The Day Hitler Died

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"Outside in the passageway, Dr. (Joseph) Goebbels, (Martin) Bormann and a few others waited. In a few moments a revolver shot was heard. They waited for a second one, but there was only silence. After a decent interval they quietly entered the fuehrer's quarters. They found the body of Adolf Hitler sprawled on the sofa dripping blood. He had shot himself in the mouth. At his side lay Eva Braun. Two revolvers had tumbled to the floor, but the bride had not used hers. She had swallowed poison."

William L. Shirer
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

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World War II and Adolf Hitler and the Nazis all came before my time so I only know what I have read or seen in documentaries.

It was real for my parents, though. They were not quite grown when the war began, not even when the war ended, but they were old enough to know who was fighting and what the stakes were.

And when the news that Hitler had committed suicide 70 years ago today reached them, they must have known that the war in Europe would be over soon.

I don't know if that means they felt the war in general was over — or if they realized that the war in the Pacific continued.

My guess is that, in 1945, most people who were old enough to remember Pearl Harbor knew there would still be a fight to finish in the Pacific. There was considerable angst about the prospect of an invasion of Japan — widely believed in April 1945 to be the only way to end the fighting but just as widely believed to be likely to claims hundreds of thousands of American lives in the process.

The Japanese were determined fighters, and no one thought they would go down easily. The invasion of Japan was expected to be won by whoever was the last man standing.

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But that was a matter to consider some other time. Seventy years ago today, Hitler was dead, and the German surrender was only days away.

Hitler's death, TIME magazine recalls, was shrouded in mystery.

"It wasn't immediately clear what had happened on April 30, 1945," wrote TIME. "This much the world knew: Adolf Hitler was gone, one way or another."

And Hitler had been at the core of Nazi Germany. The tide had turned against the Nazis — it was why Hitler committed suicide — and, when Hitler was gone, all motivation to continue fighting was gone, too.

Questions remain, though, about Hitler's final hours, even after seven decades. Was his suicide the last act of an irrational man who had been waiting vainly for the arrival of Nazi troops who never came? Or was it the cool, deliberate act of a man who had considered all the possible endings to the scenario and concluded suicide was the best choice? The people who were with him in the bunker insist they heard a single gunshot — and that Eva Braun's revolver was not fired. Papers in the Russians' files indicated that Hitler poisoned himself. Were both accounts true? Did Hitler shoot himself after (or while) biting down on the poison capsule? Or did someone else pull the trigger?

We'll probably never know — and it really doesn't matter, does it?

Auschwitz and Lessons For Today

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"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

George Santayana (1863–1952)

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This week, we observed the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz at the end of World War II. The day of the liberation by Russian troops — Jan. 27, 1945 — is commemorated annually as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

It is an appropriate time and Auschwitz an appropriate place to mark this anniversary. It has a unique significance, being the site of the first executions in what was to have been the Nazis' "final solution."

It was before my time so I have no firsthand knowledge, but I guess this was the first time that most people in the Allied countries realized what had been happening in the camps. If so, it probably came as quite a shock to some folks. Must have been hard to imagine how one group of people could be so hostile — so savage — in its treatment of another group. Sadly, it really isn't hard to imagine. Man has always been capable of great cruelty. Read your history.

I guess no one will ever know the actual figures, but the widely accepted casualty number is 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. It is further estimated that one in six Jews who died in the Holocaust died at Auschwitz. Could there be a more appropriate day or place to remember what happened?

Well, remembering is the problem for some Auschwitz survivors. If you happen to meet an Auschwitz survivor today, he or she likely was a teenager — or younger — when the camp was liberated. You can still find a few who were in their 20s when the camp was liberated, and there may be a few who were 30 or so, but they would have to be 100 or older by now.

Before long, they will all be gone. No one who lived through it will be alive to tell the tale, making it all the easier for those who deny the Holocaust to press their case.

Those Auschwitz survivors fear that the past will be forgotten, opening the door for it to happen again. It is only natural, I suppose, for them to fear renewed persecution of the Jews — it's been going on for centuries — but those who love freedom should be concerned as well.

For if one group is persecuted, none are safe. If rights are denied to some, they can be denied to all.

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That is why America must remain vigilant.

The modern enemies of freedom do not wear the uniform of a country and are therefore harder to see when they are in our midst "hiding in plain sight." But they are there. Of that, you may be sure.

And they will not be defeated until we face facts and call them what they are. This isn't a religious war. But every extremist group has at least one characteristic that its members have in common with each other. In this case, it happens to be devotion to an extreme religious doctrine. For America to preserve its way of life, it will have to confront the enemies of freedom

There is always an extreme characteristic. No more searching for euphemisms that hide the truth.

Revisionism Does No One Any Favors

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"At daybreak on September 1, 1939 ... the German armies poured across the Polish frontier and converged on Warsaw from the north, south and west. ... The people in the streets ... were apathetic despite the immensity of the news which had greeted them from their radios and from the extra editions of the morning newspapers. ... Perhaps ... the German people were simply dazed at waking up on this first morning of September to find themselves in a war which they had been sure the Fuehrer somehow would avoid. They could not quite believe it, now that it had come."

William Shirer

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One of the great what–ifs of history allegedly occurred on a battlefield in northern France in the autumn of 1918, the waning days of World War I.

Adolf Hitler, who was 29 at the time, was serving in the German army. He had been wounded and was stumbling across the battlefield when he encountered a British soldier named Henry Tandey, 27 years old.

Reportedly, the weary Hitler staggered into Tandey's line of fire, and, for a time, Hitler was in Tandey's sights. But Tandey lowered his gun, and Hitler nodded his thanks and moved on.

