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.

Bad Girl Blues

“It’s just that I’ve got everything that makes a girl forget her better judgment,” Edward G. Robinson tells Alice White in the 1930 gangster picture, “The Widow from Chicago.” That seems to be exactly the kind of man that Bonnie Parker wanted, and if she hadn’t quite found him in Clyde Barrow, she was prepared to make him over from scratch.

Well, not entirely from scratch. She had pulp fiction to draw on, westerns featuring Jesse James and hardboiled crime stories, not to mention the gangster movies that flourished in Prohibition-era America before the Hays Code. 

James Cagney plays a tough guy in “The Public Enemy”

If the reality of Bonnie and Clyde’s life on the lam was less than glamorous—the two spent more time hiding from the law than robbing, and much of their shooting seems to have been done by mistake—Bonnie’s fantasies turned them into outlaw heroes. She liked to pretend that she was a cigar-smoking gun moll, but deep down, she was the kind of gal who’d stand by her man, no matter how he treated her, and even take the rap for him.

Romance, not crime, may have been Bonnie’s true calling. I imagine her humming the lyrics to “My Man” as she waited for Clyde to be released from a two-year prison sentence he began serving a few months after they met. Fanny Brice popularized the song in the 1920s. I swear it could have been Bonnie Parker's anthem.

Oh, my man, I love him so 

He'll never know 

All my life is just despair 

But I don't care 

When he takes me in his arms 

The world is bright all right 

What's the difference if I say 

I'll go away 

When I know I'll come back on my knees someday 

For whatever my man is 

I am his 

forever more

Steven Biel's book, Bonnie Parker Writes a Poem, can be purchased for $2.99 through Amazon, Barnes and Noble Nook Books, iTunes, and Kobo Books. 

Lisa Lieberman's translation of Simone de Beauvoir's 1946 essay, "An Eye for an Eye" can be purchased for $1.99 through Amazon Kindle Singles, Barnes and Noble Nook Books,  iTunes, and Kobo Books. She blogs about old movies at Deathless Prose.

A Question of Justice

The conviction of Liberia’s former president, Charles Taylor, of aiding and abetting war crimes in the neighboring country of Sierra Leone, has been widely praised. World leaders and human rights groups have applauded the Hague tribunal’s ruling for “sending a strong message to all perpetrators of atrocities, including those in the highest positions of power, that they will be held accountable," as a State Department spokesperson said.

The UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, termed Taylor’s conviction in the Hague “a historic moment in the development of international justice.” And U.S. Representative Chris Smith, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health and Human Rights that worked to bring Taylor to trial, called his conviction “a just verdict”—a view expressed by many survivors and relatives of victims in Sierra Leone.

A just verdict? Not according to New York Times Op-Ed contributor J. Peter Pham. A conviction for complicity in crimes committed in another country which ignores the atrocities Taylor committed against the citizens of his own country is hardly worth celebrating. After a trial lasting six years, Pham argues, and with many of Taylor’s henchmen still in power, true justice for Liberians seems a long way off.

Simone de Beauvoir would have agreed. While not condoning the sort of rough justice suffered by Muammar Gaddafi at the hands of his subjects, she might have preferred seeing Taylor tried and executed by his own countrymen, as was the case with those accused and convicted of war crimes in France during World War II.

Salutary executions, Beauvoir argues in her 1946 essay, “An Eye for an Eye," are the only means of restoring the moral certainties that were compromised during the German Occupation.  “One may excuse all the offenses and all the crimes individuals commit against society, but when a man deliberately applies himself to degrade another man and turn him into a thing, it is necessary to eradicate from the earth a scandal that nothing can undo,” she writes.

The purging of war criminals was a means of restoring France’s integrity following the moral disgrace of Vichy, Beauvoir argues.  Nothing less than the nation’s legitimacy was at stake: the principles enshrined in the French Revolution, its proud commitment to justice and human decency.  “If,” she concluded, “...the values according to which we live are real, if they have weight, it is not shocking to uphold them at the cost of a life.”

-  Lisa Lieberman

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Lisa Lieberman's translation of Simone de Beauvoir's 1946 essay, "An Eye for an Eye" can be purchased for $1.99 through Amazon Kindle Singles , Barnes and Noble Nook Books, and Kobo Books. Her current project, Lost Belongings, explores the moral and political choices of exiled Holocaust survivors after the war.

