on german guilt (2016)

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6 responses to “on german guilt (2016)”

1. 

   Alfred

   February 8, 2016

   Your reflections on guilt are interesting on a psychological level, but I doubt that they explain much of German post war history. You provide very little empirical evidence for your claim that „guilt at the end of WWII was a fundamental aspect of social control“.

   It is true that immediately after the war, for a brief period of time, the Western allies tried to impose the idea of „collective guilt“ of the German people for the atrocities of the Nazi time on the Germans. The „Psychological Warfare Division“ of the HQ of the allied forces led a propaganda campaign and forced the German population to visit the concentration camps and to watch the piles of corpses there or made them watch films like „Die Todesmühlen“ (the death mills). But this campaign was quickly cancelled and the concept of „collective guilt“ was dropped altogether after the Western allies realised that they needed the support of the population of Western Germany which they wanted to turn into a strong front state against the Eastern Bloc in the incipient Cold War.

   In the eastern part of Germany, the new rulers declared, according to Dimitroff’s theory of fascism, that the ordinary people was free of guilt, as the whole responsibility for the Nazi crimes were located at the ruling elites in business, military and politics.

   There is no evidence that the short propaganda campain of the Western allies implemented the idea of „collective guilt“ deeply into the minds of the Germans. Quite to the contrary: The general attitude of the majority of the Germans after the war was that they had nothing to do with the Nazi crimes and that the accusations of the allies against them were not justified. They felt no guilt. In fact, it became an important aspect of right wing ideology in post war Germany that the whole world would impose the feeling of „collective guilt“ on the Germans to keep them on their knees – long after the allied forces or anybody else had given up to actually make such accusations!

   Your observation that class struggle and subversion in general has been on a remarkably low level in Germany after the Second World War is certainly true. But I wouldn’t blame „German guilt“ for that, but rather explain this sad fact with the results of the Nazi period itself: The brutal repression of any revolutionary current in Germany, the specific form of class compromise of the German „Volksgemeinschaft“ which prevailed in the form of the post war welfare state and the reinforcement of an authoritarian mentaliy among the population.

   What I find interesting in your text are the reflections on the fact that the showing of the horrors of the modern world via the media seems to reinforce general passivity rather than any practical oppostion against specific crimes or miseries. But this is a general phenomen which has nothing to do with „German guilt“.

   Reply
   1. 

      Sam FantoSamotnaf

      February 13, 2016

      Firstly, the fact that collective guilt was a relatively short-lived state-directed policy in the West does not mean that it didn’t outlast this period. Racism is not an explicit state policy in most countries in the world – and in many countries there are laws outlawing racist decision-making in housing, work etc. Which of course, doesn’t mean it doesn’t persist. Very obviously capitalism uses racism, and the state encourages it indirectly (through immigration policy, for instance). But not explicitly.

      It’s true, I should have talked about the use of guilt in WEST Germany – in the East the fact that class struggle erupted in 1953 might to a certain extent be indicative of the absence of any guilt (but an attidude of still blaming the Germans meant that the East Germans had virtual zilch international support, whereas 3 years later the, admittedly more profound, uprising in Hungary had enormous repercussions, partciularly amongst those who until then had considered themselves “communist”).

      Guilt about Germany’s past has persisted long after the official start of Cold War hostilities made it a partly unviable policy for West Germany, at least in any overt manner. This persistence still existed 60 years after the end of the war – for example, in 2005 the German state turned five acres of potentially lucratively commodifiable land in the centre of Berlin into a vast, grim memorial to the Jews murdered 60 years previously (see: ttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4531669.stm ). And besides, even over 70 years after the end of the war almost everyone who mentions Germany and the Germans will refer to their collective guilt during this war. In fact, the whole of the anti-deutsch phenomenon is based on the idea of German guilt (I’m not sure if you see it this way, but anyone familiar with the anti-deutsch thing but who’s never been involved in it see it that way).

