Dialog International

WWII German-American Internees "Sworn to Silence"

Each month the German Embassy publishes The Atlantic Times which is available free of charge to anyone living in the United States and Canada. I usually find something of interest in the paper.  This month Uwe Siemon-Netto has a nice piece about a German immigrant to the US, Eberhard Fuhr, who, along with 11,000 other German-Americans, spent five years in a US internment camp beginning in 1942.  I have written about the fate of these internees previously.  Much has been written about the 150,000 Japanese-Americans who were held in camps throughout the Northwest  (Read Dave Niewart's excellent Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community). They have received apologies and financial restitution from the US government. But the fate of the German-American and Italian-Americans who spent years in internment camps has largely been forgotten: no apology or financial restitution has been offered thus far.

Siemon-Netto's piece on on Eberhard Fuhr has been published on the Atlantic Times blog: 

When Fuhr and his brother were eventually led away in handcuffs, they were 17 and 18, respectively. The were first incarcerated in Hamilton County Prison where felons yelled threats at them from neighboring cells, calling them Nazis, Krauts and Huns. “Worse than this experience was the humiliating and painful way by which we were driven from Cincinnati to Chicago – in the backseat of a car, handcuffed all the way to my belt and to my brother in a manner forcing us to face each other all the time, even when nature called,” he recalled. “It was excruciating.”

While interned at the Crystal City camp in Texas, the Fuhr family lost their home to foreclosure, as well as most of their other possession. Nor did their troubles end with the end of the war.  When they were finally released the prisoners were forced to take an oath of silence, threatened with immediate deportation if they ever spoke about their experiences in the internment camps:

After their release, most detainees faced destitution. Their bank accounts were frozen, their properties gone. Worse still, their wartime experience of humiliation and stigmatization left them with “deep psychological scars,” said Fuhr. “This is why we must encourage these people to tell their story without fear of recrimination. They are not criminals but persons caught in the web of wartime hysteria.”

Finally there appears to be some effort on the part of Congress to address this shameful chapter in US history.  A bill is slowly making its way through the US Senate that would establish a commission to "to review the facts and circumstances surrounding injustices suffered by European Americans, European Latin Americans, and Jewish refugees during World War II."  Among other things the bill makes the following finding:

(5) The wartime policies of the United States Government were devastating to the German American and Italian American communities, individuals, and their families. The detrimental effects are still being experienced.

Of course, this action comes many decades too late, as most of the internees direcly affected have long since died.  You can follow the progress of the bill, as well as access a good deal more intormation at the Web site of the German American Internee Coalition.

Onkel Wackelflügel and the Candy Bombers

The Berlin Airlift ended sixty years ago this month.  Not many of the pilots are still alive to participate in commemorative events. But perhaps the most celebrated pilot, Gail Halverson - known to the children of Berlin as "Uncle Wiggly Wings" - is still active at the age of 89.  Halverson began dropping candy on his approach to Tempelhof Airport, and he would "wiggle" the wings on his C-47 as an identifying signal to the children.  Elisabeth Binder has a nice tribute to Halversen and the Candy Bombers in Der Tagesspiegel:

Die erste Ladung, die Halvorsen nach Berlin brachte, bestand aus 20 000 Pfund Mehl. „Die Deutschen schauten uns an, als wären wir Engel vom Himmel.“ Für Gail Halverson, aktives Mitglied der Mormonen-Kirche Jesu Christi der Heiligen der letzten Tage, ist Dankbarkeit die Kraft, die aus Feinden Freunde macht und das scheinbar Unmögliche möglich werden lässt. Seine erste Begegnung mit Berliner Kindern fand am Stacheldrahtzaun statt, der den Flughafen Tempelhof umgab. „Die Freiheit war ihnen wichtiger als alles andere", erinnert er sich. „Geben Sie uns bitte nicht auf“, baten sie. Keines der Kinder bettelte um Schokolade, auch das hat damals großen Eindruck auf den jungen Piloten gemacht. (The first load that Halvorsen brought to Berlin consisted of 20,000 lbs. of flour. “The Germans looked at us as if we were angels from heaven.” For Gail Halvorsen, an active member of the Mormon Church, gratitude has the power to make enemies into friends, to make what seems impossible possible. His first encounter with German children took place at the barbed wire fence that surrounded Tempelhof Airport. “Freedom was more important to them than anything,” he recalled. “Don’t give up on us,” they implored. None of the children begged for chocolate, and that made a huge impression on the young pilot.)

