Nazi Photo Exhibit in Paris
Posted May 15, 2008 01:50 AM (EST)
Read More: Andre Zucca, Christophe Girard, Deputy Mayor, Edith, Historical Library, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Tepper Marlin, Mayor Bertrand Delanoe, Nazi, Paris, Randal Marlin, Media News
In Paris last month my wife Alice and I chanced to walk past the Paris Historical Library and discovered housed in its basement through July an exhibit ("Les Parisiens sous l'Occupation") of Nazi propaganda photos of Paris life.
The exhibition is completely new because the photos of Vichy-era Paris were in the files of a Nazi magazine, Signal, that were only recently opened. The photos by André Zucca are uniquely in color because no one in Paris but the Nazis could get color film in the war years. Here are some sample pictures.
While the sight Nazi troops parading in the streets is chilling, even more upsetting are photos of Paris life seeming to go on as usual. The French Lottery continued under the Vichy government. Movies (with European stars - no Hollywood in sight) continued to run. The photos show, as the Nazis intended, a Paris largely going about its normal business except for swastikas flying over key buildings and lurid billboards warning Parisians of the Bolshevik menace.
There were special movie theaters for soldiers with special propaganda movies.The ubiquitous propaganda billboards have the following themes:- Gibes at the U.S. and British troops for making little progress in Italy.- Dying children accusing the allies of being assassins, with bombs being dropped on deliberately on civilians.- Dramatizations portraying German troops as if they were heroes defending Paris against Bolshevik terrorists. - Invitations to exhibits showing Bolshevik atrocities.- Nazi recruitment ads for French workers. "They [the German soldiers] give their blood, so you should give your work." - Appeals to self-interest: "If you want to get ahead," says a poster, "come work in Germany." - A large "Office for Placement in Germany" promising "Jobs for All."As the war went on, the photos show the propaganda becoming more desperate.
Eventually Zucca shows the Allies marching into Paris where they were met with endless American flags draped from windows. When we came home that evening and told our Parisian hostess Edith about the exhibit, she said she didn't know about it. But she told me a few days later that there were subsequently intense debates about it on the radio and television and in print, all through the second half of April.
The exhibit became a bone of contention between the French Red Guard Christophe Girard, the Deputy Mayor for Culture to Bertrand Delanoë, the openly gay Socialist Mayor of Paris. Mayor Delanoë ruled that it is inappropriate to show life as normal during the occupation. He required exhibit sponsors to take down their posters advertising the exhibit, while allowing the exhibit to remain open. The Mayor sees educational value in showing that at the same time as the Vichy police were cooperating in the deportation of Jews, and at the same time as most people in Paris were suffering, some Parisians were living pretty well. "When I became aware of the problem," Mayor Delanoë said, "I asked the historian Jean-Pierre Azema to add needed explanations to the exhibit. Historians and associations advised me not to make things worse by shutting down the exhibit."
"It is difficult to forget," added Deputy Mayor Girard, "that many left-wing intellectuals lived well in Paris under the Nazis, and on good terms with the occupiers. The ultimate statement was that of Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote (in The Republic of Silence) in 1944: 'Never have we been more free than under the German occupation.' This is perhaps the kind of 'memory' that we stir up at some risk."
Curious about Girard's characterization of Sartre, I queried my brother Randal Marlin, a philosophy professor at Carleton University in Ottawa and author of Propaganda and The Art of Persuasion. Randal says Girard takes Sartre's words out of context.
"What Sartre meant by those words was that those who were part of the resistance, knew that at any moment they could be arrested and tortured. They knew that with their freedom to choose as they did, came the price of possibly losing their lives. For that reason the meaning of freedom was more alive than before. They were never more free because the meaning of freedom had become clear. He's talking about ontological freedom, not political freedom. Sartre chose to resist through his writings, and his play The Flies, with its metaphorical reference to the Nazi occupiers as a plague of flies, would have imperiled his own safety."
The exhibit is worth bringing to New York City or other big cities. But for school children and others without a fully developed understanding of European history 65 years ago, the exhibit should be redesigned. Viewers should see each Zucca photo for the Nazi propaganda it is by having juxtaposed with it a black-and-white photo showing (with related facts) the grim reality of life and death for most Parisians, and especially Jewish Parisians, in the evil days of the occupation.
Showing posts with label Nazism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nazism. Show all posts
20 April 2008
The Mufti and the Holocaust
BOOKS:
The Mufti and the Holocaust
By John Rosenthal
John Rosenthal on Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten by Klaus Gensicke
________________________________________
KLAUS GENSICKE. Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten. WISSENSCHAFTLICHE BUCHGESELLSCHAFT. 247 PAGES. €49.90
Germany stands for an uncompromising struggle against the Jews. It is self-evident that the struggle against the Jewish national homeland in Palestine forms part of this struggle, since such a national homeland would be nothing other than a political base for the destructive influence of Jewish interests. Germany also knows that the claim that Jewry plays the role of an economic pioneer in Palestine is a lie. Only the Arabs work there, not the Jews. Germany is determined to call on the European nations one by one to solve the Jewish problem and, at the proper moment, to address the same appeal to non-European peoples.
—Adolf Hitler to Haj Amin Al-Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem, November 28, 1941 1
THE PERSISTENCE OF widespread Judeophobia in the Muslim world is hardly a matter of dispute, even if many commentators are inclined to dismiss it as merely an “understandable” reaction to Israeli “oppression.” Among those who take the phenomenon seriously, however, a debate has been taking place of late about its origins. The debate has been spurred on, notably, by the publication in English translation of the German political scientist Matthias Küntzel’s book Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11. The central thesis of Küntzel’s book is that anti-Semitism — or, more precisely, modern anti-Semitism as crystallized in the “Jewish world conspiracy” theory — was largely imported into the Muslim world from Nazi Germany.
Now, one might have expected that opponents of Islamism would welcome a book showing the direct influence of the Third Reich upon the development of the Islamist movement and, most notably, on the Muslim Brotherhood, the pivotal organization in its history. In normal political discourse, after all, pointing out the links of an organization or movement to National Socialism does not exactly constitute an endorsement. Ironically, however, Küntzel’s book has been most roundly criticized — indeed outright denounced — by precisely the most adamant foes of Islamic extremism.
For the most part self-styled experts in Islam, the latter have insisted, as against Küntzel’s thesis, that Muslim anti-Semitism is, in effect, a strictly Muslim affair.
The Gensicke volume provides considerable support for the thesis that “native” Islamic sources of anti-Semitism are primordial in Muslim or Arab anti-Semitism.
Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and the “father” of Palestinian radicalism, is obviously a key figure for such debates. As is well known, from 1941 to 1945 Husseini lived in Berlin as the honored guest of Nazi Germany. During this time, he notably collaborated with the Nazis in assembling the Muslim SS division “Handzar” in Bosnia, as well as in numerous propaganda activities aimed at Arab speakers. Whereas the facts of Husseini’s collaboration with the Nazis are widely known, what is less know, however, is the degree to which the mufti was influenced by or indeed himself influenced his hosts on an ideological and programmatic level. But a new book by German historian Klaus Gensicke titled Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten — “The Mufti of Jerusalem and the National Socialists” — sheds light on precisely this question. Based largely on primary source materials from the German archives, Gensicke’s volume provides unparalleled insight into the details of the mufti’s relationship to his Nazi hosts: at least as seen from the German side.
Gensicke’s 1988 doctoral dissertation is one of the principal sources for Küntzel’s discussion of the mufti in Jihad and Jew-Hatred and Küntzel himself wrote the preface for Gensicke’s new book: an updated version of the dissertation.
Nonetheless, the Gensicke volume also provides considerable support for the thesis that, so to say, “native” Islamic sources of anti-Semitism are primordial in Muslim or Arab anti-Semitism. At the very least, Gensicke’s account shows the relation between the mufti and the Nazis to have been very much a two-way street: even — or indeed especially — as concerns the notorious “Jewish Question.”
