YouTube is a great ressource of knowledge (and cat videos). As a history buff myself, I usually enjoy watching the newest videos of several history channels, especially during the current pandemic. And at least some channels do not shy away from covering difficult topics but of course critical thinking is still needed (Thanks, TIK, for encouraging that!). WorldWarTwo by Indy Neidell and Spartacus Olssen was one of my favorite's as they put much effort into their videos and present them in a visually and intellectually pleasing way. But recently, I came at odds about WorldWarTwo's depiction of the Holocaust. The dangers of History Edutainment - mixing entertainment and education - might also be of interest to you and that is what motivated me to write this post. The area of conflict is about the commercial interest of the channel to attract large audiences on the one side and their responsibilities to depict the events with scientific depth and accuracy on the other.
First of all, watch the following video which is about German death camp commandants during the Second World War which I want to analyze with you. If for any reason that topic is not something for you, I am sorry but better skip this post alltogether.
Everyone else interested will get the reference in the video title which hints at the legal defense of Germans involved in heinous crimes of Warld War 2 - they "just followed orders" of their superiors. But why is there a question mark behind that sentence? I will get back to that later.
You will notice the appearence of Spartacus Olssen himself and the set they use for shooting their videos (see the photo at the end of this post), it is highly staged like a theater play with costumes. As a legal scholar, I instantly noticed the statue of Justitia in the background on the left shelf. This stage and the masquarade is not a problem by itself, but it sets the environment for the fiery narrative of their scripts which use a lot of pathos and passion. I am sure that Indy and Spartacus put way more passion into their presentations than your ordinary history teacher did back in school. This is a point where the channel chose to cater to the needs of their audience at a cost of scientific objectivity which would demand to use a more neutral and less emotionally driven tone.
However, all of this symbolism can be interpreted as some form of subtle manipulation, with Spartacus speaking from his chair of infinite wisdom weighting the facts in a neutral way, just like Justitia. Either way, if the content holds up to such a high standard, I would not have a problem with such symbolism or fiery presentation. But at least in that particular video, it didn't.
Olssen first talks about Theodor Eike and the KZ system, he also mentions some biographical details about camp commandant Hans Loritz. Between 4:45 and 6:20 Spartacus talks about Karl Otto Koch, who served as a commandant at several KZ camps, at the end of his career at Buchenwald. That is what Olssen had to say about Koch: "Beyond the usual brutality, Koch is a simple thief." and backs his words up with talking about the investigations by Josias zu Waldeck und Pyrmont, a high-ranking SS police officer of the Wehrkreis IX who was responsible for the criminal investigations in the area of the KZ Buchenwald. At first, that investigation was thwarted by Heinrich Himmler on the intervention by other important SS-men Oswald Pohl and Richard Glücks. However, the investigation went on later. Olssen talks about these investigations and that Koch was eventually put on trial. What Olssen didn't tell the audience explicitly however is that the SS put him on trial and that he was sentenced to death in 1944 for murder and various corruption crimes at Buchenwald, it also wasn't mentioned that he was executed in April 1945 by the SS. Furthermore, Olssen also does not tell the audience that Hans Loritz also lost his post as a KZ commandant in the light of corruption charges but his prosecution didn't lead to a conviction.
Why did they omit these important pieces of information? I suppose it would not fit their narrative: "It is under Loritz and Koch that many of the future concentration camp commandants are brought up" (6:14). This statement is problematic as it insinuates that all of them share the same brutality and corrupt nature. The omitted information is important as the audience would get to hear that the SS did not tolerate unauthorized killings and corruption in its ranks and took at least some action to prevent it. Obviously such an attitude of preserving honor and "prussian order" within their ranks is morally in stark contrast with the authorized mass killings they appearently had no issue with. My point is this: While many KZ camp commandants were brutal and corrupt, there was still a legal framework in which they had to operate in. Unauthorized killings were regarded as a form of insubordination, a serious criminal offense in any army and to get back to the question of the video title: Koch and others did not follow orders with some of their attrocities but showed criminal initiative of their own.
From a YouTube channel which wants to depict the "War on Humanity", I can expect to mention and explain these ambiguities within the SS. The omission of such relevant information leads to a distorted picture: That all of the KZ camp commandants were evil criminal thiefs and butcherers by simply being a KZ camp commandant. This is of course a circular argument. While that system might have played a crucial role for developing these personal traits or bringing up people with that traits into positions of power, the narrative they took does not capture that some of their excesses were punishable even within the legal framework of the Third Reich and were prosecuted actively as such crimes.
There are other questions which the YouTube channel does not want to cover on purpose: "We have given glimpses into the fact that these were normal human beings that perpetrated these acts, or where fellow travelers to these atrocities at several instances in our series, the facts speak for themselves in our format and we never, as a point for absolute principle, relativize the events through commentary. Instead we describe the things that happened and their effect."
