SEPARATED IN TWO DIFFERENT WWII WORLDS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 18, 2019
HENRY WROTE
Jim,
You have done a lot of reading, many times as much as I have. I wonder if your reading ever included the history of Nazi Germany by Shrider. That book strikes me as factual. I also read about Trump before his 2016 campaign really became a contentious issue. Trump, as strikes me is his habit, threatened to sue the author. But the author went ahead because, as he said, his facts were verifiable and hence any lawsuit would fail. Trump refrained from suing.
I could go on, but there is no need for that.
I very much respect you and the example you have set by not following suit with your employer’s South African enterprise. Also as a fantastically prolific writer. But having lived under the Nazis and much of my life ruined by them, I am fearful of what America, and thereby the world is facing.
In friendship,
Henry
MY RESPONSE
Ever since I received this e-mail from
you (September 30), I’ve meant to respond.
I think the American author you are referring to is William L. Shirer,
and his book is “The Rise & Fall of
the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany” (1960). I read it when it first came out, still in my
twenties, and was amazed that none of my Nalco colleagues displayed any
interest in the book, while it made a deep impression on me. So much so that over the next several decades
I would read much on Adolf Hitler and Nazism as I will soon indicate here.
Regarding Trump and his accuser, I’m
not sure I know what book you’re referring to.
Moreover, I never threatened to sue Nalco Chemical Company. I simply resigned. Employment made no sense to me no matter how
much money they threw at me. My masters
never understood that logic because it wasn’t logical. It was personal.
Years later, I ghost wrote a book for
a consultant with a contract in five figures.
I completed the contract in less than two months with him holding my
last quarter payment. He had given me a
huge box of his papers having found it impossible to turn this material into a
book.
It proved an easy assignment because
there were only eight themes to his writing.
While his writing was actually quite horrible, the themes were not. I’ve often wondered how people who write so
poorly can be so successful. Again, I
didn’t sue.
It happened later with a public
institution with newspaper and magazine investigative journalists calling me all
hours of the day to get my reaction to the director’s underpaying me several
thousands of dollars. The director was
the cause of the organization’s dysfunction which was clearly documented in my
assessment.
A syndicated Tampa Bay Times columnist was brutal to this director in his
columns. So brutal that I never read his
columns again. But my reason for not
giving these reporters a story was personal.
I didn’t want to get the person who hired me in trouble.
IT CAN HAPPEN HERE
To put our very different experiences
as children in perspective, yours from Holland and mine from Middle America, I
might mention while in high school, trolling through the Clinton County (Iowa) Library, I came across “It Can’t Happen Here!” (1935) by the 1930 Nobel Laureate for Literature, Sinclair Lewis (1885 – 1951).
The book, published in the heyday of the
rise of Hitler’s fascism in Germany, describes the fictitious rise of “Buzz”
Windrip who is elected President of the
United States, promising drastic economic and social reforms while
promoting patriotism and traditional values.
After his election, however, Windrip
takes complete control of the government and imposes totalitarian rule in the same
manner as Hitler did in Germany and Mussolini in Italy.
Reviewers of the book, compared the
fascist rise of these two European dictators in Europe to the 1934 socialistic presidential
campaign of Louisiana politician Huey Long whose slogan was “Share Our
Wealth.” Today, at the opposite end of
the political spectrum no doubt Donald Trump would be the target of this
comparison if you go by the rhetoric. Incidentally,
Huey Long was assassinated in 1935, a year before the presidential
election.
THE GERM OF AN IDEA OR AN OBSESSION?
There is no clear logic to explain
this, but over the last sixty years I have been reading about those WWII years,
especially regarding Hitler and Nazi Germany and that interface with Roman
Catholicism and the Vatican. This has
been an attempt to understand the time of my youth, Hitler, the Holocaust,
totalitarianism, the Catholic Church, and why the Jews were the target of the
“Final Solution.” Jews have always been
the curve setters in college, and the ablest people in my experience.
My mother once said to me, “Jimmy, if we weren’t Catholic, I preferred
we be Jewish because they have a drive for excellence.” She was always about excellence when it
came to me. One day I complained. “Why all the pressure on me? Why not some on Jackie (my little brother).” She took a drag on her constant cigarette
with that notable little chuckle of hers, and said, “It’s simply a matter of
horsepower.”
In all my reading, I’ve never come
close to an answer to my dilemma. Yet, by
the accident of circumstances, I’ve lived and worked extensively in Europe,
first for Nalco Chemical Company, and then Honeywell while living in Brussels,
visited your Netherlands every month to call on Honeywell subsidiaries.
