Book Review - Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning

 Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning

New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992                                       ISBN 0060190132

"In mid-March 1942 some 75 to 80 percent of all victims of the Holocaust were still alive, while 20 to 25 percent had perished. A mere eleven months later, in mid-February 1943, the percentages were exactly the reverse." With this stark statement Christopher Browning begins his study of one part of that whirlwind of murder, the work of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Poland between July 1942 and November 1943.

That Browning is able to undertake this study is due to the fact that in the 1960s prosecutors interviewed 210 members of the Battalion in their investigations of war crimes from the period. Delving through the obfuscation and downright lies that are contained in some of the testimony, Browning lists a catalogue of horrors undertaken by this unit, and speculates how the "ordinary men" of Battalion 101 could do such things to their fellow human beings.

Unlike the Einsatzgruppen or the members of the SS assigned to run the death-camps, the Reserve Police received no special training or ideological reinforcement before being assigned to murder Jews. The Battalion was a mixture of career policemen, recruits too old to serve in the regular army, or who had joined the Reserve Police to avoid conscription. By no means were all members card-carrying Nazis, although there was a small core of party members among the group. When they were shipped to Poland, they were under the impression that they were being sent to ensure order in the civilian population behind the front lines.

However, not long after they got to Poland, they were assigned to clear the town of Jozefow of Jews, which meant sending the fit Jews away, and massacring the rest of the population. The Battalion had no idea how to go about such a task, and the resulting slaughter was a horrible mess. An extraordinary detail which the prosecutor's interviews reveal, is that the commander of the Battalion, Major Trapp, allowed members to be excused from the killing if they felt they couldn't participate. That only a few took up this offer is at the core of Browning's history....why so few?

Many others, while not "officially" standing apart from the killing, found other ways to not pull the trigger, by making themselves scarce, or participating in other tasks during that time. Browning's take on the evidence is that there was a very small number of willing killers, a majority that would kill when told to do so, a small number who tried to avoid killing when they could, and the very few who objected from the beginning, and took no part in the killing (although they did participate in other tasks such as clearing ghettos, loading Jews into trains for shipment to the death-camps, and so on).

Browning, in the last chapter of his book, goes into some detail about the theories as to why people such as the members of this battalion did the things that they did. He focuses mainly on the results of the Milgram experiment which showed that people will follow authority and do things that they wouldn't otherwise do if it is normalized in some way. The members of Battalion 101 not only had the formal structure of being ordered to do things, but also the over-arching mentality, ideology and thought-patterns of the Nazi world pushing the idea that exterminating the "Jewish threat" was for the good of their Fatherland. Most importantly, in Browning's view, is the pressure to conform with other members of their unit, which is indeed a powerful force in group dynamics. The final words in the book state the problem succinctly - "Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?"

I am not someone who feels themselves extremely well-informed about the Holocaust, so a source of fascination for me was the apparent disorganized way in which much of the killing took place. From a general understanding of World War Two and Germany, the impression is of the Holocaust as a well-oiled killing machine, trains running to timetables, and bureaucrats ticking Jewish populations off as they were transported to their deaths. The truth, it seems, was sometimes far from that. We have the example of Reserve Police Battalion 101 itself, being thrust into the maelstrom without any preparation, and having to almost make up the procedure of killing as they gained experience. Browning, in the beginning of this work, explains how the work of the Einsatzgruppen in Russia was expanded to include firstly the Jews in Poland and then the rest of Europe, but no extra manpower was assigned to those that Himmler instructed to complete the task. And so not only the Reserve Police, but groups of ethnic Germans, Latvians and others were brought together to assist, as did at times Waffen SS and even Wehrmacht troops.

Ordinary Men is a fascinating and horrible journey into the heart of one of the most terrifying events in human history. What makes it terrifying is that Browning shows clearly that such horrors can be committed by people just like you and I. For an insight into the inner workings of the Holocaust, I can highly recommend this book.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Dead Man in the Bunker by Martin Pollack

 The Dead Man in the Bunker: Discovering my Father by Martin Pollack, translated by William Hobson

London: Faber and Faber, 2007                                           ISBN 9780571228010

What a fascinating book, on so many levels. Martin Pollack has written an account of trying to track down the story of his father, an Austrian SS man who was murdered trying to cross the Brenner Pass in 1947. He takes us on a journey into the borderlands of the German people, the beginnings of the German nationalism that fed the growth of Nazism, and the forgetting that occurred after the War.

Pollack begins the story by finding the spot in a bunker on the Pass where his father's body was found. He then winds back through history, to the late Nineteenth Century when his family lived in Styria, on the "border" between Slovene and German people. Pollacks father's family, the Bast family were upstanding Germans, members of German nationalist groups, anti-Semitic, and early converts to Nazism. Pollack well describes the increasing tension on the "German language border" which only increased after World War I, when new borders exacerbated the tension. The Basts soon joined the Nazi party, which was a provocative and illegal act in Austria at that time. Gerhard, Pollack's father, risked prison as he rose further in the Party, and joined the SS. After the Anschluss, Gerhard's father rose in the Nazi bureaucracy as his son rose higher in the SS. 

 Pollack takes us further into the history of his family - he explains that Bast was not married to his mother, and in fact his mother was married to another man and had two children already. His mother divorced and married Bast in April 1945. When the war ended Bast was on the run, and so Pollack's mother re-married her first husband...and yet his mother sent him on holidays to the Bast grandparents. A very tangled story, but one he could never really talk about at the time to any of his family.

Getting information about what his father did in the War is also tangled. As Pollack explains, records for German forces, the SS in particular, are patchy owing to how many were destroyed at the end of the War, and the difficulty in tracking one person through a multitude of files in a multitude of cities and countries.

