A WRITER'S VIEW OF TODAY'S GERMANY

A Writers view of today's Germany

William E. Grim is a writer who lives in Germany and is a native of  Columbus, Ohio.

I'm not Jewish. No one in my family died in the Holocaust. For me,
anti-Semitism has always been one of those phenomena that doesn't really
register on my radar, like tribal genocide in Rwanda, a horrible thing that
happens to someone else.

But I live in a small town outside of Munich on a street that until  May of 1945 was named Adolf Hitler Strasse. I work in Munich, a  pleasant metropolitan city of a little over a million inhabitants  whose Bavarian charm tends to obscure the fact that this city was the  birthplace and capital of the Nazi movement.

Every day when I go to work I pass by the sites of apartments Hitler  lived in, extant buildings in which decisions were made to murder  millions of innocent people, and plazas in which book burnings took  place, SS troops paraded and people were executed. The proximity to  evil has a way of concentrating one's attention, of putting a physical  reality to the textbook narratives of the horrors perpetrated by the  Germans.

Then the little things start to happen that over a period of time add  up to something very sinister. I'm on a bus and a high school boy  passes around Grandpa's red leather-bound copy of Mein Kampf to his  friends who respond by saying "coooool!" He then takes out a VCR tape  (produced in Switzerland) of The Great Speeches of Joseph Goebbels."

A few weeks later I'm at a business meeting with four young highly  educated Germans who are polite, charming and soft-spoken to say the  least. When the subject matter changes to a business deal with a man  in New York named Rubinstein, their nostrils flair, their demeanor  attain a threatening mien and one of them actually says, and I'm  quoting verbatim here: "The problem with America is that the Jews have  all the money." They start laughing and another one says, "Yeah, all  the Jews care about is money."


I found that this type of anti-Semitic reference in my professional  dealings with Germans soon became a leitmotif (to borrow a term made  famous by Richard Wagner, another notorious German anti-Semite). In my  private meetings with Germans it often happens that they will loosen  up after a while and reveal personal opinions and political leanings  that were thought to have ceased to exist in a Berlin bunker on April  30, 1945. Maybe it's because I have blond hair and my last name is of  German origin that the Germans feel that I am, or could potentially  be, "one of them." It shows how much they understand what it means to  be an American.

Whatever the reason, the conversations generally have one or more of
these components:

(1) It was unfortunate that America and Germany fought each other in  World War II because the real enemy was Russia.

(2) Yes, the Nazis were excessive, but terrible things happen during  wars, and anyway, the scope of the Holocaust has been greatly  exaggerated by the American media, which is dominated by Jews.

(3) CNN is controlled by American Jews and is anti-Palestinian. (Yes, I
know it sounds incredible, but even among the most highly intelligent
Germans, even those with a near-native fluency in English, there is the
widespread belief that the news network founded by Fidel Castro's  friend Ted Turner, who was married to Hanoi Jane Fonda, is a hotbed of  pro-Israeli propaganda.)

(4) Almost all Germans were opposed to the Third Reich and nobody in
Germany knew anything about the murder of the Jews, but the Jews  themselves were really responsible for the Holocaust.

(5) Ariel Sharon was worse than Hitler and the Israelis are Nazis.  America supports Israel only because Jews control the American  government and media.

For the first time in my life, then, I became conscious of anti-Semitism.
Sure, anti-Semitism exists elsewhere in the world, but nowhere have  the consequences been as devastating as in Germany. Looking at it as  objectively as possible, 2002 was a banner year for anti-Semitism in  Germany. Synagogues were firebombed, Jewish cemeteries desecrated, the  No. 1 best-selling novel, Martin Walser's Death of a Critic, was a  thinly-veiled roman a clef containing a vicious anti-Semitic attack on  Germany's best-known literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki (who was a  survivor of both the Warsaw ghetto and Auschwitz); the Free Democrat  Party unofficially adopted anti-Semitism as a campaign tactic to  attract Germany's sizeable Muslim minority; and German revisionist  historians began to define German perpetration of World War II and the  Holocaust not as crimes against humanity, but as early battles (with  regrettable but understandable excesses) in the Cold War against  communism.

The situation is so bad that German Jews are advised not to wear  anything in public that would identify them as Jewish because their  safety cannot be guaranteed.

How can this be? Isn't this the "New Germany" that's gone 60 years  without a Holocaust or even a pogrom, where truth, justice and the  German way prevail amidst economic wealth, a high standard of living  that is the envy of their European neighbors, and a constitution  guaranteeing freedom for everyone regardless of race, creed or  national origin?

What's changed? The answer is: absolutely nothing. My thesis is quite  simple While Germany no longer has the military power to enforce the  racist ideology of the Nazis and while all extreme manifestations of  Nazism are officially outlawed, the internal conditions -- that is,  the attitudes,world view and cultural assumptions - that led to the  rise of Nazism in Germany are still present because they constitute  the basic components of German identity.

