Around the turn of the Twenty-First Century, works focusing on German suffering during the Second World War began to enjoy popular success outside of the academic historical community: W.G. Sebald's The Air War and Literature set the tone for debate; Jörg Friedrich's The Fire: Germany in the Air War provided a wealth of information to sustain it; and eyewitness accounts such as Hans Erich Nossack's The End lent force to the discussion by giving a human face to the anonymous dead. Following in the wake of these powerful and controversial accounts, Günter Grass's Crabwalk reflects upon the question of German victimhood from a new angle. He directs our attention away from well-rehearsed arguments about the firebombing of German cities and instead considers the loss of an estimated nine thousand lives in the sinking of the German refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff.

As his novel explores this maritime disaster's impact upon the lives of its survivors and modern-day Germans alike, Grass addresses how we remember and interpret history, and how this way of interpreting and remembering impinges on the present. Grass's own interpretation of history is not unreservedly sympathetic with respect to the recognition of German victimhood. Indeed, Grass is careful to portray many of the disaster's victims as blameworthy, for selfish conduct, for military service, for the personal oath they swore to the Führer, and even for their country's role in starting the war that led to countless atrocities. Grass also recognizes that the tallying of Second World War victims did not end in 1945: he traces generations of conflict among those most affected by repercussions from the past, and thus impresses upon us the relevance of historical memory to many of the shocking news headlines we see today.

To illustrate the connections between each of the conflicts in Crabwalk, which together sprawl out across much of the Twentieth Century, Grass employs a middle-aged journalist named Paul as his novel's narrator. Paul tracks the lives of a Swiss Nazi, Wilhelm Gustloff, and a Jewish doctor, David Frankfurter, up to the day that Frankfurter assassinates Gustloff in 1936. While Frankfurter goes to prison and falls into relative historical obscurity, Gustloff is immortalized as a martyr for National Socialism and receives the posthumous honour of having a cruise ship christened in his name. The narrator follows the Gustloff's story from its peacetime role as a cruise ship to its wartime use as a hospital ship, floating barracks, and finally refugee carrier, and imagines from several different vantage points how it was sunk by a Russian submarine in the Baltic Sea on January 30th, 1945. One of these perspectives comes from a fictional character, Tulla Pokriefke, who gives birth to our narrator on the night of the disaster. Irrevocably affected by the trauma she has experienced on the Gustloff, Tulla perpetually bombards both Paul and his son Konrad with stories of her suffering. While Paul eventually responds to his mother by researching the many facets of the disaster to write an article, his son creates a neo-Nazi website under the pseudonym "Wilhelm", fights online for his version of history to be recognized, and eventually meets with and murders his Internet nemesis, "David".

Grass's choice to write a novel with fictional main characters - Paul, Tulla, Konrad, and David - allows him to capture his audience's attention in a way that many other historical mediums cannot. We learn details about Tulla, for example, that make her seem even more human than the real men, women, and children who survived the disaster. Her white hair, turned colourless by the trauma she experiences, is hardly a detail we could find in a typical historical account. Indeed, we may question the biological feasibility of such a sudden transformation, but to Grass's message this is utterly irrelevant. As a symbol of her continuous suffering, Tulla's white hair is a key part of her humanity. As Grass humanizes his characters, he imbues Crabwalk with the force necessary to break into the popular sphere, a realm unknown to most purely factual historical accounts.

In a testament to Grass's popular appeal, Josef Joffe, editor-in-chief of the German weekly Die Zeit, argues that Crabwalk “captures the imagination more than tomes and tomes of historical writing on what happened.” Indeed, as our narrator denounces one of Heinz Schön's books as “written factually but too emotionlessly,” Grass signals that he is aware of the importance of emotion in capturing a reader's attention. Just as his distinctly human characters add an element of emotion to his novel, Grass uses disturbing imagery to capitalize upon our emotional response. The recurring image from Tulla's memory of “all of them little children among the ice flows… their little legs poking up in the air” appears no less than eight times in Crabwalk. A Russian who served on the submarine that torpedoed the Gustloff has nightmares about these children, once he discovers that the ship was not “stuffed to the gills with Nazis,” and David's mother breaks down and cries when she hears about them. Drawing much of its power from widely accepted notions of children's innocence, this gruesome image makes a lasting impression upon survivors, enemy sailors, and modern-day Germans alike.

Grass's novel, however, is far from a sensationalized account of innocent victims forced into pure and virtuous suffering. By contrast, our narrator remarks upon the shameful conduct of many authority figures on the sinking ship who “thought only of themselves.” Further, Paul notes that, as well as mothers and children, the Gustloff carried soldiers and naval women's auxiliaries. In his internet banter, Paul points out that each of the naval women's auxiliaries - to whom his son refers as “maidens in distress” - had “undergone military training and had sworn the loyalty oath to their Führer.” Their support for Germany's role in the war and for the man who brought it to them was certainly not negligible. Grass states this claim from Crabwalk more explicitly in an interview with Kate Connolly of The Telegraph, arguing that Germans were not simply unwilling victims of Adolf Hitler and the Second World War: “Of course they were seduced as well, but many were involved with enthusiasm.” Clearly, Grass is interested in presenting many of the victims on board the Gustloff as blameworthy in key ways.

