The Holocaust, Germany and a Cosy Myth

Now Holocaust Day is over, it's worth looking at how much British people actually know about the Holocaust, this horrible event that we must never forget. It comes as a shock to learn that one in twenty people interviewed for a poll organised by the Holocaust Memorial Trust do not believe the Holocaust happened at all; 8% believe the scale of the slaughter was exaggerated. The Guardian comments:

"Almost half of those questioned said they did not know how many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and one in five grossly underestimated the number, saying that fewer than two million were killed".

This is understandably blamed upon lack of education about WW2, but I know personally that such ignorance occurred among older generations.

In the 60s, I remember a talk given at a church youth club given by a man who'd served in the Army during WW2. He introduced his talk by telling us that when the Nazi Party (he pronounced it "Nazzy") came to power in Germany, Nazi stormtroopers collected Bibles from local churches and publicly burned them, as seen in the picture above. He was not alone in this; I knew other people of his generation who believed the same.

Only one problem: this is simply not true. The truth, which can be found in any textbook, documentary or reputable internet source that covers the period, is that the SA, (Sturmabteilung) following the Nazi takeover, burned books taken from university and public libraries written by left-wing, liberal and Jewish authors. Disgustingly, these book burnings happened with the active support of the vast majority of German students and academics. Lady Rumbold, the wife of the British Ambassador, who witnessed the burnings, asked why, if the Nazis were burning Jewish books, were they not burning Bibles? The Bible-burning myth seems to have persisted among the WW2 generation, despite an abundance of contrary evidence.

Another myth about Germany and the Nazis was expressed to me repeatedly by a friend who died recently. He asserted:

"I don't believe the German people knew about the Holocaust".

He never offered any evidence for this belief; he simply repeated his unsubstantiated opinion. Like many people of this type, he expressed this opinion so often, it seemed to become an established fact for him. To be fair, a lot of German people who lived through the war said this too - "Davon haben wir nicht gewusst!"  (We didn't know anything about it). Germany, in the immediate post-war years, resembled post-Apartheid South Africa (SA) now. As you can't find anyone in SA now who supported Apartheid, you couldn't find anyone in Germany, barring war criminals, who'd supported the Nazi regime or endorsed their policies. Either they had "been misled" or (hello!) "only obeying orders". I regard this as a "cosy myth" (my invented term), which I will discuss below.

Now, it's very difficult, after many intervening decades, to establish what 78 million people - the population of Germany in WW2 - knew or didn't know. And I am well aware that supporters of this view will simply respond to their lack of evidence for letting the German population off the hook by asking: what evidence is there to show that they did know?

Well, there might be no absolute proof that Germans knew in detail of the Holocaust, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest they had at least some knowledge. First - what did they know already? 

They knew the Nazis were anti-Semitic from the founding of the Nazi Party in 1920, with an openly anti-Jewish element to the party's programme.
Adolf Hitler made clear his views of, and intentions towards, Jews in his book "Mein Kampf" (1925).

They knew of anti-Semitic legislation passed against Jews, culminating in the Nuremburg Laws of 1935. 

In 1933, following the Nazi takeover, they saw how Jewish professionals ( judges, teachers, lawyers and army officers) were forced out of their jobs. That same year, they saw the boycott of Jewish businesses, orchestrated by the S.A.

The Nazi-controlled press waged a vicious anti-Semitic campaign from 1933-45.

German children in school were indoctrinated with anti-Semitic educational material throughout their school career.

Germans in rural areas knew that their Jewish neighbours were forced out by Nazi activity.
All Germans undeniably knew of Kristallnacht, and the accompanying outrages against the German Jewish community, in 1938.

We are sometimes told that the crimes of the Third Reich were "all the fault of the Nazis" and the mass of ordinary Germans were not involved. This cosy myth is exploded by the fact the Nazi Party had 8 500 000 members by 1945. Two million of these were members of the SA, and millions of Germans (33% of the electorate) voted for Hitler in 1933. Jon Greenberg comments, in a parting shot for the myth:

"...it ignores the Nazis’ electoral domination in 1932 and the popularity that came after the first military victories in 1939. The vote results and the assessment of the experts we reached point to a much larger figure (i.e. of Nazis, including non-party members - Blogmeister) in the range of 35 percent."
Since most anti-Nazi Germans (Socialists, Communists and others) were either murdered, intimidated, exlied or incarcerated, and in the absence of mass popular opposition to the Nazis, all this calls into question the idea that the German supposed lack of knowledge of the Holocaust is even relevant. If the Germans could not prevent what happened before 1939 (assuming they wanted to), what could they have achieved during the war years, after the Holocaust had begun?

