Volume XXX No. 12 December, 1975 INFORMATION ISSUED BY THE AssooAim Of xmH RSUCSS HI WEAT KITAIH Ernest Hearst finanzpraesidenten throughout the Reich (4.11.1941). 'Diu-ing the next few months Jews not working in economically essential indus­ THE ADMIMSTRAUVE STRUCTURE tries will be removed to a town in the Eastem territories. The property of Jews so removed will be taken over by the Reich. Each Jew will OF GENOCTOE be allowed to take with him 100 RM. and What will people make of the twentieth tives concerning their deportation, the organi­ 50kg. luggage.' What the reality of such a century two or three hundred years hence? sation of their transports and finally the "removal to a town in the Eastem territories" Will the emphasis be put on the scientific and various fates marked out for the doomed on looked like has been described in a report technological developments which altered not arrival at journey's end are all closely studied. submitted by Jewish, Quaker and Red Cross only the physical and social terms of man's This scrutiny of the administrative structure organisations to Herr Lammers, head of the existence, but enabled him to leave the con­ of genocide is followed by recording individual Reichs Chancellery and forwarded by him to fines of his native planet and set foot on the fates, fossilised in the reports of a watchful Himmler (14-3-1940). Clearest stars of a beckoning universe? Or will scribbling officialdom. Much of what Adler "The deported were stripped of all their the perspectives of history be dominated by relates in great detail has been told before and possessions. They were not even allowed to the century's equally monumental aberrations, more generally in G. Reitlinger's Final Solu­ keep their hand luggage and the women had by its propensity for organised brutality and tion or Hilberg's The Desfrwctton of European to surrender their handbags. Some people premeditated millionfold mass murder? Jewry. But what gives this work its particular who, because of the bitter cold, had tried to These are questions the contemporary asks relevance—apart from investigating the role wear several coats or pieces of underwear oot so much of the future as of himself. Can he played by the German bureaucratic apparatus on top of each other, had their coats taken justifiably look forward to the world his chil­ —is its concentration on the specific and the away... The deported arrived in Lublin with dren will have to inhabit, or must any hopeful individual. nothing but what they stood in. They anticipations be immediately modified by the were then moved on to the villages of Unspeakable horrors he has lived through or My Lai not Auschwitz Piaski, Clusk and Belcyce about 17-19 miles Witnessed? Can the future, he wonders, liber­ While one fears that so voluminous and away from Lublin. In a temperature of —20 ate itself from a past which betrayed the im­ expensive a book will necessarily have a degrees centigrade men, women and children memorial belief in human perfectibility and readership confined to academics and other had to make their way to these villages progress. How widely shared is this belief professional researchers into the immediate along snow-covered roads . During this anyway? Perhaps it belongs only to the in­ past, its appearance and the wealth of docu­ march which lasted more than 17 hours, 72 herited, mental fumiture of a now aging mentation it presents is nevertheless timely of the approximately 1,200 deported col­ generation, which appears to its offspring as enough. For the process by which the events lapsed by the roadside, many of them aged an outdated antique, irrelevant and unsuitable of thirty years ago have been absorbed into and up to 86 years old. Most of them died to their style of living. our consciousness and form part of our political of exposure. Among them a mother who had Be that as it may, for those who lived language, has tended to dim the enormity of carried her three-year-old child in her arms, through the holocaust years, the traumatic the horror. This happens whenever trendy trying to protect it with her clothes from question remains how could these enormities radicals taunt the police with shouts of Sieg the cold, until, totally exhausted she col­ be perpetrated in our age; and not in far-away Heil, or as was recently the case, when pro­ lapsed in this position . Arrived at their Places by primitive people, but here in Europe gressive and politically enlightened producers destination it was up to the deported to in the heartland of civilisation. H. G. Adler of a television documentary on the Nurem­ find accommodation in the already over­ in his monumental 1.076-page Der Verwaltete berg War Crime Trials encouraged the crowded huts and houses of the native Jews Mensch, Studien zur Deportation der Juden aus scriptwriters to draw parallels between . The deported had to look for shelter in I^eutschland (J. C. B. Mohr, Tubingen, DM 