William E. Grim is a writer who lives in Germany and is a native of Columbus , Ohio .
I'm not Jewish. No one in my family died in the Holocaust. For me, anti-Semitism
has always been one of those phenomena that doesn't really register on my radar,
like tribal genocide in Rwanda, a horrible thing that happens to someone else.
But I live in a small town outside of Munich on a street that until May of 1945 was
named Adolf Hitler Strasse. I work in Munich , a pleasant metropolitan city of a
little over a million inhabitants whose Bavarian charm tends to obscure the fact that
this city was the birthplace and capital of the Nazi movement.
Every day when I go to work I pass by the sites of apartments Hitler lived in,
extant buildings in which decisions were made to murder millions of innocent people,
and plazas in which book burnings took place, SS troops paraded and people were
executed. The proximity to evil has a way of concentrating one's attention, of putting a
physical reality to the textbook narratives of the horrors perpetrated by the Germans.
Then the little things start to happen that over a period of time add up to something
very sinister. I'm on a bus and a high school boy passes around Grandpa's red
leather-bound copy of Mein Kampf to his friends who respond by saying "coooool!"
He then takes out a VCR tape (produced in Switzerland ) of The Great Speeches of Joseph
Goebbels."
A few weeks later I'm at a business meeting with four young highly educated Germans
who are polite, charming and soft-spoken to say the least. When the subject matter
changes to a business deal with a man in New York named Rubinstein, their nostrils flair,
their demeanor attain a threatening mien and one of them actually says, and I'm
quoting verbatim here: "The problem with America is that the Jews have all the money."
They start laughing and another one says, "Yeah, all the Jews care about is money."
I found that this type of anti-Semitic reference in my professional dealings with Germans
soon became a leitmotif (to borrow a term made famous by Richard Wagner, another
notorious German anti-Semite). In my private meetings with Germans it often happens
that they will loosen up after a while and reveal personal opinions and political leanings
that were thought to have ceased to exist in a Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945.
Maybe it's because I have blond hair and my last name is of German origin that the
Germans feel that I am, or could potentially be, "one of them." It shows how much
they understand what it means to be an American.
Whatever the reason, the conversations generally have one or more of these components:
(1) It was unfortunate that America and Germany fought each
other in World War II because the real enemy was Russia .
(2) Yes, the Nazis were excessive, but terrible things happen during wars, and anyway,
the scope of the Holocaust has been greatly exaggerated by the American media, which is
dominated by Jews.
(3) CNN is controlled by American Jews and is anti-Palestinian. (Yes, I know it sounds
incredible, but even among the most highly intelligent Germans, even those with a
near-native fluency in English, there is the widespread belief that the news network
founded by Fidel Castro's friend Ted Turner, who was married to Hanoi Jane Fonda,
is a hotbed of pro-Israeli propaganda.)
(4) Almost all Germans were opposed to the Third Reich and nobody in Germany knew anything
about the murder of the Jews, but the Jews themselves were really responsible for the Holocaust.
(5) Ariel Sharon was worse than Hitler and the Israelis are Nazis. America supports
Israel only because Jews control the American government and media.
For the first time in my life, then, I became conscious of anti-Semitism. Sure, anti-Semitism
exists elsewhere in the world, but nowhere have the consequences been as devastating as
in Germany . Looking at it as objectively as possible, 2002 was a banner year for anti-Semitism
in Germany . Synagogues were firebombed, Jewish cemeteries desecrated, the No. 1 best-selling
novel, Martin Walser's Death of a Critic, was a thinly-veiled roman a clef containing a vicious
anti-Semitic attack on Germany's best-known literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki (who was a
survivor of both the Warsaw ghetto and Auschwitz); the Free Democrat Party unofficially
adopted anti-Semitism as a campaign tactic to attract Germany's sizeable Muslim minority;
and German revisionist historians began to define German perpetration of World War II
and the Holocaust not as crimes against humanity, but as early battles (with regrettable but
understandable excesses) in the Cold War against communism.
The situation is so bad that German Jews are advised not to wear anything in public that
would identify them as Jewish because their safety cannot be guaranteed.
How can this be? Isn't this the "New Germany" that's gone 60 years without a Holocaust
or even a pogrom, where truth, justice and the German way prevail amidst economic wealth,
a high standard of living that is the envy of their European neighbors, and a constitution
guaranteeing freedom for everyone regardless of race, creed or national origin?
What's changed? The answer is: absolutely nothing. My thesis is quite simple. While Germany
no longer has the military power to enforce the racist ideology of the Nazis and while all
extreme manifestations of Nazism are officially outlawed, the internal conditions -- that is, the
attitudes,world view and cultural assumptions - that led to the rise of Nazism in Germany are
still present because they constitute the basic components of German identity.
