Munich, ‘good Germans’ and the dangers of othering your opponents

Rupprecht Gerngross is not a household name, even among historians of World War II, though he led what may have been the only successful internal coup against Hitler’s regime.

In the final weeks of the war, he led his small band of military translators to take control of Munich, the revered birthplace of Nazism. By doing so, he seems to have prevented the destruction of the city, and saved thousands of lives, including many thousands of Dachau prisoners who were to be killed by their Nazi captors.

He was an unlikely hero, a London-educated solicitor, brought up in China. But it was important to him that Germans should build the new Europe themselves by doing their part to liberate their own city.

Why isn’t he well-known? Because after the war ended, few people believed or remembered what had happened there – and the story remains controversial in some circles. The BBC man sent to interview him was sacked shortly afterwards and his story was spiked by The Times on the advice of the Foreign Office that it would not be ‘helpful’ to circulate stories about ‘good Germans’.

The amazing story is finally published in a new book, compellingly researched and thrillingly written by my friend Lesley Yarranton (Saving Munich 1945 – fuller transparency: my name is also on the cover urging people to read it!).

But it has made me think about how simple it is to ‘other’ your political opponents, and how unfair. How easy it would be if every wartime German had been a Nazi, or if every demonstrator was a revolutionary (as Trump suggests). But life is never quite as simple as that – nor is it possible to see the world accurately through those kind of paint-by-numbers, cliche eyeglasses.

We seem to be moving into a new world, which is a good deal more sensitive to people’s needs and feelings. That has to be a good thing, as long as we remember that very few people will fit neatly into the new categories of good and evil – and not many more than they ever have.

Let me give the final thought to the Rev Eli Jenkins from Under Milk Wood:

“We are not wholly bad nor good,
We who live beneath Milk Wood…”

If we can remember that, it might steer us away from the puritanism that so often afflicts new elements of morality.