A glimpse into the ordinary

GRAHAM FORST

The two books under review are, in a way, quite similar: two distinguished writers – one a well-known TV producer and the other an eminent academic – recently found a Nazi in the woodpile of their family trees. These books relate how their authors discovered these family secrets, and how the discovery affected them personally. The books’ interest for Holocaust studies is in their contribution to the growing interest in the roles of fourth-liners in the Third Reich: the “ordinary Nazis” and “desk-top murderers” – the lock-step fanatics and the day-to-day bürokrats without whose dog-tenacious efforts the Shoah could not have happened, and whose activities have been progressively uncovered by the coming-to-light of wartime diaries, journals, notebooks and recently opened files.

The slighter of the two books is The Perfect Nazi: Uncovering My Grandfather’s Secret Past (Viking, 2011) by the BBC-TV producer Martin Davidson, who specializes, ironically, in history productions. When Davidson’s maternal grandfather died in 1993, Davidson’s mother began to speak about her father’s activities in Germany during the war. What Davidson found out changed his life: Opa was not the sheltered wartime dentist he had pretended he was, but a fanatical Death’s Head Stormtrooper who had proudly worn both the Gold Party Badge and the infamous Death’s Head Ring.

Historically, SS Sturmtrupper Bruno Langbehn was a relatively insignificant character. Trained as a dentist, he took over the surgery of a Jewish dentist who had committed suicide at the beginning of the war, and grew to become the head of the Berlin Dentists’ Guild. Davidson finds no evidence that Opa committed major atrocities during the war, but he admits the historical records are scanty. This lack of direct documentation leaves Davidson into a lot of pure speculation and too much writing in the conditional voice. For example, unsure whether his grandfather participated in the Nuremberg Rallies, Davidson simply says “he must have been there.” And where was Opa during Kristallnacht? “It is hard to suppose,” writes Davidson, “that he wasn’t there, after spending the first part of the night drinking with his Kameraden.”

This, and many other examples of Davidson’s unconcealed rancor for his grandfather’s shady past sharply diminishes the importance of The Perfect Nazi as a contribution to Holocaust history scholarship, however cathartic it clearly was for Davidson to write it.

Mary Fulbrook’s A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2012), on the other hand, is a work of first-class research and scholarship.

The book is a unique hybrid: while the author is a professional historian – she has a chair in German history at University College London – Fulbrook has a personal stake in her subject, leading to what she admits is a “double role” and patently a “difficult position”: she’s an historian of Jewish descent, who just found out that her godmother’s husband was a committed Nazi who lied about his past to cover his tracks.

Unlike Davidson’s zealous Stormtrooper ancestor, Fulbrook’s closet-skeleton was a quiet, nervous, escapist, guilt-ridden practising Catholic Nazi careerist whose main wartime activity was to preside over the ghettoization and ultimate 85,000-strong “de-Jewing” of the small town in Silesia (Bedzin, 40 kilometres from Auschwitz) to which he had been assigned in 1939.

This personal connection only rarely spills over into rancor with Fulbrook (although she can’t resist pointing out that the German word for her godfather’s position as a civil administrator, landrat, is reminiscent of “a rodent leaving a sinking ship”); and her access to a rich lode of data (mainly, at first, a huge cache of family wartime letters, and then much more) makes her book far more factual and, therefore, more historically significant than Davidson’s.

Fulbrook doesn’t judge her godfather, Udo Klausa, as harshly as Davidson does his Opa but, then again, Herr Klausa was hardly the zealot as was Herr Langbehr. Nonetheless, and this is the significance of her account, Fulbrook shows that the Holocaust could hardly have happened without her godfather’s zealous paper-pushing participation, along with that of tens of thousands of “ordinary people” like him. However, Udo’s wife Alexandra – Fulbrook’s godmother – does receive a great deal of gendered scrutiny for her unquestioning acceptance of her husband’s attitudes and activities, leading to the promise of a future history of Nazi wives, if not a greater history of the junction of gender and genocide.

So, two books of 400 pages on two nobodies. Why? Neither is mentioned in history. Neither was brought to postwar trial. Neither was, apparently, an “exterminationist antisemite.” But we want to know: How can ordinary people be mobilized to accept and contribute to manifestly evil protocols? How can conscience be so easily suppressed, and the consequences of actions so completely buried?

Fulbrook looks closely at these questions – but even she seems at times unwilling to accept the will that underlies participation in evil. Far too often she speaks of Udo Klausa as “caught up in” the policies of the Third Reich, as being “trapped in a system,” as having been “cowed” and “constrained,” as having “found himself in a role” and “gone along with the tide,” as if he were driftwood or eiderdown. One wants to scream out: Jews in cattlecars were truly “caught” and truly “found themselves” in situations from which they could not escape. Anyone without a machine gun pointing at them from a guard-tower has choices, as the examples of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sophie Scholl and the student militant group Weisse Rose clearly demonstrate. Klausa, like hundreds of thousands of ethnic German soldier-administrators and their wives, just turned away from the constant humiliations, the atrocities, the property confiscations, the shootings, the starvings, the public hangings, the arsons, the trainloads passing by the back windows, the smoke rising from the long chimneys in the larger town nearby, from whence the stench would have carried, for at least 40 kilometres – and who dare say these “ordinary citizens” were any the less guilty for the greatest crime ever committed against humanity? Not, for one, Fulbrook, who concludes her book by saying that it was above all the “ordinary Nazis” who permitted Nazism to “wreak such horrendous effects in practice, as policies designed by others were translated, intentionally or otherwise, into an ever more radical system of racism in practice, a system ultimately paving the way for what became a deadly reality for so many victims.

Graham Forst, PhD, taught literature and philosophy at Capilano University until his retirement and now teaches in the continuing education departments at Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia and the Banff School of Fine Arts. From 1975 to 2010, he co-chaired the symposium committee of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

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