Download Address May 8, 2010

Gert Krell, Address to a Group Commemorating the End of World War II, May 8, 2010
I.
65 years ago today, the most catastrophic military conflict in world history came to an end, at
least in Europe. I assume it will really come to an end only when the generation of those who
fought in it or suffered from it, and my generation, whose lives began towards its end or
shortly after it, have finally gone. We still have the war in our bones, some of us literally, and
we cannot get it out of our minds or souls. It may well be that I became a political scientist
and peace researcher, because I was born on July 1st, 1945, and barely survived, although the
war had already ended. It may sound paradoxical, but the entry “war” in the register of my
text book on international relations is by far the longest.
In 1945, Germany was destroyed and completely “on the ground”. “Those who sow wind,
will reap storm”, said Walter Hoffmann, the mayor of Darmstadt, in 2006, when the city commemorated the victims of the large air raid of September 11/12, 1944; the raid which also
destroyed my parents’ house and almost killed them (which did not prevent my father from
believing in the “Endsieg”, the “final victory”, and openly talking about it until the very end).
But had not Nazi-Germany sowed storm! 3.5 million, perhaps even 5.3 million German soldiers were killed in World War II; about half a million in its final 50 days, when the war had
clearly been lost already. Between 2 and 3.5 million German civilians died in air raids or
during the flight from the East. But the Soviet Union had to mourn the deaths of up to 17 million soldiers and between 12 and 17 million civilians, which is more than three times the
casualties of Germany by which it had been attacked. Poland lost more than half of its soldiers
and up to 5 million civilians, about 3 millions of them Polish Jews. In many parts of Eastern
Europe and Russia, the Wehrmacht and the SS had left scorched earth, countless villages were
burnt down, their inhabitants incinerated. In the greatest single mass crime in world history,
around 6 million Jews altogether were murdered. About 500,000 Germans were involved, in
different roles, in this process of annihilation. Very many of them had not really been forced
to involve themselves. In fact, they believed they were doing their fatherland a necessary and
useful service, even if unpleasant at times. And many, many more, a clear majority of the
Christian or “god-believing” Germans had actively participated in the discrimination against
and the exclusion and exploitation of their Jewish countrymen and -women, had explicitly
supported or at least tolerated all that without opposition.
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II.
Hardly any other country has dealt so intensively with its dark past and its enormous guilt as
Germany has since 1945, and with ample reason. Those who publicly address war crimes in
Japan, which are sometimes even officially denied until today, must expect to be visited and
attacked by right-wing thugs. If you make the Armenian genocide a subject of discussion in
Turkey, you still risk your liberty or even your life. For decades, Austria had depicted itself as
the first victim of German aggression; a serious working-through its active contribution to the
war and the terror of the Nazi regime only began in the 1990s. Major parts of the Italian
people have a very relaxed relationship to Mussolini, to put it mildly. In France, collaboration
had been a taboo for many, many years, and the war crimes in Algeria still are to some extent.
In and during the Vietnam War, in which the US army committed several massacres of unarmed civilians, hardly any of the responsible officers were ever called to account, even if
they had openly given orders to kill indiscriminately.
But Germany, which had by far the strongest reasons to take an honest look in the mirror, also
tried to avoid it. A large number of the perpetrators and mass murderers not only survived,
they even remained completely undisturbed. In sharp contrast to the survivors among their
victims, they successfully continued their lives and careers as if nothing had happened. Not
only were their crimes not prosecuted, they did not even feel guilty. Other supporters or many
fellow-travellers of the regime at least felt bad about what “had happened”, but they eased
their conscience by blaming Adolf Hitler, the Nazi elite, and the SS, who were responsible for
all the misdeeds and had lead the others astray. It took a long time until it was clear, and an
even longer time until it was accepted that almost all institutions had been actively and sometimes even proactively involved: the judiciary, trade and industry, the universities, the professional associations, the sports associations, the army, and even the churches to a large extent.
What a turmoil the first exhibition critical of the Wehrmacht had created even as late as 1995!
“The German soldier, in loyalty to his oath and with the fullest possible commitment to his
people, has achieved things which will never be forgotten”, the last report of the supreme
command of the Wehrmacht had stated in May 1945. Today, with few exceptions, the Germans have realized that not only the singular misdeeds of their army, the SD and the SS
during the war but that the war itself was a singularly huge, unforgettable and unforgivable
German crime. And as we know from many letters and notes, the German soldiers had always
been aware of what they were doing:
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“Die Juden ermordet,
als brüllende Horde
nach Russland marschiert,
die Menschen geknebelt,
im Blute gesäbelt,
vom Clowne geführt,
sind wir die Gesandten
des allwärts Bekannten
und waten im Blut.
Wir tragen die Fahnen
der arischen Ahnen:
sie stehen uns gut.“
(Murdered the Jews,
marched into Russia
as a roaring mob,
gagged the people,
hacking away in blood,
lead by a clown,
we are the missionaries
of the one known everywhere,
wading in blood.
We carry the flags
of our Aryan ancestors:
they suit us well.”)
Thus rhymed Willy Peter Reese, who was killed in action in June 1944 and who left behind
not only poems and letters but also a secret detailed report from the war.
