In an act of the most appalling bad taste, a society of German WW II veterans has misused and ridiculed the symbol of Israel's national history, the ruins of Masada, and thus offended all adherents of the Jewish religion. Since this telling incident occurred in the wake of the heated discussion about the Munich Wehrmacht exhibition, I may be allowed to place this event in its proper context at first. (This is also an addition to Bob Moeller's recent article in the AHR and - in a certain sense - a sequel to a contribution I sent in to H-Net two years ago).

I can very well understand people crying "enough, enough", when confronted with yet another piece on the Munich Wehrmacht exhibit (which has just closed its doors here). I was trying for weeks to escape from the orbit of this topic here in Munich - no chance! (Why then should subscribers to H-Net be privileged in this respect?) Whenever one opened a newspaper or switched on the radio, one was pretty sure to come across at least one report on the Wehrmacht thing. Several newspapers, such as the "Passauer Neue Presse" (March 6) and the "Fraenkische Landeszeitung" (March 11) actually went so far as to complain about the enormous amount of readers' responses and asked them not to send in any more letters.

It is very difficult to convey to people residing outside Bavaria an idea of the storm of controversy that was going on here. To give you an impression: A few weeks ago I really had enough from all that war stuff and left Munich in order to do some hill-walking in the Alpine Mountains (albeit I should better have gone to Masada in order to see what was going on there). I took a rest in a beer garden near Mittenwald and was just about to enjoy the peaceful setting surrounding me, when my wandering eyes hit the headline of a paper that was lying around: "Wehrmachts-Ausstellung: geschichtsverfaelschend und einseitig" [Wehrmacht exhibition: a one-sided falsification of history], by Pfarrer [parish priest] Konrad Schreiegg. It was the "Kreisbote. Wochenzeitung fuer das Werdenfelser Land" (March 12), one of those typical "Anzeigenblaettchen" [freesheets] that contain, apart from thousands of ads, only one or two editorial pages: circulation 41,815: distributed to all households in that area - and with it comes Father Schreiegg polemicizing against the Wehrmacht exhibit as if it were August 1914.

When I took the train back to Munich, there was an elderly couple sitting in my carriage; the man read aloud to his wife from a local paper - guess what! On arrival home I was welcomed by newspapers carrying headlines about the Wehrmacht exhibit. Then a friend called me to tell me that she had received a personal letter from Dr. Peter Gauweiler, the leading spokesman of the CSU's right wing; I was surprised about my friend's social contacts, but was relieved (otherwise not) when I learnt that Gauweiler had sent similar letters to 300,000 other Munich citizens, in which letters he complained about censorship measures on the part of the "Sueddeutsche Zeitung". There was indeed censorship enacted: The Wehrmacht exhibition had been demolished in Erfurt by a right-wing extremist; Christoph Boekel, a documentary film director, was sacked by the CSU-controlled Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation, after he had dared to produce a report on the Wehrmacht's victims; and, finally, Sven Thanheiser, one of the four town-councillors among the Munich CSU, who had dared to oppose Gauweiler in public, was taken from his area of competence.

Somehow fed up with the Wehrmacht news I fled into the catacombs of the library in order to find shelter - no chance! While I was busy with distributing the incoming new periodicals onto the shelves, I came across a journal published by the veterans of the German mountain troops called "Die Gebirgstruppe". I had to open it due to bibliographical reasons and was not really surprised to see a photo of the Wehrmacht exhibit. However, while I was quickly glancing at the accompanying editorial text labeled "Ein Anschlag auf die Wahrheit" [A plot against truth], I suddenly noticed the words "Masada" and "Roemer" (Romans) and began wondering about their proper meanings here. Damn it, I thought - what did the Wehrmacht have to do in Horvot Mezada, the Jews' last stand against the Romans in those ancient times?

This has to be explained: There is a special kind of "Hoehere Mathematik" [higher mathematics], that has been practiced at least since the end of WW I: the idea of setting German war crimes off against misdeeds committed by foreign powers past and present, whether perpetrated against Germans or anybody else. It is, as Kurt Tucholsky called it in 1919, "das kindliche alte Spiel der Aufrechnung" [the childish old game of offsetting]. However, instead of adding up the various horrors to the dark side of world history, the revisionist version of algebra, i.e. "Aufrechnung", works not by summing up things, but by subtraction - and thus somehow manages to brighten this side of the national historical horizon. Invoking all the various horrors of world history, the historians of the extreme (New) Right and their adherents balance them against their own past horrors, thus placing Nazi history in as bad a morally corrupt "context" as possible, only in order to let the Holocaust in general, or the Wehrmacht's crimes in particular, appear less unique and "outstanding" (in the negative sense of the word). The result of this kind of mathematical operation is designed to be the relativization of the Holocaust and, as sum total, the international "normalization" of German history of the 1933-45 period; the cross sum being the rehabilitation and eventual viability of extreme nationalism in Germany.

