Capturing the Kommandant of Auschwitz

Hanns and Rudolf

In my last post I started a review of Hanns and Rudolf by Thomas Harding by discussing the lives of Hanns Alexander and Rudolf Hoess through WW II. 

As the was drew to an end it was remarkable the lack of foresight by both the Allied and Germans with regard to what would happen to those Germans who had administered or worked at the concentration camps.

Hoess appeared to believe until into 1945 that somehow Germany would win the war. Only in late April of that year did Hoess and some senior SS concentration camp administrators leave the Berlin area. In a hastily arranged convoy they moved northwest to Denmark.

Contrary to my expectations there were no careful plans and money for escape from Germany. A week before the war ended Himmler said it was every man for himself. Now there were "ratlines" going north and south for Nazis escaping Germany but they appeared limited.

Beyond being given a false identity Hoess had little assistance. He found work on a farm near the Danish border. Eventually he hoped to go to Sweden and then South America on the northern “ratline”.

On the Allied side the British had less than 40 men assigned to investigate and hunt war criminals. Harding points in contrast to the major effort made by the Allies to find German scientists and take them West. The minimal effort at finding any but the most notorious war criminals was comparable to the limited effort dealing with the looted art works of Europe outlined in The Monuments Men.

Thus it was that Alexander, who was not trained as an investigator, was assigned as a translator to the war crimes investigation unit. Once a member of that team and exposed to the horrors of the Belsen concentration camp going after war criminals became a personal vendetta. Alexander's intensity and success was recognized. He was authorized to pursue Hoss.

As with most investigations he was successful because of his diligence at following up leads and being undeterred by dead ends. It was not brilliant deduction but attention to detail and determination.

In the end he extracted from Hedweg, the wife of Hoess, through a threat to deport their oldest son to Siberia, the location of Hoess.

I was struck by how each man, neither holding high position in the military nor involved in politics, had such an impact on the war and the prosecution of war crimes. Both were very resolute and well organized.

Hoss used his skills to become a mass murderer. The Final Solution would have proceeded without him but Hoess worked hard to make the process efficient. He was even called back to Auschwitz in 1944 to ensure the killing of 400,000 Hungarian Jews went smoothly.

Alexander, by capturing Hoess, provided the witness at the Nuremberg trials who personally confirmed the mass murder of Jews in concentration camps by the Nazis. It is clear that if he had not pursued Hoss there was no other active search and Hoess would probably have left Germany during 1946.

Both men received little public recognition for their work. Neither sought attention. Hoess was promoted to Major but there were no awards for being an effective concentration camp commandant. Alexander received no honours for capturing Hoess.

It was not until the author, a grand-nephew of Alexander, was at Alexander’s funeral over 50 years after the war that he learned of Alexander hunting down Hoess. Inspired to learn more he researched the lives of both men and how they intersected in 1946.

Each man was an example of the power of one in our world.

Hanns and Rudolf is not a great book but it is a good book. The hunt for Hoess was not a cliffhanger story. Harding does not over emphasize the irony of the capture of the Kommandant of Auschwitz by a German Jewish refugee. There was a compelling conclusion. Harding accompanied one of Hoess's grandsons and the young man's mother to Auschwitz.

I cannot say I enjoyed the book about the Holocaust but I am glad I read Hanns and Rudolf.

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 Hanns and Rudolf by Thomas Harding

The Choices of Pope Pius XII

Last week I put up a post on the choices of people in Germany and Western Europe during World War II. My post did not discuss the choices of Pope Pius XII.

During the war he chose not to issue public protests about Nazi actions against Europe’s Jews. Author Mark Riebling stated in the summer of 1942 the pope had written an article:

The pages contained the Vatican’s strongest protest yet against the persecution of Jewry. The pope planned to publish it in L’Osservatore that very evening. But Leiber urged His Holiness to remember the Dutch bishops’ pastoral letter. If it had cost the lives of 40,000 Jews, an even stronger protest, from even more prominent lips, could cost the lives of many times more. The pope would do better to keep a public silence and do whatever he could in secret. Pius handed the pages to Leiber, who thre them into the kitchen fireplace and watched them burn.

   
With that decision the pope became one of the millions of Europeans who chose to be silent about the Holocaust.

Among those who remained quiet with him were the leaders of the International Red Cross. Determined to maintain neutrality during the war they were silent on the Holocaust.

Red Cross visits to concentration camps were carefully managed by the Nazis and those conducting the examinations did not stray from the Nazi arrangements. They published reports of sanitized camps.

The Pope joined thousands across Europe who sought to protect and save Jews in private. Riebling states:

Over the same period (German occupation of Rome), 477 Jews had hidden in  Vatican City, and 4,238 received sanctuary in Roman monasteries and convents.

We look with admiration on the brave Berliners who kept 2,000 Jews known as “U-boats” alive through the war in the Nazi capital.

The pope did choose to become a part of the underground Resistance to the Nazis by working with the German military Resistance plotting against Hitler.

It remains striking to me that the Pope participated in conspiracies to kill Hitler. Should the leader of the Catholic Church be a part of the assassination of a Head of Government?

