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Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem” From Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin, 1994)

Otto Adolf, son of Karl Adolf Eichmann and Maria nee Schefferling, caught in a suburb of Buenos Aires on the evenin of May 11, 1960, flown to Israel nine days later, brought to trial in the District Court in Jerusalem on April 11, 1961, stood accused on fifteen counts: "together with others" he had committed crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes during the whole period of the Nazi regime and especially during the period of the Second World War. The Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950, under which he was tried, provides that "a person who has committed one of these. . . offenses. . . is liable to the death penalty." To each count Eichmann pleaded: "Not guilty in the sense of the indictment." In what sense then did he think he was guilty? … His lawyer, Robert Servatius …, answered the question in a press interview: "Eichmann feels guilty before God, not before the law," but this answer remained without confirmation from the accused himself. The defense would apparently have preferred him to plead not guilty on the grounds that under the then existing Nazi legal system he had not done anything wrong, that what he was accused of were not crimes but "acts of state," over which no other state has jurisdiction …, that it had been his duty to obey and that, in Servatius' words, he had committed acts "for which you are decorated if you win and go to the gallows if you lose." (Thus Goebbels had declared in 1943: "We will go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all times or as their greatest criminals.") Eichmann's own attitude was different. First of all, the indictment for murder was wrong: "With the killing of Jews I had nothing to do. I never killed a Jew, or a non-Jew, for that matter - I never killed any human being. I never gave an order to kill either a Jew or a non-Jew; I just did nor do it," or, as he was later to qualify this statement, "It so happened. . . that I had not once to do it" - for he left no doubt that he would have killed his own father if he had received an order to that effect. … Would he then have pleaded guilty if he had been indicted as an accessory to murder? Perhaps, but he would have made important qualifications. What he had done was a crime only in retrospect, and he had always been a law-abiding citizen, because Hitler's orders, which he had certainly executed to the best of his ability, had possessed "the force of law" in the Third Reich. … Throughout the trial, Eichmann tried to clarify, mostly without success, this second point in his plea of not guilty in the sense of the indictment." The indictment implied not only that he had acted on purpose, which he did not deny, but out of base motives and in full knowledge of the criminal nature of his deeds. As for the base motives, he was perfectly sure that he was not what he called … a dirty bastard in the depths of his heart; and as for his conscience, he remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to [do] - to ship millions of men, women, and children to their death with great zeal and the most meticulous care. This, admittedly, was hard to take. Half a dozen psychiatrist had certified him, as "normal" – “More normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him," one of them was said to have exclaimed, while another had found that his whole psychological outlook, his attitude toward his wife and children, mother and father, brothers, sisters, and friends, was "not only normal but most desirable" - and finally the minister who had paid regular visits to him in prison after the Supreme Court had finished hearing his appeal reassured everybody by declaring Eichmann to be "a man with very positive ideas." … Worse, his was obviously also no case of insane hatred of Jews, of fanatical anti-Semitism or indoctrination of any kind. He

1 "personally" never had anything whatever against Jews; on the contrary, he had plenty of "private reasons" for not being a Jew hater. … And the judges did not believe him, because they were too good, and perhaps also too conscious of the very foundations of their profession, to admit that an average, "normal" person, neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong. They preferred to conclude from occasional lies that he was a liar - and missed the greatest moral and even legal challenge of the whole case. Their case rested on the assumption that the defendant, like all "normal persons," must have been aware of the criminal nature of his acts, and Eichmann was indeed normal insofar as he was "no exception within the Nazi regime." However, under the conditions of the Third Reich only "exceptions" could be expected to react "normally." This simple truth of the matter created a dilemma for the judges which they could neither resolve nor escape. … Eichmahn declared himself to be a Gottglaubiger, the Nazi term for those who had broken with Christianity, and he refused to take his oath on the Bible, - this event was to be ascribed to "a higher Bearer of Meaning," an entity somehow identical with the "movement of the universe," to which human life, in itself devoid of "higher meaning," is subject. … The five and a half years with the Vacuum Oil Company must have been among the happier ones in Eichmann's life. … At the end of 1932, he was unexpectedly transferred from Linz to Salzburg, very much against his inclinations: "I lost all joy in my work, I no longer 'liked to sell, to make calls." From such sudden losses of Arbeitsfreude Eichmann was to suffer throughout his life. The worst of them occurred when he was told of the Fuhrer's order for the "physical extermination of the Jews," in which he was to play such an important role. This, too, came unexpectedly; he himself had "never thought of … such a solution through violence," and he described his reaction in the same words: "I now lost everything, all joy in my work, all initiative, all interest; I was, so to speak, blown out." … Before Eichmann entered the Party and the S.S., he had proved that he was a joiner, and May 8, 1945, the official date of Germany's defeat, was significant for him mainly because It then dawned upon him that thenceforward he would have to live without being a member of something or other. "I sensed I would have to live a leaderless and difficult individual life, I would receive no directives from anybody, no orders and commands would any longer be issued to me, no pertinent ordinances would be there to consult - in brief, a life never known before lay before me." … At any rate, he did not enter the Party out of conviction, nor was he ever convinced by it - whenever he was asked to give his reasons, he repeated the same embarrassed cliches about the Treaty of Versailles and unemployment; rather, as he pointed out in court, "it was like being swallowed up by the Party against all expectations and without previous decision. It happened so quickly and suddenly." He had no time and less desire to be properly informed, he did not even know the Party program, he never read Mein Kampf. Kaltenbrunner had said to him: Why not join the S.S.? And he had replied, Why not? That was how it had happened, and that was about all there was to it. Of course, that was not all there was to it. What Eichmann failed to tell the presiding judge in cross-examination was that he had been an ambitious young man who was fed up with his job as traveling salesman even before the Vacuum Oil Company was fed up with him. From a humdrum life without significance and consequence the wind had blown him into History, as he understood it, namely, into a Movement that always kept moving and in which somebody like him - already a failure in the eyes of his social class, of his family, and hence in his own eyes as well - could start from scratch and still make a career. And if he did not always like what he had to do (for example,

2 dispatching people to their death by the trainload instead of forcing them to emigrate), if he guessed, rather early, that the whole business would come to a bad end, with Germany losing the war, if all his most cherished plans came to nothing (the evacuation of European Jewry to Madagascar, the establishment of a Jewish territory in the Nisko region of Poland, the experiment with carefully built defense installations around his Berlin office to repel Russian tanks), and if, to his greatest "grief and sorrow," he never advanced beyond the grade of S.S. Obersturmbannfuhrer (a rank equivalent to lieutenant colonel) - in short, if, with the exception of the year in Vienna, his life was beset with frustrations, he never forgot what the alternative would have been. Not only in Argentina, leading the unhappy existence of a refugee, but also in the courtroom in Jerusalem, with his life as good as forfeited, he might still have preferred - if anybody had asked him - to be hanged as Obersturmbannfiihrer a.D. (in retirement) rather than living out his life quietly and normally as a traveling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company. … [He] was told that he had better enlist for some military training - "All right with me, I thought to myself, why not become a soldier?" - and he was sent in quick succession to two Bavarian S.S. camps, in Lechfeld and in Dachau (he had nothing to do with the concentration camp there), where the "Austrian Legion in exile" received its training. … "The humdrum of military service, that was something I couldn't stand, day after day always the same, over and over again the same." Thus bored to distraction, he heard that the Security Service of the Reichsfuhrer S.S. (Rimmler's Sicherheitsdienst, or S.D., as I shall call it henceforth) had jobs open, and applied immediately. … He was put into the Information department, where his first job was to file all information concerning Freemasonry… The trouble was that things were again very, very boring, and he was greatly relieved when, after four or five months of Freemasonry, he was put into the brand-new department concerned with Jews. This was the real beginning of the career which was to end in the Jerusalem court. … The first thing that happened was that his new boss, a certain von Mildenstein, required him to read. Theodor Herzl's Der Judenstaat, the famous Zionist classic, which converted Eichmann promptly and forever to Zionism. This seems to have been the first serious book he ever read and it made a lasting impression on him. From then on, as he repeated over and over, he thought of hardly anything but a "political solution" (as opposed to the later "physical solution," the first meaning expulsion and the second extermination) and how to "get some firm ground under the feet of the Jews." … He even read one more book, Adolf Bahm's History of Zionism (during the trial he kept confusing it with Herzl's Judenstaat), and this was perhaps a considerable achievement for a man who, by his own account, had always been utterly reluctant to read anything except newspapers, and who, to the distress of his father, had never availed himself of the books in the family library. … The reason he became so fascinated by the "Jewish question," he explained was his own "idealism"; these Jews, unlike the Assimilationists, whom he always, despised, and unlike Orthodox Jews, who bored him, were "idealists," like him. An "idealist," according to Eichmann's notions, was not merely a man who believed in an "idea" or someone who did not steal or accept bribes, though these qualifications were indispensable. An "idealist" was a man who lived for his idea - hence he could not be a businessman - and who was prepared to sacrifice for his idea everything and, especially, everybody. When he said in the police examination that he would have sent his own father to his death if that had been required, he did not mean merely to stress the extent to which he was under orders, and ready to obey them; he also meant to show what an "idealist" he had always been. The perfect "idealist," like everybody else, had of course his

3 personal feelings and emotions, but he would never permit them to interfere with his actions if they came into conflict with his "idea." … But what happened in Vienna in March, 1938, was altogether different. Eichmann's task had been defined as "forced emigration," and the words meant exactly what they said: all Jews, regardless of their desires and regardless of their citizenship, were to be forced to emigrate - an act which in ordinary language is called expulsion. Whenever Eichmann thought back to the twelve years that were his life, he singled out his year in Vienna as head of the Center for Emigration of Austrian Jews as its happiest and most successful period. Shortly before, he had been promoted to officer's rank, becoming an Untersturmfuhrer, or lieutenant, and he had been commended for his "comprehensive knowledge of the methods of organization and ideology of the opponent, Jewry." The assignment in Vienna was his first important job, his whole career, which had progressed rather slowly, was in the balance. He must have been frantic to make good, and his success was spectacular: in eight months, forty-five thousand Jews left Austria, whereas no more than nineteen thousand left Germany in the same period. … There were two things he could do well, better than others: he could organize and "he could negotiate. … Bragging was the vice that was Eichmann's undoing. It was sheer rodomontade when he told his men during the last days of the war: "I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews [or "enemies of the Reich," as he always claimed to have said] on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction." … To claim the death of five million Jews, the approximate total of losses suffered from the combined efforts of all Nazi offices and authorities, was preposterous, as he knew very well, but he had kept repeating the damning sentence ad nauseam to everyone who would listen, even twelve years later in Argentina, because it gave him "an extraordinary sense of elation to think that [he] was exiting from the stage in this way." … It was sheer boasting when he pretended he had "invented" the ghetto system or had "given birth to the idea" of shipping all European Jews to Madagascar. … Dimly aware of a defect that must have plagued him even in school - it amounted to a mild case of aphasia - he apologized, saying, "Officialese is my only language." But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliche. (Was it these cliches that the psychiatrists thought so "normal" and "desirable"? Are these the "positive ideas" a clergyman hopes for in those to whose souls he ministers? … To be sure, the judges were right when they finally told the accused that all he had said was "empty talk" - except that they thought the emptiness was feigned, and that the accused wished to cover up other thoughts which, though hideous, were not empty. This supposition seems refuted by the striking consistency with which Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented cliches (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliche) each time he referred to an, incident or event of importance to him. Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what he said, was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability too' speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such. … There was, finally, his greatest ambition - to be promoted to the job of police chief in some German town; again, nothing doing. What makes these pages of the examination so funny is that all this was told in the tone of someone who was sure of finding "normal human" sympathy for a

4 hard-luck story. "Whatever I prepared and planned, everything went wrong, my personal affairs as well as my years-long efforts to obtain land and soil for the Jews. I don't know, everything was as if under an evil spell; whatever I desired and wanted and planned to do, fate prevented it somehow. I was frustrated in everything, no matter what." … German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become ingrained in Eichmann's mentality. … During the war, the lie most effective with the whole of the German people was the slogan of "the battle of destiny for the German people," coined either by Hitler or by Goebbels, which made self-deception easier on three counts: it suggested, first, that the war was no war; second, that it was started by destiny and not by Germany; and, third, that it was a matter of life and death for the Germans, who must annihilate their enemies or be annihilated. … Eichmann's mind was filled to the brim with such sentences. His memory proved to be quite unreliable about what had actually happened; in a rare moment of exasperation, Judge Landau asked the accused: "What can you remember?" … In his mind, there was no contradiction between "I will jump into my grave laughing," appropriate for the end of the war, and "I shall gladly hang myself in public as a warning example for all anti-Semites on this earth," which now, under vastly different circumstances, fulfilled exactly the same function of giving him a lift. … In the disorganized, rambling notes he made in Argentina in preparation for the interview with Sassen, when he was still, as he even pointed out at the time, "in full possession of my physical and psychological freedom," he had issued a fantastic warning to "future historians to be objective enough not to stray from the path of this truth recorded here" - fantastic because every line of these scribblings shows his utter ignorance of everything that was not directly, technically and bureaucratically, connected with his job, and also shows an extraordinarily faulty memory. Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a "monster," but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. … Dr. Franz Meyer, a former member of the Executive of the Zionist' Organization in Germany, who came to testify for the prosecution about his contacts with the accused from 1936 to 1939… Eichmann at that time "was genuinely listening to us and was sincerely trying to understand the situation"; his behavior was "quite correct" - "he used to address me as 'Mister' and to offer me a seat." But in February, 1939, all this had changed. … "I immediately told my friends that I did not know whether I was meeting the same man. So terrible was the change. … Here I met a man who comported himself as a master of life and death. He received us with insolence and rudeness. He did not let us come near his desk. We had to remain standing." Prosecution and judges were in agreement that Eichmann underwent a genuine and lasting personality change when he was promoted to a post with executive powers. … Between 1937 and 1941, he won four promotions; within fourteen months he advanced from Untersturmfuhrer to Hauptsturmfuhrer (that is, from second lieutenant to captain); and in another year and a half he was made Obersturmbannfuhrer, or lieutenant colonel. That happened in October, 1941, shortly after he was assigned the role in the Final Solution that was to land him in the District Court of Jerusalem. And there, to his great grief, he "got stuck"; as he saw it, there was no higher grade obtainable in the section in which he worked. … In March, 1939, Hitler moved into Czechoslovakia and erected a German protectorate over Bohemia and Moravia. Eichmann was immediately appointed to set up another emigration center for Jews in Prague. "In the beginning I was not too happy to leave Vienna, for if you have installed such an office and if you see everything running smoothly and in good order, you don't like to give

