OPINION | HISTORY
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by Roland Binet (De Panne, Belgium)
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- In that town, I spied in the debris
- The thorn fragment of a parchment scroll
- And gently brushed away the dirt to see
- What tale it told.
- Written on it was “In a strange land” —
- Just a few words from the Bible, but the sum
- Of all one needs to understand
- Of a pogrom.
(by Z. Jabotinsky, following the Berdichev pogrom, from Jabotinsky. A Life by Hillel Halkin, Yale University Press, 2014)
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You are from Hashomer Hatsair? Mordecai asked me. Yes, I still remember the Zionists from Vienna.” Surprisingly the man who asked Chaika Grossman the question was an Austrian, officer in the Wehrmacht, stationed in Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania), who later was captured and killed by the Nazis because, as Grossman remembered, he was
“a tall officer, Schmidt, who served in the Vilna occupation army (…) He headed a collection station for soldiers who had lost their units. Cars and all kinds of papers were at his disposal. In short, the officer began a rescue operation.”
(from The Underground Army – Fighters of the Bialystok Ghetto, by Chaika Grossman, Holocaust Library, New York, 1987; she survived the war, emigrated to Israel and became a member of the Knesset)
So, one Wehrmacht officer who helped the Jews living underground outside the Vilna Ghetto. Is this enough to redeem the honor of Germany and Austria? Is this even worth mentioning at all when focusing not on individual heroism but on the bigger picture of what it is that happened?
I have long believed in the collective guilt of the German and Austrian nations in the perpetration of the Holocaust. That is my opinion.
Let us first look at the soldiers, the ones from the Wehrmacht, because under Hitler’s conception a whole branch of the military might was intended to be killers of Jews and assorted Untermenschen: the SS, the Einsatzgruppen, the Ordnung and Police battalions from the SD, as well as massive collaborators in different countries whom they so successfully inspired to commit genocide against a peaceful minority who had been their neighbors for centuries.
Apart from these professional killers of Jew among Poles, Lithuanians, , Russians, Greeks, Yugoslavs, etc., thirteen million Wehrmacht soldiers served on the Eastern Front, from the USSR to Yugoslavia. These soldiers fought but also took photographs of slaughters
“Here were soldiers photographing without the least compunction other soldiers committing atrocities. The absence of a sense of guilt or shame, the absence of any second thought (…) — this is almost harder to take than the dissolution of the boundary between military and criminal conduct, between civility and barbarity. […] Highest level military orders identified Jews as particularly dangerous enemies in what was to be a savage war. From all we know, soldiers seemed to concur.”
(figures and quotes in italics from the foreword by Michael Geyer in The German Army and Genocide – Crimes Against War Prisoners, Jews and Other Civilians, 1939-1944, edited by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, 1996)
These soldiers had families, they sent pictures home or talked about these events when on furlough. Thus, firstly, a large mass of Germans in Germany had known about the massacres on a huge scale in the East, directly or indirectly from soldiers who had been there and who had witnessed or participated in individual or mass massacres).
What about what is called the “Generalität” (upper echelon generals in the German army)? Kowtowing to Hitler began quite quickly. four days after his victory Kanzler Hitler met them at General Kurt von Hammerstein’s service flat. Hitler mentioned that one of his goals was “to restore the German Army, ‘ausrotten’ of Marxism with heels and stump, fight against Versailles, perhaps conquest of new export possibilities, perhaps – even better – conquest of Lebensraum in the East and its reckless Germanization (…).”
On February 5, the Völkische Beobachter had as headline (here in translation) “The Army shoulder to shoulder with the Kanzler” (quotes from Die Wehrmacht Eine Bilanz, by Guido Knopp, Goldmann, 2009; von Hammerstein resigned soon afterward).
But there was worse to come.
No generals had had any criticism to offer when as from August 20, 1934 all soldiers had to “swear this sacred oath that I will obey the Führer of the German Reich, Adolf Hitler…”
Nor had they objected to the Nürnberg Laws enacted in 1935.
Nor had they objected to the pogrom during the Kristallnacht of November 9-10, 1938.
They had had no objections to the creation of the concentration camps such as Dachau, beginning in March 1933.
Moreover, they had had no objection to the T4 Aktion which killed between 60,000 and 80,000 physically or mentally handicapped Germans (1939/1941). Nor to the takeover of Austria, the Sudetenland, nor the invasion of Norway and Denmark in April 1940, later of Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Belgium and France in May 1940, later of Greece and Yugoslavia and finally to the invasion of the USSR including the Baltic States (which had been incorporated into the USSR in 1940).