It means the Church is taking an active violent role in world politics.

Could Pope Pius XII have saved more Jewish lives had he publicly protested the genocidal actions of the Nazis towards the Jews of Europe?

I have come to doubt such actions would have had an impact. It was an ideological decision to embark on the Holocaust. The traditional methods of Anti-Semites in marginalizing Jewish people and seeking to exile them were inadequate for the Nazis. They were determined to render Europe Jew free.

They did not care if their persecution and execution of Jews damaged Germany’s economy and scientific research.

While eliminating Jews was the highest priority of the Nazis there was a public protest that saved Jewish lives. In 1942 the non-Jewish wives of Jewish men about to be deported to the camps in the East took to the streets of Berlin. The Nazis backed down and did not deport the husbands.

I believe it would have been different had the pope protested. The Nazis wanted to eradicate the Christian faith, especially the Catholic Church. I think public protests from Pius would have accelerated their efforts to destroy the Church.

While Nazis were reluctant to conduct reprisals against German women I do not think they would have hesitated with regard to the Church.

Most important the Pope had been unable to influence the Nazis in their actions in Poland against the Church. Three thousand Polish clergy and three million Christian Poles were killed.  When his efforts on behalf of Catholics were ignored I cannot see the Nazis reacting more positively to protests by him with regard to the Jews.

Popes, including Pius XII, had publicly protested against the persecutions conducted by Communist Russia to no avail.

Did the pope have a moral obligation to protest even if his words were futile is a different question? I am sure he thought about the choices he made every day for the rest of his life.

Personal Choices in the Third Reich

Albert Goring

I have been thinking about choices this year as I have read a group of books about life in Western Europe during the Third Reich.

In The Hotel on Place Vendome by Tilar J. Mazzeo there were the choices made by the owners and staff of a great hotel in Paris, the Ritz, during the German occupation. High ranking Germans stayed at the hotel. They enjoyed meals and celebrations with their French mistresses and French citizens working with the occupiers. While some hotel workers were in the French Resistance at the hotel they spent their shifts making life comfortable for the German occupiers. Madam Ritz and her staff conducted business as usual.

Choices were possible in Occupied Europe. The leaders of Bulgaria worked to protect their nation’s Jewish population. They refused to let them be deported to concentration camp. At the same time they made the choice not to oppose the transport of thousands of Jews from other nations, mainly Greece, who had sought refuge in Bulgaria.

I have written about my personal contacts with individual choices made in Occupied Europe. I met a Danish farm family who sheltered a German Jewish girl. I know a Dutch war bride who as a teenager altered ID cards in an office next to the local German Army headquarters. She successfully saved young men from being sent to Germany as slave labour.

Hitler’s Art Thief by Susan Ronald explored the life of Hildebrand Gurlitt, a respected professor of art history and museum director, who made the choice to become an art dealer benefiting from the forced sales, confiscations and looting of art works under Nazi rule. He was a classic war profiteer only concerned with profiting from the opportunities of war. He was uncaring about the fate of Jews beyond his family. He exploited Nazi ideology to become rich. Cooly objective he was among the earliest to realize how the Nazis would govern and conqueor and later that they were going to lose the war. He made money in victory and defeat.

By contrast, Josef Muller, in Church of Spies by Mark Riebling made a different set of personal choices. A lawyer and devout Catholic he could have had a profitable war. Refusing to grovel to Heinrich Himmler in the mid-1930’s he turned down an invitation to join the SS because its principles were opposed to his principles. He aided Jews in his law practice. Muller opposed Hitler acting as a courier and a liason between Pope Pius XII and the German Resistance led by Admiral Canaris in the Abwehr. He put his life at stake.

Albert Goring made choices that were both profitable and principled. The brother of Hermann Goring he enjoyed opportunities in the armaments industry spending most of the war working as the export director of Skoda in Czechoslovakia. While diligently working to build weapons for the Wehrmacht he also aided Jews and others being persecuted by the Nazis. Using his connections with Hermann he saved a significant number of people. He refused to adopt the customs of the Nazis. He was known in Czechoslovakia for responding to the stiff arm of the Hitler salute with a lift of his hat.

For German soldiers there was the decision on whether to participate in the Holocaust. For every fictional Bernie Gunther who refused to take part and was re-assigned there were an abundance of real life Arthur Nebe’s who moved from the Berlin Police Department to the killing fields of Western Russia in 1941.

Average Germans had their own choices.

Several thousand Berlin residents protected, fed and housed about 2,000 Jews during the war. These Jews were known as U-boats as they secretly lived in Germany’s capital.

Many more thousands personally profited from the Holocaust. In Seduced by Hitler there is the story of how over 100,000 residents of Hamburg chose to buy, from 1941 to 1945, at bargain prices in public auctions the furnishings confiscated from Jews sent to concentration camps. Such auctions were held throughout Germany.