Nazism was not an aberration; it was the distillation of the German  psyche into its essential elements. External Nazism may have been  utterly defeated in May of 1945; internal Nazism, however, remains,  and will always remain, a potential threat as long as there exists a  political and/or cultural entity known as Germany.

Now hold on a second, I hear many people saying. You can't possibly  claim that Germans are as anti-Semitic today as they were during the  years 1933-1945.

It is true that Germany today is much different than during the Third  Reich. What is different is that due to its total defeat by the allies  Germany today is a client state of America and must do its bidding.  That means repression of overt anti-Semitism. It's bad for business.

The other thing that has changed is that, even though Hitler lost  World War II, he was phenomenally successful in carrying out his  ideological agenda. Germany, indeed virtually all of Europe, is  essentially Judenfrei (free of Jews) today due to the efficiency and  zeal of the Germans as they perpetrated the Holocaust during the Third  Reich. In fact, a very convincing case can be made that Nazism is one  of the most successful political programs of all time. It accomplished  more of its goals in a shorter amount of time than any other  comparable political movement and permanently changed the face and  political structure of several continents.

Germany is wealthy, stable, relentlessly bourgeois, and for all  intents and purposes, free of Jews. Yes, there is a tiny minority of  Jews, mostly centered in Berlin, and yes, there have been a number of  Jews from the former Soviet Union who have emigrated to Germany, but  most of the immigrants from Russia are not practicing Jews and do  little if anything to promote a unique Jewish-German identity.

The result of all this is that Germans today are able to reap the  benefits of Hitler's anti-Semitic policies while paying lip service to  the "need to remember." Young Fritz doesn't have to be overtly  anti-Semitic today because his grandfather's generation did such a  bang-up job of the Holocaust. There just aren't that many Jews left to  hate any more, and besides, the Germans have their old buddies, the  Arabs, to do their hating for them.

You might call the overwhelming German support for the Palestinians to  be a form of anti-Semitism-by-proxy. The German government has made  cash payments to the State of Israel, as well as to individual Jews,  to settle claims of murder, torture, false imprisonment, slave labor  and genocide. Talk to most Germans and you'll soon discover that they  think that the score has been settled between Germany and the Jews,  that somehow the return of just a portion of what the Germans stole  from the Jews is fair recompense for the deliberate murder of millions  of people.

If you think the Germans are truly sorry for what they did to the  Jews, think again. There's never been an official "tut mir leid"  offered by the Germans to the victims of the Holocaust and their  descendants because that would admit culpability. Germany has paid off  all claims against it without acknowledging responsibility in the same  way that the Ford Motor Company engages in recalls of automobiles.  It's all done to avoid liability.

I have previously mentioned that Germans overwhelmingly support the  Palestinians as opposed to the Israelis, and that this overwhelming  support represents a form of anti-Semitism-by-proxy. Germans may claim  to be supporting the Palestinians because they think they are an  "oppressed people " but let's be honest - they are supporting the  Palestinians and their Arab handlers because the Palestinians and  Arabs share the same ideals as the Nazis.

There's a long-standing history of German co-operation with the Arabs.  In 1942 Hitler personally assured the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem that as  soon as German forces conquered Great Britain, the Jews in Palestine  (which was then under control of the British Mandate) would be  exterminated.

We should also keep in mind that the Arab terrorists who perpetrated  the 9/11 atrocities did their planning in Germany. There are several  reasons for this. The first is the well-known bungling and  de-centralized chaos of the German federal bureaucracy where literally  the "linke" hand doesn't know what the "rechte" hand is doing.

The second is that Arab terrorists can count on a substantial number  of Germans who share their anti-American and anti-Semitic views. The  former members of the SS and Hitler's praetorian guards, along with  their neo-Nazi supporters, who gather weekly in Munich beer halls,  made Osama bin Laden an "honorary Aryan" after the 9/11 attack.

Mein Kampf is also a best seller in the Arab world, especially in
Saudi Arabia, America's putative "friend." Indeed, there is very little
difference between the anti-Semitic rantings of Hitler and those of the
so-called "spiritual leaders" of al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Fatah. The Arabs  also owe Hitler and the Germans big time. Hitler killed off the Jews,  and Konrad Adenauer and his "democratic" descendants replaced them  with the Turks.

Yes, the Turks aren't Arabs, but they are Muslim, and although Turkey  is a member of NATO and has relations with Israel, many Turks identify  and support their radical Arab co-religionists. Turkey remains as  fragile a democracy as Weimar Germany during the 1920s. It wouldn't  take much for Turkey to fall into the dark side of Muslim extremism.