That story may be merely a myth, a legend without a morsel of truth in it. But we do know that Tandey lived and served during World War I, and we know that Hitler also served in World War I and lived to propel the world into a second World War. If that story about the encounter between Tandey and Hitler is true, in such a moment, the course of human history truly hangs in the balance.

If Tandey had pulled the trigger, Hitler would have died that day, and the tens of millions who died on the European battlefields, in the gas chambers or in the ovens of World War II because of him would have been spared. If Tandey had been blessed with the ability to look into the future, my guess is he would have chosen to kill Hitler to prevent the deaths of the millions.

But Tandey couldn't do it. Even with the knowledge of what could be prevented, it might still be difficult for most of us to shoot at another human being. In general, it is a good thing that most of us have that spark of humanity within us that prevents us from taking another person's life. But sometimes it is necessary to prevent or, at least, mitigate the consequences of things that are inevitable. At least, they often appear inevitable in hindsight.

If Hitler had been killed on that battlefield in France, it is highly unlikely that Germany would have invaded Poland 75 years ago today. But Tandey couldn't pull the trigger — so Hitler lived to launch the Holocaust.

The fact that Hitler lived made the Holocaust virtually inevitable, didn't it? I mean, he might have died on that battlefield in France a couple of decades earlier — or he might have died any time (and for any reason) in the next 21 years. If he had died, the likelihood of the Holocaust happening would have died with him. But, of course, he didn't — and it didn't, either. No amount of revisionist history writing would change those facts.

The invasion of Poland didn't actually start the Holocaust. That really began years earlier when Hitler started to implement anti–semitic laws in Germany — and began to fine–tune his plans for eastern Europe. Consequently, it would be wrong to designate today as the anniversary of the start of the Holocaust. It had already begun and wouldn't go into overdrive for a few more years.

In Germany, the invasion of Poland was called the "Defensive War." The Germans were told that Germany had been attacked by Poland and that Germans living in Poland were being persecuted.

But we know that wasn't true. You can clearly see — in these pictures that were published in LIFE magazine — that the Poles were not invading Germany 75 years ago today.

When people speak today of a war on a particular demographic group, they should be reminded of what a war on a particular demographic group really looks like. There are still those who know, but their numbers grow smaller with each passing year. They remember the Holocaust and the price that humanity paid for it; unfortunately, many of those who have come along in the last half century or so think the invasion of Poland and the events that followed have been blown out of proportion — if many of them happened at all.

Revisionism does no one any favors.

The invasion of Poland had many objectives, some of which were obvious while others were not so obvious.

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One of its objectives was Hitler's often–stated goal (consistently denied by western governments and elements in the media of the day who sought to appease the Nazis) of eliminating the Jewish race.

Los Angeles is home to the second–largest Jewish population in America, fourth largest in the world (larger even than Jerusalem). Amanda Susskind of the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles writes of her own family's experiences in the German concentration camps and, while "it is hard to shock me," Susskind writes that she "found it particularly chilling" to discover from recent surveys that staggering numbers of people across the globe "never heard of the Holocaust or believe it has been greatly exaggerated."

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"The survey data reveal that that it is imperative to continue to teach about the Holocaust. Sadly, we face another challenge meeting this imperative: One of the indicators of anti–Semitism is the stereotype — and roughly 30 percent of those surveyed worldwide think this — that 'Jews talk too much about the Holocaust.'"

Amanda Susskind
Jewish Journal

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Revisionist historians seem to have gained the upper hand, and appeasement is once again in the air.

As ISIS terrorists wage war with Israel and Russia continues its march to reassemble the Soviet Union, it is an appropriate time for us to remember the invasion of Poland 75 years ago today and ponder the perils of appeasement.

Have we learned anything from that experience?

When Germany and Russia Signed Their Nonaggression Pact

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By and large, people are pretty good about learning from their mistakes. When they do something that results in physical pain and/or humiliation, most people make a mental note not to do that anymore. It's a defense mechanism, I suppose.

But there is one lesson — well, actually two lessons — that people repeatedly refuse to learn: (1) There is evil in the world, and (2) there is always someone who will be willing to cooperate with that evil.

I think just about everyone can agree that Adolf Hitler was evil. Everything he did in World War II was influenced by his experiences as a soldier in World War I.

One of the most significant lessons he took from World War I was that Germany came closest to victory when Russia was not involved. When that changed, so did the fortunes of war.

Consequently, as Hitler was readying his forces for the invasion of Poland that would set World War II irretrievably in motion 75 years ago, he dispatched foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to Moscow to work out an agreement with the Russians: The countries would agree not to attack each other.

Hitler intended to keep the Soviet Union out of the fighting this time.

Ribbentrop's trip to Moscow was announced on Aug. 22, 1939. Actually, I suppose, things got started around Aug. 14, when Ribbentrop contacted the Soviets to work out the second of a couple of deals.

The first pact was an economic one. The Soviets promised to provide food and raw materials to the Nazis; in return, the Nazis promised to provide products like machinery to the Soviets. (This made it possible for the Nazis to sidestep Britain's blockade in the early years of the war.) The details had been worked out earlier in the summer, and the agreement was signed in Berlin on Aug. 19.

The second agreement was the nonaggression pact.

Under the cloak of darkness in the late hours of Aug. 23, Ribbentrop and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov signed a nonaggression pact that history remembers as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. It achieved what Hitler wanted. It kept the Soviet Union out of the hostilities.

Until Hitler himself broke the pact with Germany's invasion of Russia in June 1941.

Why did Hitler do it? I suppose you can answer that with another question: Why did Hitler do anything? The simple answer was that keeping Russia out of the war had helped him strengthen his hand in Europe. The nonaggression pact had served its purpose, and Hitler was looking to fulfill his pledge in Mein Kampf to look to the east for "living space" for the German people — and the raw materials he needed for the war effort.

