Читать книгу The Palmstroem Syndrome - Dick W. de Mildt - Страница 11
Оглавление‘Behind, be what there may,
I dare the hazard—I will lift the veil.’
Friedrich Schiller, Das verschleierte Bild zu Saïs (1795)
[The Veiled Image at Sais, translated by J. Merivale]
Distance in space and time degrades intensity of awareness. So does magnitude. Seventeen is a figure which I know intimately like a friend; fifty billion is just a sound. A dog run over by a car upsets our emotional balance and digestion; three million Jews killed in Poland cause but a moderate uneasiness. Statistics don’t bleed; it is the detail which counts. We are unable to embrace the total process with our awareness; we can only focus on little lumps of reality.
Arthur Koestler, ‘On disbelieving atrocities’, January 1944
Tarnopol, 7 April 1943
My beloved!
Before I leave this world, I want to leave behind a few lines to you, my loved ones. When this letter will reach you one day, I myself will no longer be there, nor will any of us. Our end is drawing near. One feels it, one knows it. Just like the innocent, defenseless Jews already executed, we are all condemned to death. In the very near future it will be our turn, as the small remainder left over from the mass murders. There is no way for us to escape this horrible, ghastly death.
At the very beginning (in June 1941) some 5000 men were killed, among them my husband. After six weeks, following a five-day search between the corpses, I found his body…. Since that day life has ceased for me. Not even in my girlish dreams could I once have wished for a better and more faithful companion. I was only granted two years and two months of happiness. And now? Tired from so much searching among the bodies, one was ‘glad’ to have found his as well; are there words in which to express these torments? (…)
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Tarnopol, 26 April 1943
I am still alive and I want to describe to you what happened from the 7th to this day. Now then, it is told that everyone’s turn comes up next. Galicia should be totally rid of Jews. Above all, the ghetto is to be eliminated by May 1. During the final days thousands have again been shot. Meeting-point was in our camp. Here the human victims were selected. In Petrikow it looks like this: before the grave one is stripped naked, then forced to kneel down and wait for the shot. The victims stand in line and await their turn. Moreover, they have to sort the first, the executed, in the graves so that the space is used well and order prevails. The entire procedure does not take long. In half an hour the clothes of the executed return to the camp. After the actions the Jewish council received a bill for 30,000 Zloty to pay for used bullets….
Why can we not cry, why can we not defend ourselves? How can one see so much innocent blood flowing and say nothing, do nothing and await the same death oneself? We are compelled to go under so miserably, so pitilessly…. Do you think we want to end this way, die this way? No! No! Despite all these experiences. The urge for self-preservation has now often become greater, the will to live stronger, the closer death is. It is beyond comprehension. (…)1
The farewell letters quoted here never reached their destination. More precisely, they were not even sent off to start with. We have no idea who wrote them, nor for whom they were intended. They were discovered only by chance among a pile of clothes belonging to the victims of an SS-extermination operation against the final inhabitants of the Tarnopol ghetto in the Ukraine, in May 1943. From their contents we can make out little more than that the female writer belonged to the small remainder of Galician Jews, who, only shortly before, had formed a population of some five-hundred thousand. Less than twenty-four months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union this population had vanished. It had been gassed in the extermination camps, shot inside and around the Galician towns and villages, or starved and worked to a miserable death in the numerous ghettos and forced labor camps spread across the area.
