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'The Holocaust Is German Family History'
Book Urges Germans to Quiz Dying Nazi Generation
By David Crossland
German historian Moritz
Pfeiffer asked his granddad what he did in World War II, and then fact-checked
the testimony. His findings in a new book shed light on a dying generation that
remains outwardly unrepentant, but is increasingly willing to break decades of
silence on how, and why, it followed Hitler.
Germany has won praise for collectively confronting
its Nazi past, but the subject has remained a taboo in millions of family homes
-- with children and grandchildren declining to press their elders on what they
did in the war.
At least 20 to 25 million Germans knew about the Holocaust while it was
happening, according to conservative estimates, and some 10 million fought on
the Eastern Front in a war of annihilation that targeted civilians from the
start. That, says German historian Moritz Pfeiffer, makes the genocide and the
crimes against humanity a part of family history.
Time is running out. The answer to how a cultured,
civilized nation stooped so low lies in the minds of the dying Third Reich
generation, many of whom are ready and willing to talk at the end of their
lives, says Pfeiffer, 29, who has just completed an unprecedented research
project based on his own family.
"The situation has changed radically compared
with the decades immediately after the war," Pfeiffer, a historian at a
museum on the SS at Wewelsburg Castle, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "The generation of eyewitnesses evidently wants
to talk now, at least that's my impression. Towards the end of one's life the
distance to the events is so great that people are ready to give
testimony."
"Immediately after the war, conversations about
it between parents and children appear to have been impossible because it was
all too fresh," Pfeiffer continued. "Now the problem is that no one
is listening to that generation anymore. As a source of information, one's
relatives are largely being ignored. But one day it will be too late."
New Approach to Questioning
Relatives
Oral history has become increasingly popular, even
though personal reminiscences are chronically unreliable as they are distorted
by time. But Pfeiffer took a new approach by interviewing his two maternal
grandparents about what they did in the war, and then systematically checking
their statements using contemporary sources such as letters and army records.
No one has done this before.
He juxtaposed his findings with context from
up-to-date historical research on the period and wrote a book that has shed new
light on the generation that unquestioningly followed Hitler, failed to own up
to its guilt in the immediate aftermath of the war and, more than six decades
on, remains unable to express personal remorse for the civilian casualties of
Hitler's war of aggression, let alone for the Holocaust.
His recently published book, "My Grandfather in
the War 1939-1945," (published in German only) is based on the interviews
he conducted in 2005 with his grandfather, named only as Hans Hermann K., who
was a career officer in a Wehrmacht infantry regiment. His grandmother Edith
was too ill to be interviewed at length but he analyzed many of her letters.
Both died in 2006.
Both of them supported the Nazi regime and Pfeiffer
admits that they were morally "contaminated," like millions of
ordinary Germans of that generation. He describes his grandmother Edith as a
"committed, almost fanatical Nazi."
'No One Can Say What They
Would Have Done'
But the project wasn't an attempt to pass judgment on
his grandparents, says Pfeiffer. He only wanted to understand them.
"No one today can say what they would have done
or thought at the time," he said. "I believe that people will learn a
lot if they understand how their respected and loved parents or grandparents
behaved in the face of a totalitarian dictatorship and murderous racial
ideology," Pfeiffer said.
"Dealing with one's family history in the Nazi
period in an open, factual and self-critical way is an important contribution
to accepting democracy and avoiding a repeat of what happened between 1933 and
1945."
Hans Hermann K. was so good at goosestepping that he
was briefly transferred to a parade unit in Berlin. Edith joined the Nazi Party
and was so zealous that when she married Hans Hermann in 1943, she provided
documentation tracing her Aryan roots all the way back to the early 18th
century -- even SS members were "only" required to verify their
racial purity back to January 1, 1800.
During the course of his research, Moritz Pfeiffer
found large gaps, contradictions and evasive answers in Hans Hermann's
testimony -- regarding his purported ignorance of mass executions of civilians,
for example.
Grandfather Fought in
France, Poland, Soviet Union
Hans Hermann was a lieutenant in the famous 6th Army
and fought in the invasions of Poland, France and the Soviet Union, where he
lost an eye in September 1942 when a shell exploded near him.
His wound probaby saved his life. Shortly after he was
evacuated back to Germany for treatment, his unit was sent to Stalingrad and
virtually wiped out. Only 6,000 men survived out of the more than 100,000 that
were taken prisoner by the Red Army at Stalingrad.
