Nazis – Page 3

PBS doc on the Sharps

Martha and Waitstill Sharp at home in Wellesley, Mass., in 1938. (photo from Sharp Family Archives via pbs.org)

At a time when many Americans embraced isolationism, the leaders of the American Unitarian Association were focused on the refugees clamoring to get out of Czechoslovakia. The AUA impelled Unitarian minister Waitstill Sharp to go with his wife Martha to Europe in 1938, leaving their young children in the care of others, and get as many people out as possible with documents and cunning.

Yad Vashem posthumously acknowledged the Sharps as Righteous Among the Nations in 2006. The couple’s saga, and that of several of the Jews they rescued, is recounted in Artemis Joukowsky and Ken Burns’ feature-length documentary Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War, which aired earlier this month on PBS.

For those who have seen a film or three about the various efforts to extricate Jews from the deathtrap of Nazi-occupied Europe, Defying the Nazis breaks no new ground. But there are always new generations who aren’t familiar with the Holocaust or cognizant of the courage of ordinary people who saved friends and neighbors or, in the case of the Sharps, complete strangers.

Joukowsky is the Sharps’ grandson, and the curator and guardian of their legacy. Burns, of course, brings household-name recognition and brand-name confidence to a PBS audience, as well as a uniformly high standard of craft and polish. If his name attracts viewers who otherwise wouldn’t tune in, it’s all for the good.

Defying the Nazis arrives at an especially ugly time when refugees and immigrants are being demonized and conflated with terrorists. Not that xenophobia is a new phenomenon, as Jewish readers are especially aware. But I find the film more valuable and inspiring as a reminder that there are highly moral individuals who will put themselves in mortal danger to do the right thing – even if they have no personal stake or connection to the beneficiaries.

Waitstill Sharp was a trained lawyer while Martha had the self-confidence and determination to attend college in a day and age when some families – including hers – disavowed their daughters for not getting a job to augment the household income. That is to say, the Sharps were adept at thinking on their feet, delivering persuasive and succinct arguments and hiding their emotions. Whether counseling desperate applicants in Prague, raising money in London or Paris (like Waitstill did) or accompanying refugees by train across Germany to a safe border (like Martha and Waitstill did, separately), these were essential skills.

The couple was based in the Czech capital for six treacherous months beginning just before the Nazi invasion in March 1939. They were dispatched again the following summer, this time to Lisbon.

As compelling as the Sharps’ activities were, they were relatively brief in duration. There’s only so much to tell, so the filmmakers augment the rescuers’ point of view with context from Holocaust historian Debórah Dwork and the firsthand recollections of several survivors whom the Sharps aided.

Viewers who are fascinated by the ways in which parental choices affect children will enjoy watching and interpreting the passages with the Sharps’ daughter. Martha Jr. admits to being (understandably) upset when her parents took off for Europe, not once but twice, but she touts the remarkable results they achieved rather than channeling a petulant child.

The Sharps may have alienated their daughter, at least for brief periods of her adolescence. They definitely paid a price in their marriage, which didn’t last a decade after the war.

Defying the Nazis doesn’t address it, but I highly doubt the couple had any regrets about embarking on their life-saving refugee work. Consider Waitstill’s succinct reply when the German-Jewish author Lion Feuchtwanger asked why he was taking such an immense risk to help him: “I don’t like to see guys get pushed around,” Sharp said.

Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War is available for viewing (at no charge) at pbs.org/kenburns/defying-the-nazis-the-sharps-war/home until Oct. 6.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

Saga of hunting Nazis

Andrew Nagorski will talk at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre on Nov. 29, as part of the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival. (photo by Andrew Rudakov)

The night before the legendary operation that captured Adolf Eichmann, Isser Harel, the head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, told the small cadre of men set to accomplish one of the most storied espionage missions ever: “For the first time in history, the Jews would judge their assassins.”

Harel articulated the historical momentousness of what was, in reality, a surprisingly mundane capture. Eichmann, one of the foremost masterminds of the Holocaust, had been living in Argentina under an assumed name but, apparently confident of his security, had sloppily left breadcrumbs that allowed professional and avocational Nazi hunters to track him down. Eichmann was also a creature of habit, descending from the bus each evening near his suburban home reliably around the same time. For an action with such monumental consequences, the capture was barely more dramatic than a typical mugging.

