Lessons of Nazi Germany can guide us in the wake of terror in the world today
Germany is a miracle. Today Germany is a country admired around the world. An economic powerhouse. A name synonymous with quality and efficiency. Germany, one of the leaders in transitioning to green power, making honest very costly efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. Germany, an anchor of the European Union. For all the faults of the European Union, let us remember that one of its main goals was to keep the peace in this volatile region through economic integration. After all, the most destructive wars in history have been fought among Europeans. Germany is now the West’s champion and a bulwark against Russian aggression. Germany also leads on the humanitarian front. Germany admitted more Syrian refugees than any other Western country — saving one million desperate people. As we have seen this brave gesture came with considerable risks. (But then what is bravery, but action in the face of danger.)
Yet scarcely more than 70 years ago Germany lay in ruins, its people beaten and disgraced. The world slowly learned the extent of the crimes committed by Germany so that today Nazi is the worst insult to hurl at someone. Few in the history of the world have been as vilified as German Nazis. And rightly so.
What should the world have done with the German people at the end of the Second World War? How do you punish the horrific crime of genocide against the Jews? Those in high leadership were easy cases. Their guilt obvious, they were largely hanged or hunted down and executed.
But what about the German people? State sponsored genocide requires a huge apparatus manned by human hands at every junction. What of those thousands of Germans? What is the punishment for complicity? How do you define that? Should their entire race be condemned? Surely, some Germans were ignorant of the crimes being committed, but is ignorance the same as innocence? These are uncomfortable questions for Germans. While history has judged the Third Reich harshly, its indictment on the German people is ambiguous. I will not presume to judge individual Germans from that time. Obviously not all Germans from the Second World War were Nazis. It’s likely that significant numbers of Germans were sympathetic to Nazi philosophy, but that in and of itself does not make them Nazis.
So what did the world say to those Germans after the Second World War to convince them to change? What convinced Germans that the Nazi philosophy was wrong? What set them on the right path? Was it because they were defeated by us and thus had to accept our morality — meekly accepting the victor’s morality just as they previously accepted Hitler’s morality? Or did Germans reflect on Nazism and understand its mistakes for themselves. The German-born Albert Einstein said that peace cannot be kept by force, but only through understanding. Has this understanding come to Germany?
What of German refugees during and after the Second World War? Should Canada have accepted them? How would we know whether the refugees we accepted weren’t Nazis in disguise? Should we have taken this risk to save Germans in distress? After all we could never be sure that some Nazis wouldn’t sneak in.
The lessons of Nazi Germany can guide us today. We did not condemn all Germans as Nazis. We helped our enemy Germany to rebuild itself, its people and their identity. What was the world’s violent epicenter became peaceful, stable and prosperous.
Today the world’s violent epicentre is the Middle East and we are fearful not of Nazis, but Islamist radicals. We feel hopeless against the size of the problem. But let us look past the current state of the Middle East to Germany for hope. A war zone can, in three generations, be transformed. It happened before. It can happen again. Like Germany, the Middle East can rebuild itself, its people and its identity.
The miracle of Germany is that a country and its people can come back from a dark place. Germany’s redemption is miraculous. To speak of their redemption does not lessen the staggering crime of the Jewish holocaust by Germans. You cannot be forgiven for an unforgiveable sin. But the guilty were redeemed and hope was given to the hopeless. Contradiction has always been at the heart of humanity.
@KrisSamraj is a writer. He's going to favour us with some words from time to time.