Being afraid of symbols
 
There is a war plane that became famous by its shortened name, which did not represented the model or the company that built it, but the nature of its missions… And though it is a model of the second World War’s “dark side”, even today, people recognize the name “Stuka”
This literally is short for “Sturzkamphflugzeug” …a German word meaning dive-fighter-plane…

In aviation, and aviation history, this particular plane must have held the all time record of… the fear factor. No other plane caused so much fear, because it would vertically dive down, straight from the sky on its ground targets (very much like hawks do) only to lift back sharply before reaching the ground.
Its design was beautifully-ugly (there is no other description that fits it better) and beyond its cannons, machine guns and various choices of bombs, it was equipped with a… siren that would produce a terrible howl during the procedure of diving, causing total panic and chaos…    

Being aware of my admiration for that particular plane, a student of mine presented to me as a gift a 1/72 scale metal replica of the famous Junkers-87 (that is its “official” name). The amazing thing is that this little model for display, was so well detailed you could practically spend a full hour in inspecting it… and so I did too, book on one hand, info from the internet on the other. Please note, I didn’t find the slightest of errors, of technical or historical nature. “My” Stuka has desert painting, fought in North Africa, and belonged to a specific German pilot. This highly “personalized” Stuka, was not the only one… They were, hold on please, six more variations of that same plane, which belonged to different pilots, had different paintings, having fought in different locations… All of them perfect in their variations, down to the last detail…
No other single model, in the specific company, could even come close to that number of variations, seven in all, which could mean only one thing… That even as a “toy” the famous Stuka was earning a respect that no other plane, tank, ship or vehicle would do…     

One thing that occurred to me from right… out of the box, was that, to my surprise, it was missing the swastika signs from its rear vertical wing. But what do you know… to my, second, surprise the swastika signs were in a tiny plastic bag at the bottom of the box. I though “oh well, I will put it up myself, they didn’t want to offend anybody who was still sensitive in seeing the Nazi symbol” (and please note that the box photos where missing the symbol altogether as well). But then I was surprised for a… third time. The swastika that was left for me to put up, was designed to show into the… wrong direction. I did check it over and over again, because I could not believe my eyes that they would do something so stupid deliberately, I even asked a friend or two, if maybe it was just me seeing things… into the wrong direction, but no. This plane was so well done into the last of every detail, there was no doubt this was done deliberately. And I highly doubt that the company producing it had anything to do with it, otherwise why would it undergo into so much trouble in finding historical details of the pilots, places and dates where they fought, numbers of the specific “wing” they belonged etc. At that point I felt that I had enough of this. The bitter word came out of my mouth without any effort: “Scheiße”…a German word meaning… shit! And it was perfectly matching the occasion that I was faced with for one more time in my life…

I was born on the loser’s side of the World War II. I was born a German… And though I had nothing to do with the war, since I was born later anyway, I experienced first hand the old proverb, which tells us that “History is written by the victorious”.

As a German I don’t feel any guilt about the war, or for any of the war crimes that occurred back then… I had no part of it, I didn’t do anything, I wasn’t even born then, but some people just can’t leave it alone. For the German generation/s that followed the war the demand was to feel guilty because you were a German…
I’m not making this up, this is not my opinion, this is simply the facts as they are. After the war there was a systematic effort in achieving this and it looks like… it went well.
As a teenager I practically had to… grab family members by their collar, to say the least, in order to extract any information about our own family members which died fighting. And there is absolutely no way in conducting any normal conversation, even to this day (without people turning in the color of yellow) which would include names like Hitler, Gestapo, Nazis or Waffen SS… 
Germans today do not protest against the systematic visiting of death camps, death trains, torture chambers or anything that will bring a chill up your spine. They (you will allow me to exclude myself) behave as if they had the original invention, the patent, the monopoly on this…
Russians were far more intelligent on this one. As soon as they opened their borders (around 1989) soviets managed to blow up the entire chain of Gulag that ever existed. Mostly built in remote places in Siberia, it is estimated that they were up to 500 death camps, and millions of people died there, in horror and pain. But even if Russians wouldn’t blow them up, what good is it to drag “tourists” into such a place anyway? Since any normal person will only feel his stomach go up and down, what is the purpose of this exhibition? To remember the horror and avoid in doing this again? But it did happen again, over and over… by the Red Khmer… in Yugoslavia… in Rwanda… you name it.
The display of any death camps, wherever they are, brings only negative feelings to the surface (and guilt?!)
There are countless other actions that can take place in promoting peace, understanding and friendship, and could make old enemies think of friendship… politicians and diplomats know that best (and of course keep on talking about it all the time)

Since I was brought up in Germany, but also in different parts of Europe, people had a strong opinion about “Germans” and I needed to know what it was about “us” that created dislike… And maybe unlike other Germans I was taking this “investigation” a step too far. I was fortuned to be thorough enough on my research, and so I found out about who Erwin Rommel was, who Hans-Ulrich Rudel was, or Erich “Bubi” Hartmann… and many others. But of course these Germans (and their books!) belong to the losers’ side, don’t they? Why would I need an excuse for feeling proud for these men?