      You’re completely wrong to say that accusations of collective guilt had been given up – even if it’s true of “the allied forces” it’s certainly not true of “anybody else” . German guilt for the war is such an obviously commonly expressed aspect of dominant political-historical culture, constantly talked about, to the extent that I don’t feel the need to provide well-researched empirical evidence (see, for instance, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfl6Lu3xQW0 ). Having a German father and having a German surname, I was the butt of anti-German remarks at school, including remarks made by the history teacher whenever he didn’t like anything I said. This despite the fact that my father had risked his life getting Jews and Communists out of Nazi-occupied Prague in March 1939. If you were apparently German you were almost automatically personally responsible for the war, even if you were born after it. The fact that the war criminal Churchill had had great admiration for Hitler’s patriotism in the 1930s had been censored from our history books. The fact that the USA supplied Germany with iron and steel throughout the war was too eradicated by official history.

      Having said that, however, I realise that it’s more complex than the way I’ve put it in this somewhat over-general text. Guilt as much as the attempts to reject it have, regardless of any clear social intention (in this specific case, on the part of the victors of the war), a debilitating effect on consciousness and action that make people go round and round in circles in their head and in discussions focussed not on their misery, its history and a resolve to challenge and change it but on a constant interchange between masochism and rejection of the accusations of responsiblity, which can only lead to doing nothing, beaten down by a kind of psychological warfare. The fact that right-wing ideology took up one side in this submissive vicious circle merely indicates, in negative form, the persistence of the accusations of guilt on the other side.

      In the late 60s many of the youth of Germany blamed their parents for letting Hitler happen. But then I too blamed my parents for not opposing the miserable capitalist world enough, for not making a revolution (and for having joined the Communist Party, although they’d left in the 50s), for their complacency. I suspect that almost everywhere, at least until the current horrendous epoch, blaming one’s parents is an almost invariable reflex, which is partly right. In Germany this took the form of blaming one’s parents for their passivity in the face of the Nazis, which, regardless of the extent of their collaboration was in itself sufficient to be considered collaboration. Which, in a sense it is – but then it is globally vis-a-vis the global system, and certainly not just confined to Germans during the Hitler period. Those who do nothing against it all in fact support it.

      Reply
2. 

   Sam FantoSamotnaf

   February 19, 2016

   Just seen this passionate leaflet produced in the war by a German anti-war group : http://libcom.org/library/white-rose-leaflet-1

   There are 6 more leaflets produced by the White Rose group on libcom. Edit (2/3/16): they are passionate but – given their limited ideological perspective, their time and their place, they have relevance today mostly only as examples of some element of courage and resistance to Nazism within Germany itself.

   Reply
3. 

   Sam FantoSamotnaf

   February 22, 2016

   This film about the anti-deutsch phenomenon is a good example of a basic critique of them: http://www.grapheine.com/classiktv/index.php?module=see&lang=uk&code=3408a6aa0e7aa245ff5e18b888fc2f26

   Reply
4. 

   Sam FantoSamotnaf

   March 18, 2016

   I thought the following from Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann In Jerusalem” was interesting, showing how pro-Zionist Adolf Eichmann was in the run-up to WWII. It’s taken from Chapter 4: The First Solution: Expulsion and refers to “Eichmann’s muddled general outlook and ideology with respect to “the
   Jewish question.” :

   During cross-examination, he told the presiding judge that in Vienna he
   “regarded the Jews as opponents with respect to whom a mutually acceptable, a mutually fair
   solution had to be found.

   . . . That solution I envisaged as putting firm soil under their feet so that they would have a place
   of their own, soil of their own. And I was working in the direction of that solution joyfully. I
   cooperated in reaching such a solution, gladly and joyfully, because it was also the kind of
   solution that was approved by movements among the Jewish people themselves, and I regarded
   this as the most appropriate solution to this matter.”

   This was the true reason they had all “pulled together,” the reason their work had been “based
   upon mutuality.” It was in the interest of the Jews, though perhaps not all Jews understood this, to
   get out of the country; “one had to help them, one had to help these functionaries to act, and
   that’s what I did.” If the Jewish functionaries were “idealists,” that is, Zionists, he respected them,
   “treated them as equals,” listened to all their “requests and complaints and applications for
   support,” kept his “promises” as far as he could – “People are inclined to forget that now.” Who
   but he, Eichmann, had saved hundreds of thousands of Jews? What but his great zeal and gifts
   of organization had enabled them to escape in time? True, he could not foresee at the time the
   coming Final Solution, but he had saved them, that was a “fact.” (In an interview given in this
   country during the trial, Eichmann’s son told the same story to American reporters. It must have
   been a family legend.)