The Tarnopol letters form one of the ‘little lumps of reality’ which made up the colossal tragedy of the Nazi genocide. The few surviving lines of an anonymous victim allow us a fleeting glimpse of the unfathomable despair that echoed millionfold throughout the murderous universe that Europe had become during the years 1939 to 1945. These six years comprise the history of the mass extinction of millions of men, women and children, of all ages and nationalities, coming from all strata of society and from every ←16 | 17→town and village within occupied Europe. Within a brief span of time and with breath-taking ease, they were deprived of their civil rights, robbed of their possessions and physically annihilated. In the end, little more was left of their one-time existence than the birth certificates in the registers of their places of origins. And for some, even this barest testimonial of life was lacking. Thus, on 1 July, 1943, six baby boys born in the ‘Gypsy camp’ of Birkenau were formally registered as ‘Z-8266’ to ‘Z-8271’. They would not live to see the end of the year. Like millions of others, they literally went up in smoke.2
From the outset, the absurd nature of Hitler’s genocide frustrated the efforts to grasp its true meaning. Above all, this applied to the pauperized and starving populations of the Eastern European ghettos, who were forced to witness their approaching doom. For many the spectacle was too much to cope with and so they desperately sought to deny its inevitability. The Polish-Jewish educator Chaim Kaplan observed such efforts of his fellow Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and noted in his diary:
The lack of reason for these murders especially troubles the inhabitants of the ghetto. In order to comfort ourselves we feel compelled to find some sort of system to explain these night-time murders. Everyone, afraid for his own skin, thinks to himself: If there is a system, every murder must have a cause; if there is a cause, nothing will happen to me since I am absolutely guiltless. […]
Tremendous intellectual effort is expended to find some motive behind all the slaughter. If there is a motive, there is a possibility of estimating the proximity of individual danger. But none of the theories have a leg to stand on; there are always incidents that do not fit the alleged motive, that are beyond calculation and unbounded by logic.3
And Kaplan also noted that the few who dared to publicly emphasize the latter were met with considerable animosity, as ‘People do not want to die without cause.’4
That the ghetto inhabitants failed to discover this cause is hardly surprising. Eye to eye with persecutors who appeared to act at total random and completely isolated from the outside world, they lacked the wider perspective required for even a modest beginning of such an understanding. But even for contemporaries with a more comprehensive outlook, the reality remained hard enough to grasp. Thus, German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, who received reports on the mass extermination as late as 1943 in her American exile, initially refused to believe them as they seemed so ←17 | 18→utterly devoid of any power-political or military logic. And the leaders of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and of other Jewish organizations outside occupied Europe reacted not all that differently.5 And again, those who knew better and decided not to keep silent were met with disbelief and rejection. Typical in this respect were the experiences of the British-Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler in his efforts to inform public opinion on the ongoing massacres at the European continent. In 1943 the literary magazine Horizon published a chapter on the deportations from Koestler’s new novel Arrival and Departure. Among the reactions he received were several highly negative ones, accusing the author of spreading horror stories to satisfy a morbid fantasy. On a more civilized tone, fellow writer and art expert Sir Osbert Sitwell inquired after the factual basis of Koestler’s story. It prompted a furious reaction:
Dear Sir
In your letter you asked me the idiotic question whether the events described in The Mixed Transport were ‘based on fact’ or ‘artistic fiction’.
Had I published a chapter on Proust and mentioned his homosexuality, you would never have dared to ask a similar question, because you consider it your duty ‘to know’ although the evidence of this particular knowledge is less easily accessible than that of the massacre of three million humans. You would blush if you were found out not to have heard the name of any second-rate contemporary writer, painter or composer; you would blush if found out having ascribed a play by Sophocles to Euripides; but you don’t blush and you have the brazenness to ask whether it is true that you are the contemporary of the greatest massacre in recorded history.
If you tell me that you don’t read newspapers, White Books, documentary pamphlets obtainable at W.H. Smith bookstalls – why on earth do you read Horizon and call yourself a member of the intelligentsia? I can’t even say that I am sorry to be so rude. There is no excuse for you – for it is your duty to know and to be haunted by your knowledge. As long as you don’t feel, against reason and independently of reason, ashamed to be alive while others are put to death; not guilty, sick humiliated because you were spared, you will remain what you are, an accomplice by omission.
