Dear Germany: Have you learned anything?

I grew up, as many Americans and nearly all Jews did, with a deep anger at your country. But as a young man, I began to rethink my views of Germans. Against the wishes of almost everyone I knew -- most of whom would not even buy a German product -- I decided to go to Germany. My visit in 1968, at the age of 20, was the first of at least a dozen trips to your country.

I argued that it was wrong to hold any German who had been younger than 13 years old during the war morally responsible for your country's horrific crimes. I chose the age of 13 because in Judaism, that is the age of moral culpability. I argued in 1968 that every German then under the age of 40 must be regarded as blameless, and we should not assume the worst of every German over 40.

I argued that because Volkswagen and Mercedes defied the Arab boycott and did business with Israel, Jews should not boycott German products.

I argued that you were our staunch ally in the Cold War in confronting Soviet Communism.

I argued, most important of all, that Germans were ashamed of their Nazi past and had learned great moral lessons from it.

The last argument, I now realize, was more hope than fact. There is no question that the vast majority of Germans are ashamed of Nazism and the Holocaust. But I am now as certain as I am sad that you learned nothing about good and evil from it, and that you are as confused morally today as you were when you supported Hitler. Not because you are evil, but because you cannot recognize evil.

This is stunning. Unlike the Japanese, who have ignored their atrocities against the Chinese and Koreans, you confronted your evil. You taught the next generations of Germans about Nazism and about the Holocaust.

It is therefore incredible that all that education about evil has produced a generation that shies away from judging, let alone confronting, evil. It boggles the mind that a nation that was liberated from Nazism solely by armies waging war should embrace pacifism, that a nation that saw what appeasement of evil leads to now embraces it.

I was sure that some German leaders would stand up and say, "My fellow Germans, we know a Hitler when we see one, and Saddam Hussein is one." But no German stood up to say this. Instead one of your leaders compared the American president to Hitler.

I was sure that some German leaders would stand up and say, "My fellow Germans, we know genocidal anti-Semitism when we see it, and we see it in the Arab world." But no German leader stood up to say this either.

Few of us expected anything from the French. From the Jacobins and the guillotine, to the Dreyfus trial, to the Vichy regime, to de Gaulle's withdrawal from anti-Communist NATO, France, with rare exceptions, has done little that is moral and nothing that is courageous. So the disdain that many Americans have long felt for France has merely been reinforced.

But I think that I speak in the name of many Americans in saying that we expected more of you. Because of what we did for you after World War II and during the Cold War. Because you, of all people, know that Americans are a decent people. And especially because of your experience with evil. How could you have produced a Hitler and not recognize another one just one generation later? How could you know firsthand about torture chambers and children's screams and not ache to end them in another country? How could you side with amoral France against your friend America?

There is, it would seem, only one answer. Nazism taught you nothing. Instead of learning that evil must be fought, you learned that fighting is evil.

This is only my one little anecdotal tale, dealing with ordinary German citizens, but, its all I have to go on, and I would just assume it is not representative of all Germans, but certainly representative of some...

When my boys were in grade school, my older boys class was studying WW11, and specifically the Holocaust...each student was assigned a specific subject, and had to do extensive research on that subject, and then they had to present it to the class...

My sons specific topic of research was Adolph Eichman, and I do remember that he had a lot of books, taken out of the library, ,dealing with the Holocaust, and I also had a few paperback books, in my own personal library, dealing with the Holocaust..and fortunately for my son, I had one old paperback book, falling apart practically that dealt only with Eichman...in the middle of the book, there were pages and pages full of pictures of concentration camps, and gruesome pics of the crematoriums, of people who were hung, of firing squads, and lots of pics of naked dead bodies, piled up by the hundreds....it was all very hard to look at, yet it was the truth of the matter, and my son was very intent on studyint these pics, and just full of questions, of "Why"..."Why and How could such a thing be allowed to happen"

My son had all these books on spread out on the kitchen table, and he and I were discussing these matters, when my younger son(4yrs younger than the older boy) and his little friend came into the house, and wanted to know what we were doing, and they looked with interest also, at these gruesome pics...and the were full of questions as well, and I explained to them what these pics were and what they meant, as best as I could, considering their age range, which was probaby around 9yrs old...the older boy being 13...

And I thought nothing of this...but the next day, the mother of my younger sons friend, came storming over to my house, demanding to know why I dared to show her son such pics, and how dare I mention, that this happened in Nazi Germany(she was a woman born in Germany, married an American GI, and then came to the USA)....

I explained to her, the interest all the boys had in these books and pictures, and had just assumed, quite unwisely, that her son knew something about the history of his mothers home country...

Apparently I was mistaken...this woman just floored me...she was convinced that the whole story of the Holocaust was overblown, that very few Jews were slaughtered, that Hitler and his henchmen were not really as bad as Americans made them out to be...and that I should not be telling such tales...

I politely told her to get the hell out of my house, and not to come back...she was just outraged....she really did think she could bully me, into her warped way of thinking...it was clear that she did not wish for her son to be informed of such things...wonder how she thought she could prevent him from learing about WW11, and the Holocaust...sooner or later, he would learn about it in school, or from his own personal reading...

To this day, I have never been able to understand why she thought this way....I wondered about what she had learned about her country in school, or from her family, and was she just in denial and deluded...

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