World War II

‘World at War’ documentary series has never been more relevant

/ Rudy Owens / Leave a comment

My first real exposure to the horror of World War II came through the historic 26-hour documentary series called “World at War,” released in 1973 and 1974 by producer Jeremy Isaacs in the United Kingdom. I watched all of it on my local PBS affiliate in St. Louis as a grade schooler. I was profoundly shaken by what I saw and learned. I never forgot the series and the lessons from these horrific events that still echo today.

Now, more than 50 years later, I decided to revisit the first episode, “A New Germany (1933-39).” To my astonishment, it still crackles with intensity, and for me, it is more relevant than ever. I encourage everyone to watch it, especially now.

For those who haven’t heard about this series, I found a very good description: “One of the titans of documentary television, ‘The World at War’ is a work of astounding ambition, even by today’s standards. Broadcast between October 1973 and May 1974, this 26-part series attempts to encompass the full scope of the Second World War, a conflict fought on multiple fronts across multiple continents, on land and on sea and in the air. There have been many documentaries made in the subject in the decades since…but most have stuck to one aspect or country within the wider conflict. ‘The World at War’ had the audacity to attempt to tell the whole story—and even after nearly fifty years, the results are incredible.”

The first of the 26 episodes includes chilling archival footage of Germany’s immediate prewar years, with the voice of series narrator Laurence Olivier. It succinctly shows how a far-right radical and World War I veteran, Adolf Hitler, was able to seize power in the unstable but still democratic Weimar Republic through a mixture of hate, propaganda, street violence, and political deals with politicians who thought they could control Hitler. Within 100 days, after coming to power through peaceful means, democracy was snuffed out by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the Nazi Party), and Germany turned on the continent and beyond, pursuing a path of violent conflict, war, and unspeakable genocide.

After watching this episode, one must ask, How and why did a modern nation, the home of Goethe and Bach, universities and science, turn toward brutal authoritarianism rooted in hateful racial ideology that culminated in the mass murder of millions? How did the German people allow their country to be swept up by fascism that led to their country’s destruction and tens of millions of victims, including the attempted extermination of all European Jews and Sinti-Romani people. Will these mistakes happen again in our times, and what forms will they take?

What frightens me is that those living today, including those who are our supposed protectors and champions of democratic values and civil society, will fail to read the threat when it arrives. Unfortunately, the past can be terrifying. Many of us can simply be prone to willful ignorance because we don’t wish to acknowledge history and that societies can easily repeat our past collective failures. Sadly, when we finally realize some threats, it may be too late.

Times will come when you must confront a looming threat

/ Rudy Owens / Leave a comment

I just published an essay exploring what the Finnish word “sisu” means amid geopolitical tensions between Russia and the West, and in the context of hard choices that will always come.

I first discuss a video NATO published on January 28, 2025, about Finland’s deterrence strategy and how “sisu” is part of that.

This essay emerged during tense times in my own country, where we’re seeing events never experienced in the history of my government—including dismantling of public agencies and possible violations of the constitution, according to legal scholars.

Crisis moments make me think about historic times when you know that things you have been living and experiencing will not be the same, and when a conflict is coming.

How do people respond, morally, individually, and at the national level?

One lesson that stands out to me is how Finland resisted an unprovoked invasion by the USSR in November 1939. This was one of three wars it fought in WWII. Another, 1941-44, involved Finland attempting to reclaim lost territory from the first war, aligned with, yes, Nazi Germany, and then it fought a final war against Germany, 1944-45, to create lasting peace that preserved the country.

Nothing was pleasant about this time.

Finland endured, and it did it with little help, and by making incredibly complex choices at enormous costs. I’ve seen war memorials in nearly every Finnish city/town I have visited in 2023 and 2024 that highlight these costs.

At some point, hard choices are made when confronting immoral forces and great harm.

After the first debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, I already have a ‘Plan B’

/ Rudy Owens / Leave a comment

Discounting history and facts has been one of humanity’s greatest failings. That remains true especially in the bright, glaring hot “now.”

During tonight’s horrifically moderated debate between a sleepwalking President Joe Biden and serial-lying convicted felon and former president, Donald Trump, we saw CNN abdicate all responsibility to moderate by not demanding even a shred of the truth. This event makes this wisdom from past experiences more pressing.

