After the Reich (66 page)

There were occasional incidences of fury directed at the Germans, but they were rare. The greatest act of lawlessness committed by the Jews in post-war Germany was the attempt to kill a large number of POWs in Nuremberg. Abba Kovner, who had led an armed revolt in the Vilna Ghetto, founded the Nakom (‘Revenge’) Group and conceived the idea of poisoning the drinking water in the city. One member of the group found a job in the waterworks, but David Ben-Gurion refused to allow him to go ahead with the scheme. They turned instead to the camp, where 12,000 POWs were kept, many of them ex-SS or Nazis, and succeeded in poisoning the bread. The prisoners suffered terrible pains, but none died. The perpetrators fled to Palestine and resisted all attempts to make them face justice in Germany.
⁷⁷

The afterlife of the German Jews was a long time fading. Behind barbed wire they continued their shadowy existence for over a decade. The last Jewish DP camps closed in 1957.

PART III

Crime and Punishment

12

Guilt

We experienced the false indignation of other lemurs who came to the place of lies to dig up the dead and expose the decomposed bodies; to measure them, count them and photograph them, as it was their aim. They played the role of prosecutor only to gain for themselves the right to base revenge and then to satisfy themselves with similar orgies . . . The hand that wants to help man in all this, and to lead him forth in his blindness, must be free from sin and acts of violence.

Ernst Jünger, Der Friede, Vienna 1949, 21

How Could We Have Known?

‘T
he Allies have ceased to threaten us with bombs, now they speak to us like a nanny, one who gets on our nerves with her bony index finger and her shrill old maid’s voice. You get the feeling of sitting in a classroom where you are constantly being told off in such a way that even the best-behaved pupil will after a short while become obstinate.’
¹
Many Germans reacted to the Allies’ revelations with disbelief. Ursula von Kardorff met a typical old Nazi woman who dismissed their broadcasts as so many lies. She simply didn’t want to believe in the atrocity stories. When they were shown pictures of piles of corpses in Dachau they said these were pictures of the dead after the Allied bombing raid on Dresden. Such was the effect of Goebbels’s propaganda.
²
When a Polish Jew told Käthe von Normann he had escaped the fate of twenty-three members of his family only by being incarcerated in a Siberian POW camp, the truth dawned on her. She noted in her diary, ‘What a mess was caused by this fallacious doctrine!’ and cursed Hitler for not making peace.
³

James Stern found in the course of his interviews in Munich that the responses to the questions about concentration camps varied. One working-class man asked him how German Americans were being treated. Stern replied, ‘With extraordinary fairness’ - something we now know to be untrue. When faced with the atrocities of the German camps, the man’s response was measured: if it were true it was ‘die grösste Schweinerei die es gibt!’ (the most disgusting thing he had ever heard!). A young doctor he talked to, who came from a rich family, referred to the treatment of the Jews as a
Kulturschande
(a national disgrace), but he thought the German occupation of Russia had been carried out with no more brutality than the American occupation of Munich.
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Carl Zuckmayer thought there were relatively few of these
Ewig-gestrige
(yesterday’s men) who believed their current situation was all down to the Allies and that the Germans had done nothing to deserve it. Rare were the Germans, even in the safety of their broken homes or in the corners of a dim-lit, ill-heated
Kneipe
, who rued the hanging of the defendants at Nuremberg. Most Germans would have rejected the extreme charge of ‘collective guilt’, however, on the ground that there was very little an individual could have done to stop Hitler’s warmongering and killing even if he had been fully aware that it was happening. ‘Collective guilt’ was also changing its meaning with the opening of the concentration camps. Originally the Germans were all guilty of starting an aggressive war, as their fathers had been in 1914. Now they had all committed, aided or abetted mass murder. Ernst Jünger thought he recognised an Allied agenda: ‘The thesis of collective guilt has two interwoven skeins. For the conquered it means “I must atone for my brother’s guilt”, for the victors it affords practical support for their indiscriminate looting.’
⁵
Some, like the philosopher Karl Jaspers, however, were prepared to assent to the lesser accusation of ‘general responsibility’.
⁶

