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Dear Sidney Brown, dear Dorothy Brown,...
56 years have passed since the end of the
Nazi regime, which led with the Second World War and the Holocaust
to a deep break in the history of civilisation of mankind.
57 years have passed since the horrific war events, when on
August 26th, 1944 after a night of terrific airraids a pack
of hysterical men and women chased and lynched 8 young American
airmen on their way across Rüsselsheim in a most cruel
way.
Elmore Austin, William Dumont, Norman Rogers,
John Sekul, Haigus Tufenkjian and Thomas Williams were murdered.
William Adams and Sidney Brown survived and could escape.
Welcome, dear "Gene" if I may
call you like that. It is a great honour for us that you accepted
without any hesitation our invitation to come with your wife
Dorothy and your daughter Anny Franklin to Rüsselsheim.
I am deeply moved. Welcome, Mr. And Mrs. Tian, that you as
relatives of Haigus Tufenkjian have come to Rüsselsheim
in commemoration.
For a long period of time these tragic
events of August 26th 1944 were passed over in silence, ignored
and left unclear. Only today our municipality is ready, substituting
the generation of our parents or even our grandparents to
accept your forgiveness which you have granted the people
here already long ago. Now we can, together with you, commemorate
your murdered comrades, and mourn for them. We are happy that
you survived with William Adams and that, by being here today,
you give us the chance to better understand your fate and
the fate of your comrades and to make known the war-caused
situation of those days. The shadows of these tragic events
behind which we find general notions of victims and offenders
begin to dissolve. When we face these shadows, the outlines
of desperate human beings are getting clearer step by step.
From the photos which August Nigro has
provided for the exhibition we see how young your were at
the age of 19, when you became airmen and when you were flying
your first mission in the "Wham.Bam! Thank Your Ma'm!"
on that day. You were youngsters with all your life before
you when your were sent into a war which was expected to exterminate
the cynic system of Hitler fascism, which made millions of
people victims of war and Holocaust. At the same time, however,
you and your comrades were made agents of a war strategy fo
the Allies, which hit the civil population by transferring
the front-line to their doorstep. Here are the pictures of
you and your 7 comrades, cruelly chased and lynched by hard-working,
god-believing, and up to that moment law-abiding men and women.
We read the letters of desperate mothers who are praying for
their sons and who for a long time do not give up the hope
for their return. We see the photos of the defendants in their
trial. Among them even women who were mothers themselves.
Facing the possibility of their crime, in expectation of their
punishment, in the court room they seem to have grown old
by decades, despaired and destroyed. It was not only the single
night of airraids which made them lose a humanitarian grip,
but certainly also a system approaching its end which had
destroyed their ego. A situation, similar to the one described,
by Ivo Andric in his novel "The Bridge across the Drina
River" already in 1914. The people crumbled into pursued
and into pursuing ones. The hungry animal that inhabits a
human being but must not be shown as long as the dikes of
good manners and laws are not taken away, was now liberated.
Now the sign was given, the dikes were removed. As often in
human history, violence and robbery, yes even murder, were
tacitly admitted on condition that they were carried out in
the name of superior interests, under fixed paroles and against
a limited number of humans of a certain name and a certain
conviction. Who lived in those days with a pure soul and an
open eye, could see, how a complete community changed in one
day.
We see their pictures like the pictures
of destroyed houses and can only assume what war means, where
borderlines between offenders and victims can no longer be
drawn, but where necessarily entanglements start to exist,
where offenders become victims and where victims become offenders.
War is the situation, where positions of guilt and innocence
are constantly interchangeable. We also see pictures of the
merciless executions of human beings who took part in lynch-law
and who were condemned there upon. We question the moral sight
of capital punishment. In his impressive lecture during the
first public event of forum urbanum last year August Nigro
reproached the chief prosecutor of the Rüsselsheim offenders
that he should have been more sensitive for the psychological
however not necessarily legal truth of the argument of the
defence that, facing the terror to which Rüsselsheim
had been exposed the night before, and regarding the Americans
in the morning as the responsible ones for this terror, that
the clash had been inevitable. He indicated which burden,
which shock and which suffering the home frontline meant for
a town like Rüsselsheim during the Second World War,
where the enemy as an invisible power of the sky brought destruction
and death. Such a traumatic experience could considerably
influence moral behaviour. Only when this was considered,
one could recognize how the Rüsselsheim death-trap was
set and how it worked with Germans and Americans alike.
