Books: It Just Happened

(2 of 2)

According to him, no one was to blame for what happened in Germany. It just happened, and no one was responsible but "the times." Nazism was pretty much like anything else: "Perhaps all that can be done is to describe it as a phenomenon, as a byproduct of life, and like life to be immeasurable by any standard and equally shapeless." As for democracy, "I do not know what it is ... But I fear that Hit ler's assertion — that his ideological concept was the democratic concept — will prove a hard one to refute." If he is not the former Nazis' favorite postwar writer, he should be.

For more than 100 pages, under the questionnaire heading "Remarks," Von Salomon pours out his hatred on Americans. Describing U.S. -run detention camps (those who worked in them will find them hard to recognize), he maintains that he was beaten and starved by sadistic U.S.

soldiers who got fun out of shooting at aged prisoners and watching female prisoners humiliated. He lashes into U.S.

"guttersnipes" until they begin to seem suspiciously like the Nazis.

There are in Von Salomon reflections of the things that made Hitler possible in Germany — moral color blindness, a dangerous half-intelligence that can rationalize even the most monstrous side of any case, self-pity mixed with arrogant self-righteousness. Yet it is clear that Von Salomon does not speak for all Germans, and it is hard to believe that he speaks even for an alarming or significant minority of them. There is a kind of totality, a rotten radiance about his cynicism which is rare in the worst of times or men.