Hostage taking – a flashback to the Nazi era
“A hostage”, says the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a person seized or held as security for the fulfilment of a condition”. More often than not, there is a threat attached, to the effect that if the condition is not met, further steps will be taken, such as the murder of the hostage. Seizure of non-combatants as a premeditated act ranks as one of the more odious crimes in the copybook of wartime criminality. It is a tactic long shunned as barbaric by civilised nations.
During the Second World War, the German army took hostages on a large scale. Notices such as the following frequently appeared in the pages of newspapers or on posters in occupied countries: “Cowardly criminals in the pay of England and Moscow killed the Feldkommandant of Nantes on the morning of October 20 [1941]. Up to now the assassins have not been arrested. As expiation for this crime I have ordered that fifty hostages be shot, to begin with…Fifty more hostages will be shot in case the guilty should not be arrested between now and October 23 by midnight.”
This practice was commonplace during the murderous reign of the Nazis in Europe. Typically, a ratio of 100 to 1 was proclaimed – a hundred civilians, regardless of age or gender, were to be shot for every German officer killed by underground fighters, unless the ‘assassins’ gave themselves up. The scale of slaughter of the hostages was miniscule compared with the number of helpless people (mostly Jews) herded to their deaths because they had been deemed as sub-human by their Nazi overlords and therefore considered as deserving of extermination. Nevertheless, the act of hostage taking, coupled with threats of their mass murder (invariably acted upon) sent shock waves through the communities of occupied Europe, as was the intention.
Unfortunately, memory is fickle. There is a human tendency to erase painful experiences or remodel them into simplistic configurations in order to match a current ideology. In civilised communities it is bad enough having to confront the horrific details of Nazi savagery, worse still to be compelled to reflect on the origins of such madness. With the anaesthetising passage of time, the history of life and death under the Nazis has been reduced to a few iconic images. Written histories, mainly designed for a young readership, are swamped by sanitised accounts of military and political manoeuvres in which little attention is paid to the ideologically driven sadism of the Nazi regime.
The recent mass murders of Israelis on home soil and the abdication of hostages, carried out by Hamas with unspeakable brutality, has come as a rude awakening. Israeli society, reeling from the blow, has rallied magnificently. Within the country, every conceivable source of support has been mobilised, no stone left unturned to keep attention focused on the terrible ordeal of the hostages and their families. Yet the most dispiriting and astonishing reaction to the hostage taking has come from societies outside Israel who pride themselves as being part of an enlightened tradition.
What we are witnessing has explanations which can be drawn from the psychological lexicon: denial of reality and the projection of ‘badness’ onto the Jews – a manifestly decent and responsible section of the international community. The former mechanism is widely recognised as a universal means of assuaging guilt; the latter can be traced back to an age-old hatred of the Jewish people stemming from the need to find scapegoats to take the blame for the woes of mankind.
Few anticipated, however, that in 2023 we would be dragged back into a world of medieval barbarity, still less that the myths which render hate-filled fanatics into torch bearers of liberation would seize the popular fancy and spread like wildfire. The only hope is that, like a forest fire which ultimately burns itself out, the topsy turvy assumptions about good and evil will end, just as the Nazi Reign of Terror ended in 1945.