Read my complete translation of the piece The Angels Came in Airplanes at Watching America.

You can listen to an interview with Gail Halverson here.

Did the US torture German POWs?

Many Americans have expressed shock that the Bush administration devised a legal framework for torturing detainees.  The activist Naomi Klein asks: why the big fuss?  America has been engaging in torture for decades.  I can't evaluate all of her charges, but it did pique my curiosity about the treatment of German POWs, especially high-level Nazi officers. Did the US military use "enhanced interrogation techniques" to extract intelligence from high-value Nazi detainees? 

First, it is necessary to distinguish between the overall treatment of POWs and the interrogation techniques used on specific individuals.  During the war, the US treated German POWs in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.  After the war, however, General Eisenhower changed the status of the prisoners to DEF's (Disarmed Enemy Forces), and there is no question that many prisoners in American control suffered and died from starvation, sickness and exposure, although this must be seen against the backdrop of a severe food shortage in Europe in 1945 and 1946.

With respect to torture, Caleb Miller of the History News Network examined the historical record concerning the treatment of German POWs and DEFs.  While there were many documented instances of brutality and "rough treatment", there is no evidence that torture was used by American interrogators to extract intelligence:

There are many allegations of mistreatment and unwarranted brutality. If reclassification of a detainee in order to cut his or her rations constitutes "torture," then some may conclude that Nazis were "tortured" after the fall of Berlin. If rough treatment designed to break an individual's will constitutes torture, then some may conclude that Nazis were tortured when subjected to rougher treatment, Holocaust films and American propaganda in the reeducation process.

There is no documented evidence that torture was used to gain intelligence from captured Nazis.

British historian Giles MacDonogh in his book After the Reich (read my review) charges that SS officers were subjected to brutal torture by US military interrogators at a prison facility near Stuttgart:

More conventional methods of torture included kicks to the groin, deprivation of sleep and food and savage beatings. When the Americans set up a commission of inquiry into the methods used by their investigators, they found that, of the 139 cases examined, 137 had “had their testicles permanently destroyed by kicks received from the American War Crimes Investigation team.”

Macdonogh's source for this appears to be 1949 article in the Progressive Magazine: American Atrocities in Germany by Judge Edward Van Roden.  But Van Roden himself admitted he didn't write the article, and he later disavowed its content before a US Senate hearing.  Subsequent investigations by General Lucius Clay and others revealed that out of the 127 men who had claimed their "testicles were destroyed", none were destroyed. The accusations of torture were a (in part, successful) gambit to gain acquittal from charges of serious war crimes (the Malmedy Massacre).

The master interrogators at Fort Hunt knew that torture would have been counterproductive.  They revealed their secrets in 2007 to the Washington Post:

"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.

With respect to the treatment of German detainees in WWII, at least, Naomi Wolf is wrong: there was no systemic program to use torture techniques to extract intelligence

A Window on the Past

I just spent a fascinating hour looking at photos from the Weimar Republic that the German National Archive (Deutsche Bundesarchiv) recently uploaded to Wikipedia Commons. The 100.000 digital images date as far back as 1832 and extend all the way to 2006.  You can access the photos by date here, but the images have also been sorted according to topic and photographer, as far that information is avaible.

The New York Times writes about this project in today's edition:

"As would be expected from a trove of 100,000 photographs, there are the bizarrely mundane and the breathtaking: in 1984, transporting lumber in Bad Berka in Thuringia, Germany; in 1919, a family of 11 living in poverty in a single room, photographer unknown.

