DIALOG.......................
A non-Jew's View of Today's Germany
William E. Grim is a writer who lives in Germany and is a native of Columbus, Ohio. He may be reached at [email protected], and mailto: [email protected].
You can read more by and about him at The Official William E. Grim Website ([email protected])
I'm not Jewish. Nobody in my family died in the Holocaust. For me, anti-Semitism has always been one of those phenomena that doesn't really register on my radar, like tribal genocide in Rwanda, a horrible thing that happens to someone else.
But I live in a small town outside of Munich on a street that until May
of 1945 was named Adolf-Hitler-Strasse. I work in Munich, a pleasant
metropolitan city of a little over a million inhabitants whose Bavarian
charm tends to obscure the fact that this city was the birthplace and
capital of the Nazi movement. Every day when I go to work I pass by the
sites of apartments Hitler lived in, extant buildings in which decisions
were made to murder millions of innocent people, and plazas in which book
burnings took place, SS troops paraded and people were executed. The
proximity to evil has a way of concentrating one's attention, of putting a
physical reality to the textbook narratives of the horrors perpetrated by the Germans.
Then the little things start to happen that over a period of time add up
to something very sinister. I'm on a bus and a high school boy passes
around Grandpa's red leather-bound copy of Mein Kampf to his friends who
respond by saying "coooool!" He then takes out a VCR tape (produced in
Switzerland) of "The Great Speeches of Joseph Goebbels." A few weeks
later I'm at a business meeting with four young highly educated Germans
who are polite, charming and soft-spoken to say the least. When the subject
matter changes to a business deal with a man in New York named Rubinstein,
their nostrils flair, their demeanors attain a threatening mien and one of them
actually says, and I'm quoting verbatim here: "The problem with America is
that the Jews have all the money." They start laughing and another one
says, "Yeah, all the Jews care about is money."
I found that this type of anti-Semitic reference in my professional
dealings with Germans soon became a leitmotif (to borrow a term made
famous by Richard Wagner, another notorious German anti-Semite). In my
private meetings with Germans it often happens that they will loosen up
after a while and reveal personal opinions and political leanings that
were thought to have ceased to exist in a Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945.
Maybe it's because I have blond hair and my last name is of German
origin that the Germans feel that I am, or could potentially be, "one of
them." It shows how much they understand what it means to be an American.
Whatever the reason, the conversations generally have one or more of
these components:
(1) It was unfortunate that America and Germany fought each other in
World War II because the real enemy was Russia.
(2) Yes, the Nazis were excessive, but terrible things happen during wars,
and anyway, the scope of the Holocaust has been greatly exaggerated by
the American media, which is dominated by Jews.
(3) CNN is controlled by American Jews and is anti-Palestinian. (Yes, I
know it sounds incredible, but even among the most highly intelligent
Germans, even those with a near-native fluency in English, there is the
widespread belief that the news network founded by Fidel Castro's best
friend Ted Turner, who until recently was married to Hanoi Jane Fonda, is
a hotbed of pro-Israeli propaganda.)
(4) Almost all Germans were opposed to the Third Reich and nobody in
Germany knew anything about the murder of the Jews, but the Jews
themselves were really responsible for the Holocaust.
(5) Ariel Sharon is worse than Hitler and the Israelis are Nazis. America
supports Israel only because Jews control the American government and
media.
For the first time in my life, then, I became conscious ofanti-Semitism.
Sure, anti-Semitism exists elsewhere in the world, but nowhere have the
consequences been as devastating as in Germany.
Looking at it as objectively as possible, 2002 has been a banner year
for anti-Semitism in Germany. Synagogues have been firebombed, Jewish
cemeteries desecrated, the No. 1 best-selling novel, Martin Walser's
Death of a Critic, is a thinly-veiled Roman a clef containing a vicious
anti-Semitic attack on Germany's best-known literary critic, Marcel
Reich-Ranicki (who is a survivor of both the Warsaw ghetto and Auschwitz);
the Free Democrat Party has unofficially adopted anti-Semitism as a
campaign tactic to attract Germany's sizable Muslim minority; and
Germany's revisionist historians now are beginning to define German
perpetration of World War II and the Holocaust not as crimes against
humanity, but as early battles (with regrettable but understandable
excesses) in the Cold War against communism.
The situation is so bad that German Jews are advised not to wear anything
in public that would identify them as Jewish because their safety cannot
be guaranteed.
