On Candace Owens' 'discovery' of the history of the Second World War.

The endless revival of the Germans' as victims narrative.

I won’t post any links to Candance Owens’ deluded, rightwing screeds on YouTube, but this article in Haaretz caught my eye. Owens’ videos are the usual sort of offensive, ignorant, rightwing, anti-woke nonsense, which she traffics in and profits from, and, gets high viewing figures for; in this case a ‘lecture’ entitled, Literally Hitler. Why Can't We Talk About Him?¹

I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether to look it up and watch it, I wouldn’t recommend doing so, but I have. It’s awful, deluded rubbish but seems to have kicked up a fuss, which was undoubtedly her intent.

A sensible response to her videos is to just ignore them, and dismiss them as the incoherent babblings of a rabid ideologue on the take. Which they are. I’ll pass over what she says about Hitler or Joseph Mengel because it’s utter balderdash and if it’s not anti-Semitic Holocaust denial then it is damn close, but there’s a fascinating nugget buried away in what she cites, and yes, there are citations in this mess.

Owens’ repeatedly mentions Peter Molly’s 2015 BBC documentary 1945: The Savage Peace, about the vengeance meted out to the ‘Ethnic Germans’ of Central Eastern Europe (CEE) after the war. Much of her piece is built around his film, presumably because it just aired on PBS and she happened to watch it.

I watched the film when it came out and it’s problematic. Not because it manufactures or lies about the terrible violence committed against German speakers post-1945, that’s real enough, but because it uncritically echoes the narrative of ‘Germans as victims’ (especially of communist oppression) that’s been around since the mid-1940s.

The end of the Second World War was indeed a Carthaginian peace enforced on German speakers and their collaborators across Europe. There are reasons for that happening, not all of which are defensible, moral or ethical, but reasons enough — the hint is in the term Second World War. This history is well documented and is not in doubt. There’s little to defend in much of what was done to millions of civilians in that fateful year, but there’s little that’s an unknown, unknown.

German civilians suffered terribly in the war, as obviously did many others from many nations, but this memory of ‘forgotten German suffering’ — and it is always forgotten and then miraculously recovered by each person doing it— is and was deeply rooted in anti-communism and as a counter-narrative to the emergent memory of the Holocaust, and this is where it starts to get icky. Uncovering these forgotten crimes has the potential to rapidly metastasize into antisemitism and outright Holocaust denial, not always, but it can and that’s what Owens is rifting on: although I doubt she has the slightest idea of what she’s doing or from whence it came.

A classic example of this sort of thing is David Irving, the holocaust denier, who made his name with The Destruction of Dresden (1963), which focused on the civilian death tolls from Allied bombing. The rape of German women in Berlin is another.² Both happened, and both were horrific, and both have been widely examined and debated for decades. A third is the forced removal of 11-15 million ‘Germans’ from across CEE 1945-8, often now referred to by some as ‘ethnic cleansing’.³ Hence her claim the Allies ethically cleansed Germans, which has some veracity in it, I stress ‘some’…The last of these is perhaps the least well-known to Anglophone readers, and the one most often claimed to have been forgotten. It never was.

The last of these is the narrative strand that Owens is unknowingly — and it must be said absurdly, as she attempts to find links with Nagasaki, the CIA’s Phoenix programme, Bolsheviks and Pol Pot (no, I’ve no idea either.) — replicating by mentioning the BBC documentary about Christian ‘German victims’.

But this is where I would argue it starts to get interesting because there’s plenty of ‘mainstream’, reasonably respectable literature that does much the same thing. No, it’s not a straight line, and no, I wouldn’t link any of the following to back to her, but she’s not starting from scratch.

So the basic plot is: millions of innocent German speaking civilians were ethnically cleansed after 1945; 10s or 100s of thousands were murdered during this procedure, and this was carried out by communists or by communist stooges, and everyone lied about it since then and covered it up, including the western Allies.⁴

Take a look at chapter six of Applebaum’s sub-Sophomoric 'Iron Curtain’:

Or R. M. Douglas’s ‘Orderly and Humane. The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War’, in which he single-handedly rediscovers the lost history of these events…

Or Michael Mann’s [The sociologist not the film director Ed.] ‘The Dark Side of Democracy’ much of which is based on research by Norman Naimark in his….

…‘Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe’, which came out in 2001, 14 years before the BBC documentary was aired.

Most of these, if not all, owe a debt to a earlier work of propaganda masquerading as scholarship by the lawyer Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, whose work was in turn reliant on decades of documentation produced by the expellees in West Germany and the state funded centres documenting these ‘crimes’.

de Zayas was not the first to start calling these forced population removals ‘ethnic cleaning’ he’s one of first to promote the term in English, which was only coined in the early 90s during the war in Yugoslavia.

He was pipped to the post by Andrew Bell-Fialkoff and his article in Foreign Affairs, the same edition where Clash of Civilisations was first raised…

And some bloke called Mearsheimer writing about Ukraine…

We can trace this back further, through the 1980s back to the 1940s and George Orwell who raised the hypocrisy of in an essay of his called ‘Politics and the English Language’ or F. A Voight who covered the planning of the ‘transfers’ prior, and during their implementation:

The point being, none of this is new, even in English, and less still in German, or Czech, Polish, or Hungarian…

No, Owens knows none of this, she’s is ignorant of how she got to a BBC documentary in 2015; what she said on her broadcast was offensive, puerile rubbish, but buried away in there was a deeper, longer story that I doubt she’ll ever figure out.

1. I took the kids swimming in the river yesterday and we sat on the pier chatting about Hitler because the eldest had seen something on YouTube about him dying in Argentina. A swift corrective lecture was administered.

2. I remain mystified by the popularity of Beevor’s Berlin book, I suspect he could write fascinating books just about tanks, but he doesn’t. A shame.

3. Just by chance a subject I’ve been researching, writing and lecturing about for 20 plus years. I stumbled across a deserted former German village while on holiday in Northern Bohemia in the early ‘80s, “They left.” I was told, well it was all a bit more complicated than that.

4. Of course, this is not quite what happened.