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Mostrando postagens com marcador holocausto. Mostrar todas as postagens
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sexta-feira, 25 de janeiro de 2019

Stalin e os judeus: evento no Wilson Center, Washington (29/01)

Stalin and the Black Book of Soviet Jewry

Wilson Center, January 29, 2019, 3pm-5:30pm

In 1944, Soviet writers Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman together with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee prepared a 500-page book of testimonials about the mass murder and resistance of the Soviet Jews during the Holocaust. Shortly before publication, Stalin reversed his decision to publish the book, members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were executed, and silence descended upon the memory of the Holocaust. The Black Book would not be published in Russia until 2014. In this event, we will screen excerpts from Israeli filmmaker Boris Maftsir’s upcoming documentary exploring the fate of the Black Book and consider Stalin’s views and policies vis-à-vis Soviet Jewry.
This event is part of a series organized by the Kennan Institute in honor of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, with support from the Embassy of Israel in the United States and Rabin Chair Forum at George Washington University. For more information about the series, please visit our website.
 

Speakers

  • Boris Maftsir

    Documentary Filmmaker
  • Zvi Gitelman

    Short-Term Scholar, Kennan Institute
    Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Joshua Rubenstein

    Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University

Event Co-sponsors

Sponsors: 
EMBASSY OF ISRAEL IN THE UNITED STATES
RABIN CHAIR FORUM AT GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA
LEADERSHIP, ETHICS, AND PRACTICE INITIATIVE AT THE ELLIOTT SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
INSTITUTE FOR EUROPEAN, RUSSIAN, AND EURASIAN STUDIES
EDLAVITCH JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER OF WASHINGTON, DC

domingo, 13 de janeiro de 2019

Holocausto nazista: uma máquina industrial de matar - André Vargas (IstoE)


A grande matança
Entre agosto e outubro de 1942, a Operação Reinhard eliminou 1,32 milhão de judeus, 20% das vítimas do Holocausto. A média era de 15 mil mortos ao dia. Provas estavam nos registros de transporte ferroviário. Entender esse mecanismo evitaria novos genocídios

SEM RESISTÊNCIA 
Deportados acreditavam que iriam repovoar áreas remotas: quase 10% da população judaica mundial assassinada em 90 dias (
André Vargas
Revista IstoÉ, 11/01/19 - 09h00

A Segunda Guerra Mundial segue como uma fonte abundante das mais terríveis surpresas, mesmo 74 anos após seu término. A mais recente mostra que a máquina nazista de extermínio de judeus só não foi mais eficiente por mera falta de vítimas. Dos seis milhões de mortos nos campos de concentração, cerca de 20%, 1,32 milhão, pereceu ao longo de apenas três meses, entre agosto e outubro de 1942. Em termos gerais, quase 10% da população judaica mundial de então morreu naqueles 90 dias, a uma média de 15 mil por dia, revela uma pesquisa do biomatemático Lewi Stone, da Universidade de Tel Aviv, em Israel.
Como os nazistas tentaram eliminar as evidências de seus crimes quando a derrota se mostrou inevitável, apagando todos os registros possíveis, Stone buscou dados indiretos, analisando as compilações do historiador do Holocausto Yitzhak Arad sobre as movimentações de 480 “trens especiais” para os campos de extermínio de Treblinka, Sobibor e Belzec, na Polônia. A Deutsche Reichsbahn, a companhia ferroviária germânica, manteve os registros, revelando que a maioria dos “deportados” veio de 393 cidades, vilas e guetos poloneses. A justificativa para a viagem era que as vítimas deveriam repovoar áreas remotas do leste. Como o número de sobreviventes é conhecido, não foi difícil determinar o de mortos, mesmo com os corpos reduzidos a cinzas.
O extermínio sistemático foi batizado de Operação Reinhard, em homenagem ao idealizador da chamada Solução Final, que consistia na eliminação de todos os judeus residentes em territórios ocupados pelos alemães. Nazista impiedoso, Reinhard Heydrich era chamado por Hitler de “o homem com coração de ferro”. Ele foi morto em Praga pela resistência tcheca, pouco antes do início da operação. Com isso, a responsabilidade ficou com Odilo Globocnick, um austríaco da SS. Anos depois, Globocnick seria considerado pelo historiador Michael Allen “o indivíduo mais vil da mais vil organização conhecida”. Em sua conta figura a eliminação da resistência nos guetos de Varsóvia e Byalistok, com mais 600 mil vítimas, e a criação de campos de concentração. Globocnick cometeu suicídio com cianeto ao ser capturado por britânicos na Áustria, em maio de 1945.

Máquina ociosa
Iniciada em março de 1942, a operação eliminou 1,7 milhão de judeus e só não foi mais eficiente pela absoluta falta de gente para matar. Ou seja, a máquina de morte nazista era tão eficiente e abominável que apresentou capacidade ociosa mais de dois anos antes do final do conflito. Porém, se tivessem vencido os soviéticos na Frente Leste, o processo certamente teria se repetido contra judeus e eslavos da Rússia, Ucrânia e Belarus. Tanto que parte dos que sobreviveram trabalharam como escravos no esforço de guerra em instalações próximas aos campos, que depois incluiria o de Majdanek.
De acordo com Lewi Stone, a rapidez impediu qualquer tentativa de resistência. “O massacre acabou antes que houvesse tempo para uma resposta organizada”, diz. Os detalhes seguem surpreendentes quando comparados com eventos recentes. O genocídio de Ruanda, em 1994, matou 800 mil pessoas em 100 dias, com média diária de 8 mil. Sobre a relevância dessa conta macabra, Stone explica que é preciso entender as causas e padrões desses mecanismos criminosos para ficarmos alertas. “Bósnia, Ruanda, Darfur, Burundi, Síria e Myanmar passaram por operações de assassínio em grande escala nos últimos 25 anos. Alguns dos quais poderiam ser evitados”, alerta.

