Michael Colhaze:To be a German (Part 3)

And the Truth will see the Light of Day
Even if it takes a long, long Way.
German Nursery Rhyme 

The Germans have been the most persecuted People in the 20th century, and even so continue tomake their usual excellent contributions to civilization.
D. Tyrone Crowley

The legacy of Hitler’s Third Reich swirled through post-war Germany’s bloodstream
like a resistant variant of the common flu. It called for a powerful antidote, which was
duly administered but turned out to be a Beelzebub supplanting the Devil. Manifest as a
faint but persistent headache and the occasional noisy sneeze, passed its pathogenic
devastation widely unnoticed but continued relentlessly until the nation’s intellectual
fabric had been thoroughly polluted from the kindergarten onwards. No university
curriculum without the politically correct corset, no official sermon without implicit or
explicit mea culpa, no history book without glorifying the courageous Allies as saviours
of humanity. And the pedantic, ponderous, humourless German top gazettes wallowing
at least once a week in the brown mud. Small wonder that a cerebral palsy, an academic
fustiness befell the land that was the result of rigorous omissions, obvious half-truths
and brazen lies. Take the following example.

The murder of ethnic Germans in territory lost to Poland after World War I was
triggered by Hitler’s invasion.
Dr. Martin Broszat, Director of the Munich Institute for History, 1961

Whereas millions of displaced Germans could tell an entirely different story. Namely
that already in 1921, and shortly after large parts of the German Empire had been
annexed by Poland as part of the perfidious Versailles treaties, Germans under Polish
rule were murdered in a clear attempt at ethnic cleansing. In 1927 nearly the whole
town of Rybnic in Upper Silesia was massacred in cold blood, and from then on the
killings became endemic until, a few months before the invasion, Poland had officially
established two concentration camps in Polowanie and Niemcow for her ethnic
Germans. When Hitler’s troops crossed the border, massacres happened in Bromberg
(remembered as the infamous Bromberg Blood Sunday) and many other parts of
Poland, perpetrated by the military, police and paramilitary youth groups, and
documented with photos of bestialities that defy every imagination. All this while Hitler
had repeatedly tried to secure peacefully a narrow passage through ancient German
lands that would connect the Reich proper with its old and beautiful Hanse city of
Danzig. A demand the Poles steadfastly denied, cocksure of themselves because of
their British guarantees.

We know what happened to those, and won’t shed a tear because they weren’t worth
the paper written on. Danzig is now Gdansk, famous for the Solidarnosc of Lech
Walesa, and you’ll be hard put to find an ethnic German anywhere far or near.

The furore of blatantly falsifying, denying or ignoring historical facts has continued to
this day. The German translation of Patrick Buchanan’s Unnecessary War, a cool and
objective accumulation of facts if ever there was one, and a bombshell that should have
gone off with a mega-bang among German politicians, historians and journalists, passed
studiously unnoticed by every newspaper except the Süddeutsche, which run a piece of
such malicious inanity that made it farcical.

Another fine example is the present and truly vicious hate campaign against Benedict
XVI, the Catholic Church and, by extension, against the Christian world as a whole.
Fanned by her known enemies, including Germany’s ponderous and unimaginative
chancelloress who behaves like Orwell’s Big Sister, but is in fact a sitting duck unable
to address the country’s most pressing problems. And who squeaks at the spiritual
leader of more than a billion believers to come clean, while prattling to her tired
compatriots about our exclusive war guilt. These are moments when one begins to
despair of the elected leaders, and prays for a return of the Good King, helped along by
his fearless and honourable knights, with a few regional princes of noble ethical line
thrown in to keep an eye on the situation. I have serious reservations as to the Pope’s
policies of celibacy, birth control and immigration. But I can’t help feeling a cold anger
rising at the venomous slanderers who dare to accuse Christendom’s leader of covering
up sins that were supposedly perpetrated in AD 1950, in any case long before he was
even ordained. Particularly when it is well known among his followers that he has tried
hard since years to clean out the stable.

