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'Ordnung muss sein!'
By MOSHE KOHN The literal translation of this German phrase Is "There must be order" or "orderliness." But those who were In the German concentration and death camps or who have carefully read the writings of the survivors know that this phrase expresses one of the favourite tenets of the Hitlerian order. If, say, a group of 100 camp Inmates went out on a work dtail early in the morning and a few of them died or were beaten to death while hauling rocks In the construction of an underground aircraft factory, the survivors had to carry the corpses back to camp in the evening, so that at the check-in rollcall exactly 100 bodies should "be accounted for. Otherwise, the German sense of order would Ise offended. later, along comes this pesky woman, Beate Klarsfeld, who even had the audacity to be a real German, and tries to upset the applecart. Doesn't she realize that "all that" is ancient history? Isn't she aware that there is a new Germany that is one of the pillars of the Western democratic alliance? Doesn't she consider that we have had enough of revanchist Vergeltung and Wiedergutmachung ! No, she doesn't. This Klarsfeld woman, who has married a Jew and settled In France, considers that even a generation later, when we have so many other things on our mind —like the Middle East problem and oil — one ought to be worrying about such things as 1,000 former Gestapo chiefs living in Germany who have been condemned to death she realize that the German Federal Republic is a land of law and Ordnung, a democracy whose legislators have not yet ratified a 1971 extradition agreement with France? No, she doesn't. And she even thinks she is entitled to take the law into her own hands, and tries to kidnap Kurt Lischka, one of those thousand men who, furthermore, were after all, only obeying orders when they saw to it that 90,000 French Jews were deported to their death. As if this weren't enough: Klarsfeld even goes and paints a swastika on the wall of Lischka's home in Cologne, and painting swastikas is against the law in the new Germany. Yes, Ordnung muss sein, and Beate must stand trial in Cologne todav so that there is order in the new Germany. |
