The Hitler Diaries

In retrospect, it was so lame. A cache of Hitler’s diaries, some sixty-two handwritten volumes spanning the period from 1932 to the eve of his death in 1945, was supposed to have been found in an East German barn. The German source who sold the diaries to the magazine Der Stern, Konrad Kujau, claimed to have smuggled them out of East Germany, one at a time — a process that took two years.

Kujau was a well-known forger who’d been caught peddling fake Nazi memorabilia in the past. He was apparently quite good; some of the letters he’d forged were still considered genuine at the time of the hoax. German handwriting experts compared the diaries against some of Kujau’s previous forgeries and pronounced them genuine as well. So did the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was brought in by the Times to authenticate the documents. The first installment was duly published on April 25, 1983. 

Skeptics pounced on the story the minute it hit the press. British historian Alan Bullock, author of the highly-regarded biography Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, noted that “despite extraordinary efforts... to scrape together every scrap of information about Hitler, there has never been a suggestion that he kept diaries.” Others complained that the diary entries seemed out of character. “I read one excerpt where he was supposed to have written ‘ha, ha, ha,’” said another expert. “He wasn’t that kind of person.”

Still, it must have been hard to resist succumbing to the hoax when you had entries like this one, allegedly written by Hitler in June of 1941: "On Eva's wishes, I am thoroughly examined by my doctors. Because of the new pills I have violent flatulence, and - says Eva - bad breath." Nobody knew the real Adolf Hitler, not even his closest associates. Who'd have guessed that such a monster had problems with flatulence and bad breath?

Just this past April, Rupert Murdoch told the Leveson Inquiry into media ethics that publishing the Hitler Diaries in 1983 was a "major mistake" which he would have to live with for the rest of his life. Murdoch offered Der Stern $3 million for world rights to the diaries in a bidding war against Newsweek. A recent New Yorker blog suggests that even after the hoax was revealed, Murdoch came out ahead.

The last word, I think, should go to Trevor-Roper. "For Mythopoeia is a far more common characteristic of the human race (and perhaps especially of the German race) than veracity," he wrote in The Last Days of Hitler. Or maybe we should go with P.T. Barnum: "There's a sucker born every minute."

Le Corbeau (The Raven)

All of France resisted the Nazis, if not actively, at least in their hearts. So argued Jean-Paul Sartre in “The Republic of Silence,” an uplifting little address he published a month after the Liberation. “Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest,” he wrote. “And here I am not speaking of the elite among us who were real Resistants, but of all Frenchmen who, at every hour of the night and day throughout four years, answered NO.”

Of course, Sartre knew better. In “Paris Under the Occupation,” published a few months later, he presented a different picture of the compromises that daily life under the thumb of the Germans entailed. Here he admitted that his countrymen, for the most part, were too demoralized to resist. And yet he couldn’t quite bring himself to acknowledge how eagerly many complied.

Millions of people denounced their neighbors in anonymous letters to the authorities during the Vichy era. You could say this was something of a patriotic tradition in France. During the ancien régime, secret letters led to the imprisonment of countless “enemies,” who would languish in jail, never knowing what crime they had been accused of, not even knowing the name of their accuser. The practice was stopped during the French Revolution, but the habit persisted. Under Napoleon Bonaparte it was said that half of France was paid to inform on the other half. Informers were also employed during the colonial struggles after the war.

Betrayal was an uncomfortable fact of life under the Occupation, and Henri-Georges Clouzot made it the subject of his 1943 suspense film, “Le Corbeau.” Remarkably, the film was produced by a German-owned company, Continental. More remarkably, early publicity for the picture highlighted the theme:  “Informing, the shame of the century!” Goodness, what were they thinking?

