Class in Hate

I saw Our Class on Friday, a new play by Tadeusz Slobodzianek, presently being performed at the National Theatre here in London and running until January.

Set in Poland and following the passage through time of a group of school chums, Catholic and Jewish, Our Class is a ‘Holocaust play’ but not in the form that one might imagine. For it tells a story that many Poles would rather forget, did forget for many years: that Nazi anti-Semitism harmonised with an older tradition of hatred, one with deep roots in their country. By ever tightening circles of fear and hate the story moves through war and occupation to the Jedwabne Pogrom of July 1941, in which Jews were massacred not by Germans but by their fellow Poles.

Paradoxically this is a story that could only really be told after the demise of Communism and the emergence of the new Poland. Previously it raised all sorts of complicated issues: that of Polish people towards the Jewish community in their midst, and that of the post-war Communist authorities towards the political significance of the Holocaust.

The official investigation into the Holocaust in Poland began with the setting up of a commission to gather evidence of war crimes just after the conclusion of the war, which included the Jewish Historical Institute (JHI), a body of independent historians. This was a time when Poland was not yet fully controlled by the Communists, so some degree of openness and objectivity was still possible.

Things changed from 1948 onwards. In 1950 the JHI was placed under the control of the Ministry of Education, with all inquiry not approved of by the Party coming to an end. The new line was to stress the passive response of the Jews to the Nazis, while minimising Polish anti-Semitism and collaboration. It was said that the western emphasis on the persecution of the Jews had only obscured the persecution of the Poles. The official attitude towards the Jews was further modified by the emergence of the state of Israel. Now anti-Semitism was replaced by anti-Zionism; but both still drew on the traditional stereotype of the greedy, manipulative and exploitative Jew.

After Wladyslaw Gomulka came to power, following the 'Polish October' of 1956, old forms of Polish nationalism received at least a partial rehabilitation. This was accompanied by old anti-Semitism wearing new clothes. Jewish people were removed from their positions in both the army and the civil service, while at the same time an active press campaign was launched against all of those associated with the former Stalinist regime. The particular Jewish suffering associated with the Holocaust slipped even further into the background.

The political struggles of the 1960s saw the emergence of even more strident forms of anti-Jewish nationalism, most associated with the group around Mieczyslaw Moczar, notorious both for his xenophobia and his anti-Semitism. After the victory of Israel in the Six Day War of 1967 the position for Poland's dwindling Jewish minority became steadily worse, with all sorts of people being attacked for 'Zionist sympathies', whether they had them or not. The whole programme embraced Holocaust history. Any and every attempt to define this as a uniquely Jewish event was denounced as 'part of a chauvinist Zionist propaganda plot to justify the existence of Israel and turn the world against Communism.' It was, so it was said, a new 'Jewish world conspiracy.' In 1968 all the records of the JHI were taken over by the government. Subsequent to this a conference was held to 'rebut the slanderous campaign of lies in the West...especially with reference to the accusations about the alleged participation of Poles in the annihilation of the Jewish population.' By now the JHI had all but ceased to exist.

The fall of Communism has been accompanied by a new openness; a willingness, at least by some, to confront uncomfortable truths, including the truth of Jedwabne and other matters touching on the relations between the Jewish and Catholic communities during the Holocaust.

The play itself is a remarkable if not entirely comfortable experience. It’s long, three hours long, so it requires stamina on more level than one. The ensemble, only ten strong, are utterly convincing as they move through the childhood and dreams of the 1920s to the adulthood and nightmares of the 1940s. All the performances are memorable but for me the outstanding one was that of Sinead Matthews as Dora, who dreamt of being a film star only to end by being burned alive with her baby and some 1600 other people in a barn. It’s stark; there are no visual distractions; much of the horror is conveyed by mime. More than anything the play is effective as a kind of accusation, delivered from the past to the present.

There aspects of the past that I think we would all wish to forget, not just the Poles. But remembrance is, after all, a human duty.

Heinrich Himmler and the Nazi Millenium

Himmler had his own pet scheme for eastern settlement, which could be subsumed within the general thrust eastwards for lebensraum, but was quite distinct from the Generalplan Ost. All of the details are to be found in The Master Plan: Himmler Scholars and the Holocaust by Heather Pringle.

