I am on a tour of a few European countries and I thought I would share a few things I’ve learned.
Rothenburg, Germany
Rothenburg, one of the best preserved medieval towns in Europe, is a beautiful place, filled with colourful half-timbered houses. When you see an ad for travelling to Germany, it’s very likely this little town of 10,000 people is pictured in it.
Medieval times were anything but beautiful, though. One of the only forms of entertainment was watching executions at the town square. Some wealthy people had special small windows cut into their houses so they could watch the action from the comfort of their own homes - a medieval version of Netflix, I guess. But despite providing free entertainment, being the executioner was the very lowest job you could have and thus he had a very tough time finding a wife. Since the town would need future killers, it gave him a special privilege. When the occasional woman was to be executed - usually for some nonsense like witchcraft - she was given a choice: if she agreed to marry the executioner her life would be spared. The overwhelming majority of women chose death, mainly because they believed the executioner and thus by extension his wife would go straight to hell.
Crimes that were not punishable by death still had dire consequences in that the criminal was branded on the forehead. This condemned him to a life of misery, as no other town would let him in. I think that the world runs on incentives, and the forehead brand is a hell of a disincentive to commit crime. (Perhaps we can try this with fentanyl dealers?) Yet despite the harsh punishments, the crime rate was still very high. One study estimates that the homicide rate in London in the 1340s was about 110 per 100,000; today it's 1 per 100,000. This should tell us something about how effective punishment really is at deterring crime, a debate that's come to the forefront in San Francisco recently. My takeaway is that as with almost everything, moderation is much better than the extremes on either side.
Dachau, Germany
I have been to Auschwitz , which is undoubtedly one of the most moving experiences I’ve ever had. Staring at a mountain of human hair will quickly remove any illusions you have about just how rotten human beings can be.
Dachau was the very first concentration camp and unlike Auschwitz, it never became an extermination center. It housed assorted “undesirables”- political opponents, homosexuals, gypsies, Jews, criminals, etc. and it was primarily a slave labour camp. The lie on the front gate pictured below, which translates into “work shall set you free,” was copied at all the other camps. The inmates in Dachau were lent out to different companies, including such familiar names as Siemens, Hugo Boss and BMW. These companies have been trying to reckon with their pasts. In the BMW museum in Munich, there is a section dedicated to detailing what they did (with some of the usual excuses included) and how they are making amends.
The concentration camps represent the nadir of our existence. The level of cruelty and sadism seems unfathomable to many people, but it shouldn't be. While the promise was made that it could never be allowed to happen again, it has, over and over, only on a smaller scale - Cambodia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Uyghurs, etc. It's probably happening right now in Ukraine. We need to understand that human nature doesn't change just because we've made technological progress and had economic development. Our only safeguards are our institutions - democratic legislatures, a free press, impartial courts, rule of law. Remove these and we go right back to barbarism.
Nuremberg, Germany
We visited the massive Nazi complex in Nuremberg. The rally grounds, where Hitler delivered some of his fieriest speeches, held more than 150000 people, who would listen and cheer as the deranged lunatic spewed his venom for several hours. These rallies were filmed by the famous director Leni Riefenstahl , who turned this footage into supreme propaganda films that were then made mandatory viewing throughout Germany.
The films were masterpieces of psychological manipulation and pulled every emotional lever. They exalted an imaginary past and promised a utopian future as Germany would dominate the world for a thousand years. Because she never held any position of power, Riefenstahl never spent even a day in jail and to her death in 2003 denied any responsibility for what she had helped bring about. But make no mistake, she was as important as anyone in the rise of Nazism and should have been treated as such.
People wonder how an educated, cultured society like Germany could have fallen for the Nazis. The main answer is that propaganda really works, especially on stupid people. It’s a lesson I fear we will have to learn again. Paging Fox News...
Wurzburg, Germany
Wurzburg was kind of a much bigger Rothenburg, that is until March 16, 1945. In about 20 minutes, Allied bombers destroyed 80 percent of the city, killing 5000 mostly women and children ( the men were all at war). These were horrible deaths as people were burned alive in the firestorm or were suffocated as the inferno sucked away all the oxygen. More would die in the following days from hunger and exposure.
The war was over three weeks later. There were no significant military installations or troops in or around Wurzburg. It had no industry that supplied the war effort. This was not like the rationale for Hiroshima and Nagasaki ; Hitler would never surrender and actually felt that all Germans deserved to die for “letting him down." The Allies knew all of this. The bombing of Wurzburg was purely motivated by revenge for all the horrors committed by Nazi Germany.
