The Healing Wound: Experiences and Reflections on Germany, 1938 - 2001 by Gitta Sereny
NY: WW Norton, 2001
ISBN 0-393-04428-9
Introduction
(xvii) The fact that the Russians, who lost 50 million people to Stalin, Hitler, and the war, feel both bitter and puzzled by the West’s almost exclusive concentration upon the Nazis’ genocide of the Jews is not surpising.
…Many people, myself included, have come to feel that the particularism accepted by the Western world over the past fifty-five years, in so entirely identifying HItler and national socialism with the genocide of the Jews, virtually ignoring the millions Hitler murdered elsewhere and concentrating the historic and emotional memory of that period so exclusively on that one aspect of it (including the appropriation of the - capitalized - word “Holocaust”), is both historically incorrect and psychologically unwise.
Beginnings
(4) March 1938, when Hitler invaded Austria: While I waited for Elfie in the dark, deserted park, I heard for the first time a sound that was to echo around Vienna for weeks: the rhythmic chant of many voices shouting words I had never heard before: “Deutschland erwache! Juda Verrecke!” - Germany awake! Jewry perish!
Stolen Children [Children stolen from their parents to be raised in Germany]
(28) “Extermination by work,” it was called, and it applied not only to children or Jews, but to countless slave workers. “If 10,000 Russian women die of exhaustion in digging an anti-tank ditch, this is of no interest to me except to the extent to which the ditch is readied for Germany,” said Heinrich Himmler on 4 October 1943 in Posen. “We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a correct attitude towards animals, also have a correct attitude toward these animal human beings."
(45) (If, although of the right colouring and build, they [child prisoners] were found to be physically unfit or racially “tainted,” they would end up in what to all intents and purposes was a children’s concentration camp in Lodz (renamed Litzmanstaft), about which little documentation exists except some harrowing photographs, but where it is said most of them died.)
Generation Without a Past
(71) If - soon - the German youth cannot find dignity, they will look for pride. Dignity grows and lives in freedom. Pride can arise out of oppression. An enormous and belated effort of courage is required of the adults of West Germany: they must free their children, against themselves.
(76) “The high SS officers who headed the sections of the [Einsatzkommando] 1005 were almost all originaly trained in the euthanasia program,” he [Kurt Tegge] said. “that was in the very beginning - in 1938-9. We know now how it worked: they would be ordered to kill all patients in certain institutions and hospitals for the insane, incurably ill or severely retarded. They would be told that ‘this is a difficult job, but, for the sake of Germany, and the patients themselves, it has to be done.’ If it turned out that they were sickened by this assignment - and many were - they would be asked on another occasion to try again, and then once more. But the third time, they had either overcome their objections and revulsion and would then be considered capable of ‘hard’ assignments - or else they had shown themselves incapable of this sort of work and were transferred to other duties. It is certain that this was quite deliberately used as the training ground for the SS. It was considered that if these men turned out to be capable of killing sick German children and old people, they’d be capable of anything. We’ve had numerous euthanasia trials in West Germany and there are more to come."
NB: I wonder if a generation of constant international warfare has done that in the USA and other countries in the "developed" world.
(81-82) Again and again, all over Germany, the point was made to me that the German people on the whole had never accepted, hardly knew, that genocide was perpetrated on other people beside the Jews. The Jews too tend towards this misinterpretation of events. “They killed 6 million Jews - we know, “ says Herr Rückerl. “But they also killed 5 million Russian civilians, 2 million Poles - including a large part of their finest intelligentsia - and a million other people: gypsies, German free-thinkers, and German insane or incurably sick… 8 million of what they chose to call 'inferior stock.’ But these dreadful numbers - 14 million - they are not even the point, it’s the basic insanity of categorizing humanity that matters. How can we make our people understand? And unless they understand this at least, how can we have any hope for the future?"
Colloquy with a Conscience
(88) When, sometime in 1968, I realized that this [how people could have carried out genocidal orders] was the reason for my frustration, I decided to try to find one perpetrator if possible less primitive and with at least a semblance of moral awareness, who, if approached not as a monster but as a human being, might be able to explain his own catastrophic moral failure.
(89) I went to Düsseldorf the next day and , as Spiess thought, found {Franz Paul] Stangl [commandant of the Sobibór and Treblinka extermination camps, notes on Sereny's book on Stangl at http://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2016/12/into-that-darkness-from-mercy-killing.html] more complex, more open, serious and even sad than any of the others I had observed; the only man with such a horrific record who appeared to manifest a semblance of a conscience.