As for knowledge of the Holocaust in operation, it is undeniable that the regime made strenuous efforts to conceal their mass murders. This is an area worthy of study in itself. As for "ordinary" Germans, Nazis or not, they were, for the most part, secretly listening to Allied radio broadcasts during the war which detailed the atrocities. Besides this, the perpetrators of the Holocaust were writing home describing the mass murders they had seen, even enclosing photographs. One such is the famous image seen below:

Again, during the mass shootings carried out by the Einsatzgruppen behind the German lines in Russia, many "ordinary" Wehrmacht soldiers turned out to watch the spectacle, until forbidden by superior officers. The perpetrators also talked of the killings when they went home on leave; Otto Frank, father of Ann, took his family into hiding after being told of the atrocities against Jews in the Baltic States by a Dutch SS man home from the Russian Front. As for concentration camps of all types, there were hundreds on German soil - according to Goldhagen, 606 in the state of Hessen alone. If ordinary Germans knew nothing of such places, then why did they fear being sent there? The extermination camps ("Vernichtungslager"), including Auschwitz, were situated in other countries where the local population knew of what was occurring behind the barbed wire fences. It seems strange that Polish partisan groups knew of what was happening in Auschwitz, and yet "ordinary" German soldiers said they knew nothing. Another disturbing detail that destroys this myth is the fact that escapees from the Berlin-Auschwitz transports recall that "ordinary" German railway workers taunted them about their eventual fate in the Auschwitz gas chambers. So much for the cosy myth.
It might be thought that I am taking the Patrick Moore view of the German people, past and present: "The only good Kraut is a dead Kraut". Or that I am simply endorsing the view expounded by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in "Hitler's Willing Executioners". This was a book which raised some interesting questions, as Wikipedia says:
"The book challenges several common ideas about the Holocaust that Goldhagen believes to be myths. These "myths" include the idea that most Germans did not know about the Holocaust; that only the SS, and not average members of the Wehrmacht, participated in murdering Jews; and that genocidal antisemitism was a uniquely Nazi ideology without historical antecedents".

In that, Goldhagen does truth a service, but if everyone is guilty, then no-one is guilty. My own view is, hopefully, less simplistic than either the "We didn't know" or the Moore/Goldhagen view.

My view is this: Firstly, as has been said, the first victims of Nazism were Germans, the first people to fight against Nazism were Germans and the longest-serving resistance fighters against Nazism were Germans. Again, as has been said, there was another Germany. BUT - and I can't stress this enough - while there were millions of anti-Nazi Germans, there were still many more millions of Germans who supported Hitler, and endorsed violence against Jews (and many others). No totalitarian regime can survive by terror alone, without widespread popular support.To assert otherwise is an exercise in absurdity. Between these two poles of opinion - total innocence or guilt - there would have been many shades of willingness and opposition (if at all). Complex historical events cannot be reduced to simple-minded, dismissive, pseudo-explanations.

To conclude: I believe the "did they know?" controversy to be founded on a false premise - that had the German people known what was happening, they could, or would, have stopped the Holocaust. This "view" ignores the fact that the Third Reich was a highly efficient repressive state, which would have clamped down severely on any such dissent (and did). The "active arm" of the anti-Nazi opposition - socialists, communists and a few others - was crushed after Hitler's election triumph in 1933. After that, terror reigned. To use a more up-to-date example, if you know that your neighbour is a drug dealer, but, at the same time, you know that reporting him to the police will bring retaliation against you and/or your family, you have a powerful incentive to say nothing. And, as I hope I have shown, many Germans knew, and either approved or condoned the Holocaust anyway.

Cosy Myth: Some people in German uniform who didn't know what they were doing and were only obeying orders pointing guns at some people who we don't know.
Fact: Einsatzgruppen members, fanatical anti-Semites to a man, are about to murder a few of many innocent Eastern European Jews - men, women and children. Some estimates put the number of Jews murdered by these units as over a million.. They also murdered gypsies, Communists, Polish intellectuals and anyone considered to be an "enemy". All their victims perished in mass shootings; a small detail of one such killing spree is seen in the photograph.