They did not object when the Einsatzgruppen began their dirty work first in Poland later in the USSR republics, nor when in the General Government (Eastern Poland) ghettos were created, and then, upon enactment of the death camps and factories.
Uniformed German military “at work” in Vinnitsa (Vinnytsia), Ukraine.
Troops of the Wehrmacht participated in the roundups of Jews to be slaughtered in the Baltic States, Ukraine and Byelorussia or to be put into ghettos. They did not object when millions of Soviet prisoners of war were forced to die of beatings, neglect, hunger or were killed by bullets, nor had they ever objected when millions of European civilian men and women were drafted for compelled work in German and Austrian factories or in farms (8 millions in 1945 in Germany according to Timothy Snyder’s “Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin”).
As for the Holocaust, the opinion of the Generalität was quite clear: “The Jews were not human beings any more in the European sense, they had then to be destroyed” was commonly heard from General Gustav von Bechtolsheim (cited in Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands), another General, von Reichenau, issued a directive stating that
in the East, the soldier is not only a man who fights according to the rules of the art of war. For this reason, the soldier must fully judge the necessity to inflict a punishment to the less than human species of the Jewry
(Wikipedia under his name; he is said to have witnessed the Babi Yar massacre end of September 1941)
“None of these high-ranking officers protested against the Wehrmacht’s cooperation with the Einsatzgruppen in murdering Jews because, as Field Marshall Keitel explained before the Nuremberg Tribunal, it was ‘well-known’ that ‘the officer corps in general viewed the Jews with distaste.’”
(The German Army and Genocide, cited above)
And even if postwar Germany is very proud to state that there had been resistance circles among the top Wehrmacht officers, one must realize that the number of such “heroes”’ was quite small. We may cite with admiration von Bock, Trescow, von Kluge, Canaris, von Stauffenberg, von Stülpnagel, among others But what German believers in the heroism of such men fail to grasp is that after more than six years of genocidal criminal behavior (“not just any criminal behavior”) by Hitler and his SS followers (starting with the creation of the Dachau concentration cam)}, when World War II broke out, all the generals were in favor of these military campaigns and – after the defeat of France (where many of the Generalität members had fought during WWI), –they were enthusiastic about Hitler who, finally, had redeemed, in their eyes, the honor of the German Army after its defeat in 1918, unbeaten on the battle fields but betrayed by the civilian government (theory of “the knife in the back”).
These “heroes” started to get second thoughts in the Soviet Union when they saw that the Jewish-Bolshevik monster did not crumble in six weeks as planned, when they experienced the toughness of their enemies, when they saw their own troops dropping out at staggering rates, when they started to retreat before Moscow, later in Stalingrad, later from the Kursk salient, etc.
And let us not beat around the bush: many of these German resistance generals actually wanted Hitler dead in order to be able to sign a peace treaty with the Western Allies and then have them all together fight against Soviet Russia. Even Göring and Himmler turned at the end of the war not because they had felt any remorse for the staggering killings but in order to survive as beasts that would do anything in order to live a bit more. A human instinct they had denied to their dozens of millions of victims.
Perhaps, only the Weiꞵe Rose resistance movement of young men and women who, in one of their first leaflets denounced the murder of Jews in Poland, might be worth remembering as far as genuine opposition to Hitler and Nazi Germany is concerned.
What about the civilian population of and in Germany? We know for a fact that the German population as a whole participated in the Holocaust and war crimes, approved Hitler’s plans or kept silent and politically inactive about these horrible crimes. Raul Hilberg has perhaps first and foremost given us the most plausible explanation to that inactivity bordering on indifference in his classic work:
“Immersed in their own existence, the neighbors of the Jews had only to look at the Jewish community in distress to reassure themselves: they did not share the fate of the Jews (…) In a Europe that contained Germans and Lithuanians as well as Italians and Danish, there was a whole scope of nations, each one with a varied population, but the domineering model in most of these regions does not leave any place for doubt. The Jews had been stigmatized. Once drawn, the separation line was indelible.”
(from Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews)
This was not a case of discrimination or denial of equal human rights such as had occurred in the czarist empire. This was a case of genocide of a people, not in one’s own country, but in strange lands conquered. Where being the “stranger” meant being sentenced to death for being born into a certain group in someone else’s country. The notion that the German army and its leaders, or for that matter the overwhelming majority of German and Austrian people of the time somehow did not realize all this stretches human credulity well beyond the breaking point.
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See also the author’s 2013 piece, “The Wehrmacht: One of Hitler’s Killing Machines“.