And so this book is just as much about what is not known, as it is about the facts. Pollack, naturally wants to believe that his father was - as his grandmother tells him - a good man, but he knows that would be too good to be true. He was right. 

Gerhard Bast had many phases to his SS career... one of which was commanding Sonderkommando 7a toward the end of the war, where he was definitely involved in the execution of innocents. There is no doubt that Bast was a committed Nazi. There is no doubt in Pollack's mind that his grandparents, Bast's parents remained Nazis even after the War, as did his mother and step-father...their views of the world, of Jews in particular, did not change. Pollack is unflinching in the way he describes how his views clashed with those of his family, and it is painful to read how the trauma of the experience of war, what his family suffered and the suffering it caused, throws ripples through history forever.

The Dead Man in the Bunker is one man's attempt to understand those ripples and what his family history means for him. A forceful, moving and painful book.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Hitler 1936-45: Nemesis by Ian Kershaw

 Hitler 1936-45: Nemesis by Ian Kershaw

New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000             ISBN 0393049949

Well I have climbed the Everest that is Ian Kershaw's two volume biography of Hitler (you can see my review of volume one here), and like the mountain, the journey is a hard slog, you learn much along the way, and the view from the summit is breathtaking, except in this case it is a vista of destruction, barbarism, and the ruin of the Twentieth Century.

In this volume Kershaw moves beyond the early years and begins at the highpoint for Hitler. It might seem strange to state that the highpoint of Hitler's life and political success was prior to the Anschluss and dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, and before the conquest of Poland, France and much of the USSR. Yet Kershaw convincingly argues that beyond the re-taking of the Rhineland, Hitler was gambling with Germany's fate and began walking the path that led to war, his own downfall and that of Germany as well.

Of course war was always Hitler's aim. His obsession with living space for the Germanic "race" was posited on invading his Eastern neighbors and enslaving or eliminating the people there. This was the irreducible logic of Nazi government in the 1930s: it was not a government for the masses, it was not a government for the rich, it was not a government for those of faith, it was a government that needed violent conflict and expansion to justify itself and keep the ship from sinking under the weight of expectation.

Kershaw, in my opinion, gets very close to explaining why the whole country went with Hitler on this journey into the abyss. His closest cronies would always follow him, as their views were at least as radical as his, and often more so. Many others saw their enemies (Bolsheviks, Poles to name a few), being crushed and rejoiced, and others enjoyed Germany's resurgence. The humiliation of World War One - which was the cornerstone on which Hitler built his political career - was a national trauma, and his struggle to rid Germany of this stain drew many people to his movement. As the war progressed and Germany began to lose, Hitler's appeal began to shrink, which led to the growth of terror-tactics to keep the populace in line and the army fighting in the last disastrous months of the war.

The military hierarchy too were complicit in keeping Hitler in power. They were perhaps the only counterpoint in German society that could have removed Hitler, but they were actually fellow-travellers, if not in every way, certainly to the extent of subduing Poland and attacking Russia. Even the opposition groups that tried to assassinate him agreed with Hitler's war against the Poles. While they may not all have agreed with the Holocaust and while most definitely did not agree with Hitler's tactical ideas (especially when Germany lost the initiative), they were unable to be the rational force for good that Germany needed to be rid of this megalomaniac.

Kershaw explains the growth of Hitler's ego and megalomania very clearly. Hitler's belief that he was sent by providence to lead Germany only became stronger after his first victories, and especially when he had success on the Eastern Front over-riding his more cautious Generals. His personality ran amok with no restraints, which not only led him to interfere in almost every facet of German life and culture, but to increasingly control military efforts as well. That this would be too much for anyone is quite obvious, but under the structure that he had built, there were no checks or balances that could be employed to share decision making. In fact Hitler actively worked against any initiatives to implement other sources of decision making within the Government. As the war moved on, the shambolic structure of Nazi Germany impeded rational decision-making in times of crisis. Hitler's rationality has often been called into question, but for most of the war he worked along the lines that he had set for himself. As the man sent by Providence, only he could ultimately make decisions. As a political genius only he could decide when the time was right for action....and so on. His nature, exacerbated by his obsession with the "stab in the back" of 1918, was to seek retaliation for any wound. So things that seem illogical from a "normal" standpoint fitted into Hitler's thought-world. If the Allies bombed German cities, then he would delay jet fighters until they could bomb English cities in retaliation. If the German people were not "strong" enough to win the war, then he would order the total destruction of the country regardless of any humanitarian motives. In many ways his thought patterns were those of a child - if I can't get what I want, then someone has to suffer!". The Jews of course were the prime example of that philosophy in action.

By the time the war had turned against Germany, there was no reasonable alternative to the Hitler regime: all opposition had been crushed, and everyone in the German hierarchy owed their position to the personal largesse of Hitler himself - no-one had any legitimate source of power except through him. Kershaw maps all this out very well. As Germany lurched from crisis to crisis, Hitler retreated more and more into a fantasy world - refusing to move troops from Norway and Italy at the end because they would be needed for the counter-attack, or to protect sources of minerals....long after they served those or any other strategic needs.

The end, when it came, was a farce for Hitler, and a tragedy for Germany. In the end Hitler's reign was the narcissistic adventure of one man who managed to create his own world, and lived out his dream by destroying European civilization. It's both fascinating and horrible to think about. One can hope that we'll never see his like again. There are those that compare Putin to him, and some of the comparisons are justified, but I for one don't think that any one man can again do what Hitler did. I hope I am right.

