Gert Krell

I had thought I knew your history well, yet your latest blog is so precise and compact that I can see your predicament even more clearly, and I deeply empathize with your fate. I understand how difficult it must have been and still must be for you to cope or to fight against what has been more or less invisible. It has been much easier for me and for many of my friends to come to grips with our own backgrounds. There may nonetheless be some psychological (NOT political or moral!) similarities, collectively and individually.

Alexandra Senfft

I may already have mentioned Alexandra Senfft, a writer and journalist. She is the grand-daughter of Hanns Ludin who was Hitler’s representative in Slovakia during the war and centrally involved in the murder of the Slovakian Jews. He was hanged in 1947. Ms. Senfft’s first book, Schweigen tut weh (Silence Hurts) is about her mother Erika, Hanns Ludin’s eldest daughter (born in 1933), and the destruction which the repression by the family of her grand-father’s real life and role wrought. Her mother sensed that something was wrong, particularly with her beloved father, but she never really found out. She led a life full of alcohol and pills, and at the end burned to death in a steaming-hot bathtub, into which she fell.

In the regular letters between mother and grand-mother, the husband and father is hardly ever mentioned, as if nothing had happened. The unbearable pain is never addressed. Erika’s general emotional needs remain unsatisfied, because her mother has buried her own needs in the hard shell of the honorable widow. Throughout her life, Erika longed for peace of her soul, which she would never find.

Fortunately, I have never had problems in any way comparable to those of Ms. Senfft’s mother and the Ludin family, to say nothing of your predicament. My family lost nobody in the war; none of my closer relations were in or near the center, on either side, of the Nazi murder machinery. (Otmar von Verschuer, the notorious racial biologist – Josef Mengele was his assistant –, is a very distant relative.) Both of my parents were fully convinced and active young Nazis, but they gave up most of their Nazi views after the war; other close relatives had been much more selective, indifferent or even hostile towards Nazism.

Yet I do not know how far my father went in his ideological fervor. Only two years ago, long after his death, did I learn that he had been an informer for the SD, the party’s security service. Did he report someone to the Gestapo, a colleague, a Jew? I don’t know and I never will. How deeply I regret that I did not have the chance, or was too young, or did not dare to ask him to tell me everything. Well, it seems he did not tell the full truth to my youngest half-brother Paul, who lived with him, while I only visited him occasionally. Paul even traveled to Peenemuende, the Nazi rocket basis, to find traces of my father’s past. There were none.

So in a way my generation was also up against part mystery, part wall. That is probably the reason why we fought against Nazism in the outer world and even saw it where there was none, before we discovered it in our own families and personal histories. Tilmann Moser, one of my favorite German writers and psychoanalysts, says that the surviving NS parents, in denying and repressing their own dark past, behaved parasitically towards their children, and that the vehemence of our political and in some cases physical attacks in the 1960s and 70s displayed the desperate attempt to break loose from a personal heritage and from transgenerational transmissions which we did not understand at the time.

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Gert Krell

Another friend and former colleague is Bruno. His wife Birgit Schueller is a school teacher. They live in Moerfelden-Walldorf, a twinned town right to the south of Rhein-Main-Airport, where Birgit is connected with a group of people who have been active rediscovering a KZ, a camp over which “grass had grown”, figuratively and literally.

Birgit has been a member of the managing committee of the Margit Horvath Foundation since its inception in 2004. The Foundation provides money for projects, preferably by young people, which support, advertise, or teach tolerance, intercultural understanding, and the cou¬rage of one’s own convictions. Margit Horvath survived the KZs of Walldorf and Ravens¬brück and returned to Frankfurt. Her son used the compensation money, which his mother received shortly before her death in 2001, as starting capital for the foundation. A documentary film called “Die Rollbahn” (The Runway) tells the full story of the camp and its rediscovery. The DVD is available in German, English and French. (See my summary in our next blog on forced labor and German industry: Zöblin and Lufthansa.)

Birgit also accompanies, advises and helps pupils when they visit Holocaust memorials or meet survivors. She told me that young Germans often are overwhelmed by these experiences and go either into a state of resignation and depression or simply shut down emotionally. So Birgit is not only a teacher; she also has learned to be a therapist.

Klaus and Hanne Wiltsch are among our closest friends. Hanne studied education in the 1970s at the University in Kassel, where she became involved in a project on regional history. One of her professors had discovered a huge amount of documents on Breitenau, a former Prussian workhouse and correctional facility, which the Nazis had turned into a concentration camp in 1933-34 and later a “work education” camp. The camp, located 15 km to the south of Kassel, had been all but “forgotten” after the war:

The post-history of the work education camp Breitenau is less infernal than its proper history, but it also contains elements which make the reviewer shiver. There is the irritating quick and even nonchalant return to a highly contaminated “normality”, the irritating lack of self-reflection, the silence and the denial. At the site of the terror the traces gradually disappear, they are blurred deliberately or unconsciously. (…) the past (…) is disposed of. With few exceptions, the perpetrators escape unharmed (…) The buildings are being re-used as if nothing had happened (preface to Gunnar Richter, Das Arbeitserziehungslager Breitenau, my translation).

In 1980, Hanne, Gunnar Richter and other students established, with the help of Kassel University, the “Breitenau Memorial” at the site of the former camp. It provides detailed information and documentation on the Nazi machinery of oppression, and on the suffering and in many cases the deaths of its victims: mostly members from the German opposition or foreign workers, i.e. forced laborers, who were considered unreliable or had violated Nazi rules of work or behavior.