The film was a smash hit. The Catholic Church gave it a “6” on its moral scale—“1” being appropriate for all audiences, even children, and “6” being a film so pernicious that it deserved to be banned—thus ensuring that it would find an audience for decades to come. In fact, prominent critics on both ends of the political spectrum condemned “Le Corbeau.” Clouzot was accused of treason in the collaborationist newspaper Je Suis Partout; anonymous letters were “necessary” to maintain public order claimed fascist writer Lucien Rebatet. The Left, meanwhile, objected to the complete absence of admirable characters. Nobody comes off well. Not a single soul. Children, nuns, peasants, shopkeepers, teachers, workers: all are corrupted by the poison pen letters circulating in their small town.

“You think that the good are all good and the bad are all bad,” the head of the hospital, Vorzet, tells the film’s protagonist, Germain, in a famous scene. “The good is the light and the bad is the shadow.” (Here Vorzet swings a lightbulb that is dangling from a wire overhead.) Germain is having an affair with a woman in the town. He desires her, but says that he wouldn’t hesitate to turn her in if she were found to be the culprit sending the poison pen letters. “But where is the shadow, where is the light?” Vorget asks. (By now the zones of light and shadow are shifting crazily as the bulb swings back and forth.) “Do you know if you are in the light or in the shadows?”

It’s only natural to seek clarity, particularly during times of upheaval. Simone de Beauvoir argued in favor of the death penalty for war criminals for precisely this reason. Salutary executions were the only means of restoring the moral certainties that were compromised during the Vichy era, she proclaimed in her essay, “An Eye for an Eye.” And yet both she and Sartre stood up for Clouzot when the postwar French government barred him from making any more films on account of his alleged ties with the Nazis. Sartre even worked with Clouzot on a screenplay during the two-year period before the ban was lifted.

For his part, Clouzot seems to have been quite a piece of work. Germain’s intolerance for the hypocrisy of human nature mirrored the director’s own. He was not an easy man to work with; more than one actress complained of being slapped around on the set. On the other hand, he got fine performances out of his cast and is one of only three directors to have won the top prizes at the Cannes, Venice, and Berlin firm festivals (the other two were Michelangelo Antonioni and Robert Altman).

So, where is the shadow and where is the light?




Lisa Lieberman blogs about old movies at Deathless Prose.

Review of the Movie "Free Men"

I know this will date me, but watching “Free Men” sent me back to a black-and-white TV program of the 1960s, The Outer Limits. Each episode opened with a test pattern and some eerie music. “There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture,” a menacing voice would announce.

“Free Men” is an effort to adjust our picture of the French Resistance during the Second World War to include the activities of North African Muslims who resisted the Nazis and rescued Jews. This is no small matter. Until fairly recently, the standard picture was completely FRENCH. Foreigners were left out, although early Resistance groups in occupied Paris and the Vichy zone contained large numbers of persecuted refugees from other parts of Europe, including Communists and Jews.

As for the many Arab and Berber migrants from France’s North African colonies who had come to the mainland seeking work in the 1920s and 30s, they might as well have been invisible. Yet they had their own mosque, the Great Mosque of Paris, built to commemorate the 100,000 Muslim soldiers who died defending France in World War I. Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit, the Great Mosque’s rector, is known to have saved the lives of a number of Jews, among them the Algerian-Jewish singer Salim Halali, by issuing them certificates of Muslim identity, which enabled them to escape deportation.

The story deserves to be told, and the Moroccan-French director Ismaël Ferroukhi tells it well. Younes, the young Algerian drifter who joins the Resistance somewhat against his will, is a hero by the end of the film. He helps save Halali, among others. We see him making his way through the crowd on Liberation Day, a battered hero, sadder and wiser. Unfortunately, that’s where the film ends.

Despite their sacrifices for France and the promises of independence given by Charles de Gaulle in recognition of their loyalty, Algerians did not attain their independence until 1962, after a long and bloody war. Younes and the film’s other idealistic North African characters would become casualties of this war. Some would be arrested by the French as potential terrorists, or massacred in the streets of Paris when they attempted to stage a peaceful demonstration on October 17, 1961. Others would be seen as too moderate by radical Algerian nationalists and killed by their own side.