(90) Ruth-Alice von Bismarck published the correspondence between her sister, Maria von Wedemeyer and her fiancé Deitrich Bonhoeffer, Loveletters from Cell 92 (HarperCollins, 1994)
(92) I think my reason for doing the things I do, is and always has been quite simply - or perhaps not so simply - a need, a drive to know. The price one pays (and, selfishly, expects the people one loves to pay) for giving in to this inner need, in shock, in tension and in a very particular kind of fatigue, can be high.
(94) Wiesenthal meets RFK: He [RFK] was a great man, He said, “There is no statute of limiitations on a moral obligation.' And he let the Brazilians know that America would not be pleased if there was any delay in the agreement to Stangl’s extradition. His intervention at that time affected the subsequent attitude of all South American governments: they found out where America stood.”
(95) Prison staff in West Germany are well trained (the courses include 200 hours of lectures in psychology).
(96) The need to “accommodate” himself to a situation appears to have followed Franz Stangl from the cradle.
(102) Stangl: “By then I had heard that I had originally been on a list of officials to be shot after the Anschluss [because of his finding and reporting a Nazi arms cache in 1934].
“I hate…. I hate the Germans,” he suddenly said with passion, “for what they pulled me into. I should have killed myself in 1938.” There was nothing maudlin about the way this was said: he was merely stating a fact. “That’s when it started for me. I must acknowledge my guilt.”
(105) Sereny: What made you agree to go [to the euthanasia group]?
Stangl: Several times during this talk he mentioned - sort of by the way - that he had heard I wasn’t altogether happy in Linz. And then, he said, there was a disciplinary action pending against me. That would, of course, be suspended if I accepted a transfer. He said I could also choose either to go to an institute in Saxonia, or one in Austria. But that, if I chose to refuse the assignment, no doubt my present chief in Linz - Prohaska - would find something else for me to do.”
…. After all I already knew since 13 March that it was simpler to be dead in Germany than anywhere else.
(108) “‘Just look at him [16 year old looking like 5 year old candidate for euthanasia],’ she [the nun] went on. ‘No good to himself or anyone else. How could they refuse to deliver him from this miserable life?’ This really shook me, “ said Stangl. “Here was a Catholic nun, a mother superior, _and_ a priest. And they thought it was right. Who was I then to doubt what was being done?”
The exact number of those killed has never been established, but varies between 60,000 and 80,000. But after many Germans publicly protested agaiinst the killing of German and Austrian patients, on 23 August 1941 ( by which time approximately 50,000 had been killed), Hitler ordered the Aktion stopped.
(112) He [Globocnik] said that any Jews who didn’t work properly here would be “eliminated.” “If any of you don’t like that,” he said to us, “you can leave. But under the earth,” he added in his heavy wit, “not over it.”
NB: murderers make murderers by threatening murder
(117) When I got out of the car on the Sortierungsplatz I stepped knee-deep into money: I didn’t know which ways to turn, where to go. I waded in paper notes, currency, precious stones, jewelry and clothes. They were everywhere, strewn all over the square. The smell was indescribable: the hundreds, no, the thousands of bodies everywhere, putrefying, decomposing. Across the square in the woods, just a few hunded yards away on the other side of the barbed-wire fence, there were tents and open fires with groups of Ukrainian guards and girls - whores from Warsaw I found out later - weaving, drunk, dancing, singing, playing music….
(125) Sereny: Could you not have changed that? In your position could you not have stopped the nakedness, the whips, the horror of the cattle pens?
Stangl: No, no, no. This was the system. Wirth had invented it. It worked. And because it worked, it was irreversible.
(127) Stangl: Blau was the one [Jewish inmate] I talked to most: him and his wife. No, I don’t know what he was. Business, I think. I’d made him the cook in the lower camp. He knew I’d help wherever I could. There was one day when he knocked at the door of my office about mid-morning and stood at attention and asked permission to speak to me. He looked very worried. I said, ‘Of course Blau, come on in. What’s your problem?’ (Was haben Sie denn auf dem Herzen?) He said it was his eighty-year-old father. He’d arrived on that morning’s transport. Was there anything I could do? I said, ‘Really Blau, you must understand, its impossible. A man of eighty…’ He said quickly that yes, he understood, of course. But could he ask me for permission to take his father to the Lazarett [where the old and sick were shot] rather than the gas chambers? And could he take his father first to the kitchen and give him a meal? I said, ‘You go and do what you think best, Blau. Officially I don’t know anything, but unofficially you can tell the Kapo I said it was all right.’ In the afternoon, When I came back to my office, he was waiting for me. He had tears in his eyes. He stood at attention and said, 'Herr Hauptsturmführer, I want to thank you. I gave my father a meal. And I’ve just taken him to the Lazarett - it’s all over. Thank you very much.’ I said, ‘Well, Blau, there’s no need to thank me, but of course if you _want_ to thank me you may.’
