Why Wasn't Hitler Stopped?
World War II began 70 years ago when Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. It would last six years and claim millions of lives. But the Allies missed several opportunities to stop Hitler in the run-up to the war.
and something relevant for today:
The Germans celebrated their Führer like a messiah. In a new Reichstag election on March 29, 1936, which was only moderately manipulated, close to 99 percent of the electorate voted for the Nazi Party. Even Goebbels was surprised.
Hitler had always felt intoxicated by the adulation of his supporters. The occupation of the Rhineland, as Kershaw writes, "substantiated Hitler's hubris." On March 14, 1936, the chancellor told an ecstatic crowd in Munich: "I go with the certainty of a sleepwalker along the path laid out for me by Providence."
and today's generation is revealed in this interview there:
SPIEGEL: Did you view the invasion of Poland as a mistake?
Weizsäcker: A mistake? That's not the right expression. I'm sorry, but that's a rather naive question.
SPIEGEL: We didn't live through the war ...
But then his obtuseness:
SPIEGEL: You didn't have any knowledge of the Holocaust prior to 1945?
Weizsäcker: It was only after the end of the war that I heard and tried to comprehend the word and the horrors of the Holocaust. But a friend of mine in the regiment, Axel von dem Bussche, had observed to the rear of our position that the region's Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants had been made to dig a large trench and lay down in it, whereupon they had been shot dead. He came straight back to the regiment, and I'll never forget how he said he had felt like lying down beside them. Axel was a colossus of a man, and highly decorated. He was deeply moved by his experience, and hearing that from him made you want to participate in the resistance to the extent possible.
and his father's role:
SPIEGEL: He was also acquitted of the charge of "crimes against peace." The verdict was based on "crimes against humanity." In 1942 Adolf Eichmann asked the German Foreign Ministry to issue a statement on the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz. Ernst von Weizsäcker replied that the ministry had "no objections."
Weizsäcker: My father faced a central moral dilemma: Should he stay in office or not? What would and should he be prepared to accept any mission for? What could he influence personally, and what was beyond his control?
SPIEGEL: And your reply?
Weizsäcker: He remained at the Foreign Ministry in spite of all the deep disappointment it brought him. But after fastidiously reviewing the matter, he found that he was powerless to prevent the central domestic crimes against humanity. That's why he was all the more willing to help in any specific case of persecution he had access to. This is why he remained in office. Hundreds of statements from Jews, from churches, at home, in Britain and in other countries thanked him for the many ways he protected them, as did one of the judges at the Nuremberg Trials, in contrast to his two colleagues.
SPIEGEL: So you say your father was not treated fairly at the trials?
Weizsäcker: During a confidential though recorded meeting before the trial began, the prosecutor asked my father to be a prosecution witness and agree to testify against others. The prosecutor said surely it was worth committing a bit of perjury if it meant he could therefore escape trial. My father vehemently rejected the offer. The sentence was neither historically, morally nor humanly just. The American high commissioner in Germany ordered my father's immediate release from custody, and the first German federal president, Theodor Heuss, and many others spoke out on my father's behalf. In a speech during a parliamentary debate in England, Winston Churchill even said American prosecutors had made a "deadly error" over my father.
SPIEGEL: Have you ever asked him what would have happened if he had voiced his concerns to Eichmann?
Weizsäcker: Of course we put this imaginary scenario to him.
SPIEGEL: It's not an imaginary scenario, but a moral one.
Weizsäcker: The concrete effects were imaginary. Please believe me when I say that we haven't only just discovered what a moral question is.
SPIEGEL: You mean it wouldn't have made any difference if he had refused to approve it?
Weizsäcker: I won't repeat the conversations we had, but of course both he and we were deeply concerned about this issue. What do you think?
SPIEGEL: We're trying to understand what happened back then.
Weizsäcker: I have come to know and tried to portray him as best as is humanly possible.
SPIEGEL: Does that concern you to this day?
Weizsäcker: Of course. There is no such thing as historical, moral, human immunity, whether in youth or old age. I'm sure we agree on that too.
SPIEGEL: Mr. von Weizsäcker, we thank you for this interview.
Interview conducted by Martin Doerry and Klaus Wiegrefe. Translated from the German by Jan Liebelt.
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