The Himmler Plan aimed at more than just lebensraum: it was a bizarre scheme for creating a rural idyll in western Russia, harking back to earlier modes of existence, and a more 'authentic' and Germanic way of life. By this, racially pure soldier-farmers would live in medieval-style German houses.

These ideas emerged in part from a work of 1929 by Himmler's close associate, Walther Darre, entitled Farming as a Source of Life for the Nordic Race. Himmler began to move towards a fuller elaboration of his plans with the foundation in 1935 of the Deutches Ahnenerbe Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte, or Ahnenerbe for short, meaning 'something inherited from our forefathers. The Ahnenerbe scholars investigated a whole variety of things, from ancient house designs, 'Nordic' animal breeds and even, by Himmler's specific request, the sexual practices of the ancient German tribes! A model farm was also established at Mehrow to the east of Berlin, where some of the notions were tested.

It was after the invasion of Russia that Himmler began to look to wider horizons, working in collaboration with Konrad Meyer, a senior planner and agricultural scientist, on a scheme that could be presented to Hitler. This was called the Master Plan East. By this Himmler and Meyer envisaged the creation of three huge colonies. The first, stretching south of Leningrad, was called Ingermanland; the second, embracing chunks of eastern Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, was known in the plan as Memel-Narew-Gebiet, and the third, incorporating large parts of the western Ukraine and Crimea, was Gotengau.

All three of these areas were to be completely 'Germanised' within a twenty year period. All Slavs and the 'racially unwanted' were to be killed or enslaved, and the areas repopulated with small villages of German and SS settlers. Each village, Himmler told Felix Kersten, his personal masseur, "will embrace between 30 and 40 farms. Each farmer will receive up to 300 acres of land, more or less according to the quality of the soil. In any case a class of financially powerful and independent farmers will develop. Slaves won't till this soil, rather, a farming aristocracy will come into being, such as you still find on the Westphalian estates." The villages would be dominated by a manor house, occupied an SS or Nazi party leader, a little bit like the feudal lord of the manor. Such was Himmler's view of the Nazi Millenium

Vichy and the Jews

There was a strong ideological underpinning to anti-Semitism in wartime France, going back to the Dreyfus Affair and before. Even so, the conduct of the Vichy state cannot be explained simply by reference to a pre-history of a prejudice, nor, indeed, by the presence of German troops on French soil. This question raises a complex set of issues, but let me simplify it to this: the action of the Petain government in relation to the Jews was conditioned, more than anything else, by a determination to preserve French autonomy and freedom of action, paradoxical as it sounds. For example, the first Jewish Statute of October 1940 owed nothing whatsoever to German pressure. More than this, when the Germans started to adopt their own policy in the Occupied Zone Vichy followed closely on, not because it 'feared' for its own people, but because of concerns over the disunity of France, over divergence between the free and the occupied zones.

Remember too that Vichy claimed authority, or attempted to claim authority, over all of France, not just the south. Admiral Darlan, Prime Minister of France from December 1940 to April 1942, created the Commissariat-General for Jewish Affairs in March 1941 entirely on his own initiative, for the simple reason that he wanted to pre-empt a German plan to set up their own agency, operating in the north alone. Also the General Union of the Israelites of France, a Jewish umbrella organisation on the lines of the Eastern European Judenräte, was established by Vichy in November 1941 solely to steal a march on the Germans. This attempt to keep up with the Germans, to ensure policy that applied to the whole and not the part, meant that anti-Semitism moved in an ever more radical spiral. But it was urged on by men like Pierre Laval, who replaced Darlan as Prime Minister in April 1942, and René Bousquet, who had responsibility for the police, men who were not ideologically anti-Semitic, for political and organisational reasons; for reasons, in other words, of national prestige and autonomy. This does nothing to lessen the moral turpitude involved in a policy that ensured greater safety for French Jews in areas under the control of the Italian Fascists, areas where they were safe from their own police.

Unconditional Folly

Unconditional Surrender, the declaration that the enemy powers had to lay down arms without condition or concession, was President Roosevelt's idea which he announced to the world at the end of the Casablanca Conference, on an entirely unilateral basis. For the sake of Allied unity, it was immediately endorsed by Winston Churchill, though he later admitted to being dumfounded by the announcement, and worried by its likely effect on the future course of the war.