What had happened to you and your 7 comrades,
dear Mr. Brown, on August 26th 1944 in Rüsselsheim after
the B-24 Liberator-Bomber had been hit north of Hannover by
anti-aircraft missile, after the crew had parachuted and after
8 of you had been brought to Oberursel after beeing captured?
The trip had been interrupted because of rail-damage near
Rüsselsheim. (I am quoting from August Nigro's book.)
The air-raid which preceded the lynching
cost 198 lives, among them 177 forced labourers. Rüsselsheim
suffered great damage. The air-raids cost the destruction
of half of its living quarters, the lives of 475 civilians
and the relocation of 5100 people. Most of the destruction
and the dislodgement were inflicted upon Rüsselsheim
during the air-attack of August 26th. The 8 American airmen
were led across devastated Rüsselsheim to reach a train
east of the town which was to take them to Oberursel. When
the prisoners passed the market square, a group of people
gathered and started to insult and spit at them. Then the
outcry of a woman:"These are the terror airmen who last
night destroyed our houses and murdered our children. Kill
them!" caused tumult. The airmen were driven along Frankfurt
Street in easterly direction and then south into Taunus Street
and then west along Graben Street while being hit all the
time with fists, stones, sticks and fragments of ruins. People,
who had been waiting in still-standing trains near Graben
Street streamed out of the railway waggons and joined the
railway labourers, piled heaps of debris and stones near the
wall and joined like mad the attack. Inhabitants of Rhine
Street followed shortly after. From Station Square, where
Opel workers, anti-aircraft-soldiers and others had come together,
more than one hundred rioters marched through Graben Street
to the place of the uproar.
At the wall, whereto the airmen creepingly
had taken refuge, a man, arrived with a hammer, hit the head
of an airman who stood just below him. Two other men, who
were standing on piles of debris behind the wall, lifted a
tie in order to throw it upon the airmen. On the street, women
about whom it was later reported that they had been the most
violent ones on that day, threw their milk-cans upon the airmen,
when no debris was any longer at hand. The hail of debris
hit the airmen and the wall with a rat-a-tat-tat which reminded
of machine-gun-fire. The wall was no place of refuge any longer
and the men tried to escape to the west along Graben Street.
There they met the rioting crowd from Station Square. Various
shirt-sleeved men in army pants and boots, together with railway
workers joined the others and incited the mob to hit the airmen
and to throw debris at them until they fell on the cobble-stones.
Even when the men tried to creep towards each other, in a
kind of a last effort of mutual fetus-like protection, the
hail of stones and the beating continued unabashed, until
they were all lying there motionless. At no time had the 8
young, strong airmen offered any resistance to their persecutors.
They were suffering their pain with stoical endurance or,
perhaps, with a passivity caused by terror and at no time
had the guards of Luftwaffe made the attempt to intervene
and to finish the riot. "Back to Graben Street",
cried the Nazi to the rest of the mob, that he would now finish
the suffering of the young men, moved from one end to the
row of bodies to the other and shot the first four airmen
who were lying on the ground once or twice into their heads.
Then his 6 shot, 6,35 millimeter gun ran out of ammunition.
He ordered some Hitler Boys from the surrounding crowd to
fetch a cart from a farmer onto which the lifeless bodies
were thrown. The young men pulled it, together with some other
ones, with a victory cry, as if they were Red Indians with
their booty (so a witness described it) towards the Forest
Cemetary. When the trek had reached its destination at the
forest cemetary the warden came out of his office and immediately
saw the pool of black blood which formed below the cart. Despite
the thrashing, the shots and the blood-pool one still heard
the moaning and the cries of pain which revealed the still
living men. A man armed with a slat in his hand jumped upon
the cart and hit those who still seemed to live against their
heads. Only a new air-raid alarm stopped them. Then they all
took refuge in shelters, where the main topic of conversation
was the death-march of the "Canadians".
Sidney Brown and William Adams had fortunately
survived the death-march. When they were beaten at the wall,
Sidney Brown feigned death and Adams was unconscious. When
after the alarm all ran away from the cemetary, the two men
crept from the cart and each of them was surprised that the
other one was still alive. They couldn't do anything for their
comrades and escaped, without being seen, into the Rhineland,
where they were made captive again after 4 days. On the next
day Russian workers burried the dead in an communal grave
in the eastern part of the cemetary (Quoted from August Nigro,
speech at a forum urbanum meeting, 26th August 2000 and from
his book "Wolf-trap".) What a pain it must have
been which people of this town inflicted upon you, dear Mr.
