Rome, December 1976. Herbert Kappler, 70, SS colonel and chief of the Gestapo in Nazi occupied Italy, convicted war criminal diagnosed with terminal cancer is serving his sentence to lifetime imprisonment at Rome’s Celio Military Hospital where he will mostly likely die. The German government has repeatedly appealed for Kappler’s release on humanitarian grounds but so far Italy has rejected German demands. (more…)
follow-up on my post from January 23, 2010
While 90-year-old John (Ivan) Demjanjuk was flown in from the U.S. to face trial in Munich, 95-year-old Erich Steidtman, another Nazi war criminal, lives in the German town of Hannover — unchallenged and undisturbed. (more…)
The role of his life! A ghost, somewhere between dream and waking. A corpse, frozen into speechlessness. The trial against John Demjanjuk exhibits for the world to see what has been daily routine in most German families since the end of World War II: silence. (more…)
This photograph of John (Iwan) Demjanjuk being wheeled into a German courtroom in Munich reminds me of my grandfather shortly before he died: an old man, ill and barely conscious; an old Nazi who lived a full life, had children, grandchildren, a nice house in the suburbs; a perpetrator who saw himself as victim; a typical “Mitläufer” who for fear of his and his family’s life joined the NSDAP, avoided resistance, hung a photograph of Hitler in his living room, and somehow forgot to take it down when the Nazis no longer officially ruled Germany — that’s how I remember my grandfather. (more…)
Memory is performative. To remember is to repeat.
Not every memory gets performed and repeated. Some memories are so horrific that we censor their re-presentation. Perpetrator memories of the Holocaust as sexual extravaganza belong to this category.
Liliana Cavani’s controversial 1974 movie The Night Porter has been labeled “Nazi chic” (Roger Ebert). For some critics the film [...]
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