Dwight D Eisenhower, also present at the conference, shared Churchill's misgivings, believing that such an uncompromising line would only serve to prolong the war, costing more Allied lives than was necessary. In fact, there would appear to have been few, if any, who welcomed Roosevelt's declaration of intent

It also dismayed people like Admiral Canaris and others in the German resistance, but-not surprisingly-delighted Josef Goebbels, who said "I should never have been able to think up so rousing a slogan. If our enemy tells us, we won't deal with you, our only aim is to destroy you, how can any German, whether he likes it or not, do anything but fight on with all his strength." It is surely no coincidence that the Propaganda Minister's infamous Total War Speech came a few weeks of the Casablanca edict-Now, people rise up and let the storm break loose.

Perhaps the absolutely worst thing about unconditional surrender is that it came just as the German army had suffered one of the worst defeats in its history at Stalingrad, considerably weakening the prospects for the Reich, and making it more likely that the senior command would listen to the blandishments of Canaris and others. But now they had to fight on, Nazi and anti-Nazi alike.

In the summer of 1943, with Italy on the point of abandoning the Axis, Churchill and Eisenhower's attempts to negotiate a compromise peace with Pietro Badoglio were ruined after Roosevelt held fast to unconditional surrender. In the delays that followed the Germans were able to pour troops into Italy, ensuring that Allied progress up the peninsula would be slow and painful.

Similarly, as D Day approached in 1944, George Marshall and the US joint chiefs urged Roosevelt to moderate his policy, but met with outright refusal. Even after German resistance in Normandy proved far tougher than expected Roosevelt refused to budge, despite a further appeal from Eisenhower. He defended his policy on a visit to Hawaii-when he confirmed it also applied to Japan-, drawing an example from American history, insisting that this is how U. S. Grant had dealt Robert E Lee at Appomattox in April 1865. But, of course, it was not, as those of you familiar with the history of the American Civil War will be only too well aware. Grant offered Lee and the defeated southern army terms, and very generous terms at that.

In the end the policy, though not completely discarded, was moderated after Roosevelt's death. While the Japanese surrender was declared to be 'unconditional', they were permitted to keep their Emperor. If they had not, while one cannot be absolutely certain, it is possible that America's nuclear bluff would have been called, making an invasion of the Home Islands necessary. The cost in lives of such an endeavour can only be imagined.

Inglorious Tarantino

OK, I begin with a confession: I don’t like Quentin Tarantino as a director; I don’t like his movies. Sorry, that’s not quite true: Pulp Fiction was mildly entertaining, though a little incoherent for my taste. It’s not that I don’t appreciate his talent, his love of film-making, his sense of humour and the clever way he intercuts, the visual references he makes. Yes, he’s clever, he has a real fluency with the medium-but, so far as I am concerned, he’s is also shallow, obvious, insincere and far too glib. I simply don’t take him seriously as a film-maker. Most of his stuff bores me. I would have given Inglorious Basterds a miss but my boyfriend was keen; so, off we went.

A word, to begin with, about the title, specifically the spelling of Basterds (I make no mention of Inglourious!) I wasn’t sure quite was going on here, why the words was misspelt. Perhaps it was something to do with residual censorship, with hoardings and advertising on buses? Perhaps it was akin to the swearing in Father Ted, the Irish sitcom, where it was possible to say feck but not f*ck.? Oh, what a difference a vowel makes! The title actually comes from an Italian B-movie made in the early 1970s, though the Italians managed to get the spelling right. It seems the explanation is only to be found in the mind of the director!

Yes, Inglourious Basterds is wonderfully acted and well-scripted. No matter; I hated it, really hated it. It’s a pastiche of the Second World War, of dimensions of that war, perhaps not a thousand miles removed from the likes of Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp With Eva and Adolf at Berchtesgaden. Yes, this was a romp all right, just not that gay. Well…on second thoughts. :-) It was most certainly over the top in every conceivable sense, exuberant to the point where exuberance is close to parody and exhaustion. It could be read as a black comedy, if one was of a mind to, though the comedy for me was strained in the extreme. Operation Kino, the last scene, wasn’t exuberant or comic; it was utterly ridiculous. Oh, and that movie that Nazis were watching would, I suspect, have been too boring even for them!

