"DDEckerslyke" wrote in message
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"Nick" wrote in message
om...

I hope you're still checking in on this thread

Dear Mr. Eckerslyke,

I regret the delay in my response.

According to nearly all academic historians of 20th century Germany,
"Hitler's Willing Executioners" has many serious flaws, to say the least.

Here's a better book that examines some of the same issues:
"Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland"
by Christopher Browning

Agreed, it had major flaws and because of that I stopped reading it after
about 100 pages. But for me the point was made: Hitler didn't kill six
million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, disabled people and other non-Aryans.
Neither did Goebbels, Eichmann, Himmler, Gorring or anyone else for that
matter. A huge section of German society participated in the genocide.

"Visiting the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., for example, I
was struck by the its marginalization of any other victims apart from the Jews,
to the extent that it presented photographs of dead bodies in camps such as
Buchenwald or Dachau as dead Jewish bodies, when in fact relatively few Jewish
prisoners were held there. Little attention was paid to the non-Jewish German
victims of Nazism, from the two hundred thousand mentally and physically
handicapped Germans whom the Nazis killed in the so-called euthanasia campaign
to the thousands of Communists, Social Democrats, and others who also met their
deaths in the camps. The German resistance received almost no mention at all
apart from a brief panel on the student 'White Rose' movement during the war,
so the visitor almost inevitably emerged from the museum with a belief that
all Germans were evil antisemites."
--Richard Evans (Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving
Trial, pp. 261-2)

(Richard Evans is Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University.
He was the principal expert witness against David Irving at the trial.)

"The fundamental problem for our understanding of science under National
Socialism is the persistent and virulent use of the Janus-like combination
of hagiography and demonization, the black-and-white characterisation of
scientists--like other professions and social groups--as fitting into three
mutually exclusive categories: 'Nazi'; 'anti-Nazi'; or neither one nor the
other. One could also label these categories 'Heaven', 'Hell', and 'Purgatory',
for they are based on the timeless, if sometimes simplistic theme of the
struggle between good and evil.

A spectrum of 'shades of gray' is far more useful than the black-and-white
model for studying science and scientists under Hitler. Although the two
ends of this spectrum can also be thought of as 'Nazi' and 'anti-Nazi', these
extremes are usually not reached, only approached. Almost every individual
or institution in Germany embodied some elements that were either 'Nazi',
'anti-Nazi', or neither."

--Mark Walker (Nazi Science: Myth, Truth, and the German Atomic Bomb, p. 2)

With regard to your statement, "A huge section of German society participated
in the genocide", a conscientious scholar ought to do one's best to make
meaningful distinctions in the levels and gradations of awareness, knowledge,
complicity, and guilt among the Germans and their European allies.

In her wartime memoir, 'The Past is Myself' (which was adapted by Dennis
Potter into the 1988 British film, 'Christabel'), Christabel Bielenberg
(nee Burton), an Englishwoman who had become a German national after her
1934 marriage to Peter Bielenberg (a fiercely anti-Nazi lawyer from a
prominent family in Hamburg), describes her extraordinary meeting with a
Latvian volunteer in the Waffen-SS. He and Christabel happened to be seated
next to each other aboard a crowded train late in the war. Being as fiercely
anti-Nazi as her husband (who was a close friend of Adam von Trott, who was
tortured and executed for his role in the German plot to assassinate Hitler;
Peter Bielenberg was able to survive in a concentration camp until the end of
the war), Christabel Bielenberg was in no mood to speak with a Waffen-SS man
or to spare any pity for his experiences. Somehow (in broken German) the
Latvian was able to express to her what was hidden deep in his heart. In the
summer of 1941, the Wehrmacht had first appeared to him as only the victorious
liberators of his homeland from Stalin's tyranny. In order to show his simple
appreciation to the Germans, he wished to enlist in the Wehrmacht, but only the
Waffen-SS (about which he had known nothing) would accept foreign recruits such
as himself. Soon he found himself regularly participating in terribly cruel
reprisals against Soviet civilians who had allegedly assisted the partisans.
The Latvian became stricken by guilt, which he was unable to discuss with any
of his Waffen-SS comrades. He told Christabel that 1) he knew that the war
was already lost, 2) he did not expect to survive until the war's end, 3) he
hoped that he would be killed soon so that his terrible burden of guilt would
be gone, and 4) he wondered about whether or not God could ever forgive him.
Of course, Christabel Bielenberg could not promise that God would forgive him,
yet, notwithstanding their radically opposing political convictions, she felt
that she could trust him to some extent. Overcome by exhaustion, Christabel
fell asleep with her head resting on his shoulder; when she awakened, the
Latvian already had gone to meet his fate in battle.

AFAICS the capacity for genocide is not too far below the surface in any
society and I would venture to say that it's the unquestioningly obedient
who are ultimately the Willing Executioners. Mr Bibuld and those who view
his actions favorably are maybe the freedom fighters, the Resistance. But
then again maybe I'm romanticising.

"A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective
of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as
they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority."
--Stanley Milgram (1965)

"What is life? Life is the Nation. The individual must die anyway."
--Adolf Hitler (1943, on the end of the Battle of Stalingrad)

In the thread, "OT Dresden teapots" (16 August 2003), "Briarroot" wrote:
"The bottom line is that there is only one moral imperative in war. That is to
win for your side, while preserving as many of the lives of *your own* troops
as possible. If killing every single enemy civilian can save the lives of a
single one of your soldiers, it is the task of Generals to see that it happens."

In the thread, "OT Dresden teapots" (17 August 2003), "Briarroot" wrote:
"What I did was point out the obvious; that if all of the enemy are dead, then
the war is over and can be considered to have been successfully concluded.
This has been long been the model of war making by the human race. Recent
European tradition (inherited by their former colonies) in the last several
centuries has moderated this model, but the older system is still sound."

In the RGCP thread, "Getting Messy" (24 March 2003), Jerome Bibuld wrote:
"There are those who think I have served my country, but I'm sure...you would
disagree with them. I would rather be known as having served humankind than
the U.S.A."

Like you, evidently, I should prefer the company of Jerome Bibuld to that
of a fanatically "flag-waving" American nationalist such as "Briarroot".

BTW you don't know where I can get a scholarship that will support me and
my family while I spend five years researching and writing a book on the
Anthropology of Genocide do you? ;-)

Which historical case(s) of genocide do you propose to examine? And to what
extent have you considered the potential modern political implications?

'Thus with imagined wing our swift scene flies
In motion with no less celerity than that of thought.'
--William Shakespeare (Henry V)

Alas, such opportunities tend to present themselves rarely and fleetingly.
I was asked if I could be available to play squash with the (then) president
of the Royal Society. Even if I had been able to accept that invitation,
however, I doubt that I could be of any greater assistance to you now.
Best wishes to you and your family.

'There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.'
--William Shakespeare (Julius Caesar)

--Nick