WW2 Relevance

|   9 February 2011

How nice are Doctors?

How easily can Doctors be corrupted?

We’ve just added onto the site for subscribers the testimony of Ken Yuasa who was a military doctor serving in the Japanese Imperial Army in China during the war. He describes in horrifying detail the medical experiments which Japanese doctors conducted on innocent Chinese civilians. He witnessed, for example, two Chinese men being shot and then operated on – without any anaesthetic – in an attempt to take out the bullets under ‘field conditions’.

But the corruption of doctors didn’t just occur in Japan during WW2. In the Soviet Union and Germany doctors also threw away any compassionate principles they may have possessed and did the bidding of their masters. And they not only ‘followed orders’ – in many cases they relished the new opportunities for ‘research’ that these totalitarian regimes offered. At Auschwitz, for instance, Dr Mengele pursued his own research into genetics by torturing children, and Dr Clauberg performed hideous experiments on women in order to develop new methods of sterilization.

And what’s important to understand is that few of these doctors showed any signs of their capacity to commit these crimes before the opportunity was offered to them. Almost certainly, if the regimes concerned had not given them the chance to do these things then they would have remained ‘normal’ doctors.

As I wrote in ‘Their Darkest Hour’, ‘we like to think that doctors are somehow different from the rest of us; that they are selflessly devoted to our care; that the Hippocratic oath they swore ‘not to harm anyone’ actually means something. But what the history of doctors like Ken Yuasa demonstrates is how easily large numbers of them in Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union were corrupted.’

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WW2 Relevance

|   12 January 2011

Violent rhetoric and physical violence

Tucson, Arizona

There is a relationship between violent political rhetoric and physical violence. Anyone who has studied the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis is aware of that. Which is why I’m puzzled, in the light of the debate going on in America at the minute after the tragic shootings in Arizona, that this basic – obvious – relationship is somehow in doubt.

I guess what is really being disputed are the facts of this particular case. Sarah Palin and her ‘tea party’ colleagues dispute that their rhetoric influenced the killer who murdered six people at Democratic Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords’ political meeting in Tucson last weekend. They might be right – they might be wrong. We don’t know yet.

But there is surely no doubt that a recent previous attack on Congresswoman Giffords’ office in Tucson, perpetrated just hours after the vote on health reform, was politically motivated. Nor is there any doubt about the violent gun-related rhetoric Sarah Palin uses to conduct her politics. She, for example, proselytizes a motto she says she gained from her father: ‘don’t retreat, reload’; and she published a list of districts she wanted to unseat Democrats from with the targeted area highlighted under a telescopic gunsight – this list of districts included that of Congresswoman Giffords, who is today fighting for her life after the shooting. (The idea, pushed by one of Palin’s aides after the shooting in Arizona that these were not gunsights but ‘surveyor’s symbols’ would be laughable if this were not so serious.)

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WW2 Relevance

|   22 December 2010

The Fragility around us.

Wells-next-the-sea, Norfolk. A two day drive from London

Last Saturday I left London to drive with my family to my in-laws’ cottage in north Norfolk, at the lovely sea-side village of Wells-next-the-sea.

Not exactly earth shattering news, I know. Except that this trip, which normally takes about three hours, actually took us the best part of two days. As we left, late on Saturday morning, heavy snow began to fall. Now, I have been fortunate enough to visit northern Norway and central Siberia, so I can tell you that this snowfall was scarcely spectacular. But it was sufficient to destroy crucial parts of the infrastructure of London. We reached the first service station on the M1 motorway, still within the M25, the orbital motorway around London, after over three hours driving – a journey of little more than a dozen miles.

At the service station cars were stuck in the snow or trying desperately to re-join the virtually static motorway as night fell. Inside the service station there were long queues for food and – scarcely believable I know – I thought I detected signs of panic buying. We ended up having to stay at the hotel at the service station before carrying on next day in conditions which were little better.

I mention all this because it was evidence, in front of my eyes, of the absolute fragility of our society, even our lives – something which countless veterans of the Second World War have told me about, and which is almost impossible to believe when everything seems stable. ‘Honestly, you can’t credit it, today,’ one Hungarian Jewish deportee to Auschwitz told me, ‘but one moment everything seemed safe and comfortable and the next it was as if we had entered Hell. We were shoved into a temporary ghetto, appallingly mistreated and then crammed onto a train to Auschwitz. It was so sudden. It didn’t seem possible that it was happening….’

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WW2 Relevance

|   6 December 2010

Why bother knowing this history?

The coastline of what was East Prussia and is now Poland.

A friend said to me the other day, after a convivial evening: ‘What is it with you? Why spend your time on World War Two and Nazis? Why don’t you move on to something useful!’

‘Well,’ I replied. ‘Because I think it is useful thinking about this history. I’ve certainly altered my views about life as a result.’

‘Come off it,’ he said. ‘Name one way you’ve changed as a result of studying all this stuff from the past.’

And so I told him about a German I met some years ago who had spent the early part of 1945 waiting for the Red Army to enter his village on the coastline of East Prussia (now part of Poland). He was still at school, and yet had been drafted into the local defence unit. But when the Soviets arrived his resistance didn’t last long and they managed to capture him.

I’d been wanting to interview him about his experiences as a fanatical teenage Nazi – and he had some fascinating insights into all that – but it turned out that his personal history after the fall of Nazism was even more intriguing. Because immediately after being captured by the Red Army, he said the ‘scales had instantly fallen from his eyes’ and he had realized the evil of Nazism and the purity of Communism. So he’d joined the Party and risen to become the Communist Mayor of his local town – now a fanatical Marxist. But just a few years before I met him, East Germany had been re-united with West Germany and the Communists had gone. At which point, he said, he had experienced another sudden epiphany. Now he realized that Communism was tragically flawed and that Capitalism was the answer. As a result, when I met him, he was one of the richest businessmen in town.

