The Tragedy of Nazi Germany

Peter Phillips

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000008371
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia alemana

Originally published in 1969, this book discusses the many factors which atomised German society from 1870 onwards and thus assisted Nazi evil, and it shows that Hitler and Nazism were mere phenomena of a mass age. The author wrote with the twin qualifications as historian and survivor of the camps. To have lived through it and then dissect it as a scholar is an astonishing achievement and it is this achievement that this book records.

1 Are the Germans Human?

1

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT EVIL. The evil to be explained can be characterized by such words as Hitler, Nazism, totalitarian despotism, the SS, Auschwitz, Belsen, and the Einsatzkommando extermination squads in the East; it is characterized by the slaughter of five or six million Jews, and perhaps as many Slavs, slaughtered in appallingly inhumane ways.

Since parts of the explanation suggested in this book are very controversial, a personal note must be introduced at the start. It is needed because some of the material in Chapter 4, on concentration camps and the extermination policy, comes from personal experience. It is also needed because many parts of what follows suggest that I am sympathetic to Germany—and even to Nazis. I am. But it is not the sympathy of approbation. I abhor many things Germans did, and I abominate beyond words the atrocities of the Nazi régime. It is the sympathy of understanding that these are real people, human beings caught in human situations. This kind of sympathy—so essential to the historians and, indeed, to any civilized person—was nurtured by intimate post-war contacts with Germans, some of whom were Nazis, by the acquaintance with evil and its human springs that the study of history—and life itself—can bring. All these helped teach me that hatred is sterile.

I did not come to this sympathy easily or quickly. In Germany I had been lucky enough (the choice of word is more than charitable to myself) to stay alive after having spent some time in POW camps and well over the average expectation of life in concentration camps, to which I had been sent after escaping from a POW camp and becoming involved with French resistance workers. When I came home in 1945 I hated the Germans. Anyone, even a friend, who bought a Volkswagen or any other German product went down in my estimation, so unbalanced was 1.1 would not listen to German being spoken. The result of this was that, since I had only picked up the language in Germany, my knowledge of it became so rusty that I had to relearn it to study Nazi Germany. I found it difficult, sometimes impossible, to hear the middle movement of the Pathétique Sonata, perhaps the most listenable of all music, partly because its ineffable beauty brought thoughts of life and death, and so, inevitably, of concentration camp, but partly also because Beethoven was German. Most concentration camp inmates hated the Germans—there was nothing odd in that. Only a very few exceptional inmates like the Dutch Jew, Elie Cohen, could within a very short time have sloughed off any hate they might have felt so that he could say in Human Behaviour in the Concentration Camp that, given similar circumstances, any people would have behaved as the Germans did.

Although I hated the Germans, I did not want to wreak revenge when released. In this I was no different from most other inmates. Perhaps our fear of the SS was still so overpowering we thought them invulnerable to anything we could do; perhaps we felt no adequate revenge was possible; perhaps we realized how much evil we ourselves had committed on fellow inmates in our desperate and ruthless efforts at self-preservation.

Like most other inmates, I did not want to talk to anyone about my experiences. We felt that no one who had not been an inmate could begin to understand what concentration camp life was like. On release, I told nothing to the British investigating officer probably for this reason; in any case, he did not want to probe and there were thousands more to pass across his desk. Like other inmates, I did not speak of my experiences to those near and dear to me, partly for the reason already given, partly because I knew it would bring pain to them that such things could have happened to someone they cared for. I am still considerably inhibited in this way. I still find it difficult to tell even my wife and children any more than snippets of what happened.

I tried to forget. But I could not. If I succeeded in daytime, I failed in nightmares, reliving time and again in sleep what I did not want to remember. Yet, these nightmares served one useful purpose. Some of them remind me of my own inhumanity to other inmates as well as the inhumanity of concentration camp officials to me. I held no official position in the camps, I was merely an ordinary inmate, but to stay alive one had to do inhumanely self-2 centred things. One instance. I stood and watched while the man who was then my best friend was beaten and kicked to death in front of me and several other inmates. I did not move an inch or utter a sound of protest for fear of the inevitable death that would come to me if I did. I may even have been glad that it was he who was being brutally killed, and not I. Other inmates have confessed to such a feeling in similar circumstances, and I am no braver—if that is the word—than they. I have probably repressed that terrible memory. Another example. I never volunteered to be killed in place of someone else; the camp officials cared only for numbers, not individuals, for extermination. Like many others, I feel guilty that I survived, and by so doing, ensured someone else’s death. Such guilt thoughts helped me hate the Germans more.