Guilty by Association

Fanny Kemble felt accused from the moment she arrived at her husband’s Georgia plantation in December of 1838. On the faces of his slaves, she saw the same sad and fearful expression, conveying “a sense of incalculable past loss and injury and a dread of incalculable future loss and injury.” Deep down, she must have known that, for all her pity, and despite her small acts of kindness toward “these wretched people,” as she called them, she was complicit in their oppression.

Kemble, a famous actress in England before she married Pierce Butler, gave up earning her own living to be kept by a wealthy husband whose family had lived off the unpaid labor of slaves for two generations. From the comfort of her Philadelphia mansion, she could entertain abolitionists. She could even write against slavery, but this did not change the fact that, as Butler bluntly put it, “the act of marrying a slave owner made her also a slave owner...”

At moments in her Journal, Kemble admits as much to herself:

I am getting perfectly savage over all these doings, and really think I should consider my own throat and those of my children well cut if some night the people were to take it into their heads to clear off scores in that fashion.

She cannot pretend to be pure, cannot stand above the ugly reality she witnesses. Sad and fearful, and guilty, she fled the Georgia plantation after four months.

A century later, white outsiders who, like Kemble, became insiders in the South—the Jim Crow South—felt the same complicated emotions as they contemplated the situation of the blacks. Refugee Jewish scholars from Hitler’s Germany who came to the United States and wound up teaching in black colleges in the segregated South, were dismayed to find themselves transformed overnight from victims to oppressors, owing to their white skin. Their response was quietly to circumvent the Jim Crow Laws, inviting their students into their homes while holding them to the same high standards they had expected of their students back in their German universities, replicating as best they could in their impoverished circumstances the vibrant academic community they had lost. Tellingly enough, few returned to Germany after the war.

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 Noble Nook Books, Kobo and Google Books.  Her current project, Lost Belongings, explores the moral and political choices of exiled Holocaust survivors after the war.

A continually expanding concept of national security is not viable for America's future

by John Prados


The following is excerpted from John Prados' 11,000 word essay Rethinking National Security available for e-Readers through Now and Then Reader.

America today stands at a crossroads. Beset by economic woes, driven to attempt reform that might enable the nation to regain a sense of honor and purpose, and seeking desperately to identify what actions are needed, Americans are searching for a way forward. But there is an elephant in the room that blocks the way: what we call “national security.” Few observers have paid much attention to national security. Citizens have long deferred to government and allowed it full sway in the defense of the land. But our present crisis is too great, and our resources too strained, to continue with business as usual. America’s myriad difficulties cannot be overcome without dealing with the issue of national security.

As presently conceived, national security is a trap. Left untouched, pursuit of it will continue to cripple our country. In the essay that follows I try to show how national security evolved, why in its present form it ensnares the nation, what would be the consequences of failure to correct the situation, and what a new approach might look like. I also argue that a solution to this problem is urgent: escaping the national security trap may be the critical issue of our era.

During his presidential campaign Barack Obama made many promises, some of them concerning foreign policy and defense. His ideas resonated with Americans. Candidate Obama promised to end the war in Iraq; close the notorious detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; stop torture and renditions; move away from the nuclear standoff that still exists with Russia; ratify the comprehensive test-ban treaty; end regulations that oppress gay Americans serving in the military; strengthen the International Atomic Energy Agency; and place U.S. diplomacy on a broader foundation. Mr. Obama foresaw a global fair deal in which the United States would multiply assistance to the Third World, forgive the debts of underdeveloped countries, and reduce foreign hostility by means of transparent policies and frank answers to critics of America. Candidate Obama believed in strengthening common security by investing in the common humanity of all peoples.

Four years on, much of this agenda remains unfulfilled. Case in point: the day after his inauguration, President Obama issued an executive order providing that the Guantanamo prison be closed within a year. He was not able to enforce that directive. Objections from politicians, officials, and citizens over the relocation or release of detainees comprised a mounting wave of resistance that stalled the program. The administration’s initiative to move the trial of admitted terrorist Khalid Sheik Mohammed, one of the architects of the attacks of September 11, 2001, to a civilian court—and thus end the gravely flawed military tribunals created by the Bush administration—then failed. The collapse of this effort effectively ended the president’s entire program for detainees.

Obama had also advocated a variety of steps to reset U.S. relations with Russia and eradicate the vestiges of the nuclear balance of terror, disturbingly persistent even after the end of the Cold War. Final ratification of a comprehensive nuclear test-ban treaty, making new designs for nuclear weapons more difficult, and reaching a fresh agreement with Moscow on further reductions in existing weapons stockpiles were among these initiatives. But Senate fears of weakening the nation’s defenses put the final nails in the coffin of ratification. When Obama went ahead and canceled design of a new generation of weapons, senators made the program’s continuation a condition for their ratification of the arms-reduction agreement.

