The Man in the High Castle: Holocaust Without End
In the world of Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle it is 1962. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan have won World War II, carving up the United States between them. Americans are either collaborators, second-class citizens living in fear, or part of a hunted resistance.
Many of the men in gray and black uniforms walking the streets of Manhattan are American, not German. They wear the swastika proudly, not because they must. This is not collaboration, it is embodiment.
At the pinnacle of American Nazi menace stands SS Obergruppenfuhrer John Smith. While he didn’t exist in Philip K. Dick’s original novel, which provides the underpinning for the streaming TV series that shares its name, he brings the Holocaust with him.
Smith is an important part of what Amazon gets right about the Nazi state and the genocide it committed. In many ways, as played by Rufus Sewell, he is appealing. He is loyal, strong, smart and devoted to his family.
He is also devoted to the ideas that led to the death of 6 million Jews in our world, and many more in his. He believes in “race,” as Hitler understood it. He believes in “purity,” as Nazi pseudo-scientists taught it.
And he has acted on those beliefs. When a German comrade from the the war, Rudolf Wegener, begins to reminisce and express misgivings about the genocide the two committed together, Smith admits the slaughter of millions made for bad days, but makes it clear that it was necessary work, not to be spoken of.
There is no need to travel to an alternate reality to find John Smith. He stands for thousands of men who lived in this world and wore Smith’s uniform. These were men who went home from a day of casual savagery and expected dinner to be on the table and their children to be at their knee.
In our world, that’s how the men of the SS behaved. And not just the SS, but the Gestapo and parts of the German regular army. And not just the men in uniform, but civilians. And not just men, but women, as well.
And it also describes the lives of men and women in other places and other times. Men for whom unimaginable brutality is just a day job.
The Man in the High Castle gets this right.
It’s also a TV show, meant to entertain and to provide a moral lesson.
So, it does.
Obergruppenfuhrer Smith has a problem. His son, whom he loves beyond measure, suffers from a crippling congenital disease.
The Nazi prescription is “euthanasia.”
In Smith’s world, the Holocaust hasn’t ended. The killing has never stopped. Human ashes, as seen in an early episode, still fall like snow across the Plains states. Jews are still hiding, the disabled continue to be born.
As the first season ended, Smith was left to decide his son’s fate. It’s TV, so selfishness may lead to an awakening — even redemption.
So, what happens to the Smiths who live out here with us? No one reading this can claim that mass killings and atrocities exist only in alternate timelines, or deep in the past. We all know better.
And we render our verdict, day after day, through our actions and inaction. Today is another day to choose.
Written by Jason Fields, digital editor at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
