Are Trumpers “Ordinary” in the Same Way that Nazi War Criminals Were?
A short reflection about, and excerpt from, a book review of Richard J. Evan's book:
Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich.
I finally got around to reading an article in the NY Review of Books that I've had my eye on for a few weeks but, given the stress of too many hours at my job, planning our trip to Prague, and the overbearing pressure of dealing with the collapse of American democracy, I didn't have the intellectual energy to tackle … a review of a book by historian Richard Evans called “Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich.” Outstanding review about what appears to be an outstanding book. I don't know that reading the relatively long review changed my view of Hitler and his Nazi cronies. But it did flesh it out in a way that makes it more real … and in certain ways more apropos to the Trump phenomenon. It confirms to me that Trump really is a horrid master of manipulation who deserves every ounce of revulsion we can smear on him. At the same time, he really isn't the source of infection, but rather is the pustulant head of the inflamed boil of defective American culture … the part that must be lanced and drained to stop the pain, while realizing that the potential for acute reinfection remains in the inflammation-prone tissue of social division.
I'm attaching the link to the article, but I think it's probably paygated. I'm also going to paste an excerpt below that I think captures the essence of Evan's book … that the Nazis were ordinary 'in the context of their peculiar history.' If one believes, as I do, that the American people are as pathological in their response to social problems as the Germans were, the question that is begged here, I think, is “what are Americans so angry and inflamed about?” I really don't get that part of it. We have a good life in the States … with some bumps along the way, but with low tax rates, and compared to most countries in the world a high quality of life. And now the Trumpanzees and Magats and Theocratic Terrorists want to burn it down! Why? I just don't get it.
Anyway, the excerpt:
“A master historian like Richard Evans, the author of three deservedly famous books on the Third Reich, must turn first to what the Nazis did and what the consequences were. But he evidently remains tormented by the simple, nonacademic questions that twenty-first-century people still ask. How could the Nazis, as members of the human species, have done what they did? Could they be explained away as freaks, moral perverts, sadistic psychopaths, or war-crippled spirits driven by masochistic obedience or fantasies of vengeance?
Evans does not waste much sympathy on those thoughts, which lead toward an absurd guilty-but-insane verdict. He is, of course, too young to have lived in Hitler’s time. But an example of what lies before his eyes as he writes is what British soldiers saw when they entered the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945:
Some 60,000 starving and disease-ridden inmates were found inside, with another 13,000 lying dead and unburied around them; 14,000 of the survivors were so weak that they died within a few weeks of liberation.
The young camp guard Irma Grese was still there when the British arrived. She was “seemingly unaware that she had anything to fear from the representatives of the Allies.” The press went wild about her during her trial, creating a monster of sadistic sexuality that went far beyond her provable crimes of revolting cruelty and murder. But Evans doesn’t diagnose her as a monster: “Grese came across…as a rather immature, simple young woman who had little idea of why she was being demonized”—an unquestioning Nazi to the end. They hanged her eight months later.
During the war, people in Allied countries (and occupied ones too) generally assumed that there was something deviant, aberrant, about the Germans and their leaders—a deformity, in fact. As a wartime child I listened to English soldiers singing as they tramped past in the rain: “’Itler’s only got one ball. Göring’s got two but ver-ee small. ’Immler…” and so on. (If they marched through a village, the sergeant made them change to “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”) Twenty years later, before the Frankfurt “Auschwitz Trial,” journalists were taken to view the accused camp personnel in a dim basement under the Paulskirche. Seeing the terrible face of the torturer Wilhelm Boger—the yellow eyes and boulder skull—I felt for a moment that I was looking at some throwback hominin, not a twentieth-century Homo sapiens. But that thought had to be shaken off.
It was more challenging to face up to the notion that the low-level perpetrators and their commanders were just “ordinary men.” Christopher Browning’s 1992 book of that title broke the hearts of many who believed in humanity. It showed the members of Reserve Police Battalion 101, often middle-aged family men with no fanatical Nazi views, shooting naked and defenseless Jewish villagers and their children into pits day after day, a total of some 38,000 victims. They were not even under compulsion. If a man said that he had had enough and asked to be withdrawn from execution duty, he was not punished. Since then, as Evans shows, research has weakened some of Browning’s conclusions. The policemen were volunteers, not conscripts; “they were carefully selected according to ideological criteria…. Their training included heavy doses of Nazi ideology and antisemitic indoctrination.” In short, they were not quite “ordinary men,” or a random sample.
But Evans writes later in Hitler’s People that the “hundreds of thousands of Germans [who] committed unspeakable atrocities” acted with free will and often with enthusiasm. They “positively enjoyed what they were doing.” That leads back toward Daniel Goldhagen’s spectacular claim in Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) that “exterminatory” antisemitism and a yearning for dictatorship had long been integral to the German sense of identity: the nation as collective monster, indeed. Evans dismisses some of Goldhagen’s arguments (“an updated version of the wartime propaganda”) and offers a more nuanced reflection: Nazi perpetrators and leaders were not freaks, but they had been brought up in a culture of rancid, self-pitying national paranoia after the defeat of 1918. Almost all the prominent Nazis came from middle-class families with right-wing values—patriotism, antisemitism, fear of “Bolshevism”—for whom righteous violence seemed a sign of manliness.
Evans is attempting, in his own painstaking and carefully judicious way, to answer those two indelible popular questions about Nazi leaders and perpetrators: How could they have? Were they abnormal? His answers could be summarized as: the Nazis were not ordinary people; they were ordinary German people, living in the firestorm of hatred and delusion ignited after World War I.”
(Note: Irma Grese, the Ravensbruck guard mentioned above who was hanged, is at center in the NYR photo below)