Yours truly,
A.K.6
Koestler’s bitterness resulted from the news that members of his family were among the murdered, but its deeper background consisted of his utter despair over the impenetrability of public opinion. In January 1944 he ←18 | 19→voiced this despair once again in an article in the New York Times, entitled ‘On Disbelieving Atrocities’:
We, the screamers, have been at it now for about ten years. We started on the night when the epileptic van der Lubbe set fire to the German parliament; we said that if you don’t quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot steam, mass-electrocution and live burial, of the total Jewish population of Europe. So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass-killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch. I have photographs before me on my desk while I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness. People died to smuggle them out of Poland; they thought it was worthwhile. The facts have been published in pamphlets, White Books, newspapers, magazines and what not. But the other day I met one of the best-known American journalists over here. He told me that in the course of some recent public opinion survey nine out of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies, and that they didn’t believe a word of it. … And meanwhile the watch goes on ticking. What can the screamers do but go on screaming, until they get blue in the face?7
In retrospect, the desperation of Koestler and his fellow screamers is all too understandable, of course. And we tend to blame their contemporaries for their persistent ignorance and lethargy in view of the ongoing horrors. But in all fairness it should perhaps be said that, instead of discrediting them, their disbelief to some extent speaks in their favor. For the reality of Hitler’s gas chambers and mass graves was simply still unimaginable to most. The Nazi mass extermination policies were after all a highly revolutionary and unprecedented form of state-organized criminality, which, to all but the perpetrators themselves, must have appeared outright absurd. It was yet another Warsaw ghetto chronicler, Abraham Lewin, who realized this only too well:
The level of Nazi brutality quite simply lies beyond our power to comprehend. It is inconceivable to us and will seem quite incredible to future generations, the product of our imagination, over-excited by misery and danger.8
What holds true for Lewin’s ‘future generations’ certainly applied no less to contemporaries such as Sir Sitwell and his fellow skeptics. One could say that they were largely immune for the message as they were still too decent to grasp its implications. The post-war revelations of the Nuremberg trials certainly dealt a tremendous blow to this naivety, but they did not really ←19 | 20→solve the enigma of Hitler’s genocide. On the contrary, if anything, they only increased its incomprehensibility.
Nowhere was the absurd nature of Hitler’s genocide so vividly and penetratingly present as in the post-war courtrooms where his former associates and accomplices stood trial. They were the ones who had made the effort to turn their Führer’s dystopia into reality, and so they were also the ones of whom it could be expected to solve the riddle. But their answers were outright mind-boggling, however. Take, for example, the ones from the former camp commander of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss. Acting as a witness before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Höss informed the judges about his three-and-a-half year stay at the extermination camp:
I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease making a total dead of about 3,000,000. This figure represents about 70 or 80 percent of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labour in the concentration camp industries; included among the executed and burned were approximately 20,000 Russian prisoners of war (previously screened out of prisoner-of-war cages by the Gestapo), who were delivered at Auschwitz in Wehrmacht transports operated by regular Wehrmacht officers and men. The remainder of the total number of victims included about 100,000 German Jews, and great numbers of citizens, mostly Jewish, from Holland, France, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, or other counties. We executed about 400,000 Hungarian Jews alone at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944.9
In front of the same judges, Dieter Wisliceny – subordinate and former friend of deportation expert Adolf Eichmann – recalled the words with which his chief had taken his leave in February 1945: ‘He said he would leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had 5 million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction.’10
Hardly surprising, testimonies such as these turned Hitler’s mass murder accomplices into objects of exasperated fascination in the eyes of post-war observers. Indeed, as one of them, Canadian historian Michael Marrus, aptly put it: ‘For historians of the Holocaust, the greatest challenge has not been making sense of Hitler, but rather understanding why so many ←20 | 21→followed him down his murderous path.’11 Among the earliest answers to this question was one, not by a historian but by an SS General, named Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski. Asked about the reasons behind all the slaughter, Bach, witness for the defense at the IMT trial, answered: ‘If for years, for decades, a doctrine is preached to the effect that the Slav race is an inferior race, that the Jews are not even human beings, then an explosion of this sort is inevitable.’12 And there could be no doubt about Bach’s expertise in the matter, for as Heinrich Himmler’s chief mass exterminator in the East he had personally orchestrated the outburst.13
Echoed by the Nuremberg judges in their verdict against the Third Reich’s leaders, Bach’s interpretation of Germany’s recent genocidal past became the paradigm for the conventional perspective on Hitler’s executioners. According to its line of reasoning, there existed a straightforward causality between Nazi racial theories on the one hand, and its racial practices on the other. Thus, as Von dem Bach suggested, the barrage of ideological propaganda of the 1930s constituted a brainwashing of the German people to the extent that many of them willingly engaged in the subsequent mass murders. Viewed from this perspective, the gas chambers and mass graves of the Third Reich were the inevitable result of ideas disseminated by its racial hate propagandists among a particularly receptive audience.