III.
How was it possible that a large majority of the German people in Hitler’s “supported dictatorship” got so completely lost morally? That they took pleasure in belonging to a “master
race” and assumed that certain groups or people were of “inferior value” or even did not
deserve to live? That so many really believed in the crazy idea that the Jews were a threat
which had to be forestalled by exclusion, expulsion, and even extermination? Was it because
of “poisonous pedagogy”, the centuries-old tradition of harsh, violent, humiliating and debasing child-rearing in Germany? Such as the impressive and depressing film “The White
Ribbon” seems to suggest and as Alice Miller, the recently deceased childhood researcher and
combative champion of a non-violent education, has always claimed?
To be sure, there are many connections between certain educational traditions and an urge for
power over others and a readiness to resort to violence. But this relationship is not obvious
enough to provide a satisfying answer to the questions posed and thus a clue to successful
prevention. A large number of countries had educational traditions not much less “poisonous”
than in Germany and its predecessors, but they were not involved in comparable collective
mass crimes. American and German research of mass murderers is even more disturbing than
Alice Miller’s thesis: By far the most of them were quite normal adults, not different psychologically from the fellow-travellers or even from their victims. As social-psychological experiments in several countries have shown, it does not take very much to get a majority of
people to kill or at least to involve themselves in the killing of another human being. Very
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important factors are the moral frames of reference and the social settings, and are the institutions which guide human behaviour and extend or constrain latitudes of action. Much of what
we abhor in war and in specific crimes of war is much closer to everyday life than we would
like. As the recently discovered abuse scandals or the financial crisis demonstrate, moral standards are easily suspended even in peace, even if they are generally accepted and uncontroversial: because internal institutional controls don’t work, because everybody seems to be doing it, because it does not seem to create problems, rather grant psychological or material
profit or avoid loss of stature and standing.
No doubt, we must not train our children and our youths into simple schemes of order and obedience. Democracies need people who have learned to accept personal responsibility for
what they are doing. Not like Adolf Eichmann, who admitted in his testimony that he would
certainly have shown the courage not to obey, if he had been ordered to do so. To be able to
act responsibly, we need stable and enduring moral norms which we do not adjust opportunistically, and institutions which prevent that. The miserable center of the Nazi ideology was the
distinction between a “superior” group of those who belonged and “inferior” groups of those
who didn’t, and were the morals of a fictitious pseudo-biological master race which found it
necessary to eliminate so called “inferior life”, to put what they called “Volksschädlinge”
(persons “harmful to the German people”) “out of action” and to expel and finally annihilate
the Jewish and other “Untermenschen”. Mass murder began in their minds, in their thinking.
Against all this we consider it to be self-evident that the dignity of man, and that means all
human beings, is inviolable. This norm is the basis of our constitution, of course. It is a norm
which we all need to keep in our hearts and minds. But it is also a norm which must be lived
in all institutions and in all social arrangements. In spite of major progress, we are still far
away from that.
IV.
World War II holds another important lesson for us. Albert Einstein, one of the foremost
pacifists of the 20th century, was also one of the very few intellectuals who understood what
Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933 really meant: a declaration of war against Europe and
against the Jews. He therefore tried almost desperately to convince the public in Western
Europe that it was necessary to build an effective deterrence against Germany, if it wanted to
preserve a chance to avoid war at all. He found hardly any support; his old pacifist companions even accused him of treason. The maxim that one cannot solve conflicts through war
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(a phrase often used in Germany these days in the debate about Afghanistan) certainly would
not have been a consolation to those who were attacked from 1938/1939 on. And not all soldiers are murderers. (Another phrase used by radical pacifists in Germany today. It had been
coined by Kurt Tucholsky after World War I. I am convinced he would have retracted it had
he lived to see World War II and not committed suicide in 1935 in exile.) Those who cannot
see the difference between the actions of the Jewish Bielski brothers on the one hand, who
went to live in the forests as armed partisans with hundreds of civilians, in order to protect
them and to fight against the “roaring mob” of the Germans, and the soldiers of the Wehrmacht or the SS on the other, who chased the Jews and burnt down the Belorussian villages
including their inhabitants, should not be surprised that hardly anybody outside of Germany
will take such a Pacifism seriously.
Of course we must strive to overcome the human habit of war. That is by no means impossible, but we cannot do it overnight; 65 years have not been enough. As more recent experience has confirmed, we will encounter – on our long way to a world without military violence – difficult situations in which endangered groups of people cannot be denied their right
to defend themselves, or in which other endangered people may need and deserve support
from outside. Under what conditions and how, are very serious and complicated moral, analytical and practical questions which need to be discussed openly and democratically. One
thing we do know, however. Today it is no longer enough to say: “si vis pacem, para bellum”
(if you want peace, you must prepare for war) – although even that is far away from the Nazi
program of conquest, repression, and extermination. Today we know that we must prepare for
peace, if we want peace: si vis pacem, para pacem. That’s why we are standing here, commemorating the end of World War II.
Prof. Dr. Gert Krell, Im Langgewann 37, 65719 Hofheim, [email protected]
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