Brown, and upon your comrades. How could you master it? Words
are not sufficient to understand it. A real understanding
necessarily remains limited. But the image of this town is
made different facing the shocking experience that people
in those days here, but also at other places, were capable
of those crimes against humanity. We could not even, substituting
the parent generation, ask you forgiveness, because you before
us, moved by deep Christian faith owned the magnanimity to
forgive. After 57 years, with open hands, you have returned
to this place to commemorate together with us your comrades
and to mourn for them after such a long time. This shows that
reconciliation cannot be called for or ordered, but it grows
voluntarily among men. We thank your for what you offer us.
Commemorating these days the murdered American
airmen, we are doing this in an admonishing way. For history,
which we recognize as history of civilisation, is not yet
over, the question: what we are still carrying along from
the past and where the way will lead us has not been answered.
Still today various dangers to our society are still looming
below the fragile surface of civilisation. The possibilities
of a repetition of these historical realities, in whatever
shape, can never be completely excluded. If we want to prevent
similar events from happening in the future, we need memories
that facilitate the moments of confessions, admissions or
avowals concerning the injustice that happened. That is why
an admonishing commemoration of the dead should be linked
with memories of the tragic events of August 26th, 1944.
Dear Mr. Brown, dear Mr. Tian, ladies and
gentlemen. Let me attempt to explain why our civic community
is only now - after so many generations - is growing into
the situation of overcoming the silence and of admitting publicly
these memories.
Apart from the time that possibly had to
pass by to gain distance from the immediate war events in
order to build up a new form of life, we had to work hard
in the recent past in order to understand and overcome the
shame and the traumatisation of the horrible events that led
to a non-acceptance of these memories. Behind the cold wall
of silence which was kept intact in deference to the descendants
of the condemned, many people suffered because they could
not and were not allowed to speak about it. One could hear,
that some offspring of condemned people were even excluded
from the community. Fingers were pointed at them. "Holes
of the soul" had grown which hardly admit mourning, as
the jew Salomon Korn says about how our society deals with
Holocaust: "The dimension of the crime prevented an integration
of the horrific fact into the individual and collective consciousness.
In order to bear the scope of the crime, if one is ready to
face it, it must be kept emotionally at distance." This
ist an unstable, even a traumatic state of memory which because
of its negative elements of affectation will always be menaced
by refusal, denial and repression. Resisting these effects
will need a constant act of will, an conscious effort of remembering
directed against the negative elements of affectation."
Unquote.
This act of will as a conscious effort
of remembering concerning the murders of August 26th, 1944,
had to be carried out. It was only possible on condition that
people could open themselves without renewed accusation, without
reproaches, retribution or compensation. This was made possible
by the public dialogue of forum urbanum called: "Remembering
the shadows of the past. A Rüsselsheim dialogue for reconciliation."
Conceived in a changing process and learning from past failures,
the conditions could only grow in an attitude formulated by
Roger Gorenflos. In his preface to Nigro's "Wolf-trap"
he writes: "After such a long time of denial this cannot
be the time of revengeful retribution and moral arrogance,
but of the deep understanding of a war-based, fatal situation
of which none of us can be absolutely sure whether the historic
circumstances would not have made him or her act in a way
which we would think to be impossible today."
Thus for the first time traumatic experiences
and denials could be dealt with publicly in deference to the
descendants of the condemned in a sensitive way. The fact
that not only many witnesses had come; but also descendants
of the convicted culprits confirms this. Moving stories which
were told by women in tears showed that there were and are
in Rüsselsheim despite the long years of silence, people
who mourn for the victims of lynch-law, who wish to express
this and who collectively are searching for an explanation
although they witnessed the time when they were children themselves.
Intimate and public elements were intertwined.
Individual fates and experiences were privately discussed
in families and family circles, but also publicly, whereas
the dialogue provided further instances for reflection and
initiated a renewed understanding of conditions that turn
people into killers. So for the first time it was made possible
to publicly articulate a consciousness of injustice as far
as the crime was concerned, to utter a confession. Quite different,
shared memories had to be recognized like the various fates
of victims and offenders as well as their descendants. Thoughtfulness
started, an opening of hearts and thoughts for each other.
This led to an understanding of people in this town about
how to deal with these various members in future. Advances
were made.