I’ll be fair; I always try to be fair. The opening chapter was good, the one where the French farmer was interrogated by Christoph Waltz, playing one Hans Landa, an officer in the Sicherheitsdienst, a wonderful performance, sustained throughout, at once charming and persuasive, sinister and deadly. Still, leaping ahead to the final act, I’m completely mystified why he felt compelled to strangle the actress-spy when he himself was on the point of switching loyalties. Perhaps Tarantino just saw it as an opportunity to have a woman strangled for no apparent reason other than the strangulation itself. But that’s getting away from the point. Yes, Waltz kept up a high standard but the movie itself spiraled steadily downwards ever faster with every subsequent act.

Now we are introduced to the basterds, a group of American-Jewish commandos or Special Forces or whatever, headed by Brad Pitt as Lieutenant Aldo Raine. These men are sent to occupied France to kill Nazis or Germans, for there is really no difference between the two. The movie takes a turn towards the spaghetti western, and that’s not my criticism, that’s Tarantino’s intention, as we are presented with an ‘alternate’ history of the final stages of the Second World War. But the Jewish soldiers are sent not just to kill Nazis/Germans; they’re sent to commit atrocities, exactly the same kind of atrocities that the Nazi-Germans (better, I think) carried out extensively in Belorussia and the east, though I don’t believe they actually scalped the people they killed in the fashion of Raine’s ‘Apaches.’ Well, Apaches do brutal things, do they not, a bit like Nazi-Germans, a bit like, well, Jews? For the world has been turned upside down: the Jews have become Nazis. Can you see where this is going; can you see the implications of this? I hope so. Please don’t hate me for making this point. Others will with far less benign motives.

Was there comedy here? Was there some deeper message? If there was I missed it, my failure, no doubt. When I saw a German prisoner having his brains beaten out with a baseball bat by a character called ‘Bear Jew’ for rightly refusing to divulge the position of his comrades I could feel my sympathies switch to the Nazi-Germans, not a comfortable sensation, believe me, though others around me found the scene titillating funny. The soldier who did agree to tell was allowed to live but only after he had a swastika carved on to his forehead, a reference, perhaps, though I’m not sure that the director is aware of this, to the practice of some SS units carving the Star of David on the breasts of rabbis.

The mutilated soldier returns to Berlin. Now Hitler enters the scene, played by Martin Wuttke, the usual laughable manikin. It seems to me to be next to impossible for actors to recreate Hitler as a believable human being. The only one who came close, in my estimation, was Bruno Ganz in Der Untergang.

I can hear the objections, at least some of them: don’t take things so seriously; learn to suspend disbelief, appreciate art at the level of art, entertainment at the level of entertainment. But I can’t, I simply can’t, not with this movie anyway. We are dealing with real things, real people and real events, not a collection of fictitious gangsters in Tarantino’s usual style. This is history post-Schindler’s List, past all seriousness, past all subtlety, past all introspection: it’s fun, killing is fun; it’s history-and I can find no better way of putting this- at the level gamers will understand.

I’ve read a couple of reviews of this movie, not many, and none of them terribly favourable. The comment that resonated most with me comes from a piece by Kate Williams in this week’s Spectator (“We are fast forgetting how to be guilty about the past”), a clever critique of the process by which atrocity is being turned into entertainment. She concludes thus;

If no one is affected and worrying about guilt is passé, then everything is up for revision. What can be next-a film acclaiming Nazi doctors for their work on genetics? Or Brad Pitt as Speer, a sensitive family man battling a brutal system? Now that SS officers are highly profitable Hollywood ‘booty’-as Pitt’s character shouts in Inglourious Basterds-you can bet it’s only a matter of time.

Indeed. Inglourious Basterds is not pulp fiction; it’s just pulp.

Some Thoughts on Operation Barbarossa

I wrote the following as a response to a question on how close Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia, came to success. It seems appropriate to save it here now we are close to the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War.

How close did the German invasion of Russia come to success? Far, far closer than many people care to allow. The suggestion that the whole thing was a piece of political and strategic madness by Hitler, pushed most assiduously after the war by Franz Halder, the Wehrmacht Chief of Staff, among others, does not stand up to examination. His own wartime diaries reveal that he was as keen on the whole operation as anyone. As early as 3 July he wrote, "It is thus probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in a space of two weeks".