Few would disagree that Germany as a nation has worked
hard to atone for its past, unlike Austria and Japan which have cloaked
themselves in denial. Germany has paid an estimated €70 billion in compensation
for the suffering it caused, conducts solemn ceremonies to commemorate the
victims and, above all, has owned up to what was done in its name.
Companies and government ministries have opened up
their archives to historians to illuminate their role in the Third Reich, and a late push in prosecutions of war criminals is underway to make up for the
failure to bring them to justice in the decades after the war.
But millions never confronted their own personal role
as cogs in the Nazi machinery.
Hans Hermann was no different, even though he readily
agreed to talk to his grandson.
He was born in 1921 to an arch-conservative,
nationalist family with military traditions in the western city of Wuppertal.
His father, a furniture store owner, regaled him with stories about his time as
a lieutenant in World War I, and it was instilled in him at an early age that
the war reparations of the Versailles Treaty were exaggerated.
The store boomed after Hitler took power because the
new government provided cheap government loans for married couples to buy
kitchen and bedroom furniture.
In the interview,
Hans Hermann was frank about his attitude towards Jews in the mid-1930s, when
he was in his early teens and a member of the Jungvolk youth organization,
which was affiliated with the Hitler Youth.
Asked by Moritz whether he thought at the time that
the racial laws banning Jews from public life and systematically expropriating
their property were unfair, he said:
"No, we didn't regard that as injustice, we had
to go with the times and the times were like that. The media didn't have the
importance then that they do today."
But Hans Hermann didn't join the Nazi party, and said
in 2005 that he opposed the Reichskristallnacht, the Nov. 9, 1938 pogrom
organized by the Nazi regime in which thousands of Jewish stores and synagogues
were attacked and burned.
"That wasn't right. We were angry about the
violence and the fire in the synagogue, that wasn't our thing," he said.
"That was the SA, that was the SS, we rejected that … But we couldn't do
anything, we had to keep our mouths shut."
Asked about the invasion of Poland and the executions of civilians, Hans Hermann was evasive, at first
describing relations between the German army and Poles as "friendly"
and saying he knew nothing about mass shootings of Polish civilians at the
time.
When pressed by Moritz, however, he admitted he knew
about killings being committed by the SS, but added that the Wehrmacht had
nothing to do with it -- a typical attitude that reflected the long-held myth
that regular German soldiers weren't involved in atrocities.
Pfeiffer said he found his grandfather's indifference
to the suffering of the Polish population, 6 million of whom died in the war,
"staggering" but, again, typical of the response of many Germans of
his generation.
In 1941, Hans Hermann took part in Operation Barbarossa,
the invasion of the Soviet Union. He was in the Infantry Regiment 208 of the
79th Infantry Division, and he said he knew nothing about criminal orders such
as the German army's infamous "Commissar Order" -- that all Soviet
political commissars detected among the captured must be killed.
'Hardly Believable'
Asked about the Commissar Order, Hans Hermann said:
"I didn't hear anything about that, don't know it. We were behind the
combat troops who were the ones taking prisoners."
Pfeiffer refuted the claim that his grandfather's unit
took no prisoners. He found the war diary of the 79th Infantry Division which
records that 5,088 Russian soldiers were captured between August 5 and August
31 alone. Between September 20 and 25, a further 24,000 were taken prisoner.
Even the ones who weren't shot dead on the spot had a
slim chance of survival. More than 3 million of the 5.7 million Red Army
soldiers captured by German forces in World War II died, a proportion of almost
60 percent.
Pfeiffer said his grandfather as a front line officer
and company commander would have been subject to the order to weed out the
political commissars from among captured Red Army soldiers and have them shot.
The historian said he couldn't ascertain whether his grandfather ever had to
take such a decision. But historical evidence exists that the 79th Infantry
division carried out the order.
Also, historians have proven that the 6th Army, which
Hans Hermann's division was part of, carried out war crimes and massacres, and
assisted in the murder of 33,771 Jews in the ravine of Babi
Yar in Ukraine at the
end of September 1941.
Pfeiffer said it was "hardly believable"
that his grandfather didn't know anything about the mass killings.
Hans Hermann also said: "The Bolshevists were our
enemies, that was clear and we had to be guided by that. But those who greeted
us with salt and bread on their doorstep, they couldn't be enemies, we treated
them well." He didn't say what happened to civilians who didn't greet the
troops with salt and bread.
