Reflections of a stormy petrel

I was listening to the Pope's last Angelus, and I found myself smiling when he greeted the Poles in their own language (as he did with the other main languages). I found myself thinking that there would be a special pleasure for citizens of Poland to hear a German addressing them in their own language. The recent history of the two countries has been a crescendo of mutual hatred, ending in the massacre of one-fourth of the Polish population, followed by the expulsion of millions of Germans under circumstances of terrible brutality.

But then I realized that really I could say the same for myself. When I grew in Milan, vicious prejudice against Germans was a living reality. And it's not just a matter of Nazi and torture jokes; it was a matter of real racial prejudice, with Germans being not only oppressive and homicidal, the designated enemy, but idiotic and foul-smelling too. Their Italian was uniformly terrible and expressed a basic stupidity. A German officer reaching an area flooded by its defenders is bewildered - his maps don't show any lakes there. (Germans, you see, are too stupid to understand the concept of wartime flooding.) One gag had a goat (the smelly animal par excellence) escape the company of a German: it couldn't stand the smell.

This is more than the inheritance of one, even two, world wars, and as a matter of fact it is rather better explained by much older events; it is, in fact, likely enough to be typically Milanese, and I might never have encountered it in such a virulent form if I had grown up, like my parents, in Rome. For Milan and Venice, along with surrounding areas, were the only parts of Italy to be under the direct government of the hated, German-speaking Empire of Austria from 1815 to 1859. Now, to call the hygienic twentieth-century German, even in his most murderous guise, evil-smelling, is clearly nonsense: even their mass murders were carried out with great attention to cleanliness - that was the meaning of the immediate mass destruction of murdered bodies in ovens, before they had the time to spread disease. But an evil smell was in fact a feature of the Austrian occupation troops, mostly not even German themselves, in the eighteen hundreds. In spite of their resplendent white uniforms, they had a bad habit of stiffening their martial moustaches with tallow, and apparently the result could be really stifling at close quarters. Milanese jokers seem to have needed no more than a mention of tallow or of smell to get a laugh.

This ethnic cliche' might have died out if the break with Austria after 1859 had been clean and swift; alas, it was neither, ended up trapping considerable Italian minorities behind a permanent frontier, and made sure that the hatred between the two countries lasted until the final Italian vengeance of 1918 and the annihilation of the Austrian Empire. Obviously, under such circumstances, the Milanese were not going to forget the evil smell of "German" troops for the mere reason that they were no longer around to be oppressive. Then there was the poisoned alliance of 1940-1943, the nightmarish occupation that followed, the savage partisan revolt of the last two years of war, the German massacres, all centred on Milan; and if ethnic hatred had ever had a chance to go out of style, that must have settled it. In a Milanese folk-song from the immediate post-war period, German soldiers are called "black rats":
...poeu su in muntagna a ciapà i ratt:
negher Todesch de la Wermacht,
mi fan morire domaa a pensagh!
"...then we took to the mountains, to do some rat-catching -
Black German rats from the Wehrmacht,
Makes me feel ill just thinking of them!"

These were the memories I grew up with. To people like me, and I would say to a huge amount of Europeans from all kinds of parts of the Continent, to welcome the German nation back to the world of civilized people must have been at least as much a dislocation as for Americans of the southern States to accept equal rights for their darker skinned fellow citizens; harder, if anything, because American blacks and whites at least spoke the same language, and, when the worst came to the worst, could sing the same songs. I know that, for a long time - even after a German hospital effectively saved my brother's life - I could not relate to Germans or to Germany without a certain sense of doubt and alienness. I speak German, I have been to Germany and Austria, I have German and Austrian friends, I warmly admire at least one German woman as a genius...

...but I think I can say honestly that I have never completely lost that sense of doubt and alienness until I first saw and heard Pope Benedict with my own eyes. One of the things this wonderful man immediately does is disarm ethnic hatred. He is so obviously kindly, so obviously open, so obviously everyone's beloved old uncle or father figure, that you can't help but take him as he is and love him for what he is. I like to think I am speaking for many others when I say that, to me, this gentle, tired old university professor is a living human token of peace and respect between nations.

