BRET STEPHENS: FROM BUCHENWALD TO EUROPE

http://www.wsj.com/articles/from-buchenwald-to-europe-1430781134

In the early spring of 1944 a political prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp penned a letter to his wife, Käthe, in Hamburg.

“It looks like we have to count on a long separation, but we must hope strongly for a reunion,” wrote the prisoner, a doctor named Hermann da Fonseca-Wollheim. “Today is Palm Sunday, a sunny, wintry day on our mountain. Tonight at six I will listen to Furtwängler’s concert on the radio. Why don’t you, too, tune in to the radio on Sundays and then we can think about each other fervently.”

It was the last letter Käthe would receive from Hermann. Six weeks later, on May 13, she was notified of his death, supposedly of disease.

Hermann had been arrested by the Gestapo the previous August and held on charges of Ausländerfreundlichkeit, or xenophilia. He was suspected of being friendly to foreign workers, mostly forced laborers from Ukraine, whom he treated in his practice. He had also been overheard saying that sooner or later everybody would have to learn Russian, and was learning some Russian himself. It smacked of defeatism. After the July 1943 firebombing of Hamburg, the Gestapo were keen to make examples of would-be dissenters.

In a sense, the Nazis knew their man. Hermann was fluent in English, Spanish, French and Farsi, the first three picked up as a ship’s doctor, the latter from a few years spent in the Persian city of Sultanabad (now known as Arak). His double-barreled surname—the “da Fonseca” being a Portuguese honorific acquired by an adventurous 19th-century ancestor, the “Wollheim” betraying more distant Jewish roots—suggested that xenophilia wasn’t just a political deviation. It ran in the family’s blood.

Hermann and Käthe had two sons. Friedrich, the younger one, would grow up to become a doctor like his father. Hermann, the firstborn, would spend his career as a diplomat in the service of the European Commission. He is also my father-in-law. May 8, 1945, the day of the Third Reich’s downfall, was his 11th birthday.

At a distance of 70 years, living memories of Germany’s surrender are becoming rare and therefore valuable. Hermann remembers nights in air raid shelters, and the bombs that narrowly missed his house on the Bahrenfelder Marktplatz. He remembers the town-hall wedding of a relative in April 1945, just days before surrender, in which the couple were handed a copy of “Mein Kampf” and instructed to produce sons for the Führer. He remembers walking out of the hall and feeling grateful the spring foliage might provide some cover in the event of an aerial attack. He remembers the endless columns of British armor, and of seeing fliers, distributed by Allied troops, with reports and photos from the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.

“The day after the capitulation,” he remembers, “the Hitler Youth organized a kind of farewell ceremony, with a ceremonial striking of the Reichsflagge. My mother said to me, ‘You are not going to that.’ But the mother of a friend said to me afterwards, ‘What a shame, Hermann, that you weren’t there; it was so beautiful.’ ”

This was Germany in 1945. The great Wirtschaftswunder—the postwar economic miracle created by sound money, industrial genius and U.S. security—soon cleared out the material wreckage, at least in the West. But what about the moral wreckage?

The drama of postwar Germany has revolved around the effort to bury the Nazi corpse by constantly exhuming it for re-examination. The task haunts Germany at every turn, often to good effect but not always. Should Germany’s wartime sins be expiated by subsidizing the spendthrift habits of corrupt Greek governments? Should fear of being accused of xenophobia require Germans to turn a blind eye to Jew-hatred and violent misogyny when the source is Germany’s Muslim minority? It isn’t easy, or ultimately wise, to live life in a state of perpetual atonement.

For Hermann, atonement was not the issue: What was a 10-year-old boy, whose father had died at Nazi hands, supposed to atone for? The issue was what to do next. At the University of Hamburg in the 1950s he became a member of the Young European Federalists, just as the Treaty of Rome was ushering the European Economic Community into existence. The treaty ordained the free movement of persons, services and capital—the most xenophilic act in European history, and a posthumous vindication for a doctor who perished in Buchenwald.

Today, the EU is beset by massive problems, many of its own making. But not all of them. In France, Marine Le Pen inveighs against immigrants and “globalism” in all its sinister forms, including free trade, and speaks admiringly of Vladimir Putin. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban says his goal is to build an “illiberal new state based on national foundations,” citing China, Russia and Turkey as inspirations. This week’s election in Britain rests partly in the hands of the U.K. Independence Party, which imagines that cutting the country off from its largest trading partner is a good idea.

Ausländerfreundlichkeit is becoming verboten again. Think of this column as a reminder of the distance Europe has traveled in 70 years, and why it must not slip back.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com

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