The story of Eichmann’s capture, extra-judicial extradition to Israel, trial and execution is retold in The Nazi Hunters, a book by author and former Newsweek journalist Andrew Nagroski, who will be in Vancouver this fall as part of the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival.

Harel’s words to the agents who captured the SS leader apply not solely to the Nazi hunters’ greatest catch, but to the larger phenomenon of the quest to bring the perpetrators of the Shoah to justice. The concept of the Jewish people being in a position to judge those who perpetrate antisemitic terror is a uniquely post-Holocaust phenomenon, made possible because of the existence of the state of Israel and its judicial and intelligence mechanisms.

At the same time, hunting down Nazi war criminals was not a priority of the young state of Israel, as a senior Israeli official told Nagroski. Israel’s early governments had plenty on their plates coaxing a country from the desert and looking to the future without devoting resources to tracking down the Hamans of the recent past.

As a result, as Nagorski illustrates engagingly, pursuing the perpetrators fell to an assortment of figures, some official, others self-appointed, who made up a curious collection of personalities.

There were the government investigators and prosecutors, like Fritz Bauer, a German jurist whose attention to Nazi war crimes helped the German people confront and address their past. But others among the most famous Nazi hunters, including Simon Wiesenthal and Tuvia Friedman, were lone wolves (or, at least, started out that way before recruiting their teams) to do the job that governments did not.

The Nuremberg trials, Nagorski notes, were crucial not only for bringing Nazis to justice but in helping create the initial repository of eyewitness testimony and the first draft of what would become Holocaust history. Even so, after that major initiative, which captured the attention of the world and set the Holocaust apart as an event concurrent to but separate from the broader carnage of the Second World War, official interest in the subject waned.

Europe was rebuilding, Israel had plenty of challenges, the countries of the Soviet-dominated Eastern bloc were happy to distance themselves from the events of the Shoah by imagining their socialism as the diametrical ideological opposite of the fascism that had nearly erased Jewish civilization in Europe. Canada, the United States and other Allied countries began looking ahead to a cold peace and the economic prosperity of the 1950s, the sad past being something best left behind.

Thus, it fell to some self-appointed individuals to do the work. This book shares their often gripping, diverse and idiosyncratic stories.

A rise in Holocaust denial during the 1970s spurred a renewed attention to the facts of the Holocaust. A new urgency was driven both by the need to remind the world of the truth but also the reality that time was running out to bring the perpetrators to justice.

Canada’s 1936 Olympic decision

Rarely has a book worked me up as much as More Than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics by professors Richard Menkis (University of British Columbia) and Harold Troper (University of Toronto).

More Than Just Games was published by U of T Press in the spring. I got my copy from Menkis, who, biases known, I consider a friend. Even so, it took me months to open. The cover image is of members of Canada’s 1936 Olympic team vying for Adolf Hitler’s autograph. Other than some high-quality archival images grouped in the centre of the book, the text is academic, looking almost as imposing as the topic itself. So I was surprised that, when I finally did start reading, I pretty much couldn’t stop. In just over a week, I had read the 230ish-page book, not counting the notes, bibliography and index.

That the scholarship of academics with the credentials of Menkis and Troper would be impeccable I had no doubt. What I hadn’t anticipated was the immediacy they could evoke with their writing. The amount of detail they provide, though on rare occasion overwhelming, serves to bring readers into the period leading up to Canada’s decision to send athletes to the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936, when there could be no doubt as to the Nazis’ actions and intentions.

Through ample use of citations from letters, articles and speeches of the pro- and anti-Olympic forces, readers witness almost firsthand the debates that took place prior to the Games, they get a glimpse of the almost dizzying number of internal conflicts within the boycott movement, and they get an idea of the amount of propaganda that was being disseminated by Germany in Canada (and other countries). They even learn of some of the differences of opinion between the German Olympic Committee and the Nazi party as to the value of hosting the Games, when the event’s ideal – no discrimination on “grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise” – ran contrary to the Nazis’ belief in the superiority of the Aryan race, and their efforts to annihilate those they considered inferior.

There were a few outspoken people who tried to waken Canadians to the reality of the Nazi regime – notably journalist Matthew Halton and Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath – but their voices couldn’t rise above the Games’ advocates nor break through the apathy of most of the population. Canada, we are reminded, had closed the doors to Jewish immigration in 1923 – “In distinguishing Jews from non-Jews of the same citizenship, Canada predated Nazi regulations denying Jews and non-Jews equal status under the law by more than 10 years,” write Menkis and Troper.

