There are some books that are almost impossible to review because they are so crammed with large ideas on every other page, so many that by the end ofThere are some books that are almost impossible to review because they are so crammed with large ideas on every other page, so many that by the end of the book you could only do it justice by writing a 30 page essay with footnotes; and this is not a Goodreads-friendly thing to do. The Law of Blood is one of these. (I’ve added a list of some other books in this category below.) As a way round this, I thought, what you could do is review the said problem books bit by bit. I never really thought of that before. But why not ? So….
THE LAW OF BLOOD : PAGES 1-120
Everyone knows what the Nazis did. And we have had a number of books which try to explain how they got people to do all this horrendous stuff (Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning, the enormously controversial Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen, and so on). But I haven’t before come across a book that tries to explain the totality of Nazi thought, their worldview, their belief system. It’s a truly unpleasant subject, like trying to reconstruct Ted Bundy’s attitude to women in forensic detail. But it’s well worth doing. We need to be able to recognise this world view wherever it raises its head (and it’s never far away) so we need to look the beast right in the eyes without flinching.
Professor Johann Chapoutot does a fantastic job here, and he deserves whatever medals there are going for history books.
THE THEOLOGY OF THE NAZIS
This book opens with an investigation of what you have to call the Nazi religion. To call it a philosophy would be an insult to philosophy but yes, Nazis, bit by bit, did try to assemble a coherent theoretical framework, a setting out of their stall.
In so doing, they had a problem, because they were operating within a fundamentally Christian country, and they were radically anti-Christian. So they had to proceed with caution – I know, Nazis proceeding with caution sounds oxymoronic, but in this area that’s what they did. They explained the various anti-Christian concepts to the SS but they didn’t let on how much they hated Christianity to the rest of the German population. The people, alas, would not have understood. The Nazis knew it would take some time.
Their religion went like this : the monotheistic God conceptualised in Judaism and then Christianity was out there, above everything, creator and judge. But in the pre-Christian past, the German and Nordic races were pantheists, animists, revering Nature as the perfect expression of the divine. They were holistic, they lived with nature and didn’t exploit it. The Bible, in contradistinction, says that God condemned man and Nature as fallen, sinful. But this was a wicked lie. In truth there was a grand unity of all living things, man was an animal, part of and in no way superior to the natural world. It follows, therefore, that Nazis were strong on animal rights. Their Reich Animal Protection Act of 24.11.1933 was left on the statute books until 1972.
So the Christian religion had alienated the Nordic races from their original nature. Shame of the physical, of the body, was intrinsic to this distortion. The Nazis were not ashamed of the human body, and they had no problem with art depicting nudes, and it’s well-known that they promoted nudism.
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Christianity’s essential idea is salvation – the rescue of the individual from a sinful condition, and the passage of the individual soul into the next, infinitely superior world. In the Nazi theology, the individual, firstly, is not essentially sinful, and secondly, is wholly unimportant. The individual is fused with the race in its place in Nature and there is no requirement for any kind of priesthood. Relations with the divine should be companionable and confident, as opposed to the terror-stricken grovellings of the Bible, that monstrous slave/master relationship. Prof Chapoutot summarises : The youth of Germany had been subjected to the brainwashing of Judeo-Christian alienation, trussed and tied and handed over to priests who were nothing but rabbis in disguise. [image]
A SLIGHT PROBLEM WITH JESUS
But it was always going to be difficult to throw Jesus out, alas, the people seemed to hold him very dear, so the Nazi thinkers tried the next best thing. They founded the Institute for the Exploration and Elimination of the Jewish Influence in German Religious Life and they proclaimed that Jesus wasn’t a Jew. One of these Nazi theologians wrote
We, the racists, are the only ones who revere Christ as he deserves
They said that Jesus’ original preaching was perfectly Aryan, but the rabbi Saul (St Paul) had rewritten it and Judaised the whole project, turning it from a socially revolutionary religion into a mystical-conservative one venerating death and rejecting nature.
All this in the first 120 pages.
I’m taking a break from this fascinating but wearing book, reading the whole thing through might give a person some psychological issues. But this is what great history looks like.
BOOKS TO MAKE YOUR BRAIN EXPLODE
In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X Kendi Malcolm X by Manning Marable Destiny Disrupted by Tamim Ansary The Good Soldiers by David Finkel The Honor Code by Anthony Appiah The Novel : a Biography by Michael Schmidt Shrinks by Jeffrey Lieberman A Terrible Beauty by Peter Watson Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum Black Earth by Timothy Snyder...more
It started with Manny’s review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... which itself started as an experiment that had nothing to do with Hitler or Mein Kampf. Our mutual friend Lilo had posted a one star review on Amazon of Er ist wieder da (Look Who’s Back) by Timur Vermes, a “satirical” novel about Hitler. She told people NOT to read it. Amazon deleted her review. Manny wanted to find out how far this censoring policy was being taken (we all remember the great Goodreads censorship craze of 2014 and we all know who owns Goodreads). So Manny chose Mein Kampf and wrote a one line non-review urging people NOT to read the book to find out if his non-review would be deleted. He then described what happened next in his Goodreads review. It wasn’t deleted, but many interesting things happened. The comments section of this Goodreads review then took on a life of its own, and became one of the most interesting discussions ever on Goodreads. (Someone should make a best-of-Goodreads-comments-sections list!)