Gitta Sereny in her book, The Healing Wound, talked about an aspect of German culture that continues to lead Germans to conformity with the prevailing establishment. She spoke of “Obrigkeit – authority or hierarchy”. In talking about young people a generation after the war she said:

Only a few of them connect own incapacity for battling with authority, with the unprecedented success of the totalitarian idea in Germany.

While culture played a role every German made his or her own choices.

In my travels to Germany I have met one man who was an avowed Nazi. It was in 1981 and he had been physically unfit to serve during the war. He had an amazing collection of  German war memorabilia and would ring a bell next to a skull in a German helmet in honour of the millions of German war dead. He added that in 50 years Hitler would be known as the Saint from Braunau.

Seduced by Hitler by Adam LeBor and Roger Boyes

Seduced by Hitler by Adam LeBor and Roger Boyes – A better description of the content of the book is in its subtitle – The Choices of a Nation and the Ethics of Survival.

There was some seduction by Hitler in Germany.

Average Germans benefited from the persecution of the nation’s Jewish population:

Public auctioning of Jewish goods in Hamburg began during 1941 – between three and four thousand giant containers of furniture and clothes abandoned by those Jews lucky enough to emigrate …. Public auctions of Jewish goods were held on every working day between February 1941 an April 1945. Forty-five car ships full of belongings stolen from deported Dutch Jews provided rich pickings for the bidders who soon extended well beyond the original qualifying groups …. The contents of 72,000 apartments in the East – Jews sent to Auscwitz – were loaded onto trains and sent to central collection points in German cities ….. Frank Bajohr, who has researched the “Aryanization” of Hamburg, calculates that more than a hundred thousand people in the city alone, “ordinary Germans,” directly profited from the Holocaust.

For workers in Germany the Nazis skilfully used the twin tactics of terror and seduction. The Gestapo arrested enough workers, including some family members, and used small scale camps adjacent to 165 industrial complexes to create an edge of uncertainty among German labourers. At the same time the Beauty of Work and Strength Through Joy organizations were the seduction. Many factories were improved in appearance though not often in working conditions. More important were the mass holidays available from Strength Through Joy. Many average Germans had their first travel holidays. While it may have been no more than 1% of the work force a large number of working Germans were able to go on cruises to Norway or the Canary Islands or the Mediterranean.

The elites benefited the most under the Third Reich. German generals were lavished with honours that included payments of hundreds of thousands of marks. The gifts were not limited to money. General Heinz Guderian was given a 2,340 acre estate in the area of Poland incorporated into Germany.

The Nazis were very conscious of style:

From the carefully choreographed Nuremberg rallies to the sharply-pressed black uniforms of the SS, the Nazis place great emphasis on presentation and a well-groomed appearance ….. While not every German wore a uniform, it was seen as a patriotic duty to look well-presented; it was part of the country’s national rebirth.

While in far less detail than Hitler's Empire - How the Nazis Ruled Europe the authors looked at how the Nazis treated the countries they conquered.

There was little seduction by the Nazis in Western Europe and none East of Germany.

Some bureaucrats in the West were allowed greater freedom to pursue their administrative dreams. In the Netherlands a civil servant, J.J. Lentz, was allowed to fulfill his dream of a national system of ID cards. The authors comment:

Instead of being appalled at the all-embracing reach of their Nazi overlords, Dutch civil servants such as Lentz were relieved to be working for an administration that would appreciate perfection, order and organization.

In Denmark the Nazis, because Denmark had not resisted its occupation, played a lesser role in the governance of the country for much of the occupation.

A few West European workers profited greatly. Farmers in northern Norway were paid far more than before the war as they were a part of the Nazi effort at self-sufficiency.

There were no major efforts to entice average Western Europeans into becoming fascists.

A greater part of the book than I expected related to the actions of Germans and Occupied Europeans with regard to the Holocaust. The authors were as interested in choices with regard to evil as choices with regard to enticements. Probably because of past reading in these areas I found these sections of the book less interesting.

The authors are very convincing on the strenuous efforts of the Nazis to influence and control every aspect of life in Germany. I have usually thought of propaganda in the context of politics. The Nazis effectively used propaganda to advance their policies and ideologies in all areas.

Written in 2000 the book is easy to read and filled with striking examples of lives and decisions in the Third Reich.

Much as a newspaper headline often does not reflect the story most Germans were not seduced by Hitler. The authors do make clear that only a small minority of Germans rejected and resisted the advances of the Nazis.

Church of Spies by Mark Riebling

(21. – 863.) Church of Spies by Mark Riebling – A grand spy thriller that happens to be a work of non-fiction. Sub-titled The Pope’s Secret War Against Hitler the book explores the role played by the Catholic Church in the German Resistance to the Nazi’s before and during WW II.

Pope Pius XII has been praised and criticized for his actions and inactions during WW II. John Cornwall in Hitler’s Pope was among the critical.

Riebling portrays the Pope as willing and ready to speak out against the Nazis but restrained by the German Catholic Church.

