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Mankind and Terror

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Mankind and Terror Mankind and Terror ISTORY TEACHES US that terror as a means of fright­ ening people into submission can appear in an extraordinary H variety of forms and can be closely linked with a large number of political and party systems that have become familiar to us. The terror of tyrants, despots, and dictators is documented from ancient times on, the terror of revolutions and counter-revolutions, of majorities against minorities and of minorities against the majority of humanity, the terror of plebiscitary democracies and of modern one-party systems, the terror ofrevolutionary movements and the terror ofsmall groups ofconspirators. Political science cannot content itself with simply establishing the fact that terror has been used to intimidate people. Rather, it must separate out and clarify the differences between all these forms of terror regimes, forms that assign quite different functions to terror in each specific regime. In what follows here, we will deal only with totalitarian terror as it appears in the two totalitarian political systems most familiar to us: Nazi Germany after 1938 and Soviet Russia after 1930. The key difference Speech, in German, for RIAS Radio University, March 23, 1953. English translation by Robert and Rita Kimber. 297 298 / ESSAYS IN UNDERSTANDING between totalitarian terror and all other forms of terror we know of is not that it existed on a quantitatively larger scale and claimed a larger number of victims. Who would dare to measure and compare the fears human beings experienced? And who has not wondered whether the number of the victims and the increasing indifference of others toward them are not linked closely to an increase in population that has bred in all modern mass states a kind of Asiatic indifference to the value of human life and a conviction, no longer even concealed, of the superfluity of human beings? Wherever we find terror in the past, it is rooted in the use of force that originates outside the law and in many cases is consciously applied to tear down the fences of law that protect human freedom and guarantee citizens' freedoms and rights. From history, we are familiar with the mass terror of revolutions in whose furor the guilty and the innocent die, until the bloodbath of the counter-revolution suffocates the furor in apathy or until a new reign of law puts an end to the terror. If we single out the two forms of terror that have been historically the most effective and politically the bloodiest-the terror oftyranny and the terror of revolution-we soon see that they are directed toward an end and find an end. The terror of tyranny reaches an end once it has paralyzed or even totally dispensed with all public life and made private individuals out of all citizens, stripping them of interest in and a connection with public affairs. And public affairs are concerned, of course, with much more than we generally circumscribe with the term "politics." Tyrannical terror has come to an end when it has imposed a graveyard peace on a country. The end of a revolution is a new code of laws-or counter­ revolution. The terror finds its end when the opposition is destroyed, when nobody dares lift a finger, or when the revolution has exhausted all reserves of strength. Totalitarian terror is so often confused with the intimidation mea­ sures of tyranny or the terror of civil wars and revolutions because the totalitarian regimes we are familiar with developed directly out of civil wars and one-party dictatorships and in their beginnings, before they became totalitarian, used terror in precisely the same way as other des­ potic regimes we know of from history. The turning point that decides whether a one-party system will remain a dictatorship or develop into a form of totalitarian rule always comes when every last trace of active or passive opposition in the country has been drowned in blood and terror. MANKIND AND TERROR /299 Genuinely totalitarian terror, however, sets in only when the regime has no more enemies who can be arrested and tortured to death and when even the different classes of suspects are eliminated and can no longer be taken into "protective custody." From this first characteristic of totalitarian terror-that it does not shrink but grows as the opposition is reduced-follow the next two key features. Terror that is directed against neither suspects nor enemies of the regime can turn only to absolutely innocent people who have done nothing wrong and in the literal sense of the word do not know why they are being arrested, sent to concentration camps, or liquidated. The second key factor follows from this, namely, that the graveyard peace that spreads over the land under pure tyranny as well as under the despotic rule of victorious revolutions, and during which the country can recover, is never granted to a country under totalitarian rule. There is no end to the terror, and it is a matter of principle with such regimes that there can be no peace. As totalitarian movements promise their adherents before they come to power, everything will remain in per­ manent flux. Trotsky, who first coined the phrase "permanent revolu­ tion," no more understood what that really meant than Mussolini, to whom we owe the term "total state," knew what totalitarianism meant. This is clear both in Russia and in Germany. In Russia, the con­ centration camps that were originally built for enemies of the Soviet regime began to grow enormously after 1930, that is, at a time not only when the armed resistance of the civil-war period had been crushed but also when Stalin had liquidated the opposition groups within the party. During the first years of Nazi dictatorship in Germany there were at most ten camps, with no more than 10,000 inmates. By about 1936 all effective resistance to the regime had died out, partly because the pre­ ceding and extraordinarily bloody and brutal terror had destroyed all the active forces (the number of deaths in the first concentration camps and in the Gestapo cellars was extremely high) and partly because the apparent solution of the unemployment problem had won over many working-class people who had originally opposed the Nazis. It was at this very time, in the first months of 1937, that Himmler gave his famous speech to the Wehrmacht in which he expressed the need for major enlargement of the concentration camps and announced that it would be undertaken in the near future. By the time war broke out there were already more than 100 concentration camps that from 1940 on must have 300 / ESSAYS IN UNDERSTANDING collectively had an average constant population of a million inmates. The corresponding numbers for the Soviet Union are vastly higher. There are different estimates, the lowest being about 10 million people, the highest, about 25 million. The fact that terror becomes totalitarian after the liquidation of the political opposition does not mean that the totalitarian regime then fully renounces acts ofintimidation. The initial terror is replaced by draconian legislation that establishes in law what will be considered "transgres­ sions"-interracial sexual relations or arriving late for work, i.e., in­ sufficient grasp of the Bolshevist system, in which the worker belongs body and soul to a production process guided by principles of political terror-and so retroactively legalizes the initial reign of terror. This retroactive legalization of conditions created by revolutionary terror is a natural step in revolutionary legislation. The new draconian measures were supposed to put an end to the extra-legal terror and establish the new law of the revolution. What is characteristic of totalitarian regimes is not that they too pass new laws of this kind, such as the Nuremberg laws, but that they do not stop there. Instead, they retain terror as a power functioning outside the law. Consequently, totalitarian terror pays no more attention to the laws decreed by the totalitarian regime than it does to those in effect before the regime's assumption of power. All laws, including the Bolshevist and Nazi laws, become a fa~ade whose purpose is to keep the population constantly aware that the laws, no matter what their nature or origin, do not really matter. This becomes all too clear in documents from the Third Reich that show Nazi judges and often even party agencies desperately trying to judge crimes according to a specific code and to protect duly sentenced people from the "excesses" of terror. To cite only one example from many: We know that people who were convicted of racial violations after 1936 and were sentenced to prison by normal legal procedures were then sent to concentration camps after already having served their prison terms. Because of its racial ideology, Nazi Germany could fill its concen­ tration camps with a majority of innocent people far more easily than the Soviet Union could. It could maintain some sense of order without having to adhere to any criteria of guilt or innocence simply by arresting certain racial groups on no other grounds than race: first, after 1938, the Jews; then later, indiscriminately, members of Eastern European ethnic groups. Because the Nazis had declared these non-Germanic MANKIND AND TERROR / 301 ethnic groups enemies of the regime, it could uphold the pretense of their "guilt." Hitler, who in this matter as in all others always contem­ plated the most radical and far-reaching measures, saw a time coming after the war when these groups would have been eradicated and a need for new categories would arise. In a 1943 draft for a comprehensive Reich health law, he therefore suggested that after the war all Germans should be X-rayed and that all families in which anyone suffered from a lung or heart disease should be incarcerated in camps.
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