I confronted the channel with a well-received ground-breaking monography of the Fritz-Bauer-Institut: "Moralität des Bösen - Ethik und nationalsozialistische Verbrechen" from Raphael Gross and Werner Konitzer in which several respected authors deal with questions of morality, legality, philosophy and ideology in the Third Reich. I whished the channel would have taken some of the works into account to provide a more nuanced view to the audience. The authors in that book ask non-trivial questions, such as if there was such a thing as moral universalism in the Third Reich. Moral universalism would mean that such things as human rights are the same in different societies. Not part of that book but debated in philosophic circles is also Bernard Williams who represents the school of thought of a descriptive normative relativism. According to Williams, different societies can have different moral systems with different options of action (Bernard Williams, Die Wahrheit im Relativismus, in: ders. (Hg.), Moralischer Zufall, Königstein i.T. 1984, S. 143 - 154, 151 ff.). Such a view would accept that there are different moral systems across countries, which would mean different options of actions within the Third Reich that could differ with other countries at that time.
When confronted with disputing the moral and legal validity of their narrative, instead of a constructive discussion, I got censored for one of my comments and the following replies:
"You have desperately misunderstood the work you are quoting. The authors do not show an ambiguity of morality or ethicality of the crimes committed by the SS and other Nazis perpetrators, They lay out the path of the Nazis to justify to themselves their actions, and the step by step ideological journey from normal brutes to mass murdering butchers. [...] A work like Konitzer's and Gross' is complex and important in order to understand the inner workings of Naziism - it does however stand the risk of being abused the way you are doing here, by using it as an argument of partial or total; innocence. That is a topic of morality that is far outside of the scope of our content [...]."
"Moral relativism has a place in an in depth scholarly analysis of the inner workings of Naziism. There is little room for it in public history which has to be understandable and relatable in a context of the zeitgeist it will be consumed. That zeitgeist will change, so any moral judgement, or justification inserted onto the content will not age well. The solution to that is to focus on the events and the actions of the actors involved. We do mention the prosecution of Koch, but only as an event with its results. The approach we use strips the content of any ambiguity. This troubles you because you want to insert the "Schuldfrage" into the content. We haven't and we won't deal with that issue here in this chronology - like it or not. Your comment was removed for misrepresenting a source and using it to insert that question of moral ambiguity, which the source does not do. Again, it demonstrates how a framework of morality and ethics was created to justify and make acceptable these acts - that in no way exonerates the actors, it doesn't even create the sliding scale of guilt that you claim it does. It only explains their reasoning. In exactly the same way our narrative also doesn't extend guilt beyond the actions performed."
Excuse me? It is very bold to claim that others abuse scientific work, I never quoted these authors in the fist place to back up a specific statement, I just recommended the book to the team in my original post for a more nuanced perspective as they provide more intellectual food for thought than they delivered on this topic (such as: Is there a change in moral norms in societies over time?). Framing me to have used these works to claim a partial or total innocence of thes SS men in the video, is a baseless accusation. I mentioned Oskar Gröning (who was an accountant at Auschwitz) and Kurt Gerstein (who was a SS member but is thanked for in Yad Vashem for his deeds) to highlight distinctions between moral and legal guilt and that it is up to every persons individual courage or lack thereof to judge them by their deeds or ommissions. I also very much challenged the notion that there is such a thing as guilt by association (as their narrative does by associating guilt automatically with being a KZ camp commandant - not for their individual actions and responsibilities). As a legal scholar, it is of utmost importance to me to be as fair as possible to all people, even the evil ones. But I can see that there is a difference in options for actions in a closed society as the Third Reich was, there is always the danger of judging all these people from the moral high ground of today, ignoring the individual circumstances of yesterday. Bernhard Schlink called this once the "Kultur des Denunziatorischen", Gross asks the same question (see this review and footnote 10). From a legal standpoint there is always the question of individual culpability. I wonder if the channel has understood all of these complexities and what that means for their series and how to present that topic to its viewers in a responsible way. This also means to shed some light on the German perspective at that time and to explain it to their audience, not just amassing facts after facts.
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| Spartacus Olsson with Justitia in the background, source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzowgQCoo1s&t=290s |
As I experienced it first hand how the channel deals with criticism and fails to admit their own mistakes, it was sad to see how quickly you get thrown labels at your head. The general approach they took with a chronological order while leaving out important debates is deeply flawed as seen in this example - it lacks to provide any context or insights beyond the given facts of a specific time frame. And you don't even get to see all relevant facts which I pointed out for this particular video above. For better compatibility with YouTube's algorithms you will get to see various 14 minutes long videos over the next couple of years covering this topic, but how you want to grasp the complexities in such a format is beyond me. I wonder if we will get to hear more of what happend with Karl Otto Koch when we finally reach 1945 in their timeline?! Will every viewer still be around then?! In my eyes they failed to live up to scrutiny here and could do more harm than good in the end if the quality in that video sets the trend.