   In a sense, one can understand why counsel for the defense did nothing to back up Eichmann’s
   version of his relations with the Zionists. Eichmann admitted, as he had in the Sassen interview,
   that he “did not greet his assignment with the apathy of an ox being led to his stall,” that he had
   been very different from those colleagues “who had never read a basic book [i.e., Herzl’s
   Judenstaat], worked through it, absorbed it, absorbed it with interest,” and who therefore lacked
   “inner rapport with their work.” They were “nothing but office drudges,” for whom everything was
   decided “by paragraphs, by orders, who were interested in nothing else,” who were, in short,
   precisely such “small cogs” as, according to the defense, Eichmann himself had been. If this
   meant no more than giving unquestioning obedience to the Führer’s orders, then they had all
   been small cogs – even Himmler, we are told by his masseur, Felix Kersten, had not greeted the
   Final Solution with great enthusiasm, and Eichmann assured the police examiner that his own
   boss, Heinrich Müller, would never have proposed anything so “crude” as “physical
   extermination.” Obviously, in Eichmann’s eyes the small-cog theory was quite beside the point.
   Certainly he had not been as big as Mr. Hausner tried to make him; after all, he was not Hitler,
   nor, for that matter, could he compare himself in importance, as far as the “solution” of the Jewish
   question was concerned, with Müller, or Heydrich, or Himmler; he was no megalomaniac. But
   neither was he as small as the defense wished him to be.

   Eichmann’s distortions of reality were horrible because of the horrors they dealt with, but in
   principle they were not very different from things current in post-Hitler Germany. There is, for
   instance, Franz-Josef Strauss, former Minister of Defense, who recently conducted an election
   campaign against Willy Brandt, now mayor of West Berlin, but a refugee in Norway during the
   Hitler period. Strauss asked a widely publicized and apparently very successful question of Mr.
   Brandt “What were you doing those twelve years outside Germany? We know what we were
   doing here in Germany” – with complete impunity, without anybody’s batting an eye, let alone
   reminding the member of the Bonn government that what Germans in Germany were doing
   during those years has become notorious indeed. The same “innocence” is to be found in a
   recent casual remark by a respected and respectable German literary critic, who was probably
   never a Party member; reviewing a study of literature in the Third Reich, he said that its author
   belonged with “those intellectuals who at the outbreak of barbarism deserted us without
   exception.” This author was of course a Jew, and he was expelled by the Nazis and himself
   deserted by Gentiles, people like Mr. Heinz Beckmann of the Rheinischer Merkur. Incidentally,
   the very word “barbarism,” today frequently applied by Germans to the Hitler period, is a
   distortion of reality; it is as though Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals had fled a country that was
   no longer “refined” enough for them.

   Eichmann, though much less refined than statesmen and literary critics, could, on the other hand,
   have cited certain indisputable facts to back up his story if his memory had not been so bad, or if
   the defense had helped him. For “it is indisputable that during the first stages of their Jewish
   policy the National Socialists thought it proper to adopt a pro-Zionist attitude” (Hans Lamm), and
   it was during these first stages that Eichmann learned his lessons about Jews. He was by no
   means alone in taking this “pro-Zionism” seriously; the German Jews themselves thought it would
   be sufficient to undo “assimilation” through a new process of “dissimilation,” and flocked into the
   ranks of the Zionist movement. (There are no reliable statistics on this development, but it is
   estimated that the circulation of the Zionist weekly Die Jüdische Rundschau increased in the first
   months of the Hitler regime from approximately five to seven thousand to nearly forty thousand,
   and it is known that the Zionist fund-raising organizations received in 1935-36, from a greatly
   diminished and impoverished population, three times as much as in 1931-32.) This did not
   necessarily mean that the Jews wished to emigrate to Palestine; it was more a matter of pride:
   “Wear it with Pride, the Yellow Star!,” the most popular slogan of these years, coined by Robert
   Weltsch, editor-in-chief of the Jüdische Rundschau, expressed the general emotional
   atmosphere. The polemical point of the slogan, formulated as a response to Boycott Day, April 1,
   1933 – more than six years before the Nazis actually forced the Jews to wear a badge, a sixpointed yellow star on a white ground – was directed against the “assimilationists” and all those
   people who refused to be reconciled to the new “revolutionary development,” those who “were
   always behind the times” (die ewig Gestrigen). The slogan was recalled at the trial, with a good
   deal of emotion, by witnesses from Germany. They forgot to mention that Robert Weltsch himself,
   a highly distinguished journalist, had said in recent years that he would never have issued his
   slogan if he had been able to foresee developments.

