Omega

I never doubted that he deserved his eminence, or that he had had important things to say about the course of human affairs in the twentieth century, the era in which he specialised. But the austerity of his judgements meant that charity was often lacking in his work. At times it had an air of ruthlessness, most starkly illustrated in his expropriation of my grandfather’s diaries for a book that took no account of my mother’s feelings.

At fewer than three hundred pages, In the Eye of the Storm was a slimmer volume than he usually produced. It was originally published in hardback under the title: Duty Bound: The Diaries of Colonel Heinz Thom, and for once his original title better captured the essence of the book. Heinz Thorn (he lengthened his surname to Thomas on immigrating to England) had been a young officer who was attached to the general staff of the German army shortly before the outbreak of the war. He served under its chief, Franz Halder, and his successor, Kurt Zeitzler, until a bout of ill health forced his retirement from active duties in the summer of 1944.

The colonel, who never joined the Nazi party, was the son of a Lutheran pastor from Osnabruck in Lower Saxony. Between 1940 and the end of the war he kept diaries that revealed a romantic, philosophical bent. A description of linden blossom glimpsed on an otherwise grey morning might lead him into a disquisition on the evanescence of beauty. The fall of light on a polished table might give rise to reflections on the subjectivity of perception. The sound of a horse clattering over cobbles might catapult him back to childhood and the smell and feel of such a creature in a humid stable when he was lathering it after a gallop. My grandfather had obviously read Proust; he was clearly a man of refined sensibilities.

No mention was made in any of the entries of hisday-to-day duties, and he kept them scrupulously free of any political comment. There were only passing references to the war, as when a joyous family Christmas in 1942 was contrasted with the plight of the troops in the east, by which he doubtless meant the encircled Sixth Army at Stalingrad. The regular entries ended when he was transferred to Munich after a bout of tuberculosis; after that they became infrequent, and much more focused on his joy at having his wife close at hand. They didn’t record what must have been his growing horror at the advance of the Red Army. Though he never expressed any untermenschen sentiments in his writings he plainly had a great love of his country and its culture. He also had a deep commitment to the ties of blood and family. He recorded his delight at his wife’s pregnancy and the eventual birth of my mother in early 1945, then mere weeks later his despair that his wife, who had gone to Danzig to rescue her elderly parents, had been trapped there and consumed in the Soviet onslaught, missing presumed perished.

The diaries alone, as an unadorned source, were interesting as a human document; but my father found a way to give them much wider moral significance. He did this by interleaving them with accounts of the concurrent administrative activities of my father’s office, the most notorious of which was the framing of the so-called Commissar Order prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union. This had authorised the immediate arrest and summary execution of all Communist officials by occupying forces. It was held to be the point at which the German Army surrendered its military orthodoxy to the insane imperatives of the Nazi regime.

My father’s insertions were presented without comment, except for a crucial and damning passage in his preface, where he pointed out that Heinz Thorn was one of Halder’s senior subordinates and would have been intimately involved in his office’s administrative activities. Halder, who after the war was eventually honoured with the Meritorious Civilian Service Award by the US government for services to the state, was one of the senior generals who had helped formulate the Commissar Order; he had also advocated blanket reprisals against groups containing hostile individuals. The implication was clear: despite all his aesthetic scruples, my grandfather was deeply complicit in the brutalisation of the war in the east, a brutalisation that had led to the death of millions.