Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.  

SUNDRY BOOKS ABOUT NAZIS  (all published in the early 21^st century)

 

            There’s nothing wrong in reading scholarly and well-researched books about Nazi Germany and the catastrophic results of its ruling ideology. We have to know the dark side of history if we are not to sink into profound ignorance about how human beings are capable of behaving. But I am always sceptical of people who take an obsessive interest in books about Hitler and his regime. There seems to be a sort of dark nostalgia about such an obsession; a fetishisation of evil just one step away from those people who collect Nazi memorabilia (medals, buttons, posters, uniforms) from junk-shops or specialty stores.

            As a work-horse book reviewer, I have never actively sought out books about Nazis for review. But quite a few such books have been pushed my way over the years. So here is a collection of five of them. The first two are about monsters, but are also very speculative in a way that many professional historians would question. The third is about a sheer opportunist. And the last two are about the genocidal results of Nazism. These reviews are all presented here unaltered from the way they originally appeared in newspapers and magazines.

 

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            First, “THE HIDDEN HITLER” by Lothar Machtan.  This review appeared in the Dominion, 5 January 2002

 

By inclination and practice, Adolf Hitler was homosexual. This fact determined much of the course of his private life and some of the course of his public life.

On hearing that this was the thesis of Lothar Machtan’s The Hidden Hitler, my first impulse was to bracket it with one of my all-time favourite headlines from Britain’s trash-tabloid press: Best kept secret of the war – Hitler was a woman. In other words, as a piece of off-the-wall sensationalism. But Machtan (professor of history at Germany’s Bremen university) is remarkably persuasive. Yes, he does have to lean heavily on inference sometimes, and yes, he does strain the interpretation of some documents. But there is enough here of solidly cross-referenced fact to suggest that this is a perfectly valid line of enquiry for the biographer of Hitler.

And besides, one cannot blame Machtan for having to be imaginative in some of his conclusions. One of his main arguments is, after all, that the Nazi regime assiduously destroyed evidence of the Fuhrer’s real sexuality, just as they ruthlessly destroyed witnesses.

Once he was about to become dictator, there were women who found Hitler sexually attractive, including Magda Quandt (who eventually married Josef Goebbels), the loony film-maker Leni Riefenstahl and the even loonier Englishwoman Unity Mitford. But none of them achieved the intimacy with Hitler they clearly desired. Hitler kept his niece Angela (“Geli”) Raubal as an employer keeps a servant. She committed suicide. Then there was blonde, vacuous Eva Braun, the official “mistress”, who was Hitler’s companion for his last ten years and whom he married at the last minute in the bunker. Machtan interprets Braun as Hitler’s public token of sexual “respectability” and surmises that, in fact, Hitler never advanced beyond the platonic stage with her or with any woman. Actually Hitler knew no woman (apart from his mother) till he was nearly 40 and emerging as a national political figure very much in the public gaze, whereas he knew many men on intimate terms.

His boyhood friend, August Kubizek, wrote a memoir of their erotically-charged life together. In four years of World War 1, he was so inseparable from his fellow runner Ernst Schmidt that another member of their battalion use to refer to them as “the nancy boys”. Then there were Hitler’s openly-homosexual mentors such as the anti-semitic writer Dietrich Eckhart in the 1920s and the rivals Kurt Ludecke and Ernst Hanfstaengel, who both attempted blackmail in the 1930s. And there was the whole nature of Ernst Rohm’s SA stormtroopers which, as no historian has ever denied, contained a higher-than-average proportion of homosexuals and, at first, gloried in the homo-erotic experience it promised.

It is worth noting that the exiled German socialist and communist press never tired of linking Hitler to this milieu and presenting him as a homosexual, even after the murder of Rohm and his associates in 1934.

Of course it could be argued that all this is irrelevant to the serious stuff of history. To examine Hitler’s sexuality is not to explain why he was a mesmeric orator, pathological anti-semite and mass murderer. But Machtan does make a good case for linking Hitler’s sexuality to public affairs, especially in the manner in which Nazi Germany severely persecuted male homosexuality and yet left untouched a number of high-placed homosexuals in the Nazi movement itself.

