"I, as the son of a perpetrator, am not allowed to let this pass."

July 24, 2024 7:18 AM

My family and other Nazis.

An edited version of the Krzysztof Michalski Memorial Lecture, given at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna in June 2024 by Austrian writer Martin Pollack, author of The Dead Man in the Bunker.

posted by rory (26 comments total)

I didn't want to give too much away when this article hooks you from the first few sentences:

My family were all Nazis. My grandfather and grandmother. My mother and my father. My stepfather, my uncle – literally all of them were hardcore Nazis during the second world war. And after? Not a single one changed their convictions or voiced any regrets for the Nazi crimes. On the contrary, they denied or justified them.
posted by rory at 7:55 AM on July 24 [17 favorites]

I also read this piece. It's really good. I'm reminded that it's mostly the post-war generation, the children of Nazis, who encouraged and enabled Vergangenheitsbewältigung and the coming to terms with the past that has helped to characterise Germany from the 1970s. My understanding is that the position in Austria has always been quite different.
posted by plonkee at 7:57 AM on July 24 [9 favorites]

Back in the early 1990s, the teenage daughter of one of my wife's co-workers spent time as an exchange student in Germany, and her hosts were an old couple. She talked about how they kept a shrine to Hitler in their house, including the husband's SS-Waffen helmet, and spoke to her at great length about how they believed the Nazis would return and prevail.
posted by briank at 8:35 AM on July 24 [8 favorites]

Old comment of mine about my own family's experiences with this. Chiefly: minimum survivable compliance, and, afterwards, teaching their kids and grandkids to passionately hate fascism and racism. Which is probably the reason that the rest of my family - as they all remain deeply religious evangelical fundamentalists stuck on abortion - are among the last of the GOP's dedicated Never Trumpers.

My grandmother who actually lived through the fall of Nazi Germany in her tweens is (myself aside) the exception: she has shifted passionately center-left / mainline Democrat over the course of the Trump administration and this has solidified as the details of the various criminal cases against Trump unspooled. To her, the common Hitler-Trump behavioral pattern is obvious. She likely won't be with us much longer - another year? Two? - but she's still here, still razor sharp mentally and very excited to vote for Harris if she's physically able to come November.
posted by Ryvar at 9:07 AM on July 24 [56 favorites]

Why do people turn so easily from being “ordinary men”, as the historian Christopher Browning describes them, into ruthless murderers, convinced that they are doing the right thing, and that they are serving a just cause? The historical record shows that when the state sanctions murder against minorities, people are more likely to perpetrate violence.

QFT
posted by chavenet at 9:38 AM on July 24 [14 favorites]

A part of my family didn't leave Germany and immigrate to the US until after the war. While I don't think they were Nazis, their pride and love for their home country didn't leave any room for nuance and as a result some of their American-born boomer children became very Nazi-curious if not sympathetic. One of the few times I ever spoke with my cousin in the mid 1990s, he was complaining that the removal of WW2-era war memorials in Germany was erasing his ancestors and how oppressed he feels as someone of German descent.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 9:47 AM on July 24 [1 favorite]

Sounds like public memory of Nazism in Austria is a lot like public memory of slavery or Native American genocide in the US. Don't bother us, we don't want to think about it, it wasn't our fault.

There's a lot more there there, but that bit jumped out at me as I was reading.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:49 AM on July 24 [10 favorites]

If you want to listen to the whole lecture, here is a Link (YouTube)
Martin Pollack is an impressive person, and what he did and does takes a lot of courage here in Austria.
posted by 15L06 at 9:53 AM on July 24 [12 favorites]

Why do people turn so easily from being “ordinary men”, as the historian Christopher Browning describes them, into ruthless murderers, convinced that they are doing the right thing, and that they are serving a just cause? The historical record shows that when the state sanctions murder against minorities, people are more likely to perpetrate violence.

QFT

And yet the whole explanation cannot be that, or at least the inclusion of "against minorities" is misleading. Consider the Great Terror, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, the Killing Fields. Atrocious behavior against your own countrymen, even to the point of megadeaths, does not need racist animosity to drive it.

State sanction of violence period is enough to do the trick. Or State recruitment of freelancer civilians to share in the State's monopoly on deadly force, to look at it another way. At any rate I think "ordinary men" is doing an awful lot of work in the quoted question. We who have grown up rich and at peace might have a distorted notion of what "ordinary men" will do, depending on circumstance.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:56 AM on July 24 [18 favorites]

I had a college prof whose parents were Nazis (not from Austria, but from Berlin). In private conversation with me he said that after the war, Germany should have been razed to the ground and the earth salted so that nothing would grow there again. He was not being metaphoric.

There's a lot there. He grew up in the early 1950's playing in the rubble of bombed out buildings. None of the kids really understood it, but he said there was a pervasive but undefinable feeling of wrongness. In the third grade they took the children into the auditorium and showed them a graphic documentary about the death camps, and then took them back to class -- it was never discussed. Quite the mundfuck.