I wrote to a friend right after, “I’ve rarely seen a failure like this ever in presidential debates. I wonder if that’s crossing your mind? The stakes were too high, and CNN allowed this mess to happen. I think history tells us all failures like this are too costly.”

We already know that what has happened before, in a democracy like Weimar Germany 1933, can happen again.

If you’re not familiar with the ease with which a failed coup right-wing plotter, Adolf Hitler, and his Nazi thugs seized power without a majority of the people, I recommend reading this article from Foreign Policy in February 2021, “Weimar’s Lessons for Biden’s America.” There are also dozens of books in your public library. Many will have this story.

We also are dealing with brutal facts about our unfair world.

Authoritarian regimes thrive—in China, Russia, North Korea, etc.—and crush civilian democratic systems without many consequences once public movements are quashed. Who now remembers the brutal crushing of democracy in Hong Kong in between 2019 and 2021. It’s rarely talked about, ever, by media observers or international bodies that promote democratic values.

Minutes after the Biden-Trump debate ended, I sent an email to another older and long-time friend, whose wife is a Belgian citizen, if moving is on their minds. They have a home in Belgium already, and he likely can retire early as a minister.

He probably will mock me as being alarmist, as he normally like to use jokes and insults to deflect hard topics he doesn’t like to address. Also, he is a German American, who never really came to grips with the heritage of his ancestor’s home country, Germany, home of the Nazis and birthplace of what later became some of the greatest crimes against humanity.

I also think that many “smart” and “clever” liberal people, who think their wits and societal standing will endure a society that rips down civil society, will not be able to process past historic facts. In fact, most of us can’t because they are too hard to contemplate.

I believe we are now entering the chapter of historic events, where years later we’ll ask, why did that person see it coming and why did most of the people just allow it to happen and get sucked into the abyss, like the Nazi-sympathizing typical German citizen who was not a criminal or subhuman by Nazi standards. No, this is a new chapter of U.S. history. It’s a chapter where likely violent and also street-smart people will rise to the occasion.

I have already begun planning for what happens next in my country accordingly. I want to be very public about this because I know already this can happen, and I’ve been more than two dozen former Nazi camps that the dictatorship there and its racist regime built.

If you have studied history, you know events and mistakes and horrors can and do repeat themselves, all of the time. Denial is a failed strategy that leads to more failures. I now have to implement a plan.

Published June 27, 2024

Rediscovering Rudolf Vrba, the Hero And Humanitarian

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Photos of Auschwitz escapees and authors of the Auschwitz Report, Rudolf Vrba (left) and Alfred Wetzler.

I remember clearly the first time I learned about one of the 20th century’s greatest and yet least-known humanitarians and heroes, Rudolf Vrba.

Vrba is one of a small number of Jewish prisoners to have successfully escaped from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camps, located in Oswiecim, Poland, in the spring of 1944, as the camps were speeding up the murder of Jewish civilians still living in areas of Nazi control and influence.

That so few know his story remains a tragedy to us all, because of this event’s sheer improbability and the obvious audacity of what he and his fellow Czechoslovakian prisoner, Alfred Wetzler, accomplished in April 1944. The two successfully undertook an escape and resistance mission, in order to save more than 800,000 Hungarian Jewish citizens from extermination at the Birkenau death camp gas chambers.

They provided a detailed report on Auschwitz-Birkenau to Slovakian Jewish leaders, who helped disseminate it to other Jewish leaders, the Papacy, and the Allies, making it the first reliable document to reach the world and the Allies and to be accepted as credible. The report broke the apathy and indifference to the genocide, already long underway by the Nazis. Yet the report and its news never reached the populace it was intended to save, and more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews would be killed between May and July 1944, when the transportations were halted.

I first saw their photographs hanging in the museum at the site of the Auschwitz camp complex in July 2000. At that time, I was completing a documentary photography project focused on the Nazi death and concentration camps.

Standing in the museum, housed in a former Nazi administrative building, I read with utter amazement a short history of an impossible feat. Two young Slovakian Jewish internees had escaped the greatest hidden facility in the Nazi’s universe of militarized camps across Europe and the nerve center of the Nazi death machinery still operating in 1944.

The entrance to the Birkenau Death Camp, from which Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped in April 1944.

Vrba published his gripping account of this heroic and true story in his celebrated 1963 memoir, I Escaped from Auschwitz. The book remains in print in over a dozen languages around the world.