Within Germany the Catholic cardinals and bishops thought it counter-productive to have the Pope protesting Nazi actions against the Jews for the Nazis already saw the Church as their enemy. Those leaders expected reprisals that would not just be limited to the Church. When Dutch bishops spoke out against Jewish deportations from the Netherlands there was a deportation of 80,000 Jews. Furthermore, they believed the Pope would, as an outsider, be considered as interfering in German politics.

In 1942 a German priest, Father Leiber convinced Pius, not to publish a public protest:

The pope would do better to keep a public silence and do whatever he could in secret. Pius handed the pages to Leiber, who threw them into the kitchen fireplace and watched them burn.

Yet the most important reason for public silence was the part being played by the Church in German Resistance to Hitler. There is abundant documentation in the book that Church clergy and lay persons were important members of the Resistance.

Plotters inside Germany sought secure means to liase with the nations fighing the Nazis.  Led by Admiral Canaris of the German Abwehr they sought to use the Catholic Church’s reliable and secret means of communications between Germany and Rome.

The Church has always maintained its private means of communications to and from Rome.

While the Nazis did achieve some penetration of the Church the Pope continued to have trusted agents and couriers that kept communications flowing.

The Vatican knew the Nazis would seek to infilitrate it and was wary of Nazi spies. In scenes that would seem implausible in a Hollywood thriller meetings were held in a crypt at St. Peter’s where excavations were being done to see if the grave of St. Peter was beneath an altar. In the depths of the great Basilica plots were refined and information assessed.

What startled me was the direct participation of Catholic priests and lay people in the plots against Hitler. There were two planned coups that faltered at the last moment that preceeded the assassination attempt in the summer of 1944.

In all the plots the Pope had given his blessing and approval while the consipirators kept his name from the documents should the plots fail. Had they succeeded the Pope was ready to offer assistance in mediation and peace talks.

In most great ventures there are little known heroes. Joseph Muller is among the least known characters of WW II. He was the key man for the Pope in Germany on connections with the German Resistance. My next post will further discuss this amazing man.

In his work he was greatly aided by a network of Bavarian Jesuits.

The plotters wanted to be known as representatives of Decent Germany.

I was intrigued by the theological justifications for the killing of Hitler. While the Catholic Church had developed moral reasoning on the killing of tyrants centuries ago the Protestant Churches of German did not have a comparable analysis which hampered those plotters who were Protestant.

Count Claus von Stauffenberg, the day before he attempted to assassinate Hitler went to confession and possibly sought a special blessing of the Last Rites because of the anticipated danger to his life.

When the plot failed the investigations and punishments were brutally conducted. How the Catholic participants faced the SS interrogators was profound and inspiring. We do not think often of modern martyrs.

While Pius, for the sake of the Church, was discreet the records clearly show he approved of the Church’s participation in the plots against Hitler which meant the Church was sanctioning his assassination.

While the coups were worthy causes they were and are a perilous path for a Church to engage so directly in violent government overthrow. Riebling sums up the dilemma:

In war the Vatican tried to stay neutral. Because the pope represented Catholics of all nations, he had to appear unbiased. Taking sides would compel some Catholics to betray their country, and others their faith.

Riebling is not going to convince those who condemn Pius that he played a significant role in challenging the Nazi regime but his secret actions were far more significant than I had ever realized. The Catholic Church was the leading support of the German Resistance who conspired against Hitler and the Nazis.

Hitler’s Art Thief by Susan Ronald Completed

In my previous post I started a review of Hitler's Art Thief by Susan Ronald. In that post I discussed Hildebrand Gurlitt's movement from respected academic and museum director to an unscrupulous art dealer taking advantage of the opportunities created by the Nazi regime and its ideologies.

During WW II Gurlitt’s options and profits were almost boundless. 

France was the greatest treasure trove for avaricious dealers such as Gurlitt. While Goering skimmed off a large number of artworks there were thousands of other pieces of art.

Gurlitt made sure he had good relations with the men appointed to purchase art for the planned Fuhrer Museum in Linz, Austria.

Not content with commissions from buying and selling artworks Gurlitt occasionally manipulated payments. He bought some paintings by having the purchase prices credited “against the ‘occupation credits’ that France had to pay Germany” as part of the terms of surrender in 1940.

Occasionally there is outright theft. Gurlitt is so bold as to buy paintings for Hitler that never reach their destination. Fake invoices and other fraudulent accounting aid the deception.

The looting process accelerates once the Allies invade France in 1944. The art dealers are among the first Germans to understand the war was lost and plan for the future. There were 34 export licences granted in France during part of 1944 but only 29 are reported in Germany

Gurlitt manages to get a general authorization from the Fuhrer Museum to allow him to make up his own applications for export.

He constantly visits Switzerland.

As the war comes to an end Gurlitt helps to hide art from the Allies.

It was a good war financially for Gurlitt. His estimated income during the war exceeds 1,000,00 Deutsche Marks. Continuing his pattern of deceit he declares for income tax less than 20% of his income.

When questioned after the war he carefully avoids implicating himself. It is soon apparent America is not pursuing the looters of art. The focus is on genocide and slave labour. Ronald sets out with brutal simplicity that the “Truman administration did not wish to understand that art theft and genocide were intrinsically linked”.

