German Notes on Authoritarianism

Considering the many obvious geopolitical developments as of late, it feels like the appropriate time to discuss one particular aspect of Germany’s authoritarian past that often doesn’t get as much coverage as the other, far more grisly details that are burned into most everyone’s consciousness. The suffering inflicted upon the rest of Europe and the world is well known, as are the various figures associated with the crimes. Germany itself has done its utmost since the 1960s to underline them. This has been done to such an extent that the far right and their friends, such as Elon Musk, use this culture of remembrance as their favorite punching bag (next to immigration) to tell the many disgruntled Germans that they should no longer feel guilty for what their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents did.

But what is the full scope of what they did? What the far right, Elon Musk, and others want Germans and nationalists of every stripe to stop feeling guilty about are the millions of non-Germans (to which they implicitly include German Jews and other unwanted Germans) who were killed, sexually violated, or generally terrorized over those glorious 12 years. They should stop feeling guilty about the 25 million Soviet citizens and soldiers who died miserably during the war; the 6 million Jews murdered in massacres and concentration camps across Europe; the 5 million non-Jewish victims of the holocaust that fell into the assorted categories of “unwertes Leben” (unworthy of living); the numerous other massacres and murders stretching from France to the outskirts of Moscow, from Norway to northern Africa. That toll of human lives doesn’t even account for the utter destruction of centuries, sometimes millennia, of culture, architecture, art, and the general fabric of life. It seems that grieving and guilt for this type of monumental loss has a shelf life of 80-odd years.

But leaving all that aside, as insane as that might sound, there is still even more suffering that these people want to discount. When the German AFD party refers to WWII as merely a speck of bird shit on Germany’s overall history, who and what are they discounting? Are the nearly ten million dead Germans – men, women, and children – a mere speck? Is the destruction of every major city and most mid-sized ones and their centuries of history nothing? Though this hurricane of destruction and death was indeed the result of their own actions, all those millions still lived through those years of hellfire and did so because of their trust in the authoritarians who had promised them that bright future. The pressing need for the present-day autocrats to want to relativize the effects of fascism and other totalitarian regimes (see Putin with Stalin, Xi and Mao) is a huge tell in terms of how they see their own people – precisely the ones they espouse to want to protect and lead to glory. Apologists for past genocidal crimes, be they famines or organized extermination, obviously don’t care about the outward “enemies” who suffered enormously for their nation’s dreams of domination. It’s even more crass, they don’t even care about the millions of their supposed “own” who died as a result. They couldn’t care less about their “own” cities, their “own” culture, the soul of their “own” societies that were decimated and erased.

So, let’s just do a quick rundown of the achievements of Nazism for the German nation in it’s 12 years in power. All while keeping AFD’s bird-shit perspective and Musk’s alleviation of guilt in mind as a marker for how they actually feel about the suffering of their “own”.

What does the destruction of every major and mid-size town in a country mean? What is the effect of six years of war and many millions dead on a country? What does fighting and losing some of the biggest and bloodiest battles in the history of humanity do to a people? What does six years of continuous bombing raids do to a national psyche? How does widespread sexual violence echo down through generations? How does all that, on the heels of six years of fascist dictatorship, indoctrination, denunciation, and incarceration, shape a people? Many of these questions are asked for the rest of Europe, especially east of the Oder River. But, until recently, these questions haven’t been asked in much depth about the German people precisely because they brought it upon themselves. However, these are the questions that need to be asked before assigning all those experiences and their causes to the past and giving it all one more go.

When the Germans chose authoritarianism in 1933, they chose 100,000 Germans in concentration camps by the end of that year. This was before the outright persecution of Jews. After nine months in power, the Nazis had assigned German communists, Germans designated as “antisocial,” German Jehovah’s witnesses, German homosexuals, German social democrats, German conservatives, German monarchists, German pastors, German priests, German pacifists, and many other German citizens to concentration camps and makeshift jails. And that was just the beginning. They burned German books, banned German movies, and destroyed centuries of German science and culture. Germany began bleeding itself dry culturally before it began doing it literally, and it did so by choice.