A força dos sobreviventes 
A vontade de viver pode estar oculta na mente ou no DNA, necessitando de uma terrível provação para ser ativada. É o que sugere um estudo israelense conduzido entre sobreviventes do Holocausto. Foi descoberto que, na média, eles viveram 84,8 anos, contra os 77,7 anos da média da população local. Divulgada este mês, a pesquisa analisou usuários de um serviço privado de saúde e foi conduzida entre 1998 e 2017. Foram estudados os históricos médicos de 38 mil pessoas nascidas na Europa, entre 1911 e 1945, comparando-as com 35 mil nascidos em Israel no mesmo período. O grupo de controle não passou pelo sofrimento da perseguição. Apesar de viverem 7 anos a mais, os que saíram dos campos de concentração e guetos foram mais propensos a males crônicos, como hipertensão (16%), doença renal (11%) e demência (7%). Características como estoicismo e resistência física, além da maior consciência para com a saúde decorrente da experiência traumática, podem estar entre as razões da longevidade. Os resultados provocarão novos estudos. “Foi uma cruel seleção darwinista que os levou a viver mais”, afirmou o pesquisador Gideon Koren.


domingo, 2 de setembro de 2018

Como salvar judeus, por todos os meios possíveis - Jamil Chade (OESP)

 Os passaportes, a rigor, não eram falsos, e sim verdadeiros. O conteúdo é que não correspondia à informação correta dos detentores. Isso se fez por dinheiro? Certamente, mas provavelmente não por motivos sórdidos.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Ajuda latino-americana salvou centenas de judeus do Holocausto
Passaportes falsos de Paraguai, Bolívia e Haiti foram usados para enganar
a repressão nazista e impedir que judeus poloneses fossem enviados ao Gueto de Varsóvia
Jamil Chade, Correspondente / Genebra, 
O Estado de S.Paulo, 02 Setembro 2018 | 06h00

GENEBRA - Centenas de judeus poloneses foram salvos do Gueto de Varsóvia graças a passaportes latino-americanos falsos. As informações constam em documentos encontrados em arquivos da diplomacia da Suíça, que mostram um novo papel para Paraguai, Honduras, Bolívia e El Salvador na 2.ª Guerra.
Em 1942, mais de 340 mil judeus ainda viviam no Gueto de Varsóvia. A ordem de deportação em massa veio no verão. Mas, pelas regras estabelecidas pelos nazistasalemães, judeus com passaportes de países neutros poderiam se salvar. O motivo: uma eventual troca por alemães detidos no exterior. O Brasil, que havia declarado guerra ao Eixo em agosto de 1942, deixara de ser um país neutro. 
Usando essa brecha, um diplomata polonês em Berna iniciou uma operação de falsificação de passaportes para retirar milhares de judeus de Varsóvia. Aleksander Lado e seus assistentes Juliusz Kühl, o cônsul Konstanty Rokicki e outros infiltrados, iniciaram a operação que ficaria conhecida como “Serviços de Passaporte”. 
A ideia surgiu depois do caso de Eli Sturnbuch, um polonês judeu que vivia na Suíça e falsificou um passaporte paraguaio para retirar do Gueto de Varsóvia sua noiva, Guta Eisenzweig.
De acordo com os documentos, a operação começou em outubro de 1941 e envolvia o suíço Rudolf Hugli, que na época era o cônsul honorário do Paraguai em Berna. Em troca de dinheiro pago pela própria embaixada da Polônia, ele garantiria lotes de passaportes falsos do país, que eram enviados ao gueto. 
A partir de 1942, uma lista de pessoas que deveriam ser resgatadas começou a ser feita na Suíça. Ela incluía professores, rabinos, estudantes e ricos empresários capazes de, uma ver terminada a guerra, restabelecer a influência dos judeus na região.

Fuga do Nazismo

Um dos retirados foi Aharon Rokeach, rabino da dinastia Belz Hasidic. Ele escapou dos nazistas graças a um dos passaportes fabricados pela rede clandestina de poloneses. Para que ele pudesse receber o documento, a Santa Sé garantiu a entrega. 
Aos poucos, outros países latino-americanos que tinham declarado neutralidade passaram a ser consultados e uma tabela de preços foi estabelecida. Para um passaporte paraguaio, o interessado deveria pagar 1,2 mil francos suíços, numa época em que o salário diário não chegava a 20 francos suíços. 
A notícia do esquema rapidamente chegou a Varsóvia. Dando propinas aos soldados alemães, judeus conseguiam enviar à Suíça cartas com fotos e dados pessoais. Improvisadas, algumas das fotos estavam distantes de qualquer padrão de documento oficial. Algumas delas eram recortadas de fotos de famílias. Em outras, quem buscava ser salvo estava em posições informais ou mesmo fumando. 
Os documentos, uma vez prontos, eram enviados de novo ao gueto e garantiam a sobrevivência dos judeus. Quem tivesse aquele passaporte estrangeiro era enviado para acampamentos e prisões, não para campos de extermínio. 
Segundo os arquivos, mais de 2,2 mil passaportes paraguaios foram comprados, além de centenas de outros dos demais países latino-americanos. Alguns documentos chegam a mencionar o fato de que o sistema fez circular mais de 4 mil passaportes. Durante dois anos, os funcionários da embaixada da Polônia preencheram à mão os nomes nos passaportes. 