   But quite apart from all slogans and ideological quarrels, it was in those years a fact of everyday
   life that only Zionists had any chance of negotiating with the German authorities, for the simple
   reason that their chief Jewish adversary, the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish
   Faith, to which ninety-five per cent of organized Jews in Germany then belonged, specified in its
   bylaws that its chief task was the “fight against anti-Semitism”; it had suddenly become by
   definition an organization “hostile to the State,” and would indeed have been persecuted – which it
   was not – if it had ever dared to do what it was supposed to do. During its first few years, Hitler’s
   rise to power appeared to the Zionists chiefly as “the decisive defeat of assimilationism.” Hence,
   the Zionists could, for a time, at least, engage in a certain amount of non-criminal cooperation
   with the Nazi authorities; the Zionists too believed that “dissimilation,” combined with the
   emigration to Palestine of Jewish youngsters and, they hoped, Jewish capitalists, could be a
   “mutually fair solution.” At the time, many German officials held this opinion, and this kind of talk
   seems to have been quite common up to the end. A letter from a survivor of Theresienstadt, a
   German Jew, relates that all leading positions in the Nazi-appointed Reichsvereinigung were held
   by Zionists (whereas the authentically Jewish Reichsvertretung had been composed of both
   Zionists and non-Zionists), because Zionists, according to the Nazis, were “the `decent’ Jews
   since they too thought in `national’ terms.” To be sure, no prominent Nazi ever spoke publicly in
   this vein; from beginning to end, Nazi propaganda was fiercely, unequivocally, uncompromisingly
   anti-Semitic, and eventually nothing counted but what people who were still without experience in
   the mysteries of totalitarian government dismissed as “mere propaganda.” There existed in those
   first years a mutually highly satisfactory agreement between the Nazi authorities and the Jewish
   Agency for Palestine – a Ha’avarah, or Transfer Agreement, which provided that an emigrant to
   Palestine could transfer his money there in German goods and exchange them for pounds upon
   arrival. It was soon the only legal way for a Jew to take his money with him (the alternative then
   being the establishment of a blocked account, which could be liquidated abroad only at a loss of
   between fifty and ninety-five per cent). The result was that in the thirties, when American Jewry
   took great pains to organize a boycott of German merchandise, Palestine, of all places, was
   swamped with all kinds of goods “made in Germany.”

   Of greater importance for Eichmann were the emissaries from Palestine, who would approach the
   Gestapo and the S.S. on their own initiative, without taking orders from either the German
   Zionists or the Jewish Agency for Palestine. They came in order to enlist help for the illegal
   immigration of Jews into British-ruled Palestine, and both the Gestapo and the S.S. were helpful.
   They negotiated with Eichmann in Vienna, and they reported that he was “polite,” “not the
   shouting type,” and that he even provided them with farms and facilities for setting up vocational
   training camps for prospective immigrants. (“On one occasion, he expelled a group of nuns from
   a convent to provide a training farm for young Jews,” and on another “a special train [was made
   available] and Nazi officials accompanied” a group of emigrants, ostensibly headed for Zionist
   training farms in Yugoslavia, to see them safely across the border.) According to the story told by
   Jon and David Kimche, with “the full and generous cooperation of all the chief actors” (The Secret
   Roads: The “Illegal” Migration of a People, 1938-1948, London, 1954), these Jews from Palestine
   spoke a language not totally different from that of Eichmann. They had been sent to Europe by
   the communal settlements in Palestine, and they were not interested in rescue operations: “That
   was not their job.” They wanted to select “suitable material,” and their chief enemy, prior to the
   extermination program, was not those who made life impossible for Jews in the old countries,
   Germany or Austria, but those who barred access to the new homeland; that enemy was
   definitely Britain, not Germany. Indeed, they were in a position to deal with the Nazi authorities on
   a footing amounting to equality, which native Jews were not, since they enjoyed the protection of
   the mandatory power; they were probably among the first Jews to talk openly about mutual
   interests and were certainly the first to be given permission “to pick young Jewish pioneers” from
   among the Jews in the concentration camps. Of course, they were unaware of the sinister
   implications of this deal, which still lay in the future; but they too somehow believed that if it was a
   question of selecting Jews for survival, the Jews should do the selecting themselves. It was this
   fundamental error in judgment that eventually led to a situation in which the non-selected majority
   of Jews inevitably found themselves confronted with two enemies – the Nazi authorities and the
   Jewish authorities. As far as the Viennese episode is concerned, Eichmann’s preposterous claim
   to have saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives, which was laughed out of court, finds
   strange support in the considered judgment of the Jewish historians, the Kimches: “Thus what
   must have been one of the most paradoxical episodes of the entire period of the Nazi regime
   began: the man who was to go down in history as one of the arch-murderers of the Jewish people
   entered the lists as an active worker in the rescue of Jews from Europe.”