We now known, from documents released by the Russian archives since the collapse of the Soviet Union, that this was a view that even Stalin was close to accepting. At the end of that month one of the agents of Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD, made attempts through the Bulgarian ambassador to discover if Hitler would accept large territorial concessions in return for peace. The Russian historian, Dimitri Volkogonov, has also uncovered evidence to suggest that the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, was actively preparing for a second Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which had ended Russian involvement in the First World War. The thinking seems to have been that of Lenin in 1918: trade territory for political survival.

The real crisis came in October after the great enveloping battle at Vyazma and Briansk, the opening move of the final advance on Moscow, where the Germans took 660,000 prisoners, leaving a mere 90,000 men to face the whole of Army Group Centre. It is even rumoured that some Moscovites put out welcome posters for the Germans. Zhukov later reported that Stalin was more desperate than ever for peace. He was also on the point of leaving Moscow. Document No. 34 of the State Defence Committee, dated 15 October 1941, and now in the public domain, shows just how serious Stalin believed matters had become. It is resolved, the document proceeds,

To evacuate the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and the top levels of Government...(Comrade Stalin will leave tomorrow or later, depending on the situation)...In the event of enemy forces arriving in Moscow, the NKVD are ordered to blow up business premises, warehouses and institutions which cannot be evacuated, and all underground railway electrical equipment.

The following night an armoured train made ready to carry Stalin east.

Nevertheles, it is by no means certain that the Soviet Union would have fallen even if Moscow had been taken; but it would have given the Germans crucial control over the whole Russian transport network. More than that, the collapse of Russia's ancient capital, and the flight of Stalin, is likely to have had the most devastating effect on both morale and fighting ability. If Stalin was a coward, it has rightly been written, then everyone could be a coward.

There are two things surely that saved Russia at this most crucial point in its history; the decision of Stalin, for reasons yet unkown, to remain in Moscow, and crucial intelligence forwarded from Tokyo by Richard Sorge, a Communist secret agent, that the Japanese were not going to attack Russia, not at least until after Moscow had fallen. In a huge gamble the guard on Manchuria, occupied by the powerful Kwantung Army, was dropped, and the Siberian divisions moved west. If Sorge had been wrong it is difficult to know how the Soviet Union could have survived. But he was not wrong. Zhukov deployed his fresh units to the north and south of Moscow. For once it really is appropriate to say that the rest is history

Storm of War

Andrew Roberts recently published The Storm of War: a New History of the Second World War has now dropped into my hands. I like Roberts as a historian, I always have; I like his perspective on things, intelligent, conservative, biting and insightful. I’ve read his previous books with considerable delight, well-written and well-researched. His new book is over seven hundred and fifty pages long, so it’s obviously going to take me a time to digest it properly. I have, however, been glancing through it, picking up items at random. One argument leaped out at me: Hitler lost the war for precisely the same reason he started it-because he was a Nazi. Au contraire, Andrew; Hitler did not lose the war because he was a Nazi: he lost it because he was Hitler.

Before proceeding I should in fairness add one important caveat. Insofar as Nazism was anti-Semitic, insofar as Hitler was anti-Semitic, official policy, in leading to the migration of Jewish academicians, set German science back by some distance, especially in the area of nuclear physics. In the end this meant the Nazis would lose the race to develop the Atomic bomb.

Now let’s turn to two other important areas, also vital in explaining the German defeat: the invasion of Russia and the decision to declare war on America. It’s true, of course, that in deciding to go to war with the Soviets Hitler broke what Field Marshal Montgomery defined as the first rule of warfare-never advance on Moscow. The thing is, though, this is a war that could very well have been won if it had not been guided by Hitler as Hitler rather than Hitler as a Nazi.

There were plenty in the Nazi hierarchy who saw the invasion as an opportunity to develop a positive anti-Stalin alliance. The Soviet state, built on terror, starvation, gulags and murder was hated by so many, particularly in the Ukraine, where German troops were widely welcomed in the early days of Barbarossa. People like Alfred Rosenberg, also a Nazi, wanted to build on this, pursuing in effect the same policy as Imperial Germany of creating independent and semi-independent buffer states. But as far as Hitler was concerned the Slavs, without exception, were untermenschen and nothing should be done to encourage any form of nationalism among them. So, he gave free reign to Himmler, a political fantasist, to spin out his favoured ideological projects with disastrous consequences. It wasn’t communism or Stalin that defeated Hitler in the east; it was patriotism and the simple desire for self-preservation.

