Flight or resignation
Why do we change our minds?
Sources reveal—unofficially, but reliably—that Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump, is a key mover and shaker in selecting his father’s nominations for cabinet. In more than just name: like father, like son. One of them is R. F. Kennedy, Junior, who, by contrast, is very unlike his father. He’s about to get grilled by the US Senate. He is a die-hard Republican, although he hails from a family that has hitherto been staunchly associated with the other lot: the Democrats.
Joseph Goebbels in 1916, age 18.
On two grounds, one of the most enigmatic characters of the NSDAP, or historical Nazi Party in Germany, is, I find, Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister. He was without question a gifted orator, a writer of more than average talent, if not, as such, a best-seller, and he was a thinker. In his early years, he was tutored (in his Ph.D. studies) by Jews, and that is something that does not seem to have incurred his wrath. He even dated Jewesses, and although he admitted to being put off by their religion, he nonetheless continued to be attracted by their looks: he enjoyed women’s company, and the rate of his progeny suggests that he enjoyed it in bed the most.
For me, the enigma comprises, first, his and his wife, Magda’s, decision to terminate his Chancellorship of Germany after one day by convening a suicide pact. He had certainly advocated and supported the oppression of the Jews, and he was far from sympathetic to their plight, especially once, in 1944, he had been appointed as the Minister Plenipotentiary for Total War. His endeavours to increase armaments production and recruit further bodies for the battlefield were largely in vain. His prime contribution in the latter year or so of the war lay in his oratory and its ability to galvanise a conflict-weary nation into heading off once more unto the breach (as Shakespeare’s Henry V might have put it) or close the wall up with our German dead. He was by no means an innocent in what Germany did to its Jewish population. But I don’t entirely understand what he had to fear: perhaps a lengthy prison sentence, but did he have grounds to fear his execution? And had Magda grounds to fear hers?
The second plank to his enigma was the flip side of that suicide pact with Magda: the decision to murder their six common children (a seventh child by Magda’s previous marriage, Harald Quandt, was much older and survived the war, dying in 1967). It is thought or known that high-ranking officials like Hitler himself and Heinrich Himmler (head of the SS and in charge of the Holocaust) committed suicide with cyanide (Hitler prior to his capture in his Berlin bunker, Himmler in the custody of the British army), and cyanide is also suspected as being the means by which the Goebbelses dispatched their children and themselves on 1 May 1945. The children were of an age whereby they might be regarded as well within the cradle of childhood innocence: the oldest (Helga) was only 12 years of age. After her came Hildegarde, Helmut (the only boy), Holdine, Hedwig and Heidrun. What, to extrapolate from the suicide pact, did the Goebbelses fear for the children? Did they fear their execution or imprisonment as well?
A lot of controversy surrounds the acts of Israel and its ally, the United States of America, in the conflict currently ongoing in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, as well as in Israel itself. Much focus is on children: while even the youngest children in Palestine have been known to raise fists in anger and throw stones by hand or catapult, the overwhelming tendency of criminal jurisdictions around the world is to treat children up to a certain age, be it 18, or 16 or, in some cases, 14, less strictly than their adult counterparts. This differentiation founds not on age itself but on the criminal intention that can be attributed to a child of such an age who carries out an act whereby the child is unable to be credited with appreciating the seriousness of the harm thereby caused. We call it diminished responsibility, and can also apply it to the mentally ill, or even those under the voluntary influence of drink or drugs. It is for precisely this reason that children who fall victim to acts of terrorism, war or genocide are especially to be lamented, for these are acts of political machination, and no child ought to be a victim of such machination, if only on the ground that, by definition if not in reality, they cannot fully comprehend it. It is hard to rationalise the grounds for targeting the child in warlike situations, unless it be the aim of eradicating the child’s generation and, thereby, their race.
In the 1993 film Schindler’s List, during the clearance of the Cracow ghetto, we see medics euthanising mental patients in a hospital. The doctors kill the patients to save them having to live the horrors of what is about to befall them—mercy killing. And the soldiers shoot them to preclude their constituting a hindrance to the purity of the race—eugenics. It is, I find, one of the hardest scenes in the movie to process: euthanasia of mentally disabled patients in order to preserve them from an imminent vile murder. The euthanasia and the murder have widely divergent aims, and horrifically similar consequences.
Similar considerations, of the ability of children to comprehend their acts and the consequences of their acts, and the lamentability of their death at the hands of those practising political machinations, apply also to the conflict in Ukraine, to that in Sudan, to the recruitment of child gang members and soldiers in Central America or the Democratic Republic of Congo, to name but examples. However, it is far from unusual to encounter even horrific acts by children, who, by adult carelessness or malevolence, come into possession of the means to take life or cause extreme harm, and thereupon do so, and end up being tried in courts of law as adults. It makes a mockery of the justifications that are purported to be at play in a civilised criminal justice system, since the very reason for handling juvenile delinquents as such, and not as adult criminals, is precisely the same regardless of the harm they might have caused through their acts. Any adult can have a charge of murder reduced to that of manslaughter where his or her intention was not in fact to kill; but that is no reason to augment the level of the charges against a child, even if they fully intend the death they have caused, because their age is deemed to be a factor in the lack of comprehension in their minds of the consequences of what they do. By blurring the distinction between a child and an adult in the criminal justice construct, society once again reveals its lack of cogency in designing a system that operates on sound principles; and, without sound principles, grounded in justice, a society lacks justice, and instead embraces arbitrariness.
