Nazi Sympathizers Research Articles

Zollikon seminars: Protocols--conversations--letters

This volume allows English-speaking readers to take part in an encounter between the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger and the Swiss psychiatrist Medard Boss. A product of their long friendship, this book chronicles their exchange of ideas. Heidegger sought to transcend the bounds of philosophy while Boss and his colleagues in the scientific community sought an enduring intellectual foundation for better understanding their patients and their world. The work affords a unique opportunity to see how Hiedegger clarified and elaborated his central themes for an audience beyond the confines of philosophy - and to see how this audience inspired him to pursue new ideas and new directions. During World War II, Boss came upon Heidegger's Being and Time. Intrigued by both author and book, yet conscious of the damning characterization of Heidegger as a Nazi sympathizer, Boss the physician nonetheless approached Heidegger the philosopher asking for help in reflective on the nature of Heidegger's thought. A correspondence ensued, followed by visits that soon became annual two-week meetings in Boss's home in Zollikon, Switzerland. The protocols from these seminars, recorded by Boss and reviewed, corrected and supplemented by Heidegger himself, make up one part of this volume. They are augmented by Boss's record of the conversations he had with heidegger in the days between seminars and by excerpts from more than 250 letters that Heidegger wrote to Boss between 1947 and 1971. In this book Heidegger attempts to make the fundamental ideas of his philosophy accessible to nonphilosophers. He addresses certain philosophical/psychological theories for the first and only time, including Freudian psychoanalysis and Indian philosophy.

Domestic violence and hate crimes: Acknowledging two levels of responsibility

Sometimes people harbor certain negative attitudes about a group and go on to commit crimes involving persons whom they perceive to be group members. For example, individuals have been beaten to death because of their sexual orientation, lynched because of the color of their skin, or shot because of their religious affiliation. When someone is targeted because she or he is a member of a group for which the perpetrator feels hatred, we often identify this as a crime. Much domestic violence also has its source in negative attitudes, in this case attitudes about the subordinate place of women relative to men in society and the appropriateness of using violence to keep them there. (1) Some people believe that when a crime against an individual is motivated by a negative attitude about a particular group, for example, gay men, the crime is aggravated. In other words, if a vicious beating is also a gay-bashing, the crime is more serious than an equally vicious beating that is directed against a particular individual for reasons not having to do with prejudice. Proponents of this view might support enacting legislation that deals specifically with hate crimes. I accept that crimes motivated by harmful negative attitudes about some group have an extra component that is lacking in similar crimes not so motivated. This component stems from attitudes arising from misconceptions that are potentially harmful to members of that group. I do not, however, endorse the view that hate crimes and their relatives, such as crimes of domestic violence, are for that reason worse than similar crimes otherwise motivated. Nevertheless, I shall argue that this extra component means that, in addition to the usual punishments for these crimes, we have reason to insist on counseling as a part of a just response to those who are convicted of them. The aim of such counseling would be the revision of these negative attitudes. Counseling is particularly appropriate when the attitudes that contribute to the criminal acts are mainstream. For example, homophobia is not restricted to gaybashers. Nor are racist attitudes restricted to perpetrators of racist crimes. Nor is the view that women are subordinate to men restricted to those who beat their female partners. Certainly, anti-semitism was by no means restricted to Nazi sympathizers. My argument for the appropriateness of counseling as part of a just response to convictions in the case of crimes motivated by negative attitudes of these kinds rests on a claim about moral responsibility. Specifically, I argue that incorporating counseling acknowledges two levels of moral responsibility: moral responsibility at the level of the individual perpetrator and moral responsibility at the level of the community. We have good moral reason to take a more integrated approach that includes counseling and involves not only law enforcement and penal institutions but also community-based social services. This does not rule out the possibility of incarceration. Nevertheless this approach urges that we move beyond the idea that a jail or prison term is by itself sufficient to address a conviction for criminal behavior supported by negative attitudes of the kind involved in hate crimes and domestic violence. I expect some opposition to the suggestion that a criminal conviction might warrant anything beyond those punitive consequences with which it is traditionally associated. In particular, opponents may worry that the criminal nature of these acts is compromised when we include social services in the response. Not only are they being treated differently from other assaults, but the treatment associations of counseling might suggest diminished agency, thus undermining the claim that perpetrators are responsible. This would cast into doubt the appropriateness of regarding these wrongdoers as criminals at all. Taking these worries seriously, I address them both. I show that the integrated approach makes sense once we understand the kinds of changes that need to be in place if we are to address the social aspect of these crimes. …

World War II and the American Indian

World War II marked a crossroads for Native Americans. Twenty-five thousand served in America's armed forces and forty thousand -- including many Native American women employed in defense industries -- secured jobs on the home front. The war years divided their past from their future, providing some with the skills and opportunities to enter mainstream society. For other Native Americans, wartime experiences affirmed the value of a renewed, reinvigorated Indian identity apart from the dominant society. This book is the first full account of Native American experiences from the 1930s to 1945 and the first to offer the Indians' perspective. It begins with their responses to the drift toward war in the 1930s, including their reactions to propaganda campaigns directed at them by Nazi sympathizers. It is also the only ethnohistory of their experiences during World War II. Included are the voices and recollections of Indian men who resisted the draft, of those who fought in Europe and the Pacific, and of Indian women on the homefront. The book is also a careful reinterpretation of John Collier's career as commissioner of Indian affairs during the Roosevelt years. Townsend argues that Collier's efforts to preserve traditional Native American lifeways inadvertently provided Indians the resources, training, and services necessary for assimilation in the postwar years.

