June 11



GERMANY:

Germany struggles with its Nazi past


Sixty years after Adolf Hitler blew his brains out in a Berlin bunker and
Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies in World War II, Germans
are still grappling with the protracted, painful process of coming to
terms with their past.

Yet they are doing it better than anyone else. Japan still refuses to
acknowledge the enormity of the atrocities it committed in China, while
China tiptoes around the crimes of fanatic Maoists during the Cultural
Revolution. Italy has not fully faced up to the fascist period and France
has only begun to look fearlessly at the Vichy era. Until quite recently,
Romania steadfastly denied Jews had been murdered on its soil during the
Holocaust and for decades, Austrians insisted they were merely victims of
Nazism rather than also willing collaborators.

Germany, however, has not flinched from its historical responsibilities.

Successive German chancellors, beginning with the conservative Konrad
Adenauer and extending to his current social democratic successor Gerhard
Schroeder, have vowed to keep alive the memory of the Nazi genocide.

More recently, in light of a 1985 landmark speech in which then-German
president Richard von Weizsacker warned his nation that anyone who closes
his eyes to the past is blind to the present, Germanys elite has pledged
to incorporate Nazi crimes into its national identity.

On a practical level, Germany has tried to repent by funnelling billions
of dollars of restitution payments to Holocaust survivors, fighting
neo-Nazism and seeking a Europe-wide ban on Nazi insignia, encouraging the
growth of a new Jewish community in Germany, forging a strong relationship
with Israel, preserving former concentration camps such as Dachau and
Buchenwald and building an array of sombre monuments dedicated to the
Jewish victims of National Socialism. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of
Europe, which was opened in Berlin last month after years of passionate
debate regarding its size and form, is but the latest concrete expression
of remembrance and Germanys first national Holocaust monument.

That there are Germans who complain of Holocaust fatigue, of the kind
archly described by prominent writer Martin Walser in the late 1990s, is
beyond doubt. Micha Brumlik, the director of the Fritz Bauer Institut in
Frankfurt, which studies the impact of the Holocaust on German society,
said that more 50 per cent or Germans no longer wish to be reminded of the
12-year interregnum that tarnished their countrys honour and integrity.

This phenomenon goes hand in hand with clever but transparent attempts to
relativize the Holocaust and, by implication, to wipe the slate clean.
Last year, Martin Hohmann, a parliamentarian from the Christian Democratic
Union party, claimed there is no essential difference between the horrors
perpetrated by Jewish communists during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and
the horrors carried out by the Nazis after 1933. Hohmanns analogy brought
to mind the so-called historians debate, which roiled Germany in the
1980s. The basic but subliminally subversive question it raised was
whether the crimes of the Nazis were indeed unique and whether they were
comparable to Stalins reign of terror or the slaughter of the Armenians.

Nevertheless, judging by a survey published in a recent edition of the
newsmagazine Der Spiegel, a plurality of Germans believe that, due to
Hitler's anti-Semitic policies, they bear a special responsibility toward
Jews.

For approximately the first 10 years after the war, western Germany
notwithstanding its decision to compensate Jews for their suffering, to
prosecute some Nazi war criminals and to dabble in de-Nazification did
not seriously deal with what was commonly referred to as the unresolved
past. By contrast, the Communist regime in eastern Germany, which
collapsed with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, exploited the Nazi
epoch within the context of Cold War tensions.

In a new book published by Harvard University Press, Beyond Justice,
author Rebecca Wittmann, a University of Toronto historian, argues that
Adenauers priorities were economic recovery and political democratization
rather than a judicial confrontation with the Nazi legacy.

Repression gave way to full-throated debate in the late 1950s. German
students in Karlsruhe, the seat of the Supreme Court, mounted an
accusative exhibition on the complicit judiciary during Nazi times. The
Diary of Anne Frank galvanized an angry, questioning generation. Public
figures ranging from novelist Gunter Grass to student leader Joschka
Fischer, now Germanys foreign minister, demanded a frank accounting.

According to Wittmann, Germanys first difficult confrontation with its
past coincided with the 1963 Frankfurt trial of 20 former Auschwitz
guards. The trial and execution of Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann, plus
the Six Day War, were also events of lasting importance in consciousness
raising.

In 1968, a university student named Beate Klarsfeld caused a sensation by
slapping Georg Kiessinger, the German chancellor who had been a member of
the Nazi party. Two years later, his successor, Willy Brandt, raised
eyebrows by kneeling at the Warsaw ghetto memorial in Warsaw. The 1979
U.S. television miniseries Holocaust left a deep impression, as did Steven
Spielbergs 1993 award-winning film Schindlers List.

As a result of these developments, Germany is intensely and resolutely
conscious of its historical obligations, probably far more so than any
other country, save for Israel.

Last month, as I was strolling down Berlins Unter den Linden on an
unseasonably cold morning, I caught sight of a blue banner draped on a
grey building on the campus of Humboldt University. It read: We thank the
Allies for liberating us from the Nazi dictatorship. Across the road, at
Babel Platz, opposite the faculty of law, there was a plaque attesting to
Nazi book burning. Nearby, strung on a wrought-iron gate, was a sign:
Sixty years since the end of the war. What have we learned?

While exploring a gentrified corner of eastern Berlin known as the
Hackische Hoefe, I literally walked on several small commemorative brass
plates fixed flush with the pavement. The work of Cologne-based artist
Gunter Demnig, they memorialize German Jews deported and murdered by the
Nazis. By all accounts, there are 3,000 such stolpersteine throughout
Germany.

Although Germany has compensated Jewish property owners for their losses,
new cases pop up periodically.

Last year, the descendants of the Wertheim family, which lost its
department store fortune under Nazi Aryanization laws, won a pivotal court
battle that sets the stage for further legal wrangling. Four months ago,
in a parallel case, a judge in Berlin ruled that a Jewish woman who had
been forced to flee Germany was entitled to be compensated for furnishings
in a medical clinic expropriated from her late parents.

Similarly, reparation payments are a jolting reminder of former days.

Last month, after talks with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims
Against Germany, the German government announced it would compensate Jews
who had been incarcerated in North African labour camps for at least six
months. Vichy France, an ally of Germany, established some 30 camps in
Morocco and Algeria in 1941 and 1942. When Germany occupied Tunisia in
1942 and 1943, 32 camps were set up.

In the wake of this announcement, Germany agreed to add an additional
payment of $11 million (US) to meet the home care needs of survivors in 17
countries.

Most Germans who personally or administratively killed Jews during the
Holocaust have passed on. But occasionally, newly found perpetrators, all
in their 80s and 90s, are arrested, thus reminding Germans of their
ever-present past. Nearly a year ago, an unidentified man was taken into
custody in Munich, charged with having organized a massacre of Czech
partisans and civilians. In Gottingen, meanwhile, prosecutors opened an
investigation against a former SS officer, identified only as Hans F., who
participated in the mass shootings of Jews in Ukraine.

Since 1945, 100,000 or so German citizens have been investigated for
participation in war crimes, but only 6,487 have been convicted. Of these,
13 were executed, 163 sentenced to life imprisonment, 6,197 given
temporary prison terms and 114 subjected to fines.

Not surprisingly, the past is also an issue in Germanys foreign ministry.
In March, after Fischer banned posthumous tributes in the ministrys
in-house magazine for diplomats who had been Nazi party members, he
created a commission to study the matter.

Clearly, the spectre of the Third Reich continues to haunt Germany.

(source: Sheldon Kirshner, Canadian Jewish News)