What America chose not to understand or overlooked at that time was that from the beginning of the Holocaust works of art were confiscated from European Jews meaning Gurlitt and other dealers were directly involved in the Holocaust.

Through lies and bureaucratic indifference Gurlitt’s art collection is returned to him in 1950.

The Gurlitt name becomes known around the world for the looting of art when his son, Cornelius, is discovered in 2010 as still having 1,407 pieces of artwork in his Munich apartment from his father’s collection.

Cornelius, a strange and private man, had gone through his adult life thinking his father had rescued art during the Nazi regime. Cornelius thought of the paintings as dear friends.

Once the book reached the time of the Nazi takeover I found it interesting. Unfortunately, it took 150 pages to reach that point. Ronald provided a great deal of German history in the first half of the book. Some chapters had more history than writing about the Gurlitt family.

At the end of the book there are but a few pages on Gurlitt’s family after the war and especially after he died in 1956.

It would have been a better book with less German history and more Gurlitt history.

I found the title misleading. I was expecting in the book to find out how Gurlitt was Hitler’s personal thief or at least the most prominent German art thief. While Gurlitt was an art thief for Hitler he was far from the only art thief for the Fuhrer and but one of several very successful art thieves in Nazi Germany.

Not surprisingly those who had no scruples profited most during the Third Reich in every business. What was most striking was his talent at anticipating what was going to happen before, during and after WW II. The amoral have the advantage of no ideology to cloud their judgments.

What I learned most from the book was the immense amount of money involved in art during the Nazi regime and World War II. Further conflict is ahead. The war over Gurlitt’s collection has just begun over 70 years after the end of the war.

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Hitler's Art Thief by Susan Ronald

Hitler’s Art Thief by Susan Ronald

(18. – 860.) Hitler’s Art Thief by Susan Ronald – I wanted to call Hildebrand Gurlitt the leading looter of art in the 20^th Century but he was just one of a group of unscrupulous German art dealers who plundered Europe when the Nazis were in power.

Gurlitt was born into a family of academics in Dresden. During WW I he was retrieved from the frontlines to serve with the Art Preservation and Momuments unit of which his father was a member. They were in Belgium to “preserve architecture and artifacts from destruction”. Unlike WW II German looting was modest in WW I and his father’s men did work to save artworks from being destroyed during the war.

After the war Gurlitt and his sister were well known members of the German Expressionist Movement.

After years of struggle in the economic chaos of the Weimar Republic Gurlitt became a museum director in the industrial city of Zwickau. Having gained a position in the art world he works to improve his position by publishing academic articles and acquiring a patron.

Gurlitt makes the most important business connection of his life when he gains auto parts industrialist (brake pads) Kurt Kirkbach as a patron. For the rest of his life Gurlitt will be dealing in art for and with Kirkbach.

Gurlitt first shows his talent for exploitation when he helps Kirkbach buy modern art from Germans left in desperate financial circumstances by the crash of 1929.

His prominence in modern art gets him fired by a Nazi leader in 1930 from his museum directorship.

Seeing the growing strength of the Nazis he no longer champions modern art but looks for ways to profit from his knowledge of German Expressionism.

He works out a clever scheme to buy Renaissance Art (approved as traditional art by the Nazis) in Italy to be sold in Germany and then buy German Expressionist works (the disapproved modern art) cheaply for sale in other countries such as the United States.

When the Nazis take over in 1933 there are many sellers of art, even more desperate, than the financially bankrupt of 1929.

Profit is all around for Gurlitt and a select group of art dealers. German museums are being forced to dispose of their modern art.

In 1936 the Nazis move to seizing art from German museums and a year later begin confiscating art from artists. It is estimated 21,000 works of art are taken.

Gurlitt is constantly receiving lucrative commissions for buying and selling these artworks. Occasionally he buys for himself at an unconscionably low price. One of his purchases is for but 1 Swiss Franc.

Once Germany starts taking over other countries the opportunities explode for Gurlitt and other official German art dealers. Between 1937 and 1941 a group of four dealers sold 8,700 artworks in Switzerland alone.

When Austria is annexed to Germany in 1938 there are confiscations of art and then expropriations.

Gurlitt gets a share of confiscated Jewish art.

His lack of morality is most evident in taking Jewish art for Gurlitt is one-quarter Jewish having a Jewish grandmother. Other members of his family agonize over whether to deny grandmother. While millions of Jews are persecuted and murdered Gurlitt continues to deal in art through the whole Holocaust. His Jewish ancestry is overlooked as he is useful to high ranking Nazis.

My next post completes my review of the book with an outline of his actions during WW II and the infamy gained by his son after the war.

The Hotel on Place Vendome by Tilar J. Mazzeo

(9. – 851.) The Hotel on Place Vendome by Tilar J. Mazzeo – The Ritz. No hotel in the world is more famous. It has been a destination of the world elite since it opened in the heart of Paris in 1898. Masseo has written a biography of the hotel focusing on its role in World War II.