Retaliação de Hitler

Quando o esquema foi descoberto pela polícia suíça, o temor de uma retaliação por parte de Adolf Hitler contra os países latino-americanos deu fim ao sistema. Ou seja, não evitou que milhares de judeus fossem enviados para Auschwitz. 
Os suíços, preocupados em não irritar Hitler, iniciaram investigações no início de 1943. Os alemães também começaram a desconfiar do número exagerado de latino-americanos que apareciam nos campos de Vittel, para onde os judeus estrangeiros eram enviados. 
Berlim consultou os governos latino-americanos, que desconheciam os cidadãos. Na segunda metade de 1943, os suíços desmantelaram o esquema. Em setembro, os diplomatas foram punidos com a retirada de seu status de representantes. 
A seguir, a repressão contra os judeus que receberam passaportes fez com que muitos fossem enviados a Auschwitz. A Polônia diz que 330 pessoas escaparam do gueto graças aos passaportes falsos. Outros 387 que já tinham recebido o documento foram enviados a campos de extermínio. Outros 430 desapareceram após receber os passaportes. 
No início de agosto, o governo polonês anunciou que, depois de meses de negociação, uma parte desses documentos, que estavam numa coleção privada em Israel, será entregue ao Museu Auschwitz-Birkenau, incluindo fotos e exemplares de oito passaportes falsificados. 

quarta-feira, 9 de agosto de 2017

Tribunais de direitos humanos - Ian Buruma (NYRBooks)


Fools, Cowards, or Criminals?
The New York Review of Books,

The Memory of Justice

a documentary film directed by Marcel Ophuls, restored by the Academy Film Archive in association with Paramount Pictures and the Film Foundation
available on HBO
AFP/Getty ImagesNazi leaders accused of war crimes during World War II standing to hear the verdict in their trial, Nuremburg, October 2, 1946. Albert Speer is third from right in the back row of defendants; Karl Dönitz is at the far left of the same row.

1.

The main Nuremberg war crimes trials began in November 1945 and continued until October 1946. Rebecca West, who reported on the painfully slow proceedings for The New Yorker, described the courtroom as a “citadel of boredom.” But there were moments of drama: Hermann Göring under cross-examination running rings around the chief US prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, for example. Jackson’s opening statement, however, provided the trial’s most famous words:
We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this Trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity’s aspirations to do justice.
How well humanity lived up to these words, after a good number of bloody conflicts involving some of the same powers that sat in judgment on the Nazi leaders, is the subject of The Memory of Justice, the four-and-a-half-hour documentary that has rarely been seen since 1976 but is considered by its director, Marcel Ophuls, to be his best—even better, perhaps, than his more famous The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), about the Nazi occupation of France, the Vichy government, and the French Resistance.
Near the beginning of The Memory of Justice, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin declares that the barbarism of Nazi Germany can only be seen as a universal moral catastrophe: “I proceed from the assumption that every human being is guilty.” The fact that it happened in Germany, he says, doesn’t mean that it cannot happen elsewhere. This statement comes just after we have seen the Nazi leaders, one after the other, declare their innocence in the Nuremberg courtroom.

