Dialog International

Return of the Fememord

At 10:45 a.m. on June 24, 1922, Walther Rathenau, the Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republicd departed his home in Berlin in his open car heading for his office. His car turned at the corner of the Wallotstrasse onto the Königsallee. As the driver finished the turn, a six-seated dark gray automobile pulled up alongside of Rathenau's car and then cut him off. Three men were in the large vehicle. One of the gentlemen lifted a submachine gun, pointed it at Rathenau, and fired five times. A second gentleman threw a hand grenade into Rathenau's car. The six-seated vehicle sped away; Rathenau was dead.

Leading up to the assassination, armies of right-wing extremists marched through the streets of the capital chanting:

Knallt ab den Walther Rathenau!
Der Gott-verfluchte Juden-sau!
[Shoot down Walther Rathenau/ The God-forsaken Jewish sow!]

The Nazi seizure of power didn't happen for another 11 years, but some viewed the assassination of Walther Rathenau as the beginning of the demise of the Weimar Republic. The historian Sebastian Haffner was an admirer of the charismatic Rathenau.  In his memoir Geschichte eines Deutschen (see my review) Haffner recalls his devastation upon learning of Rathernau's assissnation:

"Rathenau und Hitler sind die beiden Erscheinungen, die die Phantasie der deutschen Masse aufs äußerste gereizt haben: der eine durch seine unfaßliche Kultur, der andere durch seine unfaßliche Gemeinheit".

Rathenau's murder was the most spectacular of the many political murders by right-wing extremists in the Weimar Republic.  These were known as Fememorde.  Between 1918 and the mid 1920s, Germany was rocked by murder after murder. The victims all had a connection: they were killed for political reasons. And their deaths were made possible by right-wing extremist groups that played on racism, nationalism, and economic anxiety to stoke fear and hatred. By 1922, at least 354 government members and politicians had been murdered, setting the stage for the rise of the Nazis.

On the evening of June 2, 2019, Walter Lübcke, a regional politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), walked out onto the veranda of his residence in Kassel and was shot through the head by a sniper.  For years, Lübcke had been receiving death threats by Nazis and other right-wing groups because of his pro-immigrant stance.  His private address was shared on extremist social-media platforms.  The far-right politician, Erika Steinbach, called for his "removal" from Germany.  It came as no surprise, then, that the prime suspect arrested in Lübcke's assassination turned out to be a Nazi:

"The man who was arrested at the weekend in connection with the shooting of Walter Lübcke on 2 June is believed to have an association with the militant neo-Nazi group Combat 18 among others. [...] Investigators say they consider Stephan E to be close to the Hesse branch of the far-right National Democratic party (NPD) as well as having contact with Combat 18. The 18 in the group’s name refers to the first and eighth letters of the alphabet – A and H – far-right code for Adolf Hitler."

The assassination of Walter Lübcke and the knife attack on Cologne's mayor Henriette Reker could be just the beginning of a new wave of Fememorde.  Mayors of both large and small cities across Germany are now routinely subjected to death threats from right-wing groups. 

"Mehr als 1000 Bürgermeister hat „Kommunal“ in den vergangenen Tagen dazu befragt, ob sie oder Mitarbeiter der Verwaltung schon einmal Hass-E-Mails bekommen haben, oder gar körperlich bedroht wurden. Die Ergebnisse sind bemerkenswert: Jeder fünfte Bürgermeister berichtet von Hass-E-Mails, genauso von Einschüchterungsversuchen. In jeder zwölften Kommune wurde mindestens ein Mitarbeiter oder Gemeinderat körperlich angegriffen. 2016 hatte „Kommunal“ schon einmal Bürgermeister befragt. Damals waren es sechs Prozent, die von Übergriffen berichteten. Nun sind es acht. Jeder vierte Bürgermeister konnte von Schmierereien am Rathaus oder anderen Beschädigungen berichten."

History - It's Complicated

I confess that I am addicted to coffee.  And my favorite coffee is Major Dickason's Dark Roast Blend roasted and sold by California-based Peet's Coffee.  I drink a cup of Peet's coffee each morning when I wake up, and then several more throughout the day.  I did know that Peet's had been acquired by JAB Holdings, controlled by the Reimann Family in Germany, but only recently did I become aware of the Nazi roots of the Reimann mega-empire of consumer brands.  I personally wasn't surprised, having studied the history of other German enterprises - such as Deutsche Bank and BMW (Quandt Family).  But other coffee lovers have been shaken by the revelation. 

Boston Globe food critic Devra First - like me, a loyal drinker of Major Dickason blend - was horrified and wrote an opinion piece: "I found out Nazi money is behind my favorite coffee.  Should I keep drinking it?"

