Adolf Eichmann, the man who, with wholehearted diligence, ensured a steady supply of victims, lived after the war as a more or less respectable Argentinean citizen for fifteen years without committing any crime. Eichmann, who during his trial in Jerusalem declared that he was no anti-Semite, explained his criminal activity as mere obedience.
Had they told me my father was a traitor and I had to kill him, I would have. At that time I followed orders without thinking about them. . Orders were given, and because they were orders, we obeyed them. If I was given an order, it wasn’t meant to be interpreted. . Do you think such an insignificant person as myself was going to worry his head about it? I receive an order and look neither right nor left. It’s my job. My job is to listen and obey.
When the elite representatives of the Nazi regime stood before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremburg, all of them, except a few, pretended to be astounded and shocked by the atrocities committed by the regime. During the screening of films from concentration camps or even when bearing witness to what went on, some even broke down in tears. Of course emotion can be simulated, but it is also possible that the moment Nazi ideology was defeated and it was clear that the consequences had inflicted misery not only on those at war with Germany but also on Germany itself, the accused, stripped of all glory and inviolability, suddenly saw the world and their deeds from another point of view.
One of the most barbarous and vindictive SS men in Terezín was Rudi Heindl, an electrician by trade. Witnesses at his trial in Litoměřice testified that he had placed an old man on a red-hot stove. One witness testified that he had kicked her mother so hard that she died from the wounds inflicted. Many others related tales of his barbarity. After the war he again worked as an electrician and mistreated no one. In court he claimed that he didn’t want to cause anyone pain. Everything he did was upon orders from his superiors. Now he asked only that he be allowed to go to his family, his two daughters and his son who needed him. To them and to everyone around him he had always been amiable and good-natured.
They sentenced and hanged him.
One wonders. If Nazism had not existed, would these men have gone through life as honest, respectable farmers, workers, electricians, officials, or shopkeepers and committed no crimes? Without criminal ideologies which, often in a sophisticated way, deceive those who believe in them, would these slaughters have occurred, slaughters symptomatic of the entire first half of the twentieth century? One of course also wonders if these criminal regimes would have existed, whether hundreds of concentration camps — from Kolyma to the banks of the Rhine — would have come into being if such acquiescent people as Rudolf Höss, Adolf Eichmann, and those who had wept before the tribunal in Nuremberg had served them.
Höss was put on trial by the Supreme National Tribunal in Poland, which on April 2, 1947, for all the evil he inflicted upon humanity. . and at the behest of the world’s conscience, sentenced him to death.
In a farewell letter to his wife, the commandant of Auschwitz admits:
Based on my present knowledge I can see today clearly, severely and bitterly for me, that the entire ideology about the world in which I believed so firmly and unswervingly was based on completely wrong premises and had to absolutely collapse one day.
For the several million who were slaughtered in Auschwitz, this insight came too late. And we can certainly assume that it never would have come if it had not been preceded by the absolute military defeat of the regime that the fanatic perpetrators of these crimes served.
Utopias
It sounds paradoxical, but all escalating violence, all barbaric and unparalleled murder or theft usually occurs in the name of the good, of morality, or of reason, or, during the modern period, in the name of the people, progress, and finally the common good. All great ideologies, such as the utopian projects of the ideal communities, sought those lofty goals, or at least professed them.
Plato emphasizes that a person tasked with protecting the good of the community must be brought up from earliest childhood with that goal in mind. Then Plato poses the logical question: Can a bad example serve the reinforcement of the good in education? The presentation of a lie as something beneficial? And from this basic premise he draws conclusions, which have always suited those who justify censorship: Let none of the poets tell us. . and let no one slander Proteus and Thetis, neither let any one, either in tragedy or in any other kind of poetry, introduce Hera disguised in the likeness of a priestess. . And he adduces entire passages from Homer and Aeschylus that cannot be approved. Then he enumerates what is necessary to reject in poetry. Education is perverted by everything that elicits horror, everything that describes suffering, the moaning and lamentation of those in torment or dying, or the description of death at all. Furthermore, events that elicit laughter cannot be depicted because laughter transforms a person in inauspicious ways.
More that two thousand years later, Bernhard Bolzano was living in the Czech lands. All of his activities were aimed at strengthening democracy, eliminating social differences, and expanding education. In his utopian On the Best State (from Selected Writings on Ethics and Politics), however, he draws conclusions similar to Plato’s:
As books may never become the property of individuals, they shall be published at the expense of the state. From this it obviously follows that not everything anyone wants to publish shall in fact be printed. . Those who urge us to accept an unrestricted freedom of the press no doubt also wish it to be accompanied by an unrestricted freedom to read. Thus once a bad or dangerous book is printed and distributed, one could hardly prevent it causing incalculable damage. . Concerning. . the production of new works of art, one is not nearly so mild in one’s judgments. . For this reason, one will not so easily permit someone to make poetry or musical composition, etc., his primary business when he does not show promise of accomplishing something truly extraordinary.
As far as censorship was concerned, as a man of the Enlightenment, Bolzano wanted an enlightened, educated, and strictly limited censorship. It should be aimed primarily at immoral works, when a book contains scenes depicting lewdness or other vices in a provocative way, or even defends such vices.
It is true that freedom of the press and freedom of expression provide an opening for many depravities, but censorship in itself is a depravity that harms society more than any erotic scenes. Moreover, the linking of censorship with the Enlightenment is a contradiction.