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.

It’s easy for those of us who have never been tested in extreme situations to judge this story with a certain amount of cynicism. We would never be so changeable, we might think. But I am not so sure. Because this is just one example of the phenomenal adaptability of the human psyche I have come across in my work – I could quote many more.

Which leads me to the one sure way I have been changed by studying this history. It’s this: I now think that human beings take more of their fundamental values from the particular system they happen to be in at the time than we might like to believe.

After all, as  I say in my interview on WW2History.com: ‘if you had been born an Aztec, six hundred years ago, you would be part of a society that believed in human sacrifice and ripping people’s hearts out, wouldn’t you?’