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Jenninger went on to recall Dostoevsky's statement that "if God
did not exist, everything would be allowed ." He commented that
"what to his [Dostoevsky's] contemporaries may have appeared as
an offhand speculation of a religious dreamer has proven itself to be
the most prophetic anticipation of the political crimes of the twen–
tieth century." He then quoted directly from a gruesome eyewitness
account of an SS mass murder. There were SS-men with whips and
machine guns, family members in tears trying to comfort one
another, then the shots, and piles of bodies and blood; one of the
murderers smoked a cigarette with a machine gun on his knees, and
another group stood before the pit about to be shot. Jenninger
quoted Himmler's famous-outside the Bundestag-speech to the
SS
Gruppenjuhrer
in Posen in 1943 in which Himmler spoke of what it
meant to see the piles of bodies and to have remained "honorable," to
have fulfilled a duty to the
Volk
"without having suffered damage to
our insides, to our souls." Jenninger confessed "our powerlessness in
the face of these sentences" and of the million-fold disaster. "Num–
bers and words no longer help. Suffering cannot be made good, the
victims are irreplaceable, and all efforts to explain and understand
fall short."
Jenninger continued with how the Germans responded to the
truth after 1945. The end of the war had been a "deep shock" in
many ways:
All effort and sacrifice had been meaningless. In addition to the
horrible truth about the Holocaust, there emerged the know–
ledge , which perhaps until today has not been completely inter–
nalized , that the planning of the war in the East and the destruc–
tion of the Jews were inseparable from one another, that one
without the other would not have been possible.
In 1945, disillusionment with National Socialism merged with a
defense against grief and guilt and prevented a direct confrontation
with the past. The "quick identification with the Western victors"
called for a belief that the Germans - "just like other peoples - had
been only misused, 'occupied' and ultimately liberated." Today,Jen–
ninger said, one can criticize such "processes of repression" but
moral superiority won't help. Perhaps the Germans of 1945 could do
no better.
But today, "all questions are posed with full knowledge of
Auschwitz. In 1933, no one could know what the reality of 1941
would be." Now it was clear that centuries of hostility to the Jews
