‘Anti-Semitism is treatable’ – a banner at a Warsaw demonstration. Reuters/ Agencja Gazeta

This caused immediate outrage around the world and nowhere more so than in a country that has been, until now, a close ally of Poland: Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the bill as “distortion of the truth, the rewriting of history and the denial of the Holocaust.”

And yet, 10 days later, Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, signed the bill into law retorting that “the historic truth is that there was no systematic institutionalized participation among Poles [in the Holocaust].”

What is happening? Why, over 70 years since the end of the Second World War, is this argument taking place?

I am a sociologist who has studied controversies around the memory of the Holocaust in Poland. For me, this dispute is more than a crisis in Polish-Jewish relations. It is, above all, a crisis in Poland’s national identity.
 

The memory of World War II in Poland

This is not the first time the Poles have legislated against what they see as defamation of Poland’s record in World War II, but it is certainly the most wide-reaching. Under this new law, the punishment for people claiming that “the Polish Nation or the Republic of Poland is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich” carries a possible prison sentence of up to three years.

The timing of the vote was no accident. The government used the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day as a platform to denounce the misnomer “Polish death camps” that some – including former President Barack Obama – have used to refer to Nazi concentration camps in occupied Poland.
The Polish government, along with other Polish organizations, has been fighting the use of that expression in foreign media for several years, and with considerable success. Most American newspapers and other major media outlets have updated their stylebooks to stop those words being used.
Nevertheless, given the growing controversy, the German minister of foreign affairs took it upon himself to declare that the Germans bore the entire responsibility for the extermination camps. But then he added that “the actions of individual collaborators do not alter that fact.”
And therein lies the rub.

Many Poles find it difficult to accept they could have played a role in the Holocaust. That is because, unlike many other nations, the Polish state did not collaborate with the Nazis. Considered an inferior race by the Nazis, Poles were targeted for cultural extermination to facilitate German expansion to the East. Polish elites were systematically murdered. Tens of thousands of Poles were imprisoned in concentration camps or were forced into slave labor.

The Old Town burns during the Warsaw Uprising, August 1944. Museum of Warsaw

Poland’s losses in World War II were enormous: Approximately 6 million Polish citizens were killed in the war, over half of whom were Jewish. Warsaw was left in ruins, and its 1944 uprising alone cost the lives of about 150,000 citizens.

The dominant Polish narrative of World War II is, therefore, about victimhood, which fits squarely into its broader national mythology of martyrdom.

Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855) Unknown

Repeatedly invaded by its powerful neighbors, the Polish state disappeared from the European map for over a century – from 1795 to 1918. Poland’s national bard, the 19th century poet Adam Mickiewicz, described his country as a “Christ among nations.” In this telling Poles are a chosen people, innocent sufferers at the hands of evil oppressors.

“Revelations” of crimes committed against Jews by Poles tarnish this narrative and shake Polish national identity to its core.
 

Narrative shock

The fact is, however, as historians have shown, crimes committed against Jews by Poles were much more prevalent and widespread than most people realized.

Perhaps the most controversial and impactful research is that of the Polish-born Princeton University professor, Jan T. Gross.

In his 2000 book “Neighbors,” Gross recounts in painful detail the violent murders of Jews by their ethnically Polish neighbors in the small town of Jedwabne on July 10, 1941.

The book marked a watershed in the public debate about Polish-Jewish relations.

On July 10, 2001, roughly a year after the publication of Gross’ book, the Polish government acknowledged the murders and erected a monument at the site where several hundred Jews were forcibly brought to a barn and burned alive. Although the monument’s inscription fails to explicitly indicate that it was ethnic Poles and not Germans who committed the crime, the official apology by then-President Aleksander Kwaśniewski was unequivocal. “Here in Jedwabne,” he said, “citizens of the Republic of Poland died at the hands of other citizens of the Republic of Poland.”

The Jedwabne memorial. Genevieve Zubrzycki, Author provided

Such was the shock the story of Jedwabne caused that it is possible to distinguish between Poland “before and after” the appearance of Gross’ book. As leading Catholic journalist Agnieszka Magdziak Miszewska put it: “Facing up to the painful truth of Jedwabne is … the most serious test that we Poles have had to confront in the last decade.”
 

Law and Justice’s politics of history

It is that test, arguably, that the ruling Law and Justice party is failing.

In the battle over Polish collective memory, the party has been promoting the stories of the Poles who rescued Jews – and who are honored by Israel as the “Righteous Among Nations” – by creating museums and monuments in their name.

Through the new “Holocaust Law,” the government is, in effect, trying to repress knowledge of crimes committed against Jews by Poles. The defense of the law, however, goes one step further. In a remarkable case of what I would describe as manipulating the message, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki issued a video statement claiming that it is the Poles who are the guardians of historical truth and fighters against hatred.

And yet, the same politicians remain silent when their supporters express anti-Semitic and anti-refugee views. On Feb. 5, for example, demonstrators impatient for President Duda to sign the Holocaust law gathered in front of the Presidential Palace chanting anti-Semitic slogans and demanding that he “remove [his] yarmulke and sign the law!”

The president did sign the law, but he also sent it to the country’s constitutional court for examination.

Those Poles opposed to the law – and there are many, judging by the number of organizations and public figures denouncing it and the number of petitions circulating – hope that it will be deemed unconstitutional because it represses freedom of speech and could significantly curtail academic research.
Regardless of the ultimate outcome, however, the government’s politics of history will continue to be waged on many other fronts. What is at stake, in my view, is nothing less than the definition of Polish national identity. This is why, for all the international outrage, the controversy about the Holocaust law is hottest inside Poland, among Poles who are now debating what it means to be Polish and where Poland is going.

Geneviève Zubrzycki, Professor of Sociology, Director of the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia, University of Michigan

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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White Rose movement public memorial, Munich. Adam Jones/Wikimedia commons. Public domain.

In his 2016 book Nonviolent Resistance to the Nazis George Paxton, a Trustee of the Gandhi Foundation, sets out what is effectively secret history in a culture that reveres the violent struggle against Nazi Germany – Dunkirk and Churchill being the latest films that focus on the military campaign.
 

Ian Sinclair (IS): What was the scale of the nonviolent resistance to the Nazis in occupied Europe? What were some of the methods used?
George Paxton (GP): The extent of nonviolent resistance used against the occupiers varied from country to country with the most active probably being Norway, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. The attitude of the Nazis to Eastern Europe, which they wanted to clear of its population in order to settle Germans, meant that the resistance was different in nature.

The size of the different campaigns of resistance ranged from a single individual to large sections of the population. In the case of the Norwegian teachers opposition to the schools’ Nazification, it was around 10,000 teachers supported by about 100,000 parents. Some strikes elsewhere involved even more than this.