Jaspers in Heidelberg was now the respected voice of post-war German philosophy. He tackled the subject of German complicity in his post-war lecture-cum-essay delivered to the medical faculty: ‘The Question of German Guilt’
.
Doctors had been especially prominent in acts of atrocity against the Jews. He defended the necessary evil of the Allied presence: ‘They stop us from becoming bumptious and teach us modesty.’
⁷
The whole world was wagging its finger at Germany. Not just the victors, but also Germans who had opted for exile. Germans might feel they had other things to think about. ‘The horizon has become narrow. People don’t want to hear about guilt or the past. They don’t care about the judgement of history, all they want is for the suffering to cease . . .’
⁸
Jaspers warned, however, that ‘it is the duty of all us Germans to look clearly at the question of guilt and understand the consequences’.
⁹

He had lived in Germany during the war. ‘Germany under the Nazi regime was a prison. The guilt of falling into this prison is political guilt. Once the gates were shut, however, a prison break from within was no longer possible. Any responsibility, any guilt, attributed to the imprisoned - whenever it arose - must prompt the question whether there was anything they could do.’ In a lecture delivered on 15 August, he returned to the theme, but he was kind to Germany and the Germans: ‘Thousands of Germans either sought death or were killed anyway because of their opposition to the regime. The majority of them remain anonymous. We survivors did not seek death. We did not go out on to the streets when our Jewish friends were led away, nor did we cry out until they destroyed us as well. We preferred to stay alive on the weak if justified grounds that our death would not have helped anyway. That we live is our guilt. We know before God what deeply humbles us.’
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‘The Question of German Guilt’ helped to define a form of orthodoxy in the early years of the Federal Republic, even if the author himself thought it the most ‘misconstrued piece of his collected works’. One of Jaspers’s favourite students had been Hannah Arendt, who had spent the war years in safety in America. She too tackled the question of guilt in her book
Organised Guilt and Universal Responsibility
. Like Jaspers she felt it did not help to tar all Germans with the same brush. ‘Where all are guilty, nobody in the last analysis can be judged.’ It was an echo of Jaspers’s own line that ‘It runs contrary to sensible argument to make a whole nation guilty of a crime. The criminal is always an individual.’ ‘The
collective guilt of a nation
or a group within a nation
cannot therefore exist
and with the exception of political responsibility, there is neither criminal, moral nor metaphysical guilt.’
¹¹
Joseph Frings, archbishop of Cologne, adopted a similar line. As far as the war was concerned, ‘The Führer took such decisions on his own and at most consulted his closest advisers.’ As regards the atrocities, he maintained that most people had learned about them after the war, from the BBC: ‘The German people are much more the victims than the perpetrator of these atrocities.’
¹²

Jaspers’s wife Gertrud was a Jew, and, although she was to some extent protected through her marriage to the prominent intellectual, by the end of the war she was in hiding. Jaspers nonetheless felt that most of his fellow countrymen were not evil: ‘Generalisations about the mentalities and behaviour of millions of Germans in the Nazi era are bound to be of limited application - apart, perhaps, from the generalisation that, for the great mass of the population, the figurative colours to look for are less likely to be stark black and white than varying and chequered shades of grey.’
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Zuckmayer was also fairly indulgent. He believed that the tally of Nazis left in German society lay at around 20 per cent - the ‘blacks’. The ‘whites’ were equally represented, with 60 per cent of Germans being ‘grey’ or fellow travellers. Around 40 per cent of the ‘greys’ were an acceptable shade, while another 20 per cent were dark grey, verging on black. Zuckmayer thought the percentages given would apply to most countries, and Germany was no worse than them. Thinking back to that time, the literary critic Karl-Heinz Bohrer estimates that 70 per cent of Germans were ‘nationalists’ in 1945, which meant that they made common cause with the Nazis, even if they said they disapproved of them.
¹⁴