The archive’s motives were not entirely selfless; it hopes to harness the Wikipedia editors to improve the cataloging of the photographs, said Oliver Sander, who is responsible for the collection at the archive. There are 58,000 people in these photographs who lack an ID number assigned by the German library, and the archive would like Wikipedia editors to help identify who is in these photographs and add these codes. “Unfortunately, we don’t have the capacity to implement this with our list of people,” Dr. Sander said. “Maybe Wikipedia members could add this ID to our list. That was the first benefit from Wikipedia.”

Thus far, 29,000 photographs of people have been so coded, Dr. Sander said."

in an interview in Netzpolitik.org, Matthias Schindler of the Wikimedia Foundation Communications Committee explains that this is just the begiinning of a much larger project, for the 100.000 digitized images represent a tiny fraction of the collection: the Bundesarchiv has over 11 million photographs.

German Resistance: Truth and Myth

Recently I wrote a post about the Hollywood movie Valkyrie, which is enjoying surprising box office success in the US in spite of lukewarm reviews. Whatever one may think about the movie, the fact that it has renewed interest in the July 20 conspiracy can only be viewed as a positive development.  Valkyrie also has revived the debate on the scope and efficacy of the resistance against Hitler in Germany during the Third Reich.

The New York Times, in a piece last week on the recent spate of Holocaust films, mentions Hannah Arendt's disdain for any concept of real German resistance:

"Finally, she (Arendt) poured cold water on the notion that the German resistance to Hitler had amounted to anything substantial."

And adds this commentary on the movie Valkyrie:

If one wanted to select a film that would provide a fresh window on the Third Reich, then, “Valkyrie,” which stars Tom Cruise as the central figure of the July plot, should be it. But “Valkyrie,” too, represents a missed opportunity. It fails to explore the motives of the conspirators, who were treated with hostility by the right and left in Germany. The right saw them as traitors. And the 1960s antiwar student Left viewed the officers and generals as unreconstructed Prussian nationalists. This was a half-truth; officers like Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg (played by Cruise) and Philippe von Boeselager represented in part a moral revulsion against the Nazi regime, rooted in Protestant or Catholic moral convictions.

John Rosenthal, on the right-wing Pajamas Media Web site, rejects the notion that Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg was any kind of hero.  Rather, Rosenthal sees him as little more than an opportunisitc Nazi, trying to save his own skin:

“We have to show the world that not all of us were like him,” Cruise/Stauffenberg can be heard solemnly intoning toward the end of the film, presumably referring by “us” to Germans and by “him” to Hitler. When all is said and done, this seems indeed to be the whole point of the movie — which undoubtedly helps to explain why it received millions of dollars in financial support from the German government.

Well, of course not all of “them” were like “him.” But Stauffenberg and his inner circle of co-conspirators were in many respects more like “him” than he was. Their geo-political “vision” was essentially indistinguishable from that of leading Nazi theorists like Carl Schmitt. Stauffenberg advisor Adam von Trott zu Solz wrote, for instance, “Germany — and all of Europe — is threatened by alien powers from the East and from the West, by the Soviets and by the Americans.” Stauffenberg and his brother Berthold were devoted followers of the esoteric poet and prophet of the “New Reich,” Stefan George. It is no wonder, then, that they were thrilled when Hitler’s “Third Reich” seemed to fulfill the master’s prophecy.

So, for Rosenberg, Hollywood is an unwitting partner with the German government in a massive whitewash effort to cover up the German past. But conservative columnist George Will, writing in Newsweek, sees the German resistance as "neither negligible nor contemptible".

By July 1944, decapitation of the Nazi regime probably would not have prevented a crescendo of carnage: In the first 59 months of war, 2.8 million German soldiers and civilians died; in the last nine months, 4.8 million died. Still, Stauffenberg and many others understood the need for a gesture of national purification to refute the narrative—promulgated by Hitler and embraced by the Allies as a politically useful simplification—that the German Resistance was negligible and contemptible. It was neither.