This is one of the principal reminders of this book, which came out of an exhibit that the professors put together at the behest of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, and which opened several months before the 2010 Winter Olympics were held in the city. Canada might have become a model of multiculturalism, but it was not always so.

Another reminder that stands out is that it doesn’t necessarily take evil people for bad things to happen. Many of the supporters – including athletes – of sending Canadians to the 1936 Games sincerely believed in their position on the importance of sport above all, and seem to have been genuinely confused as to why anyone would disagree. Canada’s position was that of a good colony, following the lead of Britain, which saw no reason not to send competitors. It’s not even obvious in hindsight as to whether Canada’s absence at those Games would have made a difference to the Nazis’ progression of violence to war, to genocide.

Sensibly, Menkis and Troper don’t try to examine the issues with the benefit of hindsight. They present numerous viewpoints and historical facts, mostly without judgment. Their opinions, however, pop out here and there via their choice of adjective or use of sarcasm. I found this comforting because they generally reflected my mood at those points in the book. I would be getting all worked up about what was being said at the time and their jibe would make me smile, and not feel like the crazy one. Because that’s what it felt like reading about it – I can only imagine how people like Halton and Eisendrath felt, actually being there, trying to fight against such ignorance, selfishness, pettiness, narrow-mindedness, greed and indifference.

More Than Just Games is an important contribution to Canadian history, and it is not only a must-read but a very good read.

Tales of courage and sacrifice

Serious topics are at the fore of the books for younger readers reviewed by the Jewish Independent this Chanukah. From the story of a Russian dancer whose life is cut short by pneumonia to Canadian teenagers who must work 13-hour days for little pay to young Danes who take on the Nazis, these recent publications respect the intelligence of their audience and, through the combination of entertaining narratives and compelling images, broaden their understanding and knowledge of the world.

Swan: The Life and Dance of Anna Pavlova (Chronicle Books) is intended for readers ages 6-8. It is truly a work of art that writer Laurel Snyder and illustrator Julie Morstad (who happens to live in Vancouver) have created. The illustrations are stunning and the placement of the text is also artistically done.

As Snyder explains at the end of the book, Anna Pavlova was born in 1881. Her mother was a laundress, “and Russia under the czars was generally a world where the poor stayed poor. Anna’s life should have been dismal.” But then her mother took her to the ballet. Onstage, “A sleeping beauty opens her eyes … and so does Anna. Her feet wake up! Her skin prickles. There is a song, suddenly, inside her. Now Anna cannot sleep. Or sit still ever. She can only say, dip and spin….”

The story follows Anna as she practises and practises, until finally accepted into ballet school. After which, more practising, “Until one night she takes the stage … Anna becomes a glimmer, a grace.” She becomes world famous, traveling the globe, though never forgetting her humble beginnings, and becomes a ballet teacher when she can no longer perform. “Until a chill finds Anna, hunts her down alone, without her boots and mittens. A wind. A cough beside a stopped train. A rattle she can’t shake.” In the book, as she apparently did in real life, Anna asks for her swan dress from her sick bed. One last performance, if only in her mind. She died in 1931.

For readers interested in knowing more about Anna Pavlova, Swan includes a nine-book bibliography.

* * *

While change may take awhile in coming, it can be achieved. Take, for instance, working conditions in Canada. The title of Anne Dublin’s 44 Hours or Strike! (Second Story Press) comes from one of the unmet demands that led to the Toronto Dressmakers’ Strike of 1931: a 44-hour work week.

After their father is laid off, Rose must leave school to work in a dress factory. When their father dies from tuberculosis and their mother becomes ill from an unknown ailment (at least at first), 14-year-old Sophie must join her 16-year-old sister at the factory. The working conditions are appalling and they include a lecherous foreman.

When the workers go on strike, there is little empathy. Immigrants (especially Jews) are resented and not trusted, and the Depression has left many people in dire poverty. In an altercation 10 days into the strike, Rose – who did nothing wrong – is arrested with some other strikers and, without due process, is sentenced “to 30 days at the Mercer Reformatory for Women or a $100 fine – as if she had ever seen that much money in her life!”

Sophie must continue her strike duty, as well as care for her mother. She receives some comfort from the friendship of Jake, a paperboy who, unfortunately, is not Jewish.