We also hear a former French paratrooper recall how the French in Algeria systematically tortured and murdered men, women, and children. There are gruesome images of the Vietnam War. And Telford Taylor, US counsel for the prosecution at Nuremberg, wonders how any of us would cope with the “degeneration of standards under pressures.” Later in the film, Taylor says that his views on Americans and American history have changed more than his views on the Germans whom he once judged.
Such juxtapositions are enough to send some people into a fury. The art critic Harold Rosenberg accused Ophuls in these pages of being “lured…into a near-nihilistic bog in which no one is guilty, because all are guilty and there is no one who is morally qualified to judge.”1 Ophuls, according to Rosenberg, “trivialized” the Nazi crimes and “diluted” the moral awfulness of the death camps.
This is to misunderstand what Ophuls was up to. The film never suggests that Auschwitz and the My Lai massacre, or French torture prisons in Algiers, are equivalent, let alone that the Vietnam War was a criminal enterprise on the same level as the Holocaust. Nor does Ophuls doubt that the judgment on Göring and his gang at Nuremberg was justified. Ophuls himself was a refugee from the Nazis, forced to leave Germany in 1933, and to flee again when France was invaded in 1940. Instead he tries, dispassionately and sometimes with touches of sardonic humor, to complicate the problem of moral judgment. What makes human beings who are normally unexceptional commit atrocities under abnormal circumstances? What if such crimes are committed by our fellow citizens in the name of our own country? How does our commitment to justice appear today in the light of the judgments at Nuremberg? Will the memory of justice, as Plato assumed, make us strive to do better?
Ophuls does not dilute the monstrosity of Nazi crimes at all. But he refuses to simply regard the perpetrators as monsters. “Belief in the Nazis as monsters,” he once said, “is a form of complacency.” This reminds me of something the controversial German novelist Martin Walser once said about the Auschwitz trials held in Frankfurt in the 1960s. He wasn’t against them. But he argued that the daily horror stories in the popular German press about the grotesque tortures inflicted by Nazi butchers made it easier for ordinary Germans to distance themselves from these crimes and the regime that made them happen. Who could possibly identify with such brutes? If only monsters were responsible for the Holocaust and other mass murders, there would never be any need for the rest of us to look in the mirror.
It is true that Ophuls does not interview former Nazis, such as Albert Speer and Admiral Karl Dönitz, as a prosecutor. His role is not to indict, but to understand better what motivates such men, especially men (and women) who seem otherwise quite civilized. For this, too, Rosenberg condemned him, arguing that he should have balanced the views voiced by these criminals with those of their victims, for otherwise viewers might give the old rogues the benefit of the doubt.
There seems to be little danger of that. Consider Dönitz, for example, who makes the bizarre statement that he could not have been anti-Semitic, since he never discriminated against Jews in the German navy, forgetting for a moment that there were no known Jews in Hitler’s Kriegsmarine. When Ophuls asks him whether he really believes that there was no connection between his ferociously anti-Semitic speeches and the fate of the Jews under the government he served, the admiral’s tight little mouth twitches alarmingly before denying everything in the harsh yelp of a cornered dog. This speaks for itself, and needs no “balancing” by another voice.
Ophuls is a superb interviewer, polite, cool, and relentless. His tone is often skeptical, but never moralistic or aggressive. This allows him to get people to say things they may not have divulged to a more confrontational interlocutor. Albert Speer was responsible for, among other things, the ghastly fate of countless slave laborers pulled from concentration camps to work in German armaments factories. Responding to Ophuls’s quiet probing, this most slippery of customers speaks at length about the moral blindness and criminal opportunism that came from his ruthless ambition. Unlike most Germans of his generation, Speer believed that the Nuremberg trials were justified. But then, he could be said to have got off rather lightly with a prison sentence rather than being hanged.
Where Dönitz is shrill and defensive, Speer is smooth, even charming. This almost certainly saved his life. Telford Taylor believed that Speer should have been hanged, according to the evidence and criteria of Nuremberg. Julius Streicher was executed for being a vile anti-Semitic propagandist, even though he never had anything like the power of Speer. But he was an uncouth, bullet-headed ruffian, described by Rebecca West as “a dirty old man of the sort that gives trouble in parks,” a man one could easily regard as a monster. The judges warmed to Speer as a kind of relief. Compared to Streicher, the vulgar, strutting Göring, the pompous martinet General Alfred Jodl, or the hulking SS chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Speer was a gentleman. What saved him, Taylor recalls in the film, was his superior class. When Ophuls puts this to him, a ghostly smile flits across Speer’s face: “If that’s the explanation…, then I am only too pleased I made such a good impression.” In the event, Speer got twenty years; Dönitz only got ten.
Ophuls said in an interview that it was easy to like Speer. But there is no suggestion that this mitigated his guilt. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who also interviewed Speer at length, called him “the true criminal of Nazi Germany,” precisely because he was clearly not a sadistic brute but a highly educated, well-mannered, “normal” human being who should have known better than to be part of a murderous regime. This is perhaps the main point of Ophuls’s film as well: there was nothing special about the Germans that predisposed them to become killers or, more often, to look away when the killings were done. There is no such thing as a criminal people. A quiet-spoken young architect can end up with more blood on his hands than a Jew-baiting thug. This, I think, is what Yehudi Menuhin meant by his warning that it could happen anywhere.

2.

