"Those Were the Days" Topic

Have not read it but the review sounds interesting (one of the authors, Ernst Klee, recently died)

'Those Were the Days: The Holocaust As Seen by the Perpetrators and Bystanders (1988), written with Willi Dressen and Volker Riess, is the only one of Klee's books to be translated into English. It presents a series of horrifying personal testimonies of murder and brutality carried out by SS men, soldiers, administrators and others in eastern Europe during the war – horrifying not least because of the enthusiasm which they showed for their actions in the letters, diaries and other documents reproduced in the volume.'

I've often (as someone who has read a lot about the period) thought that secretly not a few Germans probably indeed thought "those were the days" so surprised that there's actually a book with the title – there was a play on TV years ago which very much voiced the same (to the effect of "yes of course they tell us we should be ashamed but i tell you what in those days we were the masters")

I never heard of this book before, but it does sound interesting.

Auschwitz was actually a much sought after posting by the SS. They had their own sports and social clubs, good food, plenty of booze, and nobody shooting at them. There was also plenty of money, jewelry, clothes, etc. to steal, and many of them took full advantage of the situation. I don't thing the wholesale slaughter of innocent men, women and children was something that would have caused those particular individuals too many sleepless nights.

The title I'm familiar with is The Good Old Days:

link

It is tremendously depressing, the ease and regularity with which we human beings transform into the most appalling of monsters.

Doug

And too, Doug:

I'm discovering as each generation slips into obscurity, the lessons have to be relearned. The voices of the holocaust are slipping away quickly now……
Respectfully,
Gunny

Gunny –
I totally agree with you. I run an the Connecticut Air & Space Museum in Stratford and a large part of what we do is honoring the WW2 workers and vets and in the past year I have lost several good friends who were in their 90's. The WW2 Generation is dwindling quickly.

zippyfusenet
Thanks – well it was the UK Guardian Newspaper (famous for its bloopers as well as its liberal stance) that put that as the title.

It was interesting reading on that link to the Amazon site some of the reviews, which showed that even after reading it people don't 'get it' – e.g comments about the Einsatzgruppe being made up 'weak minded criminals' (when many of them were career policemen – perhaps that person was confusing them with SonderKommando Dirlewangler) as compared to those in other arms of the Wehrmacht.

Also there's a comment from someone in the army (US? UK?)to the effect that we don't know what the moral pressures were on people to conform and that 'being a 'consciencious objector' in the Third Reich would have been suicide'.

Whilst it might have been the case that not every policemen or soldier would have known what the consequences would have been of refusing to take part and there is of course a popular view in most countries that if you refused then you'd be on the wrong side of the guns(I think that there is only documented example of an SS soldier I think it was being shot for refusing to take part in the Ardeatine Caves massacre.)

On the other hand books like 'Ordinairy Men: Reserve Police Battalion 11 and the Final Solution in Poland' make it clear that people in effect chose to shoot or chose to take up roles as drivers or perimeter security and keep out of the way (and in the case of that unit were if I recall more or less given an explicit opt out). That book also makes it clear that the members of what was reserve police unit, recruited from working class middle aged people from Hamburg (i.e. not brought up as kids in the Nazi era nor weak minded criminals or indeed police professionals) turned their hand to mass murder very easily.

Bartovs 's book Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (disliked by some mainly I think because it portrays their beloved 'clean' Wehrmacht in a less flatterig light) also makes the point that attempts to go back to the 'it was only a few criminals' (as one of the persons on Amazon who read this book seemed to amazingly conclude) are well off the mark as (even not counting the activities of various Waffen SS units) members of all sorts of units of the army (incl security divisions, military police but also on occasions other units such as the Jaeger units in Greece) and Luftwaffe (again recalling the behaviour of some units in Greece) also were involved in mass killings.

One review of ordinairy men btw was interesting subtitled 'Ordinairy for Germans' and made the assertion that:

Only one western society (perhaps only one society anywhere) has the word 'shrecklichkeit'. It is sometimes translated as frightfulness, but it is not directly translatable into English or any other language, because its meaning is remotely incomprehensible in any other language

It means to behave so brutally that non-Germans will quiver in fear whenever a German walks by. It was not originally applied against Jews. It came into currency in Belgium during World War I. The Germans were proud of it.'

Not sure I fully accept the point either linguistically or culturally/historically (the reviewer was basically say that in the case of Germany, all the culture etc was a veneer – in line with the book by Daniel Goldhagen that comes out with a specifically German (rather than Universalist) explanation for the Holocaust) but an interesting point that links in, in a way, to the theme of the Klee book.

Good Old Days was the english title
It is a depressing book but an important one as it was one of the first to show that ordinary Germans knew what was going on, up to then the standard line was that ordinary people knew very little about what was happening to the Jews.

There was a brief period of academic freedom in the 70's and 80's (before the spontaneous self censorship of political correctness started to emanate from Brussels) when it was common coin to accept that the fact that the area of modern Germany was not 'civilised' by the Roman Empire resulted in a shallower veneer of Judeo-Christian morality taking hold there. Apparently the horrors of religious warfare were particularly vicious there, so they most have been pretty horrible, as they weren't exactly a cakewalk in NW Europe… (30 years war etc)

I thought the 30YW did take place in part in Germany though?

One other interesting (if depressing) point I noted in an Amazon review of 'Ordinary Men' was that one reviewer group (the 'WW2 seminar of the William and Mary College' in Williamsburg Va) described the book as a 'novel' – its pretty sad if a group of university students (imagine their reviews are some kind of class task perhaps?) don't know what the difference between a novel and non-fiction history book – I bet they know the price of 'E' and bizarre sexual practice no.96 though (I work in an office of 30 year service cops and they were all astounded by some of the things that some of the younger folk described as being common knowledge nowadays!)
Incidentally the internet shows spellings of the word as 'ordinairy' and 'ordinary' – is it a US/UK English thing or just that 'ordinairy' is a misspelling and not a real word?