When trying to evaluate
the historical and aesthetic value of books about the Holocaust, I have found
that it is important to find a way to contextualize the language, thoughts and
feelings of the people who were victimized, not only interrogate what did they
know—what books had they read before they were forced into ghettos, arrested
and sent to one form of concentration camp another, for slave labour or for
immediate execution, what opinions did
they confront in newspapers, in daily conversations or over the radio. For most
middle class Jews, more the adults than the children, the rise of the Nazis to
power in the 1930s came as a shock and the new regulations that began to
separate them from their normal lives was an insult to the belief they had of
being assimilated, tolerated and accepted as German, Czech, Romanian, Polish
and so on. They, of course, knew about
anti-Semitism and may have been excluded from professional associations and
social spaces, but never to the extent that they feared for their lives. In
Germany especially, most Jews did not contemplate an escape until it was too
late. They had families to care for, businesses to run and networks of friends
to keep them safe until, as they often hoped, the ridiculous and un-German new
regime fell due to its own incompetence and stupidity. The idea of moving to decadent
France or class-ridden Britain, let alone to brash and crass America often seemed
out of the question.
But what about the so-called
“good Germans”? Is that in itself a tautology? Catrine Clay says she thought so
before she started writing this book. The more she studied the documents, read
the autobiographies, talked to Germans who were alive then or are the surviving
children and grandchildren of such as deserve the title “Good Germans”, however,
the more she became convinced that not all the forty million or so citizens who
did not vote for the National Socialists were completely cowed by the new order
of cruelty and injustice. However, is she able to convince us today that there
was a sufficient number or proportion of such Good Germans to rescue the honour
of the nation and place the Nazi Party and its officials, passive supporters
and quivering facilitators of their nefarious deeds, not least the Holocaust,
to category of evil distinct from all the others? She thinks so, and by the end
of her book she places them in the same category as the resistance fighters,
sabotage workers in the munitions factories and other anti-Nazis in the
territories conquered by Hitler and ruled by Quislings and Vichy-niks.
Before the seizure of
power (Machtergrifung) by the
National Socialists, less than a third of the Weimar Republic’s citizens voted
for Hitler and his street thugs. The Socialists and the Communists were
formidable, but they mistrusted one another and did not work together when such
co-operation would have pushed the National Socialists out of the electoral
game; and the old-time monarchists, military officers, and other right-wing groups
while they mostly had disdain for the Brown Shirts, also had distrust in the Volk, the workers and the liberal and
left wing parties, so that they too missed the opportunity to mount a strong
opposition to Hitler and his gang of criminals and thugs. By far the majority
of people were worn down by the losses in the Great War, feared the anarchy of
the civil wars that followed, and the weight of joblessness, food-shortages and
hyper-inflation, and they went along with the Nazis at least until the military
reverses began in around 1942, the Allies started bombing German cities, and
the dread of Soviet occupation paralyzed even thoughts of an organized
resistance or uprising. Except for a few rare individuals, even amongst the
Christian churches, no one was ready to take on the Nazis at their own game;
for whoever did put his head up, was soon beaten down, sent to prison or
concentration camp—or disappeared in the night. Those who were not “shot while
trying to escape,” were hanged or guillotined.
Clay would us believe,
however, that the Good Germans acted sufficiently in their efforts to make them
equivalent to the resisters and underground saboteurs in the occupied lands,
such as the French or Dutch. But for all their vaunted efficiency and
meticulous attention to detail, when it came to organizing a coup d’état or assassination of the
National Socialist leadership, the would-be democrats failed miserably. The
church leaders who were fearless in denouncing the regime, however, were
hobbled by their pacifism and reluctance to take a life. Even when they knew
that hundreds of thousands of people were dying in a futile effort to defeat
Russia or to hold back the Allies in their invasions of North Africa, Sicily
and Normandy, the removal of Hitler by violence was too much for them to contemplate.
Meanwhile, to stave off the inevitable defeat, the Nazis robbed the conquered
territories of food, clothing and furniture, brought in forced labour, and sent
in Hitlerjungend teenagers to fight
on the front lines once the boundaries of the Reich were breached.
