Entering the Future Looking Backwards

In one of the more frightening scenes of the recent NBC-TV docu-drama Holocaust, the young Nazi SS officer Erik Dorf looks down on the Ukrainian ravine of Babi Yar. He watches intently while thousands of Jews are led in, lined up, and then mowed down by machine-gun fire. For the first time his impassive face begins to register emotion: fascination, astonishment, awe. Speaking slowly, softly, and to no one but himself, he muses, Fantastic . . . absolutely fantastic. Indeed today, more than thirty-three years after the collapse of Hitler's Third Reich, many of the deeper meanings of the Nazi epoch still seem fantastic . . . absolutely fantastic. And the television characterization of Erik Dorf raises some of the basic dilemmas of understanding and describing the Nazi reality. Loosely modelled on the historical figure of Otto Ohlendorf, a sinister Einsatzgruppe Commander convicted in a postwar Nuremberg trial for the execution of 90,000 Jews, Slavs, and Gypsies, the fictional Dorf is portrayed as a young unemployed lawyer in search of a career. Driven by an ambitious wife, he finds a job in the Third Reich's Security Service under the ominous Reinhard Heydrich. He starts out with no strong feelings against the Jews; in fact he tells Heydrich that he is neutral on the issue

Eastern European Communism and Reforms · German History and Society · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

• Social Work Under Nazism

  David D Barney, David Barney et al.•Journal of Progressive Human…•2006

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