For those that seek to understand the Twentieth Century, the rise of the Nazis and World War Two, I cannot recommend these two volumes highly enough. I don't think they will be surpassed.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Into that Darkness by Gitta Sereny

 Into that Darkness: an Examination of Conscience by Gitta Sereny

New York: Vintage Books, 1983 (Originally published 1974)       ISBN 0394710355

I really don't know why it has taken me so long to get around to reading this book. I have read other books by Sereny, one of which I have reviewed here, and I have always admired her unflinching search for the truth, and her excellent style, given that English is her third or fourth language. Her life's quest was to try and understand the Third Reich, through talking to those that were involved - Franz Stangl being the first, along with others such as Albert Speer.

Into that Darkness grew from an article about Stangl, which originally appeared in the Daily Telegraph Magazine. Sereny spent over seventy hours interviewing Stangl, with the aim of trying to find out why - not why the Nazis eliminated the Jews, but why a seemingly normal middle-class man who, it seems, was liked by many he met, could continue to choose to work in unspeakable places and be in charge of unspeakable things.

With this goal in mind, Sereny probed Stangl about his work in the Euthanasia Centres, why he thought he'd been chosen for work in the extermination camps, what he did there, what he thought of it, how he interacted with his family during that time, what happened to him after the War. Sereny kept probing, trying to fight her way through the self-justifications that Stangl had wrapped around his life, trying to see if he could admit guilt. That he eventually did is a testament to both Sereny, and in some ways to Stangl, who fought hard against the moral judgement that he surely deserved, and which he finally began to understand.

In the book Sereny works hard to try and prove (or disprove) the many statements that Stangl made about his career, and his activities both in Sobibor and Treblinka. She also closely investigates the circumstances around his escape firstly to Syria and then Brazil, which cast a poor light on the activities on the Catholic Church in Rome. Sereny is scrupulously fair in her judgements, but often the facts speak for themselves.

The main part of this book is a very detailed look at how the death camps worked. Sereny builds this picture up not only through her discussions with Stangl but also with other SS and importantly the few Jewish survivors of the camps. For someone like me that didn't have a clear delineation in my mind between concentration camps and death camps, this history is eye-opening. The numbers are staggering, and sickening. At Treblinka,  nearly a million people were murdered in less than eighteen months. Just as staggering is the fact that, in all the extermination camps, for the whole period of Aktion Reinhardt, there were only 96 SS personnel involved in running the death camps. That so few (assisted by Ukranian guards and Jews forced to work disposing of bodies and sorting through clothes and such) could unleash such horror...

Sereny describes how carefully the gassings were organised. For richer (Western) Jews, who arrived on seemingly normal passenger trains, the (fake) station, and "welcoming" troops who explained carefully that everyone needed to be disinfected before heading out to work meant that these victims moved in an orderly fashion to their deaths. For the poorer (mostly Polish) Jews, who arrived packed into cattle-cars, the guards whipped and beat them to instil terror, forcing them into the gas chambers with the butts of their rifles.

Confronting Stangl with these facts, Sereny watches and listens as he tries to justify why he didn't leave: she (and we) knew that quite a few soldiers did and could leave the extermination camps, but Stangl used as his justification the "fact" that he would have to go back to his normal police job and a boss who hated him, and that he was a soldier following orders. He also claimed that he tried to be as kind as he could to those going to their deaths. Sereny's clear and factual tone lays bare the torturous logic that Stangl had to use to try to forgive himself for the unforgiveable. He couldn't forget either, explaining that on seeing some cattle awaiting slaughter in Brazil, he could no longer eat meat. Sereny's interviews with Stangl's wife show us a man who was slowly falling apart, unable to control his emotions in the years before his arrest and deportation back to Germany.

Sereny has her own ideas why Stangl may have kept going - from the time he was recruited from the police to assist in the Euthanasia program at Hartheim, Stangl was ambitious, enjoying the increasing rank and privileges that came with his increasing responsibility. It was only as the War went on and defeat seemed likely that he suffered stress-based illness, and understood that he was one of the "war-criminals" that would have to face justice. He remarked to Sereny with some cynicism on his posting to battle partisans around Trieste after the dissolution of the camps that he "realized quite well...that we were an embarrassment to the brass:...[s]o we were assigned the most dangerous jobs".

Stangl escaped the prison-camp in which he was placed after the War, and quite openly moved to Damascus and Brazil, where he lived under his own name for nearly twenty years before being "discovered" and sent back to Germany for trial. This section of the book is also fascinating. Once again an author blows apart the credibility of Simon Weisenthal, and once again an author uncovers the uncomfortable history of the Vatican both during and after the War. Sereny, even though acknowledging the difficulties of finding the criminals who were mingling in the millions of displaced persons, shames the Church through rigorous use of documents and interviews. While she may forgive the fact that Stangl slipped through "un-noticed", she can't forget the appalling lack of moral fortitude from the Vatican throughout the War, when it came to telling the world what they knew of the Holocaust.

Eventually, at the end of their time together, Stangl faces the fact that, because he was there, because he facilitated the murder, he shared the guilt, even if he didn't actually murder anyone with his own hands. It is a dramatic moment, heightened by the fact that eighteen hours after he finally admitted that to himself, Stangl died of a heart attack.

As a journey through the most terrifying phase of World War Two, Into that Darkness is in turn fascinating, horrifying and above all, edifying. A must read of Holocaust history.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Mengele: the Complete Story by Gerald L. Posner & John Ware

 Mengele: the Complete Story by Gerald L. Posner & John Ware

London: Queen Anne Press, 1986                    ISBN 0356125785

I had forgotten just how much of a sensation the final resolution of the fate of Josef Mengele caused when his remains were dug up from a grave in Brazil in 1985. This book, released the year after the find, brings it all back, as well as the speculation in the decades before, while telling the full story of the life of Mengele, from his early years, through his time in Auschwitz, and retelling in full his nearly 40 years of being on the run from the justice he deserved.