Serena: What happened to Blau and his wife?
That same vagueness. ‘I don’t know.'
(128) Stangl: "Even I only learned to understand the full extent of what had been done and _how_ all the secrecy had been managed, much later, by listening to the testimony at my trial. Believe me, I was horrified, astounded by many things I heard then. It was… it gave me quite a different perspective.”
(128-129) Sereny: Yours was a very special position. There can’t have been more than a dozen men like you in all of the Third Reich. Don’t you think if you had found that extraordinary courage, it would have had an effect on the people who served under you?
Stangl: He shook his head. “If I had sacrificed myself,” he said slowly. “If i had made public what I felt and had died… it would have made no difference. Not an iota. It would all have gone on just the same, as if it and I had never happened.”
(129) Sereny: What did you think at the time was the reason for the exterminations?
Stanley: His answer came at once: “They wanted the Jews’ money.”
Serena: What is the difference to you between hate - and contempt, which results in considering people as cargo?
Stangl: It has nothing to do with hate. They were so weak; they allowed everything to happen - to be done to them. They were people with whom there was no common ground, no possibility of communication - that is how contempt is born. I could never understand how they could just give in as they did.
NB: We allow these things to happen. Or don't.
from Sebastian Haffner's Defying Hitler, notes at https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2005/10/12/156233/-
"'And you see no difficulty with your new party membership because of these things? [Köpenick's week of bloodshed (German "Köpenicker Blutwoche") nearly a week of arrests, torture and killings by the SA between 21 and 26 June 1933 (thanks Wikipedia)] ' I remarked at last.
"Immediately he became defensive and his face took on a bold Mussolini expression. 'No, not at all,' he declared. 'Do you feel pity for these people? The man who shot first the day before yesterday knew that it would cost him his life, of course. It would have been bad form not to hang him. Incidentally, he has my respect. As for the others - shame on them. Why didn't they put up a fight? They were all longtime Social Democrats and members of the Eiserne Front [non-Communist leftist semimilitary group]. Why should they be lying in their beds in their nightshirts? They should have defended themselves and died decently. But they're a limp lot. I have no sympathy for them.'"
(130) Stangl: But then I heard that there was a bishop Hulgar at the Vatican who was helping Catholic SS officers, so I went to Rome. (Stangl had the name wrong: Dr Alois Hudal, the bishop in question, was rector of Rome’s Pontifical Teutonic College; he died in 1963.)
Sereny: Was there someone who helped Protestant SS officers too?
Stangl: Oh yes, he sat in Rome too. Probst Heinemann.
(132) Sereny: “Was God in Treblinka?”
Stangl: “Yes. Otherwise how could it have happened?”
Fakes and Hoaxes The Hitler Diaries
(163) “Everything went and one day there was nothing left,” he [Richard Glazar, Czech who survived Treblinka and worked packing the valuables the dead had left to Germany] said. “You can’t imagine what we felt when there was nothing there. You see, the _things_ were our justification for being alive. If there were no _things_ to administer, why would they let us stay alive?” he said. One day towards the end of March, when they had reached the lowest ebb in their morale, Kurt Franz, the deputy commandant, walked into their barracks, a wide grin on his face. “‘As of tomorrow,” he said, ‘transports will be rolling in again.’ And do you know what we did?” Richard asked. “We shouted, ‘Hurrah, hurrah.’ It seems impossible now. Every time I think of it, I die a small death; but it’s the truth. That is what we did; that is where we had got to…"
The Great Globocnik Hunt [Odilo Globocnik was in charge of the extermination camps in Poland]
(204) Incredibly, it turns out that Lore Globocnik was half-Jewish. She had married Globocnik in October 1944.
Leni
(246) And Riefenstahl’s unprecedented camerawork there [Triumph of the Will] powerfully demonstrated the principal tenet of the Nazi faith: that beauty and order _was_ harmony and as such, rather than being an aesthetic inspiration, was a moral imperative.
Kurt Waldheim’s Mental Block
(253) Had he known about Hitler’s feelling about Jews? Had he read Mein Kampf? He smiled - it is extraordinary in Germany and Austria, how people always smile when asked this question. That old condescension towards “Corporal Hitler, the house-painter” still survives.