Grass is equally concerned with his portrayal of the Russian submarine crew. They are not, he stresses, evil or demonic. Though Konrad argues that they are nothing but “murderers of women and children,” Paul points out that, with its military paint and antiaircraft guns, the Gustloff made a somewhat “ambiguous target” for the Russian crew. Indeed, when the narrator informs us that one of the torpedoes to strike the Gustloff was inscribed with the words “For Leningrad,” it becomes very difficult to view the men on board the Russian submarine as one-dimensionally "bad". The ship they targeted was serving the country that broke a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, whose army had recently laid waste to unfathomably vast sections of their homeland, and whose long and destructive siege of Leningrad had been lifted only year before. Though Paul most certainly does not condone the submarine's attack, he nevertheless shows an understanding of the motive and emotion behind it. Unlike Konrad or Tulla, Grass is adamant about the uncertainty and complexity of this matter.

By recognizing the perspective of the Russian submarine crew, Grass distances his novel from the position of extreme right groups who see the incident in Manichean terms. Indeed, in an interview with Alan Riding of the New York Times, he suggests that he intended Crabwalk to be an attack on the extreme right: “They said the tragedy of the Gustloff was a war crime. It wasn't. It was terrible, but it was a result of war, a terrible result of war. It was not a planned act.” Though he attributes the deaths of thousands on board the Gustloff to the submarine crew's actions, Grass refuses to apply the label of "war crime". Indeed, as a “terrible result of war”, the Gustloff's sinking ceases to be the sole responsibility of the men who fired the torpedoes.

Crucially, Grass's refusal to assign full responsibility for the tragedy to the Russian crew enhances and legitimizes his conclusions about German victimhood. Just as the Russian crewmembers are not fully to blame for their actions, neither can the German passengers be completely to blame for theirs. Indeed, though the adult Germans on board the Gustloff are unquestionably blameworthy in many senses, there nonetheless remains room for victimhood. As Germans qua Germans, they may share in guilt for the war, for its terrible consequences in general, and for the Holocaust in particular, but as individuals they cannot be robbed of their status as victims. Assigning himself a role as a minor character in the novel, Grass maintains that “[n]ever… should his generation have kept silent about such misery [specifically, at the hands of the Russians], merely because for years its own sense of guilt was so overwhelming.” Put simply, Grass suggests that it is no contradiction for an individual - and perhaps, by extension, a nation - to be a guilty party and a victim at the same time.

For Grass, however, it is not enough to simply assign victimhood and guilt where they are due and then, with this neatly out of the way, move on swiftly to present affairs. Not only does this ignore the plight of today's remaining survivors, many of whom are so strongly affected as to still feel at war with “Ivan,” but, to Grass, to focus solely on the present is to miss the point entirely. Without constant public recollection of issues like the Gustloff'ssinking, we become more and more detached from the victims of the past, and the group of people to whom we choose to assign guilt shrinks. Grass ridicules this trend in the German mindset:

All past, gone with the wind! Who still recalls the name of the leader of the German Labor Front? …On a television quiz show, if questions came up about Himmler or Eichmann, some contestants might have heard of them, but most would draw a total historical blank, and with a little smirk the perky quizmaster would tally up the loss of so-and-so many thousands in prize money.

As Hitler becomes the only recognizable public face of German guilt, the very meaning of the term is inevitably transformed. Indeed, focussing entirely on the present, our historical memory becomes fuzzier and fuzzier until the raison d'être for the categories of "guilty party" and "victim" lose their meaning, except insofar as quiz contestants on television shows care about their prize money. We may remember history, but it is not the same history that Grass knew. Perhaps partly for this reason the dedication page of Crabwalk contains the two words, “in memoriam”.

There may be no better proof of the importance of memory than the fact that it is constantly revised. Grass provides ample opportunity for reflection upon this tendency. In Russia, the submarine captain, Alexandr Marinesko, is at first denied any recognition for his sinking of the twenty-five-thousand-ton ship, but is rehabilitated in the 1960s, and later even receives honour as a hero of the Soviet Union. In Germany, too, the past undergoes revision. Grass addresses this by depicting monuments as symbols of memory. With a Vonnegut-like shrug, he writes “That's how it goes with monuments. Some of them are put up too soon, and then, when the era of their particular notion of heroism is past, have to be cleared away.” As the monument to Gustloff is neglected and the image of Marinesko is rebuilt, Grass not only shows us the malleability of historical memory, but also hints that it changes to fit the views of a dynamic society.

Grass's novel suggests that just as official historical memory changes from era to era, it also differs between groups of people. Indeed, this seems almost intuitively true: survivors are likely to hold very different memories of a disaster compared with those who directly caused it. Moreover, neo-Nazis and Jewish sympathizers are almost inevitably bound to view any ideologically charged happening in different terms. Such discrepancies in historical opinion become most evident when they come into direct conflict. In Crabwalk, our narrator observes and eventually takes part in this conflict through the medium of the Internet. As the left and right wings of Konrad's neo-Nazi website battle with each other over their particular slant on National Socialism, Paul comments that he is witnessing a “virtual Night of the Long Knives.” We may even read the persistent “sniping” exchanges he observes between members of the site as a subtle reminder of the constant sniping that took place during the Second World War.