I do not believe this book will be the last word on the subject. Machtan admits that many key documents are still inaccessible. But Machtan’s evidence is at least as good as the evidence that some gay writers have used to “out” prominent cultural figures from Shakespeare to Schubert to Henry James. The difference is, of course, that young Adolf will not be as welcome an addition to the gay pantheon.

 

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The next monster is Heinrich Himmler, as depicted in “S.S.1 – THE UNLIKELY DEATH OF HEINRICH HIMMLER” by Hugh Thomas. This review appeared in the Dominion 2 March 2002. It is worth pointing out that the historian mentioned in this review, Hugh Thomas, was the author of what for years was the best-known history of the Spanish Civil War. Obviously, he is not the author of this very speculative book.

 

            At the end of the Second World War, SS boss Heinrich Himmler was arrested by British troops as he attempted to pass through their lines with fake identity papers. Due to poor supervision, he was able to commit suicide while in British custody by biting the poisoned capsule hidden in his mouth. His body was hastily buried in an unmarked grave.

            That, at any rate, is the received version of Himmler’s death. But Hugh Thomas doubts it. Thomas (not to be confused with the famous historian of the same name) is a surgeon. He has a habit of doubting things. He has already written two books using medical evidence to argue that the Rudolf Hess who was put on trial in Nuremberg was not the real Rudolf Hess. His conclusions have, of course, been hotly contested.

This time, however, he is more circumspect. He does not exactly say that the man who committed suicide in custody was not Heinrich Himmler. But by examining the imperfect postmortem records from 1945, he declares a strong suspicion that it was somebody else. Oddly enough, Thomas’s circumstantial evidence is more persuasive than his rather thin medical evidence.

As Thomas tells it, Himmler was aware by 1943 that Germany had lost the war, and was already making plans for his post-war survival. At first Himmler harboured the fantasy that he would be acceptable to the Allies as an alternative German head of state to Adolf Hitler. He sent out tentative feelers to British and Amercan agents offering himself as an anti-communist ally. When these approaches were rebuffed, the Holocaust’s chief architect went to Plan B. This was to use his SS to transfer as many German funds as possible abroad (in effect robbing the Third Reich of essential capital and assets) in the hope of creating a Fourth Reich at some future date. He also made meticulous plans for his own escape.

So how, implies Thomas, would this thorough man have so easily walked into captivity at war’s end?

In an odd sort of way, I feel that Thomas has fallen for the Nazis’ myth of their own invincibility. He simply does not accept that the ferocious Himmler could (and did) do extremely silly things, especially as the Reich came tumbling down. And he never ventures to explain how an imposter would have been induced to kill himself in Himmler’s place.

On the other hand, despite a confused and plodding prose style, this is a book that raises a lot of tantalising questions. It is genuinely curious that Himmler’s second-in-comand, Walter Schellenberg, was treated so leniently by the victorious Allies (he never served the light sentence he was given at Nuremberg). Thomas claims that Schellenberg knew some dirty secrets about Soviet moles in the British secret service, and those moles (Philby, Blunt) therefore did their best to strike a deal with him to keep his mouth shut.

This section of the book is far more intriguing than theorisings about faded duelling scars that may or may not have been on the cheek of Himmler’s corpse.

 

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And here is the opportunist, as depicted in “MAGDA GOEBBELS” by Anja Klabunde. This review appeared in the Sunday Star-Times 5 October 2003. For the record, the “mysterious” death of Victor Alorosoff is often suspected to have been a “hit” carried out by Nazi agents, who were eliminating an embarrassing reminder of Magda Goebbels’ past.

 

If somebody concocted the life of Magda Behrend as an historical novel, it would be considered very far-fetched.

She was born, illegitimately, to a woman who married and divorced a number of times. The man her mother was married to for the longest period, Richard Friedlander, was Jewish. He was the stepfather Magda grew up with, on very good terms.

Although she was an ethnic German, Magda got on well with her stepfather’s Jewish friends and mingled with members of an early Zionist youth group. Her first serious boyfriend – possibly her lover – was the left-wing Zionist leader Victor Alorosoff. They contemplated marriage, but Magda was ambitious. She chose instead to marry the staid, but incredibly wealthy, German businessman Gunther Quandt.