How can this be? Isn't this the "New Germany" that's gone 57 years without
a Holocaust or even a pogrom, where truth, justice and the German way
prevail amidst economic wealth, a high standard of living that is the envy
of their European neighbors, and a constitution guaranteeing freedom for
everyone regardless of race, creed or national origin? What's changed?
The answer is: absolutely nothing.
My thesis is quite simple. While Germany no longer has the military
power to enforce the racist ideology of the Nazis and while all extreme
manifestations of Nazism are officially outlawed, the internal
conditions - that is, the attitudes, worldview and cultural assumptions - that led to
the rise of Nazism in Germany are still present because they constitute the
basic components of German identity. Nazism was not an aberration; it was
the distillation of the German psyche into its essential elements. External
Nazism may have been utterly defeated in May of 1945; internal Nazism,
however, remains, and will always remain, a potential threat as long as
there exists a political and/or cultural entity known as Germany.
Now hold on a second, I hear many people saying. You can't possibly
claim that Germans are as anti-Semitic today as they were during the years
1933-1945. It is true that Germany today is much different from during
the Third Reich. What is different is that due to its total defeat by the
Allies, Germany today is a client state of America and must do its
bidding. That means repression of overt anti-Semitism. It's bad for business.
The other thing that has changed is that, even though Hitler lost World
War II, he was phenomenally successful in carrying out his ideological
agenda. Germany, indeed virtually all of Europe, is essentially Judenfrei
(free of Jews) today due to the efficiency and zeal of the Germans as they
perpetrated the Holocaust during the Third Reich. In fact, a very
convincing case can be made that Nazism is one of the most successful
political programs of all time. It accomplished more of its goals in a
shorter amount of time than any other comparable political movement and
permanently changed the face and political structure of several continents.
Germany is wealthy, stable, relentlessly bourgeois, and for all intents
and purposes free of Jews.
Yes, there is a tiny minority of Jews, mostly centered in Berlin, and yes,
there have been a number of Jews from the former Soviet Union who have
emigrated to Germany, but most of the immigrants from Russia are not
practicing Jews and do little if anything to promote a unique Jewish-German
identity. The result of all this is that Germans today are able to reap
the benefits of Hitler's anti-Semitic policies while paying lip service to
the "need to remember."
Young Fritz doesn't have to be overtly anti-Semitic today because his
grandfather's generation did such a bang-up job of the Holocaust. There
just aren't that many Jews left to hate any more, and besides, the Germans
have their old buddies, the Arabs, to do their hating for them. You might
call the overwhelming German support for the Palestinians to be a form of
anti-Semitism-by-proxy.
The German government has made cash payments to the State of Israel, as
well as to individual Jews, to settle claims of murder, torture, false
imprisonment, slave labor and genocide. Talk to most Germans and you'll
soon discover that they think that the score has been settled between
Germany and the Jews, that somehow the return of just a portion of what
the Germans stole from the Jews is fair recompense for the deliberate murder
of millions of people. If you think the Germans are truly sorry for what
they did to the Jews, think again. There's never been an official "tut mir
leid" offered by the Germans to the victims of the Holocaust and their
descendants because that would admit culpability. Germany has paid off all claims
against it without acknowledging responsibility in the same way that the
Ford Motor Company engages in recalls of automobiles. It's all done to
avoid liability.
I have previously mentioned that Germans overwhelmingly support the
Palestinians as opposed to the Israelis, and that this overwhelming
support represents a form of anti-Semitism-by-proxy. Germans may claim to be
supporting the Palestinians because they think they are an "oppressed
people," but let's be honest, they are supporting the Palestinians and
their Arab handlers because the Palestinians and Arabs share the same
ideals as the Nazis.
There's a long-standing history of German cooperation with the Arabs. In
1942 Hitler personally assured the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem that as soon
as German forces conquered Great Britain, the Jews in Palestine (which was
then under control of the British Mandate) would be exterminated.
We should also keep in mind that the Arab terrorists who perpetrated the
9/11 atrocities did their planning in Germany. There are several reasons
for this. The first is the well-known bungling and decentralized chaos of
the German federal bureaucracy where literally the "links" hand doesn't
know
what the "rechts" hand is doing. The second is that Arab terrorists can
count on a substantial number of Germans who share their anti-American and
anti-Semitic views. The former members of the SS and Hitler'spraetorian
guards, along with their neo-Nazi supporters, who gather weekly in Munich
beer halls, made Osama bin Laden an "honorary Aryan" after the 9/11
attack.