He misjudged the strength of his position, and, apparently, he forgot with whom he was dealing.

Hitler's military leaders warned him that a two–front war would put enormous strain on the already weak German economy, but Hitler saw only the potential benefits. He soon saw the downside as his Army was repelled outside Moscow after the Russian winter set in.

There was a secret protocol in the nonaggression pact of which the world knew little until the Russians confirmed its existence in 1989.

Under this secret protocol, the Nazis and Soviets divided up eastern Europe into what were called "spheres of influence." In exchange for the Soviets' promise to stay out of the coming war, the Nazis gave them the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) to act as a buffer from an invasion from the west. Poland also would be divided between the two countries.

The spoils of war were already being divvied up — and not a single shot had been fired ... yet.

The 72-Hour Night of the Long Knives

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"After 14 stormy years the two friends, who more than any others were responsible for the launching of the Third Reich, for its terror and degradation, who though they had often disagreed had stood together in the moments of crisis and defeats and disappointments, had come to a parting of the ways and the scar–faced, brawling battler for Hitler and Nazism had come to the end of his life."

William Manchester

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Eighty years ago today, the Nazis concluded a three–day purge of their political rivals that is known to history as the "Night of the Long Knives."

Perhaps the most prominent of the victims was a man who was, at one time, regarded as not only a close associate of Adolf Hitler but also one of his closest friends, Ernst Röhm. He was killed on the last day of the purge, July 2, 1934.

Röhm was with Hitler from the earliest days of his rise to power. He and his brutal storm troopers had been largely responsible, in fact, but by 1934, the year after Hitler seized power, the storm troopers had outlived their usefulness, and Röhm was regarded with suspicion by Hitler and jealousy by Hitler's General Staff, men of affluence and a sense of entitlement.

Many of those men could trace their roots to Germany's medieval nobility; to win their support during his ascent to power, Hitler had pledged to restore them to what they saw as their rightful place by trampling the Treaty of Versailles.

He had made a similar pledge to the German businessmen who had given their financial support to national socialism. To them, he had promised to rid the country of unions and Marxists. The anti–capitalist storm troopers were bothersome; their rhetoric sounded like Marxism to the businessmen. They spoke of a "second revolution" — the socialism part of national socialism — characterized by redistribution of wealth, by force if necessary. Such talk made German capitalists uneasy.

The storm troopers' behavior thus had been causing problems for Hitler. Although all other political parties in Germany had been suppressed in his first months in power, Hitler's political survival in Germany was at risk. The thuggish Röhm and his storm troopers were perceived as a threat. They frightened Germany's middle class.

Early in 1934, Hitler met with Röhm and told him that his storm troopers would henceforth be restricted to certain political functions. Röhm agreed but later told his storm troopers that he would not keep his word.

Members of Heinrich Himmler's SS had infiltrated the group and reported to Hitler what Röhm had said. Himmler and his right–hand man, Reinhard Heydrich — along with Hermann Göring — began waging a campaign to discredit Röhm with Hitler.

That nugget of truth fueled a steady stream of rumors and half–truths that Himmler, Heydrich and Göring fed Hitler, ultimately prompting Hitler to have a long conversation with Röhm in early June 1934. A few days later, Röhm announced that he would be taking a vacation in July and his storm troopers would be inactive as well.

Röhm scheduled a conference with the leaders of the storm troopers near Munich in late June. Hitler promised to be there to oversee things.

Tensions were ratcheted up when Hitler's vice chancellor delivered a speech criticizing the storm troopers' behavior. Between that and additional rumors being spread, Hitler was being urged to take some kind of action against Röhm, but he was reluctant to do anything against his friend.

He was reluctant even at the end — 80 years ago today. Instead of immediately instructing subordinates to execute Röhm, he gave orders that a pistol should be left with Röhm so he could do it himself.

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"Röhm refused to make use of it. 'If I am to be killed, let Adolf do it himself,' he is reported to have said. Thereupon two S.A. officers ... entered the cell and fired their revolvers at Röhm point–blank. 'Röhm wanted to say something,' said this witness, 'but the S.S. officer motioned him to shut up. Then Röhm stood at attention ... with his face full of contempt.' And so he died, violently as he had lived, contemptuous of the friend he had helped propel to heights no other German had ever reached, and, almost certainly, like hundreds of others who were slaughtered that day ... without any clear idea of what was happening or why, other than that it was an act of treachery ..."

William Manchester

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Even today, 80 years later, it is unclear how many people were killed in the Night of the Long Knives. All the Gestapo documents about the purge were destroyed.

The Nazis took responsibility for 77, including the accidental killing of a music critic for a Munich newspaper who had the misfortune of having a name that was similar to someone on the hit list.

But estimates of the actual casualty count ranged from a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand.

However many there were, a lot of scores were settled in the Night of the Long Knives.

Seventy-Five Years After Kristallnacht

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Seventy–five years ago, Nazis in Germany and Austria launched Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, which was designed to intimidate German Jews.

Actually, it did a lot more than intimidate the Jews, I suppose, and I don't mean to belittle the significance of the event by using that word.

One can reach many conclusions about Kristallnacht's role in the Holocaust — whether it was truly the starting point for the Holocaust or merely another step in a process that had been under way for years (the persecution of the Jews, observes TIME magazine, was "already intense by the mid–1930s").

If it was the latter, it was a massively violent step and signaled more clearly than anything that had come before — to those who did not turn away and ignore what was happening, which was still a sizable number in 1938 — the Nazis' intention to eliminate the Jews from Europe. Synagogues were burned, Jewish schools, homes and businesses were vandalized, and nearly 100 Jews (men, women and children) were killed.

Some context is necessary here.

