Mensch, ärgere Dich nicht - Compensation Ludo
The Nazis, the Jewish Compensation Claims and the Unsinkable Werner Best
Fighting for compensation is never easy but hardly any other experience of this kind was more disillusioning or draining than what victims of Nazi crimes and persecution had to go through after the war.
Only humour could help them put up with the seemingly endless vile ingenuity with which the German state and hordes of still active Nazi sympathisers as well as high-rank Nazis themselves managed to thwart their attempts at seeking justice. In June 1950 the Allgemeine Jüdische Illustrierte published a cartoon by Peter Holstein who turned a popular German board game Mensch, ärgere Dich nicht (it can be loosely translated as “Keep calm and carry on”), played in the UK as “Ludo”.
Here, each station was a direct commentary on the contemporary situation of the survivors of the Third Reich thieving and murderous policies. From procrastination to mounting insurmountable hurdles to actually treating the perpetrators better than their victims. Like in the legendary case alluded to at the station No. 25.
One of the more remarkable episodes of post-war West Germany involved Werner Best - trained legal expert, former SS-Obergruppenführer, senior Gestapo organiser and Reich Plenipotentiary in occupied Denmark.
The man is credited with having spawned the idea of Einsatzgruppen – Nazi deployment troops used in mass murders of East Europeans. Einsatztruppen which carried out mass murders in Rumbula or at Babi Yar (just two of the horrific Nazi massacres, where in just a matter of days they shot dead 25,000 and 33,771 Jewish men, women and children respectively). Werner Best was one of the main cogs in the “Final Solution” machinery.
He was well-educated, he was ambitious and he was ruthless. Götz Aly, one of the truly admirable German journalists and historians, wrote about him in Der Spiegel in 1996:
He was the highest-ranking survivor of the Nazi terror apparatus—the third man after Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler. Yet despite determined efforts by prosecutors, he never faced justice before a post-war German court. Instead, he gradually faded from public memory.
Dr Werner Best was not the kind of banal bureaucratic perpetrator described by Hannah Arendt. He was one of the intellectual architects of National Socialism—a man who fused the German civil service’s cult of administrative efficiency with the imperial dream of a Nazi ‘Großraum’ (”Greater Germanic Sphere”) and the planned annihilation of those the regime considered unworthy of life.
So naturally, in the Third Reich he went on to have a flourishing career. Career which was to keep on flourishing well after no outstretched right arms would be raised in the open…