Hitler's Furies

Hitler's Furies was interesting.  I guess I've always assumed women were complicit in the holocaust (and not in the sexploitation way like Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS).  It seems to me you can't run a genocide without the full participation of the culture, at least in the 1940s (I think governments have only gotten more skilled at deceit).

Wendy Lower's book tries to cover that aspect of the war, but eventually falls short.  She says herself that there's a lot working against her.  Societal expectations that women weren't truly involved in the killings, or ever involved in killings of any sort, particularly children.  Modified histories by individuals keen to cover their involvement or who still believe the Nazis were in the right, but know history is against them.  Time - some of those she interviewed died during her research period and World War II and even the post-war trials are now far in the past.  And a variety of rationales and silence that have been perfected over the decades, from "I was just doing my job" to "My dead husband did it and I was trying to protect him with my original testimony" to "I didn't know that's what they were doing next door."  The result is that she has a very small set of use cases to work from and Lower has to rely on more of a conjecture approach, pondering how many other women might have been involved based on modern crime statistics, Nazi-era internalization of Jews as less than human, psychology, and what little she does have as indicative of mothers, wives, nurses, administrators, and guards.  It falls a bit thin when it comes to facts and first person accounts, and it doesn't help that her end notes are truly at the end without reference within the text.  I found myself wondering whether I should have checked out two copies of the book so I could keep one open to the back as I read along.

Still, some parts stuck out as particularly horrifying.

On page 86, Lower details how the disposed bodies were everywhere.  That not knowing wasn't necessarily a plausible excuse because you could smell decomposing bodies when you picnicked.  Your feet would sink into ad hoc graves.  And road gravel was sometimes loose because bodies were buried in the middle of the road.  "The sites of mass murder were not in out-of-the-way places; rather, they often encroached on the shortcuts and paths that connected towns."

On page 93 and elsewhere she accounts that whole sections of towns were cleared out, such as 10,000 (out of a town population of 15,000) were murdered in Novogorod Volynsk, and that Germans would recount pillaging in neighborhoods left vacant but still littered with Hebrew texts and personal belongings.  The visual of the texts scattered on the floors is a powerful knowing that the owners wouldn't leave them there unless they had no other choice.

The story of one woman feeding starving children who had escaped from a boxcar only to subsequently walk them to a mass killing pit and personally shoot them in the head one by one while they cried isn't an image I'm likely to forget.  And to leverage feeding them as a sympathetic instance in a trial rather than as an indicator of someone particularly cruel or psychotic (to feed them acknowledges them as human in my opinion, but then again I was never in Nazi-era Germany) speaks to the how deeply society was skewed.

There are significant portions dedicated to the aspects of the Holocaust run by those who weren't soldiers as those were more likely roles for women.  Administrators who handled the paperwork.  Women comforted the men who couldn't handle the killing and got them going again. Nurses potentially euthanized German soldiers injured on the Eastern Front (rumored under Action T4 - see Opposition).  And "The first Nazi mass murderess was not the concentration camp guard but the nurse.  Of all the female professionals, she was the deadliest.  Centrally planned mass killing operations began neither in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau nor in the mass shooting sites of Ukraine; they began instead in the hospitals of the Reich.  The first methods were the sleeping pill, the hypodermic needle, and starvation.  The first victims were children.  During the war, nurses gave thousands of deformed babies and disabled adolescents overdoes of barbiturates, lethal injections of morphine, and denied them food and water." (120).  Lower states elsewhere that midwifery was a role of power, and midwives could condemn a child as non-Aryan, resulting in the death of the child and potentially the mother, based on an assessment of the features sometimes tinged with personal bias.  The Child Euthanasia entry on Wikipedia covers many of the details including financial remuneration for reporting a child.

I found the Nazi mottoes and linguistic constructions Lower cites more frightening than Orwellian mottos and those from The Circle:

• "Kinder, Kuche, Kirche" - children, kitchen, and church (30)
• "Juden Kaput!" Which gave me the willies.  Turning that phrase into a slogan, including for women's rallies, sums up the mindset.
• Ostrausch - the intoxication of the East (164) - the idea that going to the East, Poland and Ukraine, was akin to the wild west of the US and gave one a euphoria that led to a certain hedonism, wildness, and that even nobility.

One can smell a bit of Orwell's 1984 in the language, and if you look back at possible origins of his Newspeak (Wikipedia): "The Principles of Newspeak" is an academic essay appended to the novel. It describes the development of Newspeak, the Party's minimalist artificial language meant to ideologically align thought and action with the principles of Ingsoc by making "all other modes of thought impossible". (For linguistic theories about how language may direct thought, see the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.) Note also the possible influence of the German book LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii, published in 1947, which details how the Nazis controlled society by controlling language.