A few days earlier, a 17–year–old German Jewish refugee shot and killed the third secretary of the German embassy in Paris. "The youth's father had been among 10,000 deported to Poland in boxcars shortly before," wrote historian William Shirer, "and it was to revenge this and the general persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany that he went to the German embassy intending to kill the ambassador."

Instead, the third secretary was sent out to see what the young man wanted and paid with his life.

As Shirer observed, there was irony in the death of the third secretary — "[H]e had been shadowed by the Gestapo as a result of his anti–Nazi attitude," Shirer wrote. "[H]e had never shared the anti–Semitic aberrations of the rulers of his country."

But it was used as the pretext for the Night of Broken Glass.

All through the night of Nov. 9–10, 1938, the sound of shattering glass could be heard throughout Germany and Austria as the Nazis carried out their search–and–destroy mission.

"According to Dr. (Joseph) Goebbels and the German press, which he controlled, it was a 'spontaneous' demonstration ... in reaction to the news of the murder in Paris," Shirer wrote. "But after the war, documents came to light which show how 'spontaneous' it was. They are among the most illuminating — and gruesome — secret papers of the prewar Nazi era."

Those papers revealed that it was Reinhard Heydrich — perhaps the main architect of the Holocaust and "the man with the iron heart," in Hitler's words — who was the "real organizer" of Kristallnacht, Shirer asserted.

On Nov. 9, Goebbels ordered that the "spontaneous demonstrations" were to be "organized and executed" during the night.

But Heydrich issued more specific instructions on how the demonstrations were to be organized:

• "Only such measures should be taken which do not involve danger to German life or property. (For instance, synagogues are to be burned down only when there is no danger of fire to the surroundings.)"
• "Business and private apartments of Jews may be destroyed but not looted ..."
• "The demonstrations which are going to take place should not be hindered by the police."
• "As many Jews, especially rich ones, are to be arrested as can be accommodated in the existing prisons ... Upon their arrest, the appropriate concentration camps should be contacted immediately, in order to confine them in these camps as soon as possible."

The thing I found telling was that the numerous rapes on Kristallnacht were of greater concern to Nazi leaders than the killings — because it was a violation of the Nuremberg racial laws for Gentiles to have sex with Jews. That says a lot about the priorities of the Third Reich. The day after Kristallnacht, Heydrich made a preliminary confidential report:

"The extent of the destruction of Jewish shops and houses cannot yet be verified by figures ... 815 shops destroyed, 171 dwelling houses set on fire or destroyed only indicate a fraction of the actual damage so far as arson is concerned ... 119 synagogues were set on fire, and another 76 completely destroyed ... 20,000 Jews were arrested. 36 deaths were reported and those seriously injured were also numbered at 36. Those killed and injured are Jews."

In the story and timeline of the Third Reich, what was the significance of Kristallnacht? Was it a perpetuation of a policy that was already in place, or was it the introduction of a new and more sinister phase of the Third Reich's rule? The Los Angeles Times favors the latter, writing that Kristallnacht "marked the Nazis' transition from discrimination to genocide." Given the historical record, it was reasonable for BBC News to wonder recently "how strong is anti–Semitism in Germany?" The answer to that question is unclear, but Stephen Evans of BBC News writes that "[w]hat does seem to be clear is that anti–Semitism is rising in Germany."

Evans cited figures from the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, an anti–racism organization, that reported more than 800 attacks on Jews in Germany in 2011. The number was more than 850 last year. The trend has continued this year; figures show 409 attacks in the first half of 2013. Not all the attacks have been physical; some have been verbal.

Makes me wonder if civilization has learned anything in the last 75 years.

When Did the Holocaust Begin?

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I've been studying history most of my life, and I think I have a pretty good understanding of things that have happened and how they have influenced the days, months and years that followed.

Some events in history are easy to pinpoint — like battles. You know when they began. You know when they ended. You know how many people were killed and how many people were injured.

Same with presidential administrations. With few exceptions, a presidential administration spreads over several years; when all is said and done, you know when a president's tenure began and when it ended.

Other events are harder to nail down. When, for example, did the Great Depression begin? Was it when the stock market crashed in 1929? Or did it really begin with events that happened before that? Or after that? I've heard historians engage in lively debates on that one.

The Holocaust is kind of the same way, really.

Some people will tell you that the Holocaust began with laws that systematically segregated Jews from the rest of German society, the most noteworthy of those being the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, or with the establishment of the labor camps, which did not come into existence as the temporary homes of Jews who had been selected for extermination (the image that many in the early 21st century have of the Nazi camps) but rather were intended to squeeze as much labor out of each prisoner as possible.

Others will tell you that the Holocaust began when hostilities did — when the Nazis conquered Poland and France.

And, while some scholars prefer to define only Jewish casualties as victims of the Holocaust, others include all victims — not just Jews but Soviets, Poles, homosexuals, the disabled and others as well — which affects the parameters of that period in history as well as the actual number of victims.

The timeline that tracks the history of the Holocaust is not always clear, even after nearly three–quarters of a century. Concentration camps were part of the Third Reich from the beginning, but, originally, they were not designed for extermination. Many prisoners did die in them but primarily from being worked to death or being killed after being overcome with fatigue.

Mass extermination was a concept that was still in the future.

In the view of many, I suppose, January 20 of this year was the 70th anniversary of the actual birth of the Holocaust as we have come to know it — the approval of the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish question."

It was on that occasion that the Wannsee Conference was held. More than a dozen Nazi leaders gathered to discuss the implementation of the "Final Solution," and the conversion of concentration camps to extermination camps began in earnest.

Some concentration camps continued to serve as concentration camps, which were understood to be places where the prisoners were forced to work for the Third Reich. The deaths of prisoners under such circumstances were regarded as acceptable — albeit unintended — consequences. Collateral damage, you might say.

