It took me longer to marshal my facts and my thoughts to write my review of this book than it took me to read it. This is because, while I must praise unreservedly the patience, diligence and fairness with which the author researched, travelled and interviewed his way to the completion of his work, I will be putting forward some areas for further inquiry and further thought.
Starting with a bundle of personal documents found hidden in a chair by a Czech emigre in the Netherlands, the author sets out to track down the descendants and investigate the life of one Robert Griesinger, a German bureaucrat in occupied Prague, who seems to have died there in 1945 at the time of the liberation. It turns out, but is not immediately obvious, that Griesinger was a member of the Allgemeine SS and the first thing for the reader to understand is that this organisation, sister to but distinct from the armed paramilitary Waffen SS, was very big and was key in the first instance to making the German state function as a NAZI state, and then to making various annexed and occupied territories function as slave states. (What is also true, but the author doesn’t quite discover, is that civilian Allgemeine SS men, like Griesinger, throughout the NAZI bureaucracy, enabled the Waffen SS to function as a front-line military force. This is because the SS was never a fully-authorised client of the official German ordnance procurement system, especially for small arms, and most of its firepower had to come from sources other than the main German arms factories. Czechoslovakia was an important source of small arms for the SS, ranging from pistols up to the SS41 anti-tank rifle. The Allgemeine SS bureaucrats had to keep certain factories running, no matter what others wanted, to ensure that the Waffen SS was indeed armed. Hollywood films which show SS and Gestapo men with Luger and P38 pistols are very misleading. In the main they would have been supplied with almost everything except Luger and P38 pistols, which were reserved for the Werhmacht. The Radom pistol factory was moved from Poland to France by the Nazis, specifically to equip the Gestapo. Czech “CZ” pistols were supplied to the SS. Some German policemen ended up with stripper-clip-fed Steyr Hahn pistols from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)
The author traces Robert Griesinger’s journey from Stuttgart to Prague, and his father’s journey to Stuttgart via New Orleans. Griesinger did not start out as an SS man in any form: like many career-minded young men he held pretty right-wing views but did not actually join the NAZI party till he had to, in order for his career to progress -and that did not happen till the NAZIs had power, of course. This is why the NAZI Party always drew a distinction between those who joined before they had power, and those who joined afterwards. It was not an arbitrary distinction, either, because the author finds that early and late members of the party were different types of men! Griesinger never really departs from the path of self-advancement and self-promotion, and the system was designed on the assumption that this would be so. The party had no illusion that his generation was serving it from any sort of principle. He was respectful to his wife and kind to his children, but there was an instruction manual telling Allgemeine SS men to be respectful to their wives and kind to their children. A caring party leaves nothing to chance.
The New Orleans connection leads the author to compare Nazi race laws with American ones and the American ones were (in the thirties and forties) more exclusive. (I already knew that even today, the US Government’s definition of “white” for census purposes is more exclusive than that used in Apartheid South Africa. The official American definition of “white” would make President Botha turn quite pale.)
The author describes deep hatred by German people (not necessarily NAZIs) of black people: there’s more in this subject than he appears to think, for two reasons:
It was the policy of the French occupying forces in German after WW1 to subject German citizens under their control to regular humiliations. Not only whenever a citizen had to deal with French soldiers or officials, but during regular parades in all the notable towns under French occupation, where racist caricatures of German people were carried through the streets by French soldiers and citizens simply couldn’t avoid seeing. It was also policy for these humiliations to be largely executed by black colonial soldiers in the French army. (Source: “Travellers in the Third Reich” by Julia Boyd.) By the time the occupation was over, the deliberate humiliation had bred hatred and in 1940 it boiled over onto any black troops, especially black French troops, the Germans captured.
But that hatred was not universal: not all Germans hated all black people; even Hitler had courteous dealings with some. An African-American scholar, Dr Milton S. J. Wright, did his Economics PhD at Heidelberg University, where he found himself an object of curiosity rather than hatred. When he had lunch with his friends at a hotel where Hitler was staying, he was invited by two SS men to meet Hitler and several hours of debate (over tea) ensued. Dr Wright found Hitler a bit disturbing, but not threatening or unfriendly, and Hitler would later make Dr Wright’s thesis required reading for German officials engaged, like Robert Griesinger, in economic work. (Source, again, “Travellers in the Third Reich”. I must commend Julia Boyd’s work to readers of “The SS Officer’s Armchair”, not out of some PC-requirement for “balance” but for the sake of a more complete understanding of the world in which Robert Griesinger grew up and found himself drawn into the NAZI party by his own self-interest.)
The author also notes, prominently, that Griesinger and many of his SS peers came from Protestant backgrounds. You wouldn’t go out of your way to state that nearly all of Mussolini’s men had been brought up as Catholics, or that many of Stalin’s thugs had Orthodox Christian roots. The significant thing is, and the author misses this, that the NAZIs saw Christianity in ANY form as a rival for the love and loyalty of the Germany people, and proceeded to infiltrate and take over the Protestant Church in order, not to make it the official religion of NAZI Germany, but to make it extinct (altars were desecrated, bibles replaced by Mein Kampf, pastors sent to concentration camps if they failed to accept blasphemous doctrines and so on.) Georg Elser and Sophie Scholl were also from a protestant background, and, like Robert Greisinger they were born in Wurttemberg. In different ways they did their best to oppose Hitler (or do him in, in Elser’s case). What more could they have done, other than what they did do and which the NAZIs executed them for?
I am not finding fault, I am urging the reader to look at the subject of SS bureaucrats in a wider and deeper way than this book, by itself, allows. And the reason why I want this is because the holocaust-related mantra of “never again” has failed and once more we see a vast and powerful militarised bureaucracy building and populating concentration camps, destroying religions in detail, putting the image of the party leader above the altar in the churches, herding blindfolded victims in their hundreds onto trains departing for unknown destinations. The parallel between the Allgemeine SS and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps is actually pretty strong, and so many people have already compared the “610 Office” to the Gestapo that it’s almost superfluous to make the point. We need to know exactly how Robert Greisinger and the other SS bureaucrats functioned, because there is another bureaucracy: the same thing, but bigger and stronger with technological tools that Himmler could only dream of, that needs to be defeated if we are not to imminently witness another holocaust, both bigger and more technologically-advanced than that of 1942-1945.
Published by Jonathan Cape on the 1st of October 2020.
No comments:
Post a Comment