"I had the perfect cup while staying with friends, and it turned out to be Peet’s Major Dickason’s Blend, a dark-roast “incomparable world blend” I can buy at the grocery store pre-ground. I brew it in the electric coffeemaker my visiting parents gave us when they could no longer stand waiting for the Chemex to mete out their morning caffeine. Welcome to adult life, when strong coffee needs to happen as quickly and painlessly as possible.

I was perfectly happy with this arrangement until in March the German tabloid Bild Am Sonntag reported that the family behind Peet’s parent company JAB Holding had been staunch supporters of the Third Reich, and in fact had built their fortune via Nazi Germany’s large-scale forced-labor system. Honcho Albert Reimann Sr. was a card-carrying Nazi who made donations to the SS, Hitler’s paramilitary force, in the early 1930s. In 1937, according to the New York Times, Albert Reimann Jr. wrote a letter to Heinrich Himmler: “We are a purely Aryan family business that is over 100 years old,” it read. “The owners are unconditional followers of the race theory.”"

Devra First decided - reluctantly - that she could no longer in good conscience drink Peet's Coffee and found a locally roasted coffee as a substitute. 

But history is never entirely black and white, and the history of the Reimann family is no different.  The New York Times published a fascinating article about the family and its secret that the mother of the three surviving Reimann children - who still control JAB Holdings - was Jewish (or half-Jewish):  Emilie Landecker was one of the forced laborers who toiled for Benckiser during the Third Reich:

"Emilie Landecker was 19 when she went to work for Benckiser, a German company that made industrial cleaning products and also took pride in cleansing its staff of non-Aryan elements.

It was 1941. Ms. Landecker was half Jewish and terrified of deportation. Her new boss, Albert Reimann Jr., was an early disciple of Adolf Hitler and described himself as an “unconditional follower” of Nazi race theory.

Somehow, inexplicably, they fell in love.

The story of Ms. Landecker, whose Jewish father was murdered by the Nazis, and Mr. Reimann, whose fervent Nazism and abuse of forced laborers did not stop his family from attaining colossal wealth after the war, is a tale of death and devotion and human contradictions. It is also a tale of modern-day corporate atonement."

The Reimann Family and Peter Harf, CEO of JAB Holdings, have established a foundation - Die Alfred Landecker Stiftung - named after Emilie Landecker's father who perished in the Sobibór death camp, to fund Holocaust research and support democratic institutions.  The new generation of ownership and leadership cannot be blamed for the crimes of the grandfather and are doing perhaps more than other German companies to atone for sins of the past.  So I will continue to wake up to a cup of Peet's Coffee.

Historian Götz Aly's Speech on International Holocaust Remembrance Day

On January 27, 1945 the Red Army liberated the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Since 2006, the date is recognized as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  Several very moving speeches were held around Germany, including an address by historian Saul Friedländer to the Bundestag. But in my opinion, the best speech was delivered by historian Götz Aly to the Thuringia state assembly.  Like other eastern states, Thuringia is a stronghold of the right-wing extremist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party.  And Aly takes aim at AfD party leaders in his strong speech.  I'll just quote and translate some excerpts, but I urge any and all readers of German to read the entire speech.

Aly starts off the speech recognizing the significance of January 27:

Wir haben uns versammelt, um an den 27. Januar 1945

zu erinnern - den Tag der Befreiung des Konzentra-

tionslagers Auschwitz-Birkenau. Erst in der Nacht

zuvor hatten SS-Truppen das letzte der vier aus Er-

furt gelieferten Großkrematorien gesprengt; eines

war im Oktober 1944 bei einem Aufstand des „Sonder-

kommandos“ zur Leichenverbrennung zerstört, die

beiden anderen waren bereits im Dezember zerlegt

und Richtung Mauthausen verfrachtet worden. Dort,

am Rand der geplanten Alpenfestung, sollte unter

dem Codewort „Neu-Auschwitz“ ein gleichwertiges

Vernichtungslager entstehen. Bis Ende 1944 waren in

Auschwitz eine Million Menschen ermordet worden,

die allermeisten, weil sie Juden waren.

 

(We are gathered to remember January 27, 1945 - the day the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated. Just the night before, SS troops blew up the last of the four main crematoria that had been delivered from Erfurt; one had been destroyed in October 1944 during an uprising by the Sonderkommando tasked with burning the corpses; the other two had already been dismantled and shipped off to Mauthausen.  There, on the periphery of the planned Alpine fortress, a new death camp - code name "New Auschiwitz" - was to be constructed.  Up to the end of 1944 a million people were murdered at Auschwitz - the vast majority were Jews)

 

Alty then makes reference to a speech by Alexander Gauland, chaiman of the AfD, in which Gauland praised the performance of the Wehrmacht soldiers ("We are justified in being proud of their performance.")