An early example of such an interpretation can be found in the study of Dutch Auschwitz-survivor Elie A. Cohen. In March 1952, Cohen earned his M.D. with a dissertation on medical and psychological aspects of the German concentration camp. His study also appeared as a commercial edition and – unexpectedly – sold out in only a few days’ time. It went through several reprints and was translated into English shortly after its first appearance.14 In his book, Cohen addressed the murderous mind-set of the SS in psycho-analytical terms:
The Super-ego, which as we know forms the introjection of the voice of the parents, the teachers and society, received a criminal contents with the SS men. From 1933 onwards, the Super-ego learned from society (radio, film, newspaper, book), from the teachers, and in many cases also from the parents: ‘The Jews are our misfortune’, ‘the Jews must be wiped out’, ‘the Russians and Poles are inferior people, and so on. In this way, the SS men received a criminal Super-ego…. (…)
Above all, it was the Super-ego which made it possible for the SS to kill Jews, Poles, Russians, and so on. One could even say: For the SS it was a necessity, for ←21 | 22→according to Nazi ideology, these people were harmful elements. To the SS their destruction was as necessary as the extermination of the Colorado-beetle in the Netherlands.15
In her widely acclaimed book The War against the Jews, published nearly twenty-five years later, American historian Lucy Dawidowicz went a considerable step further as she explained the causes of this war by way of the collective insanity of the entire German people:
Germans, otherwise individually rational, yielded themselves to pathological fantasies about the Jews. In that climate, where masses of Germans had lost the ability to distinguish between the real Jew and the mythic Jew of anti-Semitic invention, the chiliastic system of National Socialist beliefs could further influence their already distorted sense of reality. Belief in National Socialism was like belief in magic and witchcraft during the Middle Ages, similarly ruling and inflaming the minds of men. […]
In medieval days entire communities were seized with witchcraft hysteria, and in modern Germany the mass psychosis of anti-Semitism deranged a whole people. According to their system of beliefs, elimination of the Jews resembled medieval exorcism of the Devil. The accomplishment of both, it was variously held, would restore grace to the world.
As a result of this mass hysteria, the Germans considered themselves as
latter-day Laocoöns in the grip of a death struggle. In a paranoid vision they believed themselves to be innocent and aggrieved victims, outwitted by the machinations of a super-cunning and all-powerful antagonist, engaged in a struggle for their very existence. […] Consequently, in the deluded German mind, every Jewish man, woman, and child became a panoplied warrior of a vast Satanic fighting machine.16
And again twenty-five years later, another American bestselling author, political scientist Daniel Goldhagen, held out the very same message to his readers. In an extended echo of Dawidowicz, Goldhagen insisted that the explanation of the Nazi persecution of the Jews indeed lay in the delusional German obsession with the idea ‘that Jewry was locked in an apocalyptic battle with Germandom.’ Thus, as to Dawidowicz, to Goldhagen the Germans considered the extermination of the Jews necessary and justified: ‘Letting such a mortal threat persist, fester, and build was to let down one’s countrymen, to betray one’s loved ones.’17
What interpretations such as those of Von dem Bach, Cohen, Dawidowicz and Goldhagen obviously have in common is their emphasis on the ←22 | 23→ideological, and even pathological motivation of the persecutors. Their behavior is considered to have been the outcome of a perverted world-view, an extreme and compulsive form of ‘idealism’, which considered the Jews as a mortal threat to their existence; a threat which dictated (and justified) their annihilation.
The continued popularity of such ‘patho-ideological’ Holocaust explanations is undoubtedly caused by their logical simplicity. For it is indeed clear that Hitler’s terror and annihilation policies were ideologically inspired. Consequently, it also seems obvious to assume that their organizers and executors were motivated by the very same incentive. Moreover, such a conclusion appears to correspond with a rather basic view on the human condition and its psychology of motivation. Thus, we generally tend to relate extraordinary acts to correspondingly extraordinary motives. As every good deed is supposed to result from benevolent intentions, much the same applies to its opposite: bad deeds are commonly held to be caused by malignant intent. The ‘logic of evil’, therefore, requires that behind an extraordinary crime correspondingly exceptional evil motives lie hidden. Consequently, in the case of the extraordinary crime of the Nazi genocide there exists a strong inclination to rationalize the systematic physical extermination of millions of innocent and defenseless men, women and children by reference to the perpetrators’ paranoid delirium. In this way one arrives at what might be dubbed the ‘equilibrium of madness’, by applying the circular formula that insanity breeds insanity. Essentially, this way of clarifying the incomprehensible by means of the incomprehensible is what characterizes the patho-ideological perspective on the perpetrators of Nazi genocide.
