Neo-Nazis basking in public gaze
As neo-Nazis parade in public in North America and Europe, news comes out that Gudrun Himmler, daughter of Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer of the SS, one of those in direct charge of murdering 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, died this year at the age of 88.
And Claude Lanzmann, the 1985 director of Shoah, the most influential of Holocaust documentaries, has died at 92. It is painful to think of them both seeing Nazism reappear, with one enjoying it and one sorrowing.
Even as second-generation Nazis die, it becomes possible that horror might again appear in the developed countries that successfully maintained peace from 1945 until now.
The EU was built to keep the European peace, but Great Britain, which once saved the planet from enslavement, is leaving. The U.S., the world’s greatest military power, is abandoning its wartime allies like a farm horse casually brushing off flies with its tail. The smug “Never again” could become “Yes, again, absolutely.”
The Holocaust was the central story of the last century but more than that, the most violent cruelty in human histo- ry. This is what humans do to “the other” humans.
Humans envy, bully, torment, lie, offer names, grovel to power and gravitate to the tools of torture and death: guns, knives, military weaponry, even uniforms. Humans sneer at other groups of humans: migrants from North Africa and Syria; Palestinians in Gaza, refugee families on the U.S.-Mexico border, Myanmar vs. the Rohingya. And eternally, men torment and kill women worldwide.
In these times, we swing back to the personal. Katrin Himmler, Heinrich’s great-niece (he was her grandfather’s brother), is a wonderful writer who has explored the hidden Nazi history of her family — it wasn’t just Heinrich, it was the rest of them too — with the worst surname of all. Though Hitler’s distant relatives on Long Island might disagree.
Katrin wrote a fine 2007 history book, The Himmler Brothers, writing at one point that she and her sister were happy to be born girls because they could change their name upon marriage. Katrin kept hers out of honesty and courage. But her son “has been spared it.”
Katrin married a good man, a Jewish Israeli named Dani whom she met in Poland. They trod carefully. In Germany, Dani had the understandable habit of calling pigheaded rule-bound officials “Bloody Nazis!” under his breath.
When she said he should be less judgmental, Dani said, “The main thing for you is always to behave properly!” Ah. In his 1943 Poznan speech, Heinrich Himmler had praised the SS for the “proper” way they had carried out their hideous slaughter. Dani apologized but words were minefields.
Gudrun Himmler, raised to worship Papa and cruelly jailed at 15, those balled braids at the side of her head like headphones, for four years after the war, clung to a name that horrified even Germans. The girl could have been helped. Instead, terrified, underweight and near-collapse, she chose the side she felt safe with and became a monster just like her mother, Marga.
All her life, Gudrun helped Nazis, providing cash to those escaping to South America. They met regularly, like a book club, but without books. But when she married a Bavarian Nazi in the late ’60s, she took his surname, Burwitz.
Did she ever watch Shoah? It’s a remarkable film that traumatizes all who view it. I had to pause during the scene where the barber chatted as he worked, describing having been a barber at Treblinka, cutting off the hair of women and children without telling them they were about to die by gassing. Their hair would be sent to Germany to stuff mattresses.
They were told they were being taken to showers. American border police, just follow- ing Trump’s orders, now take crying children away from their parents in order to “bathe” them. It’s not the same but it raises concern, especially among American Jews. The migrant children are kept in tent camps. Camps.
I see German Chancellor Angela Merkel, trying to pacify Bavarian extremists in her coalition government, has persuaded 14 EU nations on a way to deal with migrants. Among other things, they will build new “anchor centres” to hold some migrants at borders, including Germany’s. Again, camps. Germans cannot erase their camp tendency.
Millennials (adults just under 40), if you don’t know this history, watch Shoah and read Primo Levi’s postwar story of Auschwitz in If This Is a Man. If you don’t understand the migrant “crisis,” read his sequel The Drowned and the Saved about fleeing across Europe to find a home. Then you will understand the news in 2018.
Even if you don’t agree with what Israel is doing to Palestinians — and I do not — you should understand why Jews need Israel. History is never over and pain will survive 20 generations and more. If Jews have to flee again, they will have a home this time, and they will defend it. We owe them that.