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WW2 Relevance

|   19 November 2010

Does it matter who becomes King or Queen?

We have no say over who wears the crown. Does it matter?

Looking at the interview this week with Prince William and Kate Middleton I thought two things. The first was – what a perfectly nice young couple. The other was – this perfectly nice young couple will become King and Queen one day, and not one citizen of the United Kingdom will ever have had any say about it.

But does it matter? After all, many years ago, when I was taught the history of the British Constitution, I was told that the great advantage of an unelected Head of State was not so much the power they possessed as the ‘power they denied others’ as a result of their presence. Trouble is, a study of the relationship between one British monarch and the Nazis has made me think that my teachers were somewhat naive about the nature of power. In fact, it can matter a huge amount who is King or Queen.

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WW2 Relevance

|   12 November 2010

Burma, Britain and Betrayal

Burma – or Myanmar as it is called today. A place with a terrible history.

The welcome news today that Aung San Suu Kyi, the elected leader of Burma (or Myanmar as it was renamed) may be shortly released from house arrest, does little, unfortunately, to make one think that the appalling crew of gangsters currently running the country will finally bow to the will of the people and place her in power. But, to some extent, the horror of what is happening in Burma today has its roots in the Second World War – and the actions of the British.

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WW2 Relevance

|   26 October 2010

Selected news, selected history

Paris last week – distinctly lacking in violence and chaos….

I was in Paris for a few days at the end of last week. But I almost didn’t go, because the newspapers and TV news were full of reports about the mass strikes in France, held in protest at the proposed changes in the retirement age.

If you watched the news or read the papers you would have thought that pretty much the whole country was in flames. Which meant that I was shocked to emerge from Charles De Gaulle airport to discover something wholly surprising – calm. My taxi driver, as he drove me into the centre of Paris, told me that that he’d had to queue at a petrol station for diesel, but that was about the only inconvenience he’d faced. And in the whole time that I was in the French capital there was no sign of any disturbance.

Which isn’t to say that the media were making stuff up. There were strikes, and there were other instances of civil disturbance. It’s just that this was certainly not the norm. And the message I had taken from watching and reading about what was happening in France was that it was.

And that’s my point. Not just that news reporting is by definition selective, but that we select for ourselves the most relevant bits from a message that someone else has previously selected.

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WW2 Relevance

|   19 October 2010

Resistance to Hitler

Hitler’s bunker at the Wolf’s Lair in wartime East Prussia.

In Berlin, in the early evening of 20 July 1944, Ludwig Beck, one of the leading conspirators in the plot against Hitler, posed a vital question to a fellow conspirator, General Friedrich Olbricht.

Would the sentries who guarded their resistance headquarters be prepared to fight against the Gestapo when they appeared? Crucially, would they be prepared to die for Olbricht?

Olbricht replied that he was unsure.

It was a dramatic moment in the conspiracy, and one that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. The problem Beck and his fellow conspirators faced was that they didn’t know whether Stauffenberg had managed to kill Hitler at his Headquarters at the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia earlier that day. Reports differed. Some said Hitler was dead, others that the bomb Stauffenberg had planted had merely injured the German leader. And so, in the shadow of this uncertainty, Beck tried to hold the conspiracy together. It mattered not whether Hitler lived, he said, the time had come to fight back regardless. The only trouble was that many of his fellow conspirators didn’t see the situation in such black and white terms.

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WW2 Relevance

|   4 October 2010

Over sexed and over here.

How can we calculate the cultural impact of the Americans on Britain in WW2?

We’ve just added onto the site for subscribers the testimony of Tess Stevens who married an American serviceman she met during WW2 and subsequently moved to the United States. She is also part of a video we’re making about GI Brides that will also be added to the site in the next few months.

What’s fascinating, in particular, about Tess’s story is that it doesn’t conform to the popular myth – that of a young British girl who moves to the USA and finds love and then happiness through marriage to a GI. In fact, it is a tougher story altogether, and one which shows just how remarkable and impressive a women Tess really is.

The latest research on the American impact on Britain during WW2 – and in particular the consequence for British womenfolk of so many available men arriving in Britain from 1942 onwards – shows that, if anything, the effect of this ‘friendly invasion’ has been underestimated. The fact that in Britain there were tens of thousands of illegitimate children fathered by Americans during the war tells its own story. As does the joke of the time that the Americans were ‘drinking British pubs dry, but filling up the nurseries.’

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WW2 Relevance

|   16 September 2010

The Barrier of Death.

Who can imagine their own death?

We’ve just been interviewing a variety of veterans for the site, and I’ve been struck again by the fundamental problem I have faced in the last 20 years of research into this subject.

Not the difficulty of convincing former Nazis to talk, or the time consuming task of checking that interviewees are actually who they say they are. Difficult as those tasks can be, they are all surmountable. But there’s a much bigger conceptual challenge that lurks behind all of this. Which is that we cannot interview the dead.

Yes, I know that’s a truism. But it represents a tremendous barrier to our understanding of the experience of war. I’ve met and interviewed, for example, survivors from the Nazi extermination centres of Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka. But I have never met an individual sent to any of those camps who had the ‘normal’ and ‘average’ experience – because the majority of people the Nazis sent to those camps were murdered. What that means is that we are denied a personal insight into what, in a way, is the fundamental horror the Nazis created – the last moments in the gas chamber. We also, and this worries me more, can sometimes create an impression, by interviewing survivors, that if the viewers were to be in a similar situation then they too would survive – when they almost certainly wouldn’t.

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