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 This is an example of the many bunkers built by the Germans in France during World War II, still unused, empty and cluttering up the coastline. |
What the Nazi war
machine left behind
of TheColumnists.com
BORDEAUX, FRANCE
Contrary to the
American obsession with the future, Europe tends to be a very
backward-looking place. Newspapers and television here never
miss a chance to reminisce about what happened at some point
in the past hundred years or so.
Last week was the 75th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship of Germany in 1933, the starting point of World War II, and major media took note.
As I write this, I have fresh in my memory a feature story I read in this morning’s local paper about a local farmer who sheltered a family of Rosenbergs, saving them from certain arrest in one of the periodic roundups in the area during the war. The young son went on to become head of the Louvre Museum in Paris instead of being machine-gunned or gassed in Auschwitz.
Individuals remain obsessed with the war, but in a strangely jolly spirit. Several of my French friends collect Nazi memorabilia and will pull their old Lugers on you for fun. They still dig in and around the Normandy beaches for Nazi or Allied hardware. One friend proudly showed me a cache of forbidden wartime armament and a rare pocket edition of “Mein Kampf” in French.
All this gives me the willies. The “banality
of evil”, to quote Hannah Arendt, has come to pass in France.
Probably the biggest softening of the Hitler legacy is the attitude
toward the thousands of blockhauses that were built to protect
the “thousand-year Reich”. Sixty-three years after
the German surrender they continue to mar the European coastline,
like giant stone droppings from the Nazi war beast as it clomped
across occupied territories. They reach from Finland and Norway
southward through Holland, Belgium, France and Spain--a coastline
of 4,500 miles.
Since coming to Europe many years ago, I have never ceased to be offended by these remnants of the German nightmare. Recently I started serious research on the extent of the network. Most of the bunkers are now used as impromptu toilets or good places for spray-can graffiti artists to write their coded names.
Personally I think the European Commission should mandate Germany to clean up after itself and destroy the emplacements one by one.
I am in the minority, as usual.
I spoke to an amateur historian in Belgium the other day who has created a voluminous website praising the architecture and technology of the bunkers. It’s worth a look at http://site.voila.fr/bunkers. He wants them preserved as witness to a “shared European experience”.
The Belgian is alarmed because many of the bunkers are in disrepair or being destroyed by local communities to make room for shopping malls, parking lots or just to clear the shoreline. One was buried under a mound of earth displaced in construction of the Channel Tunnel. “We’re doing everything we can to save them,” he told me.
Admittedly the construction of these 15,000 bunkers in four or five years amounts to an achievement of sorts. Not since the Romans 2,000 years ago has an occupying army left so much behind.
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blockhaus in the French countryside. Some want them preserved as monuments to the war; others see them as grim reminders that should be torn down. |
The credit for the bunker network goes to “Organisation Todt”, run by the the Nazi master builder Fritz Todt, who had his own semi-autonomous super-contractor outfit reporting directly to Hitler. He started with the construction of 2,000 miles of autobahn, and his grand plan called for the highway’s extension across France and into Spain after victory.
Todt’s bunker program advanced rapidly in part because of the abundant free labor that could be borrowed from concentration camps or simply picked up in the street. He died in a plane crash that was always suspected to have been the result of sabotage. Another Hitler favorite, Albert Speer, took over from him.
The extension of the autobahn never
got built but thousands of bunkers survive. German tourists can
be spotted occasionally admiring a blockhaus in a vacation
paradise overlooking the Atlantic, Fritz Todt’s ghost no
doubt hovering among them, gloating over his concrete monstrosities.
©2008 by Michael Johnson. This column first posted Feb. 11, 2008.
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