Breitenau also was used by the Nazis as a transition camp for a small number of Jews. One of the saddest stories is that of Lilli Jahn. Lilli and her husband, both doctors, had met as students, married soon afterwards and opened up a practice in the countryside. When the Nazis came to power, they put pressure on Lilli Jahn and her family, and in 1942 Dr. Jahn divorced his Jewish wife, and Lilli Jahn moved to Kassel with her children. She was soon handed over to the Gestapo and later taken into “custody” at Breitenau for six months, from where she was deported to Auschwitz. “Even her ashes never came back. When they asked for them, the children were told that the ashes of Jews were not given out” (quoted from Stephan von Borstel/Dietfrid Krause-Vilmar, breitenau 1933-1945: bilder, texte, dokumente – images, texts, documents, Kassel University Press 2008, a very moving bilingual book).

Lilli Jahn wrote more than 200 letters to her children, trying to cheer them up, always hoping to be reunited with them one day. Her son, Gerhard Jahn, who was a member of the Bundes¬tag from 1957 until 1990 and Attorney General in the government of Willy Brandt 1969-1974, kept these letters without telling anybody, not even his four sisters. His nephew Martin Doerry published them in 2002 under the title “Mein verwundetes Herz” (My Wounded Heart).

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Gert Krell

"Best friends #3" Tony Karp

It is almost two weeks now that I celebrated my 65th birthday which I combined with an unofficial farewell party from my years at the University. It was a wonderful event, and not only because it began in the afternoon with “public viewing” (that’s the “German” term for it) under a huge nut-tree on the lawn of the University’s guest house: Germany beat Argentina in the world soccer championship 4:0. Irene had engaged two artists from an improvisation theater, who were ever so funny. They caught the atmosphere and the speeches well and presented us with a wonderfully witty and ironical mirror of myself and of peace research in general.

The next morning I woke up with a very deep and profound feeling of happiness, a sense of my life being accompanied and indeed carried along by so many dear good friends.

The feeling is still with me now that we are vacating in the rolling hills near Kassel in the north of Hesse.
Of course, the party had not been representative of my generation as a whole, but in a way typical of the left-of-center and politically aware intelligentsia, most of them, the spouses included, active or former school and university teachers. World War II, the burden of the Nazi past, the commitment to the radical student movement of the 1960s (and its errors), and in several cases the early loss of the father – these are strong experiences and themes binding us together psychologically. I would like to begin with two of my slightly older colleagues, R. and L., who are both around seventy now and who belong to the most gentle and diligent people I know.

In one of our previous blogs, I have mentioned my close friend R. already, whose father was killed on the very last day of the war. Before he left the family for his final deployment, he called his six-year old son, his eldest child, and confided him at the train station that he would have to look after Mother and his brother and his sisters, if he, Father, were not to return. So R. had to grow up quickly.

When R. was 17, his beloved school-teacher and “Ersatzvater” told him that his real father had been an ardent Nazi and a regional manager of the “Reichsbahn” (the national railway), where he had been involved in the organization of the trains which deported the Jews to “the East”. That was when he lost his father a second time, as R. has told me.
R.’s father was so fanatical that he originally did not want any children at all, because he had found a Jewish woman among his very distant ancestors, a grand-grand-grand-grand-mother or so. He also told his wife to commit suicide and to take the children with her, if and when “the Russians came”. Fortunately, when the occasion arose during their flight, R.’s mother asked her eldest whether they wanted to live, and he must have said yes.

R.’s younger brother is a film-maker. One of his films shows how the four brothers and sisters travel back so Silesia, where the family had lived during the war. They find the house and the garden, and the tracks where the deportation trains had run through. After a moment of hesitation, the Polish inhabitants let them in. In one of the many moving scenes, one of R.’s sisters asks two from the crew to stand in as her mother and father. Under tears she attacks them for having supported the Nazi regime which brought so much unhappiness over so many people, including her own loss of her youth and her “Heimat”. Throughout her life, she had this sense of being without roots.

In another scene, R. sits at the tracks and reads out the last letter which his mother received from her husband, a letter full of warmth and caring for his wife and children. R. adds that he was looking for every sign of humaneness in his father he could find, but that he always felt both: there was the love and there was the horror.

L.’s family is from Pomerania. When the Russians came, L.’s mother took her four small children and moved west. L.’s father, a baker, stayed behind. He thought, the Russians, too, needed bread. The Russians killed him, and in the camp in Denmark, where L.’s mother was in¬terned with her children, L.’ two little sisters died.
I have never heard a sharp word from L., he is gentle and charming; the students loved (and still love) him. Like R., L. has always been a tireless worker, doing research around the world. Some of his concerns, by no means his only ones, are development, international justice, and human rights. When I had my “burn-out” and couldn’t teach any more, L. would still do the full-time job in the department he did not have to do anymore, because he had retired already.

Sometimes, when friends voice concern about his over-commitment (he has had one acute hearing loss already and is hard of hearing on one ear), L. will admit that in some way he still feels “on the run” – from the War and from war.
We are very fond of each other, although we do not have a close everyday relationship. The lark is his favorite bird as well as mine.

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Gert Krell

I have engaged in a controversy with a former colleague and old friend about May 8, 1945. I had sent him my lecture, which we posted on our blog, and he sent me a paper which he had presented to his students. He thinks my lecture is too radical, I consider his too mild.

My friend builds his paper around the tension between “defeat versus liberation”. Of course, great majorities in the countries conquered, oppressed, or devastated by the German armies and their allies felt and actually were liberated, as were the survivors in the camps. In Germany, however, in contrast to those in the camps, in the prisons, in hiding or in exile, the great majority rather felt defeated, even though most of them were glad that the war had finally come to an end. They feared for their future, their freedom, or even their lives. Many became prisoners of war, others went to gaol, millions had to leave their homes and flee, and yes, very many died. For the great majority who survived, everyday-life was extremely harsh.