Then, in another part of the forest, I came across a book called How to Read Sade, which I read and reviewed. It was part of a series of “How to Read” books, which included some of the usual suspects – the introduction refers to them as “great thinkers and writers” – so you have Darwin, Freud, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Jung, Marx – and HITLER.
What was he doing there? I was curious to find out. And also I thought that whereas I agreed with Manny to the extent of never wishing to go anywhere near Mein Kampf itself I could allow myself to read about Mein Kampf. In approaching the infectious object I would be donning the disinfective space suit of criticism.
ON TO THE AMBLE ITSELF
And this is exactly how it turned out. Neil Gregor gives us a very solid, useful essay about Hitler’s book, showing us clearly where its arguments repeat previous writers and where they suddenly become radical and original, and how Hitler’s political views were, like those of any paranoid conspiracy theorist, fairly coherent within their own system. He is at pains to say that of course Hitler was not like Wittgenstein or Freud, not any kind of great or important thinker. (True – so, really, what WAS he doing in this series?) Page three asks the question “Should we read Hitler at all?” The answer is – if we wish to understand how the Nazi ideology was formed, here is the big kahuna of foundation documents. All 650 pages of it. But be warned:
The reader will not struggle to find logical inconsistencies and self-contradiction. Some passages border on the incomprehensible.
Still, we need to confront Mein Kampf:
To dismiss Hitler’s ideas as merely eccentric or deranged is intellectually and morally lazy – it enables us to talk about Hitler in a way that avoids raising more awkward questions about the genealogy of his beliefs of their place within the intellectual traditions of western modernity.
HITLER’S BRAIN IN ACTION
Hitler was against a lot of things and he was for one thing. Which was, as you know, the German race. But not any old German race – the one which was flourishing in that golden age of the First Reich, whenever that was – around the year 900 probably. Whereas many Germans were happy to see their country embrace industrialisation and become industrially powerful (1880-1910) Hitler hated all that. Capitalism made people think only about themselves, getting on, making a buck, founding a company, manufacturing steel – but what they should be thinking about is the German race, not themselves. The race is everything, the individual nothing.
Germany was constantly being undermined by new forces. Internationalism undermined the nation-state, whether by the capitalists, who owed their allegiance to no one, or the communists, who preached the unity of all workers in all countries and rejected the whole nation-state concept. Hitler thought that both of these powerful economic-political-internationalist drivers were run by “the Jews”.
Where Hitler got his pathological anti-Semitism from is a study in itself – there’s a great book Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) all about that.
WHO PUT THE GERM IN GERMANY?
Throughout Mein Kampf we see medical imagery. The nation state (Hitler’s term was “the racial state” because there was only room for one race in his state) is thought to be like a body, prone to outside infection. There’s a whole lot about parasites, poisons, viruses, noxious bacilli, plagues and so on. At the same time, the state is involved in a constant life-and-death struggle for survival with other nation-states. To call these ideas “vulgar social Darwinism” as Neil Gregor does is probably right but surely pollutes the name of Darwin, so I hesitate to do so.
So you see where all this is going – Hitler is obsessed with Germanness and believes that being extremely German is what makes Germans great. There was absolutely no room for racial minorities in Hitler’s reich. No multiculturalist he. But even if you were 100% German you didn’t get a free pass, you had to be fit and healthy too. Maximum Germanness at all times! How can you be maximum if you have only got one leg?
Hitler had some radical ideas on how to achieve maximum Germanness. He states in MK that unfit Germans are to be strongly discouraged from having any children, and fit & healthy ones are to be instructed to have many children.
The racial state… must see to it that only the healthy beget children.
Well, there’s a chilling line. There’s the forced sterilisation programme, there’s T-4, the euthanasia programme, and there is the first experiments with carbon monoxide in a converted van at the Brandenburg an der Havel State Welfare Institute in February 1940.
RECOMMENDED
Neil Gregor has done us all a favour, he’s slogged (carefully and slowly, he says) through MK and Hitler’s little-known Second Book (unpublished until 2006) and come up with a very clear account of how Hitler thought about things rendered down to 110 short pages. I think that’s about all anyone could stand.
Although this book was and still is published anonymously, in 2003 the author was identified as Marta Hillers, a journalist who had died two years preAlthough this book was and still is published anonymously, in 2003 the author was identified as Marta Hillers, a journalist who had died two years previously at the age of 90. She was cultured, well-travelled, multilingual, and 34 years old when she wrote this diary, which covers only 58 days. It was first published in 1954, in English, then four years later, in German. They really hated it in Germany.