As George Will points out, there were 15 attempts on Hitler's life.  A thriller could be made about the courageous wood-worker Georg Elser, who nearly killed Hitler in 1939. But, of course, Elser was not a photogenic aristocrat like Stauffenberg.  And we have our own American heroine of the German resistance - Mildred Harnack - the only American woman executed by the Nazis.  But she was affiliated with the communist-leaning Rote Kapelle, and so is unaccceptable to George Will and the writers at Pajamas Media.

The Never-Ending Controversy: The Reichstag Fire 75 Years On

75 Years ago today a court in Leipzig found the Dutch bricklayer Mannus van der Lubbe guilty of arson and treason in setting fire to the Reichstag in Berlin.  The fire and its aftermath are widely viewed as the beginning of the Nazi reign of terror, and the trial itself a perversion of justice. Alexander Behar has an excellent piece in Telepolis - Justizfarce mit Folgen (Judicial Farce with Consequences) - that looks into Goering's show trial of December 1933 and how it impacted what came after:

"In den Augen von Dr. Andreas Roth, Professor für Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte und Bürgerliches Recht an der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, war der Reichstagsbrandprozess hingegen „eine politische Inszenierung der Nationalsozialisten“, der neben anderen Ereignissen „zur sogenannten Machtergreifung erheblich beigetragen hat“. Darüber hinaus sei „der Prozess ein Beispiel dafür, dass sich die Richter der ordentlichen Gerichtsbarkeit nicht, wie mitunter behauptet, neutral verhielten, sondern sich schon sehr früh für die Ideologie der neuen Machthaber instrumentalisieren ließen.“"(In the eyes of Dr. Andreas Roth, Professor of German Legal History and Civil Justice at the University of Mainz, the Reichstag fire trial was rather "political theater for National Socialists" which, along with other events, "was a significant contribution to the Nazi seizure of power". Furthermore, the trial serves as an example not, as has been argued, of judicial neutrality, but rather that the justices became instruments of the new strongmen in Germany,")

Whether van der Lubbe was guilty or innocent of the crime, whether he acted alone or with other conspirators, or whether, as many historians now believe, the arson was committed by the Nazis themselves, is still fiercely debated.  Just this year, van der Lubbe was officially pardoned posthumously by the German government.  Still, as Wilfried Kugel points out in a good article in Junge Welt, there have been numerous campaigns since 1945 in  Germany - mostly by right-wing journalists and historians - to "prove" that van der Lubbe was guilty and acted alone. 

An interesting American footnote to the Reichstag fire trial: the daughter of the American ambassador to Germany, Martha Dodd, was a spectator in the courtroom. While most foreign observers were not allowed in, Dodd had a ringside seat to the proceedings since, at the time, she was sleeping with Rudolf Diels, the head of the Gestapo.  She wrote about the trial in passing in her 1938 book Through Embassy Eyes. Later, however, she worked on a screenplay for movie about her experiences (Now It Can Be Told) with Ring Lardner, Jr. where the trial is the climactic scene.  Unfortunately, the movie was never made (although Otto Preminger was under contract to direct) so Americans were deprived of an on-screen courtroom spectacle.  I was able to get a copy of the screenplay at the National Archives in Washington DC.  Diels, in his self-serving autobiography Lucifer Antes Portas (1950), equivocates concerning who or what started the fire at the Reichstag, but he would have been in on the plot in any case.

November 9th and the Course of German History

November 9th is Germany's Schicksalstag (Day of Fate) since it was on this date that momentous events took place - both terrible and sublime.

"The anniversary of one of the most shameful chapters of Germany's turbulent history and one of its most euphoric both fall on Sunday, prompting commemorations and celebrations throughout the country.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and Jewish leaders will gather at Germany's biggest synagogue to pay tribute to the victims of the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9-10, 1938 and to the miraculous rebirth of Jewish life in recent years.

Because it shares the same date, the fall of the Berlin Wall will also be marked and the victims of communist East Germany remembered at low-key events ahead of the 20th anniversary next year."