I won't in this review go over the grisly facts of Mengele's time at Auschwitz, a time which earned him the moniker "Angel of Death", but Posner and Ware write succinctly and well about his gruesome experimental pseudo-science. In fact reading through this section turned my stomach.

The real fascination in this book is the author's description of how Mengele escaped not only captivity after the War, but Europe in the 50s, Argentina and Paraguay in the 60s, and ended up drowning on a beach in Brazil at the end of the 70s. It is a tale of loyalty, lies, grandstanding, and of the networks of Nazis and fellow-travellers which enabled Mengele (and others) to not only get out of Germany, but to stay hidden for so long.

Mengele used the confusion of the end of the War to his advantage, divesting himself of his SS identity, and emerging as a mere medical orderly. He was actually detained by the US on two occasions in 1945, but slipped through the screening, which was very haphazard. He spent several years working as a farmhand in Germany, all the while hoping that he could eventually be re-united with his wife and son. It was the "Doctor's trial" and its follow-on that convinced Mengele that he needed to leave Europe for the safe haven of Argentina. Through close family friends, he managed to get some forged papers, and when he arrived in South America, he was helped by several committed Nazis.

After a few years he felt so comfortable that he in fact began to not only use his real name, but re-applied for identification documents. Helped by infusions of money from his family (he was the son of a wealthy industrialist) he also - after his first wife divorced him - re-married and began living a relatively normal life.

That all changed on the day Mossad abducted Eichmann. He realised that he could never be safe out in the open, and he quickly moved to Paraguay, where he lived on a farm in a remote area. Thanks to his friendship with Hans-Urich Rudel, and Rudel's friendship with many in the Paraguayan Government, Mengele managed to get citizenship of that country, which importantly didn't have an extradition treaty with Germany.

Meanwhile, Mossad had decided to discontinue its hunt for Mengele, with other priorities closer to home becoming more important. West Germany was hopelessly compromised in its search for Mengele. Any action was sabotaged by the fact that many of the officials who should have pushed the case along were ex-Nazis, and so were not interested in bringing Mengele to justice. The unwillingness of the German government in particular to follow Mengele is impossible to justify, and painful to read about. It is in fact chilling to read the responses of the officials who didn't follow the evidence when they state that they were only following orders....sounds disturbingly familiar....

Meanwhile, Mengele himself had moved to Brazil, again living outside the big cities, and sharing a house with the Stammers family. This "partnership" became over time very strained - Mengele's second wife had long before moved back to Germany, and Mengele became increasingly embittered by his situation. In the end he lived by himself in a bungalow in Sao Paulo, a sad and lonely man. One of the last things he did was to host a visit by his son Rolf. This visit ended up being depressing for both men: Rolf could not come to terms with Josef's lack of remorse for what he'd done, and Josef felt that Rolf had been brainwashed by his schooling and that he was not the true son of a Mengele.

It was not long after Rolf's visit that Mengele drowned. While he didn't face the trial and justice that he should have, his life after the War was full of loneliness and fear, with his last years in particular full of disappointment. He deserved it.

Posner and Ware, as well as taking aim at the lack of governmental action to track down Mengele have very little good to say about the "Nazi hunters" such as Weisenthal and the Klarsfelds, who are mostly portrayed as out to promote themselves, and invariably they were two or three steps behind Mengele. Their tales of a wealthy man surrounded by bodyguards were far from the truth. The one thing their regular "scoops" did do though was to keep Mengele scared and on the run.

Mengele: the Complete Story is a well-told tale of the life of a hideous man - a man who's one dream was to be an academician, who sold his soul to the devil when he used his position to test his theories - theories that were based on flawed thinking, and that have since been shown to be completely baseless.

For myself, I finished this book with mixed feelings - I felt angry that Mengele wasn't brought to trial for his crimes, but I felt glad that his life, although longer than many of those he sent to death, was a life filled with fear and sadness.

Posner and Ware have produced a well-researched and well-written book - worth reading if the subject matter is of interest.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Commandant of Auschwitz by Rudolf Hoess

 Commandant of Auschwitz: the Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess translated by Constantine FitzGibbon, introduced by Primo Levi, translated by Joachim Neugroschel

London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000 (original English publication 1959, original publication in Polish 1951)                                                                                         ISBN 9781842120248

What to make of this book. Hard to read, this self serving testament from a mostly unrepentant Hoess is a strange catalogue of the events that led him to the gallows in 1947: in fact he completed the text two months before he was executed by the Poles for the crimes he committed at Auschwitz. Along with the description of his activities, this edition includes nine appendices, in which Hoess describes exactly how the Final Solution worked at Auschwitz, and his impressions of many of the key players in the SS with which he had personal dealings.

Hoess was a committed National Socialist: he was jailed for his part in a political murder in the 1920s and spent several years in prison. Like many young men, his life had been brutalised by service in the First World War, and his thoughts of becoming a priest died with his youth. He joined one of the Freikorps that had formed in Germany after the end of the war, and it is this that led him to murder, and the Nazis. His writing about that time is instructive: he had no doubts that murdering someone whom he thought was an informant was the correct thing to do, and was at ease with having to go to prison for the crime. He writes an interesting chapter on prison life, and the character types that are to be found amongst the prisoners and the guards, and how, in some ways, that same milieu existed in the concentration camps.

After being amnestied from prison after nearly five years, Hoess joined an agricultural commune society, where he first came into contact with Himmler. Hoess had married and was settling down to become a farmer when Himmler contacted him and asked him to join the SS and work in concentration camps. He began working at Dachau, then Sachsenhausen, before being moved to Auschwitz to run what was - at the beginning of his tenure - the biggest concentration camp, but not yet an extermination camp.

