of STAVROU ZOUMOULAKIS
The Greek edition, which is not completely identical to the French, of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld's "Memoirs" (translated by Karina Lampsa, published by Capon, December 2015) and their visit to Greece for the presentation of the book is good occasion to discuss a painful case, which everything around us pushes us to forget. This Franco-German couple of activists was destined, it seems, by history and fate to devote their lives to the prosecution of fugitive Nazi criminals: they meet by chance on a platform of the Paris metro, on the day of Eichmann's abduction by the Israelis. Serge's father, a Romanian Jew, had been murdered in Auschwitz, while Beate's father served as an ordinary Wehrmacht soldier.
Post-war Germany's attitude towards its Nazi past is not one and the same, it has phases, changes and variations. However, one thing is certain: after the trials of some famous Nazi names, the integration of Nazi criminals into the political, economic and cultural life of Germany will follow immediately after, during the 50s. After all, the Cold War has begun which is reshaping the political stakes around the world, defining new allies and new enemies. West Germany is essential in one camp and East in the other.
It is the Cold War that will offer Germany amnesty for the crimes of Nazism.
The smooth integration of the Nazis into German society is such that, in 1966, a high official of the Nazi regime, Kurt Georg Kissinger, becomes Chancellor of Federal Germany, neither more nor less. The man in question, a member of the Nazi Party since May 1, 1933, was the link between Ribbentrop and Goebbels. It should be noted that the American military forces had sent Kissinger to prison for 17 months. He was released as soon as the Cold War began.
We usually have the impression that Nazi criminals lived post-war in hiding in various countries, disguised, under changed names. This impression applies to a small number of criminals. Most lived normally, quietly, under their real names, such as Kurt Liska and Herbert Hagen. When Beate Klarsfeld wants to find Liska – that is, the Parisian Gestapo in person – she does the simplest thing in the world: she calls the intelligence service of the German OTE and is immediately informed of his phone number and address in Cologne. The search, I mean, for Nazi criminals – with the exception of Eichmann – is not a matter of espionage, secret service, gangster-style manhunts, but a matter of archival research and file-building – and above all of will. This will, which was missing in Germany in the first post-war years, will be expressed, belatedly but decisively, mainly by the generation of 1968.
This will is exactly what was missing in Greece, which has one of the highest rates of extermination of Jews in all of Europe (97% and 98% in some cities) and at the same time the lowest, virtually zero, in the prosecution of those committed the crime or participated in it.
This double, sad firstness is due, in the first part, to the simple fact that society did not protect its Jewish citizens in the difficult hour, and, in the second part, to the fact that, contrary to all the other countries of Europe, the ideological and the political foundation of the post-war state was not the Resistance but the victory against communism in the Civil War. The post-war Greek state was on the whole focused on prosecuting communists and accomplices rather than Nazi criminals and their Greek collaborators. After all, the latter participated in the alliance of forces that won the Civil War and thus in the post-war political power. The dosilogos in Greece not only remained, in the vast majority of them, unpunished, but became parliamentarians and ministers.
The reluctance of the post-war Greek governments to try Nazi criminals and their collaborators was humiliatingly shown in the trial of Max Merten, responsible for the extermination of the Jews of Thessaloniki, which took place in Athens in early 1959, and which ended, under the government of Kon. Karamanlis and under the extortionate pressure of the German government, in legislation that amnested the war crimes of even those serving a sentence – namely Merten, who had been convicted in the meantime – and suspended all prosecution of war crimes against German nationals. The German Nazis and their Greek collaborators were not tried for the extermination of the Jews either in Germany or in Greece.
If today it is too late for trials, since most of the criminals are dead, it is not too late to document their crime, to compile their files. Despite the fact that the archives of the National Office of War Criminals were pulped in 1975, under the government of Con. Karamanlis, and despite the Damocles sword of the law on the protection of personal data, this historical research is possible and necessary. It will reveal painful aspects of the local Greek societies, but we will also learn better who we really are. It is a debt of truth and justice.