{"id":374,"date":"2014-11-03T13:10:21","date_gmt":"2014-11-03T11:10:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.AVNER-FALK.NET\/?page_id=374"},"modified":"2024-12-11T20:37:36","modified_gmt":"2024-12-11T18:37:36","slug":"germany","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/?page_id=374","title":{"rendered":"Mastering the Past"},"content":{"rendered":"
How Germans and Jews have Dealt with the Nazi Past and with the Holocaust<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\r\n

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What Vergangenheitsbew\u00e4ltigung<\/em> is All About<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\r\n

Every person\u2019s family has a history. The history of his or her parents and grandparents may affect the entire life of the person. My <\/span>German Jewish paternal grandfather, Curt David Falk (1877-1944), who in his middle age changed the spelling of his first name to Kurt, had a successful leather business in Breslau when he was incarcerated in the Buchenwald death camp for twelve days after the infamous German Reichskristallnacht<\/em> of 1938. He left the camp broken and sick in body and mind. A few days after his release he fled Germany with his wife to British-ruled Palestine, where they joined their two sons and their daughter. They arrived in Palestine in late 1938. My grandfather died there less than six years later, when I was a one-year-old baby. <\/span><\/p>\r\n

His widow, Hulda Falk-Sandberg (1880-1969), my paternal grandmother, survived her husband by twenty-five years, and was the only grandparent I ever knew.When I was a child I spoke little or no German, whereas she only spoke German, yet we got along very well. In fact, my knowledge of the German language began with her, and with the German phrases my parents exchanged at home. German was their Geheimsprache<\/em> (secret language), which they spoke when they did not want me and my sister to understand what they were saying.
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My Polish <\/span>Jewish maternal grandfather, Josef Hersz Szpiro (1880-1941), died of starvation in the German-created \u201cGetto Litzmannstadt\u201d (the Lodz ghetto). It was a part of the the Polish city of Lodz, which the German occupiers had renamed \u201cLitzmannstadt\u201d after the First World War German general and war hero Karl Litzmann (1850-1936). <\/span><\/p>\r\n

The ghetto was surrounded by a high wall and sealed off from the rest of the town. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were packed into the ghetto, and most of them died of starvation and disease, as very little food or water came into the ghetto. Nonetheless, non-Jewish Poles constantly crossed a bridge that the Germans had erected over a main street in the ghetto, while a streetcar regularly crossed the ghetto as if life there were quite normal. The German documentary filmmaker Tanja Cummings has made a touching film about it, entitled Linie 41 <\/em>(see here<\/a>). <\/span><\/p>\r\n

The survivors of the \u201cGetto Litzmannstadt\u201d were murdered in the German death camps. My grandfather\u2019s wife, Bluma Kohn Szpiro (1879-1942) <\/span> and six of their ten children were gassed to death by the German occupiers of Poland in the Chelmno (Kulmhof) death camp in 1942. Four of their children survived. My other and her older sister had immigrated to Palestine, while two of their brothers had fled to Russia and to France.
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As I researched my family\u2019s history in the German, Polish and Israeli archives, I became aware of my hitherto unconscious identification with my murdered maternal grandfather, after whom I would have been named, had my mother know in 1943 that her father had died two years earlier. That was because the \u201cAshkenazi\u201d (German or European) Jewish tradition does not allow the naming of a newborn child after a living family member, such as a grandfather. I have had to go through the psychological process of Vergangenheitsbew\u00e4ltigung<\/em>, a German word that means \u201ccoping with the past,\u201d \u201cmastering the past\u201d or \u201cdealing with the past.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\r\n

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A Torah Scroll<\/strong><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n

In 2010 I first learned of the existence of a relic of my maternal grandfather\u2019s Torah Scroll, one of its four rings. Those rings serve to separate the handles from the rollers, as well as to support the scroll when it is laid on the bimah<\/em> (stand). My grandfather had <\/span>donated the Scroll to the Zgierz synagogue in 1927, and the synagogue was destroyed by the Germans in 1939, with most of its Torah Scrolls and other sacred objects being broken, cut up and burnt up. The German occupiers hated the Jews with a passion, and saw them as the embodiment of evil.
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Some of these sacred objects, such as fragments of the desecrated Torah Scrolls, were placed in a casket and buried in the Zgierz cemetery. The Germans in turn plowed the cemetery, dug up the casket and either destroyed or looted its contents. My grandfather\u2019s Torah Ring survived the Holocaust, was brought from Poland to Germany,was given to <\/span>the theologian-pastor Otto Michel (1903-1993), who kept it in his home from 1939 or 1940 until his death. As he lived in T\u00fcbingen, his widow donated the Torah Ring to <\/span>the T\u00fcbingen city museum. <\/span><\/p>\r\n