Extermination camps, on the other hand, were places where prisoners were not expected to live long after their arrival. Those camps were designed to carry out mass killings with almost assembly line–like precision.

But, from all outward appearances, one camp looked remarkably like the next — with the possible exceptions of the huge ovens and gas chambers that were on some properties but not on others. And in the winter and spring of 1942, some camps required physical conversions to prepare them for their new roles.

There were also changes in administrative procedures that were being implemented, the most significant of which may well have been what happened at Auschwitz 70 years ago tomorrow.

In a meeting in Berlin, Heinrich Himmler and three others made the decision on that day to begin medical experimentation on women prisoners at Auschwitz and to look into conducting similar experiments on males.

It was probably a natural step in the evolution of the Third Reich, considering that the experiments that were to be conducted were little more than torture — hardly legitimate scientific experiments.

Without going into too much detail, the experiments observed the physical reactions of people who were subjected to conditions and circumstances that would certainly result in their deaths. Of that, there was no doubt.

(The experiments included things like performing amputations on the subjects, testing drugs on them, freezing them, forcing them to drink nothing but sea water and injecting chemicals into eyes to alter their color.

(In William Shirer's rather stately language in "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," the experiments yielded "no benefit to science." Talk about an understatement.)

Nevertheless, while those experiments may have been given a fallacious label of legitimacy that permitted the doctors to put their ethics on a shelf, they seem to have ushered in the period when the Nazis as a group went past the point of no return — when they stopped merely mistreating their prisoners and began focusing on more efficient ways to kill them.

After the war, these abuses were addressed in the Doctors' Trial, one of the "Subsequent Nuremberg Trials" in which primarily medical doctors were accused of human experimentation and mass murder under the pretense of mercy killings.

That, at least, was how the doctors justified their actions — their experiments would benefit medical science, and sometimes the merciful thing was to kill their involuntary subjects when the experiment was concluded.

The wholesale killing that would forever stain this time in history had not really begun in earnest 70 years ago.

But the fact that Himmler and his colleagues even considered experimenting on humans — never mind actually sanctioning such a policy — is all the proof one needs that the Holocaust happened ... although there is so much more.

The mindset was in place.

It is bad enough to entertain the thought of human experimentation, but when the thought is given the legitimacy of law, it is no longer a considerable leap to implementation.

It is a very short step.

The Wrong Man?

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"Demjanjuk is essentially on trial not for anything he did, but simply for being at Sobibor. No specific criminal acts need be alleged, much less proved. Page through transcripts of previous Nazi trials and you'll find a rigorous focus on particulars, because that is what should be required to convict a defendant. No one in any such trial ever was convicted simply on the basis of being present at the scene."

Scott Raab
Esquire magazine
Aug. 11, 2010

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In 1956, Alfred Hitchcock made a film called "The Wrong Man."

Like some of Hitchcock's films, it was inspired by a true story. But, unlike those other adaptations, Hitchcock didn't have to change the facts much. The real story was bizarre enough. Even someone like Hitchcock couldn't embellish it.

In the movie, a struggling musician (played by Henry Fonda) tries to borrow on his wife's insurance policy so she can have some dental work done. But the man is fingered as the suspect in a couple of armed robberies at the office, robberies for which he was not responsible.

In court, the man's attorney builds a pretty solid case for mistaken identity. The man had been on vacation with his family when the first robbery occurred, and, at the time of the second, he had been suffering from a swollen jaw (which the people in the office couldn't have helped but notice).

But the defense runs into problems trying to locate someone to testify that the man was on a vacation trip at the time of the first robbery, and, eventually, a mistrial is declared because of a remark made by one of the jurors. Before the re–trial can begin, the real robber is arrested, and the musician is exonerated — but considerable damage to his life has already been done.

There is a lot more to that story, of course, but I don't really want to get into that today. I bring it up only because John Demjanjuk died today.

You might not be old enough to remember when Demjanjuk first came to the public's attention. It was in the mid–1980s when Demjanjuk, a U.S. autoworker, was deported to Israel to face trial on war crimes charges.

Demjanjuk was born in the Ukraine and served in the Russian Red Army early in World War II, but he was captured by the Germans and was recruited to serve in the German army while he was in custody. After the war, he and his family emigrated to the United States.

His indictment alleged that he was "Ivan the Terrible" (his given name was Ivan, but he changed his name to John when he became an American citizen) and that he had been a particularly brutal guard at the Treblinka and Sobibor camps.

Demjanjuk claimed he was a victim of mistaken identity, that he was not "Ivan the Terrible," but he was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to death by hanging. While Demjanjuk was in solitary confinement for the duration of his appeals, Israel's Supreme Court overturned his conviction, finding that there were plenty of reasons to doubt whether he really was "Ivan the Terrible."

The Court also found that Demjanjuk had been a prison guard during the war but not at Treblinka or Sobibor. I suppose it is possible that some prisoners might have seen him somewhere else and thought they had seen him at Treblinka or Sobibor. He was released, and he returned to the United States.

I would hardly call myself an expert on World War II, but my understanding of the way things were done in Nazi Germany — with efficiency always one of the Nazis' objectives — is that prisoners ordinarily were not transferred from one camp to another, that when they arrived at one, that was where they stayed.

(The prisoners, after all, were not soldiers. They came from what the Nazis would have considered the dregs of civilian society — the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and Communists. There may have been occasional logistical reasons for transferring prisoners, but my understanding is that it seldom happened.)

A decade after his first conviction, Demjanjuk was charged again and ordered deported. The new charges did not mention the earlier allegations that he was "Ivan the Terrible," but that continued to be the name that was used for him.

Nearly a year ago, Demjanjuk was convicted on more than 28,000 counts of being an accessory to murder at Sobibor. The number was determined because that is how many were killed while he was there. No evidence was presented linking him to a specific murder. His conviction has been under appeal.

When he died today at the age of 91, all of this ended for Demjanjuk — but there are questions that remain. And one of the most troubling may concern the apparent attitude that, because what happened in Germany was so heinous, someone must be held accountable for them, even if that person was not guilty or was coerced into cooperating with those who were.

Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer made a revealing comment in an interview with the Associated Press: "His case illustrates the principle that whenever even a very low–ranking Nazi criminal can be found and convicted, the importance is not in the sentence, not in the amount of time such a person may have to sit in jail ... the important thing is to bring the crime to the attention of the general public."

I know there are those who deny the Holocaust ever happened — in spite of ample evidence to the contrary. And I am not saying it didn't happen.

But this country has always stood for the principle that a person is innocent until proven guilty — and tangible evidence of guilt must meet certain standards. Circumstantial evidence alone is not adequate.

I didn't participate in either of Demjanjuk's trials so I don't know all the evidence that was presented, but it seems like most, if not all, of the evidence against him was circumstantial.

For that matter, one of the reasons why the war crimes trials in Nuremberg were discontinued was because the defendants largely became enlisted men who could plausibly claim that they were following the orders of their superiors.

Ask any American veteran what kind of punishment he could expect if he refused to obey such an order — and then try to imagine how it must have been for someone like Demjanjuk, who has been described as a watchman, "the lowest rank of the 'Hilfswillige' prisoners who agreed to serve the Nazis and were subordinate to German SS men," according to AP.

Demjanjuk's son said today that his father had been "a victim and survivor of Soviet and German brutality."

We'll probably never know the truth of the matter. But one thing is clear in the hours since Demjanjuk's death.

Time is running out for the Nazi hunters. The war ended nearly 67 years ago, and anyone who was at least 18 at that time would be in his mid–80s today.

It may no longer be possible to find the real "Ivan the Terrible." It may not be possible to hold the people who truly were responsible for the deaths at Sobibor accountable for their acts.

Even the scapegoats are dying.

Was Demjanjuk the wrong man?

The Beatification of John Paul II

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"The great danger for family life, in the midst of any society whose idols are pleasure, comfort and independence, lies in the fact that people close their hearts and become selfish."

John Paul II
(1920–2005)

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I'm not Catholic so I suppose today's beatification of the late John Paul II really shouldn't mean anything to me.

And, for the most part, I guess, it doesn't.

I was raised in a Protestant church. The only times I have attended a Catholic church were when I was someone's guest — or, 20 years ago this summer, when I was the pallbearer at the funeral for a friend.

Sainthood for John Paul — or anyone else — simply isn't a concern for me. I have my own idea of what I think makes a person a saint.

I always felt my mother was a saint although she isn't going to be recognized by anyone. Nevertheless, I still think she had all the qualities one looks for in a saint.

Anyway, go ahead, make John Paul a saint, urges Peggy Noonan, remembering the pope's triumphant return to Poland in 1979, less than a year after entering the papacy.

I don't think Noonan is Catholic — to be honest, I'm not sure, really, what her faith happens to be — and if she isn't, her opinion on the matter probably means no more than mine.

However, if she is a Catholic, Noonan shows how little she knows about the process — or, at least, the terminology involved. The church says it does not make anyone a saint. A higher power does that. Instead, the church recognizes that someone is a saint.

I do remember the occasion of which Noonan writes, and I agree with what she says. It was "[o]ne of the greatest moments in the history of faith," she writes, and it "was also one of the greatest moments in modern political history."

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And I remember when they gathered to say goodbye to John Paul a little more than six years ago. There was a growing movement at the time to put him on the fast track to sainthood ...

... Which, Reuters suggests now, may be a little too fast.

Actually, that doesn't really bother me, I guess, although I suppose I am sort of accustomed to the idea that those who are designated as saints are people who were dead before I was born.

Like, for example, the people in the Bible. I know that, if those people really lived, they were dead centuries before I came along. I have no image in my personal memory bank of any of those folks — the way I have for John Paul. He isn't just an historical figure to me the way he increasingly will become to others. I remember when he was flesh and blood.

I remember, too, when Ronald Reagan was flesh and blood. I didn't agree with him most of the time, either, yet he is treated like a saint by many now.

Today, also, those two men get most of the credit for the downfall of communism. I tend to think that many people played roles in that. John Paul and Reagan contributed to it, but I believe it was the combination of the resistance of ordinary people and the words of national and religious leaders over a period of several decades that, working together, brought down communism.

Reportedly, there are more than 10,000 saints, and my best guess would be that nearly all of them were before my time.

But there have been people who have lived during my lifetime whose works certainly qualify them for canonization — and the late pope is one of them.

I didn't agree with John Paul on everything, but I did respect him, and I have no problem if the Catholic church wants to recognize him as a saint.

During his lifetime and since his death, John Paul was and is symbolic of the reconciliation the church always seeks with those it deems to be spiritually adrift.

John Paul, the first Polish pope, believed he was drawn into the priesthood in part because of the events in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and his successor, Benedict XVI, the first German pope in more than four centuries, had been a member of the "Hitler Youth."

They came from opposite sides of the tracks, you might say.

(Benedict became a member of the Hitler Youth only because it was required by law, and neither he nor the members of his family advocated Hitler or nazism.)

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Thus, there is clearly a symbolic quality to the very act of this German pope presiding over the beatification of his predecessor, the Polish pope.

It signifies the reconciliation of the modern Catholic church with its uncomfortable history, notably the Reichskonkordat that the Vatican signed with Nazi Germany to ensure church rights.

So perhaps this is a good occasion to revisit the meaning of the word saint.

To be a saint is to be regarded as a holy person. Name your biblical passage, and the meaning comes down to the belief that Christ dwells in that person, here on earth and in the afterlife. I suppose that could be said of just about any Christian leader, but the belief that one is a saint is a conviction that that person is exceptional.

I don't know if John Paul was exceptional or not. But if he helped his church finally come to terms with its uneasy past, then that is saintly, in my book.

Two Speeches

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"Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.' "

Sir Winston Churchill

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As Barack Obama looks for the right leadership style for guiding the nation through the simultaneous crises in the Gulf and the economy, there may be lessons to be learned from reflecting on two speeches that were delivered on this day in London 70 years ago.

On June 18, 1940, it has been said, Charles de Gaulle became the true leader of the French Resistance. France had fallen to Nazi Germany, and de Gaulle had fled to Great Britain a few days before.

But de Gaulle tried to rally his people from afar.

"[H]as the last word been said?" de Gaulle asked. "Must hope disappear? Is defeat final? No!"

I have heard de Gaulle's speech called one of the most important in French history. I'm not an authority on French history so I can't say whether that is so, but it almost certainly was the most important speech given by a French leader in the 20th century.

It is often credited with being the start of the French Resistance, but the truth is that few people heard the speech as broadcast by the BBC. De Gaulle had a much larger audience when he delivered a similar speech four days later — prompting some to conclude that June 22, 1940, actually was the day the Resistance was born.

Be that as it may, the sentiments expressed by de Gaulle on June 18 almost surely influenced what followed.

"Whatever happens," de Gaulle said, "the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished."

For de Gaulle, the goal was to inspire his countrymen to stand up to their conquerors. The goal was similar — and yet different — for his British colleague. His task was to prevent the conquest of Britain — for, if he did not, the fate of the free world surely would be imperiled.

Britain's prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill, had been in office only a month, but he knew that, with the fall of France, Germany would feel free to focus its full attention on that island nation. Britain was the sole obstacle to the fulfillment of the Germans' goal of dominating Europe, and Churchill knew that the future depended upon how the British fared against the Nazis.

Despite his brief tenure, the prime minister had made two earlier attempts to prepare the British for what was to come. About a month earlier, he delivered his "blood, toil, tears and sweat" speech, in effect pledging everything Britain possessed to the goal of turning back the Nazis. About three weeks later, he gave his "we shall fight on the beaches" speech, encouraging the Britons to fight on — alone, if necessary, and it certainly appeared, at that time, that the British would have to fight the Germans by themselves.

Then, just before Churchill's "finest hour" speech before Parliament's House of Commons, France unsuccessfully sought an armistice with Germany.

In previous years, the British policy had been to seek to appease an increasingly aggressive Nazi regime. Long before June 1940, the British seemed to realize that Neville Chamberlain's attempts to avoid another world war had failed, and they turned to Churchill for leadership.

It is indeed fortunate for Western civilization that they did.

Judgment Day

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On this day 63 years ago, 21 Nazi leaders were found guilty of and sentenced for crimes against humanity.

In the years to come, the public wearied of the Nuremberg trials. It was the first tribunal, the one whose verdict was handed down on this day in 1946, that dealt with most of the surviving Nazi leaders — one was tried in absentia — and that was what mattered to most people. Subsequent trials dealt increasingly with those who plausibly could argue that they were following orders.

But with 21 convictions (there were a handful of acquittals), the public's desire to hold someone accountable for the Holocaust seems to have been satisfied.

It's all so clear in hindsight.

But I suspect that, if time travel was possible and any of us could return to the early 1930s, when Hitler seized power, we would find it difficult, if not impossible, to persuade the Germans of that time that they were anointing those whose acts would lead to the Holocaust.

Appearances can be deceiving.

That was the great deception of the Nazis — the "big lie" of which Hitler spoke. "The great masses of people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one," Hitler said, "especially if it is repeated again and again."

I've heard it said that, because Barack Obama has a knack for public speaking, he is Hitleresque. Hitler, some rightfully say, seduced the German people with his oratorical talent. But to suggest that a president is carrying out an agenda similar to Hitler's because he has a way with words condemns any leader whose words inspire others.

Americans are still inspired by the words of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and, from more recent times, Ronald Reagan. And people of many nationalities were inspired by Pope John Paul II, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Can anyone say that any of those people advocated fascism?

There are those today who recklessly compare the Obama administration to the Nazi leadership. This must be an exaggeration, the most outlandish comparison those critics can think of because it has no basis in reality. It is as big a lie as any ever told by the Nazis themselves.

I agree that America has its faults. I agree that the president has made some mistakes in the first eight months of his term. Most presidents do make mistakes, frequently in their first year in office.

But no one who has studied Nazi Germany or Hitler to any extent could seriously compare the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s to America in 2009.

Yet that is what some people are doing today.

Obama's critics certainly have the right to disagree with him. And they have the right to say what they believe. In America, you are entitled to your own opinion — but, as I wrote the other day, you're not entitled to your own set of facts.

If anyone really believes that we are witnessing the rebirth of Nazism, that person has no idea what he/she is talking about.

Blaming Bush

I think the first time I was exposed to the word "scapegoat" was during the Watergate scandal. Former White House lawyer John Dean claimed he was being made the scapegoat for Richard Nixon's woes.

I didn't know what the word meant. The Random House Dictionary sheds some light on that, telling us that the word "scapegoat" means "a person or group made to bear the blame for others or to suffer in their place."

Apparently, the word has biblical origins. Leviticus, in the Old Testament, describes the ritual. As a part of Yom Kippur ceremonies, a goat was driven into the wilderness to die, symbolically carrying the sins of the people on its back.

Christian theology sees the story of the scapegoat as the foreshadowing of the story of Jesus and his sacrifice for humanity.