 

Mit harter militärischer Gewalt mussten im Mai 1945

viele Zehnmillionen Deutsche dazu gezwungen werden,

ihr Werk des Hasses, der Zerstörung und Selbstzer-

störung zu beenden. Sie hatten Hitler gewählt, be-

jubelt oder geduldet und für ihn gekämpft. Insge-

samt mobilisierte die Wehrmacht von 1939 an 18 Mil-

lionen deutsche Männer - fast alle, die laufen

konnten -, um zerstörend, raubend und mordend über

Europa herzufallen: vom Nordkap bis zum Kaukasus,

von Marseille bis Leningrad. Weit überwiegend fühl-

ten sich die Landser als Herrenmenschen, zumal im

Osten Europas. Angetrieben hatte sie nazistische

Überzeugung, vaterländisches Pflichtgefühl, natio-

naler Dünkel, Abenteuerlust oder Gleichgültigkeit –

die Verrohung erzeugte die Art der Kriegsführung,

verstärkt von der begleitenden Propaganda vom „Un-

termenschen“.

 

("Only through hard military violence were tens of millions of German forced to put an end to their work of hate, of destruction, and self-destruction. They had voted for Hitler, cheered or tolerated him and fought for him. All told, the Wehrmacht in 1939 mobilized eighteen million German men - almost anyone who could walk - to carry out a campaign of destruction, robbery, and murder throughout Europe - from the North Cape to the Caucuses, from Marseille to Leningrad.  The grunts considered themselves the Master Race, especially in Eastern Europe.  They were driven by conviction in the Nazi cause, by patriotic duty, nationalistic arrogance, adventurism or indifference - the brutalization determined the conduct of war, intensified by the accompanying propaganda of Untermenschen - sub-humans.")

 

Aly then condemns Alexander Gauland for his "Bird Shit Speech" in which he called the Nazi era just a speck of Vogelschiss on 1,000 successful years of German history - citing Bach, Goethe and Thomas Mann.  But Bach would have faded into total obscurity if he hadn't been rediscovered by the Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (erased from musical history by the Nazis), Goethe was a multi-culturalist, and Thomas Mann never gave up his American citizenship after the war. 

 

Finally, Götz Aly pays tribute to the international armed forces that liberated the camps - and liberated the German people from themselves.

 

Am 19. Februar 1945 schworen die so vielen Nationen

angehörenden Überlebenden von Buchenwald, für eine

„Welt des Friedens und der Freiheit“ einzutreten.

Im Sinne des Schwurs von Buchenwald danken wir den

Millionen ausländischer Soldaten, unter ihnen - ge-

rade hier in Thüringen - den vielen Soldaten afro-

amerikanischer Herkunft: Sie befreiten die Gefange-

nen der Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslager, die

todgeweihten Zwangsarbeiter, die Insassen der Heil-

und Pflegeanstalten - und nicht zuletzt befreiten

sie die Deutschen von sich selbst.

("On February 19, 1945 the survivors of Buchenwald - who came from so many nations - swore an oath that they would advocate for a "world of peace and freedom."  In the spirit of the oath of Buchenwald we give thanks to the millions of foreign soldiers, among them - even here in Thuringiz - the many soldiers of African-American descent.  They liberated the concentration and death camps, the slave laborers condemned to die, the occupants of the nursing institutions - and, not least, they liberated the Germans from themselves.")

Review: Sebastian Haffner's Geschichte eines Deutschen

The Weimar Republic has always been a special interest of mine. The journalist and historian Sebastian Haffner was an ideal eyewitness to this turbulent period since he came of age just as he Great War was ending and lived in Weimar's epicenter - Berlin - with his family and as an apprentice lawyer.  His memoir of the period, Geschichte eines Deutschen, was written in exile in 1938, but was not discovered until after his death in 1999 by his son.  It was published in 2001. 

Haffner was well-suited to write about the rise and collapse of the Republic.  He was a talented writer, well-versed in European history and literature.  He was Liberal - in the classical sense, a conservative democrat who was highly critical of the political parties - both left and right - in Germany.  The young Haffner became enamored of the charismatic German foreign minister Walther Rathenau, who, to Haffner, represented the best of Germany and the greatest hope for German democracy.

"Rathenau und Hitler sind die beiden Erscheinungen, die die Phantasie der deutschen Masse aufs äußerste gereizt haben: der eine durch seine unfaßliche Kultur, der andere durch seine unfaßliche Gemeinheit".