The methods used in the various campaigns were very diverse such as marches, wearing symbols of resistance, private and public letters of protest, refusing to be conscripted for work, resigning from professional bodies taken over by the Nazis, hiding Jews, helping Jews escape, listening to BBC radio broadcasts, producing underground newspapers, collecting funds for resistance, deliberate slow working and many more.

IS: You include a section with a number of case studies of nonviolent resistance to the Nazis. Do you have a favourite?
GP: It is difficult to choose one but for a small scale resistance, involving just dozens of individuals, the White Rose group in Germany is one of the most impressive. Set up mainly by students at the University of Munich and including a brother and sister, Hans and Sophie Scholl, the group produced leaflets attacking the immoral nature of the Nazi regime and also the likelihood of its failure. Leaflets were printed secretly then posted out to individuals and left in public places. Groups were also started in other German towns and leaflets were transported by a resister by train in a suitcase.

But due to a careless act when Hans and Sophie were distributing leaflets at their university, they were arrested, interrogated, quickly tried and executed. This was followed by other arrests, executions and imprisonments. While their resistance was a failure in that the revolt of students they hoped to trigger did not occur, knowledge of their courageous acts spread widely in Germany and indeed abroad.

A contrasting successful resistance was the rescue of Jews, mainly children, by the villagers of Chambon-sur-Lignon on a high plateau south-west of Lyons in France. This village (and others in the region) became a hide-out for those escaping the Nazis and became a centre of safety, particularly for children. The inspiration for this action came from the Protestant pastor and his wife, André and Magda Trocmé. André was an in-comer from the north-east of France and a pacifist and his actions were a product of his Christian belief which influenced also the nature of the resistance. Thus he did not deny that Jews were hidden in the village and surrounding farms but refused to tell the police where they were hidden. André survived the occupation, although imprisoned for a time, and several thousand Jews and others hidden there survived until liberation.

There are detailed studies of these two cases published but many more have not been studied in detail and indeed no doubt some actions have been lost to history.

Although there were only about 8,000 Jews in Denmark almost all of them survived.

IS: What struck me reading your book was how Nazi Germany was not all-powerful in the countries they occupied, but was often forced to compromise and, occasionally, to back down because of nonviolent resistance. Can you talk about some of the successes those carrying out nonviolent resistance had?
GP: One of the most outstanding successes of resistance was the rescue of the Danish Jews. Denmark was treated relatively mildly by the Germans in part because the Danes were willing to supply Germany with agricultural produce. Their own government was allowed considerable independence for a while although the relationship soured eventually and the Germans took over.

The local German administration was then ordered to round up the Jews for deportation to Germany. But at the German embassy was an attaché, Georg Duckwitz, who contacted a leading Danish politician to tell him when the round-up was to take place. He, in turn, informed the Chief Rabbi who passed the word to the Jews, while non-Jewish friends hid Jews and then transported them to the coast where boats were hired to take them to neutral Sweden. Although there were only about 8,000 Jews in Denmark almost all of them survived, even the few hundred who were captured and sent to Germany were not sent to the death camps as had been promised to SS General Werner Best, the German head of government in Denmark.

In the Netherlands, an attempt to conscript former Dutch soldiers who had been disarmed by the Germans was met by the largest strike in the occupied countries. It began in mines and factories and spread until it involved half a million people who took to the streets. In response, more than 100 people were executed but far fewer former soldiers enrolled than the Germans wanted.

In Belgium, students and staff at the University of Brussels protested at the employment of Nazi staff and then organised teaching underground.  

In the Netherlands and Norway the Germans failed to bring the doctors’ professional associations under their control due to non-cooperation by the doctors.

Opposition in Germany, particularly by Catholics, forced the stopping of the ‘euthanasia’ programme although many had been murdered before it was abandoned.

A recent study, Hitler’s Compromises by Nathan Stoltzfus, shows that Hitler was very careful to keep the German population ‘on side’. He was wary of dissent and compromised if it looked as if opposition to a policy was growing, e.g. the euthanasia programme and the Catholic opposition to attempted Nazification in the Catholic Church. He did the same with the effective opposition of German wives to the deportation of their Jewish husbands from Berlin.

Nonviolent resistance in Eastern Europe was different due to the more ruthless methods of the invader. In Poland, in spite of the extreme repression, the Nazis failed to destroy Polish culture due to the extensive development of underground organisations. School and university teaching continued in people’s houses with degrees being awarded and research papers published; courts conducted trials; political parties operated with a parliament and government departments; separate military and civilian resistance groups operated; money was obtained from the Polish Government-in-exile in London.

The hiding and rescuing of Jews was on a large scale throughout Europe with possibly as many as one million Jews saved (see Philip Friedman’s Their Brothers’ Keepers); this being done at great risk for the rescuers.

I think solidarity within the resisting group must be of great importance. 

IS: Why do you think some campaigns were successful and others not?
GP: I think solidarity within the resisting group must be of great importance. The absolute numbers of resisters may not always be significant. For example, in Belgium insufficient solidarity and firmness by the higher civil servants and judges led to the Germans ultimately achieving their aims. Support from the general population was important elsewhere, e.g. funds to pay teachers on strike or working underground.

There were some quite important incidental factors such as nearness of mountains and forests for hiding and a border with a neutral country for escape.

The use of nonviolence itself is of great importance. A violent opposition will be resisted with maximum violence from the controlling power but nonviolent resistance will send different signals, e.g. we are less of a threat to you. This may give rise to a degree of sympathy among the security forces. The resisters have to be firm but not aggressive. The occupied population has the advantage of superior numbers if they choose to use their power.

IS: You contrast what you call Gandhian resistance with the pragmatic nonviolent action that people like Gene Sharp advocate. What are the main differences between the two?
GP: There isn’t a great deal dividing Sharp and Gandhi. But most of the nonviolent resistance used by resisters during the Nazi occupation was pragmatic in the sense that it was not usually underpinned by nonviolent theory; in fact, it simply did not involve the use of weapons and so other writers prefer to call it civilian resistance.  

Sharp developed nonviolent resistance theory which was independent of religious belief, Gandhi’s or others. In reality Gandhi’s beliefs were very inclusive although he tended to use Hindu terms which Sharp wanted to avoid as he did not want to tie nonviolence to any particular culture. Both of their approaches are grounded in ethics. Sharp’s academic work actually grew out of his interest in Gandhi’s career but Sharp put more emphasis on the use of power in considering the possible mechanism of nonviolent resistance; Gandhi hoped for conversion of the opponent.

For most of the occupied populations a nonviolent resistance was simply not in their minds.

IS: How do you respond to the argument that it was ultimately violent action that ended the Third Reich, not nonviolent resistance?
GP: People in general, and governments in particular, think of defence only in terms of military action. This is still true today as it was in the 1930s. Therefore for most of the occupied populations a nonviolent resistance was simply not in their minds, except for a small number of pacifists. However, when their country was occupied and they did not have the means to resist in the conventional way the braver and more imaginative sometimes turned to non-military means.