120) Auschwitz and My Lai. Now My Lai was dread­ bams, sheds and stables, and as apart from tries to answer this question. ful enough to shock eventually even the black bread there is no food and the 'How was it done', he asks in his foreword. military who condoned and tolerated it, not to hygenic conditions are appalling the daily 'How did it become and was made possible? mention public opinion in America and the death toll is mounting particularly among Who formulated and transmitted the orders? rest of the world. But for all the terrible and the aged and the children. The situation What actually happens, if one does not simply insensate slaughter of men, women and chil­ is further aggravated by the complete des­ fxpel, as it has become since 1945 an increas­ dren. My Lai was not Auschwitz, and to try titution of the deportees; lacking even cook­ ingly and terrifyinsly accepted practice in and draw parallels between them, really ing facilities, they must slowly perish". Europe, Asia and Africa; but when—so to amounts to equating coldly planned and It would be easy to quote other documents speak according to barbarically ordered pro­ ranaciously organised crime with the homo- equally harrowing or murderous directions cedures—a human being is against his will up­ cidal outburst of a fearful, frustrated and couched in equally bland officialese. But this rooted from his familiar surroundings, deprived brutalised soldiery. For those who perished, is hardly necessary, for readers of this paper pf all—or almost all—his human attributes, the difference may be meaningless—although know about the extermination camps; and their is legally expunged and in this way administra­ one was a quick death and the other a slow own experience with Nazi bureaucrats allows tively eradicated, long before being actually darkly apprehended, inexorable agony—^but for them to believe that the eventual annihilation niurdered.' Using the vast amount of evidence those who survived and want to prevent the of German Jewry was achieved in accordance an assiduously form-filling Nazi bureaucracy recurrence of such enormities, it is profoundly with neatly phased and punctiliously execu­ bequeathed posterity, the author, helped by relevant to distinguish between the two Wnds ted orders. The author therefore devoted the the hitherto undiscovered archives of the of savagery and their motivation. second part of his book to an investigation WUrzburg Gestapo containing more than 24,000 Indeed it seems to be the whole purpose of into all aspects of the administration appara­ documents, has been able to follow these 'bar­ H. G. Adler's research to demonstrate how this tus, the way It transmits and even generates baric procedures' in minute detail. Pains­ slaughter of people In their millions, was— state power and how in Germany—and by takingly, step by step, the road towards the owing to the texture and conventions of the implication in all modem industrialized socie­ 'Pinal Solution' is being retraced. The official society in which it was enacted—^first trans­ ties—it became increasingly powerful, threat­ decrees ruling the initial disfranchisement and formed into the almost innocuous sounding ening to enslave the individual it was origin­ identification of Jews, their subsequent segre­ abstractions of official directives eagerly ally meant to serve. While the erudite enquiry gation, the confiscation of their property in formulated by a reliably callous civU service. Into the history and dynamics of administra- accordance with exact inventories they them­ Take for instance the notice sent by the selves were compelled to provide, the direc­ Reichsfinanzministerium to various Ober- Continned on page 2, column 1 ^^ -.mmm.^m^'i^i^ Page 2 AJR INFORMATION December 1975 people living in Europe were dying . THE ADMINISTRATIVE STRUCTURE If the rest of the world had threatened to intervene at this moment the lives of a mil­ OF GENOCIDE lion or more people might have been saved .... They abandoned their .... brothers Continued from page 1 USSR throughout the 'thirties other imtold so that their agreeable state of general tran­ millions were uprooted, deported, starved quility might continue". tion will only be fully appreciated by sociolo­ or worked to death. Like the Wurzburger So a bitter Solzhenitsyn commenting, on tbe gists or political scientists, the waming the Gestapo files, the archives of the Smolensk officially imposed Ukranian famine of 1934. author sounds against the uncontrolled growth Party Headquarters for the period of 1917- (Times Literary Supplement, 23.5.1975.) A few of the administration complex, culminating in 1938 give a detailed official account of the years later the free and powerful peoples of the "Administrated Man", the Verwaltete persecution and destruction of the Soviet the West were equally unwilling to endanger Mensch ot the book title, is plain enough even "class enemy".