I'm going to end on the stupidest thing - in my opinion - I read in Hitler's Furies, because it speaks to what Lower was up against in trying to research the book and craft an idea of women's role in genocide.  Good historical work is often built on the accumulation of sound theory as historians leverage the ideas of each other and other disciplines and first person narrative.  Because so much of the first person narrative is potentially lies or obfuscation, Lower relies more heavily on the other aspects.  Trying to analyze the role of women in the Nazi regime obviously abuts the fields of criminality and psychology and those studies are full of a preponderance of nonsense about women as mothers, sex fiends, wives, and more. Before you can craft a meaningful story about women's roles in The Holocaust, you have to overcome meaningless statements like, "Another dubious theory posits that women have committed more crimes than have been documented, given that women are "naturally deceitful" and secretive.  The "evidence" provided is women's skill at concealing menstruation and faking orgasms (158)."  And yet those were attitudes that were believed and applied during the era and therefore important to acknowledge, not as fact, but as perception of fact that was acted upon by courts and doctors and actively leveraged by women themselves when faced with punishment.

A good book in many parts, just not executed well as a whole.

Max Manus: Man of War

I watched Max Manus: Man of War while bicycling this weekend.  It's due to be removed from Netflix streaming end of month, so I was running out of time.  I'm very glad I caught it before it was gone.  It's an incredibly good movie.  Funny in parts.  Sad in others.  Full of introspection.

Three parts I really liked where 1.) any part where you realized every house and home in Norway during WWII had a pile of wood in front of it.  I've read about how horse crap used to be a huge issue for cities and we just never hear about it now.  Similarly, I never gave any thought to the fact that not having electric or gas heating might require an amazing amount of stored wood on every corner.  2.) Where Max is explaining to Tikken (the woman he's interested in) that he misses volunteering in the Finnish Winter War because everything was so straightforward there and being a resistance fighter is full of confusion and, basically, paperwork.  You see cuts of him in the Winter War, and he's killing Russians in their machine gun nest point blank, and by chasing them down with his knife, after which he has an emotional breakdown.  It does look more straightforward, but it definitely doesn't look better. 3.) Near the end when he's having a toast with his friends.  He's not toasting their passing.  They're all toasting his survival of the war from the grave.  A very moving scene and exceptionally well done.

The history is interesting.  I knew about the sinking of the Donau, although primarily because of it's hauling of Jews to Auschwitz.  But I wasn't overly familiar with the Norwegian resistance.  And although there was some contention that not everything was true in Max's biography, he did see machine gun fire and bombardment and had to deal with PTSD.

If you get a chance to watch it, it's well worth while.  And I'd recommend it as a double feature with Tavlisota, also a great film about Scandinavia during WWII.

Advanced Squad Leader

Kyle and I used to play a lot of Squad Leader. Not Advanced Squad Leader, which involves this enormous binder of rules of such intricacy that it make the publishing systems at my company look tame, but regular old first-generation Squad Leader that came in a book case box and a dozen subsequent book case boxes as expansions. I remember our excitement when two different times, at Riverplace and at the Mall in Monticello, we found expansions priced to sell at just a few dollars each. The great part about Squad Leader was that if you had ten copies of one expansion, you could still string all the hex-based boards together into an enormous playing area. So when they were cheap, you had the opportunity to add real estate to your play area.

Which we did. We had whole weekends where Kyle, Goon (Erik, who know has an Eastern Orthodox name), and I moved little cardboard squares around several dozen boards spanning a significant portion of my apartment floor near the University of Minnesota while drinking beer and shooting the shit. It made for some memorable times. Like when we played for almost 72 hours, and the whole game involved ganging up on whoever had to take a bathroom break. Eventually it devolved into me in the mountains rushing in and trying to split them up where they had bunkered down in the city, and then them pushing me out and back up into the mountains, all the while trading hardware (machine guns, et al). Or the time we finally used tanks, and Kyle blew up one of my tanks, the joy evident on his face, only to have my tanks come around a corner and tip the game the other direction. And then there was the yelling, which introduced us to the girls on the other side of the wall. One of whom Goon dated, and another - a student at Aveda - who cut my hair for several years.

Sure...we could have been chasing women (and perhaps we were, given we were talking to them through the wall). But two of the most attractive women I knew from college (my wife aside) were seriously into war games and Russian military history. You don't get that kind of variety after you enter the real world, so it skews your idea of what's normal and acceptable behavior. If they think playing war games is fun, you just take it at face value.

Kyle and I have tried several times over the years to recapture a bit of that fun, but the Advanced Squad Leader rules are daunting. The attacker/defender fire and movement phases alone take some in depth study and practice, and many days it seems as though it's just easier to settle on some f*ing Eurogame. But once again, ASL calls. I can hear the small gun fire (or maybe that me getting offed with my .2 kill rate in Call of Duty on the Wii) and the rumble of the tanks. It's probably my fault for suggesting a game of Axis and Allies at our last gaming day. That's a gateway drug. Advanced Squad Leader is the heroin to A&A marijuana. Fortunately, the internet has occurred since we last really played, and there seem to be a few good tutorials out there to get us going.

