UBC: The SS: Alibi of a Nation

[truepenny]

Reitlinger, Gerald. The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922-1945. 1956. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1981.

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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.

Comments

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Interesting. A similar process happened much more quickly in Japan: dozens of Class A war criminals were arrested pending trial in 1945, some were tried and convicted in 1948, but that same year those who'd never been brought to trial were released, and by 1960 a former Class A war criminal was railroading ratification of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, with automatic renewal, through the Diet, because he was Prime Minister. Even those who were convicted and sentenced to imprisonment were mostly released early.

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

I was pretty horrified when I recently learned that the allies rounded up the people that the nazis had put in concentration camps for being 'homophiles' and transferred them to prison. When they finally did get release years later, they were still classified as sex offenders.

I don't know why this surprises me considering the horrible stuff Americans were doing at home on that front... But just the idea of taking someone out of a concentration camp and then sticking them in prison ends up pissing me off just that little bit extra.

[girlpunksamurai.livejournal.com]

I'd have to dig through the mountain that is my library, but I believe the Roma also suffered similar experiences. Here's a familiar formula, money changing hands+favors and/or promises=standing down.

Yes, I'm a cynic. Am I wrong?

[brown-bess.livejournal.com]

Not that I'm an expert or anything, but the Nazis were spread all the way through Germany's rulers. Everybody who wanted a part of leadership had to be a Nazi, and thus automatically was a war criminal.

So who's left? People the Nazis didn't want - who were probably killed/exiled/whatever by this point. People who had no ability to govern. People who had no desire to govern.

That's not a whole lot, if you get right down to it. So who was going to be the next government of Germany if not the lesser Nazis? That's the problem with "liberating" a country where the regime has gone on for over ten years, isn't it? The regime had plenty of time to weed out.

Again, not an expert. Just thinking and remembering some stuff from school.