Since 2010, I h<\/span>ave been slowly carrying out my Vergangenheitsbew\u00e4ltigung<\/em> by researching the history of my maternal grandfather\u2019s Torah Ring, namely, how it came from Poland to Germany and why it was donated to Otto Michel.
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The words we use in our every day political discourse are intimately connected to our psychology. <\/span>Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) understood this (see here<\/a>), as did <\/span>George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair, 1903-1950; see here<\/a>). <\/span>In his famous satire The Awful German Language, <\/em>the American humorist Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910) poked fun at the extremely-long concatenated German words such as Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapit\u00e4n<\/em> (captain of the Danube Steamship Travel Society). While not quite as long, <\/span>Vergangenheitsbew\u00e4ltigung<\/em> is <\/span>such a word. The past in this word is the Nazi rule of 1933-1945, arguably the worst time in German history, perhaps also in human history. This essay sets out to explore whether this uniquely German term denotes a <\/span>psychological reality, a wishful fantasy, or a collective psychic defense, in other words, how much of it is real and how much of it is fantasy.
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We are concerned here with the psychology of large groups, such as the Germans or the Jews, and this is no simple matter. As the French scholar Charles-Marie-Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931) discovered in the late nineteenth century, collective psychology is very different from that of the individual (see here<\/a>). <\/span><\/span>The Anglo-Irish scholar Benedict Anderson (1936-2015) has shown that nations are \u201cimagined communities” that exist primarily in the minds of their members, or in the minds of the members of other nations, rather than in actual reality (see here<\/a>). <\/span><\/span>My mentor, the Turkish-Cypriot-born American psychoanalyst Vam\u0131k Volkan (born 1932), developed and expanded the study of the psychology of \u201clarge groups\u201d such as nations or religions (see here<\/a>).
<\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n

The German psychoanalysts Alexander Mitscherlich (1908-1982), his Danish-born wife Margarete Mitscherlich-Nielsen (1917-2012) have shown that it is not only hard for the Jews to deal with their huge collective trauma of the Holocaust, in which millions of Jews were mass-murdered by Germans and their collaborators, it is also hard for the Germans to deal with their painful collective memory of their Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945, which perpetrated crimes against humanity, genocide, and mass murder (see here<\/a>). After all, it was the parents, grandparents or great-grandparents of living Germans who perpetrated the enormous crimes of the Holocaust. Their offspring must find ways to deal with this painful fact.
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The Germans have unique words for their collective efforts at Vergangenheitsbew\u00e4ltigung<\/em>, their attempts to deal with their terrible Nazi past. These words include <\/span>Auseinandersetzung (<\/em>sorting out) and <\/span>Wiedergutmachung <\/em>(reparation). This last word literally means \u201cmaking good again,\u201d and refers to the German government\u2019s \u201creparations\u201d payments to the surviving Jews and to Israel, as well as to the personal contributions of individual German volunteers to the welfare of Holocaust victims and other people in need in Israel and in the U.S. (see here<\/a>).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n

Germany\u2019s <\/span>efforts at <\/span>Wiedergutmachung <\/em>have been staggering. Germany has paid billions of dollars in Wiedergutmachung <\/em>money to Holocaust survivors and to their heirs through various German-Jewish programs and agreements. <\/span><\/p>\r\n

The primary organization involved in negotiating and distributing these funds was the U.S.-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (known in short as the Claims Conference), which has offices in Israel, in Europe and elsewhere. Payments have been made to Holocaust survivors globally, including those who were incarcerated in concentration camps, or in ghettos, or those who lived in hiding during the German occupation of their country.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