   Eichmann’s trouble was that he remembered none of the facts that might have supported,
   however faintly, his incredible story, while the learned counsel for the defense probably did not
   even know that there was anything to remember. (Dr. Servatius could have called as witnesses
   for the defense the former agents of Aliyah Beth, as the organization for illegal immigration into
   Palestine was called; they certainly still remembered Eichmann, and they were now living in
   Israel.) Eichmann’s memory functioned only in respect to things that had had a direct bearing
   upon his career. Thus, he remembered a visit he had received in Berlin from a Palestinian
   functionary who told him about life in the collective settlements, and whom he had twice taken out
   to dinner, because this visit ended with a formal invitation to Palestine, where the Jews would
   show him the country. He was delighted; no other Nazi official had been able to go “to a distant
   foreign land,” and he received permission to make the trip. The judgment concluded that he had
   been sent “on an espionage mission,” which no doubt was true, but this did not contradict the
   story Eichmann had told the police. (Practically nothing came of the enterprise. Eichmann,
   together with a journalist from his office, a certain Herbert Hagen, had just enough time to climb
   Mount Carmel in Haifa before the British authorities deported both of them to Egypt and denied
   them entry permits for Palestine; according to Eichmann, “the man from the Haganah” – the
   Jewish military organization which became the nucleus of the Israeli Army – came to see them in
   Cairo, and what he told them there became the subject of a “thoroughly negative report”
   Eichmann and Hagen were ordered by their superiors to write for propaganda purposes; this was
   duly published.)

   Apart from such minor triumphs, Eichmann remembered only moods and the catch phrases he
   made up to go with them; the trip to Egypt had been in 1937, prior to his activity in Vienna, and
   from Vienna he remembered no more than the general atmosphere and how “elated” he had felt.
   In view of his astounding virtuosity in never discarding a mood and its catch phrase once and for
   all when they became incompatible with a new era, which required different moods and different
   “elating” phrases – a virtuosity that he demonstrated over and over during the police examination –
   one is tempted to believe in his sincerity when he spoke of the time in Vienna as an idyll.
   Because of the complete lack of consistency in his thoughts and sentiments, this sincerity is not
   even undermined by the fact that his year in Vienna, from the spring of 1938 to March, 1939,
   came at a time when the Nazi regime had abandoned its pro-Zionist attitude. It was in the nature
   of the Nazi movement that it kept moving, became more radical with each passing month, but one
   of the outstanding characteristics of its members was that psychologically they tended to be
   always one step behind the movement – that they had the greatest difficulty in keeping up with it,
   or, as Hitler used to phrase it, that they could not “jump over their own shadow.”