But these were not the only reasons why the concept of liberation was rejected by most Germans at the time. Even though almost everybody accepted that the mass murder of the Jews had been a monstrous crime and the attack on Russia at least a “mistake”, and even though many were critical of Nazis bosses, less of Hitler himself, their identification with the regime and much of its ideology and practice had been so great that they felt disillusioned at best, not liberated.

So one would think that the gradual acceptance of the term, over years, even decades represented progress and a growing disassociation from the Nazi past. In fact, our Federal President Richard von Weizsaecker said as much in his speech at the Bundestag on May 8, 1985: “(…) with every day something became clearer, and this must be stated on behalf of all of us today: the 8th of May was a day of liberation. It liberated all of us from the inhumanity and tyranny of the National-socialist regime.” The old and the new Nazis did not like this speech at all and many conservatives had problems with it. Yet many Germans and many officials and common people among Germany’s allies and former enemies considered it one of the best speeches

Richard von Weizsaecker

ever given by a high-ranking German politician in the post-war years.

Well, use of the term liberation is neither unequivocal nor uniformly positive and Weizsaecker’s speech not as faultless as it may seem at first glance.
The Communists had quickly declared May 8, 1945 the “day of liberation of the German people from Hitler’s fascism”; in 1950 it became a public holiday in the German Democratic Republic. One of at least two bitter ironies in this was, of course, that they threw East Germany into another, although much less powerful dictatorship. The other was that they rejected any responsibility for the consequences of the Nazi regime and also denied the historical co-responsibility of the Soviet Union, the Communist International, and the German Communists for the destruction of the European order and German democracy between the wars. In 1975, the GDR even celebrated May 8 as the day of victory!

In his famous speech, Richard von Weizsaecker describes and analyzes (West) Germany’s moral, political, and historical place in the community of nations 40 years after May 8, 1945. The speech is well worded, very open, and very honest. (It is available in English under www.mediaculture-online.de/fileadmin/bibliothek/weizsaecker_speech_may85/
weizsaecker_speech_may 85.pdf). He strongly connects May 8, 1945 with January 30, 1933, i.e. the defeat and the burdens which it brought on the German people with Hitler’s regime, and he lists all the damages and suffering which it caused, including not only the suffering of Russians and Poles and the mass murder of the Jews but also – which is rarely done – of Sinti and Roma, of homosexuals, of handicapped children and adults. He calls for remembering the victims of the resistance in territories occupied “by us” and he honors the victims of the resistance within Germany, including the Communist resistance, rarely acknowledged officially in West Germany.

He also states very clearly that every German, even if he or she had not been involved in the Holocaust directly, could have seen what happened to the Jews. Whoever wanted to know could easily find out that trains were deporting people: “When the unspeakable truth of the Holocaust then became known at the end of the war, all too many of us claimed that they had not known anything about it or even suspected anything.” So Weizsaecker acknowledges that the elder generation had left a grave legacy to the majority of the Germans of 1985, who were born during or after the war: “All of us, whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past. We are all affected by its consequences and liable for it.”

There is much more which is valuable and important in Weizsaecker’s speech, but in a few places he was not honest enough or too timid, for whatever reasons. He says, for example, that Hitler made the entire German nation “a tool of (his) immeasurable hatred against our Jewish compatriots,” but that the genocide of the Jews, unparalleled in history, had been “in the hands of a few people”. He does call for everyone who directly experienced the Nazi era to “quietly ask himself about his involvement then”. The English translation is very generous here. Weizsaecker uses the term “Verstrickung”, which suggests much less agency than the term “involvement”; it might easily be translated as “becoming enmeshed in” or as “getting entangled or caught up in”.

Later in the speech, Weizsaecker says: “Along the road to disaster Hitler became the driving force. He wipped up and exploited mass hysteria. (…) The initiative for the war (…) came from Germany, not from the Soviet Union. It was Hitler who resorted to the use of force. (…) In the course of that war the Nazi regime tormented and defiled many nations.” So Hitler and the Nazi regime again become the central agents of the great European catastrophe. Where are the German elites, where the many rank and file who not only supported the regime but were its active participants? About half a million Germans alone had been involved, in different roles, in the murder of the Jews, and millions more in the German armies had fought a war of aggression, conquest, destruction and annihilation, particularly in the East. How could it be that “most Germans had believed that they were fighting and suffering for the good of their country”, as the Federal President says at the beginning. How could conquest, aggression, and war crimes have been regarded as a way of “fighting for the good of your country”?

Nowhere does Weizsaecker mention that too many of the active perpetrators had never been called to account for their deeds, or only in very limited ways. Too many of them had made easy fortunes again in the liberated Germany. Yes, of course we had been liberated on May 8, 1945, from a terrible regime and from the war. But liberation from Nazism in German hearts and minds took much, much longer, and it still has not been fully completed. And for many Germans, liberation became a way of liberating themselves from their responsibilities. Hitler and the Nazis had not come over Germany and fortunately been taken away again.

Toward the very end of his speech, Weizsaecker says: “We in the older generation owe to young people not the fulfilment of dreams but honesty. (…) We want to help them to accept historical truth soberly, not one-sidedly, without taking refuge in utopian doctrines, but also without moral arrogance. (…) let us face up as well as we can to the truth.” But how can I – without moral arrogance – begin to forgive my father for his involvement, if he never told me the complete truth about it? What he told me was only part of the truth, and what he told my half-brother was at least partly a cover-up. Weizsaecker spoke big and important truths; his speech was a huge step forward. But even he did not tell the complete truth. Perhaps he made a deliberate decision that it would be imprudent, even counterproductive, to address more of the taboos in the German debate about the Nazi era and May 8, 1945 than he already had.