Wiki quotes a German author Hans Magnus Enzensberger about the book’s reception and it’s worth repeating here :
German readers were obviously not ready to face some uncomfortable truths... German women were not supposed to talk about the reality of rapes; and German men preferred not to be seen as impotent onlookers when the victorious Russians claimed their spoils of war. The author's attitude was an aggravating factor: devoid of self-pity, with a clear-eyed view of her compatriots' behavior before and after the Nazi regime's collapse, everything she wrote flew in the face of the reigning post-war complacency and amnesia.
After that she would not allow the book to be published again. (She had been abused by a whole new bunch of people.) So it had to wait another 50 years, until her death, and a new translation, and then, only then, could people take the harsh truth she was recording.
We, her present readers, have to deal with the fact that Marta Hillers worked for the Nazis throughout the war but, as Wiki says, kindly I suppose, “she was probably not a member of the Nazi Party”.
In Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in Liaisons Dangereuses, and a thousand other epistolatory novels, the reader’s credulity is strained by the characters continually finding the time in their busy adventures to write a detail-crammed account of the exciting events of the day. It’s one of those literary devices that has always seemed completely unrealistic to me. But this book appears to prove it can and has been done just like that. During the longeurs between being bombed, scavenging for food and being attacked by Russian soldiers, Marta Hiller writes with pinpoint immediacy and with remarkable fluency.
A TRUTH ABOUT WAR INSTEAD OF THE USUAL EVASIONS AND EUPHEMISMS
Here is the truth – soldiers, all of them, from commanders down to the lowly infantry, who conquer enemy territory regard the rape of women as their right. They don’t even stop to consider the concept of rape. It’s not rape to the soldiers, it’s payback, for what the enemy did to their sisters, daughters and wives, maybe, but also, mostly, it's just because they want to. There is no such thing as military discipline in the chaos of an advancing front line. In most cases there is a deliberate policy of allowing wholesale rape, for various reasons – let the men blow off some steam, relax, take a little pleasure; and let the enemy feel our wrath.
You heard about the sack of Rome, the fall of Troy, the collapse of the Third Reich, all these big yet soothingly distant words – sack, fall, collapse. But this diary gives you the hour by hour of what actually happens when an invading army fights through your city street by street, and engulfs your own street. Then what happens to the civilians? If you’re female, you are expecting to be raped. Maybe you can stash your daughter in some hideyhole. Maybe you can dress as a man. Maybe you can use make-up to make yourself look older! (That’s ironic, right?) The older ones - over 50, say - can be glad for their faded looks. All other females expect their turn will come. It usually doesn’t come by rough seizing, what happens is that a couple of soldiers just turn up at your door, push it open, and invite you to sit down for a couple of friendly drinks. They're smiling, they're happy souls, look, they have brought vodka, there's no reason to become alarmed. Or, one will turn up unannounced around ten at night, looking for a place to sleep. It’s your bed he has in mind, not the sofa.
What Marta does, and what we imagine other resourceful women doing, or trying to do, is, after the first onslaught by drunken squaddies, find herself a protector, an officer type, who she will allow to rape her regularly on the understanding that he will keep others away. This works until the hurly-burly of the war drags her first Russian officer away; she has to get a new one pronto, or the squaddies will be back. And so it goes.
Outside , the war is still on. And we have a new morning and evening prayer : “For all of this we thank the Fuhrer”. A line we know from the years before the war, when it was printed in praise and thanksgiving on thousands of posters, proclaimed in speeches. Today the exact same words have precisely the opposite meaning, full of scorn and derision. I believe that’s what’s called a dialectic conversion.
When civil society was restored, this treatment of women as sex slaves faded away; when the German men came back to Berlin and elsewhere, and patched together their domestic life, they didn’t want to hear a single word about what had happened in their absence. The whole subject of rape was buried by mutual consent. Just, in fact, like the crime of child abuse – neither the victim nor the perp ever wants to talk about it.
I can’t recommend this book, it’s beautifully written, but it’s just so grim. Men will be depressed to get so strongly the sense that the soldiers were thinking of course we will have sex with these women! What, are you crazy? You would too if you were here! This is our reward for our heroic fighting! Anyway, it’s just a bit of fun – why all this squawking? and women will be reminded why their mothers told them never to live in a war zone, in case they had forgotten that useful advice.
This is the third in my series of great books on World War Two. First, Max Hastings in All Hell Let Loose gives the whole story, and brilliantly simplThis is the third in my series of great books on World War Two. First, Max Hastings in All Hell Let Loose gives the whole story, and brilliantly simplifies it too. He explains, and I’m convinced, that WW2 was essentially between Germany and the USSR, or between Hitler and Stalin if you wish. Everything else was a side show. He goes further – the result was never in doubt. If Hitler and Stalin were equally ruthless, Stalin always had more men at his disposal, and Russia always had its vast size and epic winters; it was never going to be defeated by Germany. Proving this was, as we know, ferociously, murderously, inhumanly difficult and accounted for most of the war dead. (Hastings goes further still – the second major theatre of war, USA vs Japan, was likewise never in doubt. Although the Japanese had run through Indo-China like a knife through butter their industrial strength was tiny compared to the USA, so within a couple of years they were bound to run out of material – ships, tanks, guns. Likewise, proving that foregone conclusion was deathly.)
