[extropy-chat] 'History' and the fulcrum of 1945

[Amara Graps]

Dear Hubert,

Yes, of course your recollections are compressed and viewed
decades later, but they are authentic, first hand experiences
which are extremely valuable for gaining a broader picture.
After thinking more, and seeing what you wrote in your last
message,  I would say that what you say fits very well with
Eksteins from your boyhood time.  Ekstein is addressing
a time a little bit earlier.

>What you say about Modris Eksteins seems to give a broader and
>more realistic picture. But it certainly depends on the date
>these interviews were made. In the 1960s people were too busy
>earning enough money for a volkswagen and making holidays in
i>taly to get bothered with any collective guilt question, while
>from the mid 80s on, you could get better answers though many of
>the active perpetrators were already dead by that time.

If I look at the dates in his footnotes, the direct quotes from
particular Germans are at about 1945. He probably has formed
conclusions from a variety of sources, including personal
knowledge, however.

The following is a bit long, but these typed-in pages from
Eksteins' book I think are very interesting and useful for you
and I and others, and I want to you to see this. I think it is
one of the most eye-opening parts of the book.


Tanti saluti da Roma!
Amara


_Walking Since Daybreak_ by Modris Eksteins, Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1999, pg. 214-216.


Economic recovery and the emergence of political stability in
postwar Europe would erode the concept of Stunde Null as a time
beyond convention, beyond understanding, indeed beyond the realm
of history and enlightenment. Intellectual bridges would be built
over the chasm and connections reestablished. But despite the
bridges, the chasm remains. "Even if surrounded with
explanations," Guenter Grass has written, Auschwitz can never be
grasped."(95)  The same is true of the murderous military
strategies of the two world wars, Stalin's homicidal policies and
of the firebombing of civilians in undefended cities. Nineteen
forty-five marked the nadir of Western civilization.

The Allies tried to make the atrocities against the Jews known to
Germans. They forced locals to visit the death camps; they
distributed the documentary film Die Todesmuelen widely. But even
then, proportionately few Germans were faced to confront, through
personal experience or Allied reeducation efforts, the reality of
the Third Reich's vicious onslaught on civilization. The
extermination camps had been located for the most part outside
Germany; the horrors of the Einsatgruppen took place behind
Germany's borders; of the Jews murdered by the Nazis only a small
percentage were German, the vast majority Polish and Russian.
Jews had never constituted more than 1 percent of Germany's
population; they were concentrated in the big cities, Berlin,
Frankfurt, and Hamburg. To most Germans, the Jew was a myth, not
a reality.

By contrast, most Germans did encounter Allied atrocity, in the
form of impersonal bombs raining down from the sky. German cities
were flattened. Millions of Germans encountered Soviet brutality
during the advance of the Red Army. Some twelve to fifteen
million Germans were expelled from Central and Easter Europe;
perhaps two million of them did not survive (96). This for
Germans was tangible, palpable horror.

When the war was over, the mood in Germany was an indefinable
mixture of confusion, fear, and anger, but not guilt, certainly
not collective guilt. The attempt by the Western Allies to force
repentance on the Germans evoked much cynicism and mockery. The
Allies had no moral authority to "reeducate" others. Luebeck's
most famous son, Thomas Mann, who had gone into exile in 1933,
said that the Germans even felt a kind of pride that the greatest
tragedy in world history was their tragedy (97). A British
intelligence report remarked that the Germans "tend to glory in
the distinction of being misunderstood, and maintain that it is
not the Germans who are to blame but the rest of the world for
driving Germany towards nationalist feelings." (98) Of her
husband, Emil Wolff, a professor of English and now the newly
elected pro-rector of the University of Hamburg, Mathilde
Wolff-Moenckeberg wrote in mid-May 1945: "W. is deeply
depressed... He was so passionately devoted to Great Britain and
all it stood for. Now he is disillusioned by the limitless
arrogance and the dishonesty with which they treat us,
proclaiming to the whole world that only Germany could have sunk
so low in such abysmal cruelty and bestiality, that they
themselves are pure and beyond reproach." She share his anger.
"And _who_ destroyed our beautiful cities, regardless of human
life, of women, children, and old people?" she asked in
rhetorical rage. "_Who_ poured down poisonous phosphorus during
the terror raids on unfortunate fugitives, driving them like
living torches into the rivers? _Who_ dive bombed harmless
peasants, women and children, in low-level attacks, and
machine-gunned the defenceless population? _Who_ was it, I ask
you? We are all the same, all equally guilty." (99)

The very house in Potsdam, at Kaiserstrasse 2, in which Truman
and Churchill made the decision, in July 24, to drop an atomic
bomb on Japan had witnessed only weeks earlier the gang rape by
Soviet soldiers of the daughters of the German publisher Gustav
Mueller-Grote (100).

Moreover, as awful as the war had been, it could have been worse.
The weapons of war in Europe had been gruesome, especially the
impersonal bombs and rockets from the air. Those weapons could,
however, have been even more deadly. During the summer of 1944,
when it seemed for a time that the Normandy invasion had stalled,
and when London was being subjected to a steady dose of V-1
rocket attacks, Churchill and his advisers did give thought to
gas and bacteriological warfare. They backed off for the
moment (101). A year later, after the fighting had stopped in
Europe, the Americans, who in relative terms had a light war,
did not twitch as they dropped their new atomic bombs on Japan.
Had these been available earlier, would they not have been used
on Germany? Many Germans were convinced they would have. Guild?
Morality? IN a Central and Eastern European context these were
far more complex issues than the victorious Anglo-American seemed
able in the spring of 1945 to imagine.


Footnotes 

(95) Guenter Grass, _Two States - One Nation?_ trans.
K. Winston and A.S. Wensiger (San Diego: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1990), 96.

(96) The figure normally given is twelve million. Alfred M. de
Zayas, however, puts it at fifteen in _Nemesis at Potsdam: The
Expulsion of the Germans from the East, 3rd ed. (Lincon:
University of Nebraska Press, 1989), xix.

(97) As reported in Luebecker Nachrichten, May 21, 1947.

(98) "Weekly Intelligence Sitrep," Hamburg Intelligence Office,
January 20, 1949, FO 1014/276, Public Round Office, London.

(99) Diary letter, May 17, 1945, Wolff-Moenckeberg, _On the Other
Side, 123.

(100) David G. McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1992), 407-8.

(101) The bacteriological agent considered was code-named "N" and
was probably anthrax. Anthony Cave Brown, _Bodyguard of Lies, 2
vols. (New York: Harper and Rox, 1975), II, 813-14.


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