How Just Was WW II? (And What Does that Have to Do with Our War in Iraq?)

On the morning of March 19, 2003, the preemptive invasion of Iraq seemed imminent and our local NPR station had brought together a small panel to discuss different countries’ different opinions about it. Trying to explain Germany’s unwillingness to be “among the willing” was more tricky than I had anticipated. There were hostile calls accusing “the Germans” of betraying, in this hour of need, the people who had liberated them from Nazi Evil and brought them the Good of American democracy. And my linking some aspects of the rise of Muslim terrorism to Israel’s conduct in the Middle East was rejected by some callers as familiar anti-Semitic scapegoating. There were also thoughtful questions about Germany’s motivations and they became more poignant with the news later that day that the invasion had begun; “our boys and girls” were now in harm’s way;“ and the “shock and awe” of death rushing from the sky was leaving in its wake the inevitable “collateral damage.”

On his visit to Auschwitz, the first day of his first trip abroad in May 2003, after the premature “fall” of Baghdad, the American president invoked the “six million dead Jews” to legitimize his “war on terror.” Nazi gas chambers were a “sobering reminder of evil and the need for people to resist evil.” On the last day of this trip, he praised the then still enthusiastic young soldiers in Quatar for having filled that need: “Because of you a great evil has been ended.” Rejoicing in their victory, knowing next to nothing of the past, they believed their commander-in-chief that good and evil could be separated so easily, and that the war they had won was just. They had invaded Iraq as liberators. This explicit reference to the hallowed invasion/liberation mission of their grandfathers fighting their way into Germany has become a staple in official statements on the war. It has also become the more emphatic the more the situation has worsened in Iraq. The young soldiers have now been paying with their bodies and their lives for the explosive ideological division between the pure Good of the American mission and the pure Evil of Saddam Hussein alias Osama bin Laden alias Hitler.

Like many others, I predicted on that fateful March 19th a disastrous aftermath of the invasion. Also like many others, I was angry with the Democrats’ short-sighted political gamble to allow their martial president the pleasure of being commander-in-chief. But I also thought that if more ordinary Americans, politicians included, had known more about the historical reality of W.W.II, it might not have been so easy to drag American soldiers and Iraqi civilians into an unjustifiable bloody mess.

The American public memory of W.W.II has constructed a seductively “clean, good, just war we won” that has shrunk the most terrible war in Western history into a part of the Holocaust. This both sanitizing and demonizing perspective removed the persecution of Jews from its context, the end-stage of a total war. It began with the powerful photo-documentation of the opening of the camps published by LIFE in May 1945 that introduced ordinary Americans to “the German question”: how could they have done it? Spontaneous horror did not obscure the political and moral usefulness for the American government of incomprehensible Nazi criminality; so huge that it had to include all Germans. German collective criminality and guilt was the best, the absolute justification of the war effort including the costly insistence on German and Japanese unconditional surrender. All Germans were expected to acknowledge their past active or passive complicity with Nazi criminality and commit them to memory, regardless of how they remembered their experiences, their feelings and actions during the Nazi period. They were ordered to forget what had happened to them and “remember forever“ what they had let happen to their regime’s victims-- their victims.

Vanquished, they did as they were told, and then they fell silent. It was a private silence separating them from their memories of unearthly fire-storms unleashed by Allied bombing, over 16 million deportees and refugees who had nowhere to go, an exodus that caused the death of millions of women and children. If this near-total exclusion from historical memory of their wartime experiences has created a serious loss of historical reality for ordinary Germans, this has also been true for ordinary Americans who have known next to nothing about that part of W.W.II. The war could be remembered as the "good clean, just war we won" because the American "absolute" victory protected it from all critical questions. Goodness, innocence, and official victim-status would forever be on the side of the winners; Evil, guilt, and official perpetrator-status forever on the side of the losers. W.W.II, for many populations a justified, but not a just war, could then be used over a period of six decades to justify unjustifiable American (and Israeli) military and political conduct.

In the postwar years, the Holocaust-centric perspective on W.W.II became more and more powerful, also for the German intellectual and political elites. There was no conspiracy; it just happened, one thing led to another. There was the emotionally powerful Eichmann trial that set the number of dead Jews at 6 million (historians estimate “up to 5 million”)—and spread the use of the term “Holocaust;”and there was the six days war when Jewish leaders made good use of this perspective to defend Israel’s constructing “realities on the ground”–settlements on ground that was theirs only by divine promise.

Memories of the real war easily gave way before the rising power of “the Holocaust,” the ever growing construct of memory stories around and above the historical persecutions. The “uniqueness” of Auschwitz, its cultural centrality, demanded forgetting the darker aspects of W.W.II. Why remember that the Allies stripped all German and Japanese civilians of their civilian status to make them fit Churchill’s “total air war” (1942)? The new method and scale of firebombing, followed by the nuclear bomb, would be echoed in the free fire zones in Vietnam and the “collateral damage” in later conflicts. All these events point to the new dimension of W.W.II, namely a new tolerance for human superfluity. The Nazi regime had led in this frightening tolerance, but America and Great Britain followed. The Nazi regime has been safely in the past for sixty years; the invasion and occupation of Iraq is very much in the present; and so is, in this commemorative year, the good, clean, just war we won.