The vanilla ice cream was exceptional and the company very civilized. Oh, by the way... we also liquidated...

books:


	• The Good Old Days: the Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders William S. Konecky Associates, 1996 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 15 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The vanilla ice cream was exceptional and the company very civilized. Oh, by the way... we also liquidated some 200 Jews...

This book is as difficult to read as it is necessary. It shows how inane the argument is according to which everybody was obeying orders and therefore was not responsible for anything. Whether belonging to the SS, the SD or the regular military (Wehrmacht), they all had a hand in those gruesome murders and, worse, they were all acting in a cool, professional and chillingly efficient way. All the more so as the book stresses an important point: you did not risk anything by refusing to carry out an order to kill Jews; you were just assigned another duty by your commanding officer...

The book is a sum of personal documents, journals, comments, photo albums, "lovingly" compiled by officers and also the rank and file of the German army, all of whom were active in the liquidation of the European Jews during WWII. What strikes the reader is that, in almost all of these texts, the main events (i.e. the killings) always remain in the background, whereas the perpetrators of the crimes prefer to dwell on the petty events of their mediocre lives (they miss their girlfriends, they attend social events, enjoy a good vanilla ice cream).

The book actually asks many uneasy questions, the most disturbing one being, in my opinion: what would I have done under such circumstances?

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Going along for the ride

Those numerous moralizers who are concerned to reduce the enormity of real offenders by displacing guilt onto non-offenders often resort to the trope: There but for I . . . or, in the circumstances, anyone might have done the same . . . or, we are all guilty.

That's particularly rancid baloney, and here in "The Good Old Days" is the proof.

From contemporary reports and diaries, from letters, from interrogations, Ernst Klee has set forth, without comment, what the murderers of Jews (and gypsies, commissars etc.) thought about it.

Not much, to hear them tell it.

"Somebody told me to go there, so I went there" pretty much sums up a lot of the statements. And, if you believe cold-blooded murderers, when they got there, nobody was in charge. Things just happened.

Given the German reputation for thoroughness and deference to authority and hierarchy, I think we can dismiss all those sorts of reports as lies.

More interesting are the contemporary reports of those who were, to hear them tell it -- and here they are more credible -- repulsed, horrified etc. (Curiously, none reports vomiting. Perhaps they did not, although any civilized person would have. But they were, after all, Germans.) Not, at any rate, indifferent.

But did they take action? No. Not unless the murders might have created a scandal. The worst such incident recorded in "The Good Old Days" concerns 90 children, whose parents had been slain, who were left alone in a house. Two German chaplains inspected, were appalled and took action.

Not to save the children, or even to succor them before death but to hush up scandal. The children were murdered. The chaplains made bishop after the war.

Several of the criminals offered, later, as evidence that they really did not like what they saw or were doing that they were "fathers themselves" or "Catholics."

A few had the decency to go mad, but their stories are not here.

Civilized people will never really understand Germans. All we can do is take in information and note it. We can store it but we cannot process it. Hannah Arendt, who wrote about the banality of the German evil, and others who tried different approaches, were all on the wrong track.

"The Good Old Days" is not sufficient to begin processing the Holocaust. But as a document, it gets closer to the immediacy of the event than any secondary history.

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Very interesting

This book is a very interesting read, featuring first hand accounts of the Holocaust. The fact that the book is entirely primary source materials makes it all the more interesting. These are the words of the men who did the deeds and their reaction to it. The book uses letters, diaries, interviews, reports, and all kinds of other materials for sources. It is an interesting read, but the only reason I give it 4 stars instead of 5 is although it is a great source, some of the chapters are rather dry, but overall the book is well worth the read.

Revealing

This book removes the mask from those who deny the horror and terror of the Holocaust. An engrossing work that strikes the sensibilities of its readers. The records, letters, and photos, all forbidden, but taken with pride to show their loved ones how much they enjoyed/hated/performed their sinister tasks, leaving behind mass graves for us to find.

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A Difficult Read, But Necessary to Understand the Holocaust

The most jarring aspect of this book is the casual, flippant remarks that are made about mass-extermination. Some of the German quotes in this book were taken from diaries and letters to loved ones, and much of it is casual. There is a convenient language spoken. For instance, few people say that they were "killing Jews." The most common phrase was, "special actions."

There are dry reports of incidents written by SS men that could be interchanged with a unemotional report of wheat production on any farm. Only, these reports are about numbers of Jews murdered, or bodies liquidated.

It is the casual nature of these comments that makes this book so surprising. It's all so "matter-of-fact." It's all so horrifyingly mundane.

I bought this as a compliment to other books I own about the Holocaust, and few books have matched the surreality of the Nazi "Final Solution" than this book. It is highly recommended, but only for those who want to see the atrocities described from the cold, heartless eyes of the Nazi murderers themselves.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

The title "The Good Old Days" ("Schone Zeiten" in German) comes from the cover of a private photo album kept by concentration camp commandant Kurt Franz of Treblinka. This gruesomely sentimental and unmistakably authentic title introduces an disturbing collection of photographs, diaries, letters home, and confidential reports created by the executioners and sympathetic observers of the Holocaust. "The Good Old Days" reveals startling new evidence of the inhumanity of recent twentieth century history and is published now as yet another irrefutable response to the revisionist historians who claim to doubt the historic truth of the Holocaust.

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