Reflections of a stormy petrel

The ending of World War Two engulfed all countries, victor and neutral, into a tide of horror. Even the Soviet Union, whose government had little to learn from Nazism at its worst, found it easy to show, indeed to feel, horror at what its troops discovered in the early months of 1945 in dozens of camps from Majdanek to Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. Many people evidently found it impossible to take in the enormity of German crimes; Giovanni Guareschi, for instance, in spite of having been himself dragged to Germany as a slave worker, simply does not seem to realize that the whole of the German state and army had been criminalized, and repeatedly treats individual German soldiers as honourable enemies. Such attitudes were not rare in the British and American armies as well - especially among officers; ordinary grunts who had fought the SS and knew that they tortured and murdered prisoners and made their comrades hear their screams in the night might have had a different view, but who listens to the grunt before the distinguished general?

But even to those who did not consciously or unconsciously shut down their minds against the real monstrousness of German behaviour, the facts were too close and too many to make a distinction. The Germans had murdered priests, gypsies, trades unionists, sick and old people. Their rationing policy in occupied France, according to expert testimony at the Trial of Nuremberg, seemed designed to cause mass malnutrition. There was, in fact, mass starvation in the Netherlands in the last months of the war. The amounts of food and animals stolen are unimaginable: millions of cattle, pics, fowl, made their way to Germany especially in the last few years of the war. In Germany itself, the Government had murdered thousands of people; American and French soldiers advancing through the woods of Swavia found them draped by hundreds of corpses, soldiers found by the SS and hanged without trial for supposed desertion.

Ito took a long time before the relative proportions of the various Nazi crimes became clear in men's minds. And when it did, one rather disquieting fact became clear. The worst and most determining of Nazi crimes, the one that dominated all the others and infected the whole of Germany with guilt, was one which none of the Allies had done anything to mitigate. The post-war powers, both western and Soviet, drew their legitimacy from the heroic saga of their resistence and overcoming of Nazi evil; Stalingrad and Normandy were sacred, resolving names, names that implied motivation, values and pride. But while everyone knew that the Soviets had, to put it mildly, no time for Hebraism, the record of the British Empire and the United States was if anything more despicable. The British had purchased a few hundred Jewish children from doomed Jewish families in Bohemia and Moravia. This is today presented as a humanitarian act, but to take the children while leaving the adults to their already foreseen fate strikes me as not much better than slave trade. Other than that, the record of the British Empire with respect to German Jews and Jews in general was black, and grew only blacker after the end of the war, when the very weapons that had brought down Nazism were turned against refugees fleeing to Israel and against Israel itself. As for America, the less said, the better. While universities cherry-picked illustrious and useful exiles (while remaining the one part of American society where Hitler was popular and admired), the country in general shut down against any effort to open its borders to fleeing Jews. During the war, Roosevelt and his administration repeatedly refused any proposal that might have helped the Jews, and they did so in the full knowledge that the Jews were being butchered. They also kept the knowledge of butchery from their people, on the reasoning that "we don't want them to think that we are fighting a war for the Jews". And they were right; they weren't.

There were exactly two sovereign bodies that seriously took action to help Jews. The unloveable Francisco Franco, Catholic tyrant of Spain, had inherited from his republican enemies a law dated 1926 that allowed any Jew of Spanish descent, however remote (this was meant to redress the injustice of the expulsion of the Sephardi Jews from Spain in the 1500s), could claim Spanish citizenship and reside in Spain. Under pressure from Nazi Germany, Franco gave them a list of Jews resident in Spain; a gesture that was worth nothing unless and until the Germans themselves invaded Spain. For Franco had no intention to persecute the Jews. To the contrary, his diplomatic representatives across Europe saved over 20,000 Sephardim by giving them Spanish documents according to the 1926 law, and placing them under Spanish protection. This policy also allowed the great Italian hero Giorgio Perlasca, under the guise of a Spanish diplomat, to save between three and five thousand Jews in Budapest more or less on his own.

