I like Germans; I like Americans. I’m even quite fond of the English. But when I look at the reactions to the Lancet study on Iraqi deaths. I am reminded of a photograph reproduced in Tony Judt’s Postwar. A small boy, in a knitted sweater and shorts that come down to his knees, walks down a sandy heathland road. In the background are birch trees and a couple of pines. The boy has a pained, determined expression, and is looking away from the verge, where perhaps a hundred corpses have been laid down in rows. They are former inmates of Belsen, just up the road.
Judt’s caption says "Like most adult Germans in post-war years, he averts his gaze."
One of the surprises of this really excellent history has been just how little the Germans came to terms with Nazism. When I lived there, as a teenager, between 1969 and 1971, approx, all the Germans I knew at all well were of my own generation; and the man from whom we hired our house had survived captivity after Stalingrad, and so might be considered to have expiated his crimes and then some. But Judt is full of acid little notes about the extent to which the Germans were not, as we would now say, good. "In Bavaria in 1951, 94 percent of judges and prosecutors, 77 percent of finance ministry employees and 60 percent of civil servants in the Agriculture ministry were former Nazis … Of the newly constituted West German diplomatic service, 43 percent were former SS men, and another 17 percent had served in the SD or the Gestapo."
At about the same time, a poll found that 37% of Germans thought it would be better for Germany to have no Jews on its territory, and 25% of them had a good opinion of Hitler.
This doesn’t prove the unique depravity of Germans, only their depravity. It is very hard for countries, as for individuals, to admit wrongdoing sincerely; perhaps it is harder for countries: if a language is just a dialect with an army, a nation is a dialect with defence mechanisms. We may be fairly certain that the little boy in Judt’s picture didn’t himself kill any of the corpses by the roadside, any more than you or I killed anyone in Iraq.
But it does suggest that the reaction to the Lancet’s study will be, overwhelmingly, that of George W. Bush. We won’t find it credible, because to do so would make us accomplices in something entirely ghastly. For all the people saying they predicted this horror (and I have just gone back and looked at my own predictions) I don’t think many of us thought 600,000 excess deaths were a remotely credible result of the invasion. To give an idea of what 600,000 people means, suppose that half of the people who went on the last big anti-war demo in London had died since then, as a result … that feels entirely different, even to 600,000 foreigners (of course, proportionate to Britain’s population the number should be much higher. Suppose everyone who went on the anti-war marches had died since then. That would be about the death rate proportionately.)
I doubt that even convinced opponents of the war want to believe something that terrible has happened as a result of our actions, or inactions. I don’t know whether it is worse to think now that we could have done more to stop the war, or to reflect that we could do no more than we actually did. But if we opponents must look away as they pass the rows of corpses, why should we expect that supporters of the war should face the facts when they have so much more at stake.
I’m working on a proposal concerning the Chinese-Japanese post-war relationship at the moment, for which I was looking at German post-war reactions/purging, and, yes, they’re quite shocking. Richard Bessel, in Nazism and War, notes a survey from 1953 where well over half of Germans asked denied that accusations could be levied at the behaviour of Wehrmacht soldiers in the occupied territories. I think the very existence of the SS helped Germans to live in denial about what their armies – the ordinary boys – had done in the East, because it could all be blamed on the one group.
There’s been some equal forgetting about the behaviour of the US army in the past, mind, when we think about torture and colonial occupation. Everybody goes to Vietnam when they think about this stuff, but the mass torture and killings of ‘every adult male over 10’ in the conquest of the Philippines was a big scandal back in the day, and shows what even those nice American boys can do if you give them enough space, oversight, and dehumanisation of the enemy.
Never mind 1953, it is still pretty much of a taboo here in Germany to use the words ‘Wehrmacht’ and ‘war crimes’ in the same sentence. A couple of years back the philanthropist J.P. Reemstma mounted a large touring exhibition documenting the Wehrmacht’s crimes. It caused an enormous fuss (fuelled admittedly by the neo-nazis with their catchy slogan ‘Opa war in Ordnung! – Grandpa was OK!’), but no politicians wanted to be associated with it and several towns refused to have it in their public buildings. It had to be closed for a while because tiny errors were discovered in some photo captions (regimental names not corresponding to uniform badges and such like), but the efforts made by right-wing amateur researchers to uncover such trivialities just emphasised the general hostility to the very idea. In 2006 the great majority of the German public do not accept that the Wehrmacht was involved in systematic war-crimes, only the SS and Gestapo. It’s the final step that still has to be made in their generally successful (compared to Austria or Japan) efforts to come to terms with their past, although this has always been driven by people on the left, especially writers and intellectuals, and only slowly, reluctantly accepted by the rest of society.
When I heard the news I turned to Danny and said “Yeah! More dead in 3 years than that tin pot dictator could manage in 15! That’s America, showing how it’d done!”
I missed my prediction too. I thought it would be more people dead, and we’d be in Iran by now. My problem with predictions is I always think everything’s going to happen sooner than it actually does. I’m amazed Afghantistan hasn’t gone more tits up than it has, as well. But for the absolute buckets of blood on my hands, I still don’t think this beats the particular way we coddle the pharma industry here. That’s millions of preventable deaths a year.
Many years ago I was chatting with a friend and I mentioned that I’d been to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles the day before. He asked “Did it work? Did they tolerate you?” I said something like ‘funny you should ask’ and proceeded to tell him about almost being thrown out. I started with repeating a Lenny Bruce routine in front of their display of words you’re not supposed to use. Then, from a display about what a bad and racist eye witness you are about an altercation between a (clearly bad) white alcoholic and a (clearly innocent) black man, the staff got my speech about how alcoholism is a disease, and as long as we treat it like a moral failing we are failing not only the victims of the disease but society as well, blah blah. Then in the display about the Nazis I protested the Simon Wiesthenthal Center people had dehumanized the Nazis, and that was what made people capable of doing what they did. The point, I went on, was the Nazis were human, and we could all do the same thing at any time and hey, we might not even notice it, etc etc.
Then didn’t throw me out, but my sense was that it was a close one. I did have a distractingly cute orthodox Simon Wiesthenthal Center staffer acompanying me for quite a while, sent out to sooth and manage me.
I guess the point is, you can look at that picture and say “look what the Germans are capable of!” but i think it’s more useful to look at it and say “look what the humans are capable of!”