Canadian Jewish News, Canada
June 8 2005
Germany struggles with its Nazi past
By SHELDON KIRSHNER
ixty years after Adolf Hitler blew his brains out in a Berlin bunker
and Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies in World War
II, Germans are still grappling with the protracted, painful process
of coming to terms with their past.
Yet they are doing it better than anyone else. Japan still refuses to
acknowledge the enormity of the atrocities it committed in China,
while China tiptoes around the crimes of fanatic Maoists during the
Cultural Revolution. Italy has not fully faced up to the fascist
period and France has only begun to look fearlessly at the Vichy era.
Until quite recently, Romania steadfastly denied Jews had been
murdered on its soil during the Holocaust and for decades, Austrians
insisted they were merely victims of Nazism rather than also willing
collaborators.
Germany, however, has not flinched from its historical
responsibilities.
Successive German chancellors, beginning with the conservative Konrad
Adenauer and extending to his current social democratic successor
Gerhard Schroeder, have vowed to keep alive the memory of the Nazi
genocide.
More recently, in light of a 1985 landmark speech in which
then-German president Richard von Weizsacker warned his nation that
`anyone who closes his eyes to the past is blind to the present,’
Germany’s elite has pledged to incorporate Nazi crimes into its
national identity.
On a practical level, Germany has tried to repent by funnelling
billions of dollars of restitution payments to Holocaust survivors,
fighting neo-Nazism and seeking a Europe-wide ban on Nazi insignia,
encouraging the growth of a new Jewish community in Germany, forging
a strong relationship with Israel, preserving former concentration
camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald and building an array of sombre
monuments dedicated to the Jewish victims of National Socialism. The
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which was opened in Berlin
last month after years of passionate debate regarding its size and
form, is but the latest concrete expression of remembrance and
Germany’s first national Holocaust monument.
That there are Germans who complain of Holocaust fatigue, of the kind
archly described by prominent writer Martin Walser in the late 1990s,
is beyond doubt. Micha Brumlik, the director of the Fritz Bauer
Institut in Frankfurt, which studies the impact of the Holocaust on
German society, said that more 50 per cent or Germans no longer wish
to be reminded of the 12-year interregnum that tarnished their
country’s honour and integrity.
This phenomenon goes hand in hand with clever but transparent
attempts to `relativize’ the Holocaust and, by implication, to wipe
the slate clean. Last year, Martin Hohmann, a parliamentarian from
the Christian Democratic Union party, claimed there is no essential
difference between the horrors perpetrated by Jewish communists
during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the horrors carried out by
the Nazis after 1933. Hohmann’s analogy brought to mind the so-called
`historians’ debate,’ which roiled Germany in the 1980s. The basic
but subliminally subversive question it raised was whether the crimes
of the Nazis were indeed unique and whether they were comparable to
Stalin’s reign of terror or the slaughter of the Armenians.
Nevertheless, judging by a survey published in a recent edition of
the newsmagazine Der Spiegel, a plurality of Germans believe that,
due to Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies, they bear a special
responsibility toward Jews.
For approximately the first 10 years after the war, western Germany –
notwithstanding its decision to compensate Jews for their suffering,
to prosecute some Nazi war criminals and to dabble in de-Nazification
– did not seriously deal with what was commonly referred to as the
`unresolved past.’ By contrast, the Communist regime in eastern
Germany, which collapsed with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,
exploited the Nazi epoch within the context of Cold War tensions.
In a new book published by Harvard University Press, Beyond Justice,
author Rebecca Wittmann, a University of Toronto historian, argues
that Adenauer’s priorities were economic recovery and political
democratization rather than a judicial confrontation with the Nazi
legacy.
Repression gave way to full-throated debate in the late 1950s. German
students in Karlsruhe, the seat of the Supreme Court, mounted an
accusative exhibition on the complicit judiciary during Nazi times.
The Diary of Anne Frank galvanized an angry, questioning generation.
Public figures ranging from novelist Gunter Grass to student leader
Joschka Fischer, now Germany’s foreign minister, demanded a frank
accounting.
According to Wittmann, Germany’s first difficult confrontation with
its past coincided with the 1963 Frankfurt trial of 20 former
Auschwitz guards. The trial and execution of Nazi functionary Adolf
Eichmann, plus the Six Day War, were also events of lasting
importance in consciousness raising.
In 1968, a university student named Beate Klarsfeld caused a
sensation by slapping Georg Kiessinger, the German chancellor who had
been a member of the Nazi party. Two years later, his successor,
Willy Brandt, raised eyebrows by kneeling at the Warsaw ghetto
memorial in Warsaw. The 1979 U.S. television miniseries Holocaust
left a deep impression, as did Steven Spielberg’s’ 1993 award-winning
film Schindler’s List.
As a result of these developments, Germany is intensely and
resolutely conscious of its historical obligations, probably far more
so than any other country, save for Israel.
Last month, as I was strolling down Berlin’s Unter den Linden on an
unseasonably cold morning, I caught sight of a blue banner draped on
a grey building on the campus of Humboldt University. It read: `We
thank the Allies for liberating us from the Nazi dictatorship.’
Across the road, at Babel Platz, opposite the faculty of law, there
was a plaque attesting to Nazi book burning. Nearby, strung on a
wrought-iron gate, was a sign: `Sixty years since the end of the war.
What have we learned?’
While exploring a gentrified corner of eastern Berlin known as the
Hackische Hoefe, I literally walked on several small commemorative
brass plates fixed flush with the pavement. The work of Cologne-based
artist Gunter Demnig, they memorialize German Jews deported and
murdered by the Nazis. By all accounts, there are 3,000 such
stolpersteine throughout Germany.
Although Germany has compensated Jewish property owners for their
losses, new cases pop up periodically.
Last year, the descendants of the Wertheim family, which lost its
department store fortune under Nazi Aryanization laws, won a pivotal
court battle that sets the stage for further legal wrangling. Four
months ago, in a parallel case, a judge in Berlin ruled that a Jewish
woman who had been forced to flee Germany was entitled to be
compensated for furnishings in a medical clinic expropriated from her
late parents.
Similarly, reparation payments are a jolting reminder of former days.
Last month, after talks with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims
Against Germany, the German government announced it would compensate
Jews who had been incarcerated in North African labour camps for at
least six months. Vichy France, an ally of Germany, established some
30 camps in Morocco and Algeria in 1941 and 1942. When Germany
occupied Tunisia in 1942 and 1943, 32 camps were set up.
In the wake of this announcement, Germany agreed to add an additional
payment of $11 million (US) to meet the home care needs of survivors
in 17 countries.
Most Germans who personally or administratively killed Jews during
the Holocaust have passed on. But occasionally, newly found
perpetrators, all in their 80s and 90s, are arrested, thus reminding
Germans of their ever-present past. Nearly a year ago, an
unidentified man was taken into custody in Munich, charged with
having organized a massacre of Czech partisans and civilians. In
Gottingen, meanwhile, prosecutors opened an investigation against a
former SS officer, identified only as Hans F., who participated in
the mass shootings of Jews in Ukraine.
Since 1945, 100,000 or so German citizens have been investigated for
participation in war crimes, but only 6,487 have been convicted. Of
these, 13 were executed, 163 sentenced to life imprisonment, 6,197
given temporary prison terms and 114 subjected to fines.
Not surprisingly, the past is also an issue in Germany’s foreign
ministry. In March, after Fischer banned posthumous tributes in the
ministry’s in-house magazine for diplomats who had been Nazi party
members, he created a commission to study the matter.
Clearly, the spectre of the Third Reich continues to haunt Germany.