Moral Clarity: 'Time to Deal with Collaborators'
A post-war clean up of Nazi collaborators and a prison letter from a Polish dissident offers lessons for today
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I just filed my latest Hot Type column for Byline Times, and I look forward to sharing it with you this weekend.
All I can think about in this moment is moral clarity, retaining it, defending it, not giving in to the erosion of it.
I wrote about how three key propagandists, sycophants, and puppets during World War II were executed for treason.
There was no ambiguity. The prosecutors had moral clarity — each defendant had promoted the Nazi regime and by so doing, each sealed their fate — death by hanging or execution by firing squad.
During the 1945 treason trial of William Joyce — known as “Lord Haw-Haw” — the presiding judge Mr. Justice Tucker stated that while the accused himself was “of little importance,” it was of great importance “that the standard of British justice should not be lowered.”
When Norwegian puppet-leader and traitor Vidkun Quisling was found guilty and sentenced to death on 10 September 1945, a psychiatrist who examined Quisling over three sessions noted he “was deeply lacking in a sense of reality, if not common sense.”
When the Norwegian authorities arrested Quisling in the months before his execution, they determined “it was time to deal with collaborators.”
When Joachim von Ribbentrop — the German diplomat and war criminal, who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945 — was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials for his role in starting World War II in Europe and enabling the Holocaust, the military tribunal determined:
“There is abundant evidence, moreover, that Ribbentrop was in complete sympathy with all the main tenets of the National Socialist creed, and that his collaboration with Hitler and with other defendants in the commission of Crimes against Peace, War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity was whole-hearted.”
There’s no waffling. Just moral clarity.
Ribbentrop was “in complete sympathy with all the main tenets of the National Socialist creed.”
And therefore, on October 16, 1946, he became the first of the Nuremberg defendants to be executed by hanging.
I’m sure for each of them it seemed good for a time — profiting off the regime, as it spread murderous violence, misery, and cruelty.
‘It’s Not Me Who’s Imprisoned — It’s Poland’
Intellectual historian Marci Shore drew my attention to a famously defiant letter sent by Polish historian and essayist Adam Michnik to Poland’s Interior Minister Czesław Kiszczak on December 12, 1983. Michnik sent the letter from prison — the Rakowiecka investigative arrest center in Warsaw. The letter rejected the regime's offer of freedom in exchange for forced emigration from Poland. He wrote that it wasn’t him who was imprisoned, but rather, it was Poland.
Among his statements:
“In the life of every honorable man there comes a difficult moment, General, when the simple statement that this is black and that is white requires paying a high price. It may cost one one’s life on the slopes of the Citadel, behind the wire fence of Sachenhausen, behind the bars of Mokotów prison. At such a time, General, a decent man’s concern is not the price he will have to pay but the certainty that white is white and black is black. . . It may come as news to you, that there are two things in this world, evil and good.”
Michnik offers us an example of moral clarity.
Now 79, Michnik was asked by historian Irena Grudzińska Gross for his advice on how to oppose the Trump regime, and he responded:
“Russian President Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump’s regimes do have something in common, and it is not only their rhetoric. For both, foreign policy is a function of domestic policy. Putin needs a permanent state of war to keep the Russian people under his thumb; Trump needs to create conflict with the entire world to present his use of power as necessary for the defense of American identity, for America’s well-being… we are witnessing a thoroughgoing Putinization of the United States. Trump wants to create a Putin-like regime, but he must do so within the American system…
If I were to give advice… I would (say) to read Snyder’s On Tyranny. It is a textbook that allows you to understand the world you live in and what dangers await you. It is no coincidence that he draws heavily on the experience of Eastern Europe at the time of the dying communist dictatorship… None of us knew back then that the dictatorship was dying; we all knew that it was weakening, that it was faltering, but no one expected it to end the way it did. Later, none of us expected the ‘revenge of memory’ that we now see in Russia, as well as in Hungary, the US, Brazil, Argentina, and so forth.
We are seeing a different face of America that we had lost sight of, though it was there all along. It is the face of racism, exclusion, cruelty, lynchings, and brutal imperial domination – an impulse that was fully on display during Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s clash with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office… it was something none of us expected. It was a physical shock… We need to understand how we can defuse these minefields. It will not be easy.”
None of this easy.
But it’s made more difficult by the propaganda barrage coming from regime collaborators.
I recommend anyone who can get to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to do so.
My soul is still filled up from the recent tour I took of the ICC — where there is no ambiguity about “evil and good.”
I keep returning to William Shirer’s final paragraph in Berlin Diary, which is where I learned about the fate of multiple Nazi collaborators.
As a CBS reporter, Shirer documented the rise of Nazi Germany and in his last diary entry on December 13, 1940, as he’s fleeing Germany to go back to the US, he writes:
“I stood against the rail watching the lights recede on a Europe in which I had spent all fifteen of my adult years… they had been happy years, personally, and for all people in Europe they had meaning and borne hope until the war came and the Nazi blight and the hatred and the fraud and the political gangsterism and the murder and the massacre and the incredible intolerance and all the suffering and the starving and cold and the thud of all the bombs blowing the people in a house to pieces, the thud of all the bombs blasting man’s hope and decency.”
It’s that he ended his book on the word “decency,” that’s what keeps staying with me.
These conniving regimes hammer away at decency, because they are so very indecent.
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