the good war that never ends

    Collingham, E. M. (Elizabeth M.)  The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food. New York, Penguin, 2012.
     Kempowski, Walter. Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich. Translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside. Foreword by Alan Bance. New York, Norton, 2015. [Originally published in Great Britain by Granta Books, 2014 as Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary from Hitler's Last Birthday to VE Day.] "Original German edition first published in 2005. Walter Kempowski: Das Echolot. Abgesang '45 Ein kollekitives Tagebuch. Copyright © 2005 by Albrecht Knaus Verlag, Munich."
     McConahay , Mary Jo. The Tango War: The Struggle for the Hearts, Minds and Riches of Latin America during World War II. New York, St. Martin’s 2018.
     McMeekin, Sean. Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II. New York, Basic Books, 2021.
     Schmid, Walter. A German POW in New Mexico. Translated by Richard Rundell; edited by Wolfgang T. Schlauch. Albuquerque, NM, University of New Mexico Press, 2005. [Published in cooperation with the Historical Society of New Mexico]. [First published in Germany in 2000 under the title Einer unter Vielen: ein Bericht über Kriegseinsatz in Tunesien und Gefangenschaft in Amerika und England 1942-1947 (W. Schmid [Libri Books on Demand], Hamburg, [Norderstedt], 2000)].
     Selby, Scott Andrew. A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin: The Chilling True Story of the S-Bahn Murderer. New York, Berkley Books, 2014.

