Many western criminal justice systems have what is sometimes called a "crime passionnel", a crime of passion. Man catches his spouse in bed with another man, goes crazy, and proceeds to kill both of them. The law gives much leeway when this happens, as it is not felt that the average person can withstand but so much without snapping.
In the military, one of the key things officers are taught is not to get emotionally caught up in what's happening. Stay cool, make decisions, think calmly for the group and leave the passion to others. Even when you make a big deal out of some emotional outburst, such as in jumping up and yelling "Charge, men!", it should be for dispassionate and good tactical/strategic reasons.
But coming into to Dachau just minutes after the SS left? Seeing 40,000 people in that state? I don't think any member of an army or otherwise rational human being would be called to justice for going just a little bit crazy. In fact, I would be extremely disturbed by those who were not extremely disturbed by what they saw.
War is a hell of a thing, and even in that hell, what these soldiers went through must have scarred them for life. (I'm not trying to de-emphasize the much worse suffering the residents had, only point out the great emotional roller-coaster they must have experienced moving between "we're winning the war" and "oh. my. god.")
Both Germany and the US do not like to think about US soldiers committing war crimes or even behaving badly in WWII.
The US thinks so, because its war was all about moral high ground, ignoring its very own blatant racism at home.
Germany likes to think so, because the liberation by the US actually ended in being liberated. Millions of civilians had to flee and/or were being raped by the Red army. Prisoners of war ended in Siberian gulags for decades, while the GDR was constructed at home.
I think with time passing it becomes easier to paint a more complex and realistic picture acknowledging the situation these (often young) people were in, without justifying their actions. I would like to see glorification shifting more and more to memorization of a time and of circumstances that brought out the worst in people and must never happen again anywhere in the world.
To be fair, it wasn't just the German POWs who ended up imprisoned for decades; Russian POWs who managed to survive the German camps were shipped off to labor camps in the USSR.
What an outstanding and moving article. When I lived in Germany years ago I visited Dachau and other sites. Despite the long interval since the camps were used, the aura of the atrocities committed there was still palpable.
The doctor's letters are no doubt an immensely valuable resource concerning history of WWII and the holocaust. More importantly, it's a record of human reaction to the horrors of what he observed, and very likely provides insight into experience that transforms a person so adversely.
Nowadays we call it PTSD and of course it's still a scourge in a world filled with horrific conflict. Perhaps these letters would encourage people suffering in the way the doctor knew to get treatment, above all talk about it, hard as that is to do.
I hope the letters are donated to a proper archive for preservation and made accessible so that the lessons contained can be widely shared, and become an encouragement to healing.
My grandparents raised me, and my grandfather lived through a whole variety of horrible experiences in WWII in the Pacific and China/Burma/India theaters.
I do not deeply understand their relationship, but I know that my grandfather was not kind to my dad, their only child. As I read the story about Mr. Wilsey, the father and husband, I was constantly reminded of my grandfather, directly but more indirectly.
He was 51 years old when I was born, and I spent most of my first six years with him and my grandmother. At that time, my parents divorced and assigned full legal custody of me to my grandparents. I grew up there, leaving when I was 18, and my grandfather was 69, my grandmother 67.
My grandparents were kind to me, but my grandfather was distant. He was distant with everyone. He had only a single close friend, who died of cancer in the late 70s. He almost never spoke of what he went through in the war. He rarely spoke at all. He had a quick wit, and rarely, he would inject acerbic barbs into conversations.
He took me to some Veterans of Foreign Wars meetings in the early 80s, where I met and spoke to two other old men, whose names I can not recall. They served with him in Burma.
Several times, they took me aside and told me things about my grandfather. Things he would never speak of. How he could fire a clip from his BAR on full automatic and lethally aim individual clusters of bullets, singly stopping a Japanese assault.
They told me that he lost, killed, six different ammunition carriers. How a slug lodged in his femur and extensive fragmentation wounds had no impact on his ability to slaughter the enemy, day after day, night after night, week after week, month after month.
