Survival, ethics, and history intertwine in stories of World War II forced labor camps. Comparing lives across generations raises timeless questions about morality, psychology, and human resilience. Were survival choices under Nazi Germany collaboration or necessity? Exploring Tim Overdiek’s Silent Fathers reveals the complexity of ethics, freedom, and silence—challenging how we judge past lives today.
In my opinion, my life is already progressing quite a bit. At sixty-three years old, I dare to say that I have already gone through many different developments. Probably everyone around my age will think of this for themselves at some point. Only when you can make a comparison with other people, and/or generations, will you sometimes encounter large and often disastrous differences. As you probably know by now, I am an avid reader. History, science, psychology, and health are in many ways my favorite subjects to read.
Can you compare lives as a person?
I think it is very difficult for us to compare the lives of different people at different times. At the moment I’m reading a book by the writer Tim Overdiek with the title: “Silent fathers.” The book is about the fathers who once worked for the German occupiers in the German labor camps during the Second World War. Men who, during this terrible war, were ordered to work in German factories for the sake of the German war industry. According to tradition, it was initially very difficult to work for the enemy, but the care that the men and women received was of a reasonable nature, according to the survivors of this tragedy. But can you call survival under duress, far away from family and friends, reasonable?
How hard is survival under a dominant regime?
As the war progressed, the gradually losing Germans had an increasing need for new weapons, so that these forced laborers had to work harder and harder and were fed more sparingly. They could still have a beer or a drink outside the grounds of the metal factory on Sunday evenings, but it became increasingly grim in relation to the German “guards.” The relationship with these people became more and more rigid as this time went on. Fortunately, a seemingly eternal crisis in our lives almost always comes to an end. Just as the Second World War came to an end in 1945.
Was the end sweet as candy for the labor camp victims?
When the end of the horrors experienced came, this was not the final end. Initially, the Germans wanted to forcibly take the workers deeper into Germany. But after a while, the Americans were able to free them. They were examined and deloused with D.D.T. and transported home. There, at home, before their eventual final release, a new drama began. The Justice Department went back to the Netherlands to interrogate them. How did they end up in Germany, could they not have fled from the enemy? Should they have refused work? Wasn’t there a form of voluntariness in the work they had done? Should they have tackled the “salary”? Could they not have fled?
What does ethics say about the things you do during your life?
In other words, “was it ethical to give these war victims freedom to return?” Every person released from the German labor camps was interrogated before they were finally reunited with their surviving relatives. It seems to me to be a horror when you know that you have acted in good faith. What was actually the alternative in this situation, the bullet of the Germans for refusing to work? Yes, perhaps the Nazis had already had a production and/or logistical problem with more people who refused to work earlier in the Second World War. But wasn’t that for the people in question choosing a certain death? In a position where we don’t yet have a real description of what happens to us after death, I find this a difficult choice. And what happens to your wife and children if you don’t return home?
Did they have to choose evil?
For people who have never had to make this choice themselves, I find this very difficult to understand. I also understand the choice of the interrogators, they “probably” wanted to put the “national interest” above all else. In their eyes, the national interest took precedence over the lives of a few hard-to-fathom “Collaborators?” Right or wrong is the question here, but who has ever been able to answer this question ethically. What happens to a person when he or she, just returned home from a terrible labor camp, and finally thinks he or she can feel and experience freedom, and then possibly be prosecuted for treason?
Is silence the only option?
“Speech is silver, but silence is golden.” This is often said. Is the collective silence after the war about the German war labour camps by the former workers perhaps the purpose of not wanting to step into a traitor role? Were there really any collaborators of the Germans released from the labor camps after this terrible war? Were the “good guys” too anxious to pay the price when reporting these bad guys? We will probably never know seventy-nine years after the terrible Second World War. But ask yourself, “What is right, and what is wrong in such a situation?” Suppose you had no money to buy food for your spouse and children, and you knew that by sacrificing yourself, by working in a German labor camp, you could still take care of them, what would you do? Can you give me your honest sincere answer? I cannot answer this question.
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