It has been remarked that my choice of reading material for a holiday is not 'happy'. The American Civil War, a biography of Leonard Cohen, and now a book about the systematic extermination of Jews in Poland in 1941-2. OK, I see the point.
However, that is just for starters. And the reason I am sitting with my books and iPad in a cafe (with wifi) by a lake while my wife and friends do something else is because I have a seriously dodgy shoulder awaiting treatment when I get back to Bradford.
Right, that's the explanations and excuses dealt with.
Anyway, we had a conversation over breakfast this morning about how individuals, communities or entire nations manage to collude in inhuman behaviour while then proving totally incapable of coming to terms with that behaviour later. Austria has never seriously addressed its complicity with Nazism and the Final Solution; Switzerland's neutrality during the Second World War allowed it the freedom to cover both heroism and quiet cruelty; Rwanda sought to blame the Belgians and the French for sowing the seeds of genocide only twenty years ago.
We were discussing how the ground for dreadful collective behaviour and individual complicity in it is laid by years of cultural and linguistic corruption. Turn Jews and Bolsheviks into categories of 'enemies' and it becomes easier to justify getting rid of them. Spend years referring to 'the other tribe' as “cockroaches” and stamping them out becomes reasonable as well as achievable.
This reminded me of something I heard years ago at Greenbelt. I think it was the great and late-lamented Mike Yaconelli who claimed that the most common cause of death of cattle on the great plains of the American mid-west was “being hit by a train”. Trains and railway tracks were hard to find in the vast expanses of empty land. And the cows didn't set out to find them in order to get flattened by the iron horse. They simply put their head down, nibbled the nearest bit of grass… then moved on to the next piece of grass… and then the next bit… until they had moved a very long way and found themselves nibbling grass in front of tons of moving metal.
They nibbled their way to destruction.
People don't set out to collude in genocide. They just keep their head down and their eyes narrowly focused. They attend to the immediate business to hand and don't look up to see the bigger picture. But, one day they find themselves in front of a train.
Which is how and why Ordinary Men end up doing extraordinarily terrible things to other people.
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August 14, 2013 at 12:55 pm
Two other good books on the subject are Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” and Gitta Sereny’s “The German Trauma”
August 14, 2013 at 1:49 pm
Peter, yes. I have read them both, but only now reading the Browning book.
August 14, 2013 at 1:50 pm
I have some *great* stories to tell of sitting in Austria with some of my grandmother’s generation talking about before, during and after the war.
August 14, 2013 at 3:52 pm
‘They nibbled their way to destruction.’
‘People don’t set out to collude in genocide. They just keep their head down and their eyes narrowly focused. They attend to the immediate business to hand and don’t look up to see the bigger picture. But, one day they find themselves in front of a train.’
‘Which is how and why Ordinary Men end up doing extraordinarily terrible things to other people.’
Is this ‘Politics…..’?
August 14, 2013 at 5:27 pm
I, too, have read ‘Ordinary Men’ and this from Klaus Fischer’s ‘The History of an Obsession’,
: “There is something demonic about modern industrial states transforming themselves into organized killing machines, whether the purpose is to protect democracy, protect national self-interest, or, more disturbingly, annihilate racial enemies or fulfill romantic longings for heroism and death. In the case of many young Germans, the First World War provided the experiences that would predispose them toward a fascist way of life, including the glorification of a pseudoreligious nationalism and an exaggerated form of militarism” (p.123).
resonances?
August 15, 2013 at 7:51 am
I’m trying to read a new book about the Hungarian Holocaust, having written about it earlier in the year. If you’re interested it’s by Szabolcs Szita, ‘The Power of Humanity: Raoul Wallenberg and his Aides in Budapest’, published last year. I’m finding it quite hard going, partly because the translation is not that fluent, but also because of the content. As a historian, I need to read it, but as a human being I need to be careful not to send myself into an even deeper depression than I’m already in. I continue to ponder the fundamental connection between history and human memory, goodness and evil. Maybe that’s why it took me twenty years to return to the interviews we recorded twenty odd years ago. However, I learnt a lot from the process, especially about why Hungarians were unable to speak about these events for more than forty years. It may be gloomy reading, but it’s essential. Otherwise we’re tempted to believe that human nature is fundamentally good, rather than a mixture of both.
August 23, 2013 at 1:07 pm
I have got into a twitter spat with a militant atheist ( I know .. I know..) who insists that Hitler was a Catholic/Christian. This seems to be a recurring theme amongst them. Do you know of an authoritative study on his views on religion which, I appreciate had a significant degree of opportunism/ cynicism.
August 31, 2013 at 1:29 pm
Martin, it is difficult to know where to start. Ian Kershaw’s two-volume ‘Hitler’ is excellent and addresses this partially. However, it is difficult to dislodge the lazy charge from those whose prejudices depend on it. My response is usually to the effect that “Hitler is to Christianity what Stalin/Mao are to atheism.” Of course, Hitler was a Roman Catholic – he was an Austrian – but his treatment of the church (‘Deutsche Christen and the Bekennende Kirche) speaks for itself.