When I was a post-doctoral student,
I sat in on a course on German films during World War II. The instructor was an
80 year-old German man whose parents had been forced into sending him to a
Hitler Youth camp. I asked him once whether he had seen Hitler in person, and,
if so, did he look like how the documentaries have him pictured. Having the
respect for knowledge that should be expected from a scholar, he told me that
he had indeed seen Hitler in person. The brutal Nazi dictator was authentically
smiling during his visit to the Hitler youth. I was surprised, as I had been brought up with
the image of the grizzled grins and terse glares. To be sure, the victor’s history fits the
horrendous crimes committed, but at the cost of objectivity, which any
historian should value. The subjective historical portrayal and the German
professor’s honest answer led me to wonder what Hitler was really like as a
person. Even the epitaph of monster does not fit with the notion of the
banality of evil visible at the Eichmann trial in 1961. Eichmann had been
responsible for making the trains run on time to the concentration camps.
About a decade after my
conversations with the German professor, I met a 92 year-old American veteran
of World War II. Did the American people
know of the holocaust? I asked. Only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
in Hawaii, he answered. Before the U.S. went to war, the European war was
something far away. When the U.S. was at war in Europe and Asia, Jewish leaders
in Europe asked President Roosevelt to bomb the train tracks that were carrying
the cattle-cars to the ovens. Roosevelt, the veteran said, told the Jews that
he didn’t have time for that. “Wow, that’s a story!” I said in astonishment.
One of the veteran’s daughters asked him how he knew this. “It was common
knowledge at the time,” he replied. I had not even known that the American
public knew of the gas chambers before the liberation of the camps. Even if
Roosevelt wanted to be focused on military
objectives because achieving them would mean winning the war, that he felt
he didn’t have time to thwart the Nazis from transporting human beings to ovens
astonishes me. I asked the veteran if the very language, cattle-cars to ovens applied to human beings shocked Americans
during the war. He replied that “surprised” is not the right word for it. He
did not characterize how he and other Americans had taken the news, which I
found interesting.
The full essay is at "Inconvenient Truths."
The full essay is at "Inconvenient Truths."