'Spellbound by the Words of
the Führer'
Pfeiffer's book also presents letters written by his
grandmother Edith that showed her ardent support for Hitler. On Nov. 8, 1943,
she wrote to her husband after hearing Hitler speak: "I am still totally
spellbound by the words of the Führer that were stirring and inspiring as ever!
I glow with enthusiasm … One feels strong enough to tear out trees."
In his interview, Hans Hermann expressed criticism of
the Allied bombings of German cities. "How could that be possible, against
the civilian population!" He made no mention of German bombing attacks on
Rotterdam and Coventry in 1940.
He was taken prisoner by American forces in Metz,
France, in October 1944 and didn't see his wife again until March 1946.
Pfeiffer concluded that his grandfather wasn't lying
outright in his interviews, but merely doing what millions of Germans had done
after the war -- engaging in denial, playing down their role to lessen their
responsibility.
It led to the convenient myth in the immediate
aftermath of the war that the entire nation had been duped by a small clique of
criminals who bore sole responsibility for the Holocaust -- and that ordinary
Germans had themselves been victims.
Germany has long since jettisoned that fallacy. But
Pfeiffer admits that his book didn't answer a key question about his loving,
kind grandparents who were pillars of his family for decades.
"Why did the humanity of my grandparents not
rebel against the mass murders and why didn't my grandfather, even in his
interview in 2005, concede guilt or shame or express any sympathy for the
victims?"
'Moral Insanity'
When asked whether he felt that he shared any of the
collective guilt for the Holocaust, Hans Hermann said: "No. That is no
guilt collectively. No group is levelling this collective guilt, it's
differentiated today, in historical research as well. The individual guilt of
people and groups is being researched."
Pfeiffer writes that his grandparents were infected by
the same "moral insanity" that afflicted many Germans during and
after World War I: "A state of emotional coldness, a lack of
self-criticism and absolute egotism combined with a strong deficit of moral
judgment as well as the support, acceptance and justification of cruelty when
the enemy was affected by it."
Those are damning words. Pfeiffer said his
grandparents' generation probably had no choice but to suppress their guilt in
order to keep on functioning in the hard post-war years when all their energy
was focused on rebuilding their livelihoods. "It was a necessary human
reaction," said Pfeiffer.
The Vergangenheitsbewältigung -- the
confrontation with the past -- got a much-needed push with the 1968 student
protests.
For many, the atonement didn't come fast enough.
German author Ralph Giordano referred to the "Second Guilt" in a book
he wrote in 1987 -- the reluctance to own up to the crimes, and the ability of Nazi perpetrators to prosper in
postwar West Germany.
Pfeiffer hopes his book will encourage other children
and grandchildren of eyewitnesses to follow suit. "I think conversations
like the ones I carried out will bring relatives together rather than drive a
wedge between them," he said.
Pfeiffer's original intention had been just to write a
family history for personal use. After he interviewed his grandfather, he
edited the transcript and presented it to the family at Christmas in 2005.
'Non-Verbal Admissions of
Guilt'
But he had noticed omissions in his grandfather's
testimony and had asked him to submit to a second, more rigorous interview in
summer 2006. Hans Hermann agreed. Unfortunately, Moritz never got the chance to
conduct it. Edith died in June that year after a long illness. Overcome by
grief, Hans Hermann died six weeks later.
Asked how he thinks his grandfather would have reacted
to his book, Pfeiffer said: "I think he would have initially been shocked
about the unsparing presentation of his life story and wouldn't exactly have
been delighted at my critical comments and conclusions.
"But I think he would have spent a long time
examining it and would acknowledge the factual analysis and the fact that I
wasn't trying to discredit him or settle any scores."
Pfeiffer sees a big difference between what the dying
generation is able to articulate and what it is actually feeling. He detected
what he called "non-verbal admissions of guilt" in his grandfather's
behavior.
After the war, Hans Hermann encouraged his daughter to
learn French and hosted French pupils on exchange programs. He also supported
the European integration policy of Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle, and
avoided going to veterans' reunions.
In 2005, he was outraged at first by a research report
Pfeiffer co-wrote at the University of Freiburg about the involvement of the
Wehrmacht in war crimes. A few weeks later, however, he told his grandson:
"I have thought a lot about it -- and there's some truth to it."
Moritz Pfeiffer: "Mein Großvater im Krieg
1939-1945. Erinnerung und Fakten im Vergleich". Donat-Verlag, Bremen 2012, 216 Seiten.
Spiegelonline
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