5 it up." … Hundreds of thousands of Jews had left their homelands in a matter of a few years, and millions waited behind them, for the Polish and Rumanian governments left no doubt in their official proclamations that they, too, wished to be rid of their Jews. … The avenues for emigration overseas now became c1ogged up… since there existed no territory to which one could "evacuate," the only "solution" was extermination. … [Heydrich] said, "The Fuhrer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews." After which, "very much against his habits, he remained silent for a long while, as though he wanted to test the impact of his words. I remember it even today. In the first moment, I was unable to grasp the significance of what he had said, because he was so careful in choosing his words, and then I understood, and didn't say anything, because there was nothing to say any more. For I had never thought of such a thing, such a solution through violence. I now lost everything, all joy in my work, all initiative, all interest; I was, so to speak, blown out.” Furthermore, all correspondence referring to the matter was subject to rigid “language rules," and, except in the reports from the Einsatzgruppen, it is rare to find documents in which such bald words as "extermination," "liquidation," or "killing" occur. The prescribed code names for killing were "final solution," "evacuation", and "special treatment”… The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, "normal" knowledge of murder and lies. Eichmann's great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for "language rules." … A captain of the Order Police (perhaps Kriminalkommissar Christian Wirth himself, who had been in charge of the technical' side of the gassing of "incurably sick people" in Germany, under the auspices of the Fuhrer's Chancellery) came to greet them, led them to a few small wooden bungalows, and began, "in a vulgar uneducated harsh voice," his explanations: “how he had everything nicely insulated, for the engine of a Russian submarine will be set to work and the gases will enter this building and the Jews will be poisoned. For me, too, this was monstrous; I am not so tough as to be able to endure something of this sort without any reaction. . . . If today I am shown a gaping wound, I can't possibly look at it. I am that type of person, so that very often I was told that I couldn't have become a doctor. I still remember: how I pictured the thing to myself, and then I became physically weak, as though I had lived through some great agitation. Such things happen to everybody, and it left behind a certain "inner trembling." … Shortly after this, in the autumn of the same year, he was sent by his direct superior Muller to inspect the killing center in the Western Regions of Poland that had been incorporated into the Reich, called the Warthegau. … Here things were already in full swing, but the method was different; instead of gas chambers, mobile gas vans were used. This is what Eichmann saw: The Jews were in a large room; they were told to strip; then a truck arrived, stopping directly before the entrance to the room, and the naked Jews were told to enter it. The doors were closed and the truck started off. "I cannot tell [how many Jews entered], I hardly looked. I could not; I could not; I had had enough. The shrieking, and … I was much too upset, and so on, as I later told Muller when I reported to him; he did not get much profit out of my report. I then drove along after the van, and then I saw the most horrible sight that I had thus far seen in my life. The truck was making for an open ditch, the doors were opened, and the corpses were thrown out, as though they were still alive, so smooth were their limbs. They were hurled into the ditch, and I can still see a civilian extracting the teeth with tooth pliers. And then I was off - jumped into my car and did not open my mouth any more. After that time, I could sit for hours beside my driver without exchanging a word with him. There I got enough. I was finished. I only remember that a

6 physician in white overalls told me to look through a hole into the truck while they were still in it. I refused to do that. I could not. I had to disappear." Very soon after that, he was to see something more horrible. This happened when he was sent to Minsk, in White Russia, again by Muller, who told him: "In Minsk, they are killing Jews by shooting. I want you to report on how it is being done." So he went, and at first it seemed as though he would be lucky, for by the time he arrived, as it happened, "the affair had almost been finished," which pleased him very much. "There were only a few young marksmen who took aim at the skulls of dead people in a large ditch." Still, he saw, "and that was quite enough for me, a woman with her arms stretched backward, and then my knees went weak and off I went." … He went to see the local S.S. commander and told him: "Well it is horrible what is being done around here; I said young people are being made into sadists. How can one do that? Simply bang away at women and children? That’s impossible. Our people will go mad or become insane, our own people." This was not yet the end. Although Eichmann told him that he was not "tough enough" for these sights, that he had never been a soldier, had never been to the front, had never seen action, that he could not sleep and had nightmares, Muller, some nine months later; sent him back to the Lublin region, where the very enthusiastic Globocnik had meanwhile finished his preparations. Eichmann said this now was the most horrible thing I had ever seen in his life. When he first arrived, he could not recognize the place, with its few wooden bungalows. Instead, guided by the same man with the vulgar voice, he came to a railway station, with the sign "Treblinka" on it, that looked exactly like an ordinary station anywhere in Germany - the same buildings, signs, clocks, installations; it was a perfect imitation. "I kept myself back, as far as I could, I did not draw near to see all that. Still, I saw how a column of naked Jews filed into a large hall to be gassed. There they were killed, as I was told, by something called cyanic acid." … But since he had been employed in transportation and not in killing, the question remained, legally, formally, at least, of whether he had known what he was doing; and there was the additional question of whether he had been in a position to judge the enormity of his deeds - whether he was legally responsible, apart from the fact that he was medically sane. Both questions now were answered in the affirmative: he had seen the places to which the shipments were directed, and he had been shocked out of his wits. … But if the facts of the case were now established, two more legal questions arose. First, could he be released from criminal responsibility, as Section 10 of the law under which he was tried provided, because he had done his acts "in order to save himself from the danger of immediate death”? … In the Nuremberg documents "not a single case could be traced in which an S.S. member had suffered the death penalty because of a refusal to take part in an execution" … In his last statement to the court, Eichmann admitted that he could have backed out on one pretext or another, and that others had done so. He had always thought such a step was "inadmissible," and even now did not think it was "admirable"; it would have meant no more than a switch to another well-paying job. … Eichmann's defective memory where Himmler's ingenious watchwords were concerned may be an indication that there existed other and more effective devices for solving the problem of conscience. Foremost among them was, as Hitler had rightly foreseen, the simple fact of war. … Especially effective in this atmosphere of violent death was the fact that the Final Solution, in its later stages, was not carried out by shooting, hence through violence, but in the gas factories, which, from beginning to end, were closely connected with the "euthanasia program" ordered by Hitler in the first weeks of the war and applied to the mentally sick in Germany up to the invasion of Russia. …

7 What followed, as Eichmann recalled it, went more or less smoothly and soon became routine. He quickly became an expert in "forced evacuation," as he had been an expert in "forced emigration." In country after country, the Jews had to register, were forced to wear the yellow badge for easy identification, were assembled and deported, the various shipments being directed to one or another of the extermination centers in the East, depending on their relative capacity at the moment. … As Eichmann told it, the most potent factor in the soothing of his own conscience was the simple fact that he could see no one, no one at all, who actually was against the Final Solution. … Eichmann, in contrast to other elements in the Nazi movement, had always been overawed by "good society," and the politeness he often showed to German-speaking Jewish functionaries was to a large extent the result of his recognition that he was dealing with people who were socially his superiors. … What he fervently believed in up to the end was success, the chief standard of "good society" as he knew it. Typical was his last word on the subject of Hitler - whom he and his comrade Sassen had agreed to "shirr out" of their story; Hitler, he said, "may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German Army to Fuhrer of a people of almost eighty million. … His success alone proved to me that I should subordinate myself to this man." His conscience was indeed set at rest when he saw the zeal and eagerness" with which "good society" everywhere reacted as he did. He did not need to "close his ears to the voice of conscience," as the judgment has it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a "respectable voice," with the voice of respectable society around him. … This was the way things were, this was the new law of the land, based on the Fuhrer's order; whatever he did he did, as far as he could see, as a law-abiding citizen. He did his duty, as he told the police and the court over and over again; he not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law. … The first indication of Eichmann's vague notion that there was more involved in this whole business than the question of the soldier's carrying out orders that are clearly criminal in nature and intent appeared during the police examination, when he suddenly declared with great emphasis that he had lived his whole life according to Kant's moral precepts, and especially according to a Kantian definition of duty. This was outrageous, on the face of it, and also incomprehensible, since Kant's moral philosophy is so closely bound up with man's faculty of judgment, which rules out blind obedience. The examining officer did not press the point, but Judge Raveh, either out of curiosity or out of indignation at Eichmann's having dared to invoke Kant's name in connection with his crimes, decided to question the accused. And, to the surprise of everybody, Eichmann came up with an approximately correct definition of the categorical imper- ative: "I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws" (which is not the case with theft or murder, for instance, because the thief, or the murderer cannot conceivably wish to live under a legal system that would give others the right to rob or murder him). Upon further questioning, he added that he had read Kant's Critique of Practical Reason. He then proceeded to explain that from the moment he was charged with carrying out the Final Solution he had ceased to live according to Kantian principles, that he had known it, and that he had consoled himself with the thought that he no longer "was master of his own deeds," that he was unable "to change anything." What he failed to point out in court was that in this "period of crimes legalized by the state," as he himself now called it, he had not simply dismissed the Kantian formula as no longer applicable, he had distorted it to read: Act as if the principle of your actions were the same as that of the legislator or of the law of the land -

8 or, in Hans Frank's formulation of "the categorical imperative in the Third Reich," which Eichmann might have known: "Act in such a way that the Fuhrer, if he knew your action, would approve it" … Much of the horribly painstaking thoroughness in the, execution of the Final Solution - a thoroughness that usually strikes the "observer as typically German, or else as characteristic of the perfect bureaucrat - can be traced to the odd notion, indeed very common in Germany, that to be law-abiding means not merely to obey the laws but to act as though one were the legislator of the laws that one obeys. Hence the conviction that nothing less than going beyond the call of duty will do. Whatever Kant's role in the formation of "the little man's" mentality in Germany may have been, there is not the slightest doubt that in one respect Eichmann did indeed follow Kant's precepts: a law was a law, there could be no exceptions. In Jerusalem, he admitted only two such exceptions during the time when "eighty million Germans" had each had "his decent Jew": he had helped a half-Jewish cousin, and a Jewish couple in Vienna for whom his uncle had intervened. This inconsistency still made him feel somewhat uncomfortable, and when he was questioned about it during cross-examination, he became openly apologetic: he had "confessed his sins" to his superiors. This uncompromising attitude toward the performance of his murderous duties damned him in the eyes of the judges more than anything else, which was comprehensible, but in his own eyes it was precisely what justified him, as it had once silenced whatever conscience he might have had left. No exceptions - this was the proof that he had always, acted against his "inclinations," whether they were sentimental or inspired by interest, that he had always done his "duty."… On June 29, 1961, ten weeks after the opening of the trial on April 11, the prosecution rested its case, and Dr. Servatius opened the case for the defense; on August 14, after a hundred and fourteen sessions, the main proceedings came to an end. … [They] convicted Eichmann on all fifteen counts of the indictment, although he was acquitted on some particulars. "Together with others," he had committed crimes "against the Jewish people," that is, crimes against Jews with intent to destroy the people, on four counts: (1) by causing the killing of millions of Jews"; (2) by placing “millions of Jews under conditions Which were likely to lead to their physical destruction"; (3) by "causing serious bodily and mental harm" to them; … All crimes enumerated under Counts 1 through 12 carried the death penalty. Eichmann, it will be remembered, had steadfastly insisted that he was guilty only of “aiding and abetting” in the commission of the crimes with which he was charged, that he himself had never committed an overt act. The judgment, to one's great relief, in a way recognized that the prosecution had not succeeded in proving him wrong on this point. For it was an important point; it touched upon the very essence of this crime, which was no ordinary crime, and the very nature of this criminal, who was no common criminal; by implication, it also took cognizance of the weird fact that in the death camps it was usually the inmates and the victims who had actually wielded "the fatal instrument with [their] own hands." … But "in such an enormous and complicated crime as the one we are now considering, wherein many people participated, on various levels and in various modes of activity - the planners, the organizers, and those executing the deeds, according to their various ranks - there is not much point in using the ordinary concepts of counseling and soliciting to commit a crime. For these crimes were committed en masse, not only in regard to the number of victims, but also in regard to the numbers of those who perpetrated the crime, and the extent to which anyone of the many criminals was close to or remote from the actual killer of the victim means nothing, as far as the measure of his responsibility is concerned.