Most people expected their countries to be liberated by military means from outside but what we need to take into consideration is the cost of violent resistance, which in WWII proved to be enormous in terms of deaths and destruction. And as Gandhi pointed out before WWII began the Allies would need to resort to the Nazis’ foul methods in order to ‘win’. When one remembers the blanket bombing of the German and Japanese cities which were largely occupied by civilians it is difficult to disagree.

The nonviolent resistance used in the occupied countries was too small in scale to defeat the invaders but I believe the potential is there, and with the knowledge we have today future conflicts could be handled by nonviolent resistance.

Courtesy: Open Democracy
 

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The story of how close Germany – and much of Europe – came to liberating its LGBTQ people before violently reversing that trend under new authoritarian regimes is an object lesson showing that the history of LGBTQ rights is not a record of constant progress.

Very recently, Germany’s Cabinet approved a bill that will expunge the convictions of tens of thousands of German men for “homosexual acts” under that country’s anti-gay law known as “Paragraph 175.” That law dates back to 1871, when modern Germany’s first legal code was created.

It was repealed in 1994. But there was a serious movement to repeal the law in 1929 as part of a wider LGBTQ rights movement. That was just before the Nazis came to power, magnified the anti-gay law, then sought to annihilate gay and transgender Europeans.

The story of how close Germany – and much of Europe – came to liberating its LGBTQ people before violently reversing that trend under new authoritarian regimes is an object lesson showing that the history of LGBTQ rights is not a record of constant progress.

The first LGBTQ liberation movement

In the 1920s, Berlin had nearly 100 gay and lesbian bars or cafes. Vienna had about a dozen gay cafes, clubs and bookstores. In Paris, certain quarters were renowned for open displays of gay and trans nightlife. Even Florence, Italy, had its own gay district, as did many smaller European cities.

Films began depicting sympathetic gay characters. Protests were organized against offensive depictions of LGBTQ people in print or on stage. And media entrepreneurs realized there was a middle-class gay and trans readership to whom they could cater.

Partly driving this new era of tolerance were the doctors and scientists who started looking at homosexuality and “transvestism” (a word of that era that encompassed transgender people) as a natural characteristic with which some were born, and not a “derangement.” The story of Lili Elbe and the first modern sex change, made famous in the recent film “The Danish Girl,” reflected these trends.

For example, Berlin opened its Institute for Sexual Research in 1919, the place where the word “transsexual” was coined, and where people could receive counseling and other services. Its lead doctor, Magnus Hirschfeld, also consulted on the Lili Elbe sex change.

Connected to this institute was an organization called the “Scientific-Humanitarian Committee.” With the motto “justice through science,” this group of scientists and LGBTQ people promoted equal rights, arguing that LGBTQ people were not aberrations of nature.

Most European capitals hosted a branch of the group, which sponsored talks and sought the repeal of Germany’s “Paragraph 175.” Combining with other liberal groups and politicians, it succeeded in influencing a German parliamentary committee to recommend the repeal to the wider government in 1929.

The backlash

While these developments didn’t mean the end of centuries of intolerance, the 1920s and early ‘30s certainly looked like the beginning of the end. On the other hand, the greater “out-ness” of gay and trans people provoked their opponents.

A French reporter, bemoaning the sight of uncloseted LGBTQ people in public, complained, “the contagion … is corrupting every milieu.” The Berlin police grumbled that magazines aimed at gay men – which they called “obscene press materials” – were proliferating. In Vienna, lectures of the “Scientific Humanitarian Committee” might be packed with supporters, but one was attacked by young men hurling stink bombs. A Parisian town councilor in 1933 called it “a moral crisis” that gay people, known as “inverts” at that time, could be seen in public.

“Far be it from me to want to turn to fascism,” the councilor said, “but all the same, we have to agree that in some things those regimes have sometimes done good… One day Hitler and Mussolini woke up and said, ‘Honestly, the scandal has gone on long enough’ … And … the inverts … were chased out of Germany and Italy the very next day.”

The ascent of Fascism

It’s this willingness to make a blood sacrifice of minorities in exchange for “normalcy” or prosperity that has observers drawing uncomfortable comparisons between then and now.

In the 1930s, the Depression spread economic anxiety, while political fights in European parliaments tended to spill outside into actual street fights between Left and Right. Fascist parties offered Europeans a choice of stability at the price of democracy. Tolerance of minorities was destabilizing, they said. Expanding liberties gave “undesirable” people the liberty to undermine security and threaten traditional “moral” culture. Gay and trans people were an obvious target.

What happened next shows the whiplash speed with which the progress of a generation can be thrown into reverse.

The nightmare

One day in May 1933, pristine white-shirted students marched in front of Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Research – that safe haven for LGBTQ people – calling it “Un-German.” Later, a mob hauled out its library to be burned. Later still, its acting head was arrested.

When Nazi leader Adolph Hitler needed to justify arresting and murdering former political allies in 1934, he said they were gay. This fanned anti-gay zealotry by the Gestapo, which opened a special anti-gay branch. During the following year alone, the Gestapo arrested more than 8,500 gay men, quite possibly using a list of names and addresses seized at the Institute for Sexual Research. Not only was Paragraph 175 not erased, as a parliamentary committee had recommended just a few years before, it was amended to be more expansive and punitive.

As the Gestapo spread throughout Europe, it expanded the hunt. In Vienna, it hauled in every gay man on police lists and questioned them, trying to get them to name others. The fortunate ones went to jail. The less fortunate went to Buchenwald and Dachau. In conquered France, Alsace police worked with the Gestapo to arrest at least 200 men and send them to concentration camps. Italy, with a fascist regime obsessed with virility, sent at least 300 gay men to brutal camps during the war period, declaring them “dangerous for the integrity of the race.”

The total number of Europeans arrested for being LGBTQ under fascism is impossible to know because of the lack of reliable records. But a conservative estimate is that there were many tens of thousands to one hundred thousand arrests during the war period alone.

Under these nightmare conditions, far more LGBTQ people in Europe painstakingly hid their genuine sexuality to avoid suspicion, marrying members of the opposite sex, for example. Still, if they had been prominent members of the gay and trans community before the fascists came to power, as Berlin lesbian club owner Lotte Hahm was, it was too late to hide. She was sent to a concentration camp.

In those camps, gay men were marked with a pink triangle. In these places of horror, men with pink triangles were singled out for particular abuse. They were mechanically raped, castrated, favored for medical experiments and murdered for guards’ sadistic pleasure even when they were not sentenced for “liquidation.” One gay man attributed his survival to swapping his pink triangle for a red one – indicating he was merely a Communist. They were ostracized and tormented by their fellow inmates, too.