So that was the big picture. The next two books gave the detail of two parts which I knew little or nothing about – Ian Kershaw’s The End gives a gruesomely detailed description of the final year of the war in Europe, the Gotterdammerung catastrophe of Germany itself, which, as you contemplate its massive, thorough ruination, puts you in mind of a nation-sized suicide-by-police some criminals prefer to prison.
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Now, finally, Savage Continent gives a forensic portrait of the hideousness of the aftermath of this European lunacy. Popular historians have mostly steered clear of this period (1945-48) and understandably so – it presents a horrible vista of misery and viciousness, of physical destruction and moral collapse, and of where there was enough food to eat and enough men left standing who were not too busy raping the women who were still alive, of ethnic cleansing, untrammeled vengeance and further civil wars. It takes a historian with a very strong stomach to write in detail about this period. And us readers need to be able to distance ourselves emotionally from what we are reading here, otherwise we would never pick up a book like this. But readers of history are very familiar with that kind of mental discipline.
History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. (Edward Gibbon)
WORLD WAR TWO AND A HALF
World War Two ended at different times in different places – autumn 1943 in Italy, a year later for France, but in parts of eastern Europe, Greece and Poland, for instance, it morphed into local civil wars and continued into the 1950s. There was one over-arching conflict between the Allies and the Nazi regime. But parallel to that, weaving all the way through it, was a war between the left (the communists) and the right (the nationalists, for want of a better word). Then, separate to those two, but closely entwined, so it was often hard to see a difference, were many local wars between the ethnicities in a given area – Ukrainians versus Poles, Croats versus Serbs, Germans versus Poles, these wars went on and on, and only intensified after May 1945. The way these were dealt with by the occupying Allied forces was lamentable. But Keith Lowe firmly says :
In a straight choice between Stalinist communism and the flawed mix of democracy and authoritarianism espoused by the West, the latter was undoubtedly the lesser of the two evils.
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STATISTICS OF CHAOS IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH
There’s a table on page 122 – DEATHS AMONGST PRISONERS OF WAR which records that the USA captured 3,097,000 prisoners, of whom 4537 died; and Britain captured 3,635,000 of whom 1254 died. There is a discussion of why more POWs died in American camps than in British. But this all becomes rather academic when, even before presenting the stats table, Keith Lowe says :
We must remember that these are conservative figures: even official historians concede that thousands of deaths probably went unrecorded.
And later, after more gruesome revenge stories :
The validity of accounts like this is impossible to verify, and it is quite likely that some aspects have been greatly exaggerated.
Underneath another stats table (THE JUDICIAL PUNISHMENT OF COLLABORATORS IN WESTERN EUROPE) he says
Despite the precise nature of some of the figures above, they should be considered estimates only, as many of the absolute numbers are disputed.
This entire book is strewn with statistical data, big numbers everywhere, and all are disputed, all may be wrong. But this does not stop the author. Acknowledging the immense difficulties, he ploughs on. He covers topic after topic – whole chapters on, for example, the fate of the “horizontal collaborators”, the women who had intimate relations with occupying German forces – maybe we should say the women who became sex slaves of one or more soldiers. They were hated and reviled, such is to be expected, however unfair.
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The author then gives us seven pages about the attitudes to and experiences of the children of such unions, and how they were despised and ostracized, for decades. E.g., in Norway
Every year, right up until the start of the 1960s, these children and their guardians had to undergo the annual humiliation of applying to the local police for permission to remain in the country.
FINISHING THE JOB THE NAZIS STARTED
If you thought the Holocaust of European Jews ended when the camps were liberated Keith Lowe brings you bad news. Killings of Jews continued. Antisemitism was nearly universal in eastern Europe (although Poland easily won the contest for Most Antisemitic Post-War Country, which I found not surprising. Between 500 and 1500 Jews were murdered by Poles in the 12 months after May 1945.
Jews of all nationalities would discover that the end of German rule did not mean the end of persecution. Far from it. Despite all that the Jews had suffered, in many areas anti-Semitism would increase after the war. Violence against Jews would resurface everywhere – even in places that had never been occupied, such as Britain. In some parts of Europe this violence would be final and definitive : the task of permanently clearing their communities of Jews, which even the Nazis failed to do, would be finished off by local people…. By 1948 much of the region had become, even more than in Hitler’s time, Judenfrei
Where did this anti-Semitism come from? Lowe reports that in the vicious right-left nationalist-communist struggle which was now surfacing all over Europe, the nationalists characterized the Communist Party as Jewish; and the Communist counter-propaganda was to label the Jews as capitalists, hoarders and black marketeers.
So the Jews fled from Eastern Europe – how ironic that Germany, Austria and Italy were now safer than Poland, Ukraine or Yugoslavia! And Britain argued passionately that these fleeing Jews should NOT be allowed to emigrate to Palestine. The British Foreign Office said that would be admitting that the Nazis “were right in holding that there was no place for the Jews in Europe”.