While this kind of mimetic machinery had been rather idle for a few decades, it was reactivated with much success only a few years ago, after the fall of the Berlin wall. It was already very active during the Goldhagen debate, but has reached its peak only now. While going through all those (published!) hysterical readers' responses concerning the Wehrmacht exhibit, which have been sent in to Bavarian regional newspapers as well as to national right-wing papers such as the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" or "Die Welt", one encounters an enormous mass of metaphorical representations of the Wehrmacht's misdeeds that refer to other armies' horrors.

But it is not only Gauweiler's favorite argument, i.e. the war crimes of the Soviet army, that people have employed here in their attempts to match the Wehrmacht's atrocities; it is not merely the bombing of Dresden, the fate of German refugees, and other such contextual moralistic juxtapositions, which seem to have already hit the textbook-level (cp. the "Kleine deutsche Geschichte" by Hagen Schulze, recently published in the renowned C.H. Beck publishing house, that equates - without any further qualification - the war crimes committed by the Wehrmacht with those of the other powers involved in WW II: "Bei allen Greueln und Kriegsverbrechen, die in der Folgezeit von saemtlichen Beteiligten begangen werden sollten, muss man aber stets im Auge behalten, dass die entscheidende Schuld am Kriegsausbruch bei der deutschen, in sehr viel geringerem Umfang bei der sowjetischen Fuehrung lag" (p. 211)). It seemed to me - just as one reader of the "Augsburger Allgemeine" (Feb. 28, p. 2) had promised - as if the whole course of world history were passing by before my eyes, while I was reading all those letters: "Untaten gab es in allen Armeen - bei Spaniern, Briten, Amerikanern, Russen etc. - Man muss nur in der Geschichte weit genug zurueckblaettern" [There were atrocities committed by all armies - by the Spaniards, the British, the Americans, the Russians, etc.].

Readers' responses saw the Wehrmacht's ethical equivalents fighting in the battlefields of former Yugoslavia, in the paddy-fields of Vietnam, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, etc., etc., etc. - as if a ghost army of Wehrmacht soldiers were still marching, a haunted battalion, that in a desperate - but fruitless - effort to find a suitable match for their own atrocities were engaged in a metaphorical conquest of the world. They were present, when Sherman burnt down Atlanta, the British put Boers into concentration camps, and while Goya was drawing the horrors of the Napoleonic warfare (a comparison that was used in Karl-Heinz Bohrer's intellectual monthly "Merkur", vol. 50, p. 458). The "reason" behind all these juxtapositions is most outspokenly made clear in "Freiheit und Verantwortung", a yearbook published by the "Bildungswerk" [educational institution] of the Austrian extremist FPOe (by now representing 27 per cent of the Austrian national electorate): the 1995 volume, headed by a foreword from FPOe chairman Joerg Haider, carries among other "revisionist" essays an article by Lothar Hoebelt entitled "Die Befreiung und das Denkmal von Euston County", which cites the example of a historical monument memorializing the defeated Confederate army that had unfortunately fought for the cause of pro-slavery, concluding: "Deshalb gedenkt man dennoch mit Respekt der Vorfahren, die auf Seiten der Suedstaaten gefochten haben" [Nonetheless one still commemorates respectfully one's own ancestors, those who fought the civil war on the side of the Southern states) (p. 901) - and so comes with the help of the mathematics of Aufrechnung via logical transfer to the conclusion, that also we Germans (!) ought to be proud of the Wehrmacht's achievements.

And then there are the less likely objects for Aufrechnung: the tobacco produced by the father of J. Ph. Reemtsma (the Wehrmacht exhibition organizer), which - according to Gauweiler - ought to deserve more attention than the Wehrmacht's crimes, because it had ruined the good health and the lives of so many consumers, and the massacre of the Israeli army in Beir Jassin, which one letter to the Suedd. Zeitung (March 10) compared with the Wehrmacht's crimes.

And so it came to pass in those days of hysterical debate that this haunted Wehrmacht battalion arrived at the mountain of Masada. And now you may guess, what the Wehrmacht was doing there - You may guess, I said, and you are sure to have guessed wrongly, because something happened just at that point in time, when those haunted latter-day Landsers were about to put on the Roman uniforms and their army sandals: They received mail from home, not from the "Third Reich", but from the present Free State of Bavaria. In times of war, soldiers are very grateful for all kinds of messages: Two years ago they had already received a mailbag containing the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" (No. 83, April 7, 1995), a paper that had willingly executed the order (instructed by a large number of extreme right-wing personalities, including Gauweiler) to place an ad that was to interpret the end of WW II primarily as the beginning of the victimization of Germans.