THUS, IN MARCH 1933, only two months after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, it was in fact the mufti who sought contact to the new German authorities and not vice-versa. In a March 31 telegram to Berlin, the German general consul in Jerusalem, Heinrich Wolff, reported on his meeting with Husseini:
The Mufti explained to me today at length that Muslims both within Palestine and without welcome the new regime in Germany and hope for the spread of fascist, anti-democratic forms of government to other countries. Current Jewish economic and political influence is harmful everywhere and has to be combated. In order to be able to hit the standard of living of Jews, Muslims are hoping for Germany to declare a boycott [of “Jewish” goods], which they would then enthusiastically join throughout the Muslim world.
As Gensicke explains, however, the initial German response to the mufti’s advances was cool. Indeed, the German attitude toward the mufti would remain reserved throughout the first years of Nazi rule. At the time, the Nazi leadership still hoped to come to an understanding with Great Britain that would allow it to pursue unhindered its expansionist goals in Eastern Europe. In return for British acquiescence, it was prepared to treat the Middle East as part of the British sphere of influence.
Moreover, for at least part of the Nazi leadership — Gensicke points in particular to Deputy Foreign Minister Ernst von Weizsäcker — the immigration of German Jews to Palestine represented a tolerable solution to Germany’s supposed “Jewish problem.”
This attitude was obviously inimical to the plans of the mufti, who pleaded with German authorities to restrict Jewish immigration. Starting in August 1933, however, they did the opposite: in effect, facilitating Jewish immigration under the complex terms of the so-called Haavara or “Transfer” Agreement. The Haavara Agreement simultaneously permitted German Jews to transfer part of their wealth to Palestine and favored German exports to the region — the latter aspect earning it the support also of the Economics Ministry. “It cannot be denied that the Haavara Transfer made a considerable contribution to the development of Jewish settlement in Palestine,” Gensicke writes.
The immigration of Jews to Palestine represented a tolerable solution to some in the Nazi leadership, but it was inimical to the mufti’s plans.
By August 1940, however, the situation had radically changed. The outbreak of the war had brought the Haavara Agreement to an end. Even while it was still at least formally in effect, moreover, the Germans had already been quietly providing financial and material support to the mufti-led “Arab Revolt” in Palestine from 1936 to 1939. The aim of the revolt was precisely to stop Jewish immigration. After guiding the Arab Revolt from exile in Beirut, the mufti had in the meanwhile taken refuge in Iraq. There he allied himself with the pro-Axis circle around new Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gailani, who had recently replaced the pro-British Nuri as-Said. On August 26, an emissary of the mufti by the name of Osman Kemal Haddad met with Fritz Grobba of the German Foreign Office in Berlin. According to Grobba’s notes, Haddad asked for a declaration from Germany and Italy recognizing the right of the Arab countries to independence and “self-determination” and that they might resolve the “question of the Jewish element” just as Germany and Italy had done. In return, Haddad promised that Iraq would accord Germany and Italy “a privileged place” in its foreign relations: notably as concerns the “exploitation of Iraq’s mineral resources and in particular its oil reserves.”
Only the defeat of Rommel at the second Battle of El Alamein prevented German forces from entering Palestine and carrying out operations against the Jewish population.
Gailani would resign his post in January 1941 and then be returned to power by a coup d’état four months later. The British military intervention that followed would bring a provisional end to the mufti’s plans of transforming Iraq into a pro-Axis beachhead in the Middle East. “Sonderkommando Junck,” a somewhat perfunctory German Luftwaffe mission dispatched by the Reich to support its allies in Iraq, could not reverse the trend. Both the mufti and Gailani fled to Tehran toward the end of May.
Even after their departure, Gensicke writes, “a wave of acts of intimidation and terror on the part of the pro-Axis forces continued.” These included a major anti-Jewish pogrom, known as the “Farhud,” in which some 179 Iraqi Jews were killed.
As Gensicke’s account makes clear, moreover, the Nazi leadership would continue to accord central importance to the Iraqi “liberation struggle.” The deposed Iraqi Prime Minister Gailani followed the mufti to Berlin, where he, too, would take up residence starting in November 1941. For the remainder of the war years, the two Arab leaders would compete jealously for the Nazis’ favor. In light of the obvious parallels between the anti-British Iraqi “liberation struggle” of the early 1940s and the anti-American Iraqi “liberation struggle” of today, it is curious that Nazi Germany’s involvement in the former has not received greater public attention. A separate study of Gailani’s collaboration with the Nazis would undoubtedly be rich in historical lessons.
Hitler appears to have made German plans for a more muscular intervention to “liberate” Iraq merely contingent upon the successful conclusion of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Once the Wehrmacht had taken control of the southern Caucasus region, German troops were to sweep down into Iraq. The German defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943 definitively put an end to such plans.
ON NOVEMBER 28, 1941, three weeks after his arrival in Berlin, the mufti was received by Hitler. As recorded in the minutes of the meeting, Hitler urged his guest to remain patient:
At some not yet precisely known, but in any case not very distant point in time, the German armies will reach the southern edge of the Caucasus. As soon as this is the case, the Führer will himself give the Arab world his assurance that the hour of liberation has arrived. At this point, the sole German aim will be the destruction of the Jews living in the Arab space under the protection of British power.
In the same meeting, Hitler likewise assured the mufti of his opposition to the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, which, he said, “would be nothing other than a political base for the destructive influence of Jewish interests.” More than 15 years earlier, Hitler had expressed the same thought in more colorful terms in Mein Kampf: “They are not at all thinking of building a Jewish state in Palestine in order, for instance, to live there; but rather they only hope to have a headquarters for their international swindling operations that is furnished with sovereign powers and removed from the influence of other states.”2
When the right time had come, Hitler told the mufti, the Arabs and other “non-European peoples” would be called on to “solve the Jewish problem” just as the “European nations” had done. The chilling remark suggests plans to exterminate even those Jews that the Nazi leadership had earlier permitted to immigrate to Palestine. As so happens, historians Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers have recently uncovered evidence that such plans did indeed exist. A special SS commando unit was formed in 1942 and attached to Rommel’s African Panzer Army. Its writ was in large part identical to that of the infamous Einsatzgruppen that accompanied the Wehrmacht during the invasion of the Soviet Union and that were responsible for the murder of upwards of one million Soviet Jews. On Mallmann and Cüppers’s account, only the defeat of Rommel at the second Battle of El Alamein prevented German forces from entering Palestine and carrying out similar operations against the Jewish population there.3
Among his other activities in Berlin, the mufti served as honorary chair of a newly founded “Islamic Central Institute” The institute was officially opened on December 18, 1942: during Eid al-Adha, the Islamic “Festival of Sacrifice.” In a letter to Hitler on the occasion, the mufti expressed the hope that “thousands of Muslims around the world” would cooperate with Germany in the fight against “the common enemies”: “Jews, Bolsheviks and Anglo-Saxons.” The speech given by the mufti at the opening ceremony provides perhaps the clearest evidence that he required no lessons from the Nazis in anti-Semitism — or, at any rate, that if he did, he had by this time successfully assimilated those lessons into a remarkable synthesis of “traditional” Quranic and “modern” European Judeophobia:
The Jews and their accomplices are to be counted among the bitterest enemies of the Muslims, who made known . . . their hostility since ancient times and have everywhere and always . . . treated them [Muslims] with guile. Every Muslim knows all too well how the Jews afflicted him and his faith in the first days of Islam and what hatefulness they displayed toward the great Prophet — what hardship and trouble they caused him, how many intrigues they launched, how many conspiracies against him they brought about — such that the Quran judged them to be the most irreconcilable enemies of the Muslims. . . . They will always remain a divisive element in the world: an element that is committed to devising schemes, provoking wars and playing peoples off against one another. . . . In England as in America, it is the Jewish influence alone that rules; and it is the same Jewish influence that is behind godless Communism. . . . And it is also this Jewish influence that has incited the nations into this grueling war. It is only the Jews who benefit from the tragic fate that they [the nations] suffer. . . .