Spanish decency, however, stopped at Sephardi Jews, a small minority of the Jews under threat; and it was simply dwarfed by the deeds of the Catholic Church, unless indeed it was to be counted as part of it - for Franco was a devout Catholic. The Catholic Church, driven by none too secret orders from the Pope himself, hid and smuggled abroad hundreds of thousands of Jews. Jews were hidden in monasteries, in church schools, in cathedral closes, among friendly families, in every possible place that resourceful priests and religious could find. Underground networks for the printing and distribution of faked documents were set up. The small puppet state of Slovakia, headed by a priest, did not arrest or execute a single Jew after 1942, when the Vatican made a strong protest (although it does seem to have taken the opportunity to accept or compel a huge bribe from surviving local Jews). An American Jewish historian estimates the number of Jews saved directly by Church intervention at 850,000. And the Church paid for it, too: Hitler knew who to thank for resistence against his exterminating policies, and 6000 priests and many more layment were murdered in the camps by way of thanks.

The larger the butchery of Jews loomed among the other enormous crimes of Germany, of course, the more serious the cognitive dissonance in the West. Roosevelt's direction came back to haunt them: they had not, indeed, fought the war to save the Jews. The war to save the Jews had not been fought except by the Church and by a couple of unpleasant but Catholic tyrants.

Nothing, therefore, explains itself more easily than the savage and historically wholly groundless assault on Pope Pius XII as "Hitler's Pope". The people who handed themselves over to this mania were and remain utterly blind and deaf to facts; or they would have shut up long since. They are under the psychological compulsion of a crawling, subtle, horrible guilt. They will not say it, or even admit it; but they know that the entities to which they are loyal, eastern or western, and which draw a great deal of moral legitimacy from the destruction of Nazi evil (and quite right too, for Nazism was evil if anything was) have in fact failed, failed systematically, failed horribly, in the most defining of the many moral challenges that Nazism threw at mankind. They could not contemplate the camps and the ovens without a small voice somewhere telling them that their own leaders had betrayed that mass of murdered mankind. The connection between this and the vicious, unreasoning, deliberately cruel assault on a dead Pope should be obvious.

Are there other phenomena like this? Aren't there just! The other vicious assault on the Church in our time has been in the name of abused and sexually assaulted childhood. And let me say immediately that abuse is a horrible crime and that the priests who broke their vows in this peculiarly ugly and treacherous way deserve anything that happens to them. But the history of the sexualization of children in our time has not yet been written, indeed it is not yet completed, and when it is written it will tell a very similar story as that of "Hitler's Pope". For the horrible abuser priests who seem to have sprung up across the Church bore on their forehead, like the mark of Cain, the imprint of secular culture in their time. What was the hallmark of the fifties, even before the sixties, across the West? Sexual liberation! Sexual liberation, of course; so imprinted in our memories as children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of that age that most of us don't even imagine taking a critical position towards it.

However, there is one way in which commonplace attitudes have retreated since the sixties. In the sixties, the calls for the complete normalization of sex with and among children multiplied till some countries legalized it or ceased to take any cognizance of violation of the laws on consent and rape. In 1969, the people involved in such things would frankly say that they saw no difference between the legalization of homosexuality and of paedophilia. For a while, groupls like NAMBLA were welcome partners in civil-rights environments.

However, in this area, and in this alone, there was an effective reaction. Throughout the seventies, grassroots movements of mothers rebelled against the normalization or toleration of paedophilia. It was from them, and in opposition to the sexual-revolution establishment, that the current hatred of paedophiles arose. Now we have a kind of broken-backed consensus that to have sex with someone under 14 is evil and forbidden and the worst thing in the word in all circumstances whatsoever, but to prevent two consenting persons above 16 from having any kind of sex they wish is is evil and forbidden and the worst thing in the world in all circumstances whatsoever. That is the conscious state of our society, in which the paedophile is absolutely the lowest of all beings.

However, this does not correspond to facts on the ground. I don't think there is a single thinking person who doesn't realize that the sexualization of children proceeds apace. Fashion, advertising, music, address and represent pre-teens in obviously allusive contexts. The revolt against paedophilia was a grassroots revolt, and the commercial heights of our society have every intention of circumventing and drowning it.