9 On the contrary, in general the degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hands [Arendt’s italics]." … Then came Eichmann’s last statement: His hopes for justice were disappointed; the court had not believed him, though he had always done his best to tell the truth. The court did not understand him: he had never been a Jew-hater, and he had never willed the murder of human beings. His guilt came from his obedience, and obedience is praised as a virtue. His virtue had been abused by the Nazi leaders. But he was not one of the ruling clique, he was a victim, and only the leaders deserved punishment. (He did not go quite as far as many of the other low-ranking war criminals, who complained bitterly that they had been told never to worry about "responsibilities," and that they were now unable to call those responsible to account because these had "escaped and deserted" them - by committing suicide, or by having been hanged.) "I am not the monster I am made out to be," Eichmann said. "I am the victim of a fallacy." He did not use the word "scapegoat," but he confirmed what Servatius had said: it was his "profound conviction that [he] must suffer for the acts of others." After two more days, on Friday, December 15, 1961, at nine o'clock in the morning, the death sentence as pronounced. … Mr. Ben-Zvi [president of Israel] rejected all pleas for mercy on May 31, two davs after the Supreme Court had delivered its judgment, and a few hours later on that same day - it was a Thursday – shortly before midnight, Eichmann was hanged, his body was cremated, and the ashes were scattered in the Mediterranean outside Israeli waters. … Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. … He was in complete command of himself, nay, he was more: he was completely himself. Nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words. He began by stating emphatically that he was a Gottglaubiger, to express in common Nazi fashion that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death. He then proceeded: "After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long, live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them." In the face of death, he had found the cliche used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows, his memory played him the last trick; he was "elated" and he forgot that this was his own funeral. It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil. …

Epilogue The trouble with Eichmann was preicise1y that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From, the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied - as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels - that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani [an enemy of all mankind], commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong. …

Postscript Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never

10 realized what he was doing. … In principle he knew quite well what it was all about, and in his final statement to the court he spoke of the "revaluation of values prescribed by the [Nazi] government." He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness - something by no means identical with stupidity - that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. … For the concept of genocide, introduced explicitly to cover a crime unknown before, although applicable up to a point is not fully adequate, for the simple reason that massacres of whole peoples are not unprecedented. They were the order of the day in antiquity, and the centuries of colonization and imperialism provide plenty of examples of more or less successful empts of that sort. The expression "administrative massacres" seems better to fill the bill. … In its judgment the court naturally conceded that such a crime could be committed only by a giant bureaucracy using the resources of government. But insofar as it remains a crime - and that, of course, is the premise for a trial – all the cogs in the machinery, no matter how insignificant, are in court forthwith transformed back into perpetrators, that is to say, into human beings. If the defendant excuses himself on the ground that he acted not as a man but as a mere functionary whose functions could just as easily have been carried out by anyone else, it is as if a criminal pointed to the statistics on crime - which set forth that so-and-so many crimes per day are committed in such-and-such a place - and declared that he only did what was statistically expected, that it was mere accident that he did it and not somebody else, since after all somebody had to do it. Of course it is important to the political and social sciences that the essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them. And one can debate long and profitably on the rule of Nobody, which is what the political form known as bureaucracy truly is. …

Sereny, “Into That Darkness (Franz Stangl: Commandant of Treblinka)” From Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (Vintage, 1974)

I originally conceived the idea of talking with Stangl when, attending his trial in Germany in 1970 (as, in the course of journalistic work, I had attended other Nazi crime trials), I realized that whatever else he might have been, he was, unlike many others I had observed under similar circumstances, an individual of some intelligence. … After we had been left alone, he immediately began to rebut various accusations made during his trial. The arguments, the phraseology, the very words he used were gratingly familiar from his and other trials for Nazi crimes: he had done nothing wrong; there had always been others above him; he had never done anything but obey orders; he had never hurt a single human being. What had happened was a tragedy of war and - sadly there were tragedies of war everywhere: "Look at Katyn," he said, "look at Dresden, Hiroshima and now Vietnam." He was sorry, yes sorry for that young American lieutenant who, like him, had done no more than obey orders in Mai Lai and was now having to carry the can. … I lunched that day in the canteen and talked to several members of the prison staff. It was evident at once that they liked Stangl. "If only they were all like Stangl," they said, "our life would be a bed of roses." …

11 He was born in Altmunster, a small town in Austria, on March 26, 1908. …his father was already an ageing man. "He was a nightwatchman by the time I was born, but all he could ever think or talk about were his days in the Dragoons [one of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial elite regiments]. His dragoon uniform, always carefully brushed and pressed, hung in the wardrobe. I was so sick of it, I got to hate uniforms. … "Even so, was he kind to you?" He laughed without mirth. "He was a Dragoon. Our lives were run on regimental lines. I was scared to death of him. I remember one day - I was about four or five and I'd just been given new slippers. It was a cold winter morning. The people next door to us were moving. The moving van had come - a horse-drawn carriage then, of course. The driver had gone into the house to help get the furniture and there was this wonderful carriage and no one about. I ran out through the snow, new slippers and all. … I got down as fast as I could and raced back through the deep snow into the kitchen and hid behind my mother. But he got there almost as fast as I. 'Where is the boy?' he asked, and I had to come out. He put me over his knees and leathered me. He had cut his finger some days before and wore a bandage. He thrashed me so hard, his cut opened and blood poured out. I heard my mother scream, 'Stop it, you are splashing blood all over the clean walls.'” … He left school at fifteen and became an apprentice weaver. … “When I was eighteen and a half I did my exams and became the youngest master-weaver in Austria." He was still proud of this achievement. "I worked in the mill and only two years later I had fifteen workers under me. I earned two hundred schillings a month, and gave four-fifths of it to my parents." … On Sundays I built myself a Taunus - a sailboat." Again he began to cry and continued for a long time. "Excuse me. . . ." "What is it that makes you cry when you remember this?" "It was my happiest time." He shook his head again and again with a gesture of helplessness. By 1931 - at twenty-three - five years after becoming a master-weaver, he had come to realize that he was at a dead end. "Without higher education I couldn't get further promotion. But to go on doing all my life what I was doing then? Around me I saw men of thirty-five who had started at the same age as I and who were now old men. The work was too unhealthy. The dust got into your lungs - the noise. . . . I had often looked at young policemen in the streets: they looked so healthy, so secure - you know what I mean. And so clean and spruce in their uniforms. . . ." It was a place of constant turbulence, alarming headlines, hostile crowds, street fighting, police sirens, shootings, barriers; and, perhaps in contrast to the anarchy in the air - I remembered from my own childhood memories.,.. uniforms did seem attractive. Stangl applied to join the police… The Austrian police training was tough. "They called it the 'Vienna School'," he said. "They were a sadistic lot. They drilled the feeling into us that everyone was against us: that all men were rotten. … I had nothing to do except work. So I volunteered for special duties, evenings and weekends." "What sort of special duties?" He laughed, "Oh, you know, just flushing out villains here and there. It was all good experience and I knew it wouldn't hurt my record. During the Socialist uprisings in February 1934 there were terrific street battles in Linz. In one of them the Socialists entrenched themselves at the Central Cinema and we had to fight for hours to get them out. I was the one who flushed the last ones out that night at 11 p.m. - after well over twelve hours. I got the silver Service Medal for it." …

12 “But surely, for an intelligent man, in the midst of the political turmoil of Austria at that time, it was impossible not to form his own ideas? What did you yourself feel about the Nazis then?"… "You know," he said, "outside, of course, of doing my job properly, I wasn't really very interested. You see, I had just got married. I had, for the first time, a home of my own. All I wanted was just to close the door of my house and be alone with my wife. I was mad about her. I really wasn't political you see. I know it sounds now as if I should - or must - have been. But I wasn't. I was just a police officer doing a job. … What affected us a lot though," he went on, "was Cardinal Innitzer's call to Catholics to co-operate. And of course the fact that Schuschnigg [who succeeded Dollfuss as Chancellor] threw in the sponge at once. What I felt above all was fear. You remember that medal I'd been given - the Eagle? Well, five people had received that at that time. The Nazis took over on March 13; on the 14th they arrested two of those five and a few days later a third. That left only my friend Ludwig Werner and myself. Meanwhile in Linz they had shot two of the chiefs of our department. People we'd seen just; few days before. No trial, nothing - just shot them. … So after that we filled out the questionnaire and said that we'd been Party members since 1936." "And that wasn't true?" He shook his head. "No." … It was only very shortly after this that I was ordered to sign a paper certifying that I was prepared to give up my religion." "What exactly did it say on the paper?" "It said that I affirmed that I was a Gottglaubiger [believer in God] but agreed to break my affiliation to the Church." "How did you feel about signing that? How strongly did you feel about the Church?” "Well. . . of course I've always been a Catholic. . . ." For a man of Stangl's character, whatever his religious attitude, the Church has a tremendous significance as a symbol of respectability and status. Equally, any official document is something of the greatest import. There is no doubt therefore that signing this document was a decisive step in the gradual process of his corruption. Frau Stangl was later to confirm its importance. I asked Stangl whether he had seen it as a compromise he had to make in order to keep his job. "Not just my job," he said. "Much more than that- as I told you before. By then I had heard that I had originally been on a list of officials to be shot after the Anschluss [incorporation of Austria into “Greater Germany” in 1938]. And not only that; at that very moment, a disciplinary action had been started against me because I had approved the arrest of a poacher who turned out to be a high Party member. … There was one time I remember, they were talking about Dr. Berlinger, one of our chiefs before the Anschluss…; they'd arrested him and one of them - in the duty-room - was describing how he'd been interrogated. . . ." He stopped, embarrassed. "They hurt him?" He looked away from me. "They laughed and said, 'He pissed all over himself.'" He turned back to me. "Imagine, Dr Berlinger. I hate... I hate the Germans," he suddenly burst out with passion, "for what they pulled me into. I should have killed myself in 1938." There was nothing maudlin about the way this was said; he was merely stating a fact. "That's when it started for me. I must acknowledge my guilt." … Frau Stangl remembered vividly the day, very soon after the Anschluss, when her husband came home from work and, the moment he entered the house, said, “It’s all right now – I’ve fixed it – we don’t have to worry any more: they can’t do anything to us now.” … But none the less,

13 she also said that he never gave the impression of being a Nazi, never even showed the slightest sympathy for them. "And he never said anything against Jews," she said. "I never heard him say a word like that.” In November 1940 Stangl, by now again promoted, was ordered to report to Berlin for instructions. "The order was signed by Himmler," he said, a tone of awe in his voice even now. "It said I was transferred to the General Foundation for Institutional Care … Kriminalrath Werner told me", he continued, "that it had been decided to confide to me the very difficult and demanding job of police superintendent of a special institute which was administered by this Foundation, the HQ of which was Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin." "Did you know then what Tiergartenstrasse 4 was?" "I had no idea. I had heard it vaguely referred to now and then as T4, but I didn't know what their specific function was." This was no doubt true at that time. For Tiergartenstrasse 4 was the hub of what was for years the most secret operation in the Third Reich: the administration first of the "mercy-killing" of the mentally and physically handicapped in Germany and Austria, and later of the "Final Solution": the extermination of the Jews. … "I ... I was speechless. And then I finally said I didn't really feel I was suited for this assignment. He was, you know, very friendly, very sympathetic when I said that. He said he understood well that that would be my first reaction but that I had to remember that my being asked to take this job showed proof of their exceptional trust in me. It was a most difficult task - they fully recognized it - but that I myself would have nothing whatever to do with the actual operation; this was carried out entirely by doctors and nurses. I was merely to be responsible for law and order." … "But the way you are telling about it, now, you were obviously not ordered to do this. You were given a choice. Your own immediate reaction, quite properly, was horror. What made you agree to do it?" "Several times during this talk, he mentioned - sort of by the way - that he had heard I wasn't altogether happy in Linz. And then, he said, there was this disciplinary action pending against me. That would of course be suspended if I accepted this transfer. "And that decided you, did it?" "The combination of things did; the way he had presented it; it was already being done by law in America and Russia; the fact that doctors and nurses were involved; the careful examination of the patients; the concern for the feelings of the population. … "Wirth [Captain Christian Wirth, a director of the euthanasia programs] was a gross and florid man," Stangl said. "My heart sank when I met him. … And here it was again, this awful verbal crudity: when he spoke about the necessity for this euthanasia operation, he wasn't speaking in humane or scientific terms, the way Dr Werner had described it to me. He laughed. He spoke of 'doing away with useless mouths' and said that 'sentimental slobber' about such people made him 'puke'." … "For a long time. After the first two or three days I told Reichleitner that I didn't think I could stand it. By then I'd heard that the police official who'd had the job before me had been relieved upon his request because he had stomach trouble. I too couldn't eat - you know, one just couldn't." …

14 "You say you saw your wife quite frequently: it must have become obvious to her that you were under strain - it must have shown up somehow. Didn't she ever ask you again what you were doing? That's very unlike a wife, isn't it?" "She asked, but only casually you know. She was used to my not being able to discuss service matters." "Do you think the patients at Hartheim knew what was going to happen to them?" "No," he said immediately, with assurance. "It was run as a hospital. After they arrived they were again examined you know. Their temperatures were taken and all that… You see, even Wirth said, 'The people must not be allowed to realize that they are going to die. They have to feel at ease. Nothing must be done to frighten them.'" … "And did you get to the point where you convinced yourself you were involved in something that was right?" "Of course, I wasn't 'involved' in that sense," he said quickly. "Not in the operational sense." I reformulated my question. "Did you get to the point where you convinced yourself that what was being done was right?" One day," he said, "I had to make a duty visit to an institution for severely handicapped children run by nuns. … It was part of my function," said Stangl, "to see that the families of patients - afterwards - received their effects: clothes and all that, and identity papers, certificates, you know. I was responsible for everything being correctly done." "What do you mean by 'correctly done'? How' were the families notified?" "Well, they were told the patient had died of a heart attack or something like that. And they received a little urn with the ashes. … When I arrived, the Mother Superior, who I had to see, was up in a ward with the priest and they took me up to see her. "We talked for a moment and then she pointed to a child - well, it looked like a small child -lying in a basket. 'Do you know how old he is?' she asked me. I said no, how old was he? 'Sixteen,' she said. 'He looks like five, doesn't he? He'll never change, ever. … And the priest who stood next to her nodded fervently. 'Just look at him,' she went on. 'No good to himself or anyone else. How could they refuse to deliver him from this miserable life?' This really shook me," said Stangl. "Here was a Catholic nun, a Mother Superior, and a priest. And they thought it was right. Who was I then, to doubt what was being done?" … "What did you think at the time was the reason for the extermination of the Jews?" I was to ask Stangl. "They wanted their money," he replied at once. "Have you any idea of the fantastic sums that were involved? That's how the steel was bought, in Sweden." … “Why,” I asked Stangl, “if they were going to kill them anyway, what was the point of all the humiliation, why the cruelty?” “To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies,” he said. “To make it possible for them to do what they did.” … “I reported to the SS HQ in Lublin. … The general greeted me warmly. … He said that he intended confiding to me the construction of a camp called Sobibor.” … "And during those three hours … did he ever hint at what the real purpose of Sobibor was? Did he mention the Jews?" "Not with one word. I had no idea whatever. … In the early spring of 1942 the planned physical extermination of the Jews was known to comparatively few people even amongst the highest party echelons, and the population of Germany - there can be no doubt of this whatever now - was at that time, though not later, in total

