Walter Karl Ernst August von Reichenau, Field Marshal of the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Reichenau commanded the 6th Army during the invasion of Ukraine in June, 1941. In stark contrast to the lie that the regular German Army (Heer) did not take part in war crimes, Reichenau issued an order on 10 October 1941 which specifically commanded his army to murder Jews as a political act incorporated into the military purpose of the invasion. Under his command, the 6th Army regularly committed war crimes, ensuring the German Army would forever be a part of the Holocaust.
Dr. Hermann Reuss, the Catholic Divisional Chaplain of the 295th Infantry Division of Army Group Central, wrote a report describing atrocities being carried out under the German occupation of Ukraine on August 20, 1941, not even a month after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Reuss had been alerted by German soldiers that an enormous execution had taken place in the village of Byelaya Tserkov, just an hour’s drive from Kiev. A platoon of the Waffen SS, aided by members of the Ukranian Nationalist (read Fascist) militia, had rounded up and executed several hundred Jewish men and women by firing squad. After the massacre, the SS rounded up the children and, apparently not willing to go that far, at least today, locked them up in a house and put them under the guard of the Ukranians. Dr. Reuss and a Protestant Chaplain named Kornmann, visited the house and found a sight hard to behold. Wailing and crying for their dead parents who had been murdered in front of them, the children were undernourished and in great despair. About 90 of them were in a state of peril in the house, some of them covered with their own feces. The young were looking after the younger. Reuss learned from another German soldier that the day before the SD had taken three trucks stuffed with children from the house, all to be executed, and more executions were scheduled the following day. Reuss and Kornmann’s report to Lieutenant Colonel Groscurth greatly alarmed him. He cordoned off the building, arranged for water to be brought to the children, and then, unbelievably, sent a cable to Army headquarters (Field Marshal von Reichenau’s HQ) for a decision on whether or not the children were to be liquidated. The SD officer had returned with an Abwehr representative and two SS officers to discuss the matter with Groscurth, evidently expressing indignation that a stay of execution of the wailing children had been postponed, and accusing the chaplains of sticking their noses into places they didn’t belong. They should be taking care of the spiritual welfare of the German Soldaten, one Captain Luley exclaimed, not intervening for screaming Jewish children. The army’s decision was to continue the executions, with some senior general staff officers complaining the children had a 24 hour stay of execution. The group then planned out the execution. The children were then rounded up, taken to the same spot where the previous truckloads were executed, unloaded, and shot in the head before being dumped into a ditch. No infant escaped this treatment. Groscurth then wrote a report to his immediate commanding officer, von Richenau, noting that executions of children were an inevitable result of war, but should be done in secret, away from the prying eyes of ‘normal’ troops, and complained that the children in question should have been executed with their parents. “Both infants and children should have been eliminated immediately in order to have avoided this inhuman agony,” he wrote, citing several officials that decided it was impossible to let the children live given ideological and practical considerations. Reichenau was incensed at even receiving a report, making three copies in reply for posterity and saying he reviewed the matter and in his professional opinion, “I have ascertained in principle that once begun, the action was conducted in an appropriate manner.” So for instance, the inappropriate action was the one-day pause in executing the children. This exposed the ‘special aktion’ to the troops, and this was unacceptable. “It would have been far better,” the legendary Field Marshal closed “if the report had not been written at all.” This was deemed by some as “practical work for our Fuhrer.”
When I was in middle school, I used to ride my bike through the neighborhood next to mine, past the local synagogue, across the drainage canal, and past the Hong Kong market to a used book store in a small storefront run by an ex-school teacher who had enough of little shits like me. One time I had no book to trade and went into a dollar and seventy cents of debt to get Stephen King’s The Dead Zone. When I finished it, I came back and traded it, taking on another twenty cents of debt, for a novel by Philippe Van Rjndt named The Trial of Adolf Hitler - a counterfactual fiction that described what the world community would have done if Hitler had escaped the bunker, lived a couple of decades, and then was put on trial by the UN for war crimes. It wasn’t good. Van Rindt was like many of us, educated and fascinated with the horrors and legacy of the Third Riech. His book The Tetramachus Collection was another fictionalization but closer to the mark in tracing the Vatican’s secret operation to smuggle SS war criminals out of Allied Occupied Europe and into the safe arms of the Fascist States of South America. Last Message to Berlin was about a mole in the US Embassy in London and a double agent in the Roosevelt Administration bent to stop an Allied Plan to win the war. Van Rindt was not a good author. All his books are out of print. But he seemed to successfully hone in on a theme several authors had cashed in on before, including H.P Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick.