To reduce the danger of accidental nuclear war, the Obama administration suggested that both the United States and Russia modify the command control of their long-range missiles so that targets in the other nation would not be preset into the rockets’ guidance systems. Meanwhile a different initiative held over from the Bush administration called for an anti-ballistic-missile defense system that requires placing early-detection radars on the territory of nations contiguous to Russia. Moscow considers this an aggressive action aimed at Russia, but Obama officials continued the program. The Russians responded with actions of their own, including the rejection of the measure to reduce the danger of accidental war.

One campaign promise that President Obama fulfilled was his commitment to end the oppressive treatment of gay Americans by the military in the form of its “don’t ask, don’t tell” regulations, under which admitted homosexuals were dismissed from the armed forces. When the White House mandated cancellation of this regimen, a procession of generals and admirals—and powerful politicians—resisted by arguing that permitting gays to serve openly in the military would reduce the effectiveness of U.S. forces. Obama won through, and legislation ending the obsolete regulations was enacted into law.

In each of these situations involving foreign policy and defense, a common thread may be found in behind-the-scenes maneuvering and policy debates: the single concept of “national security.” Unremarked by nearly everyone, the idea of national security has expanded to the point where today it has acquired a quasi-mystical meaning. Almost anything that relates remotely to the nation’s well-being is declared within the realm of national security. As a candidate Barack Obama subscribed to many forward-thinking ideas. As president many of his campaign commitments remain in limbo precisely because of the demands of national security. But the president is not merely a prisoner of aggressive national security stalwarts. In important ways he himself believes in its precepts.

The central problem is not an individual—even a president—and not a cohort of advocates. America’s crisis today hinges in large part on an overweening and outmoded concept of national security. Left over from Cold War days, it has ballooned far beyond its original meaning. And this has happened without serious consideration by American citizens. If it is not curbed, national security will drive the decline of the very state it aims to preserve. Traditional national security is a trap.

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John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. He is the author of more than twenty books in the field, including 'Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA;' 'Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975;' 'Combined Fleet Decoded: The Secret History of U.S. Intelligence and the Japanese Navy in World War II;' and 'Keepers of the Keys: A History of the National Security Council from Truman to Bush.' He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.


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The complete essay 'Rethinking National Security' is available to purchase for $2.99 Kindle and iPad through Amazon and iTunes.

Happy Birthday, Charles Fourier

Picture yourself in a commune near Boston

With lions as butlers and lemonade seas

Everyone’s willing to share their possessions

And work for the community

Happy small children collect all the trash

Riding on Shetland ponies

Free education, free love

Total equality

The magnificent failure known as Brook Farm, a utopian commune set up in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, was more fantastic than anything dreamed up by John Lennon. Founded by free-thinking New Englanders in 1841—the hippies of their generation—its ambitious program gave ownership of the community to anyone who lived and worked there, one share distributed for each day a member worked, and provided a high-quality education from preschool through college for all of the colony’s children. Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the original shareholders; Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet and Transcendentalist, along with feminist author Margaret Fuller, and the fathers of Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe were all enthusiastic about the enterprise.

The experiment was based on the socialist ideals of the French reformer Charles Fourier. Like other late-18th-century rationalists, including Ben Franklin, Fourier believed you could solve all the problems of the world if you just put your mind to it. Putting his mind to the problems of urban and industrial society, he came up with the “back-to-the-land” philosophy that inspired not only Brook Farm, but numerous communes throughout the United States, not to mention the Kibbutz model in Israel.

But Fourier didn’t stop at social engineering. He predicted that a new planetary alignment would change the earth. The North Pole would melt and the seas would lose their saltiness and turn to lemonade. Wild animals would become the servants of humankind. So maybe he went off the deep end, but his ideas were incredibly influential. Karl Marx “borrowed” his criticism of capitalism, the exploitation of workers for the benefit of factory owners, and his understanding of the way that factory work alienated workers. Others picked up on his support of women’s rights—Fourier coined the word “feminism”— his critique of the institution of marriage and advocacy of sexual freedom, including same-sex unions.

All in all, he was a pretty radical guy, not only for his time, but for ours as well. “The first right of men is the right to work and the right to a minimum wage,” he said. “This is precisely what has gone unrecognized in all the constitutions. Their primary concern is with favored individuals who are not in need of work.”

Charles Fourier was born on April 7, 1772, and died on October 10, 1837.

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 Noble Nook Books and Google Books.