Failure to forget made me, after many years, decide to face up to the whole horrifying subject of concentration camps, Nazism, Hitler and the rest. If I could understand, perhaps I could exorcize the horror of the memories. I undertook an intensive study of Nazi Germany. Remembering my own inhumanity to others made me wonder—perhaps paradoxically—whether even the worst SS man was still human. So, after many years of hatred, I came to the kind of sympathy that (in the words of Charles Darwin) ‘feels for the most debased’. History cannot be properly studied without it. Nazi evil certainly cannot be understood and explained without it. No evil can.

The Nazi evil is one of the worst in history—some say the worst. Despotic denial of freedom, and the atrocious inhumanity that always in some measure goes with it, are no modern discoveries. Names like Caligula, Nero, Ivan the Terrible prove that Hitler had his predecessors, even if, compared with him, they were mere tyros. Certainly, except for Stalin’s liquidations, at no time and in no other place has the extent of the inhumanity been so great if measured in terms of numbers annihilated. The savage holocausts of Attila, Genghis Khan, Tamburlane were, statistically, child’s play compared with Hitler’s. However bloodcrazed they might have been, earlier despots intent on butchery and carnage lacked the technical and administrative resources available to the modern death-dealing tyrant. A totalitarian Cain in the twentieth century can be a slayer of millions. This is a macabre tribute to the development of modern technology and administration.

No doubt the horror in photographs of the atrocities of Auschwitz, Belsen, Dachau and other extermination centres is no greater than that in Goya’s The Disasters of War, depictions of atrocities in Napoleon’s War in Spain; or in Callot’s Grandes Misères de la Guerre, etchings of cruelties perpetrated in the Thirty Years War. In fact, the horror may be less since the camera is not so adept at communicating emotion as the great artist.

The terrible treatment meted out by the Syracusans to the Athenians defeated in the Sicilian expedition so vividly described in Book Seven of Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War; the monstrous cruelty of the anti-Albigensian crusaders who totally wiped out those they deemed heretics; the ruthless killing by whites of Red Indians in America, Bushmen and Hottentots and Bantu in Southern Africa, Aborigines in Australia, and uncounted Indians after the 1857 Mutiny, are sad witness that the Nazis did not invent inhuman atrocities.

But where the earlier despotisms and atrocities do little more than leave a nasty taste in the mouth, Nazi tyranny and crimes against humanity shock profoundly because they seem to most people unnatural in the twentieth century—at least in the Western world. Despite the erosions of faith, hope and charity caused by Auschwitz, Stalinist purges and Hiroshima, in the West today belief in inevitable progress and the fundamental goodness of man persists strongly from the nineteenth century, so aptly called the century of hope. Shakespeare, for once, was wrong when he remarked that it is the poor that are hopeful; rather, it is in the affluent breast that hope springs eternal.

It is also much easier to be kind and merciful when the house is centrally heated and has running-water, a W.C. and a bath; when the chairs are dunlopilloed, a car is in the garage, clothes are plentiful, three good meals a day are regular, the children at school, and a 40-hour week, an adequate pay-packet and an annual paid holiday assured, and, for everyday, at least six hours leisure and eight hours sleep are possible. In the English-speaking world since the nineteenth century the pattern of life has been steadily approaching this acme of materialism, at least for the upper and middle classes. For them, violence has, by and large, been confined to wars abroad, the sensational newspapers, TV Westerns, and James Bond sex-and-sadism spasms. They—and most historians—with their eyes glued on the topside of society, have overlooked or been ignorant of the commonplace violence, cruelty and inhumanity that have been so much a part of working-class domestic life. Not surprisingly, working-class people leave few records for historians. Only very rarely has a novelist—an Arthur Morison or a Louis-Ferdinand Céline—used the working class as material for its own sake. Less often, but still only occasionally has a Gerhart Hauptmann, Emile Zola or D. H. Lawrence exploited for ulterior purposes the drama of a strike or the begriming brought by industrialism. The official portraitist of society does not venture down slum streets.

