30
Friday, October 19, 1984
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
If you're not
wearing it,
sell it.
Rewriting history: Modern-day Germans try
to absolve themselves from Nazi-era guilt
You can't enjoy jewelry if it's sitting in your safe
deposit box. Sell it for immediate cash. We pur-
chase fine gems, Diamonds and Gold Jewelry.
BY VICTORY M. BIENSTOCK
Special to The Jewish News
A SERVICE TO PRIVATE OWNERS, BANKS AND ESTATES.
6*- 014(4‘
4
est.
1919
30400Telegraph Road
afg, Suites 104;134
Birmingham, Mi. 48010
(313) 642-5575
AWARDED CERTIFICATE BY GIA IN GRADING & EVALUATION.
Daily til 5:30
Th urs. til 8:30
GEMOLOGIST
DIAMON TOLOGIST
Sat. til 5
LAWRENCE M. ALLAN
President
MOVING?
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Do You Have Furniture And
Decorative Accessories To Sell?
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We also conduct In-house estate sales
The Re-Sell-It Shoppe
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VOLKSWAGEN • PEUGEOT • MAZDA
•
History is not engraved on
stone but written on the shifting
sands, as German politicians and
scholars are currently trying to
prove. The Germany of the last
quarter of the century is trying
hard to rid itself of guilt and the
sense of guilt for the evils of Adolf
Hitler's Third Reich by seeking to
dissociate the German people
from the regime it
enthusiastically put into power in
1933 and faithfully supported
until the Allied armies crushed it
in May 1945.
To a certain extent, the current
revision of the history of the Nazi
era and the creation of a new
mythology is a first, necessary
step in the reunification of East
and West Germany by the ending
of the country's division into two
states, one a part of the Western
world, the other a satellite of the
Soviet Union.
To German nationalists (and
there are not many Germans who
do not want to see their country
reunified) the division of the
country is unnatural and arbit-
rary.
They believe that the German
people will not have regained its
dignity and self-respect and been
freed of the stigma of defeat until
the Wall is razed and the two
Germanies become one again.
After World War II, the world
accepted the division of Germany
as a necessary evil ensuring that a
German Reich dominating the
continent of Europe, would not
again become powerful enough to
plunge the world into war as it
had done twice in the first half of
the 20th Century. Now, 50 years
later, powerful forces on both
sides of the Wall dream, speak
openly and plan for the reunifica-
tion of the two Germanies into one
great Reich.
The process of rewriting history
is not as easy as in George Or-
well's 1984 when the old records
were physically destroyed each
day as their revisions were pro-
duced.
The old records survive today;
they may be packed away in
musty warehouses while the
schools and media churn out the
new, revised versions of the
events of a half-century ago, but
they are still available to refute
the new mythology as are the re-
collections of many still alive who
were participants either as in-
struments or victims of the Nazi
system.
Eventually, as has happened
often in the past, the constant ex-
position of the new mythology
may overwhelm and overshadow
the memory of the truth and re-
cast for future generations the
portrait of the past we call history.
The new mythology in the proc
ess of being created will permit
the Germans to claim that the
Holocaust was not the result of
deliberate policy dictated by the
leaders of the state but a "spon-
taneous" development that
emerged on the local level out of
local conditions and, from that
beginning, assumed its own
snowballing momentum.
This theory has already ad-
vanced seriously by German
scholars. A conference at
Stuttgart earlier this year
gravely debated whether Adolf
Hitler had ever given the specific
order for the murder of Jews. Re-
spected German academicians
advanced the concept that the
first mass killings of Jews had
been undertaken by the local
authorities because they saw no
other way to cope with the prob-
lem of feeding and housing the
large number of Jews who had
been transported to their areas.
The process of absolving the
German people of guilt for the
evils of Nazism also takes the di-
rection of seeking to prove that
there was a large-scale resistance
to Hitler throughout Germany.
We know that there were isolated
resistance groups such as the
White Rose, a quixotic attempt by
a devout young Christian student,
his sister, three other students
and an aged professor to stir the
public conscience into opposition
to the Nazi crimes, but their gal-
lent, foredoomed attempt ended
with-the guillotine in 1943.