15 ignorance of these intentions. Victor Brack testified at his trial in Nuremberg that when he was originally requested to send euthanasia personnel to Lublin and put it at the disposal of Globocnik, neither he nor Bouhler had "any idea" that they were to be used in the mass extermination of Jews. … "When did you first find out what the camp was really for?" "Two things happened: when we'd been there about three days, I think, Michel came running one day and said he'd found a funny building back in the woods. ‘I think there is something fishy going on here,' he said. 'Come and see what it reminds you of.’ … The moment I saw it I knew what Michel meant: it looked exactly like the gas chamber at Schloss Hartheim." … "Did you ask Globocnik about the gas chambers?" "There was no opportunity," he said firmly. "I went back to Sobibor and talked it over with Michel. We decided that somehow we had to get out. But the very next day Wirth came. He told me to assemble the German personnel and made a speech - just as awful, just as vulgar as his speeches had been at Hartheim. He said that any Jews who didn't work properly here would be 'eliminated'. 'If any of you don't like that,' he said to us, 'you can leave. But under the earth,' - that was his idea of being humorous ¬'not over it.' And then he left. I went back to Lublin the next morning.” … "Oh God, the smell. It was everywhere. Wirth wasn't in his office. I remember, they took me to him. . . he was standing on a hill, next to the pits. . . the pits. . . full. . . they were full. I can't tell you; not hundreds, thousands, thousands of corpses. . . oh God. That's where Wirth told me - he said that was what Sobibor was for. And that he was putting me officially in charge." … "I said [to Wirth] I couldn't do it," he said. "I simply wasn't up to such an assignment. There wasn't any argument or discussion. Wirth just said my reply would be reported to HQ and I was to go back to Sobibor. In fact I went to Lublin, tried again to see Globocnik, again in vain: he wouldn't see me. When I got back to Sobibor, Michel and I talked and talked about it. We agreed that what they were doing was a crime. We considered deserting - we discussed it for a long time. But how? Where could we go? What about our families?" … "But you knew that day that what was being done was wrong?" "Yes, I knew. Michel knew. But we also knew what had happened in the past to other people who had said no. The only way out that we could see was to keep trying in various and devious ways to get a transfer. The direct way was impossible. As Wirth had said, that led 'under the earth'. … And then one afternoon Wirth's aide, Oberhauser, came to get me. I was to come to the gas chamber. When I got there, Wirth stood in front of the building wiping the sweat off his cap and fuming. Michel told me later that he'd suddenly appeared, looked around the gas chambers on which they were still working and said, 'Right, we'll try it out right now with those twenty-five work-¬Jews: get them up here.' They marched our twenty-five Jews up there and just pushed them in, and gassed them. "So now the exterminations had really started; it was happening right in front of you. How did you feel?" "At Sobibor one could avoid seeing almost all of it - it all happened so far away from the camp-buildings. All I could think of was that I wanted to get out. I schemed and schemed and planned and planned. I heard there was a new police unit at Mogilev. I went again to Lublin and filled out an application form for transfer. I asked Hofle to help me get Globocnik's agreement. He said he would do what he -could, but I never heard of it again.” …

16 The exact date on which Sobibor became fully operational is not quite certain; it was either May 16 or May 18, 1942. It is certain, however, that in the first two months, the period when Stangl was administering the camp, about 100,000 people were killed there. … Richard Glazar, a highly intelligent Czech survivor of Treblinka, who has even less reason than Suchomel to defend Stangl, says, "They all carried guns and whips [at Treblinka] except for Stangl. He only carried a small riding-crop." In the final analysis it is, of course, irrelevant whether or not Stangl carried a gun, and indeed - considering everything else he stood for in these camps - whether or not he actually used it. … Stangl, insisting that he had never shot into a crowd of people, appeared to be more indignant about this accusation than about anything else, and to find irrelevant the fact that, whether he shot into the group or not, these very same people died anyway, less than two hours later, through actions ultimately under his control. This may appear to be a marginal matter, but I believe it to be peculiarly significant in representing a profoundly mistaken emphasis accepted - perhaps of necessity - by the courts, and also by the public and by the individuals involved: a concept whereby responsibility has been limited to momentary and often isolated actions, and to a few individuals. It is, I think, because of this universal acceptance of a false concept of responsibility that Stangl himself (until just before he died), his family and - in a wider but equally, if not even more, important sense - countless other people in Germany and outside it, have felt for years that what is decisive in law, and therefore in the whole conduct of human affairs, is what a man does on isolated occasions rather than what he is. …

In his book Szmajzner described this first meeting with Stangl in greater detail: "He dressed impeccably and appeared vain although his eyes seemed kind. He had a soft voice, good manners and was extremely polite. He looked like a young university professor. . ." and he went on to say that Stangl had said repeatedly that he was amazed to find a boy of his age capable of making good jewelry. "Stangl seemed so friendly when they brought the gold in the afternoon," he told me. “I felt encouraged to ask about my father. I told him that I'd like to go and see my father. 'Where is he, please?' I asked. 'You are much better off here,' Stangl answered in a very friendly way. 'This is a much better place to work. Don't worry about him. He is all right.’” … Szmajzner allowed press photographers to take pictures of him with Frau Stangl after the hearing ended in Dusseldorf. I remem¬ber being amazed at seeing this survivor of Sobibor pose with Stangl's wife for smiling pictures, and I asked Stan about it in Goiania. "I agreed to it," he said "because I had nothing against Stangl's family and I was aware of how hard all this was on them. I thought if I showed my own goodwill towards them by posing for pictures with Frau Stangl for the Brazilian press, this might reflect on the public attitude here towards Stangl's family." Throughout our long conversation Stan Szmajzner was fair and tolerant. Indeed, I felt, almost too anxious to give credit where he could, to a man whose family "who had nothing to do with all this", was also living in his chosen country. This was in sharp contrast to his attitude on hearing from me that Gustav Wagner was still alive and was probably in Brazil, information which I had from Stangl. On hearing this, Stan cried. "It is the worst, the most terrible shock you could have given me," he said. "That man. Here in Brazil. To think that 1 am now breathing the same air as he - it makes me feel terribly, terribly ill. . . . I would not know how to find words to describe to you what a terrible - a truly terrible man that is. Stangl- he is good by comparison, very good. But

17 Wagner - he should be dead. .. ." He begged me to find out where Wagner was, because, he kept on repeating, "I must do something." It took most of the day, off and on, to calm him and persuade him that vengeance ought not to be his. … "I never saw Stangl hurt anyone," he said at the end. “What was special about him was his arrogance. And his obvious pleasure in his work and his situation. None of the others - although they were, in different ways, so much worse than he - showed this to such an extent. He had this perpetual smile on his face. . . . No, I don't think it was a nervous smile; it was just that he was happy." …

"But my wife did find out, though not from them," Stangl said. "One of the non-corns, Unterscharfuhrer Ludwig, came by once while I was out. He had been drinking and he told her about Sobibor. When I got back she was waiting for me. She was terribly upset. She said, 'Ludwig has been here. He told me. My God, what are you doing in that place?' I said, 'Now, child, this is a service matter and you know I can't discuss it. All I can tell you, and you must believe me: whatever is wrong - I have nothing to do with it.’” "Did she believe this, without further questions or arguments?” He shrugged. "She spoke of it sometimes. But what else could I say to her? It did make me feel, though, that I wanted her away from there. I wanted them to go home.” … "But this time you knew where you were being sent; you knew all about Treblinka and that it was the biggest extermination camp. Here was your chance, here you were, face to face with him at last. Why didn't you say right there and then that you couldn't go on with this work?" … "Don't you see? He had me just where he wanted me; I had no idea where my family was. Had Michel got them out? Or had they perhaps stopped them? Were they holding them as hostages? And even if they were out, the alternative was still the same: Prohaska was still in Linz. Can you imagine what would have happened to me if I had returned there under these circumstances? No, he had me flat: I was a prisoner." "But even so - even admitting there was danger. Wasn't anything preferable by now to going on with this work in Poland:?" "Yes, that's what we know now, what we can say now. But then?" "Well, in point of fact, we know now, don't we, that they did not automatically kill men who asked to be relieved from this type of job. You knew this yourself, didn't you, at the time?" "I knew it could happen that they wouldn't shoot someone. But I also knew that more often they did shoot them, or send them to concentration camps. How could 1 know which would apply to me?" This argument, of course, runs through all of Stangl's story; it is the most essential question at which, over and over, I found myself stopped when talking with him. 1 didn't know when I spoke with him and 1 don't know now at which point one human being can make the moral decision for another that he should have the courage to risk death. However, my reactions to some of the things Stangl said in this part of his account changed slightly subsequently, as a result of my conversations with his wife. These demonstrated very clearly that - if nothing else - he had manipulated events, or his memory of events, to suit his need to rationalize his guilt, his awareness of his guilt or (at that point in our talks) his need to avoid facing it. …

[Frau Stangl said,] “One day while he was at work - I still thought constructing, or working at an army supply base - Ludwig came with several other men, to buy fish or something. They brought

18 schnapps, and sat in the garden drinking. … ‘Don't you know?' he asked. 'Don't you know what is being done out there?' - 'No,' I said, 'What?' - 'The Jews,' he answered. 'The Jews are being done away with.' - 'Done away with?' I asked. 'How? What do you mean?' - 'With gas,' he said. 'Fantastic numbers of them.’ "He went on about how awful it was and then he said, in that same maudlin way he had, 'But we are doing it for our Fuhrer. For him we sacrifice ourselves to do this - we obey his orders.' And then he said, too, 'Can you imagine what would happen if the Jews ever got hold of us?' "Then I told him to go away. I could hardly think. I was already crying. I took the children into the house. I sat there, staring, staring into an abyss - that's what I saw; my husband, my man, my good man, how could he be in this? Was it possible that he actually saw these things being done?” … "I walked for a long time and sat down on a tree-trunk to wait for him. When he rode up and saw me from afar, his face lit up - I could see it. It always did - his face always showed his joy the moment he saw me. … "I said, 'I know what you are doing in Sobibor. My God, how can they? What are you doing in this? What is your part in it?' First he asked me how- I'd found out, but I just cried and cried; and then he said, 'Look, little one, please calm down, please. You must believe me, I have nothing to do with any of this.' I said, 'How can you be there and have nothing to do with it?' And he answered, 'My work is purely administrative and I am there to build - to supervise construction; that's all.' – ‘You mean you don't see it happen?' I asked. 'Oh yes,' he answered. 'I see it. But I don't do anything to anybody.' "Of course, I didn't know he was the Kommandant: I never knew that. He told me he was the Hochste Charge. I asked him what that meant and he said again he was in charge of construc¬tion and that he enjoyed the work. I thought, 'My God.' … I finally allowed myself to be convinced that his role in this camp was purely administrative - of course I wanted to be convinced, didn't I? … That night Countess Chelmicki found me crying. In my terrible need to talk to somebody I told her what I had found out. “’Don't you think we know?' she asked. 'We've known about it since the beginning. But you must calm yourself; it is dreadful, but there is nothing to be done. We are convinced that your husband is a decent man.' … "The next day Paul came back, just for a day, or even less. He said he was being transferred, to Treblinka - a place he said, that was in a terrible mess, where the worst Schweinereien were being done, and where it was necessary to make a clean sweep with an iron broom. I said, 'My God, I hope not another place like this one here,' and he said no, he didn't think so - for me not to worry. … I trusted [Reichkeitner] you know, so I said, 'You know, if I thought that my Paul had anything to do with the awful things which are being done at Sobibor, I wouldn't stay with him another day.' "He answered quite spontaneously, you know, not thinking it over at all. He said right away, 'My God, Frau Stangl,' he said, 'but your husband has absolutely nothing to do with that. That's all Wirth. You don't think, do you, that he would allow anyone to rob him of the pleasure of doing away with the Jews? You know how he hates them. Your husband's part in this is purely administrative.'" …