In the historical discourse about the Holocaust, the Jewish victims are often said to have been killed by \u201cNazi\u201d murder groups or to have been the victims of \u201cNazi\u201d persecution. While the German government was indeed ruled by Hitler\u2019s NSDAP (the Nazi party), the persecution and murders of the Jews were perpetrated by Germans rather than by members of the Nazi party. Many of these Germans were ordinary men rather than Nazi party members (see here<\/a>). By 1940 the NSDAP had eight million members out of a population of over seventy million Germans. <\/span>The use of the phrase \u201cvictims of Nazi persecution\u201d is erroneous and is intended to obscure the fact that the Jews were victims of German<\/strong> persecution.
<\/span><\/p>\r\n

The Jewish <\/span>groups that have received Wiedergutmachung <\/em> include Jewish refugees from the former Soviet Union who fled the German Einsatzgruppen<\/em>, the German mobile killing units during World War II. <\/span>Compensation has also been paid to the heirs of Holocaust victims. <\/span>From 1945 to 2018 Germany paid approximately $86.8 billion in Wiedergutmachung <\/em> restitution and compensation to Holocaust victims and to their heirs. <\/span><\/p>\r\n

The Claims Conference has negotiated additional payments by Germany to its Jewish victims. In 2024 Germany committed $1.4 billion for Holocaust survivors, which included $888.9 million for home care and supportive services and $175 million for the Hardship Fund. The Hardship Fund <\/span>provides one-time payments to Jewish victims who were persecuted and who meet specific eligibility criteria. <\/span>Eligible applicants receive a one-time payment of 2,556.46 Euros. The Hardship Fund <\/span>is primarily intended for Jewish survivors who we<\/span>re not incarcerated in death camps or in ghettos, who f<\/span>led the German mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen<\/em>), and who are <\/span>ineligible for other German pension and compensation programs. <\/span><\/p>\r\n

The Hardship Fund w<\/span>as created in 1980 by the Federal Republic of Germany with an initial amount of DM 400 million. <\/span>The Jewish Claims Conference administered the applications and the payments, as stipulated by its agreement with the German government. <\/span>Germany has agreed to extend the Hardship Fund Supplemental program until 2027. <\/span>This extension will provide additional annual payments of about $1,350 each to approximately 128,000 Holocaust survivors. <\/span>The Hardship Fund has approved nearly five hundred thousand applications of Jewish victims of German persecution for payment, paying them a total of about $1.5 billion. <\/span>While the payments are symbolic, they offer some financial relief to many elderly Jewish Holocaust survivors, particularly those from the former Soviet Union who may be among the poorest in the Holocaust survivor community. In addition, t<\/span>he <\/span>Child Survivor Fund provides one-time payments to Jewish survivors who were children during the Holocaust. <\/span>Germany also funds extensive social welfare services for survivors, including home care, food, medicine, and transportation, through a network of over 300 social welfare agencies in 83 countries. In short, Germany has made supreme efforts to compensate financially those Jews who had been persecuted by Germans during the Third Reich (1933-1945).<\/span><\/p>\r\n

The Flakhelfer<\/em> were the youngest generation of German soldiers in the Second World War. They were teenagers in 1943, and were drafted as teenagers into Hitler’s Wehrmacht<\/em> and Luftwaffe<\/em> as Germany was losing the war. <\/span><\/span>The German investigative journalist Malte Herwig (Born 1972) found that many of the Flakhelfer<\/em> later concealed their Nazi past, convinced themselves that they had been forced to become Nazis, and some of them went on to become major literary, social or political figures in post-war Germany (see here<\/a><\/span>). The best-known among these Flakhelfer<\/em> was the German writer G\u00fcnter Grass (1926-2015), who only revealed his teen-age membership in the Waffen-SS<\/em> during the last decade of his life.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

