Nicholas Stargardt on the Germans' Experience of the War

Germany During the Second World War

 When, in the summer of 1950, after graduating from College, I returned to Germany from which our family had emigrated eleven years before, I gathered my first German impressions as an adult. I then wrote to my parents that quite aside from issues of Nazism, I found people to be quite rigid and bound by self-imposed rules—even self-righteous. My mother retorted that except for the Nazis, she saw nothing wrong with the German ethos—though that’s not how she phrased it. I was uncomfortable in Germany—my resolution to pretend that I didn’t speak the language lasted half an hour. However, my annoyance when I was repeatedly envied for having left before the war—my father was sent to Dachau on the Kristallnacht; as Jews, we were lucky to get out. I did not return to Germany for another thirty–plus years; not inadvertence. These thoughts were brought to mind by my reading, just completed, of Nicholas Stargardt’s book about how Germans experienced the second world war that had begun with their invasion of Poland.

   In my view the book, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945, is a brilliant achievement. The account of how the German population—from its soldiers and officials to ordinary inhabitants of every stripe—experienced the war, told with copious citations of letters and diary entries, makes fascinating and revealing reading from beginning to end. Here I want to make a few comments, just short of random and far short of a review, of which many can be found on the internet. But before doing so, let me confess that I was able to read this book because neither the participants of those events are still alive nor most of the generation after them—while their contemporary descendents, I optimistically believe, have assumed views and attitudes quite distinct from the personages that populate Stargardt’s book.

   My comments mostly concern what was news to me. Let me start at the top. Hitler is more offstage than on. Of course he makes speeches now and then and he is reported to give orders to the military and to appoint and dismiss leading military leaders, but he makes far fewer appearances than I would have expected. However, that does not mean that he is not emphatically present in the minds of a very large proportion of the population whose fervent patriotism attaches them equally to the Führer and to the Vaterland.

   The high-level governmental officer with is a much more frequent presence is Goebbels in his role as minister of propaganda. He regularly writes pieces that are widely read, he makes frequent pronouncements and gives orders to a variety of purveyors of propaganda, in writing and on radio; he also gives directions to the worlds of theater and film. Goebbels is concerned both to shape the beliefs of the German population and very much about their morale. What struck me about him, given his beliefs as a faithful Nazi and devotee of Hitler, he is not at all a hack, but clearly very perceptive, really smart.

   In part in consequence of effective propaganda, but also rooted in a much longer and deeper tradition of what I will just label as German patriotism: sentimental and ideological attachment to the Vaterland, to the Heimat. That pervasive mindset accounts for a lot that went on between 1939 to 1945. Enthusiasm for the war at the start, stick-to-it-ness as it developed with significant ups and downs and, finally, the stubborn unwillingness to give up until the bitter—very bitter—end.

   Jews, are a multifaceted topic. While, rightly, given its subject, the book does not include an account of the systematic murder of Jews in Auschwitz and other death camps, it does report about what the population knew. But otherwise, Jews are incessantly invoked. Jews are the agents of the Soviet Union, Jews are behind the American participation in the war against Germany: you name it, and it’s because of the Jews. It is so mechanical, so routine and certainly not based on any knowledge. Irony: when prominent representative of American Jews asked that the rail tracks to Auschwitz be bombed, they were turned down because their proposal didn’t fit into Allied plans for the war.

   In any case, incredible powers were attributed to Jews; and since only a few were left in Germany during WW II, whatever was the rhetorical value of that appeal, it basically came to not very meaningful slogans.

   Finally and most seriously, I was shocked and amazed about the killing that went on throughout this period. Executing—that is, just shooting—Jews of course, prisoners, inhabitants of conquered towns, women and children very much included, killing German soldiers thought to be laggards. Killing people became well nigh routine. No procedures: no finding guilty under some rule or law. Some official, some authority high enough not to be questioned, decided on the death of a group of individuals and that was that. On numerous occasions what even Germany’s enemies thought were the rules of war were wantonly disobeyed.

   Denazification after the war (and after the conclusion of this book) did not deal with these issues. It would take the passing of the warring generation to restore Germany to the status of a Rechtststaat. 

