Well, This Is What I Think

In the 1930s and 40s, many ordinary Germans knew of the Holocaust horror about death camps. Details of the deaths of Jews and other groups in concentration camps were well publicised in the media and elsewhere, as a determined and deliberate effort to de-sensitise the German public to accept atrocities committed on their behalf. This is quite regardless of the fact that millions of ordinary folk must have seen Jews being deported to the camps.

According to a new research study, the mass of ordinary Germans did know about the evolving terror of Hitler’s Holocaust. They knew concentration camps were full of Jewish people who were stigmatised as sub-human and race-defilers. They knew that these, like other groups and minorities, were being killed out of hand.

They knew that Adolf Hitler had repeatedly forecast the extermination of every Jew on German soil. They knew these details because they had read about them.

They knew because the camps and the measures which led up to them had been prominently and proudly reported step by step in thousands of officially-inspired German media articles and posters according to the study, which is due to be published simultaneously in Britain and the US early next month and which was described as ground-breaking by Oxford University Press yesterday and already hailed by other historians.

The reports, in newspapers and magazines all over the country were phases in a public process of “desensitisation” which worked all too well, culminating in the killing of 6 million Jews, plus homosexuals, communists, prisoners of war and others, says author Robert Gellately.

His book, Backing Hitler, is based on the first systematic analysis by a historian of surviving German newspaper and magazine archives since 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor. The survey took hundreds of hours and yielded dozens of folders of photocopies, many of them from the 24 main newspapers and magazines of the period.

Landmark

Its results, Professor Gellately says, destroy the claim – generally made by Germans after Berlin fell in 1945 and accepted by most historians – that they did not know about camp atrocities.

He concludes by indicating that the only thing many Germans may not have known about was the use of industrial-scale gas chambers because, unusually, no media reports were allowed of this “final solution”. However, by the end of the war camps were all over the country and many Germans worked in them.

Yesterday OUP said his study exposed “once and for all the substantial consent and active participation of large numbers of ordinary Germans”. Its head of historical publishing, Ruth Parr, called it a landmark study of the terror. “He asks and answers some very difficult questions about how much the ordinary German people knew about the Nazi atrocities, and to what degree they supported them,” she said.

A leading British-born Holocaust historian, Professor Michael Burleigh, said the book was “original and outstanding, genuinely important”. Another authority on the camps, Professor Omer Bartov, of Brown University, Rhode Island, US, described Backing Hitler as “path-breaking – a crucial contribution to our understanding of the relationship between consent and coercion in modern dictatorship”.

Conventional wisdom among post war historians has been that – as Lord Dahrendorf, ex-warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford, says in his study Society and Democracy in Germany (1966) – “It is certainly true that most Germans ‘did not know’ about National Socialist crimes of violence; nothing precise, that is, because they did not ask any questions_.” A common explanation among influential modern German historians, including Hans-Ulrich Thamer in his study Wooing and Violence (1986) is that the Nazis “seduced” an unwilling or passive public.

But Gellately, professor in Holocaust history at Clark University, Massachusetts, offers a mass of detail to support the theme of an earlier work, Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which caused an international sensation in 1995. Goldhagen’s theme was that “what the Nazis actually did was to unshackle and thereby activate Germans’ “pre-existing, pent-up anti-semitism”.

Gellately began his inquiry after finding a press report – published as routine – of a woman reported to the Gestapo for “looking Jewish” and allegedly having sex with a neighbour. “For decades my generation had been told that so much of the terror had been carried out in complete secrecy,” he writes.

His media trawl, with a research assistant, found that as early as 1933 local papers reported the killing of 12 prisoners by guards at Dachau, the first to be set up as a “model” concentration camp initially for communists.

On May 23 the Dachauer Zeitung said the camp was Germany’s most famous place and brought “new hope to the Dachau business world”.

By 1934 the main and widely read Nazi-owned paper Volkische Beobachter was reporting a widening of policy to other “political criminals” including Jews accused of race defilement.

By 1936 communist prisoners were no longer mentioned: in a photo-essay in the SS paper Das Schwarze Korps emphasised the camps as places for “race defilers, rapists, sexual degenerates and habitual criminals”.

This broadening mission, as Gellately calls it, was reflected in Volkische Beobachter photographs of “typical subhumans” including Jews with “deformed headshapes”. For the first time their detention was said to be permanent. In January, 1937 Berliner Borsen Zeitung reported the SS chief Heinrich Himmler as announcing the need for “still more camps” for “those with hydrocephalus, cross-eyed, deformed half-Jews and a whole series of racially inferior types”.

