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Liberated or Conquered

21 Tuesday Apr 2015

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April is an important month for much of Germany when it comes to World War II. The general surrender was signed in May 1945, but April was the month when city after city surrendered directly to allied forces. That makes now — April — the 70th anniversary of. . . .

What exactly?

Recently my local newspaper in Essen featured an article about this time period called As the Americans freed the Ruhr Region. That was an interesting take on what happened. It made me as an American, think — Did the US free this part of Germany? Or did it conquer it?

At the time, the Allies made it clear they were here to conquer, not to liberate. But they were slick. They dropped leaflets to the populace urging them to turn against the Nazi officials and surrender their cities without fighting. Many did. Maybe this was the moment when the war weary Germans began to conjure up the idea of being liberated from the Nazis, no matter what their political persuasion was in the past.

That attitude carried through right up to the present. It seems a lot more fashionable to talk about the liberation of the Germans than it is to talk about the conquering of Germany. There’s no denial that it happened; American, British, French and Soviet forces occupied German territory and held military bases far too long for the Germans to close their eyes to what happened.

But now, 70 years later, with most of Germany back in German hands and the old allied forces all but gone, we’re left with the idea that the Allies freed the Germans from a criminal regime.

That’s only somewhat true. At bottom, the Allies came to win the war. And so I’d re-title that recent article, As the Americans Conquered the Ruhr Region.

Propaganda films

06 Friday Feb 2015

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We’d like to think propaganda is the brainwashing a non-democratic country does to its people, or false information it tries to shove on the world. We don’t do that kind of thing.

But propaganda is just media that delivers a political message. Everybody does it. After World War 2, the Americans and British used films to inform the public about the conditions in defeated Germany. They show fascinating period footage. The commentary may be even more interesting.

Check out an episode of “This is America” on Germany 1947. US soldiers teach Germans baseball and English, they play golf to pass the time. “Occupation Girls” live in mansions with German servants. But be warned, the commentator says: The Germans are waiting for a new Führer. They nurse old hates. Two years after the war, the United States urges its people back home to stay vigilant.

And here’s a film from the British Pathé Pictorial Looks at Berlin 1947. There’s a subtle glee in the descriptions of German destruction that probably went down well in post-Blitz England. The commentator can’t resist an ominous warning here too: Will a new war-monger rise from the rubble?

Both films take jabs at the Soviets in Germany. The American film is more obvious about it. The Allies are laying the groundwork in their films for a new, Cold War enemy, while reminding viewers that the old Reich may still be a threat.

Haunted by the past

19 Monday Jan 2015

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I usually don’t write about modern Germany, but there’s been a development lately I can’t ignore.

In Dresden, people have been gathering for Monday demonstrations, marches that protest immigration from Islamic countries. They apparently fear for the future of European civilization. They call themselves PEGIDA — Patriotic Europeans against the Islamic influence in Europe. Its organizers claim no links with Neo-Nazis and violent football hooligans, though there’s enough crossover to raise more than one eyebrow.

The Pegida movement has spread to other cities in Germany (using similar acronyms), and for the most part run peacefully. The protesters refuse to speak to the media. They are told not to shout any slogans that might be reported falsely in what they call the “Lügenpresse” — the lying press, a word the Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels loved to use in his day. Regular people attend the protests, and men with black scarves over their faces. Nobody could quite figure out what Pegida people want because they never talked to anyone.

A silent protest.

A disillusioned middle class marching with the far right wing is not new in Germany. It happened in the 1930s and it brought down the Weimar Republik.

The German government, local and federal, know that. There are calls to take Pegida’s fears seriously, and of course they enjoy the right of free speech. But on the whole, the official response is counter-protest. Even going so far as to turn off the lights of national landmarks and whole cityscapes.

This might be unique. At least I’ve never heard of it before. For a march in Cologne, the head of the city’s landmark, the Dom, shut off all the lights of the magnificent cathedral. The old city and the bridges over the Rhine also remained dark. The protesters shouldn’t have a photogenic backdrop. In Berlin, the Brandenburger Tor was darkened.

