Born on the Wrong Side

How should we view ‘the enemy’?

I can’t remember when I realised that my family were viewed by some in my homeland of England as being ‘on the wrong side.’ I don’t recall at what age I fully comprehended what being half German with a German mother and beloved German grandparents meant. It was a gradual process of assembling puzzle pieces via questions and observations. Spending every school holiday with my Grandparent’s in Nuremberg, Hitler’s favourite city, with its unavoidable visual reminders of a dark Nazi past kindled an early curiosity in me. Opa, (Grandad), encouraged that curiosity and often spoke with me about the war. But it was when I was 9 years old and in the first year of secondary school that I first experienced ‘being on the wrong side’ in a personal sense. ‘Your Grandparents were Nazis! Your Grandad killed British soldiers like my Grandad.’ I don’t actually think there was any real malice in my classmate’s words, just a type of childish smugness at having the upper hand. Being different to the majority in any way as a child makes you vulnerable to being picked on. Growing up in England children quickly learn that ‘we fought the Germans’ so a bilingual German/Brit national rather has a target on their forehead. I was lucky that I got into a cosmopolitan posh private school in leafy North Oxford, (via the now abolished Government ‘assisted places’ scheme that paid my fees). There was certainly a broader perspective on different nationalities than I think there may have been in other schools and indeed all my teachers and many fellow pupils stood up for me. Still some of the words remain etched into my brain. As is often observed, what has been said can’t be unsaid.

  This is not to say that I have always felt somehow rejected by my fellow Brits. After school I rarely encountered anti German sentiment and my Church of England vicar mother feels totally accepted by her adopted country. For example in Mum’s more than 20 years as a priest she has had an especially close relationship with the British Legion and her Remembrance Sunday services have been universally praised. However, there are always certain times when we both feel somewhat ‘other’ to varying degrees. Sport, especially football, always seems to evoke war imagery when it comes to the rivalry between Britain and Germany. Of course this is often done in good humour but there’s still a niggling discomfort. Even though I am an ardent Brexiteer, during the Brexit referendum campaign I sometimes felt uneasy at the language used to (often legitimately) criticise Germany’s dominance of the EU when it slipped into war references.

When it comes to discussing current bloody armed conflicts there is nothing lighthearted or humourous. It has depressed me to hear ‘We had to carpet bomb Dresden’ used as justification for Israel using any means to try and destroy barbaric terrorists Hamas, no matter the civilian death toll. When understandably outraged by an attack on us or our allies some in Britain seem to erase the moral soul searching done after World War Two by the Allies about their own conduct. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 were born out of the acknowledgment that war crimes can be committed by any side in war, even those fighting for the most just of causes. These treatises protecting the human rights of both non combatants and military prisoners of war have always been seen as a ray of light to come from a global conflict defined by dehumanisation. After all if we become what we hate what exactly are we fighting for? Sadly the recognition that those on the opposing side are fellow humans of widely varying culpability for their Government’s actions is quickly drowned out in an internet media world fuelled by bellowing outrage. Let’s blame all Russians for Putin’s illegal invasion, let’s blame all Palestinians for Hamas’s barbarity, let’s blame all Germans for Hitler, but let’s not blame ourselves when our Government conducts an illegal war or sells bombs that kill countless civilians. There isn’t even a logical consistency because it’s driven by the embedded human desire to ‘feel superior.’ This enticing emotion goes way beyond feeling proud of one’s nation’s achievements or one’s personal admirable accomplishments. The flip side of this particular coin is ‘othering’ and eventually dehumanising.

   Of course for many it is easier to feel grief at the loss of Ukrainian soldiers fighting for their sovereign territory than it is to grieve for the invading Russians mown down as canon fodder. But not for me. When I think of Russian soldiers, many of whom are conscripts with no agency in their fate, I think of my amazing German grandfather, my Opa and his two brothers who had to fight on the wrong side. Opa’s youngest brother Ludwig was eager to sign up even though a medical issue could have kept him home longer. Like most teenage boys he longed for adventure, comradery and yes to defend his country. Ludwig was 19 when he was hit by a barrage of shrapnel on the border of Finland and Russia. The death notification letter my great grandfather received described how ‘countless’ large and small fragments hit him in the back, right thigh and left arm. The fragments penetrated the stomach and bowels and he bled out on the operating table. If was only then, post mortem, that he was awarded the Iron Cross second class for bravery. Opa was fighting in Crete when he heard the news of his brother’s death. He found out via his letter being returned with the words ‘Return to sender. Recipient fallen for the German Reich.’ Opa rarely cried and yet until the day he died when he spoke of Ludwig to me his eyes glistened with tears. His mother, my great grandmother, never wore anything but black again.