For those who are interested, a novel that he and others recommended to me, written during and about this time in post-war Germany is "Billiards at Half Past Nine," by Heinrich Böll. I pass that recommendation on to you. It's a hell of a book.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 10:14 AM on July 24 [22 favorites]

I remember reading an NYT piece back when Trump took office: I Loved My Grandmother. But She Was a Nazi.

I thought the tone of this was going to be more like that. But the cases are different. For the grandmother:

My grandmother [...] was not, as I knew her, xenophobic or anti-Semitic; she did not seem temperamentally suited to hate. [...] They joined the Nazi Party to be youth leaders in an agricultural education program called the Landjahr, or “year on the land,” in which teenagers got agricultural training. [...] “We didn’t know” was a kind of mantra for her on the long walks we took

For Martin Pollack's father:

[H]e had been an officer of the SS and a leading member of the Gestapo [...] He was sent with his men into the city, heavily armed and in civilian clothes, to liquidate, as he put it himself, whoever they came across

I'm thinking about the differences and similarities now. About how the one enables the other. About how in every country the soldiers are more violent than the teenage girls, but they're part of the same society, and need each other, in some sense. About how different it might be to come to terms with a loved one having played one role vs the other. And about the difference between a grandmother you knew and a father you didn't.

I don't know. I don't have any conclusions. But my own Trumpist family members are more similar to the grandmother. Though I do have some cousins, young men or middle aged, who I could imagine finding themselves in the latter role if our society went just a little bit more that direction. Should I feel angry at them even though they haven't done anything (yet)? Should I feel sorry for them? What's my role? Is there anything I can do to prevent them from becoming what Martin Pollack's father became?
posted by OnceUponATime at 10:22 AM on July 24 [4 favorites]

I'm reminded that it's mostly the post-war generation, the children of Nazis, who encouraged and enabled Vergangenheitsbewältigung and the coming to terms with the past

The film The Nasty Girl is an example of how this did (or didn't) work out. Based on a real person.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 11:40 AM on July 24 [6 favorites]

Just to note that the Germania student group is still active.
posted by misterpatrick at 11:45 AM on July 24

The German side of my family, which was really only my Dad by the time I was old enough to even understand this sort of thing, never really talked all that much about what they were doing in the war. And he was pretty young in the war -- 13 when it ended -- so his understanding may never have been all that clear in the first place.

Anything I ever heard was really vague and I have no idea how much of my understanding of their situation was based on actual truth and how much of it was based on wishful thinking that my family would not have done bad things. But I learned relatively recently that the area where they were living was deliberately settled by staunch German nationalists who supported and carried out the persecution of the Polish population in the region even before WWII. That tends to really put a damper on plausible deniability.
posted by jacquilynne at 12:27 PM on July 24

In the third grade they took the children into the auditorium and showed them a graphic documentary about the death camps, and then took them back to class -- it was never discussed. Quite the mundfuck.

For what it’s worth this was the exact same age myself, my siblings and my cousins (so: our entire clan’s second gen) were shown documentaries of the concentration camps by my grandparents. And we most certainly did discuss it at length afterwards. That’s why I know that towards the end of the war my paternal great-grandfathers were - like my great uncles - in the Wehrmacht in backline support roles (eg weather reporting for the Luftwaffe’s London bombing campaign). Whether or not any of them participated in some of the Wehrmacht’s supporting roles in the Holocaust (guarding the trains, etc) isn’t known. Most of them did not survive the eastern front AFAIA.
posted by Ryvar at 1:00 PM on July 24 [1 favorite]

This is tangential but appropriate, I think. The Stolpersteine project is still controversial. I can understand the objection that general traffic and detritus that these memorials are subject to can be considered disrespectful. But some of the objections are of the "let's all move on" variety and I find them problematic. I am deeply moved by the ones that mark the last German home of my great-grandmother and her brothers in Schöningen. Given, as Mr Pollack notes, that many victims died anonymously, the Stolpersteine are reminders that real people lived in those houses and were forcibly removed.
posted by angiep at 2:02 PM on July 24 [11 favorites]

angiep, I saw stolpersteine in Regensburg a few years back and the tour group I was with passed the hat around to donate to the project. Thanks for the wikipedia article, I hadn't heard about that absolutely vile old saying and glad that makes it even more of a "fuck you" to people who want to bury history.
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 2:43 PM on July 24 [1 favorite]

Reference to Graz rang a bell with me. I was at university in the mid 1980s and remember one of my fellow students who was doing a degree that included a year spent in Germany -well, Austria, as it happened, and Graz in particular. There was nothing unusual about her in terms of her appearance in Britain - she wore flowing hippie skirts and had long henna'ed hair - but I remember her saying when she got back that it was the sort of town that had seemingly been bypassed by the modern era. People would stop talking and stare at her in the street when she walked past them and children would run after her - just because she looked different to the rest of the community. And like I said that would have been around 1987 or so.
posted by Martha My Dear Prudence at 3:22 PM on July 24 [2 favorites]

this was hard to read. thanks for posting
posted by HearHere at 4:21 PM on July 24 [3 favorites]