The looming danger of a backslide

This isn’t 1930s Europe. And making superficial comparisons between then and now can only yield superficial conclusions.

But with new forms of authoritarianism entrenched and seeking to expand in Europe and beyond, it’s worth thinking about the fate of Europe’s LGBTQ community in the 1930s and ‘40s – a timely note from history as Germany approves same-sex marriage and on this first anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges.

In 1929, Germany came close to erasing its anti-gay law, only to see it strengthened soon thereafter. Only now, after a gap of 88 years, are convictions under that law being annulled.

John Broich is Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve University.

This story was first published on The Conversation. Read the original.

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Image credit: Quora

It is epic. An oedipal argument that demands the destruction of the old and the grand, so that the new edifice rises that much the higher. In the business of empire building, mere business or the politics of power, there is much bloodshed in the battlefield. And to the winner belong the spoils, the laurel crown on the brow, and the profile in marble and in gold.

No, the tallest statue in the world will not be his. It will remain as planned, that of Vallabh Bhai Patel, the Congressman from Gujarat. But everyone will see in the glum, brooding, motionless steel Patel, the lively reality of Narendrabhai Damodardas Modi. The man and his admirer are both important to the project, each impossible without the other.

To his critics, Modi may remain the man in the striped charcoal grey suit. Not suit and boots. No one wears boots in India, other than soldiers, and a few great grandsons of former rajas who still fancy themselves princes as if there never had been an Indira Gandhi who stripped them of their feudal titles. The stripes in his suit, as everyone knows, were letters of his name, woven into the expensive Rs 10 lakh fabric, in an unending chant to his glory.

He has often assumed the pose and posture, we have seen, and possibly sees himself at least in his dreams, as a true follower of his namesake Narendra Dutt, the modern-age warrior saint who rejuvenated Hinduism, and in his lifetime was called Swami Vivekananda. The students and government employees of the state of Madhya Pradesh will be reminded of this connect every day. 

The government of the state has asked all educational institutions to display portraits of the prime minister and the saffron-clad monk in his now famous pose, on their walls. After the outcry of Modi replacing Mahatma Gandhi in the calendars and official publicity material of the Khadi and Village Industries Commission, the state was clinically politically correct in putting Mahatma Gandhi and Babasaheb BR Ambedkar also on the wall. There are no options. You defy that order at risk of your job.

The brand building has been assiduous, intuitively by the man, but also with assistance from the experts in mass psychology resident in the headquarters of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). They had spotted it early. Their recruitment was from unmarried men, bachelors and presumably celibates. This young man had been married, if only for a very brief period, and had then walked out on his young bride in cold-blooded pursuit of a future in the service of Mother India. Sterling material. The year 2002 would prove them right. And in turn, that commitment qualified him for higher office in 2014.

Modi has been, in a manner, in a warrior mode ever since. In suits, tunics, costumes of a dozen states and a score of nations, beating huge drums or sounding the conch in prayer, he remains the warrior, arms outstretched holding unseen weapons, his expensive watches, writing instruments and spectacles like so many pieces of body armour.

He chooses his targets well, sharply and placed well in the crosshairs of his eyepiece, much as Arjuna, the field commander, did. He too says he has been wronged, and his mother, the land, has been robbed, and he must avenge this insult. Above all, he says he is being targeted, and threatened with injury.

He seemingly is going by the book, following a script that Jawaharlal Nehru first wrote, and then Indira Gandhi. Nehru, the first prime minister, placed the assassinated Gandhi at the core of the new nation, born in a bloody partition, erasing the contribution of every other leader who had walked with the Mahatma. Most of them he had angered anyway, rejecting their chauvinism and their orthodoxy which they wanted perpetuated in new laws. They were therefore not even a memory in the mind of the generation raised in the first two decades of Independence.

Indira Gandhi was ruthless. She destroyed the old Congress, annihilating all those who had remained from Nehru’s purges. Going further than her father, she saw herself as the saviour of the combined heritage of Nehru and Gandhi, removing every vestige of the Raj and the hold that the industrial giants and moneybags had over political structures and the administration.

The ending the privy purses and egos, and political influence that went with the feudal principalities, she finally completed the task that Patel was apparently reluctant to do. He had got the princes to sign in as members of the new Union of India, but had allowed them their titles and allowances. They remained Their Highnesses in a republican democracy, anachronisms and agents of the status quo.

Indira Gandhi inevitably attracted sycophants, courtiers and satraps who paid her homage. Eventually this conflated her with India, the nation. When the notional Congress president, Dev Kant Barooah, said “Indira is India”, he no more than told her something she believed in, and was just waiting to hear. She did not plan the subsequent chain of events, but it was as if the time-chain had been designed by a higher power.

Civil disobedience of a different kind by a motley combination of old enemies and new internationally connected agitators inexorably led to a state of Emergency, and the suspension of the Constitution and the human rights and civil liberties that were enshrined in it. The police system was enslaved, and the Supreme Court, in self-preservation, evolved a suitable jurisprudence for the times. 

The evolution of the concept of a “national conscience” is in keeping with that errant tradition. The Khalistan movement, the emergence of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the army attack on him in the Golden temple complex, her assassination, and the massacre of the Sikhs in Delhi and other cities in 1984, are links of a macabre nightmare lived by so many.
 
Admired, loathed, hated and cursed, Indira Gandhi saw many moods of her people. She remains in their memory.

But even at the height of the Indira-is-India rhetoric and the hired crowds at her residence at Number I, Safdarjang Road in New Delhi, in the mid-summer heat of police surveillance, Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) and extra-constitutional centres of authority and their fawning officials, there was, in hindsight, a difference. The cadres, perhaps, were of the poor. Garibi Hatao, she had said, of her creed.  The critics were the rich, the once powerful, those who had once exercised control.

Like her, Modi has razed every edifice, every little milestone that could remind of the past political legacy. In destroying the virtual statues of Nehru and Indira, he has also destroyed the memory of the years of Vishwanath Pratap Singh who implemented the Mandal Commission report and gave political power to the Other Backward Castes (OBCs) and communities to which Modi, a Ghanchi, himself belongs. And in true oedipal thrust, he has also erased the six years of Atal Behari Vajpayee.

The cadres now are the middle class, the power brokers, the bigots. The bigots grow the most, expectedly, nourished on a heady diet of supremacist cultural nationalism. Hate, targeted violence and state impunity intimidate, marginalise and alienate religious minorities as never before. It would seem there is a de facto state religion, that India is, in their minds, a theocracy. The super-rich, the crony capitalists, are entrenched, favoured and protected even in a globalised economy. Their wealth finds a short circuit to growth, feeding off the assets of what was the public sector.

