The satisfyingly and usually gruesome fate of most Nazis in American film might make us feel good, but it’s largely false, and it lulls and ill prepares us to notice and to fight incipient fascism all around. That was the sobering yet fun main takeaway from “Immigrant Holocaust Perpetrators in American Media,” a Zoom lecture delivered Wednesday night by Claire Aubin, a post-doctoral fellow at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism (YPSA). As we teeter on the brink of American fascism, Aubin let us have some movie fun: Think, she said, of the filmic image of evil Nazis eventually and satisfyingly hunted down in American political thrillers and what do you come up with? There’s handsome, vigorous, grey-haired owl-spectacled Lawrence Olivier, the dentist of Auschwitz, sadistically giving Dustin Hoffman a root canal in Marathon Man; or Maximilian Schell playing a contemporary electronics executive Edward Roschmann, whose real WWII job was just a little different in being commander of the Riga concentration camp, in the great Odessa File directed by John Schlesinger in 1974. Or consider even the template-setter of them all — Orson Welles as Franz Kindler, the most evil of evil Nazis who dreamed up the genocide of the Jews in his 1946 The Stranger. There, if you can believe it, the original Nazi hunter Edward G. Robinson breaks through Welles’ disguise as a headmaster of a tony prep school in one of our nearby quaint Connecticut towns, and Kindler gets his just desserts, Well, well, all those media images and outcomes, satisfying as they may be cinematically, are not only contrary to the facts of Holocaust perpetrators’ actual lived lives as they developed post-World War II in the U.S., they are even dangerous in how they lead us away from the banal reality of evil and reinforce misconceptions about fascism that do precious little to prepare us for future outbreaks. That was the main point of Aubin’s lecture Wednesday night. “The very real Holocaust perpetrator is very different from the one who lives in our minds,” said Aubin, who is also functioning as a mentor and workshop leader at YPSA this year. Aubin also wears another hat as the host of the podcast “This Guy Sucked,” whose tag line is “the show that proves no matter how long you’ve been dead, it’s never too late to have haters.” It appears to be a serious historian’s deep dive into notorious and awful figures who also are, thanks to her podcast, getting their just desserts, their being dead notwithstanding. Aubin brought that touch, by turns disturbing and entertaining to her remarks and to a tour of “convenient or inconvenient, preferred or not preferred” depictions of Holocaust perpetrators in the movies. “These tropes have real consequences,” she said, and then she enumerated the huge discrepancy between the lives and identities of the actual 150 or so immigrant Holocaust perpetrators to the U.S. whose cases she has studied, and the ones who live on our screens. Most, for example, did not live professional or executive lives when they migrated to the U.S. — not dentists or business entrepreneurs, or heads of vast scary new fascist networks. On the contrary, they were simple people by and large, not a headmaster, but a janitor at a school, and factory workers, and most were not even native Germans, but German-ish from perhaps Romania and many from Ukraine. Most were not even Nazi party members but associated with collaborationist organizations or guards or low-level policemen or in militias. And unlike the way the vigorous, scary middle-aged Nazis are satisfyingly brought to justice or, more often than not, knocked off in the midst of vigorous new lives in the movies, Aubin’s real perpetrators “lead post-immigration lives that are unremarkable, working-class laborers in large factories of the Midwest, with kids in the 4-H Club. They join church and are nondescript.” While imagined perpetrators enter through some secret network powered by surviving Nazi money and connections, “the majority completed normal immigration processes,” Aubin said. “In reality they apply to immigrate like everyone else, but they lied on their applications about what they did. They kept their names as they were not officially Nazis and usually Eastern Europeans. Most were low-level functionaries, with little decision power. A small number held power in the camps, but they represent less than 5 percent of the whole [150 she has studied]. They were very ordinary, which remains an idea Americans are unfamiliar with. In the American mind they were all bloodthirsty. Their defining quality is that this figure is just an avatar of evil.” And if they are prosecuted, it is usually for immigration fraud charges and for lying, not for heinous crimes. “Twenty-five percent [of the 150] faced no legal consequences,” Aubin said, and the average age of death of these perpetrators, she added, was in the their 80s. So what’s behind the durability of this contrast? she asked. And what does it undermine? “America loves to fantasize about” the Holocaust . . . it trends a lot on social media . . . on heroism, rescue, redemption . . . memory. We buy tickets to visit Auschwitz, but without studying the past.” The revenge, the poetic justice, the deaths of movie Nazis that echo their crimes, the acts of retribution, Aubin added, are “part of a larger American fantasy that allows us to recast our role in the Holocaust and its aftermath.” The imagined Nazi, she says, stays so rooted because the truer stories, the “ones that are boring, that have mundanity, don’t have the potential to make us feel better about the post-Holocaust world.” “Or they don’t confirm to our idea of evil as intrinsic,” she said, and thus susceptible to our annihilating evil with a coup de cinema. “Or to see evil the way it is, rather, as a set of circumstances, of people working boring jobs.” In a post-lecture answer to a question, Aubin acknowledged the work of Hannah Arendt and Christopher Browning on the importance of focusing on what Arendt of course called “the banality of evil.” “The boring stories are worth telling,” she concluded. “They fascinate me, although most Americans prefer the movie version. The problem is the fantasied version is a contribution to the flattening of history.” With so many Americans today, however, disturbingly unaware either of the reality of the Holocaust or the fate of its perpetrators come to American shores — a third, by Aubin’s estimation, don’t even know that the Holocaust represented an attempt to annihilate the Jews! And two-thirds don’t know that it extended far beyond geographical boundaries of Germany — these media tropes have real consequences. What Aubin termed the “sacred” place the Holocaust holds in American memory is in danger of doing considerable disservice when “narrative convenience is the detriment of truth.” The post To Catch A Nazi, Don’t Go To The Movies appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less