When the German army rolled into Paris in June of 1940 the Ritz was a favoured destination for its officers. On orders from Berlin the hotel was not formally taken over but remained privately run with Hans Franz Elmiger, its Swiss born deputy manager, in charge of hotel operations.

Marie-Louise, Madame Ritz, widow of the hotel’s founder, Cesar Ritz, remained an active presence in the hotel.

The German military did take all the rooms in one wing of the hotel paying discounted rates.

The American heiress, Laura Mae Corrigan, was evicted from the Imperial Suite in favour of Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering.

Several long term residents of the hotel continued to stay in the section of the hotel not occupied by the Germans. Most famously, Coco Chanel, maintained a suite.

During the German occupation the Ritz remained the focal point of elite Parisian life. The champagne flowed. The famous mixed cocktails of Frank Meier in the rue Chambon side bar were eagerly consumed. German officers and their French mistresses celebrated good times.

There were Resistance members among the hotel staff but the hotel, as with most of the French population, accommodated if it did not actually collaborate with the German occupiers.

There were spies and plots swirling around the Ritz throughout the war. Mazzeo discusses the meetings of German officers who attempted to assassinate Hitler in the summer of 1944. For a few hours those plotters took over Paris until word spread that Hitler had survived.

After the Allied invasion of Normandy in June of 1944 there was a race to return to Paris. While the Allied armies looked to re-take the capital of France among American war correspondents it was a competition to be the first to reach Paris and more important, re-claim the Ritz.

Ernest Hemingway was determined to win the race. “Papa” at 45 effectively formed his own private company within the American Army. He had been going to the Ritz since he had arrived in Paris during the 1920’s and had but enough money for a couple of drinks at the bar.

What I had not known before reading the book was the number of women war correspondents who covered the war. Several had been in as much in action as any of the men.

The relationships of two female journalists with Hemingway involved as much intrigue as any war story. As 1944 unfolded Hemingway’s marriage to Martha Gellhorn was swiftly deterioriating and Hemingway had entered into an affair with Mary Welsh.

In the final rush to Paris Hemingway famously said he intended to liberate the cellars of the Ritz. His arrival at the hotel on the day of the liberation of Paris was appropriately dramatic and he took charge of the hotel and the finest wines were opened. Hemingway was to start each day at the hotel for the next seven months by opening a bottle of fine champagne.

The famous kept coming. A month after liberation Ingrid Bergman arrived at the Ritz and became the lover of famed war photographer, Robert Capa.

The word “fabulous” has been overused but it best describes the Ritz of that era.

Mazzeo portrays a Hotel of grandeur and unsurpassed elegance. Within its rooms, salons, bar and restaurant passed everyone who mattered in Paris. Generation after generation of the elect in France made sure they were seen at the Ritz.

There is a good movie to be made with the dramas of the rich, famous and beautiful unfolding in a beautiful hotel.

The Hotel on Place Vendome is well written. In a couple of chapters it tries too hard for drama but Mazzeo’s life of the Ritz has made me wish I could visit that grand hotel which re-opens this summer after a 2 year renovation.

Myself and Stalin

A couple of days ago Sharon and I were in Sochi, Russia. On our whole cruise I was most interested in going ashore in Sochi as there was a tour that took in Stalin’s summer dacha.

Early last decade I read a biography of Stalin. At that time my personal reviews were much shorter. I wrote:

32. - 122.) Stalin by Edvard Radzinsky – An excellent biography which penetrates the most ruthless man in the history of the world. From his humble origins in Georgia to unquestioned authority as the new “tsar” the book clearly explains his actions and motivations. As he rose he carefully watched the actions of other leaders. “Bit by bit, we learn” was the chilling quote that explained how Stalin developed the principle that any action was permitted as he pursued the “Great Dream” of socialist world domination. No man has brought about the deaths of more people. Compassion was foreign to Stalin. (Oct. 21/02)

He was also a poet and a writer.

The dacha was a vivid historic experience. It is a deep green. The guide said Stalin was worried about it being easily visible from the air and vulnerable to being bombed.

It is set in a lovely location amid the pines above Sochi and looks out over the Black Sea.

Our guide said you could book his bedroom as the dacha is part of a hotel. I am not sure that room is available but I read online that there are 18 rooms you can book to stay in overnight for about $450.00 per night with meals included in the room rate. I think there are too many ghosts haunting the dacha for me to want to stay there.

In the restored or preserved rooms there is fine woodwork. The keyhole to his private chambers is covered on both sides so no one could take a peek.

There is a room with a full size snooker table. Because of his withered left hand a special extra weighted cue was made for Stalin. It was passed around for us to balance with a regular cue. It was much heavier.

There is a small but deep indoor oval pool beside his bedroom.

Most interesting was the area where his desk is located. It is startling to walk into the room and encounter a life size wax statute of him sitting behind the desk. (He was 5' 4".) A slight chill went through me as I contemplated him sitting at this desk at night going through the lists prepared for him and checking off who lived and died.

We were allowed to have a photo taken beside Stalin. Sharon took the above photo of myself and Stalin. I felt very much a part of history.