At the same time, tens of thousands of people have gathered in cities across Germany to support tolerance, freedom and the rights of all people. When 18,000 gathered in Dresden alone, several times that gathered around the country.

protest cropped2Yesterday, 5,000 people marched through the pedestrian zone of Essen, the city I live in. It was a march for human rights. I was there, because I know history. The current German government is far stronger than Weimar ever was. The spirit of Nazism won’t take over democratic rights as easily as Hitler did in 1933. But when I heard what some Pegida people said, I had a shiver of recognition. So did Jewish groups in Germany, who warn against Pegida. As one Jewish leader said, scapegoating starts with one group of people, and where does it end?

Pegida and anti-Pegida demos in Dresden have been banned for now because of assassination threats on Pegida organizers. Now the public discourse has shifted to whether the ban cuts Pegida’s right to free speech. Pegida leaders even held a press conference. Or as the national weekly Der Spiegel put it, a “Lying-press conference.”

Back to the real issues. I believe people should talk seriously about the threat radical Muslims and others are to world peace. We should talk about immigration. We should freely critique government policy. But the discussion should be done openly, with level heads. It shouldn’t be hijacked by fear — from the political right or left, or from terrorists. It’s a turbulent moment in Germany, and a test of its democracy. And its people. I have confidence in both.

Expelled Germans

20 Monday May 2013

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This is a tricky subject.

So tricky, I’ll leave it to the Stanford researcher James Mayfield to state what this is all about:

…the largely unknown story of more than 10,000,000 ethnic German civilians who were subjected to deportation, compulsory labour, expulsion, and in some cases starvation and ethnic violence following World War II with varying support and involvement by the governments of the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Romania, and Yugoslavia.

Let’s attack the problem head on. Is it possible to talk about this without being accused of revisionist history or of feeling sorry for the Tätervolk (an ugly word implying the collective guilt of a whole people)?

In my opinion — yes.

For years, this was taboo in Germany. To some extent, it still is. There’s always an uncomfortable aftertaste when the Germans talk about any situations they suffered under during and after the war. You get two main arguments: “That generation deserved it” versus “There were perpetrators and victims in all countries.” Like the horrors of the wartime allied bombardments, the expulsions of Germans after the war were suffered largely in silence and shame. It’s taken decades and generations for people to open up about the expulsions. Many Germans today don’t know much about them.

Expellee groups claimed millions of Germans died in the postwar expulsions. For years, the West German government and the Red Cross generally agreed. But modern academic research has settled on something between 400,000 and 600,000.

Was it ethnic cleansing?

It’s a political question, one that rankles people, especially in Poland and the Czech Republic. Poles and Czechs suffered massive violence, deportation and execution at the hands of Nazi Germany. Any talk of the ethnic cleansing of Germans in their territory after the war is seen as revisionist history. They claim the Germans in their regions benefited from Hitler’s policies during the war – and in many cases, this was true, for instance when German settlers moved into houses of Poles who were expelled or killed. The interesting article “Distorted historical memory and ethnic nationalism as a cause for our forgetting the expelled Germans“ sums up their view:

What the Germans remember as ethnic cleansing or even genocide, the Czechs and Poles remember as merely the punishment of Nazi criminals and the formation of states long denied their sovereignty by German hegemony.

Cue the case of Erika Steinbach. She’s a controversial figure and the leading advocate for restitution for expellees. Her attempt to build a “Centre Against Expulsion” in Berlin failed largely because of the protest from Poland and the Czech Republic. Though the center intended to denounce ethnic cleansing in general, including the postwar Germans as a case of it was unacceptable. The German experience could not be lumped together with that of the Poles and Czechs.

President Jaroslaw Kaczynski further reflected this national perception by insisting that the Germans should “remember who was the perpetrator and who was the victim.”

I’m not Polish, Czech or German. My view of all this from the outside – though admittedly closer to the Germans since I live here – waivers between both arguments. But I don’t believe in collective guilt. No one deserved to be deported or killed no matter what ethnicity they were, and deporting Germans wholesale was an understandable, but unjust reaction to atrocities during the war.

That opinion won’t make me any friends among certain groups in Poland,  the Czech Republic and other countries where one man’s justice was another man’s reprisal. On the other hand, I don’t buy into romantic notions of the former German territories in the east. The documentaries where expelled Germans talk about their childhood and deportation or escape from the east are often moving. They were victims – the children definitely – of forces outside their control. They lost their homes and were raised in shame at who they were. But anyone who secretly wishes those lands belonged to Germany again are naive and crazy.