Far from being a moral nihilist who trivialized the Nazi crimes, Ophuls was so committed to his examination of guilt and justice that The Memory of Justice had a narrow escape from oblivion. The companies that commissioned it, including the BBC, did not like the rough cut. They thought it was far too long. Since the film was to be based on Telford Taylor’s book Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (1970), they wanted more on the Vietnam War and less on Nuremberg. Rejection only made Ophuls, who never took kindly to being told what to do by the men in suits, stick more stubbornly to his own vision. He was less interested in a specifically American tragedy, or indeed a German tragedy, than in man’s descent into barbarousness, wherever or whenever it happens.
Ophuls was locked out of the cutting room in London. The producers put together a shorter version of the film, with a different spin, which was sold to ZDF television in Germany. Ophuls then traveled all over Europe to save his own version. A German court stopped ZDF from showing the shorter one. The original edit was smuggled to the US, where a private screening reduced Mike Nichols to tears. Hamilton Fish, later a well-known publisher, managed to persuade a group of investors to buy the original movie back and Paramount to distribute it. It was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976, and then in New York and on college campuses, as well as on television in many countries. But for the cussed perseverance of Ophuls and the help of his American backers, The Memory of Justice would never have been seen. In Fish’s words, “You needed his type of personality to make such a film. He took history on personally.”
After its initial run, however, the movie disappeared. Contracts on archival rights ran out. The film stock was in danger of deteriorating. And so a documentary masterpiece could easily have been lost if Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation had not stepped in with Paramount to put it all back together again, a labor that took ten years and was completed in 2015.
Much has changed, of course, since 1976. Germany is a different country now, geographically, politically, and culturally. When Ophuls talked to Dönitz, the West German establishment was still riddled with former Nazis. Most of the wartime generation masked their dirty secrets with evasions or shabby justifications. The history of the Third Reich, in the words of Eugen Kogon, a Holocaust survivor and the first German historian to write about the camps, was still “the corpse in the cellar.”
Quite ordinary people, like the smiling man encountered by Ophuls in a small town in Schleswig-Holstein, still remembered the Third Reich with great fondness as an orderly time when people knew how to behave and there was “no problem of crime.” Ophuls happened to meet this friendly burgher while he was trying to track down a female doctor who had been convicted at Nuremberg for murdering children in concentration camps by injecting oil into their veins, to name just one of her grisly experiments. After she was released from prison in 1952, she continued for a time to practice as a family doctor. She was, it appears, well respected, even friendly.
When Ophuls finally managed to find her, she very politely declined to be interviewed, since she was in poor health. Another former concentration camp doctor, Gerhard Rose, did agree to talk, however, but only to deny any guilt, claiming that his medical experiments (infecting victims with malaria, for example) served a humanitarian purpose, and that the US Army performed experiments too. Ophuls observes, quite rightly, that American experiments were hardly conducted under the kind of circumstances prevailing in Dachau and Buchenwald. But the hypocrisy of the Western Allies in this matter might have been better illustrated by pointing out that German and Japanese doctors who committed even worse crimes than Dr. Rose were protected by the US government because their knowledge might come in handy during the cold war.2
Perhaps the most disturbing interview in the movie is not with an unrepentant Nazi or a war criminal, but with the gentlemanly and highly esteemed lawyer Otto Kranzbühler. A navy judge during the war, Kranzbühler was defense counsel for Admiral Dönitz at Nuremberg, where he cut a dashing figure in his navy uniform. He later had a successful career as a corporate lawyer, after defending the likes of Alfried Krupp against accusations of having exploited slave labor. Kranzbühler never justified Nazism. But when asked by Ophuls whether he had discussed his own part in the Third Reich with his children, he replied that he had come up with a formula to make them understand: if you were ignorant of what went on, you were a fool; if you knew, but looked the other way, you were a coward; if you knew, and took part, you were a criminal. Were his children reassured? Kranzbühler: “My children didn’t recognize their father in any of the above.”
Dominique Nabokov: Marcel Ophuls, Neuilly, circa 1988
It was a brilliant evasion. But Kranzbühler was no more evasive than the French prosecutor at Nuremberg, the equally urbane Edgar Faure, who had been a member of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France. Ophuls asked him about French war crimes during the Algerian War of Independence, when torture was systematically applied, civilians were massacred, and prisoners were thrown out of helicopters, a practice that later became widespread under South American military regimes. “Well,” said Faure, “events do get out of hand. But you can’t really criticize politicians who have the difficult task of running the government.” Edgar Faure was prime minister of France during part of that war.
The 1970s were a critical time in Germany. There were still people, like the son of the former Waffen SS officer interviewed by Ophuls, who believed that the Nazi death camps were a lie, and it was the Americans who built the gas chambers in concentration camps. But the postwar generation had begun to question their parents amid the student revolts of the 1960s. Just a year after The Memory of Justice was completed, radicalism in Germany turned toxic, when members of the Red Army Faction murdered bankers, kidnapped industrialists, and hijacked planes, all in the name of antifascism, as though to make up for their parents’ complicity with the Nazis.
German families were torn apart by memories of the war. Ophuls includes his own not uncomplicated family in the film. His German wife, Regine, the daughter of a Wehrmacht veteran, speaks openly to American students about her own childhood under the Nazis. One of their teenaged daughters talks about the need to come to terms with the past, even though their mother finds seventeen a little too young to be confronted with images of concentration camps. Then Regine says something personal that cuts to the core of her husband’s life and work. She wishes sometimes that Ophuls would make films that were not about such dark matters. What kind of films? he asks. Lubitsch films, she replies, or My Fair Lady all over again. We then hear Cyd Charisse singing “New Sun in the Sky” from The Band Wagon (1953), while watching Ophuls in a car on his way to find the doctor who murdered children in concentration camps.
This is typical of the Ophuls touch, show tunes evoking happier times overlapping with memories of horror. The motive is not to pile on cheap irony, but to bring in a note of autobiography. His father was Max Ophuls, the great director of Liebelei (1933), La Ronde (1950), and Lola Montès (1955). Max was one of the geniuses of the exile cinema. Memories of a sweeter life in imperial Vienna or nineteenth-century France are darkened in his films by a sense of betrayal and perverse sexuality.
Nostalgia for better days haunted his son, who spent his youth on the run from terror with a father whose genius he always felt he couldn’t live up to. He would have loved to direct movies like La Ronde. Instead he made great documentary films about the past that won’t let him go, about Vichy France, or Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo butcher of Lyon, or Nuremberg. The true horror stories are mixed in all his work, as in a collage, with songs from pre-war Berlin music halls and Hollywood movies.
One of the most unforgettable examples of the Ophuls touch is a scene in a film that has almost never been viewed (another bitter fight with producers). November Days (1991) is about the fall of the Berlin wall. One of the people he interviews is Markus Wolf, the former East German spy chief, whose father, the Communist writer Friedrich Wolf, had known Max Ophuls in pre-war Berlin. While Markus dodges every question about his past with blatant lies, we hear music from one of Max’s movies slowly swell on the soundtrack as Marcel thinks out loud to himself how lucky he was that his father decided to move west instead of east.