   More damning, however, than any objective fact was Eichmann’s own faulty memory. There were
   certain Jews in Vienna whom he recalled very vividly – Dr. Löwenherz and Kommerzialrat Storfer
   – but they were not those Palestinian emissaries, who might have backed up his story. Josef
   Löwenherz, who after the war wrote a very interesting memorandum about his negotiations with
   Eichmann (one of the few new documents produced by the trial, it was shown in part to
   Eichmann, who found himself in complete agreement with its main statements), was the first
   Jewish functionary actually to organize a whole Jewish community into an institution at the
   service of the Nazi authorities. And he was one of the very, very few such functionaries to reap a
   reward for his services – he was permitted to stay in Vienna until the end of the war, when he
   emigrated to England and the United States; he died shortly after Eichmann’s capture, in 1960.
   Storfer’s fate, as we have seen, was less fortunate, but this certainly was not Eichmann’s fault.
   Storfer had replaced the Palestinian emissaries, who had become too independent, and his task,
   assigned to him by Eichmann, was to organize some illegal transports of Jews into Palestine
   without the help of the Zionists. Storfer was no Zionist and had shown no interest in Jewish
   matters prior to the arrival of the Nazis in Austria. Still, with the help of Eichmann he succeeded in
   getting some thirty-five hundred Jews out of Europe, in 1940, when half of Europe was occupied
   by the Nazis, and it seems that he did his best to clear things with the Palestinians. (That is
   probably what Eichmann had in mind when he added to his story about Storfer in Auschwitz the
   cryptic remark: “Storfer never betrayed Judaism, not with a single word, not Storfer.”) A third Jew,
   finally, whom Eichmann never failed to recall in connection with his prewar activities was Dr. Paul
   Eppstein, in charge of emigration in Berlin during the last years of the Reichsvereinigung – a Nazi-appointed Jewish central organization, not to be confused with the authentically Jewish
   Reichsvertretung, which was dissolved in July, 1939. Dr. Eppstein was appointed by Eichmann to
   serve as Judenältester (Jewish Elder) in Theresienstadt, where he was shot in 1944.
   In other words, the only Jews Eichmann remembered were those who had been completely in his
   power. He had forgotten not only the Palestinian emissaries but also his earlier Berlin
   acquaintances, whom he had known well when he was still engaged in intelligence work and had
   no executive powers. He never mentioned, for instance, Dr. Franz Meyer, a former member of the
   Executive of the Zionist Organization in Germany, who came to testify for the prosecution about
   his contacts with the accused from 1936 to 1939. To some extent, Dr. Meyer confirmed
   Eichmann’s own story: in Berlin, the Jewish functionaries could “put forward complaints and
   requests,” there was a kind of cooperation. Sometimes, Meyer said, “we came to ask for
   something, and there were times when he demanded something from us”; Eichmann at that time
   “was genuinely listening to us and was sincerely trying to understand the situation”; his behavior
   was “quite correct” – “he used to address me as `Mister’ and to offer me a seat.” But in February,
   1939, all this had changed. Eichmann had summoned the leaders of German Jewry to Vienna to
   explain to them his new methods of “forced emigration.” And there he was, sitting in a large room
   on the ground floor of the Rothschild Palais, recognizable, of course, but completely changed: “I
   immediately told my friends that I did not know whether I was meeting the same man. So terrible
   was the change. . . . Here I met a man who comported himself as a master of life and death. He
   received us with insolence and rudeness. He did not let us come near his desk. We had to remain
   standing.” Prosecution and judges were in agreement that Eichmann underwent a genuine and
   lasting personality change when he was promoted to a post with executive powers. But the trial
   showed that here, too, he had “relapses,” and that the matter could never have been as simple as
   that. There was the witness who testified to an interview with him at Theresienstadt in March,
   1945, when Eichmann again showed himself to be very interested in Zionist matters – the witness
   was a member of a Zionist youth organization and held a certificate of entry for Palestine. The
   interview was “conducted in very pleasant language and the attitude was kind and respectful.”
   (Strangely, counsel for the defense never mentioned this witness’s testimony in his plaidoyer. )
   Whatever doubts there may be about Eichmann’s personality change in Vienna, there is no doubt
   that this appointment marked the real beginning of his career. Between 1937 and 1941, he won
   four promotions; within fourteen months he advanced from Untersturmführer to Hauptsturmführer
   (that is, from second lieutenant to captain); and in another year and a half he was made
   Obersturmbannführer, or lieutenant colonel. That happened in October, 1941, shortly after he
   was assigned the role in the Final Solution that was to land him in the District Court of Jerusalem.
   And there, to his great grief, he “got stuck”; as he saw it, there was no higher grade obtainable in
   the section in which he worked. But this he could not know during the four years in which he
   climbed quicker and higher than he had ever anticipated. In Vienna, he had shown his mettle, and
   now he was recognized not merely as an expert on “the Jewish question,” the intricacies of
   Jewish organizations and Zionist parties, but as an “authority” on emigration and evacuation, as
   the “master” who knew how to make people move. His greatest triumph came shortly after the
   Kristallnacht, in November, 1938, when German Jews had become frantic in their desire to
   escape. Göring, probably on the initiative of Heydrich, decided to establish in Berlin a Reich
   Center for Jewish Emigration, and in the letter containing his directives Eichmann’s Viennese
   office was specifically mentioned as the model to be used in the setting up of a central authority.
   The head of the Berlin office was not to be Eichmann, however, but his later greatly admired boss
   Heinrich Müller, another of Heydrich’s discoveries. Heydrich had just taken Müller away from his
   job as a regular Bavarian police officer (he was not even a member of the Party and had been an
   opponent until 1933), and called him to the Gestapo in Berlin, because he was known to be an
   authority on the Soviet Russian police system. For Müller, too, this was the beginning of his
   career, though he had to start with a comparatively small assignment. (Müller, incidentally, not
   prone to boasting like Eichmann and known for his “sphinxlike conduct,” succeeded in
   disappearing altogether; nobody knows his whereabouts, though there are rumors that first East
   Germany and now Albania have engaged the services of the Russian-police expert.)

