Heresies and Heretics

by George Watson

  Nor is it cheerful news if the murder of millions can be kept secret: it makes it all the more likely that governments will do it again or try it again, and Hitler’s holocaust was neither the first nor the last, as Pol Pot proved in Cambodia in the 1970s. So my case here is not a whitewash, and if Auschwitz was a secret it is not good news. The silence began with those who survived, and it is hard now to recapture the shame of those who outlived the camps and their fears of what might be said of them. Dorothy Rabinowitz’s New Lives (1976), amply based on interviews with survivors, showed how difficult it could be to induce them to talk. A Viennese girl rescued by a British soldier at Belsen from a pile of corpses when he saw her arm move is a touching instance; she recalled how at Auschwitz she had once resolved to kill herself by clutching the corpse of a prisoner who had committed suicide by throwing himself on the electric fence. But ‘her courage failed her, with the result that, in addition to having to live, she lived loathing herself for failing to die.’

  The first historical study of the subject was Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews, which appeared as late as 1961 because the author had prolonged difficulty in finding a publisher. Holocaust literature would now fill a library, and it is hard to imagine an age in which Jews as well as Germans did not want to know about it. There are no silences now. But those who listen need to deepen their critical awareness of what really happened in 1941-5, during the greatest war in history, when the incredible occurred and was largely unreported when it did.

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  Christabel Bielenberg was an Englishwoman who lived in Germany through the Nazi era married to an anti-Nazi lawyer who survived the camps; she has left an account in a memoir called The Past is Myself (1968), which stopped in 1945. In 1992, however, in a BBC radio interview, she revealed more: that in the first months of Allied occupation in 1945 she and her anti-Nazi friends were outraged by reports of Nazi incinerators and mass graves, along with photos from the liberated camps of piled bodies, and decided sadly it was a British propaganda-stunt. ‘The war has altered England too; it’s like Goebbels all over again.’

  During the war it had never occurred to them that such things were happening: ‘That there was mass extermination never entered our minds,’ and she later went through the Nazi press and confirmed there was nothing there. Anti-Jewish declarations were always about what would happen, never about what was happening or what had already happened. The Nazis never boasted of mass-murder. The sites of the death-camps – though not always of the concentration camps – were a secret; camp operatives were sworn to secrecy; dire punishments were handed down to anyone who tried to spread what the regime called atrocity-propaganda; the chief extermination centres were far outside the old 1937 borders of Germany and mainly in what is now Poland; and the SS, when there was time, took elaborate steps to obliterate them as they retreated.

  That was a matter of high policy. In September 1941, weeks after the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler issued a general directive, minutely detailed, and it survives. It forbade them to know any more about such activities than their own duties might require. It forbade them to know before they needed to know. And it forbade them to speak of it. The directive, of which this is only a summary, was issued by Hitler from his military headquarters deep in the Soviet Union when mass-grave killings had already begun in the newly occupied territories of Byelo-Russia, the Ukraine and the Baltic states; the decision to undertake the Final Solution, it seems reasonable to guess, was already hatched.

  The decision itself, or its implementation, dates from the Wannsee conference near Berlin in January 1942, almost halfway through the war, and Auschwitz was fully operative soon after, by the summer of 1942. Hitler’s distrust of his own people could not be clearer. The directive shows that a strenuous attempt at secrecy had been decided on, and in the highest quarters, in the very weeks the genocidal programme began. It seems in large measure to have worked. In his Lübeck Diary (1947) A.G. Dickens, a British historian, after a spell of occupation duty in north Germany in 1946 that included publishing the Belsen trials, recorded that German civilian ignorance was probably genuine and widespread:

  Without believing any specific claims to ignorance, it is my considered belief that the great bulk of the people in this town had few facilities for learning much detail about these appalling crimes prior to our own publicity.

  Even victims did not usually know. In his diaries Ich Will Zeugnis Ablegen (1996) Victor Klemperer has left a record of how little even well-informed German Jews expected genocide, and in his introductory memoir to Not by Fact Alone (1989) John Clive, a Harvard historian, has told how as a boy in Berlin his middle-class Jewish parents were so assimilated that they doubted if the Nazis could keep power for more than a few years, and it took Kristallnacht and the burning of the synagogues in November 1938 to convince them that the Nazis were in any way serious about their own slogans. If the German people was virulently anti-semitic, it was something they had failed to notice.

  The outcome, when it was finally revealed at the Nuremberg trials, astounded all but a few. The Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose horror of Nazism as a Viennese exile has never been in question, moaned so loudly after the war when he saw photos of the camps that a dinner hostess in Cambridge had to leave the room. ‘Oh my God, my God,’ his voice rang out through the house, convinced only then that the Nazis had in fact fulfilled their promise of hate.