3.

In the second half of The Memory of Justice, the focus shifts from east to west, as it were, from Germany to France and the US. Daniel Ellsberg, speaking of Vietnam, says that “this war will cause us to be monstrous.” We hear stories from men who were there of American soldiers murdering civilians in cold blood. We hear a Vietnam veteran talk about being told to shut up by his superiors when he reports a massacre of civilians ordered by his commanding officer. We hear Ellsberg say that no one higher than a lieutenant was ever convicted for the mass killing of Vietnamese civilians by US soldiers in My Lai.
On the French side, stories about summary executions and the use of torture during the Algerian War (1954–1962) are followed by a crucial question put by Ophuls to Edgar Faure, the former Nuremberg prosecutor and later prime minister of France: Did he, Edgar Faure, think the French would have accepted an international commission that would judge, on the basis of Nuremberg, what the French did in Algeria? No, said Faure, after a pensive suck on his pipe, since one cannot compare the invasion of another country to the actions taken by a sovereign state in its own colony.
Sir Hartley Shawcross, the British prosecutor at Nuremberg, speaking to Ophuls in his elegant country house in Sussex, remembers how much his American colleagues had believed in justice and the rule of law. Like other British officials at the time, he took a more cynical view: “All law is created by the victors for the vanquished.” What mattered in his opinion, however, was not who made the laws, but whether the principles were right. About this he had little doubt.
Looking back, Otto Kranzbühler shared Shawcross’s memory of American idealism. But he believed that as a model for the future, Nuremberg had been a failure. The trial, as he saw it, presupposed a united world community in which wars would be a thing of the past. This illusion did not last long.
In fact, the trial was tainted from the beginning, not only because among the men who judged the Nazi leaders were Soviet veterans of Stalin’s bloody show trials, but also because Allied war crimes could not even be mentioned. A former British officer involved in the wartime bomber command had no doubt that the destruction of Dresden was a war crime.
If The Memory of Justice has a weakness, it is that this second half of the film, concentrating on French and American war crimes, is not quite as gripping as the first half about the German legacy of Nuremberg. Perhaps Ophuls’s heart was not in it to the same extent. Or perhaps no matter what one thinks of My Lai or Algiers, they are overshadowed by the sheer scale and savagery of the Nazi crimes.
Then again, pace Rosenberg, Ophuls doesn’t suggest that they are equivalent. What is comparable is the way people look away from, or justify, or deny what is done in their name, or under their watch. The wife of a US marine who died in Vietnam, living in a house stuffed with flags and military memorabilia, simply refuses to entertain the idea that her country could ever do anything wrong. More interesting, and perhaps more damning, is the statement by John Kenneth Galbraith, an impeccably liberal former diplomat and economist. His view of the Vietnam War, he tells Ophuls, had been entirely practical, without any consideration of moral implications.
Vietnam was not the Eastern Front in 1943. My Lai was not Auschwitz. And Galbraith was certainly no Albert Speer. Nevertheless, this technocratic view of violent conflict is precisely what leads many people so far astray under a criminal regime. In the film, Ellsberg describes the tunnel vision of Speer as “controlled stupidity,” the refusal to see the consequences of what one does and stands for.
This brings to mind another brilliant documentary about controlled stupidity, Errol Morris’s The Fog of War (2003), featuring Robert McNamara, the technocrat behind the annihilation of Japanese cities in World War II and the escalation of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. To him, the deliberate killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians was a mathematical problem. Only many years later did he admit that if the US had lost World War II, he could certainly have been indicted as a war criminal.
Even more chilling is another documentary by Morris, which received less attention than The Fog of War. In The Unknown Known (2013), we see Donald Rumsfeld, another gentlemanly technocrat, shrug his shoulders about Vietnam, commenting that “sometimes things just don’t work out.” When, as the result of another war in which he was even more intimately involved, Baghdad was convulsed in anarchic violence, he notoriously remarked that “stuff happens.” This is what Hannah Arendt called a “criminal lack of imagination.”
Perhaps the US in 1945 set its ideals too high. But it is a tragedy that the same country that believed in international law, and did so much to establish the norms of justice, has done so little to live up to them. The US is not even a signatory to the International Criminal Court, a flawed institution like the Nuremberg tribunal, but a necessary step in the right direction. No one can hold the greatest military power on earth accountable for what it does, not for torture rooms in Abu Ghraib, not for locking people up indefinitely without trial, not for murdering civilians with drones.
For Germans living under the Third Reich it was risky to imagine too well what their rulers were doing. To protest was positively dangerous. This is not yet true for those of us living in the age of Trump, when the president of the US openly condones torture and applauds thugs for beating up people at his rallies. We need films like this masterpiece by Ophuls more than ever to remind us of what happens when even the memories of justice fade away.
  1. “The Shadow of the Furies,” The New York Review, January 20, 1977; see also the exchange between Rosenberg and Ophuls, The New York Review, March 17, 1977.  
  2. The most notorious case was that of Surgeon General Ishii Shiro of Unit 731, the biological warfare unit of the Imperial Japanese Army, who tortured countless people to death in Manchuria in the course of his experiments. He was shielded by US authorities from prosecution as a war criminal in exchange for data from the experiments. 

terça-feira, 2 de fevereiro de 2016

Uma nota do Itamaraty sobre o Holocausto em geral (deve ter muitos holocaustos por ai...)