The link Grass seeks to illuminate from past struggles to present cyber-battles is more than metaphorical. Paul hears the “irrepressible jabber of the has-beens” like Tulla when he reads the comments of young Germans on his son's website. The old speak through the young in these chat rooms, right down to the types of expressions they use. Instead of “giving” a salute, Konrad's cyber-Nazis “present” a salute, because this was the correct terminology from more than half a century ago. More seriously, the rampant antisemitism of the Third Reich resurges in the far-right corners of the internet, such that Paul notes “Jew-bashing is in season again.” When this conflict spreads outside of cyberspace and Konrad kills his Internet rival, the continuity with the past is unmistakable: in a dramatic inversion of Frankfurter's report of his murder in 1936, Konrad says, simply, “I fired because I am a German.” Grass's message is simple: Germany's past is far from irrelevant to Germans' lives in the present.

Grass expands upon this message in the final pages of his novel. Though, after time in a youth detention centre, Konrad seems to sever his links with the past, Paul learns that his son's actions have earned him a following on the Internet. Konrad is rehabilitated but the ideology he embraced survives through others, just as Germany's de-Nazification failed to eradicate many strains of Nazi thought from the country. Thus, the final two sentences of the novel - “It doesn't end. Never will it end.” - are more than a simple caution as to the tenacity of extreme ideologies. With this statement, Grass shows the gap between the past and the present to be more porous than we might like to think. He warns us that we cannot easily break free from the struggles of previous generations.

Crabwalking from the streets of Davos to the battlefields of war-torn Europe, to the tortured mind of a white-haired woman, and to a new front line in cyberspace, Grass explores a multi-generational conflict over the interpretation of victimhood. He weighs in on this issue by suggesting that Germans - just like other national groups - may be both victims and perpetrators, and leaves us with a powerful sense of why this distinction still matters after more than half a century has elapsed. Most importantly, Grass's novel places the actions of today's neo-Nazis in historical context, alerting us to the inescapable impact of the past on our present.

 

An enormous amount of Holocaust literature is available for those who desire to comprehend the dimensions of the Holocaust. Some are left behind by victims in the form of journals, letters and diaries, while others were written by Holocaust survivors. There are also accounts of resistance and stories of heroic rescues. The most important goal of learning about the Holocaust is to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again.

Here are six classic holocaust-themed books:

1. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

   
   
   A book comprising of excerpts from diaries written by Anne Frank, beginning from her thirteenth birthday in June 1942 which was a mere three weeks before she and her family went into hiding from the Gestapo in a building's tiny room in Amsterdam until their eventual betrayal in August 1944 when they were transported to Bergen-Belsen camp, where she died of typhus in 1945. It provides a glimpse of daily life under the Nazis and her expression of faith in human goodness in the hope of living in a world without hate.

2. Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi

   
   
   Originally titled "Se Questo e un Uomo" (Italian for "If This Is a Man"). This memoir recounts the author's two agonizing years at Auschwitz with his life spared mainly because of his scientific expertise being a chemist by profession, making him valuable to the Nazis. It was written to expose the atrocities perpetrated by the German Nazi regime.

3. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

   
   
   Initially published in 1946 under the title "Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager"(literally "A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp" in German). Viktor Frankl chronicled his three torturous years of experience in Nazi death camps where he lost his wife and parents; and discussed logotherapy, a new psychotherapeutic method developed to assist people find a reason for living, even in the most painful circumstances including suffering and death.

4. Night by Elie Wiesel

   
   
   Originally published in Yiddish in 1956 entitled "Un di Velt Hot Geshvign" ("And the World Remain Silent"). Elie Wiesel, after having endured through four concentration camps, vowed never to speak of his holocaust experience but decided after a decade to finally break his silence when Nobel laureate Francois Mauriac encouraged him to write a memoir about it; and had since written more than 30 works dealing with Judaism, Holocaust and the moral responsibility to battle racism and genocide. It somehow enabled people to understand the horrors of the Holocaust.

5. They Fought Back by Yuri Suhl
   
   

   A book featuring a collection of more than 30 amazing stories, detailing accounts of women including teenagers, wives and widows; and of many Jewish people of diverse political beliefs who courageously conducted anti-Nazi operations in Berlin at the height of the war. It was written to in an effort to dispel the Holocaust myth that Jews did not resist their tormentors, because the truth is, many did.

6. Their Brothers' Keepers by Philip Friedman

   
   
   A scholarly work by the "Father of Holocaust History" for the purpose to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive after more than a decade of extensive research through interviews, eyewitness accounts and official documents. It features objective accounts of many ordinary individuals, who, at great personal risks, displayed great compassion and courage in aiding Jews during the Nazi occupation.

In the book Elie Wiesel writes (p.24), "There are 80 of you in the car, the German officer added, if any one of you goes missing, you will all be shot like dogs." In this quote Elie Wiesel shows just how ruthless the Germans could be in their task of deporting the Jews, it also shows just how cruel the Germans were to their prisoners, they packed them into cattle cars 80 at a time and referred to them as "dogs". In referring to the Jews as dogs the Germans dehumanized the Jews by not treating them as human, but as animals.

Another passage where we see dehumanization was when on p. 37 Elie Wiesel writes on how the first concentration camp changed the prisoners, "In a few seconds, we had ceased to be men." This quote shows just how bad the Jews were treated at the first camp they arrived to. After arrival they were sorted, stripped, and forced to run from barrack to barrack, after this process had been going on a wile Wiesel writes that they had "ceased to be men". This is just one of the many ways that the Germans dehumanized the Jews in this book. This passage shows dehumanization because the Germans took away the prisoners human qualities, the Jews were forced to run like animals under the Germans control.

