Nazism

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

A great historian with fascist tendencies has died

A great historian has died. He joined the Nazi party in the 1930s, spurred by a fear of the communism which was then spreading through Europe. Although he survived for many decades to see the consequences of the ideology, he nevertheless remained nostalgic for, and loyal to, fascism. He also retained an active interest in the Conservative party and acted as a guru for a time to John Major, though he subsequently expressed disappointment at the direction of his leadership. In a statement the current leader of the Conservative party, David Cameron described the historian as: ‘An extraordinary historian, a man passionate about his politics and a great friend of my family’.

Friday

Fleur Macdonald

Blast from the past: The Teleportation Accident reviewed

He'd probably agree with Edward Gibbon's assessment of history as 'little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind' but Ned Beauman's instinct as to why we do what we do is a lot more basic. We're motivated by sex: whether we're having it or - as is more often the case in Beauman's world - not having it. And he might have a point. Take for example Ernst Hanfstaengl who described his former buddy, a certain Adolf Hitler, as "a man who was neither fish, flesh nor fowl, neither fully homosexual nor fully heterosexual... I had formed the firm conviction that he was impotent, the repressed, masturbating type." A committed Freudian might call that motive enough.

Friday

J P O'Malley

Interview: Bernard Wasserstein and the Nazi genocide

As 1930s Europe moved towards the catastrophe of the Second World War, much of the greater part of the continent —  for Jews — was being turned into a giant concentration camp. Bernard Wasserstein’s On the Eve, The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War, captures the sorrows and glories of European Jewry in the decades leading up the Nazi genocide. From the shtetls of Lithuania, to the salons of Vienna, Jewish culture was already on the road to extinction. Wasserstein’s book also proves that contrary to received wisdom, there was a growing awareness that Jews were approaching a cataclysmic extinction. Bernard Wasserstein was born in London and has taught at Oxford, Sheffield, Jerusalem, Brandeis, and Glasgow Universities.

Friday

Douglas Murray

Gitta Sereny and the truth about evil

The death of the author and journalist Gitta Sereny earlier this month drew some strangely critical notices. One piece even tried to blame her for a current cultural tendency to claim people are not responsible for their own actions. Though this was a dissenting view, there was a more general seam of criticism which ran through many obituaries. The claim was, essentially, that Sereny grew too uncomfortably close to her subjects and even ended up on occasions sympathising with them or excusing them. It is probably on the basis of her biography of Albert Speer that most of the criticism has come. It is true that Sereny got close to Speer and liked him.

Friday

Daniel Korski

‘Let everyone live happily…’

Created to remember one of the darkest chapters in mankind's history, Holocaust Day is for many people an occasion for unadulterated discomfort. Most of my family perished in the Holocaust and those who survived either hid in occupied Poland, pretending to be Catholics, fled to Uzbekistan in the then-USSR or, like Marcel Rayman, fought the Nazis. Today I re-read a letter Marcel sent to his family the night before he was executed by the Nazis for trying to kill the German commander of Paris: Little mother, When you read this letter, I'm sure it will cause you extreme pain, but I will have been dead for a while, and you'll be consoled by my brother who will live happily with you and give you all the joy I would have liked to give you.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

The Lucifer Effect

Today’s papers are full of comment on the brilliant Panorama exposé of care home abuse. But none have mentioned what jumped out at me: the parallels between this and the Stanford Prison Experiment. The way that the tattooed Wayne treated his mentally ill patients is sickening — but, to me, this is not just a story about human evil. It’s a story about how institutionalisation brings out the evil in people, and that this evil is far closer to the surface than we like to admit. Philip Zimbardo, a psychology professor at Stanford, randomly divided 25 volunteers to play the roles of prisoners and guards in a poorly-regulated, mock prison.

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Caught between two great evils

David Brooks, the great New York Times columnist, recommends the best essays of the year every Christmas. His selection this year includes a brilliant essay by Anne Applebaum, of this parish, on Hitler, Stalin and Eastern Europe. It makes you realise quite how bloody the Eastern Front was—‘On any given day in the autumn of 1941, as many Soviet POWs died as did British and American POWs during the entire war’—and think about the effect on these societies of being caught in the middle of these two extremist ideologies. There is always a tendency for us to discuss how the crimes of Hitler and Stalin compare.