Immediately after receipt of this message, the "Kameradenkreis" of the haunted mountain troopers dutifully recorded in their Wehrmachtsbericht, i.e. the journal "Gebirgstruppe" (No. 3, June 1995, p. 8), that: "Der 8. Mai 1945 beendete eine Spirale von Unmenschlichkeit, Gewalt und Zerstoerung. Fuer sehr viele Menschen begannen jedoch erneut Verfolgung, Vertreibung, Gefangenschaft und endloses Leid." [May 8, 1945 put an end to .... inhumanity, violence, and destruction. For very many people, however, it was the starting point for yet even more persecution, expulsion, imprisonment, and endless misery]. This time the mailbag contained a copy of the CSU-owned "Bayernkurier" of March 1, 1997, which - under the headline: "Demagogische Inszenierung" - publishes an official note of a CSU committee that denounces the Wehrmacht exhibit as "unwissenschaftlich" and instead talks about the "beachtlichen Opfer" [considerable sacrifices] and even "schwerste Opfer" [most severe sacrifices] on the part of the Wehrmacht troops (and none else). Nobody doubts that many a German soldier had to suffer, that they were very often, as one reader of the "Muenchner Merkur" (March 5) termed it, forced by the state to defend "Freiheit, Lebensraum" [freedom, living-space] etc. and in the result could claim (so a letter to "Die Zeit", March 21) not to have been "Schaediger, sondern Geschaedigter" [victimizer, but victim], because he had - among other, more serious things - to suffer from "erschwerten Studienbedingungen" [difficult study conditions] after the war's end (- if that correspondent only knew today's study conditions at German universities!).

Now back to Masada, where the haunted battalion is still waiting: After having read the latest official announcements from the Bavarian government and by now well versed in the rhetorics of both "Aufrechnung" and "victimization", the commander of the "Unbelehrbaren" wondered why his troops should always have to be playing the part of the "bad guys" instead of changing over to the "good guys" - and so he ordered his men to drop the Roman uniforms and, as is indeed quite natural for mountain troops, to climb (METAPHORICALLY) on top of the mountain of Masada, in order to DEFEND the Zealots against the bad Romans (and against the bad, bad Wehrmacht exhibit which - as he seems to understand it - maintains that all soldiers were criminals):

"Wir leben. ... Wir sind zurueckgekommen und stehen in der Pflicht, ... das Opfer derer zu erklaeren und zu verteidigen ..., die ihr Leben fuer die anderen gaben. ... Ueber alledem bleibt, dass wir eingebunden sind in allgemeines Menschenschicksal. Wir sind dabei gewesen, als Leonidas' Maenner fuer die Ihren in den Tod gingen, die Zukunft und das Ueberleben des Volkes mit dem Blute duengend. Wir haben auf den verlorenen Felsbrocken von Masada gestanden und den Ruecken nicht vor den Roemern gebeugt."

(Gerhart Klamert: 'Ein Anschlag auf die Wahrheit. Anmerkungen zur Ausstellung "Vernichtungskrieg, Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1945"', Die Gebirgstruppe. Mitteilungsblatt des Kameradenkreises der Gebirgstruppe, vol. 46 (1997), No. 1, p. 3)

[We are alive. ... We have come back and have to obey the call of duty:.... to explain and to defend the sacrifices of all those, who have given their lives to save the lives of the others. ... Above all it remains certain that we are integrated into the general fate of human nature. We were there when Leonidas' men were sacrificing themselves for their kinship, thus fertilizing the future and the survival of their Volk with their own blood. We were standing on the lost rocks of Masada and did not surrender to the Romans.]

Think! The Wehrmacht defending Western civilization at the Thermopyles and then defending the Jews at Masada during WW II! Think! (We received this issue of the "Gebirgstruppe" on March 10 - nobody seems to have bothered so far).

And this is not such an obscure publication: The Masada article is immediately followed by a Grusswort [greeting] from major general Rainer Jung, the ACTIVE commander of the 1st Gebirgsdivision and c-in-chief of Wehrbereichskommando [military district] VI. The journal "Gebirgstruppe" even has a Library of Congress serial number: sn 92014861

And remember: This was not an airborne landing: There were people, irresponsible politicians and intellectuals, who helped them on their way to Masada.

I am well aware that I am not allowed to use four-letter words; however, I may quote from Max Liebermann announcing in 1933: "Ich kann ja gar nicht soviel fressen, wie ich kotzen moechte!" [I simply can't scoff as much as I would like to puke!] And this is probably what the Roman soldiers did, when they saw those German soldiers standing on the hilltop of Masada.

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