 

     

The German Experience of the Second World War

How the Germans Experienced World  War II

   I am reading a totally fascinating book and by now I am just at 37% per cent, since that’s the way Kindle measures one’s progress, rather than giving old-fashioned page numbers. The title is Germans at War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945  by Nicholas Stargardt; it gives an account of how the Germans experienced the second World War that had been started by Hitler with the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Its distinctive procedure is to make copious use of diaries and letters of Germans in all corners of the Reich, many were combatants, but by no means only such. In brief but meaningful quotations they give accounts of their experiences and views, starting with letters sent home to their wives by soldiers who participated in the invasion of Poland.

   A very large number of subjects are covered, touching on all aspects of military and civilian life with very skillfully wrought—very smooth—transitions from one to another.

   When I’ve finished the book, I may report additional impressions of the book, but I won’t compete with the many reviews to be found on the internet, quite a few by experts in one or another related subject. But I do want to say a word about the author. Nicholas Stargardt was born in Melbourne in 1962 and received his higher education in Britain. He is a fellow of Magdalen College and teaches European history at Oxford. He is the son of a German Jewish father who emigrated to Australia. I surmise that the father is of my generation, with the difference that I came with my family to New York, while he wound up in Australia, marrying an Australian woman.

   I provide this small bio of the books author, because I believe that he may have been the ideal person to write this book. As a native German speaker, educated outside Germany, but trained as a historian of Germany he was a particularly favorable position to do this book. To look at it in another way, it might well have been very difficult if not impossible for a native German historian to keep out of the text a certain defensiveness, even when writing these many years later than the events recounted. On the one hand, Stargardt is in full command of the facts that he reports and on the other, he is able to refrain from making judgments about that huge range of events—from pronouncements by Hitler and Goebbels to reports about horrendous atrocities committed by so many Germans during this period.

   To point to a quite different German trait, I have both been impressed and amused by the evidence of German Gründlichkeit, thoroughness, of keeping records. “By 1943, a mere 3,450 people had been punished for listening to foreign radio. . . . between April and November 1942, 1,375,567 civilian workers went into the Reich from the occupied Soviet territories, a further 291,756 from the Polish General Government . . . compared to 357,940 from the Netherlands, Belgium and all but northern France” etc., etc.

   Stargardt is married to Lyndal Roper, a distinguished Oxford professor of history and a prolific author about witchcraft. Considering that the Germans stuck with Hitler to the war’s bitter—and ruinous—end, that Oxford household has been coping with a good deal of irrationality.

A 2007 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette OpEd: Germans and Jews Today

Sunday Forum: Germans and Jews today

The relationship is complicated and RUDOLPH H. WEINGARTNER finds that nostalgia is part of it

Sunday, August 19, 2007

In 1995 I returned to Heidelberg, invited by the city as one of its former Jewish inhabitants. On the Friday evening, the arranged program took us to a service at the then newly built synagogue, at considerable distance from the center of town where the old one had stood. (That building, having been burned down on Crystal Night, is now reduced to a well-kept empty lot hosting a memorial plaque.)

Rudolph H. Weingartner (rudywein@pitt.edu) is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. His latest book is "A Sixty-Year Ride Through the World of Education" (Hamilton/Rowman & Littlefield).

Given that the new synagogue is quite large and expensively detailed, I asked a (non-Jewish) Heidelberg acquaintance, why so? -- given that the Jewish congregation was quite small.

"The state," she replied with a wicked smile, "was willing to contribute substantially to the building, provided the synagogue would be quite impressive."

The state clearly wanted to make a statement; but what is it they wanted to say? At the time, I did not think much about it and simply assumed it was yet another instance of expiation of past guilt. But further observations, a more recent visit to Germany, and some reflection led me to think that things are more complicated.

The last Germans who might actually have been guilty vis-a-vis Jews are the grandparents of the current generation, a cadre that is rapidly disappearing. Many members of subsequent generations, agreeing that some of their forebears (especially if they were dead) were guilty of heinous crimes, question that they should also bear the burden of that guilt.

As individuals, they are surely right, in spite of the Biblical dictum, "the sins of the fathers ..." German society, however, a continuous quasi-organism, of which these individuals are "components," does have obligations. (Just as ours does, recent Supreme Court decisions to the contrary notwithstanding, toward the descendents of those whom our ancestors enslaved.)

The state of Baden-Wurtemberg was no doubt acting in behalf of German society, as do other states and cities in the erection of numerous memorials to Jews throughout Germany.