In another quote Elie Wiesel describes their German tent leader, (p.48) "Our tent leader was a German. An assassin's face, fleshy lips, and hands that resembled a wolf's paws." This quote is describing how the dehumanization affected both the Jews and the Germans. In the quote the leader of the tent in Buna is described with an assassin's face and hands like a wolf this could mean that he is both deadly like a wolf or an assassin, this is an example of how dehumanization affected the guards, in an earlier quote (p.28) the guards surrounded the prisoners "like wolves".

 

Levi's original title, If This Is a Man , implies that in Auschwitz, even one's membership in the human race may be called into question. Transformed into "one single grey machine", Häftlinge3 are robbed of all conventional forms of identity; all clothes and personal items are confiscated4 and even names are replaced by six-digit numbers. The Häftlinge are further dehumanised when, as cogs in this machine, they are pitted against their fellow inmates in virtually hopeless competition, becoming "enemies or rivals" , seemingly mere obstacles to each other's personal chances for survival. The prevailing attitude in the camp is, "You will be chosen [for extermination]. I will be excluded."

It is almost unimaginable that any human values could persist in such circumstances, but, Levi argues, persist they do. He refuses to see his fellow inmates as faceless competition, writing "No, I honestly do not feel my companion of today, harnessed with me under the same load, to be either enemy or rival."

Encounters with others help him to remember that they are indeed human beings and individuals, which helps him to keep a grip on his own humanity and personal identity. Recalling maternal scoldings for thoughtless money-handling, he bonds with Pikolo over a shared past

Italian national identity cements the relationship between the author and his “inseparable” friend, Alberto; through contact with Lorenzo, an Italian civilian who gives him food, Levi manages "not to forget that I myself was a man."

Inspirational as Levi's account is, it is more than that: he casts an analytical eye on a situation that would be absurd were it not so horrific. He proves that “no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis”by explaining or making rational, in its terrible context, the apparently inexplicable and irrational. For example, the oxymoronic statement, “our wisdom lay in "trying not to understand"” is comprehensible when he explains that any expenditure of mental effort is fruitless and wasteful; any extra energy is channeled solely into short-term endurance.

Indeed, Levi writes “we care about nothing else”. Without forgiving or justifying the violence he witnesses, he nevertheless makes it make appalling sense: for example, “they knocked him to the ground. It was their everyday duty.” Where others might blame some monstrous, abstract Evil for Auschwitz, Levi is not content to stop at such a simplistic explanation, and finds profound peril in “the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.” From the “indifferent air” of SS troops at a hanging, examples abound of the day-to-day banality attendant upon mass murder. of soldiers at the Auschwitz train station to the “indifferent eyes”

Levi's portrayal of the ordinary, mundane nature of evil is potent and timeless, applicable to countless historical and current scenarios and as relevant as his depiction of the ordinary, mundane nature of survival during the Holocaust. Yet this it is only one of the compelling reasons for reading Survival in Auschwitz. True, lacking careful chronological ordering and documentation, the account is not particularly useful in documenting specific atrocities or the events of any particular day. Levi gives no assurance of his information's validity beyond the simple statement, “It seems unnecessary to add that none of the facts are invented.” No, this is not a history of dates or sources, but of humanity at its best and worse, and for that Levi deserves an honorary place not only among the historians of the last century, but among its most cherished minds.

 

After briefly outlining Opel's early history, GM President Alfred P. Sloan's acquisition of the German company in 1929, and the negative effects of the Weimar Republic's subsequent economic downturn on GM's subsidiary, Turner turns to Opel's relationship with the newly dominant Nazi Party. Initially wary of an openly xenophobic political organisation, Opel executives found their fears quickly dispelled by Adolf Hitler's favoured treatment of the auto industry and apparent acceptance of the company's American ownership.

Turner points out that within two weeks of his chancellorship appointment Hitler was publicly photographed inspecting Opel car models at the annual Berlin auto show, and that by the spring of 1933 the Nazis had significantly lowered taxes on the purchase of new cars. The impressive economic recovery in German society that came about in the first few Nazi years was quickly mirrored by the auto industry. Opel began to receive growing orders for its products, in stark contrast to its fortunes in the Weimar years. Turner's account shows that, of all the prewar years, GM lost money only once, in 1936. In many respects, the Nazi Party was good for business.

However, Turner is quick to point out the harmful effects of Nazi government on GM and its subsidiary as well. He downplays the American firm's monetary advantages from Opel, pointing out that the Nazi regime's restrictive currency controls reduced GM's dollar returns on the Opel investment “to a fraction of what they would have been” in a more open economic system. GM credited its prewar net profit of seven million marks from Opel as reserves, Turner argues, due to fears of the Nazis' unpredictability and increasingly worrying bids for control of the company. Turner portrays Opel's warming relationship with higher Nazi and military leadership in this prewar period primarily as a response to these early lower-level Nazi clutches at control; in order to block the Gauleiter's designs on the firm, Opel's management had to enlist the support of high-level Nazis, including Göring and Hitler.

Turner traces the development of Opel's relationship with German authorities, inside and outside the Nazi Party, showing a rapid expansion from cordial dealings to multi-million-dollar commitments. To explain this political development, Turner quotes Cyrus R. Osborn, chief GM executive at Opel from 1937-1940, who wrote that:

“In the interest of the protection of our entire investment in Germany, it has become necessary for us to co-operate with high and important government departments in the furtherance of certain of their projects.”