19 [Stangl] arrived at Treblinka. … "I drove there, with an SS driver," he said. "We could smell it kilometers away. The road ran alongside the railway. When we were about fifteen, twenty minutes' drive from Treblinka, we began td see corpses by the line, first just two or three, then more, and as we drove into Treblinka station, there were what looked like hundreds of them - just lying there - they'd obviously been there for days, in the heat. In the station was a train full of Jews, some dead, some still alive … that too, looked as if it had been there for days." "But all this was nothing new to you? You had seen these transports constantly, in Sobibor?" "Nothing like this. And in Sobibor - I told you - unless one was actually working in the forest, one could live without actually seeing; most of us never saw anybody dying or dead. Treblinka that day was the most awful thing I saw during all of the Third Reich" - he buried his face in his hands - "it was Dante's Inferno," he said through his fingers. "It was Dante come to life. When I entered the camp and got out of the car on the square [the sorting platform] I stepped knee-deep into money; I didn't know which way to turn, where to go. I waded in notes, currency, precious stones, jewelry, clothes. They were everywhere, strewn all over the square. The smell was indescribable; the hundreds, no, the thousands of bodies everywhere, decomposing, putrefying. … "I went straight back to Warsaw and told Globocnik that it was impossible: no order such as he had given me could be carried out in that place. 'It's the end of the world,' I said to him, and told him about the thousands of rotting corpses. He said, 'It's supposed to be the end of the world for them.' … "I had heard that the new police chief of Warsaw was a man from my wife's home town in Austria. I went to see him as soon as I left Globocnik and I begged him to help me get a transfer." "Did you tell him about Treblinka?" "No, no, you 'don't understand: it would have been madness; the secrecy regulations were absolute." … "But he said anyway he'd help; he'd try to get me into an anti-partisan unit. He wrote everything down - I really thought this time it would work. But it didn't. I never heard from him again. Of course, any transfer required Globocnik's signature - without that it couldn't be done. And I know now it was stupid of me ever to hope. Globocnik could never have let me go. … "It was a matter of survival- always of survival. What I had to do, while I continued my efforts to get out, was to limit my own actions to what I - in my own conscience - could answer for. At police training school they taught us - I remember, it was Rittmeister Leitner who always said it - that the definition of a crime must meet four requirements: there has to be a subject, an object, an action and intent. If any of these four elements are missing, then we are not dealing with a punishable offence." "I can't see how you could possibly apply this concept to this situation?" "That's what I am trying to explain to you; the only way I could live was by compartmentalizing my thinking. By doing this I could apply it to my own situation; if the 'subject' was the government, the 'object' the Jews, and the 'action' the gassings, then I could tell myself that for me the fourth element, 'intent' [he called it 'free will'] was missing." … "What if you had been specifically assigned to carry out the actual gassings?" "I wasn't," he said drily, and added in a reasonable and explanatory tone: "That was done by two Russians - Ivan and Nicolau, under the command of a sub..." He was telling the truth as he had seen it twenty-nine years ago and still saw it in 1971, and in so doing he voluntarily but unwittingly told more than the truth: he revealed the two men he had become in order to survive. …

20 "Stangl?" [inmate Joe Siedlecki] said. "I never saw him kill or hurt anyone. But why should he have? He didn't have to. He was no sadist like some of the others, and he was the Kommandant. Why should he dirty his own hands? It's like me now in my job; if I have to fire somebody, I don't do it - why should I? I tell somebody else to tell the person he is fired. Why should I do the dirty job myself? Stangl never beat anybody either," he said. "Why should he? Oh, he was there when it was done of course. . . well. . ." - he retracted, as he was to do in almost every instance when he mentioned Stangl's being present at or taking part in anything - "He must have been there; they were all there. And he was the Kommandant. I tell you exactly the way it was; I was there for a year, and I know. Anyone tells you differently, anyone tells you Stangl beat or killed anyone, or anyone tells you Stangl talked to them - they are lying. He didn't talk to any Jews - why should he?” … "They arrived, and they were dead within two hours," Stangl said. And these two hours were filled with such an infinity of carefully devised mass violence that it robbed these hundred thousands of any chance to pause, or think.

At Christmas 1942 Stangl ordered the construction of the fake railway station. A clock (with painted numerals and hands which never moved, but no one was thought likely to notice this), ticket-windows, various timetables and arrows indicating train connections "To Warsaw", "To Wolwonoce" and "To Bialystock" were painted on to the facade of the "sorting barracks"; all for the purpose of lulling the arriving transports - an increasing number of whom were to be from the West - into a belief that they had arrived in a genuine transit camp. "It is possible," Stangl agreed at his trial, "that I ordered the construction of the fake station." "You've been telling me about your routines," I said to him. "But how did you feel? Was there anything you enjoyed, you felt good about?" "It was interesting to me to find out who was cheating," he said. "As I told you, I didn't care who it was; my professional ethos was that if something wrong was going on, it had to be found out. That was my profession; I enjoyed it. It fulfilled me. And yes, I was ambitious about that; I won't deny that." "Would it be true to say that you got used to the liquidations?" He thought for a moment. "To tell the truth," he then said, slowly and thoughtfully, "one did become used to it." "In days? Weeks? Months?" "Months. It was months before I could look one of them in the eye. I repressed it all by trying to create a special place: gardens, new barracks, new kitchens, new everything; barbers, tailors, shoemakers, carpenters. There were hundreds of ways to take one's mind off it; I used them all." "Even so, if you felt that strongly, there had to be times, perhaps at night, in the dark, when you couldn't avoid thinking about it?" "In the end, the only way to deal with it was to drink. I took a large glass of brandy to bed with me each night and I drank." "I think you "are evading my question." "No, I don't mean to; of course, thoughts came. But I forced them away. I made myself concentrate on work, work and again work." "Would it be true to say that you finally felt they weren't really human beings?" "When I was on a trip once, years later in Brazil," he said, his face deeply concentrated, and obviously reliving the experience, "my train stopped next to a slaughterhouse. The cattle in the pens, hearing the noise of the train, trotted up to the fence and stared at the train. They were very

21 close to my window, one crowding the other, looking at me through that fence. I thought then, 'Look at this; this reminds me of Poland; that's just how the people looked, trustingly, just before they went into the tins… I couldn't eat tinned meat after that. Those big eyes … which looked at me … not knowing that in no time at all they'd all be dead." He paused. His face was drawn. At this moment he looked old and worn and real. "So you didn't feel they were human beings?” "Cargo," he said tonelessly. "They were cargo." He raised and dropped his hand in a gesture of despair. Both our voices had dropped. It was one of the few times in those weeks of talks that he made no effort to cloak his despair, and his hopeless grief allowed a moment of sympathy. "When do you think you began to think of them as cargo? The way you spoke earlier; of the day when you first came to Treblinka, the horror you felt seeing the dead bodies everywhere - they weren't 'cargo' to you then, were they?" "I think it started the day I first saw the Totenlager in Treblinka. I remember Wirth standing there, next to the pits full of blue-black corpses. It had nothing to do with humanity - it couldn't have; it was a mass - a mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said, 'What shall we do with this garbage?' I think unconsciously that started me thinking of them as cargo." "There were so many children, did they ever make you think of your children, of how you would feel in the position of those parents?” "No," he said slowly, "I can't say I ever thought that way." He paused. "You see," he then continued, still speaking with this extreme seriousness and obviously intent on finding a new truth within himself, "I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass. I sometimes stood on the wall and saw them in the tube. But - how can I explain it - they were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips like. . ." the sentence trailed off. ("Stangl often stood on the earthen wall between the [two] camps," said Samuel Rajzmanin Montreal. "He stood there like a Napoleon surveying his domain.") "Could you not have changed that?" I asked. "In your position, could you not have stopped the nakedness, the whips, the horror of the cattle pens?" "No, no, no. This was the system. Wirth had invented it. It worked. And because it worked, it was irreversible." "Stangl did improve things," Suchomel said later. "He alleviated it a bit for people, but he could have done more, especially from Christmas 1942; he could have stopped the whipping post, the 'races', 'sport', and what Franz did with that dog, Bari...; he was Stangl's dog originally. He could have stopped all that without any trouble for himself. [The dog, originally harmless, had been trained to attack people, and specifically their genital regions, on command.] He had the power to do that - and he didn't. I don't think he cared - all he did was look after the death camp, the burning and all that; there everything had to run just so because the whole camp organization depended on it. I think what he really cared about was to have the place run like clockwork." Gustav Miinzberger, who was more incriminated than Suchomel, put it differently. "Do I think that Stangl could have done something to change things at Treblinka?" he said. "No. Well, perhaps a little, the whipping post and all that; but, on the other hand; if he had, then Franz would have told Wirth, and he would just have countermanded it. So what was the use?" "What was the worst place in the camp for you?" I asked Stangl. "The undressing barracks," he said at once. "I avoided it from my innermost being; I couldn't confront them; I couldn't lie to them; I avoided at any price talking to those who were about to die: I couldn't stand it."

22 It became clear that as soon as the people were in the undressing barracks - that is, as soon as they were naked - they were no longer human beings for him. What he was "avoiding at any price" was witnessing the transition. And when he cited instances of human relations with prisoners, it was never with any of those who were about to die. … "In the midst of all the horror that surrounded you, ... and of which you were so aware that you drank yourself to sleep each night, what kept you going? What was there for you to hold on to?" "I don't know. Perhaps my wife. My love for my wife?"

This question about his dedication to his work was one of the few during our meetings that made Stangl angry. "Everything 1 did out of my own free will," he answered sharply, "I had to do as well as 1 could. That is how I am." … “Supposing for a moment it would have been the end, as you say. There were people in Germany who stood up for their principles, not many, it is true, but some. Yours was a very special position,' there were less than a dozen men like you in all of the Third Reich. Don't you think that if you had found that extraordinary courage, it would have had an effect on the people who served under you?" He shook his head. "If I had sacrificed myself," he said slowly, "if I had made public what I felt, and had died. . . it would have made no difference. Not an iota. It would all have gone on just the same, as if it and I had never happened."

"I didn’t see Paul again until July," Frau Stangl said. "And that was a terrible time - he stayed almost a month. By that time I had thought more about Treblinka. Of course I was pregnant, that probably also influenced my state of mind. At Christmas, you see, he had told me again that he was the 'highest ranking' officer in Treblinka and I had asked him - again - what that meant. Because he'd never mentioned being Kommandant - never. He answered that it meant everyone had to defer to him, and do what he said. I said, 'But then. . . my God, Paul, then you are in charge?' But he answered, 'No, Wirth is in charge.' And again I had believed him, I suppose because I needed to - I had to believe. How could I have gone on otherwise? As it was, I often looked at him and thought to myself, 'Who are you? Oh my God, what are you that you can bear even to see this? What - oh God, what are you seeing with these eyes which look at me?' … "It is true, you know, although I cried, oh so many times when I thought of those people they were killing, I never never knew there were children too, or even women. I, too, rationalized it I suppose; I told myself, I suppose, that we were at war and that they were killing the men; men, you know: enemies. I suppose I thought - or told myself - that the women and children were being left at home. I know it isn't logical, but I suppose I just didn't dare to think further. What I did know and did think was already more than I could bear. But it's true, I also said to myself many times: if he did refuse, if he did just run away, throw away his life and ours, it would still go on. There would not be just hundreds, there would be thousands only too happy to take his place. …” "But by the time he came on leave in July I had ceased to believe; it had been too long. And now I began to see the terrible change in him. No one else saw this. And I too had only glimpses; occasional glimpses of another man, somebody with a different, a totally changed face; someone I didn't know; that face that you too saw later; in the prison - red, suffused, swollen, protruding veins, coarse - he who was never coarse or vulgar, who was always loving and kind. That was when I began to nag him - at least he called it that. I asked him again and again, 'Paul, why are you still there? It's a year now, more than a year. All the time you said you'd manage it, you'd wangle a

23 transfer. Paul,' I'd say, 'I'm afraid for you. I am afraid for your soul. You must leave. Run away if must be. We will come with you, anywhere.' - 'How?' he said. 'They'd catch me. They catch everybody. And that would be the end for all of us. I in a concentration camp, you in Sippenhaft [detention for compromised relatives of unreliables] - perhaps. the children too; it's unthinkable.' That's what he said.” …

Stangl claimed that Frau Kramer had told him that people in Germany weren't buying Janusz Korczak's book (with which he had obviously become fascinated) and that she couldn't understand why not, and would be interested to know what he thought the reason was. "I've studied it," he said, opening the big book with its lovely illustrations at a page he had marked with a piece of paper torn out of a notebook. "I know why they don't want to buy it. Now listen to this… "and he read aloud from the fairy tale in the book. " … 'When a soldier gets an order, he must obey it. He must not ask questions, he must not hesitate, and must not think: he must obey.'" He closed the book. "Of course parents here don't want their children to read this. I told that woman that if I liked the book I might even buy it myself as a present for my grandson in Brazil. But I am not buying it. I don't want my little grandson to read this either. That is exactly the sort of thing they must not read, ever again." …

[Frau Stangl:] "When Paul met us in Damascus, I found him to be the happy sweet man he had been years before all the horror. It was my decision not to talk to him again about Treblinka. I felt I had to let him regain his peace of mind; the awful things that had been done were done, and my thoughts now had to be for the children, for our life together, for the future. … The terrible times were, if not forgotten, then certainly suppressed; we rarely, rarely spoke of them. If I ever very gently touched upon the subject, Paul would say wearily, 'Are you starting on that again?' and I'd stop. After all, I too didn't want to think about it any more.” "I was so sorry for the people who had been killed, but I too continued to rationalize: I know this now. I told myself, those men had been killed in those camps like soldiers at the front. They killed them - I said to myself - because of the war. Oh, deep down I knew it wasn't so. But that's how I rationalized it for myself. I never never allowed myself to think that women and children had been killed. I never asked him about that and he never told me. [And she must simply have turned off her mind when these facts were mentioned - as they were, often - in the Brazilian as well as the German press.] If my thinking - as I know now," she said, "was illogical, then it was because that was how I wanted, how I needed, how I had to think in order to maintain our life as a family and, if you like - for I know this also now - my sanity.” "Paul was an incredibly good and kind father. He played with the children by the hour. He made them dolls, helped them dress them up. He worked with them; he taught them innumerable things. They adored him - all three of them. He was sacred to them…” "Did your children know?" His face went scarlet; it was the second time he showed real anger at a question (the first time had been when I had asked him, with reference to his conduct in Treblinka, whether it wouldn't have been possible for him, in order to register his protest, to do his work a little less well. "Everything I did out of my own free will," he had answered, "I had to do as best as 1 could. That is how I am." "My children believe in me," he said now. "The young all over the world question their parents' attitudes. Are you saying that your children knew what you had been involved in, but never asked questions?"