The change came in 1942, when Hitler decided to rid Europe of the Jews by killing them all. Auschwitz was chosen as one of the sites where this was to take place. It was the place where the Nazis discovered the effectiveness of Zyklon B as a method of killing people, firstly on Russian prisoners, and then on well over one million Jews.

What does Hoess have to say about this? Surprisingly little really. His autobiography is more concerned with logistical problems to do with building the camps, his constant battle with his superiors about hygiene, sanitation and food supplies, and his contant problems with the low calibre of the guards and other staff at the camps. He describes the two competing forces at work at Auschwitz: the Security Section's wish that all Jews be exterminated as soon as possible, and the commercial arm of the SS wanting as many workers as possible for the armaments factories that were set up around the camp. Hoess writes that he tried to convince his superiors that there was no point getting huge numbers of "workers" who were too debilitated to work, and kept requesting material and food to allow for a better life within the camp. This turned out to be impossible, and as Germany began to collapse, so did the camps.

While Hoess is very forthcoming with organisational facts and issues, the morality of what he was doing is barely mentioned. He notes that to disobey orders was not feasible in the SS, but he fails to note that people could and did ask for transfers. As I stated earlier, he was a committed National Socialist, and saw the Jewish race as the enemy of his people: while he states he didn't agree with mass extermination, he "saw the necessity" of it in the quest for final German victory. His worries were more to do with the how, rather than the why, of the Final Solution. He had little to no concerns with each individual human life that was taken under his command, only with trying to meet the conflicting needs of his superiors.

This in the end is what makes reading this book so chilling. That Hoess could divorce himself from the outcome of his efforts is scary, especially knowing that he was not the only one. Yes, there were psychopaths in the SS, and running Germany, but Hoess does not come across as one, yet he was a key figure in the mass murder of millions of people, and could justify his actions to himself, if not to the reader. His evidence, both given at trials where he was a witness, and in this autobiography, are a crucial document illustrating the depravity to which humans can sink when driven by extreme ideology, and how an evil system can continue to exist even when it goes completely against human nature.

Hoess comes across as a man who has lost touch with his humanity: certainly his early life-experiences started him along that path, but it was his commitment to an anti-human ideology that dragged him completely into the mire of immorality and evil. It seems, from his last few paragraphs that while he had come to terms with the fact that he must die, it was only - in his view - because the Nazis had lost.

A vital document from Nazi Germany, Commandant of Auschwitz is, if you can handle it, an insight into the workings of the Nazi mind.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Destruction of the European Jews: student edition by Raul Hilberg

The Destruction of the European Jews: student edition by Raul Hilberg

New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985                                  ISBN 0841909105

The publication of Raul Hilberg's three volume work The Destruction of the European Jews was a pivotal event in Holocaust studies. It has been the basis for much greater study of this moment in history, and has formed the base for many further publications to do with the killing of Jewish populations by the Nazis. Hilberg's exhaustive study has, in this book, been reduced in size but not scope - "These, then, are excerpts, pure and simple, tied together to form a smaller coherent whole."

Hilberg systematically outlays the structure and execution of the Final Solution, showing how not only the Nazis, but ordinary Germans, Romanians, Poles, Balts, Ukrainians and Russians participated as perpetrators, but also how the Jews of Europe responded to their situation.

Early in the book Hilberg outlines how the Holocaust developed: first when the Nazis defined who the Jews were, then concentrating them in ghettos, before the final act of their murder. He shows how the Jews responded, by their age-old methods of obedience and appeasement, which, in this case, were disastrously inadequate.

What comes across strongly in this abridged edition is the speed of the killings once they got underway. The efficient bureaucracy that had developed the definitions of and concentrated the victims meant that once the decision to murder the Jews was taken, they could be killed at the rate of ten thousand per day. The numbers of Germans required to ensure the extermination took place was surprisingly small, even Adolf Eichmann was not working full-time on the "Jewish Question".

The reason this was so was because to a great extent the Jews themselves assisted in the process of concentration and trans-shipment to the death camps. Hilberg clearly shows the terrible choices that those that ran the Jewish Councils had to make - "to sacrifice 100 to save 1,000, 1,000 to save 10,000". They couldn't conceive, until it was too late, that they were unable to save anyone. The Jews were trapped by history, trying strategies to weather the storm that had worked in the past. They couldn't grasp that the only value they had to the Nazi hierarchy was as corpses.

The speed of the exterminations were a crucial part of the success of the Holocaust in killing so many - the Einsatzkommandos  closely followed the front-line troops and quickly rounded up and shot their victims, before they had a chance to flee. Those trans-shipped to the death camps from the ghettos were similarly collected and moved very quickly, to minimize the chance of rebellion. Rebellion was difficult if not impossible, and the few attempts to do so failed miserably.

What also failed was the attempt by Jews outside Europe to get the Allies to do anything about the killings, whether by bombing camps and railway lines, threats of reprisals on those who ran the operations, or even paying the Germans off to save Jews. The reluctance of the Allies to consider these avenues of action was not their finest hour, with mealy-mouthed excuses such as lack of shipping, or being able to re-house such numbers of refugees falling way short of the moral standard they were claiming to uphold.

For those that might find the three-volume work a bit daunting, this abridged edition of The Destruction of the European Jews still packs a sickening punch, and really is a must-read.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans

The Third Reich at War : how the Nazis led Germany from Conquest to Disaster
by Richard J. Evans

London: Penguin, 2008 (first published 2007)     ISBN 9780141015484

There is no doubt that both the collapse of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe and the passing of the war generation has led to a revolution in the historiography of both the Third Reich and World War Two. One allowed historians access to hitherto hidden archives, and the other has allowed a less personal and more probing look at what went on during the years 1933-1945.

