The Jewish Question in Europe

Two members of the same family. One has values so abhorrent and repugnantly abusive of human rights and decency that the other recoils and takes it upon himself to attempt to overturn as best he can  some of the effects of his more politically powerful brother's edicts.

Hitler's second-in-command, Hermann Goering, was fully engaged in the absolute necessity for the Third Reich of exterminating European Jewry. For starters. Of course when Nazi Germany and its Axis alliance succeeded in defeating the Allied resistance to its inexorable march to world domination, whatever was left of the world's Jews would then be dispatched as well.

His  younger brother, Albert Goering, did what little he could, as a relatively anonymous, but power-linked-by-family-association, protester against Germany's racist ideology. Blood was evidently thicker than anti-Semitic termination of Jewish presence on Earth, as Hermann appeared to willingly protect his younger brother from state persecution.

But as commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, second-in-command after Adolf Hitler, Hermann gave the order to "make all necessary preparations for a final solution of the Jewish question in Europe."

The German newspaper Der Spiegel in a recent article, noted that Albert Goering "would have been lost without his brother. Without his support, the Gestapo -- which knew exactly what Albert Goering was doing and with whom he associated -- would have arrested and executed him." Among other issues of actively working against the policies of the Third Reich relating to the extermination of Jews, one Gestapo report made note of his refusal to acknowledge the greeting "Heil Hitler".

The younger Goering was export director of the Skoda Works, a major arms manufacturer,  in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia during the war years. After he was he was arrested post-war, he spent two years in prison, while attempting to convince his Allied captors that he was not a Nazi collaborator.

He was placed on trial in Prague, acquitted after testimony from Skoda factory workers. The Austrian lyricist Ernst Neubach wrote to the president of Czechoslovakia with the information that he had been instrumental in saving "hundreds of men and women" who had been "rescued from the Gestapo, concentration camps and executioners."

The stigma of the family name and what it represented had a depressing influence on Albert Goering's psyche, leading him to become an alcoholic post-war. He died in obscurity, alone and alienated. Now, Yad Vashem is preparing to enlist him among the Righteous Among The Nations in recognition of his work to save victims of the Nazis from concentration camps, his obtaining of exit permits for Jews, and aid in transferring Jewish assets abroad.

He will join humanitarian luminaries of the dread Holocaust such as Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who sheltered Jews in his factories, and Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who issued countless visas enabling Jews to escape their dread fate. Currently 510 Germans have received the honour of being named as Righteous Among The Gentiles, at Israel's Holocaust memorial and research centre.

Interestingly enough, history being what it is, and humankind's unwillingness to learn from what went before the current era, we have a distinct habit of re-visiting old habits. Some, like anti-Semitism, just refuse to be put to rest. And, as it happens, throughout the Europe of today, while another world war doesn't appear quite on the horizon, though some might argue with that analysis, given the various tinderbox situations in the Middle East and Asia, Europe seems still to be struggling with its "Jewish question".