crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
Kathinka Dittrich van Weringh *1
Promoting public awareness of totalitarian crimes
“On your knees!” shouted a Civil Guard as he struck me. This was during a raid at the University
of Barcelona in Franco’s Spain. “Up, forward!” I felt deeply humiliated, physically and mentally.
A few years later, during the Soviet era, when I was working as the founding director of the
Goethe-Institute in Moscow, a Jewish friend and journalist begged me: “Do not say anything on the
phone, let’s talk on the street where we are not overheard and taped.” Fear had become an inherent part
of her thinking.
“Oh, you are German, but you are quite nice.” That was said by a casual café-acquaintance during
my years in New York, a city with many immigrants from Hitler’s Germany. I remained silent and felt
discriminated against.
And when I ran the Goethe-Institute Amsterdam in the Netherlands – a country, of course, occupied
by Germany in World War II – I was paid the probably well-meaning ‘compliment’: “Kathinka, you are
not really German, you are like us.”
“Is Europe so important for you that you would die for it?” a Serbian publisher recently wanted
to know, enquiring about my attitude as Chair of the Board of the independent European Cultural
Foundation. “No!” I answered. A vision should never turn into fanaticism.
These few personal examples may indicate how complex is the seemingly simple question before
us – How are we to promote public awareness of totalitarian crimes? – and also the likelihood that
possible answers will be influenced by personal experience. And when critical investigations into past
and present totalitarian crimes are being conducted, I find it essential to ask “Why?” and “For whom?”
before approaching the big issue of how they should be dealt with.
1. Why, then?
To commit proven criminals against humanity to their just punishment, on the basis of human
rights agreed Europe-wide, with all the legal consequences? A Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Milošević,
had they survived; a Mladić, Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, and many other less publicly known figures?
Yes, this is a matter for the courts of justice.
However, ‘eminent’ criminals are as rare as eminent heroes of resistance. Life simply is not black
and white. The majority of people move in a grey, often ambivalent zone, preoccupied by personal
interests, their daily joys and sorrows, but also by a readiness to help. Hannah Arendt opened our eyes
to the ‘banality of evil’.
We should also take a closer look at the various motives of private individuals and public figures
that lived under totalitarian regimes in Europe and now want to have their former surveillance files
opened – or kept firmly shut. That ‘the truth must come to light’ is a convincing argument, but the
truth has many faces. Another very good argument is that victims should be acknowledged and
compensated. Well, yes, if the victim and the perpetrator can be clearly distinguished. But ulterior
motives sometimes lurk behind politically correct and even often honestly meant arguments. Wherever
people are trying to come to terms with their totalitarian past – in Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied
countries (up to 1945), in Portugal, Greece and Spain (up to 1974–75), in the Soviet Union and Sovietoccupied/‘supervised’
countries (up to 1989), and elsewhere – envy and malice will also play a role, as
will defensive nationalistic attitudes and personal careerism. The latter will have a better chance where
the public prosecutor and the Ministry of Justice are one and the same. But not only there. During my
time at university in Hamburg in the 1960’s, I once asked a fellow student “Why do you study law?”
The answer: “To dig up Nazi criminals and so earn a lot of money quickly.” I shall never forget it. To
beat political criminals using their own means? Does the aim sanctify the means?
* Kathinka Dittrich van Weringh, Chair of the Board of the European Cultural Foundation.
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