For more than half a century armies of the word are marching up and down on every occasion in declaring the winning of WWII… And we Germans have managed to hide our heads in the sand, instead of honoring an entire generation of soldiers that served and died for their country…
But this is not entirely a German affair… have you ever noticed that there is not a single movie (yet) that would narrate the story of a German soldier, or pilot… and not make him look being the “bad” guy or stupid officer or the lunatic leader or the sadistic Nazi and so on and so forth… Until now they don’t dare do a “genuine German hero” though we all knew that the truth is they were German war heroes, just like in every country… Their stories will wait patiently in time, for the day when they will be heard and admired.    
 
Forbidding the display of the swastika shows only needless fear of the past and I can only have understanding for that. But putting it into the wrong direction shows stupidity of the largest scale… and I could comment it only like a German would do: Ze sign should point into ze ozer direction you idiots, to ze right!
Have you ever noticed that every other youngster (that lives in… Utah or …Australia) that goes through “a phase” is drawing the damn swastika cross simply because it is forbidden? Or how proud the neo-Nazis salute and tattoo on their body “their” symbol? Did you hear the latest news? Now in some countries they have the “Hammer-Sickle” communist symbol on the run! …ridiculous isn’t it? My sympathies to the Russian…
By forbidding signs, any signs, we only demonstrate that we are lesser democrats.
  
To dispense evil by wiping out symbols would be nice… in the fairytale land… and by the way, the swastika cross is a thousands of years old… religious symbol from India, representing the wheel of life and it is also found curved in ancient Greek marble temples, too. Shall we burn them to the ground?!

War crimes…
The Americans were the occupant forces in the Northern part of (the former) West Germany, the place were I was born and lived as a child, and they must have done a good job too, because ever since I remember myself, I simply loved Americans, and along with it whatever it was they represented… and I still do.

When Germany was defeated it was common sense for German soldiers to surrender to the Americans...
A thing we can not say about the Russians! We Germans were not prejudiced against Russians… we simply had “experiences”.
Those experiences were somehow denied to Germans, or better said, were conveniently overlooked, since Germany was “rightly” suffering back its own aggressive war.
The number of German troops that died in the Russian Gulag can only be “estimated”. Worst is that these troops were needlessly dragged there, right after Germany was defeated, in total ruins and on its knees. These soldiers died after Germany had surrendered in an act of revenge…

War crimes are committed by people, which are of flesh and blood just like you and me. There is no monster race, or monster sign, or monster leader, which you will isolate, wipe out, or kill and have it done with…
Unfortunately the monster lives in each and every one of us.
If we deny this, we stick our heads in the sand once more… 
Mark my words: The violence of a justified cause is equal, and some times exceeds, the violence of an aggressor… 
We see this example in Martial Arts every other day. When a person is attacked unjustified and without any reason, he will have much more trouble handling this after the attack is over… The number of people, who take up Aikido because they were attacked, is always (regardless of “times”) a countable percentage. And it takes them considerable effort and amount of practice, in order to put their anger aside…

Two wars for one man
I would like to offer just a few lines to man of peace, whose destiny was to fight in both of the great wars.
My great-grand father was a person that, as a boy, I had the honor to meet. From all my family without exception, he was the one I sincerely loved above all. Everybody seemed happy around him and his loud like thunder laughter.
When he died I was no more than a boy and I simply cried like a dog… Not because he died, but because on our last meet, sensing his death, he whispered into my ear for nobody else to hear “I will never see you again my boy” and he never did. This man fought in both World Wars, on the loser’s side, only to see his fatherland in ruins twice…

The axis
The other pole of the “evil” axis was the Japanese… They also fought and lost the war, suffering also a great loss of people (both civilian and military) not to mention the two atomic bombs. Hiroshima was a town purely full of civilians, without any military installations, totally untouched by war, and therefore was considered “ideal” in order to see the effects of the new toy…

In the German surprise attack on Russia in 1941, the Luftwaffe destroyed the greatest air force that ever existed (and nobody was aware of so far) while it was waiting on the ground, to do what?… 
And is it ironic coincidence? In the great Russian-Japanese war in 1904 the Japanese attacked and whipped out the greatest armada of Russian warships that ever existed (that was certainly not built for… fishing).
Was General Patton right after all? (Just an academic question…)

One last question to consider (of academic nature as well)
How can that be? While other countries that won the war went… backwards, Germany and Japan, which were practically “floored” became… shall I say excellent?!
Out of the ashes of war the German missile V2, created by Wernher von Braun, became the American Gemini and Apollo that did send man to the moon. The internet points out elegantly that this man wore the “death’s heads uniform” of the SS only once and only because he was ordered to… Oh yeah?! And what was he wearing while sending missiles into London, his bathing suit? And what’s the difference anyway… 

My little Stuka toy is lonely on its shelf… I was thinking to buy it some company, something challenging. Challenging as in adversary… And since it is ugly-beautiful, a contradiction with a drop-dead-beautiful plane would be nice. The American Mustang P-51 is a war plane to admire for its shape. It looks much more than a plane that is part of an acrobatic team and looks nothing like a warplane. Shiny silver is my favorite, with the big blue-and-white star sign all over it… which, believe it or not, for my taste, is the best in looks of all signs ever! Yes, I will do that. Hang the Stuka like in a steep dive, with the Mustang on its tail chasing it…
What?! You took me for a crypto-Nazi lover and now I confused you?....     

October 6, 2009