But there is much more to the current relationship of Germans toward Jews and Judaism. To begin with, enough time has passed since the period before Germany became a Nazi state, for there to be a historical awareness of what had transpired during the century before then. In that period Jews in Germany never numbered more than about half a million out of a population of about 65 million at the end of this pre-Hitler period.

Nevertheless, members of that tiny fraction made signal and recognized contributions in a large range of activities, as jurists, physicians, journalists, academics -- from the humanities to the sciences -- and as leading members in other professions and, of course, in commerce. These folks are now missed.

But the prominence of Jews in additional domains suggests another dimension of current German attitudes: Jews were active in music and the arts, in theater and film, as popular writers, and as entertainers of various kinds.

In a country that was culturally very homogeneous -- and thus very unlike America -- Jews provided a kind of spice, an interesting exotic element, while remaining essentially middle class, seldom venturing outside the bounds of gentility and the broad framework of German culture. It was a case of having your cake and eating it too, if for a period of less than a century.

One component, as I see it, in the current German attitude toward Jews is a nostalgia for a complex condition that, in effect, few if any alive today had themselves actually encountered. And no doubt this experiential gap adds a mythic element to the object of this nostalgia.

Evidence? On my 2006 trip to Heidelberg, we were asked to speak to high school students about our families' lives before emigration. I never taught a class that was so attentive and as active with questions, an experience equaled by my colleagues.

Further, besides those many modest monuments and memorials dotted throughout Germany, the number of Berlin streets bearing the names of Jews, famous and not so, is astonishing. Then there are the different types of schools of Jewish studies that have been established in Germany, capable of serving a far larger student body than there are eligible Jews living in Germany. Non-Jews attend.

One of these institutions, Abraham Geiger College attracted national and, indeed, international, attention when, last fall, it ordained its first three graduates as liberal (reform) rabbis --the first in 60 years in Germany. More to the point I want to bring out, that ceremony was attended by none other than Horst Kohler, president of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland!

Many in Germany -- and many surely not: there is also anti-Semitism -- want the German cake leavened by Jews who once made such a contribution. But the German Jews who played that role are dying out: I was 12 when I left there in 1939 and am 80 now.

The largest number of Jews living in Germany now came there from Russia and, if my small sampling gives me an accurate reading, a large proportion of these immigrants mostly keep to themselves, living apart from German society. No doubt, to a significant degree that is their own doing. We know from our own history here that the first generation of newcomers bands together, venturing as little as possible into "established" society.

But then I suspect that not enough is done by Germans to counteract such isolationism. I surmise, further, that specifically Jews that had been brought up in Germany are the object of the nostalgia I detect, Jews that had already been domesticated. Well, that process of integration, such as it was, took several centuries and depended on its success, such as it was, on the actions of Germans -- just as those Germans were able to nullify it in a thrice.

Nostalgia, in the end, can never be gratified, since the past cannot be brought into the present. If Germans desire to add Jewish seasoning to their culture, they will have to make major efforts to reach out to those Jews who live there and they will have to accept the new flavors that future integration will bring. To paraphrase our recently resigned secretary of defense, "You make do with the Jews you have."

First published at PG NOW on August 17, 2007 at 9:34 pm

A Vintage Op Ed from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette: Jewish History in Berlin