Holocausto contra pigmeus, hotentotes, gente feia, contra quem afinal?
Não tinha reparado nessa nota do Itamaraty no dia 27 de janeiro de 2016, “Dia Internacional em Memória das Vítimas do Holocausto”. Transcrevo:

O Brasil une-se hoje, 27 de janeiro, às celebrações em todo o mundo da memória das vítimas do Holocausto, conforme decisão da Assembleia Geral das Nações Unidas. Nesta data, em 1945, tropas do Exército Vermelho libertaram o campo de extermínio de Auschwitz.
Ao recordar a memória dos milhões de vítimas inocentes da barbárie nazista e a atuação heroica daqueles que, como os brasileiros Aracy de Carvalho Guimarães Rosa e Luiz Martins de Souza Dantas, trabalharam em condições adversas e com alto risco pessoal para salvar vidas, o Governo brasileiro reafirma seu inabalável compromisso com os direitos humanos e com a eliminação de todas as formas de racismo e de discriminação.
No momento em que manifestações de intolerância se repetem com preocupante regularidade em várias partes do mundo, é fundamental manter viva a memória do Holocausto e educar as novas gerações, para evitar que voltem a ocorrer crimes contra a humanidade como os que marcaram aquele que é um dos períodos mais sombrios da história.

Hummm, deixa eu ver:
"Exército Vermelho"??!! Uai!
Quem é que fala uma coisa dessas? Só pode ser um daqueles anticomunistas furibundos, hidrófobos, que veem comunistas até nas dobras das calças do Lula. Ou então é um dos entusiastas das gloriosas Forças Armadas da (infelizmente) finada União Soviética, que libertaram a humanidade do monstro do nazi-fascismo, para quem as mesmas FFAA soviéticas que foram simplesmente guilhotinadas em 1937-38 pelo "marechal" Stalin, representaram e representarão sempre o Exército Vermelho.
Será que foi o Itamaraty que redigiu essa nota?
 
Mas, peraí: Holocausto contra quem?
O Hitler saiu matando gente por aí, indiscriminadamente, vítimas inocentes escolhidas a dedo, ou recolhidas ao acaso, assim como quem cata champignons na floresta?
"Crimes contra a humanidade"???
Foi toda a humanidade que Hitler visou?
O Holocausto era para extirpar feios, gordos, deformados, gente cheirando mal, enfim, quem não era do Partido Nazista?
 
Que coisa, gente!
Será que foi mesmo o Itamaraty que redigiu essa nota?
Um prêmio para quem descobrir quem foi...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 2 de fevereiro de 2016

terça-feira, 30 de setembro de 2014

Duas tragedias da humanidade: Ebola e Holocausto - Der Spiegel

Matérias desta data (30/09/2014) na revista alemã Der Spiegel:

INTERVIEW WITH EBOLA DISCOVERER PETER PIOT

'It Is What People Call a Perfect Storm'

Almost four decades ago, Peter Piot was part of the team that discovered the Ebola virus. In a SPIEGEL interview, he describes how the disease was isolated and explains why the current outbreak is different than any that have come before.
Photo Gallery: A Growing Epidemic

A VOICE FOR THE DEAD

Recovering the Lost History of Sobibór

Henchman with the Nazi SS sought to cover up the mass murder that occurred at the Sobibór concentration camp in eastern Poland. Archeologists recently uncovered the site's hidden gas chambers and important artifacts that shed light on the victims.

domingo, 10 de agosto de 2014

Raoul Wallenberg, salvador de judeus: em tempos obscuros, surgem homens dignos...


Schindler sueco' desafiou nazistas e salvou judeus da morte há 70 anos
SILVIO CIOFFI
OLIVIA FREITAS
DE SÃO PAULO
09/08/2014  Folha.Mundo.

