Germany Should Act Against Those Who Invoke “Free Speech” to Destroy Its Still-Fragile Democracy

Der Landser: Ostfront, 1944

The recent “New York Times’” headline—“Wiesenthal Center Calls for Closing of German Magazine It Says Glorifies Nazism”—reflects what may an ominous divergence in German and American attitudes toward Nazism.

As recently as the 1960’s when “Hogan’s Heroes” was a hit television sitcom, “comic Nazis”—inept and even innocuous—were in vogue. The reason may have been that American (and English) audiences were still not ready for portrayals of unvarnished World War II horrors. It’s probably no coincidence that “comic Nazis” disappeared from popular culture in tandem with the rise of realistic discourse about and dramatization of the Holocaust, really beginning with 1977’s television series of that name that aired the same year the Simon Wiesenthal Center was founded.

The situation is very different is modern, reunified Germany where portrayals of “normal”—indeed, “normative” Nazis—even bathed in a patriotic, heroic glow have grown rather than declined over the past two decades.

At the same time German schools were integrating realistic treatments of Nazi enormities in their curricula, German culture at the elite level was hosting a school of historical Revisionists with a very different agenda. This was so the so-called “Historikerstreit” (historians’ quarrel”) in which historians like Ernst Nolte changed positions to argue that Nazism should be viewed, not so much as an aberration but as an integral part of the history of German nationalism, and the Hitler’s labor and death camps were essentially a wartime adaptation of the harshness of Stalin’s gulags.

The Wiesenthal Center’s focus this year, which caught the attention not only of the “New York Times” but of European-wide media, was not the troubling quarrel precipitated by elite historians wanting to “normalize” the history of the Third Reich, but its current manifestations in popular culture—specifically in the pages of “Der Landser”—a middle-brow German magazine that, since the 1950’s but on a more ambitious scale in recent years, has been combining sanitized history and military hagiography to glorify Hitler’s soldiers.

The “Times” summed up the “jarring view of history, in a magazine published by one of Germany’s largest news media companies and available for download on Amazon and Apple’s iTunes” by citing just one example from a recent issue of “Der Lanser”: “Members of the feared World War II military unit were portrayed as just a bunch of good-natured soldiers doing their jobs and, between battles, sharing rounds of local plonk with Greek villagers grateful to have been invaded. ‘We conquered them, and they’re still a friendly folk’, remarked one member of the squad, a unit that served as Hitler’s personal bodyguard.”
In the 1970s, Bauer—a major German publisher poised today to become Europe’s biggest—took over Pabel Moewig which had published pulp magazines whitewashing Hitler’s Germany (without using the word “Nazi” or invoking Jew hatred) and the World War II Wehrmacht. Since 1999, “Der Lanser” has been edited by Guntram Shulze Wegener who edits two other major historical magazines.

While coming in for some criticism for decades, the current controversy only emerged about ten years ago when “Der Landser”—with regular and special editions selling over 90,000 in newsstands and railroad kiosks as well as through cyberspace—implemented a major change of emphasis: from glorifying the Wehrmacht in general to the Waffen SS in particular—in the process blurring the lines between the two.
As historian Stefan Klemp documents in a new online report for the Wiesenthal Center—“‘Der Landser Magazine” (July, 2013)—“Der Landser” has now transformed the Waffen SS into a regular military formation, ignoring its leaders immersion in Nazi exterminationist anti-Semitism as well as their role in spearheading the Final Solution. Building on the work of retired Professor Peter Conrady, Klemp did original research in “Apabiz” (an anti-fascist archive in Kreuzeberg) and “Centrum für Antisemitismusforschung” at Berlin Technical University. He found 24 of 29 SS “heroes” in “Der Landser’s” pagesexplicitly identified with war crimes. They served in SS Panther Divisions and the infamous SS Division Totenkopf.

“Der Lanser” publisher Bauer—as in the past—is stonewalling in the face of criticism. But the German Justice Ministry (as well as the Interior Ministry) takes “very seriously” the Wiesenthal Center’s demand for an investigation of the possible violation of section 86 of the German Penal Code, which specifically prohibits glorifying Nazism. Wiesenthal Center Dean Rabbi Marvin Hier added: “Our call to action comes at a time when 20 percent of all Germans still harbor anti-Semitic attitudes, when crimes committed by the far right rose to 17,616 and anti-Semitic attacks increased 10.6 percent. The way they [‘Der Lancer’] interpret it, everyone in the Wehrmacht was just like in the American Army or the Canadian Army or the British Army. They forget the most important point. People in this army were thugs and murderers who almost brought down Western civilization.”

There is no doubt that SS membership and the perpetration of war crimes were interchangeable if not synonymous.

The “New York Times” frames the current controversy in terms of balancing free speech with “efforts in Germany to eradicate the neo-Nazi movement and tamp down anti-Semitism.” While greatly respecting the First Amendment, enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, the Wiesenthal Center believes that nations—above all, Germany—where in living memory Nazi and Nazi allies committed unprecedented genocides during World War II—have the right—indeed, the obligation—to use the law to combat Holocaust Denial and other movements that seek to destroy twenty-first century democracies the same way they destroyed the Weimar Republic a century ago.