Another factor that she
keeps hitting home with is that in the mid- to late-1930s, German emissaries of
the liberal political parties, the military and diplomatic corps tried in vain
to enlist the support of the French and British governments to virtually
guarantee a successful coup or regime
change in Berlin. Everyone was still in
a state of shock from the 1914-1918 war that they could not contemplate
entering into another, no matter how just the cause or strategic the necessity.
Lacking such agreement and showing nothing but hesitancy and cowardice, the
French and English made it impossible for the Good Germans to overthrow the
hated Nazi regime. Or so they claimed.
Good Germans, for the
most part, put as much emphasis on remaining Germans as being “good”, at least
in their own eyes. Many of them, such as Communists and left-wing academics
also preferred to look to the East after the War.
As for the Americans,
on the one hand, we could excuse their hesitancy because they were still
working their way out of the Great Depression; and on the other, there was a
deep-seated desire to withdraw back inside “Fortress America” and leave the
rest of the world to stew in its own juices. But there were other factors that
allowed FDR to put off doing more than issue pious words (“we have nothing to
fear but fear itself”) and provide not-so-covert aid to the British Empire
through “Lend-Lease,” which the Americans demanded be paid back when England
was still recovering from the disasters of World War Two and the loss of the
Empire. One factor was the popular leaning towards backing Germany, with
sympathy for what was felt to be the harshness of Versailles reparations and
what the Germans called “the stab in the back”: on the other, the anti-Semitism
at all levels of American society, with Washington unwilling to be seen to be aiding
the Jews make war on the rest of the world. In hindsight, of course, not only
did the USA come out as the only superpower able to hold back the Soviet Union
from taking over most of Europe and Asia, but, thanks to the desperation of
Jewish intellectuals, artists and scientists to escape the Nazi persecutions,
but the recipient of a tremendous brain drain from the Old Countries to the New
World.
This not always subtle
allusion to the situation in America in the wake of the 6 January 2021
insurrection and promise of a so-called “reinstatement” in mid-August gives a
particular edge to her book and suggests an unstated agenda in bringing it out
now. As we all too well know in our own period of right wing, nationalist and
racial tyrannies, including the never-ending force of Trumpian militias and
bureaucratic underminers of democratic institutions and principles, it is not
easy to oppose the Big Lie, the pervasive violence (more Americans are shot
each year in mass murders, domestic violence and suicide) than most countries
at war. And close to half the votes in the 2020 presidential elections went to
the Republicans. Not only is anti-science and anti-[rationality rife in many
western states today, but a persistent pandemic of coronavirus is exacerbated
by resisters to vaccination, masking and social distancing. The situation,
hardly mentioned by Clay in her book, except in the repeated catch-phrase about
Hitler “going to make Germany great again,” nevertheless constantly lurks just
below the surface.
In brief, Clay shows
that many hundred, even thousands of Good Germans did their best to resist the
Nazi regime, and she tells the stories of
Socialists, Communists, Prussian aristocrats, educated civil servants,
intellectuals, teachers, religious youths, Christian leaders, shopkeepers and
police officers—and when arrested to accept martyrdom for the cause. But their
best, it seems, was never good enough. In retrospect their numbers were not
sufficient to warrant letting Germany off the historical hook either before,
during or, especially after, the war. After the defeat of Hitler, there was
only a perfunctory effort in bringing war criminals to justice, holding
collaborators to account and removing from positions of power and authority all
the university professors, court judges and high-level bureaucrats who
permitted the Holocaust to run its course. The need was to reconstruct a strong
NATO-oriented Germany in Central Europe and to stand against the threats of the
Cold War from the USSR and the Warsaw Pact counties.
Her focus is on six individuals and she draws upon their memoirs, autobiographies and other published works, does interviewing where she can, and ploughs through the heaps of historical studies available. One has to read with a finger stuck in the last pages of the book where she lists her sources page by page, rather than having the convenience of notes at the foot of the page. But as there is some popular animus against the scholarly appearance of pages, publishers probably are responsible for this tedious way of following Clay’s use of sources—and, if and where possible, checking her versions against the original. Her approach is also personal, in that she tries to reconstruct scenes, reproduce speeches, and speculate on thoughts and feelings of the characters, and this is why it would be so much better to check what she writes against what is supposedly testimonies and confessions of the historical persons focused on. Though I recognize some of the persons and scenes from other writers on Nazi Germany, not everything seems to be right, or at least not strong enough evidence for what is claimed.