24 "They. . . they. . .my children believe in me," he said again. "My family stands by me." And he cried. Renate - the Stangl's middle daughter [said], "He was the best father, the best friend anyone could ever have had," … "All I can say"; she told me that night in the car, almost in a whisper, "is that I have read what has been written about my father. But nothing - nothing on earth - will make me believe that he has ever done anything wrong. I know it is illogical; I know about the trial and the witnesses; and now I know what he himself said to you. But he was my father. He understood me. He stuck to me through thick and thin and he saved me when I thought my life was in ruins. 'Remember, remember always,' he once said to me, 'if you need help, I'll go to the end of the moon for you.' Well, when he died in Dusseldorf I had just had an operation; but I decided I would be the one to fly over to bring him back here to Brazil - to us - for burial. I too would go to the end of the moon for him - that's what going back to Germany then was for me. I hope he knows it where he is now. I love him - I will always love him." "The Eichmann trial?" Frau Stangl said. "Yes, Paul followed it avidly. He sat there [she pointed to an armchair in the little sitting room] and read everything that was said about it in the Brazilian and also in the German papers we got. Yes, he read a great deal about all these things, always: newspaper articles and many of the books that were written. But he never commented on any of them to me - we never spoke about any of it: it was taboo.” … “The day [Paul] was sentenced," she said, "I know you won't agree with me about this, as you haven't agreed about other things, but I must go on being honest with you: those other Germans who sat in judgment over him, what do you think they would have done in his place? …”

“Do you think”, I finally asked [Paul] – it had become very late – “that that time in Poland taught you anything?” “Yes,” he said, … “That everything human has its origin in human weakness.” … “In your case, could it be to seek truth?" "Truth?" "Well, to face up to yourself? Perhaps as a start, just about what you have been trying to do in these past weeks?" His immediate response was automatic, and automatically unyielding. "My conscience is clear about what I did, myself, … "I have never intentionally hurt anyone, myself," he said, with a different, less incisive emphasis, and waited again - for a long time. For the first time, in all these many days, I had given him no help. There was no more time. He gripped the table with both hands as if he was holding on to it. "But I was there," he said then, in a curiously dry and. tired tone of resignation. These few sentences had taken almost half an hour to pronounce. "So yes," he said finally, very quietly, "in reality I share the guilt. . . . Because my guilt. . . my guilt. . . only now in these talks. . . now that I have talked about it all for the first time. . . ." He stopped. He had pronounced the words "my guilt": but more than the words, the finality of it was in the sagging of his body, and on his face. After more than a minute he started again, a half-hearted attempt, in a dull voice. "My guilt," he said, "is that I am still here, That is my guilt." "Still here?" "I should have died. That was my guilt." "Do you mean you should have died, or you should have had the courage to die?" "You can put it like that," he said, vaguely, sounding tired now. "Well, you say that now. But then?"

25 "That is true," he said slowly, perhaps deliberately misinterpreting my question. "I did have another twenty years - twenty good years. But believe me, now I would have preferred to die rather than this. … " He looked around the little prison room. "I have no more hope," he said then, in a factual tone of voice; and continued, just as quietly: "And anyway - it is enough now. I want to carry through these talks we are having and then - let it be finished. Let there be an end." It was over. I got up. … Stangl died nineteen hours later, just after noon the next day, Monday, of heart failure.

Mayer, “They thought they were free: The Germans” (Univ. Chicago Press, 1955) Foreword to the 1966 reprint: … As "things" changed, on the whole for the worse, and the postwar world became the prewar world, and disarmament became rearmament, there arose a modestly circumscribed sentiment that it might be profitable to find out what it was that had made "the Germans" act as badly as they did. Dreadful deeds like Auschwitz had been done before in human history, though never on so hideously handsome a scale. But they had not been done before in an advanced Christian society like-well, like ours. If we would keep such deeds from ever being done again, at least in advanced Christian societies, it might be worth digging a little deeper than the shallow grave so hurriedly dug at Nuremberg. After the heat of the long moment had gone down, it was equally difficult to cling to the pleasurable doctrine that the Germans were by nature the enemies of mankind and to cling to the still more pleasurable doctrine that it was possible for one ( or two or three) madmen to make and unmake the history of the world. … The "German problem" moves in and out of focus as the twentieth century continues to produce - at an always accelerating tempo - more history than it can consume. Korea is forgotten, and Hungary, Cyprus, and Suez are the new sensations; Hungary, Cyprus, and Suez slide into sudden oblivion, and we are all agog at Tibet and the Congo; Tibet and the Congo vanish before we have time to find them on the map (or to find a map that has them) and Cuba explodes; Cuba subsides to something combining a simmer and a snarl, and Vietnam and Rhodesia (or is it Southern Rhodesia?) seize us. Ghana, Guiana, Guinea. Crisis is our diet, served up as exotic dishes, and dishes ever. more exotic, before we are able to swallow (let alone digest) those that were just before us. Remember the "Lebanon crisis" of 1958, in which the United States was deeply involved? Of course not. Who would, these days? Who could? And why? …

Foreword to the 1955 edition: As an American, I was repelled by the rise of National Socialism in Germany. As an American of German descent, I was ashamed. As a Jew, I was stricken. As a newspaperman, I was fascinated. It was the newspaperman's fascination that prevailed-or at least predominated-and left me dissatisfied with every analysis of Nazism. I wanted to see this monstrous man, the Nazi. I wanted to talk to him and to listen to him. I wanted to try to understand him. We were both men, he and I. In rejecting the Nazi doctrine of racial superiority, I had to concede that what he had been I might be; what led him along the course he took might lead me. … In 1935 I spent a month in Berlin trying to obtain a series of meetings with Adolf Hitler. My friend and teacher, William E. Dodd, then American Ambassador to Germany, did what he could to help me, but without success. Then I traveled in Nazi Germany for an American magazine. I saw the German people, people I had known when I visited Germany as a boy, and for the first time realized that Nazism was a mass movement and not the tyranny of a diabolical few over

26 helpless millions. Then I wondered if Adolf Hitler was, after all, the Nazi I wanted to see. By the time the war was over I had identified my man: the average German. I wanted to go to Germany again and get to know this literate, bourgeois, "Western" man like myself to whom something had happened that had not (or at least not yet) happened to me and my fellow-countrymen. It was seven years after the war before I went. Enough time had passed so that an American non-Nazi might talk with a German Nazi, and not so much time that the events of 1933-45, and especially the inner feeling that attended those events, would have been forgotten by the man I sought. I never found the average German, because there is no average German. But I found ten Germans sufficiently different from one another in background, character, intellect, and temperament to represent, among them, some millions or tens of millions of Germans and sufficiently like unto one another to have been Nazis. It wasn't easy to find them, still less to know them. I brought with me one asset: I really wanted to know them. And another, acquired in my long association with the American Friends Service Committee: I really believed that there was "that of God" in every one of them. My faith found that of God in my ten Nazi friends. My newspaper training found that of something else in them, too. They were each of them a most marvelous mixture of good and bad impulses, their lives a marvelous mixture of good and bad acts. I liked them. I couldn't help it. Again and again, as I sat or walked with one or another of my ten friends, I was overcome by the same sensation that had got in the way of my newspaper reporting in Chicago years before. I liked Al Capone. I liked the way he treated his mother. He treated her better than I treated mine. I found - and find - it hard to judge my Nazi friends. But I confess that I would rather judge them than myself. In my own case I am always aware of the provocations and handicaps that excuse, or at least explain, my own bad acts. I am always aware of my good intentions, my good reasons for doing bad things. I should not like to die tonight, because some of the things that I had to do today, things that look very bad for me, I had to do in order to do something very good tomorrow that would more than compensate for today's bad behavior. But my Nazi friends did die tonight; the book of their Nazi lives is closed, without their having been able to do the good they mayor may not have meant to do, the good that might have wiped out the bad they did. By easy extension, I would rather judge Germans than Americans. Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany-not by attack from without or by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler. … I felt - and feel - that it was not German Man that I had met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might be here, under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I. …

November 9, 1938 [The date of Kristalnacht - “the night of broken glass” – the night when Jewish synagogues and businesses were vandalized and burned throughout Germany] In 1930, when Party uniforms were forbidden, the Party paraded quietly in white shirts, and, when the Fuhrer spoke in Kronenberg in 1932, forty thousand people crowded quietly into a super- circus tent on the Town Meadow to hear him. (Nazi open-air meetings were forbidden.) That was the day that a Swastika Bag was run up on the Castle; in England or France it might have been taken for a college-boy prank, but in Kronenberg the culprit, who proudly admitted his guilt, was heavily fined. Kronenberg went quietly Nazi, and so it was. In the March, 1933, elections, the NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers Party, had a two-thirds majority, and the Social Democrats went out of office. Only the university - and not the whole university - and the hard-core Social

27 Democrats held out until the end, and in nonindustrial Kronenberg there were no trade-unions to hold the mass base of the Social Democrats. The town was as safely Nazi now, in 1938, as any town in Germany. … And Kronenberg, so old and changeless, off the main line and the Autobahn, is conservative even for Hesse. But its very conservatism is a better guaranty of the Party's stability than the radicalism of the cities, where yesterday's howling Communists are to day's howling Nazis and nobody knows just how they will howl tomorrow. A quiet town is best. …

The Lives Men Lead … Only one of my ten Nazi friends saw Nazism as we - you and I - saw it in any respect. This was Hildebrandt, the teacher. And even he then believed, and still believes, in part of its program and practice, "the democratic part." The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it. As we know Nazism, it was a naked, total tyranny which degraded its adherents and enslaved its opponents and adherents alike; terrorism and terror in daily life, private and public; brute personal and mob injustice at every level of association; a flank attack upon God and a frontal attack upon the worth of the human person and the rights which that worth implies. These nine ordinary Germans knew it absolutely otherwise, and they still know it otherwise. If our view of National Socialism is a little simple, so is theirs. An autocracy? Yes, of course, an autocracy, as in the fabled days of "the golden time" our parents knew. But a tyranny, as you Americans use the term? Nonsense. When I asked Herr Wedekind, the baker, why he had believed in National Socialism, he said, "Because it promised to solve the unemployment problem. And it did. But I never imagined what it would lead to. Nobody did." I thought I had struck pay dirt, and I said, "What do you mean, 'what it would lead to,' Herr Wedekind?" "War," he said. "Nobody ever imagined it would lead to war." The evil of National Socialism began on September 1, 1939; and that was my friend the baker. Remember - none of these nine Germans had ever traveled abroad (except in war); none had ever known or talked with a foreigner or read the foreign press; none ever wanted to listen to the foreign radio when it was legal to do so, and none (except, oddly enough, the policeman) listened to it when it was illegal. They were as uninterested in the outside world as their contemporaries in France - or America. None of them ever heard anything bad about the Nazi regime except, as they believed, from Germany's enemies, and Germany's enemies were theirs. "Everything the Russians and the Americans said about us," said Cabinetmaker Klingelhofer, "they now say about each other." Men think first of the lives they lead and the things they see; and not, among the things they see, of the extraordinary sights, but of the sights which meet them in their daily rounds. The lives of my nine friends - and even of the tenth, the teacher - were lightened and brightened by National Socialism as they knew it. And they look back at it now - nine of them, certainly - as the best time of their lives; for what are men's lives? There were jobs and job security, summer camps for the children and the Hitler Jugend to keep them off the streets. What does a mother want to know? She wants to know where her children are, and with whom, and what they are doing. In those days she knew or thought she did; what difference does it make? So things went better at home, and

28 when things go better at home, and on the job, what more does a husband and father want to know? The best time of their lives. There were wonderful ten dollar holiday trips for the family in the "Strength through Joy" program, to Norway in the summer and Spain in the winter, for people who had never dreamed of a real holiday trip at home or abroad. And in Kronenberg "nobody" (nobody my friends knew) went cold, nobody went hungry, nobody went ill and uncared for. For whom do men know? They know people of their own neighborhood, of their own station and occupation, of their own political (or nonpolitical) views, of their own religion and race. All the blessings of the New Order, advertised everywhere, reached "everybody." There were horrors, too, but these were advertised nowhere, reached "nobody." Once in a while (and only once in a while) a single crusading or sensation-mongering newspaper in America exposes the inhuman conditions of the local county jail; but none of my friends had ever read such a newspaper when there were such in Germany (far fewer there than here), and now there were none. None of the horrors impinged upon the day-to-day lives of my ten friends or was ever called to their attention. There was "some sort of trouble" on the streets of Kronenberg as one or another of my friends was passing by on a couple of occasions, but the police dispersed the crowd and there was nothing in the local paper. You and I leave "some sort of trouble on the streets" to the police; so did my friends in Kronenberg. … In what you and I call the blessings of life - including uncritical acceptance by the whole of the undifferentiated community - every one of my ten friends, excepting Tailor Schwenke, who had once had his own shop and was now a school janitor, was better off than he had ever been before; and not just they and their families, but all their friends, the "whole" community, the widows and orphans, the aged, the sick, and the poor. Germany had been what many Americans would call a welfare state ever since Bismarck, the reactionary Junker, introduced social legislation to stave off social democracy. In the collapse after the first World War, and again in the collapse at the end of the 1920's, the Weimar Republic could not maintain its social services. Nazism not only restored but extended them; they were much more comprehensive than they had ever been before or, of course, than they have been since. Nor were they restricted to Party members; only "enemies" of the regime were excluded from them. … The best time of their lives. "Yes," said Herr Klingelhofer, the cabinetmaker, "it was the best time. After the first war, German families began to have only two children. That was bad, bad for the family, the marriage, the home, the nation. There is where Germany was dying, and that was the kind of strength we be- lieved that Hitler was talking about. And he was talking about it. After ‘33 we had more children. A man saw a future. The difference between rich and poor grew smaller, one saw it everywhere. A man had a chance. In 1935 I took over my father's shop and got a two-thousand-dollar government loan. Ungeheuer! Unheard of! "The good development had nothing to do with whether we had a democracy, or a dictatorship, or what. The form of government had nothing to do with it. A man had a little money, a chance, and he didn't pay any attention to any system. Inside the system, you see the benefits. Outside it, when you are not benefited by it, you see the faults, I suppose. I suppose that's the way it is in Russia now. That's the way it is everywhere, always…”

Hitler and I …said Tailor Schwenke… “Himmler I detested. Goebbels, too. If Hitler had been told the truth, things would have been different." For "Hitler" read "I."