The PCF, Stalinism and the Cold War

I must admit my great surprise when I was invited to speak at a conference on Louis Aragon. Aragon, arguably more than any other French intellectual in this century, identified his life and career with Communism. And the opening of the Moscow archives, resulting in may be termed what we now know literature, and the appearance of the so-called Livre noir du Communisme, not to mention Francois Furet's Le Passe d'une illusion, (one may mention Tony Judt's condemnation of Stalinist intellectuals in Past Imperfect here as well) have created, or are symptoms of, a very hostile climate for the study of the Communist past, more so even in France than here. (1) I want to do here today is evaluate both the nature of the recent polemical literature of which the Livre noir is emblematic, and where we are in terms of the What we now know literature; in the process I will refer and try to defend my own research on the party done in the primitive darkness in terms of sources that existed over twenty years ago. The authors of the Livre Noir seem to find the PCF today in a coma but lingering; they appear to hope to put it out of its misery. The book, or compendium, has three distinct theses. One is that crime and repression are of the essence of communism as a system anywhere and everywhere it has exercised power. Lenin is held responsible for Stalin's crimes, and an absolute equivalency is established between Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev, and even Gorbachev, and it is extended to Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, and Poi Pot. An ancillary conclusion is that communist parties not in power will inevitably perform as parties in power have done if they get the opportunity to do so. Machiavelli said man is everywhere the same. The authors of the Livre noir believe Communists are everywhere the same. Proof offered here is the iniquity of the Comintern and its activities in Spain, but political murders performed by Communists as far afield as Spain, France, and Mexico. Stephane Courtois argues that the Comintern, as much as any Communist regime, was a totalitarian enterprise. The second thesis is to establish the comparability and the equivalency in evil of Stalinism, Maoism, and the Nazi genocide, although subsequently some of the authors who collaborated on the volume later disagreed with its editor and author of the introduction, Stephane Courtois on this question. Both systems carried out extermination for ideological goals, selected their enemies for who they were rather than anything they did (Jews and Kulaks), interned their victims in concentration camps, and perpetrated mass murder for its own sake. Francois Furet's Le Passe d'une illusion is primarily concerned with giving a long intellectual pedigree to this thesis, while also demonstrating its empirical reality in communist practice. But I find the third thesis of the Livre noir the most disturbing: it preaches the iniquity of utopian forms of thought as inherently perverse and destructive; both Nazism and Communism stand as indicators of the dangers of espousing doctrines that dare to imagine any ideal human society. It seems to me perverse to equate Nazi and Communist notions of utopia, and there is a serious question whether, without utopian thought, any progressive social movement would be possible. (2) Aragon is a target of the Livre noir: He is mentioned at least four times, for his poems in praise of the GPU, of Thorez, and of Stalin; Martin Malia, in his introduction to the American edition, questions why Aragon is praised and republished today in France, and his politics ignored, when former Nazi sympathizers are dismissed as beyond the pale. I must admit to having received a quite contrary personal education in my childhood from Communists among my parents' friends, which was confirmed when I set out to write a book about the PCE The Communists I knew growing up were profoundly humanist; and the former French Communists I interviewed, including Pierre Daix and Dominique Desanti, with whom I am honored to appear today, seemed to me little different. …

Burying the Past: Carl Orff and His Brecht Connection

In 1997, on the eve of the New York City Opera's production of Carmina Burana, a Holocaust survivor from Jerusalem telephoned me in my capacity as president of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music to protest on behalf of Richard Wagner's great-grandson, Gottfried: How could you allow Brecht Weill's Sieben Todsgnden to be performed with Carmina Burana? After all, Carl Orff was a Nazi! That provocative indictment begs all sorts of thorny questions of fact interpretation. Several have already been formulated by Leon Botstein in his prefatory essay to the summer 1995 issue of this journal. How does music, through performance listening, assume then divest itself of political cultural meaning over time, wondered Botstein, and what can we make of the process of loss of memory reconstruction that emerges in the writing of history criticism?' Is there something elusive about music that permits it to resist equally the evil the good with which it is periodically allied? What permits us, fifty years later, to listen to Metamorphosen Carmina Burana without any sense of ambivalence recognition of history?2 Including Orff on his list of Nazi sympathizers linking Carmina Burana in particular with German fascist ideology in the 1930s, Botstein noted that works of music whose origin ide-