In a subsequent talk at the Islamic Central Institute on November 2, 1943, the mufti called on Muslims to follow the example of National Socialist Germany, since the latter “knew how to save itself from the evil [Unheil] done by the Jews. . . . It had precisely identified the Jews and decided to find a definitive solution to the Jewish menace, in order to eliminate their evildoing [Unheil] from the world.” Gensicke points to the latter remark as evidence that the mufti was “well informed” about the extermination program that was by this time long underway in the Nazi death camps in occupied Poland.4
INDEED, PERHAPS THE most shocking finding of Gensicke’s research concerns the repeated efforts of the mufti after 1943 to ensure that no European Jews should elude the camps: this during a period when it was becoming increasingly obvious even to the Nazi leadership that Germany would lose the war. Thus, for example, Bulgarian plans to permit some 4,000 Jewish children and 500 adult companions to immigrate to Palestine provoked a letter from the mufti to the Bulgarian foreign minister, pleading for the operation to be stopped. In the letter, dated May 6, 1943, Husseini invoked a “Jewish danger for the whole world and especially for the countries where Jews live.” “If I may be permitted,” the mufti continued,
I would like to call your attention to the fact that it would be very appropriate and more advantageous to prevent the Jews from emigrating from your country and instead to send them where they will be placed under strict control: e.g. to Poland. Thus one can avoid the danger they represent and do a good deed vis-à-vis the Arab peoples that will be appreciated.
One week later, the mufti sent additional “protest letters” to both the Italian and German Foreign Ministries, appealing for them to intervene in the matter. The German Foreign Ministry promptly sent off a cable to the German ambassador in Sofia stressing “the common German-Arab interest in preventing the rescue operation.” Indeed, according to the post-War recollections of a Foreign Ministry official, “The Mufti turned up all over the place making protests: in the Minister’s office, in the waiting room of the Deputy Minister and in other sections: for example, Interior, the Press Office, the Broadcast service, and also the SS.” “The Mufti was a sworn enemy of the Jews,” the official concluded, “and he made no secret of the fact that he would have preferred to see them all killed.”
As Gensicke points out, the mufti’s hyperactivity is particularly notable in light of the fact that the Foreign Ministry — and even indeed Heinrich Himmler’s Reich Security Central Office (RSHA), which was directly responsible for implementing the Final Solution — had shown signs of being willing to tolerate the Bulgarian rescue action: at any rate, for a price. The RSHA demanded the release of some 20,000 Germans interred by the Allies in exchange for the Jewish children.
In the nearly 800 pages of the two volumes of Hitler’s would-be magnum opus, Arabs are not mentioned at all as such and Islam is mentioned just once.
In late June, both the Romanian and Hungarian Foreign Ministers would be recipients of similar appeals from the mufti. The Romanian government had been planning to allow some 75,000 to 80,000 Jews to immigrate to the Middle East, and Hungary — which had become a refuge for Jews escaping persecution elsewhere in Europe — was reportedly preparing to allow some 900 Jewish children and their parents to immigrate as well. The mufti repeated his counsel that the Jews should be sent rather to Poland, where they could be kept under “active surveillance.” “It is especially monstrous,” Gensicke concludes, “that el-Husseini objected to even those few cases in which the National Socialists were prepared, for whatever reasons, to permit Jews to emigrate. . . . For him, only deportation to Poland was acceptable, since he knew fully well that there would be no escape for the Jews from there.”
SELF-PROFESSED Islamophobes — whose insistence that Islamism has something to do with Islam is, of course, not unreasonable in itself — will undoubtedly be tempted to see in Gensicke’s research support also for far more extravagant propositions.
Pointing to the alleged admiration for Islam of this or that Nazi luminary or of the Führer himself, the most hysterical reactions to Matthias Küntzel’s Jihad and Jew-Hatred seem even to want to suggest that it is not, after all, National Socialism that is the source of rampant anti-Semitism in the Muslim World, but rather Islam that was perhaps the source or inspiration of the anti-Semitism of the National Socialists! Thus, for example, in a review of Küntzel’s volume on the Frontpage website,5 Andrew Bostom accuses Küntzel of “selective citation” and triumphantly adduces a passage from Albert Speer’s memoirs in which Speer describes Hitler expressing his regrets that Arabs had failed to conquer Europe in the early Middle Ages, since their warlike Muslim religion was “perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament.”
Let it be noted in passing that it is at least odd for Bostom to accuse Küntzel of having, in his words, “omitted” this passage, given that Küntzel’s own citation of Speer concerns a different topic (Hitler’s alleged fantasies about the destruction of New York) and is drawn indeed from an entirely different book. The eccentricity of such a procedure, moreover, appears less innocent when one considers that Bostom himself — in a 10,000-word screed replete with lengthy citations — has taken the trouble to suppress the following words from the very middle of his own Speer passage: “Hitler said that the conquering Arabs, because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate and conditions of the country. They could not have kept down the more vigorous natives. . . . ”6
Gensicke, citing a similarly anecdotal source, suggests that it was precisely Hitler’s belief in the racial inferiority of Arabs that prevented him from fully utilizing the support that the mufti and his Arab nationalist allies could have provided the Nazi cause. More generally, Gensicke notes that “on account of their racial ideology, it was impossible for the National Socialists to advocate the idea of Arab independence.” For the Nazis, he concludes, “the Semitic Arabs were as incapable of successfully running a state as were the Jews.” Even leaving aside the biographies of Nazis who would convert to Islam after the War or Himmler’s well-documented (though seemingly rather superficial) enthusiasm for Islam, this well-meaning caveat is contradicted by archival evidence adduced by Gensicke elsewhere in his volume.7
If, however, instead of turning to more or less reliable recollections of third parties,8 one returns to the source — namely, the undisputed bible of the National Socialist movement, Hitler’s Mein Kampf — one discovers that Hitler’s own views on Islam and Arabs were almost nonexistent. In the nearly 800 pages of the two volumes of his would-be magnum opus, Arabs are not mentioned a single time as such and Islam is mentioned just once, in a neutral remark on the relative appeal of Islam and Christianity in Africa. The fevered mental universe of the discharged corporal and aspiring “race theorist” was amply populated by different varieties of Slavs, the occasional “Negro” [Neger], and, of course, always and everywhere the conniving and threatening Jew: the racial antipode of the honest “Aryan.” But Arabs and the “Muslim world” seem barely to have crossed his radar. Only once does Hitler implicitly offer his “racial” assessment of the latter: this in considering the prospect of German National Socialists forming an alliance with Egyptian insurgents fighting against British colonial rule. Hitler even alludes tantalizingly to the insurgents’ “Holy War” — in scare quotes, suggesting his clear disdain for the idea. “As [someone] who assesses the value of humanity according to racial criteria,” Hitler writes, “the knowledge of the racial inferiority of these so-called ‘oppressed nations’ forbids me from linking the fate of my own people with theirs.”9
It was only during the war that Hitler would, in effect, be confronted in a far more practical and urgent form by the very same question of “linking” the Nazi cause to religiously-tinged Arab nationalism. And when he was, as Gensicke’s volume shows, he would find not only a willing ally, but also a kindred spirit, in Haj Amin Al-Husseini.
________________________________________
John Rosenthal writes on European politics, with a special focus on Germany and France. His work has appeared in the Claremont Review of Books, the Opinion Journal, Les Temps Modernes, and Merkur. He is a contributing editor for World Politics Review.
________________________________________
1 Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007), 60-61. Author’s translation.
2 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Verlag Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1943), 356. Author’s translation.