Recently, when I looked him up in the Internet for a reference, the absolute first
heading I found was called Creepy Pictures of Pope Benedict XVI. On a site called
ANORAK, right under an advertising to visit Israel, a few photos are displayed of which
I saw only the first, namely the smiling Holy Father blessing a child. It must be indeed a
sad world where a small act of compassion can be interpreted as creepy. But then again
we are well aware of who owns Yahoo, and Google, and you name it.

Which is probably the reason why we rarely hear of Rabbis who were caught, like in
Antwerp, with tons of Ecstasy made in Israel, a drug of the worst kind that literally
destroys the brains of our young in no time at all. Or Rabbis dealing with organs of
dubious provenance, like in New York. Or a Rabbi raping a seven year old girl, in ditto.
Or a Rabbi, military him, who assures his IDF soldiers that killing Palestinian women
and children is God’s will. The archaic one, of course.

Which, at a remove, brings us to the aforementioned antidote’s most powerful
ingredient, namely the Holocaust.

Even while I never, at least consciously, harboured the faintest doubt about its
historical truth, were there moments when I wondered why the sordid saga was so
attractive to people who didn’t seem particularly impressed by the continuing onslaught
of the assorted world media. I have an old acquaintance from schooldays who turned
into one of those construction cranks that plaster every available spot of nature with
their concrete castles. About as sentimental as his bricks, did he regale his many clients
for Christmas with one of the myriad Holocaust yarns, bound in extra-fine leather and
handsigned by its grateful author who had pocketed of course a fistful of cash. Which
brought me to the realization that the said yarn seems to act as a kind of moral license,
or carte blanche, for anything from destroying nature, ripping off investors or murdering
children with phosphor bombs. Because whatever crime committed, it couldn’t be as
bad as what the Germans have done in their darkest hour.

As the Holocaust blossomed into full flower, the Jews of this world, and particularly
those of Germany, became a saintly tribe of martyrs cocooned in boundless
compassion. Their antics made every Christian heart beat faster, their capers became a
blazing paragon for the rest of the prostrate Occident. With Germany leading the fray
by a mile and a half.

Or better, with 300.000.000.000,00 hard Deutschmarks and rising, paid over the years
to the millions of miraculous survivors. Three hundred billion, in case all those zeros
make your eyes swimming. The latter surely the case with all those German taxpayers
who, groaning under an ever increasing tax load, watched dumbfounded as the sell-out
of their native lands and assets continued unabated.

As to the saintliness, it was now and then marred by minor accidents. Like a Mossad hit
team mistakenly gunning down an innocent bystander. Or a private investment bank
knitting a private Ponzi scheme that left its clients cool in the cold, including Germany’s
foremost political commentator and Israel supporter, who became somewhat mum after
all his and his children’s savings had gone up in smoke. Or the president of the Jewish
cupola in Germany being accused of massive embezzlement. Or its vice-president jailed
for cocaine dealing and underage white-girl slaving. Or other occasions like these. Not
to mention the continuing plight of the Palestinians who somehow managed to stay in
the news.

Mishaps not really serious, but more like the proverbial hair in the soup. They soured
relations for a while, yet never for long. And in any case, who were we Germans to
throw the first stone? Because if we did, as we sometimes did, all Hell broke loose and
we got clobbered with our collective guilt until black and blue in the face.

Which happened as a rule, and occasionally not only metaphorically, but with vicious
beatings, to the so-called revisionists, a small band of dumb fascists, stubborn neo-Nazis
or, most vilified, a few demented historians with a reputation of professional
excellence. Had it been solely for them, whatever doubts existed should have slowly
disappeared, blown over by time and forgetfulness. But apparently there was always
more to it, much more.

To use a simile, it felt as if you watched a calm and starlit sea on a balmy night, and
noticed a sudden eddy, and knew that something had just passed close to the surface
and took a look at you. Something dark and enormous and without a name.