Nor does he heed the pessimistic warnings of the direction being taken by Western Civilization uttered by all the greatest Western imaginative writers in the twentieth century: Eliot, Gide, Joyce, Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Mann, Pound, Proust, Yeats. The official picture is one of steady, swift material progress over the last 100 years, engineered by fantastic leaps forward in science and technology, inspired by spreading education, and organized by ever newer methods of mass production and distribution conceived in executive suites and huge office blocks. The twentieth-century English-speaking world may be a pecuniary paradise for psychologists, but there can be no doubt that it is an age of material comfort. And comfort soothes the savage breast.

Adding to this sense of comfort has been the growth of a steady, stable, evolutionary democracy. Two of its main pillars have been restraint of conflict and respect for the humanity of the other man. Those who call themselves democrats have not infrequently fallen short of their ideals, but, by and large, they have not fallen so far short that their way of life deserves the invective of the acidulous American writer, H. L. Mencken, who called democracy the worship of jackals by jackasses. Winston Churchill was never more right when he judged that democracy, for all its many and manifest faults, is the least imperfect form of government yet invented.

Unlike John Wesley who looked on all the world as his parish, Englishmen—and, for that matter, English-speaking peoples generally—look upon their parish as all the world. This attitude has affected their view of history, particularly political history. They see the natural, proper course of political development after the English or American model as ‘freedom broadening down from precedent to precedent’ and culminating in parliamentary democracy. Unblushingly ignoring the fact that most of the world is, and always has been, ruled non-democratically, they see any foreign kinds of development as deviations from the norm, unnatural. This is the Podsnap interpretation of history, and there are still numerous twentieth-century Podsnaps who think the natives begin at Boulogne.

This comfortable, stably ruled condition of English-speaking man is one reason why many of them have preferred to close their eyes, or merely blink at, Nazi totalitarianism and atrocities. Optimists—and they are the majority—close their eyes out of cosiness, joie de vire, and a credulousness that it won’t—can’t— happen here. Pessimists do so out of pain, fear of overpopulation and the spread of the bomb, and the barbiturate that all one can do is eat, drink, and be as merry as possible, for tomorrow we all die nuclearized. So, whether pessimists or optimists, they shudder away in revulsion from, or masochistically enjoy, the obscenity of the ashes to ashes of Auschwitz. Some, perhaps rationalizing a little, possibly from charity, advocate we should forgive and forget. After all, Hitler, Himmler, and the exterminated Jews and Slavs have been dead these 20 and more years. Let the dead bury their dead.

Understandable as all this is, there are cogent reasons for not forgetting and forgiving. In the first place, those who suffered German inhumanity neither want to, nor indeed can forget. Although time is reputed to dull the worst memories, and although the sufferings can be thrust to the back of the mind in daylight, they recur constantly in sleep in nightmares—and always will until the last sufferer is dead. It is something one has to learn to live with. Victims and their sufferings do not deserve to be forgotten, if only in the same way as Armistice Days—and the Crucifixion— do not deserve to be forgotten.

It ill becomes those who did not suffer at the hands of the Nazis, to advocate forgiving and forgetting. After all, it is by no means sure that any crime against humanity should be forgiven, except in the sense that a transgressor—even a Hitler or Himmler or Eichmann—should not cease to be regarded as still human. He should not be regarded as irremediably marred, as beyond the pale. We should do all we can to love the sinner again; but, equally, we should still continue to hate the sin. And this certainly needs remembering.

If we do not continue to hate the sin, if we do forget these crimes against humanity, then we overlook the evidence on which we base our proper condemnation of the motives which caused them, and our condemnation will lack effectiveness. It may be that neither Germany nor any other country will sink to such abysmal depths of inhumanity as under Hitler. And if they do not, it may be partly because these crimes and their motives have been remembered and understood. Understanding cannot be won without as full a remembering as possible. No one, surely, could reasonably suggest that the Nazis have been the last criminals against humanity, or that we understand more than a fraction of the reasons why such crimes continue to be committed. Since 1945, although not in such terrible volume, cruel atrocities have been committed—still are being committed—in sacred ideological names. Shibboleths still single out those for slaughter, and, since 1945, modern Gileadites have massacred Ephraimites in Korea, French Algeria, Kenya, Portuguese Angola, in Russian Siberian slave camps, Chinese purges, Indonesia’s annihilation of Communists, and on both sides of the 17th parallel in Vietnam.

