A few thoughts on trying to understand WWII

Reading In the Garden of Beasts, a book about the Dodds, an American family in Berlin during the 1930s, is like watching a cruise ship capsize when the ship’s passengers have no idea that they’re sinking, much less how far below the bottom is (or so I imagine it). It’s also a haunting parade of “what if?” moments – one of the most maddening of which is, of course, what if Americans (and specifically the American government) had actually listened to Ambassador William Dodd's warnings, rather than ridiculing and dismissing him as “Ambassador Dudd.”

Beasts is of course riveting (read the NYTimes review of it here), but this post isn’t so much about  the book itself as my own musings on how anyone who wasn’t part of the “greatest generation” can wrap their minds around World War II and the Holocaust.  

My uncle’s niece

I’m not sure there was ever a time I didn’t know about Hitler and World War II. My father had a vast collection of World War II histories, to the point where he had to hide the volumes when a house guest who spotted a swastika-spined book (probably the classic Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, recognized as one of the most important books of history of all time), assumed he was a Nazi. (Right. My dad the skinhead…).

I think in another life my dad could have been a historian, but his fascination with WWII, while he’s never expressly said it, must originate with his beloved brother’s death in the Battle for Brest after D-Day. I think that for most of his life, my dad has been trying to make sense of his brother’s death through reading, as if understanding the historical backdrop – why and how Hitler came to power and stayed there – will explain the most unnatural loss of his life.

The Battle for Brest, where my uncle was killed in combat.

My father was 14 in 1944, and his brother was 19, maybe 20, when he was drafted while at Cornell. I have never had the heart to ask my father to recount how his family found out that their oldest son was dead, but I find one family photo from the summer of ’44 particularly poignant: my mother and father (childhood friends), stand poolside; my mother smiles shyly at the camera, and her new hips peek from her wool bathing suit; my father, with his corrugated farm boy abs, beams. Judging by the undiluted joy on my father’s face, that photo must have been snapped early that summer, weeks or even days before his brother was killed in action.

But back to Hitler in my household. Like my father, my older brother was obsessed with WWII, and in the same way that I adopted his revulsion to baked beans and zucchini, I adopted the fascination in my own way, mainly by poring over books that had huge gory illustrations of battles. (I also remember asking my brother, when I was about six, which war was his “favorite”: World War I, World War II, or World War III? Needless to say, I got an earful about how World War III hadn’t even happened yet, dummy…). 

An education

But while I knew roughly about Hitler and World War II, it wasn’t until I was about eight that my brother enlightened me about the Holocaust with a paperback history that featured photographs of stacked cords of bodies, skeletal living humans on bunkers, sunken eyes and tattered prison garb, ovens. Then I remember my parents preparing us for some family friends who were going to visit: Don’t ask about the numbers on his arm (which meant, of course, that I spent the duration of the visit staring at his arm). In our household, “childlike fascination” wasn’t so much about bugs or trains or volcanoes, but rather how the horrors of war, and those of European arena of WWII in particular, happened.

Now, I’ve often wondered Auschwitz and Dachau were things I really needed to know about at eight years old, but I think it was okay: it accustomed me to the notion that history as simultaneously vital and scary; it forced me to wonder at an early age about whether or not I thought “evil” existed, and if it did, what form it took; and it made me at least somewhat conscious of how power in the hands of one person – just one!– could unleash completely disproportionate horror. 

Those of us who have never experienced war are prisoners of abstraction – we can never fully “get it.” And while “greatest generation” talk puts my feathers in faint disarray, I do fuss that as time passes, the capacity to even remotely “get it” recedes, hazier and hazier. Massive tragedy is confined to black and white text, black and white photographs. I hope when I explain to my son the back story to the image of his grandparents by the pool in 1944 he can absorb the magnitude of what he can never fully understand. That he will at least know what he will (one hopes) never know.

A few years ago, I was helping a high school senior with a college admissions essay. Imagine my consternation when I read, “Hitler was a selfish man who didn’t take advice from the people around him. He would only do things he felt was right regardless of what others said to him. His poor decision-making led Germany to lose the war and ultimately his own death. Hitler’s faults in life helped me to better understand how to handle things in my own life.”

Needless to say, I never heard back from this particular fellow after I returned to him his draft, complete with my marginal rants, but his version of Hitler stuck with me. How on earth could anyone wind up with that as their “takeaway” about Hitler and World War II? Did his parents have that light an attitude about it? His teachers? Was this sloppy and frankly offensive interpretation of World War II and the Third Reich typical of today’s teenager?

As a teenager, I remember reading the Keats line, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' -- that is all ye know on eart, and all ye need to know," immediately thinking of the Holocaust, and then deciding Keats was full of shit. As for the existence of "evil", I'm agnostic, but I try to not use the term casually.

It’s not like I have anything particularly new or insightful to share in this post – this bit of turf has been ploughed endlessly (and should be). But I did need to get my thoughts on it out, if just for a moment. Even if it's in black and white.