So, I was in Germany about a year ago. I remember driving by a statute of Adolph “the Jew exterminator” Eichmann, right outside the main entrance to Heinrich Himmler Armeestützpunkt (Fort Himmler, military base). A couple of miles away, as we passed the Hitler Memorial, we turned left to pass the Hermann Göring Luftwaffenstützpunkt (Air Force Base). These political and military leaders were the best Germany had to offer in World War II, even as they lost the war. These testaments to Germany’s history rise above the enslavement, religious persecution and mass murder that we associate with WWII Germany. Except they don’t exist. Instead, there is nothing but shame in most of Germany over this brutal period where so many Germans chose to look the other way. That shame lingers… and the German government never wants its citizens, even those yet unborn, to forget that ugly past.
23 years after Germany’s surrender, the now young adult children – forced in public education to read about the horrors of concentration camps and mass extermination of Jews – asked a collective question of their parents and grandparents: “What did you do during the war, mother and father?” Parents stammered to answer, many heads hung low. It was time of rising protests all over the world, against the Vietnam War in the United States, elitism in parts of Europe and against the system that allowed Nazis to rise to power in Germany in the 1930s.
As we have seen so many times before, a violent incident often opens the floodgates of social anger… and so it was in the late 1960s in Germany. “It was the 1967 killing by police of a young activist during a demonstration in Berlin against a visit by the Shah of Iran that apparently persuaded Andreas Baader that the post-war authorities were little better than that which they had replaced… Vowing to mount a violent campaign, he started off in 1968 by detonating home-made bombs in two Frankfurt department stores.
“Arrested and imprisoned, he escaped in 1970 during a library visit with the help of a left-wing campaigning journalist - Ulrike Meinhof - and the Baader-Meinhof gang was firmly established in the public mind.” BBC.UK.co, 2/12/2007. The group later became known as the Red Army Faction, and a groundswell against traditionalism, conservative German values and capitalism exploded into street violence. The “1968 Movement.” Communism and socialism were seen as the opposite of the fascism that allowed Nazi’s to control Germany for those critical years. Essentially, an entire generation woke up to what their parents had perpetrated over two decades earlier… and were completely repulsed by what they learned. They simply rejected everything they thought their parents stood for. It was a startling awakening.
“Welcome to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, otherwise known as frequency illusion or recency illusion. This phenomenon occurs when the thing you've just noticed, experienced or been told about suddenly crops up constantly. It gives you the feeling that out of nowhere, pretty much everyone and their cousin are talking about the subject -- or that it is swiftly surrounding you. And you're not crazy; you are totally seeing it more. But the thing is, of course, that's because you're noticing it more.” HowStuffWorks.com. For those angry young Germans, it was realizing that their parents, one way or another, had enabled Adolph Hitler.
Over the years, as these Boomer generation youngsters got older, they did not follow the traditional pattern that applied to virtually every other nation on earth in dealing with atrocities. They did not sanitize their textbooks and downplay the horribles that Germany had implemented. They did not ignore the horribles of the past; they made damned sure every German child learned of the horrors. They were committed to “never again.”
Shortly after the turn of the new millennium, perhaps too young to remember the disgusting reality over half a century before, a neo-Nazi movement began in Germany. The Boomers-in-charge were horrified. After a neo-Nazi group attempted to assassinate a high-ranking police official in Bavaria (around Munich), in 2009 the district implemented a new mandatory change in the local public school curriculum. Here’s how it was carried in the press: “School children in the German district of Bavaria will be forced to visit Nazi extermination camps as part of their school curriculum, the London Times reported …
“According to the new program, school children will be obligated to visit a concentration and death camp at least once, and history classes will include trips to museums and archives that present Germany's Nazi past… The Bavarian students will likely visit the Dachau camp near Munich … The program will also include a state-funded project to encourage youngsters not to join extreme rightists groups.
The Bavarian Education Ministry believes that many youths are drawn to such groups and become members in them due to peer pressure.” YNetNews.com, 1/8/09. Today, such visits are compulsory for all German school children. Tough scrappy teenaged boys break down in tears all the time. But Germany will not let any rising generation forget. Oh, and Nazi flags and swastikas are actually illegal all over Europe and are considered deeply offensive as occassionally used by rising right-wing groups.
I guess you have figured out where this is going. Americans have long-since dismissed the mass murders, the lynchings, the Jim Crow laws and the notion of slavery that built much of the United States, including the White House itself. Too many Americans, many whose ancestors immigrated to the United States well after the Civil War, rail at the thought of collective guilt for the cruelty of US slavery. A favorite topic of such ultra-right-wing opinion-makers, like Rush Limbaugh. But as yet another recent spate of blue on black violence and the ensuing protests evidence, the vestiges of slavery, of second-class citizenship and the deep differentiation between the application of justice in so many jurisdictions between white and people of color remain astounding.
Children’s books (see above) and textbooks often depicted a gentle bucolic life for slaves… or simply gloss over that practice with a wildly inaccurate euphemism and/or a cursory summary. “Educational publisher McGraw-Hill said it will revise and reprint a geography textbook that refers to African slaves in America as ‘immigrants’ and ‘workers,’ after a complaint by the mother of a Texas high school freshman, reports KTRK-TV.” Los Angeles Times, 10/5/15. Typical.
No other country elevates those who have committed legions of atrocities with memorials, statutes, naming rights and other forms of nobility or glorification. The losing side in a brutal conflict. Just us. Confederate generals and political leaders. Notoriously cruel slave owners. Adopting the losing’s side symbol of the right to own slaves would seem an obviously unacceptable symbol in general use across the United States. It’s not nostalgia!
Yes, the Confederacy is a part of American history. And yes, the Nazi rule of Germany is equally a part of German history. And if so many of us are offended, particularly Jews, at the use of the swastika, often smeared by hatemongers across Jewish temples, how do you think the ancestors of slaves, ripped from their homes and brutalized into subhuman conditions, feel about the wide use of the Confederate flag and the proliferation of idolatry dedicated to those who battled for the right to continue to own and repress slaves? Remembering history or longing for a return to an era of unbridled and very legal white supremacy?
It’s not hard to understand why Germans are aghast as senior American political leaders continue to support racist practices and defend as “nostalgia” or “historical” what even Germans see as obviously deeply offensive symbols and memorials.
I’m Peter Dekom, and it shouldn’t take a genius to figure out which symbols and memorials are obviously offensive to substantial segments of society.
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