3 See Klaus-Michael Mallman and Martin Cüppers, “‘Elimination of the Jewish National Home in Palestine’: The Einsatzkommando of the Panzer Army Africa, 1942” in Yad Vashem Studies XXV (available online at http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_holocaust/studies/vol35/Mallmann-Cuppers2.pdf, accessed February 29, 2008). Mallmann and Cüppers have published the results of their research in book-length form in Halbmond und Hakenkreuz. Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006).
4 Citing documents from the Nuremberg Trials, Gensicke also notes that in mid-1942 members of Husseini’s and Gailani’s respective entourages visited the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg near Berlin. It is perhaps exaggerated to conclude from this fact that the mufti was aware of what was transpiring in the camps further to the East. According to the commonly accepted classification, Sachsenhausen was not a “death camp,” but merely a “normal” concentration camp. This is not to say that tens of thousands were not executed there: above all, Soviet prisoners. In any case, the Jewish inmates at Sachsenhausen were supposed to have “particularly interested” the visitors, who came away from their visit with “a very positive impression.” Gensicke, 206, note >55.
5 http: //www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=E352185E-D91E-4773-B4AE-9A5C3EA4949B (accessed February 29, 2008).
6 Lest I myself be accused of “selective citation,” I should mention that in a more recent blog post — discovered thanks to a fortuitous Google search rather than comprehensive familiarity with the author’s output — Bostom cites the full Speer passage and now allows that Hitler’s views of Arabs and Islam were “ambivalent.” See http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2008/01/25/verboten-discussion—hitler-muhammad-and-islam/ (accessed February 29, 2008).
7 Thus in a letter of March 11, 1941, Deputy Foreign Minister Ernst von Weizsäcker assured the mufti that Germany was “of the opinion that the Arabs are an ancient cultured nation [ein altes Kulturvolk] that has proven its aptitude for administration and its military virtues and that is fully capable of governing itself.”
8 Speer in particular was a notorious fabulist and his often farfetched inventions have been the subject of several books: such as Matthias Schmidt’s Albert Speer: the End of a Myth and Dan van der Vat’s The Good Nazi: the Life and Lies of Albert Speer. In a particularly craven and macabre instance, at one point during questioning at the main Nuremberg trial, Speer claimed to have been planning to assassinate Hitler by dropping poison gas through a ventilation pipe at the Reich Chancellery, a plan that only failed to come to fruition, he said, because the opening of the pipe was too high for him to reach.
9 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 747. Author’s translation.
The Mufti and the Holocaust
By John Rosenthal
John Rosenthal on Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten by Klaus Gensicke
________________________________________
KLAUS GENSICKE. Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten. WISSENSCHAFTLICHE BUCHGESELLSCHAFT. 247 PAGES. €49.90
Germany stands for an uncompromising struggle against the Jews. It is self-evident that the struggle against the Jewish national homeland in Palestine forms part of this struggle, since such a national homeland would be nothing other than a political base for the destructive influence of Jewish interests. Germany also knows that the claim that Jewry plays the role of an economic pioneer in Palestine is a lie. Only the Arabs work there, not the Jews. Germany is determined to call on the European nations one by one to solve the Jewish problem and, at the proper moment, to address the same appeal to non-European peoples.
—Adolf Hitler to Haj Amin Al-Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem, November 28, 1941 1
THE PERSISTENCE OF widespread Judeophobia in the Muslim world is hardly a matter of dispute, even if many commentators are inclined to dismiss it as merely an “understandable” reaction to Israeli “oppression.” Among those who take the phenomenon seriously, however, a debate has been taking place of late about its origins. The debate has been spurred on, notably, by the publication in English translation of the German political scientist Matthias Küntzel’s book Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11. The central thesis of Küntzel’s book is that anti-Semitism — or, more precisely, modern anti-Semitism as crystallized in the “Jewish world conspiracy” theory — was largely imported into the Muslim world from Nazi Germany.
Now, one might have expected that opponents of Islamism would welcome a book showing the direct influence of the Third Reich upon the development of the Islamist movement and, most notably, on the Muslim Brotherhood, the pivotal organization in its history. In normal political discourse, after all, pointing out the links of an organization or movement to National Socialism does not exactly constitute an endorsement. Ironically, however, Küntzel’s book has been most roundly criticized — indeed outright denounced — by precisely the most adamant foes of Islamic extremism.
For the most part self-styled experts in Islam, the latter have insisted, as against Küntzel’s thesis, that Muslim anti-Semitism is, in effect, a strictly Muslim affair.
The Gensicke volume provides considerable support for the thesis that “native” Islamic sources of anti-Semitism are primordial in Muslim or Arab anti-Semitism.
Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and the “father” of Palestinian radicalism, is obviously a key figure for such debates. As is well known, from 1941 to 1945 Husseini lived in Berlin as the honored guest of Nazi Germany. During this time, he notably collaborated with the Nazis in assembling the Muslim SS division “Handzar” in Bosnia, as well as in numerous propaganda activities aimed at Arab speakers. Whereas the facts of Husseini’s collaboration with the Nazis are widely known, what is less know, however, is the degree to which the mufti was influenced by or indeed himself influenced his hosts on an ideological and programmatic level. But a new book by German historian Klaus Gensicke titled Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten — “The Mufti of Jerusalem and the National Socialists” — sheds light on precisely this question. Based largely on primary source materials from the German archives, Gensicke’s volume provides unparalleled insight into the details of the mufti’s relationship to his Nazi hosts: at least as seen from the German side.
Gensicke’s 1988 doctoral dissertation is one of the principal sources for Küntzel’s discussion of the mufti in Jihad and Jew-Hatred and Küntzel himself wrote the preface for Gensicke’s new book: an updated version of the dissertation.
Nonetheless, the Gensicke volume also provides considerable support for the thesis that, so to say, “native” Islamic sources of anti-Semitism are primordial in Muslim or Arab anti-Semitism. At the very least, Gensicke’s account shows the relation between the mufti and the Nazis to have been very much a two-way street: even — or indeed especially — as concerns the notorious “Jewish Question.”
THUS, IN MARCH 1933, only two months after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, it was in fact the mufti who sought contact to the new German authorities and not vice-versa. In a March 31 telegram to Berlin, the German general consul in Jerusalem, Heinrich Wolff, reported on his meeting with Husseini:
The Mufti explained to me today at length that Muslims both within Palestine and without welcome the new regime in Germany and hope for the spread of fascist, anti-democratic forms of government to other countries. Current Jewish economic and political influence is harmful everywhere and has to be combated. In order to be able to hit the standard of living of Jews, Muslims are hoping for Germany to declare a boycott [of “Jewish” goods], which they would then enthusiastically join throughout the Muslim world.
As Gensicke explains, however, the initial German response to the mufti’s advances was cool. Indeed, the German attitude toward the mufti would remain reserved throughout the first years of Nazi rule. At the time, the Nazi leadership still hoped to come to an understanding with Great Britain that would allow it to pursue unhindered its expansionist goals in Eastern Europe. In return for British acquiescence, it was prepared to treat the Middle East as part of the British sphere of influence.
Moreover, for at least part of the Nazi leadership — Gensicke points in particular to Deputy Foreign Minister Ernst von Weizsäcker — the immigration of German Jews to Palestine represented a tolerable solution to Germany’s supposed “Jewish problem.”
This attitude was obviously inimical to the plans of the mufti, who pleaded with German authorities to restrict Jewish immigration. Starting in August 1933, however, they did the opposite: in effect, facilitating Jewish immigration under the complex terms of the so-called Haavara or “Transfer” Agreement. The Haavara Agreement simultaneously permitted German Jews to transfer part of their wealth to Palestine and favored German exports to the region — the latter aspect earning it the support also of the Economics Ministry. “It cannot be denied that the Haavara Transfer made a considerable contribution to the development of Jewish settlement in Palestine,” Gensicke writes.
The immigration of Jews to Palestine represented a tolerable solution to some in the Nazi leadership, but it was inimical to the mufti’s plans.