There are so many issues described in this awesome book. Keith Lowe has fused together so much material and so many stories into something resembling coherence, and he deserves a big fat history book prize. There is nothing too difficult or too obscure or too detailed for him. His prose has almost no flair or flavor but it gets the job done with unflagging humanity. It’s devastating.
A fast ride through World War Two. This will be unspeakable, but we must speak.
Here goes.
Poland – the Ariel:
Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
A fast ride through World War Two. This will be unspeakable, but we must speak.
Here goes.
Poland – the only nation in which there was no collaboration with the Nazis…
when the Soviets invaded Finland the Finns joked "There are so many and our country is so small, where shall we find room to bury them all?"…
A Norwegian officer reported that one British unit was composed of "very young lads who appear to come from the slums of London. They have taken a very close interest in the women of Romsdal and engaged in wholesale looting of shops and houses"…
Eight million French people abandoned their homes in the months following the German assault, the greatest mass migration in west European history…
the London Blitz lasted about nine months. Some 43,000 British civilians were killed and a further 139,000 injured (160 deaths every day for 9 months)…
for almost a year following France's surrender, scarcely a single German soldier fired a shot… …
Germany was not an advanced industrial country by comparison to the USA which it lagged by perhaps thirty years…
while fighting the Italians in Albania a Greek soldier has to abandon his horse : "Starving, soaked to the bone, tortured by endless movement on rocky ground, he was doomed to stay there. I emptied my saddlebags to follow the others on foot, then stroked the back of his neck a little and kissed it. He might be an animal, but he had been my comrade in war. We had faced death many times together. We had lived through unforgettable days and nights. I saw him looking at me as I walked away. What a look that was, my friends. It revealed so much anguish, so much sadness. I wanted to cry but the tears did not come. War leaves no time for such things. Momentarily I thought of killing him but I could not bear to do so. I left him there, staring at me until I disappeared behind a rock"……
"I came to realise that for every man sweating it out in the muck and dust of the Western desert, there were twenty bludging and skiving in the wine bars and restaurants, night clubs and brothels and sporting clubs and race tracks of Cairo"…
"the gunner was smiling at me cheerfully though his right arm was smashed to bits beneath the elbow"…
A total of around 300,000 Russian soldiers are believed to have been killed by their own commanders for alleged cowardice and desertion – more than the entire toll of British troops killed by enemy hands during the course of the war…
Since the 1917 revolution the population of the Soviet union had endured the horrors of civil was, famine, oppression, forced migration, and summary injustice. But Barbarossa transcended them all in the absolute human catastrophe that unfolded in its wake and eventually became responsible for the deaths of 27 million of Stalin's people, of whom 16 million were civilians….
War correspondent Vasiliy Grossman met a peasant carrying a sack of frozen human legs, which he proposed to thaw on a stove in order to remove the boots…
The ruthlessness of the Soviet state was indispensible to confound Hitler. No democracy could have established as icily rational a hierarchy of need as did Stalin, whereby soldiers received the most food, civilian workers less, and "useless mouths", including the old, only a starvation quota. More than two million Russiams died of starvation during the war in territories controlled by their own government…
at the end of 1940 only 16% of Americans wanted the USA to join the war…in the absence of Pearl Harbor it remains highly speculative when, if ever, the USA would have fought…
"I couldn't see anything for the swirling spray. The wind shrieked through the rigging and superstructure. It looked as though we were sailing through boiling water as the wind whipped the wave tops into horizontal spume, white and fuming, which stung my eyes and face. Now and again I caught a glimpse of one of the big merchant ships being rolled on its beam ends by the huge swells sweeping up"…
"The Russians attach little importance to what they eat or wear. It is surprising how long they can survive on what to a western man would be a starvation diet…[they] move freely by night or in fog, through woods and across swamps. They are not afraid of the dark, nor of their endless forests, nor the cold" (Lt Gen Gunther Blumentritt)…
Gen Vasiliy Chuikov said "Time is blood…you send off a liaison officer to find out what's happening, and he gets killed. That's when you shake all over with tension"…
Stalin's orders were simple and readily understood : the city must be held to the last man or woman. …
"We have fought for fifteen days for a single house…the front is a corridor between burnt-out rooms. Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous clud of burning, blinding smoke… animals flee this hell, the hardest stones cannot bear it for long. Only men endure."…
the NKVD report from Leningrad was optimistic: In connection with the improvement in the food situation in June, the death rate went down by a third… the number of incidents of use of human flesh in food supply decreased. Whereas 236 people were arrested for this crime in May, in June it was just 56."…
An Italian general asserted in 1942 that 99 per cent of his fellow countrymen not merely expected to lose the war but now fervently hoped to do so as soon as possible…
Half the British population moved home in the course of the war…
"On that particular day the butcher let me have some rabbit. I didn't want the rabbit cause I'd rather give my small children an egg. So I took the rabbit round to my neighbour. She was so thrilled. On that particular day her son was killed."…
"In this place one's mind returns continually and dwells longingly on food… I think of duck and cherry casserole, scramled eggs, fish, scallops, chicken stanley, kedgeree, trifle, summer pudding, fruit fool, bread and butter pudding".