Em julho de 1944, o sueco Raoul Wallenberg tinha 31 anos e uma missão na cabeça: salvar da deportação nazista estimados 100 mil judeus-húngaros que ainda viviam em Budapeste.
Naquele mês, ele chegava à Embaixada da Suécia na capital da Hungria.
Até essa data, o alemão Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962), oficial nazista em Budapeste, já havia enviado cerca de 400 mil pessoas ao campo de extermínio de Auschwitz-Birkenau, na Polônia.
Formado em arquitetura pela Universidade de Michigan (EUA) e vindo de uma família conhecida como "os Rockefellers da Suécia", Wallenberg contou com mais do que um clã influente para adquirir imunidade diplomática sueca e, com ela, agir numa Budapeste convulsionada pela ocupação alemã.
A ajuda extra veio do presidente americano Franklin Roosevelt, que nos derradeiros seis meses da guerra criou a organização "War Refugee Board", à qual o governo sueco aderiu.
A Suécia era neutra na Segunda Guerra Mundial; assim, na condição de diplomata (embora não de carreira), Wallenberg pôde emitir passaportes provisórios ("shutz-passes") e alugar prédios que, pintados de amarelo, serviriam de moradia e de "território seguro", garantindo a sobrevivência para milhares de perseguidos.
Por sua atitude, Wallenberg passou a ser chamado de "Schindler sueco", uma referência ao industrial alemão Oskar Schindler (1908-1974), famoso mundialmente por ter salvado cerca de 1.200 judeus do Holocausto, a maioria empregados de suas fábricas.
No último dia 9 de julho, em memória aos 70 anos da chegada de Wallenberg a Budapeste, o Congresso americano lhe concedeu postumamente a Medalha de Ouro. A honraria foi recebida por sua irmã, Nina Lagergren.
DISCUSSÃO ÁSPERA
Inimigos nada cordiais, Wallenberg e Eichmann possivelmente discutiram as deportações de judeus num jantar na casa do diplomata sueco Lars Berg, no fim de 1944.
Berg relembrou o diálogo áspero que ambos teriam tido em entrevista publicada pela "The New York Times Magazine" em 1980. "Foi um jantar especialmente civilizado para uma época brutal. Tomamos brandy, ninguém falou alto, mas era possível ver o fogo da artilharia russa através da janela [o Exército Vermelho começava o cerco a Budapeste para expulsar os nazistas]."
Nesse encontro, Wallenberg teria afrontado Eichmann e dito: "Veja, você tem que enfrentar isso. Perdeu a guerra. Por que não desistir agora?"
Eichmann teria respondido que o fim até poderia estar próximo, mas continuaria a fazer seu trabalho, mesmo que fosse morto.
Então, sempre de acordo com o relato de Berg, Eichmann e Wallenberg se encararam. "Não pense que você é imune só porque é um 'diplomata neutro'", teria dito o alemão.
Coincidência ou não, alguns dias depois, o carro diplomático de Wallenberg, sem a sua presença, foi esmagado por um caminhão.
Presidente do instituto que leva o nome de Raoul Wallenberg, o empresário argentino de origem armênia Eduardo Eurnekian, 81, que administra 52 aeroportos e é dono de bancos e vinícolas, diz não ter dúvidas de que Eichmann tinha conhecimento das atividades de Wallenberg.
Eurnekian o define como "brilhante, charmoso, falante e cheio de imaginação", além de ter sido "um dos principais salvadores que a humanidade já teve".
SUMIÇO E MISTÉRIO
Seis meses após a chegada de Wallenberg a Budapeste, o Exército Vermelho concluiu a ocupação da cidade, em 17 de janeiro de 1945.
Como os soviéticos eram aliados dos americanos, ele foi ao encontro do general russo Malinovsky.
Quando essa reunião ocorreu, a diplomacia soviética enviou telegrama aos suecos dizendo que Wallenberg estava a salvo, mas ele nunca mais foi visto.
A mãe de Wallenberg procurou a embaixada soviética em Estocolmo, capital sueca, em 1945, com um pedido de esclarecimentos sobre seu paradeiro. Como resposta, ouviu que ele "estava bem de saúde, num local seguro, em Moscou".
A diplomacia sueca não fez muito empenho em afrontar a União Soviética, pois Wallenberg não era, de fato, um diplomata de carreira. E, à época, ninguém queria confusão com os soviéticos.
Em 1947, um informe da chancelaria em Moscou disse que Wallenberg tinha morrido depois de sofrer um ataque cardíaco.
Logo depois, no mesmo ano, um encarregado de negócios estrangeiros soviético respondeu à questão do paradeiro de Wallenberg de modo diferente: "Ele não é uma pessoa conhecida na União Soviética".
Surgiram, então, rumores de que ele tinha morrido numa escaramuça de rua durante a tomada de Budapeste.
Em 1957, vários prisioneiros foram libertados e, entre eles, houve quem confirmasse ter visto Wallenberg num 'gulag' (campo de trabalhos forçados) soviético, afirmando que se referiam a ele como "o prisioneiro número 7".
ESPIÃO?
Presidente do instituto, Eurnekian acredita na possibilidade de o ditador soviético Josef Stálin (1878-1953) ter inferido que a operação de resgate dos judeus-húngaros poderia ser apenas um disfarce para Wallenberg, pois havia a suspeita de ele ser um espião a serviço dos EUA.
Hoje é sabido que Wallenberg tinha contato com agentes do Escritório de Serviços Estraégicos (OSS, na sigla em inglês), o serviço de segurança americano durante a Segunda Guerra, que foi o predecessor da CIA.
Especula-se que ele tenha sido cooptado ainda bem jovem, quando estudava na Universidade de Michigan.
"O sumiço de Wallenberg é um capítulo da história que permanece em aberto, e a verdade ainda pode emergir com a abertura de arquivos da burocracia moscovita", afirma Eurnekian.
O instituto que ele dirige oferece recompensa de € 500 mil (aproximadamente R$ 1,53 milhão) para quem der informações que ajudem a esclarecer o paradeiro de Wallenberg.