Harry, Meghan and the Racist Mindset

Well, they're going their own way, and who can blame them? The incorporation of Meghan Markle into our royals was never given much of a chance after their fairy tale wedding. From the outset, she was the target of a hostile tabloid press. Foremost among the hostile critics was our old pal, Nigel Farage, who, in Melbourne last August, lamented the fact that Harry was once:

"... a brave British officer who did his bit in Afghanistan... the most popular royal of a younger generation... then he met Meghan Markle, and it's fallen off a cliff."

It seemed as if Meghan could do nothing right, if our tabloids were to be believed. As Amna Saleem said in yesterday's Guardian: 

"She couldn’t even enjoy avocados without being framed as a drought- and murder-fuelling traitor, set on bringing down the monarchy. Harry, to his credit, has been by her side every step of the way, challenging traditions by demanding an end to the tabloids’ abuse of her, which sadly had little impact."    

Sad indeed, as we are set to lose our most progressive pair of royals since er...when? I didn't listen to Nigel Farage on LBC this morning - never do - but I bet he's smirking like a well-fed mongoose.

What has not been mentioned so far is the fact that Harry and Meghan's wedding came after the EU Referendum when hate crime against religious and ethnic minorities was increasing. This xenophobic tide, which Farage and others ride so skilfully, clearly influenced the tabloid press and made hostility to Meghan far worse than it would have been, say, ten years ago.

I don't believe that racism was the sole cause of the hostility. As said before, old fashioned upper-crust snobbery against a divorced, mixed race, American commoner would have played its part. Resurgent racism, though, was undeniably a major factor, and I think it needs looking at more closely.

So - what makes a racist, or, which is perhaps a better question, what is the racist mindset? It is difficult to answer this, as racism is an irrational attitude, best examined by social psychologists. However, I think that by providing insights from my own experience (and thus admittedly anecdotal) I can point to certain racist characteristics.

One such is the fact that racists rarely think clearly or logically. In the 1970s, I worked for Southport Parks Department. One of the foremen was a rabid racist. He'd served in the army in Palestine during the Jewish uprising in 1948 and was virulently anti-Semitic. For no apparent reason, he hated black people as well. One of his first questions to newcomers was: "Are n-----s human?". If you replied in the negative, that was fine; if you said "yes" you were no friend of his. When I asked him what he meant by human, he displayed his intellectual capacity by replying "Well...white". This overt racism would never be tolerated in any workplace nowadays (I hope), but at that time, his racism was well known to management - and tolerated.

One day, he was vehemently blaming coloured immigrants for lengthening queues in hospital A&E; the fact that there were hardly any black families in Southport did not occur to him. In fact, there were more people of colour working in the local hospital on any given day than were attending as patients. Pointing this out to him would have  had no effect. Racists, you see, start with their racism and look round for reasons to justify it. Even when their absurd anti-immigrant tropes are exposed as false, they simply look round for other reasons to be racist - rationalisations. 

Another was a man who'd lived in Yorkshire in what he described as "a good area". It seems that a black couple moved into one house and opened a brothel. "That's why I hate them!", he said - i.e. all black people. Very logical - I don't think. Both of these parks men were Conservative voters.

Racists often speak of their admiration for the late Enoch Powell whom, as we know, is deeply admired by Nigel Farage. Interestingly though, when you ask them "Well, what did Powell say that you agree with?", they are usually unable to give a coherent answer. Most appear to think he advocated compulsory repatriation, but he did not. In fact, the closer you question them about Powell, the vaguer they get. And this points to another racist feature - the incoherent understanding of Populist politicians like Farage and Powell and, it seems, politics in general. The classic example of this was the man interviewed on Channel 4 the day after the EU Referendum. This man had somehow acquired the belief - perhaps by osmosis? - that as of the next day, all Muslims were going to leave Britain. 

Sadly, racist views can be found among more intelligent whites also. Again, a narcissistic Southport racist I knew in the 70s, who prided himself on his IQ, among other things, held a senior position in a Southport hospital. Interestingly, he never expressed racist views in the hospital. His ethnic minority colleagues - doctors, nurses and others - never knew that he referred to them as "wogs" out of their hearing. Still less did he tell of how he had once actively considered joining the National Front, but he was at least more honest than the others when asked why he was a racist. No rationalisations from him. He confessed: "I don't know - I just don't like them!" ("them" being black people). Racists of this type were given encouragement by the rise of the National Front, and statements such as that made by Margaret Thatcher in 1978:

"People [in Britain] are rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture".