In this situation, what does it mean to single out the Catholic Church for a sin which it has taken in from the world - all the abusing priests were worldlings involved in "modern" movements in various ways, as indeed were those among the bishops who protected them - and in which the world greatly surpasses it? (It has been proven again and again that there are more child abuser among state schoolmasters than among priests, but it does not pay so much to prosecute the former. And the Church has not invented or decreed the success of Britney Spears and other paedophile-themed singers and actresses.)

What these facts suggest to me is simple: the Church is the conscience of the West. And when parts of the West feel filth on their consciences, they project it on the Church, imagining the objective body of the Church to be as filthy as their own inner consciences. It's an easy mistake to make.

NOTE: I corrected a mistaken account of the Slovak puppet tyrant Monsignor Tiso's activities. It was only after a direct protest from the Vatican that Tiso and his people stopped cooperating with Nazi persecutors. That, of course, only underlines more strongly the centrality of the Pope's position. From 1942 to 1944, Slovakia not only stopped deporting Jews, but became a refuge for Jews fleeing from neighbouring countries.

...some new and interesting evidence turned up.

In 1938, just as the persecution of Jews was moving into high gear, the Vatican not only came near breaking point with Italy about its new "racial laws" (and it was not the Vatican that blinked), it also bashed Catholic Poland for some similar bright ideas. And the man who did the bashing was the future Pope Pius XII - yeah, right, "Hitler's Pope" according to the vile propaganda of creatures best left unnamed.

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The admission by Guenther Grass, Nobel Prizewinner for literature and "conscience," or at least leading figure, of Germany's hard left, that he had been a member of the Waffen SS, raised some ugly thought in me.

That there was a long subterraneous - or not even so subterraneous - solidarity between Brown and Red, especially at the level of what might be called the international intelligentsija, is not exactly news. Everyone knows, for instance, that the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger was all but sheltered from de-Nazification, and given genuine new lustre, largely thanks to the French Communist writer Jean-Paul Sartre. Heidegger had done as much as anyone to aid the Nazi takeover of the German universities; and as the universities were the most prestigious and internationally respected bodies in Germany, it may be said that someone like Heidegger bore more guilt for the rise and propagation of Nazism than anyone outside the Party circle proper. But Heidegger and Sartre shared the philosophy of Existentialism, and, from his point of view, Sartre was quite right in trying to shelter his master - even though another Existentialist, Hannah Arendt, had told Heidegger to his face that Nazism was a natural and inevitable development of his, Heidegger's, philosophy.

Of course, Grass was not a philosopher of international repute, on whose writings people wrote PhD theses, when he committed his little indiscretion. He was a teen-age boy. At 15, he had tried to volunteer for the submarine service, but had been rejected on grounds of age; the Third Reich, at the time, was not yet desperate. It may have been on account of that earlier attempt that when he was drafted in 1944, he was sent, not to the Army, but to the Waffen SS, a wholly separate body. By late 1944, the SS had ceased to be a volunteer troop, as they had been through most of their history: frightful losses on the Russian front, the loss of most auslandsdeutsch districts - German-speakers outside Germany - which were their main recruiting ground, and the dubious loyalty of the Army after the July 20 plot, had made recruitment for them a matter that could no longer be trusted to volunteering. Even so, they were treated as elite units, and conscripts sent to them were regarded as select.

Grass admits that. He claims that he was drawn to the Waffen SS not by their political meaning, but by their reputation as the last-ditch troops, those who were sent to stop breaches in the line and on desperate or unconventional missions. He also claims that the two missions in which he took part were dangerous long-range reconnaissances far behind Russian lines, which is credible enough; and that he never shot a bullet in anger, which is rather less credible. ON April 20, 1945, as the whole front was slowly melting into the fire of advancing Russian American, British, Allied and Partisan armies, he was wounded and taken to a field hospital; and that was the end of his war. That is his story. I see no reason to doubt its detail, and it is not the detail that troubled me.