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Gert Krell

Neurobiologist Eric Kandel

With one passage in Eric Kandel’s book,  In Search of Memory, I feel particularly uncomfortable. The desire to destroy people outside the group to which one belongs, may be an innate response and may thus be capable of being aroused in almost any cohesive group, he says (p. 30). But he quickly adds that such “quasi-genetic predisposition” would probably not operate in a vacuum. “One important reason for the actions of the Viennese in 1938 was sheer opportunism. The successes of the Jewish community generated envy and a desire for revenge among non-Jews, especially those in the university. Nazi party membership among university professors greatly exceeded that in the population at large (my emphasis).”

I asked myself how I would have reacted to the successes of the Jewish community, had I been a Viennese professor in the 1930s and not one in Frankfurt/Main in the 1990s. My questions became even stronger, when I read Kandel’s next chapter and really did feel envious, of his successes, his excellence, his (seemingly) happy family life, his (seemingly) uncomplicated relationship to the other sex, and his strong academic connections. I grew up in a broken family, with a loving but violent mother. I had no Mizzi to introduce me to the joys of eroticism; I was rather shy and had strong inhibitions towards girls. I was good at school, but not self-evidently excellent. I was a good and well-liked teacher, but I had few academic connections and was more of a “home-town professor”.

With my good senses I know that the relevance of such comparisons is highly doubtful, they may even be considered arrogant. I never experienced such a terrible year as Erich Kandel did in 1938, and compared to your mother’s fate, which you so caringly describe in Is It Night Or Day?, I grew up in heaven. I was a brave boy in the better sense of the term, but how brave was your mother as a girl – thrown out of her homeland, without her parents and soon to be orphaned, living with and depending on an aunt who did not love her. Nevertheless, if I can have such feelings today, how might I have felt had I received my education in an anti-Semitic academic climate!

You know how angry and sad, sometimes desperate, I often feel about the German Nazi past and the lack of atonement in the years after it. Part of the anger derives from the fact that responsibility was not accepted by many or even most of those who had committed the mass crimes or had supported the regime which ordered them, asked for them or allowed them to happen. A responsibility which many in my generation felt we had to bear and which we rejected at the same time. We wanted to be innocent and tried to put as much distance between ourselves and the Nazis and what we regarded as personal and structural continuities.

Another part of the anger, however, derives from the fact that we are not innocent by definition, nobody is. In the almost obsessive desire not to be anywhere near the perpetrators, some of my compatriots among the leftist students became perpetrators themselves. They fantasized themselves into a fascist state which was seen as planning a new Auschwitz, this time on them. Gudrun Ennslin, one of the leading figures in the RAF, once literally said so. Another leading figure, Horst Mahler, a lawyer by training, later became one of the leading Neo-Nazis. He is currently in jail because he publicly denied the Holocaust.

So it is important that the successors to a generation of murderers and racists or at least supporters and fellow-travelers of murderers and racists sort out complicated relationships between guilt, innocence, and responsibility. We are not guilty, but we are not innocent by definition. We cannot define ourselves by being the complete opposite to the perpetrators in every respect. It is highly unlikely that we ever become like them, but we are responsible for what we do and who we are.

I wonder, what kind of complications you see in the generation which succeeded the victims, how you define yourself, and what risks you see in your generation’s strife for identity.

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Wahnfried, once the center of anti-semitic ideas

Gert Krell

Yes, it is very important always to remember that groups of people and whole societies are capable of learning, and that new generations are willing to challenge the taboos which nations build around their histories. Knowing that there are so many Germans genuinely ashamed of our past and actively engaged in symbolical and also small material efforts to undo some of the vast furor Teutonicus which the Nazis brought over the world, is part of the breathing space which people like me and my wife need to feel o.k. in this country.

I saw a report the other day on German TV about Arabs who had saved Jews in North Africa during World War II. When a French general (!) from the Vichy regime presented the then King of Morocco with 20 000 Yellow Stars of David for the Jews in his country, the king said he needed 20 more, for his own family. I have ordered the book by Robert Sattlof “Among the Righteous”, who has more stories about Muslims who saved Jews. (The report was based on the book.)

On Friday, we visited an exhibition by the Folkwang Museum in Essen (my brother was born there and we still have relations in Essen) on paintings banned by the Nazis. Until 1933, this place had been considered one of the best collections of modern art, and they tried to present at least some of their old treasures. It was so crowded that we had to wait an hour to get in. The sheer number of painters banned from the museum in the 1930s – they were all listed near the exit and included so many well-known names – was mind-boggling. In a major book about “Verfemte Kunst” (Outlawed Art) I read that well into the war many art dealers still tried to present small collections of modern art and that they still had customers. The Nazis were angry that they did not seem to be able to control the Germans’ taste completely. The majority went along, of course.

Sometimes we feel helpless and overwhelmed by the amount of brutality and stupidity which Nazism represents. This also concerns the years after the war, when everything ought to have been different but wasn’t. To be sure, the Federal Republic never was a “fascist state”; in spite of many continuities it never came even near it. Compared to other countries, we have not done too badly in facing, coping with, and working through our dark past. But in relation to the dimensions of the crimes and idiocies of the Nazi period we certainly could have done better. I cannot and do not want to forgive stories such as the one I reported about the Flick family.