	Pittsburgh, Pa. Monday, Sept. 25, 2006

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Weekend Perspectives: Berlin's surprising model Jewish history is honored in the German capital Saturday, July 22, 2006 By Rudolph H. Weingartner A recent visit to Berlin prompts me to make a statement that I had never expected to utter: With respect to Jews, the Berliners got something right -- on a matter, moreover, about which we here in the United States might think a bit more clearly. Jews are represented, so to speak, by two formidable Berlin sites. Rudolph H. Weingartner and his family came to the United States in 1939 as Jewish refugees from Germany. He lives in Squirrel Hill (rudywein@pitt.edu). The most recently completed (May 2005) is Peter Eisenman's Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, placed in the very center of the city, next to the Brandenburger Tor and not far from the Reichstag. The other is Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum, which opened in 2001 in a residential area of Berlin. The paths toward the erection of these two works were anything but smooth. In particular, the squabbling, sometimes fierce, about every aspect of the Memorial -- design, materials, cost, location and even just what it was to commemorate -- lasted for more than a decade and a half. In a sense, it continues to this day since by no means all of those who disapprove of the design or even of its purpose are reconciled to its existence. But I am by no means alone in my admiration of Mr. Eisenman's achievement. Heinrich Wefing, a leading German architectural critic, refers to it as a beautiful abstraction "that does not dictate what its observer should think or experience, but is nonetheless thoughtful and moving," while The New York Times' Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote "how abstraction can be the most powerful tool for conveying the complexity of human emotion." What must not be ignored is the sheer scope of the memorial: 2,711 steles of different heights spread over an expanse measured in the most ur-American way, as having the size of two football fields. If the paradigmatic individual memorial is the simple tombstone, Mr. Eisenman's expanse of slabs is an appropriate cenotaph for 6 million. The motto of the Jüdische Museum Berlin across town calls for "two millennia of German-Jewish History." And in a somewhat cluttered way, it emphatically lives up to that slogan. Its numerous displays convey a wealth of information about the many and changing roles that Jews have played in Germany. As one descends from the starting point at the top of Mr. Libeskind's edifice, one moves forward in time until one reaches the lowest floor where information is provided both about the Holocaust and the emigration of Jews to other lands, reinforced by the Garden of Exile and Emigration just outside. In two significant ways, Berlin got it right, even if it took years of controversy and argument to get there. First, by placing the account of the Shoah at the end of an elaborate overview of those 2,000 years of the intertwining of German and Jewish societies that basement exhibit is not one of mere victimhood but is reached by museum visitors after having been elaborately informed as to who those victims were. This horrendous period of history is shown to have been both a murderous destruction of human lives and an attempt to eradicate a significant part of human civilization. It takes a Jewish museum to show that, rather than a Holocaust museum. The second way in which Berlin got it right is that it was sensitive to the tension between the institutional goal of providing knowledge and that of fostering commemoration. The didactic goal is indefinitely complex. Museums use displays and documents, film clips and computer screens, earphones and loudspeakers and ever more modes of communication to cram masses of information and impressions into the heads of their patrons. Alert visitors -- moving this way and that, looking and listening here and there -- take in a lot. With luck, they will remember a goodly fraction of what they have experienced, and with even more luck, they will later reflect on what they have found out. When all the stars are properly aligned, then, the absorbed stream of information may lead to retrospective contemplation. But a monument like Mr. Eisenman's has the power to do that on the spot. Inducement to reflection and meditation is focused, monolithic, immediate. By pressing different buttons from those multifaceted didactic ones, a thoughtful monument evokes thought, then and there. That, finally, brings me to our own practices in the United States. To a degree, Washington's Holocaust Memorial Museum serves both the didactic and the memorial function, though in the latter role not as successfully as Israel's Yad Vashem. But if we leave aside these major establishments of world capitals, accounts about the United States are not encouraging. The Israel Science and Technology Homepage reports that to this date, we have created 23 Holocaust museums, not counting our little one in Pittsburgh that didn't make it onto the list. If you put aside actual Shoah sites, such as Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz, that is more than in all of the rest of the world together. By way of contrast, the same source of information show there to be 24 Jewish museums in our land, while there are 57 in the rest of the world, not counting numerous museums in Israel. Ours is the wrong ratio, a wrong view of history, the wrong way to present the contributions of the Jewish people to the world's history and the wrong way to commemorate the Shoah. We must hold on to an inclusive meaning of Never Forget. Forget not what they did, but remember, too, who they were to whom they did it. Let's stop building Holocaust museums and create Jewish museums instead.

Look Who’s Back, A Novel about Hitler Coming Back to Life: Some Comments

   Look Who's Back, the English translation of the German novel Er ist wieder da (literally: He’s here again) by Timur Vermes is a runaway best seller in Germany. It would not have had this success half a century ago (and probably would not have been written, not to mention published) when a good part of the German population had experienced the real Hitler, the Führer, ruthless and fanatical head of a nation that had gone profoundly astray. The closest this book comes to follow an actual model is that of the picture of Hitler conveyed by Traudl Junge, his secretary in the Berlin bunker, when he was essentially powerless and implicitly expecting a self-inflicted end, to avoid far worse were he to be caught. That almost kindly, ruminating Hitler is whom we get in the novel, including a mild sense of humor of which few if any were aware when he was in power or on the way there.