  Survivors have confirmed that ignorance. They were tricked into boarding trains with talk of safe havens and a choice of work. Why would they bring baggage unless in the expectation they would survive? That is attested by those who were there. A Slovak escapee from Auschwitz, Rudolf Vrba, has left his own testimony. ‘Often people ask: just how could the Jews enter the trains which were to carry them to mass slaughter without a sign of protest?’ The answer, as he said, is simple. ‘They did not know’, believing what they had been told about Jewish resettlement areas in the east where they would have to work hard but would be safer than at home. That, after all, was the hollow promise over the gate at Auschwitz: ‘Arbeit macht frei’, and it shows how profoundly unjust the Goldhagen thesis is to the victims of genocide. They did not go like lambs. They were tricked.

  In Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, an extensive French documentary based on the lengthy recollections of survivors and published as a text in 1985, a Czech Jew called Filip Müller forced in Auschwitz to work at corpse-disposal tells how another prisoner in his special detail recognised a woman as the wife of a friend in Prague. She had just left the train confident, like her companions, that she was on her way to the showers; and when he explained it was a gas chamber – ‘in three hours you’ll be ashes’ – she badly needed to be convinced. When at last she did believe him she told the other women, who thought her crazy; then the men, to the same effect. So she screamed. As the other prisoners were gassed she was held back and forced under torture to identify her informant, who was then thrown alive on to the flames, and the rest of the work detail was told by the SS they would follow him if they tried to warn any more prisoners. The story suggests that the campaign of secrecy worked, and it suggests how far the Nazis were prepared to go to maintain it.

  In Poland itself memories linger among the survivors and their descendants. In recent years the Jewish community in Cracow has fallen to some two hundred people, and one of them I recently talked to there, the son of camp survivors and born after the war, repeated to me what his parents had once told him. ‘All the Nazis needed was a secret place with a railhead,’ he said, explaining why Auschwitz had been chosen. He was off there next day, as often before, to show it to American visitors. It is some thirty miles away, hidden in woods, and he was in no doubt that it had been chosen for those two reasons: a secret place with a railhead. The intention of secrecy he had learned from his parents was one he had never doubted.

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  How well was the secret kept? Christabel B
ielenberg’s incredulity after the war, when she saw photos of piled bodies, is all the more striking when you consider that rumours circulated in wartime Germany that might have suggested something highly exceptional was happening. There were always those who knew some of the truth. In October 1942, for example, Helmuth von Moltke, a dedicated anti-Nazi executed towards the end of the war, lunched in Berlin with someone just back from occupied Poland who told him of the SS gas chambers. ‘Previously I had not believed it, but he assured me it was true: 6,000 people are “processed” daily in these chambers.’ The conversation occurred more than a year after the holocaust began, and it is illuminating in more ways than one. It shows that there were such stories, at least within closed circles of friends and acquaintances; it shows they could be heard, even by an anti-Nazi, and still not be believed in the first instance; and it suggests that estimates of the number of victims were grossly understated. By October 1942 the daily total is likely to have been far higher than 6,000; in other words, von Moltke knew something, as an anti-Nazi, but only reluctantly, and what he knew was still far short of the truth.

  Months later, in a famous letter of March 1943 smuggled out of Germany to Lionel Curtis in Oxford, von Moltke argued that most German civilians were probably far too busy dealing with the shortages of daily life to think about such things at all, and in his own sober view ‘at least nine-tenths of the population do not know that we have killed hundreds of thousands of Jews’. They believed the Jews had been ‘segregated’ in the east, and not necessarily to their disadvantage: ‘a little more squalor but without air-raids’, and if anyone suggested otherwise they would cite British atrocity-propaganda against the German occupation of Belgium during the first world war, which was famous for its creative extravagance. In May that year von Moltke wrote to his wife that passing Warsaw he had seen ‘a big cloud of smoke’. The smoke, it is now known, was from the flames of the Nazi clearance of the ghetto, when they deported all its remaining inhabitants to the death camps. But von Moltke, near as he was, failed to guess it. He believed the German army was mopping up partisans who had been reinforced by airborne Russians, German deserters and Polish communists.

  Simply being there, then, was not enough. The strangest and most telling instance of all, perhaps, was that of Léon Blum, a former prime minister of France who was held as a political hostage in Buchenwald for two whole years, from April 1943 till April 1945. Separated from the mass of prisoners, he learned of their inhuman conditions only after a year and more, when work-parties were herded around his house to clear up the debris of a bombing raid; and it was only in Paris after the liberation, as he tells in ‘Le Dernier Mois’ (1946), that he realised the smell that sometimes invaded his quarters had been from an incinerator. So even camp inmates, on occasion, may not have known they lived with mass murder.

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  It is the prime paradox of National Socialism that it did not boast of doing the very thing it had proudly and publicly promised to do, and a refusal to speak of such things, an habitual reticence, seems to have reached into the highest places of the Nazi state.

  In April 1942, in his table-talk, Hitler remarked conversationally that sympathy for the Jews was misplaced; a hardy people, they will flourish, he confided to his friends, even in Lapland and Siberia. That suggests that the holocaust was a taboo subject even in the mealtime conversations of the Nazi leadership, and how private mythologies were devised to pretend that nothing extraordinary was happening.