I learned how he had received the pile of ribbons and medals that I had caught a fleeting glimpse of in the attic.
The daily horror, fear and relative certainty of death. Of the horrors they inflicted, all too often needlessly.
The man who raised me also raised my father. But those 25 years made a big difference. I'm sure that all of the critical words and quick anger were still inside him in the 70s and 80s, but inside they stayed.
Though I never heard the word 'love' come from his mouth, I had no doubt that my grandfather would do anything for me. And he did.
Though notoriously cheap (for instance, we 'harvested' ketchup and mustard packets from Jack in the Box to refill our supply), my grandfather spent many hundreds and thousands of dollars to buy me a Color Computer and a TRS-80 Model 100 laptop in the early 80s. Though he had only a 6th grade education, he knew, in broad strokes, what the future would look like, and the things his grandson would need to learn.
I speak little of my grandmother here. She was a far more open and loving person, but she took heavy doses of Valium and related drugs the whole time I was with them, and after. She and her husband had slept in separate beds since before I was born. They had no love for each other. They were house-mates, generally tolerating each others presence, and helping each other as needed.
In many ways, my grandparents were progressive, open-minded people. But they did not support of "mixed marriage." Though it didn't drive them crazy either. "Live and let live" was their credo. Yet they were raised in casual, abstract and always present racism. I heard a lot about how the "Mexicans are taking all of our jobs", growing up in Southern California.
This isn't all that pleasant, but it is Real Life. Real Life is muddy and complex and conflicted. And people in the past carried different cultural burdens than we do today.
After their deaths, I, like so many others, venerated the Greatest Generation. During their lives, I took my grandparents for granted. But they were patient with me. They were pretty sure I would grow out of my selfishness and arrogance, even though they would not live to see it. And they were ok with that. Their love and support were iron-clad and steadfast.
The Greatest Generation is important. So are the Baby Boomers, and my own Generation Xers. And my son's Millennials. All important.
And complicated. And conflicted. We will find that every generation is generally laden with backwards cultural norms.
This article solidifies much that I already knew about the raw, life-long impact such things have on people. It helps me understand my dad a little better.
I'm not sure how to end this somewhat emotional ramble, so I'll exhort everyone to embrace the complications and conflict that make up every person, of every generation. Understand their personal and cultural history.
I think the sad truth is that we keep repeating the mistakes generation after generation -- every time a little different -- every time the same.
You may or may not find the documentary "Stray Dog"[1] interesting. It opened my eyes to how much pain is still left in the US from the Vietnam war -- and how much has been added, and is added with every war since then.
I've been opposed to pretty much every military action by Nato/UN I'm aware of -- but that does not mean I don't have great sympathy and respect for those that served in those actions. I strongly believe very few participated with anything but the best of intentions. Certainly none of the veterans I've talked to.
I'm not actually sure I would label is at a good movie as such -- I would probably have made different editing choices. I get the impression that the director may have been too close to the material. But I found it interesting -- and that is perhaps the most important aspect of any documentary.
Your comment has - at best - a tangential relationship with the linked article, and I greatly enjoyed it. Thanks for posting, it's one of the more "real," things I've seen here.
Thanks for sharing. My grandfather got a bronze star but no one knows for what as he would never talk about the war, or much of anything. He sat by the window, smoke cigarettes and fed the squirrels.
It is a shame the New Republic were the ones to get their hands on these letters rather than someone more reputable.
There was no reason at all to divert form the interesting historical war component to some sort of shameful generalisation about the racism of the letter writer.
Especially the implication the language used, which is not appropriate today, but was commonly used at the time is relevant.
The letter writer spoke his mind, which seemed rare back then. But is brought down, after years of war and post war atrocities because they spoken openly.
They obviously cared about being prejudiced, which I cannot see being common at the time.
