Category: History

Another issue that Lagrou takes a close look at in The Legacy of Nazi Occupation is the effective move by anti-Communist forces in the early postwar period (especially from 1947 on) to build a close tie between the Communist enemy and the strong existing anti-Fascist sentiment in the aftermath of the war. This is none other than the development of theories on and propaganda about Totalitarianism. The most famous theoretician of totalitarianism which conflates fascism with communism is Hannah Arendt. I blogged earlier some notes on an article about her by Samantha Power. I’m sure we can all think of other places we have seen this at work, whether it is our own textbooks, the speeches of Truman, or the essays of George Orwell. It is one of the fundamental theoretical building blocks of the deeply flawed binary between the “free world” and the Communist evil empire we struggled against in the Cold War—one which was and continues to be selectively applied as political expedience requires.

Lagrou focuses in on the specific ways this link is found in the postwar resistance/veteran associations, the associations of wartime victims and generally how, “the memory of Nazi persecution became the battle horse of anti-Communism.” (269) Lagrou notes that the early postwar anti-fascist organizations and the anti-totalitarian memories of the cold war shared one major feature in common from the start:

“They systematically obscured the specificity of the genocide. The anti-fascist discourse assimilated all victims of fascism with anti-fascists. The genocide was not recognised as distinct from the overall anti-fascist martyrdom….The anti-totalitarian discourse was more exclusive; its freedom fighters were mostly recruited from nationalist resistance circles, who did not admit victims of the genocide to their clubs. Above all, not only did it obscure the genocide, but genocide was strictly incompatible with its aim. An assimilation betwen Nazi persecution and the Gulag essentially required the omission of genocide.” (285)

In other words, in the Cold War anti-totalitarian rhetoric, the general oppression and the concentration camps (for forced labor, PoWs, and Jews – all mashed together in one category) of Nazi occupation were placed in parallel to the Gulag as its central and most powerful symbol. However, as Lagrou and I’m sure others show, however, this is requires forgetting the specificity of the holocaust—the memory of which resists all attempts to be dragged into a simple Fascism=Communism equation.

Of course, the anti-totalitarian discourse of our own side in the Cold War certainly shares parallels to a similarly reductive discourses related to fascism and imperialism that were popular under Communism. However, it might be worth reminding ourselves of the interesting early postwar genesis and historical consequences of some the most compelling ideas of recent generations. In this specific case, the rapid shift to a dominant anti-totalitarian ideology equating fascism with communism greatly served the radicalization of anti-communism in Western Europe and as Lagrou shows throughout his book, had devastating consequences for Communist resistance fighters or other Communist victims of Nazi persecution repatriated after the war.

I have blogged once before about a fantastic book by Pieter Lagrou called “The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945-1965 . The more I look at it, the more I think of it as a potential model for the kind of study I would like to do for my dissertation on the postwar memory and condemnation of treason or wartime collaboration in East Asia.

In his chapter on “Patriotic memories and the genocide” he discusses the remarkable “reversal of memories” in Western Europe from a memory of wartime Nazi atrocities that marginalized or completely ignored the unique tragedy of the Jewish experience of the war in favor of a discourse emphasizing the hardships of deported laborers and atrocities in retaliation for resistance activities. Lagrou tries to explore this reversal by asking whether or not anti-Semitism continued in the aftermath of war and whether this is enough to explain the lack of attention to the holocaust and the Jewish wartime experience.

While I won’t retrace his arguments, he has a fascinating passage showing how an awareness of the genocide was not “at all incompatible with a continuing, traditional, anti-Semitic discourse. He finds the following passage in a 1945 book by a Dutch author, Leo Hendrickx in liberated Belgium:

“Even if we accept that the power and influence of Jewry in our modern society are not imaginary, yes, if we even willingly admit that the righteous resistance and fair measures against numerous Jewish practices positively benefit Christian society, then it still remains no less true that no Christian of conviction can approve the phenomena that present themselves nowadays under the universal as well as meaningless name of anti-Semitism….The Jews were guilty of the murder of the Son of God, but Pontius Pilate was no less guilty when he nailed an innocent to the cross out of cowardice…Of course, the Jewish problem is a burning question, but those who wish its solution from the perspective of hatred and often of angry envy have rejected Christian love and with it their Christianity…Christian love requires a different struggle, a different anti-Semitism. The mass murder of the Jewish people is the clearest proof that national-socialism is not anti-Semitic, but anti-Christian. Of course the Christian world will have to fight its war against Jewish hegemony, but in a struggle according to its own principles and not according to the whispering of some evil spirit…The freedom we yearn for must not lead to licentiousness and anarchism, because they are the trump card through which the liberal-Jewish hegemony can establish itself.” Gekneveld en Bevrijd (Maaseik, 1945) pp. 140-1 (in Lagrou p257) My italics.