The White Rose conspiracy has
been carefully documented by the
late Richard Hanser, an Ameri-
can writer, who noted that far
from showing sympathy for Hans
and Sophie Scholl and their asso-
ciates, on the evening of the day
on which the Scholls were guil-
lotined, an assemblage of several
thousand students in Munich
roared its condemnation of the
White Rose and everyone con-
nected with it" — a telling indica-
tion of the popular feeling.
Here and there were brave
souls who were critical of Hitler
and his regime, who dared to con-
demn the bestialities of the Nazi
regime and hoped for its over-
throw, but none of them except
those involved in the officers' plot
which came to be known as Oper-
ation Valkyrie ever reached the
action stage.
This plot was a Wehrmacht op-
eration; it involved members of
the High Command and lesser
ranks. Its motivation was not op-
position of Nazism and its
policies, but opposition to Adolf
Hitler's assumption of command
of the armed forces, his contemp-
tuous disregard of the preroga-
tives of the military caste and the
fear that his command and his
policies would lead to a defeat of
the German forces in the field for
the second time in the century.
Their plot first took shape in
1938 when the High Command
opposed Hitler's plan to invade
Czechoslovakia. High Command
emissaries secretly made contacts
in London, hoping that a strong
Allied statement would deter Hit-
ler. The cautious Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain would not
commit his country and the inva-
sion took place as scheduled.
The opposition to Hitler contin-
ued in the High Command but the
personnel changed under the
stress of war and Hitler's shifts of
commanders to weed out those he
considered hostile. Direct action
against Hitler was unthinkable
for most of the officers because
they had taken an oath of fealty to
Hitler as well as to the Reich and
direct action against Hitler would
thus have been regarded as
treason.
It was not until July 1944, when
Germany's defeat appeared in-
evitable that the conspiracy'
moved into action. Its objective
was to assassinate Hitler arc::
make peace on the Western front,
before the Allies overran Ger-
many. Some of the conspirators
believed that the Allies would
then join with the Germans in
pressing the war against the
Soviet Union in the East.
Col. Count .Claus von Stauffen-
berg, a one-eyed; one-armed vete I
ran of the Afrika Korps, who had
access to Hitler, agreed to kill the
Fuhrer. He tried on July 20, 1944
and failed. Hitler was only
slightly injured; von Stauffenberg
was speedily identified as the pc.-
petrator arrested, court-
martialled and with three other
The process of
absolving the
German people of
guilt for the evils of
Nazism also takes the
direction of seeking tG
prove that there was a
large-scale resistance
to Hitler throughout
Germany.
officers involved in the plot, put
before a firing squad within 24
hours in the courtyard of
Wehrmacht HQ in West Berlin.
Before the dust had settled,
some 5,000 Wehrmacht officers
and civilians accused of a role in
the conspiracy were executed.. ,
Hitler used the assassination at- I
tempt as the pretext for a
wholesale purge of the elements
in and about the Wehrmacht that <
he considered unfaithful to him.
The Valkyrie plotters were not
motivated by lofty sentiments or
questions of honor; their objective
from the outset was to ensure that
the Wehrmacht remained tlr-
province of the German military
caste and not fall into the hands oi'
the Nazi upstarts and the little
Austrian corporal.
It took them five years before
they dared to act and then it was
not in outrage against the horrors _
of the Nazi system but becautse
they wanted to come to terms with
the Allies to protect Germany
from invasion and to preserve the
Wehrmacht.
But now, says Chancellor Hel
mut Kohl in a West Berlin cere-
mony honoring the plotters on the- -
40th anniversary of their failure,
the assassination attempt "was --
meant to show the world that the
Germans as a people were not Hit-
ler's collaborators."
German historian Joachim Fest
says this new version of history
has provided many Germans wit: - --
"a positive memory" of the past
although he concedes that many
Germans still regard von Stauf-
fenberg and his fellow con-
spirators as guilty of betrayal am', <-
of stabbing Germany in the back.
The new resistance mythology
which, Fest points out, has
enabled many Germans to feel--
,