Quakers and Nazis: inner light in outer darkness

Why the title Quakers and Nazis, not Quakers against Nazis? Was not hostility part of the interaction between the two groups? On the contrary, Hans A. Schmitt's compelling story describes American, British, and German Quakers' attempts to mitigate the suffering among not only victims of Nazism but Nazi sympathizers in Austria and Lithuania as well. With numerous poignant illustrations of the pressure and social cost involved in being a Quaker from 1933 to 1945, Quakers and Nazis: Inner Light in Outer Darkness reveals a facet of Nazi Germany that is entirely unknown to most people. The book focuses on the heroic acts foreign and German Quakers performed under the Nazi regime, offering fully documented and original information regarding the Quakers' commitment to non-violence and the relief of the victims. At a time when the scholarly world is divided as to whether all Germans knew and approved of the Final Solution, this book makes a valuable contribution to the discussion. Quakers - despite their small numbers - played, and continue to play, an important role in twentieth-century humanitarian relief. Quakers and Nazis: Inner Light in Outer Darkness, a study of how Friends performed under the extreme pressure of a totalitarian regime, will add significantly to our general understanding of Quaker and German history.

Response to Joseph Bendersky

Abstract Joseph Bendersky's brief against 20th century American xenophobia sounds peculiar. It is hard to believe that it deals with the recent past of a country in which quotas and other special benefits are routinely awarded to designated minorities, in which anthropology and sociology departments adamantly insist that genders and races are mere social constructs, and where the media constantly warns against deviations from angelic standards of tolerance. In Bendersky's America, the US army was full of Nazi sympathizers but ended up annihilating Nazi Germany. Its government abounded in anti-Semitic bigots, yet waged a relentless war against suspected German sympathizers in the US.

Creativity, social and political attitudes, and liking or disliking David Duke

Measures of creativity (complexity-simplicity preferences) and social and political attitudes were obtained from 52 Louisiana university students about a month before the U.S. Senate election. Of interest was the reason for liking or disliking the candidate David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi sympathizer. The creativity measure was significantly related to liking or disliking Duke: liking Duke was associated with preference for simplicity, which suggests low creativity. Although students showed preferences for some of the social and political variables, these variables were not related to attitude toward Duke. Finally, the simple, anonymous measurement procedures used here accurately predicted that Duke would do well in the campaign and receive more than 50% of the white vote. This is in stark contrast with the predictions of political pollsters and experts who seriously underestimated his strength.

Social Life, Local Politics and Nazism: Marburg, 1880-1935

Focusing on Marburg, a contentious university town where voters demonstrated strong electoral support for Adolf Hitler's National Socialist party, this imaginative study discusses the political role of small-town organizational life and painstakingly reconstructs the full range of Nazi sympathizers' cross-affiliations with local voluntary groups.

The 1933 German Protestant Church Elections: Machtpolitik or Accommodation?

On 23 July 1933, the pro-Nazi German Christian movement won a stunning victory in the elections for representatives to local parish councils of the German Evangelical Church. In many areas, especially north and eastern Germany where the National Socialist party itself was strongest, the German Christians attracted as much as 75 percent of the vote. The Old Prussian Union church, which embraced most of the political unit of Prussia, felt the effects most profoundly. Upon filling the higher synods after the parish elections, the German Christians were the majority in seven of eight provincial representative bodies. Only the provincial synod in Westphalia retained a non-German Christian majority. Yet this resulted less from a lack of a strong German Christian following in the parishes than from an intentionally undemocratic filtering system that protected higher synods from the Nazi sympathizers.

German Influence in South Brazil

Now that official Axis diplomats have been eliminated from Brazil following the Rio de Janeiro Conference, there remain three sources of possible subversive activities in that country: Axis nationals, Axis racial comrades of Brazilian citizenship, and general pro-fascist elements. In Southern Brazil, where 85% of the million Germanic settlers are Nazi sympathizers, is to be found the largest concentration of National Socialists in the world, outside Europe. Hitler's departing agents have left behind them a well-oiled machine, carefully trained to take over in case diplomatic relations were ever broken off. These states of Parana, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul caused Brazil much anxiety during the first World War, but they had not then been systematically schooled in a technique of world-wide military domination which recent history has seen Axis sympathizers employing in Norway, Holland, France, and at Pearl Harbor. Wide rural areas and sizeable cities in South Brazil are German settled and controlled. Their key civic leaders-mayors and merchants, peasants, pastors and professional men-form possibly the major fifth-column organization remaining in South America's largest country. Some North Americans discount the potential danger of this area. There were North Americans, too, who spoke glibly of France's army as the greatest in the world and smiled at any suggestion that Pearl Harbor might be assaulted. The Brazilian settlements are not the only population centers for Axis propaganda and sabotage remaining in Latin America. Mexico's German groups have been skilfully drilled for Axis usefulness by a galaxy of Nazi agents during nine consecutive years. The pro-