“Free Men” makes a place for North Africans in the heroic pantheon, but the picture it presents is still in black-and-white and out of focus. The real story of the role Algerians and Algeria played in French history, including the Second World War, was not about heroism. It was about betrayal. Sadly, not much has changed.

Lisa Lieberman's translation of Jean-Paul Sartre's essay, "Paris Under the Occupation" can be purchased for $1.99 through Amazon Kindle Books, Apple Bookstore Quick Reads, Barnes and NobleNook Books and Google Books. Lost Belongings, her current nonfiction project, tells how Holocaust survivors coped with irretrievable loss.

Smoking With Sartre

If you could live in any historical period, where would you go and who would you be? I used to imagine myself as an aristocratic woman hosting a salon in eighteenth-century Paris, carrying on brilliant conversations with all the fine philosophers in my living room—the only stipulation being that I got to die of natural causes before the fateful summer of 1789.

But then I was seduced by the myth of the heroic French Resistance. Forget the towering pouf hairstyles, the wigs and powder, the punishing corsets, the dubious medical practices (leeches?) and nasty smallpox epidemics. If I’d lived in Paris during World War II, I’d have been arguing passionately about matters of life and death while writing my own books by day, risking my life for those same ideals by night. I’d have been among the throngs mobbing the streets at the Liberation, cheering as Charles de Gaulle marched down the Champs Élysées at the head of the victorious Allied army.

A few years later you’d have found me smoking Gitanes at some Left Bank café with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. For a time, we’d have been celebrated the world over for our moral fortitude. We’d have taken a stand against colonialism in Vietnam and Algeria. Together, we’d have defended Stalin, and stuck with him long past the time when most people lost faith in the Soviet experiment. In May of 1968, we’d have been on the barricades with the students, and then we’d have gone on to sing Mao’s praises during the Cultural Revolution.

Well, I might not have stayed with Sartre to the bitter end. By the time he died in 1980, he was respected more for his plays and his Existentialist philosophy than for his politics, most of the causes he’d supported having lost their luster.

Last to crumble was the the myth of the heroic role he’d played, along with so many of his countrymen, in resisting the Nazis—which is strange, since Sartre himself shattered that myth in “Paris Under the Occupation.” Written a few months after the Liberation in 1944, and addressed to an audience outside of France, Sartre admits that the majority of French people, himself included, went about their daily lives under the German Occupation as before. “Who would understand me if I said that at the time it was intolerable and that we accommodated ourselves to it quite well?”

Here was a country that had capitulated to the Germans in six weeks. In the unoccupied zone, an authoritarian, right-wing government headquartered in Vichy had pursued a policy of collaboration, lending support to the German war effort at the expense of its own people. Some seven hundred thousand French laborers were conscripted to work in Germany; French crops were requisitioned; French factories were refurbished to produce war materiel for the enemy.

Heroes were scarce in the early years of the Occupation, resistance limited to groups targeted for elimination by the Nazis: Communists, Jews, and foreigners. Vichy’s social agenda only reinforced Hitler’s, its so-called “National Revolution” a campaign to return to the order and simplicity of a premodern past and cleanse France of its impurities, namely, Communists, Jews, and foreigners.

The ease with which the French accommodated themselves to the Germans for four long years cannot be denied; nor is Sartre begging his foreign audience for forgiveness. Rather, he aims to explain the complicated reality of day-to-day life in occupied Paris, the “gray zone” that other guilt-ridden survivors of trauma have also sought to describe. “The evil was everywhere,” he writes, “every choice was a bad choice, and yet it was necessary to choose and we are responsible.”

The man who famously proclaimed, “Hell is other people” in his best-known play, No Exit, finds it hard to live with himself in this essay. Somehow I like him more for telling us. Another cigarette, Monsieur Sartre?

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Sartre's essay "Paris Under the Occupation", translated from the French with an introduction by Lisa Lieberman can be purchased for $1.99 through Amazon Kindle Books, Apple Bookstore Quick Reads , Barnes and Noble Nook Books and Google Books.  

For a preview of "Paris Under the Occupation" visit Now and Then Reader.