There was no reason to declare war on America in December 1941. Germany was under no obligation to do so under the Tripartite Pact with Japan and Italy. Hitler declared war because he was convinced America was a ‘military weakling.’ Yet again this was Hitler, not Nazism. Others in the hierarchy may have accepted that America was a ‘military weakling’ at that particular point in time, but they were also aware that it was an industrial giant with a huge manpower reserve. More particularly, it had the power to transform itself almost overnight, the lesson of 1917 and 1918.

These are just two examples but there are many others, cases where Hitler’s laziness, incompetence and tendency to micro-management all contributed to the eventual outcome. I emphasise my point again: it was Adolf Hitler who lost the war, not Nazi Germany.

One other thing about Roberts: he is not at all reluctant to say what he likes and say what he dislikes; and the one thing he most assuredly dislikes is the French! Sorry, I’m being provocative. Better said, he does not like French conduct during the war, the conduct of the Vichy regime in particular. He draws his facts into battle like a general drawing soldiers: in 1941 it took only 30,000 German troops to hold down the occupied part of France-less than two full divisions-whereas some 400,000 French people enrolled in Nazi military organisations over the course of the conflict. When additional Abwehr files were opened in 1999 these showed that many thousands of French were paid to spy on their fellow country people, often for pitifully small amounts of money and so on and so on.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to reading the whole work at greater leisure when I find the time-if I find the time-and if I don’t disappear beneath a constant avalanche of books!

Crimes against the Germans

This is a tragic story, one that deserves to be better known; and, yes, it was a crime against humanity, which involved, sad to say, the western powers as well as the Soviets. Anyway, you will find all of the details in Giles MacDonogh's After the Reich: from the Liberation of Vienna to the Berlin Airlift (London, 2007), specifically in Chapter 15, headed Where are our Men? Briefly, of the eleven million soldiers taken prisoner on or before May 1945 a million and a half never returned; most from captivity in the east, but also well over 100,000 in the west.

When Germany surrendered the Allies decided that the state had ceased to exist, so newly captured soldiers were defined as 'Surrendered Enemy Persons' or 'Disarmed Enemy Persons', which meant in practice that they had no protection as POWs under the Geneva and the Hague Conventions. Therefore almost half the soldiers taken by the British and Americans, both of whom had signed the Geneva Convention (the Russians had not), had no right to the same levels of subsistence and shelter. They were used, quite freely, as slave labour; and many died as such, while the likes of Fritz Sauckel and Albert Speer stood indicted at Nuremberg for this very crime. While the Americans were seeking to prosecute the perpetrators of the Malmedy massacre, where some hundreds of POWs had been killed by advancing SS units, anything up to 40,000, yes, 40,000, Germans were allowed to die of starvation, exposure and neglect in muddy, open-air camps scattered along the banks of the Rhine. A tragic story indeed.

Political Fraud; the Story of the People's Convention

The so-called People's Convention was set up after the outbreak of the Second World War, supposedly on the initiative of the Hammersmith Trade. In reality the initiative came from the Kremiln during the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact, the honeymoon of the odd couple. Loyal Communists were instructed to denounce the struggle with Germany as an 'imperialist war', hence the need for bogus front organisations like the People's Convention.

It was all quite subtle, of course, in the usual Communist style. People were encouraged to join in support of initiatives like higher living standards or better bomb shelters. Once safely enrolled they discovered that the 'real enemy' was not Germany but Winston Churchill and those members of the Labour party who joined the wartime coalition. The best denunciation of the whole fraud came from George Orwell, Harold Laski and Victor Gollancz, who in 1940, under the auspices of the Left Book Club, publised Betrayal of the Left. In this Gollancz asked,

Can anyone carry self-delusion to the point of being able to read through the file of the Daily Worker [The Communist Party Newspaper] and still believe that this motive was any other than to weaken the will to resist? When, at the same time, you tell people that this is an unjust war, fought for no purpose but to increase the profits of the rich: when you jeer at any comment about the morale and heroism of the public and call it 'sunshine talk'; what possible purpose can you have but to stir up hatred of the government and hatred of the war, with the object of underminining the country's determination to stand up to Hitler?

The Convention, shameful as it was, attracted the support of some prominent intellectuals, including Raymond Williams and Eric Hobsbawm, who wrote a pamphlet defending the Soviet aggression against Finland, because Stalin was only seeking to defend Russia against an attack by 'British imperialists'!