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Malte Herwig \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/strong> \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 G\u00fcnter Grass
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Since 2002, Malte Herwig has published his articles in German and international media, including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit, Welt, Deutschlandradio Kultur, Literaturen, Cicero, Weltwoche, The Observer <\/em>and The New York Times<\/em>. He was an editor in the culture section of Der Spiegel<\/em> for several years. In 2005, Eliten in einer egalit\u00e4ren Welt<\/em> was published, an examination of the newly emerging debate about elite universities. <\/span><\/span><\/span>In 2009, Herwig sparked a controversy when he published in Weltwoche<\/em> and Zeit-Magazin<\/em> the alleged NSDAP<\/em> membership of the German composer Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012) and of the German writer Dieter Wellershoff (1933-2005) based on research in the German Bundesarchiv<\/em>. <\/span><\/span><\/span>In 2010 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Meister der D\u00e4mmerung<\/em>, <\/span><\/span><\/span>Herwig\u2019s biography of the German writer and future Nobel Prize laureate Peter Handke (born 1942), was published by the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt<\/em>. <\/span><\/span><\/span>The German journalist Hannah Franziska Augstein (born 1964) criticized Herwig, saying that Henze did not deserve his \u201clifelong advocacy in word and in tone for peace, humanity and justice […] being degraded to an exercise in penitence\u201d (see here<\/a>). However, Henze\u2019s (and Wellershoff\u2019s) NSDAP<\/em> membership was indisputable. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\r\n
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In 2013 Herwig published the Spiegel<\/em> bestseller Die Flakhelfer<\/em>.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span>In 2018, Herwig discovered several hundred audio cassettes in the basement of the former Stern<\/em> reporter Gerd Heidemann (born 1931), containing recorded conversations that Heidemann had had between 1980 and 1983 with Konrad Kujau (1938-2000), the forger of the \u201cHitler diaries,\u201d whose forgeries Heidemann had sold to Stern<\/em> for ten million German Marks. Heidemann was arrested, charged with fraud, convicted, and sentenced to four and a half years in jail. <\/span><\/span><\/span>Herwig is also the author and speaker of the German television mini-series Faking Hitler,<\/em> which has won multiple awards.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\r\n
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The Saga of the Torah Ring from Zgierz<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\r\n

The saga of my maternal grandfather\u2019s Torah Ring began for me in the summer of 2010, when Hans-Joachim Lang, a prominent Holocaust historian and journalist in the southwestern German university town of T\u00fcbingen, who is now an honorary professor of history at the university of T\u00fcbingen, contacted me by e-mail. He had found my name in the <\/span><\/span>online archives of <\/span><\/span>Yad Vashem<\/em> (see here<\/a>), in a \u201c<\/span><\/span>page of <\/span><\/span>testimony\u201d that I had filled out for my <\/span>maternal grandfather, Jozef Hersz Szpiro, who had died of hunger and disease in the Lodz ghetto in 1941, aged only sixty.When I filled out that \u201cpage of testimony\u201d in 1999 I had no idea that my grandfather had died in the Lodz ghetto in 1941. I erroneously entered the year of his death as 1944 and the place of his death as Auschwitz.
<\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n

The T\u00fcbingen city government had just published the existence in its museum of a wooden Torah Ring from Zgierz, my mother\u2019s home town, which had been in its possession since 1994. <\/span><\/span>This Torah Ring turned out to be one of the four <\/span>wooden <\/span>rings of the Jerusalem-made housing of a Torah scroll that my maternal grandfather had donated to his Zgierz synagogue in 1927 in memory of his deceased parents, after visiting Palestine with his Hasidic rebbe<\/em> and buying the housing for his Torah scroll in Jerusalem. From September to November 1939 the Zgierz synagogue was attacked several times and finally burned down (see here<\/a>). <\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n

A German Wehrmacht NCO or junior officer had come to see the rabbi of Zgierz on September\u00a0 8, 1939, the day the German Wehrmacht occupied the town; he may or ,may not have\u00a0 been the same soldier who rescued (or looted) the Torah Ring from the burning synagogue or from the Zgierz cemetery and gave it in late 1939 or in 1940 to Prof. Otto Adam Christoph Michel (1903-1993), the German theologian and Evangelical pastor in Halle, a Nazi and Sturmabteilung<\/em> (SA) member, who moved from Halle to T\u00fcbingen in late 1940, who in 1957 founded the Institutum Judaicum<\/em> in T\u00fcbingen, who kept my grandfather’s Torah ring in his private study for fifty-three years, until his death, and whose widow had given the Torah ring to the T\u00fcbingen city museum in early 1994. It had taken the City of T\u00fcbingern 16 years to publicize the existence of this Torah Ring in its museum.
<\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n