In spite of its apparent appeal, however, this ‘Laoconian-style’ interpretation does not answer the question posed by Michael Marrus in any satisfactory way. Indeed, among its flaws is its very simplicity. For if the crimes and criminals of Nazism could so easily be understood by reference to its pathological ideology, the question arises why so few of their contemporaries failed to grasp the logic at the time. If, as suggested in Laoconian-type retrospection, the blueprint of mass destruction was so unambiguously present in the propaganda speeches and writings of Adolf Hitler and his likes, and if the bloodlust flickered so prominently in the eyes of their followers, how ignorant must these contemporaries then not have been to overlook the ←23 | 24→message? For obvious reasons, an explicit answer to this question is generally avoided, but it is not all too difficult to figure out that it would not be particularly flattering for the victims of Nazi persecution.
That the patho-ideological perspectives lean heavily on hindsight simplifications also becomes clear if one takes a closer look at their core arguments. In order to disclose the psychology of the Third Reich mass murderer, its advocates recruit these arguments from leading Nazi hate propagandists and simply project them – quite often literally – onto the minds of the Nazi executioners.18 But whoever considers Hitler’s genocidal collaborators as mere replicas of their Führer ignores the crucial importance of their personal motives. That these motives matter in the light of Marrus’ question can be illustrated by a closer look at the organization chiefly responsible for Hitler’s terror policies. Thus, Himmler and Heydrich recruited many of their leading Gestapo officials from among experienced CID men who had already proven their professional qualities during the Weimar Republic and who were far more concerned with the advancement of their careers than with any party-political ideology. The best known example in this respect was, of course, the infamous Gestapo chief who was to become Adolf Eichmann’s superior in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Heinrich Müller.
Müller had entered the Munich Metropolitan Police at the age of 19, shortly after the end of World War I. He rapidly advanced in its political department, where he received the task of monitoring left-wing parties and earned a reputation as a particularly ruthless Communist-baiter. In 1933 Himmler and Heydrich recruited Müller for their newly established Bayerische Politische Polizei (the precursor of the Gestapo), in spite of the fact that Müller was no Nazi Party member. Indeed, he would – without much enthusiasm – only become one as late as 1939, when he became head of the Gestapo. A political evaluation report of two years earlier praised him for his draconic measures against the Communists during the Weimar era, but tellingly added:
It is no less clear, however, that had it been his task, Müller would have proceeded just the same against the Right. With his vast ambition and relentless drive, he would have done anything to win the appreciation of whoever might be boss in a given system.
For this reason, the Ortsgruppenleiter of Munich-Pasing had observed about Müller, somewhat earlier: ‘We cannot very well imagine him as a ←24 | 25→party comrade.’ And yet, only a few years later this unwelcome party comrade belonged to the elite circle of Hitler’s extermination experts.
Another example is Müller’s colleague, Franz Josef Huber. If Müller’s ruthless opportunism was frowned upon in party circles, Huber was originally considered an outright enemy of the Nazi movement. As Müller, he had been employed at the political department of the Munich CID before 1933. But whereas Müller had persecuted the left, Huber’s ‘victims’ were on the right side of the political spectrum. In a fiercely critical party evaluation report of 1937, Huber is said to have been an informer on Nazi colleagues during the Weimar years and even to have referred to Hitler as a ‘runaway, unemployed house-painter’ and an ‘Austrian deserter’. Hardly surprising then, Huber was scheduled to be executed after the Nazi’s came to power. Heydrich saved him by offering him a post in his police force. Huber finally wound up as Gestapo chief of Vienna.19
For the moment these two examples may suffice to underline the caution required when identifying the motives of the perpetrators. For it is by no means self-evident to assume ‘idealist’ intentions with Hitler’s genocidal collaborators solely on the basis of their involvement in the crime. Without doubt, Huber and particularly Müller belonged to the leading men of this group. But their motives appear to have remained at a fair distance from the paranoid ones discussed earlier. Apparently, others could be at least as inspiring.
