36/52 – Villains, Collaborators, and Followers
This is a hard post to write and one I do not take lightly. I've previously spent a bit of time thinking about the question of how we respond to tyranny (33/52 – Hard Questions), particularly these two questions:
Political -- Why do people willingly – even eagerly – turn over their rights to autocrats?
Personal -- Why do seemingly “normal” people commit unspeakable acts?
These questions were on my mind last week as we toured the Mauthausen Concentration Camp.
Mauthausen was established on August 8, 1938, near Mauthausen in Upper Austria, about 20 km east of Linz. It was the first camp to be built in Austria after its annexation by Nazi Germany. It was a "Category III" camp, the harshest classification in the Nazi system, and initially housed German and Austrian criminals and political prisoners. The targets were later expanded to include Jews, Roma and Sinti, Soviet POWs, and other groups, and by the end of the war, prisoners from over 30 nations were interned at Mauthausen. Numerous slave labor subcamps operated throughout Austria and southern Germany.
The camp's initial focus was the local stone quarry, and was expanded later to include armaments and aircraft production. Mauthausen was known for its brutal conditions and high mortality rate. The horrors at the camp are perhaps best symbolized by the "Stairs of Death," 186 steep stone steps where prisoners were forced to carry heavy granite blocks, and by torture known as the "Parachute Jump," where prisoners were executed by pushing them off a cliff. According to the US Holocaust Museum, an estimated 197,464 prisoners passed through the Mauthausen camp system between August 1938 and May 1945. At least 95,000 died there. More than 14,000 were Jewish.
I don't have any pictures to share because it seemed too disrespectful to take pictures. But the images are seared in my mind. Our guide, Johann Gutenbrunner, did not shy away from the difficulty of the subject matter. His thoughtful commentary led me to explore a few myths (conclusions and any errors are mine) relative to the triad in my title -- Villains, Collaborators, and Followers:
Villains
A myth about the Nazis with which we have reassured ourselves is that the Holocaust was the work of a relatively small number of SS villains and that most "average" people didn't know what was going on. In his difficult but worthwhile books, Timothy Snyder talks about the limits of a "camp-centric" view of the Holocaust. This view ignores the killings that occurred outside the formal extermination system. A significant number of Holocaust victims were killed in the early years of World War 2 before the industrialized killing of the extermination camps reached its peak.
This is horrifying because it dramatically expands the number of primary villains into the hundreds of thousands. While exact figures are debated – and the story is further complicated by the millions killed by Stalin -- Snyder suggests that millions of Jews were killed outside the formal camp system through mass shootings, deliberate starvation, and forced labor leading to death. Local populations in occupied territories sometimes participated in killings, complicating the narrative of the Holocaust. Ordinary people of every stripe augmented the efforts of the SS by participating voluntarily in the killings, often disappearing after the war into their everyday lives.
The sheer number of camps is also something that boggles the mind. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its allies established more than 44,000 camps and other incarceration sites (including ghettos). 44,000. Hard to miss. Consider this map, which only includes the Dachau and Mauthausen systems:
Collaborators
One of the things that first strikes you about Mauthausen is the beauty of the town and the surrounding countryside. The beauty reinforces the myth that the residents of such an idyllic town couldn't possibly have known what was happening; we like to believe that the horror of the camps must have been the work of a small few, likely "just following orders." Not so.
In the United States, we have had a distorted view of Austria's role in the Third Reich. To the extent that we have an impression, it is likely through a "Sound of Music/Captain Von Trapp" filter. Namely, that Austrians resisted the 1938 annexation by Germany (the Anschluss) and were in some ways the "first victims" of the Third Reich. Do you remember the song "Edelweiss" from the movie, sung as a sign of Austrian resistance, much to the consternation of the evil Herr Zeller? Not quite. The song “Edelweiss” was a creation of Rodgers and Hammerstein, not an ancient Austrian folk tune.
