Requiem for a German Past
by Jurgen Herbst
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999

books reviewed by Peter G. Pollak

15 years ago when the NYS Education Department was videotaping Holocaust survivors, I tried to get my parents to volunteer. My mother complained that neither she nor my father was a Holocaust survivor because they had escaped -- as if you had to have been in a concentration camp to qualify as a survivor. To me, and not just because they were my parents, their stories were important no matter how much less they suffered than people who didn't escape. Each person's story qualifies as having historical significance, I believe, when it sheds light on important historical events, and few events of the modern era are harder to understand than the phenomena of Nazi Germany.

Fortunately, hundreds of survivors have told their stories in histories, videos, poems and memoirs. In my family, two of my mother's cousins and the mother of one of my best friends have written personal accounts -- all from the side of the victims. There is less literature from the other side -- that is, from people who were caught up in the Nazi tidal wave, but were not its intended victims.

Understanding what European Jews and others suffered is important because it honors their memory and provides motivation for each generation to remain vigilant. It may be more important, however, to understand how Hitler and the Nazi Party were able to obtain absolute power even when as late as March of 1933 the majority of Germans voted against them.

The publication of a memoir by Sebastian Haffner adds an important piece to that literature. Born in 1907 to an "Aryan" family in Berlin, Haffner left Germany in 1938 for England where he joined the chorus of expatriates who warned the free world to take Hitler's threat seriously. After the war he continued to write commentary and histories on European topics. The memoir - written in the late 1930s and found among his effects after his death in 1999 - was translated by his son and released in English for the first time this year.

As much an intellectual history as a memoir, Haffner describes the cultural and political climate of Berlin during the 1920's and 30's. He relates how he personally and Germans at first rationalized the Nazi Party's step by step rise to power and then had to come to grips with the fact that Hitler meant what he said.

Haffner describes a revealing incident in 1933 when he failed to protest when confronted personally for the first time. Until then like the majority of Germans he did nothing because his own life had not been affected. By the time he and his friends realized what had taken place, personal protest meant imprisonment if not immediate death. Their only options were to join the Nazi Party or to leave. Yet like Haffner, many continued to temporize. Haffner moved to Paris for a short time, but then returned and did not leave finally until 1939.

Haffner argues the importance of understanding this particular period in history through the eyes of someone like himself. While it is important is not just what Hitler and his advisers were planning or how the rest of the world responded, it's also crucial to try to understand what prevented the Sebastian Haffners in Germany from appreciating and acting on the danger that Hitler represented.

In his view it was a combination of their history - the experience of losing World War I is primary - and culture. Hitler tapped into German nationalism, providing the country an explanation for their problems and the solution. Too few cared about the methods he intended to employ.

A very different account of the same period was published in 1999 by Jurgen Herbst, emeritus professor of history and educational policy at the University of Wisconsin. Their lives couldn't have been more different, starting with their origins. Sebastian Haffner was the son of a career bureaucrat. He enjoyed the economic and social status of that class. Herbst, who was born in 1928, was the son of a librarian and self-styled scholar, the first of his family to attend a university.

Haffner saw history unfold from Berlin - the center of the action. Herbst lived in a small town 50 miles outside of Hannover, hundreds of miles from Berlin. Unlike Haffner who witnessed events first hand, Herbst first felt the ripples and then the aftershocks of the Nazi takeover.

Haffner's family was typical for its class - their religion was less important than their nationality. Haffner's best friend was Jewish; he dated Jewish girls and when the first of the anti-Jewish laws was passed he told his family he planned to convert to Judaism in protest. The Herbsts were Lutherans and the church played a major role in their lives. It was part and parcel of their nationality.

With little guidance from a father who was called back into the army when he was only 11, Herbst joined the Jungvolk, a youth organization through which Nazi propaganda was spread throughout the nation. Herbst found in the Jungvolk what boys value -- purpose, challenge and friendship - and he rose to a leadership position. At one point when his father was home on leave, Herbst told him he planned to join the SS, the Nazi Party's fighting force. His father flew into a rage and made him promise to never do such a thing.

Captain Herbst - his first name is never mentioned in the book - represented a part of German society that also enabled Hitler to obtain power despite abhorring much of what he stood for. The German army was built to instill the values of national pride in the ranks. Above all being a solider meant personal sacrifice for a higher cause. While honor and obedience in many ways helped Herbst come through the war without being debased, Haffner points out that the Army's leaders did nothing to stop Hitler when something could have been done.

Each element of German society that potentially stood in Hitler's way - the Army, the state bureaucracy, the political opposition parties, even the churches - crumbled and gave in. Little can be learned from the failure of the leaders of these institutions. They lacked the courage of their convictions. In other societies, leaders are replaced when they fail; in Germany, where democratic values were underdeveloped, too many people just threw up their hands. That makes the lives of the few who defied, resisted and acted - if only to flee - so interesting.

From Sebastian Haffner we learn how and why one individual refused to become a Nazi when many of his friends did. From Jurgen Herbst we learn how the traditional value system of the Lutheran German solider provided a reference point with which to resist Nazism. Herbst was fortunate to survive his brief experience at the western front and after the war he made it to the US through the aid of the Quakers.

To close the circle, Jurgen Herbst's memoir is dedicated to Felix Pollak, my late uncle who Herbst credits with recognizing the value of his story and encouraging him to write it down. Like my parents Herbst at first doubted the historical value of his experience. Hopefully, those who read his story and also read Sebastian's Haffner's memoir will appreciate how important these personal accounts are to our understanding of how great evil can for a short time prevail.

Peter G. Pollak is editor in chief of The Empire Page and CEO of Empire Information Services, Inc.

10/04/2002