April turns out to be “Remember-a-Nazi Month.” A 93-year-old Auschwitz guard, a former member of Adolf Hitler’s Waffen-SS unit, is on trial on 300,000 counts of accessory to murder. He says he “morally” shares the guilt for taking cash and belongings from the prisoners as they entered the camp, but is innocent of any criminal act. Peter Longerich’s Goebbels, a biography of Hitler’s most sycophantic sycophant, has been translated into English from the German, prompting Cordula Schacht, a lawyer and daughter of Hitler’s most famous economics minister, to sue Random House for a share of the royalties. It seems, reports The Times (London), that Longerich quotes extensively from Herr Goebbels’ diaries, and that Ms Schact claims to have inherited the rights to license the diaries — get this — “from François Genoud, a Nazi-supporting Swiss financier, who was the executor of Goebbels’ estate and a good friend of her father, Hjalmar Schacht, who was Hitler’s minister of economics”. Random House apparently first agreed to fork over some of the profits from the book’s sale but is now arguing that the contract is “null and void … against moral rights.” Instead, the publisher offered to pay royalties into a Holocaust charity. Nope, says Ms Schact: the money has to go to Goebbel’s heirs. She has a point: had Goebbels not worked so hard and so prominently to further the Holocaust there would have been no biography, and no royalties.
No one knows whether Ms Schacht’s effort to claim this inheritance will be any more successful than Edda Goering’s plea to the Bavarian parliament to return some of the assets seized from her father, Herman Goering, who committed suicide to avoid hanging after his conviction as a war criminal. Ms Schacht is not greedy: She only asked for enough of her father’s loot to provide a “subsistence livelihood”. The rotund, morphine-addicted WWI air ace who, The Telegraph notes, failed to sweep the RAF from the air as he had promised Hitler, and so launched the London Blitz. He was second only to Hitler in the Nazi hierarchy — Hitler designated Goering as his heir — and founded the Gestapo. The Reichsmarschall was senior to all Wehrmacht commanders, which put him in a perfect position to loot works of art from all over Europe, amassing a huge collection of stolen works.
But all of that is in the past — at least it is for most people who do not live in countries where a new wave of anti-Semitism is a reminder of the bad old days. Things are different now. Jonas Kaufmann, one of the world’s most popular tenors, is to sing “Rule, Britannia!” on the last night of the Proms, “when classical music lovers wave their Union flags … with patriotic fervor” notes The Telegraph. It will be a first for the 120-year old celebration. Never before has a German roused British patriotism to the fever pitch I saw when I attended that final night of the Proms. Oh, yes, Deutschland Uber Alles, adopted in 1922, remains the German national anthem, presumably sung by Mr. Kaufmann at events on the other side of the channel, where Chancellor Angela Merkel intends to have the EU continue to rule Britannia, according to many unhappy Tories.