What roused my thoughts was that, until now - and it must be admitted that Grass seems to have made his admission of his own free will - he was believed to have served on an Anti-Aircraft unit. This connected him to another important German intellectual, his exact contemporary, Josef Ratzinger, who was forced out of the seminary where he was studying for the priesthood to be conscripted into one.

The difference between the two is the enthusiasm with which the teen-age Grass threw himself into the war effort, first trying to be a submariner, then taking with pleasure the role of a chosen soldier of the Party and Fuehrer. Young Ratzinger, on the other hand, entered the seminary in the clear consciousness that anyone who took that step deprived Army and State of his services - until the State, in its death throes, abolished the exemption of the priesthood and forced them into military service - and placed himself in an unfriendly position. And when he was recruited, he soon deserted.

What people unfamiliar with events will not realize is that, by deserting, Ratzinger showed no less purely physical courage than Grass reconnoitering behind Russian lines. Both risked a quick and nasty end. When American and French divisions crossed the Rhine in April 1945, they found the trees of the Black Forest hung with hundreds, thousands of dead young men hanged by their neck to save ammunition. These were soldiers who had been found to be AWOL, and been executed without trial or waiting. Some were hanged in their front yards, in front of their families Their executioners, on orders from Central Command, were the Waffen-SS - Guenther Grass' lot. As the chosen bearers of Nazi faith, they had been ordered to force the rest of Germany to resist to the last man, woman and child.

I am certainly not charging Mr.Grass with murder. As I said, I see no reason to doubt his unsolicited account of his wartime days, clearly the result of a deep personal unease. It is rather that this story places the two men, at a time when neither can have had even a suspicion of their extraordinary and iconic future, at opposite ends (Grass even says that he met Ratzinger in a POW camp after the war) of a really iconic group of events and institutions, and does so by anything but chance. What the one young man sought, the other fled. I do not know whether the misleading statement that young Grass fought his war in an Ack-Ack battery came from him or whether it was something he just allowed to be believed, it is clear that it was the sort of thing that could be believed of a decent, untainted German; that it did nothing to damage the reputation Grass was getting, as the moral authority of the German left. Yet young Ratzinger wanted nothing to do even with that, and risked the noose to escape it.

What attracted young Grass - whose parents had named him for a pagan Teutonic hero - and repelled young Ratzinger - whose parents had named for the husband of Mary and several Christian saints - was the suicidal appeal of the dying Nazi party. Whatever the ordinary German teen-ager might know, suspect, or be unwilling to suspect, of the horrors and crimes of his government, there was one thing that nobody could miss, that was the very daily atmosphere of dying Nazism: the heavily charged sense of suicidal, revolutionary glory and doom, of a whole party and nation turning kamikaze in order to bring down their enemies and themselves in one red and monstrous ruin. Weltmacht oder Niedergang, world power or annihilation; "Better an end in terror than a terror without end". These were not, unlike the massacre of Jews or Russians or disabled or negroes or homosexuals, things done in "night and fog"; they were the slogans and the reasons for existence of the Nazi Party, its mind and passion, its proudly exhibited belief. That those beliefs then led to political criminality on an untold scale is, in a sense, secondary; that is, in order to become thieves and murderers, men had first to assent to this mental attitude.

The revolted romanticism, the highly-charged, throbbing emotion of disgust and rejection, that lay at the heart of Nazism, is the join between the last days of Hitler as young Grass experienced them, and his destiny as Red Pope, moral authority of the anti-American, anti-capitalist, fanatically pseudo-pacifist hard left. The conclusions may be different; the root is the same. I do not know whether either Grass or Ratzinger ever thought of the other as in any way his opponent, his counter, the symbol as much as the leader of the forces he himself rejects; yet they oppose each other with a perfection that belongs more often to mythology than to real life. At seventy-eight years of life, filled in both cases with tremendous achievement and worldwide renown, the White Pope faces the Red still on the grounds of what the one rejected, and the other passionately accepted, in the dying days of Germany's awful night.

I recently read an article on the historical German right which felt so convincing to me that I archived it.( Read more... )