You will find more information on the Convention in "All the Russians Love the Prussians", Chapter Eight of Nick Cohen's What's Left, an excellent expose of the moral cowardice of so much left-wing thought.

Being and Nothingness as Political Commentry

Envisage, if you can, Paris in 1943: a bleak place, one where the arena of personal freedom was growing more circumscribed by the day. In the streets, alongside the German occupiers, there were French Fascist auxiliaries of one kind or another, with links to Marcel Déat and others among the so-called Paris Collaborators. The previous year all French Jews had been required to wear the yellow star, not by order of the Germans, but on the initiative of Darquier de Pellepoix, Vichy's Commissioner for Jewish Affairs. Round-ups and deportations were now a regular occurrence. Through the city German propaganda, evoking final victory, was an ever-present feature of life in public places. Denunciations, anonymous letters and police raids wee a constant threat. France has been seized by a Judeo-Bolshevik phobia. The atmosphere is stifling.

So, for Sartre, and every other Frenchman, objective freedom has all but gone. It is against this background that Being and Nothingness, was published, a profoundly Cartesian work, one where subjective forms of freedom find their greatest defence.

There, in subjective consciousness, lies the origin of one's absolute freedom, one that is shaped in a state of permanent criticism. All labels are rejected-"How them shall I experience the objective limits of my being: Jew, Aryan, ugly, handsome, kind, a civil servant, untouchable, etc.-when will speech have informed me as to which of these are my limits?" It is from these labels that alienation and inauthenticity are created: "Here I am-Jew or Aryan, handsome or ugly, one armed etc. All this for the Other with no hope of apprehending this meaning which I have outside and still, more important, with no hope of changing it...in a more general way the encounter with a prohibition in my path ('No Jews allowed here')...can only have meaning only on and through the foundations of my free choice. In fact according to the free possibilities which I choose, I can disobey the prohibition, pay no attention to it, or, on the contrary, confer upon it a coercive value which it can hold only because of the weight I attach to it."

Sartre's theory of freedom is expressed, for the most part, in highly abstract terms, but it still has to be read against a specific historical background. The call for freedom, and the parallel denunciation of all forms of bad-faith, was never more meaningful in Nazi France.

Why did the Germans allow this? Well, because they operated in some areas a fairly relaxed censorship policy, especially over such abstract works as Being and Nothingness. It also helped if the author expressed an anti-German message which the Germans themselves could not understand, as Sartre did in his play, No Exit, which concludes with his most famous quote "Hell is other People", or l'enfer, c'est les autres in French. By this time the French ad long ceased to refer to the occupiers as Boches-they were, quite simply, Les autres

La Guerre d'un Seul Homme

I’m a member of the film society at my university. Last term we screened La Guerre d'un Seul Homme-One Man's War-directed by Edgardo Cozarinsky, an Argentinean in writer and film-maker. It’s a remarkable dissertation in what the director calls ‘documentary fiction.’ He’s taken a lot of war-time footage, most from occupied France, Paris, in particular, and some from the Eastern Front, to create a visual essay. Some of the footage is light-hearted, to the point of outright banality, some of it darker and altogether more serious. Much of it contains commentary of the day, particularly on aspects of Parisian life or more generally the politics of France during the occupation.

The whole thing is punctuated by readings from the Paris Journals of Ernst Jünger, who served as an officer in the occupation force for much of the war. Jünger is probably best known for In Stahlgewittern-Storm of Steel-, his account of life on the Western Front during the First World War. He had an international reputation, which give him easy access to French intellectual salons in Paris, where he met with people like Cocteau and Picasso. Jünger was an anti-Nazi, involved in the fringes of the 1944 Plot against Hitler, but he always seems to maintain a sense of Olympian detachment, disapproving of much of what he sees, but never quite prepared to take that final step. It was of particular interest for me because I know Paris so well, wandered the same streets, parks and embankments as Jünger, and had the same kinds of encounter. There is a deep poignancy to the whole thing; there was for me, anyway.

Was World War Two a Just War?

Well, was it? It seems appropriate to ask, with the D-Day anniversary just past.

Anyway, put out of your mind the suggestion that we were fighting to defend our homeland from the Nazis; we were not, not by any measure. We declared war on Germany; Germany did not declare on war on us! We declared war for what? For Poland, for the freedom of Poland? I'm now finding it difficult to stop myself from laughing!

