Re: Niemcy w cieniu Hitlera...

http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,345720,00.html

Why Germans Can Never Escape Hitler's Shadow
By Michael Sontheimer

SPIEGEL staff writer and historian Michael Sontheimer reveals his
family's Nazi past and explains why even his 11-year-old son still has
a burden to bear. As the 60th anniversary of Germany's defeat
approaches, he analyzes the ever-present debate about German guilt,
memory and responsibility that still divides the country.


Almost 60 years after Nazi Germany's defeat, Hitler remains a
polemical figure. Germans used to regard May 8, 1945 as the day they
were defeated. Now, they view it as the day they were liberated from
Nazi tyranny. The shift has been slow and is not without pitfalls.
In Berlin, the former seat of Nazi Germany, a scandal is currently
brewing that has nothing to do with modern Germany and everything to
do with the nation's Nazi past. The brouhaha is over how May 8, 1945,
the day Nazi Germany capitulated, should be remembered. Local
officials of a wealthy Berlin district just passed a motion stating
that victims of Nazi oppression are not the only ones who should be
memorialized and honored. Regular German soldiers and civilians who
were killed as well as women who were raped by the advancing Soviet
army, too, should be remembered, they declared.

The resolution has provoked harsh criticism, especially after one
lawyer and local politician said that in some matters, he can't help
but agree with one of the nation's neo-Nazi parties. Critics charge
that lumping all victims together, and going so far as to turn war
criminals into victims, dangerously blurs the question of guilt and
responsibility for the war.

The message of the debate is clear: For us Germans, whether we like it
or not, the past is always present. One only has to take a look at a
German bookshop these days. The shelves are overflowing with new
publications on every imaginable aspect of the Nazi period. Newspapers
and TV channels are running dozens of documentaries on World War II.
The conflict cost about 60 million lives and obviously it still haunts
us.

Every German harbors a family war story


Hitler met with great fanfare by an enthralled German public in 1935.

Probably the most important reason for this ongoing presence of the
Nazi past is quite personal. The former Wehrmacht soldiers who fought
in the war are now almost all in their eighties. Still, almost every
single German family harbors a complicated personal war history, some
more bitter than others.

Part of mine, for instance, is that my Austrian grandfather committed
suicide in the spring of 1945. He had been a simple tailor, churning
out Nazi uniforms, but never putting one on himself or fighting.
Still, he had been a Nazi party member and feared revenge from the
advancing Soviet troops.

As a teenager in the late 1960s, I stumbled upon a box of family
photos containing a portrait of a handsome, dark-haired young man in a
black jacket with skulls on the collar, the uniform of Hitler's elite
SS division. My grandmother revealed to me that the man in the photo
was Willy, her beloved little brother. Willy joined the illegal
Austrian branch of the Nazi party in the 1930s, and was then
imprisoned. He escaped and went to Germany, where he joined the SS.

He served at the Dachau concentration camp and my grandmother
remembered how he returned home for a holiday saying he had seen
terrible things which he could not talk about but which made him
despise National Socialism. Willy then volunteered for the eastern
front and was shot in 1941, during the first week of the Russian
campaign.


About 7,000 prisoners were found alive at the Auschwitz death camp
when it was freed on Jan. 27, 1945. About 1.5 million others died at
the camp.

My father, recruited late in the war because of his young age, served
as an anti-aircraft gunner in southwest Germany and was lucky not to
have been on duty on the day in early 1945 when Allied bombers
attacked the dam his unit was protecting. Several of his fellow
soldiers died. He was 16 years old at the time.

My wife's parents tell a harrowing tale of fleeing from advancing
Soviet troops in 1945. They were only children, but leaving behind
their homes and everything they knew was a traumatic experience that
deeply influenced their personalities and lives. Of course, we got
away lightly compared to the fate of Jewish-German families, but
still, the war lingers in almost every German home.

What did you do during the war, Grandpa?

Wehrmacht soldiers in Poland tear down the German-Polish border on
Sept. 1, 1939, the day Germany began its blitzkrieg invasion. Six
years later, more than 60 million people were dead.
Nevertheless, the way the war and the Nazi years are talked about in
Germany has changed radically in the past 60 years. Right after the
war, there was a deafening silence. "Don't mention the war," was the
basic mantra, which the British comedian John Cleese brilliantly
satirized in the 1970s classic BBC TV comedy "Fawlty Towers".

In West Germany, the vast majority of Nazi judges, scientists and
bureaucrats simply stayed in office. When Chancellor Konrad Adenauer
was asked in early 1955 if there should be an official event marking
the 10th anniversary of the liberation from the Nazis he answered,
tellingly: "You don't celebrate your defeats."

Only in the 1960s, did rebellious teenagers like me start to question
their parents and grandparents: What were you doing between 1933 and
1945? What did you know about the killing of the Jews? We did not
accept the collective amnesia regarding the Nazi crimes. We also
refused to buy the popular legend of an evil demon called Hitler who
single-handedly seduced and betrayed an innocent German people who
knew nothing about the atrocities the Wehrmacht and the SS committed.