Vrba’s own words written on Sept. 7, 1963, in a letter to the British newspaper, the Observer, summarized what he details with scientific precision in his book. “With my friend Fred Wetzler from Slovakia, I managed to escape from Auschwitz on April 7, 1944, and we headed straight for the Zionist leaders. In April 1944, we handed to a high representative of the Zionist movement, Dr. Oskar Neumann, a sixty-page detailed report on the fact that extermination of 1,760,000 Jews had taken place in Auschwitz and that preparations were complete for the annihilation of one million Jewish Hungarians during the very next weeks. Did the Judenrat (or the Judenverrat) in Hungary tell their Jews what was awaiting them? No, they remained silent and for this silence some of their leaders—for instance Dr. [ Rezsö] Kasztner—bartered their own lives and the lives of 1,684 other ‘prominent’ Jews directly from [Adolf] Eichmann. They were not ‘helpless and benumbed hostages’ but clever diplomats who knew what their silence was worth. The 1,684 Jews whom they bought from Eichmann included not only various prominent Zionists, not only relatives of Kasztner, etc., but also such Jews who were able to pay with millions, like the family of Manfred Weiss. At the same time, they silently watched as more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews, unaware of their fate, were tricked into Auschwitz, where thousands of their children were not even gassed but merely thrown into the pyre alive.”

STORY CONTINUED ON MY WEBSITE; GO HERE.

‘Ideals are peaceful, history is violent’

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About 15 years ago, a friend of mine told me a story that has stuck in my memory. It was not her story. Rather, it was the story of her husband’s father. Her husband is Jewish, and she is of Armenian descent. So both have a keen sense of history, and the consequences of history, including the crimes that occurred during war. So this is why I gave this story a lot of weight.

Her husband came from the city where I grew up, St. Louis. His father lived there most of his life. The father, I learned, was a veteran of World War II. He fought in Europe, with an armored division as it entered Germany in April 1945, just as the European conflict was ready to end.

The Tank Crew in the FIlm Fury

Above is a publicity shot of the WWII action film Fury, starring Brad Pitt (2014).

She told me about her father-in-law sharing war tales. They were not happy stories. There were stories of conflict and death. One story he shared was about his armored column’s capture of Nazi soldiers. The American soldiers chose not to take the surrendering soldiers into custody. Instead, they shot them down with their weapons, and kept their advance.

I had often wondered how much truth there was to that tale. I know war is pure hell, and soldiers on all sides do not allow their better angels to rule when their inner demons are unleashed in life and death combat. I just did not know what to think about U.S. GIs mowing down Nazis surrendering in the heat of battle.

I thought about that tale again while watching the 2014 film Fury, by writer and director David Ayer, starring Brad Pitt as the leader of a U.S. Sherman tank crew. In one scene, Pitt’s character, Don “Wardaddy” Collier, leads a team of tanks and soldiers in an attack on a German position. They overcome the Germans, and in the final moments of victory, slaughter them in brutal fashion. This was far less brutal than the Nazi were everywhere, when they pillaged and committed war atrocities on an unimaginable scale, especially in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

Brad Pitt as Don "Wardaddy" Collier

Above is a publicity shot from the WWII combat film Fury, with Brad Pitt.

One German soldier escapes the executions and is left at the mercy of the enraged American soldiers. Wardaddy picks out his newest team member, a teenager named Norman Ellison (played by Logan Lerman) and forces him to shoot the surviving German soldier with a pistol. It is a painful scene, because the elder Wardaddy is initiating his new “son” into the art of death to make him ready for combat and a better team player.

The film captured a fair bit of critical acclaim for its gritty realism of combat in the claustrophobic conditions of these metal boxes that were no match for Nazi Panzers. I kept thinking about my friend’s father-in-law as a young man, faced with a choice of capturing the enemy or killing them, so they could achieve their objectives more quickly, with less risk to their side. I now believe everything I heard was true.

It was war, and the most brutal war in human history. This was how the war was won. Fury holds back nothing. It is worth watching to appreciate what happened day in and day out, from Stalingrad to Warsaw to Anzio to the Ardennes to the fall of Berlin. Mercy was in short supply, and a whole lot of killing happened to bring the horrible mess to an end—a mess started by the Nazis and carried to an extreme. As Wardaddy told Ellison, before he died, “Ideals are peaceful. History is violent.”