    For professional historians as well as amateur enthusiasts (like myself), World War II is a source of never ending fascination and discovery, as is witnessed by the continuing deluge from the major publishing houses, small presses, and do-it yourselfers: every year new information is discovered or a new take on the events surges forth.
    As for myself, I enjoy the offbeat and even eccentric approaches to the conflict: studies that consider a specialized aspect or offer a different perspective, in contrast to the Allied-centric narrative we’re presented by pop culture venues like the History Channel, Story, A&E, Hollywood, as well as the many print popular histories. Thus the six, relatively recent, entries considered here, presenting as they do aspects of the war that haven’t been covered so thoroughly, are especially welcome.
   Selby’s account of a serial murderer in Nazi Berlin at the height of the war, and Schmid’s POW memoir, while the slightest entries, are in their different ways the most remarkable, certainly the most novel, of the six volumes considered herein. McMeekin’s hefty Stalin tome, even with its revisionist vibe, is the most conventional in content and treatment, and moreover has considerable academic sheen. Collingham's analysis of food and the war similarly takes the familiar historical approach. The two remaining titles, Tango War and Swansong 1945, fall somewhere in-between.
    Kempowskli’s volume, however, is practically sui generis and thus deserves primacy as it is indeed a unique historical document. Swansong delivers the goods primo as it portrays the multi-dimensional, collage-like nature of the war as experienced by a wide swath of individuals. Swansong is the final entry of Kempowski’s ten-volume, 7,000-page opus maximus, Sonar: A Collective Journal (1993-2005). For two decades Kempowski collected newspaper articles, diaries, letters, memoirs and documents written by people on all sides of the fighting and from every level of experience and life during World War II. Swansong 1945 covers the final conflagration and ultimate end of Nazi Germany and the war in Europe. It covers four fateful days in Spring 1945: Hitler's birthday on April 20, American and Soviet troops meeting at the Elbe on April 25, Hitler's suicide on April 30, and finally the German surrender on May 8. In the Sources section the vast majority of the cites are of German texts, giving a primary source verisimilitude to the mix.
    The various persons quoted run the gamut from heads of state to civilians, prisoners-of-war, ordinary soldiers, refugees, and artists and writers caught up in the conflict. Indeed for some of us, such first-person historical accounts of the type we get in Swansong are the best barometers for what really happened, even if in some cases the memories must be treated with care. Still, one is tempted to invoke the cliché compulsively readable, because this book is exactly that. It’s tough to put down because there’s something compelling on every page.
    Especially fascinating to read is Joseph Goebbels’s unintentionally ironic entry from 20 April (perhaps not so coincidentally Hitler’s birthday), in which he poetically – and presciently – waxes on about a newer, brighter Europe that will emerge after the war. Just such a Europe did emerge, but perhaps not in the way Dr. Goebbels envisioned. Then there’s an SS officer recalling a dinner at the fashionable Hotel Adlon in Berlin on April 20, where “waiters in tuxedos and maîtres d’ in tailcoats went on solemnly and unflappably serving purple pieces of kohlrabi on the silver trays meant for better days.” And there are the chilling first-hand accounts of the activities at the Führerbunker during the last days of the war.
      One quibble: I would have preferred some photographs of the individuals. If that wasn’t possible then a few photos of the various diaries, newspaper clippings, letters, notebooks, etc.. to give a flavor of the originals. But a quibble is only a quibble. Swansong 1945 is a work of signal import and is highly recommended to all serious students of WW2.
     Sean McMeekin’s ponderous Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II is not so much a new history – most of the chronologies and events discussed have been covered at length elsewhere – as it is a new emphasis and interpretation, actually more of individuals than events themselves. Most historical accounts of WW2 describe it as Hitler’s war and make Hitler the central protagonist and ultimate villain in the conflict. McMeekin, however, argues that the war that emerged in Europe in August 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler, also that the Pacific War was due at least in part to Stalin’s maneuverings and schemings. McMeekin covers in some detail the massive aid in materiel offered to the Soviets by the United States. Apparently egged on by “Soviet assets” in his orbit, President Roosevelt went out of his way to appease the Soviet dictator, perhaps too much so. If Roosevelt didn’t exactly give away the store, he gave way a lot. The ultimate result was that Stalin emerged as the major beneficiary of the war, and that the Soviet Union was in a much stronger position, albeit at horrific cost, at the war’s conclusion than when the war started.
     McMeekin doesn’t go so far as to overtly endorse the controversial Suvorov theory that Stalin was planning a massive attack against the West in 1941 or 1942, and that Hitler simply beat him to the punch by attacking the Soviet Union first, a classic case of a preventive, rather than preemptive, assault [1]. But if one reads carefully between the lines we can see at least a certain sympathy for and receptivity to this revisionist view. That McMeekin had access to documents in Russian archives and reads Russian adds strength to his arguments, be they controversial or conventional. Stalin’s War includes index, photos, and 120 pages of notes and bibliography.
     Similarly Mary Jo McConahay’s The Tango War, if not quite revisionist history, refreshingly takes on an aspect of WW2 that’s largely ignored in conventional histories, that is, the struggle between the U.S. and Germany for allegiances – and resources – in Latin America during World War II. Indeed McConahay’s opus may well be the first popular survey of what was going on South-of-Border during WW2, and for the most part the book succeeds admirably.
