Discovering the Holocaust: A Hulu Series Walter G. Moss I’ve just completed watching the Hulu five-part series “Deutsches Haus,” aka “The Interpreter of Silence.” It’s based on a 2018 German novel by Annette Hess, who later became one of Germany’s most successful TV screenwriters. Each of the episodes (about an hour long) center on a young German woman, Eva Bruhns (Katharina Stark), who acts as a Polish-German interpreter at the famous Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1963-1965). It’s the first time ex-SS officers are accused of murderous actions at Poland’s Auschwitz Concentration Camp, and the trial received ample media attention. Eva ultimately learns that as an infant she lived with her family at Auschwitz, where her father served as a cook. I’ve been to the Auschwitz camp in southern Poland, where massive numbers of Jews, as well as lesser numbers of others were executed. According to Episode 4 “over 20,000 men, women, and children were murdered here without a reason.” I’ve also visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D. C. What Auschwitz, the D. C. Holocaust Museum, and now Deutsches Haus all scream out to us is How? Why? How could the Nazis and all their accomplices be so cold-hearted, so merciless, so evil as to kill millions of people, especially but not exclusively Jews, in Auschwitz and the other death camps operated by the Nazis? And the series does not play down the evil, but through court testimony--often translated by Eva--reveals much of it. Here is a sample taken from one of the German judges’ concluding remarks: For behind that gate [of Auschwitz] opened up a hellscape that is impossible for the human brain to imagine and that words fail to describe. The defendants . . . are accused of murdering numerous people at the Auschwitz concentration camp . . . Jews and Christians, Poles and Germans, Russian prisoners of war and members of other faiths, people from all over Europe. Over the course of the many months of this trial, the court experienced in spirit all of the suffering and anguish that these people endured and that will forever be associated with the name Auschwitz. . . . [For example,] the hollow, questioning, bewildered and terrified eyes of the children . . . who took their last steps in Auschwitz.
At the trial the accused deny their guilt, usually claiming they did not do what witnesses said they did and only occasionally replying that they were just following orders. On one occasion the wife of one of the defendants says to Eva, “There are lies being told in there, and you're translating those lies.” Eva asks, “Why would the witnesses tell lies?” The wife answers, “For financial reasons, of course. And you're part of that. You are involved in slandering law-abiding citizens. I know that at some point, you'll deeply regret this.” The wife reflects what we have too often seen in our own Trumpian times: the refusal of many people to accept reality, to accept the truth. (In late 2023, 66 percent of Republicans still believed, in the face of overwhelming facts to the contrary, that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.) In Hitler’s day, as in our own, too many people simply do not want to face up to truths, whether present or past. Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as “confirmation bias.” In an article three years ago I cited various sources that agreed with Rick Shenkman’s observation in