Mein Kampf is also a best seller in the Arab world, especially in Saudi
Arabia, America's putative "friend." Indeed, there is very little
difference between the anti-Semitic rantings of Hitler and those of the
so-called "spiritual leaders" of al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Fatah. The Arabs
also owe Hitler and the Germans big time. Hitler killed off the Jews, and
Konrad Adenauer and his "democratic" descendants replaced them with the
Turks. Yes, the Turks aren't Arabs, but they are Muslim, and although
Turkey is a member of NATO and has relations with Israel, many Turks
identify and support their radical Arab CO-religionists. Turkey remains
as fragile a democracy as Weimar Germany during the 1920s. It wouldn't take
much for Turkey to fall into the dark side of Muslim extremism.
The end result of Muslim immigration into Germany has been twofold:
(1) It allows the Germans to feign liberalism and being open to freedom
and diversity; and (2) By replacing the Jews they murdered with Muslims, who
for the most part are as viciously anti-Semitic as were the Nazis, the
Germans have cynically assured that those few Jews who remain in Germany
will be unable to reassert political power even in a minority role.
A final point I would like to make concerning the reasons for the
resurgence of anti-Semitism in Germany is one that many will find at odds
with the prima-facie evidence, or even appear to stretch the boundaries of
common sense. Yet, I ask you to consider carefully my line of reasoning.
In many respects Germany got away with the Holocaust without paying much
of a price. Yes, many Germans died as a result of German perpetration of
World War II and the Holocaust, and yes, there was much physical
destruction in the country, but the situation is like the little boy who
steals a cookie from the tray when it is cooling on the kitchen table.
For his efforts he may have gotten his hand slapped by his mother, but the stolen
cookie remains eaten nonetheless.
After having committed the worst crimes in the history of humankind, the
Germans were allowed to regain their sovereignty after only ten years;
their infrastructure was completely rebuilt thanks to the generosity of
the American people; and relatively few Germans were brought to trial for
their monstrous crimes. Even those who were tried and convicted received
relatively short sentences or had those reduced or commuted in general
amnesties. For example, some members of the Einsatzkommandos, those
Germans who, before the construction of the death camps, hunted and
murdered Jews by the hundreds of thousands, received sentences of as
little as five years imprisonment.
If there were true justice in the world, Germany would no longer exist as
a separate country, but would have long ago had its territory divided up
and dispersed among the Allies. It was an unfortunate historical
coincidence that the Cold War began just as Germany was at last being brought
to task for its many crimes and atrocities extending back to the First World War.
The new threat of the Soviet Union took precedence over a just settling of
accounts with Germany. The tragic result is that many of the countries
raped and despoiled by Germany, such as the Czech Republic and Poland, are
just now coming out of decades of economic decline, while Germany - fat,
sassy, arrogant, self-satisfied, and essentially Judenfrei - has enjoyed
four decades of undeserved economic prosperity.
We can't turn back the clock to redress all of the historical wrongs that
have been committed by the Germans, but there are a number of things that
can be done to assure that Germany can never again be in a position to
threaten the rest of the civilized world.
First and foremost is the realization that, while not all Germans are
anti-Semitic, there is an anti-Semitic tendency within German culture that
extends back to the time of Martin Luther. Germans are instinctively
anti-Semitic in the same way that Americans are instinctively freedom
loving. Anti-Semitism has been and unfortunately remains the default
ideology of the German people. All things being equal, Germans will
instinctively support the enemies of the State of Israel. Therefore,
America will need to monitor closely and be ready and politically
willing to intervene at a moment's notice in German affairs when it
appears that Germany is backsliding into anti-Semitism.
Additionally, it should be a goal of American foreign policy to oppose and
to accelerate the dismemberment of the European Union. We must not allow
German domination of the EU to accomplish through parliamentary
maneuvering and brokered deals what Hitler and the Germans were unable to accomplish
during the Third Reich. Given Germany's resurgent anti-Semitism (and that
of France as well), a strong, German-dominated EU that tolerates and
even benignly encourages anti-Semitism, and is diplomatically allied with
the Arab world, is potentially the greatest threat to Judaism since Nazi
Germany and a major threat to the United States as well.
The enemies of Israel are the enemies of the United States. Let all Jews
and Americans stand united as we proclaim never again to both the
Holocaust and 9/11.
vb