Counterfactual history is largely cast aside in the slow and steady academic work that cascades down like a glacier from the Ivory Tower of history Ph.D’s. No one has time for it. Historians are too busy trying to document what actually happened, they don’t have time to go through the what if’s, despite the handful that do pontificate if Britain had actually lost the war. So this purely theoretical exercise has been largely left to the world of fiction. One of the best fiction books of the 90’s was Robert Harris’ Fatherland, a tome that took place in 1963, when Joseph Kennedy was President and on the verge of signing a peace treaty with Nazi Germany that would have ended America’s twenty-two year war with Hitler. HBO made a film about it and Rutger Hauer starred as an SS Officer who uncovers a plot to assassinate Kennedy...in an open motorcade… on a state visit to Berlin. Obviously the plot is by higher ups in the party. No, he does not survive. This counterfactual exploration inspired me my senior year in high school to write a short story exploring the counterfactual idea that the Confederate States of America had at the last minute pulled off a truce with the North because Lincoln had been assassinated one month earlier and thus before the Battle of Petersburg. The modern day CSA was a Fascist nightmare that sided with Spain during the Spanish-American War, Imperial Germany in 1917 prompting another War Between the States, and successfuly aided Nazi Germany in keeping America from helping Britain or fighting Japan in the Second World War. Slavery was outlawed in the 1960’s, but in reality racial serfdom continued to thrive as the sunbelt boom continued and the border kept rich Jews from New York and Chicago out of home grown reform movements involving buses and lunch counters. After three chapters, I was sick to my stomach and gave up the enterprise. Years later, I threw the manuscript away.
My interest in everything German comes from my Grandfather. A non-commissioned officer in the Second Infantry Division in the Second World War, he had landed on D-Day + 22 and had fought all the way to Belgium on foot, enduring horrible combat. After he was wounded the second time, he was evacuated first to Britain, then to the desert of West Texas to heal an onslaught of Asthma. Deemed fit for duty, but not for combat, he returned to Europe in early 1945 and took over a platoon of men in Graves Registration where he tagged, documented, and buried bodies in designated Allied or American cemeteries. He did this until November ‘45 when he caught a ship home. Growing up with my grandfather was complicated. I loved him dearly, and respected him as a reluctant soldier. Though he had fought valiantly and for the most noble cause, he detested war, and outright told his two sons not to go to Vietnam. At the same time, his racial attitudes were very much antiquated. Though he found a special place in hell for Germans, and heavily criticized the Lebensborn Program, he held strong racist views that I could not account for and always made me uncomfortable. But it was from him that I learned about the war, how much he hated it, and I came to hate it with him. As I matured, and he passed, I amassed a knowledge of what he fought against, and it solidified my resolve against it, but I still wasn’t sure why it was all so evil. That came in grad school, when I was forced to deep dive into sources too horrible to contemplate. The details and specifics of such gangster politics and ideological evil were hard to stomach, but like a train wreck, it was hard to turn away. The expression of the Jewish experience through art since the Shoah, which was the ultimate result of such evil, I found fascinating and enriching. Film is the supreme apex of all art, so why would it not be the ultimate expression of survivor experience, or what will shortly become a legacy expression when all our survivors have passed. Marathon Man. The Night Porter. The Music Box. All of these gave way to deeper contemplation in films like Downfall. Germany, Pale Mother. Shoah. The reverberations down through the decades captured legacies of the War and the Shoah that had cultural and political consequences that were not predicted. They gave rise to films that touched the edges of the tragedy. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. The Baader Mienhof Complex. Germany in Autumn. Even Iron Sky dealt with these issues, at hand the horrible thought that the Third Riech had survived - a well used trope but not in terms of comedy.