By August 1940, however, the situation had radically changed. The outbreak of the war had brought the Haavara Agreement to an end. Even while it was still at least formally in effect, moreover, the Germans had already been quietly providing financial and material support to the mufti-led “Arab Revolt” in Palestine from 1936 to 1939. The aim of the revolt was precisely to stop Jewish immigration. After guiding the Arab Revolt from exile in Beirut, the mufti had in the meanwhile taken refuge in Iraq. There he allied himself with the pro-Axis circle around new Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gailani, who had recently replaced the pro-British Nuri as-Said. On August 26, an emissary of the mufti by the name of Osman Kemal Haddad met with Fritz Grobba of the German Foreign Office in Berlin. According to Grobba’s notes, Haddad asked for a declaration from Germany and Italy recognizing the right of the Arab countries to independence and “self-determination” and that they might resolve the “question of the Jewish element” just as Germany and Italy had done. In return, Haddad promised that Iraq would accord Germany and Italy “a privileged place” in its foreign relations: notably as concerns the “exploitation of Iraq’s mineral resources and in particular its oil reserves.”
Only the defeat of Rommel at the second Battle of El Alamein prevented German forces from entering Palestine and carrying out operations against the Jewish population.
Gailani would resign his post in January 1941 and then be returned to power by a coup d’état four months later. The British military intervention that followed would bring a provisional end to the mufti’s plans of transforming Iraq into a pro-Axis beachhead in the Middle East. “Sonderkommando Junck,” a somewhat perfunctory German Luftwaffe mission dispatched by the Reich to support its allies in Iraq, could not reverse the trend. Both the mufti and Gailani fled to Tehran toward the end of May.
Even after their departure, Gensicke writes, “a wave of acts of intimidation and terror on the part of the pro-Axis forces continued.” These included a major anti-Jewish pogrom, known as the “Farhud,” in which some 179 Iraqi Jews were killed.
As Gensicke’s account makes clear, moreover, the Nazi leadership would continue to accord central importance to the Iraqi “liberation struggle.” The deposed Iraqi Prime Minister Gailani followed the mufti to Berlin, where he, too, would take up residence starting in November 1941. For the remainder of the war years, the two Arab leaders would compete jealously for the Nazis’ favor. In light of the obvious parallels between the anti-British Iraqi “liberation struggle” of the early 1940s and the anti-American Iraqi “liberation struggle” of today, it is curious that Nazi Germany’s involvement in the former has not received greater public attention. A separate study of Gailani’s collaboration with the Nazis would undoubtedly be rich in historical lessons.
Hitler appears to have made German plans for a more muscular intervention to “liberate” Iraq merely contingent upon the successful conclusion of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Once the Wehrmacht had taken control of the southern Caucasus region, German troops were to sweep down into Iraq. The German defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943 definitively put an end to such plans.
ON NOVEMBER 28, 1941, three weeks after his arrival in Berlin, the mufti was received by Hitler. As recorded in the minutes of the meeting, Hitler urged his guest to remain patient:
At some not yet precisely known, but in any case not very distant point in time, the German armies will reach the southern edge of the Caucasus. As soon as this is the case, the Führer will himself give the Arab world his assurance that the hour of liberation has arrived. At this point, the sole German aim will be the destruction of the Jews living in the Arab space under the protection of British power.
In the same meeting, Hitler likewise assured the mufti of his opposition to the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, which, he said, “would be nothing other than a political base for the destructive influence of Jewish interests.” More than 15 years earlier, Hitler had expressed the same thought in more colorful terms in Mein Kampf: “They are not at all thinking of building a Jewish state in Palestine in order, for instance, to live there; but rather they only hope to have a headquarters for their international swindling operations that is furnished with sovereign powers and removed from the influence of other states.”2
When the right time had come, Hitler told the mufti, the Arabs and other “non-European peoples” would be called on to “solve the Jewish problem” just as the “European nations” had done. The chilling remark suggests plans to exterminate even those Jews that the Nazi leadership had earlier permitted to immigrate to Palestine. As so happens, historians Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers have recently uncovered evidence that such plans did indeed exist. A special SS commando unit was formed in 1942 and attached to Rommel’s African Panzer Army. Its writ was in large part identical to that of the infamous Einsatzgruppen that accompanied the Wehrmacht during the invasion of the Soviet Union and that were responsible for the murder of upwards of one million Soviet Jews. On Mallmann and Cüppers’s account, only the defeat of Rommel at the second Battle of El Alamein prevented German forces from entering Palestine and carrying out similar operations against the Jewish population there.3
Among his other activities in Berlin, the mufti served as honorary chair of a newly founded “Islamic Central Institute” The institute was officially opened on December 18, 1942: during Eid al-Adha, the Islamic “Festival of Sacrifice.” In a letter to Hitler on the occasion, the mufti expressed the hope that “thousands of Muslims around the world” would cooperate with Germany in the fight against “the common enemies”: “Jews, Bolsheviks and Anglo-Saxons.” The speech given by the mufti at the opening ceremony provides perhaps the clearest evidence that he required no lessons from the Nazis in anti-Semitism — or, at any rate, that if he did, he had by this time successfully assimilated those lessons into a remarkable synthesis of “traditional” Quranic and “modern” European Judeophobia:
The Jews and their accomplices are to be counted among the bitterest enemies of the Muslims, who made known . . . their hostility since ancient times and have everywhere and always . . . treated them [Muslims] with guile. Every Muslim knows all too well how the Jews afflicted him and his faith in the first days of Islam and what hatefulness they displayed toward the great Prophet — what hardship and trouble they caused him, how many intrigues they launched, how many conspiracies against him they brought about — such that the Quran judged them to be the most irreconcilable enemies of the Muslims. . . . They will always remain a divisive element in the world: an element that is committed to devising schemes, provoking wars and playing peoples off against one another. . . . In England as in America, it is the Jewish influence alone that rules; and it is the same Jewish influence that is behind godless Communism. . . . And it is also this Jewish influence that has incited the nations into this grueling war. It is only the Jews who benefit from the tragic fate that they [the nations] suffer. . . .
In a subsequent talk at the Islamic Central Institute on November 2, 1943, the mufti called on Muslims to follow the example of National Socialist Germany, since the latter “knew how to save itself from the evil [Unheil] done by the Jews. . . . It had precisely identified the Jews and decided to find a definitive solution to the Jewish menace, in order to eliminate their evildoing [Unheil] from the world.” Gensicke points to the latter remark as evidence that the mufti was “well informed” about the extermination program that was by this time long underway in the Nazi death camps in occupied Poland.4
INDEED, PERHAPS THE most shocking finding of Gensicke’s research concerns the repeated efforts of the mufti after 1943 to ensure that no European Jews should elude the camps: this during a period when it was becoming increasingly obvious even to the Nazi leadership that Germany would lose the war. Thus, for example, Bulgarian plans to permit some 4,000 Jewish children and 500 adult companions to immigrate to Palestine provoked a letter from the mufti to the Bulgarian foreign minister, pleading for the operation to be stopped. In the letter, dated May 6, 1943, Husseini invoked a “Jewish danger for the whole world and especially for the countries where Jews live.” “If I may be permitted,” the mufti continued,
I would like to call your attention to the fact that it would be very appropriate and more advantageous to prevent the Jews from emigrating from your country and instead to send them where they will be placed under strict control: e.g. to Poland. Thus one can avoid the danger they represent and do a good deed vis-à-vis the Arab peoples that will be appreciated.
One week later, the mufti sent additional “protest letters” to both the Italian and German Foreign Ministries, appealing for them to intervene in the matter. The German Foreign Ministry promptly sent off a cable to the German ambassador in Sofia stressing “the common German-Arab interest in preventing the rescue operation.” Indeed, according to the post-War recollections of a Foreign Ministry official, “The Mufti turned up all over the place making protests: in the Minister’s office, in the waiting room of the Deputy Minister and in other sections: for example, Interior, the Press Office, the Broadcast service, and also the SS.” “The Mufti was a sworn enemy of the Jews,” the official concluded, “and he made no secret of the fact that he would have preferred to see them all killed.”
