Now I could choose many paths upon which to continue in life. I was offered various appointments, including membership in newly arising parties. I rejected them all. I had left behind me the brief period of my life when I believed that the duty of each person who did not want to waste his own life was to try to save the world. The world did not need saving; humanity did not need the prophets who, until recently, had led it to unimaginable heights. It needed decency, work, honor, and humility.
I wanted to keep doing what I knew how, at least a little. To write.
ESSAYS
Ideological Murderers
History can be seen as a series of bloody acts to which entire nations often fall victim. In some cities or areas humiliated during wartime, every living creature, including cattle, was exterminated. Sometimes, however, the slaughter following a victorious battle was carried out by the celebrating soldiers, and their behavior has been metaphorically described as “drunk with blood.” It is a sort of afterglow of battle during which “drunken” men, before they sober up, carry out even more devastation. The occupying German forces would continue their destruction of conquered territory in Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union, where soldiers often assassinated, burned alive, or hanged the inhabitants they considered defiant.
In the slaughter of the Jews, there was something even more appalling. This had no connection with soldiers who had survived the moral peril of battle and continued killing in rage and ecstasy. It was a carefully planned operation, the goal of which was to destroy an entire, precisely defined group of citizens in the shortest amount of time, without regard to sex, age, profession, creed, or religion. Thousands of men and women, officials, guards, cold-blooded killers, sadists, and obedient administrators participated in this slaughter, and they were clearly not in the condition of a soldier drunk with blood. They had days, weeks, and months to consider what they were doing. They painstakingly — and soberly — carried out orders, whatever they were, whether they impinged on their emotions or perhaps were in conflict with whatever remnant of morality and conscience they had.
A similar slaughter, just as senseless and cold-blooded, took place two decades later in the Soviet Union. Certain individuals or entire groups, often chosen at random — there was a quota of enemies that had to be annihilated — were loaded onto trucks and executed somewhere in secrecy. Those who were not murdered outright were carted off to one of thousands of Siberian camps, where most of them, under the leadership of similar hatchet men, sadists, or obedient administrators, perished.
Where did so many people, who were suddenly willing to commit such villainy, come from?
Several years after the war when I was sojourning in Poland, I dug up the memoirs of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. I’ve never read a book so many times as this dry, matter-of-fact record of mass murder. I don’t think I was the only one fascinated by this memoir. It inspired the French novelist Robert Merle when he was writing Death Is My Trade. Today Merle’s novel, along with the Auschwitz commandant’s memoirs, has been almost forgotten, overshadowed by the more recent massacres in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia or the murders committed by Muslim terrorists and other fanatics. I believe, however, that there are few texts that demonstrate the degree to which one can be driven by blind obedience to an aberrant doctrine, when the fanaticized mind enables a person to concede responsibility for his actions and suppresses his last tremor of conscience.
In the spring of 1942 the first transports of Jews arrived from Upper Silesia. All of them were to be exterminated. They were led from the ramp across the meadow, later named section B-II of Birkenau, to the farmhouse called Bunker I. Aumeir, Palitzsch, and a few other block leaders led them and spoke to them as one would in casual conversation, asking them about their occupations and their schooling in order to fool them. After arriving at the farmhouse they were told to undress. At first they went very quietly into the rooms where they were supposed to be disinfected. At that point some of them became suspicious and started talking about suffocation and extermination. Immediately a panic started. Those still standing outside were quickly driven into the chambers, and the doors were bolted shut. In the next transport those who were nervous or upset were identified and watched closely at all times. As soon as unrest was noticed these troublemakers were inconspicuously led behind the farmhouse and killed with a small-caliber pistol, which could not be heard by the others. .
Many women hid their babies under piles of clothing. . The little children cried mostly because of the unusual setting in which they were being undressed. But after their mothers or the Sonderkommando encouraged them, they calmed down and continued playing, teasing each other, clutching a toy as they went into the gas chamber.
I also watched how some women who suspected or knew what was happening, even with the fear of death all over their faces, still managed enough strength to play with their children and talk to them lovingly. Once a woman with four children, all holding each other by the hand to help the smallest ones over the rough ground, passed by me very slowly. She stepped very close to me and whispered, pointing to her four children, “How can you murder these beautiful, darling children? Don’t you have any heart?”. .
As the doors were being shut, I saw a woman trying to shove her children out of the chamber, crying out, “Why don’t you at least let my precious children live?”. .
According to Himmler’s orders, Auschwitz became the largest human killing center in all of history. When he gave me the order personally in the summer of 1941 to prepare a place for mass killings and then carry it out, I could never have imagined the scale, or what the consequences would be. Of course, this order was something extraordinary, something monstrous. However, the reasoning behind the order of this mass annihilation seemed
correct
to me. At the time I wasted no thoughts about it. I had received an order; I had to carry it out. I could not allow myself to form an opinion as to whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not. At that time it was beyond my frame of mind. Since the Führer himself had ordered “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” there was no second guessing for an old National Socialist, much less an SS officer. “Führer, you order. We obey” was not just a phrase or a slogan. It was meant to be taken seriously. .
Since my arrest I have been told repeatedly that I could have refused to obey this order, and even that I could have shot Himmler dead. I do not believe that among the thousands of SS officers there was even one who would have had even a glimmer of such a thought. Something like that was absolutely impossible. . I am convinced that not even one would have dared raise a hand against him, not even in his most secret thoughts. As leader of the SS, Himmler’s person was sacred. His fundamental orders in the name of the Führer were holy.
Rudolf Höss came from a narrow-minded Catholic family. His father had destined him for the clergy and inculcated in him a boundless respect for authority. His father, however, died when Höss was young, and at sixteen he enlisted in the army against his mother’s protests. After the war he joined the semilegal units of the Freikorps, and when he heard Hitler’s 1922 speech in Munich, he joined the Nazi party. He and his pals then participated in the murder of a teacher whom they believed to be an informer. Höss always considered this murder an act of justice, and it was correct to carry it out because it was highly unlikely that any German court would have found him [the teacher] guilty. Höss was sentenced to ten years in prison for the teacher’s death but was released after five for good behavior. Before he joined the SS, he had made his living as a farmer. He writes that he enjoyed this work and harbored a love of horses. When the war ended, he evaded arrest and worked as a farmhand under the name of Franz Lang. During these eight months before he was captured, he didn’t kill anyone and probably didn’t feel the need to, since no one was giving him those orders, and the architect of the iniquitous ideology to which he subscribed was dead. In a letter to his wife just before his execution, he writes about himself: How tragic it is that I, by nature kind, good-natured, and always obliging, became the greatest mass-murderer. ., who cold-bloodedly and with all the attendant ramifications carried out every single order of extermination.