A nation under guilt

National Interest, The, Fall, 2004 by Martin Walker

Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 622 pp., $34.95.

Nikolaus Wachsmann, Hitler's Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 538 pp., $45.

AT THE invitation of French president Jacques Chirac, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder joined the leaders of the Allied powers of World War II at this year's 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings. His presence, a subtle suggestion that Germans may also claim to have been liberated from Hitler's tyranny by the Allies, was a richly symbolic moment in Schroder's long campaign for his country to be treated as "a normal nation." This had been an important theme of his first successful election campaign in 1998, and the "normal nation" phrase was deployed to justify his bold decision to deploy German troops abroad (for the first time since 1945) in Kosovo-Metohija and Afghanistan.

The increasing official prominence given in Berlin to the annual commemoration of the July 20, 1944 bomb plot against Hitler should be seen in the same political context. Graduating cadets from the Bundeswehr military academy now take their oaths of allegiance to the Federal Republic and its constitution on the date of the abortive assassination attempt and at the site of the former Wehrmacht HQ. The political implication is clear: There was a brave and determined German resistance to Hitler, and therefore Germans also enjoyed a real liberation in 1945. The new Germany, which takes an honorable part in the military operations of the international community as mandated by the UN Security Council, should thus finally be allowed to emerge from the long shadow of the Third Reich.

Officially, some countries agree; hence the invitation to the D-Day event in Normandy this year. The event was marked by little of that international furor that attended the presence of President Ronald Reagan at the Bitburg military cemetery some twenty years ago, when it was learned that SS men were among the dead. Germany and the world have moved on and the World War II generation is dead or in retirement. But the history never quite goes away. In April of this year, the German agency in charge of war graves found, after a request by Schroder's sister Gunhild, the unmarked grave of their father Corporal Fritz Schroder, killed in 1944 by partisans in Romania at the age of 32. Schroder, who never saw his father, has said that he will at some point visit the grave, and hoped for privacy from the media when he did so.

He is unlikely to get it, because Germans are as fascinated by their own past as anyone else. But the recent wave of books and films about the Third Reich suggests an important new element has entered the national memory. The new theme is Germans as victims. Jorg Friedrich's Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945 ("The Fire: Germany in the Bombing War") deals at length with the horrors inflicted on civilians by the Allies' strategic bombing campaign, while giving short shrift to the Luftwaffe's own pioneering efforts in Guernica, Rotterdam, London and Coventry. Gunther Grass's new novel, Crabwalk, deals with the sinking of the cruise ship Gustloft taking refugees from Konigsberg with 4,000 children aboard. The Fall of Berlin, by the British historian Anthony Beevor, with its powerful account of the mass rapes of German women by the victorious Red Army, has become a best seller. The film Amen (directed by Costa-Gavras) recounts the vain but heroic attempts by German officer Kurt Gerstain to alert the Catholic and Lutheran church hierarchy to the reality of the extermination camps.

This is not an improper rewriting of history so much as changing the angle of vision from Germans as extraordinary perpetrators of a unique evil to Germans as fellow-sufferers of a unique regime. There is something in this. Even in the election of March 1933, two months after Hitler came to power, and after the Communist Party had been driven underground and the Social Democrats and trade unions crushed, Hitler won only 17 million votes in an electorate of 45 million. With the support of their Nationalist allies, the Nazi-led coalition won 51.9 percent of the votes cast (and were somewhat surprised to have done so well. "Unbelievable figures", Goebbels confided to his diary.) But even from the underground, the Communists took over 12 percent of the vote, the Social Democrats won 18.3 percent and the mainly-Catholic Center Party took 11.2 percent. The Nazis won over 50 percent of the vote only in the lands east and north of Berlin. Throughout the Rhineland and in most of Bavaria and central Germany, they scored less than 40 percent of the vote.

It is entirely understandable that the Federal Republic should seek to present the Hitler period and the Third Reich as an aberration from which they suffered as much as other Europeans. First, this has become a habit. Throughout the Cold War, East Germany viciously claimed that West Germany was the heir to the capitalist and military-industrial complex on whose behalf Hitler had seized power and sought to crush communism both in Germany and in its Soviet homeland. This charge had to be constantly refuted, particularly after 1968, when a disturbing proportion of young Germans seemed inclined to believe it. Second, no self-respecting state can abide the debilitating thought that it represents a people eternally flawed with an extreme political version of original sin. Third, modern Germans (and their allies and partners in NATO and the European Union) have reason to be proud of the stable and prosperous democracy they have built.