German Guilt

To Community News:  9/9/05
German guilt
 
We Germans are guilty! We are guilty of having accepted a guilt we had no moral right to accept. For this moral failing another people, the Palestinians and  Iraqis, are now paying the price. Let me elucidate. Jeff  Jacoby, writer for the Boston Globe had this to say in his article Prerequisite to Mideast peace (6/27/2002). “ …what was done to Japan and to Germany can be done to the Palestinians (Iraq). Pulverizing defeat followed by occupation and transformation.”  For the victors, both, pulverization and transformation were a resounding success. And success  feeds on success.
    Let’s first look at the pulverization. Pforzheim was pulverized  Feb. 23, l945 by the English (W.W.II ended May 8, l945) How did the 18 000 victims (low estimate), mostly mothers and their children die? Some had their lungs burst by air mines, some were buried  by falling debris, but most of them were burned to death. On March 4, 1945, an English airplane machine gunned to death another 115  Pforzheimers standing in line at a soup kitchen. Among them was the twelve year old schoolmate of my friend. The late Johanna Roth  (Germania) told me that during the first days of occupation the English picked up the mayor of Pforzheim and hanged him. The fate of Pforzheim was the fate of all the German cities, save one, Heidelberg. My mother recited the following ditty: “Oh Heidelberg, du Schoene! Wir werden dich verschonen, denn wir wollen in dir wohnen! – Oh Heidelberg, you beautiful! We will spare you, because we want to live in you.” Heidelberg subsequently became the American headquarters.
    Now to the second part, the transformation.  I came across  an article by Andy Rooney writing about his experience as a soldier in the American occupying army of Germany. He was surprised that the moment the war was over there was no resistance. Unlike the American soldiers in present day Iraq, he felt absolutely safe driving about the defeated country. I wrote back: ”Dear Mr. Rooney: Who was supposed to have  sniped at you, me a girl of ten, or my invalid uncle and aunt, or their overworked daughter who had to do all the heavy farm work?”  The German prisoners of war, as far as they had not been killed outright, or left to die from exposure and starvation, trickled back only slowly. In the last batch being released from Siberia in December l953  was my cousin, Xaver Sonner. 
    The American and English however did not and could not take Jeff Jacobi’s advise, namely to pulverize  the Palestinians and Iraqis. The world was watching. Therefore these  people can resist and transformation  is out of the question. When Germany and Japan were pulverized everybody  wanted to be in on the kill. The victors promised booty.
   The pulverization of Germany therefore was the prerequisite for the transformation of the German mentality. This transformation  was put into Jewish hands. Only they and the willing stooges of the victors got the licenses to restart the public media.  But you know what! Nothing of what the media said, or wrote at that time  affected us, the war generation. The war crime trials and the subsequent hangings of the German leadership passed us by. Were we so indifferent? No! We were just too busy  trying to keep from freezing and starving. My father, one of the first ones to be released from Siberia, tried to publish a little calendar. He did not get the  printing permission  in the American zone to which Pforzheim belonged, but had to have it printed in the French zone. He spent  countless hours and energy just to get from one occupational zone to the other. His sister, having immigrated to the US in the twenties asked him what she should send, shoes or something to eat. My father wrote back: “Send me something to eat. I can walk barefoot if need be, but I can’t walk on an empty stomach.” Here is what I remember of the daily calorie allotment in the American zone.  If some of you remember better, let me know. A man, doing heavy work, (Schwerarbeiter) was allotted 1750 calories. I, a growing child got 1375. A housewife got the least, 880.
   But then came the change, namely the falling out of the victors, and with it the cold war. Suddenly the Germans were needed again. 12/1946 the English and the Americans put their zones together creating the bizone. With the joining of the French zone 3/1948  Westgermany  made its appearance. The Russians eventually built a wall to keep their zone, named Eastgermany (in reality  middle Germany - the eastern part of Germany having been given to Poland) safe from their former allies, the Americans, English and the French. The respective victors allowed the physical reconstruction  of Germany but enslaved them mentally. It was the transformation of  the Germans from a  rational people to a people in the truest  sense of the  words mentally ill. One of the biggest roles in that transformation was played by the education system.   In order to eliminate  the influence of the parents and to discredit their knowledge of how things really were during the Nazi period, an artificial generational conflict was  promoted by the media beholden to the victors. But not every father abandoned his authority to the schools. When young Udo Voigt, present head of the NDP, came home and tried to berate his father with the atrocity propaganda heard in school, his father gave him a box on the ears. This ear boxing had  tremendous curative powers (no wonder the authorities try to outlaw corporal punishment). I admire Udo Voigt as opposition to the present day decadent, traitorous German  leadership.
   To assert authority demands effort which the Germans do not want to expend anymore. To stand up for the truth in present day Germany is dangerous  and detrimental to living the good life. Sacrificing everything to the “good life,”  the honor of  their  parents and grand parents and the future of their  children,  therein lies the German guilt. The problem is not that the present generation of Germans does not know the historical facts. They do not want to know. When I told my half brother  about the repeated rapes his mother had to endure from the Russian soldiers he replied: “Das will ich gar nicht wissen - I don’t want to know about it.”
  But the good life, the way present day Germany under the tutelage of its victors is going, will end. Hard times are coming. Let us hope that hard times restore the sanity of the German people.
 
Christine B. Miller