In the 1970s, young teachers introduced the Nazi period into the
school curriculum and historians began more intensely documenting and
researching the rise of the Nazis. The American TV series "Holocaust"
also had a strong impact. Then, on May 8, 1985, President Richard von
Weizsaecker -- once a Wehrmacht officer -- gave a historical speech to
the German parliament in which he declared the day the "Deutsche
Reich" submitted to an unconditional capitulation a "Tag der
Befreiung," a "day of liberation" for Germans.

This was especially resonant considering Weizsaecker's own family war
story. His father Ernst served as Nazi deputy foreign secretary and in
1942 signed deportation orders that sent about 6,000 French Jews to
extermination camps. In his speech, Weizsaecker Jr. remembered Jews,
but also other groups, like Gypsies, homosexuals, communists and the
handicapped, who were persecuted and killed because they were
different or had dissenting political opinions.

Democracy grows from defeat

Nazi war criminals tried after the war in Nuremberg.
By the 1980s, recognition of Nazi crimes and the acceptance of the
German duty to critically remember them had finally attained broad
consensus. Now it is commonplace. Just the other day, Wladimir
Kaminer, a Jew from Moscow who came to Berlin 15 years ago and who is
now a German citizen and very successful writer, told me. "Your defeat
in World War II has helped you build up a true democracy. The Germans
are hopeless now when it comes to anything militaristic and
totalitarian. The Russians, on the other hand, still can't even
recognize the victims of Stalinism. That's because even though he was
a dictator, he won the war against evil Nazi-Germany and you don't
accuse a winner. That's why you have a lot more racists and right-wing
extremists in Russia than in Germany."

Respected British historian Ian Kershaw -- who wrote what I believe is
the best Hitler biography -- recently praised the Germans for having
done much more to come to terms with their fascist past than the
Austrians, Italians or Japanese.

This is encouraging to hear, though it does not offer an excuse to
indulge in complacency. In the last few years, books on the Allied
bombing campaign and the brutal expulsion of Germans from Poland and
Czechoslovakia in 1945 have focused on how Germans suffered during the
war. Leftists have warned that this shift could lead to a moral
levelling and suppression of the fact that it was Nazi Germany which,
after all, began the war and that their goal was to enslave Europe and
ultimately achieve world supremacy.


Neo-Nazis are becoming more brazen and visible in Germany. Many
unabashedly honor Hitler as a great German statesman.

And unfortunately, on the fringes of German society -- particularly in
the impoverished former East Germany -- anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism
still exist and at the moment seem to be thriving. Last year, neo-Nazi
parties won parliamentary seats in two German states and party heads
have unabashedly declared their desire to win federal representation
in 2006 elections. It is hard to understand how such self-declared
nationalists can actually defend Hitler -- a fanatic who transformed
Germany into an immoral police state and ultimately brought the nation
to its knees and forced it to bear decades of occupation. Still, they
do and this shows that even now, the debate on the Nazi period is not
always terribly rational.

And calm rationality is what is desperately needed on all sides when
it comes to confronting Germany's Nazi past. Unfortunately, such even-
temperedness is often sorely lacking. Whenever a right-wing extremist
provokes controversy -- like last month, when a prominent Neo-Nazi
called the Allied attacks on Dresden in February 1945 a "Holocaust of
bombs" -- German politicians immediately start to moralize in grand
style instead of discussing and analyzing the historical facts.

The truth is that after the Dresden air attacks, even British Prime
Minister Winston Churchill looked at the rubble and ordered a review
of what he called the "bombing of German cities simply for the sake of
increasing terror, though under other pretexts". There are other good
arguments to support the conclusion that the relentless bombing of
German cities did, indeed, conflict with international law and
therefore can be judged a war crime. Of course, one must not leave out
the bombing attacks perpetrated by the German Luftwaffe against
Guernica, Warsaw, Rotterdam or Belgrade, which were also war crimes.

But out of fear they might nurture nationalistic ideas or be
misunderstood and criticized by the foreign media, German politicians
continue to evade a detailed discussion of the historical facts.
Instead, they prefer to loudly lament the popularity of neo-Nazis who
dare to insult Holocaust victims. Again, emotionalism and moralizing
beat out rationalism.

The past is present

Allied bombers left Dresden in ruins in 1945. Historians still debate
if the attacks can be justified militarily. Even Winston Churchill
questioned them.
As a boy I loved to play in bombed out villas in Berlin and even today
when I look out of my kitchen window I can still see a house with a
bombed-out back wing where tiles from blasted-out bathrooms still
stick on the wall. This house is certainly an anomaly, as most of
Berlin has been rebuilt. But it will take many more years until all
traces of the past completely disappear.

Meanwhile, my 11-year-old son has started to ask me about the Nazis.
While we were living in London, his schoolmates sometimes greeted him
mockingly with a "Heil Hitler." Although he was born almost 50 years
after the "Fuehrer" shot himself in his bunker, he, too, can't escape
history. That is not something I regret.

.

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