   I have read a few reviews (only ones in English) and was surprised that none of them mentions the book’s pretty important trait, that the person who relates its story is Adolf Hitler himself. I will get to the several important consequences of that fact after very briefly outlining the book’s plot. In 2011, Hitler wakes up in an empty lot in Berlin, dressed in the uniform he wore during his last days that ended in his 1945 suicide. The owner of a nearby newspaper kiosk takes him to be an actor, brilliantly impersonating the long-since-dead Führer and connects him up with some TV people who, also believing that they are confronted with a brilliant impersonator, put him on the air, where he delivers impromptu rants that are lapped up as hilarious by all but a few naysayers. (His entire audience takes him to be a very skillful and knowledgeable actor. Needless to say, no one takes him to be a 122-year-od real thing.) While I was getting to the latter part of the book, I kept wondering about how Herr Vermes would end it and found out, when I got to the last page (or the Kindle equivalent) that he wasn’t ending it at all. Things would go on with a bigger and better television series.

   As I see it, the book has essentially three themes, if you don’t count the reactions of others to Hitler’s talk and actions, since most of them are in the entertainment business, playing along with their profitable find. One important theme actually has nothing much to do with Hitler, though if it were omitted, Look Who’s Back would be a much shorter book. I am speaking of the reactions to the country—its people, its customs, its stores, its gadgets, and much more—of someone returning to the scene after an absence of sixty-six years. Maybe not a brave new world but certainly a new and wondrous one, not to mention that in those olden days Berlin was lying in ruins. A few reviewers mention Rip Van Winkle. The second theme has Hitler parcel out bits of the history of his time, by referring—just about always very briefly—to (well known) events of his life and of the contemporaneous history of Germany and World War II.  In the course of remarks on these themes, he mentions numerous colleagues and subordinates, putting tiny dobs of flesh, so to speak, on the occasional historical bones. In an appendix, Jamie Bulloch, the translator of the book into English, gives brief sketches of 36 such historical actors and while I recognized well over half of them, I suspect that much younger German readers would no doubt benefit from such a crib. But on the other hand, the sense of authenticity is not undermined if the reader does not know who all these characters are, while the names of a few, such as Göring and Goebbels are still familiar to most readers.

   The heart of the novel is of course Hitler’s rants. They are fun to read—anyway, most of them—but quite a few of them are not those of the founder and leader of the NSDAP, the Nazi party, but those of an old-school gentlemen talking about marriage, and proper behavior in a variety of contexts. Foreigners living in Germany are repeatedly “treated,” Turks above all. But Hitler’s discussions of such themes is as much puzzled as censorious.

   Of course Jews come in and out of these disquisitions, the Jewish theme is made up of conventional clichés, without the venom with which Hitler expressed his anti-Semitism. There is no mention of the Holocaust, except for a single incident that is not particularly well handled. When the secretary who was assigned to him—whom he likes and thinks well of—tells her grandmother about her dealings with “Hitler,” the grandmother doesn’t only disapprove, but reveals—showing a precious old photograph—that her family who was Jewish, were “gassed.” That brief scene sort of sits there. Serious scenes are not Vermes’s forte.

   Finally, I want to take up the question as to why this book has been so immensely popular in Germany. It’s well written (I sampled the German), smoothly and with light humor. (Though I agree with one reviewer, that in patches it’s just a bit boring.) Further, the novel is built around a genuinely good idea; Hitler is not just anyone coming back from the dead. But most important, Vermes found a way to talk about a grim past with humor. Germans have been made to feel guilty about that past, even though a person born in 1965, say, might rightly respond with “I’ve not had anything to do with the crimes of the Nazis.” Look Who’s Back in effect whitewashes the past with an invisible brush. All those references to real people and events proclaim wie es eigentlich gewesen war without doing any such thing. It’s a case of have your cake and eat it too. Who wouldn’t be for that?

Your comments, positive or negative, are much appreciated. For your convenience and mine use the email method, the last item in the column on  the right.