In November, 1938 the anti-Jewish pogrom on and after “the night of broken glass” was reported countrywide in papers as heroic. The propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, announced that the “final answer” to the Jewish problem would be by way of government de cree, according to Volkische Beobachter

In late 1939, the year war started, newspapers acting on government orders announced a post-8pm curfew on all Jews in case they “molest Aryan women”.

That November the first summary executions of “anti-socials” by police without trial were reported. Papers were told to report these clearly and forcefully.

In March, 1941 the Hamburger Fremdenblatt reported the first mass auctions of possessions of detained or killed Jews. Hamburg became the wartime clearing house and Gellately says at least 100,000 citizens bought items at the auctions.

After this the focus switched. Most press reports about Jews were about those outside Germany. This was because the official but unpublicised final solution was being implemented.

But enthusiastic denunciations by ordinary citizens of Jewish and other “internal enemies” continued to be copiously reported. Backing Hitler discusses 670 cases. By the end of the war Hitler was still getting 1,000 private letters a week, many of them denunciations of Jews.

For more detail on the process of “Othering”, currently enthusiastically being employed by President Donald Trump in America, by the Liberal-National Government in Australia as regards refugees, and by many Governments around the world concerning religious minorities with which they disagree, click here.

We have restrained ourselves from commenting overmuch on the Brett Kavanaugh matter for one simple reason.

From a distance, one simply cannot, with any real confidence, parse the facts of the matter.

It also raises so many fundamental questions as to spin the mind.

The most important of these are: how does the system effectively adjudicate matters that invariably happened out of the sight of corroborating witnesses?

And how does the system balance the concept of presuming a woman’s testimony of sexual assault to be valid and worthy of the deepest and most serious consideration, with the concept of “innocent until proven guilty by a jury of one’s peers” – a concept so ingrained in our own world view that is assuredly deserves the epithet “fundamental”.

The short answer to these worrysome questions is that ultimately – and unsatisfactorily – the “facts” of any given matter will often come down to opinion. Opinion about the credibility of each party to the dispute.

And opinion, of course, whilst inevitably part of our decision-making process, is simply made up of the accumulated life experiences we have had, and the opinions imprinted upon us by others at some time or other, and although it is a key decision-making tool for all of us, in no way can it reliably be called empirical. Nevertheless, it is often all we really have.

In these things, therefore, we often rely on our gut instincts. Our “feel” for the situation. Indeed, sans identifiable facts we fall back on aphorisms and folk wisdom. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. Recent research into “mob decisions” or the “wisdom of crowds” seems to tell us that the collective wisdom of large groups of people is more often likely to be right than wrong, born of some sort of collective hive mind experience that is not yet clearly understood, although much conjectured upon.

One such folk aphorism is “there’s no smoke without fire”.

This is the simple belief that when a quantity of controversy is in the air, something genuine must be behind it. And it is, indeed, a reliable indicator, to some extent. Over and over again investigations based on the appearance of smoke do, indeed, eventually reveal the fire behind it. The problem is that it also often amounts to nothing at all. Smoke can be manufactured by interested or malign parties, nowadays more easily than ever, to the extent that leads people to assume “it must be so”. This effect is magnified hundreds of thousands of times in a world where social media endlessly repeats “facts” that are not, in any empirical sense, facts at all. In a sense this is by no means solely a modern affair. For example the infamous Dreyfus affair from 1894 to 1906 divided France deeply and lastingly into two opposing camps: the pro-Army, mostly Catholic “anti-Dreyfusards” and the anti-clerical, pro-republican Dreyfusards. It embittered French politics and encouraged radicalisation on both sides for decades. But today, the effect is infinitely more powerful, and therefore infinitely more caution is indicated.

The Wikipedia article on Wisdom of Crowds is well worth reading. It reveals the pluses and minuses of this phenomenon. Ironically, one real danger is the desire to feel “connected”, leaving us at the mercy of our own emotions, urgently vacuuming up opinions and “facts” that confirm our world view. This goes way beyond mere confirmation bias, which is a well-understood phenomenon. It goes to what we actually believe to be happening around us. It affects our empirical view of the world. Our opinions become our reality. Doubt or rationality become dangerous to our mental well-being.

So what has the Kavanaugh case revealed about our ability to perceive truth? We would argue the following:

1. Whilst many men and women (and especially women) have become swept up in the outrage surrounding the accusations, many have also seen the entire matter as a political hit job on a decent man, or sought to downplay the matter “even if it is true”. Which way the opinion falls may depend on our personal backgrounds, or how we perceived the demeanour of the central characters.