Currently I am reading another book by Brigitte Hamann, on Hitler’s Bayreuth and the Wagner family. “Wahnfried”, the house where Richard Wagner’s widow, his son Siegfried with his wife Winifred, and his daughter Eva Wagner with her husband and famous racist philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain lived, was a center of “völkisch” and anti-Semitic ideas and conversation, and it played a major part in the network of support for young Hitler and Nazism. They were all very close to the “Führer” until the end; Winifred felt so even until her own death decades later. If the Federal Republic had really wanted a new beginning and a clear cut from its past, it would have closed Bayreuth for at least 20 years.

In the 1920s, Siegfried wrote letters to Jews asking for financial support so that the Wagners could reopen their festivals. He tried to explain that he wasn’t really anti-Semitic, but his explanations were so tortuous that his vehement prejudice became all the more obvious. Siegfried Wagner was a minor composer and he blamed the lack of enthusiasm for his work on the “Jewish press”. This reminds me of his father, who once wrote an almost servile letter to Giacomo Meyerbeer, assuring him of his everlasting gratitude. Meyerbeer, whose operas were very successful in France in the 19th century, had supported young Richard Wagner financially and had helped him set foot in the business. We all know where Wagner’s gratitude led: to a vicious attack on the “Jewishness” in music.

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Gert Krell

On the long Pentecost weekend we watched the film “Auf der Suche nach dem Gedächtnis” (In Search of Memory). You may know it, and of course you know Eric Kandel, the famous Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist on whose book, which combines personal biography with the story of his scientific discoveries, it is based.

Eric Kandel’s family left Vienna in 1939, a year after the “Anschluss” and the November pogroms, when their situation had become unbearable. In an interview for German TV he said he had been afraid to cross the street, but that he crossed the Atlantic. Eric (I assume he was called Erich at the time) was nine years old when his parents sent him

and his brother to grandparents in the United States. They followed their sons six months later.

Of course, I connected Eric Kandel’s story with my recent reading of Brigitte Hamann’s book on “Hitler’s Vienna”. Eric Kandel himself established such a connection when he complained in another interview that the part of the ring road, where the University of Vienna resides, was still named after Karl Lueger, the anti-Semitic popular tribune and one of Hitler’s political teachers. (A few weeks ago, I read in the papers that a group of Viennese students was trying to have this ring road section renamed, but it seemed an uphill fight.)

German industrialist Fredrich Flick

Yesterday we watched a German TV documentary about Friedrich Flick, one of Germany’s biggest tycoons of the 20th century. Flick built his first industrial empire in the 1920s and persuaded the government, with a mixture of political blackmail and financial lubrication, to save him in the crisis of 1932. They bought parts of his coal and steel works with taxpayers’ money for more than three times their worth on the stock exchange.

Friedrich Flick was heavily involved in the Nazi economy and in arms production during WW II. He was close to Hermann Göring and also a member of Heinrich Himmler’s “circle of friends,” which he supported financially. He greatly profited from “aryanization” and from forced labour, altogether increasing the value of his group fourfold between 1933 and 1943.

Flick was no. 3 on the Allies’ list of the 42 industrialists most responsible for the Nazi crimes. During the Nuremberg trials, he denied any active involvement in the Nazi era and depicted himself as a kind of involuntary fellow-traveler, even a victim in his own right. He got away with a sentence of seven years in prison, of which he only served three, and later used the mild ruling as proof of his essential innocence. The new German government and its new Western allies needed him for rearmament. Our first Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, wrote to him and congratulated him on his “great and amazing life’s work.” So Flick began, even when he still was in his prison cell, to reconstruct a new financial and business empire, of which Daimler/Mercedes later became a central part for many years.

Flick had to make restitution of Jewish property, but he arranged clever deals which did not harm him too much. He never paid any compensation for forced labor. On his 70th birthday, one of his friends presented him an album of photographs from the Nuremberg trials in which he ridiculed the whole process and particularly the witnesses who had testified on the conditions in Flick’s factories during the war. By the end of the 1960s, Flick had become the richest man in Germany. He and later his son also continued the habit of (illegally) subsidizing the major political parties – the young Helmut Kohl is said to have been one of his major clients –, also trying to buy tax favours. This led to a political scandal in the 1980s and a trial in which one central manager and two cabinet ministers were (mildly) convicted.

According to the documentary, only one of Flick’s six grandchildren and heirs to his tremendous fortunes voluntarily contributed to the forced labor claims fund jointly set up by the German government and the business community in 2000 (when most of the potential claimants had already died), and another one only after public complaints had been raised about an exhibition of his collection of paintings worth several million Euro.

Eric Kandel was luckier than your mother, because his parents also survived and the family rejoined in the US. Yet even for him, the expulsion from his old Heimat and the Holocaust were traumatic experiences. In the book he writes: “In retrospect, my family was fortunate. Our suffering was trivial compared with that of millions of other Jews who had no choice but to remain in Europe under the Nazis. (…) Although my family and I lived under the Nazi regime for only a year, the bewilderment, poverty, humiliation, and fear I experienced that last year in Vienna made it a defining period of my life.” He had tears in his eyes when he said, in an interview about the film, that it was not easy to be a Jew.

In 1963, Friedrich Flick, one of the leading figures in the Nazi regime, was awarded the “Große Bundesverdienstkreuz mit Stern und Schulterband”, one of the highest decorations which the Federal Republic grants.

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Gert Krell

I fully agree with what you write. There is no excuse, philosophical, ethical, pedagogical or political, for the poisonous educational tradition of “For Your Own Good,” nor for neglect, neither in the family nor at school. But the connection between education and mass murder is more complicated. I have now read Brigitte Hamann’s excellent book “Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship,” first published in German in 1996. Dr. Hamann has done original research on Hitler’s early years in Vienna until 1913, when he moved to Munich at the age of 24.