Otto Michel had been a Nazi and SA<\/em> member since 1933, even though he was also a member of the Bekennende Kirche<\/em>. When that church split into a pro-Nazi and an anti-Nazi faction in 1936, he stayed with the former. From 1943 to 1945, however, he had gone through a series of traumatic personal events, including the loss of his professorship, his humiliation as a simple Wehrmacht<\/em> soldier who had to scrub barracks floors, and his arrest in 1944 on suspicion of being a member of the conspiracy to assassinate the F\u00fchrer<\/em>. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n

The accumulated trauma transformed the German theologian. The British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion called such traumatic change \u201ccatastrophic change.\u201d Otto Michel developed what another British psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, called a \u201cfalse self.\u201d <\/span>After the Second World War, Otto Michel changed his middle name from Adam to Christoph, as part of his struggle to forge a new self. <\/span>A similar transformation, as the German scholar Ottmar Ette (born 1956) has shown, took place with the German literary scholar Hans Robert Jauss (1921-1977), who had been a captain in the Waffen-SS<\/em> and had commanded military units that murdered hundreds of people, and was interned by the Allies at the end of the war, barely surviving execution. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n

After 1945 Jauss began a \u201csecond life,\u201d denied his Nazi and SS<\/em> past throughout this \u201csecond life\u201d and, which is more important, the German society and his university collaborated with this incredible denial and gave Jauss many honors. Similarly, Otto Michel began a \u201csecond life\u201d after 1945, becoming a respectable theologian and Jewish Studies scholar. Not one word was said either by him or by his university about his “brown” past, and no one bothered to investigate this past while he was alive.
<\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n

Since first learning about the Torah Ring in 2010 I have been trying to find out when and how this relic of my grandfather\u2019s Torah scroll came into Michel\u2019s possession, why the former Nazi had become \u201ca friend of the Jews,\u201c why Michel himself had said nothing about his Nazi past in his autobiography, and why he had told no one about how he had come by the wooden Torah disc. It turned out that during the war, in 1943-1945, Michel had undergone a series of traumatic experiences that made him undergo a spiritual conversion and re-create a \u201dfalse self\u201d for himself as a \u201cHebrew.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\r\n

On November 24, 2011 I received this relic of my grandfather\u2019s Torah scroll from the mayor of T\u00fcbingen, Boris Palmer, in a public ceremony in the T\u00fcbingen city hall, in the presence of my sister and her elder son, at which I delivered a German-language lecture on Otto Michel and the Torah scroll (see http:\/\/youtu.be\/Wdaw4zujc2Q<\/a>). The story was published in several local newspapers and in a full page article in Die Zeit<\/em> (see http:\/\/www.zeit.de\/2012\/04\/Judaistik-Theologe-Michel<\/a>). <\/span><\/p>\r\n

Upon my return to Jerusalem, I took the Torah ring to a <\/span>maker of wooden Torah-scroll housings in the ultra-orthodox quarter of Jerusalem, Me\u2019ah She\u2019arim, <\/em>who at once identified its maker, the late Berysz Sztoker. I then had the Torah ring, which was missing some mother-of-pearl decorations and flower-headed silver nails, restored by a local jeweler. <\/span><\/span>In 2015 <\/span>my grandfather\u2019s five heirs (my sister, myself, our Israeli-born New York cousin and her late brother\u2019s son and daughter) <\/span>had an emotional family reunion in my Jerusalem home, at which we decided to donate the ring to the POLIN Jewish museum in Warsaw (see http:\/\/www.polin.pl\/en<\/a>), which was eager to have it. In late 2015, the son of my late cousin flew from Tel Aviv to Warsaw and hand-delivered the restored Torah ring to the POLIN Jewish museum in Warsaw. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n