     McConahay’s approach is journalistic rather than purely historical, and she concentrates on the human element in the form of the wide array of colorful, often shady characters on both sides of the conflict. Perhaps most entertaining are the descriptions of the Good Neighbor efforts by the Office of Inter-American Affairs, which sent not-so-secret weapons – Hollywood celebrities like Errol Flynn, Orson Welles and the Walt Disney troupe – south to garner good will for the American cause. In the case of Welles and Disney, some legitimate cinematic products resulted, specifically Welles’s ill-fated documentary It’s All True and the Disney films Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros. On the other hand, the shameful, forced internment in the U.S. of "dangerous" individuals being extended to Central and South America was one of the more cringeworthy episodes recounted in the book, especially so since some of the internees were exchanged for American prisoners-of-war. Likewise compelling is the chapter on espionage activities. There’s also a section on the infamous ‘ratlines,’ the escape routes that helped Nazi fugitives escape to South America.
     In the final chapter McConahay discusses the sinister parallels between European fascists of World War II and Latin American dictators of the 1970s and ’80s, many of whom were unrepentant fans of Mussolini and Hitler. These regimes had the sometimes public, sometimes covert, backing of Washington, so long as they were anti-Communist and friendly toward American economic interests. A mild weakness of Tango War is that McConahay eschews the chronologic for the topical, and as a result there’s some jumping around in the narrative. On balance, however, a good read, also replete with lots of photos. Tango War is a long overdue examination of a little-known aspect of the war.
     Scott Andrew Selby’s A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin is more noteworthy for the book’s subject matter than its treatment or style. For all that there’s plenty of works in English on Germany’s war effort, both military and civilian alike, little has been written on crime and criminals in the Third Reich amongst ordinary civilians, much less about serial murderers. And as has been pointed out, it’s a concept awash in contradiction: that such a regime specializing in state sponsored mass murder would spend so many resources tracking down a lone killer of a few women is difficult to understand. Indeed the dynamic is not unlike that depicted so provocatively in Hans Helmutt Kirst’s novel Night of the Generals, later adapted into a popular film, which told the story of a Polish prostitute murdered in 1942 by a high ranking German general, and of a certain Major Grau’s subsequent quest to track down the culprit. One can’t help recalling Grau’s maxim, ‘let us say what is admirable on the large scale is monstrous on the small. Since we must give medals to mass murderers, why not give justice to the small entrepreneur.’
     Serial Killer covers the case of Paul Ogorzow, the S-Bahn Killer. He had a family, a job with the railroad, and was a member of the Nazi Party. Since Ogorzow worked on the railway he found that the air raid blackouts at night provided good cover for him to do his deeds. Ogorzow murdered eight women total, attempted to murder six others, and assaulted many others. Wilhelm Lüdtke, head of the Berlin police’s serious crimes division, emerges as the story’s hero as he was tasked to hunt down the monster in the midst, and eventually he did. Lüdtke had the, albeit discreet, support of the likes of Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels, who “wanted to project an image of Nazi Germany as a place free from such problems as the predations of a serial killer.” Lüdtke’s rather florid afterlife following the war is covered in some detail in the epilogue. In addition to his other activities, Lüdtke worked as an asset for the CIA in the 1950s.
     Ogorzow was convicted and sentenced to death. He was executed – by guillotine – two days later. The book offers plenty of detail about the S-Bahn and investigative techniques of the German police, but little on the psychology of the protagonist. Thus the story that emerges is rather dry. For those of us accustomed to the backgrounds and especially psychology of serial killers, we sense something is lacking.
     The case was such a sensation that a series of crime novels emerged, most prominently Death Rode the Train (Der Tod fuhr im Zug). Its author was Wilhelm Ihde, writing under the name Axel Alt, and the killer’s name was changed to ‘Omanzow,’ but the fiction didn’t fool anybody, and the book was a big seller in Germany during the war. An even more bizarre detail is that Ogorzow’s widow was charged a fee for the use of the guillotine during the execution. Serial Killer includes a detailed S-Bahn map as well as photos of S-Bahn carriages, stations and towers.
     Walter Schmid’s A German POW in New Mexico offers a different take on the war experience. There are any number of WW2 personal narratives out there, written by those on all sides of the conflict, among them quite a few prisoner-of-war memoirs. Most of these are from the Allied point of view, but there aren’t many accounts of the German POW experience, written by a German, published in English, no less. In fact, A German POW is the only one I know of, though indeed there could be others.
     Walter Schmid was a member of Rommel's Afrika Korps and had fought only five months before he was captured in Tunisia. Schmid was one of 380,000 German POWs sent to prison camps in the United States. He was first sent to Oklahoma and soon transferred to New Mexico in July 1944. Schmid worked in southern New Mexico near Las Cruces as a farm laborer. His primary duties were picking cotton and harvesting melons. A German POW in New Mexico is based on his diary and the letters he sent home to his German girlfriend, whom he later married. Schmid's memoir was published in Germany in 2000, and the abbreviated English version that’s A German POW in New Mexico benefits from the translation of Richard Rundell. Special mention must also be made of editor Wolfgang Schlauch’s introduction, as well as his commentary interspersed throughout. Includes vintage photos, bibliography and appendixes.
     Collingham's hefty opus, Taste of War, was an eye opener for me in many ways. Even as a (admittedly amateur) WW2 buff, truth be told I never thought much about the importance of food production and delivery in the context of the conflict. There have been many books on the personalities, battles and strategy of the war, but the present tome may well be the first (more or less) scholarly treatment of how something so basic as the supply of food and the feeding of soldiers (and civilians) was central to the prosecution of the total war that was World War II. Includes photos, maps, extensive notes and bibliography. Much recommended.  

