Many Germans remained silent and sought to forget the events that took place between 1933 and 1945. Between 1945 and 1960, most memorials erected in Germany were initiated by survivors or relatives of victims, with little to no initiation by the state.3 However, state voices supporting efforts at memorialization did eventually emerge to remember German soldiers and civilian victims in what scholar Jenny Wüstenburg describes as a “dominant narrative whereby everyone had suffered under Hitler and, apart from a few bad apples, all were to be honored for having served the fatherland.”4 Through both forgetting and selectively remembering, the German state began to distort the narrative surrounding Germany’s role in the war and in the Holocaust.
‘Dig Where You Stand’: Grassroots Movements
While this distorted narrative took hold in the initial decades following WW II in parts of the German psyche, a significant shift in public memorialization emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. Influenced largely by people like Sven Lindqvist—whose book Dig Where You Stand: How to Do Research on a Job advocated for grassroots investigation into the history of industries—German citizens began their own efforts at “memory activism.”5 Struck by Linqvist’s assertion that the powerful control historical narratives and transmit them with biased partiality, many Germans were inspired to follow his call for ordinary workers to bring a new and balancing perspective to the table. As a result, citizens began to lead grassroots efforts to commemorate the murdered victims of the Nazi state leading to the erection of more memorials and plaques during the 1980s than were erected in the entire period between 1933 and 1980.6
One of the most notable examples of this social action occurred on May 5, 1985. On that date, a group of citizens gathered with shovels at a vacant lot in the middle of West Berlin. Forty years prior this spot had been the headquarters of the Gestapo, but by 1985 it had become nothing but an overgrown lot. These activists—who adopted the phrase “dig where you stand”—began to symbolically and literally dig up the past.7 Today the Topography of Terror Documentation Center, one of Berlin’s most visited museums, stands at the site.
These grassroots movements not only demanded that Germans actively and publicly engage with the past but they also worked to ensure that public memory reflected historical truth. Although these activists were primarily from the side of the perpetrators, they sought to discover and elevate the narratives of the victims. These new narratives that emerged contextualized and challenged the centralized, state-sanctioned notions from previous decades, and for the first time “perpetrators, sites of crimes, and the range of Nazism’s victims were explicitly named and commemorated.”8
Although public memorializations are still a point of contention in Germany, the decades since the 1980s have given rise to a new culture of memorializing the Holocaust and the atrocities committed under the Nazis. Where once a distorted narrative or silence predominated, a new and complex narrative has emerged that reflects with much greater accuracy the history of a people who elected Hitler and participated, either directly or indirectly, in the murder of nearly six million Jews, among many others. While this revision of the narrative to include the victims and their experiences has led to painful remembrances, it has opened up a process for continual renewal and engagement with Germany’s past. Despite the pain, many Germans have recognized that telling the whole story gives recognition to the victims and serves as a step toward Germany’s own social healing. Moreover, they have recognized a vital function of public remembrance: to serve as a warning of one’s own capacity for evil.
The ‘Waco Horror’
Many Americans miss the irony of condemning Nazi Germany while ignoring their own history of racial violence and terror. Between 1889 and 1918, the United States saw 3,224 lynchings. This number amounts to one such act every three days. Of those lynched during this period, 80% were B lack.9 Justifications for lynching ranged from punitive justice to proactive self-defense “against the Negro criminal as a race.”10 A minority of white Americans did publicly denounce lynchings—some because of its role in racial terror, many out of concern for the preservation of law and order—but through the mid-twentieth century lynching was still considered acceptable throughout the United States. Although public opinion evolved slowly, one particularly brutal incident brought lynchings to the forefront of public discourse and galvanized efforts to outlaw the practice.