29 "The killing of the Jews?" said the "democratic" bill-collector, der alte Kampfer, Simon. "Yes, that was wrong, unless they committed treason in wartime. And of course they did. If I had been a Jew, I would have myself. Still, it was wrong, but some say it happened and some say it didn't. You can show me pictures of skulls or shoes, but that doesn't prove it. But I'll tell you this - it was Himmler. Hitler had nothing to do with it." "Do you think he knew about it?" "I don't know. We'll never know now." Hitler died to save my friend's best self. …

“What Would You Have Done?” None of my ten friends ever encountered anybody connected with the operation of the deportation system or the concentration camps. None of them ever knew, on a personal basis, anybody connected with the Gestapo, the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service), or the Einsatzgruppen (the Occupation Detachments, which followed the German armies eastward to conduct the mass killing of Jews). None of them ever knew anybody who knew anybody connected with these agencies of atrocity. Even Policeman Hofmeister, who had to arrest Jews for "protective custody" or "resettlement" and who saw nothing wrong in "giving the Jews land, where they could learn to work with their hands instead of with money," never knew anyone whose shame or shamelessness might have reproached him had they stood face to face. The fact that the Police Chief of Kronenberg made him sign the orders to arrest Jews told him only that the Chief himself was afraid of getting into trouble "higher up." Sixty days before the end of the war, Teacher Hildebrandt, as a first lieutenant in command of a disintegrating Army subpost, was informed by the post doctor that an SS man attached to the post was going crazy because of his memories of shooting down Jews "in the East"; this was the closest any of my friends came to knowing of the systematic butchery of National Socialism. … Anti-Nazis no less than Nazis let the rumors pass - if not rejecting them, certainly not accepting them; either they were enemy propaganda or they sounded like enemy propaganda, and, with one's country fighting for its life and one's sons and brothers dying in war, who wants to hear, still less repeat, even what sounds like enemy propaganda? … What if one came to know? What then? There was nichts dagegen zu machen, "nothing to do about it." Again and again my discussions with each of my friends reached this point, one way or another, and this very expression; again and again this question, put to me with the wide-eyed innocence that always characterizes the guilty when they ask it of the inexperienced: "What would you have done?" … what did we expect the good citizen of Minneapolis or Charlotte to do when, in the midst of war, he was told, openly and officially, that 112,000 of his fellow-Americans, those of Japanese ancestry on the American West Coast, had been seized without warrant and sent without due process of law to relocation centers? There was nichts dagegen zu machen - not even by the United States Supreme Court, which found that the action was within the Army's power - and, anyway, the good citizen of Minneapolis or Charlotte had his own troubles. … A good man - even a good American - running to catch a train on an important assignment has to pass by the beating of a dog on the street and concentrate on catching the train; and, once on the train, he has to consider the assignment about which he must do something, rather than the dog-beating about which he can do nothing. If he is running fast enough and his assignment is mortally important, he will not even notice the dog-beating when he passes it by. …

30 And the decent bourgeois teacher was to teach "Nazi literature" from Nazi textbooks provided by the Nazi school board. Teachers teach what they are told to teach or quit, and to quit a public post meant, in the early years of the Third Reich, unemployment… The "democratic," that is, argumentative, bill-collector, Herr Simon, was greatly interested in the mass deportation of Americans of Japanese ancestry from our West Coast in 1942. … He asked me whether I had known anybody connected with the West Coast deportation. When I said "No," he asked me what I had done about it. When I said "Nothing," he said, triumphantly, "There. You learned about all these things openly, through your government and your press. We did not learn through ours. As in your case, nothing was required of us - in our case, not even knowledge. You knew about things you thought were wrong - you did think it was wrong, didn't you, Herr Professor?" "Yes." "So. You did nothing. We heard, or guessed, and we did nothing. So it is everywhere." When I protested that the Japanese-descended Americans had not been treated like the Jews, he said, "And if they had been - what then? Do you not see that the idea of doing something or doing nothing is in either case the same?" …

The Joiners Men joined the Party to get a job or to hold a job or to get a better job or to save themselves from getting a worse job, or to get a contract or to hold a contract, a customer, a client, a patient. Every third man, in time, worked for the State. … It would not be reckless to estimate that half the civil servants had to join the Party or lose their jobs. … There are many lawyers in the United States who disagree vehemently with the policies and program of the American Bar Association; but, if they want to practice law, they had better belong to the constituent societies of the ABA. There are even more physicians in the United States who disagree even more vehemently with the policies of the American Medical Association, but, if they want to practice medicine, they had better belong to the constituent societies of the AMA. They may only pay dues, and that grudgingly; but the record shows that they belong. They are officially "guilty" of the policies of the organization which speaks in their name. …

“We Think with Our Blood” “There were good things, great things, in the system - and the system itself was evil." "For instance?" "You mean about the evils?" "No, I know about those. About 'the good things, the great things.' " "Perhaps I should make it singular instead of plural, the good thing. For the first time in my life I was really the peer of men who, in the Kaiser time and in the Weimar time, had always belonged to classes lower or higher than my own, men whom one had always looked down on or up to, but never at. In the Labor Front - I represented the teachers' association - I came to know such people at first hand, to know their lives and to have them know mine. Even in America- perhaps; I have never been there - I suspect that the teacher who talks about “the common people' has never known one, really known one, not even if he himself came from among them, as I, with an Army officer as a father, did not. National Socialism broke down that separation, that class distinction. Democracy - such democracy as we had had - didn't do it and is not doing it now." "Wedekind, the baker," I said, "told me how 'we simple working-class men stood side by side with learned men, in the Labor Front.' " "I remember Wedekind," said the teacher. "I didn't know him before I joined the Party, and I don't know him now. Why? Because he was my inferior. A baker is nothing, a teacher is

31 something; in the Labor Front we belonged to something together, we had something in common. We could know each other in those days. Do you understand that, Herr Professor?" "I understand it because you call me 'Herr Professor,'" I said, smiling. "Yes. The baker calls me 'Herr Studienrat' - that was my rank - and I call you 'Herr Professor.' It is for me to accept the baker and for you to accept me." "Neither the baker nor the teacher would call a professor 'Professor' in America," I said. "Never?" "Rarely. I can't remember ever having been called 'Professor,' except by friends, who in an argument might say ironically, 'Professor, you're crazy.'" "It was never like that in Germany," he said, "or anywhere else in Europe - not even, from what I know, in England. Always in Germany, before Nazism, and again now, the title is a genuine reflection of class distinction." "I understand," he said. "This is your American feeling of absolute equality. That we have never had here. But there was a democracy in Nazism, and it was real. My - how shall I say it? - my inferiors accepted me." My inferiors accepted me. … Expertness in thinking, exemplified by the professor, by the high school teacher, and even by the grammar-school teacher in the village, had to deny the Nazi views of history, economics, literature, art, philosophy, politics, biology, and education itself. Thus Nazism, as it proceeded from practice to theory, had to deny expertness in thinking and then (this second process was never completed), in order to fill the vacuum, had to establish expert thinking of its own-that is, to find men of inferior or irresponsible caliber whose views conformed dishonestly or, worse yet, honestly to the Party line. The nonpolitical pastor satisfied Nazi requirements by being nonpolitical. But the nonpolitical schoolmaster was, by the very virtue of being nonpolitical, a dangerous man from the first. He himself would not rebel, nor would he, if he could help it, teach rebellion; but he could not help being dangerous - not if he went on teaching what was true. In order to be a theory and not just a practice, National Socialism required the destruction of academic independence. In the years of its rise the movement little by little brought the community's attitude toward the teacher around from respect and envy to resentment, from trust and fear to suspicion. The development seems to have been inherent; it needed no planning and had none. As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, "blood," "folkishness") seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the "little man," the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society. Germany was preparing to cut its own head off. By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon "intellectuals" as unreliable and, among these unreliables, upon the academics as the most insidiously situated. … In 1931, when Tailor Schwenke rejoined the Party, his Nazi indoctrination plus his personal experience had awakened his hostility toward professors in general, many of whom in Kronenberg, he told me, were Communists. (None was.) … Tailor Schwenke would not, after 1933, any more than before, have failed to tip his hat to the Herr Professor; all the more joyously he received the revelation that half the academics were traitors and the other half dupes and boobies who might be tolerated - under close surveillance - by the New Germany which Tailor Schwenke, at your service, Sir, represented. …

The Anti-Semitic Swindle

32 What Gustav Schwenke wanted, and the only thing he wanted, was security. The job he wanted, and the only job he ever wanted, was a job with the State, any job with the State, with its tenure, its insurance, and its pension. Gustav was not, I imagine, the only boy born in Germany in 1912 who wanted security and thought, until 1933, that he would never have it. When he got it, when the Party Police were incorporated into the Military Police in 1935, his dream was come true. At last he belonged. He was a man at last. … After all their centuries of exclusion from all the honorable pursuits, the Jews had turned, as their liberation began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the "free professions," those which were not 'Organized as guilds or associations excluding them: medicine, law, journalism, teaching, research, and, of course, for the greater part, retail merchandise. (The poorer among theI1l had turned, when they were driven out of the towns in past centuries, to the only possible occupation, the ancestor of retail trade: peddling). …

“Everybody Knew.” “Nobody Knew.” When people you don't know, people in whom you have no interest, people whose affairs you have never discussed, move away from your community, you don't notice that they are going or that they are gone. When, in addition, public opinion (and the government itself) has depreciated them, it is still likelier that you won't notice their departure or, if you do, that you will forget about it. How many of us whites, in a white neighborhood, are interested in the destination of a Negro neighbor whom we know only by sight and who has moved away? … The fact is, I think, that my friends really didn't know. They didn't know because they didn't want to know; but they didn't know. They could have found out, at the time, only if they had wanted to very badly. Who wanted to? We whites - when the Negro moves away - do we want to find out why or where or with what he moved? … Shortly after the war began, a group of Jews were seen working on the street, laying blocks in the trolley-car track (Jews were now forbidden any but common labor). Hofmeister waved a greeting to some he knew but didn't talk to them. Cabinetmaker Klingelhofer spoke to one he knew, a lawyer, who had been a customer of his. "Did you ask him how he happened to be there?" I said. "No. I knew." "How?" "Everybody knew." "How?" 'Oh - we just new.” …

"Do you know any Jews over there, Herr Professor?" he said. "Oh, yes," I said, "many, quite well. They live among us over there, you know, just like other people." "Not like Negroes," said the "Old Fighter." "But," he went on, "I want to ask you about the Jews. Can you always tell a Jew when you see one, over there? We can, here. Always. They're not like you and me." "How can you tell?" I said. "They sometimes look like you and me.” "Certainly," he said, "sometimes. It isn't by looks, though. A German can tell. Always.” "Well," I said, like a man who is saying to himself, "You learn something new every day." "Yes," he said. Then I said, "Could you tell, if you saw Jesus, that he was a Jew, Herr Simon?"

33 "I think so," he said, "if he was a Jew. But was he a Jew? If he was, why did the Jews kill him? Can you tell me that?" - He went right on - "I've never heard a pastor say that Jesus was a Jew. Many scientists say he wasn't. I have heard that Hitler himself said that he was the son of a Greek soldier in the Roman Army." … "Yes," said Herr Simon, "and do you know, Herr Professor, the Jews have a secret Bible, called the Talmud. Maybe you never heard that, either, but it's true. They deny it, of course. You just ask a Jew about it, and watch him when he says it doesn't exist. But every German knows about it; I've seen it myself. It has their ritual murder in it, and everything else. It tells them - mind you, it was written I don't know how many centuries ago - that they must marry German women and weaken the German race. What do you think of that?" … "How do you know that they all worked together, Herr Damm?" "They always do. They held us in the palm of their hand. Do you know what one of them once did? He bought a calf from my father and took it to town and sold it to my father's cousin, at a profit." "Yes," I said, "but that is just the profit system. You believe in the profit system, don't you? You're certainly no Communist!" "Of course," he said, "but only think - to my father's own cousin! If my father had known his cousin wanted the calf, he could have sold it to him himself, without the Jew." … "Now," I said, as we were lighting up after dinner, "what many Christians in America cannot understand is how you Christians in Germany could accept the persecution of the Jews, no matter how bad they were. How could you accept it as Christians?" It was the first time I had taken the initiative on the subject. "The Jews?" - he said - "but the Jews were the enemies of the Christian religion. Others might have other reasons for destroying them, but we Christians had the Christian duty to. Surely, Herr Professor, you know how the Jews betrayed our Lord?" … Nobody has proved to my friends that the Nazis were wrong about the Jews. Nobody can. The truth or falsity of what the Nazis said, and of what my extremist friends believed, was immaterial, marvelously so. There simply was no way to reach it, no way, at least, that employed the procedures of logic and evidence. The bill-collector told me that Jews were filthy, that the home of a Jewish woman in his boyhood town was a pigsty; and the baker told me that the Jews' fanaticism about cleanliness was a standing affront to the "Germans," who were clean enough. What difference did the truth, if there were truth, make? I suggested from time to time, and always in hesitant fashion, that perhaps the medieval exclusion of Jews from citizenship and landholding, their subsequent exclusion, after 1648, from guild apprenticeship, and their confinement for a thousand years to the practice of moneylending, with the attendant risk of the despicable creditor against the knightly debtor, might have required cunning of most of the Jews in most of early Europe as the condition of survival itself; that the consequent sharpening of the intellect under such circumstances would have produced a disproportionate number of unusually noble and unusually ignoble dispositions among any people, their unusualness, in the marginal occupations to which they were driven, disappearing as the great community removed the disadvantagements which produced it. I reminded the bank clerk, Kessler, that the ancestors of the Christians who now forbade Jews to be bank presidents once compelled them to be. … But there are some things that everybody knows and nobody learns. Didn't everybody know, in America, on December 8, 1941, that the Japanese, or Japs, were a treacherous people?