Rathenau's assassination by right-wing extremists was a severe blow to Haffner and his hopes for the Republic. From that point on Haffner saw very little in terms of political response that would stand in the way of the Nazis. 

I found Haffner's discussion of the brief period of stability  - from 1926 to the death of Gustav Stresemann in 1929 - particularly insightful. For a brief period the German people were not buffeted by war, revolution, ruinous inflation. Foreign investment was flowing into the country, Germany was at peace with other European nations thanks to the diplomacy of Stresemann. Berlin was the global center of cultural innovation.  And yet for many Germans - especially the younger generation - stability was anathema:

"So empfanden sie das Aufhören der öffentlichen Spannung und die Wiederkehr der privaten Freiheit nicht als Geschenk, sondern als Beraubung. Sie begannen sich zu langweilen, sie kamen auf dumme Gedanken, sie wurden mürrisch - und sie warteten schliesslich geradezu gierig auf die erste Störung, den ersten Rückschlag oder Zwischenfall, um die ganze Friedenszeit zu liquideren und neue kollektive Abenteuer zu starten."

Much of Haffner's memoir - especially the riveting sections after 1933 - deal with the question of German acquiescence to the Nazis.

"Noch am 5. März 1933 hat die Mehrheit von ihnen gegen Hitler gewählt. Was ist aus dieser Mehrheit geworden? Ist sie gestorben, vom Erdboden verschwunden? Oder, so spät noch, Nazi geworden?"

And Haffner doesn't exclude his own personal behavior from this discussion.  Could he have done more to push back against the Nazis- even among his own circle of young jurists?  Geschichte eines Deutschen was translated into English  by Haffner's son Oliver Pretzel and published with the title Defying Hitler.  But Haffner would be the first to reject the notion that he "defied" Hitler.  In one gripping passage he describes how a group of SA thugs intrude on the courthouse where Haffner was clerking as an apprentice lawyer.  His Jewish colleagues were all violently pushed out into the street and one of the thugs confronted Haffner with the question: "Sind Sie arisch?" - he meekly answered "Ja!". 

Another interesting observation of Haffner's is the impossibility of "innere Emgration" - retreat into the private sphere - in a totalitarian system:

Wohin immer man sich zurückzog - überall fand man gerade das wieder vor, wovor man hatte fliehen wollen. Ich lernte, dass die Nazi-Revolution die alte Trennung zwischen Politik und Privatleben aufgehoben hatte, und dass es unmöglich war, sie enfach als "politisches Ereignis" zu behandeln.[...]sie wirkte wie ein GIftgas, das durch all Wände dringt."

So the only option for Haffner was self-imposed exile to Great Britain. 

Geschichte eines Deutschen was written in 1938, but Haffner could see clearly that Germany was on a path to war.  Also, he was very clear that anti-Semitism was a driving force of the Nazis and Jews were facing mass detention in concentration camps - although he could not have imagined something as monstrous as the Holocaust.  Finally - and here Haffner was especially prescient - he knew that Germany could only be liberated from Nazism by outside force.

With the rise of the AfD in Germany, and authoritarian movements in the USA and throughout Europe, Haffner's book as relevant today as it was when it was written.

Harvard University's 1939 "Prize for Nazi Stories"

I've written about the scandalous role Harvard University played in promoting the "science" of eugenics at the turn of the 20th century - the research of which found its way into Nazi ideology and ultimately Mein Kampf.  Certainly a university as old and influential as Harvard - a institution I love dearly - has many skeletons in its closet. But there were also Harvard students and alumni who recognized the threat of Nazism and risked their lives to combat it.  I've written about Varian Fry - the young Harvard graduate who single-handily secured safe passage to America for Alfred Döblin, Heinrich and Golo Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Hannah Arendt, and scores of other writers, artists and intellectuals.  But there were other Harvard students and faculty who did what they could to ward isolationist America in the 1930s and early 1940s about Nazi Germany.