Quandt gave her wealth, prestige and one son. But he also profoundly bored her. She divorced him. She almost took up with Alorosoff again, but he emigrated to Palestine (and was later murdered in very mysterious circumstances).

Instead, to fill her empty life, Magda discovered the Nazi movement. She wooed and married Hitler’s Berlin deputy Josef Goebbels, who was then the chief organiser of the brownshirts’ running street battles with the communists. Her complaisant first husband witnessed her wedding to her second. Socialist newspapers, knowing something of her background, gleefully ran the inaccurate headline: “Nazi Boss Marries Jew”.

Anja Klabunde’s biography doesn’t make any excuses for Magda Goebbels. But it does try to understand her. Basically, she was an opportunist with no strong convictions of her own, who was willing to go along with any dominant male who could deliver her power and position. If, in an alternative version of history, Germany had been going communist, then she would happily have married a commissar.

Once committed to the Nazis, however, she supported them fanatically. This included turning her back on Jews who had been her friends. As the wife of Hitler’s propaganda boss, she was fully aware of the regime’s crimes and attempted genocide, and justified them in her diaries.

For the sake of appearances, she remained married to Goebbels, although she was twice sorely tempted to divorce him. As head of the Nazi film induistry, Goebbels had access to young actresses, whom he exploited in endless affairs. Magda, meanwhile, gave birth to their six children, all of whom were bizarrely given names beginning with “H”: Hilde, Helga, Hedder etc.

In the bunker, when defeat was inevitable, the Goebbels murdered all of their six children before killing themselves. Pity about the kids, of course, who were too young to bear any responsibility for their parents’ crimes. But very hard to feel sorry for a woman who had nothing going for her but her social ambition and a love of chic clothes.

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“THE LOST” by Daniel Mendelsohn is a very compassionate work by a Jewish writer, who goes down the unusual path of seeking to understand those who collaborated with the Nazis in their genocidal programme. He does not condemn. He understands. This review appeared in the NZ Listener 30 June 2007

Why did Cain kill his brother Abel? If you like, you can go all anthropological, the way Jean-Jacques Rousseau did, and say the story encodes long racial memory. Cain tills the soil while Abel keeps sheep. So the story's really about centuries of hostility between farmers and nomadic herdsmen. But such Enlightenment guessing really misses something more fundamental. God accepts Abel's offering but rejects Cain's. Cain, the elder brother, feels humiliated and hurt. He turns on his brother and kills him. People who have suffered are often spurred to make others suffer as well.

Now flash-forward some millennia. Why did many Ukrainians collaborate with the Nazis in the Ukraine and eastern Poland, helping to hunt down and kill Jews during the Holocaust?

In the 30s, Stalin's regime visited terrible suffering on Ukrainians, whom the Georgian dictator particularly despised. In collectivisation, purges and organised starvation, the number of murdered Ukrainians at least equalled, and possibly exceeded, the number of Jews Hitler murdered.

True, this historical fact has been used by Holocaust-deniers and other nutters in mitigation of the Holocaust. But it is a fact, nevertheless. When Nazi tanks rolled eastward in 1941, whole Ukrainian villages welcomed them as liberators.

When the time came, Cain murdered Abel a million times over. It's not frivolous to think of a Holocaust book in these terms, because they are the terms of the author of The Lost, Daniel Mendelsohn.

Apparently Mendelsohn is a secular, non-observing US Jew for whom the Torah is no more a historical record than those Greek tragedies that he (as a professional classicist) has spent much of his life studying. Yet as he tells his own Holocaust story, Mendelsohn can find no better unifying structure than meditations on what Jews call Bereishit and Gentiles call the Book of Genesis.

Why did Cain kill Abel? Does God's covenant with Abraham mean Jews are special? Do Noah's Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah mean that God is indifferent to His Creation, or does He actually approve of mass murder? Whether readers are secular or religious, they will find that these meditations, underscored with remarks by rabbinical commentators, give this particular quest a wholeness and moral authority lacking in other accounts of equal horrors.