44 Hours or Strike! – aimed at readers 10 to 14 years old – covers a lot of issues in its 124 pages. The archival photos really help put readers in 1931 Toronto, and brief biographies of some of the labor activists at the time are included at the back of the book. Dublin also lists many options for further reading on the topic.

* * *

The incredible true story of a group of Danish teenagers who, during the Second World War, fought against the Nazis through acts of sabotage is told by Phillip Hoose and Knud Pedersen in The Boys Who Challenged Hitler: Knud Pedersen and the Churchill Club (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

This book is comprised of Hoose’s narrative and excerpts from his nearly 25-hour interview with Pedersen in 2012, as well as photos, illustrations, scans of documents and sidebars. At times, it’s hard to know where to look on a page and what to read first. But that shouldn’t be a problem for the 12-to-18-year-olds for whom the book is written.

Pedersen was in Grade 8 when, on April 9, 1940, Germany attacked both Norway and Denmark. The Norwegians put up a valiant, if short-lived, resistance. “Jens [Pederson’s brother] and I, and our closest friends, were totally ashamed of our government,” Pedersen says. “At least the Norwegian victims had gone down in a country they could be proud of. Our small army had surrendered to the German forces within a few hours on April 9…. One thing had become very clear: now any resistance in Denmark would have to come from ordinary citizens, not from trained soldiers.”

The brothers with a few others started their rebellion in Odense, where they were living. They called themselves the RAF Club, after the British air force. They would do things like change or damage road signs and cut telephone lines.

When their father was posted to Jutland and the family moved, the brothers organized the Churchill Club; named, of course, after Winston Churchill. They continued their acts of resistance, which came to include blowing up train cars full of material the Nazis needed. Eventually, after about a year, all of the Churchill Club boys were discovered and sent to jail in 1942. The brothers spent two years in prison. Hoose lets readers know what happened to them and their co-saboteurs. There is a selected bibliography and author’s notes on each chapter. This book would be great as the basis of a school project.

Out-of-bounds tactic stinks

Anti-Israel groups have used dubious tactics over the years, but they stooped to unprecedented depravity recently when someone Photoshopped a photo of emaciated Holocaust survivors.

A Facebook page with 91,000 followers (at press time) posted a picture of survivors, presumably taken at the time of a camp liberation, manipulated to appear to be holding signs with terms like “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza,” “Israel Assassins” and “Stop US aid to Israel.” At the bottom, a caption reads, “Whatever happened to ‘Never again?’” The image received hundreds of likes and many shares, including from organizations that have until now posed as legitimate voices for Palestinians.

The picture is instantly offensive for obvious reasons. But it is additionally repugnant on a number of grounds, beyond the explicit desecration of historical memory.

Anyone who can equate the Israeli-Arab conflict with the Holocaust – and, further, depict the Jews of Israel as the instigators and perpetrators – holds a view of contemporary and historical events so removed from fact that their opinions should be discarded from the discourse. The problem is, they’re not.

In fact, the meme of Israel perpetrating a holocaust against Palestinians is rampant. On social media, in the comments sections of mainstream media, in conversations with moderately informed neighbors and friends, the concept is almost inevitable.

You may have heard of Godwin’s Law, the theory that, the longer a political discussion (on any topic) continues, the greater the likelihood someone will compare someone or something to Hitler or Nazis. A parallel – call it Godwin’s Corollary – could almost be written in stone: Whenever two or more people engage in discussion of Israel’s actions, someone will inevitably accuse the Jewish state of having learned from the masters, or of doing unto others what was done unto them in Europe.

The concept is appalling and, yet, it seems to be irresistible. It has been said that Jews are like everyone else only more so. Throughout the history of Jews as scapegoats, others (as well as some Jews in the past and today) project onto the Jewish people the sins of humanity and then proceed toward the inevitable end that scapegoating demands. How perfect for our cynical time that we should have a modern fable that so succinctly and conveniently proves our assumption that even the victims of the most venal atrocities can – and would – in a generation or two turn around and perpetrate the same on others.

This ahistoric fable implies that, because Jews are Nazis, they deserved the Holocaust and whatever other retribution is seen fit to dispense. And, if Israel is the “reward” for the Holocaust, then it can be taken away as appropriate punishment, as well. That the “facts” do not in any way approach reality is irrelevant. It is a fable intended to teach a moral lesson, and truthiness is beside the point.

