Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad

While I was in London, I picked up Daniel Finkelstein’s memoir of his parents, Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad. It is the moving story of the parallel hardships his parents faced during the war, his mother in Holland and Germany, and his father in Poland and Russia. His mother ended up in a concentration camp, whereas his father was sent to Siberia.

In one sense, Finkelstein is merely tracing their separate timelines and recounting what happened to each parent, but the larger point of the story is that the similarities in their experiences were not a coincidence. The similar dreadful details were the result of equivalent policy in the two totalitarian governments in Germany and Russia. As Finkelstein points out, much of our current understanding of the Holocaust first took shape during the Nuremberg trials, where Soviet crimes were not mentioned:

Finkelstein asserts that the failure to categorize Soviet crimes properly continues to have consequences today, such as it being news that current Russian leadership wants to wipe Ukraine off the map. It is generally understood now that Soviet policy in Ukraine in the 1930s was genocidal. Finkelstein argues that the Nazi-Soviet pact and the Katyn massacre should be categorized in the same way for Poland.

One of the themes of the book is that people do not always understand what they are seeing. The grasp of Nazi crimes, for instance, was not an automatic process. It required intensive study, argument, anti-disinformation campaigns and legal cases in order to become apparent to the forces arrayed against the regime. Finkelstein’s maternal grandfather was Alfred Wiener, the founder of the Wiener Holocaust library. Wiener originally worked for the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, an organization that attempted to counter Nazi propaganda about the Jews during Weimar and beyond. Under the auspices of the Centralverein or CV, as it was known in Germany, Wiener amassed information about Nazi ideas and crimes that ended up becoming a resource for Allied governments during the war.

Wiener was involved in the 1935 court case in Switzerland against the publisher of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The judge in the case ruled that the document was clearly a fake. Of course, the trial did not end the influence of this awful antisemitic book, but it was a step in the right direction:

It reminds me of the way the recent verdict against Trump did not finish him off, and yet put a serious dent in his presidential campaign. Every little bit of truth helps. You have to make the argument. You have to marshal the facts. You can’t just rely on ordinary people to draw conclusions from the seemingly obvious.

Finkelstein makes a compelling case for the equivalence of Nazi and Soviet crimes. He provides a concrete example of the struggle to see what is in front of one’s nose. I would, however, add the caveat that much of the list of people in Finkelstein’s acknowledgments seem to have some issues labeling things accurately. The most striking case, to me, is Anne Applebaum, a scholar and journalist who is a friend of Finkelstein’s and shares his interest in Poland. Applebaum may be fine talking about the history of Russia and its crimes, but she has also written several articles making false equivalence between left-leaning academics and far-right politicians in the United States. In the current crisis of American democracy, in which we almost lost the right to free and fair elections because of a massive far-right conspiracy involving Trump and his allies, we nevertheless get endless editorials about the supposed threat to free speech coming from college professors and students. How much ink has been spilled on this lesser if not made-up problem? Applebaum is a figure actively obscuring what is going on in the contemporary United States. So acknowledgment of her contribution to the book struck a false note.

This blindspot makes me wonder about the ways that cold war memory and McCarthyism influence the ongoing understanding of Soviet crimes. It is not as if we remained allies with Russia all this time. Criticism of the Soviet Union has certainly occurred post-1945. I would guess there is some hesitation, however, to fully embrace the comparison between 1940s Germany and Russia because of the agenda of the people most apt to make it.