This meant placing the reports and the
memories into the framework of today's life, taking position
despite existing risks even in the political field. - For,
Remembering does not mean returning to the source of the events
that and how they happened. Remembering is always the result
of a more or less lavish production. Whatever lies in historical
archives cannot simply be taken out and presented the way
they are. They are asking for renewed contextualisation which
necessarily determines its sense, its meaning. History is
no mirror, no fact, no necessity: History has to be told.
History's topic is neither its offender nor its victim, neither
the active nor the passive hero, but first of all its narrator.
History always has a benefit or a disadvantage for a present-day
position." (Quoted from Barbara Kuon during the last
meeting of forum urbanum on November 14th, 2000).
For a democracy like ours it is liberating
and ingenious at the same time if it admits the various memories
of the shadow-sides of the past and stands up for them without
any reservations. For past, present and future are intertwined
and only in this context ingenuity and identity, however diverse
and fragmentary, can be born in a community, responsibility
can grow for a more humane future. I think it is important
to understand where the causes for war, terror and violence
are located worldwide, and to recognize at the same time that
with the possibilities of biotechnology we are confronted
with a new dimension of a determination of humanity in future.
Facing growing xenophobia and violence before a right-wing
background in our society we are called upon "To show
face". Not only to protect potential victims, but also
to protect our civil society, we have to oppose those dangers.
Such an attitude does not remain outside,
but it demands to look inside, to ask what we are still carrying
in us. "Aren't these below the surface military, or even
fascist traits looming, where a march may become a death march?"
(Quoted from Dr. Karen Joisten in: "Rücksicht auf
Rüsselsheim", exhibition catalogue). Where are our
potentials to prevent this from happening? Hans Diebschlag
with his picture "We love marching" hast pointed
on it. The former Head of the Department for Cultural Affairs,
Gerhard Löffert, had the idea to give the citizens of
Rüsselsheim, by using artistic means, the possibility
to find an identity with their town by tackling the past.
After an old lady had reported to Hans Diebschlag during his
public work of the horrible events which had happened not
far from his studio, he was deeply moved. "I was speechless",
he said, " I took my brush and painted underneath the
street where the carnival activists were marching, corpses
and soldiers, as if the street had become transparent. Thereby
the artist created his own version of the "Death Dance".
He shook up and provided the decisive impetus not to forget,
but to remember.
Apart from articles that had already appeared
in local newspapers in the eighties, Dr. Günter Neliba
contributed with his book that was published last year to
further elucidation with his present evaluation of the records
of the lawsuit he confirms Dr. Negro's thesis, we received
from Prof. Dr. August Nigro with his book "Wolf-Trap.
Deathdance in Rüsselsheim" an important contribution,
where already more than 10 years ago he treated and documented
the tragic events of August 26th in a literary way. I wish
to express my regrets that the painting was recklessly removed
from the Townhall meeting-chamber and only five years later
brought back in the course of the dialogue. I am very sorry
that the manuscript of "Wolf-Trap" in German language,
ready for publication was locked away for about ten years
and that the author did not get the financial and political
support for its publication. We owe it to him that Eugene
Brown with his family as well as the Tian family are among
us today.
Without the Diebschlag-picture and without
the book by August Nigro we would not have got so far in the
dialogue which necessarily was also a controversial debate.
By becoming ourselves - not quite accidentally - subjects
of history, we were able to prepare together with others,
the ground to meet Sidney Brown today.
Ladies and gentlemen,
The events of commemoration that begin today give each of
us the chance for an answer to what you, dear Mr. Brown, offer
us. Your presence here today facilitates further approaches
for open developments of the future. Further encounters of
relatives of the murdered American airmen with citizens from
Rüsselsheim will certainly follow. If this frankness
succeeds, we will learn how responsibility for the future
of our society will grow with succeeding generations, just
because the perspectives concerning the cruel events will
change according to time and topical context. Te visit of
the Brown family in a Rüsselsheim school will be another
step on this way. Also with the planned competition for the
realisation of a piece of art can we keep awake the memories
for a future time by opening it for artistic perspectives.
We are very thankful to persons from the
arts, science, the churches, local business enterprises, persons
from public life and politics who have jointly carried this
process of rememberance and will share it further on. Our
special thanks go to the Town Council of Rüsselsheim
and Oberbürgermeister Stefan Gieltowski who made today's
meeting possible.In the next few days, especially tomorrow
during Open Townhall of Rememberances as well as after the
commemorative Church service on Sunday there will be ample
time to continue and to deepen the talks with our guests.
I thank you, Sidney Brown, that you have
come to us.
I thank you for your attention and
I now pass on the word to Sidney Brown. Gene, it's your part
now.
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