WW2 Relevance

|   26 August 2010

Reacting to History

As I suspected it would, the reaction of the popular press this summer to the anniversary of the Battle of Britain has been jingo-istic to the point, occasionally, of parody. This, as I wrote earlier on this blog (and also in the September edition of BBC History magazine), has not necessarily been helpful to an understanding of the real significance of the Battle of Britain in the history of WW2.

But it is a natural reaction. Everyone is proud of the ‘good’ bits of their own history – even sometimes to the point of omitting anything inconvenient that doesn’t fit the myth.

This is part of a broader problem that we often ignore. Indeed, I have had a great deal of personal experience over the last twenty years of how people can operate different standards of judgment depending on what they were predisposed to think about a particular historical subject. Let me give you an example. In 1991 I wrote and produced a film which looked at what I believe was a ‘British’ war crime committed in Austria during WW2. It was called ‘a British Betrayal’, and examined the handover by the British army of Cossack and Yugoslav prisoners to Stalin and Tito in 1945. Many of these prisoners then suffered appallingly – a number were tortured and killed. And the British Army give up these prisoners illegally – acting against Allied policy. I still think this was scandalous.

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WW2 Relevance

|   19 August 2010

No First World War – No Second World War

The WWI cemetery at Verdun.

Newspapers here in Britain are full of articles about 1940 and the various 70th anniversaries that fall this year. But what almost no one seems to emphasise is how the Second World War – including the key events of 1940 – existed in the shadow of the First World War. The anxieties of the German General Staff, for instance, just before the invasion of France in 1940 were largely the result of fear of a repeat of the trench warfare in Flanders.

Indeed, one of the most important insights I gained from meeting many former Nazis over the last twenty years is that it’s almost impossible to over-exaggerate the importance the First World War played in shaping the Second. Not just in the obvious way – the defeat of Germany and the perceived injustice of the Treaty of Versailles – but in an emotional, visceral way.

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WW2 Relevance

|   29 July 2010

Concentration Camps and Extermination Camps

Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria.

I was recently asked  what I thought was the single greatest confusion in the public consciousness about the Nazis and their policy of oppression.

Not, I admit, a question that I am often asked. But, as it happened, it was one for which I had a ready answer, because I have thought for a long time that a huge amount of confusion is caused because of the difference between a Nazi concentration camp (in German ‘Konzentrationslager’) and a Nazi death camp (in German ‘Vernichtungslager’).

I remember that when I first visited Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria – some twenty years ago now – I overheard an English tourist remark that she thought it ‘terrible, since Dachau opened in 1933, that people didn’t stop the Nazis murdering Jews in the camp from that very moment’. And then, only a couple of years ago, a high school student I met at the Holocaust museum in Washington asked me: ‘since concentration camps appeared in Germany almost from the moment Hitler came to power, why hadn’t the Holocaust been stopped right there and then!’

It’s a profound misunderstanding, of course, to think that a ‘concentration camp’ and an ‘extermination camp’ were the same. Concentration camps like Dachau were indeed established in Germany very early on during Hitler’s rule, but they were not built to kill the Jews. Whilst some Jews were sent there, as were Gypsies and other at risk categories in the Nazi state, these camps were primarily established to imprison the Nazis’ political opponents and the majority of inmates were released after a stay of anything from a few months to a few years.  Conditions in the concentration camps were appalling – torture and other forms of mistreatment were commonplace – and a number of people were killed, with the SS sometimes pretending they died whilst ‘trying to escape’ – but this was not the norm. These concentration camps were conceived not as extermination centres but as places of oppression. As such the Nazis wanted people to know that they existed. The concentration camp of Buchenwald, for example, was built on a hillside, directly overlooking the city of Weimar.

Extermination camps, on the other hand, only came into existence during the war and were all situated in Nazi occupied Poland. Places like Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were in remote areas and only had one purpose – the murder of the Jews. 99% of people who arrived at these camps were dead within a few hours.

Part of the confusion about the two types of camp is caused because the biggest camp of all – Auschwitz – was both a concentration and an extermination camp. It opened in 1940 as an even nastier version of a pre-war concentration camp (Rudolph Hoess, the SS commandant had trained at Dachau) and then subsequently developed into a place of extermination as well.

But I also believe there is another reason why so many people confuse these two types of camps. I often think that it is easier for some people to try and comprehend the horror of the Holocaust by imagining that Hitler and the Nazis always had a ‘blueprint’ for the mass murder of millions, and that they implemented a policy of mass murder from the very start of their rule in 1933. That way it is possible to dismiss the perpetrators as inhuman monsters. It makes the crime easier both to understand and – in a way – dismiss. Because since the perpetrators were so obviously evil and insane then something similar would be simple to spot if it was ever about to happen again.

