4 - THE BULLETIN - Thursday, June 19. 1980
PERUSING THE PRESS
GERMAN TOWN CONTINUES TO HONOR NAZI COMMANDER
BY JORG RECKMANN
Friedrich Christiansen, member of the Nazi *People's Court', air force flyer, general, condemned to 12 years of imprisonment in the Netherlands for crimes against humanity, remains an honored citizen of Wyk-on-the-Fohr, and the main street of the town is to continue to bear his name.
Thirty-five years after the end of the war, a majority of the town council could not bring itself recently to terminate the honors won by its late great son for his accomplishments as a flyer between 1918 and 1932.
AVorse yet, the Written statement' supporting the decisjpn urged the councillors belonging to the Christian , Democratic Union, the Free Democratic Party, and the Communal Fellowship to issue a declaration honoring the general. Since then, the state ministry of the interior ih Kiel has called in the records, of 4he case for the archives. The chance for an admission of shame, or at least for a gesture in that direction, is already gone.
In World War One, Christiansen was a highly decorated pilot. As commander of the airship DO X, he was world-famous in the early thirties. His career continued under the Third Rieich: he became national commissioner for air travel and leader of the * National Socialist Flying Corps, a post that gav«.him ministerial rank.
On May 20, 1940, Christiansen became military commander in the Netherlands.  In  reprisal for a
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EDITOR'S NOTE: ThisartlclebyJorgReckniann, "The TownofWyk—ItsPeopIeandTheirGeneral, origmally appeared in I)feZ«a of Hamburg, Germany on ApriU, 1980. The Item gives a penetratto^ of the case of Air Force General, Friedrich Christiansen, who rcmahis an^honored citizen of the town of Wyk-on-the-Fohr, despite urefutable evidence of his strong Nazi past. The article was transbited from the German_ by Leon Hurvitz of Vancouver.
partisan attack, he had the village of Putten reduced in flames on Oct. T, 1944 and all males between the ages of 18 and 50 deported.. The number thus transported was 660, of Whom 540 died in German concentration camps — 107 in a labor camp in Ladelund, scarcely 40 kilometres from Wyk.
General Christiansen made no use of his power to grant clemency. This fact is borne Out. by materials belonging to the Netherlands State Institute for War Documents. For instance, a plea on the part of Aleid van der Hal, a man of whom both legs had been amputated, carries the scribbled rfote, in Christiansen^s own handwriting, *A Jew is a Jew, legs or no legs.* Van der Hal died on June
where they have been sitting for 15 years. In 1965"any councillor could have looked at them. Still nothing happened.
By this time, the Christiansen case had achieved tragic fame. The Dutch, in particular, could not comprehend why Christiansen's honors were renewed in 1952, when the English had abrojgated them immediately after the war.
Twelve years later, in 1964; Wyk was in the headlines again. A majority, belonging to the Christian Democratic Union arid the Fellowship of Communal Voters, defeated a proposal by the Social Democrats to revoke Christiansen's honors. Resigned, Die Zeit reported, *No Change in Wyk', and Eugen Kogon
Although, at the session at which the magistrate announced his decision, the Christian Democrats had a clear majority, a decision in favor of abrogation, if only a slim one, seemed a certainty.
Opinion, in Wyk has been divided. While Friedrich Winter, supervisor of the voteijs' register, finds the name Christiansen intolerable ("We might as well reintroduce our old Adolf Hitler Street!"), another citizen, ICurt Plotz, feels that one should "let these things lie; historically, they're of no interest to anyone". Still another citizen finds it "very unpleasant when Germans once again are flinging these things in one another's teeth."
One -.day before the vote was
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Further requests for clemency were dismissed by Christiansen with similar comments. Their initiators were put to death in German concentration camps. An unanimous judgment, rendered in writing in 1965, identifles Christiansen as the author of theju>tes.
All of this has been known and documented ^or a long time. There are copies of the documents among the records of the town government,
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said, in the television program Panorama, "Why are those who set the tone in Wyk so unwilling to take an unequivocal position towards a bit of their ®wn past that is, after all, embarrassing, if nothing else? It seems to me that the people there are afraid of one another more than of anything else. They,are reluctant to fall out of the accustomed social group, to part company with those. who share the same fashionable opinions. So the old disease remains, from which, one day, the new disease, may grow.**.
. The Island Courier, a local paper, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Christiansen's birth — he had died in 1972 — recalled briefly the^ate general's achievements as a flyer. His mother achievements, which took place under Nazi rule, were neatly and clinically omitted. The issue was reopened by a letter from a reader, who said, without wasting words, "One of the few survivors of the Dutch village of Putten will, at the appropriate time and from his own experience, continue in great detail your current series, *In Memoriam Friedrich Christiansen*.**
There followed a.violent debate among the paper*s readers, a debate in which all the details of the Christiansen case, by now a Wyk sa.'sa, were put down in black on white. Mayor Peter Schlotfeldt, quoting the minutes of the town CQunciU made it clear that the tatter's members had resolved to reconsider the matter of honoring Christiansen after examining the documentary evidence, but that they had totally failed to act on their own resolution.
Under pressure of the publicity, the town magistrate decided to propose the Christiansen affair at a meeting   of  the  town council.
taken, there appeared in the Island Courier an announcement from 27 of the town's teachers, which said, "As teachers, we have the duty to educate our pupils towards democracy. If we wish to remain credible, the injustices df our most recent German history may be neither silenced and suppressed nor prettified."
That, however, is exactly what has happened in Wyk since the end of the war. The Social Democrats themselves, who had initiated the action against Christiansen, did nothing even when they controlled a majority.
The election, hall, tinged with yellow, was almost full with its
audience of 150 when Kurt Haase, a Christian Democrat representingthe body politic, opens the council session. He was in the town council* in 1964, when the first resolution of the Social Democrats against Christiansen was iiitrpduced -and defeated.
Shortly after the session had begun, Haase took from his pocket a letter from the state minist^ of the interior, which he quoted to the effect that honors granted a citizen automatically come to an end with the citizen's' death. On these grounds, said he, the point is, and will remain, moot/ Mayor Schlotfeldt challenged ^the statement; the Social Democratic fraction was dumbfounded:
With the votes of the Christian Democrats, the Free Democrats and the Communaf Fellowship, the point was dismissed from the agenda without further ado.
When another issue was raised, that of removing Christiansen's name from the street sign. Mayor Schlotfeldt made^ a point of repeating the objections against Christiansen, verifying them point by point, quoting anti-Semitic notes written on the petitions.
All the same, and without a word of justification. Christian Democrats,: Free Democrats and repre-sentattves of the Communal FellowsHip dismissed the propsal of the Social Democratjs.
The next daiy, in a modest press conference, the nay-sayers defended their vote. What they put down in writing and spelled out in speech amounts to a whitewash of Christiansen:
"Christiansen, through his love^f cdiihtry arid his^indissoltible loyalty to his honieland, h^s impressed himself on the consciousness of the local people by the many deeds he has done in their behalf .
(Continued on page 6) See: CHRISTIANSEN
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