The end result of Muslim immigration into Germany has been twofold:

(1) It allows the Germans to feign liberalism and being open to  freedom and diversity; and

(2) By replacing the Jews they murdered with Muslims, who for the most  part are as viciously anti-Semitic as were the Nazis, the Germans have  cynically assured that those few Jews who remain in Germany will be  unable to reassert political power even in a minority role.

A final point I would like to make concerning the reasons for the a
resurgence of anti-Semitism in Germany is one that many will find at  odds with the prima-facie evidence, or even appear to stretch the  boundaries of common sense. Yet, I ask you to consider carefully my  line of reasoning.

In many respects Germany got away with the Holocaust without paying  much of a price. Yes, many Germans died as a result of German  perpetration of World War II and the Holocaust, and yes, there was  much physical destruction in the country, but the situation is like  the little boy who steals a cookie from the tray when it is cooling on  the kitchen table. For his efforts he may have gotten his hand slapped  by his mother, but the stolen cookie remains eaten nonetheless.

After having committed the worst crimes in the history of humankind,  the Germans were allowed to regain their sovereignty after only ten  years; their infrastructure was completely rebuilt thanks to the  generosity of the American people; and relatively few Germans were  brought to trial for their monstrous crimes. Even those who were tried  and convicted received relatively short sentences or had those reduced  or commuted in general amnesties.

For example, some members of the Einsatzkommandos, those Germans who,  before the construction of the death camps, hunted and murdered Jews  by the hundreds of thousands, received sentences of as little as five  years imprisonment. If there were true justice in the world, Germany  would no longer exist as a separate country, but would have long ago  had its territory divided up and dispersed among the Allies.

It was an unfortunate historical coincidence that the Cold War began  just as Germany was at last being brought to task for its many crimes  and atrocities extending back to the First World War. The new threat  of the Soviet Union took precedence over a just settling of accounts  with Germany. The tragic result is that many of the countries raped  and despoiled by Germany, such as the Czech Republic and Poland, are  just now coming out of decades of economic decline, while Germany -  fat, sassy, arrogant, self-satisfied, and essentially Judenfrei - has  enjoyed four decades of undeserved economic prosperity.

We can't turn back the clock to redress all of the historical wrongs  that have been committed by the Germans, but there are a number of  things that can be done to assure that Germany can never again be in a  position to threaten the rest of the civilized world.

First and foremost is the realization that, while not all Germans are
anti-Semitic, there is an anti-Semitic tendency within German culture  that extends back to the time of Martin Luther. Germans are  instinctively anti-Semitic in the same way that Americans are  instinctively freedom loving. Anti-Semitism has been and unfortunately  remains the default ideology of the German people.

All things being equal, Germans will instinctively support the enemies  of the State of Israel. Therefore, America will need to monitor  closely and be ready and politically willing to intervene at a  moment's notice in German affairs when it appears that Germany is  back-sliding into anti-Semitism.

Additionally, it should be a goal of American foreign policy to oppose  and to accelerate the dismemberment of the European Union. We must not  allow German domination of the EU to accomplish through parliamentary  maneuvering and brokered deals what Hitler and the Germans were unable  to accomplish during the Third Reich.

Given Germany's resurgent anti-Semitism (and that of France as well),  a strong, German-dominated EU that tolerates and even benignly  encourages anti-Semitism, and is diplomatically allied with the Arab  world, is potentially the greatest threat to Judaism since Nazi  Germany and a major threat to the United States as well.

The enemies of Israel are the enemies of the United States. Let all  Jews and Americans stand united as we proclaim never again to both the  Holocaust and 9/11.

The following appears to be a commentary on this article written by a  Jewish man:

* This is the very first post-Holocaust picture of Germany that i have  ever seen published that depicted the post-Holocaust country of the  nazis with absolute accuracy in every detail. Over the years i have  often written about the reunification of the two Germanys and  described it as one of the greatest mistakes ever made in history, and  wrote that instead naziland should have been divided into the four  historical parts that is its nature, never to rise to brutalize its  neighbors or the world again! A crucial and horrible error!

It took only a few minutes during my first visit back to the land of  my birth for me to realize that the place was clearly no different  than when my parents and I had the good fortune to be among the very  last Jews to escape, literally "minutes before midnight", when the  gates of that man-made hell slammed shut with a resounding clang for  the final time, dooming those of my people left behind,including over  50 of my immediate family.

I recall the words of my beloved grandfather as we came to Breslau to  say our final farewell, knowing that there was no likelihood of ever  seeing each other again. He ran alongside the slowly rolling departing  train we were on, knowing he was bidding a final farewell to his only  son and his family. Even then he optimistically maintained that "no  harm will come to us.

After all, I served my country and my Kaiser as an officer, and have  always been a good citizen."

I do not know Mr. Grim, but I salute him for his clear view and thank  him for writing this piece, which, had it been written by a Jew, would  never be believed nor given its proper credence.












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