I found this thing in a tin of bits and bobs. I’m guessing it travelled from Germany among the loose change in my uncle’s pockets, at the end of the war. He’d been in the army, fought in France, was evacuated from Dunkirk, then spent years training in the Cairngorms. In 1944, he was fighting in Belgium and ended the war in Germany, at Bergen-Belsen.
He never talked about the war unless pressed, and then he rarely elaborated. There was just that one time when, as a naive young man, I’d tried to pin him down about Belsen, and got more than I’d bargained for. What he told me of this time there, I could never quite assimilate, let alone repeat. Indeed, I think I rejected it as too complex and too dark a thing for me to deal with. Thus, I discovered there is a psychological disconnect between those of a peace-time mind-set and those who witness, and must digest, the worst humanity is capable of.
As for this little memento, I’ve always assumed it was some sort of regimental cap-badge. But I recently did some research on it and discovered it’s a souvenir given out in exchange for donations to the German Police. This was in 1942, and the German Police by then were very different to peacetime cops. As if to drive the message home, that same research took me to other images featuring the German Police in action, executing women and children.
As with all holocaust imagery, one wonders what systemic failure could allow such monsters into power? What could turn a police force into brutal, militarized units suppressing unarmed civilians? Was there something particular about the circumstances of those times that could give rise to such an orgy of mass-murder? And is it too naive to suppose we have learned the lessons, and could never find ourselves so benighted again?
That this little souvenir was associated with the very worst in humanity came a shock. I don’t know why I should have been surprised by that – the clue is, after all, in the Swastika. Not everyone’s of the same opinion of course. There are those who find Nazi memorabilia fascinating, indeed even thrilling. This little thing, cheap as it was, and banged out by the tens of thousands, can now fetch up to £50 at auction. I find that both surprising and revolting.
There were lots of divisions to the German Police. Some were civilian, some military, some political, but all came under command of the Schutzstaffel, the SS, a name forever marked as the personification of evil. But it’s dangerous to dismiss evil as something “other”. It does not come from outside the human race, but dwells within it.
The German Police were not recruited because they were known killers, with long records of ruthless violence. They came from the rank and file of ordinary life, such as it was in wartime Germany. It was circumstance that robbed them of innocence, and then something of the animal took over, normalizing the violence and the de-humanisation of others. This should serve as a warning to the rest of us: just because we imagine we’re incapable of such atrocities ourselves, it doesn’t make it true. All it means is we’ve never found ourselves in a situation where that side of our natures comes out. Nor does it mean we’re ever free from witnessing such atrocities again.
We have only to flick through the vile things people write on social media to see the seething broil of the dark collective. The only thing more dangerous than glorifying the worst of humanity is the belief we could never repeat the horrors of what the German Police did in wartime. If we need any more proof of that we have only to look at the images of the American Police in action in recent days to see how easily the balance of a State can tip from the protection of its citizens to their oppression by militarized force. Indeed, we need extrapolate contemporary events very little into the future, to find ourselves in very dark territory indeed.
For the time being then, I’m putting this odious little souvenir back in its tin. Out of sight, but not out of mind. Such darkness is a thing we must recognize and own if we are ever to keep a lid on it. Then at the very least we might have a chance of spotting it, before it overwhelms us again.
The Rivendale Review 