The most searing denunciation of racism I know ( Read more... )

What with the increasing propaganda for Enoch Powell;
The presence of a few outright Fascists in my country's governing coalition;
The American columnist I spoke of and condemned a couple of years ago;
The current civil war within the anti-jihadist movement between the racists and the rest of us;
The Ron Paul candidacy, proving that from five to ten per cent of registered Republicans would turn out to vote for a proven racist, conspiracy theorist and liar;
And now THIS (http://thenewsdispatch.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=12532);
It seems that perhaps we have more need to be vigilant against racism and Fascism than I was hoping.

EDITED IN:
Since these newspaper articles tend to be removed from the Web after a while, or moved to a different archive, I will place a copy of the text (from The Michigan City News-Dispatch) behind this cut:
( Read more... )

Just as a horrifying photograph showing Pakistani women carrying a sign saying "God bless Hitler" has gone around the world, I, who thought I had heard all sides of the horror of Nazism - and who have something of a family feud against it - found out about yet another crime this vicious cult managed to commit. Avvenire, the daily newspaper of the Italian episcopate, published this review of a book by one Serge Bilé about the Nazi massacre of tens of thousands of blacks. The reviewer is Paola Springhetti and I just translate her article.

Besides Jews, Gypsies, disabled people, nazismo persecuted and butchered blacks as well. Civilians, immigrants from the former German colonies, but also in France, Netherlands and other conquered countries, and soldiers in enemy armies, the French especially. Little is known about the numbers and stories of those taken to the concentration camps or killed even before. Sometimes even fellow prisoners, when rescued, were unable to tell whether they had seen one or more; they tended to be unable to tell them apart. And nobody bothered, afterwards, to collect testimonies and evidence of their presence and experiences in the death camps.

They were certainly not few. Although Nazi practice was to murder black prisoners on the spot, Petain's collaborationist French government alone held 44,000 dark-skinned prisoners. They included Léopold Sédar Senghor, later to become a major poet and head of State. He was lucky because he remained in the French-ran camps; the Germans found it funny to steal even the starvation rations from African prisoners and watch them starve to death.

A new book sheds light on this neglected aspect of the history of Nazism and its victims. Bilé's work starts in Namibia in the late 1800s, when it was a German colony. Its governor from 1884 was Heinrich Goering, father of the notorious Hermann. Daddy Goering is heavy-handed and in a rush: he shifts whole populations and enslaves them; he confiscates land and has any opponent killed. Only one tribe try a serious resistance, the Hereros. Goering has them exterminated. In a few months 60.000, over 80% of the population, are butchered. The 15 thousand survivors are shut up in concentration camps where one half die within a year, of starvation and appalling medical and scientific experiments practiced upon them. This is a test run of what Hitler is to do on a large scale in his death camps, including the design of the camps themselves.

Anyway, in the first decades of the twentieth century a certain number of Africans immigrated into Germany. They were mostly children of the African upper classes, eager to advance their studies and genuinely impressed by the country that had conquered theirs. But, from the word go, Germany rejected them: they were an inferior race.

World War One cost Germany her colonies - among other things - and the black immigrants were left without a country. Among the things that infuriated the German army was to have been beaten by the French - an army which made large use of black soldiers. The French troops that occupied the Rhineland in 1923 included African regiments. Hitler wrote; "Jews have taken niggers into the Rhineland to pollute and bastardize the Aryan race". In 1936, the Nazis rounded up all the eight hundred children born from mixed couples; half of them were sent to the camps, the other was sterilized. The following year, sterilization - without anaesthetics - was forced on all black men and women.

24,000 African-Germans lived in Germany in the thirties, plus a number of American blacks, mostly musicians and artists. The latter fled back to the USA, but the German citizens had no second country to take them back. Serge Bilé tries to follow the fate of a few black internees, reconstructing their history as far as as possible. There is one Raphaël Élizé, France's first-ever black mayor - utterly intolerable for the Nazis - killed in Buchenwald in 1945. Anton de Kom, from Suriname, a leading opponent of colonialism, dead in Neuengamme only a few days before the liberation. And Blanchette, whose real name and origin are totally unknown, but who ended up in Ravensbrück in February 1944 - and vanished again. Saddest of all, perhaps, there was a black kapò or trusty in Auschwitz, who allowed himself to be humiliated in every possible way to scrounge a little bread to share with his fellow prisoners. He was remembered for his justice and kindness, but he died in Auschwitz. A favourite Nazi game was to try to "wash out" the prisoners. One Mamadou N'Diaye found himself at the receiving end of a "washing" with boiling water, soap and rough towels, ending up with wounds and bleeding scrapes all over his body.