses out of their own pockets.

  Entering the camp, one finds oneself in a huge courtyard in the middle of a carrefour of barracks. As it is now, the entire camp is more like an education centre, a museum to be leafed through like a book, a useful, lively history lesson from which all the death and stench have been scrubbed away.

  I see the wooden gallows. It stands there with all the obstinacy of a tool, its wood scratched and worn, its pedestals dented. In the exhibition halls one sees the familiar images: the starvation, the executions, the so-called ‘altitude tests’. A series of photographs: a man is being placed in a little booth, a lively face, dark eyes, a Frenchman perhaps? Then the air pressure is lowered, or raised. You see his horrified look, see him raise his hands to his head. Then he collapses. The pressure is brought back to normal. A new session. At last the man is dead. The final photograph: his skull, cut open. Other tests were done to see how long a person could survive in ice-cold water. Some people were still alive after a day. Liver punctures were performed on other patients. Without an anaesthetic.

  On display is a letter to the camp supervisors from Dr Sigmund Rascher, MD, Troger Strasse 56 in Munich, dated 16 April, 1942: ‘After a respiratory arrest, I brought the last experimental patient, Wagner, back to life by raising the pressure. Because experimental patient W. was earmarked for a terminal experiment, because further experiments would produce no new results and because your letter had not yet reached me, I immediately began a new experiment that patient W. did not survive.’ Rascher had an urgent request of his own: might he be allowed to photograph the autopsy specimens in the camp, ‘in order to document the rare structure of a multiple lung embolism’?

  Prisoner Walter Hornung provided a glimpse of camp life in Dachau in the year 1936. The SS comes stomping through the camp:

  When the knives are dripping with Jewish blood,

  Then you know we're feeling good!

  Then comes the roll-call. Prisoners are selected for heavy labour. Different categories are made to step forward each time. ‘Parliamentarians and secretarial personnel to the front!’; ‘Editors and journalists to the front!’; and finally,‘Münchener Post to the front!’ A small, crippled man steps forward from the latter group. He is the perfect target.

  Why the Münchener Post? Because the journalists of this social-democrat daily had, more than anyone else, kept an eye on the Nazis from the very start, had published all their findings and had treated the National Socialists for what they were: a gang of thugs.

  Hitler called the paper ‘the vipers’ nest’. If the Führer had allowed himself a little splurge at a luxurious hotel in Berlin, the bill was printed the next day in the Post under the headline ‘How Hitler Lives’. When Hitler's niece and lover, the young Geli Raubal, committed suicide in September 1931, the Münchener Post immediately provided all the background information. The editors kept careful score on all political murders. Like some morbid syndicated column, they were published on the front page every day:‘New Victims of the Brownshirts’ Bloodlust’, ‘Firebomb for Social-Democratic Journalist’, ‘Nazi Terror Against Farmhands: Six Boys Killed’, ‘Because Christmas is a Time of Peace: Nazis Kill Communist’. On 14 December, 1931 the paper printed a full-page list of ‘Two Years of Nazi Killings’. Beneath the headline was a quote from Adolf Hitler: ‘Nothing takes place within the movement that I do not know about, and of which I do not approve. Even more: nothing happens without my desiring it!’ Then followed the names of sixty victims, most of them workers, who had been murdered or had died of grievous bodily harm.

  A monument should be built to the Münchener Post, the American historian Ron Rosenbaum wrote in a commemorative piece, and I can only concur. The Nazis hated the Post with everything they had in them, and as soon as they were in power they tore it to the ground. On the evening of 9 March, 1933, an SA gang wrecked the editorial offices, threw the typewriters out onto the street and destroyed the printing presses. That was the end of the paper. The editors ended up in Dachau, disappeared into exile or succeeded, with a great deal of luck, in making it through the Third Reich in one piece.

  I make a little pilgrimage to Altheimer Eck, a winding little street behind the big department stores in the heart of Munich. At number 13 (formerly number 19) I recognise the gateway. This was the courtyard where the Post was made. The printing office in the basement moved away only a year ago, but a newspaper is still being made here: the Abendzeitung, an airy daily featuring the occasional glimpse of a female breast. The people who work there tell me that the Süddeutsche Zeitung had its offices her
e after the war, but these days no one knows anything about the Post. The paper's name has been obliterated by a thick layer of plaster above the gate. There is no trace of all that heroic spirit, no plaque, not even a dot on Simon Wiesenthal's map of heroes.

  The only trace that does remain of the Münchener Post is the Bavarian State Library. I spend an entire day there, amid conscientious and flirtatious students, rolls of microfilm and badly printed pages of the Post. In the 1920s the paper's tone is simply soporific, with headlines like ‘The Future of Public Housing’, ‘Agreement on Funding Programme’ and ‘Employment Perspective under the Social Democrats’. The Nazis’ activities are usually dealt with briefly under miscellaneous regional news.

  But, from 1929, the editors awaken. The headlines are accompanied more frequently by exclamation marks: ‘Voters, Think Twice!’, ‘Civil Servants, Wake Up!’ On 20 December, 1929 the paper recommends, ‘if necessitated by polling-place terror’, to render one's ballot void by crossing off both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. The Nazi murders receive full attention, and the Post rapidly transforms itself from a staid party organ to a hard-hitting newspaper, with revelations on an almost weekly basis. On 5 July, 1932, for example, the front page contains a careful overview of the sums paid by the Nazis to a number of soldiers for their part in the November 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. A certain Oberleutnant Kriegel received 200 Swiss francs for his participation, a common soldier received about 15 francs. A total of 1,173 francs was paid out, a capital sum in those days. The money came largely from Helene Bechstein and her husband, the famous piano manufacturer.