There is another fault almost as grievous. Anti-Israel groups often employ the Jewish historical experience against the Jewish state – routinely employing Holocaust and Nazi imagery, along with other culturally appropriated concepts like apartheid. To a fair observer, these thefts of the experiences of others would be an admission that the bare facts of the Palestinian experience are not enough to convince and so they must be dressed up in masquerades of the historical traumas of others. But fair observers are not driving this discussion. The more ghastly the accusations that can be thrown at Israel, the more voraciously they are adopted by the haters.

At the very same time, these voices do everything in their power to negate the Jewish historical experience as a justification for Jewish self-determination and Zionism. Any reference to the Holocaust that might aid Israel’s case is hollered down as exploitative, as bringing a knife to a fist fight, as too weighty an historical weapon to introduce to the contemporary context. The Holocaust, in today’s environment, can be used against the Jewish people, but to raise it in a way that could justify Jewish strength or self-defence is ruled out of bounds.

Angry assassin or hero?

A 17-year-old Jewish refugee in Paris on Nov. 7, 1938, shot Nazi diplomat Ernst vom Rath. The assassination provided Nazi Germany with a golden opportunity. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, portrayed the teenager as an agent of the international Jewish conspiracy trying to provoke a war between France and Germany. Two days later, the Nazis orchestrated a surge of horrific violence against the Jews. More than 200 people died, 1,300 synagogues were destroyed and 7,500 Jewish shops were trashed in a spasm of hatred known as Kristallnacht.

The assassin, Herschel Grynszpan, became a notorious figure at the time, both in Germany and beyond. For anti-German voices, he became a cause célèbre. A top newspaper columnist with the New York Herald Tribune, Dorothy Thompson, stirred up widespread sympathy for Grynszpan, raising funds to hire a celebrated defence attorney for him. Grynszpan became so well known that Leon Trotsky, living in exile in Mexico, declared his “moral solidarity” with the assassin.

But, 20 years later, Grynszpan had become irrelevant to history. Hannah Arendt, in her book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, dismissed Grynszpan as a psychopath. She wrote that Grynszpan was probably an agent provocateur used by the Gestapo to provide a pretext to escalate persecution of the Jews and eliminate a diplomat who was not an enthusiastic supporter of the regime. Today, historians show little interest in the assassin, believing, as Arendt did, that the Third Reich was looking for an excuse and the escalation of violence against the Jews would have taken place regardless of what happened in Paris. Yad Vashem does not even mention him in accounts of Jewish resistance to Nazi Germany.

Author Jonathan Kirsch says Grynszpan has been shortchanged. In The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2014), Kirsch sets out to convince the reader that Grynszpan is an unrecognized hero of the Second World War. According to Kirsch, Grynszpan was a courageous Jew who stood up to Nazi power at a time that France and Britain were more interested in appeasing Hitler than confronting him. And, four years later, Kirsch writes, Grynszpan did something even more remarkable. He outsmarted Goebbels, undermining efforts to stage a show trial that Hitler wanted in order to justify the mass murder of the Jewish people.

Kirsch sees Grynszpan as a character in a mystery “deeply layered with conspiracy and intrigue, erotic scandal and rough justice.” As he paints his sympathetic portrayal of Grynszpan with colorful anecdotes and captivating details, he also raises intriguing questions about who can rightfully be considered a hero of the Second World War. The issue is complicated, especially since Grynszpan’s motive for shooting vom Rath has never been clear.

What is indisputable is that Grynszpan, caught in a bureaucratic labyrinth in Paris over his residency permit, with no money and fighting with his family, was becoming increasingly frantic in the days before the incident. His parents had moved to Hanover, Germany, in 1911, fleeing Radomsk, Poland, in an effort to escape a rising tide of antisemitism, but they never received German citizenship, despite living in the country for years. Officially, they were classified as Polish citizens living in exile in Germany.

With the Nazi Party victory at the polls in the 1933 election, the Grynszpan family, similar to many others, started to make plans to leave the country. But they never had enough money to do so. In desperation in 1936, they sent their 15-year-old son out of the country.

Grynszpan, staying with relatives in Paris, followed Hitler’s aggressive campaign against the Jews in the Yiddish papers. The news became increasingly alarming as 1938 unfolded. In March, the Third Reich formally absorbed Austria into Germany and Austrians took to the streets to terrorize the Jews of Vienna and other cities. In July, the international community met in the French resort town of Evian to develop a response to Nazi aggression but no one was willing to confront Nazi Germany or provide sanctuary to Jewish refugees. “Nobody wants them,” was the headline in a Nazi Party newspaper after the Evian conference.

