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“This is a day I will never forget. I feel like I am in a dream. He has answered all our questions. The amphitheater reverberates, everyone stands up and cheers, waves, screams! I am crying like a toddler now! I am a different man! What a voice! What passion! I can barely control myself! Now everything is clear! He was born to lead! I am ready to sacrifice everything for this man!” – Joseph Goebbels, Reich Propaganda Minister, in giddy rapture, at a Hitler rally in 1938.
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In the immediate aftermath of World War II, ordinary Germans realized with horror a truth they had never known – that the world thought Nazism was an abomination, a blight upon the earth. They found it difficult to accept that they or their government had done anything wrong while the Third Reich flourished. They had been convinced that their Großdeutsches Reich was God’s chosen land and that they were God’s chosen people.
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Back in 2004, I spent time at a Christmas Eve party at the home of a German-Canadian colleague, whose father had had a Nazi past. When we migrated here, Canada had many such Nazis who had fled Germany at the end of WW2, in the guise of innocent civilians escaping Soviet brutality.
Soon as I set eyes on the old man, the blogger in me perked up, sensing a story here. I began discreetly looking for the tattoo. Members of the Wehrmacht, SS and WaffenSS had their blood groups tattoed prominently on their forearms, a very distinct 1/4-inch marking. I saw no tattoo or surgical scar from removal where the tattoo should have been.
Baldur Wirsing could have been a member of the SS-Totenkopfen a.k.a the ‘Death’s Head’ Unit of the SS, the vicious hardcore SS Unit whose members guarded the death camps. In that case he would have been exempted from being tattooed. (In the days after the German surrender, Allied troops had been taught to recognize those tattoos and to arrest on sight anyone who sported them).
Maybe he was drafted near the end of the war. At that point, the Third Reich had no time for tattoos, desperately recruiting anything on two legs aged 16 to 60.
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Given my morbid fascination with World War II, I tried to buttonhole the man where he sat quietly on an armchair stuffed with cushions in a corner. He held a 40-ml shot glass from which he constantly sipped a clear spirit.
Searching for an opening, I pointed toward his shot glass and asked what he was drinking and why he wasn’t chugging it down in one gulp. I associate shot glasses with wild one-gulp slugs but he was taking little sips, savoring it.
He smiled a personable but forced smile and said, “A good German does not gulp down but sips schnapps. The aim is to feel in command and not lose control.” He still held on to the guttural German accent and the distinct rhythmic tone, the ‘W’ pronounced like a ‘V’, the “TH” like an ‘S’.
A good German, hmmm. The 1940 edition perhaps???
“Were you in the Wehrmacht ….or the SS?” I am a bit of an adventurer. What the fuck could he do? Ask his son to throw me out?
His voice was barely audible. “If only you had been there….Excuse me.” He rose, holding the shot glass in his hand and disappeared into the adjoining room, closing the door behind him, leaving me gobsmacked.
For a moment I thought I saw that same exact dreamy look like the one Joseph Goebbels must have had at that 1938 rally he recorded in his diary.
“Nice talking to you,” I called after the old man as he disappeared from sight. Thankfully, in the hubbub, nobody had noticed our little interaction.
I hadn’t expected him to open up. Usually military veterans (especially those with moral injuries from committing war crimes) are reticent about their wartime experiences, sometimes even with their own families.
He must have been in his 20s in the 1940s.
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“If only you had been there…” The nostalgia rush is a universal emotion.
I am a baby boomer, having come of age early 1960s. We have our share of nostalgia – the secure jobs, the laid-back middle class existence, the two cars, the picket fences, the annual vacation and little kids running around the neighborhood unattended, while large business conglomerates spread all over. For the coloreds in white-majority lands, they felt safer under a new sense of security. The “sundown towns” were fewer than before the war.
The generation preceding the boomers was a vastly different one. It was defined by strong righteous folks who had weathered the Great Depression and the fought a war against Nazism and won. The America journalist, Tom Brokaw, called it “The Greatest Generation”. They too were nostalgic, about their will to prevail over evil in a just war and the glory that war brought to them. They expected all the credit for the economic boom that followed directly after the war, a prosperity that they felt was the direct result of their toil.
But the nostalgia that old man Wirsing had was different, a selective one. It was the nostalgia for an ethnocracy.
Baldur Wirsing had a distinct persona – that of a1930s-born Nazi / Nazi sympathizer who went about his business before the war, secure in the glory of a Germany transformed under its Fuhrer into ‘the greatest nation on earth’.
He failed to see Hitler as what he really was – an impulsive and immature individual driven by emotions, unable to think strategically – a loser who dragged down a whole nation into hell with him.
If one could add two personality traits – an overwhelming propensity to grift and a manic desire to commit sexual assaults – into Hitler’s character traits, he would be a Donald Trump doppelgänger.
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Germany might have won the Second World War had Hitler not exhibited atrocious judgement and taken impulsive, emotional, sometimes illogical and sometimes race-based decisions right from Day-1…..
1940 : He ordered German Panzer divisions to halt outside Dunkirk instead of destroying the trapped British Expeditionary Force, thereby allowing nearly 340,000 Allied troops to evacuate and live to fight another day. After the war, some captured German generals claimed Hitler intentionally let the British escape as a goodwill gesture, hoping Winston Churchill would negotiate a peace treaty. Hitler completely misread Churchill.
1941 : Four days after Pearl Harbor, for no reason whatsoever, Hitler declared war on the largest and most powerful nation in the world – America and in doing so, woke up a sleeping giant. How dumb is that?