These projects, as Turner makes plain, involved production of materials directly necessary for the operation of the German Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht. Instead of branding Osborn as the man who led Opel towards its regrettable participation in the Third Reich's drive towards militarism and, ultimately, its plunge into war, however, Turner hails him as the saviour of GM's subsidiary, the man who “successfully frustrated Geuleiter Sprenger's designs on the firm.” For Turner, Opel's refusal to manufacture directly for the Luftwaffe by selling to Junkers instead, as well as its choice not to manufacture offensive armament such as rifles and machine guns, were evidence enough for its innocence in this regard.

By early 1941, however, Opel's factory was producing torpedo detonators for the Kriegsmarine, aircraft parts for the Luftwaffe, and munitions for the Wehrmacht. Turner excuses GM from any implication in these activities, however, pointing out that the GM employees at Opel, Osborn and Hoglund, were “not directly involved in these projects” and were frequently absent from the Rüsselsheim factory. With respect to GM's role from the United States, Turner finds no evidence for direct implication in Opel's production.

Turner is unable, however, to find any evidence of American objections to “the firm's increasing involvement in the German war effort.” By the time of Germany's declaration of war on the United States, all American employees at Opel had left and all records of communication with the firm ceased soon afterward. With no remaining remnants of control over Opel available to GM by this time, Turner insists that responsibility for the use of slave labour by Opel that was to follow in 1942 cannot be attributed to GM in any way. Turner assigns full responsibility, however, to GM for its 1951 claim to the dividends that Opel accumulated during the war.

Due to the highly sensitive and widely followed nature of the allegations against GM that Turner seeks to examine, he seems to be writing not only for the historical community, but also for towards today's corporate world, as well as for readers with an interest in ethical issues. Engaging such a wide audience obliges Turner to address a wide range of concerns; it is no small task to ensure historical accuracy, preserve relevance to business, and adhere to a consistent moral framework in the space of a brief 160 pages. Another potential hindrance, the author's close relationship with GM, as the director of a separate documentation project sponsored by the corporation, certainly invites criticism with respect to his personal slant on the issue.

However, in an important sense, each of these potential drawbacks may also be viewed as great strengths. Turner's position as a GM project director on a project related to the topic gave him unrestricted access to the previously untapped resource of GM's files, allowing him to make valuable contributions to the subject's historiography. The historical nature of Turner's account ensures a degree of thoroughness and attention to sources that lends it great integrity and reduces its vulnerability to criticism.

In contrast, Turner's awareness of his wide business audience helps to keep his discussion of matters that might be deemed largely irrelevant to a bare minimum, facilitating his focus on matters important to the business community today. The moral concerns at issue provoke critical engagement on Turner's part, as opposed to a mere recitation of facts, which opens the field for popular yet informed debate. Each of these concerns - the work's place in historiography, its use of sources, its value to the business community, and its contributions to the ethical debate - will be addressed in turn.

Published in 2005, GM and the Nazis was added to the debate in the wake of a host of allegations against several well-known companies for their involvement in Nazi affairs. GM had joined the ranks of IBM, Ford, Daimler-Benz, and Siemens, four other firms attacked for their alleged association with Hitler's party over the past two decades. This recent surge of attention paid to victims and villains of Nazi policies was reflected in the media, including spotlights in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Turner's study in particular received enthusiastic reviews from the historical community.

S. Jonathan Wiesen of Southern Illinois University Carbondale, for example, applauds Turner's account for its “scrupulous scholarship and brisk writing.” Wiesen criticises Turner, however, for failing to deal with larger issues such as transatlantic economic relations as a whole during the period. Though this criticism is accurate, it fails to take into account that one of Turner's primary strengths is his sole concentration on Opel's & GM's relationship to the Nazi regime. To diverge into generalising comments about transatlantic commerce as a whole could inevitably detract from Turner's focus, and would be better left to a broader account of the subject.

The criticism of Mark Spoerer, at the University of Honenheim, seems to be more serious. Spoerer sees reason to doubt that Turner's work was undertaken independently, due to his “curious omission” of easily-available comparative information regarding Ford's Fordwerke in Cologne, whose history is considerably more stained. Though this comment seems to suggest that Turner did not criticise of Ford because of some relation to this company, it is difficult to see how such an account of GM's involvement (or lack thereof) with Hitler could portray Ford in a positive light. If anything, it calls attention to an already notorious matter that Ford would have, in all likelihood, sought to downplay. Beyond its wildly speculative allegations, the message of this criticism seems to be approximately the same as Wiesen's: Turner has not written an account of much beyond GM's and Opel's particular actions.

Though Turner has not made any concerted attempt to use sources for comparative study, his primary sources relating directly to GM and Opel are of a high standard. Turner's unprecedented extensive access to GM's files automatically elevates his work to an important position in the debate surrounding the subject. His account is, in effect, directly linked back to the Third Reich through Opel's own files, distinguishing it from many other accounts, such as Billstein's Working for the Enemy, which does not benefit from such valuable material. This unique relationship to the subject material that Turner's account demonstrates lends considerable power to its conclusions. This power enables Turner to provide alternative viewpoints and corrective insights into previous histories of GM. For example, in his endnotes section, Turner directly contradicts Bradford C. Snell's allegations that GM “was in complete management control of its Rüsselsheim warplane factory for nearly a full year after Germany's declaration of war against the United States.” Such contradictions of previous sources are possible only because Turner has the ammunition of GM's complete files available to him.