I remember vividly the day, during the glorious Seventies while reclining in an armchair
and probably mildly under some influence, when it occurred to me that the only logical
explanation for this vast and wild world must be a benevolent God. A realization never
altered since, only joyously and overwhelmingly expanded. The same thing happened to
me a few years ago, though as a sadly reverse realisation, when I read somewhere that
there doesn’t exist a single written document relating in any way to the giant
organisational exertion which must have been necessary to pull off the Holocaust. At
first I thought the article was mistaken, or some fascist propaganda, or whatever, and
left it at that. But something had been kicked loose, and after some time I looked
deeper into the matter, and saw that it was true.

Six million human beings rounded up in less than four years in every corner of war-torn
Europe and ferried to their death. An operation so vast that must have involved
thousands of henchmen and their vehicles, all properly supplied, with salaries, social
insurance and overtime hours paid in time. Plus informers who first ferreted out the
culprits and made sure they were Jews and not Bohemians. Plus local authorities who
kept them in communal prisons or compounds, then in regional ones, before they were
sent off in trains with perfectly planned routes who arrived on the hour exactly at their
destination. And never mind the Allies who bombed every railroad to smithereens they
could clap an eye on.

And all this without a single written order!

If I know something with absolute certainty, then it is that we Germans love our Red
Tape. No hiccup, cough or fart without a major bureaucratic exertion that states aroma,
size, duration, time of day, date and weather conditions, backed up by protocols,
assessments, historical comparisons and judicial footnotes in case of accident, all with
twenty copies, each stamped ten times and signed by at least five independent superiors.

A few years back I had the absurd idea to open a miniscule dependence of my Italian
business in Munich, with the result that I got inundated with an avalanche of official
affidavits sent by legions of official agencies whose innumerable officials told me in
endless big and small print of what to do and what not to do, at what time to do it and at
what time not to do it, and how to do it and how not to do it, and help me God if I
didn’t do it. Which made me for once loose my temper and send it all back with the
advice to push it up their backside while omitting a return address.

So what happened?

This is what happened.

What began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not
organized centrally by an agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget
for destructive measures. They were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came
about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a
consensus-mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.
Signed: Raul Hilberg, the Holocaust’s most eminent historian.

Wow! you may say, these amazing consensus-mind reading Germans! No wonder they
are good beer brewers!

And if that weren’t enough, how about this one?

Ninety-nine per cent of what we know about the Holocaust we do not actually have
the physical evidence to prove . . . it has become part of our inherited knowledge.

Signed: Professor Jan van Pelt, of Waterloo (sic) University
and leading authority on Auschwitz, in a recent interview with the Toronto Star.

Where he pleaded for the immediate razing of that infamous hell-hole, since according
to him it had outlived its purpose. Which I would certainly do as well after a life-long
dissemination of facts whose historical authenticity can be verified with no more but
ONE percent out of a hundred.

Well, the Poles won’t agree on that one, for sure. And why should they, pocketing all
those millions of hard Euro every year by confounding their awed visitors with the one
gas chamber they built themselves in 1948, in lieu of the real ones which couldn’t be
made out to this day on the brilliantly clear Allied air photos.

As to the little nursery rhyme at the outset, I know that similar proverbs can be found in
every decent society. It seems that the goddess Truth is not only a sacred gift, but an
essential part of God’s blueprint regarding His most elaborate invention. She has her
own momentum, her own inscrutable fabric. The singular perpetrator might get away
with an evil deed, at least in this World. But if Truth concerns a country, even a whole
People, it cannot be suppressed, manipulated or defeated for ever. To put it somewhat
poetically, the goddess Truth is a small but very clear brook. You may catch a few
drops in your cupped hand, and they are almost weightless. But with the time they will
undermine whole citadels, even Empires, no matter if they are of the Sword, of a False
Creed, or merely of Mammon.

As for me, I found myself in the awkward situation that whereas once I had swallowed
almost everything with respect to Hitler’s Third Reich, by now I believed nearly
nothing anymore.

An unhealthy state of affairs that required some urgent attention.