In the mid 1970s, when I was 12 or 13, my father, a WWII vet and survivor of the Italian campaign, took a job with a German firm. My parents, younger brother and I went to live in Heidelberg for a few months. My family was kind of messed up and my father had never really recovered from the war - undiagnosed PTSD, it's a thing, when you combine it with some other things life gets super interesting - and he hated Germans. Living in Germany was not kind to him nor, by extension, to any of us. I remember a lot, but germane to this article, two incidents stand out:

I overheard him shouting at my mother one evening. He was probably at least a little drunk, neither of these things were at all unusual, but for once he wasn't yelling AT my mother but instead about the Germans he was working with. "They're my goddamn age," he said, "But they all say they were too young to be in the war, oh no, they were out working on their uncle's farm and they didn't know anything about it. Liars! Liars and crooks and goddamn Nazi bastards!" I paraphrase. I'm sure there was more cursing.

My mother took me and my younger brother on a lot of historical tours while we were there - castles and manor houses and even a trip down the Rhine. On one guided tour of some castle or another, the guide began complaining about how the building had been damaged by Allied bombs. My gentle mother, who never did anything to call attention to herself, who was always very conscious of her appearance and how things looked to others, took us by the hands, turned around and walked out. She was shaking with fury. "Why does he think the Allied troops were bombing them?" she said loudly as we marched to the door. "We didn't start that war. How DARE he say such a thing. They should have bombed the entire town to the ground."
posted by mygothlaundry at 4:34 PM on July 24 [20 favorites]

Folks in this thread may already be familiar with Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free, which recently spent too long on my bedside table unread because of its similarities to the article above. When I finally read it, the explication of Nazism as a commonplace belief clarified quite a bit for me. I knew in the abstract that beliefs are contingent, but unpacking the Absolute Evil of the Third Reich in those terms was something I felt was off limits. There are the obvious parallels, of course, and understanding context doesn't mean condoning or forgiving reprehensible behavior, whether it occurred then or now. The book is insightful about subjectivity amidst the rise of fascism.

What I found interesting about Mayer's work is that he was a journalist recruited by the Frankfurt School to look at Nazism through a lens sympathetic to their project. Horkheimer brought him into a professorship and he and Adorno advised on the methodology, even refining interview questions posed to the Nazis Mayer interviewed. They distanced themselves from Mayer when he took heat for expressing what was considered a sympathetic view of Nazisim.

Mayer sought to connect with the "average German" under Nazism. He chose a village (again, under Horkheimer's guidance) that happened to be a bit of a Nazi hotbed, and so maybe failed in this regard. Nevertheless, the lessons hold.

The last thing I'll say about it is that it's exceedingly well written. He did a fun thing of serving up an aphorism that seems plausible in the flow of his argument--some generalization about Germans, for example--then twisting it into new shapes and unexpected meanings. It's journalistic but punches above its weight.

At any rate, it's a good complement to Pollak's work.
posted by criticalyeast at 6:25 PM on July 24 [7 favorites]

If any of you here have yet to see The Zone of Interest, I strongly encourage--even beg--you to. It might be the greatest visual statement about the banality of evil ever made. And for a movie about Auschwitz, you needn't hesitate for fear that it would be too violent; all is out of frame, though not out of earshot. It's a kind of double movie, an ordinary family drama unfolding against what we already know is one of the worst crimes of history. Anyway, it's tremendous. And very relevant to the subject of the thread.
posted by jokeefe at 7:50 PM on July 24 [8 favorites]

Aardvark Cheeselog, the Killing Fields at least were driven partly by racism. Cambodia has always been multi ethnic with substantial minority populations and during the KR era, those minorities were specifically targeted for mass murder. There continues to be significant racism driven politics in Cambodia. I don’t know about the other examples cited, but Germany doesn’t have a monopoly on blood purity as a political drive for sure.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 11:32 PM on July 24 [3 favorites]

State sanctioning of violence + othering
posted by bq at 5:38 AM on July 25 [1 favorite]

@dorothyisunderwood, the Great Terror had its antisemitic elements, and while I know little about the postwar Chinese State terror, I expect there was ethnic score-settling there also.

Which does not change the fact that none of these megadeath events was primarily driven by ethnic hatred. I don't see any need to re-examine my assertion: Atrocious behavior against your own countrymen, even to the point of megadeaths, does not need racist animosity to drive it.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 6:23 AM on July 25

How about "Race and ethnicity are socially constructed, and can be constructed in such a way as to justify violence when people are looking for reasons to justify violence?"

Chris Hedges got sucked into Putin-propaganda, sadly. But I will always appreciate his description, in "War is a Force That Gives us Meaning" of how tiny differences among people who had considered themselves to be part of the same social groups got exaggerated into meaningful ethnic identities in the lead up to the war in the former Yugoslavia. People sorting themselves into "us" and "them" based on the tiniest signifiers.

Or think about the origin of the word "shibboleth."

Do the ethnic identities give rise to the hatred? Or does the hatred end up defining the ethnic identities? Or is it a vicious circle?
posted by OnceUponATime at 7:26 AM on July 25 [1 favorite]