     Likewise it may be easier for some to grieve for Israelis barbarically kidnapped and murdered than it is to shed tears for Palestinians governed by those murderers dying due to the bombing and blockade. There’s also an understandable fear in the West of not just Islamist terrorsim but those aspects of more orthodox Isalm which conflict with liberal democratic values. How can people go along with such a worldview? Even if they’re not enthusiastic supporters or involved in any violence surely that makes them complicit? But similar questions in a different context have been asked about my own grandparents, the best humans I’ve been privileged to know. It hasn’t just been mouthy high school girls but otherwise sensible adults who have shown me that many still believe in the concept of ‘collective guilt’. Since WW2 the Germans themselves have suffered under the burden of all encompassing guilt, passing it down the generations. A seminal part of my mother’s school education consisted of drumming this guilt into her, even to the extent of showing her horrific Holocaust images at far too young an age. ‘Your people did this.’ The fact that Opa deliberately failed his officer exam to avoid getting embroiled in the regime, putting himself at great risk when superiors got suspicious, doesn’t matter. There wasn’t an antisemitic bone in either of my grandparents, indeed Oma (Gran) closest school friend was a Jewish girl. Also none of my German family had a clue what happened in the concentration camps. But ‘we are guilty’ was still a burden they had to bear.

   Although my grandparent’s conduct during the dark Nazi period is beyond question to anyone rational it is also often less easy to judge ‘culpability’ or ‘complicity’. In her book ‘A Village in the Third Reich’ Julia Boyd eloquently shows how the residents of the Alpine village Obersdorf joined the Nazi Party for a wide variety of reasons, including protecting their families and jobs. Many of these party members were known to be indifferent or even hostile to the regime. Furthermore Obersdorf’s second mayor during the war was ‘both a committed Nazi and a decent human being – a statement that will strike many as a contradiction in terms.’ Despite being known for his pro Nazi speeches this man protected Jews and non Jews alike from persecution. Such a moral spaghetti state can be difficult to unravel and make sense of. When the BBC drama ‘Generation War’ hit our screens in 2014, it evoked controversy and claims that it portrayed the five young German protagonists too sympathetically. It seemed to make some uncomfortable that it showed how easily ordinary, good people can get sucked into a dark vortex and become part of evil in ways they would never have thought possible. Journalist Martha Kearney who lead a BBC panel discussion on the mini series used the words ‘five hours of self pity.’ It seems ‘pity’ must be prefaced by the word ‘self’ when being used for those born on the wrong side.

    None of this is to exonerate those who perpetrate evil by giving them a tear jerking back story in X Factor style. Nor is to argue against holding perpetrators to account. Justice must be served, but justice isn’t vengeance. What we desperately need, perhaps never more than now, is just a simple recognition of the common human condition we share. Very few of us are real psychopaths, i.e. do evil for evil’s sake. Political theorist and German Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany Hannah Arendt famously concluded that neither Adolph Eichmann nor the Nazis generally were psychopaths or non human monsters. In fact what their behaviour showed was the very human ‘banality of evil’. This means we as humans tend to justify harming others with claims, however warped, that we are working for the greater good. When the Covid pandemic ushered in a regime of lockdowns, curtailed civil liberties, limiting healthcare and state enforced medication. Many of us would describe this as unethically authoritarian and responsible for countless deaths. The Covid years clearly showed that lots of Brits easily slipped into spying and reporting on neighbours, demonising people for non compliance and dehumanising those who chose not to get vaccinated (even though it soon became clear the vaccine didn’t stop transmission). It’s not an exaggeration to say that many relished the chance to control and ‘other’ their fellow citizens. Something I will never forget is the Labour Party tweeting a quote from a nurse proudly describing how she stopped a weeping husband entering the hospital to be with his wife as she died. How quickly fear and the lustre of feeling morally superior eroded basic compassion.

‘Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an unuprooted small corner of evil.’

  An edited version of this passage from the famous account of life inside a Soviet Gulag, ‘Gulag Archipelago’ by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn is oft quoted, including by me. However the extended quotation is needed now more than ever. Born out of suffering most couldn’t even imagine Solzhenitsyn reminds us that being human means we all have light and darkness, good and evil within us. Moreover the balance between those opposites is not set in stone but rather our hearts and souls are malleable, subject to be moulded by outside influence. Humility and self awareness are virtues that are sadly lacking in many world leaders, politicians, public figures, people of influence and keyboard warriors on social media. Many would deny they have their own ‘unuprooted small corner of evil’ deep within. However introspection, the basis of humility, is a strength not a weakness. Furthermore it is the best defence against dehumanising others. It is only if you understand the common human condition in which the capacity for both great good and great evil lies within every soul, that you will come to understand that you too could have been ‘born on the wrong side.’

‘None is righteous, no not one.’ (Romans 3:10)

(The young man/boy in the photo is my great uncle Ludwig).