For everyone who had heard stories ‘from the east’ - transmitted by relatives in the army who had witnessed atrocities - there were equal numbers of ordinary Germans who genuinely knew nothing. One who merely suspected that terrible things were being done was Gertrud Jaspers - who might have experienced the horrors at first hand had the authorities been able to prise her away from her husband. The Allied revelations came as a profound shock to her; they painted a picture she had never imagined.
¹⁵

Re-education through Propaganda

James Stern ran into the American propaganda campaign soon after arriving in Bad Nauheim. He observed the groups of Germans huddled in front of a billboard. At first they were silent, then they began to shake their heads and walk away, but it was no good - the poster was everywhere. ‘Who is guilty?’ it read. Beneath those words were a number of photographs showing human skeletons, charred bones, prisoners in uniform hanging from gibbets and children dead from starvation. This poster was to be seen throughout the zone.

According to Stern, no German commented. Some moaned, one or two stifled a cry, but generally they looked on in silence before moving away. Another poster in the series answered the question posed by the first: ‘This town is guilty! You are guilty!’
¹⁶
Others report that, despite the propaganda posters, the Final Solution was very little discussed in the 1940s or 1950s, possibly because images of slaughtered children aroused memories of the Allied bombing campaign which was still fresh in German minds. The Western Allies failed to pursue their quarry after the first campaign. That would fit with the diminishing enthusiasm for trial and denazification. By 1948 it had fizzled out.
¹⁷

The most famous propaganda film of all was the Movietone footage shot at Belsen by the British cameraman Paul Wyand. Even today it remains the most powerful account of the abuse of human life and dignity in the Nazi camps. Wyand turned up at Belsen on 23 April 1945. It is not clear whether the film was intended as propaganda from the outset, or whether Wyand and his crew were there to record what the British were doing to save lives. Wyand interviewed a number of inmates and guards. The latter were humiliated and made to pose in front of heaps of bodies. Dr Fritz Klein, who had been involved in selection at Auschwitz, had been burying bodies for a week. Wyand worked with a Polish interpreter. Klein, who was already half insane from the work he had been forced to do, gave an incorrect answer to a question. When the interpreter relayed this to Wyand, the British beat him with rifle butts. Klein was then filmed in a pit filled with corpses. Sometimes the film had the wrong effect. People found it hard to cope. Alfred Karzin saw it in a cinema in London’s Piccadilly: ‘many laughed’.
¹⁸

Doubts were expressed about the use of such grotesque images, but one writer has raised the valid point that where we have no pictures we find the slaughter intangible, and easier to forgive. There are, for example, few revealing pictures of the Soviet camps, or of the fate of their victims.
¹⁹
There were mixed reactions in America. One obvious target was the large German American population of the Mid-West. Joseph Pulitzer from St Louis was one of them. He insisted that the city’s Kiel (
sic
) Auditorium be festooned with photo-murals taken from the camps. Others, such as James Agee in the
Nation
of 19 May 1945, were unconvinced. Agee refused to look at the pictures and questioned their propaganda role, which was to prepare the American people for an ‘extremely hard peace against Germany’. The pictures elicited another protest from Milton Mayer in the
Progressive
who spoke of a Carthaginian peace and said ‘vengeance won’t raise the tortured dead’.
²⁰

Meanwhile the camps had become the object of a ghoulish voyeurism. The former prisoners continued to die in droves (200 a day in Mauthausen), while journalists, congressmen, senators and soldiers paraded around the huts. At Buchenwald tours began with the iron hook and the crematorium before visitors saw the macabre collection of tattooed-skin lampshades, shrunken heads and pickled organs apparently put together by Ilse Koch. Dead bodies were left around for days for the visitors to see. A tour of a concentration camp became part of the ‘ritual of exorcism and revelation in the occupied Germany of late April and early May 1945’. Typical was the reaction of Representative John Vorys who visited the Little Camp at Buchenwald and saw what appeared to be ‘absent-minded apes. Many were professors, doctors, writers or generals . . . They had preserved their spirits and had not sunk mentally to the bestial level of their living.’
²¹