American Views Abroad


Wednesday, December 13, 2006
 
The last part of the trilogy Die Kinder der Flucht (Fleeing Children) on ZDF, the second public TV station here, was devoted to the city of Breslau, today known as Wroclaw, and its agonizing months from January till May 1945. The fact that the war was lost, totally lost with no chance of reversal, was apparent to all but the most fanatical followers of Hitler. Yet these political fanatics became so hardened in their ideology, or perhaps beneath the ideology it was a lethal combination of anger and denial at losing, that they proved relentless in their pursuit of Final Victory. It caused the meaningless slaughter of thousands of civilians in an attempt to build an airport in the middle of the city in March 1945 so that non-existent extra troops and military hardware could land and drive back an overwhelming Soviet army and it drove untold numbers of young boys to their deaths in a last sick hurrah.

The difference between taking a step back in time and following the lives of those caught up in such horror as compared to watching the nightly news and hearing of yet another bombing with scores dead is that the persons are real and not just a number before going on to the next topic. It highlights how those who grab power and ruthlessly use it can put us in mortal danger. More to the point it shows the utter randomness of war and how, ultimately, it destroys all of us, piece by piece. It brought home how the notion of who is an enemy can get whipped out of control and take on a life of its own. It depends on what you have in your papers identifying you and on the person looking over those papers. Even those you consider your liberators might not necessarily see you as a friend or victim. There were so many parallels to what's going on today, yet the most striking thing is how so little has changed. We are enlightened, supposedly a democracy, yet a deeply unpopular war that is spiralling out of control continues on the whim of one person.

www.zdf.de/ZDFde/inhalt/4/0,1872,4079460,00.html

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