Root of all
Currently sat watching some nonsense (thing about the making of Merlin that might make more sense if I actually watched Merlin). This after watching a baffling teenage programme called ‘The Cut’, that only served to make me really very pleased I’m not a teenager anymore. I am struggling to find enough distracting material on iPlayer*.
My need for distraction comes from having watched part 2 of The Last Nazis which has left my already muddled up little head reeling*.
Part 1 from last week didn’t leave me feeling as confused as the second part. If at all. Part one though was an almost simpler context. It followed the Nazi hunter from the Simon Wiesenthal Center as he pursued Aribert Heim , who by every definition was a sadistic man. A man who from the descriptions it seemed, to me, took the Third Reich as an excuse to live out all of his cruelest fantasies. Subscribing to such a horrible ideology was probably only an extension of his existing personality*.
Part two though dealt with those on foot soldier level. In particular two of the men featured were from annexed countries (Serbia and Hungary) where collaboration was as much a way of survival as anything. One may or may not have been in the early-mid stages of dementia, one was on trial and speaking only in pre-written statements and the third was more lucid than the other two, but not much more forthcoming.
My reeling confusion comes from just exactly where, and how, you define what someone’s role in something as big, as awful as the holocaust ( or indeed any genocide) is.
At one point the film-makers spoke again to the man from the Simon Wiesenthal Center (Zuroff) and asked whether pusuing someone so elderly (all are in their nineties) was worth it. Zuroff’s position is that since they were not old, possibly senile, men when the holocaust was happening then that is exactly the course they should be taking. Just because it takes sixty years to find someone who has committed a crime, does not lessen the impact of the crime. Expecially not one so big. And I can’t disagree with him.
However, I think the filmmakers asked the wrong question. The more interesting question to me is how do you judge culpability?
Though since the second world war armies across the West have increased the level of questioning amongst the ranks, encouraging soldiers to ask why not just do what they’re told (though how many actually bother I’m not sure), it’s most definately a modern phenomena.
Self preservation is a pretty normal human response, and given the choice between following an order in an army that you got no choice about joining, or dying (and in the case of collaborators risking that your family would also bear the brunt of your failure). What do you do? I can’t possibly begin to answer that. I have no idea. I can’t imagine making a decision in a world where you know pamphlets could result in being beheaded (Sophie Scholl).
How do you define whether someone collaborated because they were a right wing sadist, or because they were petrified?
Where does the line of power start? Whose decision is the one that matters? Is it the frontline soldiers who actually do the killing? Or is it their captain? Or his commander?
There can be no excuse for such awful crimes, nor indeed those that followed since*, but ultimately whose responsibility is it?*
There have been over 1000 people tried for war crimes in WW2 so far (and to be fair given the age of the remaining people there’s unlikely to be many more). But there were many, many more Nazi operatives, soldiers, workers than that. So how do you decide who is culpable? Who is human awfulness at it’s most human? And who was scared and going along to protect themselves? How do you decide who to pursue?
As the filmmakers noted none of the men they saw seemed to espouse right wing ideologies. Maybe that was a concerted effort on the part of men knowing that they could end up spending their few remaining years in a gaol, but maybe it was a genuine reflection of them.
Much scarier, to me, was the right wing orator they interviewed Ursula (something), who had spent her life, since childhood, wrapped up in the ideology. She was a talented speaker, which frightens me greatly. More worrying still is her assertion that the current economy is ideal for her brand of politics to move in. History suggests that she is probably right, right wing politics and hatred of the outside thrives in poverty. It was after all the disasterous Weimar economy that made it possible for the Nazis to gain power.
In some ways the prospect of the now. Of the potential awfulness of such people easily gaining power, suggests to me that no matter how much hunting for elderly murderers we do, we haven’t learnt all that much from the mistakes of the past.
*Sky Box has completely deaded, and since I stopped paying them for a multitude of channels I didn’t watch there’s nowt I can do about it. This isn’t such a bad thing though given that iPlayer now is all spangly on PS3. Except of course for the playstations that it has apparently completely wiped…
*And the only movie I have on my stack to watch is Downfall, which is hardly going to fulfill the need for distraction.
* Some might argue that such a condition is always necessary for someone to subscribe to such awfulness. I can’t believe that to be true, humans are much more complicated and the genuinely horrid are I honestly think, luckily few and far.
*For my first assignment at college I just had to read a portion of Storr’s Human Aggression and I find myself in very definite agreement with his assertion that the cruelty of one human to another is unique to our species.
* Everyone’s at the wider sense I suppose.
Tags: confusion, history, politics, television