Harald Quandt, Magda Goebbels’s son by her first marriage, survived the Second World War to become a successful industrialist. As far as I know, he was never prosecuted for crimes against humanity, or even for parking tickets; and nor was his father, Günther Quandt, likewise an industrial magnate (including car-maker BMW). Harald’s name, as the only member of Magda Goebbels’s family to survive the war, seems to be clean enough (at least cleaner than his father, who wasn’t prosecuted for his collaboration with the Nazis). So, what accusations might have been levelled against the other Goebbels children?
Were they murdered (there were clear signs that the eldest at least resisted her parents’ attack) because, as far as they were concerned, Magda and Joseph Goebbels wielded absolute power of decision over who should live and who should not? Whatever Goebbels did at the Propaganda Ministry, he never had authority over the machinery by which the Jews were exterminated. He was Gaulieter (local administrator) for a while in the early days, but any crimes he committed against humanity, as such, might have been criminal in terms of the victors’ justice and may even have been criminal in terms of German (even Nazi German) justice, but he’s not renowned as a mass murderer.
He wrote in 1942: “A judgment is being carried out on the Jews which is barbaric but thoroughly deserved.” His job as propaganda minister was certainly to encourage discrimination and violence against Jews. The question under discussion here is less what Goebbels’s role was in the deaths of the opponents and victims of the Nazis and more whether it was his own acts that persuaded him to murder his children, or realisation of the fact that they would never follow in his antisemitic footsteps. I think it’s not entirely rational to assume that, even in the defeated Germany, Goebbels’s children would have been associated with the acts of the Holocaust (more so than simply by dint of the national guilt of being German). Moreover, even if Joseph’s hands had been red with the blood of Jews, would it be right that the children should stand guilty of the sins of their father (e.g. Exodus 34:7)?
And, so, the question turns away from why the children were murdered, and more to why Joseph murdered them, for in spite of the fact that Magda had come under the thrall of Joseph while working as his secretary, in 1931, I can hardly think that the collective murder of the kids was done at her initiative.
I don’t know why Joseph Goebbels did such a terrible thing. So I must speculate: that he and Magda had produced these pretty, well-liked offspring in order that they should inherit the new Earth, to which Germany’s victory in the War should lay down the path. They should inherit the Earth, and all that is in it (Kipling, this time). And if Germany’s victory was to prove elusive, then, with nothing to inherit, there should be no heirs.
Perhaps this is clumsily expressed on my part, but it boils down to this sad observation: that the survival of these six human beings (who, I have to say, earn little more these days than a clinical gloss by otherwise politically obsessed historians) depended not on the survival of their parents, or on the survival of Germany (for it is still there), but on that elusive victory. Like party decorations carefully crafted for the great anniversary of a man who sadly passes away before the festivities can even begin: dumped in the bin as being of no further purpose, a waste of time. And the decision that switched hope of victory into acceptance of defeat was taken in that night between 30 April and 1 May 1945, when the Chancellor of Germany … changed his mind.
Was Robert F. Kennedy, Junior, always a Republican? How does it come that Benito Mussolini’s granddaughter finds the Brothers of Italy to be too right-wing? Why isn’t she a die-hard fascist, like her grandfather was? Why am I not a staunch Conservative supporter like my mother and father were, and like my brothers are? Why do we disagree with our families? Why do we disagree with each other?
Is it that we come to realisations to which those with whom we disagree have not come? Or do we perforce lack some realisation to which they have come, and we have not? Do we weigh up their interests against our interests, or do we weigh up the interests of all, and formulate a rationale that directs and determines our actions, in all spheres of all our lives? Or do we, at each turn, blow with the wind, regardless of its compass direction?
The bladder-wrack on the shore will always drift up the beach at high tide, and some of it may remain where it lands at the high water mark; but much of it will recede to the low water mark … as the tide turns.
A flag, however, cannot stay fluttering westward when the wind that blows it turns eastward. It will follow. It will always follow, for no flag is capable of doing anything but: blowing with the wind.
And some there are who procure that their throne be carried onto the beach, where they will sit and command the tide not to flood around their feet. And the water will not desist, but will lap at their feet; and thus will it be proved that there are things that mankind cannot change, whether he stand fast or no, whether he command or no, whether he will, or no, but whose persistence in opposition to his principle requires either his flight, or his resignation: his self-sacrifice.