Why the ongoing fascination with the Third Reich? On one hand, the answer is obvious: World War II was the largest armed conflict in human history, and Hitler's Germany was its principal antagonist. In addition, the appalling Nazi atrocities that culminated in the Holocaust provide a visceral example of a demonic ideology responsive only to military might - in other words, an ideal villain for the military-industrial complex. Is it any wonder that since 1945, almost every leader of a country deemed an official enemy by the United States or Russia has been compared to Hitler?
The glorification of World War II by the victors is as much about legitimizing those states' own authority as it was about defeating Hitler's regime. Especially once the full extent of Nazi war crimes became known, it became almost impossible to argue against the decision of the American, Soviet, British or Canadian governments to send their armies to Europe. Although the Nazis' crimes against the Jews were downplayed by Western governments at the time - to avoid portraying the war as a strictly "Jewish problem" - in retrospect the discovery of the concentration camps provided the ultimate vindication of the Allied war effort. Since then, WWII has became indelibly known as the "good war" in Russian and Western thought.
Unfortunately, this idealized view of the conflict belies the less romantic reality that, like most wars, World War II was fundamentally a struggle between opposing world powers with competing geopolitical interests. Such a notion is incompatible with its depiction in the West as a grand contest between "freedom and democracy" and totalitarian fascism. There is little room in this conception for moral complexity and the shades of grey that also characterized the Allied war effort - the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in internment camps, the segregation of black and white American soldiers into distinct units, the firebombing of Dresden, and most controversially of all, whether the United States was justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In similar service to jingoistic nationalism, the role of the Soviet Union is often downplayed, as in the preposterous assertion of some conservative U.S. commentators that it was the United States that defeated Nazi Germany. Rather, it was the Soviet Union that truly defeated the Nazi war machine; by the time of the Normany invasions, Hitler's armies had been largely decimated in the meat grinder of the Eastern Front.
All of these skewed depictions of the war have one thing in common - to justify our own war policies, to bolster national pride and provide a legitimacy to our governments that has lasted well into the 21st century. After all, if your opponent is Nazi Germany - indisputably one of the most odious regimes in human history - it's easy to promote your own side as morally superior. This is why the Nazis have remained ideal villains in Hollywood films. But as the past recedes further and further into history, we remain focused on it to our own detriment.
It's 2009. To still dwell on Hitler and the Nazis more than 60 years after their defeat - as is all too common in our political discourse - is ludicrous and dangerous. The world has changed immeasurably since then, and the main foreign policy of Western nations is no longer the military defeat of comparable adversaries, but rather the exploitation and subjugation of impoverished Third World nations. By continuing to paint ourselves as the heroic adversaries to a more despicable, militarily comparable rival, we distort the current state of world politics.
I remember well the onslaught of Nazi and Holocaust-themed films that cropped up in the multiplex during the 2008 holiday season. While the Israeli war machine slaughtered hundreds of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and committed its own Naziesque war crimes, we were treated to films such as Valkyrie, The Reader, and most notably, Defiance - the latter, in its focus on Jewish partisans fighting Nazi aggressors, remarkable for its ironic timing. The distorted claims of the Israeli far right that its war crimes in Gaza were a defensive action found their support, as always, in reversion to a World War II mentality, a time in which Jews were the victims of ethnic cleansing rather than its perpetrators.
Let me finish by pointing you to a spot-on article by a German professor in which he examines the difference between American conceptions of WWII as the "good war" and German views of it as the "bad war". Most notable are his comments on postwar militarism. I encourage you to read the whole article, but here are some crucial passages to whet your appetite and establish the critical points:
In 1955 an Austrian member of Parliament shrewdly observed that the most significant developments in the international arena were "the Americanization of Germany and the Prussication ["Verrpeußung"] of America."
[...]
The most important legacy of the postwar occupation may well have been an ever more prevalent German pacifism in all political camps (not only in the Green Party where it is strongest). Only in the post-Cold War era have Germans begun to participate in "out of area" Western military interventions (Kosovo, Afghanistan). Young Germans abhor war and would rather not serve in the military and since the Vietnam War have become ever more critical of American military adventures abroad. The formerly deeply rooted Prussian military tradition was obliterated by the highly successful Anglo-American postwar occupation regime that produced prosperity and the "Wirtschaftswunder" instead of resentment and rejection.
[...]Meanwhile the United States has become a militarized society in peacetime and sports a martial pride and attendant hyperpatriotism in its mainstream culture and ethos that is reminiscent of old Prussia. As the leader of the Western world, the U.S. has built the most powerful armed forces and destructive weapons systems the world has ever seen. During the Cold War the Americans spent up to 30 percent of its budget on the military. They established an awesome global base system that allows the U.S. to project its power swiftly and devastatingly when needed. It has fought long wars in Korea and Vietnam and intervened dozens of time around the world when it saw its national interests threatened.
This acceptance of a permanent peace-time military establishment and global power projection after World War II has much to do with the hard-won victories and the subsequent American memory regime of the "good war." Actually, the cultural production in the years after the war maintained an ambivalent and darker view of the war which had dehumanized so many of its young soldiers in the epic battles in the Pacific and in Europe. Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and Joseph Heller's Catch-22 stand for this darker view.
But since the 1980s D-Day commemorations turned uncompromisingly patriotic and the cultural production celebratory of the "greatest generation" that lived through the Depression and rose to victory during World War II. Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and the ten-part TV series "Band of Brothers" signify a patriotic memory of World War II that celebrates the "good war." The late historian Stephen E. Ambrose has done more than anyone to enshrine this new view in his books and in the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans. In the words of historian Chad Barry "the good war thesis became a powerfully seductive and intoxicating view of an idealized past and a golden age."
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