It only requires 5% of a population to be able to behave with violence with impunity, to alter a whole society. I am not sure whether the implication is that there should be much more zealous secruity measures against the right wing, or whether there is a general anti-semitism in German society that still needs to be combatted.
I am struck by the apolitical tone of the German debate about commemorating the holocaust, whether people are for or against a particular memorial.
Last week I went to exhibitions in Hamburg on the murder of 170 thousand mentally ill German people during the Nazi period, and to the Neuengamme slave labour camp for prisoners from many countries, but none from England or the US. There, some 50,000 were worked to death. Neither exhibition was particularly well publicised.
These figures do not compare with the total number killed, but they could clarify how such events occurred. And one thing that is repeatedly omitted in the name of factualness and objectivity, is the political effect of the coup which destroyed civil society in 1933. Anti-semitism, I suggest, played a number of roles in Nazi power, and one of them was to establish the principle that a section of society could be deprived of civil rights, and if necessary of more, brutally. Although it was not quite the first KZ camp, Dachau, near Munich was the flagship, demonstration camp. It was used to intern socialists and communists from the city that had given rise to the red republic only 14 years before. It was only in 1938 that it had any substantial population of jews. With such an attack on civil liberties, who could speak out against greater injustices?
As in the concentration camps, a particular target of retribution was any show of solidarity with the oppressed.
Nevertheless there were disorganized and disjointed forms of resistance. One surprise is that Hitler was forced in August 1941 within two years of its start to abandon the officially organised campaign for killing of the mentally ill run from Tiergarten Strasse 4, because of resistance from relatives. Subsequently administrative directives to intendants of asylums had to exercise the policy secretly, by such methods as a special fat-free diet that would kill people only gradually in a way that could be put down to war-time shortages.
Without a conscious political analysis of the end of civil society, including the mistakes of the socialists and communists, the issue of commemorating the holocaust and learning from it seems to me one that would be likely to divide people into those who feel that guilt must still be felt, and those who feel that guilt cannot go on passing down in history even unto the fourth generation.
There is little about resistance to the Nazis and nothing about Communist resistance of course.
A nation which oppresses another cannot itself be free. In remembering the atrocities to the Jews the lesson will be better learned if it is in the context of the atrocities to many others too, including other Germans. But this requires a politically informed analysis and not just a moral one.
I am sure Johannes and others from Germany have thought much more about some of these issues that myself, but I felt some comment was necessary on his brief post. Certainly I got the impression that there was extensive coverage of Bubis's death on the German television channels.
Chris Burford
London