At the moment, I'm reading this one at BoardGameGeek which uses a more lyrical approach to the rules (no 1.2.1.1.b, references 1.1.0.3.c) and jogs my memory of all the things we kept trying to remember and couldn't (oh yeah, cowering). I'm hoping it's a good place to start, and you know I'm optimistic as even these simple tutorials are over 24 pages per section. So a basic introduction is 160 or so pages, which gives you an idea of the complexity of the outlined rules system.

• Tutorial 1 - Basic Phases
• An ASLSK Tutorial (Part 2) - Support Weapons - http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/166941
• An ASLSK Tutorial (Part 3) - Infantry in Battle - http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/169542
• An ASLSK Tutorial (Part 4) - Ordnance and the To Hit Process - http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/177157
• An ASLSK Tutorial (Part 5) - Tanks - http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/361467
• Explanation of ROF (and Defensive Fire) - http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/88350
• Explanation of the Rout Phase - http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/122340

Witness to Barbarism

I took Klund's advice and made use of the inter library loan system last night. Not just because I wanted some of the Terry Pratchett books the Dakota library system doesn't carry, but because a number of books in my Amazon list aren't things I can get at Dakota County (not surprisingly, a few of them I can't get in Minnesota at all), and because I read the first Sandman collection (by Neil Gaiman), Preludes and Nocturnes, and wanted to get my hands on the other nine collections my own library doesn't carry. Yes, I am reading a comic book (eff that graphic novel stuff - Cain and Abel are mixed in, and I read enough old House of Mystery/House of Secrets comic books as a kid, courtesy of the flea market, that I know those weren't classics of literature), and one that's almost 20 years old now, but it's interesting to see where Gaiman did some of his early work.

On a more interesting note, I recently read Witness to Barbarism, by Horace R. Hansen, St. Paul lawyer (well, he was, he's passed on), and chief prosecutor of the Dachau war-crimes trials. My brother-in-law bought it for me last Christmas, and I've finally moved deep enough into my bedside shelf to tackle it.

First off, my apologies to Horace, but he's a horrible writer. More than a little bad. He details how people finish speaking (He folded his arms. We were all done speaking for the day), and not just once, but a couple hundred times, and often at the end of a chapter, when you'd know they were done because the chapter ends. But that's just nitpicking. His first-hand account of his experiences as a prosecutor at the end of the war is fascinating. Near the beginning of the book he talks about U.S. units engaged in raping locals and their trials and execution. Not one or two, but what sounds like large portions of certain units (he doesn't give exact numbers). There's also interesting bits about General Eisenhower ordering Germans to bury burnt concentration camp victims at Gardelegen, one German to dig each grave and to appoint a successor in perpetuity, and another bit where Eisenhower orders that German officer POWs are not to be allowed execution by guillotine (considered a more honorable way to die, and used extensively in Nazi Germany), but were to be hanged. I had also never heard the phrase Sitzkrieg, although it was apparently characteristic of a whole stage of WWII (also called the Phony War or Twilight War).

The pictures are incredible, many of them from Hansen's collection and the collections of the Germans he met, and as long as Horace sticks to his first-hand accounts, and not the accounts of the German recorders for Hitler's staff meetings, which take up a sizeable portion of the book, exceptional. It's the level of discussion of the recorders' interviews which make them not as interesting, as they mainly detail high level politics and events, not their day-to-day lives, or the lives of those they were in contact with. Whenever Horace swings back to the actual trial and his personal contact with those from the camps, both victims and victimizers, being told history stops, and listening to Horace live history begins. His personality peeks through when he refuses to stay for two months to run the trials when he gets enough points to go home (he's obviously sick of what he sees), and when he feels a pang of guilt about the American rapists because German soliders get one to three years for rape, while U.S. soldiers get immediate life imprisonment or death. That's something that certainly highlights the changes in our country when conservatives note that we need to fight on the same level and with the same rules as terrorists.

In that same vein, I close with a good quote (p. 146):

"He disliked professionals, like teachers, journalists, engineers, and lawyers, because they were trained to look at both sides of an issue and might come out in a gray area and take no stand," ends Reynitz.

"That's very interesting. Shows his character. How did he use propaganda?" I ask Krieger.

He always takes time to answer, and he speaks calmly now: "Hitler and his close associates used propaganda to take a position on an issue. By constantly repeating a position, even if false, the propaganda took on credibility. The Americans and British were saying in their newspapers that this was use of the Big Lie. He was good at it."