One of the great things about subscribing to the New York Times is having access to its "Time Machine" - access to all issues of the newspaper dating back to the 1890s.  For August 6, 1939 one comes across this short article:

The competition was organized by Harvard sociologist Dr. Edward Hartshorne, who had written his doctoral thesis on Germany universities under National Socialism. Hartshorne received over 200 manuscripts - mostly from Jews who were forced to flee Germany - from the US, Great Britain, Palestine, and Shanghai.  Many of the "Nazi Stories" dealt with the events surrounding Kristallnacht - the November 1938 pogrom that resulted in the destruction of Jewish-owned businesses and synagogues throughout Germamy.  Hartshorne selected 34 manuscripts for publication for a book - Nazi Madness. November 1928 - which however was not published until 2012 (The Night of Broken Glass: Eyewitness Accounts of Kristallnacht by Uta Gerhardt). The recollections of that terrible night are indeed chilling: 

For Hugo Moses, a former bank official, the behaviour of the drunken mob of stormtroopers who broke into his apartment on the night of 9 November, overturning his furniture and smashing his ornaments and pictures, while an SS man held a loaded revolver to his head[...]Sofoni Herz, a teacher at a Jewish orphanage in Dinslaken, a mining town in the Ruhr, hurriedly took 32 children outside while a gang of 50 men systematically destroyed everything in the building, "shattering window panes, throwing books, chairs, beds, tables, linens, maps, valises, piano parts, etc out of the windows and doors" before setting the orphanage's synagogue on fire. A Nazi official announced "that we have ordered that the cow belonging to the orphanage, which is taken care of by a German farmer, will continue to be fed. Animals must not suffer on this day." [...] A Nazi teacher persecuted Hugo Moses's nine-year-old son in the classroom, making him sit on a bench on his own, refusing to correct his work and banning him from using the school swimming pool: "You are not allowed to contaminate German water." The boy later told his father he would have thrown himself under a train had this continued much longer. The head teacher, though sympathetic to the father's protests, confessed he could do nothing, because he would lose his job if he did. [...] particularly harrowing are the stories of what happened to the Jewish men arrested and taken off to the camps. The shopkeeper Karl Schwabe endured "a series of endless physical and mental sufferings" at Buchenwald. In the first days they were deprived of food and drink – "our mouths dried out completely, our throats burned". They were forced to stand outside in rows for hours, with the SS mercilessly hitting and kicking anyone who fell over. Many were beaten to death; others, unable to bear the torture, ran into the electrified barbed wire fences. Elderly men were forced to do squats until they dropped from exhaustion. "The sanitary conditions", Schwabe wrote, "defy description."

But the events - as awful and chilling as they are to read - are just a taste of horror that would soon follow. 

As for the Harvard sociologist Hartshorne, he was instrumental in the de-nazification of German universities just after the war ended, but was assassinated while driving on the Autobahn from Munich to Erlangen in August 1946.  His killer was never identified.

Jamaica Collapse and the Lessons of Weimar

Now that the Liberal Party's mini-Trump Christian Lindner blew up Jamaica there are no good options for moving forward. The SPD refuses to participate in another grand coalition.  The FDP will not come back to the table  - Lindner is firm about this. A minority government doesn't seem feasible.  So the most likely path  - the one favored by Angela Merkel - would be a new election in early 2018.  This solution, however, carries risks that remind us of the last Neuwahl in German history that led to the destruction of the Weimar Republic and eventually to the Nazi seizure of power three years later. 

Warum das Grundgesetz von vorgezogenen Neuwahlen nichts hält, ist historisch erklärbar: Es reagiert auf die Zerstörung der Weimarer Demokratie nach dem 27. März 1930, als die letzte parlamentarisch legitimierte Regierung scheiterte. Vorgezogene Neuwahlen am 14. September ließen die bisherige Splitterpartei NSDAP zu einem erstrangigen Machtfaktor der deutschen Politik werden. Ihre Mandatszahl schnellte auf 107 Reichstagssitze hoch, gleichzeitig verbesserten sich die Kommunisten.

Then, as now, the parties were unable - and unwilling - to compromise on critical issues, which lead to an increasingly violent polarization.  Of course, there are huge differences between Weimar Germany and the Federal Republic today.  Instead of an economic depression the German economy is booming, and the democratic institutions remain strong. Still, the political realities in Poland, Hungary, Czech and Austria show that right-wing populism - fanned by Russian-infiltrated social media - has strong support among huge swaths of the population.  There is a very good chance that the beneficiary of a new election would be the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, since many voters see the collapse of Jamaica as evidence of weakness of Angela Merkel and the mainstream political parties. 

Just a few weeks after the Neuwahl in September 1930 Thomas Mann delivered his famous speech  Appell an die Vernunft ("Appeal to Reason"), in which he outlined how the nation had arrived at this crisis and warned about the consequences of right-wing extremism if left unchecked.

[T]he moment has already come when militant nationalism displays itself less militantly for foreign than for domestic consumption…Its hatred is levelled not so much without as within; yes, actually its fanatical love of the fatherland appears chiefly as hatred not of the foreigner but of all Germans who do not believe in its methods and whom it promises to destroy root and branch.

Mann's speech was, for the most part, ignored or greeted with derision.

Who today has a similar stature to deliver a message?  And would anyone even bother to listen?