They New Republic cannot even bothered putting in the proper quote without comment -
> There was a lengthy screed about his black comrades-in-arms, which began with the always troubling disclaimer, “I am NOT prejudiced—whether you believe me or not”:
What I liked most about seeing this is it added a whole new dimension. As it states so much about what we see in film and writing is about how once the USA (We) got there how were all super altruistic and what-not. Coming upon a scene of 40,000 corpses and near death it's obvious the clear right answer is to help. But the amount of anger and hatred I would have had for the germans when I got there that to me helping would be to kill every SS officer I could find... This man went through hell and still spent his life as a doctor after. Amazing.
It is no longer horrific, but the entire Dachau site still has a strange nature to it. The original barracks that the prisoners stayed in are gone, although two reproductions are there. The buildings within the compound are still intact and have a variety of presentations and artifacts in them. There are several memorials on site. In general, there are just a bunch of tourists trudging around onsite nowadays. It is still really weird to stand their and realize you are vacationing where so many atrocities were committed.
The buildings outside of the fenced compound area were part of the Dachau site, but are still used today.
While I dare to say I'm generally not easily impressed or emotional: after being just a few minutes on the premises, you can get an idea of what those poor people had to go through. Just by being there. You don't have to read much.
I would describe it as the feeling of powerlessness that everything in that place signifies.
You immediately now you'll never get out (unless they let you, which of course didn't happen). You couldn't decide anything yourself (eat, sleep, toilet,...). Might sound like a regular prison, but it's not.
Not that I have any idea what it must have been like of course.
I think it would be somehow wise/responsible if everyone would visit it once. I wouldn't call it tourism.
I wonder if the rebellion of the youth in the 60's (in the US) can be seen as an echo of atrocities our soldiers lived in WWII? Did everyone come home changed, and cold... and rais a generation that reacted badly to that?
No, I don't think so. For one thing, a fairly small proportion of those under arms actually served in battle. For another, those of that generation I knew were not particularly cold and hardened.
That Hitler was a demon is an easy explanation. The easiness does not worry me, what worries me is that it underplays the danger. It leads to the belief that WW-II fascism was an one off with very little chance of repeating, after all demons are rare. I think the more realistic and infinitely more worrisome message is that nationalism, popularity and supremacist feelings (some call it pride) can make people do horrible things. The line is a very thin one and it is imperative that one is cognizant of it and transgressions of it, however innocuous it might appear to be. The road to the WWII holocaust were paved by such apparently innocuous acts drawn from the wells of nationalism and supremacy -- what could possibly go wrong !
That and, everyone is a sucker for blaming their situation on an internal enemy.
Not disagreeing, just reminding everyone that national socialism isn't the only -ism that has killed millions: communists have killed even more people AFAIK
I'm surprised much of the content of those letters made it past the censors, even allowing for the war in Europe being over at the time they were sent.
Sad, but not surprising, to see one of the liberators being rather openly racist in his letters. There's a reason why all countries surrounding Germany were slow to denounce the Nazi party -- much of the hate they were spreading was accepted as fact. Not entirely unlike the current fear of the Middle East, and Muslims.
The idea that all human beings are "equal" in the sense that they deserve dignity and respect is a modern idea. I'm not aware of any other time in human history that there's been this sort of universalism among more than a few philosophers here and there.
Likewise the notion that war is not a good thing seems modern to me. Ancient philosophers typically extolled the virtues of war. It was really the advent of mechanized warfare, and especially the a-bomb, that made war so abnormally destructive that it became something roundly condemned.
"Big fire at Reichstag"
Manchester Guardian, February 1933
"The wildest rumours were circulating in Berlin last night, adds Reuter. One was to the effect that secret orders had been issued to the Nazi Storm Troopers to create a Bartholomew night on Saturday, when all political opponents of renown were to be "disposed of."
Although the police asserted the Communists are responsible, some people think that the fire might have bee started by irresponsible Nazis with the object of provoking trouble."
"Communists to be interned in Dachau"
The Guardian, Tuesday 21 March 1933
The President of the Munich police has informed the press that the first concentration camp holding 5,000 political prisoners is to be organised within the next few days near the town of Dachau in Bavaria.