Nonetheless, no matter how attractive this prospect may seem, we cannot place full confidence in Turner's sources. He does not address the issue of reliability to any significant extent, seemingly taking it as a given that GM's records have not been falsified in any way. Moreover, the statistical nature of several of his sources raises some warning flags. Raw data consisting of figures can be interpreted in various, and sometimes contradictory, ways. GM's listing of Opel's asset value at $1, for example, may be interpreted in many ways: Turner concludes that this indicates GM's belief that it had lost Opel as an asset, but it may equally be interpreted to indicate that GM was trying to hide a continued involvement with Opel during the war. Finally, Turner is forced to admit that official records are unable to illuminate the entire story. A most striking illustration of this comes to light when Turner writes that Graeme Howard preferred “not to commit [certain] business matters to paper.”

That Howard would run certain aspects of Opel's business in such secrecy highlights key concerns to the business community even today. Aside from the ethical issues involved, Howard's choices illustrate that a corporate employee's quasi-legal actions - even actions that merely seem quasi-legal - can be dangerous for a company years down the line. If every aspect of Opel's business had been conducted reasonably openly, allegations of secret complicity with the Nazis would have been much harder to sustain. However, Howard's actions also reveal much of the political context that foreign-owned companies had to deal with when operating in a regime like Nazi Germany. The consequences of GM's involvement in Germany are readily apparent: Turner shows that GM's reluctance to pull out due to strict currency controls led to increasingly dangerous relationships with the Nazi state. Such relationships, in many cases, would provide much impetus for Howard to put his pen aside and stay off the record. Opel's story is also a cautionary tale about attempting to retain control in a difficult political situation; GM's veto over “a secret body designed to exercise tight control over the newly installed German management” ultimately proved destined to fail.

Perhaps the most important message to business in Turner's account is its warning against operating with economics as the sole concern, regardless of political climate. He specifically quotes Sloan at length to show that this is exactly what GM intended to do. Sloan wrote to a shareholder that GM

“…should conduct its operations in strictly business terms, without regard to the political beliefs of its management, or the political beliefs of the countries in which it is operating.”

Similarly, James D. Mooney, president of GM's overseas operations, is portrayed as noble, yet regrettably naïve and “[b]linkered by his subordination of politics to economics.” As late as July of 1939, an equally naïve Osborn still believed that Germany would never wage war because it did not possess the necessary resources. Turner's message is clear: businesses must be sensitive to the political environment in which they operate, and must never concern themselves with economics alone.

Of course, there is also an essential sense in which even politics and economics are not alone sufficient concerns for a business to take into account. Ethics are clearly relevant to any business's decisions, and play a primary role in Turner's account of GM's and Opel's involvement with the Nazi regime. The moral issues Turner brings to light are threefold: GM's 1951 request for its subsidiary's war dividends, GM's responsibility for the fate of victims of involuntary labour working for Opel during the war, and GM's rendering of help to the Nazi war effort through its Opel subsidiary. Turner finds GM innocent of the last two moral charges, and fully responsible for the first.

Turner's declaration of GM's responsibility for the receipt of these war profits is uncontroversial, and seems to have been resolved as reasonably as possible by Opel's contribution of thirty million marks to a German compensation fund for the victims of slave labour during the Third Reich. In light of the evidence Turner presents for GM's loss of control over Opel before the outbreak of war, it would appear that GM cannot be implicated - legally or otherwise - in the slave labour charge. Furthermore, the fact that GM went out of its way to transfer several Jewish employees to a less hostile environment in Britain suggests at least a lack of malicious intent on the company's part.

The charge of GM's responsibility for Hitler's ability to wage war, however, is far less easily resolved in Turner's account. He argues that GM cannot be blamed for what happened to Opel under the Third Reich, and that Opel's wartime production for the Nazis was “neither sought for nor desired by GM or its executives and met with rejection from the corporation's top leadership.” Turner also points out that GM produced for the Americans during the war, countering objections against the American corporation of a pro-German bias. GM's part in Germany's pre-war production was unavoidable, Turner argues, because by refusing to allow Opel to accept military contracts, it would have invited inevitable “damaging consequences.”

However, the consequences resulting from Opel's acquiescence to Nazi demands were, in the long run, overwhelmingly more damaging to the world. Bradford Snell of the Washington Post writes that GM was “far more important to the Nazi war machine than Switzerland,” claiming that the Nazi invasion of Poland and Russia would have been possible without Switzerland, but not without GM, which was an “integral part of the German war effort.” Indeed, the spirit, if not the letter, of these charges is borne out in GM and the Nazis. Osborn, writing on behalf of GM, claimed that through Opel GM had “rendered significant help to the German armed forces.” The scale of these consequences clearly warrants further scrutiny before GM can be let off the hook.

According to Turner's own sources, it was inescapable that GM's management in the United States knew about the wartime production of Opel's Rüsselsheim factory by mid-1940. Though an official mandate from GM specifically denied Opel any authority to produce aircraft engines, Opel obtained approval from GM to do almost exactly this in 1939. Euphemisms such as “new materials” and “new products” were used by GM employees at Opel to refer to parts being manufactured for the Luftwaffe. Again in 1939, when the outbreak of war looked assured to even the most optimistic appeasers, GM employees participated in something very close to industrial espionage against the firm in America, allowing a Wehrmacht lieutenant-colonel to visit American production facilities. Clearly, employees of GM on both sides of the Atlantic took a series of disturbing actions in order to make possible Opel's production of wartime materials. Since these actions occurred in the context of GM President Sloan's talk of Germany's “place in the sun” and Howard's likening of Hitler to Roosevelt and Lincoln, it would not seem unjustified to discern a GM bias towards producing for the military of the Third Reich.