This economy demands its own blood sacrifice. Trade unions are comatose, if not dead. The rights of the farmers and the tribals are no longer sacred. If anything, their sacred groves are being defiled, destroyed in reckless abandon. Their young men and women are incarcerated. Many executed, branded as extremists and foreign agents, enemies if the state.

To be a stable, profitable equation, this demands that the leader and his garrisons uphold each other, build each other as icons, larger than life. Indigenous industrial and economic progress, which led to the growth of the heavy industry sector, the big dams and the advances in space science and technology, and the birth of the Information Technology sector, is given a fresh coat of paint as Make in India.

To call it a cult will be to minimise its potential and its threat.  Modi is not the Fuehrer, the Intelligence Bureau (IB) not the Gestapo and the cadres, some in khaki long pants and the others in striped suits like the one he himself has worn at least once, are not Fascists and Nazis in jackboots.

This is a more sophisticated and malevolent regime and emerging political system.

Political scientists and public philosophers are yet to invent a name for it.
 
(This article is also published in Indian Currents weekly).
 
 
 

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Courtesy: Orange-papers.org

‘Make in India’ has failed to resonate with businesses internationally because the accumulation of capital, worldwide, is driven by more than just propaganda and a fading charisma. But this hasn’t stopped the ruling party and government machinery from ‘making’ at a furious pace. It has manufactured the crisis at JNU as part of a wide-ranging assault on the control of higher education in the country.

To manufacture that crisis it has fabricated ‘sedition’ charges, evidence ostensibly implicating JNUSU leaders (videos, tweets), smear campaigns, hysteria (storm-troopers in black coats), even a conception of patriotism that identifies a country not with its people and their real conditions but with some mythical, half-deified abstraction before which people, real flesh-and-blood people, have to bow in a state of permanent genuflection and fear.

Behind this mixture of tragedy and farce looms the patriarchal shadow of the RSS. Of course, no one elected the RSS in 2014 but they feel they have the right to run the country and are effectively doing so. The ABVP is one of its many arms, extended ruthlessly into campuses to beat them into submission to ‘sanghvaad’. The ABVP has an assurance that it can mobilise the state machinery to enforce this drive to dominate the universities. JNU’s strongly left-wing culture and tradition have warded off this attack with a remarkable display of unity and good political sense.

The following write-up stems from a talk the author gave at JNU on 11 March. It isn’t a transcript but a reconstruction of the essential arguments in that lecture. It looks at fascism through the work of three writers, extracting major insights from each of them. It lays out three basic theses: 1. About the constructed nature of nationalism (or fascism’s use of the “myth of the nation”, Mussolini’s expression!); 2. About the family/patriarchy as the most important instrument of the state’s power; and, 3. About fascist violence as a product of what Sartre calls “the continuous action of a group on a series”.  To be able to confront fascism successfully, supporters of democracy have to be able to build resistance at each of these levels.
 

At a talk I gave in JNU recently I suggested that it was crucial for us to deal with the deeper forces from which fascism stems and not fall into the trap of thinking, for example, that fascism only emerges in a context of massive economic crisis or is even caused by economic crisis, as a lot of Marxists still think. I identified those ‘deeper forces’ with nationalism, patriarchy (or the authoritarian family), and the way organised groups are able to exercise domination over the largely unorganised mass of any modern society.

Each of these perspectives (1. fascism and the myth of the nation, or, if you like, the constructed nature of nationalism; 2. patriarchy as the mainstay of the state’s power in a capitalist society; and, 3. the conception of ‘manipulated seriality’ as the heart of fascist politics) is embodied with special clarity in the work of at least one of three thinkers of the Left, viz. Arthur Rosenberg (1889–1943), Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). Sartre is too well known to say much about but the other two, Rosenberg and Reich, are worth introducing briefly.

Arthur Rosenberg was a historian who was also politically active. As a member of what became the KPD (German Communist Party), he was part of the left-of-centre grouping within the party called the ‘Berlin Left’. The Marxist philosopher Karl Korsch was also part of this grouping. Rosenberg was also a Reichstag deputy, that is, a member of the German parliament, but he resigned from the KPD in 1927 out of sheer disgust at the way the Comintern (under Stalin’s influence) kept interfering in the affairs of the German party. He fled from Germany in 1933, and eventually died in the USA (of cancer) some ten years later.

In 1934 he published Fascism as a Mass Movement, which argued that fascism only succeeds to the extent that it succeeds in becoming a mass movement. This raises the whole issue of what it means for the extreme Right (any extreme Right) to be able to construct a ‘mass’ base. How does it do that, given that its political agenda is so manifestly opposed to the economic and democratic interests of ordinary working people?

Wilhelm Reich moved from Vienna to Berlin in the late 1920s. He was a psychoanalyst strongly influenced by Freud but deeply critical of the latter’s separation between psychoanalysis and politics and of his excessive political timidity in the face of fascism.

When Reich moved to Berlin from Vienna he started a series of ‘Sexpol clinics’ which were hugely popular. The clinics attracted thousands of patients from largely working-class families, because they were literally the only places where ordinary people could discuss their sexual problems and their sexual lives in some overt way, especially the kinds of stress and/or distress they were experiencing.

To take one example, in 1931 there were some 1 million illegal abortions in Germany and a staggering forty-four percent of those resulted in fatalities! Reich began to confront the problem of emerging fascism partly through his experience in those clinics, and soon after Hitler came to power in 1933 he published The Mass Psychology of Fascism, arguing that it was impossible to understand the appeal of the Nazis without its psychological roots, that is, without looking at the nature of families, domination within them and the sort of character-structures that lay at the back of the fascist success.

Reich was promptly expelled from the German Communist Party when he published Mass Psychology, then hounded by the authorities in all the countries he fled to by way of seeking asylum, and, like Rosenberg, ended up in the USA where he died in an American prison, under FBI custody.

Fascism and the Myth of the Nation

To Rosenberg fascism largely reiterated ideas that were widespread in European society before the First War. (“The ideology which is today called ‘fascist’ was already widespread before the War.”) In his analysis the conservative elites of 19^th-century Europe adjusted to the era of parliamentary democracy and mass politics with an aggressive nationalism imbued with racial ideas, one that canvassed active support for strong states wedded to expansion abroad and was unashamedly willing to use anti-Semitism “as a way of preventing middle-class voters from moving to the Left” (Weiss, Conservatism in Europe 1770-1945, p. 89).

Rosenberg argued that fascism lacked a coherent ideology of its own, it was a pastiche of motifs drawn from the ultra-nationalist political circles of the pre-war period. In this sense he reversed the direction of causality between ideology and politics. The Nazis emerged from a pre-existing ideological milieu dominated by a “stupid, fanatical nationalism”.

“Fascism developed the nationalist propaganda characteristic of the new kind of politics to perfection.” (Fascism as a Mass Movement, p. 27). Rosenberg called this a “demagogic nationalism” that “spontaneously seeks an object through which it can daily demonstrate its own superiority and release the delirium of its racial frenzy” (p. 32). 

