Monthly Archives: January 2019

Arts, Books, History, Literature

Book Review: Reckonings

HOLOCAUST

Intro: Up to a million people were involved in the extermination of Jews in Hitler’s death camps, yet only a paltry 6,600 were convicted

THE recent publication of Reckonings, Mary Fulbrook’s monumental account of the attempt to bring the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice, is propitious in its timing. It coincides with the rise in anti-Semitism.

The British historian has already won acclaim for her earlier work, A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis And The Holocaust. This latest volume deserves awards, too.

As with all detailed work related to the Nazis’ programme of exterminating the entire European Jewish population, a prospective reader should be warned: the depravity described is almost impossible to read. It is disturbing.

But it is a sense of deep injustice, as well as horror, that will eventually overcome readers of Reckonings. Its main theme is how the overwhelming majority of those involved in the murder of an estimated six million men, women and children were either never brought to justice or were dealt with so leniently that it amounted to the victims being gravely insulted.

Fulbrook estimates that “perhaps 200,000 people, and possibly closer to a million, were at one point or another actively involved in killing Jewish civilians. And the ranks of those who made this possible were far wider”.

The solitary name of Auschwitz has become almost synonymous with the Holocaust and the mass murder of Jews, but there were around another 1,200 “sub-camps” spread across the Reich.

Yet, out of a total of 172,294 participants prosecuted, only 6,656 were convicted. And the overwhelming majority of those actually found guilty received sentences of less than two years’ imprisonment.

One reason for that was the astonishing efficiency of the Nazis’ methods. As Fullbrook duly observes, the West German courts, originally charged with bringing the perpetrators to justice, needed witnesses but “the more perfect the extermination machinery, the less likely the murderers were to be found guilty”.

For example, there were only two known survivors of the Belzec extermination camp, where an estimated half a million people had been gassed – and one of those survivors was killed in suspicious circumstances before he could give evidence.

Only one person, Josef Oberhauser, was convicted, in Munich in 1965, in connection with this mass slaughter.

 

THIRTEEN of the 14 witnesses called to testify in court were former SS personnel. But as Fulbrook writes, were “hardly likely to want to incriminate their former colleagues and in the process risk incriminating themselves”.

In general, the West German courts would acquit those who could make a case that they had little choice but to perform their role in the mass murder (though there are no records of anyone who was punished for refusing to participate).

Claims by many of the perpetrators that they had done their best to make the victims’ final moments more bearable were also treated as a mitigating factor.

The 1966 trial of Walter Thormeyer, a former SS Hauptscharfuhrer, provides a vivid and grotesque example. His deputy, Rudi Zimmermann, one of the miniscule number to display remorse and who actually turned himself in, told the court that, on the occasion of mass killings: “Thormeyer appeared to prefer shooting the female Jews personally… with a certain relish.”

In fact, Thormeyer had a Jewish mistress, but when he feared that this (a crime under Nazi law) would be discovered, he took her for a walk in some woods… and shot her in the back of the neck.

The judge declared that this was a token of Thormeyer’s “consideration”, and the act “humane” – because his mistress had been spared the knowledge that he was going to kill her.

Thormeyer was, at the time of his trial, an official in the West German court system and, as Fulbrook observes, one reason for the general lenience of the sentencing (Thormeyer himself got 12 years) was that the entire German legal bureaucracy was riddled with ex-Nazis.

The idea that the extermination camps were killing Jews “humanely”, by using gas, rather than bullets, was invariably suggested by those put-on trial afterwards, most notably Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz.

In his memoir, he wrote how “humane” this was: “I was relieved that we would be spared all these bloodbaths, and that the victims too would be spared suffering until their last moment came.” Such concern for the victims. Pah.

It was solely out of concern for the killers that mass shootings were supplanted by gassing. The splattering of the brains of women and children was said to have had a deleterious effect on the morale of all but the most depraved German (and, indeed, Austrian) executioners. And it was anything but a humane killing: the very use of the word in connection with mass extermination is itself utterly repulsive.

 

DURING one of her – thankfully rare – accounts of what actually happened, Fulbrook provides citation from one involved in the gassings at Treblinka, Chil Rajchman (whose main job was extracting gold fillings from the dead): “During their death agonies from asphyxiation the bodies also became swollen, so the corpses form literally a single mass.”

He observed that there were differences between the bodies recovered from the smaller and larger gas chambers: in the smaller chamber, death took 20 minutes, whereas in the larger chambers, it took three-quarters of an hour.

Corpses from the larger chambers “were horribly deformed, their faces all black as if burned, the bodies swollen and blue, the teeth so tightly clenched that it was impossible to open them”.

Which, as Rajchman observed, made his job of pulling out all those gold crowns even more difficult.

