The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age by Robert Aquinas McNally (Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press)
Berlin 1936: Sixteen Days in August by Oliver Hilmes (Other Press)
The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial by Lawrence Douglas (Princeton University Press)
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Writing recently in the London Review of Books about America’s thirst for war against Saddam’s Iraq, Pankaj Mishra observes that George Bush had inherited language perfect for the occasion. He says, “Bush’s own demotic – ‘We’ll smoke them out,’ ‘wanted dead or alive, ‘Pretty soon, we’ll have to start displaying scalps’ – repeatedly invoked wars of extirpation against what the Declaration of Independence had called ‘merciless Indian savages’ … The Atlantic’s Robert Kaplan cheerfully reported that ‘Welcome to Injun Country’ was the refrain among American soldiers worldwide.”
Exporting democracy to the wilds, whether to Iraq or the Iroquois, has proceeded more efficiently when ammunition is expended. For this reason, Robert McNally’s bracing narrative on the American government’s offensive against a small if pugnaciously independent tribe called the Modocs is subtitled “A Story of Genocide.” But he has not larded his writing with moralistic recriminations nor is he attempting to appeal to what his critics have called “public taste.” The Modoc War takes the reader to the moments of decision with a talent for telling detail, apposite use of archival materials, and a capable story-teller’s sense of pacing and direction.
The Modocs inhabited lands on the border between California and Oregon. Numbering about 800 individuals, they first encountered white immigrants around 1840 and quickly succumbed to the effects of smallpox and other infectious diseases. Fiercely protective, they struck back as their tribe suffered. In 1864, they agreed to a treaty with the American government that entailed their merging with the Klamath tribe to the north. But in 1870, under the leadership of their chief Captain Jack (Kientpoos), the Modocs returned to lands they considered their rightful home. Settlers objected (“They are Extreamley saucey, and Menacing”) and the local superintendent for Indian Affairs received an order to move the Modocs back north. On November 29, 1872, soldiers confronted Modoc warriors at Lost River – resulting in as many as 15 dead settlers, two dead soldiers and six wounded, and one dead Modoc and three wounded. The Modocs decamped to the forbidding Lava Beds to the south. The war had begun.
McNally writes, “In describing why he ordered his cavalry troop to charge into the midst of the Modocs at Lost River, Frazier Boutelle saw the tactic as obvious. ‘We were white and they were red,’ wrote Boutelle, the secretly mixed-race second lieutenant, without the least irony. ‘There was the almost invariable result. The dark skin gave way.’”
What began as a skirmish turned into a national call for Modoc blood. Brigadier General Edward R.S. Canby arrived at the Lava Bed encampment to broker a peaceful agreement – but he and a government official were murdered by Kientpoos. “Just before Kientpoos shot him,” writes McNally, “Canby spoke in this demeaning manner to the Modocs, according to [The New York Herald’s Edward] Fox: ‘Nothing could have been kinder than his speech to these savages, and the kind old gentleman talked to them as if they had been his children.” On word of Canby’s death, General of the Army William Tecumseh Sherman telegraphed to the army commander at the Lava Beds: “Your dispatch of yesterday … has been shown to the President, who authorizes me to instruct you to make the attack so strong and persistent that their fate may be commensurate with their crime. You will be fully justified in their utter extermination.”
On June 1, 1873, Kientpoos surrendered. On October 3, he and three Modoc warriors were hanged for war crimes. The remaining 155 Modoc tribe members were exiled to a desolate reservation in what is now Oklahoma. The unraveled hangman’s noose was sold for souvenirs at $5.00 per strand. An army surgeon decapitated the head of Kientpoos and shipped it to the collection of native remains at the Army Medical Museum in Washington for the comparative study of racial differences. In 1898, the skull was transferred to the Smithsonian. In 1984, the Smithsonian returned the remains to Kientpoos’ relatives.
McNally’s chapter on the trial of Kientpoos is quite moving as the defendant attempts to address the charges, describe his peaceful interactions with white settlers, and explain his view of coexistence. An impressive command of cultural context permits McNally to create the sense of witnessing events as they unfolded. Although there is no question about his view of the treatment of the Modocs, the overtly prejudicial statements and acts of his American subjects require little further interpretation. President Grant himself stated, “All the laws and customs of civilized warfare may not be applicable to an armed conflict with the Indian tribes upon our western frontier.”
