The material on Speer in this chapter is taken from Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth by Gitta Sereny, Inside the Third Reich by Speer, The Spandau Diaries by Speer and The Last Days of Hitler by Hugh Trevor-Roper.
1 ‘There is nothing a man will not do to another; nothing a man will not do for another.’ From Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels.
2 Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth is a work of exceptional insight and power. When I read it for the first time in 1996 it had a tremendous impact on the ideas I was then beginning to develop. I was struck by the way analytical rigour was combined with a compassion for humanity in her work. And that these forces were not regarded as threats to the other, mutually exclusive, but rather they acted together in a creative tension that gave a unique power to her writing. I’m aware that some historians are critical of her, for getting too close to her subject. This reveals more about the territoriality of historians than anything else, no doubt extremely envious of the unprecedented access that Speer gave Sereny. It also neglects the fact that she had written, eleven years earlier, what is widely regarded as the greatest work ever on perpetrator psychology – her devastating and terrifying book Into That Darkness, on Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka.
Chapter Three: My Father and his Silence
1 ‘I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us …’ is from Kafka’s letter to Oskar Pollak, 27 January 1904.
2 ‘It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections …’ from the opening of The Truce by Primo Levi.
3 ‘trying to look into the black sun which is the Holocaust’ – Claude Lanzmann interviewed by Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil.
Chapter Four: The Silences of Societies in the Face of Atrocity: Germany, France, America, Britain
1 ‘I had grown up with the feeling that something was being kept from me …’ is from Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, ‘Air War and Literature: Zurich Letters’, part III.
2 The Kiefer quote, ‘We had no information about the Third Reich when I was in school …’ I found in the Royal Academy catalogue of the ‘Anselm Kiefer’ exhibition in 2014 (I believe the original source was from an interview with the radio journalist Tim Marlow, in 2007).
3 ‘Have you ever seen a map of London?…’ Hitler quoted by Speer, Inside the Third Reich, Chapter Twenty.
4 The casualty figures for Bomber Command (55,573 dead) are taken from the Royal Air Force Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park and also Among the Dead Cities: Is the Targeting of Civilians in War Ever Justified? by A. C. Grayling; the casualty figures for the Hamburg firebombing (42,500 civilians killed, and 37,000 injured) are from the definitive work on the subject – the four-volume Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany 1939–1945 by Charles Webster and Noble Frankland.
5 ‘The Germans have cut themselves off from half of their culture; they have disabled themselves …’ Kiefer interview with Jean-Marc Terrasse, 2011, quoted in Royal Academy catalogue, 2014.
6 ‘The human condition is Auschwitz, and the principle of Auschwitz finds its perpetuation in our understanding of science and political systems …’ Beuys quoted in Joseph Beuys by Caroline Tisdall.
7 ‘During the Thanksgiving holiday a few weeks ago, I took a walk with some friends and family in a national park …’ is from Arundhati Roy’s The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, ‘The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky’.
Chapter Five: Vernichtung
In this chapter I’ve drawn principally upon material from Exterminate All the Brutes by Sven Linqvist, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold by Mark Cocker and, most of all, from The Kaiser’s Holocaust by David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen. I have enormous admiration for the work of all these writers, but this chapter owes a substantial debt to Olusoga and Erichsen’s brilliant research, which forms the backbone of what I’ve written here.
1 ‘The most righteous of all wars is a war with savages …’ Theodore Roosevelt quoted in ‘Theodore Roosevelt, Geopolitics, and Cosmopolitan Ideals’ by Greg Russell, Review of International Studies, Vol. 32, No. 3 (July 2006).
2 ‘The Mischlinge concept provided the lawyers and civil servants with both a conceptual framework and quasi-legal terminology …’ is from The Kaiser’s Holocaust by David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen.
Chapter Six: A Coda: The Power of History and the Burning of Books
1 ‘where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings too.’ Heine’s famous words come from his 1821 play Almansor – ‘Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.’
2 ‘You do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past.’ The Goebbels quotation is from The Holocaust: An Encyclopedia and Document Collection, edited by Paul R. Bartrop and Michael Dickerman.
3 ‘If there is anything we must change it is the past …’ is from the poem ‘Correspondences’ by Anne Michaels.
Chapter Seven: A Question from Günter Grass
1 The George Steiner quotations are from his essay ‘Dying Is an Art’ in Language and Silence.
2 My nieces’ experience of history at school, together with Moni Mohsin’s and Mukulika Banerjee’s comments, lead me to think that very little has changed over recent generations, and that the teaching of British history is still clearly regarded as a ‘hot potato’ by education authorities and the state. There must have been decisions taken at government level which determined that learning about shameful aspects of Britain’s past would not be ‘beneficial’ for children in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first, nor helpful to our wider society. I feel this is a shocking dereliction of responsibility, by successive governments, but it is also a failure of our wider civil society that there has never been sufficient pressure to address this issue – because the narrative a country tells itself about its past is an extremely powerful phenomenon, for good or ill. It can try to liberate the generations that follow (look at Canada’s processes for a new understanding of its First Peoples, or the way that the Truth and Reconcilation methodology made such an impact on post-apartheid South Africa); it can also stunt the development of an entire society. To give a single example: some years ago, in the pre-Internet age, I was trying to find out more about Britain’s involvement in Tasmania and the extermination of the indigenous people there. I found my copy of the History Today Companion to British History and turned to the relevant page. The entire entry on ‘Tasmania’ was only twenty-nine words, and only twelve words referred to the genocide – less than half a sentence: ‘The early years were marked by determined destruction of the Aboriginal population; prosperity from wheat-growing was followed by severe depression, saved after the 1880s by mining and forestry.’ You’ll also notice that there’s no reference to who were the agents of this destruction – the government of Great Britain, and the white settlers of Tasmania.