As Gensicke points out, the mufti’s hyperactivity is particularly notable in light of the fact that the Foreign Ministry — and even indeed Heinrich Himmler’s Reich Security Central Office (RSHA), which was directly responsible for implementing the Final Solution — had shown signs of being willing to tolerate the Bulgarian rescue action: at any rate, for a price. The RSHA demanded the release of some 20,000 Germans interred by the Allies in exchange for the Jewish children.
In the nearly 800 pages of the two volumes of Hitler’s would-be magnum opus, Arabs are not mentioned at all as such and Islam is mentioned just once.
In late June, both the Romanian and Hungarian Foreign Ministers would be recipients of similar appeals from the mufti. The Romanian government had been planning to allow some 75,000 to 80,000 Jews to immigrate to the Middle East, and Hungary — which had become a refuge for Jews escaping persecution elsewhere in Europe — was reportedly preparing to allow some 900 Jewish children and their parents to immigrate as well. The mufti repeated his counsel that the Jews should be sent rather to Poland, where they could be kept under “active surveillance.” “It is especially monstrous,” Gensicke concludes, “that el-Husseini objected to even those few cases in which the National Socialists were prepared, for whatever reasons, to permit Jews to emigrate. . . . For him, only deportation to Poland was acceptable, since he knew fully well that there would be no escape for the Jews from there.”
SELF-PROFESSED Islamophobes — whose insistence that Islamism has something to do with Islam is, of course, not unreasonable in itself — will undoubtedly be tempted to see in Gensicke’s research support also for far more extravagant propositions.
Pointing to the alleged admiration for Islam of this or that Nazi luminary or of the Führer himself, the most hysterical reactions to Matthias Küntzel’s Jihad and Jew-Hatred seem even to want to suggest that it is not, after all, National Socialism that is the source of rampant anti-Semitism in the Muslim World, but rather Islam that was perhaps the source or inspiration of the anti-Semitism of the National Socialists! Thus, for example, in a review of Küntzel’s volume on the Frontpage website,5 Andrew Bostom accuses Küntzel of “selective citation” and triumphantly adduces a passage from Albert Speer’s memoirs in which Speer describes Hitler expressing his regrets that Arabs had failed to conquer Europe in the early Middle Ages, since their warlike Muslim religion was “perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament.”
Let it be noted in passing that it is at least odd for Bostom to accuse Küntzel of having, in his words, “omitted” this passage, given that Küntzel’s own citation of Speer concerns a different topic (Hitler’s alleged fantasies about the destruction of New York) and is drawn indeed from an entirely different book. The eccentricity of such a procedure, moreover, appears less innocent when one considers that Bostom himself — in a 10,000-word screed replete with lengthy citations — has taken the trouble to suppress the following words from the very middle of his own Speer passage: “Hitler said that the conquering Arabs, because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate and conditions of the country. They could not have kept down the more vigorous natives. . . . ”6
Gensicke, citing a similarly anecdotal source, suggests that it was precisely Hitler’s belief in the racial inferiority of Arabs that prevented him from fully utilizing the support that the mufti and his Arab nationalist allies could have provided the Nazi cause. More generally, Gensicke notes that “on account of their racial ideology, it was impossible for the National Socialists to advocate the idea of Arab independence.” For the Nazis, he concludes, “the Semitic Arabs were as incapable of successfully running a state as were the Jews.” Even leaving aside the biographies of Nazis who would convert to Islam after the War or Himmler’s well-documented (though seemingly rather superficial) enthusiasm for Islam, this well-meaning caveat is contradicted by archival evidence adduced by Gensicke elsewhere in his volume.7
If, however, instead of turning to more or less reliable recollections of third parties,8 one returns to the source — namely, the undisputed bible of the National Socialist movement, Hitler’s Mein Kampf — one discovers that Hitler’s own views on Islam and Arabs were almost nonexistent. In the nearly 800 pages of the two volumes of his would-be magnum opus, Arabs are not mentioned a single time as such and Islam is mentioned just once, in a neutral remark on the relative appeal of Islam and Christianity in Africa. The fevered mental universe of the discharged corporal and aspiring “race theorist” was amply populated by different varieties of Slavs, the occasional “Negro” [Neger], and, of course, always and everywhere the conniving and threatening Jew: the racial antipode of the honest “Aryan.” But Arabs and the “Muslim world” seem barely to have crossed his radar. Only once does Hitler implicitly offer his “racial” assessment of the latter: this in considering the prospect of German National Socialists forming an alliance with Egyptian insurgents fighting against British colonial rule. Hitler even alludes tantalizingly to the insurgents’ “Holy War” — in scare quotes, suggesting his clear disdain for the idea. “As [someone] who assesses the value of humanity according to racial criteria,” Hitler writes, “the knowledge of the racial inferiority of these so-called ‘oppressed nations’ forbids me from linking the fate of my own people with theirs.”9
It was only during the war that Hitler would, in effect, be confronted in a far more practical and urgent form by the very same question of “linking” the Nazi cause to religiously-tinged Arab nationalism. And when he was, as Gensicke’s volume shows, he would find not only a willing ally, but also a kindred spirit, in Haj Amin Al-Husseini.
________________________________________
John Rosenthal writes on European politics, with a special focus on Germany and France. His work has appeared in the Claremont Review of Books, the Opinion Journal, Les Temps Modernes, and Merkur. He is a contributing editor for World Politics Review.
________________________________________
1 Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007), 60-61. Author’s translation.
2 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Verlag Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1943), 356. Author’s translation.
3 See Klaus-Michael Mallman and Martin Cüppers, “‘Elimination of the Jewish National Home in Palestine’: The Einsatzkommando of the Panzer Army Africa, 1942” in Yad Vashem Studies XXV (available online at http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_holocaust/studies/vol35/Mallmann-Cuppers2.pdf, accessed February 29, 2008). Mallmann and Cüppers have published the results of their research in book-length form in Halbmond und Hakenkreuz. Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006).
4 Citing documents from the Nuremberg Trials, Gensicke also notes that in mid-1942 members of Husseini’s and Gailani’s respective entourages visited the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg near Berlin. It is perhaps exaggerated to conclude from this fact that the mufti was aware of what was transpiring in the camps further to the East. According to the commonly accepted classification, Sachsenhausen was not a “death camp,” but merely a “normal” concentration camp. This is not to say that tens of thousands were not executed there: above all, Soviet prisoners. In any case, the Jewish inmates at Sachsenhausen were supposed to have “particularly interested” the visitors, who came away from their visit with “a very positive impression.” Gensicke, 206, note >55.
5 http: //www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=E352185E-D91E-4773-B4AE-9A5C3EA4949B (accessed February 29, 2008).
6 Lest I myself be accused of “selective citation,” I should mention that in a more recent blog post — discovered thanks to a fortuitous Google search rather than comprehensive familiarity with the author’s output — Bostom cites the full Speer passage and now allows that Hitler’s views of Arabs and Islam were “ambivalent.” See http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2008/01/25/verboten-discussion—hitler-muhammad-and-islam/ (accessed February 29, 2008).
7 Thus in a letter of March 11, 1941, Deputy Foreign Minister Ernst von Weizsäcker assured the mufti that Germany was “of the opinion that the Arabs are an ancient cultured nation [ein altes Kulturvolk] that has proven its aptitude for administration and its military virtues and that is fully capable of governing itself.”
8 Speer in particular was a notorious fabulist and his often farfetched inventions have been the subject of several books: such as Matthias Schmidt’s Albert Speer: the End of a Myth and Dan van der Vat’s The Good Nazi: the Life and Lies of Albert Speer. In a particularly craven and macabre instance, at one point during questioning at the main Nuremberg trial, Speer claimed to have been planning to assassinate Hitler by dropping poison gas through a ventilation pipe at the Reich Chancellery, a plan that only failed to come to fruition, he said, because the opening of the pipe was too high for him to reach.
