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The New Yorker's 'Sieg Heil' to Herr Honecker
| Article
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10100 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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4 / 1993 |
1,085 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
The January 11 issue of the New Yorker magazine carried an account of the trial of former East German President Erich Honecker. With this as our guide, we will portray how it might have covered the trial of Adolph Hitler.
"The terminally ill… man sat on the defendants' bench" at Nuremberg. "The court" and the public were "discussing his disease." How seriously had Dr. Morell's treatments affected his heart and liver? Hitler "would rather be a defendant than a patient. He did not believe he had done anything wrong," and he was eager to " advance his case."
For many years Adolph Hitler had been Fuhrer of the Third Reich, "the most powerful man in the" state. "Many hold him responsible for the evils of the" Third Reich. "The man… in the street (who statistically includes the Tattler) would like to see" Hitler "punished." This would "let collaborators off the hook, and it would also gratify the genuinely wronged." The Allies, who seven years earlier had "rolled out a red carpet for" Hitler, indicted him for 107 deaths in the former Auschwitz concentration camp. However, Hitler is terminally ill and will escape any prison term. Indeed, the proceeding cannot be completed with Hitler's lifetime and this "apparently outrages the prosecution and other impartial members of the court."
Originally six defendants were tried with Hitler. Goring was removed, however, because he was in a heroin psychosis. Gobbles was removed because of senile dementia. Himmler was removed because his rages "threatened to disrupt the courtroom." And Streicher was in a coma. That left only two defendants to share the bench with Hitler. "With their canes and wandering eyes, they looked like visitors from an old age home."
Hitler "still radiates a kind of stern intensity…. His back is still straight, a symbol of incorruptibility in Germany…. The spectators of the trail have a bit of trouble grasping him; they see a villain. They should look more closely, but they cannot. They could see there a Young" Nazi "disguised as an elderly grump. They might even see the remains of a hero, the aftermath of heroism."
A painter "by profession," Hitler in the twenties and thirties was an "unbridled opponent" of the Weimar Republic. "This put him in very select company. He was one of a group of organized foes of the… regime who had been arrested" and imprisoned. After release and surrounded by his comrades, "it must have been a thrilling time of utopian hopes-comparable, perhaps, to
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