(259) As of October 1943, after the horrible speech by Himmler in Posen, the German gauleiters knew. And three months later, in January 1944, he made accomplices of the generals by telling _them_.
(260) “I remember the first mass meeting I went to,” Waldheim told me, “I heard screams and watched, horrified and afraid, and I said to my brother: ‘It is hysterical, vulgar, undignified, unnatural - it’ll end badly.’” No, he was not a Nazi, but had he yet to grasp these were not the right words for what he saw?
The Man Who Said “No”
(262) “Nothing was going to make me do it [making the nightly selections for the gas chambers],” he [SS pathologist Dr Hans Münch] told Austrian TV. Even more strikingly, he added: “I don’t think anyone in the SS was forced to do what they did against their will.”
Albert Speer
(268) In his letter, Speer wrote that it was “ludicrous” for anyone to claim that the genocide of the Jews could have been anyone’s idea but Hitler’s. “It shows a profound ignorance of the nature of Hitler’s Germany, in which nothing of any magnitude could conceivably happen, not only without his knowledge, but without his orders.”
Children of the Reich
(288) Martin Boorman, the son: “I don’t have to invent or even describe,” he said. “I just read them bits from Hitler’s speeches, about the teaching of the young. ‘I want no intellectual education,’ Hitler said. ‘Knowledge will spoil the young for me. It is control they must learn; it is the fear of death they must conquer: this is what creates true freedom, creativity and maturity for the young…’"
(293) Dan Bar-On’s Legacy of Silence tells the story of 13 children of Nazi perpetrators
(299) "When she [Himmler’s mistress, Frau Pothast] opened the door and we flocked in, we didn’t understand at first what the objects in that room were - until she explained, quite scientifically, you know. Tables, and chairs, made of parts of human bodies. There was a chair…” Martin’s voice becomes toneless as he describes it; the people around the table have frozen into stillness, and I feel my body go prickly. “The seat was a human pelvis, the legs human legs - on human feet. And then she picked up one of a stack of copies of Mein Kampf - all I could think of was that my father had told me not to bother to read it, as it had been outdated by events. She showed us the cover, made of human skin, and explained that the Dachau prisoners who produced it used the Rückenhaut - the skin of the back to make it."
(303) Dirk, whose father was executed: But they [perpetrators] were incapable of shame or repentance and therefore left us alone with nothing but the heritage of their awful guilt.
The Case of John Demjanjuk
(312) …the Nazis hung some of the most remarkable resisters in Germany, including Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, General Oster, his chief of staff, Count von Moltke, founder of the Christian resistance group, the “Kreisau Circle,” and the great theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
(332) … the memory of how a man walked, a characteristic that is said not to change with age.
A Last Witness to Hitler
(360) Traudl Junge, one of Hitler’s secretaries: “His speeches all had these words in them [about the Jews and the Slavs] and I now know that one simply got used to them, didn’t really hear them, blocked them, I suppose, in the sense that otherwise they would… surely… have been unacceptable. And an instant later, he would be quiet again, professorial with his steel-rimmed glasses.”
(361) “Kershaw’s biography reminded me how unsystematic everything was, his political and military decisions, his life, really. Putting together what this book now shows us and what I probably felt in my bones then, but only understand consciously now, the essential thing about Hitler probably was that his mind and his actions were ruled not by knowledge but by emotion. I had never understood until now how he, who supposedly so loved the Germans, was prepared to sacrifice them so cold-bloodedly at the end.
(362) “I thought - yes, I did think then - how undignified it [Hitler’s last will] all was. Just the same phrases, in the same quiet tone and then, at the end of it, those terrible words about the Jews After all the despair, all the suffering, not one word of sorrow, or compassion. I remember thinking, he has left us with nothing. A nothing. (Ein Nichts.)”
Final Reflections
(363) But because the poison which we hoped and believed had been eradicated in our own time by the knowledge of the ultimate evil - the gas-chamber murders committed by the Nazis - is in fact still present, not in any one area of discrimination or racism, or in a restricted number of specific rulers or governments, but in all humankind. I call it “Inner Racism.”
(366) 2001 in the former East Germany: Startlingly, NPD activists (from the extreme-right National Democratic Party) have succeeded in creating so-called nationally liberated zones: no-go areas for non-believers, aliens, dark-skinned Germans and anybody else who does not conform to their racist ideology.
(367) Munich 18 year old high school student who lived in a working-class district: “They don’t get modern history at all.” He shrugged. “So you see, instruction in Nazi history has become a matter of class."
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