With liberalism in retreat across most of Europe it was this aggressive authoritarian xenophobic nationalism that came to the fore. Secondly, the targeting of minorities such as the Jews in Germany became a mobilising strategy and led in Germany to the proliferation of numerous racist ‘action groups’ well before the Nazis themselves became popular.

What was peculiar to fascism, Rosenberg argues, was the storm-trooper tactic, that is, the active use of violent squads that attacked Jews, destroyed Jewish property and so on in pogroms that targeted them the way Muslims and Christians have been targeted in India, but also combated the unions, strikers, Communists, etc. Street clashes between Nazis and Communists dominated the late 1920s but failed to stem the growth of Nazism.

A still from the Hindi film, 'Parzania'

One reason was that the storm-troopers worked with the connivance of the state. The active complicity of the existing state authorities in condoning fascist violence is a key element of Rosenberg’s argument. The authorities turned a blind eye to illegal activities such as conspiracies and political murders and to the repeated atrocities against Jews.  The storm-troopers should have been tried and convicted in the courts of law but nothing of the sort happened.  Trials were used as further platforms for Nazi propaganda. The police and the courts connived in fascist violence instead of dealing with it as the law required.  State complicity for Rosenberg was a major reason why the Nazis could survive into the late 1920s to re-emerge rapidly as a mass movement.

What about nationalism itself?  In the talk at JNU I contra-posed two broad views of the subject, Gellner’s conception of the constructed nature of nationalism (nationalism exists before nations do, nations are simply their invention) and Benedict Anderson’s view of the nation as an ‘imagined community’.  For example, Eric Hobsbawm writes, “with Gellner I would stress the element of artifact, invention and social engineering which enters into the making of nations. ‘Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying [humans], as an inherent … political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates preexisting cultures: that is a reality’. In short, for the purposes of analysis nationalism comes before nations. Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way round.’’

To explain this a bit more, to think of nations as somehow existing before and outside of nationalism is to reify them. Nationalism is not the self-awakening to consciousness of pre-formed, pre-existing entities called ‘nations’ but the process by which nations are defined and constructed to be or to look like what they are.

For his part, Anderson doesn’t explain who does the “imagining”. And what does it mean to say that the nation “is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship”?

Isn’t this a way of almost saying that the imaginary construct of the “nation” is an attempt to make people forget that in real life they are actually divided into classes, castes, genders, and so on and that these divisions are marked by deep inequalities and relations of oppression?

In her book Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity the American scholar Liah Greenfeld describes something she calls collectivistic nationalism. This it seems to me is an apt description for the sort of nationalism that the BJP and their handlers are trying to shove down our throats today. She writes, “Much more often a nation is defined not as a composite entity but as a collective individual, endowed with a will and interest of its own, which are independent of and take priority over the wills and interests of human individuals within the nation. Such a definition of the nation results in collectivistic nationalism. Collectivistic nationalisms tend to be authoritarian and imply a fundamental inequality between a small group of self-appointed interpreters of the will of the nation – the leaders – and the masses, who have to adapt to the elite's interpretations.”

 We are up against an artificially engineered surge of collectivistic nationalism in India today, except that this one is strongly imbued with communal overtones.  But it’s important to see that much of the myth-making about the “nation” is part of a wider fascist agenda. As Mosse pointed out, nationalism is the “bedrock” upon which all fascist movements built themselves.

The indoctrination strats early

Moonje was tremendously impressed by the way the Italian Fascist Party organised the indoctrination and training of Italian youth and transposed the model to India through the RSS. Italian fascism was defeated and overthrown in the 1940s but its legacy lives on, not just in the way youngsters in India are being trained for physical combat and indoctrinated in subservience to some mythical national utopia

Patriarchy as the Mainstay of the State

Reich’s perspective moves the focus away from broad historical movements to the mechanisms which allow ideologies like nationalism to gain a wider purchase. He locates those mechanisms in the structure of the family and the kinds of sexual repression that abound there. The authoritarian family, Reich argues, is a veritable factory of reactionary ideology and structure. As such it is the mainstay of the state’s power in modern (capitalist) society.

Patriarchy for Reich is characterised not just by the domination of women by the leading males of the family but by the sexual suppression of both women and children within the family. “The goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation. At first, the child has to adjust to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family; this makes it capable of later subordination to the general authoritarian system” (Mass Psychology, p. 25).

Reich went further. He suggested that the submissive, authority-fearing character-structure moulded in this kind of family was the key reason for the emergence of Hitler-type political leaders, Führers or “mass leaders” with a commanding or overpowering presence that could mobilise and dominate “masses”. Fascism’s ability to dominate the middle class and wider masses beyond it could be explained by the way children and adolescents grew up to identify with authority in one form or another – with their employers, with the state authorities, with the state itself and finally with the “nation”.

This process of “identification” was one sense in which ideology could be seen as becoming a “material force”.  “The more helpless the individual is made by his upbringing, the more strongly does he identify himself with the Führer… This tendency to identification is the psychological basis of national narcissism, that is, of a self-confidence based on identification with the “greatness of the nation”.’ (Mass Psychology, p. 38)

Manipulated Seriality and the Climate as Worked Matter

Finally, Sartre. In his great work The Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) there are two ideas specifically that we should try and integrate into our understanding of fascism. The first is his notion of “manipulated seriality”, the second his conception of the political climate or fascist violence as “worked matter”.  

Sartre divides modern societies into two sorts of ensembles, “series” and “organised groups”. Seriality is the condition of being unorganised, hence incapable of acting and therefore vulnerable to domination by those who are organised and who do act (collectively). That domination can take the form of manipulating seriality, that is, conditioning series or influencing them to behave in certain ways.

Political propaganda works on the same principle as advertising; it generates what Sartre calls the illusion of “totalised seriality”. The series (ensembles that are unorganised, hence sharply distinct from the “organised groups”) can do nothing, it is dispersed and inert, but through advertising, propaganda, the mass media, climates of fear, violence, etc. it can have a great deal done to it and even think of itself as somehow unified! Advertisers get consumers to buy things by suggesting that ‘others’ are buying them. Those ‘others’ don’t actually exist, since each potential consumer is other to the other and the whole chain forms an infinite regress.

The pogrom is a gruesome example of how powerful organised groups can even extract actions (dispersive acts of violence) from the series while the latter remain serial, that is, dispersed, unorganised and inert. They become the instruments of the violence orchestrated/perpetrated by organised groups. Sartre calls this sort of violence the “passive activity of a directed seriality”.

