Belarus, Nazis and Psalm 82/2

pictures above from 82, published by AMC

Martin Toft wrote about walking to war earlier this week which connected to Michal Iwanowski's recreating the walk his grandfather did at the end of the Second World War; a walk that went through Russia, Belarus and Lithuania before he reached his devastated homeland of Poland.

Mention Belarus and it automatically makes me think of the Greatest War Film Ever Made (GWFEM), Come and See. I wrote about Come and See here, it's a brutal tale of a young partisan's walk through the murder and devastation of a country where the policy of extermination went on beyond the camps.




Janina Struk writes about what happened in Belarus (and beyond) in her excellent book, Private Pictures, Soldiers' Inside View of War. She talks about the post-war erasing of memory, the simplification and shrinkage of events into the Holocaust and what happened in the camps and the way in which large parts of the Wehrmacht were absolved from all responsibility as though war crimes only happened in the camps and nowhere else.

This was a result of the Nuremberg war trials. Once the leading Nazis were imprisoned. writes Struk, '...a clear distinction was made between crimes committed by the Nazis and the millions of soldiers who had fought an 'honourable' war. Historian Omar Bartov wrote: 'If the initial purpose (of the tribunals) had been to punish and purge, the ultimate result was to acquit and cover up.''

Struk also writes about the War of Extermination exhibition that toured Germany in the late 1990s and  challenged the myth of the honourable war fought by the regular Wehrmacht soldier and how this shook people out of their comfort zones.

Interestingly, Struk extends the argument and describes how these images could be seen as a wider narrative on war and the use of images, that abuse extends into different wars and conflicts and images such as the Abu Ghraib pictures of 2004 share a family resemblance to those of Jews being persecuted in Europe in the 1940s ( and here's a video of anti-semitism in contemporary France).

She also notes that the reaction of the American authorities to the Abu Ghraib pictures - to prosecute those who took and posed in the photographs, was not so different to the reaction of the Nazi authorities to those who took pictures of atrocities in the Second World War: she mentions the case of  Max Täubner, an SS officer who was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment in 1943 not for killing Jews, but for photographing their deaths.

The pictures that Täubner took could have appeared in the two volume set  82, published by AMC.

The book is in two parts, both of which feature the private pictures that Struk writes about, the pictures of people directly involved in the events portrayed. 82/1 looks at the material loss of the war; burned out houses and crashed planes. 82/2 looks at the human loss of the war, the humiliations and atrocities, the death, the imprisonment, the violence waiting to be unleashed. Sometimes, the people portrayed (most often Eastern Europeans, Russians or Jews) are shown smiling or giving Nazi salutes

The backs of the pictures are also included (as with Melinda Gibson's great book - it just keeps on getting better and better) so giving the pictures a sense of location.

82 is edited by David Thomson and presents the pictures as they are. The backs of the pictures aside, there is no text so you have to draw your own conclusions and make your own narrative. And as Struk shows, maybe that's not as simple as might first appear.

And the title of the book. There are a couple of psalms, the second of which in particular connects to both the images and the idea that the complexities of war cannot be reduced to polarities of Good and Evil, Wehrmacht and SS, Allies and Axis, West and East.

So maybe the message of the book, and it's volume titles, is not to isolate and demonise what is so obviously evil, but instead to look into our own hearts and question our own behaviour.

A few years back, you would always see banners at World Cup matches reading John 3:16 which refers to eternal life and Jesus. Which is a bit religious for my liking. 82/2 is good for anyone/anywhere. anywhere.


Psalm 82/1: 

God presides in the great assembly; he renders judgment among the “gods”

Psalm 82/2

How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?  Give justice to the weak and the fatherless;  maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.

Belarus, Herta Muller and Come and See

These images are from an album that is not a family album, but Franz Krieger's War Album, with pictures from various locations including Belarus. It's interesting to see the images and then to question how you can have compassion for German soldiers (as with the shell-shocked soldiers featured in the top image) who were operating in Belarus, where some of the most  horrific atrocities of the Second World War took place - horrific both in terms of scale and cruelty.

Can we divide the German perpetrators into Nazis and non-Nazis, into monsters and humans. Is this useful? How exactly does it work? And how about when we measure the contemporary aftershocks of the War - how do we measure and judge and forgive? Do we forgive? Do we remember? Do we forget?

While we can all recognise Naziism as an almost unique murder machine, where does that leave our judgement of our own behaviour both during and after the war? What of British war crimes and torture, of sending home eastern European refugees to certain deaths in the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia.What of the firebombing of German cities such as Dresden or the post-war justice meted out to civilians and soldiers from the defeated sides..

It's not on the same scale as the Nazis ( or Stalin, or Mao or whoever ) but does that matter.In Cruel Britannia, Ian Cobain links the justification of torture in Afghanistan to that in the Second World War

During and just after the second world war, we hated and feared Germans, so we tortured them. Interrogators were told that "mental pressure but not physical torture is officially allowed." While murder was forbidden, interrogators were told they "were permitted to threaten to kill prisoners' wives and children", techniques that were deemed "quite proper". The interrogators read between the official lines, just as their counterparts did later in Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. They employed stress positions (standing up for eight days on end), strappado (hanging from the wrists, originally devised by the Spanish inquisition) and denial of food, combined with the "standard sleep deprivation and isolation regime". In a precise parallel with Bagram air base, two prisoners died in the custody of one Captain John Smith.



What did this systematic abuse of Germans achieve? These "interrogations … proved, beyond doubt, that Hitler was dead." When the political mandarins were faced with the horror of what had been done to the prisoners, the truth was too embarrassing to bear, so the British authorities made sure there were no public prosecutions where inconvenient truths might seep out. One witness was advised to "escape" (by walking out of the open gate) after being told that if he testified against the British officers he would be the one spending the rest of his life in prison.

The narrative of the Second World War gets simplified into an after-the-fact Good versus Evil, black and white affair - which isn't surprising really when you consider just how crazy bad the Nazis were. 

However,  the story is a bit more complex thatn that, especially for the people who were multiple victims and were born in the wrong place at the wrong time, something that could be said of Herta Muller, the Nobel Prize winning novelist from Romania.

This is from a Herta Muller interview in last weekend's Guardian

In January 1945, after the Nazi-supporting regime of Ion Antonescu had surrendered to the Red Army, all Romania's ethnic Germans aged 17-45 were deported to forced labour camps to rebuild the shattered Soviet economy. Those who survived spent five years shovelling coal and hefting bricks in a corner of the gulag.Müller's mother was among the shaven-headed deportees, who returned home three years before she was born: "As a child I perceived my mother as an old woman." All the villagers "knew of everyone who had been deported, but nobody was allowed to speak about it."

 Her father, a field labourer and alcoholic, was among many local volunteers for Hitler's Waffen-SS. "It was terrible to find my father on the murderers' side. He was a simple man, and obstinate. When I spoke about the Nazis' crimes, he always said, 'Well, look at what the Russians did.' When he spat on his shoes to shine them, I'd say, 'Ah, that's what a Nazi does.' I didn't make life easy for him." Her father was in the same tank division as Günter Grass. When Grass's teenage SS membership came to light in 2006, Müller berated him for keeping quiet about it. "If I charge my father with this, I must charge Grass, an intellectual, too" she says. "He took the moral high ground for decades. His silence was a lie."

Oh, and back to Belarus in the Second World War is the setting for Come and See, perhaps the most traumatising and relentless war movie ever.

Here's the Come and See trailer.