But the most important objection against the patho-ideological perspective remains its paradoxical exoneration of the perpetrators. Inspired by their revolting crimes, the advocates of the Laoconian point of view underscore their profound evil by picturing them as the blinded and obsessively fanaticized disciples of Hitler’s satanic Weltanschauung. Inevitably however, the result of such a picture is the opposite of the painter’s intention. For with his violent brush strokes, the criminals he seeks to expose transform into the psychopathic crusaders of their Führer’s gospel. In this way, the Nazi criminal acquires the amalgamated characteristics of the bogeyman, the demon and the lunatic. But with the appearance of this pitch-black diabolical culprit, the possibility of identification, and thus worldly judgment, evaporates into thin air. For how, after all, should we be able to judge those who considered themselves as ‘latter-day Laocoöns in the grip of a death struggle’, or who genuinely felt that the indiscriminate ←25 | 26→mass killing of men, women and children equaled the rescue of the world or the extermination of vermin on the field? One can hardly reproach the agonized Laocoön for defending himself, or the family man for protecting his loved ones and the farmer for assuring the survival of his crops. The problem here is, of course, that all three lack any sense of wrong-doing. And because of this, the attribution of subjective guilt becomes impossible. For guilt presupposes blame, which in turn requires the ability to distinguish between right and wrong. With the absence of the latter, the first two become meaningless.
Whoever takes the patho-ideological interpretation seriously is therefore confronted by the uneasy outcome that the only remaining yardstick left for passing judgment on the Nazi killers is the one we normally reserve for the mentally ill and insane. If the criminal acts of such unfortunates result from their mental deficiency we do not consider them subjectively guilty and therefore do not punish them, but instead refer them to an asylum for appropriate care and treatment. Paradoxically then, the application of the patho-ideological perspective to the collaborators of Hitler’s genocide inevitably results in the excuse of their conduct, as one simply cannot diagnose the patient as mentally deficient and then call him to account for the actions caused by his handicap. In such a scenario individual guilt and criminal responsibility disappear behind the horizon of mental derangement and the Nazi genocide itself is reduced to an error of judgment with the gas chambers as the absolute low point of its catastrophic consequences. According to this kind of logic, the mass murders are indeed turned into a self-defense strategy of the Third Reich, which may not have had any basis in reality, but which, in the final analysis, becomes understandable – and even excusable – because of the failing mental capabilities of those who carried them out.
Such considerations may well have played a part in Von dem Bach’s statement before the IMT, and, as we shall see, they initially determined the defense of some of his former SS colleagues.20 But there can be no doubt that they are not the intention of the advocates of the patho-ideological interpretation of the perpetrators’ conduct. And yet, they form its logical outcome. Thus we arrive at the bizarre situation in which the very same arguments applied by the Nuremberg defense counsel to exonerate their clients were subsequently adopted by their ‘historical prosecutors’ to emphasize the exact opposite.
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The idea that the behavior of the Nazi killers could somehow be explained by a perverted form of ‘subjective self-defense’, based on erroneous ideological assumptions – the very heart of the patho-ideological interpretation –, was already thoroughly dealt and dispensed with shortly after the war. The clearest demonstration of its inadequacy took place in the Nuremberg court room during one of the so-called follow-up trials by the Americans. It concerned the Einsatzgruppen-trial in 1947/48, in which this particular scenario of self-defense played a significant role.21 On trial were a number of commanding officers of the mobile annihilation units of the SS – the Einsatzgruppen –, who had carried out mass killing operations in Eastern Europe and the Soviet territories. Because of the overwhelming evidence none of the defendants seriously denied his objective participation in these killings. Disagreement, however, arose over their subjective involvement. Thus, their defense counsel sought to convince the judges that their clients had actually committed their crimes in good faith. While recognizing that in reality their victims had constituted no threat at all to either themselves or the German Reich, they maintained that the defendants had nevertheless genuinely believed in the existence of such a threat at the time and had acted accordingly. Clearly, in hindsight, they were proved wrong, but considering the circumstances they could hardly be blamed for this ‘judgmental error’. In the words of the prominent legal expert, Professor Reinhart Maurach, this defense reads as follows:
The defendants, according to the National Socialist theory as well as due to their own conception and experience, were obsessed with a psychological delusion based on a fallacious idea concerning the identity of the aims of Bolshevism and the political role of Jewry in Eastern Europe. This conception was apt not only to exclude the possibility of a discussion regarding the moral defensibility of the liquidation order but to bring the defendants to the conviction that the attack against the future existence of the German Reich and people was to be expected mainly from the Jewish population in the occupied Russian territories.