   In March, 1939, Hitler moved into Czechoslovakia and erected a German protectorate over
   Bohemia and Moravia. Eichmann was immediately appointed to set up another emigration center
   for Jews in Prague. “In the beginning I was not too happy to leave Vienna, for if you have
   installed such an office and if you see everything running smoothly and in goody order, you don’t
   like to give it up.” And indeed, Prague was somewhat disappointing, although the system was the
   same as in Vienna, for “The functionaries of the Czech Jewish organizations went to Vienna and
   the Viennese people came to Prague, so that I did not have to intervene at all. The model in
   Vienna was simply copied and carried to Prague. Thus the whole thing got started automatically.”
   But the Prague center was much smaller, and “I regret to say there were no people of the caliber
   and the energy of a Dr. Löwenherz.” But these, as it were, personal reasons for discontent were
   minor compared to mounting difficulties of another, entirely objective nature. Hundreds of
   thousands of Jews had left their homelands in a matter of a few years, and millions waited behind
   them, for the Polish and Rumanian governments left no doubt in their official proclamations that
   they, too, wished to be rid of their Jews. They could not understand why the world should get
   indignant if they followed in the footsteps of a “great and cultured nation.” (This enormous arsenal
   of potential refugees had been revealed during the Evian Conference, called in the summer of
   1938 to solve the problem of German Jewry through intergovernmental action. It was a
   resounding fiasco and did great harm to German Jews.) The avenues for emigration overseas
   now became clogged up, just as the escape possibilities within Europe had been exhausted
   earlier, and even under the best of circumstances, if war had not interfered with his program,
   Eichmann would hardly have been able to repeat the Viennese “miracle” in Prague.

   He knew this very well, he really had become an expert on matters of emigration, and he could
   not have been expected to greet his next appointment with any great enthusiasm. War had
   broken out in September, 1939, and one month later Eichmann was called back to Berlin to
   succeed Müller as head of the Reich Center for Jewish Emigration. A year before, this would
   have been a real promotion, but now was the wrong moment. No one in his senses could
   possibly think any longer of a solution of the Jewish question in terms of forced emigration; quite
   apart from the difficulties of getting people from one country to another in wartime, the Reich had
   acquired, through the conquest of Polish territories, two or two and a half million more Jews. It is
   true that the Hitler government was still willing to let its Jews go (the order that stopped all Jewish
   emigration came only two years later, in the fall of 1941), and if any “final solution” had been
   decided upon, nobody had as yet given orders to that effect, although Jews were already
   concentrated in ghettos in the East and were also being liquidated by the Einsatzgruppen. It was
   only natural that emigration, however smartly organized in Berlin in accordance with the
   “assembly line principle,” should peter out by itself – a process Eichmann described as being “like
   pulling teeth . . . listless, I would say, on both sides. On the Jewish side because it was really
   difficult to obtain any emigration possibilities to speak of, and on our side because there was no
   bustle and no rush, no coming and going of people. There we were, sitting in a great and mighty
   building, amid a yawning emptiness.” Evidently, if Jewish matters, his specialty, remained a
   matter of emigration, he would soon be out of a job.