In defence of Turner's view, the pro-Nazi sentiment expressed GM's American leadership came almost exclusively during the early years of the Nazi party. Further, no evidence exists to directly implicate more than a small handful of GM employees - none of whom were outside of Germany at the time - in Opel's wartime production. Though unfortunate choices were made by GM employees, Turner's sources do not indicate any directly illegal action. Clearly, the issue of GM's involvement in the Reich's militaristic rearmament of the late 1930s and first months of 1940 is not as simple as either Turner or his critics might claim.

If anything is clear from Turner's argument, it is that, as a foreign-owned firm operating in Nazi Germany, Opel was encouraged, if not compelled, to make unsavoury compromises. Whether these were unavoidable for Opel, and whether GM could have done more to prevent their terrible consequences, will probably never be established. However, with the benefit of hindsight, it may be possible for a modern reader to learn from the mistakes of men like those in Turner's account. Therein lays its value to the historical community, the business world, and the concerned citizen alike.

 

Before the Nazi Eugenic Sterilisation Law came into effect on 1 January 1934, however, sterilisation laws had already been enacted in thirty American states, as well as a number of other countries. (Childs 2001, 15)

As Childs also tells us the "other countries" include Iceland, Sweden, Switzerland and Norway. He goes on to say, "The thoroughness of these countries repression of awareness of their eugenical history helps to explain the shock occasioned by newspaper reports in the late 1990s of such laws" (Childs 2001, 15)

Before the Nazi atrocities of the Second World War, eugenics was a hotly debated subject and its ideas were popular with many people. The popularity of eugenics gave rise to legislation in the USA and other European countries during the early part of the twentieth century which made sterilisation of some impaired people compulsory. As Britain's conflict with Nazi Germany began, Adolf Hitler continued his version of a eugenics programme to create an Aryan master race by ridding Germany of those civilians that he felt were unworthy of life. Bartov comments,

Hitler's wartime authorisation of an adult "euthanasia" programme was conceived as an economy measure, a means of creating emergency bed-space, and hostels for ethnic German repatriates from Russia and eastern Europe, which anticipates and mirrors the linkages between "resettlement" and murder later evident in the Holocaust... In the eastern areas of the Reich, SS units under Eimann and Lange were sub-contracted to shoot psychiatric patients in a parallel operation. The Chancellory of the Führer established an elaborate covert bureaucracy ...whose task was to organise the registration, selection, transfer and murder of a previously calculated target group of 70,000 people, including chronic schizophrenics, epileptics and long-stay patients. (Bartov 2000, 53)

As we read in Rhodes, Eimann and Lange oversaw the murder of an estimated total of 4,500 patients. For example, in Neustadt, Trucks delivered the disabled to the forest. The first victim was a woman about fifty years old; Eimann personally dispatched her with a Genickschuss, a shot in the neck from behind ... During November 1939, further victims were transported from Danzig, filling the Neustadt pits with some 3,500 bodies. (Rhodes 2003, 7)

These murders are referred to in the post-modern novel Time's Arrow (1991) by Martin Amis, as Vice remarks, This figure comes from Tod's past, and from Lifton's discussion of the pre-war "euthanasia" project directed against the mentally and physically disabled, and the transportation of patients to killing centres (Vice 2000, 37)

Novels about the Holocaust, especially work about the murder of disabled people in that event are comparatively rare. Sue Vice remarks that, Over forty years after Auerbach's study Mimesis was published, novels about the Great War are no longer received in anything like the scandalized fashion which greets Holocaust fiction, as the success of Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy (1991, 1993, 1996) shows. The trilogy was widely hailed as the recasting- the regeneration- for our time of an 80 year-old history, suggesting that proximity is a significant factor in disquiet about Holocaust fiction. (Vice 2000, 8).

The fact that writers such as Martin Amis, Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut have written fantasy/science fiction stories centred on the holocaust bears out what Vice says.

They have tried to distance the reader from the horror by setting the stories in fantastical worlds, thus negating the effects of proximity in time.

When an estimated quarter of a million disabled people were among the many millions more killed in the Nazi eugenics programme, most people distanced themselves from the concept. However as Barnes remarks, "whilst the atrocities of the German death camps put an end to the overt persecution of disabled people in Europe, there remains tacit support for these ideas among sections of the British population" (Barnes, 1992: 10).

Even after witnessing the horrific extremes of the Holocaust, eugenics was still supported, although not as vociferously as before 1939. The fact that the Galton Institute, formerly known as the British Eugenics Society until it changed its name in 1989, is still in existence as are a number of organisations who support s similar ideal such as the American Eugenics Society and the Marie Stopes Foundation bears out Barnes' assertion. Diane Paul tells us that in Marie Stopes's view it was disgraceful that middle class taxpayers were only able to rear one or two children while society allowed, "the diseased, the racially negligent, the careless, the feeble-minded, the very lowest and worst of members of the community to produce innumerable tens of thousands of warped and inferior infants" (Stopes 1921a, 236) (Paul 1995, 94-95).