With these advantages, and building on the work of historians before him, Richard Evans has written a detailed, scathing and (as it says on the cover) terrifying account of the Third Reich during the period of the War (1939-1945). This book is the final of a three part account of Nazism written by Evans (the others being The Coming of the Third Reich, and The Third Reich in Power). Along with Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler and Saul Friedlander's history of the Holocaust, Evans' work gives the early twenty-first-century reader a clear and chilling insight into what was perhaps the most murderous regime in history.

What Evans makes clear in this work is that murder - annihilation of entire sections of society, entire classes and indeed entire races - was at the core of everything National Socialism stood for. Their way of "making Germany great again" consisted only of eliminating "enemies". Evans shows us how much time, effort and expense went in to eliminating not only the Jews, but anyone else that the Nazis felt needed to be got rid of.

Hitler, and by extension the cronies he'd gathered around him, had a very narrow idea of what constituted a good German: anyone who didn't fit that idea, and certainly anyone who wasn't German (or "Aryan") was not considered to be human, and so fit for destruction. The warped Social Darwinism of the Nazis drove them to ever more killing, as the stock of "good Germans" was reduced by the war. The executions continued up to (and even beyond) the end of hostilities.

Evans mentions several times throughout the book that the Nazis never garnered more than about 37% of the popular vote in elections, so how did they manage to keep the whole country under control for so long? There was no doubt that Nazi Germany was a police state, which became ever more the case as the war dragged on. Fear was a big factor in the quiescence of the population. The victories early in the war were genuinely popular, and by the time the war turned against Germany, it was clear that a whirlwind of vengeance would descend, and the Nazis played on that fear to keep the country fighting. Much of the population, as Evans suggests, were by this time expending all their energy in trying to get enough food and fuel to live, and so didn't have time to foment rebellion.

Apart from the July plot, there were other small attempts at defiance of the regime, which usually ended in failure, imprisonment or worse. Evans spends some time on the ambivalent attitude of the Church - both Roman Catholic and Protestant - to Hitler and the regime, with their desire to protest compromised by their desire to not lose their position or possession in society. It's fair to state that they don't come through unscathed by shame.

Evans also spends time focusing on the political economy of the War. That Germany was destroyed by the War we know; that it was always going to be the case was probably not in doubt even early on in the conflict. The German economy was simply not big enough to equip an army for the task Hitler set, nor was the German population big enough to replace the horrendous losses entailed in fighting in Russia. Evans shows clearly that, even without US industry, the Allies were producing more weapons and food than Germany. Despite having over 400,000 foreign workers and hundreds of thousands more POW and Concentration Camp inmates working in agriculture and industry (the latter classes often being worked to death), the German economy was simply unable to provide enough material for the Army to prevail. The irony of the racial state of the Third Reich having to rely on the "lower" races (Slavs, Jews) to undertake vital work is not lost on Evans. Any fraternising between these imported workers and native Germans was forbidden, with harsh punishments for those who transgressed.

What comes through very clearly in Evans' work, and indeed through most studies of the government of the Third Reich, was how - apart from the Police apparatus - shambolic the systems and activities of government were. The personalized nature of the Nazi dictatorship meant that all "law" emanated from Hitler, and so when he did not codify activities and behaviour, his disciples made it up, according to what they thought he wanted. Combined with Hitler's inability to delegate power to one person (most areas of the economy had two or three departments attempting to run them), this led to constant bickering and power-grabs by whomever thought they might have the upper hand at the time. This extended into the military sphere as well, with Albert Speer's attempts to streamline military production constantly stymied by personal projects of other Nazi leaders.

At well over seven hundred pages this is not a short book, and given its subject matter not always easy to read, but it is a masterful overview of the final years of Nazi power, which drew the World into a War that ended up destroying not only the Third Reich, but Germany itself. Designed to be read as a stand-alone book or as the final of Evans' trilogy, it's a must-read not only for those who wish to know more about one of the darkest periods in human history, but also for serious students of World War Two.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Cafe Scheherazade by Arnold Zable

Cafe Scheherazade by Arnold Zable

Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2003 (originally published 2001)     ISBN 1877008095

Going to University was a very formative experience for me. After two years in college, I moved into a shared house with some of my new (now life-long) friends. Needless to say, these years were ones where looking after myself physically was not high on the agenda. Missed meals, or take-away, became part of my life.

Except on Tuesday nights - on Tuesday nights a group of us would travel to St. Kilda from wherever we happened to be living, to have a meal at Cafe Scheherazade in Acland Street. This was often the only proper meal in a week's eating. Barley soup, chicken and cheese sandwich on rye, or a schnitzel with the works: I'm feeling hungry just thinking about it. The waitresses came to know us over the years, and like mother hens would encourage us to eat up. As the years went by we finished our studies and moved into the workforce, and I remember the time a friend of mine, now a lawyer, appeared on the television news and how excited the waitresses were that Tuesday when we turned up for our regular meal. We sometimes talked of how we would bring our children to Scheherazade when we had some.

Well we now do all have kids, but unfortunately Cafe Scheherazade is no more. The unstoppable gentrification of St. Kilda, and the passing of the Holocaust generation saw its demise.

As young 20-somethings, we'd often sit at our table and wonder at the histories of the other people in the cafe, with their animated conversations in Polish, Russian, Yiddish, a combination of the three, or some other language. We realised of course that it was the War that had led them to this particular end of the earth, and their European-ness was still noticeable even after what, for most, had been a long time Down Under.