Then, on Aug. 22, 1938, Germany revoked all residency permits issued to foreigners. They could not stay in Germany and Poland refused to repatriate Poles who lived in Germany. The Grynszpan family was in effect rendered stateless.

The Third Reich drew up arrest lists of 50,000 names on Oct. 26, 1938. Grynszpan’s family was on the list. The following day, his parents and two siblings were escorted to the police station. They were transported to the Polish border town of Zbaszyn, where they were trapped in a no-man’s land. Media reports provided detailed accounts of 12,000 Jews, deprived of food and shelter, and unable to enter Poland or return to Germany. The Yiddish newspapers reported the spread of deadly diseases and suicides. Grynszpan received a postcard from Zbaszyn on Nov. 3 from his mother. Four days later, he shot vom Rath.

When he was arrested, he had a postcard in his pocket. “My dear parents,” he wrote, “I couldn’t do otherwise. God must forgive me. My heart bleeds when I think of our tragedy and that of the 12,000 Jews. I have to protest in a way that the whole world hears my protest, and this I intend to do. I beg your forgiveness.”

He derailed the show trial shortly before it was to be held in Germany in 1942 by abandoning the rhetoric of heroism and revenge. Those familiar with history will not be surprised by the twist in events. Grynszpan asserted the shooting was as a result of a tiff between homosexual lovers.

Kirsch says his claim, which has never been backed up with any evidence, was Grynszpan’s greatest act of courage. Grynszpan understood Hitler’s loathing of homosexuality and destroyed the propaganda value of the show trial. The Third Reich did not want anything to do with homosexuality, even though Goebbels and others believed the claim to be a complete fabrication.

Despite their reputation for record keeping, the Nazi authorities did not document what happened next to Grynszpan. He just disappeared. A trial was never held; his place of incarceration was not recorded. His death was not documented, feeding conspiracy theories that he may have survived the war and continued living somewhere in Europe under a pseudonym.

So, where should we place Grynszpan in the pantheon of resisters? Can an act of personal revenge be considered heroism?

Grynszpan is clearly not of the stature of Mordechai Anielewicz, the hero from the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. But is he in the same league as Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, sparking the First World War? Or Yigal Amir, who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, derailing Israel-Palestinian peace efforts?

Holocaust historian Michael Marrus has said Grynszpan has his place in the register of futile but symbolic acts of resistance against unspeakable tyranny. Grynszpan was an ordinary youth who was driven to lash out against a ruthless tyranny, Marrus has written, and his story deserves to be better known.

Kirsch regrets that Grynszpan remains without honor, even among the people whose avenger he imagined himself to be. However, this well-written book may change how history regards the angry assassin.

Media consultant Robert Matas, a former Globe and Mail journalist, still reads books. The book reviewed here is available at the Jewish Public Library. To reserve it or any other book, call 604-257-5181 or email library@jccgv.bc.ca. The catalogue is at jccgv.com, click on Isaac Waldman Library.

Ancient hatred writ large

Near the end of World Without Jews (Yale University Press, 2014), we find this passage from a letter written in June of 1943 by a Wehrmacht officer named Wilm Hosenfeld, a Catholic, a schoolteacher in civilian life who had come to know a lot about the fate of the Jews deported from the Warsaw Ghetto: “With this terrible mass murder of the Jews we have lost the war. We have brought upon ourselves an indelible disgrace, a curse that can never be lifted. We deserve no mercy, we are all guilty.” Hosenfeld was later captured by the Soviets and died in a Siberian gulag.

The remarkable thing about this letter is not just that it was written, but that its author was a member of the notorious Sturmabteilung who later became a full member of the Nazi party. One may ask: doesn’t the fact that one Nazi could feel this way repudiate the “we had no choice – we were following orders” excuse so often heard from other Holocaust perpetrators?

These are the kinds of questions posed in the meticulously researched new book by Israeli-born historian Alon Confino of Ben-Gurion University and the University of Virginia, which draws upon many non-traditional sources to present an answer to a new Holocaust question: not whether or not the Holocaust was intentional, or how it was carried out, but rather how did Germans come to conceive of a world without Jews? (And, as Confino makes clear: it was indeed a world without Jews, not a Germany without Jews, that the Nazis envisioned.)