This, however, was not the end of the affair. We still needed to understand the individual and collective psychological processes involved in this drama. To that end, here is a brief summary of my frustrating dealings with the German bureaucracy in my quest for the identity of the German student-soldier who brought the Torah ring from Zgierz to Halle and gave it to Otto Michel. Only in 2024 would Hans-Joachim Lang, who began this saga by contacting me in 2010, personally try to establish that identity.
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The Former Deutsche Dienststell<\/em>e <\/span><\/strong>(WASt)<\/span><\/span><\/pre>\r\n
From a map of the military situation on the River Bzura in mid-September 1939 which my Berlin friend Tanja Cummings, a Holocaust documentary filmmaker, found in the German military history series Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg<\/em>, I learned that the Panzer-Abwehr-Abteilung 545, <\/em>a battalion-size or regiment-size anti-tank unit of the Wehrmacht<\/em>, occupied my grandfather’s home town of Zgierz on September 8, 1939, and fought the Poles during the Battle of the Bzura in mid-September. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n
Fortunately, in 2019 the Deutsche Dienststelle<\/em> was dissolved and all its files became part of the German federal archive. In early 2024 all its documents became available online on the latter\u2019s website, including the complete dog-tag index of the Panzer-Abwehr-Abteilung 545,<\/em> each soldier\u2019s first name, middle names, last name, birth date and birth place. And, in mid-July 2024, Hans-Joachim Lang, the German historical detective who initiated this saga, took on the task of matching the lists of soldiers with those of Michel\u2019s students.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n
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 The Martin Luther university of Halle-Wittenberg<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\r\n
In 2012, after a prolonged foot dragging and a stubborn stonewalling, which necessitated a personal confrontation between the Israeli envoy in Berlin and the chancellor of that university, <\/span>the Martin Luther university of Halle-Wittenberg sent the Israeli envoy the names of the students <\/span>who registered to study theology <\/span>at that university from 1935 to 1940. It refused to give out any further information on the students, however, especially their birth dates. Whenever I found an identical name in the Panzer-Abwehr-Abteilung 545\u2019<\/em>s dog-tag index and in the university\u2019s theology-student list, the university claimed that they did not have the same birth date (die Geburtsdaten stimmen nicht \u00fcberein<\/em>). There were several such cases. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n
The breakthrough occurred more than ten years later, in 2023, after I visited T\u00fcbingen again during a brief visit to Germany, and met again with its mayor, Boris Palmer, whose intervention with the Halle university\u2019s new chancellor, Alfred Funk, led the university to cooperate with me for the first time and to disclose to me the complete personal information on its theology students in 1935-1940.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n
In late 2023 Noach Wunner, an undergraduate student at the university of Halle, was tasked by the T\u00fcbingen city administration with carrying out the vital Abgleich<\/em> (matching) of the list of the Halle theology students in 1935-1940 with the dog-tag index of the soldiers who occupied Zgierz in 1939, the members of the Panzer-Abwehr-Abteilung 545<\/em>. The student could thus compile a list of all the theology students, including their middle names, birth dates, and birth places, and reconcile that list with the dog-tag index of the Panzer-Abwehr-Abteilung 545. <\/em><\/span><\/span>If he found one identical name, including his middle names, birth date and birth place, he would be our man. In July 2024 Hans-Joachim Lang came to Halle to complete Noach\u2019s work.
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The City and Church of Halle<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\r\n
After an initial resistance, Karsten Eisenmenger, the librarian of the Evangelical Church in Halle, gracefully sent me a list of eight Wehrmacht<\/em> soldiers, five of whose children Otto Michel had baptized as the second Standortspfarrer<\/em> (garrison pastor) in 1939-1940, and three of whom he personally married at that time in Halle, where he was a military chaplain as well as a theology professor before moving to T\u00fcbingen in late 1940. There is one soldier in this small list whose name stands out. He is an anti-tank NCO named Otto Will Hans Hartung (born 1915), who served in several Wehrmacht<\/em> anti-tank units in 1939 (but apparently not in the Panzer-Abwehr-Abteilung 545<\/em>) and who was married by Otto Michel in Halle in 1940. However, the city of Halle, where he was born and married, consistently ignored my requests for\u00a0 information on his descendants, whom I wish to ask whether they know about this story, and if they do, and if he is my man, to thank them for his having saved my grandfather’s Torah ring from the flames of the Zgierz synagogue. Personal appeals to the mayor of Halle have remained unanswered. The matter remained unresolved, at least until 2024.
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The Government of Sachsen-Anhalt<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\r\n