Some of our questions are answered in this book by Arnold Zable: while not a history, Zable writes in his Author's Note at the end of the book that he has written "a homage to the power of storytelling, a mediation on displacement, and on the way in which the after-effects of war linger on in the minds of survivors." He goes on to note that "[w]hile Cafe Scheherazade is based on actual events, and upon tales that Avram and Masha and others have told me, I have reshaped and re-imagined them. Yossel, Zalman and Laizer a composite characters, whose fictional journeys are based upon tales I have heard from many survivors."

The book is structured around the journalist Martin, who meets and talks with the regulars at the Cafe about their experiences during the War. The stories we hear are incredible - surviving bombing raids, ghettos, Soviet prison-camps and work gangs, lucky stamps on passports that meant a journey to Japan and then Shanghai, where there were more bombings, returning home after the War only to leave again on discovering that not only homes, but entire families had been wiped out. Or stories of committed Bund members who were persecuted by the Nazis and the Communists, who formed partisan gangs and exacted revenge when and where they could. All now sitting around tables at the Cafe Scheherazade; named from a scene in the book Arc de Triomphe by Erich Maria Remarque, as Avram and Masha promised to rendezvous there in Paris after leaving Poland, Avram illegally and Masha legally.

Zable's writing is very effective - he captures the different middle European character types in his composite characters - the philosopher, the schemer, and the soldier. He shows them all in their different ways as lost souls, perpetually wandering the streets of their adopted home in search of they don't know what, drawn again and again to the coast, to look out across the bay, which leads to the nothingness of the Southern Ocean. Each try to make sense of their experiences. Laizer is given the quote "I cannot see continuity in my journey, only broken lines." His whole family perished in the Holocaust. Zalman - "...though I have lived in Melbourne for over fifty years, I have no sense of belonging. I am acutely aware that everything is temporary in life, a mere bridge." Yet he has reached a type of peace - "You have a taste for champagne, but a pocket only for beer. So the saying goes. But I have enough imagination to make beer taste like champagne. This is the great gift I received. Through losing everything, I became free."

Through these stories, the reader is perhaps able to begin to grasp something of what was lost, and to feel the horrors of that time for Eastern European Jews: what it was to be a victim of fate as the World collapsed around you not just once, but many times. There is some really powerful writing here.

Zable also captures the atmosphere of Cafe Scheherazade within the book - the groups of old men, the younger people, the future up-market denizens of St. Kilda that were sounding the death-knell of Scheherazade even as they asked for Lattes at the counter. And the food - " 'Schehererzade is a schnitzel gan eiden,' he says, 'a schnitzel paradise. It has the best. And every variety. My favourite is the chicken. But, if you wish, you can have veal schnitzel, a Parisian schnitzel, a Wiener schnitzel. Or you can order your own, the way you once had it, over there, homemade, in der alter velt.' " I can still picture the big round brown tables and simple chairs, the place mats, the 50s wallpaper, and the drawings on the wall - a true haven.

Those of the War generation who once frequented this great place have all passed now, but Cafe Scheherazade's loss is still mourned by those of us who know nothing of the suffering that the owners and their friends went through to make it to 99 Acland Street, St. Kilda.

The site of Cafe Scheherazade is now a shoe shop.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Eichmann before Jerusalem by Bettina Stangneth

Eichmann before Jerusalem : the unexamined life of a mass murderer by Bettina Stangneth, translated from the German by Ruth Martin

Melbourne: Scribe, 2014                                                        ISBN: 9781925106176


When we think of Adolf Eichmann, we think of a small-minded bureaucrat with an endless monotone voice - the picture of Arendt's banality of evil, the pen-pusher who mindlessly facilitated the Final Solution.

With a towering piece of scholarship, Bettina Stangneth shatters that image once and for all in this groundbreaking new book. Drawing on recently discovered material, and a concerted effort on her part through the various archives that hold material related to Eichmann, Stangneth shows that, far from being a bureaucrat, Eichmann saw himself as being on the front line of the extermination of the Jews, revelled in his notoriety, and had no regrets for what he had done. The Eichmann we saw in Jerusalem was an elaborate front, created to minimise the damage to himself and his colleagues in what was a misguided attempt to keep alive the flame of Nazism.

Stangneth starts her investigation by looking at Eichmann's career in the SS, where she shows that the image Eichmann tried to portray in Jerusalem, of being a man behind a desk working with files and signing requisitions, was far from the truth. He was an ambitious and ruthless organiser and perpetrator of the destruction of the Jews: he enjoyed his growing notoriety, and his falsely gained reputation of being a Jewish expert, which Stangneth shows as Eichmann merely being a few steps ahead of the mass of Nazis, rather than having any deep learning. Still, he used this myth to increase fear amongst the Jews, and trick them into negotiating with him in the false sense that they had something to gain from the process.

Of course the Jews couldn't change their fate under Nazi rule, and we know Eichmann joked about this during his sojourn in Argentina - we know because he was taped joking about it. Stangneth has used the taped recollections of Eichmann heavily in this book to reconstruct his thoughts and actions. While these tapes - known as the Sassen Interviews - were known to exist at the time of the trial, they were not known in their entirety, and Eichmann effectively denounced them as his drunken ramblings, egged on by an ambitious reporter. Stangneth shows this to be far from the truth.

Eichmann did not enjoy his slide into the shadows after the war, and his sessions with Willem Sassen were far from drunken ramblings: they were the first part of a bigger project to not only write a life of Eichmann, but to restore the glory of the Third Reich to the wider world. Sassen was not only a journalist, but also part of a small but active group of ex-Nazis and fellow travellers that published books and newspapers extolling the lost Reich and Adolf Hitler.

