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What the survivors taught me

February 5, 2015 13:17
Relief: Refugees returning to Paris after the German capture of the city, 1940. Some 1.6 million people who had fled Paris before the arrival of the Nazis returned to the capital after France's capitulation.

By

Anonymous,

Anonymous

6 min read

How was it possible that during the 20th century people from Germany, a cultured nation at the heart of Europe, perpetrated such crimes? In my attempt to answer this, I was helped by two accidents of history. The first was I met many former Nazis at exactly the moment when most had nothing to lose by speaking openly. Fifteen years earlier, holding down influential jobs and pillars of their communities, they would not have spoken. The second fortuitous circumstance was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the access to Eastern Europe – not just to archives but people as well.

As I travelled, however, I became aware that the question was not confined to Germany. In the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe, I encountered something frightening: virulent an- tisemitism. I had expected people to tell me how much they hated the Communists. But to hate Jews? It seemed ludicrous, especially since there were hardly any Jews left in the places I was visiting – the Nazis had seen to that. Yet the old man in the Baltic States who had helped the Nazis shoot Jews in 1941 still thought he had done the right thing. And even some of those who had fought against the Nazis held wild antisemitic beliefs. One Ukrainian veteran, who had fought bravely for the Ukrainian Nationalist partisans against the Nazis and the Red Army and had been persecuted as a result, asked me: "What do you think of the view that there is an international conspiracy of Jewish financiers operating out of New York which is trying to destroy all non-Jewish governments?" I looked at him for a second. Not being Jewish myself, it is always something of a shock to encounter naked antisemitism from an unexpected source. I replied: "It's total garbage." The old partisan took a sip of vodka. "Really," he said, "That's your opinion. Interesting."

Those who think that this history is of little relevance today, or that the corrosive antisemitism was somehow confined to the Nazis, would do well to remember that the extermination of the Jews was not imposed by a few mad people upon an unwilling Europe. Indeed, there was nothing 'uniquely exterminatory' about German society before the Nazis came to power and many Jews had fled to Germany in the 1920s to seek sanctuary.

And having questioned a significant number of perpetrators from all of the three totalitarian regimes of World War II - the Nazis, Stalin, and the Japanese - and having written comprehensively about all three dictatorships, I can confirm that the Nazi war criminals I met were different. In the Soviet Union, the climate of fear under Stalin was pervasive in a way it never was in Germany under Hitler. Whereas in Nazi Germany, unless you were a member of a specific risk group, the Jews, the Communists, the gypsies, homosexuals and, indeed, anyone who opposed the regime – you could live comparatively free from fear. People felt personally secure and happy enough that they would have voted to keep Hitler in power if there had been free and fair elections. By contrast, in the Soviet Union, not even Stalin's closest, most loyal colleagues, ever felt they could sleep securely.