HOW CAN WE "RECONCILE" COMMUNIST AND NAZI LEGACIES?
585
public at large, even for the well educated. This is even truer for the
Chinese, Cuban, North Vietnamese, and other Communist atrocities and
repressIOns.
Still, lack of information as such has not been the decisive factor in
the tepid moral reactions. There was information already in the 1930s,
increasingly so after World War
II,
and even more following the de–
Stalinization campaign of Khrushchev after 1956. There were even some
comparative accounts (based on personal experience) of Nazi and Soviet
concentration camps such as
Under Two Dictators
by Margarete Buber
and Gustav Herling's
World Apart.
But such accounts attracted little
public attention and sparked little moral outrage, before the publication
of
The Gulag Archipelago .
Nazism was defeated in war and thereby conclusively delegitimated;
there was no possibility of "a Nazism with a human face" arising, of a
Nazism reformed under more enlightened leaders (equivalents of
Khrushchev or Gorbachev). Nazism had few, if any defenders in the West
partly because the system was dead. Defeat by itself has moral implica–
tions. Even former Nazis were somewhat chastened in the wake of the
defeat and less likely to defend the system, to seek legitimation or excuses
for their beliefs and actions.
The defeat of Nazi Germany was also important because it made
possible unobstructed information-gathering: extermination camps could
be filmed, archives scrutinized, evil-doers captured, interrogated, tried
and sentenced in public. Survivor witnesses provided vivid accounts about
the horrors they experienced. Nazism never had the same appeal for
Westerners - especially opinion makers, leaders and intellectuals - as did
the Soviet Union and other Communist systems. And National
Socialism, unlike Marxism-Leninism, was not a universalistic ideology; it
could not be applied to other Western (or non-Western) societies. The
ideology of Nazi Germany represented a reversal of the hopes and opti–
mistic expectations of the nineteenth century regarding the decline of
obscurantist beliefs, including nationalism and the conflicts inspired by it.
There were no great thinkers or historical figures associated with
National Socialist ideology, whose legacy it claimed to realize.
It
was
difficult to argue that the ideals of Nazism were impressive, that only its
practice left something to be desired. Few Western intellectuals, church–
men, or opinion leaders idealized Nazi Germany.
Moreover, for most of its existence Nazi Germany was an undeni–
ably aggressive, warlike society which also detracted from possible ideal–
ization. (The Nazi-Soviet conflict itself tilted the scales decisively in favor
of the Soviet Union and allowed the earlier Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 to
