Jews, Germany, and the Holocaust

I am Jewish, and I want to talk about the attitude of Jews toward Germany. Many Jews hold a very strong animus toward Germany because of the killing of millions of Jews during the Holocaust. Some Jews would not buy a Mercedes or fly Lufthansa or drink a German beer, if they could avoid it.

So I want to tell a little about what feelings I have come to have, where Jews, Germany, and the Holocaust are concerned.

I would never use the word "forgive" because, human nature being what it is, forgiveness surely is asking too much for anyone who has been closely touched by the Holocaust. (In the interest of disclosure, relatives of mine who were still in Europe at the time were killed, but I only heard about this from my mother and I did not know those people. On the other hand, I did know cousins who survived the concentration camps and still had their concentration camp numbers tattooed on their arms.)

I do believe, though, that I have heard some such as the famous writer and concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel say they can forgive but they can never forget.

For much of my life I just did not know how one should feel about Germany. By now, though, I have had a number of decades in which to form my thoughts.

First, killing of Jews, over the hundreds and thousands of years, was not a new idea conceived by the Nazis.

From pogroms in Russia in the late Czarist era, going back and back: country after country in Europe, where Jews dwelled, at one point turned anti-Semitic and expelled the Jews. In 1492—not coincidentally the same year that Columbus sailed because that was the year that Ferdinand and Isabella completed the Christian "reconquest" of Spain from the Islamic Moors—the Jews of Spain, who had for the most part enjoyed very favorable conditions under the Moorish rulers of Spain, were given an ultimatum: convert to Christianity or get out. Of course many did leave, very large numbers, the ancestors of all the world's Sephardic Jews. Some converted--sometimes not sincerely, thus becoming crypto-Jews or "Marranos" (literally 'pigs'). Some remained and then were tortured to death by the Inquisition.

During the Crusades, it was not uncommon for Crusaders, on their way to the Holy Land, to slaughter any Jews they happened to come upon along the way. All in the course of carrying out their holy mission as urged by the Pope.

During the plagues of the Middle Ages, the Jews often were blamed for causing the plagues. I happened to come across a letter from the bishop of one town to the bishop of another (one of them, if I recall, was in Switzerland), advising his clerical colleague to burn the town's Jews in order to keep the plague away.

(To digress a bit, that kind of thinking is not as outdated as we might hope. Witness the modern preachers who blamed Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans on that city's "sinfully" permissive attitudes toward gays, etc. And a right-wing member of the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) recently said that earthquakes in Israel were caused by homosexuals. Seems we never learn.)

So, over a thousand years and more, killing of Jews has gone on. The anti-Semitism and persecution of the Jews by the Nazis was nothing that new, and anti-Semitism could be found in France, England, Hungary, Bulgaria—well, everywhere. The Germans simply applied their characteristic thoroughness and efficiency, although to even say this certainly conjures up gruesome images.

So what is the attitude toward Germany that I have arrived at? I find it hard to believe that there can be such a thing as an intrinsic flaw in the German national character. Germany had been the most cultured and enlightened country in the world. (There was a TV drama about the experiences of a Jewish family in the 1930s as the storm clouds gathered around them. The wife said to her husband, "This can't be happening here. This is the country of Lessing [a playwright who preached tolerance in his play about a Jew, Nathan der Weise], Goethe, Beethoven." The husband replied, "Unfortunately, none of them is in power right now.")

So, Germany was okay before a certain time, and I'm willing to presume that now, after three generations—when few mid-century Nazis are still alive—that it's okay now. They have paid reparations to the Jews, they have erected monuments to Holocaust victims.

True, some of the Nazis directly involved, like concentration camp commanders, were monsters—and in a way, or on a scale, that boggles the mind. I prefer to think these few Germans were a minority. Other Germans risked their lives to save Jews—for example, Otto Schindler, about whom the movie, "Schindler's List," was made. A list is kept of "Righteous Gentiles" who helped save thousands of Jews, often at risk to their own lives. Four hundred fifty-five Germans are on this list* but it must be admitted that there are more individuals on the list from nine other countries.

There was also a very interesting story about a German woman who had to learn, only much later, in her adulthood, about her father and his role as a concentration camp commander. There was no loyalty to, or defense of, her father, but only revulsion, horror, and shame. (In this case, and even in the larger issue of how we feel toward the country, we might ask whether we agree with the stern edict in the Bible which says, "The sins of the father are visited upon the children.")

And there have been other examples of genocide in human history. Some meliorists believe that the human race has been evolving, but it's not clear to me that genocide has become less common in modern times. One example, on nearly the scale of the Nazi extermination of the Jews, is that the Turks, over three years starting in 1915, wiped out perhaps 1.5 million Armenians. More recently we've had genocide in Rwanda. And Stalin in the Soviet Union and Pol Pot in Cambodia killed hundreds of thousands of their own people.

Any nation, any group of people, has its good and bad eggs. For a variety of reasons, which I won't go into, it was easy for Nazi propaganda to stir up hatred against the Jews. (No, I do not think it was easy because the Germans were inherently more prone to such manipulation. View other postings on this blog which discuss the use of propaganda, and dehumanizing of "the other," to arouse hatred of an enemy.) I am not sure that it couldn't happen as well somewhere else, even here. We certainly have neo-Nazi hate groups here, today. Look at the Netherlands, often pointed to as a country that always remained hospitable toward the Jews during World War II. The other side of that is that the Dutch Nazi Party had 15,000 members—a small number, but it's a small country. And some fine, upstanding Dutch person turned in Anne Frank and her family.

So, I feel what is to be concluded is that the Germans are not somehow inherently flawed, nor any worse, as a group, than the general run of humans. However, I do not presume to tell anyone how they should think. You can't, really. This is only a summation of the point I have arrived at, after many years in which to think about this issue.
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* From Wikipedia: "Including Oskar Schindler, the businessman who saved over a thousand Jews by employing them in his factory, and Hans and Sophie Scholl, sibling members of the White Rose resistance movement, Captain Gustav Schroeder who commanded the "Voyage of the Damned", and German army officer Wilm Hosenfeld."

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein