Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (161 page)

The reaction to Nolte came above all from Jürgen Habermas, who—like Enzensberger, Günter Grass and other members of the ‘skeptical generation’—was old enough to remember Nazism and thus intensely suspicious of any attempt to ‘limit’ German responsibilities. Nonsense, Habermas replied to Nolte: the point about Nazism is not to ‘situate’ or ‘historicize’ it—that is precisely the temptation which no German would ever again have the right to indulge. The Nazi crime—the German crime—was unique: unique in its scale, unique in its ambition, unique in its un-plumbed evil. Contextualization in Nolte’s sense, with the implicit relativisation of German responsibility that must inevitably ensue, was simply proscribed.

But Habermas’s uncompromising stance set a standard to which few of his countrymen (including historians, for whom comparison and context are the lifeblood of their discipline) could be expected to adhere for long. The new salience of the Holocaust in German public discussion—culminating in the Nineties in copious displays of official remorse for past shortcomings, with Germans indulging in what the writer Peter Schneider called ‘a kind of self-righteous self-hate’—could not last indefinitely. To ask each new generation of Germans to live forever in Hitler’s shadow, to require that they take on responsibility for the memory of Germany’s unique guilt and make it the very measure of their national identity, was the least that could be demanded—but far too much to expect.

Elsewhere in Western Europe the process of remembering and acknowledging had first to overcome self-serving local illusions—a process that typically took two generations and many decades. In Austria—where the television ‘Holocaust’ was broadcast just two months after its German showing but with no remotely comparable impact—it was not until the country’s President, Kurt Waldheim, was revealed in the mid-Eighties to have played a role in the Wehrmacht’s brutal occupation of wartime Yugoslavia that (some) Austrians began a serious, and still incomplete, interrogation of their country’s Nazi past. Indeed, the fact that Waldheim had previously served as UN Secretary General without anyone in the international community troubling themselves over his war record fuelled the suspicions of many Austrians that they were being held to uniquely high standards. Austria, after all, had had a post-war Jewish Chancellor (the Socialist Bruno Kreisky), which was more than could be said for the Germans.

But no-one expected very much of the Austrians. Their largely untroubled relationship to recent history—as late as 1990, nearly two Austrians in five still thought of their country as Hitler’s victim rather than his accomplice and 43 percent of Austrians thought Nazism ‘had good and bad sides’—merely confirmed their own and others’ prejudices.
⁴⁰⁹
Austria’s Alpine neighbour Switzerland was another matter. For forty years after 1945, Switzerland secured a free pass for its wartime record. Not only was it forgotten that the Swiss had made strenuous efforts to keep Jews out; on the contrary, in popular fiction and in films everywhere the country was represented as a safe, welcoming haven for any persecuted person who could reach its borders. The Swiss basked in their clear conscience and the envious admiration of the world.

In fact, by 1945 the Swiss had taken in just 28,000 Jews—seven thousand of them before the war began. Wartime refugees were refused work permits—they were supported from payments levied upon wealthy Jewish residents. Not until June 1994 did the authorities in Bern officially acknowledge that the Swiss request (made to Berlin in October 1938) for the letter ‘J’ to be stamped on the passports of all German Jews—the better to keep them out—was an act of ‘intolerable racial discrimination’. If this were the extent of Swiss misbehaviour there would hardly have been much fuss—London and Washington never actually requested an identification tag on Jewish passports, but when it came to saving Jewish refugees the British and American records are hardly a source of pride. But the Swiss went considerably further.

As became painfully clear in the course of official investigations conducted through the 1990s, Switzerland not only trafficked in looted gold and made a substantial practical contribution to the German war effort (see Chapter 3), but Swiss banks and insurance companies had knowingly pocketed indecently large sums of money belonging to Jewish account holders or to the claimants of insurance policies on murdered relatives. In a secret post-war agreement with Communist Poland—first made public in 1996—Bern even offered to assign the bank accounts of dead Polish Jews to the new authorities in Warsaw, in return for indemnity payments to Swiss banks and businesses expropriated after the Communists’ take-over.
⁴¹⁰
Once this sort of evidence started to emerge, the country’s burnished reputation came apart, and no amount of (grudgingly conceded) amends and payments and ‘victims’ funds’ are going to put it back together very soon. A September 13th 1996 editorial in Germany’s
Die Zeit
—noting that Switzerland had at last been caught by ‘the long shadow of the Holocaust’—smacked more than a little of
Schadenfreude
. But it was the simple truth.

The burnished image of wartime Holland—where almost everyone was believed to have ‘resisted’ and done their best to impede German plans—was engaged and discredited somewhat earlier, and by local initiative. By the mid-Sixties multi-volume official histories of the Second World War provided copious information about the
what
of the Netherlands’ wartime experience, including the deportations, but studiously avoided addressing in detail the
who
, the
how
and the
why
of the Jewish catastrophe in particular. In any case, few people read them. But in April 1965 a Dutch historian—Jacob Presser—published
Ondergang
, the first full history of the extermination of Dutch Jewry; it sold 100,000 copies in 1965 alone and precipitated a torrent of public interest in its subject.
⁴¹¹
It was followed in short order by an avalanche of television documentaries and other programmes about the wartime occupation—one of which,
De bezetting
(‘The Occupation’), was to run for over two decades—and by a shift in official mood. It was in 1965 that a Dutch government, for the first time, offered to contribute to the memorial at Auschwitz—though it took another seven years before the Netherlands at last agreed to pay to surviving Jewish deportees the pension that had been accorded resisters and other Nazi victims since 1947.

As in Germany, the trigger for Dutch interest in their occluded past was the Israeli and German trials of the early Sixties. And in the Netherlands as elsewhere, the post-war baby-boomers were curious about recent history and more than a little skeptical of the story they had been told—or, rather, not told—by the ‘silent generation’ of their parents. The social changes of the Sixties helped breach the wall of official silence about the occupation: the breaking of social and sexual taboos—which in parts of the Netherlands, notably Amsterdam, had deeply disruptive implications for a hitherto conservative society—drew in its train a suspicion of other received practices and cultural truisms. For a new cohort of readers the core-text of the Dutch Holocaust—Anne Frank’s diary—was now read in a very different light: Anne and her family, after all, were betrayed to the Germans by their Dutch neighbours.

By the end of the century, the years 1940-45 had become the most thoroughly studied period in Dutch history But although the truth about the contribution of the Dutch to the identification, arrest, deportation and death of their Jewish fellow citizens first became public knowledge in the Sixties, it took a long time for the full implications to sink in: not until 1995 did a reigning head of state—Queen Beatrice—publicly acknowledge the tragedy of the Dutch Jews, in the course of a visit to Israel. Perhaps only in the mid-Nineties, with the image of armed Dutch UN peacekeepers standing placidly aside to let Serbian militia round-up and murder seven thousand Muslims at Srebrenica, did the lesson finally strike home. A long-postponed national debate about the price the Dutch have paid for their heritage of order, co-operation and obedience could at last begin.

In their defense, the Dutch—like the Belgians, the Norwegians, the Italians (after September 1943) and most of occupied eastern Europe—could claim that however shameful the cooperation of individual bureaucrats, policemen and others with the occupying authorities, the initiative always came from above: from the Germans. This is not as true as was once believed, and in certain places—notably territories like Slovakia or Croatia (or Hungary in the final months of the war) where local puppet governments pursued criminal projects of their own—it was only ever a half-truth. But in occupied western Europe, with one outstanding exception, there were no popularly accredited local regimes, no ostensibly legitimate national governments exercising authority and thus fully responsible for their actions. The Germans could not have done what they did in occupied Norway or Belgium or Holland without the collaboration of the locals (in the one country—Denmark—where that collaboration was not forthcoming, the Jews survived). But in all these cases it was the Germans who issued the orders.

The exception, of course, is France. And it is the tortured, long-denied and serially incomplete memory of France’s war—of the Vichy regime and its complicitous, pro-active role in Nazi projects, above all the Final Solution—that has back-shadowed all of Europe’s post-war efforts to come to terms with World War Two and the Holocaust. It is not that France behaved the worst. It is that France mattered most. Until 1989, Paris—for reasons discussed in this book—was still the intellectual and cultural capital of Europe: perhaps more so than at any time since the Second Empire. France was also by far the most influential state in continental western Europe, thanks to Charles De Gaulle’s remarkable achievement in re-establishing his country in the corridors of international power. And it was France—French statesmen, French institutions and French interests—that drove forward, on French terms, the project for a united continent. Until France could look its past in the face, a shadow would hang over the new Europe—the shadow of a lie.

The Vichy problem can be simply stated. Marshall Pétain’s regime had been voted into office in July 1940 by the last parliament of France’s Third Republic; it was thus the only wartime regime that could claim some continuity, however spurious, with pre-war democratic institutions. At least until the end of 1942, an overwhelming majority of French men and women regarded Vichy and its institutions as the legitimate authority in France. And for the Germans, Vichy was an immense convenience—it saved them the trouble of installing a costly occupation regime of their own in so large a country as France, while furnishing them with everything they needed from such a regime: acquiescence in defeat, ‘war reparations’, raw materials, cheap labor . . . and much else besides.

For Vichy did more than accommodate itself and its subjects to France’s defeat and run their country for Germany’s convenience. Under Pétain and his Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, France initiated collaborative projects of its own: notoriously the introduction in 1940 and 1941 of ‘Jewish laws’ without any German pressure to do so, and the arrangement whereby French authorities themselves would round up the country’s Jewish population (beginning with the many foreign-born Jews resident there) to meet quotas being demanded by the Nazi authorities as the Final Solution got under way. As a consequence of this successful assertion of French administrative autonomy, most of the Jewish deportees from France never even saw a foreign uniform until they were handed over to Germans for final trans-shipment to Auschwitz from the train yards at Drancy (north of Paris). Until then the whole affair was in French hands.

Following the Liberation, for all the obloquy poured upon Pétain and his collaborators, his regime’s contribution to the Holocaust was hardly ever invoked, and certainly not by the post-war French authorities themselves. It was not just that the French successfully corralled ‘Vichy’ into a corner of national memory and then mothballed it. They simply didn’t make the link between Vichy and Auschwitz. Vichy had betrayed France. Collaborators had committed treason and war crimes. But ‘crimes against humanity’ were not part of the French juridical lexicon. They were the affair of Germans.

This situation still obtained twenty years later. When the present author studied French history in the UK in the late Sixties the scholarly literature on Vichy France—such as it was—paid almost no attention to the ‘Jewish’ dimension. ‘Vichy studies’ in France and elsewhere focused on the question of whether the Pétainist regime was ‘Fascist’ or ‘reactionary’, and how far it represented continuity or a break with the country’s republican past. There was still a respected school of French historians who argued that the Pétainist ‘shield’ had protected France from ‘Polonisation’—as though Hitler ever intended to treat his western conquests with the barbarous ferocity visited upon the East. And any questioning of the myth of a heroic, nationwide resistance was still off limits—in historiography as in national life.

The only concession French authorities in those years would make to the changing mood abroad came in December 1964 when the National Assembly belatedly incorporated the category of ‘crimes against humanity’ (first defined in the London accords of August 8th 1945) into French law and declared them imprescriptable. But this too had nothing to do with Vichy. It was a response to the Auschwitz Trial then under way in Frankfurt, and was intended to facilitate any future prosecution on French soil of individuals (whether German or French) for their direct participation in the Nazis’ exterminatory schemes. Just how very far it was from official thinking to re-open the question of France’s
collective
responsibility became clear in 1969, when the government forbade French television to show
Le Chagrin et la Pitié
(‘The Sorrow and the Anger’) by Marcel Ophuls.