Read the accounts of bombing raids anywhere in the world during WWII, and you will realize that even the most gruesome horror movies give only tiny glimpses into the very real horror that previous generations saw regularly. The firestorms of Dresden or Hamburg, where 20,000–40,000 people were killed in a couple of days, offer truly horrific and gut-wrenching accounts. Add to that all the other cities and towns and know that the German totalitarians were more than happy to take these deaths, and all the suffering that came with them, into account to fulfil their imagined destiny. While most German men lived through a certain hell and committed atrocities in the field, the rest of the population were left to deal with the regular terror of bombs raining down on cities and what that can do to both a cityscape and the human body. Entire towns vanished; neighborhoods were erased. Enter any cemetery in Berlin, for example, and you will find mass graves. Children, elderly, men, women. Sometimes the first name is missing, sometimes the birth date – neighbors, that people knew only passingly. Some are marked “unknown,” most carry the same death date. Through them, you can guess the dates of bombing raids. Then, there is a huge cluster during the final assault on Berlin.

These battles for various cities would turn what was left of the cities into hollow canyons. The movement of the Red Army, the displacement of millions upon millions, the loss of lands that had been German for about as long as the U.S. has been the U.S. Long before the Red Army arrived, German soldiers on leave had been telling people back home that Germany needed to win the war. Why? To avoid the terrible retribution for what they had done in the East. They already knew the full reality of the path the Germans had chosen and the price they would pay. This is what authoritarianism offered as the fruits of all its songs and pageantry. Cities soaked in the smell of ashes and rotting bodies. This is what the Germans chose and even cheered for in the Berlin Sportpalast when, surrounded by ruins, Goebbel’s asked them if they wanted “Total War?!”

And what does Germany have to show for its choice? The nation that had brought forth so much philosophy, art, movies, music, science, and industry, which had been at the forefront of academic research, was an empty shell. It had willingly disemboweled itself. It was drained of both manpower and brainpower, neutered by 12 years of fascist brain rot and war. Cityscapes, landscapes, torn apart. To this day, unexploded ordnance from WWII is uncovered an average of every two weeks throughout Germany, halting construction and forcing neighborhoods to evacuate. A recent survey of how many unexploded bombs were still left underneath Berlin expected to find roughly 3,000 – instead, they found 4,500. Millions lost family and homes, were orphaned – whole districts were permanently annihilated, never to exist in their original form again. Add to that the cultural suicide. It was a total loss of self, never to be regained.

Then occupation, then the division into two separate nations, both doing their utmost to deny their past. One becoming, in true German fashion, an even more totalitarian version of its communist neighbors. One where, much like in Nazi Germany, children spied on their parents, fathers on their daughters, where you could be exiled for reading the wrong books or writing the wrong songs, where you could be killed for trying to leave. A place where listening to punk rock could land you in a psychiatric hospital. On the other side, old Nazis roamed free, populated the upper echelons of the new society. The rest of the population was left to make sense of this new, smaller country, some roaming for years before settling down. It took decades to begin to heal the physical scars of the war, with many mental and emotional scars still very much tangible to this day. After living through that much, physical and mental, death and violence, and in the knowledge that they had joined such a completely deluded and ill-fated crusade and had nothing but pain and loss to show for it – a culture of silence was the only answer to the colossal shame they had brought upon themselves. Down the line, it would trigger its own reaction, and domestic terrorism carried out by the younger generation to hold the older generation accountable.

The whole point is this: with authoritarianism comes the inherent distrust of one’s own and the inevitable strangulation of what constitutes one’s own self. Taken to its extremes, as in Germany, it means the utter destruction of the known world in all of its forms. Authoritarians take their fears and personal insecurities and project them onto the world. Their people are simply a means to an end. Hitler cursed the German people for failing him in his bunker, Mao sacrificed tens of millions to his many moods and would have happily sacrificed millions more, Stalin sent millions to their deaths to assert his power, the Iranian Mullahs gladly sent droves of unarmed young men to clear out mine fields in human wave attacks in the Iran-Iraq War, Kim Jong-Un will willingly send his troops to their deaths in Ukraine and anywhere else, as will Putin. Forget about the suffering, authoritarians don’t care about the lives of their people. They will willingly destroy their own – over and over again. History shows this to be true. This is why they must always be stopped.