34 The Crimes of the Losers An American Occupation judge was trying to get transferred. "It's got so," he said, "that the minute a German starts whining, I know I'm going to find him guilty. And they all whine. They all have a hard-luck story. Well, they have had hard luck. But they gave other people lots harder luck first. Of course, they've forgotten that." The judge was equating inequivalents. The hard luck the Germans have had they have had, while the hard luck they gave, somebody else had, somebody they don't know; and they don't even believe that it was they who gave it. Herr Damm, after losing his career and his home and possessions, was now earning $47 a month as a "black," that is, unauthorized worker; he did not see the equivalence between his boycott of Jews in the past and his own children's undernourishment now. He hadn't seen the Jews who, as the ultimate consequence of his legal acts were slain; and, besides, like everyone else except Hitler, who had a mandate from the German people, Herr Damm had a mandate from Hitler, the head of the government, to boycott Jews. I am sure that the tailor, Schwenke, had a hand, and a ready one, in burning the Kronenberg synagogue. See the way he may see the crime (which he denies): He was a man provoked to fury by extreme misfortune, in which "the Jews" played the central role; and. he was one of many; and he was a follower, not a leader; and he was being a patriot in Nazi Germany; and the victim was a building; and so on. … But there was the woman who told me, "It was my own fault. 1 should have been more courageous"; and the man who said, "I should have been man enough to say 'No' at the very beginning" … In October, 1945, the Confessional church of Germany, the "church within the Church" which had defied Hitler's "German Christians," issued the "Stuttgart Confession": "We know ourselves to be with our people in a great company of suffering, but also in a great solidarity of guilt. With great pain do we say that through us has endless suffering been brought to many peoples and countries. That to which we have often borne witness before our congregations, we declare in the name of the whole church. True, we have struggled for many years in the name of Jesus Christ against a spirit which has found its terrible expression in the National Socialist regime of violence, but we accuse ourselves for not witnessing more courageously. . . ." Those, too, were German words. …

“That’s the Way We Are” … The German press devotes much more of its space than ours to politics and more of its political discussion to issues than to personalities. In our first conversations, when I found that my friends preferred talking about Versailles or the Polish Corridor to talking about themselves, I thought that they were running away from their guilt. I was wrong. They did not regard what they themselves did as important, and they were interested in important things like Versailles and the Polish Corridor. To say that my German friends were nonpolitical, and to say no more, is to libel them. As in nearly all European countries, a very much larger proportion of Germans than Americans turns out for political meetings, political discussions, and local and general elections. Where the German was (in contrast with the American) nonpolitical was at a deeper level. … He saw the State in such majesty and magnificence, and himself in such insignificance, that he could not relate himself to the actual operation of the State.

35 … Arguing with an American, you may ask him, with propriety, "All right - what would you have done if you had been President?" You don't ask one of my Nazi friends what he would have done if he had been Fuhrer - or Emperor. The concept that the citizen might become the actual Head of the State has no reality for my friends. … My friends, like all people to whom the present is unpalatable and the future unpromising, always look back. Looking back, they see themselves ruled, and well ruled, by an independent Sovereign. Their experience with even the outward forms of self-government does not, as yet, incline them to it. The concept that the citizen actually is, as such, the Head of the State is, in their view, nothing but self-contradiction. I read to three of my friends a lecture I had prepared, in which I was going to say that I was the highest official of the United States, holding the office of citizen. I had used the word Staatsburger. "But that," said all three, in identical words, "is no office at all." There we were. "But it really is the highest office in America," I said; "the citizen is the Sovereign. If I say 'souveraner Staatsburger,' will that be clearer?" "Clearer, certainly," said Herr Kessler, the bank clerk, "but wronger, if I may, Herr Professor. Those two words do not go together. The idea is not a German idea. It says that the citizen is the ruler, but there are millions of citizens, so that would be anarchy. There could be no rule. A State must have a Head, not a million or fifty million or a hundred million Heads. If one of your 'sovereign citizens' does not like a law, do you allow him to break it? If not, your 'sovereign citizen' is only a myth, and you are, like us, ruled by real rulers. But your theory does not admit it." … "We have heard of your American cities ruled by gangsters working with dishonest politicians who steal the people's money and give them poor service, bad roads, and such, charging them always for good roads or good sewers. That we have never known here in Germany, not under the Kaiser, not under Hitler. That is a kind of Anarchie, maybe not mob rule but something like it." … Each new generation's leadership was somewhere in Pennsylvania or the Argentine or Wisconsin or China. But millions of liberty-loving Germans remained, and all men, in whatever form they love it, love liberty. Thus throughout Germany, as everywhere where there is oppression among literate peoples, one encountered, and still encounters, more diversity, more individuality, than there is among, say, Americans, who are unoppressed; more variety in entertainment and in the arts, in political partisanship and in the political complexion of the press; all this, more individuality, more independence, stubborn or sublimated, in the land of the goose step than one finds in the land of the free. Free Americans all read the same papers, wear the same clothes, and vote for the same two transposable parties; Germans dress freely, freely read different papers, and vote a dozen different ways, but they are, in their submissiveness, the same. …

But Then It Was Too Late … "You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was 'expected to' participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time." … "Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for

36 people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your 'little men,' your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. … Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about - we were decent people - and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think? "To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures' that no 'patriotic German' could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head. … "Your 'little men,' your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemoller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something - but then it was too late." … "You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why not? Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty. … "You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.' "And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. … But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked - if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in '43 had come immediately after the 'German Firm' stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in '33. But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D. …

Collective Shame

37 … "I was employed in a defense plant (a war plant, of course, but they were always caned defense plants). That was the year of the National Defense Law, the law of 'total conscription.' Under the law I was required to take the oath of fidelity. I said I would not; I opposed it in conscience. I was given twenty-four hours to 'think it over.' In those twenty-four hours I lost the world." "Yes?" I said. "You see, refusal would have meant the loss of my job, of course, not prison or anything like that. (Later on, the penalty was worse, but this was only 1935.) But losing my job would have meant that I could not get another. … "There, then, is my point. If I had refused to take the oath of fidelity, I would have saved all three million." "You are joking," I said. "No." "You don't mean to tell me that your refusal would have overthrown the regime in 1935?" "No." "Or that others would have followed your example?" "No." "I don't understand." "You are an American," he said again, smiling. "I will explain. There I was, in 1935, a perfect example of the kind of person who, with all his advantages in birth, in education, and in position, rules (or might easily rule) in any country. If I had refused to take the oath in 1935, it would have meant that thousands and thousands like me, all over Germany, were refusing to take it. Their refusal would have heartened millions. Thus the regime would have been overthrown, or, indeed, would never have come to power in the first place. The fact that I was not prepared to resist, in 1935, meant that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands, like me in Germany were also unprepared, and each one of these hundreds of thousands was, like me, a man of great influence or of great potential influence. Thus the world was lost." … "My education did not help me," he said, "and I had a broader and better education than most men have had or ever will have. All it did, in the end, was to enable me to rationalize my failure of faith more easily than I might have done if I had been ignorant. And so it was, I think, among educated men generally, in that time in Germany. Their resistance was no greater than other men's." … I want my friends not just to feel bad and confess it, but to have been bad and to be bad now and confess it. … But I am not God. I myself am a national, myself guilty of many national hypocrisies whose only justification is that the Germans’ were so much worse. My being less bestial, in my laws and practices, than they were does not make me more Godly than they, for difference in degree is not difference in kind. My own country's racist legislation and practices, against both foreigners and citizens, is a whole web of hypocrisies. …

The Furies: Heinrich Hildebrandt … "What did you do that was wrong, as you understand right and wrong, and what didn't you do that was right?" The instinct that throws instant ramparts around the self-love of all of us came into immediate operation; my friends, in response, I spoke of what was legal or illegal, or what was popular or unpopular, or what others did or didn't do, or what was provoked or unprovoked. … Fear and advantage, Hildebrandt had said, were his reasons for becoming a National Socialist in 1937… For eight years I held the rank of Studienassessor. It carries no tenure with it. After 1933 my name was not even included in the list of candidates for Studienrat, the rank which is usually given after five years of high-school teaching. The spring the Nazis took power, I was

38 dismissed from my radio program and from my adult-school lectureship. Then I was transferred from the city to one small school after another. … I waited two years, and then I joined the Party. I was promoted to Studienrat and got married."… "When were you really disillusioned with National Socialism?" I said in a later conversation. The blush again; deeper, this time. "Only after the war - really." "That discourages me," I said, "because you are so much more sensitive than most people, and this makes me realize how hard it must be, under such conditions, for people, even sensitive people, to see what is going on around them." He continued to blush, but my blush-detector told me that this was not it. "It's all so well masqueraded," he said, "the bad always mixed up with the good and the harmless, and you tell yourself that you are making up for the bad by doing a few little things like speaking of Mendelssohn in class." … "I fooled myself. I had to. Everybody has to. If the good had been twice as good and the bad only half as bad, I still ought to have seen it, all through as I did in the beginning, because I am, as you say, sensitive. But I didn't want to see it because I would then have had to think about the consequences of seeing it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent. I wanted my home and family, my job, my career, a place in the community. I wanted to be able to sleep nights-" …

The Furies: Johann Kessler … “It was because people called the Party in all difficulties arising from the reconstruction of the country, and the Party always helped. This pattern was established from the first, long before the war. It was what made the Party so strong - it would always help. In religious matters, in domestic problems, in everything. It really watched over the lives of the people, not spying on them, but caring about them. "You know, Herr Professor, we are told that not a sparrow falls without God's care; I am not being light when I say this - that not a person 'fell,' fell ill or in need, lost his job or his house, without the Party's caring. No organization had ever done this before in Germany, maybe nowhere else. Believe me, such an organization is irresistible to men. No one in Germany was alone in his troubles - " "Except," I said, "'inferior races' and opponents of the regime." "Of course," he said, "that is understood, but they were few, they were outside society, 'over the fence,' and nobody thought about them." "But these, too, were 'sparrows.'" "Yes," he said. "Could these," I said, "have been 'the least of them,' of whom Jesus spoke?" "Herr Professor, we didn't see it that way. We were wrong, sinful, but we didn't see it that way. We saw 'the least of them' among our own people, everywhere, among ordinary people who obeyed the laws and were not Jews, or gypsies, and so on. Among ordinary people, 'Aryans,' there were 'the least of them,' too. Millions; six million unemployed at the beginning. These 'least,' not all who were 'least' but most of them, had somewhere to turn, at last…”

New Boy in the Neighborhood … Ethnical heterogeneity is greater among the Germans (taking the Austrians as Germans) than it is among any other of the world's peoples except the Russians and the Americans.

39 True, my ten friends, not one of whom met or even approached the Nordic standard, rejected their own "Aryanism." But they did accept a kind of racist “Germanism," a biologized mystique which, I was surprised to discover, they were not alone in accepting. … My friend Simon, he of the secret Talmud, when he told me that, yes, the Jew Springer was a decent man, and I asked him how there could be a decent Jew when the "Jewish spirit" was a matter of blood, replied: "Of course it's a matter of blood. It might skip a generation" - he had certainly not read Mendel - "but it would show up in the next. Only when the proportion of Jewish blood is small enough will it no longer be a danger to Deutschtum." "How small," I said, "would it have to be?" "The scientists have that worked out," he said. …

“Like God in France” … In such exquisitely fabricated towers a man may live (or even a whole society), but he must not look over the edge or he will see that there is no foundation. The fabrication is magnificent; the German is matchless in little things, reckless only in big ones, in the fundamental, fateful matters which, in his preoccupation, he has overlooked. … Who is this Einstein, who was "only a scientist" when he conceived the atomic bomb and now, in his old age, sees what he has done and weeps? He is the German specialist, who had always "minded his" - high- "business" and was no more proof against romanticism than his tailor, who had always minded his low business. He is the finished product of pressure, the uneducated expert, like the postal clerk in Kronenberg whose method of moistening stamps on the back of his hand is infallible. The German mind, encircled and, under pressure of encirclement, stratified, de- vours itself in the production of lifeless theories of man and society, deathless methods of licking postage stamps, and murderous machinery. For the rest - which is living - the German has to depend upon his ideals. … "The German revolutionaries," said Lenin, "could not seize the railways because they did not have a Bahnsteigkarte" - the ten pfennig ticket admitting visitors to the train shed. …

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