Hamann’s book not only shows that Alice Miller was empirically wrong to some extent in her own brief study of Hitler’s family background, but also that you have to address the cultural and political situation, if you want to explain how H. became what he was; in Vienna and later in Germany, of course. What I found most ironically disturbing: as a very young man, H. was only mildly anti-Semitic at most, probably not at all. His authoritarian and conservative father was clearly against anti-Semitism. The Jewish family physician, Dr. Bloch, liked Adolf as a boy and as an adolescent and considered his love for his mother exemplary. When H. was “down and out” in Vienna, and that was almost all of his time there, he had good and friendly business connections (very small business, at or below the existential minimum) with Jews, which he esteemed.

H. always had strong and somewhat manic political views and was always intolerant of other opinions, and he had strong inhibitions and was definitely femiphobic. So he was a bit strange, but he was no psychopath. To put it differently: his political and ideological environment was at least as “psychopathic” as he was. To be sure, Vienna was one of the early global cities and had a very modern multicultural side, where science and the arts flourished. Yet in her book, Brigitte Hamann deals with the other, the “dark side” of the city: the side of prejudice, anti-intellectualism, anti-modernism, and (racial) ethnocentrism, the side of the cranks who invented the strangest theories of the world’s origins or of the history of the “Aryan race”. It was mostly this side in which H. developed his world views. Certainly, World War I and the revolutionary upheavals towards and after its end were highly relevant formative experiences as well.

The political side of Vienna (and Austria-Hungary) before the Great War was one of permanent crisis:
– fast growth and industrialisation, large migrations, wide-spread poverty and other huge social problems, class war, and a political process almost completely stalled by competing nationalisms
– a (militarist) conservative-clerical elite who were anti-Semitic to a large extent (not the monarchy), with Dr. Karl Lueger, Vienna’s mayor, as a new type of Christian-Social popular tribune and one of Hitler’s most important “teachers”
– banal chauvinism and anti-Semitism of the masses, particularly the “Kleinbürger” (petty bourgeoisie), and the dilemma of the Jews between assimilation, new mass migration from Eastern Europe, and Zionism (it is often said that Theodor Herzl became a Zionist because of the Dreyfus affair in France; that is only part of the story, however: Vienna’s politics and its strong anti-Semitism were at least as important)
– several radical right-wing anti-Austrian and pro-German nationalist groups who were mostly even more racist and anti-Semitic than the Christian-Social conservatives

The dwindling Liberals and the growing Social Democrats were the only more rational and basically humanistic forces. It is very saddening to see how attractive radical nationalism and even racism were not only to the far right but in slightly moderated form also to large parts of the common men and women and to parts of the elite. It seemed so attractive at the time that even some Jews accepted it – Otto Weininger being the most obvious and tragic case: he became an ardent pro-Aryan anti-Semite and committed suicide. You can find traces of it even in early Zionism.

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Gert Krell

It is interesting that you read “For Your Own Good“ in reaction to my first page. The German original, “Am Anfang war Erziehung,” was one of my favorite books in my therapy years in the early eighties. The first chapter, on “Schwarze Pädagogik” (the official English translation is “poisonous pedagogy”), establishes a strong connection between German educational theories and practices since the mid-18th century and the ideas and values of major leading Nazi figures.

Alice Miller died in mid-April, at the age of 87. She died at a time when the first Catholic bishop who was ever forced to give up his position in the Federal Republic of Germany resigned, because he had severely beaten children many years ago and had lied about it. Surprisingly, in the recent debate nobody had mentioned her, who fought against child abuse much of her adult life and who had appealed in private letters to the Vatican long ago to do more for the protection of dependants. The first two obituaries I saw did not establish the connection you instinctively did, only the third one noted the omission.

Actually, one of the obituaries viciously attacked Alice Miller for her “misrepresentation” of classical psychoanalysis, her “unrestrained simplifications”, her “almost insane interpretative monism”, and her “pathologicalization” of childhood experiences and their repression, an approach which is said to develop “openly totalitarian features” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 24, 2010, p. 36, my translations).

Can World War II and the Holocaust be explained with details from Hitler’s family background and his upbringing? Not alone, of course, if at all: the dehumanizing effects of Word War I, general cultural practices, institutions, ideologies, political dynamics, they all have to come in. But our history books are full of these aspects. Everybody knows about the importance of “The Great Depression” for the rise of the Nazis. We don’t learn much, however, about the other “great depression”, the collective psychological wounds and the urge for compensating grandiosity resulting from common family structures and educational practices which were just as important.

The real challenge to Miller’s wider theory, my good friend and psychoanalyst Martin tells me, is the fact that the great majority of the chief Nazi perpetrators and of the active fellow travellers were relatively “normal” people with “normal” childhoods and family relations. This is even more disturbing, but we need to be careful not to put all the blame on child-rearing. Norms and institutions, e.g., i.e. “bad thinking” and its institutional backing are just as and perhaps even more important.

The current scandals certainly are a vindication of Miller’s “obsession”. The Catholic Church and the liberal elite reform school in the Odenwald now openly admit that they had not properly cared for the victims, the children. “Though Shalt Not Be Aware” (the title of another famous book by Alice Miller) had literally been social practice for many years, by the institutions involved, by friends and colleagues, by the media, and by parents who could have known and even a few who knew what was going on.