Commemoration of Kristallnacht has become ritualized in Germany.  Virtually forgotten is Germany's November Revolution, which began on November 9, 1918 when Friedrich Ebert declared the end of the German monarchy. At the same time, Kurt Eisner declared Bavaria a Free State and Republic, which would be governed by workers- and soldiers soviets or councils (Räterepublik).  The inspiration in both Berlin and Munich was the 1917 Russian Revolution. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was short-lived: the "White Guard" loyalists of the German army soon entered the city, assassinated Eisner and slaughtered over 1000 citizens.  Today, as Andrea Naica-Loebell writes, Eisner and the November Revolution in Germany are virtually forgotten:

München hat einen Franz Josef Strauß Flughafen und auch sonst kann sich die Liste der Ehrungen dieses ehemaligen bayerischen Ministerpräsidenten sehen lassen.

Für Kurt Eisner und die Räterevolution hat das Land dagegen nicht viel übrig. In München ist eine unbedeutende Straße (die vom Karl-Marx-Bogen abgeht!) in der Satellitenstadt Neuperlach nach ihm benannt.

(Munich has a Franz Josef Strauss Airport and otherwise a long list of street-names, buildings, etc. honoring this (ultra-conservative) former minister president of Bavaria. But the state doesn't have much interest in commemorating Kurt Eisner and the Bavarian Soviet Republic. In Munich there is an insignificant street in the satellite city of Neuperlach that is named after him (a turn-off from Karl Marx Street). 

The end of Kurt Eisner and the Bavarian Soviet Republic ushered in an era of right-wing extremism and terror.  Munich became a hotbed of fascist activity, culminating with Hitler's stormtroops marching in an attempted putsch on the War Ministry five years later - on November 9, 1923.

Pope Pius XII and History

Pope Benedict XVI opened an old wound last week when he praised the achievements of his predecessor Pope Pius XII:

Pope Benedict XVI on Thursday thanked the organizers of a symposium examining role played during World War II by Pius XII - a pope criticized by some for his stance towards the Nazi-led persecution of Jews. Benedict, referring to Pius as "this noble Pope" said the symposium's work had helped appreciate that pontiff's "human wisdom and pastoral intensity... especially in providing organized assistance to the Jewish people," Benedict said. The pontiff was addressing participants of the symposium, organized by the Pave the Way Foundation, a US-based group including Jews and Catholics that promotes improved relations between followers of different religions.

By coincidence, last week I also saw the the film Constantine's Sword, a powerful documentary of James Carroll's book by the same title.  Carroll was a Roman Catholic priest who became disenchanted with the Church during the Vietnam War and eventually left the priesthood.  Constantine's Sword is an historical and also personal account of anti-Semitism, which Carroll feels is embedded in the history and teaching of the Catholic Church.  Needless to say, both the book and the film have a different take on Pope Pius XXII and his actions - or inactions - during the Nazi era.

I always felt there was something odd about the efforts of Pope John Paul II to beatify Pius XII. Was the Church engaging in a massive coverup?  The Vatican then made the preposterous claim that Pius had "saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives".  The Symposium that Benedict addressed had determined that Pius had, in fact, saved 80 Jews from the death camps.  Given the enormous power of the papacy, is saving 80 lives sufficient for achieving sainthood?

The fact is, Pius' "secret efforts" on behalf of the Jews were so secret they went unnoticed by the Nazis. The Vatican was silent about the atrocities committed during Kristallnacht and its aftermath. Pius was obsessed with the spread of Russian Bolshevism and spoke out repeatedly against "atheistic communism" while remaining silent about National Socialism.  Presumably Pius viewed Hitler - a born Catholic - as a lesser evil than Stalin. The the one historical fact that speaks against the canonization of Pope Pius XII is his documented postwar effort to smuggle Nazi criminals and Croatian fascists out of Europe. Why does Benedict remain silent about this shameful episode in the Church's history?