Towards the end of the book, an Indian nicknamed Steamboat Frank told an army major that “the American mode of warfare seemed bizarre to the Modocs: ‘White man fight one day, two days, three days; one week, two weeks, maybe three weeks or a month; Indian fight one day and want to quit.”
[Published November 1, 2017. 432 pages, 11 b&w plates, $$34.95 hardcover]
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Oliver Hilmes writes in Berlin 1936 that on August 4, 1936, the fourth day of the Olympic Games in Berlin, the renowned Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, a Hitler admirer, “gave a rousing address to ‘the youth of the world’” at the new 110,000-seat Olympic Stadium. Later, he visited one of the Reich’s Labor Service Camps where young women “work in gardens and fields, feed livestock and look after children.” Meanwhile, 35 kilometers north of Berlin at Oranienburg, prisoners from the Esterwegen concentration camp in western Germany were erecting the Sachsenhausen camp which would incarcerate over 200,000 inmates and kill 20,000 of them until the Red Army arrived in 1945.
Berlin 1936 trades animatedly in such contrasts, portraying the blandishments of Berlin and the bonhomie of the Nazi Über-mensches while the Olympic torch relay (a ceremony created by the Germans) is cheered on by hordes of saluting Hitler youth and brownshirts and filmed by Leni Riefenstahl. Hilmes illuminates the conditions that made August 1936 a pivotal point in the Reich’s 12-year reign. In retrospect, it seems surprising that Hitler was ever sensitive to world opinion, and as Richard J. Evans has noted, “he found the internationalism of the event highly suspect. Yet after boycotts of the Olympics were mounted mainly due to Germany’s anti-Semitic actions, Hitler agreed to allow the Games to proceed (they had been designated for Berlin two years before he took power).
Joseph Goebbels mandated in his newspaper The Attack that “We must be more charming than the Parisians, more easygoing than the Viennese, more vivacious than the Romans, more cosmopolitan than London, and more practical than New York.” None of those cities could be as efficient as Berlin in devising certain effects and results. Goebbels even tamped down his media, ordering them to stop “burdening reports on the Olympic Games with racial perspective,” and told Julius Streicher that he could not sell copies of his virulent anti-Jewish paper Der Stürmer in his sidewalk boxes.
The Olympics gave Hitler the opportunity to strut his technological advances and grandiose nationalistic bravado while keeping his adversaries off balance. After pushing his anti-Semitic agenda in the period immediately after his rise to power, Hitler had lately turned down the heat such that even some Jews who had fled Germany now returned. The 1936 Olympics may represent a lull in the policy strivings of the Nazis – yet while America’s Jesse Owens was winning his four gold medals, Hitler was pushing his military to prepare for war by 1940. He had recently marched into the Rhineland, thus expressing his rejection of the Versailles Treaty.
Hilmes propels his narrative in the present tense, vividly portraying the soon to be restrained nightlife of Berlin. Berlin 1936 unleashes a parade of period characters, all with a stake in the Games, some plotting, some tricked – entertainers, diplomats, opportunists, socialites, spies, musicians, metrosexuals, and writers. Throughout the story one may trace the presence of Thomas Wolfe: “The writer initially seemed to care little that Berlin was the epicenter of a brutal dictatorship that persecuted, imprisoned and murdered its political enemies. Although his views would later change, the American author praised the Germans as the ‘cleanest, kindest, warmest-hearted, and most honorable people I’ve met in Europe.’” Wolfe came to Berlin to feel the force of his own celebrity and departed with the sickening sense that something fatefully disturbing had coalesced in Berlin.
The competitive games are briskly described. In one episode, the Peruvian football team is deprived of a victory when three of their goals are disallowed. Peruvian fans swarm the field and attack an Austrian player: “And the Peruvians? They smell a conspiracy. Nazi Germany has pressured FIFA to cheat Peru’s national team, which include five black players, of victory.” FIFA decides to stage a rematch with no spectators; the Peruvians boycott and leave Berlin.
