The Loyal Servant

"Hentschel ran the lights, air and water and I did the telephones -- there was nobody else. When someone would come downstairs we couldn't even offer them a place to sit. It was far too small -- little cells of 10 or 12 square metres. It was no bunker to live in. It was an air-raid bunker.
"As they took Hitler out ... they walked by me about three or four metres away, I saw his shoes sticking outside the sack."
SS Staff Sergeant Rochus Misch

He was a survivor, was Rochus Misch. And nothing whatever to regret in his past. He did his loyal duty to a man who deserved it. No ordinary man this, but certainly not the monster that history portrays him as. The world has it on the authority of the memory of one who knew him well. SS Staff Sergeant Rochus Misch was Adolf Hitler's bodyguard, a man upon whose dedication to his duty the Fuhrer could depend, and proud of it.

What German brutality? He saw no evidence of it. "That was never a topic. Never." No guilt, because there was nothing to be guilty of. The proverbial monkey who saw no evil, heard no evil, spoke no evil. Although surely it must have been evil to declare the intention of a Final Solution to authorize and demand that a protocol, a blueprint, a firm plan be devised to annihilate European Jewry. And to toss in homosexuals, political dissidents, Roma.

It was a different "reality", he wrote. And he never asked questions during his "regular day at work". When he signed up to become a member of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, "It was anti-communist, against Stalin -- to protect Europe. I signed up in the war against Bolshevism, not for Adolf Hitler". And then was rewarded by the assignment to be one of two SS men to serve as general assistants and bodyguards.

"He was a wonderful boss. I lived with him for five years. We were the closest people who worked with him... we were always there. Hitler was never without us, day and night", he boasted. Even to living underground with the man in the Fuehrerbunker with its heavily reinforced concrete ceilings and walls. A rare privilege. A witness to history and a willing servant to a man who made history.

Of course the poor man suffered, too. Becoming a prisoner of the Soviets. Who put in him a prisoner of war camp for nine years. Now isn't that just too peculiar? Adolf Hitler's very personal bodyguard, one of a pair including Johannes Hentschel, a man whom Fortune smiled upon, survived his Soviet-era incarceration. In itself an achievement of survival.

Considering, in contrast, that a noble character like Raoul Wallenberg, ostensibly suspected of being a spy, was arrested by the Soviet military and placed in prison for an extended period of time. Raoul Wallenberg, who affirmed the sanctity of human life. Who could have been complacent behind the dignity of his diplomatic status, and simply not bothered to notice the horrible atrocities being committed.

Unlike SS Staff Sergeant Rochus Misch who was proud of performing his duties to perfection, in looking to the affairs and well-being of the world's most notorious butcher who reigned over the meticulous performance of the administration of last rites for an entire ethnic and religious group of people who had throughout their existence, advanced science, medicine, art, jurisprudence to an extent no other such group had ever managed.

SS Staff Sergeant Rochus Misch took care never to enquire, never to become involved, never to rock the boat, never to become aware, never to express the merest hint of compassion or humanity. He chose to admire and defend he most obnoxiously viciously murderous oppressor in modern history. And that he lived to a ripe old age of 96, while a selfless humanitarian like Raoul Wallenberg perished in a Russian prison is quite simply intolerable.

Labels: Anti-Semitism, Germany, Holocaust, WWII

posted by Pieface @ Monday, September 09, 2013