Is Heroic Resistance Possible Without a Transcendent Ethos?

The FAZ has an interesting interview with Klaus von Dohnanyi about his father Hans von Dohnányi, who was an important member of the anti-Nazi resistance. Hans von Dohnányi was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and was executed - along with his brother-in-law, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer - in April 1945, just days before the collapse of the Third Reich.

When asked whether the current generation would have the same courage to resist tyranny as his father and the others in the anti-Hitler resistance Klaus von Dohnányi answered as follows:

Ich weiß nicht, ob die heutige Generation so tapfer wäre wie die Generation, die nach 1933 Widerstand geleistet hat. Wird eine solche moralische Kraft heute noch vermittelt? Und kann man Anstand lernen? Die Demokratie kann die Fundamente nicht schaffen, auf denen sie steht, so etwa schreibt Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde. Braucht diese Kraft vielleicht doch eine transzendente Substanz? Etwas, das nicht rational zu erschließen ist? Wenn es in den zehn Geboten heißt, du sollst nicht töten, dann heißt das eben, du sollst nicht töten! Wenn Sie aber die zehn Gebote nicht kennen, dürfen Sie dann aus „guten“ Gründen töten, wie im materialistischen Sowjetsystem?

("I'm not sure that today's generation would be as brave as the generation of the resistance after 1933.  Is such a moral force even mediated today? Can a person be taught decency?  Democracy is not capable of creating the foundation required for such a stance - as Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde writes. Doesn't such a powerful motivation perhaps require a transcendent substance? Something that can't be completely explained rationally? When the Ten Commandments declare Thou Shalt Not Kill, that means simply you should not kill! If however you are ignorant of the Ten Commandments then there may be "good" reasons to kill, like in the materialistic Soviet system.")

By referencing the Ten Commandments Klaus von Dohnanyi seems to be referencing Christian faith.  The younger generation seems to have drifted away from organized religion, as evidenced by the empty pews in German churches.  He seems to imply that this absence of religious faith would result in cowardice in the face of evil.

Surely Klaus von Dohnany's father knew the problem with this point of view.  Under the the NS-Regime and the "Deutsche Christen" movement  the Protestant -and to some extent the Catholic Church - had become a perversion of Christianity - with a  dejudicized Jesus.  

By chance I happen to rereading Bonhoeffer's Letters & Papers from Prison, where he talks extensively about his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnányi and mentions visits by Klaus and his siblings. In the preface to the American edition Bonhoeffer holds the Church accountable for not resisting the NS-regime.

"We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds: we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use?"

The Church had failed.  In response Bonhoeffer came to advocate a "religionless Christianity" that would embrace an unmediated "true discipleship" of Jesus:

"Only the one for whom the final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all these, when in faith and sole allegiance to God he is called to obedient and responsible action: the responsible person, whose life will be nothing but an answer to God’s question and call."

So perhaps von Dohnanyi's pessimism about the younger generation is unwarranted.  Plenty of people have left the traditional religious institutions asking themselvs "are we still of any use?" But they could still embrace an Ethos that is aligned with that of Bonhoeffer and others who resisted Hitler.

Harvard University's Contribution to Mein Kampf

In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler has a detailed explanation of the Nazi Rassentheorie and how the mixing of the Aryan race with inferior races was resulting in the decline of civilization.:

"Die Blutsvermischung und die dadurch bedingte Senkung des Rassenniveaus ist die alleinige Ursache des Absterbens alter Kulturen; denn die Menschen gehen nicht an verlorenen Kriegen zugrunde, sondern am Verlust jener Widerstandskraft, die nur dem reinen Blute zu eigen ist." (Hitlers "Mein Kampf", S. 324).

Was this something he just dreamed up on his own, or overheard in a Munich beer hall?  No, Hitler was basing his treatise on the most advanced "scientific research" coming out of the United States.  The field of "eugenics" originated in Great Britain, but it was the Americans who latched on to the theory and began to develop social and medical (forced sterilization) programs based on the junk science.  American eugenics grew out of the Social Darwinist ("survival of the fittest") misinterpretation of evolution popular in the late 19th century and a crude interpretation of genetics which began to emerge early 20th century America.  Much of the  eugenics "research" and policy recommendations came out of America's great universities, and at the forefront was the country's oldest and most prestigious institution: Harvard University.  This is personally painful for one who owes much to Harvard, but - to the university's credit - it has completely acknowledged this shameful chapter in Harvard's illustrious history: 

"As eugenics grew in popularity, it took hold at the highest levels of Harvard. A. Lawrence Lowell, who served as president from 1909 to 1933, was an active supporter. Lowell, who worked to impose a quota on Jewish students and to keep black students from living in the Yard, was particularly concerned about immigration—and he joined the eugenicists in calling for sharp limits. “The need for homogeneity in a democracy,” he insisted, justified laws “resisting the influx of great numbers of a greatly different race.” Lowell also supported eugenics research. When the Eugenics Record Office, the nation’s leading eugenics research and propaganda organization, asked for access to Harvard records to study the physical and intellectual attributes of alumni fathers and sons, he readily agreed. Lowell had a strong personal interest in eugenics research, his secretary noted in response to the request."