When American machine-gunner Donald Schoo's driver had a hand blown off, the man ran in circles laughing hysterically "I'm going home! Thank you, God! I'm going home!"…
I should add that this is a brilliant book, recommended to all. I think you probably got that....more
These 400 pages are like a single chord with six notes, horror, terror, death, pain, ruin and obedience. You will have observed the absence of pity anThese 400 pages are like a single chord with six notes, horror, terror, death, pain, ruin and obedience. You will have observed the absence of pity and mercy. I wonder whether we – I – read this account of the last year of the Third Reich in the spirit of revenge, in some distant vicarious sense, because this is where the Nazis finally got what was coming to them. So it could be the one to read straight after Hitler's Willing Executioners or a viewing of Claude Lanzmann's documentary Shoah. And who wouldn't wish those perpetrators to suffer. And suffer they did, especially the ones who didn't die quickly.
The End is simply a catalogue of German torment. It's amazingly repetitive. Here's a core sample - some phrases, adverbs and adjectives from three random pages:
P 150 : raging inferno; misery of the population; deprived of all amenities; primitive conditions; little more than holes in the ground; grim-faced; bitter cold; contempt; delusion; starting to flake; crisis in confidence; failed
P250: no heroic defence; desperate refugees; wounded civilians; broken, then crushed; 143,000 officers and men killed, wounded or missing; battered forces
P350 : the misery; so cowardly; like sheep to the slaughter; hatred is blazing; increasingly desperate fight; process of liquidation; a futile aim
You could take a similar sample from any three other pages and get the same result. It becomes numbing. I wonder how Ian Kershaw could have dragged himself through the writing of this book. Yet in interviews he seems fairly cheerful. Glad to be rid of it, perhaps.
The fascination with Nazi Germany which I share with a lot of people is easily explained. It has a personal element. Germany in the Thirties was just like England in the Thirties. The people there had my father's and my mother's faces. Germans wrote great books and composed music and made movies and drank strong beer and everything. So when they went collectively insane, and these astonishing, horrifying racist visions erupted out of their hearts and minds, and they turned their brilliant energies to the business of taking over all the rest of Europe and wiping out an entire other race right down to the last tiny child, the question is obvious : they were just like us, so could all that have happened here? In England? In America? In France? If not, were the Germans in the Thirties and Forties all psychopaths? Obviously not. So what happened? And after the Gotterdammerung of 1945, did they all revert back to being the normal ordinary Germans we had before Hitler? Like waking up from some hypnotic spell or terrible drunken bender and finding a couple of dead bodies in the room and saying no, I couldn't have done that – that wasn't me! But it was.
The Germans (and we can use that term because everyone was involved) fought to the bitterest of all bitter ends, until the last bulletless Walther was prised from the last 14 year old boy's dead hand. Kershaw in his introduction makes a song and dance about why in the face of all the overwhelming power of the Allies in late 44 or early 45 did the Germans not capitulate? But it is very easy to see why. For a start, Goebbels' propaganda about the ravening Bolshevik hordes from the East turned out to be true. Germans knew what had been perpetrated during Operation Barbarossa, that their army had been the combine harvester of human agony, and so did the Russians. For the Red Army, as they invaded from the East, it was white hot payback time – civilian slaughter, routine rapes, you name it. Soviet propaganda : "Take merciless revenge on the Fascist child-murderers and executioners, pay them back for the blood and tears of Soviet mothers and children." To the West, from the gentler sensibilities of the British and Americans, came carpet bombing. The bombing campaigns altogether killed approximately 500,000 people. So if these things did not convince you to continue fighting, maybe this would :
EXECUTIONS FOR DESERTION – A COMPARISON
German soldiers executed for desertion in the First World War : 48 British soldiers executed for desertion in the First World War : 306 British soldiers executed for desertion in the second World War : 40 French soldiers executed for desertion in the second World War : 103 American soldiers executed for desertion in the second World War : 146 German soldiers executed for desertion in the second World War : approximately 20,000.
There was another more prosaic line of reason, if you could find any reason at all in this lunatic final year. Germans believed – correctly – that the Western governments hated communism as much as they did, and they figured that if they could stave off an invasion of central Germany long enough, the Americans and British would realise that the true enemy was not Germany but the USSR. So that was the vague, mad, stupid hope. And as we know, Patton wanted to roll the tanks on from Berlin to Moscow, so there was something in it.
GERMAN VOICES FROM DIARIES AND LETTERS 1944-45
Injured soldier writing home : I believe for certain that a change will soon come. On no account will we capitulate! That so much blood has already been spilt in this freedom fight cannot be in vain!
Lt Julius Dufner : We want to build a new Europe – we, the young people facing the old! But what are we? Famished, exhausted and drained by madmen. Poor and tired, worn out and nerve-ridden.