Mendelsohn's quest is to find out how exactly his great-uncle and his daughters died in the Ukrainian town of Boleshaw under Nazi occupation. Over nearly 600 pages, The Lost (subtitled “A Search for Six of Six Million”) tells how he and his photographer brother Matt travelled, interviewed and researched for five years. This makes The Lost as much a reflection on the fragility of historical memory as on the Holocaust.

So, often, old people in Boleshaw, Israel, Sydney, Stockholm and Copenhagen only half-remember things. Or what they remember turns out to be wrong. Or they confuse rumour with witness. Or they have reason to suppress information, like the old lady who clams up because, as Mendelsohn later discovers, her brother was in the "Jewish police" who thought they could save themselves by collaborating.

The story includes some heroism and some moral solace. The two Poles who hid Mendelsohn's great-uncle and one of his daughters. The Ukrainian priest who provided baptismal certificates to give Jews cover identities. The Catholic boy who chose to be hanged rather than give up his pregnant Jewish girlfriend.

And of course, the story also includes the unspeakable. The crowds who watched impassively or jeered or even cheered when the round-ups and mass shootings were taking place.

It's an extraordinary serenity that Mendelsohn finally reaches. He befriends elderly Ukrainians. He understands what makes Cain tick and respects Cain's viewpoint. Having lived a privileged life in the US, Mendelsohn knows he has no right to criticise other people's lack of courage when the reward for helping or sheltering Jews was a public hanging.

Read with the most objective and rational spirit, there are still parts of this book that will choke you up. If they don't, I assume you are a hardened cynic. Or maybe you have read too many books.

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            Finally, “THE HOLOCAUST – A NEW HISTORY” by Laurence Rees. It can be recommended as a concise, but comprehensive, history of the subject. This review  appeared in Sunday Star-Times 12 February 2017

 

 

            It is always gruelling to read a book about the Holocaust because no other subject gives so much evidence of human depravity and cruelty on such a vast scale. Industrialised mass murder, gassing by Zyklon B or carbon monoxide, machine-gunning of men, women and children by “Special Purpose” units, consistent sadism by camp guards and SS officers, inhumane medical experiments and millions of deaths all justified by an insane racial theory. To read the 400-plus closely-printed pages of Laurence Rees’ The Holocaust is to read about all this and it is inevitably very, very depressing.

            But the questions arise: Haven’t we heard this all before in numerous books and TV documentaries? And is there really a place for this “new history”?

            I think there is a place for this book for a number of reasons.

            First, Laurence Rees is not only a bona fide historian (Oxford University grad.), but he is also an excellent communicator. For years he was in charge of BBC TV’s History unit and he produced such series as The Nazis: A Warning from History and World War II: Behind Closed Doors. He does not simplify or talk down to readers, but his style is clear, fluent and easy to read, as well as scholarly.

            Second, his methodical, chronological approach allows him to follow the whole course of the disaster from Hitler’s first years of wide influence in the 1920s to the end of the war. In the process he is able to show how the attempted genocide of Jews (and Roma and Slavs) grew gradually from theory to practice. There was no one moment  - not even the much-publicised Wannsee Conference – at which the Holocaust “began”. It was implicit in what Hitler preached from the start. In his postscript, Rees agrees with the historian Ian Kershaw’s statement “No Hitler, No Holocaust”. Holocaust-deniers sometimes pretend that Hitler had no hand in ordering atrocities, but that is complete nonsense as the record shows. Even so, genocide was often carried out according to initiatives of local Nazi Gauleiters and camp commandants.

            Third, Rees shows in detail how non-Jewish populations reacted to the Jews’ plight. There was much collaboration with the Nazis. There was also much heroism. Basically Italians (even Fascists) refused to cooperate with Hitler’s plan to destroy Italian Jews, and most Italian Jews survived the war.  Many church people showed sympathy. Some even practised it, although the highest church authorities remained hesitant to do anything and the silence of the Vatican still causes debate.

            At the other end of the moral scale, it is almost funny, in a grotesque way, to learn how leading Nazis tried to dissociate themselves from the Holocaust at the last moment, when they knew Germany faced defeat and retribution would follow. Worst monster, making pathetic attempts to do this, was Heinrich Himmler himself.

            Of course detailed accounts of what happened in each facility are sheer horror, but they are a necessary part of the story. This could well be the best single-volume history of the Holocaust to date.