Yes, it wasn't easy, opposing racism in the 1970s. I'd hoped that the intervening decades had put paid to such bigotry, but events are proving me wrong. I can only hope that those of us who believe in a tolerant, enlightened, multi-racial Britain can again successfully combat these prejudices, and perhaps restore a society in which Meghan, Harry, their son and all of us can live in peace.

Assassinating Sulemani : A Pragmatist View

Regular readers of this blog, and those who glance at it from time to time, will know that I am not a great fan of the regime in Iran. I have highlighted the human rights violations of this state against its own people and  others for a number of years. I shall shed no tears over the liquidation of Qassem Soleimani, who was a key figure in the Iranian leadership and both a supporter and initiator of its repressive policies at home, and aggressive policies abroad. As The Guardian says:

"Suleimani, 62, oversaw the external operations of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards and was the architect of an expansion of Iranian influence across the Middle East in recent decades, controlling politicians and proxy militias in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen among other places."

Nor do I deny the right of the USA to take action to defend its citizens anywhere in the world. The Pentagon claims that militants under his command had killed and wounded hundreds of US servicemen and were planning to kill more. Sulemani appears to have been involved in such activities since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 where, under the subsequent occupation, Shia militants under Iranian direction attacked both US and British troops with Iranian-supplied equipment. Sulemani's demise has been welcomed in parts of Syria and Iraq; Iranian exiles in the UK have been phoning talk radio programmes to express jubilation at his death.

So, do I share in this jubilation? Not really. To quote the same Guardian article:

" His killing triggered rejoicing in parts of Iraq and Syria, where he was implicated in tens of thousands of civilian deaths, but the general reaction in world capitals was one of apprehension."

Many people in the UK have criticised the killing, in particular Jeremy Corbyn, questioning the legality of the killing and the lack of notice to America's allies.  These issues will doubtless be discussed again and again in the coming weeks, but I would like to express my concern on pragmatic grounds.

Firstly, there is the small matter of ISIS. This group has taken a severe drubbing in recent months but is not totally defeated, and is trying to reorganise on the ground. Like it or not, Sulemani's fighters are a vital part of the struggle against ISIS and this is hardly the time to deprive them of their leader and thus to alienate them. It's rather like Churchill and Roosevelt assassinating Stalin in 1944, before the final German defeat. Unless they're stupid, ISIS will see an opportunity to strike a deal with the Shia militias.

Secondly, the timing of the attack was potentially dangerous to US and western expat workers in Iraq and Iran. The US government has advised its nationals to leave Iraq, but they would have become vulnerable to reprisal attack from the very moment of the assassination. Even if every US expat escapes safely, there will be plenty of other western nationals left behind to be attacked or held hostage. And, as we know, the Iranians already have a number of hostages in custody, including Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. Their position must now rank as downright perilous.

Next, President Trump is convinced that by threatening attacks upon Iran, he will deter any future hostile activity. As the BBC comments:

"President Trump, who authorised the attack on Soleimani on Friday - an option refused by both Presidents Bush and Obama as too risky - said on Saturday the US was ready to strike 52 sites "important to Iran & the Iranian culture"."

A more pragmatic approach would be to learn from three historical case examples of what happens when aerial bombing is used to try and subdue a civilian population: Britain 1940-41; Germany, 1942-45; North Viet-Nam, 1964-73. All these bombing offensives failed to break civilian morale, and only served to unite the native populations behind their leadership. There already seems to be some sign of this happening in Iran.

This "big stick" operation will not succeed in its main aim. Like it or not (and I don't), the Iranian regime has many supporters and Sulemani will be replaced, hydra-like, by someone perhaps even more militant, determined upon revenge. At the very least, I would expect the attacks on US installations in Iraq to continue and possibly increase.

While there are no good pragmatic results likely to flow from this situation, one positive result could be the beginning of the end for Populism worldwide. Complex political problems cannot be solved by simple actions. We have seen this with the trauma of Brexit, the comedy of the Mexican border wall, and I expect this crisis will be no different - apart from the fact that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people will be killed and injured.