5 minute read
WELL DONE! HANS by B. A. Brittingham
He died on the Eastern front.
That’s nearly all I know of him, this cousin named Hans.
He was the son of my grandmother’s sister, Annalise, and I am certain that she mourned him with no less intensity than any other of the millions of soldier mommas did; even if he had fought for the deadly and dreadful Nazi regime.
These are among the things where a different level of humanity comes into play. Does the fact that one side of a war wins thus creating a defeated part really make any difference to those who suffer? It certainly exemplifies the terrible finales for those who choose to follow terrible leaders, even when they think they are selecting the right path for their country.
After World War I, the German people were financially and morally crushed by reparations forced upon them by the Allies who wanted to recover some of their massive military outlays. This was also intended to humiliate Germany and to fiscally cripple its economy so that they could not launch a comeback and another possible war.
We know how well that calculation turned out.
All nations are proud and self-important and perhaps the German Republic was a bit more. Stifled, starving, with high unemployment, they were stirred by the hollow promises of Adolph Hitler.
Where one lives has a heavy-duty influence on one’s beliefs. My grandparents came to America in the early 1920s; they were too busy working to become standard Americans to pay much attention to the Nazi movement as it took seed in their homeland. When they did notice, there was a slight schism in family attitudes.
But by the mid-1930s, there were reports reaching the US of Hitler Youth Brigades, torch bearing night parades, and all the extreme measures invoked to terminate the Jewish population and thus solidify the public behind the deplorable burgeoning regime.
My grandmother once said, “I told my sister Annalise, if you follow Hitler, you will pay with your son.”
And so, it came to pass.
Not only a soldier, Hans was also an SS member, in one of the most feared of Hitler’s high ranking special cadres. These men were so devoted to their Führer that they blindly did anything he wanted regardless of its depravity. That was why Hitler sent them to the frontlines of newly occupied cities and countries: their grisly reputation preceded them forcing the conquered to timidly buckle under.
But Hitler’s villainy was eventually short-circuited by the Russian army which had much more experience with fighting in the severe weather conditions of their own country.
I see this lost and distant cousin as he freezes to death, wondering in his still forming nineteen-year-old mind where the entire Nazi illusion went wrong. Did he live long enough to know that there were places like Auschwitz and Bergan-Belson? Was he aware of the Polish ghettos intended to exploit and convert to slave-labor (and eventual death) their occupants?
Probably not. And even if he did, what could he have done?
Whenever I think of him, he appears as a blond, blue-eyed figure wafting forth from a mist; or maybe the snowbank in which my fiction writer’s imagination visualizes ice crystals forming in his blood as he perishes.
What do we do with such reprehensible images? All that youth, potential, and life pressed down into some great fatality pit alongside all those innocents — Jews and gypsies and Poles and Soviet POWs and Catholics and the mentally infirm and various dissidents. Etcetera.
Somehow the German population has found a way to deal with their appalling past which cannot be undone but must be accepted. It is called Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung and describes the attempt ‘to analyze, digest and learn to live with the past, particularly the Holocaust.’
Don’t all countries and populations have pasts with unspeakable portions to them; somewhere they slipped off the ‘natural track’ for whatever reasons? In our own nation, there are many: the forced importation of Africans, the genocide of our Indigenous People, the War Between the States, the incarceration of the Japanese during WW II. Much of the time it seems as though we handle these transgressions by sweeping them aside or going on with blinders affixed to our consciences.
Maybe it’s all too difficult to look at, too many bodies, too much badness, too bleak an outcome. Maybe we need to remember it in terms of one, as the representative of the many.
When I think of Hans, I remember that like many of us, he was a victim of his time and political circumstance. That his death (and so many others) gave them (in some way) a quick relief from the sins of their community as a whole. It was left for the modern, mournful, and reflective nation to figure out how to process this tragic portion of history.
And yet, as we look towards the Middle East, we must wonder how they—and even our own national choices— will deal in the future with the steady climb of 41,000 plus deaths. Will there someday be an Islamic-Judeo Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung?
Or are we destined to never learn?