Sassen was initially drawn to speak to and publish Eichmann because of the latter's knowledge of the Final Solution. By the time the project began, in late 50s, the World was finding out more and more about the horror of the Holocaust, and Sassen and his cronies were determined to deny the so-called "lie of the six million". They thought by getting the information directly from one of the architects of the murder of the Jews they could definitively prove that those who claimed that six million Jews were murdered were lying.

The dreadful irony is that Eichmann agreed to the project for exactly the opposite reasons - he wanted to show that he was indeed the architect of the murder of six million Jews, and that it was ordered by Hitler, and that, far from being remorseful, he "would leap laughing into the pit, because millions of Jews would be lying there with him."

The whole project of the interviews collapsed once the Sassen circle realised that, far from vindicating the Nazis, Eichmann's story would condemn them from their own mouths. Hence everyone, for different reasons, wished to suppress this material once Eichmann was captured and faced trial. The interviews did however, have a big impact on the trial itself, in an unusual way.

When Sassen was interviewing Eichmann, he had copies of all the latest books published on the Holocaust provided for Eichmann to read and comment on. Of course the Israelis had no idea once they had him in custody that Eichmann had already read the works they showed him, and therefore he was one step ahead of them when it came to interrogation (of course his previous career ensured he was well-versed in interrogation techniques, and so had a counter to many of the ruses of the Israeli interrogation team). Eichmann knew exactly what the Israeli's knew about him, and what they didn't know, and used this to his advantage - while it didn't save his life, it did change the perspective of the world toward him and in fact the Holocaust itself - it wasn't a project that had a life of its own owing the efficiency of mindless German bureaucrats as Eichmann tried to portray it, but a murderous policy actively pursued and orchestrated by dedicated Nazis, with the passive collusion of much of the German and European population.

While the Eichmann version of events has slowly been deconstructed over the years by various scholars, Eichmann before Jerusalem now deconstructs Eichmann's trial version of his own life and activities. It is the first of what will no doubt be a revisionist wave of scholarship to do with this most evil of men, and of the milieu that allowed him and those like him to escape and live comfortable lives across the seas after the War.

This is a must read.


Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The German trauma : experiences and reflections 1938-2000 by Gitta Sereny

The German trauma : experiences and reflections 1938-2000 by Gitta Sereny

London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2000   ISBN 0713994568

Gitta Sereny has been writing about the Third Reich and The Holocaust ever since the War. As a young volunteer nurse in France in World War II, she was nearly arrested by the Gestapo for resistance activities; ironically, given her hatred for Germany and Germans, she was tipped off about her impending arrest by a German Officer, and successfully made it to the USA via Spain.

After the war she returned to Europe, working for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which was engaged in the melancholy duty of trying to repatriate children to their birth parents where possible (especially children "stolen" by the Nazis and given to Aryan parents). This experience, and the loss of her homeland and childhood to Nazism, has led to a life-long quest to try and find meaning and answers from participants in the most horrendous crimes committed in Europe during the War.

The German trauma is a collection of many of the articles written by Sereny over the years on the German response to their history. Most of the articles have been re-written for inclusion in this book, and are headed by reflections and responses by Sereny. She begins with a little of her own history, her work with UNRRA, and the responses of Germans to her when she was representing the "victors". She moves from that experience to the youth of Germany in the post-war period, who were caught between their parent's generation, who were trying to forget or block out the past, and the truth of history and their place in it. One article discusses the work of the German prosecutors who worked on the trials that took place in Germany for decades, trying servants of the Nazis. These committed men and women, many driven beyond their capacity to cope, are some of the few Germans who clear-headedly faced up to the nations crimes. These trials were always extremely well reported by the German press, and even attended by schoolchildren as part of their education. However, as Sereny notes, the reaction of many Germans was to switch off, unable to face such horrible facts (a thing that happens in many countries with nasty episodes in their past).

One of the biggest trials held under this process was of Franz Stangl, who was Commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp, and for a time, of Sobibor. Sereny spent several months talking with Stangl after he began serving his life sentence. As with her major work Albert Speer : his battle with the truth, Sereny is interested mainly in how Stangl lived with the knowledge of what he'd done. Unlike some of the other Nazis involved in the extermination camps, Stangl was an intelligent and thoughtful man. His justifications under the relentless blowtorch of Sereny's questions is painful to read, and his partial realisation of his guilt preceeded his death by heart attack by nineteen hours. In fact many of the people Sereny talks to over the years point out that one could not live with the idea that such horrors occurred, let alone having a direct part in them, which is perhaps one of the more compelling reasons perpetrators go to such lengths to avoid taking responsibility. Her piece on the trial of John Demjanjuk, accused of being "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka, being a case in point. Demjanjuk preferred to be sentenced to hang than admit he was a guard at one of the other camps (Sobibor), which would have seen him acquitted from the charges laid against him. Of course to admit that would have given the lie to his entire life since the war, as a well-loved father and husband and pillar of his local church. Eventually, the truth saved his life, while at the same time destroying it.

The apologists for the Nazis also appear in these pages, and get short shrift from Sereny. From people who are merely treasure-hunters, to those with more sinister motives; her articles about the Hitler Diaries hoax and the life and death of Odilo Globocnik (head of Aktion Reinhard, the creation and use of extermination camps which killed over 2 million Jews in 1942-43) revealing how deep the threads of Neo-Nazim still run in our society.

The book ends, however, on an optimistic note, pointing out that the Young Germans of today (2000, when the book was written), seem to be more interested than ever in discovering and talking about the past, and are not weighed down by some of the taboos of previous generations. Ironically, given the books release not long before 9/11, Sereny's final message is a plea against racism and xenophobia, and the "categorization" of peoples and races. Something humankind still has to learn.

The German trauma is well worth a read - you will learn something, and as always with Gitta Sereny, you will be reading well-shaped prose. Try and find it at your local library.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell