Translated from Rolf Gutte/Freerk Huisken, Alles bewältigt, nichts begriffen! Nationalsozialismus im Unterricht. Eine Kritik der antifaschistischen Erziehung, VSA-Verlag, Hamburg, 2007, p. 195-228.
The Second World War –
Failure due to excessHitler wanted the world war. This brands him a criminal in the eyes of textbook authors. That’s why none of the excuses that well-regarded statesmen use to explain their wars apply to Hitler: He did not “slide into it,” did not have to “defend” himself against military attacks, and was not persuaded to participate in “peace-making measures.” His wars have not been transformed into practical necessities or liberation campaigns legitimized by international law, into peace-making and humanitarian necessities. What is customary today for all wars waged by the free West, namely that they are declared world peace operations or acts of freedom committed to values, does not apply to Hitler the criminal. The “question of war guilt” is clearly answered: Hitler wanted the world war.
However, if one takes the fact alone, this finding is not based on any particular result of historical research. The research material is clear. The political program, announcements, and actions of the National Socialists paint a clear picture. Hitler himself in “Mein Kampf” justified the war on the basis of his foreign policy goals and publicly announced it long before 1933. Opponents and political rivals reacted accordingly. The left mobilized against the NSDAP in 1932 with the slogan: “A vote for Hitler is a vote for war!” Hitler ran in the Reichstag elections with a program to revise the results of the First World War and, once his absolute power was secured, immediately and unmistakably began preparations for war in both domestic and foreign policy.
Textbook authors know this and sprawl it across their textbooks. But not to explain Hitler’s war policy, but to morally disqualify him. The Second World War is not presented as the consequence of an imperialist foreign policy, if only because proving a political calculation would assume that Hitler’s will had a rationally explainable content. But this simply does not fit with the established finding that fascism is profoundly irrational. Hitler, the textbook authors would have us think, did not want the war as a statesman who calculated with all the means of foreign policy, but as a criminal driven by a pathological desire for war.
The German people didn’t want war
It is therefore also clear to them that the German people naturally neither wanted war nor seriously expected it: “Many had read this program (in ‘Mein Kampf’), but most took it just as unseriously as the other elements of National Socialist doctrine... People believed that Hitler would act more responsibly and moderately as Chancellor, and they felt confirmed in this assumption by the many moderate ‘peace speeches’ he had given since 1933.” [189]
Certainly, not much fits together here in the first place: On the one hand, Hitler is accused of open warmongering; on the other, he is said to have led the German people around by the nose with “peace speeches.” On the one hand, he went into the election campaign with the promise of returning Germany to its former greatness and was elected to the Chancellor’s office by almost half of the German people on this promise, while, on the other hand, the majority of the German people are said to have expected him as Chancellor not to fulfill this program, but rather to fail to fulfill it. On the one hand, the German people are said to have been so desperate in view of their own situation and that of the German Reich that they believed all of Hitler’s “promises”; but, on the other hand, they are said not to have taken these “promises” seriously at all. On the one hand, Hitler is said to have systematically begun preparations for war by promoting the national arms industry, by openly arming the country in a demonstrative breach of the Treaty of Versailles, by introducing universal conscription, and by providing comprehensive military training in schools and the Hitler Youth, and, on the other hand, the people, who had to bear the burden of these preparations for war at all levels, are said to have put their trust in Hitler as Chancellor of Peace. This naïve German people probably did not take the occupation of the Rhineland “seriously” either, but instead considered it a big game of cops and robbers, took the military intervention in the Spanish Civil War for a foreign intrigue, and chalked up the invasion of German troops into Prague as a visitation program to bring people together.
In the obvious effort to provide a one-sided answer to the question of guilt, to declare Hitler a militaristic Beelzebub, and to present a basket full of excuses for the participation of the German people in the preparation and execution of the war, no argument is too stupid and no contradiction too embarrassing for the textbooks. The fact that the majority of Germans gave their approval to Hitler’s foreign policy program, that they knew his goals were fully warlike, that they were consequently prepared to go to war under Hitler for the “repatriation of all Germans to the Reich” and for the “conquest of new living space” if necessary, at least as long as victory was in sight, does not fit into the desired image of the German people. The fact that they were seduced and blinded into following Hitler until their eyes opened at some point is something that can and should be considered, as this view admits the complicity of the German people, but at the same time it can be transformed into the image of a reformed people who have the mental make up for the desired post-war morality, namely a tendency toward anti-fascism. The fact that the fascists’ preparations for war required the mobilization of the will and energy of the German population and successfully created the Germans’ willingness and ability to wage war, on the other hand, results in a highly undesirable picture of the German people. A declared will to wage war for national goals must not be included in the catalog of the mixed, but essentially not bad, “characteristics” of the German people.
Hitler’s modest peace propaganda
In order to prove that Hitler intended to beguile the people and the world of states with his “modest appeals for peace,” the textbooks confront these appeals with the “secret instructions” to the Wehrmacht leadership in which Hitler is said to have spoken quite differently and made no secret of his aggressive plans.[190] So a contrast is constructed between public appeals for peace and the open commitment to goals of territorial expansion within the Wehrmacht circles, which is owed entirely to the difference between diplomacy and the interests expressed in plain language. Hitler also mastered the art of presenting his bellicose concerns as legitimate and necessary concerns about defense and peacekeeping. However, this art is out of place for the outlook of generals to their future tasks. On foreign policy issues, Hitler made no distinction between “Reichstag speeches” and “Mein Kampf,” between public appearances and consultations with the General Staff. There can’t be any talk of an unintelligible diplomatic translation of his “true intentions” which a people untrained in diplomacy could have fallen for.
Anyone who interprets Hitler’s “appeals for peace” as an attempt to conceal his war plans from the world must inevitably declare “Mein Kampf,” which, as we know, was published at the end of the 1920s and sold in millions of copies, to be a kind of secret dossier. This political-programmatic “life confession” contained everything Hitler planned for his people, the Jews, and other states. There was only one prerequisite for this: it had to be taken seriously. On the other hand, one didn’t even need to read it to uncover Hitler’s “true” intentions. Anyone who pledges, as Hitler did in his first government declaration on January 31, 1933, to “preserve and strengthen peace, which the world needs today more than ever before,” and who expresses the hope that “the world [!] may never again make it necessary to increase our [!] own weapons by limiting its [!] arms,”[191] is not hiding anything, but is communicating his intentions to the world in the usual diplomatic logic of peace. It has the following content: The state of peace is a highly unstable matter that requires constant attention! Hitler says he is prepared to do this. He counts himself among the “keepers” of peace. Peace is threatened by others, he states. Everything he does is therefore – and this sounds familiar – a peacekeeping measure. Hitler thus says that there are unresolved issues between him and the rest of the world of states that need to be clarified. He considered these unresolved issues between the states to be so important that he considered peace to be seriously threatened if they were not resolved in a way that is satisfactory for him. And since he also wanted to make his own rearming process dependent on whether the others would voluntarily restrict their arms, the issues disrupting peace were on the table. Hitler felt disturbed by the military superiority of other states. This destabilizes his peace, so he urgently needs to rearm in order to stabilize the situation. He does not announce that he will enter into negotiations about political forms of contact between states in order to avoid misunderstandings, but rather in this way discloses his plans to prepare for war. This clear interest is presented as the highly worthy concern of maintaining the peace.
Quite independently of this historical review, one can see from the textbooks that they also give peace an esteem that it does not deserve. Peace is used to trivialize a situation in which weapons between states are silent, making it seem like an idyll. Yet peace is generally not a state in which wars between states have been overcome once and for all. A peace slogan does not express the intention to silence weapons in relations between states once and for all, nor does it express the desire to destroy the instruments of war. Peace propaganda is certainly not based on the finding that the conflicts between states that are likely to cause war have been eliminated. The objects of peace policy always contain a warlike core. Talk of peace does not deny this, but only wants to have the question of war guilt clarified from the outset: If it is always the other states that disturb the peace – says every state – then, as is well known, sometimes only the last resort can help to pacify the troublemaker. Once this goal has been achieved, peace reigns and the victors and losers can prepare for the next war.
Hitler’s appeal for peace in the textbooks is only a lie because it does not contain what the writers imagine to be Hitler’s evil intentions. Of course, Hitler never told his people that he intended to use them to slaughter non-Germans, that they were merely cannon fodder for his bellicose desires, nor did he tell the neighboring states that he would certainly invade, destroy, and subjugate them. However, this was not because he intended to conceal his true intentions in measured diplomatic speeches in the Reichstag, but because that was not his intention at all. Hitler, too, was not interested in waging war as an end, as is assumed by all those who cannot identify any warlike intentions in the announcement of foreign policy goals if they are not presented with bellicose war cries. Even a Hitler would have been quite happy if he had been able to realize his foreign policy plans without the use of weapons of war – as in the case of the reconquest of the Saarland or the “Anschluss” of Austria. But since he could easily calculate that neither the Eastern and Northern European states nor the Western European neighboring states would stand idly by and watch while his plans were being realized – after all, their existence as sovereign nation states was at stake – preparing for war was his most important domestic political goal. He saw the creation of his Wehrmacht’s ability to win as the decisive means of “safeguarding the right to life and thus regaining the freedom of our people,”[192] i.e. of “winning the Aryan race its rightful place on this earth.”[193]
Moreover, Hitler combined his message of peace with clear declarations of hostility. It was no secret to anyone that he saw Germany threatened by Bolshevism and gagged by the “Treaty of Versailles.” His appeal for peace was therefore nothing less than a double declaration of war: on the one hand, he considered coexistence between the Soviet Union and the “Third Reich” to be impossible, thus, in the interests of a fascist-supervised peace in Eastern Europe, he put nothing less than the abdication of “Jewish rule in Russia” on his agenda.[194] On the other hand, he declared the Treaty of Versailles to be an injustice and demanded the restoration of the German Reich to its former rights and the restoration of the borders of 1914. With this content of his peace message, which was neither then nor now historically disputed, Hitler made it clear to the Soviet Union that he saw it not only as a competitor for supremacy in Europe, but also as the powerful embodiment of the enemy that he also intended to eradicate within the German Reich: Jewry. The aim of conquering Eastern Europe was thus also declared to be a necessary defensive measure. The victorious powers of the First World War were presented with the choice of either no longer insisting on the fulfillment of the Treaty of Versailles or accepting the breach of treaty blamed on them with the occupation of the Ruhr in 1922/23 and allowing Hitler to have his way, or preparing for war with Germany.
Textbooks that want to come to the defense of the German citizens impute to them a degree of naivety that is completely untypical of nationalists. After all, appeals for peace are reliably seen through. It is not only common practice between states to “expose” a rival’s “peace talk” as preparation for an attack, which is then countered with their own peaceful intentions. Citizens also know what to think when the appeals for peace become more insistent.
Hitler’s non-aggression pacts surprised the world
Hitler is said to have “surprised” not only naive German citizens, but also seasoned foreign policy experts from other nations with his foreign policy moves: “In January 1934, Hitler surprised the world public by concluding a German-Polish non-aggression pact.”[195]
Hitler came up with two more “surprises” of this kind after his equally unexpected withdrawal from the League of Nations: in 1938 he signed a non-aggression pact with England as part of the “Munich Agreement” and in 1939, shortly before the attack on Poland, he signed a similar pact with his main enemy, the Soviet Union. In this way, Hitler is said to have succeeded once again in completely deceiving the world and, above all, his treaty partners. The textbooks’ inadvertent praise for Hitler who, as a sophisticated propagandist, had beguiled the masses with speeches about peace is thus supplemented with respect for the finesse of his foreign policy: for “despite [!] this rapprochement with his Eastern European neighbor, he never lost sight of his goal of conquering German ‘living space’ in the East.”[196]
Textbook authors know this very well. Foreign politicians, by contrast, deceived themselves. As if the Polish, British, and Soviet politicians had credulously lost sight of their immediate goal of protecting themselves from an attack by Hitler with immediate effect and had seen Hitler as their closest ally!
Now Hitler – like any other foreign policymaker – might have and did leave his opponents in the dark about some things.[197] But when signing a non-aggression pact, especially with Poland or the Soviet Union, such ambiguities are out of the question. The fact that a non-aggression pact is the opposite of a heartfelt brotherhood, that it is only signed if there are differences between two states that suggest the use of the military, i.e. when there are intentions to attack that are not or not yet being carried out for reasons of an alliance policy, economic, strategic or arms policies are part of the basic math of foreign policy. After signing the non-aggression pact, the Polish government had no reason to believe that Hitler would abandon his policy of revising Germany’s eastern borders. In line with Hitler’s public announcement that the Soviet Union was the main enemy in the East and that Poland was only a secondary theater, the Pilsudski government hoped that it would be spared militarily if it made the appropriate concessions – after having unsuccessfully asked the Western powers to support a “preemptive strike” against the German Reich in 1933. As is well known, Hitler kept his promise not to attack for six years, for as long as it suited his plans. The six years of mutual compliance with the treaty gave him peace on the eastern border and time to rearm. Six years later, the treaty had served its purpose for Hitler.[198] It was therefore now considered obsolete. Hitler still adhered to the customs of war diplomacy and accused the Poles of violating the treaty before “firing back.” Whether he actually managed to reassure the national and international public by reversing the facts of the case in order to justify the invasion under international law, or whether anyone was actually convinced of the honorableness of Hitler’s intentions, is completely irrelevant.
In dealings between states, such justifications are treated as what they are anyway: not as an explanation of political interests, but as their legitimization. The same applies to the concerns that democratic states pursue externally. They, too, are rarely presented as what they are, namely as variants of imperial interests, but as highly honorable and legitimate concerns worthy of recognition.
Nor are the heads of nation states unaware that, unlike contracts between private individuals, there is no superior legal authority endowed with power in the case of pacts between states, before which the parties would have to justify themselves morally and legally for misconduct and which would ultimately be able to enforce a judgment. Just as the signing of a non-aggression pact is based on the fact that the relationship between states is fraught with war and that the commencement of hostilities can only be prevented by a declaration of political will from both parties to the treaty, the termination of the treaty simply means that one of the signatory states now expects more from the use of its means of violence than from refraining from it and that it is even prepared to accept the judgment of the world of states that it is unpredictable because it has breached the treaty. Between states, it is political calculation with the will of the other state that governs first and foremost. If recognition of a foreign state’s interest promises a benefit, then states swear allegiance to the treaty and engage in diplomacy, in which they try to find out whether the other party expects to benefit from complying with the treaty and, if so, how. This is why the apparatus of violence is always immediately lurking behind it, because the termination of the contract by one side does not first call the judiciary, i.e. the legal system, into action, as is the case with private law. Morality only has the function of a well-founded title of appeal because it is not enforceable anywhere. In “realpolitik,” nobody falls for the scam of human rights, peace, and friendship between nations. Nobody confuses the political interests of states with the morality in whose name they are pursued militarily. Neither the Weimar political greats nor Hitler saw and handled this differently in principle.[199]
It is completely different in the textbooks. According to this popular stupidity, good politics is characterized by the fact that it is guided by humanity and human rights. Good, i.e. democratic, politicians only want peace, which is always broken by others. According to this, statesmen would be priests who have inadvertently gotten into politics and constantly fail because of their morality. And evil politicians like Hitler could not be measured by political standards either, or even less so.
Hitler’s exaggerations – or:
Where nationalist Lebensraum politics becomes implausibleBut strangely enough, the textbooks do not consistently stick to their own lessons. They apply completely different criteria when they look at Hitler’s goals in detail. Then suddenly his military campaigns are not just crimes against humanity, but must be sorted into justified and unjustified, sensible and senseless wars. Among his war aims, the pedagogical theorists of fascism discover some that make sense to them. They suddenly also recognize non-fascist aspects of fascism. Hitler, they suggest, also pursued honorable goals. They take these from the NSDAP program, for example, which insists on the “right to self-determination of peoples” and demands “equal rights” for (his) people, as many other statesmen and national leaders did before and after Hitler:
“1. We demand the unification of all Germans on the basis of the right to self-determination, of the peoples into one Greater Germany. 2. We demand the equal rights of the German people vis-à-vis the other nations, abrogation of the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain.”[200]
If the historical references – Versailles and St. Germain – were not so clear, these euphonious demands would have fit perfectly into the preamble to the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, which still proclaims “reunification” and complete national sovereignty. The “right to self-determination of peoples” and their “equal rights” are still well-regarded titles in international law. They have a good reputation even among anti-imperialists. They, too, regard peoples, especially those of the Third World, as titles of appeal. For them, a people is a collection of one and the same “type” of humans, many of whom are enslaved, displaced, colonized, divided, or do not have equal rights in the rule. Consequently, the people always have morality on their side because they are not the rulers. The people are already entitled as a people – at least one that is allowed to be unified and taken into service by a new rule.
The textbooks have no idea how to counter such intentions. On the contrary. They endorse this thoroughly nationalist view and only find fault with the fact that Hitler did not stop at establishing national unity: “The foreign policy demands that Hitler proclaimed to the public: the removal of the ‘shackles’ of Versailles and the right to self-determination for all Germans were in line with the wishes of almost the entire German people. Hitler also found hesitant concessions abroad – as long as he could maintain the appearance of having no further-reaching goals ... It was recognized too late that the limitation [!] to ‘just’ demands had been a tactical means for Hitler to win the approval of the German people for his [!] foreign policy and to prevent the formation of a front against Germany abroad. The fulfillment of these demands then secured Hitler a starting position from which he could put his imperialist plans into action... [With the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the invasion of Poland,] Hitler was no longer bringing ethnic Germans [!] ‘home to the Reich’, but was subjugating a foreign [!] people.” This was the “reach across the national border” with which “he became untrustworthy before the whole world.”[201]
So the textbooks ultimately end up with the evil Hitler again: He did not really want the legitimate goal of national unification, but only used it as a “tactical means” for his “reach across the national border.”
“Home to the Reich”
This sorting, which the ideological representatives of the (Western) loser of the Second World War performs on the plans of the loser of the First World War and recommends to the next generation for adoption, is in itself completely baseless. But it is understandable because it is the order of the day everywhere. After all, revanchism is a good foreign policy custom, regardless of whether its representatives are called Adenauer, Brandt, and Kohl or Ebert, Brüning, and Hitler. A war that has been started and lost is no reason for the loser state, if it still exists, to reflect on slightly different purposes of existence.[202] A lost war is not seen as a reason to rethink the political purposes of those who use people for their wars – unfortunately, successfully, again and again. Once the victims have been mourned, buried, and duly decorated posthumously, the defeat is quickly regarded as a disgrace that must be erased. If the victorious states annex territorial parts of the spoils of war, this is considered a violation of the right of peoples to self-determination, and the program “Home to the Reich” – launched after 1945 under the new name “Reunification” – is declared to be the nation’s highest foreign policy objective. The fact that this includes the next war is an inevitable consequence of the objective itself. For what are “lost territories” for the loser of the war, to which he in turn formulates a claim because one of his political predecessors once conquered them himself, are new conquests for the winner of the war, to which he in turn lays a legal claim because he has proven himself to be militarily superior. His victory erases all the loser’s historical claims and creates completely new ones for him. And when “right stands against right” between states, then force alone decides in the end.[203]
All this is fine for the textbook writers. The warlike nature of the policy of reconquest is also checked off. It probably falls under the faux frais of the right of peoples to self-determination. The oppressed parts of peoples and countries, which are first defended, then occupied, then liberated, finally reconquered, i.e. liberated again, can count themselves lucky that several states show so much interest in them. As a member of the nation, you don’t really know what to decide. But that doesn’t matter, because statesmen exercise the right to self-determination on behalf of their fellow national compatriots; they do not need the consent of the people for this, just a political interest. This is then called “nationality.” This means that all those who have ever served under the German flag are given this national citizenship like a natural endowment which is passed on from generation to generation, regardless of a person’s political will. Once “nationality” has been decided on the basis of the appropriate historical borders, the people have no say in the matter. They are then treated according to the state’s decision on their “political nature”: they are “brought home,” “reunited,” reconquered, etc. And since peoples lack a common will, since there are no positive reasons for something like an “identity,” they must consider themselves fortunate to understand their negative national identity, of being subject to one and the same rule, as a self-evident purpose of their existence, and make it a matter of life and death.
Belonging to a people is the result of rule. Rule determines who belongs to which people by violently asserting its authority over people and through the victories and defeats it experiences in the process. The commonalities in poetry and costume, in food and songs, or even in nature, which supposedly determines the identity and differences between ethnicity and citizenship, are either completely invented or only emerge in retrospect with the course then taken by state affairs. They are also only tolerated and promoted as long as a certain rule makes history with “its” people. If the people are once again assigned to another state as “its” citizens, then that state decides whether and how it wants to tolerate the past ethnic identity. If the conquered populations, in their outdated nationalistic delusions, long for their old homeland, the conqueror will come up with “integration measures” which, according to classic and still current models, range from banning the old mother tongue to resettlement and expulsion. The aim of this integration is get them to gradually forget their old ethnicity over time through forced naturalization into the victorious state and replace it with a new national identity. As a rule, the integration project shows that the new citizens have few good reasons to immediately feel at home in their old surroundings under the new regime. Since neither under the old nor under the new leadership were they anything more than the human material with which electoral, production, and real battles are won for the nation state, the orientation of their nationalism alone determines whether they are regarded as foreign bodies or follow the path of the “born” citizen who, after a brief initial difficulty under any rule, indulges in the same self-deception that he has been quite lucky with his leadership. As if he had ever chosen it himself!
Claiming the peoples’ right to self-determination therefore has nothing to do with people declaring an interest in taking their fate into their own hands. Anyone who has the misfortune of being chosen as a member of the people by a political leadership in state office or fighting for it is destined to be the material of their rule. And if he is persuaded by foreign or domestic politicians that the state power ruling over him is not at all suited to his people’s nature, from which he must therefore free himself or be freed from outside, then he can count himself lucky if he survives the carried out realization of his “national nature.”[204] These are always imperialist concerns in any case: Regardless of whether a national fanaticism is at work that believes in the alleged pre-state identity of the people, or whether a hegemonic concern is disguised as a campaign for the liberation of the people; regardless of whether – as with Hitler – the “repatriation” of parts of the people is conveniently linked to the conquest of lost territories, or whether a foreign ruler “only” lures away part of a state’s people by encouraging them to flee – as is known to have been done semi-officially by West German authorities before “reunification.”[205] The fight for land and people is the foreign policy concern. The arguments used to make it palatable to the people and digestible to the world public are interchangeable titles.
Fascism was no exception. In order to erase the “disgrace of Versailles” and restore “national honor” through national unity, it launched its first campaign of conquest – Saarland, Rhineland, Austria, Sudetenland – which, incidentally, the Weimar politicians had already flirted with. The fact that its fascist imperialism was not primarily keen on spheres of influence for capitalist business, but rather with establishing the rights of the German people, i.e. the Aryan race, to world domination, already constitutes a difference to the imperialist annexations and wars of conquest in the democratic world of states.[206] The fact that Hitler was able to carry out the first phase of his conquests entirely without war, i.e. not without military force but without military resistance, was not because he wanted to protect his compatriots in the Saar or Rhineland from war, but because the victorious states were not unfamiliar with the “right to national self-determination” and were still counting on the success of their appeasement policy.[207]
Over-stepping the “national border”
But none of this, according to the textbooks, constituted Hitler’s actual foreign policy. The reconquest of former German territories, together with the populations living there, was not fascist, but rather international law put into practice. It supposedly had nothing to do with national self-determination and the slaughter that goes with it. Only Hitler’s Lebensraum policy is considered unjustified in school textbooks. Fascist foreign policy is said to have begun only with the “over-stepping of the national border,” and Hitler is said to have revealed himself to be an imperialist politician who was only interested in domination in Europe and who in this way discredited the legitimate aims of national unification.
These findings are indeed curious. Why did Hitler only “finally cross the Rubicon of national purity and German unity” with the annexation of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939, as the British ambassador in Berlin at the time put it and as the textbooks reprint?[208] Or to put it another way: if fascism only begins with the military “reach across the national border,” where does this “border” lie? Where does the German Reich legitimately end and where does the imperial project of a Greater Germany begin? Why, one might ask – following the logic of the textbooks – did the majority of the German people, who supposedly only gave Hitler the task of restoring German national unity, not oppose his cross-border fascist Lebensraum policy? Why should it have been “too late” to intervene by the time Hitler wanted to begin the supposedly completely new phase of a genuinely fascist foreign policy?
The textbook raises these inconsistencies. However, they are not noticed by the authors, who do not accuse the post-war aim of German reunification of either revanchism or imperialism and certainly do not want to put it anywhere near fascism. They arise from the fact that the textbook authors attribute to Nazi citizens a need for foreign policy distinctions between good and evil, legitimate and reprehensible, which they did not even know. Anyone who at the time suffered as a citizen with his state from a loss of power, for whom the regaining of German honor was more important than anything else, not only understood that lost territories had to be reconquered along with the former German population – even if it cost them their loves. To him, Hitler’s follow-up program also seemed entirely consistent: of course, it was about securing this newly united German nation the land and soil it deserved on this earth and “necessarily winning Germany the position it deserved on this earth.”[209]
After all, a citizen can only suffer from a “divided nation” if, instead of the everyday restrictions imposed on him, he places the barriers that his state has discovered in the repute of its sovereignty at the center of his own desires. Even if he really missed visiting his Sudeten German relatives, the appropriate way to remedy this benign malady would have been to buy a train ticket, not to call for territorial conquest. However, anyone who, along with his politicians, suffers from the loss of power of his home state will certainly make sense of the reasons and strategies for its expansion. And he certainly will not see any contradiction between a policy of annexation that claims the unity of the nation and a policy of conquest that now wants to gain the corresponding “space” for the “united people.”
It was therefore not “too late” for the German population to intervene against Hitler’s Lebensraum policy because the German leadership had already irreversibly set the course for illegitimate conquests with conquests that were considered legitimate. Nothing was done because the majority of Germans had no objection to asserting a natural “right to the earth” (Hitler) after the establishment of their national unity and to demanding it militarily in the east.
Since these resolute Germans were also offered the opportunity to see themselves as the race who was by nature entitled to higher things, and since this offer fell on fertile ground, the claim to secure the necessary living space for their own, better people simply could not stop at any ethnic border, let alone one drawn by other states. It is part of the logic of a foreign policy justified by racism that it does not only define people’s rights in terms of imperialist ideologies of international law that are familiar and still valid today, with “national unity” or “the right of peoples to self-determination,”[210] thus in a broader political sense. It had all kinds of reasons for expansion that for it stood far above all the petty agreements and dealings between states and their alliances: For fascism, the right of the German people to expand their living space far into the Russian taiga was derived from the nature of the German people. Its three decisions, that the people are a race, that this race is superior and therefore entitled to rule over other races in the interest of securing adequate living space for its own, are completely independent of any convention between states. Conversely, for the fascists, even submission to the raison d'être of a League of Nations was an inadmissible restriction of national sovereignty.
The “ethnic border,” this alleged Rubicon between international law and fascism, is therefore nothing but an ideology. At the same time, it provides the student with a criterion for assessing foreign policy that is quite extraordinary. For the criticism of the “overstepping of ethnic borders” that is disseminated in textbooks shares the imperialist logic according to which citizens of foreign states, together with the territory on which they live, may be conquered if they can be claimed by another state as part of its people that was lost in the wake of one of the last wars.[211] With its complaint that Hitler made himself “untrustworthy,” pursued “pure power politics,” exposed himself as an “imperialist conqueror” and consequently only “concealed his Lebensraum policy” with the policy of national unity,[212] it only begins at the point where Hitler supplemented the universally recognized right of his people to unity with the right of the same people to adequate living space, which is also borrowed solely from imperialist logic. However, this second right cannot be rejected solely by referring to the interest for which it was invented. Such an exposure would at the same time uncover the first right.
The apodictic textbook judgment that it is not appropriate for nation states to subjugate foreign peoples is therefore ultimately not based on the sorting of peoples between tribes that are foreign and their own, but rather wants to condemn war based solely on the political lot awaiting the people during and after the war. This is generously apart from the fact that the difference between “liberation” and “subjugation” pretty much cancels out when the people are wracked with war. By lot then is not meant the fate that befalls people, but rather the war waging party’s interest in them. If this is acceptable according to the standards of the judging authority, i.e. if the foreign peoples are drawn into a war in the name of freedom, then the surviving remnant of the people can be grateful for their liberation. If the interest is generally condemned, as was the case with Hitler, then the people are considered subjugated.
Campaign against the evil empire
The situation – Hitler no longer “united his own people” in 1939 when he began the invasion of Poland, but “subjugated foreign peoples” – is complicated for the skilled textbook writers by the war situation from 1941 onwards. For it is well known that Hitler undertook a campaign which – according to the post-war sorting of states into friend and foe – was a politically correct war, although it included the “subjugation of foreign peoples” and should therefore actually be condemned as reprehensible.
We are talking about the “Eastern campaign.” This not only irritates post-war historians,[213] but was already the core of the Western powers’ appeasement policy before 1939. The fact that Hitler wanted to seek his living space primarily in the East, that his war against the Soviet Union was billed as a “war of ideologies” and commented on with sympathetic undertones,[214] fitted in perfectly with the calculations of the Western anti-Hitler alliance. For a long time, they had counted on being able to harness Hitler’s anti-Bolshevism, which they shared, for themselves.
Seen in this light, the war against the Soviet Union was the right war, and it could be presented as the liberation of the people from the yoke of communism had it not been led by the wrong person. West German historians do not think that Hitler was the wrong man for this campaign due to the fact that Hitler had no intention of doing the anti-communist dirty work for the USA, France, and England, only to subsequently fall victim to a new Versailles in an anti-fascist campaign himself. They know this so precisely because the war turned out differently than the Gröfaz (“Greatest General of All Time”) had imagined. The mere fact that Hitler’s Russian campaign led to defeat, and that Stalin’s system was not wiped out, but that the Soviet Union had to be included in the alliance of the victors and thus gained international prestige, makes for a war criminal argument.
And so students can learn that the last lesson only applies to a limited extent: because – and textbooks emphasize this – sometimes the subjugation of “foreign peoples” actually represents their liberation. One learns this from the period after the Second World War, when Third World countries in particular were subjugated if they saw their freedom in cooperation with the Soviet Union, and were liberated when they were subjugated by the West. Consequently, one can justifiably translate the textbook judgment on the “subjugation of foreign peoples” into the following two High German maxims: When a Hitler invades “foreign peoples,” he subjugates them; when democratically constituted states do the same, it is of course something completely different – liberation. If a Hitler invades a subjugated people, such as those of the Soviet Union, then they are also liberated, but by the wrong people, because, as we know, Hitler lost this proper war.
Senseless dying
It should come as no surprise that such lessons also teach the moral of “senseless dying.” Anyone who wants to teach the younger generation that the post-war slogan of the war loser is indeed “Never again war!”, but that this must not be misunderstood in pacifist terms, in other words, if understood correctly it means “Never again wage an unjust war!” and win every just one,[215] must soon enough begin teaching the distinction between a “senseless” and a “meaningful death.” Admittedly, this distinction is besides the point since death naturally ends the misery of any search for meaning. But one should see it completely differently. It is not about the meaning of the death for the deceased person himself, but about the moral lesson that the survivors have to draw from it. The deceased may be indifferent to whatever they died for. It matters to posterity, especially the authorities who decide over the lives and deaths of people. Because as long as they are established as a state power, the killing orders they issue no longer earn them the accusation of being “murderers” and the victims they accept have given their last gasp in the “service to the fatherland,” they attach great importance to their people actually being prepared to do their last bit of service. This requires convincing reasons, although there are simply no such reasons for dying.
Moreover, the deceased can’t ever again convince themselves whether their deaths were “worth it.” However, this absurdity will be an indispensable part of education for as long as states have reasons to use their people to expand, i.e. to “defend,” their sovereignty.
Stalingrad
At Stalingrad, schoolchildren learn that dying is particularly pointless when a battle can no longer be won or even the entire course of the war can no longer be positively influenced by further sacrifices of human life. Students are therefore quite right when they draw the opposite conclusion: using soldiers as cannon fodder is ok if it helps bring victory to the national cause. “Germany must live – even if we have to die” is the saying, and the meaning has not changed even in more recent military deployments.
Military experts quickly agreed after 1945 that Stalingrad was the “turning point” in the Eastern campaign. As long as the German soldiers had to die there in anticipation of a relief attack, not much could be said about the “meaning” of their deaths. After the defeat, the matter was settled for posterity: the German soldiers had been senselessly sacrificed by a madman who had long since lost sight of military realities in his fanatical belief in the “final victory.” From this higher perspective, a meaning can be discerned from their deaths: Insofar as they are held up as a beacon of senseless dying, they too did not ultimately die “in vain,” i.e. senselessly.[216]
At the same time, the spirit of the Wehrmacht is also said to have divided at Stalingrad. With this mass grave, the creation of legends about the anti-fascism of German generals, which the textbooks follow in their own way, continues. The famous radio message from General Paulus, in which he tried – albeit in vain – to get Hitler to consent to surrendering, is rarely missing from collections of material. The general’s request is considered far-sighted and philanthropic: “The suffering of the troops caused by cold, hunger and epidemics can no longer be endured. Continuing the battle under such conditions is beyond human strength.”[217]
The army commander was thinking less about the suffering of soldiers than about its effect on the physical and moral fighting power of his unit. No one knows better than a trained army commander that the “suffering of the troops” in war is not a barrier, but rather a means of waging war. This is demonstrated by all those eulogies about the “bravery of the German soldiers” when it was time to celebrate a victorious battle. If the German cannon fodder’s capacity for suffering had just been greater than that of the enemy, then the “superhuman exertions” were praised as proof of the German soldier’s invincibility. Whether one and the same human trench misery is celebrated as “heroic bravery” or lamented as an overtaxing of human strength depends solely on the military balance of power. And it is well known that it is part of the tactics of warring parties to sacrifice an entire army of starving, freezing, and sick soldiers on one section of the front if they calculate that they can be more than compensated for with victories on other sections of the front – which, incidentally, was Hitler’s hope until the end of the Battle for Stalingrad. It is therefore always only the military defeat that provokes the judgment of the “senseless” deaths of poor soldiers.
General Paulus is useful for the purpose of proving that there were also forces among the uniformed fascists who, unlike Hitler, were able to make competent judgments about senseless and sensible human sacrifices and who warned the Reich Chancellor early on against military adventurism, even though he responded to Hitler’s rejection of his request with the radio message: “Your orders will be carried out. Long live Germany.” He represents the classic conflict of loyalty in which half of the military leadership in the Third Reich, and especially the resistance fighters, are said to have found themselves. A peculiar conflict that is supposed to represent the virtue of the tradesmen of war: Knowing that they had to carry out their feats of destruction in the service of national politics, they translated the respective national raison d'état into orders for the Wehrmacht. In doing so, they quite naturally emphasized their relationship of service to their respective rulers and only allowed themselves to have doubts when, according to their own standards, they could no longer reconcile the political orders given to the military and the national cause that was to be advanced with these orders. In the cauldron of Stalingrad, a conflict is said to have played out in the General’s soul between his oath to the Führer and his higher obligation to “holy Germany.” The duty of unconditional obedience to the incumbent holders of the highest German responsibility and the nationalism of these people, which as a rule coincide completely, got in each other’s way here because the professional militarist suddenly discovered a danger to the fatherland in the ruling “civilian,” Adolph Hitler. Should he have violated his duty to the Führer in the knowledge that he was serving Germany? Or should he have fulfilled his duty and relied on the fact that Germany would ultimately be best served by proving the unconditional obedience of the military in critical situations? The brave general chose the second option – and he is highly commended for this – but he made it clear that he was not thinking of the Führer, but of Germany. It is therefore part of the legend that Hitler is said to have been furious about the radio reply:[218] It did not end with “Heil Hitler!” but with “Long live Germany!”
If, after appropriately processing the material, students are expected to declare that Hitler was to blame in response to the question of “who bears responsibility for the downfall of the 6th Army,”[219] then there is a need at work that would like to absolve the German military in the Third Reich of the accusation of fascism without accusing it of violating its military duties. For the same reason, after 1945, it was very popular to appeal to having acted under orders from a superior. The soldiers were also said to have only participated involuntarily or because of the military code of honor.
This later acknowledgment that former members of the Reichswehr were only following orders also encourages a distinction between fascist SS henchmen, who belonged to an organization that was declared superfluous with post-war democracy, and a Wehrmacht that could not be fascist because it existed before 1933 and was supposed to exist again after 1945. The fact that this Wehrmacht was at the service of the fascist program, that the officer corps belonged almost entirely to the NSDAP and that some officers only began to have doubts when they no longer felt that the German cause was in good hands with General Hitler, should not invalidate this official praise of the Wehrmacht. Paradoxically, it is precisely this profession’s obedience to orders, to serve as a soldier to any national leadership, which is supposed to free the soldier’s profession from the suspicion of not only having waged war, but of having made common cause with the fascists. They had to obey, is the message. But that doesn’t mean they were fascists – at least not all of them, it is said.
This method not only clears the Wehrmacht from the suspicion of fascism. It also minimizes the number of active fascists. The fact that Hitler primarily commissioned Himmler’s elite troops to exterminate Jews behind the lines excuses those who pushed the front lines to the east, who organized and supported the conversion of the economy into a war economy, who gave the Führer the next generation of soldiers and who made outstanding contributions to the military fitness of the youth. Soldiers, workers, mothers, and educators, who in their own way contributed to the functioning of the Third Reich, benefit in this clarification of the question of guilt because Hitler did not order every German Aryan to personally kill all the Jews he knew of, but had this done by a separate part of his apparatus of violence. In this way, the social division of labor in the fascist state is used negatively to exonerate all groups that did not belong to the SS. They were not part of the Holocaust and knew nothing about it!
The Wehrmacht whitewashers have another argument. They point out that high-ranking military officers had already tried to persuade Hitler as early as 1944 to break up the alliance of the Western powers with separate armistice agreements and prevent an unconditional surrender. This gave rise to the next legend, according to which parts of the leadership corps of the German Wehrmacht, of all people, would have been the right force to avert harm to the German people. The subject of the disagreement that broke out between some German generals and Hitler in the final phase of the war and the timing when it occurred refute any legend about the anti-fascist Wehrmacht. When the only question in dispute is whether there was still a chance of victory in the war, the goals of fascist conquest policy are always approved; and if the retreat is already in full swing, then the resistance against a policy that unwaveringly continues to propagate the “final victory” does not pursue an anti-fascist line, but rather realism and idealism face off against each other within the fascist camp itself. The foreseeable military failure alone produced a mass of doubting Thomases and avowed anti-fascists among the military. They suddenly saw traces of madness in Hitler, who they had served for years with enthusiasm for the successes of the Gröfaz, right when he still saw the racial superiority of the German people as a decisive factor in the war in a way that was no longer plausible to some military officers. The military relied more on tangible means of war and wanted to leave racism to the maintenance of troop morale. Hitler, on the other hand, held firm to his judgment about the invincibility of the Aryan race until the end – he even believed that it was capable of developing and producing the miracle weapon. In contrast to the opportunism of these military men in the face of failure, Hitler regarded the period of defeat as a test of his racist theory. He is quoted as saying: “If the war is lost, the people will also be lost ... the [German] people will have proved to be the weaker one, and the future will then belong exclusively to the stronger Eastern people.”[220]
Whereas the military wanted to save Germany regardless of the outcome of the military test, Hitler made his judgment on the right of the German nation to exist dependent on whether it would prove in war that it was the embodiment of the superior race. So where some, in their nationalist delusion, clung unconditionally to Germany as their fatherland, Hitler, in his racist delusion, made a calculation: Holding on to Germany is only worthwhile if the German people are actually called to higher things. If “providence” does not materialize in victory, then the future does not belong to this German people. Then the Germans would have to consider whether they wanted to continue living with the disgrace of not belonging to the stronger nation. Hitler consistently paid tribute to this delusion: in defeat, he famously declared himself unworthy of life.
The Volkssturm
The only complaint that school textbooks have about Hitler’s last contingent, the Volkssturm, is the following: “The units [of the Volkssturm] could hardly be equipped and could no longer be given uniforms; an armband identified them as soldiers. In February, women and girls were then called up to assist the Volkssturm ... Units of twelve and thirteen-year-old Hitler Youth, whose youthful idealism and willingness to sacrifice were now abused just like those of the previous generation, bled to death in the fire of the enemy’s tanks.”[221]
This verdict and the obligatory showing of B. Wicki's “The Bridge” round off the predictable textbook wisdom about the fascists’ warfare: Young people were slaughtered and abused not because they were sent to war, not because of the fascist war aims, but because their efforts could no longer prevent the defeat of German fascism. This should not happen again to future German generations, say the textbook writers: Without uniforms and weapons, without training and military discipline and certainly not without the prospect of victory, the “idealism and willingness to sacrifice” of German youth will never again be deployed in the future! That is the promise that this reappraisal of the Second World War makes to the young generation. Idealism and willingness to sacrifice are only warned against when they serve the wrong cause.
The zero hour: Surrender or liberation
And the textbooks use the “zero hour” to demonstrate what idealism and the willingness to sacrifice can be used for. The younger generation can imagine themselves in a new version of the “Disgrace of Versailles”: “The ‘total’ war ... had transformed Germany and large parts of Europe into a landscape devastated by bombs. Millions of people had lost their families, their possessions, their homes and, in many cases, their national identity. [Note the escalation!] A new beginning seemed almost inconceivable in view of the consequences of the war and German guilt. Public order had almost completely collapsed. Transport, supplies and education institutions had come to a standstill in many cases... The refugees and displaced persons [!] streaming westwards from the ‘German eastern territories’ had to be provided for... The impending division of Germany by the ‘Iron Curtain’ increased the general uncertainty... Gradually, the efforts by the world powers to prevent the reunification of Germany gained ground in the occupied zones [!]. As a result of the war unleashed by Hitler, the German Reich had become a destroyed and divided [!] country with an uncertain future, which was viewed with suspicion by its neighbors. Even [!] many of the liberated [!] states of ‘inter-Europe’ lost their full sovereignty and came under the influence of the Soviet Union under Stalin... While the final determination of Germany’s borders was also left to a peace treaty, realistic contemporaries soon realized that the East German [!] territories would have to be ceded to Poland in the long term. In the Eastern Treaties of 1970, the Federal Republic of Germany, in close coordination with the Allies, recognized the territorial losses of the German Reich as a reality [!].”[222]
Although the laments over the loss of loved ones and possessions were justified, the true suffering that plagued the German people after the end of the war was supposedly of a completely different nature and far removed from the everyday worries of the people who had survived the world war. It consisted of a suffering that only torments a nation state and its representatives: Suffering from the bitter loss of power and greatness: “German eastern territories had to be ceded to Poland.” It was not until 25 years (!) after the end of the war that borders were finally established. The “territorial losses” accepted in this way were only conceded from 1970 onwards “in close coordination with the Allies,” i.e. at the insistence of the Allies! Obviously, the losers of the war were never really able to accept the capitulation and regarded the new borders drawn by the victorious powers as an infringement on German territorial sovereignty that still existed in some way. Moreover, Germany was an “occupied” country that the victorious powers had divided into occupation zones. And to top off the “disgrace,” the world powers even prevented the “reunification” of the divided fatherland. Once again, nothing but nationalistic worries!
This is only shared by those citizens who can get over the destruction of their private possessions but can never get over the loss of their “homeland” and “national identity.” For them, “division” is the mandate for reunification, “occupation” is the mandate for liberation, the cession of German territories in the east is the mandate for reconquest, and “escape” or “expulsion” is the mandate to at least enforce compensation for the surviving relatives of the victims. The question of whether 1945 was a liberation to be celebrated or a capitulation to be mourned has long since been answered.
In this depiction of the situation after 1945, the world of states is sorted less into winners and losers, into warmongers and invaded states, but rather into victims and perpetrators, into occupiers and subjugators, in short: into friend and foe. The warmonger and war loser is the victim. The new perpetrators are the victors, the states that robbed, occupied, and divided Germany. It is not difficult for the textbook authors to sort the victors once again: They are all occupiers, but the Soviet Union has also brought new guilt upon itself by immediately “subjugating” the “liberated states of ‘Middle Europa’.”[223] In this way, the world was sorted once again in a way that corresponded to the foreign policy raison d'être of the Federal Republic, which was newly admitted to the camp of the Western victorious powers. As is well known, some of the revanchist tasks compiled in the textbooks were enshrined in the Basic Law as a “claim to reunification.” The rest was left to the ideal care of compatriots to whom German politicians declared their benevolence depending on the foreign policy situation, protecting them from accusations of “revanchism” or even sometimes advising them to show more restraint. Another 25 years after the treaties with Eastern Europe, Germany has been able to record successes in terms of sovereignty and territorial gains through a persistent, NATO-supported foreign policy that leaves only a few of the tasks compiled by school textbooks unfulfilled. The main enemy has been brought to its knees, the division of Germany has been overcome and full sovereignty has been established. The influence on the domestic policy of those states responsible for the “German eastern territories” has been enormously advanced through all kinds of minority protection treaties. Options for jurisdiction over Königsberg have been announced, and even wishes for a protectorate were announced for the Volga and other “ethnic Germans.”
German foreign policy today has proven in practice what the theoretical analysis of German textbooks indicates: for German imperialism, the Second World War only ended with the revision of the defeat of 1945. In a similar way, leading politicians of the Weimar Republic had also assessed the outcome of the First World War and set about correcting the Treaties of Versailles with varying degrees of success. However, none of them were as successful as the politicians of post-war democratic Germany have been to this day.
[189] Zeiten und Menschen, Paderborn 1978, p. 128. The foreign policy part of his inaugural speech as Reich Chancellor on January 31, 1933 is also said to be among the moderate peace speeches.
[190] Cf: Der Nationalsozialismus, p. 42.
[191] Ibid.
[192] Ibid.
[193] And even if Hitler deliberately spoke untruths in public speeches, which is known to happen with politicians, his actions from 1933 onwards spoke volumes. Only those who love self-deception can counter his actions with words that are supposed to be a rejection of war preparations. There will have been such Germans who, referring to the German Chancellor’s refusal to go to war, tried to dismiss his Lebensraum foreign policy as grandiloquent talk. But even these Germans knew what Hitler wanted. Why they did not, conversely, point to the actions of the new government and expose the “moderate peace speeches” as the political morality of war preparations is explained solely by their interest in wanting to reconcile themselves with an unpopular new German leadership.
[194] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, quoted in: Zeiten und Menschen, Paderborn 1978, Bd. 4, p. 128.
[195] Grundriß der Geschichte, Bd. 2, Stuttgart 1984, p. 290.
[196] Ibid.
[197] Of course, politicians also lie through their teeth and want to keep other states in the dark about many things, e.g. about their own strength, about secret weapons, about the time and place of an attack, etc., but never about who has been declared an enemy and why, and that the enmity is being seriously pursued. How could that be possible?! According to school material, this is exactly what Hitler is supposed to have concealed in his “moderate speeches.”
[198] Incidentally, termination rights and conditions are usually included in the contracts.
[199] In addition, the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin is no longer subject to all the arguments that the textbooks found appropriate for the non-aggression pacts between Poland and Germany, Germany and England. This pact, which once again is said to have “surprised” the world, is not to be interpreted by any textbook as a peace agreement by at least one of the parties. Since both parties enjoy or enjoyed the same global political ostracism, it is clear in this case that “both dictators wanted temporary relief”! The authors are therefore well aware of the calculations that states occasionally pursue with non-aggression pacts. They make no secret of this when the contracting parties are presented as war-mongering villains anyway. If, on the other hand, one of them is a good guy, it promotes peace with the treaty, whereas the other abuses it by breaking it. The difference between Hitler’s foreign policy and that of his European neighbors therefore consisted solely in the fact that Hitler was already determined to go to war, meaning that his foreign policy and diplomacy served this purpose alone, while his neighbors were still trying to combine their imperial concerns with a calculation of benefit and damage.
[200] R. Kühnl, Der deutsche Faschismus in Quellen und Dokumenten, p. 106.
[201] Zeiten und Menschen. Ibid., p. 130.
[202] As the GDR tried to do.
[203] The fact that the (re)conquest of the GDR was not carried out with wars involving German participation, not with mass exterminations by Germans in uniform, is credited to Germany’s post-war policy. Yet the German conquests, above all the “reunification” which, like Hitler’s “peaceful” land seizures, only established the “unity of the German people,” could never have been achieved without 40 years of Cold War and its worldwide accompaniment by hot wars. The substance of German “reunification” was the conquest of the socialist GDR for capitalist Germany, and therefore a highly warlike affair.
[204] One look at the war in Yugoslavia and there is more than enough evidence.
[205] For example, through impunity for “escape helpers.” At this point, one can also ask oneself the question of what the verdict would have been on a policy of caring for “Volga Germans” if it had been pursued by Hitler: Repatriation or unjust war. And where does the “national border” actually run today?
[206] Economic concerns were always pursued at the same time: Baku, granaries... See also the unwelcome lesson at the end of the chapter.
[207] A school textbook interprets the fact that the Saarlanders had supported the slogan “Home to the Reich” in a referendum as follows: “Their love of the fatherland was stronger than their fear of dictatorship.” (Zeiten und Menschen, op. cit., p. 130) So their vote was actually directed against Hitler!
[208] Cf. Zeiten und Menschen, op. cit. p. 132, quoted approvingly in the textbook.
[209] A. Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 108 (op. cit.: Zeiten und Menschen, p. 128).
[210] Cf. e.g. the “International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights” of 1966, Art. 1, in: Menschenrechte. Beck-texte, Munich 1992, p. 22.
[211] Incidentally, Hitler’s “Home to the Reich” policy can almost be considered unambitious in territorial terms compared to a West German policy that identified and incited Volga Germans far into Siberia.
[212] Fragen an die Geschichte, vol. 4, Bielefeld 1971, p. 152/Zeiten und Men- schen, p. 129 /Der Nationalsozialismus, p. 43ff.
[213] Cf. the section on the historians’ dispute in the chapter: “Dealing with the past politically.”
[214] Grundriß der Geschichte, vol. 2, Stuttgart 1984, p. 299. This becomes clear, for example, when the Hitler-Stalin Pact is portrayed as an alliance of dictators in which the two greatest enemies in world history made a short-term pact in order to better prepare for war against each other – a war in which no one would be harmed. Incidentally, this was also the view of the Western powers at the time.
[215] J. Fischer and Bündnis 90/The Greens saw it similarly in 1995 onwards.
[216] They can share this cynical distinction with the radiation victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who also died a militarily senseless death – as people outside US historiography and in settlement with the first victor of the Second World War now say. However, as a moral memorial to the dangers of the atom in the wrong hands, it can be exploited to the full.
[217] Unsere Geschichte, Bd. 3, Frankfurt 1986, p. 205.
[218] Hitler had radioed: “Forbid surrender. The army will hold its position to the last soldier and the last cartridge.” According to: Our History, p. 206.
[219] Ibid.
[220] Der Nationalsozialismus, p. 70.
[221] Ibid.
[222] Grundriß der Geschichte, Bd. 2, Stuttgart 1984, p. 314.
[223] An example of the dialectic of liberation and subjugation: Poland was “liberated” from fascism, then not “liberated” from capitalism by the Soviet Union, but “subjugated” again. Poland was only “liberated” from this yoke in 1990. The question of how Polish citizens fared under the yoke or in freedom is pointless.