9 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 747. Author’s translation.
04 April 2008
Yoonited States of America
[http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?]
Think about this:
Last night, I watched the film "Downfall" on DVD. I've seen it several times as I consider it to be the single best portrayal of Adolf Hitler's and the Nazi regime’s final days in his "Wolf's Lair" in Berlin at the end of April 1945. I have read about all the histories of that time (well, at least 4) and the film contains the feeling that the end of a dream, suddenly turned nightmare for the Nazis, was violently coming down around them owing to the accuracy and diameter of Russian artillery. The story is told from the perspective of Hitler's private secretary, Traudl Junge, whom we first meet 2-1/2 years before the unimaginable end of Hitler and his regime. She is shown to be giddy about getting a job with “der Fuehrer”. We are fast-forwarded to the morning of, if memory serves, April 25, 1945 and the occupants of the veritable city beneath the streets of Berlin are only a little nervous that the Russians are 12 KM outside the city. Traudl herself is seen at the beginning and end of the movie answering questions about her own guilt as a young woman of 22 who, 60 or so years later, tragically realizes that she was part of and enabled a huge death machine for the Jews in particular and other "undesirables" in general. She realized, much too late to do anything about it, that she, like Sophie Scholl (a film about her has been made in Germany as well and I have seen it, too) another young German woman, had choices to make. And Traudl admits to the camera that she chose to close her eyes to even her parents' warning about the Nazis and who further warned her not to get involved. When this film came out in 2004, I do not remember if "torture" and/or the wiretapping of Americans was known. But isn't it our responsibility to find out? I never, ever, want to become what have been come to be known as "Good Germans" who just went along with Hitler and his gang of killers, thugs and geniuses. This issue troubles me deeply and profoundly. You?
RS
Yoonited States of America
The Bush "torture memo" released this week is getting a lot of attention--but for the wrong reasons.
Benjamin Wittes, The New Republic Published: Saturday, April 05, 2008
The disclosure of the former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo's "torture memo" this week was, in most senses, an exercise less in news than in archaeology. The public has long known the memo existed. And it has also known, in broad strokes, what it says: that military interrogators aren't constrained by domestic or international law and that the president has the power to sweep statutory constraints aside anyway. The Bush administration has long since repudiated the memo. Congress some years ago passed the McCain Amendment, clarifying that military interrogators are bound by the Army's Field Manual on interrogations. The military has cleaned up its interrogation act. America has actually made a lot of progress in this area. So for all the convulsive media attention it has received, the memo--81 pages of The World According To Yoo, circa 2003--describes a world in which we no longer live.
Yet there are at least two reasons why the memo is not merely of historical interest but seems to speak so directly to current American debates and political battles. The first is that we have yet to figure out what to do with the people the military and the CIA interrogated brutally in 2002 and 2003. The second is that while the military has made enormous strides, we have yet to decide as a society how the CIA should handle such people in the future. While almost everyone now agrees that the answer doesn't lie in the Yoonitary vision of an entirely unimpeded executive, we have yet to forge a consensus as to either what the rules should be or who should make them. While we don't live in Yoo's world any more, in other words, it still casts a long shadow over us and will continue to do so until we figure out the rules we want instead.
The question about previous detainees is hard to answer. Both the military and the CIA--under the authority of memos from the Office of Legal Counsel, where Yoo operated as a kind of éminence gris--engaged in aggressively coercive interrogations for intelligence purposes in the years that followed September 11. Whether you regard these tactics as unforgivable torture or necessary toughness, fruitful or counter-productive, they have left us with a puzzle without a good solution: A group of hard-core Al Qaeda activists in custody, including the 9/11 plotters, who will be profoundly difficult to bring to trial yet whom America can never release and whose acquittal is, to put it bluntly, unthinkable.
Under normal circumstances, our justice system would likely prefer that a criminal walk free than admit evidence that was derived, even indirectly, from waterboarding a suspect or the lesser sorts of coercive nastiness that went on at Guantanamo. Yet we simply can't do that with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Mohammed al-Qahtani, both of whom are now facing charges before a military commission at the base. And we won't do it. But what then will we do? The Bush administration has only just begun answering this question this year with the 9/11 prisoners, and every aspect of its answer remains in dispute.
The question of future interrogations is even more wrenching--notwithstanding the genuinely impressive progress the military has made. The combination of the McCain Amendment and the Army's rewrite of its field manual have largely solved the problem of military interrogations in a way that--quite magically--has made everyone happy. While coercion and physical pressure are clearly out of bounds now, interrogators have modest new flexibility in certain respects and a great deal more guidance as to what they can and can't do to detainees. Interrogators I have spoken with are pleased. So are human rights groups. It's one of the great, largely unsung successes of the legal battles over counterterrorism.
But it's incomplete. The residual question--what the rules for CIA interrogators should be--is a narrow one affecting a small group of the highest-value detainees. CIA Director Michael Hayden has testified that fewer than 100 people have passed through the agency's secret prisons program since the advent of the war on terror; that only about a third of these people have required enhanced interrogation techniques of any kind; and that only three of that subset required the most dramatic tactic: waterboarding. The remaining dispute, in other words, involves a tiny corner of the larger interrogation question: whether the baseline rules for the CIA should be the same as the baseline rules for the military, and how far agency interrogators can go in breaching those baseline rules in the most extreme of circumstances.
But this is a question that truly tests our core values. Are we opposed to all coercive interrogation as a matter of principle? Or does our opposition involve a strong norm that tolerates, one way or another, certain exceptions? If the latter, when do we tolerate these exemptions? With what kind of coercion? With what kind of oversight? And perhaps most critically, who decides?
You don't have to be John Yoo to ask these questions. In fact, Yoo and his ilk don't need to ask them. If the president can ignore the law and do whatever he deems necessary, they answer themselves. But once we decided as a society to cast the Yoo memos aside, we could no longer avoid answering them. And until we do so, the memos will retain a contemporary importance. They are what we're moving from, but as yet, we do not know what we're moving to.(emphasis added)
Right now, we're at something of a stalemate over that. Congressional Democrats have passed an ill-conceived effort to apply the Army Field Manual to CIA interrogations--a bill that reflects a misunderstanding both of the different institutional needs of the agency and the military, and of the considerable space between what the field manual permits and what the law might reasonably tolerate. Bush's veto of the bill, with Yoo's shadow looming, accepted the need for no additional legal restraint on the agency and proposed nothing in its stead. In my forthcoming book, I suggest an alternative predicated on tightening the baseline rules for CIA interrogations while permitting certain deviations from those rules in the highest-stakes cases, with the highest level of political accountability and detailed disclosures to Congress.
One way or another, the current situation is unacceptable. We ask interrogators to live their professional lives on the edge of illegality, yet we refuse to define the line of legality in any terms other than the broadest of generalities: Don't inflict severe pain or suffering, don't do anything cruel, inhuman, or degrading. If interrogators refrain from any interrogation tactic we later decide--with knowledge of the consequences--we would have preferred they use, the next 9/11 Commission will condemn it as a missed opportunity to have prevented a devastating attack. If they take the opportunity, however, they risk being branded as war criminals and society's retroactive insistence that whatever intelligence they garnered was flawed by definition (because nothing useful can ever come of torture, after all) or that it was obtainable by gentler means. It is a no-win situation from which we have an obligation as a society to relieve those we ask to man the barricades against Al Qaeda.
We talk about John Yoo in large measure because it's easier, because his position--that meaningful legal restraints don't exist at all in the face of presidential will and need--is laughable, and by a kind of transitive principle, we can use that laughter to make our current problems seem easy too. But they're not easy--no easier for a President Obama or Clinton than for a President McCain. And Yoo cannot distract us from our real problems forever.
