Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (182 page)
Especially in America. In 1950 the Displaced Persons’ Commission of the US Congress stated that ‘The Baltic Waffen SS units are to be considered as separate and distinct in purpose, ideology, activities and qualifications from the German SS. Therefore the Commission holds them not to be a movement hostile to the government of the United States’. The Baltic Waffen SS had been among the most brutal and enthusiastic when it came to torturing and killing Jews on the Eastern Front; but in the novel circumstances of the Cold War they were of course ‘our’ Nazis. I am grateful to Professor Daniel Cohen of Rice University for this information.
Except of course in Israel.
In October 1991, following the desecration of tombs in Vienna’s Jewish cemetery, Gallup polled Austrians on their attitude to Jews: 20 percent thought ‘positions of authority’ should be closed to Jews; 31 percent declared that they ‘would not want a Jew as a neighbour’; fully 50 percent were ready to agree with the proposition that ‘Jews are responsible for their past persecution’.
The Poles happily agreed—for these purposes Warsaw saw no impediment to defining Jews as Poles . . .
Ondergang
was published in English in 1968 as
The Destruction of the Dutch Jews
.
See Sonia Combe,
Archives interdites: Les peurs françaises face à l’histoire contemporaine
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), p. 14.
Professor Paxton of Columbia University, who had initiated historical investigation into Vichy’s crimes nearly a quarter of a century earlier (when most of his French colleagues were otherwise engaged), took a less monastic view of his professional calling and gave important testimony.
When US President Ronald Reagan, on a visit to West Germany in 1985, was advised to avoid the military cemetery at Bitburg (site of a number of SS graves) and pay his respects at a concentration camp instead, Chancellor Kohl wrote to warn him that this ‘would have a serious psychological effect on the friendly sentiments of the German people for the United States of America.’ The Americans duly capitulated; Reagan visited Belsen
and
Bitburg . . .
Quoted by Ian Buruma in ‘Buchenwald’,
Granta
42, 1992.
When the Czechoslovak parliament voted in 1991 to restitute property seized after the war it explicitly limited the benefits to those expropriated after
1948
—so as to exclude Sudeten Germans expelled in 1945-46, before the Communists seized power.
Under President Putin, Russia continues to insist that the Balts were liberated by the Red Army, after which they voluntarily joined the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The memorial was not uncontroversial: in addition to many who disliked its abstract conception there were those, including a Christian Democrat Mayor of the city, Eberhard Diepgen, who criticized it for helping turn Berlin into ‘the capital of repentance’.
In March 2004 eighty-four Hungarian writers, including Péter Esterházy and György Konrád, left the country’s Writers’ Union in protest at its tolerance of anti-Semitism. The occasion for the walk out were comments by the poet Kornel Döbrentei following the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to the Holocaust survivor Imre Kertész. The prize, according to Döbrentei, was ‘conscience money’ for a writer who was just indulging the ‘taste for terror’ of ‘his minority’.
The last statue of Franco in Madrid was quietly removed at dawn, in front of an audience of one hundred onlookers, on March 17th 2005.
‘We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. . . . We are . . . an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications, or their attributes or their good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it, or they returned mute.’ Primo Levi,
The Drowned and the Saved
(NY, 1988), pp. 83-84.
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi,
Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory
(Seattle, 1982), p. 116.