It's not another country

Here’s irony for you: on the same day that the BBC reports that France’s state rail company finally admitted and apologized for its role in deporting that country’s Jews to Nazi extermination camps, the NY Times runs a story on a US government report admitting that for years this government did indeed harbor and use for geopolitical purposes whole rafts of Nazis and Nazi collaborators.

SNCF, which operates France’s railway system, spent the last five and a half decades insisting that it and its employees weren’t responsible for participating in the deportations; it was all German orders, and rail workers had no choice in the matter.

France as a nation has had an uneasy time with this issue of collaboration—right from the Liberation, when the preponderance of “collabos” punished were women who had consorted with Germans (and not, say, public officials who paved the way for governmental cooperation, or businessmen who made big profits off the invaders), there’s been this national myth that, really, no one helped the occupiers, everyone was a resistant and all the evil-doing was auf Deutsch. The biggest collaborator of all, Philippe Pétain, was in fact tried for the crime, but the French couldn’t bear to give him the death penalty he richly deserved—they did reluctantly sentence him to death, but commuted it to imprisonment.

(They didn’t have the same problem with his deputy, Pierre Laval; they couldn’t wait to send him to the firing squad. Laval was the perfect target. His execution gave the French the satisfaction of having “dealt with” a big-wig collaborator and enabled them to pretty much dust their hands of the whole issue.)

The reality is murkier, as you’d expect. There was plenty of go-along-to-get-along cooperation with the Germans; it was a long four years of occupation. Notable among the goers-along were businesses large and small. SNCF would be one of them.

There were resistants, even within SNCF; which means that if some employees could sabotage operations then there were choices to be made. But, as with the country as a whole, it’s easier to think back on those days as perhaps their “greatest generation”, and pretend that the French were either heroes or victims.

But the Frogs are nothing if not pragmatic: the “profound sorrow and regret” expressed this week are directly related to bids that SNCF wants to put in to build high-speed rail networks in Florida and California. It seems both states are making noises about not doing business with any organization that refuses to acknowledge its involvement in the Holocaust.

C’est l’argent qui parle; et la fraternité qui marche.

However, the US has been engaged in its own cover-up about collaborating in giving refuge to Nazis who should have been dealt with as war criminals. The report the Times acquired this week documents five and a half decades of activities by some federal agencies (largely intelligence related) to protect these Nazis from other agencies (like Justice) that were trying to identify and prosecute war criminals. (And, BTW—this is our tax dollars at work: one agency working full bore against another.)

Our hands are not only not clean in this matter, the agencies are still trying like hell to obfuscate their involvement. If not for a lawsuit filed four years ago, we still wouldn’t have any official recognition. They all want to pretend that their actions were above board; or else that it was so long ago it really doesn’t matter anymore.

But here’s a clue: if you spend all this governmental capital on covering something up, it’s generally something that you wouldn’t want to brag to your grandchildren about.

I understand that, having made a deal with the Georgian devil to destroy the Austrian one, the Anglo-American governments got to 1945 and realized that Stalin was going to be more troublesome than expected, and they made more deals with a whole flock of Nazi devils to help in the Cold War. We don’t have the luxury of black and white clarity; it’s all half-tones.

But what bothers me is that going on for 60 years after the fact we’re still acting like we’ve taken the high road when obviously we’ve been grubbing around in the ditches.

Perhaps what our government needs is a financial incentive such as enticed SNCF into apologizing. If brotherhood won’t do it, maybe the money will.