VOICES FROM THE ABYSS
October 11, 2010 § Leave a comment
It was for only a dozen years that Adolf Hitler held power by political means in Germany and by conquest over much of Europe. Yet, in that relatively brief span of time, the Nazi regime that he masterminded managed to plunge the entire world into an abyss of degradation, terror, inhumanity and conflict so barbarous that we can scarcely imagine its scope and depth 65 years after its end.
I recently read or re-read three books dealing with life in Nazi Germany during the Hitler years.
The first is WHAT WE KNEW: TERROR, MASS MURDER AND EVERYDAY LIFE IN NAZI GERMANY by Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband. If you click on the picture to the left, it will take you to Amazon.com where you can read excerpts.
What makes this book a fascinating read is the first 250 or so pages, consisting of oral histories related by people who lived through the Nazi terror. Interviewees include: Jews who left Nazi Germany before Kristallnacht and those who left after; Jews who were deported; Jews who went into hiding; Germans who knew little about mass murder; Germans who had heard about mass murder; and Germans who knew about, witnessed or participated in mass murder.
What emerges from the testimony of these survivors is an engrossing picture of what everyday life was like in Nazi Germany from around 1932 to the end of World War II.
There are the stories of Jews who managed to flee ahead of the Nazi terror, as well as that of those who were transported to the death camps, and what they did to survive there. There is the testimony of Jews who somehow managed to hide out in Germany or its subjugated states, escaping extermination. They tell persecution by the government, and of the verbal and physical abuse they suffered at the hands of ordinary Germans who had once been their friends and neighbors, as well as of the rare kind and courageous Germans who helped them, often surreptitously so as to avoid repercussions from the Nazis.
Also here is the testimony of the Germans. There are the stories of those who adored and idolized Hitler and of those who despised and resisted him to their detriment and even destruction. There are the stories, too, of those who claim they knew nothing of the systematic extermination of the Jews and of those who knew and even participated in it.
One of the enduring questions arising out of Nazi Germany is what did ordinary people know about the atrocities of the Nazis? The authors devote the remainder of the book to analyzing the data they accumulated to address that question and others such as how anti-semitism took hold under the Nazis, the extent of spying and denunciation by ordinary citizens, the scope of police persecution, and the various forms of persecution of the Jews and others selected for torment and even annihilation. Their conclusions? You will have to read the book.
It is important for Americans to know and understand how the Nazis rose to power and came so close to dominating the entire world but for the determined resistance of England and the industrial might of the United States. After all, the Nazi phenomenon did not arise out of some ignorant peasant backwater. It occurred in the country long known as the “Land of Poets and Thinkers,” the nation that gave birth to Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Beethoven, Leibniz, Einstein, Bach, Holbein, and so many other luminaries of western civilization. It was grinding depression, political instability and desperate economic straits in the lingering aftermath of World War I that opened the way for the Nazis to capture the allegiance of the German voters, who made a devil’s bargain by surrendering their freedom in exchange for stability and economic improvement.
If the Germans could cast aside their considerable legacy of civilization and embrace the barbarity and totalitarianism of the Nazis for comfort and security, who is to say that we could not fall on the same sword?
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I also re-read NIGHT by Elie Wiesel.
If you have never read this powerful little book (only 120 pages) written by the Nobel-prize-winning author who as a teenager wsa transported with his family to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald, you need to put down whatever you are reading and pause to read this. This latest edition is a new translation of the original French by his wife, Marion, and purports to be closest of all editions to Wiesel’s own voice.
Other than the substance itself, what makes this book so powerful is its spare, minimalist style, pared down ruthlessly from the original Yiddish into French by the French writer François Mauriac.
The book opens in Wiesel’s hometown of Sighet, in Transylvania, where the Jewish community was warned but refused to heed an eccentric who had been briefly imprisoned by the Nazis. It goes on to recount the establishment of a Jewish ghetto in the town and the ultimate transportation to the death camps or work camps. Wiesel saw his mother and sister taken off to the gas chamber. He and his father were put to slave labor in the camp at Buna. As the war wound down and the Russians closed in on western Poland where their camp was situated, Wiesel, his father and the other inmates were forced to march in a bitter winter blizzard from Auschwitz-Buna to Gleiwitz, a march in which thousands died. Wiesel and his father survived the march, but his father contracted dysentery soon after being savagely beaten by an SS guard, and the elder Wiesel was taken off to the gas chamber. The author poignantly tells of his last conversation with his father, a passage of the book you will not soon forget.
Wiesel’s haunting retelling of the inhumanity he endured and how he survived it will live vividly in your mind long after you have read this book.
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The final book is MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING by Viktor Frankl, which I re-read. This little book was listed by the Library of Congress in 1991 among the 10 most influential books in the United States.
Like Wiesel’s, Frankl’s book includes his eyewitness account of the brutality and suffering that he survived as a Jewish slave/prisoner in various Nazi concentration camps. Unlike Wiesel, Frankl approaches the experience from a psychological and psychoanalytical perspective, from which he developed the theory of Logotherapy. His theory is that life has meaning in even the most apocalyptic circumstances and finding that meaning is the main motivation in life, and that we have the freedom to find our own meaning in our suffering and the unchangeable obstacles we face. The first part of the book is Frankl’s account of his experiences, and the second is his analysis of those experiences and his conclusions about their meaning.
This is an inspirational book that rejects the notions of victimhood and determinism. It will challenge some of your own notions about how one addresses and rises successfully above the vicissitudes and misfortunes of life.
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Some years ago I visited Dachau concentration camp only a few miles from Munich. The entrance gate bore the cynical epigram “Arbeit macht frei” — “Work makes you free” — the words that were copied from there and placed over the gate to Wiesel’s Auschwitz.
Dachau was not established as an extermination camp for Jews, although many Jews were imprisoned and died there. Dachau’s original and primary function was as an internment camp for political opponents of the Nazis, homosexuals and the mentally ill or erratic. Later in the war, Russian prisoners of war were transported there by the thousands, and were put to death by the bullet, some being used for target practice by the guards.
Dachau was also the site of scientific experimentation on the prisoners, which was intended to be of some military benefit. Some prisoners were put into chambers and subjected to increasing pressure until their brains literally burst out of their ears and mouths, in order to see how much pressure a human could stand. Some had organs removed and were sewn back up to see how long one could live without, say, a liver. Some had objects implanted inside of them so the effects could be observed. Some were guinea pigs for drug testing, and others were administered lethal substances to determine just how much dosage was lethal.
It was chilling to stand in the barracks where so many suffered and perished, to walk across the appelplatz where the roll call of walking dead took place every day, to see the guard towers, to stare into the crematorium where the bodies of the executed were disposed of. Gazing across the huge expanse of the camp, one could see through the barbed-wire fence the homes where German citizens of Dachau village lived their mundane lives, oblivious — they claimed — to the profound suffering and obscene atrocities taking place literally across the street.
The main gate and grounds of Dachau Concentration Camp today
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