Nazism was not an aberration; it was the distillation of the German psyche into its essential
elements. External Nazism may have been utterly defeated in May of 1945; internal Nazism,
however, remains, and will always remain, a potential threat as long as there exists a political
and/or cultural entity known as Germany.
Now hold on a second, I hear many people saying. You can't possibly claim that Germans are
as anti-Semitic today as they were during the years 1933-1945.
It is true that Germany today is much different than during the Third Reich. What is different
is that due to its total defeat by the allies Germany today is a client state of America and must
do its bidding. That means repression of overt anti-semitism. It's bad for business.
The other thing that has changed is that, even though Hitler lost World War II, he was
phenomenally successful in carrying out his ideological agenda. Germany , indeed virtually
all of Europe , is essentially Judenfrei (free of Jews) today due to the efficiency and zeal of the
Germans as they perpetrated the Holocaust during the Third Reich. In fact, a very convincing
case can be made that Nazism is one of the most successful political programs of all time. It
accomplished more of its goals in a shorter amount of time than any other comparable political
movement and permanently changed the face and political structure of several continents.
Germany is wealthy, stable, relentlessly bourgeois, and for all intents and purposes, free of Jews.
Yes, there is a tiny minority of Jews, mostly centered in Berlin, and yes, there have been a number
of Jews from the former Soviet Union who have emigrated to Germany, but most of the immigrants
from Russia are not practicing Jews and do little if anything to promote a unique Jewish-German identity.
The result of all this is that Germans today are able to reap the benefits of Hitler's anti-Semitic policies
while paying lip service to the "need to remember." Young Fritz doesn't have to be overtly
anti-Semitic today because his grandfather's generation did such a bang-up job of the Holocaust.
There just aren't that many Jews left to hate any more, and besides, the Germans have their
old buddies, the Arabs, to do their hating for them.
You might call the overwhelming German support for the Palestinians to be a form of
anti-Semitism-by-proxy. The German government has made cash payments to the State of Israel,
as well as to individual Jews, to settle claims of murder, torture, false imprisonment, slave labor and
genocide. Talk to most Germans and you'll soon discover that they think that the score has been
settled between Germany and the Jews, that somehow the return of just a portion of what the
Germans stole from the Jews is fair recompense for the deliberate murder of millions of people.
If you think the Germans are truly sorry for what they did to the Jews, think again.
There's never been an official "tut mir leid" offered by the Germans to the victims of the Holocaust
and their descendants because that would admit culpability. Germany has paid off all claims
against it without acknowledging responsibility in the same way that the Ford Motor Company
engages in recalls of automobiles. It's all done to avoid liability.
I have previously mentioned that Germans overwhelmingly support the Palestinians as opposed
to the Israelis, and that this overwhelming support represents a form of anti-Semitism-by-proxy.
Germans may claim to be supporting the Palestinians because they think they are an "oppressed
people " but let's be honest - they are supporting the Palestinians and their Arab handlers
because the Palestinians and Arabs share the same ideals as the Nazis.
There's a long-standing history of German co-operation with the Arabs. In 1942 Hitler personally
assured the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem that as soon as German forces conquered Great Britain,
the Jews in Palestine (which was then under control of the British Mandate) would be exterminated.
We should also keep in mind that the Arab terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 atrocities did their
planning in Germany . There are several reasons for this. The first is the well-known bungling and
de-centralized chaos of the German federal bureaucracy where literally the "linke" hand doesn't
know what the "rechte" hand is doing.
The second is that Arab terrorists can count on a substantial number of Germans who share
their anti-American and anti-Semitic views. The former members of the SS and Hitler's praetorian
guards, along with their neo-Nazi supporters, who gather weekly in Munich beer halls, made
Osama bin Laden an "honorary Aryan" after the 9/11 attack.
Mein Kampf is also a best seller in the Arab world, especially in Saudi Arabia , America 's
putative "friend." Indeed, there is very little difference between the anti-Semitic rantings of
Hitler and those of the so-called "spiritual leaders" of al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Fatah. The Arabs
also owe Hitler and the Germans big time. Hitler killed off the Jews, and Konrad Adenauer and
his "democratic" descendants replaced them with the Turks.
Yes, the Turks aren't Arabs, but they are Muslim, and although Turkey is a member of NATO
and has relations with Israel , many Turks identify and support their radical Arab co-religionists.
Turkey remains as fragile a democracy as Weimar Germany during the 1920s. It wouldn't take
much for Turkey to fall into the dark side of Muslim extremism.
The end result of Muslim immigration into Germany has been twofold:
(1) It allows the Germans to feign liberalism and being open to freedom and diversity; and
(2) By replacing the Jews they murdered with Muslims, who for the most part are as viciously
anti-Semitic as were the Nazis, the Germans have cynically assured that those few Jews who
remain in Germany will be unable to reassert political power even in a minority role.
