investigations into German crimes on the eastern front. Beginning in Ulm in 1958 with proceedings against members of wartime ‘Intervention Groups’, followed by the arrest and prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, and culminating in the Frankfurt trials of Auschwitz guards between December 1963 and August 1965, these proceedings were also the first opportunity since the end of the war for camp survivors to speak publicly about their experiences. At the same time the Federal Republic’s twenty-year Statute of Limitations for murder was extended (though not yet abolished).
This change in mood was driven in large measure by a wave of anti-Semitic vandalism at the end of the Fifties and by growing evidence that young Germans were utterly ignorant about the Third Reich: their parents had told them nothing and their teachers avoided the subject. Beginning in 1962, ten West German
The change should not be exaggerated. During the Sixties both a West German Chancellor (Kiesinger) and the Federal President (Hans Lubke) were former Nazis—a glaring contradiction in the Bonn Republic’s self-image that younger commentators duly noted, as we saw in Chapter 12. And it was one thing to tell the truth about the Nazis, quite another to acknowledge the collective responsibility of the German people, a subject on which most of the political class was still silent. Moreover, while the number of West Germans who believed that Hitler would have been one of Germany’s greatest statesmen ‘but for the war’ fell from 48 percent in 1955 to 32 percent in 1967, the latter figure (albeit composed overwhelmingly of older respondents) was hardly reassuring.
The real transformation came in the following decade. A series of events—the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War of 1967, Chancellor Brandt dropping to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial, the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics and, finally, the German telecast of the ‘Holocaust’ mini-series in January 1979— combined to place Jews and their sufferings at the head of the German public agenda. Of these the television series was by far the most important. The purest product of American commercial television—its story simple, its characters mostly two-dimensional, its narrative structured for maximum emotional impact—‘Holocaust’ (as noted in Chapter 14) was execrated and abominated by European cineastes from Edgar Reitz to Claude Lanzmann, who accused it of turning German history into American soap opera and rendering accessible and comprehensible that which should always remain unspeakable and impenetrable.
But these very limitations account for the show’s impact. It ran for four consecutive nights on West German national television and was watched by an estimated twenty million viewers—well over half the adult population. It also happened to coincide with another trial, of former guards from the Majdanek death camp: a reminder to viewers that this was unfinished business. The public impact was enormous. Five months later the Bundestag voted to abolish the Statute of Limitations for murder (though it should be recorded that among those who voted against was the future Chancellor Helmut Kohl). Henceforward Germans would be among the best-informed Europeans on the subject of the
Knowing—and publicly acknowledging—what Germans had done to Jews four decades earlier was a considerable advance; but situating it in German and European history remained a difficult and unresolved dilemma, as the ‘historians’ clash’ of the Eighties was to demonstrate. Some conservative scholars, among them the hitherto well-respected historian Ernst Nolte, were uncomfortable with the insistence on treating Hitler, his movement and his crimes as unique and
The reaction to Nolte came above all from Jurgen Habermas, who—like Enzensberger, Gunter Grass and other members of the ‘skeptical generation’—was old enough to remember Nazism and thus intensely suspicious of any attempt to ‘limit’ German responsibilities. Nonsense, Habermas replied to Nolte: the point about Nazism is not to ‘situate’ or ‘historicize’ it—that is precisely the temptation which no German would ever again have the right to indulge. The Nazi crime—the German crime—was unique: unique in its scale, unique in its ambition, unique in its un-plumbed evil. Contextualization in Nolte’s sense, with the implicit relativisation of German responsibility that must inevitably ensue, was simply proscribed.
But Habermas’s uncompromising stance set a standard to which few of his countrymen (including historians, for whom comparison and context are the lifeblood of their discipline) could be expected to adhere for long. The new salience of the Holocaust in German public discussion—culminating in the Nineties in copious displays of official remorse for past shortcomings, with Germans indulging in what the writer Peter Schneider called ‘a kind of self-righteous self-hate’—could not last indefinitely. To ask each new generation of Germans to live forever in Hitler’s shadow, to require that they take on responsibility for the memory of Germany’s unique guilt and make it the very measure of their national identity, was the least that could be demanded—but far too much to expect.
Elsewhere in Western Europe the process of remembering and acknowledging had first to overcome self- serving local illusions—a process that typically took two generations and many decades. In Austria—where the television ‘Holocaust’ was broadcast just two months after its German showing but with no remotely comparable impact—it was not until the country’s President, Kurt Waldheim, was revealed in the mid-Eighties to have played a role in the Wehrmacht’s brutal occupation of wartime Yugoslavia that (some) Austrians began a serious, and still incomplete, interrogation of their country’s Nazi past. Indeed, the fact that Waldheim had previously served as UN Secretary General without anyone in the international community troubling themselves over his war record fuelled the suspicions of many Austrians that they were being held to uniquely high standards. Austria, after all, had had a post-war Jewish Chancellor (the Socialist Bruno Kreisky), which was more than could be said for the Germans.
But no-one expected very much of the Austrians. Their largely untroubled relationship to recent history—as late as 1990, nearly two Austrians in five still thought of their country as Hitler’s victim rather than his accomplice and 43 percent of Austrians thought Nazism ‘had good and bad sides’—merely confirmed their own and others’ prejudices.[421] Austria’s Alpine neighbour Switzerland was another matter. For forty years after 1945, Switzerland secured a free pass for its wartime record. Not only was it forgotten that the Swiss had made strenuous efforts to keep Jews out; on the contrary, in popular fiction and in films everywhere the country was represented as a safe, welcoming haven for any persecuted person who could reach its borders. The Swiss basked in their clear conscience and the envious admiration of the world.
In fact, by 1945 the Swiss had taken in just 28,000 Jews—seven thousand of them before the war began. Wartime refugees were refused work permits—they were supported from payments levied upon wealthy Jewish residents. Not until June 1994 did the authorities in Bern officially acknowledge that the Swiss request (made to Berlin in October 1938) for the letter ‘J’ to be stamped on the passports of all German Jews—the better to keep them out—was an act of ‘intolerable racial discrimination’. If this were the extent of Swiss misbehaviour there would hardly have been much fuss—London and Washington never actually requested an identification tag on Jewish passports, but when it came to saving Jewish refugees the British and American records are hardly a source of pride. But the Swiss went considerably further.
As became painfully clear in the course of official investigations conducted through the 1990s, Switzerland not only trafficked in looted gold and made a substantial practical contribution to the German war effort (see Chapter 3), but Swiss banks and insurance companies had knowingly pocketed indecently large sums of money belonging to Jewish account holders or to the claimants of insurance policies on murdered