When Christina Rossetti wrote ‘Better by far that you should forget and smile, than that you should remember and be sad’, she was partly right. Yet, however much we want, we cannot banish sadness completely from our lives, and it is not even desirable that we should so want. Sadness is an important part of what makes us human. ‘History, though it may make a man wise, cannot fail to make him sad.’ When Bishop Stubbs said that, he did not intend a weak withdrawal from the fight, or resignation to the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind that Gibbon thought constituted history. He intended a vigorous sadness which understands man’s infinite capacity for good and bad, weakness and strength, loving the best and doing the worst. We keep alive the sad stories of the past—the evil that men do—to help ourselves and others know how to live better, by enlarging our understanding of man’s humanity and inhumanity, that is, our humanity and our inhumanity, actual and potential. To do this we must court sadness, since, without this catharsis, no healthy moral life is possible, no lessening of man’s inhumanity to man is feasible. Cure cannot come without understanding. To understand we must be willing to bear sadness. This certainly does not mean sentimentality or self-righteousness, seeing ourselves always as those wronged. We have to see ourselves not merely as potential victims, but also as potential executioners. Even with Nazis, we have to say There but for the grace of God, go I.’ We need to be all those who were in the garden of Gethsemane (Peter and Judas included), Pilate in his house, and the centurion in his barracks.

That is—or should be—why we mourn past tragedies on anniversaries: a Good Friday, an Armistice Day. The words ‘lest we forget’ have become so trite, so stifled by lip-service, in our world which has witnessed the death of millions by violence. But clearly we owe it to those who died and to ourselves to have remembrance days. We owe it far from least to those millions who died because of their race between 1933 and 1945. This was their Calvary, and ours, too. All Calvaries are shared by those who died there, and those alive.

We remember not only in tribute to the past, a worthy enough aim on its own, but also for the future. Hitlerism and Nazism were not confined to Hitler and the Nazis. They were only the worst instances. The flaws which they enlarged to the extreme are human flaws, shared in some measure by all of us. The Nazis were the worst perpetrators of the kind of crimes they committed. But they were only the worst. Even Nazis are, in significant ways, ‘as other men’.

For all these reasons, it is essential not to forgive and forget. If Dionysius is right, that history is philosophy teaching by example, we must remember in order to understand what is, undoubtedly, human inhumanity, and what are its myriad, complex causes. The historian himself may not wish to pronounce moral judgments on this inhumanity. He may prefer to leave that to the philosopher skilled in ethics or the clergyman practised in theology. But obviously the historian by his training and his aims should be best fitted to establish the facts about past inhumanity and its multiple causes. After all, inhumanity, if only because it is so human, is very much part of the proper study of mankind.

2

The monstrous enormity of Nazi crimes stuns the mind, especially one swathed in English-speaking stability and moderation. One murder—ten—may be able to be grasped, though not accepted, by the mind. But when the number is millions, and the millions are men, women and children, and they are slaughtered in gas-chambers and mass graves, it is hard beyond measure to compre-8 hend the fact as real or human. So, the reaction of the historian to the enormity gravitates to the sheer stupor of mere narration. Or if comprehension is attempted, the explanations are only likely to be profound and aware of the complicity of human behaviour if comparatively small aspects of Nazism are studied. Explanations of the whole tyranny and holocaust lean to the superficial.

All this has coloured the literature, historical and otherwise, on Nazi Germany. The two most common explanations are, first, that it was the product of the country’s history and German national character; and, second, that it was a conspiracy of Hitler and his Nazi thugs with men at the top level, whether generals, industrialists, non-democratic politicians or a Presidential camarilla, each being blamed according to the bias of the particular historian. Both explanations are open to serious objections.

German history is rich enough to supply evidence for ...