Reckonings: Legacies Of Nazi Persecution And The Quest For Justice, Fulbrook - B, Inc.

  This award-winning book explores how people were transformed by the experiences of the Holocaust. Both the processes of  persecution, and the long-term reverberations, are explored through the experiences of the perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. Early on, the Nazis sponsored state violence in order to reestablish law and order and to clear Germany of undesirables. Before the war, the 1930's saw the construction of camps throughout the country, often in close proximity to major cities. Jews, Roma, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses were uniformly condemned, imprisoned, tortured, and often murdered. "The work of leading Nazis was made infinitely easier by varying combinations  of support, complicity, acquiescence, accommodation, or capitulation among those who, for whatever reasons, did not engage in courageous acts of resistance or organized opposition." Many advanced their careers by enthusiastically embracing the Nazi's policies. Far more widespread was simple conformity. The first mass victims of Nazi extermination policies met their death in Germany, not Poland. They were the mentally and physically disabled,  whose life was deemed unworthy of living. For the common good, euthanasia of the disabled began in 1939, starting with infants and eventually, children and adults. The medical profession committed the crimes and the state's lawyers looked the other way. The euthanasia killing centers were in Germany proper and became known to the local public, who occasionally raised a mild complaint, but generally accepted what was going on around them. Those who managed the program learned important skills and many were later transferred east to participate in the burgeoning Holocaust. Those who assisted had such small roles in a large programs that they were able to later claim that their contributions were de minimis. 

  The occupation of Poland led to the first ghettos and death camps, and the opportunity for non-Germans to aid and abet the Nazis. For two years, until the invasion of the USSR and the decision to implement the Final Solution the Jews starved and suffered in Poland's ghettos. From that point on, the Jews of Poland, whether in city ghettos or small towns,  and the Jews from the rest of Europe were sent to the charnel houses. As the war's progression led to manpower shortages in German industry, many Jews, as well as POWs, were worked to death as slave laborers. Somewhere between 200,000 and one million people were directly involved in killing Jewish civilians. The invasion of the USSR gave free range to the Einsatzgruppen, who slaughtered 1.8 million Jews in the opening months of Barbarossa. The work of killing innocents was so stressful that the Reich had to devise a more efficient method than shooting in place. Zyklon-B was utilized at Auschwitz and its success led to the scaling up of the Nazi's industrial killing machines.  "Auschwitz remains an iconic site not only of remembrance but also of selective oblivion." Its place in history as the epitome of evil has been sealed by the number of deaths -well over a million - and the number of survivors whose memoirs ably described the horrors that took place there. At nearby Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec, pure extermination camps, where there was no work to be done by the prisoners, there were virtually no survivors. And without witnesses, very few of the managers of the extermination camps were ever brought to justice. The killings returned to Germany as the war waned. The Soviet arrival sent hundreds of thousands on forced marches from the camps into the Reich. Those marches became known as death marches and every corner of Germany saw them. For those who survived, "the experience of persecution was the defining experience of their life, they could never forget or evade the past, only learn to live with it." Their lives changed in a matter of minutes and they went from living a normal life to losing any sense of individuality and even humanity. They became members of a subspecies. For those who survived, "they were neither entirely of  the living nor of the dead, but rather a community apart." Most survivors could only talk about their experiences with other survivors and even then, sparingly. 

  In Poland, occupied Germany and Austria, many were brought to swift justice in the immediate aftermath of the war. Nuremberg saw the trial of the top dozen surviving Nazi leaders and the exposition of their atrocities to the world. The Americans followed up with successor trials against the Army, the Luftwaffe, government bureaucrats, doctors, the Einsatzgruppen, concentration camp officials, industrial leaders,  I.G. Farben, manufacturer of Zyklon-B and others. The British held 358 trials.  Although there were hundreds executed, most were sentenced to jail and almost all of those jail terms were reduced because of a general amnesty in 1950. These men were need back in society to assist West Germany in the Cold War. West Germany also developed what the author calls 'the alibi of a nation', scapegoating the excesses of the SS and the Gestapo and alleging the army was clean. After the victors' trials, each of the successor states, Austria, East and West Germany also held trials, with the focus on activities in those states and involving crimes against fellow Germans or Austrians. 

   At the half way point in this book, I was forced to call it quits. The topic is of immeasurable consequence, one I have an interest in and a meaningful amount of knowledge about. But, the depth of the detail and the fact that in order to deal with a given topic, e.g., the use of slave labor, the author roves far, wide, back and forth and into specifics about one or two people, and then back to industry or state wide topics left me spinning.