Delusions of Superiority Fester Again in Germany--but Not Only in Germany

A strong sense of deja vu came over me when I heard about the election victory in West Berlin of a party described as fascist and Nazi-like.

I lived in Berlin at the time of the infamous Kristallnacht on Nov. 9, 1938. I was only 6 years old, and probably slept through that night of destruction and killing, but I do recall the Star of David painted in front of Jewish-owned stores, as well as the yellow stars that Jews were forced to wear.

Barely 50 years later, we are witnessing the open political re-emergence of German racism in the form of a neo-Nazi political party winning votes on a racist platform, this one directed against Turks and other immigrants.

As World War II ended and the horrors of the Nazi extermination camps were revealed, the world was shocked into the realization of just what monstrous deeds a modern state is capable of when under the influence of ideological delusions. My own awareness of what my countryhad done to millions of Jews and others began a bit earlier, shortly before the end of the war.

Driven out of Berlin by allied air raids, my mother and brothers and I found ourselves temporarily quartered as refugees in a small town in Saxony. One day in February, 1945, I was walking with some of my schoolmates near a crossroads when a policeman approached our group and motioned for me to come to him. He instructed me to run to the next village down the road and inform the police there that a column of prisoners was scheduled to come through their community before long. I had just arrived back at the crossroads when the column of “prisoners” arrived, 1,000 or more men in vertically striped uniforms. There was only a handful of armed guards, which surprised me. My next reaction was apprehension: With so few guards, the prisoners could easily escape or perhaps overpower their guards. But as the front of the column arrived at an open area near the crossing, the guards permitted the prisoners to stop for some rest. Most of them just collapsed in place to sleep, while others began to urinate or defecate wherever they happened to be. The sight of these prisoners, the most emaciated people I had ever seen, eliminating where they stood or sat, without any sign of modesty or shame, was utterly unanticipated and shocking to me. I had never witnessed such a sight before, and I have never seen anything like it since.

It wasn’t until after the end of the war, and the widespread revelations of what had been done in the concentration camps, that I understood what I had seen that day at the crossroads. Though I had become an unwitting witness to only a small fragment of the horror of the Nazi extermination machine, the image of those terribly thin, exhausted and thoroughly dehumanized prisoners became forever etched into my mind.

I was 13, a crucial and formative age, and those events and their genesis became a lifelong, even life-altering, concern of mine. I most likely would have become a comfortable businessman in Berlin, as my father had been (he died in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp). But the war and its horrifying aftermath, the recognition of what people are capable of doing to their fellow human beings, shocked me to the core and motivated me to spend much of my adult life in search of understanding the complex reasons for genocide.

It is frightening to realize that in the United States today we, too, have in our midst a sizable number of people who seem to have learned very little from the errors of the past. The Ku Klux Klan, various neo-Nazi groups and, most recently, “skinheads” have been trying to propagate their message of hate in America. Instead of dismissing these groups and their leaders as extremist or irrelevant, we must recognize that their message has not fallen on deaf ears here, either.

Why are these groups gaining in popularity, and how can we counteract such hate groups and their appeal?

American history offers numerous examples of the use of ideological delusions about white superiority. First the American Indians and then black Africans were kept “in their places” and out of competition with whites by a variety of legal barriers and outright terror. As long as there was an ample supply of cheap land and cheap labor, the ideology was justified by the “proof” of its success economically.

In Germany the contemporary parallel came with the so-called postwar economic miracle. With a relative shortage of manpower, the newly revived industries imported “guest workers” from Turkey, Portugal and other impoverished countries to do the monotonous, dirty jobs--menial work for the lowest possible wages. Over time, the guests settled in, and now their children, born and educated as Germans, are in competition with ethnic Germans.

We are still living with the vestiges of historic racism here in America, and the Germans are learning that racist ideologies did not die with the collapse of Hitler’s “Thousand-Year Reich.” In both countries, ideological delusions are again the means by which discrimination and prejudicial behaviors are justified.

Economic disparities may be the primary motivating factor in prejudice, but unfair competition and bloody conflict is often the result. Since fair and equal competition would mean that natives, or the majority, might not get the greater share of the better jobs, other means may be employed by the majority to avoid fair competition. Either existing ideologies are utilized to characterize the imported labor as inferior or worse, or new ideological delusions are developed to justify the discriminatory treatment of the imported workers. Just as blacks in America were portrayed as inferior and thus incapable of work in the mainstream, the German “Republicans” now view Turks and other non-natives as inherently inferior and thus suited only for menial and mindless work. Ironically, the Turks, who are themselves charged with the 1915 genocide of 1 1/2 million Armenians, have now become the victims. Will we ever learn?

Once racist delusions about the inherent inferiority of outsiders are accepted, the corollary of the superiority of the majority is not far behind. Many working-class people, whose own economic well-being is rather precarious, are vulnerable to appeals based on primitive ethnocentrism and nationalistic chauvinism.

Though Nazi Germany was not the only country to perpetrate mass killings in this century, the Nazis did so on an unparalleled scale and with great viciousness. Thus Germany today must be even more alert to such developments. Its recent history demands not just reparations and restitution, but an even greater sensitivity to the kinds of actions and attitudes that bred and supported the Nazis. We cannot afford to forget, and we certainly cannot let this happen again.