 

Others made funny gestures for their photos. Considering who Stalin was and what he did those gestures felt disrespectful to the millions of his victims.

Kathy D. and I – A Resistance Dialogue

The paperclip was a symbol of the Norwegian Resistance
partially chosen as it binds things together

Over my last three posts I have reviewed books. on the Danish Resistance and discussed a real life flight which led Ken Follett to write Hornet Flight. I have had previous posts on European Resistance movements during WW II. One post stands out for me as it discusses real life members of the Resistance I have had the chance to meet. The post was about a Dutch teenager and about a Danish farm couple and their inspiring actions. My posts on the Resistance have always drawn comments from regular commenter to my blog, Kathy D. For a post I wrote titled Alan Furst’s Quiet Heroes we exchanged a series of comments I felt fitted with my recent posts on the Danish Resistance. I want to share our exchange with all readers of my blog.

Kathy D. December 10, 2013 at 9:15 PM

So glad to read this review about Alan Furst's books and characters. If I read this genre, and could bear to read about WWII, I would read his series first.

I have given Spies of the Balkans to a friend as a holiday gift, hoping he'd like it. I think I'll give him another book by Furst this holiday.

On resistance in Europe, the more one reads blogs, books and talks to people about the subject, the more one learns about this. The NY Times ran a piece a few years ago about Germans hiding a Jewish musician during the war.

Irene Sandler, with help from others, smuggled 2500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, to farm families in rural areas. She was arrested, tortured and then released from prison. She won a Nobel Prize for this.

Then there's a book out about a couple, which saved 300 people in the Warsaw Zoo and in their homes. A blogger wrote of an elderly woman living on a French farm who hid three Jewish men in her cellar, wrapping her groceries in newspaper every day so she could bring home the war news to them.

There were many resistance fighters. After I saw the film Defiance about the Bielski brothers who saved 1200 Jews in the forests of Belarus,, I looked up more about partisans and Resistance fighters, found more in Belarus, some in Poland (a tough place), and, of course, in Italy. Read The Collini Case for a legal mystery about that.

Greece had a strong partisan movement, as did Yugoslavia. Even Malta; I read about a teenage girl who was shooting a machine gun at the Nazis; unfortunately, she was caught.

And then within Germany itself, reportedly 800,000 political prisoners under Nazis, including students Sophie Stoll and her friends.

Margaretta von Trotta's film Rosenstrasse tells of non-Jewish German women who demonstrated every day in front of the deportation center where their Jewish husbands were held. They stood up to Nazis with machine guns. They won their husbands' release.

And then the famous Warsaw Ghetto uprising happened in 1943; the Resisters had nothing to lose. My grandmother, a Russian/Polish/Jewish immigrant had a friend who wrote a book about other resisters in other Jewish ghettoes.

And then in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, resistance, too. This post reminds me that I know a man who never knew his Dutch uncle. He died at the hands of the Nazis while in the Dutch Resistance movement. And there's the famous burning down of the population records building in Amsterdam. Although most involved were caught and paid the ultimate price, thousands of Jews were saved.

So, if one keeps reading, one finds out a lot more about European resisters. 

Bill Selnes December 12, 2013 at 12:41 AM

 

Kathy D. Thank you for a thoughtful and insightful comment.
As I read your comment I think Mazower was too narrow in his conclusions about lack of resistance in Western Europe. He took resistance to require armed action against the nations. I think your Examples, as with my examples, show resistance took many forms.

When I was in the Lofoten islands north of the Arctic Circle in Norway last year I met people who told me the Nazis had required them to help build fortifications against a potential Allied seaborne assault. Required to carry stones for the project they would stumble when they could so the stones would roll down hills and they would have to go get a new stone to carry.

Kathy D.December 12, 2013 at 7:47 PM

Good you added that.

Another point, which is quite astounding is that women who were rounded up in France in a 240 or so in a women's convoy were at a camp. Even though they were of different religions and political ideology, they all jointly sabotaged the labor in the Germans' work camps. They deliverately sabotaged the machinery, did slowdowns of work and protected the more fragile women who couldn't do hard physical work. This is from my reading of marks by a leading French resister who was imprisoned in a camp. After she got out, she testified at the Nuremberg trials, then told of the women's resistance inside a camp.

I think if more people had weapons in Europe and military training, many more would have fought back physically. When people have no weapons or training and are taken by surprise by the German military with a lot of force and weaponry, what do they do? And what do villages do without guns, ammunition, military training?

In the movie "Defiance," the Bielski brothers and people in their encampment did fight back with whatever weapons they could buy or get via bartering or just finding and seizing.

I left out but should have included the massive resistance in Spain to Franco and fascism; so many sacrificed and died then.

Cara Black who writes the Aimee Ledoc series set in Paris, has written of commemorations to deceased and still living French Resistance fighters, who are highly honored still. And in Greece, I believe the Italian government gave that government two hours to either capitulate or not at the start of the war. The Greek people said NO and valiantly fought back, including Jewish people. Just read at Murder Is Everywhere about the last living Jewish Resistance fighter in Greece, a retired dentist. And so on.