After years of resistance, the government of the German Land<\/em> of Sachsen-Anhalt, in which Halle is located, tracked down a descendant of Otto Willi Hans Hartung, the soldier who may have rescued (or looted) the Torah ring and brought it to Germany. The government contacted him, asking him whether he would agree to my contacting him. He refused my request. I have asked the government to make it clear to him\u00a0 that I wish to thank his ancestor and to find out what he may know about this. The matter remained unresolved.
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[***]<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\r\n
The Psychology of Bureaucratic Resistance<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\r\n
One famous joke about bureaucrats is their slogan, \u201cWhy complicate matters if we can make them impossible?\u201c <\/span><\/span>The ostensible reason given by the German bureaucrats for this stiff resistance to my research is the very <\/span>stringent <\/span>German personal-data-protection laws, which were probably enacted as an extreme reaction to the complete absence of personal-data protection during Hitler’s Nazi regime, when the Gestapo knew everything about everyone in Germany. On the other hand, however, there are the German freedom-of-information laws, which stand in stark contrast to the data-protection laws, as well as the Washington and Terezin declarations, which Germany has signed, and under which all its institutions must collaborate fully with scholars like myself. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n
Are there also unconscious reasons for this intractable German resistance to my attempts to identify the Wehrmacht<\/em> soldier who brought my grandfather\u2019s Torah Ring from Poland? <\/span>Is it really possible to master such a terrible past as that of Germany under Hitler\u2019s murderous regime from 1933 to 1945? Are the German deluding themselves? Are they denying their past rather than mastering it? What brought about the German Historikerstreit<\/em> (historians\u2019 quarrel) of the 1980s, when the right-wing German historian Ernst Nolte (1923-2016) attempted to rewrite the history of the Nazis, of the Second World War, and of the Holocaust in a subtle way that concealed guilt feelings and Holocaust denial, and when he was supported by many other German historians, while left-wing German historians, like J\u00fcrgen Habermas (born 1929), bitterly opposed him? (see https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Historikerstreit<\/a>) And do we, the Israeli Jews, cope well with our own traumatic past? (see https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/3791564?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents<\/a>)
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The Torah Ring is now exhibited in the POLIN museum of Polish Jewish history in Warsaw, to which my family has donated it,\u00a0 but, as Wilhelm Triebold of the Schw\u00e4bisches Tagblatt<\/em> has written, much still remains to explain (see https:\/\/www.tagblatt.de\/Nachrichten\/Es-bleibt-noch-immer-vieles-ungeklaert-406722.html<\/a>), above all how the Ring made its way from the burning synagogue in Zgierz to Otto Michel in Halle. This not an accident. I would call it the collective inability to mourn and to master the past.<\/span>
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How Germans and Jews have Dealt with the Nazi Past and with the Holocaust What Vergangenheitsbew\u00e4ltigung is All About Every person\u2019s family has a history. The history of his or her parents and grandparents may affect the entire life of the person. My German Jewish paternal grandfather, Curt David Falk (1877-1944), who in his middle […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-374","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/374\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
The Zgierz Memorial Book says that a junior German officer who visited the home of the rabbi of Zgierz that day expressed an interest in Judaism (see http:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/yizkor\/zgierz\/zgi577.html#Page588<\/a>). I therefore contacted the now-defunct <\/span>Deutsche Dienststelle <\/em>(WASt), <\/span>which possessed the personal files of all Wehrmacht<\/em> soldiers and all the dog-tag indices of all Wehrmacht<\/em> units, but <\/span>which, for historical reasons, was an authority of the Land of Berlin rather than part of the German federal archive, which it only became on January 1, 2019 (see here<\/a>). <\/span><\/span>When I first approached it, the Deutsche Dienststelle<\/em> gave me some basic information on anti-tank units of the Wehrmacht, but refused to give me the list of the soldiers of the Panzer-Abwehr-Abteilung 545<\/em>. The governing mayor of Berlin, who is both the mayor of the city and the governor of the Land<\/em>, refused to intervene, as did the German federal government. After a protracted and exhausting struggle with the help of the Axel-Springer-Verlag<\/em>, <\/span>the Deutsche Dienststelle<\/em><\/span> sent me the list of names and birth dates of the members of the staff and of the three anti-tank companies of this battalion, but with all the other details blacked out, and without those of the members of the machine-gun company and of the battalion’s supply train, which the Deutsche Dienststelle <\/em>falsely claimed not to have. In August 2016 I received some of the additional names, but that was as far as the bureaucrats would go. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n