Here, he said, Communists, "Marxists" and Reichsbanner leaders who endangered the security of the State would be kept in custody. It was impossible to find room for them in the State prisons, nor was it possible to release them. Experience had shown, he said, that the moment they were released, they started their agitation again.
It's hard to shake the similarity to some other terrorists who "cannot be released" -- held without any proper trial]
Under normal circumstances I would consider the treatment of the SS soldiers described here war crimes. But the men of the SS were and are not deserving of the protections normally granted to soldiers. For the atrocities that they committed only the most brutal punishment will suffice.
My dad had a friend who as a partisan fought on the eastern front. Whenever they captured a German soldier they checked his armpit for the telltale tattoo. If he had it they would immediately run him over with a tank. I think that's the most kindly death they could expect in light of their heinous behavior.
Whether another human deserves to die (in a cruel and extrajudicial manner no less) is a judgement I hope never to have to make. To that end, I suspect I'd find "the protections normally granted to soldiers" to be entirely appropriate.
That said, to stand in either man's shoes these seventy years later is an act of imagination beyond me. So in that sense, I accept my inability to judge either's actions.
Reminds me of some of the scenes from the movie Fury.
I see the same thing for ISIS-members. Read some of the refugee stories from Christian, Shia and Yezidis. The Yezidis got to suffer the brunt of it.
Sweden decided to give immunity and apartments/jobs for returning ISIS member. The Sunni-lobby has done a tremendous job for themselves in Sweden under the shrouds of "feminism" and "anti-racism".
Last meeting with the Swedish government, had NOT A SINGLE Shia-muslim representation.
In my eyes, any single person who was even partially part of ISIS deserves lead surgically placed between their eyes.
Suffice for what? Only to make you feel better. This is some real magical-thinking torture porn. Nothing special happens when you kill a person one way versus another.
I'm not going to pretend to understand the feelings that went through the heads of the men mentioned here.
But, I could certainly see how after witnessing and surviving a foreign army rampaging through my home, killing tens of thousands and seizing everything in sight one would develop an extreme distaste for the Germans. After surviving that, to witness the SS round up or simply murder the Jews, communist party officals (or amyone else for that matter) and engage in the rape & pillage and reprisal (ie. Kill any Russian in a 10:1 ratio as revenge for Germans killed by partisans) routine they were known for must have created a kind of rage that is difficult to contain or control.
Its hard for me to imagine. But I think that it would be hard to let some SS guy live in that situation. Why should he live when so many didn't? Is that justice?
There is little morality to be found in war, particularly one like WW2. As distasteful as it may be, I don't think you can judge these men with our civilian at peace moral perspective.
It's not "very real". If a survivor knew their captour was shot, run over by a tank, put in prison immediately or on the run for years, but eventually captured the survivor would feel about the same amount of resolution as their personality is disposed to synthesize. Nothing special happens in human consciousness if the resolution is extra gory.
That is patently incorrect. If it were, horrific methods of execution would never be imagined or used as deterrent punishments throughout history. The method of execution can have a profound psychological impact on many different people in many different ways.
Further, if there was no difference to a victim or survivor between imprisonment and execution, we wouldn't have a death penalty debate at all.
In the military, one of the key things officers are taught is not to get emotionally caught up in what's happening. Stay cool, make decisions, think calmly for the group and leave the passion to others. Even when you make a big deal out of some emotional outburst, such as in jumping up and yelling "Charge, men!", it should be for dispassionate and good tactical/strategic reasons.
But coming into to Dachau just minutes after the SS left? Seeing 40,000 people in that state? I don't think any member of an army or otherwise rational human being would be called to justice for going just a little bit crazy. In fact, I would be extremely disturbed by those who were not extremely disturbed by what they saw.
War is a hell of a thing, and even in that hell, what these soldiers went through must have scarred them for life. (I'm not trying to de-emphasize the much worse suffering the residents had, only point out the great emotional roller-coaster they must have experienced moving between "we're winning the war" and "oh. my. god.")