Based on these arguments, leading defense counsel Dr. Rudolf Aschenauer insisted that the defendants had committed their criminal acts ‘in presumed self-defense on behalf of a third party’, and ‘under conditions of presumed necessity to act for the rescue of a third party from immediate, otherwise unavoidable danger.’ The ‘third party’ here was, of course, made up of the ←27 | 28→German Reich and its people, whose very existence was supposedly endangered by Eastern European Jewry. And, as Aschenauer continued, ‘if the existence of the state or of the nation is directly threatened, then any citizen … may act for their protection.’ That the menace did not really exist hardly mattered as far as the judgment on the defendants was concerned, for ‘An error concerning the prerequisites of self-defense or of an act for the protection of a third party is to be treated as an error about facts and constitutes … a legal excuse or – at the very least – a mitigating circumstance.’
The striking parallel between this line of defense by Aschenauer and his colleagues on the one hand, and the patho-ideological perspective of historians such as Dawidowicz and Goldhagen on the other, can hardly escape anyone. And the resemblance is even more remarkable when one realizes that the intentions behind both positions are diametrically opposed to one another. Thus, although the arguments used to explain the behavior of the perpetrators are identical, the Nuremberg defense counsel used them to emphasize the innocence of their clients, whereas the historians apply them to underline the exact opposite. As far as logical consistency is concerned, the latter are obviously no match for the lawyers, but this did not benefit their clients much.
In what was a surprisingly humorous rejoinder, given the subject matter under consideration, presiding judge Michael A. Musmanno reduced the subjective self-defense argument to the obvious nonsense it was:
Under this state of law a citizen of Abyssinia could proceed to Norway and there kill a Norwegian on the basis that he, the Abyssinian, was motivated only by the desire to protect his country from an assumed aggression by the Norwegian.
And that is not all – ….
Thus, if the Abyssinian mentioned above, invaded Norway out of assumed necessity to protect his nation’s interest, but it developed later that he killed the wrong person, he would be absolved because he had simply made a mistake.
That Musmanno and his fellow judges had little sympathy with such sophistry was made crystal-clear in their conclusion:
The annihilation of the Jews had nothing to do with the defence of Germany, the genocide program was in no way connected with the protection of the Vaterland, it was entirely foreign to the military issue. Thus, taking into consideration all that has been said in this particular phase of the defence, the Tribunal concludes that the argument that the Jews in themselves constituted an aggressive menace to ←28 | 29→Germany, a menace which called for their liquidation in self-defence, is untenable as being opposed to all facts, all logic and all law.22
The very idea that the defendants – all of sound mind and in possession of a level of intelligence and education considerably above average – had committed their crimes because they had genuinely believed in such a factual, logical and legal absurdity, was simply too grotesque for credibility. And in its verdict, the court again made it clear that it was not prepared to follow Aschenauer and his colleagues in this. Out of the twenty-two officers who stood trial, it sentenced no less than fourteen to death, two to life imprisonment and five to sentences between ten and twenty years.23
What the Einsatzgruppen-trial then made clear at a very early stage already, was that the notion of a misguided ideological obsession on the part of the Nazi mass murderers was untenable, not only because it formed such a bizarre contrast with common sense considerations and historical facts, but particularly also because it did not match the profile of its representatives in the dock. Contrary to the suggestions of their counsel, these defendants were no deranged ‘idealists’ who had lost their grip on reality and should therefore be excused for their crimes. Whatever their motives for participation in the mass extermination might have been, a blind belief in its justified necessity was not among them.