Hilmes captures the highly politicized relations of this moment, because for two weeks Berlin had become a diverting magnet for the world’s tensions. He relates a story about Werner Finck, one of the last satirists to poke his pen in Goebbels’ eye. An actor and cabaret star, Finck wrote a daily column for the Berliner Tageblatt (which would be shut down in 1939). “The visitors from all over the world are leaving. Never have they been so spectacularly welcomed,” Finck wrote. “The question is: how have Leni’s cameras captured it all? … Suddenly she sees in reverse how positively the Negro ran. In the negatives, we get our revenge. The white man is at the head of the pack — meters in front of the others, while the black fellows bring up the rear!”
[Published February 6, 2018. 312 pages, $$24.95 hardcover]
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“It quickly became clear to me that there was an issue more important even than the fact that mass murderers remained at large and undisturbed,” wrote Tom Bowers in The Pledge Betrayed in 1981, an investigation of the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. “What really merited investigation was that those who gave the orders for murders … returned to their desks and were again in a position to give orders.” With the founding of the German Federal Republic in 1949, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer began dismantling the Allied program for reckoning with the past. By 1958, most war criminals had been pardoned. Only a few of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials remained imprisoned. As Bower noted, amnesty rulings allowed the reintegration of hundreds of thousands of Nazi officials and sympathizers – including Gestapo and Waffen SS members.
Adenauer’s actions permitted the individual German to disclaim any personal responsibility for the vast scale of crimes. Such was realpolitik. But the silences and denials at mid-century incurred a cost. By the mid-1970’s, with the publication of newly detailed histories of the Holocaust, reexamination was underway and incriminations followed. As Lawrence Douglas notes in The Right Wrong Man, “The mid-1970s was also a time when the United States was finally beginning to address the disturbing legacy of the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. In theory, the act had barred the issuance of visas to persons who had ‘assisted the enemy in persecuting civilians.’” In 1973, the country extradited its first naturalized citizen to face Holocaust-related charges, Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan, formerly a guard at the Majdanek camp.
Two years later, John Demjanjuk was named as an alleged war criminal. Living in Cleveland since 1950, he made his living as a unionized mechanic at a Ford plant to support his family. A Ukrainian, he had been drafted into the Soviet Army, captured by the Germans and interned at a POW camp, trained at Trawniki as a camp manager, and posted at Sobibor as a guard. Douglas details how lawyers with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service built a case against Demjanjuk, leading to a 1984 court decision against him. In 1986, he was extradited to Israel which had issued a warrant for his arrest.
Demjanjuk turns into “the wrong man” after newly uncovered documents from Russia forced the Israelis admit in 1993 that he was not “Ivan the Terrible,” the notoriously sadistic guard at Treblinka. In Israel, he had been tried, convicted and sentenced to death. But then, he turns into “the right man after all” when, after returned to the United States and re-prosecuted in 2008 in light of hardcore research by historians, he was deported once again but in this instance to Germany where he was convicted on the charge of facilitating genocide of 28,000 Jews as a guard — only to die at age 91 in a nursing home in Bavaria.
“My interest was not with Demjanjuk the person,” writes Douglas. “No one familiar with the case can seriously doubt that Demjanjuk served as a camp guard – not just as Sobibor, but at Majdanek and Flossenbürg, too. All the same, no evidence has ever been adduced to suggest that Demjanjuk distinguished himself by his cruelty, and I am prepared to believe that he did not. I can also readily imagine how, by the end of his life, he had come to view himself as a victim.” This, of course, is exactly what makes the book compelling in its argument that the consequences for one’s actions do not dilute over time. Douglas treats the legalistic entanglements with concision and clarity, though there are many of these knots to untangle.
Douglas observes that the Demjanjuk trial in Germany represented an important shift in proceedings. Evidence provided by professional historians provided the most telling material. In the past, testimony by survivors had comprised the most compelling evidence. But also, Demjanjuk as a rather passive operator of mass murder was presented as just as culpable as the criminals on top. This takes us back to reflect on the silences and denials of the immediate post-war period.
When Demjanjuk was returned to the United States from Israel in 1993, “demonstrators dressed in the garb of concentration camp inmates gathered in front of his house, as did counter protestors, including members of the local KKK.” He had arrived in Ohio from JFK Airport on a chartered flight – accompanied by Congressman James Traficant.
[Published January 12, 2016 as hardcover, January 8, 2018 as paperback. 331 pages, $29.95/$19.95]