Individual Catholics such as Cardinal August Graf von Galen, the Lion of Münster, spoke out bravely against Nazi atrocities. And elsewhere Benedict XVI has spoken movingly about the hundreds of priests who perished in the concentration camps, sharing the fate of the Jews.  But the Catholic Church as an institution failed as an embodiment of Christian faith - just as the Protestant Church failed abysmally to stop the evil.  I recommend Carroll's book, and for an historical analysis of Christianity (both Protestant and Catholic) in the Third Reich I recommend Doris Bergen: Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich.

Robert Lowell's Letter to FDR

Recently I wrote a review of Nicholson Baker's controversial book Human Smoke. Baker tells the stories of the largely unknown pacifists, draft resisters, and war critics who tried to stop the US from waging war against Germany and Japan. Baker's book ends at the end of 1941, just after the US declared war. There were some Americans, however, who supported the initial declaration of war as a matter of national survival, but later became highly critical of the Allied practice of targeting the civilian populations in Germany and Japan, as well as the US and Britain's policy of "unconditional surrender".  In 1943 two events stood out that called into question American and British war tactics: the firebombing of Hamburg in July of that year that killed tens of thousands in a deliberate firestorm, and the bombings of the Ruhr dams - Operation Chastise - that resulted in the deaths of 2,000 non-combatants - mostly female Russian slave-laborers. 

On September 7, 1943 the poet Robert Lowell wrote to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (excerpt quoted from Robert Lowell, Collected Prose):

"Dear Mr President: I very much regret that I must refuse the opportunity you offer me in your communication of August 6, 1943 for service in the Armed Force. I am  enclosing with this letter a copy of the declaration which, in accordance with military regulations, I am presenting on Septer 7 to Federal District Attorney in New York. [...} You will understand how painful such a decision is for an American whose family traditions, like your own, have always found their fulfillment in maintaining, through responsible participation in both the civil and military services, our country's freedom and honor."

Rudi Dutschke Commemorated

Forty years ago this month the radical student leader Rudi Dutschke was  shot in the head by a crazed right-wing fanatic.  Many Germans applauded, but the students took to the streets and violent demonstrations erupted.  Today, after a four year campaign by the Tageszeitung, a street in Berlin has been named after Rudi Dutschke.  It happens to cross a street named after Dutschke's nemesis, the late newspaper publisher Axel Springer (Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse has the right-of-way). Many believed it was the hate-filled attacks on Dutschke in Springer's Bild-Zeitung that motivated his would-be assassin.

Rudi Dutschke was certainly a charismatic figure.  You can watch some great footage of him in this ZDF television documentary (1968 - Mythos und Wahrheit) on the student revolt of 1968. On the other hand, what specific ideas and proposals was he advocating?  Here it gets a bit fuzzy, and I have to agree with Lord Dahrendorf's assessment of Dutschke which he articulated in a recent interview in taz (Dahrendorf actually debated Dutschke at a demo in Freiburg in 1968):

Seien wir ehrlich: Er war ein konfuser Kopf, der keine bleibenden Gedanken hinterlassen hat. Worauf man heute zurückblickt, ist die Person: ein anständiger, ehrlicher und vertrauenswürdiger Mann. Aber ich wüsste niemand, der sagen würde: Das war Dutschkes Idee, die müssen wir jetzt verfolgen. Die Diskussion war schlimm damals, er brachte all diese Schlagworte, maoistische Versatzstücke, aber was er eigentlich denkt, war nicht leicht festzustellen. (Let's be honest: he was a very confused guy who didn't leave behind any lasting ideas. Looking back, I found him to be a forthright, honorable and honest person. But no one today says: "That was Dutschke's idea; we need to implement it. " The level of discussion was pretty bad back then. He tossed out all these slogans and Maoist fragments. But it was impossible to tell what he was really thinking.)

But love him or hate him - Dutschke embodied the spirit of 1968 like no other individual, so it is appropriate that a street in Berlin bears his name. 

Do we need a Rudi-Dutschke Street in America? Dutschke was Germany's most vocal critic of America's war in Vietnam. But he married an American, Gretchen Klotz, and had three children with her.  She lives today just outside Boston.