A final point I would like to make concerning the reasons for the a resurgence of anti-Semitism
in Germany is one that many will find at odds with the prima-facie evidence, or even appear
to stretch the boundaries of common sense. Yet, I ask you to consider carefully my line of reasoning.
In many respects Germany got away with the Holocaust without paying much of a price. Yes,
many Germans died as a result of German perpetration of World War II and the Holocaust, and yes,
there was much physical destruction in the country, but the situation is like the little boy who
steals a cookie from the tray when it is cooling on the kitchen table. For his efforts he may have
gotten his hand slapped by his mother, but the stolen cookie remains eaten nonetheless.
After having committed the worst crimes in the history of humankind, the Germans were allowed
to regain their sovereignty after only ten years; their infrastructure was completely rebuilt thanks to
the generosity of the American people; and relatively few Germans were brought to trial for their
monstrous crimes. Even those who were tried and convicted received relatively short sentences
or had those reduced or commuted in general amnesties.
For example, some members of the Einsatzkommandos, those Germans who, before the
construction of the death camps, hunted and murdered Jews by the hundreds of thousands,
received sentences of as little as five years imprisonment. If there were true justice in the world,
Germany would no longer exist as a separate country, but would have long ago had its territory
divided up and dispersed among the Allies.
It was an unfortunate historical coincidence that the Cold War began just as Germany was at last
being brought to task for its many crimes and atrocities extending back to the First World War.
The new threat of the Soviet Union took precedence over a just settling of accounts with Germany.
The tragic result is that many of the countries raped and despoiled by Germany , such as the Czech
Republic and Poland , are just now coming out of decades of economic decline, while Germany - fat,
sassy, arrogant, self-satisfied, and essentially Judenfrei - has enjoyed four decades of undeserved
economic prosperity.
We can't turn back the clock to redress all of the historical wrongs that have been committed by the
Germans, but there are a number of things that can be done to assure that Germany can never again
be in a position to threaten the rest of the civilized world.
First and foremost is the realization that, while not all Germans are anti-Semitic, there is an
anti-Semitic tendency within German culture that extends back to the time of Martin Luther. Germans
are instinctively anti-Semitic in the same way that Americans are instinctively freedom loving.
Anti-Semitism has been and unfortunately remains the default ideology of the German people.
All things being equal, Germans will instinctively support the enemies of the State of Israel. Therefore,
America will need to monitor closely and be ready and politically willing to intervene at a moment's
notice in German affairs when it appears that Germany is back-sliding into anti-Semitism.
Additionally, it should be a goal of American foreign policy to oppose and to accelerate the
dismemberment of the European Union. We must not allow German domination of the EU to
accomplish through parliamentary maneuvering and brokered deals what Hitler and the Germans
were unable to accomplish during the Third Reich.
Given Germany's resurgent anti-Semitism (and that of France as well), a strong, German-dominated
EU that tolerates and even benignly encourages anti-Semitism, and is diplomatically allied with the
Arab world, is potentially the greatest threat to Judaism since Nazi Germany and a major threat to
the United States as well.
The enemies of Israel are the enemies of the United States. Let all Jews and Americans stand united
as we proclaim never again to both the Holocaust and 9/11.
------------------------------
The following appears to be a commentary on this article written by a Jewish man:
* This is the very first post-Holocaust picture of Germany that i have ever seen published that
depicted the post-Holocaust country of the nazis with absolute accuracy in every detail.
Over the years i have often written about the reunification of the two Germanys and described it as
one of the greatest mistakes ever made in history, and wrote that instead naziland should have been
divided into the four historical parts that is its nature, never to rise to brutalize its neighbors or the
world again! A crucial and horrible error!
It took only a few minutes during my first visit back to the land of my birth for me to realize that
the place was clearly no different than when my parents and I had the good fortune to be among
the very last Jews to escape, literally "minutes before midnight", when the gates of that man-made
hell slammed shut with a resounding clang for the final time, dooming those of my people left behind,
including over 50 of my immediate family.
I recall the words of my beloved grandfather as we came to Breslau to say our final farewell, knowing
that there was no likelihood of ever seeing each other again. He ran alongside the slowly rolling departing
train we were on, knowing he was bidding a final farewell to his only son and his family.
Even then he optimistically maintained that "no harm will come to us.
After all, I served my country and my Kaiser as an officer, and have always been a good citizen."
I do not know Mr. Grim, but i salute him for his clear view and thank him for writing this piece,
which, had it been written by a Jew, would never be believed nor given its proper credence.
Please do forward this article to your lists and see that it gets the widest possible circulation
No comments:
Post a Comment