You seem to sense a strain of determinism in Alice Miller’s thinking; perhaps there is. Yet she always insisted that children with harsh or non-responsive parents often find alternative sources of love and understanding, and that we can later “repair” some of our unpleasant childhood experiences with knowing and helping witnesses – “repairing” meaning “reliving” them and feeling what we were not allowed to or could not feel then, such as sadness, pain or anger, and all that in an environment of fond support. She was convinced that we can break the cycle of violence between the generations. On a personal level, I cannot agree more. I believe there is a lot of overlap between Alice Miller’s thinking and transactional analysis the way I got to know it: In TA theory, “don’t feel what you feel” is considered one of the most important and most harmful “injunctions” against the “free child”.

On her website, Alice Miller writes: “Out of 192 members of the United Nations, only 19 have so far forbidden corporal punishment of children (Germany being one of them, GK). In the USA, there still remain 20 states that allow this cruel violence against children and teenagers. (…) When in Sweden legislation laws prohibiting corporal punishment were launched in 1978, 70% of the citizens, when asked for their opinion, were against them. In 1997, the figure had dropped to 10%. These statistics show that the mentality of the Swedish population has radically changed in the course of a mere 20 years.”

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Note: We interrupt this blog to bring you Dr. Gert Krell’s speech commemorating the end of World War II, May 8,1945. Dr. Krell spoke at the Arboretum at Eschbom near Frankfurt/Main, Germany on Saturday, May 8, 2010. The Arboretum is a large park, built on a former camp for prisoners of war, with trees from many areas of the world, symbolizing understanding and reconciliation.

I.
Sixty-five years ago today, the most catastrophic military conflict in world history came to an end, at least in Europe. I assume it will really come to an end only when the generation of those who fought in it or suffered from it, and my generation, whose lives began towards its end or shortly after it, have finally gone. We still have the war in our bones, some of us literally, and we cannot get it out of our minds or souls. It may well be that I became a political scientist and peace researcher, because I was born on July 1st, 1945, and barely survived, although the war had already ended. It may sound paradoxical, but the entry “war” in the register of my text book on international relations is by far the longest.

In 1945, Germany was destroyed and completely “on the ground”. “Those who sow wind, will reap storm”, said Walter Hoffmann, the mayor of Darmstadt, in 2006, when the city commemorated the victims of the large air raid of September 11/12, 1944; the raid which also destroyed my parents’ house and almost killed them (which did not prevent my father from believing in the “Endsieg”, the “final victory”, and openly talking about it until the very end). But wasn’t it rather the other way round? Had not Nazi-Germany sowed storm and reaped wind! 3.5 million, perhaps even 5.3 million German soldiers were killed in World War II; about half a million in its final 50 days, when the war had clearly been lost already. Between 2 and 3.5 million German civilians died in air raids or during the flight from the East. But the Soviet Union had to mourn the deaths of up to 17 million soldiers and between 12 and 17 million civilians, which is more than three times the casualties of Germany by which it had been attacked. Poland lost more than half of its soldiers and up to 5 million civilians, about 3 millions of them Polish Jews. In many parts of Eastern Europe and Russia, the Wehrmacht and the SS had left scorched earth, countless villages were burnt down, their inhabitants incinerated. In the greatest single mass crime in world history, around 6 million Jews altogether were murdered. About 500,000 Germans were involved in this process of annihilation. Very many had not really been forced to involve themselves. In fact, they believed they were doing their fatherland a necessary and useful service, even if unpleasant at times. And many, many more, a clear majority of the Christian or “god-believing” Germans had actively participated in the discrimination against and the exclusion and exploitation of their Jewish countrymen and -women, had explicitly supported or at least tolerated all that without opposition.

II.
Hardly any other country has dealt so intensively with its dark past and its enormous guilt as Germany has since 1945, and with ample reason. Those who publicly address war crimes in Japan, which are sometimes even officially denied until today, must expect to be visited and attacked by right-wing thugs. For decades, Austria had depicted itself as the first victim of German aggression; a serious working-through its active contribution to the war and the terror of the Nazi regime only began in the 1990s. Major parts of the Italian people have a very relaxed relationship to Mussolini. In France, collaboration had been a taboo for many, many years, and the war crimes in Algeria still are to some extent. In and during the Vietnam War, in which the US army committed several massacres of unarmed civilians, hardly any of the responsible officers were ever called to account, even if they had openly given orders to kill indiscriminately.

But Germany, which had by far the strongest reasons to take an honest look in the mirror, also tried to avoid it. A large number of the perpetrators and mass murderers not only survived, they even remained completely undisturbed. In sharp contrast to the survivors among their victims, they successfully continued their lives and careers as if nothing had happened. Not only were their crimes not prosecuted, they did not even feel guilty. Other supporters or many fellow-travelers of the regime at least felt bad about what “had happened”, but they eased their conscience by blaming Adolf Hitler, the Nazi elite, and the SS, who were responsible for all the misdeeds and had lead the others astray. It took a long time until it was clear, and an even longer time until it was accepted that almost all institutions had been actively and sometimes even proactively involved: the judiciary, trade and industry, the universities, the professional associations, the sports associations, the army, and even the churches to a large extent.