It is this idea of a Nazi survival that has terrified us, and has driven us to be fans of the rare counterfactual academia, literature, and very well produced ‘television’ series on streaming services such as Amazon Prime. I was ‘Primed’ for The Man in the High Castle. I had read the book decades ago, and a plot about an America as a colony of the conquering Riech, splitting its continent with the just as Fascist Japanese Empire seemed right up my alley. I was not disappointed. The screenwriters did their homework. If you study the occupied territories of both of those powers during wartime, you’ll find remarkable similarities to what you see in The Man in the High Castle. The Japanese simply never trusted anyone who was not Japanese, and in every single circumstance in their colonial empire, they replaced all important officials with Yamato, the racial description of themselves. All the cops were Japanese in China for example, managing the minute structure of precinct police forces. This stretched the Empire to its breaking point, very well conveyed in the show. You could say the Japanese were right at the end of our war with them to accuse us of being their teachers. Britain had done the same in South Africa, India, and even in neighboring territories of Asia. Things were so integrated they were hard to tear apart. The Japanese Pacific States is an integrated part of the Empire, and so was Manchukou and other conquered islands they ruled. The Nazis on the other hand, took a much different approach. There was alway a Nazi in charge, make no mistake about that, but whereever the party went, the party relied on local home grown fascists to contribute to the cause. Whether it was the Netherlands or Ukraine, the local members of the fascist order would step up to do the dirty work. Only places marked for Germania, such as the lands in Poland that were previously under the German Empire before the Treaty of Versailles, were conquered territories directly incorporated into the Riech. To their racial ideology, only such land, equal on footing with Austria, was racially pure. All other lands such as the Baltics, the Balkans, any previously Soviet administered country, was therefore managed with recruits. Fascist Ukranian militia, trained at special camps run by the Nazis, were trained to round up Jews, shoot Jews, and parcel their property out to those who were loyal to the state. First in the list were the overlords, but the long term beneficiaries of any place occupied by the Nazis, even Poland, were the Goyim neighbors who moved into Jewish homes, Jewish farms, Jewish businesses, Jewish properties. Everything. Nothing belonged to the Jew anymore.
And so in the Greater American Reich of The Man in the High Castle, it is rightfully set that there are no Jews. There are no African Americans. There are no Latinos. There are no minorities of any kind, because there were no minorities tolerated in Germania, and they were only tolerated in the occupied territories as a slave labor force for the Reich. They built, they quarried, they exhumed and cremated their dead. So what are we to glean from this absence of minorities in The Man in the High Castle? Where are they? I’ll tell you where they are. American Jews and African Americans, and Latino immigrants, were all rounded up, shot in the head, and buried. That’s option one. Option Two is they were cremated after mass gassings, the procss being perfected for use in Europe during the war. You could probably find these gas chambers in the suburbs of Hoboken, outside Jackson, Mississippi. Perhaps even in Gary, Indiana.
The character arcs that happen in The Man in the High Castle are a fascinating play out of conspiracy theories that don’t seem that outlandish outside the phenomenal aspect of the show. Helen Smith, doting wife of SS Obergruppenfuhrer John Smith, begins as an ardent NAZI wife. She doesn't like to remember the old days before war and instead focuses on her life of new American consumerism. One of the critiques we take of this is that it might not be that far off from the real consumerist obsession of 1950’s housewives. Whether that is a real disadvantage to American history is debatable, but racism is not, and in the first episode, Helen seems to always bend to the will of her husband when confronted with ‘facts’ at the breakfast table like racial superiority or what should happen to ‘non-conformist’ students. Over the arch of the show, Helen at first finds doubt in the system due to her only son turning himself in to be euthanized after he discovers he has a genetic disorder: so successful is the racial brainwashing propaganda of the American Riech. Not even in Nazi Germany was the euthanasia program very successful. It had to be shut down because of the public uproar after families were notified that their sons or daughters, uncles or friends, were gassed in accordance with the plan to rid German society of physical or mental defectives. It was the Spartan equivalent of throwing the deformed babies over the cliffs after birth, and Germans were not having it. Priests and ministers, even low level NAZI politiicans, took to the streets in vast protest at the snuffing out of innocent German lives. The fact that the program was stopped in the face of such protests was shocking. The fact that no other protest ever again took place in Germany for the Communists, or the Jews, or the Gypsies, or the homosexuals, is damning. In the last season of the show, Helen Smith’s ideological animosity slowly infects her relationship with her husband as she strongly suspects, then confirms that his power grab for control of North America is more than just keeping his family safe. It is also about continuing the racial extermination of undesirables across the continent. So in that context Smith is worse than Field Marshal von Richenau. He’s just as bad as Himmler, or Heydrich. Or worse. When Helen discovers the plans for the gas chambers to be built all across America and used to cleanse a non-white present for an all-white future, she snaps. She is specifically equating her ‘defective’ son to those people of color. After all, there was nothing wrong with Thomas, genetically. He was just sick. Humans get sick. It’s a fact. It does not mean that Thomas’ life had any greater or lesser value than any one other person. That’s Mengele talking. So Helen began to think about the black population of the neutral zone, the Jews of the former Japanese Pacific States. They weren’t much different than her dear son. Once she arrived at that truth, her character took an enormous step.
