Der Spiegel reports that Germany is still actively pursuing a small number of alleged Nazi-era war criminals, although U.S. authorities have just granted a temporary stay on the extradition of the accused John Demjanjuk to face trial in Germany. I know some ConHome readers will disagree, but I say 'well done, Germany' for pursuing these cases, but this is not the main point of this post.
The Demjanjuk case highlights a problem I have been observing for some 25 years now, which is how Germany has been dealing with its difficult and abhorrent past, and what lessons there might be for other nations which are seeking to come to terms with their own history, a process for which the Germans have a characteristically long and precise compound noun, Vergangenheitsbewältigung. I write this as someone who is neither German, nor Jewish, nor Eastern European, but I am going to try to draw on the experience of all of these in writing this piece.
This post is not about the merit of pursuing war criminals from the 1940s per se, nor about the evils of the Holocaust, but about how I believe that Germany, or more specifically, West Germany, has done a pretty good job of securing a proper understanding by its people of the magnitude of what happened in 1933-1945, of the depth of human depravity reached in those years, and of the proper significance of Jewish culture in German history overall. Others might well take note.
Concentration camps on German soil like Dachau and Sachsenhausen remain well-visited by German school groups and it is rare to meet a young German who doesn't have both a good knowledge of what happened, combined with a feeling of some responsibility for ensuring that anti-semitism and other forms of racism do not take hold again. Despite having now virtually no Jewish community, the country has made a good job of preserving and restoring some significant elements of its Jewish past.
The famous Oranienburger Straße synagogue in Berlin, which was destroyed in Kristallnacht in 1938 has been lovingly restored. Ironically, it is now under constant police protection, but this is not this time from German mobs like in 1938, but from Islamist extremists. Most German provincial towns have tried to locate and preserve their Jewish past. In December, I paid a visit to Speyer, near Frankfurt, to visit what were the largest Jewish public baths in Germany, which have been beautifully restored, even though there was nobody left after 1945 to use them. In 2001, the substantial German Jewish Museum opened in Berlin.
Of course, preserving historic buildings is not the whole story, and none of this will restore life to any of the 6 million systematically murdered, but together with its effective education programming, and the special responsibility that German governments of all hues have recognised towards the state of Israel, I think that overall West Germany has done a good job.
The former GDR is a slightly different case, as there the standard line in the years 1949 - 1989 was that the concentration camps were part of an anti-Fascist struggle. In the GDR version, it was not the Germans who carried out the Holocaust, it was merely a Fascist minority. The Jewishness of the victims was downplayed, if not entirely ignored, partly because the Soviet Union had become hostile to Israel. For the GDR, the Holocaust was ideological, not racial. Since 1989, the approach has changed, but there are still marked differences in approaches of those aged over 35 or so. In the East, one is much more likely to meet people who say that the Holocaust is merely an historical event which is of no special significance for modern Germans.
Nevertheless, the real problems with Vergangenheitsbewältigung are further to the East. It is a sad fact that many of the peoples of Eastern Europe were also victims of the Nazis, yet continued to pursue in many cases active persecution of their Jewish minorities, before, during and even after the end of Nazism. That is partly what the John Demjanjuk case is all about. The allegation is that he was a guard at the extermination camp in Sobibor. He has been charged in Germany with 29,000 counts of being an accessory to murder. Demjanjuk is of Ukrainian origin.
Three times as many Russians as Jews died in the War thanks to the Nazis; as a proportion of population Poland lost a greater share than any other country; but that doesn't mean to say that there aren't painful histories to come to terms with in both countries. Remarkably, pogroms were still happening in Poland even after the end of the War, as seen, for example, at Kielce in 1946, when 42 Jewish Holocaust survivors were murdered. Post-Communist Poland has done a better job of facing up to its own past. In 1990, President Lech Walesa, in one of his very first acts, went to Kielce to unveil a commemoration plaque to the Jews murdered.
In my Commons speech on Holocaust Memorial Day in January, I described the difference between in 2008 visiting Auschwitz with the Holocaust Educational Trust with local Polish guides, and the experience of having done so in Communist Poland. Then, the Jewish nature of the extermination camps was excised, in favour of a different narrative of a Communist Party led struggle against Fascism. We should never forget that Poland itself was almost destroyed by Nazi Germany, but nevertheless Poland since 1990 has made a much better effort in its own Vergangenheitsbewältigung towards its former Jewish citizens. The town of Oswiecim (Auschwitz) now has a fascinating little museum of Jewish life in the town prior to 1939.
I only wish I could say the same for Russia and some other former Soviet republics. I was fascinated to read this online Time magazine article from 1964 describing anti-semitism in the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War. I am proud to have been heavily involved with the Student and Academic Campaign for Soviet Jewry (SACSJ) in the late 1980s in highlighting the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union. However, since 1991 and the end of the Soviet Union, it appears that little effort has been made to change public or private attitudes in Russia. The Anti-Defamation League published this report in 2003 on anti-semitism in the country. This might be a generalisation, but it seems that Putin's Russia is just not interested in following a new approach.
My conclusion to all this is as follows: I think many countries in the world with histories of prejudice, persecution or even genocide towards one or more people or peoples, and which have thankfully now made the political decision to come to terms with their past, would be well advised to study what Germany has done since 1945. It would be wrong to compare the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews with any more recent persecutions, but I do believe that there are universal lessons to be drawn from the German experience in the years since.
