The ignored racist dimension of WWⅡ

A nation has first to have remembered something before it can begin to forget it.

The neglect

In October 1944, the Belgian authorities automatically ascribed the nationality “German” to any Jewish survivor in Belgium who could not prove his or her Belgian citizenship. Theoretically this abolished all wartime “radical” distinctions—but it also turned surviving Jews into de facto enemy aliens who could be interned and whose property was seized (and not returned unto January 1947).

Under legislation passed in 1948, the term “deportes” could be applied only to French citizens or residents deported for political reasons or for resisting the occupier. No distinction was made regarding the camp to which someone was sent or their fate upon arrival. Thus Jewish children who were licked into trains and shipped to Auschwitz for gassing were described in official documents as “political deportees”.

In a 1952 survey, nearly two out of five adults in West Germany did not hesitate to inform pollsters that they thought it was “better” for Germany to have no Jews on its territory.

The recognition

Beginning in 1962, ten West German Lander announced that henceforth the history of the year 1933-1945—including the extermination of the Jews—would be a required subject in all schools.

The German telecast of the “Holocaust” mini-series in January 1979 was by far the most important. It ran for four consecutive nights on West German national television and was watched by an estimated twenty million viewers—well over half of the adult population.

Elsewhere in Western Europe the process of remembering and acknowledging had first to overcome self-serving local illusions—a process that typically took two generations and many decades.

France

It is the tortured, long-denied and serially incomplete memory of France’s war—of the Vichy regime and its complicitous, pro-active role in Nazi projects, above all the Final Solution—that has back-shadowed all of Europe’s post-war efforts to come to terms with Word War Two and the Holocaust.

Under Petain and his Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, France initiated collaborative projects of its own: notoriously the introduction in 1940 and 1941 of “Jewish Laws” without any German pressure to do so, and the arrangement whereby French authorities themselves would round up the country’s Jewish population to meet quotas being demanded by the Nazi authorities as the Final Solution got under way. As a consequence of this successful assertion of French administrative autonomy, most of the Jewish deportees from France never even saw a foreign uniform until they were handed over to Germans for final trans-shipment to Auschwitz from the train yards at Drancy (north of Paris).

In France, uniquely, the breakthrough into a more honest engagement with wartime history was the work of foreign historians. This was not a subject that any native-born scholar had felt comfortable addressing: thirty years after the Liberation of France, national feelings were still acutely sensitive.

In 1994, after nearly fifty years in hiding, Paul Touvier—an activist in Vichy’s wartime Milice—was caught and brought to trial for the murder of seven French Jews in June 1944 near Lyon. In the wake of Touvier’s condemnation, and in the absence of Bousquet, the French judiciary at last found the courage to inculpate, arrest and prosecute another major figure, Maurice Papon. The Papon trail was exemplary nonetheless. It demonstrated conclusively that the fine distinction between “Vichy” and “France” so carefully drawn by everyone from De Gaulle to Mitterrand had never existed.

On March 15th 2005, at the newly inaugurated Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, Chirac’s Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, solemnly declared: “France was at time an accomplice in this share. She is bound forever by the debt she has incurred”.