Appeasement was not just a good policy: it was an essential policy. More than that, it would have been far better, in every respect, not to have gone to war in the first place. In July 1940, in what he called his ‘final appeal to reason’, Hitler called for an end to the conflict;

The continuation of this war will only end with the complete destruction of one of the two warring parties...I see no reason that should compel us to continue this war.

He was wrong about one thing: the continuation of the war brought the complete destruction of one of the parties, yes, but it also brought the near destruction of the other.

So, was the Second World War a 'good' war, understanding good to mean that it brought some benefit to those who needed help? The answer is not at all obvious, is it? Think of our leadership, think of the adventurism of Churchill, the tyrant of the glittering phrase. Soon after hearing of Hitler's 1940 peace offer Frances Partridge wrote in her diary "It's too tantalising since there's no shadow of a doubt we will reject any such suggestion. Now I suppose Churchill will again tell the world that we are going to die on the hills and the seas, and then we shall proceed to do so." A pretty accurate prediction, don't you think?

The problem with Churchill was that he was the eternal schoolboy caught up in the excitement of the battle, a man with little or no long-term vision; no understanding of the political consequences of fighting on the beaches and the landing grounds, in this place and in that; no understanding of the consequences for his country or its Empire of unrestrained and prolonged conflict. In 1945 he had heaps of moral authority. The trouble is he had almost nothing else; an Adam without the fig-leaf.

Oh, sorry, he did have something else: he was also the chief architect of imperial deconstruction, rather ironic when one considers his past history! Break through the circles of his rhetoric and the picture that emerges is not particularly uplifting.

What Churchill was really interested in was not an 'anti-Fascist' crusade; for it is doubtful that he ever really understood the nature of Fascism, a concept altogether too modern; he certainly never saw any fault in Mussolini, or danger in Japan. He wanted a scrap with Germany; that's it.

His scrap, moreover, was not, by and large, with German soldiers but with German civilians, waged with the ruthless weapons of blockade and bombardment, bombardment increasingly delivered without any degree of moral restraint. After all, if the Nazis were bad, why should we not be worse? As the civilian populations, swollen by refugees, of Poland, Belgium, Norway and the Netherlands faced starvation, Churchill refused to let food aid through the Navy's blockade of Europe. In justification he told Parliament in 1941 that the enemy would use fats to make bombs, potatoes to make fuel and that 'the plastic materials now so largely used in the construction of aircraft are made of milk.' Yes, he did! In October of that year Herbert Hoover asked;

Is the Allied cause any further advanced today because of the starvation of children? Are Hitler’s armies any less victorious than if those children had been saved? Are Britain's children better fed today because these millions of former allied children have been hungry or died? Can you point to one benefit that has been gained from this holocaust?

There is, of course, no answer. Nor is there any answer, when one thinks about it, to the effectiveness, or the desirability, of the bombardment. In 1941 it was estimated that only one in five British bombers was dropping their payload within seventy-five miles of their designated targets. Because of this targets were deliberately selected so that, even if the aircraft missed, there would be a 'bonus' in civilian deaths, and thus the weapons would not be wasted. But even this brought no discernable benefits, either in the dislocation of production or the collapse of morale. So what was needed? Why, more and bigger bombs; more and more dead civilians. Neither Churchill, nor Bomber Harris nor anyone else in the British command seems to have considered just exactly what impact the German Blitz on Britain had.

Some might argue that the war was fought to prevent the persecution of the Jews. It was not. Churchill showed almost no interest in the German persecution. More seriously, the twin weapons of blockade and bombardment impacted most severely on Jewish people; for as rations reduced everywhere they reduced even more severely in the ghettos; as the bombing took hold it was Jewish families who were among the first to be evicted to make way for those whose home had been destroyed. Indeed, the Final Solution itself was in every respect one of the direct consequences of the Second World War. It is inconceivable, in other words, it its absence.

So, we fought to destroy Hitler and lost all perspective in the process. Yes, he was a tyrant. Yes, he was a butcher. But we fought alongside a man who was no less tyrannical, no less of a butcher and, in the end, no less of an anti-Semite. At huge cost, both human and material, we fought to free Poland from Hitler...only to give it to Stalin.