Book to read: “The Order Of The Day” by Eric Vuillard. The corporations which benefited from the Reich’s concentration camps – and the politicians – didn’t give a tinker’s damn about incarcerated Jews, or to the annexation of Austria. Chilling parallels with Uyghur slave labour in Xinjiang, destruction of Hong Kong democracy, and threats against Taiwan.
Check out “The Order Of The Day” by Eric Vuillard.It’s a beautifully written reconstruction of a series of defining meetings in the lead up to World War Two.
It opens and closes with the twenty four German patriarchs who are the titans of German industry.
Their shameful willingness to aid and abet Hitler, to profit from the Reich, and from the slave labour of the concentration camps, generated phenomenal wealth – which was the foundation of their post war success.
From Krupp to Bayer, BMW, Daimler, IG Farben, Agfa, Shell, Schneider, Telefunken and Siemens their fortunes were made in the hideous camps of Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, and the rest.
Like the political leaders who danced obligingly around Hitler, these tainted corporations – and the calculating machines which owned them – didn’t give a tinker’s damn about what was happening to the incarcerated Jews, and others.
The play-acted fantasy meetings which Vuillard describes- from a Downing Street lunch for Ribbentrop to an encounter between Lord Halifax and Hitler – and the toadyism of aristocratic English neo-Nazis – has the feel of a Whitehall farce whose actors sleep walk into a World War.
The chapters which deal with the elimination of Austria, the treacherous collaboration of weak political and church leaders, are potent and deeply relevant today as we watch the ascent of the Chinese Communist Party.
Learning again how quickly opposition was subdued and the population largely acquiesced as Jews were forced to scrub paving stones and Nazi ideology became commonplace is a sobering reminder of the thin veneer which separates us from tyranny.
The collaborating corporations turning a blind eye to slave labour in Xinjiang, to reports of appalling human rights violations, Genocide, and atrocity crimes, and to the daily intimidation of Taiwan (as too many pretend it isn’t happening) make “The Order of the Day” required reading.
Le Monde is right that the book’s “staggering power lies in its simplicity.”