Another Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Op Ed of almost a decade ago.
A	Pittsburgh, Pa. Monday, Sept. 25, 2006

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Weekend Perspectives: Berlin's surprising model Jewish history is honored in the German capital Saturday, July 22, 2006 By Rudolph H. Weingartner A recent visit to Berlin prompts me to make a statement that I had never expected to utter: With respect to Jews, the Berliners got something right -- on a matter, moreover, about which we here in the United States might think a bit more clearly. Jews are represented, so to speak, by two formidable Berlin sites. Rudolph H. Weingartner and his family came to the United States in 1939 as Jewish refugees from Germany. He lives in Squirrel Hill (rudywein@pitt.edu). The most recently completed (May 2005) is Peter Eisenman's Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, placed in the very center of the city, next to the Brandenburger Tor and not far from the Reichstag. The other is Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum, which opened in 2001 in a residential area of Berlin. The paths toward the erection of these two works were anything but smooth. In particular, the squabbling, sometimes fierce, about every aspect of the Memorial -- design, materials, cost, location and even just what it was to commemorate -- lasted for more than a decade and a half. In a sense, it continues to this day since by no means all of those who disapprove of the design or even of its purpose are reconciled to its existence. But I am by no means alone in my admiration of Mr. Eisenman's achievement. Heinrich Wefing, a leading German architectural critic, refers to it as a beautiful abstraction "that does not dictate what its observer should think or experience, but is nonetheless thoughtful and moving," while The New York Times' Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote "how abstraction can be the most powerful tool for conveying the complexity of human emotion." What must not be ignored is the sheer scope of the memorial: 2,711 steles of different heights spread over an expanse measured in the most ur-American way, as having the size of two football fields. If the paradigmatic individual memorial is the simple tombstone, Mr. Eisenman's expanse of slabs is an appropriate cenotaph for 6 million. The motto of the Jüdische Museum Berlin across town calls for "two millennia of German-Jewish History." And in a somewhat cluttered way, it emphatically lives up to that slogan. Its numerous displays convey a wealth of information about the many and changing roles that Jews have played in Germany. As one descends from the starting point at the top of Mr. Libeskind's edifice, one moves forward in time until one reaches the lowest floor where information is provided both about the Holocaust and the emigration of Jews to other lands, reinforced by the Garden of Exile and Emigration just outside. In two significant ways, Berlin got it right, even if it took years of controversy and argument to get there. First, by placing the account of the Shoah at the end of an elaborate overview of those 2,000 years of the intertwining of German and Jewish societies that basement exhibit is not one of mere victimhood but is reached by museum visitors after having been elaborately informed as to who those victims were. This horrendous period of history is shown to have been both a murderous destruction of human lives and an attempt to eradicate a significant part of human civilization. It takes a Jewish museum to show that, rather than a Holocaust museum. The second way in which Berlin got it right is that it was sensitive to the tension between the institutional goal of providing knowledge and that of fostering commemoration. The didactic goal is indefinitely complex. Museums use displays and documents, film clips and computer screens, earphones and loudspeakers and ever more modes of communication to cram masses of information and impressions into the heads of their patrons. Alert visitors -- moving this way and that, looking and listening here and there -- take in a lot. With luck, they will remember a goodly fraction of what they have experienced, and with even more luck, they will later reflect on what they have found out. When all the stars are properly aligned, then, the absorbed stream of information may lead to retrospective contemplation. But a monument like Mr. Eisenman's has the power to do that on the spot. Inducement to reflection and meditation is focused, monolithic, immediate. By pressing different buttons from those multifaceted didactic ones, a thoughtful monument evokes thought, then and there. That, finally, brings me to our own practices in the United States. To a degree, Washington's Holocaust Memorial Museum serves both the didactic and the memorial function, though in the latter role not as successfully as Israel's Yad Vashem. But if we leave aside these major establishments of world capitals, accounts about the United States are not encouraging. The Israel Science and Technology Homepage reports that to this date, we have created 23 Holocaust museums, not counting our little one in Pittsburgh that didn't make it onto the list. If you put aside actual Shoah sites, such as Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz, that is more than in all of the rest of the world together. By way of contrast, the same source of information show there to be 24 Jewish museums in our land, while there are 57 in the rest of the world, not counting numerous museums in Israel. Ours is the wrong ratio, a wrong view of history, the wrong way to present the contributions of the Jewish people to the world's history and the wrong way to commemorate the Shoah. We must hold on to an inclusive meaning of Never Forget. Forget not what they did, but remember, too, who they were to whom they did it. Let's stop building Holocaust museums and create Jewish museums instead.