In his book Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust, author Andrew I. Port, a professor of history at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, examines the impact of memories of the Third Reich and the “Final Solution” on Germany’s responses to genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. Would politicians and policymakers have acted differently, Port asks, if discussions of the Holocaust had not helped stimulate an “intensive reckoning” with Germany’s past?
In 1979, as 20 million West Germans – one-third of the population – watched the four-part television miniseries Holocaust, produced in the US, German journalists used the phrases “final solution,” “concentration camps,” “gas chambers,” and “extermination” to describe the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia as a “holocaust.”
Although Jürgen Möllemann, chair of the Bundestag’s Subcommittee on Humanitarians Assistance, indicated that he was “usually very cautious” about making comparisons to the Third Reich, he declared that the suffering of Cambodians was much like the “horror and misery” visited on victims of the Nazi “machinery of destruction.” Not surprisingly, the Association for the German Language designated “holocaust” as its Word of the Year.
“History loomed large,” Port demonstrates, in the “evocative imagery and jarring language” Germans used to describe mass murders in Bosnia and Rwanda, as well as Cambodia. Atrocities in Bosnia, proclaimed Freimut Duve, a member of the Bundestag, fit the definition of genocide in the UN Convention of 1948, created in the wake of Auschwitz.
Eyewitnesses reported that anyone who did not wear a white armband designed by Serbs became “a victim of terror,” a perverse “reversal of the Nazi Star of David.” Serbs also drew on “fascist anti-Jewish laws” as models for their own decrees. And, Port writes, reports of the “foul stench” of decomposing bodies, and the nervous laughter of Hutus, when asked where their Tutsi neighbors had gone, triggered memories among Germans of the “dark period” in their history.
Measuring the relationship between “pervasive allusions to Germans’ own past crimes” and government policies, Port acknowledges, is difficult. After all, “analogies and associations with Nazism were often ‘just’ rhetorical devices.”
Drawing on the lessons of World War 2
DEMONSTRATING THE “fungibility of history,” consciously or unconsciously, politicians, diplomats, humanitarian activists, academics, and journalists drew on different lessons from World War II “to make their cases for diametrically opposed arguments about military entanglements abroad.”
Port also recognizes the role of pragmatic considerations, especially political and economic costs and benefits; military options and risks; pressure from allies; domestic public opinion; and partisan political calculations.
Struggling to explain how Communists could have committed genocide in Cambodia, for example, officials in East Germany, then under the thumb of the Soviet Union, labeled the Khmer Rouge puppets of China, with its Maoist “obedience to the Fuhrer,” the “complete opposite of Marxism.”
After welcoming Cambodian refugees, chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s cabinet reduced additional immigration in response to an economic downturn and an increase in xenophobic violence in 1981.
In the fall of 1979, the Federal Republic joined many of its allies and voted to continue to recognize the Khmer Rouge as the legal representative of Cambodia (instead of the Vietnamese regime that ruled the country). Moral considerations, Schmidt subsequently indicated, played no role in his government’s decision. More relevant, Port notes, was increasing trade with emerging economic powerhouses in Asia, including China.
When Germans across the political spectrum agreed to extend humanitarian aid to Cambodia a few years later, Port writes, “the systematic murder of the Jews” was not necessarily foremost in their minds.
Despite calls to “do something,” and the use of Nazi atrocities as the default historical analogy, neither Germany nor any other nation in the international community “lifted a finger” to stop the slaughter in Rwanda.
“Stark facts” trumped human rights rhetoric. They included straitened financial circumstances in the wake of reunification between East and West Germany; perceived constitutional constraints; a consensus that Rwanda was not vital to Germany’s national interest; and racism.
GERMANY DID respond more decisively to reports of genocide in Bosnia.
The “burden of the past” and “the legacy of the Third Reich,” Port suggests, “weighed heavily on Germany’s present actions and decisions,” including authorization of limited military participation, short of sending ground troops, in concert with European allies and the United States, and substantial humanitarian assistance.
But here again, practical considerations played a pivotal role.
Germany had economic ties to the Balkans, which was in its neighborhood – a sizable Yugoslav contingent lived in the Federal Republic; the stature of Germany on the world stage had increased; and then-US president Bill Clinton was exerting behind-the-scenes pressure on Bonn to join a coalition.
Germany crossed a Rubicon, according to Port, after Srebrenica became the site of the most horrific slaughter in Europe in 50 years. German diplomats played an important role in the Dayton Accords that ended the conflict. And Germany sent hundreds of soldiers to enforce the peace.
In the Bundestag, Christian Schwarz-Schilling quoted from the entrance to the newly built Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC: “Out of our memory... of the Holocaust we must forge an unshakable oath with all civilized people that never again will the world stand silent, never again... fail in time to prevent this terrible crime of genocide.”
At the end of the 20th century, Schwarz-Schilling reminded his colleagues, “We have not kept this promise.” But, Port indicates, with a few exceptions, “genocide of the Jews was not a direct motivation for the decision to commit armed forces.”
In the 21st century, Port writes, Germany still struggles to balance “too much” with “too little” memory. Along with so many other countries, Germany reacted barely at all to genocides in Darfur and against the Rohingya in Myanmar. However, it is sending heavy weapons to Ukraine.
That said, during the debate about aid to Ukraine, only one member of the Bundestag referred to “the heavy mortgage of German history.” And Germans are now pinning Nazi crimes on Russia.
Is Germany now a “normal” nation? Port asks. Only to answer his own question by emphasizing that the decision on Ukraine “roiled Germany like no other place in the West, and that in itself showed just how much the country’s conflicted past continued to count.”
Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
- NEVER AGAIN: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust
- By Andrew I. Port
- Belknap Press
- 416 pages; $18