When I was a student, I sat in on a course on German films during World War II. The instructor was an 80 year-old German man whose parents had been forced into sending him to a Hitler Youth camp. I asked him once whether he had seen Hitler in person, and, if so, did he look like how the documentaries have him pictured. Having the respect for knowledge that should be expected from a scholar, he told me that he had indeed seen Hitler in person. The brutal Nazi dictator was authentically smiling during his visit to the Hitler youth. I was surprised, as I had been brought up with the image of the grizzled grins and terse glares. To be sure, the victor’s history fits the horrendous crimes committed, but at the cost of objectivity, which any historian should value. The subjective historical portrayal and the German professor’s honest answer led me to wonder what Hitler was really like as a person. Given the atrocities committed by the Nazis, we can expect that history being written by the victors proffers a corresponding warping rather than objective historical reporting. What we in the twenty-first century glimpse of Nazi Germany has undoubtedly been warped akin to how the fabric of space-time is bent by the gravity of an object having a large mass in space.
About a decade after my conversations with the German professor, I met a 92 year-old American veteran of World War II. Did the American people know of the holocaust? I asked. Only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, he answered. Before the U.S. went to war, the European war was something far away. When the U.S. was at war in Europe and Asia, Jewish leaders in Europe asked President Roosevelt to bomb the train tracks that were carrying the cattle-cars to the ovens. Roosevelt, the veteran said, told the Jews that he didn’t have time for that. “Wow, that’s a story!” I said in astonishment. One of the veteran’s daughters asked him how he knew this. “It was common knowledge at the time,” he replied. I had not even known that the American public knew of the gas chambers before the liberation of the camps. Even if Roosevelt wanted to be focused on military objectives because achieving them would mean winning the war, that he felt he didn’t have time to thwart the Nazis from transporting human beings to ovens astonishes me. I asked the veteran if the very language, cattle-cars to ovens applied to human beings shocked Americans during the war. He replied that “surprised” is not the right word for it. He did not characterize how he and other Americans had taken the news, which I found interesting.
Clearly, history leaves important things out, and perhaps even covers them up. Those pesky inconvenient truths are all too easily relegated to see the light of day; someone who happens upon them may display the jewels, but by that time, the knit story is so engrained that the little gems may hardly register. So what if Hitler was happy at times; what he did to his own people was much more important for us to know. So what if Roosevelt didn’t want to get involved in Germany’s internal affairs; he won the war. I think history is generally gray rather than black and white.
A day before I spoke with the veteran, I met a retired librarian who was still working on gay history. Could such a history be written and viewed objectively? I wondered. He told me of the huge police presence in the weekend’s Phoenix Gay Pride festival and remarked that police in Tucson had physically attacked protesters outside a Trump rally during the campaign. I replied that I had been in the venue, where I saw Donald Trump looking on as a muscular military man was stomping on a protester being led up the aisle by one of Trump’s hired security men. I had wondered why people at the rally were so emotionally angry at “the protesters,” as if they all stood for one thing. Anger at people without any personal contact (the protesters were outside) had stunned me at the time. I leaned over to two undecided women seated to my right, and observed, “This feels like what a Nazi rally must have been like, with people angry at the Jews.” The two women agreed. Then we witnessed the stomping and Trump saying to the protester, “You’re disgusting” over and over as she was being stomped. Then it really felt like a Nazi rally. To the gay historian, I said, “The Germans had been mad at the Jews for a reason; Trump’s supporters at the rally had shotgun anger at an amorphous group of protesters. The Germans were annoyed because the Jews did not consider themselves Germans and thus many rich Jews held back in giving to German causes during the hard times when Germany was paying war reparations from World War I.” The gay “historian” quickly looked at his phone and discovered he had somewhere else to be. So much for objective history. I did stress that the Nazis took the resentment way too far, and that I had no idea whether the wealth Jews in Germany in the 1920's really did constrict giving out of a belief that they were not Germans and therefore had no obligation to help them in hard economic times, but the “damage” was apparently done. I should add that I have no reason to doubt the veracity of the German professor. Unlike the historian of famous gay men, the professor was open to inconvenient truths, for he acknowledged a friendly Hitler many decades after having been forced to go to Hitler Youth. I doubt either the protesters or the Trump supporters at the Tucson rally would tolerate inconvenient truths.
Perhaps as the West has secularized, the belief that truth can be (or is) partial has gained credibility. By implication, inconvenient truth can be regarded as heretical and thus rightly intolerable. To be sure, Christian sects in the West have historically gone to war over contending partisan (i.e., partial) truths even though such things can be regarded as inherently oxymoronic. In this essay, I have probably written something for everyone in the sense that everyone can probably find some statement to be offensive or even provocative. In a world that has outlawed inconvenient truths, I would expect no less. Am I for Hitler just because I report here that he could be happy and even friendly? Am I anti-Semitic because I report that they may have limited their charitable giving to other Jews living in Germany during hard times? Am I a gay-basher because I am critical of the gay historian’s lack of tolerance for the inconvenient truth? Am I against Democrats because I include the veteran’s report of Franklin Roosevelt’s refusal to help the European Jews under German control? Am I against Trump and all his policies because I report having witnessed his enabling of violence at a rally? Such assumptions evince a lack of education, given the over-use of reason involved in taking the assumptions to be facts. Just because someone reports something does not in itself mean he or she ideologically believes in the content. For instance, that Hitler was happy visiting the kids in Hitler Youth does not mean I believe in him, his conduct, or his ideology.
Rather, I believe that history is inadequate where inconvenient facts are omitted for ideological purposes. Admitting inconvenient truths into the history may be assumed to stem exclusively from valuing knowledge, but I think toleration must also be valued. Indeed, that truth goes beyond partiality and convenience must be held as an assumption. I am for inconvenient truths as a matter of principle as well as scholarship.