Drawing upon untraditional sources, many of which have only recently been found or made available – wartime letters, diaries, journals, newspapers and photographs – Confino provides a shocking answer to this question: “Germany went after the Jews … not in spite of being a nation of high culture but because it was such a nation…. The Nazis perpetrated the Holocaust in the name of culture.”

Confino notes that the burning of the Bible was a Nazi obsession: thousands and thousands of Bibles were heaped on the flames, culminating in the great fires of Kristallnacht, during which not only Bibles, but 1,400 synagogues were set on fire.

Confino’s goal in World Without Jews is precisely to explore the very backgrounds and influences that created a uniquely genocidal culture. He begins his quest at a new starting point by asking, if Nazi policies were fueled by master-class racism, why were the Nazis so anxious to prioritize the burning of the Bible? Confino notes that the burning of the Bible was a Nazi obsession: thousands and thousands of Bibles were heaped on the flames, culminating in the great fires of Kristallnacht, during which not only Bibles, but 1,400 synagogues were set on fire.

Confino’s subject, then, is not Auschwitz, as it is of many Holocaust historians. Rather, it is this: how could Germans imagine a world without Jews? Where could such an absurd, fantastic notion come from? How could it become legitimized? How could it possibly be carried out?

Confino is certain of one thing: the Judeocide was fully anticipated before it began in 1941. This conviction contradicts that of most Holocaust historians, who feel that the Holocaust was an ex tempore “solution” to the “Jewish Problem” raised by the German forces’ occupation of Eastern Europe. Not so, says Confino, because the Holocaust was a result of “an accumulation of ancient [largely Christian] hatreds” fueled by 19th-century nation-building and given precedent by the mass murders perpetrated around the world in the 19th century by British, French, Dutch and Belgian colonizers. But why Jews? Why was their extermination seen as so central to German survival?

Confino’s answer to this question is that Jewish culture had always been a culture of chaim, of life; the Nazis wanted to found a culture of death. To do so, they had to “eliminate the shackles of a past tradition” to “liberate their imagination to open up new emotional, historical and moral horizons that enable them to imagine and to create their empire of death.” Thus, life-centred Jews had to go, and their books with them.

What we have here, in other words, is “the first experiment in the total creation of a new humanity achieved by extermination, a humanity liberated from the moral shackles of its past.”

On the question of who knew what was happening, Confino is uncompromising: no one in Germany could not have known – not necessarily about the mass murders, but that “something terrible” was happening.

On the question of who knew what was happening, Confino is uncompromising: no one in Germany could not have known – not necessarily about the mass murders, but that “something terrible” was happening. To prove his point, Confino cites hundreds of articles, pamphlets, radio speeches and photographs “showing what Germans saw when they walked in the street, drove on the road, or made their way to work” – all of which refer to the need to eliminate the “Jewish influence.”

In Confino’s view, the extermination of the Jews was fully intentional; all it required was a passive populace, and the active participation of the Christian Church. The Nazis got both, in spades.

Confino doesn’t hesitate to directly implicate the Christian Church in the Nazis’ program to eradicate Christianity’s Jewish origins: time and again he reasserts the “fundamental affinity” between Nazism and Christianity regarding the need to eliminate Christianity’s “Jewish roots.” The difference between them was that for the Nazis, they produced Christ; for the Church, it was because they killed him.

Nazism, then, was to be a new Bereishit, a new beginning point. Canadian scholar Northrop Frye said often that Western culture was permanently “anchored” in the Bible: the Nazi project was to cut this anchor and drop a new one, rooted in the crazed dogmas of Mein Kampf. Getting rid of Jews was, in other words, “akin to making a clean historical slate.”

One of the most unforgettable and heretofore never published photos contained in World Without Jews, shows a small statue of a crucified Christ in front of a church in Westphalia. Under the statue, in large letters, there is the sign “No Jews Allowed.” Just over the head of the Christ are the letters “INRI”: that is, in Latin, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” May this irony not be lost and, to that end, may we be thankful for books such as Confino’s World Without Jews.

Graham Forst, PhD, taught literature and philosophy at Capilano University until his retirement and now teaches in the continuing education departments at Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia and Banff School of Fine Arts. From 1975 to 2010, he co-chaired the symposium committee of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.