This is the process whose vast majority of active participants the post-war German courts exonerated on the basis that they were “only obeying orders”.

Yet, as Fulbrook summarises it, “obeying orders” was only one element.

There were also “varying combinations of careerism, cowardice, conformity, fear, lust, brutalisation, hopelessness”.

She adds to that list “desire for reward”. For yes, there were takings to be had from the desperate Jews, before exterminating them.

Obviously, modern-day Germany is not that of the immediate post-war period, when self-preservation and shame combined to hide and conceal the truth.

Yet, during 2018, the head of the increasingly popular Alternative for Deutschland party (AfD), Alexander Gauland, declared the crimes of Hitler and the Nazis to be just “a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of glorious German history”.

Mary Fulbrook, or any reader who is repulsed at such comments, should send him a copy of her book.

. Reckonings by Mary Fulbrook is published by OUP for £25, 672pp

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Arts, Films, History

Film Review: The Favourite (15)

REVIEW

THE FAVOURITE, set in the corrupt and debauched court of England’s Queen Anne during the 18th century, played magnificently by Olivia Colman, is an absolute hoot. The War of the Spanish Succession is also raging on the Continent.

Colman will soon be appearing as Queen Elizabeth II in the Netflix series The Crown, but it’s safe to say that this regal outing doesn’t give us much of a preview in what’s to come.

Her Anne character here bears more resemblance to another Elizabeth: Miranda Richardson’s Queenie in the TV sitcom Blackadder. She is childlike, prone to taking tantrums, full of self-pity, and in need of constant nursing at the hands of her lifelong but infinitely more glamorous and capable friend, Sarah Churchill, acting the part of the Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz).

At the start of the film, Anne shows Sarah a model of the fabulous palace she is gifting her and her husband, the Duke (Mark Gatiss), to mark the famous victory at the Battle of Blenheim. But as Sarah points out, that victory didn’t actually end the war:

“Oh, I did not know that,” replies the Queen, who is not only dim, but also crippled with gout, overweight and given to eating until she makes herself sick. Her courtiers might flatter her absurdly, but the camera says something quite different. Colman, hobbling along the corridors of her palace, gives an uproarious and decidedly un-vain performance. The palace itself is Hatfield House in Hertfordshire.

Weisz similarly delivers an excellent performance. She plays Sarah which at times is almost like the thigh-slapping principal boy in a panto. Both are matched by an ambitious and conniving servant, Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), who inveigles her way first into Sarah’s affections, then into the Queen’s.

Hill has an impeccable English accent, connected to her lineage from an aristocratic family. Indeed, her father was Sarah’s cousin; yet, he was also irredeemably feckless.

“When I was 15 my father lost me in a card game,” says Abigail, so matter-of-factly. Sarah condescendingly tosses her a job as a kitchen maid. However, Abigail has not arrived at court to scrub floors and wash dishes. When she uses her foraging skills to make a herbal treatment for the Queen’s gout, she begins her inexorable rise in the court hierarchy.

She then discovers that there is a very secret dimension to the relationship between Sarah and the Queen, who even have pet names, Mrs Freeman and Mrs Morley, for each other.

How can she use this knowledge to her advantage? By this stage it should have occurred to the audience that the film’s title might not refer to Weisz’s calculating Duchess, but to Stone’s social-climbing servant.

Despite this Sarah will still take some supplanting as the power behind the throne. She is politically astute, a vital ally to the Prime Minister (James Smith), as he seeks to raise taxes to subsidise the war effort, which is being led in the field by her heroic husband. Her sworn enemy is the Leader of the Opposition, Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult), who hopes to outflank Sarah by recruiting Abigail as a spy.

Handily, his protégé Colonel Masham (Joe Alwyn) fancies Abigail rotten. “Have you come to seduce me or rape me?” she asks, as he slips into her room one night. With an indignant reply, Masham replies: “I am a gentleman.”

“So, rape then,” she mutters. Repeatedly, the women in this film get the better of the men. All the bawdiness – and the language gets extremely salty at times – would be entertaining enough, but it is given a raucous spin by director Yorgos Lanthimos, working from a very comical and original screenplay by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara.

In one marvellous scene, he has a ball – quite literally with the baroque fashions of the time – with all those teetering wigs, powdered cheeks and fake beauty spots. The Greek director can hardly be accused of making ordinary films. His last two screen pictures, 2015s The Lobster (which again featured both Weisz and Colman) and The Killing Of A Sacred Deer in 2017, lurched between the whimsical and the downright weird.

