Monk

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Andrew Sullivan has pointed out an intriguing quote from Jon Wiener's interview with historian Saul Friedländer regarding Nazi Germany:

JW: You do think we need to understand the German people and why they continued to follow Hitler to the bitter end.

SF: Yes, a great majority of Germans remained faithful to their fuehrer, many of them to the end, and, it has to be admitted, quite a few even after the end. That, for a historian, is a puzzling situation. Stalin was feared by the Russians—admired by only a section of the population. Roosevelt was hated by many people in America. Churchill was hated by many people in England. But in Germany, you find adoration of Hitler—even after Stalingrad, even towards the end when everything was in ruins. The psychology of this I do not understand very well.

Sullivan offers, "It is the psychology of political theology, fused with unrestrained nationalism and hero-worship."

I think one really has to look to the appeal of white/racial supremacy to explain the powerful support that Hitler commanded. It is a primal call to family. Although it seems unlikely that such a call can be so effective in the West today, I suspect that there remains a latent source of spiritual power in such a perspective.

As a non-Western example, I think it is this kind of call that helps to explain the draw of Islamism for many Muslims. Considering Nazi Germany and contemporary Islamism, it can look like being down and out as a people and a culture is an enabler of these more primal instincts.

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MOSCOW, Aug. 14 — The Russian authorities said Tuesday that they were investigating a video recording of what appeared to be the grisly execution of two bound and gagged young men, filmed in a forest beneath a large Nazi flag. At least one of the men was beheaded on camera as he lay in a shallow grave.

The video, which appeared Sunday on several Russian ultranationalist Web sites, circulated on the Internet with a note from a previously unknown organization calling itself the National-Socialist Party of Russia. The note announced that a “military vanguard” had begun an armed struggle against “black colonists and those who support them from the Russian government.”

It demanded the expulsion from Russia of all Asians and people from the Caucasus and the granting of independence to all of Russia’s internal republics in the Caucasus.

-- C. J. Chivers for The New York Times

It is thought that this new neo-Nazi offshoot is a very marginal group, but it would seem to give a flavor of how the politics of the region is going.

Who can say that the world is any less savage than it was in caveman days?

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Aside from the mass murders and the Holocaust and ,like, starting World War II, you have to admit the Nazis were pretty cool with a sense of style.

Apparently, it is not unusual in Europe for youths to wear some Nazi chic and even give the stiffy salute, but supposedly without truly celebrating the actual historic Nazis, or indeed without even really knowing about that history. This is reported to be bigger in soccer circles. Just a little cool youthful rebellion. Like leather jackets and long hair, I guess.

Of course, there are also real neo-Nazis lurking about. You have to be mindful and look deeper to distinguish between the cool and the murderously hateful.


(Source: Nicholas Wood for The New York Times)

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A majestic new book on the Nazis is out. It is the second half of the two volumes that Saul Friedländer has written “establishing a historical account of the Holocaust in which the policies of the perpetrators, the attitudes of surrounding society and the world of the victims could be addressed within an integrated framework.” It is titled "The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945". The reviewer, Richard Evans, writes for the Times that this in-depth work has the virtue of reading like a novel and is therefore meant for more than academicians and amateur enthusiasts. Evans, however, also notes that Friedländer's focus on the Jews has its disadvantages:

And the book’s focus on the sufferings of the Jews pushes the broader context of Nazi racial policy — which includes the mass murder of millions of Soviet prisoners of war, the systematic extermination of the Polish intelligentsia, the killing of about 200,000 mentally ill or handicapped Germans, the annihilation of a large part of Europe’s Gypsies — possibly too far into the background. For as a good deal of recent work has shown, the Third Reich’s genocidal policies toward the Jews have to be understood as part of a larger policy aimed at the ethnic reshaping of Europe. Comparisons with these other victims would have made it evident that the Jews occupied a special place in the exterminatory mentality of the Nazis; they were perceived not as a regional obstacle but as a global threat, not as inferior beings like insects but as powerful enemies, whose very existence anywhere was a terrible danger to the future of the German race.

To be honest, I am happy with William Shirer's great work "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" which perhaps has even more of the page-turning force of a dramatic novel while also providing a broader sweep of the macabre events. Shirer's work is one of my rereadables, and it will probably continue to serve me in my interest and fascination over this cataclysmic epoch. But this new work is definitely worth a mention.


(Source: Richard J. Evans for The New York Times)

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Some new documents have been recently uncovered giving us more of the story behind the Diary of Anne Frank:

On April 30, 1941, just days after a Gestapo courier may have threatened to denounce Anne Frank’s father, Otto, to the Nazis, he wrote to his close college friend Nathan Straus Jr. begging for help in getting his family out of Amsterdam and into America.

“I would not ask if conditions here would not force me to do all I can in time to be able to avoid worse,” he wrote in a letter that forms part of a 78-page stack of newly uncovered documents released yesterday. “Perhaps you remember that we have two girls. It is for the sake of the children mainly that we have to care for. Our own fate is of less importance.”

Frank needed a $5,000 deposit to obtain a visa and Straus, the director of the federal Housing Authority, a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt and the son of Macy’s co-owner, had money and connections. “You are the only person I know that I can ask,” he wrote. “Would it be possible for you to give a deposit in my favor?”

That letter begins a series of personal correspondence and official papers that reveal for the first time the Frank family’s increasingly desperate efforts in 1941 to get to the United States or Cuba before the Nazis got to them. The papers, owned by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, had lain undisturbed in a New Jersey warehouse for nearly 30 years before a clerical error led to their unexpected discovery. Given the thorough historical research and extraordinary efforts to preserve Anne Frank’s legacy, the appearance of this overlooked file is surprising.

The story seems to unfold in slow motion as the painstaking exchange of letters journey across continents and from state to state, their information often outdated by the time they arrive. Each page adds a layer of sorrow as the tortuous process for gaining entry to the United States — involving sponsors, large sums of money, affidavits and proof of how their entry would benefit America — is laid out. The moment the Franks and their American supporters overcame one administrative or logistical obstacle, another arose.

... Ultimately, powerful connections and money were not enough to enable the Franks, not to mention most other European Jews, to break through the State Department’s tightening restrictions. By the summer of 1942, the Franks were forced into hiding. They remained in the secret annex for two years before being turned in, probably by the same courier who initially may have tried to blackmail them. As schoolchildren around the world know, the story ends with the death in concentration camps of 15-year-old Anne, her sister Margot and her mother, Edith, and the publication of Anne’s diary, now a literary and historical landmark that personalizes the Holocaust’s immeasurable loss.

(Source: Patricia Cohen for The New York Times)

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