Children of Impure Blood

Any experienced official will tell you that in bureaucracies the biggest crises like to happen on Friday afternoons, when people are already starting to dream about the weekend. Bernhard Lösener, head of the racial legislation department at the Third Reich’s Ministry of the Interior, must surely have cursed this bureaucratic curse when, on September 13, 1935, the Führer himself called and ordered him to draft, within 24 hours, the text of the laws for the protection of German blood and honor. Hitler had decided to present the new legislation that very Sunday at the Nazi rally in Nuremberg, so Bernhard had to say goodbye to his plans to spend the weekend carousing and smashing the windows of Jewish shops with his colleagues from the ministry. Instead, he had to roll up his sleeves and draft the acts that legalized racial discrimination and stripped millions of Jews of their citizenship and human dignity. For these rules, later known as the Nuremberg Laws, to be implemented effectively, it was of course also necessary to define whom they applied to. So we got full-blooded Jews and, alongside them, Mischlinge of the first and second degree, that is, the Jewish children, or the children of Jewish children, of mixed marriages, with half or a quarter Jewish blood. The leading “experts” on racial discrimination in the Third Reich were in fact quite critical of the hastily written laws. Some found them insufficiently scientific and too lenient, especially regarding the Mischlinge. These were supposedly even more dangerous than full-blooded Jews, because they could carry out their Jewish schemes with a dose of Aryan efficiency. Hitler himself was satisfied with the laws, since, as later events confirmed, they fully achieved their purpose, namely to create enemies of the nation. Hitler himself once admitted that if the Jews did not exist, they would have to be invented. Nothing unites like a shared hatred.

The pieces in the series of articles that the weekly Demokracija and Nova24TV recently began publishing about the “children of the UDBA” also seem to have been written in rather a hurry. “Children of the UDBA” (udbovska deca) is a term introduced into the Slovenian media space by the pen of a former respected judge of the European Court of Human Rights, freed from the ethical and moral shackles of a well-paid office. The gentleman, as only he can, has also given the whole matter a scientific basis. If I understand correctly, these are people in important positions who should not be there because they are related to personalities whom the gentleman and the two outlets, rather sweepingly and superficially, link to the UDBA, the Yugoslav secret police, and to all manner of immoral dealings from recent Slovenian history. Translated into the language of the Nuremberg legislation, the “children of the UDBA” are half- and quarter-UDBA Mischlinge.

The point of what I am writing is not, of course, a comparison between the notorious secret police of the former regime and the Jews who were the victims of the greatest crime in human history. The Holocaust was an inconceivable crime, yet today it is being relativized and belittled, including in the name of and with the help of ideas promoted by some of the hunters of the children of the UDBA. I have a very low opinion of the UDBA, rivaled only by the contempt I feel for those who distort historical facts and spread ideas and a politics of lies, hatred and fear. What incontestably justifies the comparison with the 1930s is the attempt first to incriminate a group of people wholesale and accuse them of the worst crimes, and then, on the basis of blood ties, to disqualify their children or grandchildren as well. If the evidence of alleged misdeeds by the “UDBA men” is already on rather shaky ground, for the “children of the UDBA” there is none at all. Impure blood is enough for disqualification, together with the fact that these are people who, in one way or another, stand in the way of the populist attack on the civilizational foundations of Slovenian democracy and independence.

According to the two outlets, the “children of the UDBA” are people who have “stolen the state” from Slovenians. This is what they say: “The Slovenian deep state is rooted very deeply in all spheres of society, politics and the economy, even almost 30 years after independence, when the communist regime was supposed to have been ended.” The aforementioned expert on moral questions is also worried. This is how he complained: “The political protest is directed against the UDBA men themselves, but it is forgotten that countless of their children and even grandchildren are on the scene. I have been watching the rise of UDBA children and grandchildren for at least twenty years, not only in the people’s republic but even in international organizations. There are at least two in Strasbourg; how many there are elsewhere, I don’t know.”

Let us look at what Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the newly minted Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda—minister of public enlightenment and propaganda—said on the subject of the “hijacked state,” this time hijacked by the Jews, in the great salon of the Hotel Carlton in Geneva in September 1933, two years before the Nuremberg legislation was adopted. “The Jews have occupied the leading positions in the German media, literature, theater, film, in the medical and legal professions and on the stock exchange. They control parliament and the political parties,” he complained. In his conclusion, he did try to allay fears about where complaints about the “hijacked state” might lead. “The concentration camps are intended only for the re-education of antisocial leaders into useful citizens,” Dr. Goebbels asserted, assuring his audience “that this excessive Jewish influence will be dealt with in a just and humane manner.”

Such assurances, which, as history showed, Dr. Goebbels evidently gave with his fingers crossed behind his back, are nowhere to be found in the articles about the children of the UDBA, but, as I mentioned, this is a series, so perhaps more reassuring tones can be expected in one of the next episodes.

The list of “UDBA men” who supposedly spawned the “red aristocracy” includes personalities who played various roles in the past. Just as I reject sweeping accusations, I will not defend them sweepingly either. People who think and respect facts can form their own opinion about each of them. What cannot be ignored, however, is the attempt to accuse and disqualify their children and grandchildren on the basis of blood ties. Here the analogy with Nazi racial legislation is certainly appropriate. I want to believe that such writing is merely the result of moral and intellectual handicaps, since as a humanist I don’t want automatically to think the worst of people, but the whole story still comes across as sinister and frightening. It is also striking that the list of alleged “UDBA men” does not include quite a few public figures who, by any objective yardstick and on the basis of their own deeds and ideas before the Slovenian Spring, would surely deserve a place on the incriminating list. Perhaps their turn will come, or perhaps they have been left off because they are connected to the “UDBA” only through their own past deeds and former convictions, not through blood ties.

Illogical? Not credible? Stupid? Perhaps, but certainly effective in achieving its purpose. You know: if enemies don’t exist, they have to be invented. Nothing unites like a shared hatred.