Final Account – My Attempt to Understand
This post will be different than normal but it is something I've been interested in since high school when I first learned about WWII. When I learned about the Nazis and their effort to exterminate the Jews, I was horrified. How can an entire nation descend into such atrocity? What propelled them to do this? How does everyday people cheer, support or turn a blind eye to the killing of a single race in concentration camps?
Background
Since high school I have read books on the subject: Albert Speer's (architect and Hitler's Minister of Armament and War Production) book which is not in production anymore, William Shirer's book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, several books on general WWII history, a book on the psychology of Hitler (which was pretty wild), a book on the war technique of firestorms Inferno, a book by a lady who grew up on Hitler's getaway mountain On Hilter's Mountain, a book on the last days of his regime Five Days that Shocked the World. None of them gave me any insight on the German people.
Only in the last few years have I found some that gave me an inkling of what was going on with everyday people, who drove the country off the rails because let's face it, Hitler could not have succeeded unless the people were willing participants. One was a book by Volker Ullrich, which I have to re-read before reading his part 2, but more importantly, the second book by Erik Larson In the Garden of Beasts. The following long snippet is what really crystallized my thinking:
“Nice days were still nice. ‘The sun shines,’ wrote Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin Stories, ‘and Hitler is the master of this city. The sun shines, and dozens of my friends…are in prison, possibly dead.’ The prevailing normalcy was seductive. ‘I catch sight of my face in the mirror of a shop, and am shocked to see that I am smiling,’ Isherwood wrote. ‘You can’t help smiling, in such beautiful weather.’ The trams moved as usual, as did the pedestrians passing on the street; everything around him had ‘an air of curious familiarity, of striking resemblance to something one remembers as normal and pleasant in the past – like a very good photograph.’
“Beneath the surface, however, Germany had undergone a rapid and sweeping revolution that reached deep into the fabric of daily life. It had occurred quietly and largely out of easy view. At its core was a government campaign called Gleichschaltung – meaning “coordination” – to bring citizens, government ministries, universities, and cultural and social institutions in line with National Socialist beliefs and attitudes.”
“ “Coordination” occurred with astonishing speed, even in the sectors of life not directly targeted by specific laws, as Germans willingly placed themselves under the sway of Nazi rule, a phenomenon that became known as Selbstgleichschaltung, or “self-coordination”. Change came to Germany so quickly and across such a wide front that German citizens who left the country for business or travel returned to find everything around them altered, as if they were characters in a horror movie who came back to find that people who once were their friends, clients, patients, and customers have become different in ways hard to discern. Gerda Laufer, a socialist, wrote that she felt ‘deeply shaken that people whom one regarded as friends, who were known for a long time, from one hour to the next transformed themselves.’ ”
In the Garden of Beasts, Erick Larson, 2011, p.56 (softcover).
Process of Socialization
The "coordination" process resonated with me because I have been thinking about the process of socialization, ever since I noticed how the dance community knew the unspoken rules on the dance floor. When two or three failed to conform to the general rules of behavior, it got me thinking on how we pick up cues on how to act. To fit in within a community we mimic the mores and belief system because the community around you is regarded as normal and nice. We grow up looking to our parents on how to behave and think and that blind adherence gets translated to the teachers when we enter schools, and finally translated to society in general. If you grow up in a society that practice cannibalism, then you will regard that practice as okay because that is all you know.
Maybe the only way out of that trap is by going to college (and maybe not even then) where you encounter different belief systems forcing you to consider things differently or where you are trained to think critically. College education doesn't always lead to that result because Richard Spencer, an avowed white nationalist and maybe a Nazi sympathizer, went to college.
A Film Documentary Recording the Perpetuators' Thoughts
What prompted this post is an article on the documentary called Final Account. The film is unique in that the movie records the words of the perpetuators rather than the words of the victims or the victims' descendants. Now some might not want to lend "respectability" to these people but I fear recording them may be the only way in which we can capture their thoughts and learn what drove them to go off the rails. Because it can happen again.
The article gave me only a teaser but consider this:
“Holland had spent several years interviewing hundreds of Germans who were in some way complicit in the Holocaust, from those whose homes neighboured the concentration camps to former members of the Waffen SS. The responses he captured ran the gamut from shame to denial to a ghastly kind of pride.”