The Favourite contains plenty of whimsy, too. But, without doubt, it is comfortably his best yet; Lanthimos has a director’s eye for the grotesque that suits overt comedy even better than it does for quirky horror. He is aided here by a droll chamber-music score, and by Robbie Ryan’s clever artistry and cinematography – which, sometimes, makes use of a wide-angle lens to wreak further distortion on the film’s twisted characters. The framework of the story, though, is entirely factual. Abigail Masham, as she later became, really did topple Sarah Churchill as the Queen’s favourite, if not perhaps as ruthlessly as she does here. But with hilarious audacity, Lanthimos along with his fellow screenwriters also sprinkle the story with anachronisms, including a dance that is more Saturday Night Fever than House of Stuart, and all sorts of modern-day idioms.

There is also great poignancy beneath all the fun. Abigail finds a way to Anne’s heart partly by playing with the 17 rabbits the Queen keeps in her bedchamber as substitutes for the 17 children she has lost. A later act of callous cruelty reminds us, however, that Abigail does not have her sovereign’s best interests at heart. In fact, she barely has a heart at all.

The Duchess, for all her machinations, genuinely does. This is a film which, at its own heart, is about friendship – both real and faked. A superb film that comes with the highest recommendation.

Verdict: A regal treat of historical fact.

★★★★★

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Arts, Books, Literature

Recommended Biographies…

SUMMARIES

. Robert Graves by Jean Moorcroft Wilson (published by Bloomsbury for £25, 480pp)

ALONG with Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves was one of the great poets of the First World War. Graves was born in 1895 and when war broke out a week after he left school, he enlisted aged 19.

Jean Moorcroft Wilson describes his troubled schooldays at Charterhouse and the horror of the war, during which he was wounded and reported dead. He survived, and, whilst he was haunted by his experiences, married 18-year-old feminist artist Nancy Nicolson.

The first volume of Moorcroft Wilson’s finely researched biography concludes with the scandalous end of Graves’s marriage, when he and American poet Laura Riding – who had been conducting a turbulent, four-sided relationship with Nancy and Riding’s married lover – threw themselves out of the upstairs windows of their Hammersmith house.

. Becoming by Michelle Obama (published by Viking for £25, 448pp)

FOR most of us, making a toasted cheese sandwich would be almost the least exotic thing we could do. But for Michelle Obama, after eight years in the White House, sitting in the garden of her own house and eating toasted cheese felt like “my new life just beginning to announce itself . . . Here I am, in this new place”, she writes in the preface to her autobiography, “with a lot I want to say”.

Born into a working-class family in Chicago, she studied at Princeton and became a lawyer at a prestigious Chicago law firm, where she mentored a geeky summer associate named Barack Obama. When they bought ice-cream cones one summer evening and kissed for the first time, Michelle had no idea of the destiny that would one day find her bonding with the Queen over their uncomfortable shoes.

Warm-hearted, funny, passionate about social justice and movingly candid about the problems of being a politician’s wife, Becoming is as compulsive to read as a great novel.

. On Leopard Rock by Wilbur Smith (published by Zaffre for £20, 368pp)

FROM his early childhood years and onwards, Wilbur Smith’s twin passions have been hunting and writing. The secret of both, he observes, is tenacity. Smith was born in 1933, in what is now Zambia, to parents who would inspire his future career in different ways. His father, Herbert, was obsessed with hunting (when Wilbur was a child, Herbert shot three man-eating lions), while his mother, Elfreda, was a passionate reader. Shelves of books lined the walls of their ranch house, and every night she would read to Wilbur in bed.

Soon he was determined to become a writer himself, an idea that his father vigorously opposed: “You’ll starve to death,” he predicted.

Uninhibited by the political correctness he detests, Smith’s memoir is a rollicking yarn of slaughtered wildlife, literary superstardom and late-blooming love. “I won’t stop writing until I stop breathing,” he promises.

. Not The Whole Truth by Angela Huth (published by Constable for £20, 320pp)

“SUDDENLY I am old”, writes the journalist and novelist Angela Huth, author of Land Girls. She was born in 1938, the daughter of the director and producer Harold Huth and his wife, Bridget. While Angela adored her father, her mother was “bored stiff by small children”, leaving Angela and her sister to be looked after by a devoted Nanny, who did her best to conceal their mother’s penchant for gin: “Oh dear, poor mummy fell down the stairs last night.”

Haphazardly educated at a girls’ boarding school, Angela studied art in Paris and Italy before returning “to face the dotty business of becoming a debutante”. A longing to write led her to Queen Magazine, where she met the brilliant journalist Quentin Crewe, who would become her first husband. There ensued an intensely glamorous Bohemian social life, with friends including David Frost and Princess Margaret, who shared Huth’s unusual phobia about dolls.

Deliciously gossipy and trenchant, Not The Whole Story is an entertaining collection of stories from times past.

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