On May 15, 1916, 17-year-old Jesse Washington was savagely tortured and lynched in Waco, Texas. At the time Waco was a “city reputed to be an enlightened, respectable, middle-class community,” writes James SoRelle, professor of history at Baylor University.11 With its 63 churches and the Baptist-affiliated Baylor University (the oldest institution of higher education in Texas), Waco had gained nicknames such as the “Wonder City,” the “Athens of Texas,” and the “City with a Soul.”12 Yet commingled with this religiosity and education was a deep-seated racial animosity, exhibited in Waco’s racial segregation and violence. Like Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, the lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco exposed the sobering reality that—as writer and theologian Richard Rubenstein said of the Holocaust—”it is an error to imagine that civilization and savage cruelty are antithesis [sic].”13
The events leading up to the lynching of Washington began on May 8, 1916, when 53-year-old Lucy Fryer was found murdered on her farm in Robinson, Texas. Suspicions fell almost immediately onto Washington, a 17-year-old B lack farm hand who had been hired a few months prior. Washington was arrested and taken to the Waco jail before being quickly transferred to Hillsboro and then to Dallas to avoid mob violence. This relocation was prudent; that evening around 500 citizens showed up at the Waco jail demanding Washington, unaware that he had been relocated.14
The following Monday on May 15, 1916, Washington was brought back to Waco for trial. Although debate still surrounds his innocence, Washington pled guilty to rape and murder in front of a packed courtroom. After deliberating for only four minutes the jury returned a guilty verdict. As the judge was recording the verdict—which warranted the death penalty—chaos erupted and an unidentified white spectator, using a racial epithet, yelled to “get” Washington.15 A group grabbed Washington and took him down the back stairs of the courthouse, where approximately 400 people were waiting in an alley.
Once outside they threw a chain around Washington’s neck and dragged him toward city hall. Along the short route Washington was stabbed with knives and battered with fists, bricks, clubs, and shovels.16 By the time they arrived outside of city hall— where a group had been waiting and preparing a bonfire—Washington was semi-conscious and bleeding profusely. The group doused his body with coal oil, hung him up on a tree by the chain around his neck, cut off his fingers, ears, and toes, and then lit the combustibles
9 James M. SoRelle, “The ‘Waco Horror’: The Lynching of Jesse Washington,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 86 (4) (April 1983): 517.
10 SoRelle, 517.
11 SoRelle, 519.
12 Patricia Bernstein, The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2005), 11-12.
13 Cited in Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 9.
14 SoRelle, 521.
15 SoRelle, 526.
Many Germans remained silent and sought to forget the events that took place between 1933 and 1945. Between 1945 and 1960, most memorials erected in Germany were initiated by survivors or relatives of victims, with little to no initiation by the state.3 However, state voices supporting efforts at memorialization did eventually emerge to remember German soldiers and civilian victims in what scholar Jenny Wüstenburg describes as a “dominant narrative whereby everyone had suffered under Hitler and, apart from a few bad apples, all were to be honored for having served the fatherland.”4 Through both forgetting and selectively remembering, the German state began to distort the narrative surrounding Germany’s role in the war and in the Holocaust.
‘Dig Where You Stand’: Grassroots Movements
While this distorted narrative took hold in the initial decades following WW II in parts of the German psyche, a significant shift in public memorialization emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. Influenced largely by people like Sven Lindqvist—whose book Dig Where You Stand: How to Do Research on a Job advocated for grassroots investigation into the history of industries—German citizens began their own efforts at “memory activism.”5 Struck by Linqvist’s assertion that the powerful control historical narratives and transmit them with biased partiality, many Germans were inspired to follow his call for ordinary workers to bring a new and balancing perspective to the table. As a result, citizens began to lead grassroots efforts to commemorate the murdered victims of the Nazi state leading to the erection of more memorials and plaques during the 1980s than were erected in the entire period between 1933 and 1980.6
One of the most notable examples of this social action occurred on May 5, 1985. On that date, a group of citizens gathered with shovels at a vacant lot in the middle of West Berlin. Forty years prior this spot had been the headquarters of the Gestapo, but by 1985 it had become nothing but an overgrown lot. These activists—who adopted the phrase “dig where you stand”—began to symbolically and literally dig up the past.7 Today the Topography of Terror Documentation Center, one of Berlin’s most visited museums, stands at the site.