Any impartial observer would call this bombing a war crime. But of course, nothing ever happened to those that ordered it. Initially, the American military wanted to leave Wurzburg as a destroyed shell to remind the Germans of what they had done and the consequences. But eventually the city was rebuilt under the Marshall Plan, in which the US paid for most of Europe's reconstruction. Now that’s some 3-D chess-level thinking: needlessly bomb the crap out of a town and then pay to fix the mess.
Distomo, Greece
Distomo is a village near the ancient site of Delphi. In June 1944, the SS, in reprisal for some partisan attacks, went door to door and massacred 228 people, again mostly women and children. They then burned the town to the ground.
No one who participated in this atrocity was ever held to account for it, despite the fact that there were many eye witnesses. Even a special agent attached to the SS unit reported the atrocity in detail to his superiors, documents which survived the war. Despite this, nothing was ever done. There were innumerable other atrocities just like this one, committed by the Nazis and their collaborators, throughout the war. Very few men were ever held to account. We now know that many powerful people in postwar Germany were trying to avoid their own pasts, so they weren't very interested in pursuing war crimes. We also know that many ex-Nazis were allowed to escape justice because the US used them as assets against communism. It would be far from the last time this 'realist' mindset allowed criminals free reign (see below).
The Nuremberg trials are considered a watershed in the effort to see such horrific crimes punished. The examples of Wurzburg and Distomo show how haphazard, incompetent and outright hypocritical the prosecution of crimes against humanity were right from the beginning and has continued to be in the decades following. We are witnessing daily atrocities in the Ukraine right now. For those hoping that Putin and his henchmen get their deserved punishment, well, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Athens, Greece
Greece had its own MAGA moment in 1967. A group of army officers, claiming that they had to save the country from communism and modern consumer culture, overthrew a lawfully elected government. Like most right-wing nut jobs, the junta fantasized about going back to the past, returning Greece to religious orthodoxy and the fairy tale greatness of the good old days.
It was a terrible dictatorship that relied on violence and that mangled and botched every single thing it touched. Thousands were arrested and tortured and some were murdered.
In the cold-blooded calculations of cold war politics, the junta was supported by the West as a way to protect Greece from a communist takeover. (As FDR once said about Somoza, the brutal Nicaraguan dictator, “he may be a son of a bitch but he’s our son of a bitch.") The economy nosedived and Greece was soon embroiled in a costly war with Turkey over Cyprus.
In 1974, the junta was removed, and Greece reverted back to democracy. But the effects of the junta are still felt today, with Greeks having very low levels of trust in their government. This mistrust fuels and justifies widespread tax evasion, as many believe the government is still as corrupt as it was back then. But depriving the government of resources just leads to more government failures, which leads to more mistrust, and soon you're in a vicious circle from which there seems little chance of escape.
The lesson is that authoritarian dictatorships leave long-lasting scars. Once a country goes down that road, it’s hard to come back from it. Keep this in mind when listening to the garbage spewed forth by our current batch of wanna-be strongmen.
Belfast, Northern Ireland
In Ireland, it was called The Troubles, the conflict between 'Catholics' and 'Protestants' in Northern Ireland that lasted for 30 years. Overlaying the religious divide was a political one, as Protestants mainly wanted to stay in the UK, while most Catholics wanted to be reunited with the rest of Ireland (this is a generalization). While the history is complex, the modern conflict began with Catholics/Nationalists simply wanting equal treatment in Northern Ireland, which was dominated politically and economically by Protestants/Loyalists.
The Troubles are a textbook case in how a few people can seek to divide a population for their own personal benefit. All of the various paramilitary groups driving the conflict were little more than glorified mafias. They engaged in protection rackets, sold black market goods, and even exchanged contract killings with the other side. (Today, the paramilitaries are still operating as drug gangs.) The conflict was kept going for so long mainly so that the leadership could continue to line their pockets. Gerry Adams, the head of the IRA’s political arm, was recently outed as a millionaire. The disgusting Reverend Ian Paisley, whose lunatic rhetoric about papal conspiracies played a large role in prolonging the violence, was made a Baron and when he died in 2014, he left an estate worth nearly a million USD.
If you were a Catholic who lived next to a Protestant , you both looked similar, ate the same food, and shared a common language and history. The main difference was on Sundays you went to different buildings to hear pretty much the exact same bullshit. It’s an age old con game but it usually works. Just listen to some of our current politicians trying the same fraud today. As Mark Twain said, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
This is the nature of evil and there are very few of us who are immune.