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UBC: The SS: Alibi of a Nation
Jul. 9th, 2009 05:44 pmReitlinger, Gerald. The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922-1945. 1956. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1981.
This is, unfortunately, not a very good book. Mr. Reitlinger lacks the gift of explication almost entirely, and to explain the SS, you need the jumbo super-size gift of explication. Also . . . well, the word that keeps floating around my head is "gossipy." He says things like "Bouhler was a really silly man whom no one thought anything of." His argument, which he finally gets around to making explicit in the last chapter, is buried for most of the book beneath the avalanche of petty details, and I allocated more brain space than should have been necessary to critiquing his paragraph structure.
What he does do well is chart the intensely creepy and unjust process by which, ten years after World War II, those Nazis who weren't either executed within the first couple years or captured by the Russians were being let slide, step by step, out from under. Death sentence commuted to life sentence, and men with life sentences were being let out after ten, or five, or three years. Many Nazis weren't prosecuted at all. Nazi generals were receiving municipal pensions in Germany. Now, I have ethical issues with both capital punishment and long-term incarceration (not to mention extreme doubts about their efficacy), but the way in which the Allies took this grand moral stand--shock! horror! Nuremberg trials!--and then backed down, and down, and down some more, until you get Nazis being presented as martyrs, and being championed by Senator Joseph McCarthy of abhorrèd memory, and simply not being held accountable: that's not justice, either.
This is, unfortunately, not a very good book. Mr. Reitlinger lacks the gift of explication almost entirely, and to explain the SS, you need the jumbo super-size gift of explication. Also . . . well, the word that keeps floating around my head is "gossipy." He says things like "Bouhler was a really silly man whom no one thought anything of." His argument, which he finally gets around to making explicit in the last chapter, is buried for most of the book beneath the avalanche of petty details, and I allocated more brain space than should have been necessary to critiquing his paragraph structure.
What he does do well is chart the intensely creepy and unjust process by which, ten years after World War II, those Nazis who weren't either executed within the first couple years or captured by the Russians were being let slide, step by step, out from under. Death sentence commuted to life sentence, and men with life sentences were being let out after ten, or five, or three years. Many Nazis weren't prosecuted at all. Nazi generals were receiving municipal pensions in Germany. Now, I have ethical issues with both capital punishment and long-term incarceration (not to mention extreme doubts about their efficacy), but the way in which the Allies took this grand moral stand--shock! horror! Nuremberg trials!--and then backed down, and down, and down some more, until you get Nazis being presented as martyrs, and being championed by Senator Joseph McCarthy of abhorrèd memory, and simply not being held accountable: that's not justice, either.