These grassroots movements not only demanded that Germans actively and publicly engage with the past but they also worked to ensure that public memory reflected historical truth. Although these activists were primarily from the side of the perpetrators, they sought to discover and elevate the narratives of the victims. These new narratives that emerged contextualized and challenged the centralized, state-sanctioned notions from previous decades, and for the first time “perpetrators, sites of crimes, and the range of Nazism’s victims were explicitly named and commemorated.”8
Although public memorializations are still a point of contention in Germany, the decades since the 1980s have given rise to a new culture of memorializing the Holocaust and the atrocities committed under the Nazis. Where once a distorted narrative or silence predominated, a new and complex narrative has emerged that reflects with much greater accuracy the history of a people who elected Hitler and participated, either directly or indirectly, in the murder of nearly six million Jews, among many others. While this revision of the narrative to include the victims and their experiences has led to painful remembrances, it has opened up a process for continual renewal and engagement with Germany’s past. Despite the pain, many Germans have recognized that telling the whole story gives recognition to the victims and serves as a step toward Germany’s own social healing. Moreover, they have recognized a vital function of public remembrance: to serve as a warning of one’s own capacity for evil.
The ‘Waco Horror’
Many Americans miss the irony of condemning Nazi Germany while ignoring their own history of racial violence and terror. Between 1889 and 1918, the United States saw 3,224 lynchings. This number amounts to one such act every three days. Of those lynched during this period, 80% were B lack.9 Justifications for lynching ranged from punitive justice to proactive self-defense “against the Negro criminal as a race.”10 A minority of white Americans did publicly denounce lynchings—some because of its role in racial terror, many out of concern for the preservation of law and order—but through the mid-twentieth century lynching was still considered acceptable throughout the United States. Although public opinion evolved slowly, one particularly brutal incident brought lynchings to the forefront of public discourse and galvanized efforts to outlaw the practice.
On May 15, 1916, 17-year-old Jesse Washington was savagely tortured and lynched in Waco, Texas. At the time Waco was a “city reputed to be an enlightened, respectable, middle-class community,” writes James SoRelle, professor of history at Baylor University.11 With its 63 churches and the Baptist-affiliated Baylor University (the oldest institution of higher education in Texas), Waco had gained nicknames such as the “Wonder City,” the “Athens of Texas,” and the “City with a Soul.”12 Yet commingled with this religiosity and education was a deep-seated racial animosity, exhibited in Waco’s racial segregation and violence. Like Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, the lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco exposed the sobering reality that—as writer and theologian Richard Rubenstein said of the Holocaust—”it is an error to imagine that civilization and savage cruelty are antithesis [sic].”13
The events leading up to the lynching of Washington began on May 8, 1916, when 53-year-old Lucy Fryer was found murdered on her farm in Robinson, Texas. Suspicions fell almost immediately onto Washington, a 17-year-old B lack farm hand who had been hired a few months prior. Washington was arrested and taken to the Waco jail before being quickly transferred to Hillsboro and then to Dallas to avoid mob violence. This relocation was prudent; that evening around 500 citizens showed up at the Waco jail demanding Washington, unaware that he had been relocated.14
The following Monday on May 15, 1916, Washington was brought back to Waco for trial. Although debate still surrounds his innocence, Washington pled guilty to rape and murder in front of a packed courtroom. After deliberating for only four minutes the jury returned a guilty verdict. As the judge was recording the verdict—which warranted the death penalty—chaos erupted and an unidentified white spectator, using a racial epithet, yelled to “get” Washington.15 A group grabbed Washington and took him down the back stairs of the courthouse, where approximately 400 people were waiting in an alley.
Once outside they threw a chain around Washington’s neck and dragged him toward city hall. Along the short route Washington was stabbed with knives and battered with fists, bricks, clubs, and shovels.16 By the time they arrived outside of city hall— where a group had been waiting and preparing a bonfire—Washington was semi-conscious and bleeding profusely. The group doused his body with coal oil, hung him up on a tree by the chain around his neck, cut off his fingers, ears, and toes, and then lit the combustibles
27