1941-42 : Less than two years after he had signed a non-aggression treaty with Moscow, Hitler wasted precious resources ordering the largest military invasion in history – Operation Barbarossa – the disastrous invasion of Russia. Barbarossa was a totally unprovoked act of aggression that Hitler, in his paranoia, claimed was a “preemptive defensive strike”.
Having launched the invasion Hitler didn’t go straight ahead. Rather than allowing his generals to push direct for Moscow and capture it in a lightning attack, he quite inexplicably diverted his forces south toward Kiev.
1942-43 : With the 6th Army now in Ukraine, Hitler obsessed over capturing Stalingrad (today’s Volgograd). In his eyes, Stalingrad was a sudden opportunity, a low-hanging fruit. On his orders, The German forces took a sharp left and marched right into Stalingrad. The resulting 6-month Battle of Stalingrad destroyed an entire German field army (the 6th Army), leaving 1.0 million fighting men dead or wounded and turning the tide at the Eastern Front.
In all, Operation Barbarossa and the attempt to annex Russia cost Germany two million dead, 100000 wounded, 3000 tanks and mobile artillery pieces, 41000 trucks and personnel carriers and 210000 horses destroyed.
1941-43 : Instead of the hard left turn to Stalingrad, the Germans could have kept on southward and rolled through the Caucasus into Iran and annexed it. That way they wouldn’t be thirsting for oil by 1944. But Hitler lacked foresight.
1944 – the Endgame : His fortunes completely reversed by now, the Luftwaffe practically non-existent, Hitler committed his final fatal error – he did not heed Rommel’s advice when the revered Field Marshal urged him to move remaining elite Panzer divisions to the Normandy coast because he expected the Allied landings there. Instead, Hitler swallowed the lies manufactured by the British MI5 and transmitted to the German High Command through turned German spies. Some of those spies – now newly minted double agents – revealed Calais (350kms east) to be the location where the Allies would land and some reported that the invasion would be launched from Scotland and the landings would be around Oslo and Stavanger, Norway, 1500kms from the actual landings at Normandy.
1943-45 : Another huge strategic error was the lack of allocation of sufficient funds for the already ongoing nuclear research and the development of the atom bomb which would have assured a German victory. After all the scientists and the designs were essentially German. Here, racial ideology clouded Hitler’s judgement – the Nazis had already purged top-tier Jewish physicists who had fled westward. The list is a who’s who of nuclear physics – Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe, Lise Meitner, Leo Szilard and many others. These scientists drove the American Manhattan Project that led to the dropping of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man”, the two nuclear bombs that folded the Japanese will to fight on, within just six days of Nagasaki and Germany lost its only fighting ally.
1944-45 : Unlike the atomic bomb, which suffered from underfunding, the V-weapons (Vergeltungswaffen or “Vengeance Weapons”) suffered from the exact opposite problem. For no apparent reason, Hitler became obsessed with them, pouring massive resources into a program that yielded little or no military returns.
The V-2 rocket program cost Germany roughly $2 billion US, a sum equivalent to the entire Manhattan Project. It absorbed vast quantities of rare exotic high nickel-chrome alloy steels, special aluminum alloys and highly skilled technicians. The state-run Mittelwerke GmbH was given carte-blanche to monopolize the entire potato crop to produce alcohol needed for the production of the V-weapons. At a time of severe food shortages, the potatoes would have provided ordinary Germans much needed sustenance. Instead, they starved.
Worse still, the V-1 and V-2 rockets were horribly inaccurate terror weapons. They could not target specific military bases or factories, so they were fired blindly at massive civilian targets like London and Antwerp. Neither did they slow down the Allied advance nor did they alter the course of the war.
The enormous amounts of steel, aluminum and labor spent on V-weapons directly took resources away from the production of conventional defensive weapons. Had they been funneled into developing and building more of the new jet fighters like the Messerschmitt Me-262, anti-aircraft guns and advanced radar systems, Germany could have significantly minimized the losses from the devastating 1944-45 Allied carpet bombing campaign that leveled German cities and infrastructure, when wave after wave of American B-17s and B-24s bombed German cities during the day while, in the night, Dresden, Hamburg, Essen, Cologne, Dusseldorf and the entire Ruhr got hammered by the British Lancasters, Mosquitos and Wellingtons.
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Right after the war, this personae of men like Baldur Wirsing adjusted to the new reality of living in a destroyed wasteland of a nation, as common German citizens again and behaving like they had been the victims.
When Germany recovered quickly, its astonishing economic miracle of the 1960s became their own achievement. They never acknowledged the invaluable help that the American post-WW2 Marshall Plan provided Germany, just as the post-WW1 Dawes Plan had done three decades prior.
Men like Wirsing do not recognize that the Nazis did terrible things. They refuse to believe that their Fuhrer really had been just a dumb fuck. All that they remember is that their Fuhrer had brought them “glory”. Even though they were on the losing side, to them theirs was “The Greatest Generation”. They remember with nostalgia Hitler’s tirade during a massive rally in Munich, 1937, where he proclaimed, “God is on our side, walking with us. Always before God and the world, the stronger has the right to carry through what he wills…”
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Baldur Wirsing passed on in 2014. Had he been alive today he would witness the current explosion of nationalistic right-wing anti-immigrant ethnocratic fervor worldwide. He would cheer on the inexorable march of the Alternative For Germany(AFD) Party to occupy the Bundestag. He would dream of donning his old SS-Untersturmführer’s uniform and heading for the nearest bierhalle where he, along with his Nazi Kamerads, could once again slant their right arms palms down, to the heavens with repeated toasts of “Sieg Heil!!” to their beloved Fuhrer.
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