WWll obsession As Germany prepares to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany on May 8, 1945, a wide range of emotions has surfaced among the German populace.
Looking back at events a half-century ago, there is sadness and horror. But there is also bitterness, resentfulness and, in some cases, indifference.
The events of the past have become something of a national obsession, as reflected in the enormous number of newspaper articles, television programs, discussions and exhibits devoted to the 50th anniversary of the end of the war.
German newspaper, from national dailies to local papers, have been running series of articles for weeks, detailing the military struggle for Berlin and the personal recollections of those who survived the war.
Public television has been running nightly programs about what happened five decades earlier. An exhibit in Berlin on the last days of the war, called “Berlin 1945,” has reportedly drawn some 1,000 visitors daily.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a well-respected conservative daily, has received strong support for its series “Fifty Years Ago,” which began in January.
The introspection gripping the country also comes amid a series of commemorations marking the liberation of Nazi death camps 50 years ago.
On Sunday, German officials joined survivors at the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau, the first concentration camp erected by the Nazis and one of the last to be liberated.
Edmund Stoiber, governor of Bavaria, spoke for many when he said at the rain- soaked ceremony, “I feel ashamed that the crimes against those people those people were perpetrated by and in the name of Germans.”
But as 80 million Germans dwell collectively on the past, their emotions are mixed.
For most people outside Germany, World War II was black-and-white affair, with the Germans as the bad guys and the Allies heroically coming to the world’s rescue.
But for some Germans, the past is more of study in grays. Although many see the Nazis as the aggressors, one can find books and films in which the German are portrayed as the victims of the Soviets, who after the war occupied the eastern half of Germany and drove some 12 million ethnic Germans out of Eastern Europe.
A heated debate now galvanizing the country illustrates the scope of the controversy.
A group of some 300 Germans, including the country’s development minister and a former federal prosecutor, recently backed a statement saying that the May 8 anniversary should not only be seen as the day Germany was liberated from the Nazis.
The date, they said, also marked “the beginning of expulsion, terror and new suppression in the East, and the beginning of the division of our country.”
The statement’s supporters contend that young Germans are infinitely better informed about Nazi atrocities Jews and others than they are about Soviet atrocities against Germans after the war.
Many Germans who lived through the war agree that the May 8 anniversary should not be viewed as a day of liberation.
“It was a liberation,” an 81-year-old woman who asked not to be identified said sarcastically.
“The Russians liberated us of our last shirt,” she said, referring to the mass rapes that occurred when the Soviets overran eastern Germany.
For her, liberation came only when East and West Germany were reunited Oct. 3, 1990.
Virginia Seiring, an elderly woman who was forced from her home in East Prussia by the Soviets at the war’s end, said, “It would be a humiliation for me to celebrate [the end of the war] as a liberation.”
Arnulf Baring, a well-known historian, said that 50 years ago, German were happy that the bombs stopped falling, but they also had to deal with their defeat in the war and what would come next.
When older Germans talk about the war, they tend to describe their personal experiences. Older Berliners recall how they were bombed out of their homes, how they left the war-torn city for the countryside or how difficult it was to obtain food.
Rarely, it ever, to they voluntarily bring up what happened to their German Jewish neighbors.
After the war, it appeared as if only unconscious people supported this [Nazi] regime,” Polish writer Andrezj Szcypiorski and last month at ceremonies commemorating the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the Sachsenhausen death camp.
Although the “we didn’t know anything” excuses still often surfaces in talk with older Germans, other reasons emerge as well.
“We were afraid,” admitted Kurt Robbel, an octogenarian who fought as a soldier in the war and was taken prisoner by the Soviet Union.
Robbel said the terror of the Nazi regime was so complete that people were numbed into silence out of fear for their own lives.
For Germans who were born after the war, opinions are also mixed.
But two key views among the young emerge in the German media: The obsession with World War II and the Holocaust to the point that personal guilt emerges for the 6 million Jews who were killed and the feeling that Germany’s wartime experience has nothing to do with them.
An illustration of how difficult it is for German to deal with the Holocaust was provided by a series of letters to the editor after the intellectual weekly Die Zeit published an article on the Holocaust by Israeli writer David Grossman.
Grossman was asked by the paper to write the article earlier this year to coincide with the 50th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz.
Grossman’s front-page story, “We Still Can’t Speak About Forgiveness,” argued that Israelis are further a along in their discussions about the Holocaust and its effects on future generations than are the Germans.
He suggested that the issues Germans deal with when discussing the Holocaust are domestic in nature — such as the country’s view of authority, attitudes toward those who are perceived as different and the German concept of “Heimat,” or fatherland.
“The significant questions that the Second World War and the Holocaust poses for you do not necessarily have anything to do with Jews or Israelis,” Grossman wrote to his German audience.
Responding to the article, Gisela Amberg said that for years she viewed the Nazi period as something that had nothing to do with her.
But after reading Grossman’s article and the anniversary reports about auschwitz, she felt differently.
“It is lie that you can believe that you can forget something like this,” she said.
Ludger Meyer, a 26-year-old from Dortmund, saw it in a different light.
He belongs to a generation, he wrote, that is trying to stake out a position on the Holocaust somewhere between the idea of collective guilt and the view that it had nothing to do with the younger generation of germans.
He also said his generation has trouble defining itself.
“If I think of myself as German, and I say it, then I find myself in the rightist Nazi corner again,” he said. “If you want to be European, then you’re [countryless], and there is a suspicion that you’re to hide from your own history.”
Meyer also defended present-day Germany, saying the current activities of the radical right are stronger in Russia, Italy and France.
This is a common reaction: Younger Germans often compare the activities of Nazis and neo-Nazis with events in other countries. Favored comparisons include U.S. treatment of the American Indians and the white-black conflict that prevailed under South Africa’s apartheid regime.
Perhaps these comparisons provide some justification for Grossman’s view. A close look at the national dialogue shows that 50 years after Germany’s defeat, the country is only just starting to come to grips with its Nazi past.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