What a turmoil the first exhibition critical of the Wehrmacht had created even as late as 1995! “The German soldier, in loyalty to his oath and with the fullest possible commitment to his people, has achieved things which will never be forgotten”, the last report of the supreme command of the Wehrmacht had stated in May 1945. Today, with few exceptions, the Germans have realized that not only the singular misdeeds of their army, the SD and the SS during the war but that the war itself was a singularly huge, unforgettable and unforgivable German crime. As we know from many letters and notes, the German soldiers had always been aware of what they were doing:

“Die Juden ermordet,
als brüllende Horde
nach Russland marschiert,
die Menschen geknebelt,
im Blute gesäbelt,
vom Clowne geführt,
sind wir die Gesandten
des allwärts Bekannten
und waten im Blut.
Wir tragen die Fahnen
der arischen Ahnen:
sie stehen uns gut.“

(Murdered the Jews,
marched into Russia
as a roaring mob,
gagged the people,
hacking away in blood,
lead by a clown,
we are the missionaries
of the one known everywhere,
wading in blood.
We carry the flags
of our Aryan ancestors:
they suit us well.”)

Thus rhymed Willy Peter Reese, who was killed in action in June 1944 and who left behind not only poems and letters but also a secret detailed report from the war.

III.
How was it possible that a large majority of the German people in Hitler’s “supported dictatorship” got so completely lost morally? That they took pleasure in belonging to a “master race” and assumed that certain groups or people were of “inferior value” or even did not deserve to live? That they really believed in the crazy idea that the Jews were a threat which had to be forestalled by exclusion, expulsion, and – if need be – extermination? Was it because of “poisonous pedagogy”, the centuries-old tradition of harsh, violent, humiliating and debasing child-rearing in Germany? Such as the impressive and depressing film “The White Ribbon” seems to suggest and as Alice Miller, the recently deceased childhood researcher and combative champion of a non-violent education, has always claimed?

To be sure, there are many connections between certain educational traditions and an urge for power over others and a readiness to resort to violence. But this relationship is not obvious enough to provide a satisfying answer to the questions posed and thus a clue to successful prevention. A large number of countries had educational traditions not much less “poisonous” than in Germany and its predecessors, but they were not involved in comparable collective mass crimes. American and German research into the mass murderers is even more disturbing than Alice Miller’s thesis: By far the most of them were quite normal adults, not different psychologically from the fellow-travelers or even from their victims. As social-psychological experiments in several countries have shown, it does not take very much to get a majority of people to kill or at least to involve themselves in the killing of another human being. Very important factors are the moral frames of reference and the social setting, and are the institutions which guide human behavior and extend or constrain latitudes of action. Much of what we abhor in war and in specific crimes of war is much closer to everyday life than we really want. As the recently discovered abuse scandals or the financial crisis demonstrate, moral standards are easily suspended even in peace, even if they are generally accepted and un¬controversial: because internal institutional controls don’t work, because everybody seems to be doing it, because it does not seem to create problems, rather grant psychological or mate¬rial profit or avoid loss of stature and standing.

No doubt, we must not train our children and our youths into simple schemes of order and obedience. Democracies need people who have learned to accept personal responsibility for what they are doing. Not like Adolf Eichmann, who admitted in his testimony that he would certainly have shown the courage not to obey, if he had been ordered to do so. To be able to act responsibly, we also need stable and enduring moral norms which we do not and cannot adjust opportunistically. The miserable center of the Nazi ideology was the distinction between a “superior” group of those who belonged and “inferior” groups of those who didn’t, were the morals of a fictitious pseudo-biological master race which found it necessary to eliminate so called “inferior life”, to put what they called “Volksschädlinge” (persons “harmful to the German people”) “out of action” and to expel and finally annihilate the Jewish and other “Untermenschen”. Mass murder began in their minds, in their thinking. Against all this we consider it to be self-evident that the dignity of man, and that means all human beings, is inviolable. This norm is the basis of our constitution, of course. It is a norm which we all need to keep in our hearts and minds. But it is also a norm which must be lived in all institutions and in all social arrangements. We are still far away from that.

IV.
World War II holds another important lesson for us. Albert Einstein, one of the foremost pacifists of the 20th century, was also one of the very few intellectuals who understood what Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933 really meant: a declaration of war against Europe and against the Jews. Einstein almost desperately tried to convince the public in Western Europe that it was necessary to build an effective deterrence against Germany, if it wanted to preserve a chance to avoid war at all. He found hardly any support, his old pacifist companions even accused him of treason. The maxim that one could not solve conflicts through war (a phrase often used in Germany these days in the debate about Afghanistan) certainly would not have been a consolation to those who were attacked from 1938/1939 on. And not all soldiers are murderers. (Another phrase used by radical pacifists in Germany today. It had been coined by Kurt Tucholsky after World War I. I am convinced he would have retracted it had he lived to see World War II and not committed suicide in 1935 in exile.) Those who cannot see the difference between the actions of the Jewish Bielski brothers on the one hand, who went to live in the forests as armed partisans with hundreds of civilians, in order to protect them and to fight against the “roaring mob” of the Germans, and the soldiers of the Wehrmacht or the SS on the other, who chased the Jews and burnt down the Belorussian villages including their inhabitants, should not be surprised that hardly anybody outside of Germany will take such a Pacifism seriously.

Of course we must strive to overcome the human habit of war. That is by no means impossible, but we cannot do it overnight; 65 years have not been enough. As more recent experience has confirmed, we will encounter – on our long way to a world without military violence – difficult situations in which endangered groups of people cannot be denied their right to defend themselves, or in which other endangered people may need and deserve support from outside. Under what conditions and how, are very serious and complicated moral, analytical and practical questions which need to be discussed openly and democratically. One thing we do know, however. Today it is no longer enough to say: “si vis pacem, para bellum” (if you want peace, you must prepare for war) – although even that is far away from the Nazi program of conquest, repression, and extermination. Today we know that we must prepare for peace, if we want peace: si vis pacem, para pacem. That’s why we are standing here, commemorating the end of World War II.

email for Dr. Gert Krell: mail@gert-krell.de

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