In the back of my mind, I’ve thought I
might one day write a book on the Sinclair Lewis theme “It Can’t Happen Here,” but
alas, that is unlikely. Still, here are
the books I’ve read on this subject in my library, but in no particular order:
Hitler’s
Charisma – Kaurence Rees; Hitler’s
Pope: The Secret History of Pope Pius XII – John Cornwell; Hitler’s Willing Executioners – David
Goldhagen; Unholy Trinity: Vatican,
Nazis, Swiss Bank – Mark Aarons/John Loftus; Breaking Faith – John Cornwell; Hitler & The Final Solution – Gerald Fleming; Hitler
& The Vatican – Peter Godman; Anti-Semitism – Paul Goodman/Edwin
Halperin; Siegfried – Harry Mulisch;
The Secret Diaries of Hitler’s Doctor
– David Irving; Blood & Iron: From
Bismarch to Hitler & Von Moltke Family – Otto Friedrich; The Hitler of History – John Lukacs; The Man Who Invented Hitler –David
Lewis; The Mind of Adolf Hitler –
Walter anger; The Birth of the Nazis
– Nigel Jones/Michael Burleigh; Hitler:
Study in Tyranny – Alan Bullock; The
Hidden Hitler: Explaining Hitler – Ron Rosenblum; Hitler:
Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet – Fritz Redlich; The Last Days of Hitler – Hugh Trevor-Roper; Third Reich Memories – Albert Speer; Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth – Gitta Sereny; Hitler’s Vienna – Brigitte Haman; Hitler
in Vienna: 1907-1913 -- J. S. Sidney Jones; The Rise & Fall of the Third Reich – William L. Shirer; The Trial of Hitler – David King; The Death of Hitler – Lev Bezymenski; Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power: January 1933
– Henry Ashby Turner, Jr.; The Good Nazi:
The Life & Lies of Albert Spear –Dan van der Vat; Hitler & the Holocaust – Robert S. Distich; The Pope’s Jews – Gordon Thomas; Hitler – Joachim C. Fest; The Year That Made Hitler: 1924 – Peter
Ross Range.
What I’ve gathered from this is that
we are always vulnerable to a demi-god.
The horror for me was remote; for you it was real. You lived in the crucible of daily terror as
a boy with the Nazis in your homeland.
That is still difficult to fathom.
If you can imagine, my hometown of
Clinton, Iowa was in the middle of the United States in the middle of the
century and in the middle of the farm belt in a community of 33,000. It was a working class neighborhood “In the Shadow of the Courthouse” (the
title of my 2003 memoir written as a novel).
There was no television, no mega
sports, no big new automobiles or manicured lawns. There was radio, movies, high school sports,
the Clinton Industrial Baseball League
where men too young, or too old for military service played for the fun of
it. Clintonians had victory gardens,
drove old jalopies, took the bus to work, or rode their bicycles.
Clinton, situated on the banks of the
Mississippi River, was a vibrant industrial town operating 24/7 providing
supplies for the war. We kids were
pre-teens during the war years living mainly with two parent families few of
whom had gotten beyond grammar school. But
the majority of their sons and daughters would earn college degrees.
It was also a time when kids created
their own play as parents were too busy working or simply too tired to pay them
much mind. Clinton children would never
again know such Darwinian freedom, or its accompanying brutality. They were on their own.
HENRY AGAIN
Good morning, Jim
About 30 years ago I wrote a story named “Lesson from Leo”:
It so happened that I just read it again and then my thoughts
dwelled on what’s happening today - in the US, in European countries, now also
in Canada.
Yesterday I came across a story about people scared to express
their views out of unadulterated fear. “Treacherous waters.” Then I
thought of the final lines of the U.S.’s anthem.
Compare and contrast.
How can this possibly be rectified?
Nonplussed,
Henry
MY RESPONSE
Your modesty is always a bit
overwhelming. I must get through it each
time I read one of your “My-2-cents.”
This was one of the most moving, perhaps because it is my current focus and
attention, then again it might simply be because of your prevailing sincerity. Like Hemingway, so much of the meaning of this
essay is subtle and between the words, such as:
“One
day, Leo came over to my house to say he was going on vacation, by train
through Germany to the East. My father
wished him well and gave him a dime. I
felt envy. Why did he have all the
luck?”
We know where Leo was going.
THE MYSTICAL ANNE FRANK
We read Anne Frank’s Diary, saw her story in a film, and then visited the Anne Frank House at Prinsengracht 263 in
Amsterdam when we lived in Brussels, which is now a museum. It was here that she lived with her family in
the daily terror for two years of one day being discovered by the Nazi Gestapo, which finally did
occur. During this time, Anne Frank
dutifully kept her diary without angst but in a spirit of hope riding on her vivid
imagination. Her diary shows that she
was in every sense a typical young lady with the dreams and aspirations of
youth.
She is mentioned here because, like
Henry’s “My-2-cents,” there is no room for the possibility of defeat from
within. Individualism and “free will,”
now under something of a cloud, will eventually surface because human nature as
Rousseau has shown is indomitable.
Following the arrest of the Frank
family in October or November 1944. Anne and her sister Margot were transferred
from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where the two girls died a
few weeks later, probably of typhus.
Anne was 15.
Call it Catholic guide if you must,
but I’ve never been able to get my mind around Hitler or the Holocaust, despite
reading dystopian novels such as Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” which I read at sea in the Mediterranean as a
corpsman on the flagship of the Sixth Fleet, the USS Salem (CA-139).
I hope readers will open your essay
and ponder it along with these remarks.
We are not in a safe place in our culture at the moment. And it is not a specific ethnic or German
problem – a people I’ve always quite admired; nor a religion or theology
problem much as religion is a convenient scapegoat to our confusion, but a
humanity society problem of civilization.
Be continuing wise,
Jim
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