   [1] Suvorov, Viktor.The Chief Culprit: Stalin's Grand Design to Start World War II. Annapolios, Md., Naval Institute Press 2008.

Revisionism and its discontents

    Zinn, Howard, A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.
   Jeff Riggenbach, Why American History is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism, Auburn, Mises Institute, 2009.

Revisionism. The policy or practice of revision or modification; departure from the original interpretation of a theory, etc.; esp. the revision of Marxism on evolutionary socialist or pluralist principles. 2. The theory or practice of revising one's attitude to a previously accepted situation or point of view; spec. (orig. U.S.) a movement or process involving the revision of an established or accepted version of historical events.
Revisionist.orig?. U.S. A person who questions or revises a previously accepted version of historical phenomena or events.

   “Inevitably history becomes what the historian chooses to point out.” - Simon Winder, The Man Who Saved Britain

   “It is always difficult for the non-historian to remember that there is nothing absolute about historical truth” - Gordon Craig, “The Devil in the Details,” NY Review of Books, Sept. 19, 1996.

    A crusty old professor of mine once told me that all history is opinion. The more I experience of history, and of life itself, the more I’m convinced he was spot on in his assessment. Indeed, like the doctor and lawyer, the (professional) historian is paid for expressing opinions, but he has other privileges, chief among them an especial perk not available even to the two aforementioned honorable professions, that is, to alter the way we see history itself. In other words, and put simpler, historians have the power to, well, rewrite the past [1].
    But not so fast. To wit, over time clichés and 'truisms' gradually creep into the conversation and are accepted uncritically as part of the historical record, and there emerges a historical consensus. Nowhere is this more egregious than in what we might call pop history. In any case, and getting back to revisionism, there are, happily, a few dissenting voices, which we usually refer to as revisionist, or less controversially, contrarian. In a perfect world all history could be characterized as revisionist [2], and rightly so: the historian’s job is to examine conventional interpretations of history and consider new evidence or interpret facts and events in a new light, applying new methodologies and fresh perspectives. In this sense it’s not such a step to also view creative writing as revisionist. We writers of fiction revisit the old formulas and provide new takes in, we hope, fresh and interesting ways.

    Characteristically dry and uncontroversial, the Oxford English Dictionary’s entry above is hard to fault. But revisionism is more complicated than a mere definition, and, like some phrases – ‘feminist,’ ‘liberal,’ or ‘activist’ come to mind – the word itself has taken on a bad odor [3], to the point where it’s more or less synonymous with deliberate falsification and distortion. Recriminations and counter-recriminations abound with charges of conspiracy theory thinking at one extreme and political correctness at the other. Thus anything labelled revisionist carries with it an emotional charge, and as a result it has been both praised and (mostly) damned by both the Left and the Right. Depending on the source, or audience, a revisionist historian may delight or infuriate: one person’s revisionist is another’s responsible, skeptical historian [4]. Like many things in the study of history - and politics - what's a revisionist and what is not is in the eye of the beholder. 

    As a case in point, there’s the calculus of historians like Howard Zinn, whose A People’s History of the United States in particular critiques the ruling classes and their (according to Zinn) self-conferred right to tell history their way, i.e. usually state-friendly [5]. Zinn’s approach to history gives voice to those who don’t have voices, i.e. those who don’t usually write history: poor and working-class people, women, African-Americans, gays and lesbians, the uneducated, among others. Not so surprising, then, Zinn’s opus maximus explodes much of orthodox history. True, it is biased and selective – there’s little history that isn’t – and Zinn doesn’t hide his likes and dislikes. There’s nary a sacred cow that escapes his rapier gaze: Lincoln, FDR, JFK, World Wars I & II, the New Deal. All take their lumps.

    A People’s History has garnered the most mainstream acceptance of any revisionist work – it's even used at a text at some high schools and colleges & universities. [6] It’s also been much reviewed and commented on: at last count well over a thousand (mostly favorable) reviews on Amazon alone.

    Jeff Riggenbach is a kind of Zinn disciple, and his provocatively titled if much less well-known Why American History is Not What They Say offers a fresh and illuminating analysis, both as consideration of U.S. history as well as a meaty introduction to revisionist history in general. Included is a wealth of detail, but some topics and individuals get special attention: the Civil War, WWI, WWII, the Cold War, Zinn, and libertarian guru Murray Rothbard.

    Why American History is Not What They Say presents its case in well organized and engaging, if wordy, style: the detail-rich content includes many sources listed in the text supplemented by a blizzard of footnotes. In fact Riggenbach’s book is so source-rich it wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to describe it as a gigantic bibliographic essay with some history and editorial comment sprinkled in.