To summarise then, the theory of eugenics, already popular in several European countries and America and Britain was perverted by the Nazis to suit their ambition to create a "master race". The Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler, began a programme intended to purify the German nation that involved the slaughter of many thousands of disabled people. This horrific use of eugenical ideas forced a change in the concept -although eugenics has continued support, its plan for a wide-spread eradication of disabled people has been discredited.

In his book, Levi details various survival methods his fellow comrades used to escape internment alive. These include trading cloth for bread or soup, as well as trading gold fillings for more cloths to begin the cycle anew. The economic system presented here is vast, with various suppliers and demand points. Currency became null and void, bread was the currency, and it gets you anything you wanted or needed. Anything one might want could be acquired provided s/he posses the proper amount of bread. Every item, he says, has value and if one drops their guard for a millisecond the item will be stolen.

Also, his portrayal of the German guard could leave one a bit perplexed. If he did not talk about them, one might forget that Levi was in a concentration camp or that the Germans were keeping him there. He also makes no strides to demonize of dehumanize them, despite the conditions they kept him under. The author portrayed them as just cogs in a larger machine. The author portrays the beatings that the German captors gave out as routine, failing to give them any context or descriptive words such as horrible, terrifying, or inhumane. One might also find it surprising that he records the German's orders word for word despite admitting to only possessing a cursory knowledge of German and spending a considerable amount of his story on the harshness of the language barrier.

He evens goes so far as to recall the story of Babel to fill make tangible his plight with speaking all these languages. Yet, he still manages to present German (or Yiddish) as perfect as he can, recalling every detail on what is said and the signage, if any, that appears around him.

Every time he presents someone new for the reader to meet, he immediately tells you everything about them. This includes what their name is, what part of Europe they lived, and what job they had "on the outside" as well as a physical description. For example, when he introduces the reader to Walter Bonn on page 52, he says: “One is Walter Bonn, a Dutchman, civilized quite well mannered”. Levi then goes on to recount what disease lands Walter in Ka-Be, which is organic decay, before asking him for a spoon as Levi lost his. He spends much of the individual "chapters" time introducing the reader to various people, whether they are prisoners, or guards, or watchmen. Even if the author did revisit his tale years after the fact, he makes no citations. Why might he include everyone's name with whom he interacts? It is clear that he wished to give you people's names as part of a process of re-humanization. Having their names robbed and taken from them and replaced with a number by the Nazi's, he attempts to restore theme somewhat. In essence, he makes it possible for them to live again.

Furthermore he uses two analogies during his book that hearken back to stories told before, and relies an at least mentionable part on Greek tales. First, to describe and make vivid his struggle he uses (albeit indirectly) the story of Sisyphus, who was condemned by Zeus to push a rock up a hill only to have it fall down again. Secondly, to make vivid the not just the want but the need of food and its acquisition he compares dreams that other have to the figure of Tantalus, who was condemned by Zeus to always be denied food and water. Hence the part of the book where the author speaks of tantalizing dreams where the dream's mouth moves as if to imitate the act of eating. One is left wondering if when food is of that significant importance, if one really is thinking of Greek stories to satiate themselves. His use of allusions and literary devices suggest to me that he took substantial time after the fact writing this book. However, I am still left questioning why he presents information that he, frankly, could not have known. More then just language, he presents how soup is acquired and who is responsible for its creation. Where did he get such information? Did he do outside research and if so, why did he not cite any sources? Even if he did as little as interview survivors of the Holocaust, why not at least cite that?

In some places, his phrasing seemed to be a bit simplistic and general for what his was referring. For example, on page 84 he says: “Everyone knows that it is the nurses who send it (various trade goods) back on the market”. Who is everyone referring to? Could it be that his audiences, or at least his intended audience, are people that do not deny the Holocaust? Is it referring to other people in the camp? Certainly, one would not think that nurses did such things.

Levi admits to the following “The chapters have been written not in logical succession but in order of urgency.” This means that his book is not in a certain chronological order that one might expect. His "order of importance" argument suggests he has an underlying agenda. What is this agenda? A simple Google search reveals his motivations. According to another book Levi wrote, “His view was that the Nazi death camps and the attempted annihilation of the Jews was a horror unique in history because the aim was the complete destruction of a race by one that saw itself as superior. It was highly organized and mechanized and it entailed the degradation of Jews even to the point of using their ashes as materials for paths.” I believe on the whole, in simply telling his tale, he has accomplished his goal.

Beyond this however, it seems to me that he uses his voice very well, in that he delivers all of these events to you somewhat dispassionately. He makes no value judgments about the things transpiring around him, he just presents them with, and it seems, unbelievable accuracy. Memory can be tricky and beguiling entity as various authors, such as Abe Akira in his essay Peaches, have suggested and elaborated on. What has the effect of time done to his story?

In the end he summarized the book with “No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of man's presumptions made of man in Auschwitz”. And so, after spending 10 months moving from death camp to death camp, Primo Levi relates to us, one man's struggle. Although I found fault with his structure and mechanics of his harrowing story, I found it refreshing that he acknowledges this, and handles it by, saying in the Preface: “I recognize and ask indulgence for, the structural defects of the book…The need to tell our story to "the rest" and make "the rest" participate in it”. I am convinced that everything he recounts happened to him and that he has not fabricated anything within his tome. Despite what some people like British Historian David Irving or Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad say the Holocaust did, indeed, happen and this story should be required reading for anyone in the field of history.