Tony Judt - Postwar

The death and morbid afterlife of Princess Diana may seem an exception to this rule. But even though many other Europeans watched her funeral on television, they lost interest soon enough. The bizarre outpouring of public grief was a strictly British affair.

The notorious exception was a tiny but very hard core of German and (especially) English fans who travelled to international games explicitly in search of a fight, to the utter mystification of everyone else.

In January 2003, at the initiative of the Spanish and British prime ministers, eight European governments (Britain, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Italy, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic) signed a joint declaration of pro-American solidarity. Within a few months the Hungarians and Czechs were privately expressing their regrets and expressing bitterness at having been ‘bullied’ into signing by the Spanish Prime Minister, José María Aznar. A year later Aznar himself was thrown out of office by Spanish voters, in large measure for having led Spain into the ‘coalition’ to invade Iraq—something to which the nation was overwhelmingly opposed.

‘Yes, Americans put up huge billboards reading “Love Thy Neighbor”, but they murder and rape their neighbors at rates that would shock any European nation’. T. R. Reid, The United States of Europe (NY, 2004), p. 218.

The new business class in Eastern Europe, it should be noted, ate, dressed, phoned and drove European. To be modern it was no longer necessary to imitate Americans. Quite the contrary: American consumer products were frequently disdained as ‘dowdy’ or ‘bland’.

In France in 1960 there were four workers for every pensioner. In 2000 there were two. By 2020, on present trends, there would be just one.

In 2004, health costs absorbed 8 percent of GDP in Sweden but 14 percent in the USA. Four-fifths of the cost was borne by the government in Sweden, less than 45 percent by the Federal government in the US. The rest was a direct burden on American businesses and their employees. Forty-five million Americans had no health insurance.

Under Delors’ successors the pendulum has shifted: the Commission is still as active as ever, but its efforts are directed to de -regulating markets.

In Europe, but not in America. In international surveys at the end of the twentieth century, the number of Americans claiming to be ‘very proud’ of their country exceeded 75 percent. In Europe only the Irish and the Poles exhibited similar patriotic verve; elsewhere the number of ‘very proud’ people ranged from 49 percent (Latvians) to 17 percent (former West Germans).

The American prosecutor Telford Taylor was struck by this in retrospect but acknowledges that he did not even notice it at the time—a revealing admission. See Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (NY, 1992), p. 296.

In the town of Pithiviers, near Orléans, where Jewish children rounded up in Paris were kept until their shipment east, a monument was actually erected in 1957 bearing the inscription ‘ A nos déportés morts pour la France’ . Only in 1992 did the local municipality erect a new plaque, more accurate if less reassuring. It reads: ‘To the memory of the 2300 Jewish children interned at the Pithiviers camp from July 19th to September 6th 1942, before being deported and murdered in Auschwitz’.

Giuliana Tedeschi is quoted by Nicola Caracciolo in Uncertain Refuge: Italy and the Jews During the Holocaust (University of Illinois Press, 1995), p. 121.

In post-war Britain, an unusually thin or sickly person might be described as looking ‘like something out of Belsen’. In France, fairground chambers of horror were labelled ‘Buchenwalds’—as an inducement to voyeuristic trade.

See The Times Literary Supplement for October 4th 1996. Jews were not the first people in Britain to opt for discretion where the Holocaust was concerned. The wartime government under Churchill chose not to deploy information about the death camps in its propaganda against Germany lest this incite an increase in anti-Semitic feelings—already quite high in some parts of London, as wartime intelligence reports had noted.

Especially in America. In 1950 the Displaced Persons’ Commission of the US Congress stated that ‘The Baltic Waffen SS units are to be considered as separate and distinct in purpose, ideology, activities and qualifications from the German SS. Therefore the Commission holds them not to be a movement hostile to the government of the United States’. The Baltic Waffen SS had been among the most brutal and enthusiastic when it came to torturing and killing Jews on the Eastern Front; but in the novel circumstances of the Cold War they were of course ‘our’ Nazis. I am grateful to Professor Daniel Cohen of Rice University for this information.

Except of course in Israel.

In October 1991, following the desecration of tombs in Vienna’s Jewish cemetery, Gallup polled Austrians on their attitude to Jews: 20 percent thought ‘positions of authority’ should be closed to Jews; 31 percent declared that they ‘would not want a Jew as a neighbour’; fully 50 percent were ready to agree with the proposition that ‘Jews are responsible for their past persecution’.

The Poles happily agreed—for these purposes Warsaw saw no impediment to defining Jews as Poles…

Ondergang was published in English in 1968 as The Destruction of the Dutch Jews .

See Sonia Combe, Archives interdites: Les peurs françaises face à l’histoire contemporaine (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), p. 14.

Professor Paxton of Columbia University, who had initiated historical investigation into Vichy’s crimes nearly a quarter of a century earlier (when most of his French colleagues were otherwise engaged), took a less monastic view of his professional calling and gave important testimony.

When US President Ronald Reagan, on a visit to West Germany in 1985, was advised to avoid the military cemetery at Bitburg (site of a number of SS graves) and pay his respects at a concentration camp instead, Chancellor Kohl wrote to warn him that this ‘would have a serious psychological effect on the friendly sentiments of the German people for the United States of America.’ The Americans duly capitulated; Reagan visited Belsen and Bitburg…

Quoted by Ian Buruma in ‘Buchenwald’, Granta 42, 1992.

When the Czechoslovak parliament voted in 1991 to restitute property seized after the war it explicitly limited the benefits to those expropriated after 1948 —so as to exclude Sudeten Germans expelled in 1945-46, before the Communists seized power.

Under President Putin, Russia continues to insist that the Balts were liberated by the Red Army, after which they voluntarily joined the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The memorial was not uncontroversial: in addition to many who disliked its abstract conception there were those, including a Christian Democrat Mayor of the city, Eberhard Diepgen, who criticized it for helping turn Berlin into ‘the capital of repentance’.