Quote of the Day (The German High Command, With a Fateful Step Toward the Holocaust, in ‘Night and Fog’)

“Within the occupied territories, communistic elements and other circles hostile to Germany have increased their efforts against the German State and the occupying powers since the Russian campaign started. The amount and the danger of these machinations oblige us to take severe measures as a determent.”— The “Night and Fog” (Nacht und Nebel) Decree, December 7, 1941

For anyone who desires to put December 7, 1941 in a worldwide context, the indispensable place to start is with Stanley Weintraub’s Long Day’s Journey Into War. It shows how the events of that “day which will live in infamy” were experienced not only in Pearl Harbor but in such other diverse places as Washington, D.C., Manila, Moscow, Tokyo, Tobruk, Singapore, London, and Berlin.

It was in the last of these that some of the most chilling moments of that day were experienced, as Adolf Hitler first broke out the champagne to celebrate the attack on the American naval base in Oahu by Axis partner Japan, then took one ominous step closer to the Final Solution with the “Night and Fog” decree.

At first, this key document of the Third Reich sounds like a defensive measure— they’re just trying to defend themselves against those “communistic elements.” But by the time we get to “severe measures,” we realize that the bureaucratese stands for something far more sinister.

The decree (Nacht und Nebel, in German) came from the hierarchy of the Third Reich itself--issued by Adolf Hitler and signed by Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the German Armed Forces High Command. It called for individuals found to be undermining the security of German troops to be transported to Germany for trial by special courts, thus undermining international conventions governing the treatment of prisoners. Instead of resistance members simply being kidnapped, they would disappear without a trace, in the “night and fog.”

Keitel spelled out the inevitable corollary of this policy in the following passage from a letter he released: “Efficient and enduring intimidation can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminals do not know the fate of the criminal. The prisoners are, in future, to be transported to Germany secretly, and further treatment of the offenders will take place here; these measures will have a deterrent effect because: A. The prisoners will vanish without a trace. B. No information may be given as to their whereabouts or their fate."

　
　

One especially obscene element of this was the measure’s code name. “Night and Fog” had been coined by the titan of German literature, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Its use here reinforces the essential puzzle people have struggled to understand since the 1930s: how a nation of culture— of Goethe, Mann, Beethoven, Haydn, Brahms, Kant, and countless other figures— could have orchestrated this descent into terror.

If Hitler was determined to undermine culture through his appropriation of the term, a French filmmaker evoked the title to use culture as an act of remembrance. Alain Resnais’ short 1955 documentary, Night and Fog, was made only 10 years after the war’s end— at least a couple of decades before literature, film and television began to explore the Holocaust in depth.

Yet, when this film was shown in a high school religion class of mine some 35 years ago, its stark, black-and-white images left all of us silent and shaken— and many of us sobbing— at its conclusion.