   Reply
5. 

   Sam FantoSamotnaf

   July 1, 2018

   An email correspondent writes:

   “I was dumbstruck to hear of this “anti-deutsch” movement and the baleful effect it had on the summer camps you wrote of. I was even more appalled, though, to find someone, anyone, but especially someone from a nation subjected to one of the three heaviest terror-bombing campaigns of the war (Germany, Japan, Malta), speaking in favor of the vile Arthur Harris. Possessed of an instrument whose accuracy was , before the introduction of H2S, laughable [Churchill’s own, none-too-sharp scientific advisor Lord Cherwell – who had earlier opposed the emphasis on radar that was later to save England during the Battle of Britain – had found that “on average only one in three aircrews claiming to have dropped bombs within 5 miles of their target had actually done so….but over the heavily protected, smoke-laden industrial heart of the Ruhr only seven in a hundred air crews came within 5 miles of their target” Padfield, War Beneath the Sea, p. 279], Harris acted in a manner that Weber would certainly have understood: to preserve the institutional power of his organization, he reconfigured the air war strategy over Germany so as to “dehouse”, as the euphemism had it, German industrial workers. So this aspect of the war was clearly and specifically directed against the German working class. The Goebbels Diaries point out that after the British terror-bombing campaign had gotten underway, he could go through working-class districts which had previously been no-go areas for Nazis, and be cheered. This is the outcome the British leadership thought preferable to the possibility of working-class opposition to the Nazis taking the shape it did in 1917-1921. So these ‘anti-deutsch’ imbeciles (or some of them, as you write) supported a pointedly anti-proletarian campaign of mass-murder which pushed the German workers into the arms of the Nazis. What perverted contortions; and to what practical end?

   And that is not the only indefensible place this fiendishly stupid logic takes these creatures, contorted as they choose to be in their peculiar self-hatred…: all of this bureaucratic hardball to protect Harris’ and the Bomber Command’s monopoly over the force of available long-range heavy aircraft (specifically the Lancaster bombers, which had the longest range and heaviest payloads of the three types of four-engined bombers, Lancasters, Halifaxes, and Stirlings, used by the Bomber Command at that time) came at a very high price, namely the resulting inability of the RAF Coastal Command to provide air cover to convoys passing through the “air gap” in the North Atlantic. Hundreds of ships, often with their crews, were sunk in that very area, particularly after the Americans finally tightened-up their coastal defenses, forcing the U-boats back into the mid-Atlantic after losing a staggering number of ships offshore during the first six months following the official US entry into the war. One needs little effort to realize that, here too, the working class – this time the international seagoing working class that had been recruited by the Allies to man their merchant fleets – is to be made the ultimate victim of bad military, and murderously evil social, planning. It was only after Roosevelt, who in one of only two presidential interventions in the execution of the war, demanded that US Liberator bombers (the only other suitable VLR – very long range – aircraft in the Allied inventory) be sent to cover the air gap after March 16-17, 1943, when two big convoys, SC 122 and HX 229, had lost twenty-two ships between them, that the situation was put right. Concomitant to this arrant pig-headedness of Harris’, was the initial British refusal to prioritise the large-scale use of H2S centimetric radar – undetectable by the German, French-supplied, Metox radar-detector – for antisubmarine purposes: another smart move that resulted in the deaths of many merchant sailors and escort crews, as well as the eventual German discovery of the shot-down “Roterdam Device”, which allowed them to finally develop countermeasures.

   What willfully ignorant Bozos, these “anti-deutsch” anti-proletarians!

   I heartily concur with your judgement of these people and your break with them.”

   SamFanto writes:
   I should point out that though there are and/or have been many anti-deutsch people who very publicly support/ed Bomber Harris (chanting support for him on demos etc.) I don’t know if Jungle World support him or have had articles supporting him, though given that they support the IDF and the USA’s invasion of Iraq they might just well have supported him.

   Reply

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