  All that is confirmed by a story about Hitler two years later and more; it is told by his press chief Otto Dietrich, whose recollections were published after his death in 1952. The English version is called The Hitler I Knew (1955), and it sensibly argues that the absence of any signed order from Hitler means little or nothing, since he hated paperwork, seldom sat at his desk and loved to shout orders while pacing up and down. The order to exterminate, in any case, and indeed the act itself, he always denied. Dietrich saw him daily during most of his twelve years of power, and recalls his absolute silence about the mass killings, ‘never mentioning these matters to any of his associates’; and he tells how, as the Red Army advanced through Poland and reports of what they had uncovered began to appear in the foreign press, Hitler angrily refused to issue a denial. They were propaganda lies, he told Dietrich, distortions by a Bolshevik enemy intent on hiding crimes like the massacre in the Katyn forest, where the German army had recently revealed a Soviet mass-grave shooting committed by the Russians in April 1940.

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  The notion that German civilians during the war knew about mass murder, and wanted it or least accepted it, is probably exceptional as a view in central Europe, even among the most dedicated anti-Nazis. But it has long been commonplace outside Germany. Most of us, including myself, were brought up on it. Perhaps the best-documented account of that view is by Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm in Yad Vashem Studies in 1984, where the very title says a good deal. The article is called ‘The Holocaust in National-Socialist Rhetoric and Writings: Some Evidence against the Thesis that before 1945 Nothing was Known about the Final Solution’, and it claims to show that the German public did know, though in fact it shows no more than that the officer corps (or much of it) knew, which is not in doubt; and the bloodthirsty rhetoric of speeches and songs in the Nazi era – ‘Jewish blood spurts from German knife’ – merely offers some reason to think that ordinary Germans should have guessed what was about to happen. That is a distinct claim, and to argue that they should have known, or guessed, is not to demonstrate that they did.

  The article is a late and learned instance of the simplistic view. For an earlier and more popular version, look at Otto Preminger’s remarkable film Judgement at Nuremberg, which appeared in 1961, soon after the breaking of the taboos that had largely constrained talk about the subject in the 1950s. The film shows Spencer Tracy as an honest American judge in Germany who, in the end, bravely condemns a handful of Nazi war criminals to life imprisonment. All the Germans in the film, including the widow with whom he falls in love, side with the criminals on the grounds that they were only obeying orders; and in a scene in the kitchen, where a pair of German servants swear they knew nothing about the killings, Tracy cuts them off with a brief word and an impatient gesture that implies ‘That’s what you all say.’

  It makes good drama. But how good is it as history? Goldhagen’s book is so single-minded in the pursuit of its thesis – that the whole German people wanted the Jews dead – and so indifferent to counter-evidence, that one is bound to wonder what its motive might be. The hunting-down of criminals? If so, it is misconceived. A guilt shared by a hundred million is individually far less than the guilt of a clique that took elaborate care to hide what it was doing and enlisted its killers largely from outside the Reich. It is also implausible.

  If a whole people had wanted mass murder, they would surely have been told about it when it happened and applauded it when it did. It was the plea of many an SS man in the dock that he was obeying the orders of a whole nation – a plea rightly disallowed – and Goldhagen seems unaware that he is reinforcing a view favourable to the murderers.

  Non-Germans played no minor role. When an American court in 1980 stripped the Ukrainian-born Feodor Federenko of his American citizenship on learning what he had done in Treblinka – a human abattoir, the judge called it – the hearing revealed that the camp had been staffed by over 120 Soviet prisoners of war and a mere twenty-odd Germans. That would have its practical advantages for a nation at war, releasing Germans for the front. It may also have made it easier to keep the action a secret in Germany itself.

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  History has no need by now to work with a broad brush, and those who seek to blame everything on the Germans, like those who once blamed everything on the Jews, should reflect on the enormous implausibility of what they propose. Edmund Burke once said he did not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people. The warning is still timely
. A whole people can only be condemned by consistently ignoring evidence that conflicts with the indictment. That sounds all too much like the behaviour of German civilians who lived through an age of racial abuse and deportations, half a century and more ago, and failed to listen and failed to look.

  16. Thoughts on a Dead Elephant

  In 1936 George Orwell wrote an article about his time as a colonial policeman in Burma. Called ‘Shooting an Elephant,’ its startling conclusion was that empires can enslave the conqueror rather than the conquered.

  Indian independence, and the return of Hong Kong to China half a century later in 1997, and it is time to ask if he was right. Are ex-imperial powers like France and Britain stronger or weaker for having given up their empires? Or, for that matter, richer or happier? Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands count here too; so does the United States, it is easy to forget, since the independence of the Philippines in 1946. Theodore Roosevelt annexed it in 1898, as he admitted, because he had been impressed by Rudyard Kipling’s poem about the white man’s burden. So Orwell’s thesis has now been tested to the limit, and beyond the wildest expectations of the 1930s. Even after the second world war few believed that Africa would be independent before the turn of the century, and African leaders themselves neither demanded it nor expected it. The wind of change, as Harold Macmillan vividly called it, when it blew across Africa in 1960, was sudden and swift, and its effects in former colonies are widely studied. But how about its effects at home?