The Austrians eagerly embraced the Anschluss, greeted Hitler with rabid enthusiasm, and tried to outdo the Germans in their antisemitism. Salzburg residents conducted a bücherverbrennung (“book burning”) in the Residenzplatz within a few weeks of the Anschluss. In Vienna, Jews were forced to wash sidewalks and public toilets with toothbrushes or their bare hands. And that was just the beginning.
Followers
Many locals adopted a stance of "looking away" or purposeful ignorance. Fear of reprisals from Nazi authorities likely contributed to this passive stance. Local businesses collaborated with the camp to exploit its supply of slave labor. Arriving prisoners were paraded through town from the train station to the camp. The sounds and screams from the camp could be heard by those nearby. Many of the SS guards at the camp attended local churches and visited local pubs and businesses; the grounds included a soccer field, with games attended by locals.
Of course, the Nazis not only killed their victims, but they also first stole everything they had. This included personal property (homes, jewelry, artwork, furniture, clothing), financial assets (bank accounts, stocks, bonds, insurance policies, business assets (companies, real estate, factories), and communal property (synagogues, schools, cultural institutions). Hundreds and hundreds of billions of current dollars, all stolen to fuel the Reich and to maintain personal living standards, while Germany militarized and then went to war. Millions had to know that the apartment or the discounted fur coat that suddenly became available had to have come from somewhere.
Our Own Myths
Which brings me to our own myths. One of the things that Johann and other guides mentioned is that when THEY were in school, none of this was covered. In their defense, the World War 2 generation of German adults just clammed up. It wasn’t until the grandchildren of that generation started questioning things that German and Austrian schools started honestly covering World War 2 and the Holocaust. I can say from other visits I’ve made to sites and museums that the Germans and Austrians have taken this task seriously and honestly.
It’s an example I wish we could follow in dealing with our treatment of Native Americans and African Americans. It might help us to be more honest if it were understood that OUR treatment of Native Americans and African-Americans was one of the “inspirations” for the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis.
One last point. And it's a political point, so some may wish to check out here; you’ll still be my friends. But please consider how you will vote this November; these are not normal times.
There are so many ways that Donald Trump is not fit to be President. However, one is especially important to me, given my study of Germany in the 1930s. And I can't help but think that resisting the tide of autocracy is much easier at the ballot box before power is seized than after. In the last relatively free election in Germany (November 1932), the Nazi Party won only 33.1% of the vote and 196 out of 584 seats in the Reichstag. But it was enough of a foothold for Hitler to become Chancellor and then end democracy within six months because so many assumed Hitler wasn't serious about the things he was saying and that he could be controlled.
When Trump cavalierly throws out phrases like “vermin,” “unified Reich,” “poisoning our blood,” “camps to round up deportees,” “a registry of Muslim-Americans,” and “using serial numbers to round up deportees,” he is either deliberately invoking Nazi imagery or ignorant about that history. Either is horrifying and something we need to take seriously. When he fails to immediately reject an endorsement by a KKK Grand Wizard because he “knows nothing about white supremacists,” that is something to be taken seriously. When his own Vice Presidential candidate has called him an “American Hitler,” that is something to be taken seriously no matter how much J.D. Vance tries to justify it with a later Road to Damascus recantation. And when Trump has dinner with a Holocaust denier, that is something to be taken seriously.
Will Trump turn into Hitler? I doubt it. Will he turn into an autocrat? It seems clear that's his intention. If places like Mauthausen tell me anything, it's that when someone tells you what they will do and who they are, you ought to believe them.
It is still in our power to resist this course. Hundreds of people who worked for Trump and have been leaders in past GOP Administrations have endorsed Kamala Harris. Hundreds. Countless members of his own Cabinet have renounced him, including his own Vice President. These are not “liberals” or “socialists” or “communists.” They are not changing parties or embracing everything that Harris/Walz stands for.
But they ask us to consider whether this man deserves to be followed blindly. We ought to believe them when they tell us who Trump is. They know.
We are not being asked this November to do anything terrifically brave.
But if we fail to act, it might not be so easy the next time.