I don't know about that. In my life, most of the scapegoats I've known of were athletes who, fairly or unfairly, were blamed for their teams' failures — Bill Buckner, whose error was said to cost the Boston Red Sox the 1986 World Series against the New York Mets, or Scott Norwood, whose missed field goal led to the first of four consecutive Super Bowl defeats for the Buffalo Bills.

A far more serious example of scapegoating occurred before I was born — when Nazi propaganda blamed the Jews for Germany's problems after World War I.

I guess it is a tendency of human nature to look for someone to blame when things go wrong. Perhaps that is why Barack Obama has insisted that Americans should look to the future and not look back as they seek to deal with the many problems facing the nation and the world. It is a sentiment I agree with, to a certain extent, although I still believe, as I have written on this blog before, that Congress should investigate the decisions that were made that led to the invasion of Iraq and the use of torture techniques in affiliated interrogations.

I have advocated such an investigation not because I want to punish anyone (notably the former president and vice president) but because there are lessons to be learned from how those decisions were made, and I believe we can benefit from that knowledge.

But, lately, I've been sensing a real bloodlust on the part of the public, and the previous administration is at the heart of it. As I have pointed out on many occasions, I am a Democrat, and I was never a Bush–Cheney supporter. But, as I have also stated in this blog, economies are massive, complex things. Presidents can give direction from the bully pulpit, but it is unfair and inappropriate to give them excessive credit or blame for the millions of decisions that business owners must make.

And the same thing applies to the people in their administrations.

But some people are adamant about finding someone to blame.

For example, I was looking at the New York Times' website today. For the third straight time, Maureen Dowd wrote a column about former Vice President Dick Cheney. Granted, Cheney's activities recently have been unseemly, to say the least, for a former vice president, but Dowd's columns seem to be particularly vitriolic.

Dowd made no secret of her support for Obama during the campaign, even before Obama's bid for the nomination took hold with the rank and file. Well, Dowd's candidate won, and Cheney's out of office now. Cheney may be in the spotlight by his own choice, but he has no authority to speak of. It seems, to me, that it would be a good idea for Dowd to ease up now.

Dowd isn't the only one, though. On Facebook lately, members have had the option of joining a group that constantly urges people to revel in "not having George Bush as president." Recently, this group has been encouraging people to celebrate the six–month anniversary of the end of the Bush presidency on July 20. From this group's perspective, I suppose it would be expected that parties on that date — which also happens to be the 40th anniversary of the first walk on the moon — would include piñatas in the shape of Bush and Cheney's heads.

More recently, this group has been polling people, asking them whether they would prefer to have Bush back as president ... or be impaled. The latest "results" I saw indicated that 225,000 people would rather be impaled while about 1,000 would opt to have Bush back in the White House.

Talk about a push poll.

Actually, I suspect the results would be different if the choices were real rather than hypothetical.

I understand the temptation to hold Bush and Cheney responsible for all the problems America must deal with now. And, even with all the things that are on the current administration's plate, I still believe there are valuable lessons to be learned from how the previous administration made decisions that determined how foreign policy was conducted, especially regarding how a war was launched.

But some of these other things seem counterproductive to me. They may be psychologically satisfying, but they do little, if anything, to help us find our way out of this wilderness.

Blueprints Reveal More Than Plans for Auschwitz

November has always been a busy time for Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party.

On Nov. 8, 1923, Hitler led the unsuccessful Beer Hall Putsch. Although the coup d'etat failed, Hitler's life was changed. He wrote "Mein Kampf" while serving his prison sentence, and he emerged from the experience with a belief that, in order to seize power in the future, he had to follow the letter of the law — which he did, manipulating the law when necessary.

On Nov. 9, 1938, the first coordinated Nazi attack on Jews occurred in the form of Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass." Ninety-two Jews were murdered and perhaps as many as 30,000 Jews were deported to concentration camps.

And recently, the German newspaper Bild revealed that original blueprints for the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz had been found in an apartment in Berlin.

The blueprints documented a lot more than that. Well, actually, they appear to have proven some interesting points.

I have to rely on an English translation that often isn't clear to me — and perhaps someone who can translate German can clarify it for me — but my understanding of it is that the plans date to November 1941.

I don't see anything in the article that suggests that the systematic murder of the Jews, the so-called "Final Solution," had begun in November 1941 — only that preparations for (if not the actual construction of) the death camps had clearly begun by that time.

We've been told, for more than half a century, that the "Final Solution" was given the green light by senior Nazi officials at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942.

But there seems to be something of a misunderstanding about the "Final Solution." The plan did refer to the extermination of the Jews, but the original plan approved at Wannsee had more of a purpose to it than that. It called for all the Jews to be deported to parts of eastern Europe that were populated by Germans, where they would build roads. Those Jews who did not die while the roads were being built would be exterminated after the projects were completed.

That plan, however, was based on the assumption that Germans would continue to occupy the Polish and Soviet lands they controlled at that time. But, because of the gradual loss of much of that territory to advancing Soviet troops, the Nazis sent most of the European Jews they had in custody to the death camps instead.

That's where most of the executions took place.

And it seems to have become clear rather rapidly to the conference attendees in 1942 — based on the few documents that survive — that they had been assembled to confirm a decision that had already been made.

Perhaps that was to give the proceedings the semblance of a legal framework.

We've also been told for many years that the first gassings of prisoners took place at Auschwitz in September 1941. The experiments led to the adoption of Zyklon B as the lethal agent of choice. The article in Bild appears to confirm both that selection and the fact that gassing experiments had been conducted by November 1941.

So what was new in the Bild report? Not much, really.

Except for the revelation of the existence of Auschwitz blueprint plans.

And perhaps evidence that will, as Ralf Georg Reuther says in Bild, "rebut ... the last Holocaust deniers."