The war is long over
Issue of collective guilt still persists
Over the past 60-plus years, all of us have seen many World War Two news films showing endless stacks of bombs falling from endless streams of bombers onto large cities, while a stentorian voiceover coloured the report to make that kind of wholesale destruction seem necessary and heroic.
None of us would want to be in the hell on earth under those bombs, even in our imaginations.
Gertrud Mackprang Baer was 20 when the war ended in 1945, and she still lives through those horrors. She shared them in her 2002 book, In the Shadow of Silence, and again when we talked recently in her east end Ottawa home. Mrs. Baer can be called Dr. Baer, having earned an MD after the war.
This is neither a book review nor an attempt to sell books.
As a writer interested in stories from people who experienced war, I found the Baer book fascinating. She’s a scientist and writes like one. It’s a scholarly work studying the issue of collective guilt. A spooky happenstance hooked me. I was reading about a 20-year-old Gertrud discussing the collective guilt issue with another inmate in a postwar prison camp, and she told her friend she didn’t have the answer to the guilt issue. But she was certain it would still be being discussed many years from then.
As I read those lines, radio was playing in the background. It was CBC Sunday Morning, Dec. 9, 2012, at 11:26. The discussion was about the issue of German collective guilt. In the end, there didn’t seem to be a definitive answer and it’s probably safe to forecast the issue will be talked about for generations.
Dr. Baer’s book is a scholastic discussion, so her description of being under a heavy bombardment is almost a side issue. In a few paragraphs one can see her and others being bounced around an underground room by blasts, smelling and feeling the heat of high explosives. Hot winds of blast bounced them as the landscape above them was shattered and shifted. It went on for hour after hour. No bathroom breaks. No food or water. No sleep. With control of the air at that point, the Allies could bomb ’round the clock.
Experiences like that must leave lifelong scars. Asked about that in the comfort of her suburban home, Dr. Baer paused, and answered in a quiet voice.
“My family thinks I’m silly, but when I hear thunder approaching, I go to the basement. I have to.”
The Baer study touches on the Nuremberg trials, but also focuses on a postwar element seldom mentioned. The Allies’ “de-nazification” process suspended civil rights for the defeated and a form of concentration camps kept operating. Germany was divided between the four major allies — Britain, the United States, Russia and France. Tribunals, in reality special courts with far-reaching powers, were established and each court needed personnel to feed in the raw material — German citizens.
In the American zone alone there were 545 such courts, tasked with determining who could be trusted, or who carried guilt. The Americans employed 22,000 to feed the courts. Germans by the millions were denazified and Gertrud was caught up in the factory-like process. She spent a year in holding camps in the British sector, having no idea what she was accused of. The young woman who spent the war years as an office assistant eventually worked her way up the waiting list and appeared before a proper authority. It seemed to be a matter of — oops. There were no apologies.
Those months were spent living in overcrowded and barely tolerable conditions, subsisting on thin soup. Just in the American zone, 3.6 million Germans were prosecuted and 800,000 of them punished. Usually that meant loss of one’s job.
The generation of Nazism is almost gone and the guilt issue is fading. De-nazification and billions in reparations were applied. The winners didn’t stamp “paid” to the bill until 1990. Time Magazine, in 2011, reported Greece attempting to bill Germany a further $95 billion in war damages.
It’s time to end it, but never forget it.
Gertrud earned her doctorate in 1953, and in 1956 married chemist Hans Baer. They immigrated to North America and lived in California and Washington, D.C. before settling in Ottawa, where he taught chemistry. He was head of University of Ottawa’s chemistry department when he retired in 1992. They raised two children.