Benjamin Wittes is a Fellow and Research Director in Public Law at The Brookings Institution and a member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law.
Think about this:
Last night, I watched the film "Downfall" on DVD. I've seen it several times as I consider it to be the single best portrayal of Adolf Hitler's and the Nazi regime’s final days in his "Wolf's Lair" in Berlin at the end of April 1945. I have read about all the histories of that time (well, at least 4) and the film contains the feeling that the end of a dream, suddenly turned nightmare for the Nazis, was violently coming down around them owing to the accuracy and diameter of Russian artillery. The story is told from the perspective of Hitler's private secretary, Traudl Junge, whom we first meet 2-1/2 years before the unimaginable end of Hitler and his regime. She is shown to be giddy about getting a job with “der Fuehrer”. We are fast-forwarded to the morning of, if memory serves, April 25, 1945 and the occupants of the veritable city beneath the streets of Berlin are only a little nervous that the Russians are 12 KM outside the city. Traudl herself is seen at the beginning and end of the movie answering questions about her own guilt as a young woman of 22 who, 60 or so years later, tragically realizes that she was part of and enabled a huge death machine for the Jews in particular and other "undesirables" in general. She realized, much too late to do anything about it, that she, like Sophie Scholl (a film about her has been made in Germany as well and I have seen it, too) another young German woman, had choices to make. And Traudl admits to the camera that she chose to close her eyes to even her parents' warning about the Nazis and who further warned her not to get involved. When this film came out in 2004, I do not remember if "torture" and/or the wiretapping of Americans was known. But isn't it our responsibility to find out? I never, ever, want to become what have been come to be known as "Good Germans" who just went along with Hitler and his gang of killers, thugs and geniuses. This issue troubles me deeply and profoundly. You?
RS
Yoonited States of America
The Bush "torture memo" released this week is getting a lot of attention--but for the wrong reasons.
Benjamin Wittes, The New Republic Published: Saturday, April 05, 2008
The disclosure of the former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo's "torture memo" this week was, in most senses, an exercise less in news than in archaeology. The public has long known the memo existed. And it has also known, in broad strokes, what it says: that military interrogators aren't constrained by domestic or international law and that the president has the power to sweep statutory constraints aside anyway. The Bush administration has long since repudiated the memo. Congress some years ago passed the McCain Amendment, clarifying that military interrogators are bound by the Army's Field Manual on interrogations. The military has cleaned up its interrogation act. America has actually made a lot of progress in this area. So for all the convulsive media attention it has received, the memo--81 pages of The World According To Yoo, circa 2003--describes a world in which we no longer live.
Yet there are at least two reasons why the memo is not merely of historical interest but seems to speak so directly to current American debates and political battles. The first is that we have yet to figure out what to do with the people the military and the CIA interrogated brutally in 2002 and 2003. The second is that while the military has made enormous strides, we have yet to decide as a society how the CIA should handle such people in the future. While almost everyone now agrees that the answer doesn't lie in the Yoonitary vision of an entirely unimpeded executive, we have yet to forge a consensus as to either what the rules should be or who should make them. While we don't live in Yoo's world any more, in other words, it still casts a long shadow over us and will continue to do so until we figure out the rules we want instead.
The question about previous detainees is hard to answer. Both the military and the CIA--under the authority of memos from the Office of Legal Counsel, where Yoo operated as a kind of éminence gris--engaged in aggressively coercive interrogations for intelligence purposes in the years that followed September 11. Whether you regard these tactics as unforgivable torture or necessary toughness, fruitful or counter-productive, they have left us with a puzzle without a good solution: A group of hard-core Al Qaeda activists in custody, including the 9/11 plotters, who will be profoundly difficult to bring to trial yet whom America can never release and whose acquittal is, to put it bluntly, unthinkable.
Under normal circumstances, our justice system would likely prefer that a criminal walk free than admit evidence that was derived, even indirectly, from waterboarding a suspect or the lesser sorts of coercive nastiness that went on at Guantanamo. Yet we simply can't do that with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Mohammed al-Qahtani, both of whom are now facing charges before a military commission at the base. And we won't do it. But what then will we do? The Bush administration has only just begun answering this question this year with the 9/11 prisoners, and every aspect of its answer remains in dispute.
The question of future interrogations is even more wrenching--notwithstanding the genuinely impressive progress the military has made. The combination of the McCain Amendment and the Army's rewrite of its field manual have largely solved the problem of military interrogations in a way that--quite magically--has made everyone happy. While coercion and physical pressure are clearly out of bounds now, interrogators have modest new flexibility in certain respects and a great deal more guidance as to what they can and can't do to detainees. Interrogators I have spoken with are pleased. So are human rights groups. It's one of the great, largely unsung successes of the legal battles over counterterrorism.
But it's incomplete. The residual question--what the rules for CIA interrogators should be--is a narrow one affecting a small group of the highest-value detainees. CIA Director Michael Hayden has testified that fewer than 100 people have passed through the agency's secret prisons program since the advent of the war on terror; that only about a third of these people have required enhanced interrogation techniques of any kind; and that only three of that subset required the most dramatic tactic: waterboarding. The remaining dispute, in other words, involves a tiny corner of the larger interrogation question: whether the baseline rules for the CIA should be the same as the baseline rules for the military, and how far agency interrogators can go in breaching those baseline rules in the most extreme of circumstances.
But this is a question that truly tests our core values. Are we opposed to all coercive interrogation as a matter of principle? Or does our opposition involve a strong norm that tolerates, one way or another, certain exceptions? If the latter, when do we tolerate these exemptions? With what kind of coercion? With what kind of oversight? And perhaps most critically, who decides?
You don't have to be John Yoo to ask these questions. In fact, Yoo and his ilk don't need to ask them. If the president can ignore the law and do whatever he deems necessary, they answer themselves. But once we decided as a society to cast the Yoo memos aside, we could no longer avoid answering them. And until we do so, the memos will retain a contemporary importance. They are what we're moving from, but as yet, we do not know what we're moving to.(emphasis added)
Right now, we're at something of a stalemate over that. Congressional Democrats have passed an ill-conceived effort to apply the Army Field Manual to CIA interrogations--a bill that reflects a misunderstanding both of the different institutional needs of the agency and the military, and of the considerable space between what the field manual permits and what the law might reasonably tolerate. Bush's veto of the bill, with Yoo's shadow looming, accepted the need for no additional legal restraint on the agency and proposed nothing in its stead. In my forthcoming book, I suggest an alternative predicated on tightening the baseline rules for CIA interrogations while permitting certain deviations from those rules in the highest-stakes cases, with the highest level of political accountability and detailed disclosures to Congress.
One way or another, the current situation is unacceptable. We ask interrogators to live their professional lives on the edge of illegality, yet we refuse to define the line of legality in any terms other than the broadest of generalities: Don't inflict severe pain or suffering, don't do anything cruel, inhuman, or degrading. If interrogators refrain from any interrogation tactic we later decide--with knowledge of the consequences--we would have preferred they use, the next 9/11 Commission will condemn it as a missed opportunity to have prevented a devastating attack. If they take the opportunity, however, they risk being branded as war criminals and society's retroactive insistence that whatever intelligence they garnered was flawed by definition (because nothing useful can ever come of torture, after all) or that it was obtainable by gentler means. It is a no-win situation from which we have an obligation as a society to relieve those we ask to man the barricades against Al Qaeda.
We talk about John Yoo in large measure because it's easier, because his position--that meaningful legal restraints don't exist at all in the face of presidential will and need--is laughable, and by a kind of transitive principle, we can use that laughter to make our current problems seem easy too. But they're not easy--no easier for a President Obama or Clinton than for a President McCain. And Yoo cannot distract us from our real problems forever.
Benjamin Wittes is a Fellow and Research Director in Public Law at The Brookings Institution and a member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law.
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