Martin Bormann writing to his wife: Anyone who still grants that we have a chance must be a great optimist! And that is just what we are! I just cannot believe that Destiny could have let our people and our Fuhrer so far along this wonderful road only to abandon us now and see us disappear forever. A victory for Bolshevism and Americanism would mean not only the extermination of our race but also the destruction of everything that its culture and civilisation has created.
As we know, the Soviet army surrounded Berlin in late April 1945 and battled its way in, street by street. By the time they reached the Chancellery Hitler had committed suicide. Curiously, this review was written on the day another dictator finally met his death, after his own city was taken street by street. But Gaddafi was hunted down and executed by the people of Libya. They liberated themselves. In Germany in 1945 there was no liberation, no one danced in the streets that the beast was dead, they were all conserving their energies which they knew they would need to fend off their own growing guilt and horror in having been a supporter and participant in the thing called Nazi Germany. For those looking for the triumph of the human spirit or democracy or something uplifting like that, avoid this book. The story it tells isn't anything like that.
Man goes into a cafe, asks for the menu. He wants breakfast.
"I'll have bacon and mushrooms please."
WaiteA joke told during World War Two in England :
Man goes into a cafe, asks for the menu. He wants breakfast.
"I'll have bacon and mushrooms please."
Waiter says "Sorry sir, we haven't got any bacon or mushrooms, it's because of rationing."
"Okay, I'll have eggs on toast."
"Sorry sir, no eggs."
"No eggs? No bacon? What have you got then?"
"Well, we've got sausages. And a few kind words."
"All right, I'll have that then."
After a few moments the waiter brings a plate of sausages. The man says
"What about the few kind words?"
The waiter says "I wouldn't eat those sausages."
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I read this book years ago and I remember it was a kind of anti-romantic-myth anti-heroism corrective to the bucketfuls of soft focus and soft soap which you see in all those WW2 movies which were cranked out from the 40s to the 60s and which men of a certain age used to lap up. It's old fashioned because Paul Fussell clearly thought he was saying some shocking things, and times have moved on a whole lot since then and we all know these shocking things. We assume them. That's what I thought when I read this. But now....every other day, miserably, the BBC reports the death of another British soldier in Afghanistan. And they dutifully report how he was very brave, a credit to his company, beloved by all, died a hero, the very heart and soul of our glorious fighting forces, a great guy, a father, a friend, a brother, a son. And conversely, even now, in 2010, every act by the other side, the Taliban is described routinely as dishonourable, using civilian shields, using roadside bombs - be assured, my radio, tv and newspapers tell me, our enemy has no courage, will soon turn and run, their soldiers motivated only by money and having no loyalty, their ideology despicable, their so-called army a joke. And yet there they still are, and there we still are, and we haven't beaten them, with our drone plane attacks and our helicopter gunships and our billions of dollars. Something doesn't add up. I think this propaganda thing is still going on. Paul Fussell... not as out of date as I thought. ...more
"A World In Flames" could win a prize for The Most Unoriginal Book Title, but of course, it would have to share it with at leFirst, what a crap title.
"A World In Flames" could win a prize for The Most Unoriginal Book Title, but of course, it would have to share it with at least twelve other books most of which are also about World War Two. So if all these authors think that they need their WW2 histories to stand out from the shelves of WW2 histories to tempt the browsing drowsing reader, then guys, that is not the way to do it. In fact, it makes me think you have no skills in simple research which makes me think all your same-titled books will be badly researched.
Moving on!
I had wished to read a short history of World War Two and that's what this book says it is, but it should say on the front somewhere that in fact it's not written in English but in the indigestible language of soap opera episode summaries.
Like this :
Von Moltke's claims that he has reported Vichy to the police leave him terrified at the prospect of going to see Hitler. It looks like Montgomery has landed Patton in hot water with Churchill, but events don't turn out as expected. Eichmann's pet schnauzer has run away and Eichman is beside himself. Himmler faces disappointment when having persuaded Elaine to take King Michael of Romania out for the night he invites Eisenhower round for dinner, and Goebbells spots Ribbentrop coming out of Austria. Eileen and Paula come to blows over the Anschluss, prompting one of the girls to consider secretly contacting MI5. Stalin refuses to accept Lithuania's plea for forgiveness. Julie almost catches Charles visiting the Sudetenland, while Ken and Deirdre are struggling without de Gaulle's presence. Eileen and Elaine compare sexy spying techniques (how to win your fuehrer!). They decide to have a baby. Hitler refuses to have anything to do with his brother, despite Rita and Emily's efforts to bring them together. Maria realises that Gen MacArthur has been visiting John when her friend receives a phone call from the prison, Colin reveals his regrets at the Anschluss, and Eddie lands himself in trouble while invading another minor European nation. They decide to have a baby. Churchill and Hitler discover to their horror that they are brothers. Eichmann's schnauzer is discovered playing stand-up bass in a club in Hamburg. In an unexpected turn of events, he marries Aileen
Okay, here's a real excerpt taken at random :
The Canadians faced stiff opposition and made slow progress, partly because they stopped to take out strong points rather than bypass them. Dempsey had little difficulty advancing through the Bocage, and Montgomery made a serious mistake in not reinforcing the Canadian right flank with units from the 2nd Army. Hitler obliged by refusing to halt the counter-offensive at Mortain aimed at Avranches, and Bradley made rapid progress to complete the entrapment of the German forces.