In a fight with her daughter in the series finale, Helen has a remarkable exchange about the genocide that she participated it. It is true, she didn’t know. It is also true that she didn’t want to know, and in not wanting to know, in accepting the lies that that black Americans had just magically moved away, She was complicit in a willing suspension of disbelief. In actively denying what happened, she was also actively admitting to herself what was really going on. How did she ‘know’; that black Americans were exterminated in a racial genocide? Because she knew enough to not want to know. It’s worse than plausible deniability. It is collaboration that makes Vichy France look quaint. Helen’s reaction to her daughter’s tirade, and her daughter’s hurtful condemnation of her parent’s crimes, were repeated by millions across all of the Federal Republic of Germany. By 1965, German baby boomers were between the ages of 15 and 25, and were old enough to ask once they got to college “what did you do doing the war?” And all of a sudden, it became upsetting to say, “darling, in one day, I shot five hundred twenty seven Jewish men, four hundred and thirty four Jewesses, and three hundred and fourteen Jewish children. That includes about eighty infants, less than a year old. I did it for Germany. I did it for the Fuhrer.”
Amazon, despite the enormous beef it has endured during such a tumultuous year, has scored more than a few introspective hits the past couple of years. In one, The Boys, which is a retelling of an almost forgotten comic book run, the hero worship in our society is looked at under a microscope, as is how precariously close we truly are to fascism. All it takes is worshiping the wrong man, regardless of what flag he is waving or wearing, and we are all putting ourselves under the Geheime Staats Polizei. And if you think that’s crazy, just look at the federal agents in Portland who removed their badges and name tags while in uniform to beat the shit out of peaceful protestors. There’s a similar scene in Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 on Netflix shortly before Eddie Redmayne and Sacha Baron Cohen, playing Tom Hayden and Jerry Rubin, are thrown into a restaurant window. They’re later charged for inciting a riot the police started. Last year, Amazon chased this theme with The Plot Against America. Ostensibly about a Jewish family divided by the politics of Roosevelt during his third election, and second re-election, in 1940, the show carefully delineates over the course of a year how a nation slowly slides from democracy into fascism. Every book I’ve ever read about Italy before Mussolini’s rise to power confirms everything you see in this slow but startling series. The small scale street fights that gradually turn into street brawls. The micro laws meant to restrict Jewish activities that gradually turn into Jews can’t do this. Jews can’t live here. Jews must do this. Pretty soon, it’s Jews, get into the oven. Mussolini’s Italy was all about this gradual slide into a dictatorship. While it is true that while he personally was head of state, the persecution of the Jews was pretty light handed (by comparison) it is also true that when the time came, he gave them up just like everyone else, including in Petain’s France. This slide from democracy to dictatorship, is carefully constructed and some would say too patiently paced out in The Plot Against America. But this I think is the point. We all get bored. We all get tired. We all move on. So what if more of your liberties are taken away at an even faster pace. At least you have your iPhone. By the end of this series, as you become more and more aware what a shitbag the real Charles Lindbergh was (a pro-Hitler fascist, a nodding racist celebrated in Germany, where he franchised a second family) you start to become, even as a gentile, distrustful of anything that isn’t Jewish. Then, even after you think as long as it’s kosher, it’s safe, other Jews turn on you. John Turturro and Winona Ryder, perfectly cast as a Rabbi and his fiancee to-be, are not merely stand ins for the hundreds of Jews who formed councils to give away the rights of the entire community. They exemplify why there was no ground swell organized resistance across occupied Europe: because the Germans had already organized the opposition, and used it to destroy its own people. It’s like reading about the Sonder Kommando at Auschwitz. Recruited and trained to clean out the crematoria of dead bodies after each gassing, the first job of the Sonder Kommando was to clear out the bodies of the previous Sonder Kommando. There were fourteen Kommandos in total. The thirteenth rebelled, were murdered anyway. The fourteenth went to their deaths like the twelfth. It makes you wonder how Turturro and Ryder are going to survive their completely preventable decisions.