Keeping inferior human genes out of the United States became an obsession with Harvard geneticists.  One prominent member of the Harvard science faculty, Professor Edward M. East, sounded the alarm about uncontrolled immigration in a best-selling book:

In his 1923 book, Mankind at the Crossroads, East’s pleas became more emphatic. The nation, he said, was being overrun by the feebleminded, who were reproducing more rapidly than the general population. “And we expect to restore the balance by expecting the latter to compete with them in the size of their families?” East wrote. “No! Eugenics is sorely needed; social progress without it is unthinkable….”

Hitler began writing Mein Kampf shortly after the publication of East's book.

It would have been bad enough if the Harvard professors had kept their junk science confined to Harvard Yard, but they were intent on infecting government institutions and the public at large with the eugenics gospel of genetic superiority:

"In 1894, a group of alumni met in Boston to found an organization that took a eugenic approach to what they considered the greatest threat to the nation: immigration. Prescott Farnsworth Hall, Charles Warren, and Robert DeCourcy Ward were young scions of old New England families, all from the class of 1889. They called their organization the Immigration Restriction League, but genetic thinking was so central to their mission that Hall proposed calling it the Eugenic Immigration League. Joseph Lee, A.B. 1883, A.M.-J.D. ’87, LL.D. ’26, scion of a wealthy Boston banking family and twice elected a Harvard Overseer, was a major funder, and William DeWitt Hyde A. B. 1879, S.T.D. ’86, another future Overseer and the president of Bowdoin College, served as a vice president. The membership rolls quickly filled with hundreds of people united in xenophobia, many of them Boston Brahmins and Harvard graduates.Their goal was to keep out groups they regarded as biologically undesirable. Immigration was “a race question, pure and simple,” Ward said. “It is fundamentally a question as to…what races shall dominate in the country.” League members made no secret of whom they meant: Jews, Italians, Asians, and anyone else who did not share their northern European lineage."

America's attempts to keep "inferior genes" from its shores through restrictions on immigration found a great admirer in Adolf Hitler, who advocated similar controls for Germany.

"Mein Kampf also displayed a familiarity with the recently passed US National Origins Act, which called for eugenic quotas. "There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but [the US], in which an effort is made to consult reason at least partially. By refusing immigrants on principle to elements in poor health, by simply excluding certain races from naturalisation, it professes in slow beginnings a view that is peculiar to the People's State."Hitler proudly told his comrades how closely he followed American eugenic legislation. "Now that we know the laws of heredity," he told a fellow Nazi, "it is possible to a large extent to prevent unhealthy and severely handicapped beings from coming into the world. I have studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock."

Harvard's infatuation with the "science" of eugenics was eventually played out by the 1930's and the university - and America - reversed course and rejected the junk science.  But the damage was done.  And even today we see the remnants of eugenics in the rhetoric of Donald Trump, who calls immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere "rapists, murderers, drug dealers and gang members."  Or in Thilo Sarrazin's book Deutschland schafft sich ab,  - an anti-immigrant screed that draws heavily on the work of Charles Murray (Harvard University, Class of 1965).

Holocaust Denial Alive and Well in the United States

Unlike in the European Union, Holocaust Denial is protected free speech in the United States under the First Amendment.  It has always existed here in the shadows, but the deniers have been emboldened with the presidency of Donald Trump and the prominent role of White Supremacists in the Trump Administration.  The feature film Denial - about the infamous libel trial of the Holocaust Denier/"historian" David Irving and the American historian Deborah Lipstadt was shown in US movie theaters at an important juncture - the election of Donald Trump - but it came and went without much fanfare.  It is now available on Netflix and will soon be coming to Germany ( "Verleugnung" - Starttermin 13. April 2017)

 

It is depressing to read the hundreds of anti-Semitic and Holocaust-Denying comments posted on YouTube for this trailer. 