2. U.S. President Donald Trump said he is “100 percent” certain that Christine Blasey Ford named the wrong person when she accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault in testimony during his Supreme Court nomination hearings.

Yet Ford told the Senate Judiciary Committee that she was “100 percent” certain it was Kavanaugh who sexually assaulted her in the upstairs bedroom of a home in a wealthy Washington suburb in 1982 when both of them were teenagers. Her testimony before the committee was steady, largely unemotional, circumspect and appeared credible. And for many, that testimony dredged up painful memories of their own experiences of sexual violence, that had often been privately endured for years. Ford’s manifest bravery in the face of those who were at times both hostile and disbelieving also empowered survivors; they felt that they were no longer alone and that they too had a voice. Many felt the urge to take action, both in support of those who had been affected but also to change societal attitudes to sexual harassment.

3. In stark contrast, the Judge’s testimony was at turn tragic, angry, (bordering on fury), and sometimes overtly political and partisan. If he was an innocent man wronged then his emotions could quite clearly be understood. If he was a guilty man found out, then it appeared he was erecting an ever-growing smokescreen of emotive blather, to obscure any matters of fact. Which it was will depend entirely on the pre-held opinions one brings to watching his testimony. For many on the right it was understandable, credible and even long overdue. A warrior of conservatism fighting back for his reputation and his life against a conspiracy involving the Democratic Party, left wing media and femi-nazi activism. For many on the left his speech epitomised male privilege and a machismo-drenched “winner takes all” mentality which betokened no opposition. The left’s response to the entire brouhaha is well laid out here.

So what can we conclude from this riveting but sorry matter?

For all that the President tries to spin it one way, the short story is that the Senate have now said they believe Ford to have been untruthful, whether mistakenly or deliberately.

This must inevitably be a huge psychological blow to women everywhere who may delay reporting sexual assault for all sorts of very good and well-understood reasons. At the very least, concerted efforts must be made to encourage women to speak up against sexual violence perpetrated against them, whenever it was. If the net outcome of this matter is that fewer women will seek redress, that would be a dolorous outcome indeed.

The new Justice of the Supreme Court may have revealed himself to be temperamentally unsuited to such a senior role, no matter the guilt or otherwise of his case, nor the level of his legal acumen, which is by all accounts very high. At least one former Supreme Court Justice and 2,400 law professors believe this to be the case. It may be that his intemperate testimony will haunt him even longer than the facts or otherwise of the accusations against him.

In any civilised society, there must surely be a thorough legal investigation into the two other complainants against the Judge, if only to dismiss their accusations. To leave their matters swinging in the breeze is merely to prolong the saga. Indeed, should the Judge himself not call for them to be investigated, to clear the air, even though he has publicly rejected them? And if he does not, why not? What does that say, if anything? And what if those people – or Ford herself, indeed – bring a civil case against the Judge? How would that affect his ability to carry out his role?

Last but by no means least, the case has shown the American political system, and society in general, to be in an even more toxic state than everyone already knew it to be, if such a thing were possible.

American today looks more than ever like it did in the war-fuelled and conflicted era of 1968 and its surrounds. People simply seem unable to listen to one another, or to debate politely. They choose what to believe based on their political allegiance and not a careful review of known facts. In the world’s most significant liberal democracy, that is a matter of active danger, as people may give up on the model altogether in sheer frustration. Indeed, there are those that argue that the political classes are already preparing to do exactly that. A confluence of power and money is taking place which threatens to ride roughshod over institutions and process – and which is utterly uninterested in pesky little matters such as facts.

An unhappy time, in short.

You also deserve, Dear Reader, to know what we think.

In our view, the performance of the Judge in cross-questioning revealed him to be unfit to hold the highest level of judicial appointment in America, perhaps in the world, in its impact. Not because of his opinions – he’s entitled to those – but because of of how he chose to express them. But one can make excuses for his brutalistic performance, call it a one off, or argue we all might fail when under such scrutiny. All of which might be true. Or might not.

So to make our own judgement, fraught with incapacity and uncertainty, we will rely on one last piece of folk-wisdom, using an aphorism popular in our home of Australia.

When it seems impossible to be certain on the rights and wrongs of any given matter, ask yourself, “Does it pass the sniff test?”

Like a piece of meat lifted to quivering nostrils, does it “smell” fresh or tainted?

And to our nose, the Kavanaugh matter simply does not pass the sniff test.

But then again, we might be wrong.