and sometimes it's the political version:
The invasion of Czechoslovakia resulted in a slight stiffening of the attitudes of the British and French governments. Chamberlain gave a somewhat petulant speech in Birmingham and both nations withdrew their ambassadors for consultation. Hitler took no notice of any of this. He demanded Memel from the Lithuanians, who promptly gave way. These German successes encouraged Mussolini to push ahead with his plans to invade Albania.
Bah. Who can read this stuff. It's like eating a mixture of melted church pews, brussel sprouts and jellybabies, with rolls of linoleum shoved in at random.
Hitler was the world's greatest motivational speaker. You go to one of his meetings and he gives you astonishing d(updated with further nasty comment)
Hitler was the world's greatest motivational speaker. You go to one of his meetings and he gives you astonishing dreams, and he gives you permissions. Next day, you see an old Jew in the street. Last week, you wanted to give him a kick. Today, you actually do that, right there, and he falls over. But a policeman was watching you the whole time. Sheiss! Now you're in for it. You look up from the Jew and meet his eyes. He laughs briefly and shrugs, and walks on. He was at the meeting too.
*********
Some times when I listen the Bob Dylan I think - Hitler would have had you killed if he had half a chance. Along with Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, George and Ira Gershwin, Philip Roth, Lou Reed, Mark Rothko - you could name dozens more - every one would have been shipped off to the nearest extermination centre. Himmler would have seen to it in his meticulous way. Their hatred was limitless.
*********
And just a quick something about this great book - it rang my head like a bell many years ago. You know where they say "it was a biography but I was turning the pages like it was a thriller"? This is the one that does that....more
Everybody steals this phrase now and Ron Rosenbaum stole it too - this facemelting book could/should have been called What We Talk About When We Talk Everybody steals this phrase now and Ron Rosenbaum stole it too - this facemelting book could/should have been called What We Talk About When We Talk About Hitler. Because that's what it's about. This is a great chatty whistle-stop world tour of Hitler scholars and Hitler theories. And oh my my, what cans we find, and what worms crawl out of them.
Where can we start? Well how about this - most people would see in him the absolute embodiment of as pure an evil as we have experienced in history so far, but there's a remarkable reluctance in modern scholars to agree. Everyone kinda sorta agrees the definition of evil is a person knowingly doing wrong/causing suffering. The scholars pose the question: did Hitler do wrong knowingly? Often historians are emphatic that Hitler was convinced he was doing GOOD (saving the world from a scourge, saving the Aryan race). Real evil, some say, was to be found in the middle managers of the Holocaust, like Eichmann, who knew they were murdering innocents, but did so for motives such as career advancement. So that's interesting - imagine the headline in the Daily Vulgarian :
Hitler Not Evil Says Historian
Moving on, this book asks of its big-name interviewees the question "Where did Hitler's pathological hatred of the Jews come from?". We get a whole pick and mix of theories, many of which are concerned with finding a handy Jew to blame. Did a Jewish prostitute give Hitler syphilis in Vienna? Well, maybe. Did Hitler believe his paternal grandmother was seduced by a Jew? Well, maybe. Was there a Jewish doctor who bungled Hitler's mother's cancer treatment and made her suffer horribly? Well, MAYBE. Then along comes another historian (Alan Bullock to be specific) to propose that Hitler had no especial hatred of the Jews, he just hyped up the whole thing to get himself a political career. Imagine that - in this theory the other Nazis just took him far too literally! He must have been appalled! (It's okay, that theory has been rubbished by everyone else who'se ever heard of it.)
The Hitler explainers are haunted by a notional lost safety-deposit box - you know, the one in which reposes the single piece of evidence which will explain everything. A document from a forgotten archive, a long lost unpublished memoir, a connection never made. Rosenbaum himself admits to "evidentiary despair" (a poignant phrase) - which means accepting the idea that the explanation will never be found. Yehuda Bauer, on the other hand, believes that Hitler and the Holocaust are explicable, but no, we haven't explained them yet. Claude Lanzmann presents a bracing alternative to all this thrashing about. He baldly states that certain things are forbidden :
Psychohistory is a figleaf for revisionism
He goes further than just stating that to explain is the same as to understand is the same as to justify, by stating that justification is the explainers' unacknowledged intention. Lanzmann was also apoplectic about anyone publishing baby photos of Hitler (as on the front of this book). Anything which humanised him was justification according to Lanzmann. You pays your philosophical money and you takes your philosophical choice here, but every argument, when not risible, is at once intriguing and horribly disturbing. Some readers think this is a lightweight bunch of interviews. I think this book drives the scalpel down to the bone. It's not pretty but it's essential....more
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