Also on Amazon is the sideways spy drama Hunters, which does not know exactly what it wants to be all of the time. There’s awkward comedy, true tragedy, and unbelievable performances out of past prime actors like Al Pacino, Carol Kane, and the gloriously heart string puller Saul Rubinek. Hunters does not pull any punches when it comes to what the darkest side of American racism is. As one antagonist says: “We like playing with you Jews, because you know what the stakes are.” And after a particularly horrible scene that shows the brutality resulting from segregation and miscegenation, one particularly horrible asshole says: “When you don’t separate the whites from the coloreds, the colors always bleed.”
By now you must be wanting me to provide a point to all of this. Well, what is the point of all of these counterfactual experiences from our friendly neighborhood streaming services? What are they trying to tell us? What does it have to do with my blunt opening to this rambling essay? What is it all about, Dylan? Good question. What is John Smith’s point? Or Lindbergs? Or Homelander’s? Endgame time. What we must remember, or at least try to keep in some perspective, is the ultimate goal of John Smith, or Charles Lindberg, our two great American Patriots. What is it that they want to achieve? I’ll tell you. It’s a stronger, whiter America, with hundreds of thousands of ditches filled with millions of infants, strangled and bludgeoned, truncheoned and thrown, after they’ve been shot through the head by a 1944 toggle locked recoil operated semi automatic 7.65 millimeter Luger Parabellum Pistole, most specially held by your next door neighbor. He informed on you to your local police. He had a score to settle since your boy beat his boy in the spelling bee. Chances are he’s not flying a Biden flag in his front yard, if you know what I’m saying. He hates you because you look like a Communist. Or Slavic. Or a Jew. You don’t even have to have a label to be marked as an enemy of the state. In the first episode of The Man in the High Castle, John Smith listens to a story from his teenage son about another kid in his history class that thinks different. “Ah,” Smith says, “a non-conformist.”
That’s what I am. A non-conformist. I don’t think it’s okay to separate immigrant children from their parents, regardless of their circumstances. I don’t think it’s okay to stop or restrict abortion procedures that save the lives of mothers. I don’t think it’s okay for the nation’s executive to tell foriegn heads of state to stay at his hotels, or spend money on his products. I don’t think it’s okay to cancel the valid visas and residency permits of legal immigrants because you don’t like what color they are or what religion they are. I don’t think it’s okay to piss off your closest, most friendly neighbor, whom you share a combined economy and the earth’s longest unguarded border just to show them who’s in charge. I don’t think it’s okay to talk to foriegn governments about ‘dirt’ they have on your political opponents. I don’t think it’s okay to attack the free press with the intent to delegitimize all criticisms from any quarter. I don’t think it’s okay to excuse the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans because you worship the almighty dollar. I don’t think it’s okay to publicly lie about facts of which you know to be false simply because you do not want to admit you are not universally liked, or loved, or voted for, or whatever. I don’t think it’s okay for the most powerful man in the world to be surrounded by sycophants. I don’t think it’s okay for the Commander in Chief to be a racist. I don’t think it’s okay for the President of the United States to openly grab women by their pussy as a way of introduction. I don’t think it’s okay for him to not concede after he has clearly lost, and to encourage his voters and followers to challenge the results of a legal election. Somehow, in the twisted, fucked up world of Donald Trump, I am a non conformist because I believe that the traditions of this country have so far provided a rocky if forward path of progressivism. And because of that, because I believe racism is wrong, sexism is wrong, and that democracy should be respected regardless of who won, where will I be after a second Trump term?
Probably in a ditch with the Jews. That’s my point.