All over the world, people have fought for independence and freedom throughout the centuries. I don't think Jewish people or Polish people or Italians or any other people were more passive than others.

Bill Selnes December 13, 2013 at 10:11 PM

 

Kathy D.: Thanks for the further comment.

I think the word "resistance" was an appropriate word to describe the response in conquered nations. "Resistance" is not confined to arms. It takes all the forms described by you in your comments.

The peoples of Nazi occupied nations could not have expected as brutal and systemic scheme of murder as carried out by the Nazis. Certainly there have been atrocities and killings by previous occupying powers but they could not have expected the scale of Nazi brutality. Had they realized sooner what was going to happen "resistance" would have been far more.

Kathy D. December 15, 2013 at 1:28 AM

 

Agree. If people had known -- and had access to weapons and were trained in how to resist, more resistance would have happened.

And as a further bit of information, as I was reading Rachel Donadio's piece about traveling to Naples in the New York Times Sunday Travel section, I came to this section, which is new to me:

In 1943, when the Nazis began rounding up Neopolitan men, the furious women of Naples fought back, successfully driving the Nazis out of town, albeit on a killing spree, in a rare mass citizens' revolt against the German occupation!

So glad to see this group resistance by women. I do know that women were part of the Resistance Movement in occupied countries and carried out many tasks. In addition to other tasks, women were also often couriers of messages for Resistance forces.

 

Bill Selnes December 15, 2013 at 11:30 PM 

 

Kathy D.: I was not aware of the battle in Naples.

It is ironic that Allied governments were far more willing to use women in clandestine operations than they were to allow them in regular military forces.

Kathy D. December 16, 2013 at 4:31 AM

 

That's interesting; it's true.

But women were in the Resistance movements all over Europe. I've read amazing stories of courage and determination, of great risk-taking. Women were part of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance, and were among French resisters, too.

Although I just can't bring myself to read it, there is a book about the convoy of women rounded up in France and taken to a camp. It was about 240 women. Their stories are told in this book. I think about 49 survived. A friend got the book, but became too sad and also upset at their suffering, so she stopped reading it.

But some wonderful heroes are mentioned, leaders, organizers even within the camp.

There is also the choir at Terezin camp. These Jewish prisoners sang to resist, and they kept on singing even while their numbers were dwindling around them.

There is a terrific documentary about them. Survivors speak of how even if the German soldiers had burst in and threatened their lives, they would have stayed in their places and kept on singing. It's quite a story.

Bill Selnes December 16, 2013 at 11:35 PM

 

Kathy D.: Have you read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl in wich the author, a pyschologist from Vienna, discusses life in concentration camps and what he learned from the experience. I posted a review on January 18, 2011. The book has influenced me since I was taught about it in 2nd year university 42 years ago. His observation that the inmate who lost “faith in the future – his future – was doomed” is a powerful statement on the importance of hope.

Kathy D. December 18, 2013 at 9:07 PM

I have not read Frankl's book, but I have read all about it many times. I have gleaned from what I read that one important aspect of survival was the interaction and humanity among the prisoners.

From one anecdote, I learned that on Frankl's birthday, a fellow inmate had given him a pencil stub and matchbook so he could write. What an incredible kindness amidst that horror.  

Bill Selnes December 18, 2013 at 10:03 PM

 

Kathy D.: I hope you get a chance to read the book. It can change the way you think about life.

Kathy D. December 19, 2013 at 7:00 PM

 

I have read a great deal about Frankl's book. I may or may not read it. I try to steer clear of reading about the horrors of WWII, which is why I don't read novels set during the war. I know enough. As a 5-year-old living in New York, my friend's lovely parents had numbers on their arms.

 

Her mother looked so sad and gaunt. Her eyes looked haunted. I noticed this at that age, and also knew that she was a kind person to her child and her friends.

I asked my parents about the numbers on the adults' arms, and I was told by my Jewish mother enough that I could grasp at that age. By 9, I knew about the Holocaust enough to talk about it.

Sara Paretsky's latest excellent book, "Critical Mass," harks back to 1938-1942 Vienna in the Jewish ghetto, and mentions the deportation of the characters, except the grandchildren who were able to go to London. The adults could not get visas, and we know what happened then.

The book does describe a few horrors, enough for me. What sane people who care about humanity cannot in their wildest dreams think of, the Nazis did.

So, it's not distraction for me or entertainment, what I expect of crime fiction.

Bill Selnes December 21, 2013 at 10:30 AM

 

Kathy D.: I would not be afraid to read Frankl's book. What happened in the camps was awful. Frankl takes us into the minds of those who were there and challenges us on how to live our current lives and deal with bad times.

I am angry each time I read how the Nazis were so brutal and caused so much suffering and loss. At the same time I admired how Frankl developed a philosophy of life out of those terrible circumstances.

Frankl was in Vienna during the years of 1938 - 1942. The book delves into why he stayed.

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Thank you Kathy for your thoughtful and thought provoking comments. You have made my blog better through your comments.