Professor Mary Fulbrook will be joining us from the UK this Sunday, February 16 at 1 pm Eastern for a Casual Conversation about her extraordinary book Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest For Justice (Oxford University Press 2018), ISBN 978-0-19-068124.
Professor Fulbrook returns after speaking with us about her later book, Bystander Society. She is one of the most knowledgeable people in the world about German society (plus Polish society) and the range of involvements in murder during the Nazi era of mass state-sanctioned collective violence. For a number of reasons, she goes into extraordinary detail, in describing the arc of increasing violence and murder, and in providing examples of the murders and by and to whom and how they occurred. As one of the most important of the reasons, she insists that the general--embodied in the saying “Never Again”-- not overcome the particular:
It is not some general, abstract message about tolerance, however laudable, but rather the detailed interactions between individuals and changing contexts on which we should focus if we want to understand the dynamics of this violent past and continuing significance and legacies of persecution. This episode is one that has defined our times, and has done so in very particular ways. . . . This means that we have to approach the past with precision. (At 538, 539.)
What we learn from the particulars includes the following:
Hundreds of thousands of people were actively involved in one way or another in the practices and processes of exclusion, deportation, maltreatment, and killing, and millions more were knowledgeable about the violence and at least some aspects of the machinery of destruction. (At 523.)
As we learn more about what must be reckoned with, we also learn about the ways in which the reality of guilt has been avoided by those who fell within the large circle of perpetrators: participation and even knowledge of the murderous violence that suffused the Nazi rule from the outset. It served the perpetrators and the millions of Germans to claim “alleged lack of knowledge of ‘it’—generally meaning organized mass murder, sometimes even only the gas chambers-- . . . rooted in an extraordinarily narrow definition of what was held to be truly evil . . .” (At 43-44.)
But T4, the program of eugenic euthanasia of so-called “useless eaters,” was the training ground for administrators of the camps, labor and extermination. Labor camps, smaller extermination camps, slave labor for the industry titans—murder on an astonishing scale, a murder of each person taken by collective violence.
How do we reckon with what happened? Professor Fulbrook starts with what we are to reckon with. She then describes the inadequate responses—failure by failure--of the courts and justice systems of both the victorious allies and the German states created post-war. Finally, she contrasts the post-war lives of the perpetrators and victims. The actual perpetrators lied, changed their identities, and rationalized their way through the remainder of their lives. (One of the liars was Speer.) Their children took vastly different approaches between themselves to reconciling, or not, their father with the murderer. Now, in the third generation, there may be a hope for a greater awareness of the truth by Germans and others:
. . . [W]ith the passing not only of eyewitnesses and survivors but also—less widely noted—of the perpetrator generation, there is a new opportunity for reinserting a wider range of perpetrators into public narratives about the past. (At 536.)
There is another important reason to read this book and to know what was done to the victims—to give witness even now:
The Chairman of the Jewish Council of the Warsaw ghetto committed suicide when he was told that the children of the orphanage were to be sent to their deaths. The children were led to their deaths by those in charge of the orphanage, who were killed along with their charges. Mary Berg observed their departure from her window in the Pawiak prison across the road: “Rows of children, holding each other by their little hands, began to walk out of the doorway. There were tiny tots of two or three years among them, while the oldest were perhaps thirteen. Each child carried a little bundle in his hand. All of them wore white aprons. They walked in ranks of two, calm, even smiling. They had not the slightest foreboding of their fate.” The children were accompanied by nurses and one of the doctors and were led by the director of the orphanage . . . who had refused the opportunity to escape and remained with his small charges, comforting them to the end.” (At 83-84.)
Let me know if you wish to participate by emailing me at Arthur.Fergenson@ansalaw.com by close of business this Friday, February 14.
Arthur Fergenson