    For all its virtues – and flaws – Riggenbach’s tome is hardly the last word on revisionism, the nature of which precludes any conclusive or definitive statements. But Why American History is Not What They Say does an admirable job of synthesizing and summarizing the current state of revisionist art in a relatively even-handed, if ultimately sympathetic, fashion.

    [1] However, the old adage you can have your own views but not your own facts hasn’t always been adhered to, and the practice of embroidering, censoring or softening historical facts to make a more palatable narrative for interested individuals, groups, or nations, certainly didn’t begin with our current climate in which the phenomenon seems to be taking on epic proportions. But that, as the man said, is another story, and another post. In a post elsewhere on this blog, I more or less take on this question directly and opine that all history is spin in that the historian wants to project a certain interpretation of events and persuade the reader to accept said interpretation.
    [2] In his excellent book The Ever-Changing Past: Why All History is Revisionist History (Yale Univ. Press, 2021), author James Banner makes that very point. He demonstrates why historical knowledge is unlikely ever to be absolute, unchallenged and unchanging, and why history as a branch of knowledge is both a science and an art. Using several broad historical examples, he goes on to explain why all historians are revisionists as they seek to more fully understand the past, and how they always bring their distinct dispositions, perspectives, expertise, and yes, biases to the historical subjects they cover.
   [3] Interesting that revisionism as a term doesn’t appear in the august Library of Congress Subject Headings. Rather, the term ‘Historiography’ is used, both as main heading and subheading.
   [4 In recent years World War II has been especially fertile territory for revisionist and quasi-revisionist interpretations that, at least to some extent, take issue with the idea of WW2 as the ultimate Good War. British historian A.J.P. Taylor was one of the first to give an academic patina to World War II revisionist history with his The Origins of the Second World War, published in 1961. Other examples of WW2 revisionism might include: Patrick Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, Crown, 2008; Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke: the Beginning of the Second World War and the End of Civilization, Simon & Schuster, 2008; Jörg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945, Columbia Univ. Press, 2006; David Irving, Hitler's War and the War Path, Focal Point Publications, 1991; George H. Nash, ed., Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath, Hoover Institution Pr., 2011; Jacques R. Pauwels, The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, Lorimer, 2002; Ashley Smith, “World War II: The Good War?” International Socialist Review, Issue 10, Winter 2000; Viktor Suvorov, The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II, Naval Institute Press, 2013; M.S. King, The Bad War: The Truth Never Taught About World War II; Sean McMeekin, Stalin's War: A New History of World War II, Basic Books, 2021; Michael C.C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2015. See also: “A ‘Good War’ No More: The New World War II Revisionism,” in: Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Hi Hitler!: How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture, Cambridge Univ. Pr., 2015, pp. 29-77.
   [5] “In one of his most iconoclastic essays, “The Anatomy of the State,” Murray Rothbard observed that it is crucial to ruling groups to manipulate the thinking of the ruled. They must get the populace to accept that the rulers are truly good people working tirelessly to advance the common good. Toward that end, the rulers employ a bag of tricks, among them the writing of history to cast the State in a positive light.” - George C. Leef, review of Riggenbach’s Why American History is Not What They Say.
   [6] A People’s History “... has gone through five editions and multiple printings, been assigned in thousands of college courses, sold more than a million copies, and made the author something of a celebrity.” [Michael Kazin, “Howard Zinn’s History Lessons,” Dissent, Spring 2004].

Further reading:

Anders, Charlie Jane, “When Does Historical Revisionism Become Alternate History?” 
Bacevich, Andrew J., “The Revisionist Imperative: Rethinking Twentieth Century Wars,”
   Journal of Military History 76 (April 2012), pp. 333–42.
Conger, Cristen, How Revisionist History Works 
Duberman, Martin, Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left, New Press, 2012
Fantina, Robert, Empire, Racism & Genocide: A History of U.S. Foreign Policy, Red Pill
    Press, 2013
Hughes-Warrington, Marnie, Revisionist History, Routledge, 2013.
Judt, Tony, “What Have We Learned, if Anything?” NY Review of Books, 1 May 2008
Kirsch, Adam, "Is World War II still 'the Good War'?" NY Times, May 27, 2011 

Newsinger, John. The Blood Never Dried : A People's History of the British Empire. Second
   edition. London, Bookmarks, 2013.
Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American
    Historical Profession, Cambridge, 1988