Advanced criminal jurisdictions in the world today seek to cope with these situations of violence by using a robust concept of “command responsibility”.  Climates of fear, violence, etc. that trigger a wave of lynchings, pogroms and so on are also worked matter, that is, they are the result of organised groups working serialities (or working on series), as if this was a production process where masses of people are literally the raw material of the labour (praxis, freely chosen activity) of organised groups. A climate of violence is created by organised groups as a conscious act/activity. Manipulated seriality is the heart of fascist politics, Sartre argues in the Critique.

A still from Rakesh Sharma's documentary 'Final Solution' on Gujarat 2002 mass crimes

Fascist Origins of the RSS

What the talk at JNU did was to look at fascism through these complementary perspectives and suggest that they need to be seen as different moments of the same general development. Subservience to authority turns out to be a central theme in the conditions that allow for fascist emergence. It was the factor that Reich himself stressed most of all, linking it with the nature of the family and describing the family itself as “the most important instrument of the state’s power”.

The RSS understood this from its inception. Marzia Casolari has shown the reasoning that lay behind the emergence of the shakha. BS Moonje, friend and mentor of Hedgewar, RSS founder, described his 1931 meeting with Mussolini in his diary. Moonje, Casolari points out, “played a crucial role in moulding the RSS along Italian (fascist) lines”.

Here is what he wrote in his diary: “The idea of fascism vividly brings out the conception of unity amongst people… India and particularly Hindu India need some such institution [as the Fascist youth organizations] for the military regeneration of the Hindus… Our institution of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh of Nagpur under Dr Hedgewar is of this kind…”.  The RSS would be publicly embarrassed to have these connections widely publicised since they show that its own model of moulding the minds of Indian youth stems directly from the experience of Italy and Mussolini’s recommendations.

Moonje was tremendously impressed by the way the Italian Fascist Party organised the indoctrination and training of Italian youth and transposed the model to India through the RSS. Italian fascism was defeated and overthrown in the 1940s but its legacy lives on, not just in the way youngsters in India are being trained for physical combat and indoctrinated in subservience to some mythical national utopia, but also in the structures that have allowed fascism to become a major threat to India’s democracy, not least among these being the manipulated hysteria of nationalism and the structures of patriarchy and the traditional family. 
 
 

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This article written by a German professor in the context of the 2015 student protests in USA has equal relevance to our own context with campuses across India in ferment

The protests over race and diversity that shook campuses across the U.S. in 2015 continue to reverberate.

In January the president of Ithaca College resigned. In February Princeton University began public discussions of the controversial legacy of its former president and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. And also in February, the University of Missouri fired the professor who called for reporters to be removed from covering a campus protest.

Although some administrators deem such students’ demands as fair and justified, others accuse them of revisionist and wrong, claiming “history cannot be comprehended if erased.”

As a German Studies scholar, I am observing the controversies on U.S. campuses attentively. I am reminded of the discussions that students initiated in Germany in the 1960s to overcome the past.

Indeed, looking back at the protest movement in Germany reveals parallels that help to understand the present.

The German burden

Probably no other country has struggled as hard to come to terms with its past as Germany.

The Nazis' unimaginable crimes cost the lives of millions of people, many of whom died in ghettos or in concentration, labor and death camps. Most of these victims were Jewish. Others included ethnic and religious minorities, political activists, members of resistance groups and gays.

After the war, all visible signs of Nazi rule – such as swastikas and portraits of Hitler – were removed under orders from the Allied Powers of the U.S., United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union.
But that did not mean that racism had been uprooted in postwar German society.

Students helped to democratize German society through instigating public debates on topics such as gender equality, wealth distribution, and the meaning of public leadership. And if necessary, former protesters took matters into their hands and founded their own media outlets such as the left-leaning newspaper cooperation “taz” in Berlin in 1978.

It was students who sparked a public discussion on race and gender. It was they who initiated what ended up being a cathartic process of healing. In the process, however, there was resistance and violence on both sides. The students' targets were clear. They were protesting against universities' failure to remove professors that were known racists and had served in the Nazi administration; against the authoritarian and paternalistic structures at universities; and in favor of equality among the sexes.

In doing so they were targeting the German government itself.

First attempts to undo 12 years of Nazi propaganda

After World War II, denazification and reeducation programs were designed to undo 12 years of Nazi propaganda.

They had limited success.

The Nazis had consolidated their power through centralization and massive organizations. The Nazi Party itself had more than 8 million members or almost 10 percent of the population. The German Labor Front, a state-mandated union whose leaders supported the regime counted as many as 25 million members.

The sheer number of people who had been members of Nazi organizations made the goal of removing them from government and public offices impossible. Many were able to move into high positions in the West German government, and some of those even had the backing of the United States, who considered them efficient anti-communists.
 

Hans Globke. Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F015051-0006 / Patzek, Renate, CC BY

One of these was the director of the Federal Chancellery of West Germany, Hans Globke, a jurist who had co-authored the Nuremberg Laws that revoked Jews’ citizenship in 1935.

Yes, the Nuremberg trials of 1945-46 convicted – in the spotlight of the international media – 22 main Nazi officials, military officers and business leaders. And, yes, there were a number of trials to follow in the 1950s. But it took until the 1960s and the Auschwitz trials for the larger public to be shaken out of its comforting illusion that an economic recovery could continue without addressing the traumatic experience of Nazi crimes and the involvement and passive support of significant segments of the population.

New role models for students

Student protests in West Germany were kick-started by the decision of the center left Social Democratic Party to exclude its student union from party membership in 1961.

The students saw themselves as legitimate political players. They began speaking up not just against the establishment’s decision to silence them but also the establishment’s past.

In their fight against the “lies of the fathers,” students turned to new intellectual role models, such as Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse , leading figures of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory who had been in exile during the war.
But if these “fathers of the revolution” sparked debate, it was often women who took action.

Into the streets
 

Beate Klarsfeld in 1970. Nationaal Archief, CC BY

The political activist Beate Klarsfeld, for example, received major public attention when she slapped Kurt Georg Kiesinger, German chancellor from 1966-69.

Kiesinger had been a Nazi Party member and deputy director of the State Department’s foreign radio network.

It was unacceptable to students that a staunch opponent of free speech could be the highest dignitary of West Germany.

Kiesinger, however, struck back. He introduced an infamous “Emergency Law” in 1968 that only intensified the protests against the government and its representatives.

The law was implemented in May 1968 and authorized the government to make wide-ranging decisions without confirmation or consent by the German Parliament. It gave the government power to strip citizens of constitutional rights such as the right of free speech in case of an armed conflict or a natural disaster.

Students attacked the law as undemocratic and took to the streets. Demonstrations became violent. The deadly shooting of Benno Ohnesorg in 1967 (whose attacker was revealed in 2012 as an undercover agent for the East German Stasi secret police) and of charismatic student leader Rudi Dutschke a year later, brought matters to a boiling point.