Here is a typical comment by one of them ("docwillems")

Yes, there is a victim in all this and it ain't the Jews. David Irving was a widely respected historian before the Zionist thugs wrongly defamed him. The White Western World would be so wonderful without jewish marxism,Jewish Financial system ,Jewish Media,Jewish art , Jewish Porn, Jewish feminism, antiwhite antinational liberalism , relativisim , Israel , and jewish multiculturalism. Neocon liberal (cultural marxist) Jews have imposed multiculturalism,feminism,atheism,muslim immigration, degenerate music and art, hollywood jew filth etc... The White Christian Civilization must survive and clean Europe of the subversive jews and non-white islamic migrants.

There are numerous Web sites, books, and newsletters published by Holocaust deniers masquerading as "revisionist historians"  - in the Trump era they are seeing a surge of activity.  On one such site - The Barnes Review - you can purchase any number of books with titles like "The Holocaust Hoax Exposed"  or "The Myth of the 6 Million".  Fortunately, Amazon is finally removing titles from its site that "question or deny the Holocaust", but that will not deter people from going directly to hate sites such as CarolynYeager.net, where we are told that "Adolf Hitler’s goal was not world domination and enslavement, but to establish justice and fairness for Germans and to build a great German nation within a unified, anti-communist Europe". 

As for David Irving, the subject of the movie Denial, he is more popular than ever, as he recently boasted to the Guardian newspaper:

His new fans, he says, are the same people who in the US are supporting Donald Trump, who he believes will make a good president and “has his heart in the right place”. Though, he says, he is also impressed by the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

Despite Nazi Fake News: "Jeder konnte es wissen" / Everyone could have known

The argument that the Nazi "Gleichschaltung" of the press and radio prevented the population of Germany from learning the truth about the Holocaust doesn't hold water.  Anyone who wanted to see through the "Fake News" could have known - and did know - that the regime was engaged in mass genocide of Jews and other "undesirables".  Take the case of Friedrich Kellner, a low-level bureaucrat in the provincial town of Laubach in Hessen.  Kellner was was not part of the "elite" - he didn't study at the university, he didn't travel abroad, he didn't have access to the foreign press or radio programs.  His only source of information was the Nazi-sanctioned media outlets.  Yet, as he documented in his 900-page diary that he began keeping after the 1938 Novemberpogrom, he clearly saw what was going on in the Nazi state:

Kellner's writings offer a glimpse into what everyone could have known about the war of extermination in the East, the crimes against the Jews and the acts of terror committed by the Nazi Party. He wrote about the executions of "vermin" who made "defeatist" remarks, and about "racial hygiene." In July 1941 he wrote: "The mental hospitals have become murder centers." A family that had brought their son home from an institution later inadvertently received a notice that their child had died and that his ashes would soon be delivered. "The office had forgotten to remove the name from the death list. As a result, the deliberate killing was brought to light," he wrote.

Millions of Germans watched and cheered as their Jewish neighbors were herded in to deportation areas and transported east.  Did they really believe these people were simply being "resettled"? Jeder konnte es wissen / Everyone could have known

Im September 1942 erfasst der Mordapparat auch Kellners unmittelbare Umgebung. Aus Laubach werden zwei jüdische Familien deportiert. Seinem Entsetzen und Zorn macht Kellner in seinem Tagebuch Luft: »In den letzten Tagen sind die Juden unseres Bezirks abtransportiert worden. Von hier waren es die Familien Strauß u. Heinemann. Von gut unterrichteter Seite hörte ich, daß sämtliche Juden nach Polen gebracht u. dort von SS-Formationen ermordet würden. Diese Grausamkeit ist furchtbar. Solche Schandtaten werden nie aus dem Buche der Menschheit getilgt werden können. Unsere Mörderregierung hat den Namen ›Deutschland‹ für alle Zeiten besudelt. Für einen anständigen Deutschen ist es unfaßbar, daß niemand dem Treiben der Hitler-Banditen Einhalt gebietet.«

("In September 1942 the murder apparatus struck close to home for Kellner.  Two Jewish families were deported from Laubach. Kellner gave vent to his horror and anger in his diary:" In the last few days the Jews in our district have been deported.  Both the Strauss and Heinmann families. I learned from a well-informed source that all the Jews would be transported to Poland and then murdered by SS-Troops. This atrocity is terrible.  Such shameful crimes can never be erased from the book of humanity. Our murderous regime has forever stained the name "Germany".  It is inconceivable to decent Germans that no one can put a stop to the actions of the Hitler bandits.")

Historian Peter Longerich has studied what the German population knew about Holocaust and came to this conclusion:

In der deutschen Bevölkerung waren generelle Informationen über den Massenmord an den Juden weit verbreitet.

(General information concerning the mass murder of Jews was widespread in the German population.) 

(See my review of Longerich's "Davon haben wir nichts gewusst."