The history wasn’t like that at all, of course. I’ve met many Germans who approved of concentration camps during the 1930s. They thought – mistakenly – that these camps were kind of tough ‘short sharp shock’ centres for ‘curing’ anti-social elements in society. But I certainly haven’t met many Germans who lived through this period who ‘approved’ of extermination camps.

But – via a long and winding road – one type of camp led to the other.

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WW2 Relevance

|   18 May 2010

How do revolutions start?

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Bangkok – serene no more

The desperate events that are happening now in Bangkok fill me with profound gloom.

I have been in love with Thailand since I first visited the country twenty five years ago. My family and I go there on holiday whenever we can. In my experience the people are wonderful, the food and hotels are both inexpensive and high quality, the Buddhist culture wholly admirable and the atmosphere serene.  Which shows you just how wrong a tourist can be – since the place is clearly not the least bit serene today. The idea that soldiers are firing live ammunition at protesters near the Dusit Thani Hotel – where my family and I ate seafood in complete calm just a few months ago – just doesn’t compute.

Clearly the anger of Thailand’s poor and dispossessed cannot now be suppressed without social change or violent oppression. Like many countries, Thailand is a country of two halves – the relatively rich south (especially the capital, Bangkok) and the comparatively poor north (especially the north east). In the north east I have seen people living off roasted insects. That’s a long way from the tiger prawns of the Dusit Thani.

But events in Thailand have also made me think again about a question that has been in my mind almost as long as my love of Thailand. Which is, when you see the power of street protest, why was there so little open revolt in Nazi Germany? Of course, one obvious answer which many people immediately think of is terror – Nazi Germany was a ruthless dictatorship, Thailand is a democracy (well, of sorts, that’s part of the problem). But, actually, that explanation doesn’t really work. Just think of the mass street protests in 2007 in Burma (which is governed by a hideous dictatorship relying on terror) or the near open revolution in Communist China in 1989 at Tiananmen Square. History shows us that determined and courageous people can protest even in the most appalling of circumstances – and at the risk of losing their own lives. (more…)

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WW2 Relevance

|   7 May 2010

The Poles, Katyn and the recent plane crash.

The Polish flag flies at half mast at the Polish Centre, West London

Someone once asked me a really unexpected question: of all the sites of death and destruction that I had ever visited, which did I think still felt the saddest today?

It wasn’t a question I’d ever considered before – despite having traveled to many places in the world which have an extremely depressing history. Most obviously Auschwitz, of course, but also some terrible battlefields like Vyazma, west of Moscow, where I remember seeing rusting military equipment still lying amidst the trees, or the fields around Stalingrad where each spring human bones still push their way up through the thawing earth.

So I had to think a bit before I gave my answer. And in the end I could only narrow it down to two locations – each of which seemed as desperate as the other. The first was the site of Treblinka death camp. What was so dreadful about this place was the immensity of the crime committed here – around 900,000 people were killed on this one spot – combined with the scale of the camp. Treblinka was tiny. Only a few hundred meters square. And the reason it was so small was because it only had one function – murder. Almost everyone who came here was dead within a few hours of arriving.

And the other site that had the most profound impact on me was a forest near Smolensk in Western Russia. A forest called Katyn. It was here in April 1940 that the Soviet secret police – the NKVD – shot around 4,000 Polish citizens, the vast majority of them officers in the Polish Army. (Over 20,000 members of the Polish elite were murdered that April in total, since there were two other related murder sites elsewhere in Russia). (more…)

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WW2 Relevance

|   3 May 2010

Athens: a warning?


This is Athens as we want it to be.


This is the new reality

Over the years I’ve met a large number of people who lived through the extraordinary transformation in the fortunes of the Nazi party between 1928 and 1933. In the elections of 1928 the Nazis gained less than 3% of the vote – they seemed an irrelevance in German politics. Yet by January 1933 they were the biggest party in Germany and Hitler was Chancellor.

‘You just can’t imagine how quick things can change,’ many of these Germans said to me. ‘One moment it seemed that everything was stable, certain, and the next the banks had crashed, the middle-class had lost their savings, there was mass unemployment, and the whole fabric of our culture seemed to be unraveling. You couldn’t even walk through the parks – it just wasn’t safe anymore. There was so much crime. And Hitler offered us salvation from all of that disorder.’

I thought of those sentiments on a recent visit to Athens. (more…)

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