In the wake of this violence the student movement split. Most continued peaceful protests. But some, notably the Red Army Faction (RAF), turned to terrorism. It was their kidnapping and 1977 murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the president of the Confederation of German Employers Association that pushed the government into a state of emergency.

And once again the wartime past reared its head.

Until his kidnapping, the public had known little about Schleyer – one of the country’s most powerful business leaders. Now it was revealed that he had been an active Nazi party member, a Nazi Student Organization leader, and a Second Lieutenant in the infamous and murderous Schutzstaffel or “SS.”

The legacy

The RAF was undoubtedly a criminal organization without lasting impact on society as a whole. But the student protests changed the German mindset forever.

Students’ demands to have a role in governing universities were largely accepted. The government increased spending on education, changed curricula to prepare students better for the job market, and introduced Universities of Applied Sciences or “Fachhochschulen.”

More female high school graduates entered higher education. New non-discrimination laws made it easier for women to pursue careers in higher education. In addition, universities lowered access barriers for students from low income families.

Students helped to democratize German society through instigating public debates on topics such as gender equality, wealth distribution, and the meaning of public leadership.
And if necessary, former protesters took matters into their hands and founded their own media outlets such as the left-leaning newspaper cooperation “taz” in Berlin in 1978 – a publication that continues to be a thought leader today despite its relatively small circulation of 52,000 copies.

Other former protesters cofounded the Green Party, now a major player in Germany’s political landscape with an average 10% of the votes countrywide and currently in coalition governments in no less than eight of the sixteen German states. The Green Party’s most prominent member to this day is a former student leader from Frankfurt, Joschka Fischer, who was the country’s Foreign Secretary from 1998-2005.

2015-2016

The echo of student protests in the 1960s and ‘70’s can still be heard to this day.

Yes, there are a growing number of nationalists that oppose Angela Merkel’s decision to open borders to 1.1 million refugees mainly from Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea. But at the same time, students in Germany have vociferously expressed their support for refugees by volunteering in aid projects, teaching the German language, helping with translations, offering legal advice, and accompanying migrants to medical doctors. More and more universities are opening up their English course offerings for refugees and a new tuition-free university in Berlin is targeted specifically at migrants.

Merkel’s politics, I believe, can be seen as a result of lessons learned by German history. The official response to political oppression and racism, in other words, must be civility and responsibility.

History, much like in the U.S., should adapt to the values of the present, not the past.

This article was first published in The Conversation.
 

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The other victims of Nazi racism, including Europe’s Sinti and Roma are now routinely named in commemoration, but not all survivors have had equal opportunities to have their story heard. One group of victims who have yet to be publicly memorialised is black Germans.

All those voices need to be heard, not only for the sake of the survivors, but because we need to see how varied the expressions of Nazi racism were if we are to understand the lessons of the Holocaust for today.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, there were understood to have been some thousands of black people living in Germany – they were never counted and estimates vary widely. At the heart of an emerging black community was a group of men from Germany’s own African colonies (which were lost under the peace treaty that ended World War I) and their German wives.

They were networked across Germany and abroad by ties of family and association and some were active in communist and anti-racist organisations. Among the first acts of the Nazi regime was the suppression of black political activism. There were also 600 to 800 children fathered by French colonial soldiers – many, though not all, African – when the French army occupied the Rhineland as part of the peace settlement after 1919. French troops were withdrawn in 1930 and the Rhineland was demilitarised until Hitler stationed German units there in 1936.

Denial of rights and work

The 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their German citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with “people of German blood”.

A subsequent ruling confirmed that black people (like “gypsies”) were to be regarded as being “of alien blood” and subject to the Nuremberg principles. Very few people of African descent had German citizenship, even if they were born in Germany, but this became irreversible when they were given passports that designated them as “stateless negroes”.

In 1941, black children were officially excluded from public schools, but most of them had suffered racial abuse in their classrooms much earlier. Some were forced out of school and none were permitted to go on to university or professional training. Published interviews and memoirs by both men and women, unpublished testimony and post-war compensation claims testify to these and other shared experiences.

Employment prospects which were already poor before 1933 got worse afterwards. Unable to find regular work, some were drafted for forced labour as “foreign workers” during World War II. Films and stage shows making propaganda for the return of Germany’s African colonies became one of the few sources of income, especially after black people were banned from other kinds of public performance in 1939. (Carl Peters 1941 propaganda movie  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LOTJAwf4ys)

Incarceration

When SS leader Heinrich Himmler undertook a survey of all black people in Germany and occupied Europe in 1942, he was probably contemplating a round-up of some kind. But there was no mass internment.

Research in camp records and survivor testimony has so far thrown up around 20 black Germans who spent time in concentration camps and prisons – and at least one who was a euthanasia victim. The one case we have of a black person being sent to a concentration camp explicitly for being a Mischling (mulatto) – Gert Schramm, interned in Buchenwald aged 15 – comes from 1944.

It was the Nazi fear of “racial pollution” that led to the most common trauma suffered by black Germans: the break-up of families. “Mixed” couples were harassed into separating. When others applied for marriage licences, or when a woman was known to be pregnant or had a baby, the black partner became a target for involuntary sterilisation.

Instead, the process that ended with incarceration usually began with a charge of deviant or antisocial behaviour. Being black made people visible to the police, and it became a reason not to release them once they were in custody.

In this respect, we can see black people as victims not of a peculiarly Nazi racism, but of an intensified version of the kinds of everyday racism that persist today.

Sterilisation: an assault on families

It was the Nazi fear of “racial pollution” that led to the most common trauma suffered by black Germans: the break-up of families. “Mixed” couples were harassed into separating. When others applied for marriage licences, or when a woman was known to be pregnant or had a baby, the black partner became a target for involuntary sterilisation.

In a secret action in 1937, some 400 of the Rhineland children were forcibly sterilised. Other black Germans went into hiding or fled the country to escape sterilisation, while news of friends and relatives who had not escaped intensified the fear that dominated people’s lives.

The black German community was new in 1933; in most families the first generation born in Germany was just coming of age. In that respect it was similar to the communities in France and Britain that were forming around families founded by men from the colonies.

Nazi persecution broke those families and the ties of community. One legacy of that was a long silence about the human face of Germany’s colonial history: the possibility that black and white Germans could share a social and cultural space.

That silence helps to explain Germans’ mixed responses to today’s refugee crisis. The welcome offered by German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and many ordinary Germans has given voice to the liberal humanitarianism that was always present in German society and was reinforced by the lessons of the Holocaust.

The reaction against refugees reveals the other side of the coin: Germans who fear immigration are not alone in Europe. But their anxieties draw on a vision that has remained very powerful in German society since 1945: the idea that however deserving they are, people who are not white cannot be German.

(This article was corrected on January 27 to clarify the situation in the Rhineland between the two world wars and was first published in The Conversation)
 
 

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