“‘It became crystal clear they were lying’: the man who made Germans admit complicity in the Holocaust”, The Guardian, Dorian Lynskey, December 2, 2021.
"Ghastly pride". Sixty-five or seventy years later, some still had pride on what transpired in Germany during the '30s and '40s.
Another chilling line in the article that stopped me cold:
“There are many such indelible scenes in Final Account, all the more chilling for taking place in small-town living rooms on quiet afternoons: knobbled fingers fondly stroking old medals and Nazi insignia; eyes flashing with pride at belonging to the SS’s elite band of brothers; a croaking voice saying of Kristallnacht that “I didn’t feel any pity for the Jews”. Cutaways are used sparingly so that we can see whether the interviewees unapologetically meet the camera’s gaze or flinch and turn away. Some tremble on the precipice of acknowledging their guilt before retreating into denial or excuses.”
Ibid.
And finally:
“the reason for the film’s existence is clear. “I feel like the film has a spooky relevance to the times we’ve been living in, and how easy it is to be swept along by ideologies,””
Ibid.
A Sidebar on Age and Culpability
Today is 2021 and WWII ended in 1945, so about 76 years. For ease of calculations, I'll round to 75.
I imagine the age of adult is generally regarded to begin at 18 or maybe 16. So those who would have been 18 in 1945 would be 93 in 2020. Let's assume that age max out at 100 (although there are some who are above 100 but the percentages become vanishingly small). So, if one is 100 in 2020, then the age would be 25 in 1945.
I ask about age because I also ask about at what age does one become culpable for one's actions. Obviously, a 6-year-old will not be regarded as culpable as a 25-year-old because he doesn't have agency. The 18-year-old resides in the gray area in my mind - he is just starting his journey into adulthood.
Now tack onto that another layer where one could essentially say the people were indoctrinated during the 12 years Hitler was in power. He ascended power in 1933 and committed suicide in 1945. The 18-year-old would have been 6 and the 25-year-old would have been 13 - prime years for indoctrination. Now, are they still as culpable?
In my mind, a 15-year-old should already know that killing someone is bad; just look at the Ethan Crumbley of today who recently brought a gun to school and proceeded to gun down 4 students and injure at least 7 others. He's been charged with a crime because our society regards students at that age should know that killing someone is a crime. It is just not done.
But what if he came from a society that says "Eh, no big deal" to such killings? Far-fetched but think about those societies that had cannibalism. Supposed our society or the German society was similar to cannibalistic society? Would that be an extenuating circumstance? Would that kind of strong socialization be an extenuating factor? I don't know. The article doesn't say what kind of atrocious acts the interviewees did or whether they did the actual killing or just resided in the town next to the concentration camps.
And then tack on top of that the consideration that males are not mature until age 25.
All of this is troubling because the circumstances would require those under 25 to be able to withstand the socialization and recognize the depravity of the acts of Nazism. Think about the Brett Kavanaugh's case a few years back when he was accused of sexually harassing a girl his age as a senior year student. He came from an era that, while harassment was frowned upon, the harassment was probably widespread and thought of as boys will be boys. The movies of that era kind of imply that. Today, he is a Supreme Court judge - he got confirmed despite the harassment claims (the claims were not affirmatively proven to have occurred).
Relevance to today?
When I read all of those books trying to understand how the Germans went off the rail, I was also trying to figure out what I would need to do to safeguard should I find myself in a similar environment. Never did I think I would really have to worry about that, but I did think about it. Well, it seemed like the last few years were kind of similar to Germany in the '30s. Some of those who lived in Germany at that time and were old enough to remember reported that the current times felt very similar to Germany in the '30s.
We are currently undergoing increasing violence and increasing criminal activity from the "smash and grab" robberies during this Christmas season to the death threats to election officials and to the increasing violence directed at school boards. An author wrote about his theory about the "smash and grab" robberies: normal people seeing the elite, wealthy, and powerful getting away with their crimes and thinking that everybody does it now.
We have lots of people quitting their jobs. Inflation appears to be raging. We have what appears to be an unbridgeable political divide that has seeped down into the state levels. A new covid variant is on the horizon and spreading. Tension appears to be rising.
And climate change continues unabated.
The next few years are going to be rough. Do people keep on the "coo coo for cocoa puffs" train or do they come back to sanity? We have real problems that need addressing so people need to come back to reality. Please come back.
You must be logged in to post a comment.