In an even more dramatic fashion, a lesson of at least similar significance was spelled out in yet another trial against a major Nazi criminal, some fifteen years later. This time it took place in Jerusalem and was directed against one of the chief coordinators of Hitler’s genocidal bureaucracy, Adolf Eichmann. As head of Department IV B 4 of the RSHA, Eichmann had organized the mass deportation transports of Jews from the occupied countries to the extermination camps in Poland. His arrest by the Israeli secret service was clearly a formidable catch and his abduction from Argentina in order to bring him before a court of law was generally applauded as an act of supreme justice. Here, after all, was a Nazi criminal who had played a decisive role in the operational heart of the annihilation machinery and whose criminal reputation ranked only slightly below that of its main architects, Himmler, Heydrich and Müller. Here too, was the man, who, as we saw earlier, had shown himself particularly cheerful over the fact that he had personally been involved in the murder of millions. ←29 | 30→Considering Eichmann’s prominent role in these killings, it was therefore hardly surprising that one of his many instant biographers dubbed him ‘the most sadistic and callous murderer of men, women and children this world has ever known.’24 And indeed, as more and more details surfaced about the murderous involvement of this former ‘expediter of death’, as he was called by some of his colleagues, Eichmann grew into the very embodiment of criminal perversion. On the eve of his trial in Jerusalem, Dutch author and trial reporter Harry Mulisch accurately captured the widely felt drama of the moment when he wrote:
It is one of the most fantastic somersaults of history that this trial will be held in Jerusalem. In that same city a man has been sentenced of whom the mysterious story goes that he has taken ‘the sins of men upon himself’. Now there is a man on trial who is supposed to have committed all of them.25
The image of Eichmann’s trial as the counterpart of that against Jesus certainly reflected much of the high-strung expectations over Eichmann’s performance before his judges. But, as with the earlier Jerusalem trial, the court room’s public met with a grave disappointment. For as the carpenter’s son from Nazareth had hardly lived up to the image of God’s Son, neither did the chicken farmer and Mercedes Benz employee from Buenos Aires showed much resemblance with the devil’s envoy. Thus, the anxiously awaited exposure of the super villain and the meticulous dissection of his diabolical mind and character turned into an outright disillusion from the moment Eichmann entered the court room on 11 April, 1961. For instead of showing the particulars of a demon in disguise, the criminal inside the Jerusalem dock turned out to be of a breath-taking human mediocrity. As one trial observer put it, it was ‘the discovery that there was nothing to discover’ which turned the Eichmann trial into such a shocking experience.26
The paradoxical features of the trial could indeed hardly have been greater. Here was a man on trial for organizing millionfold murder, who, when questioned, was unable to produce anything more than inarticulate and stereotyped answers and cliché-ridden pseudo-justifications which were so utterly devoid of meaning that they almost became laughable. Without doubt, Eichmann’s appeal to Kant’s categorical imperative was the culmination of his farcical courtroom performance. As trial reporter Hannah Arendt commented: ‘Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody ←30 | 31→could see that this man was not a “monster”, but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.’27
The greatest shock of the Eichmann trial was not the obvious impossibility of matching crime and punishment, but the bizarre discrepancy between the format of the crime and that of the criminal. Personified by the man in the glass booth, this discrepancy turned the logic of evil upside down by demonstrating that, apparently, one did not need to be a psychopathic megalomaniac to find satisfaction in murdering millions of people. It was Hannah Arendt who most aptly captured the lesson by subtitling her trial report with the famous formula of ‘the banality of evil’. But the phenomenon itself was neither new nor limited to this particular SS officer. It had already been apparent in the courtrooms of Nuremberg and elsewhere, and it would surface again and again in the subsequent German trials against Hitler’s genocidal collaborators.
It was certainly no coincidence that Eichmann’s banality manifested itself so clearly in the courtroom. The sobering reduction of evil to common human proportions forms a standard ingredient of most criminal trials and the German ones against the collaborators of the Nazi state were no exception. The defendants in these trials were no mythical characters, but specimens of the kind, persons of flesh and blood, who were called to account for their involvement in concrete criminal acts. That their prosaic courtroom appearances differed considerably from the more flamboyant presentations of historical imagination is therefore hardly surprising. For anyone who seriously wants to find out why these men (and women) had once ‘followed Hitler on his murderous path’, however, it is imperative to study their ‘courtroom profiles’. For they document a significantly more mundane – even though by no means more reassuring – story than the Laoconian-style historiography. Thus, to get to know these criminals and their backgrounds one has to turn to those who brought them to justice during the past decades. They consisted of the criminal investigators, state prosecutors and especially also the judges, who got to know them far more intimately than any historian ever would. For a variety of reasons, the efforts and achievements of these prosecution officials have met with considerable ←31 | 32→criticism, which can easily be summed up by the simple threefold formula of ‘too little, too late and too lenient’. Such reproaches were targeted particularly at the track record of the West German justice system, and for each of them serious arguments can be found.28 Paradoxically however, it is precisely this much criticized West German justice system which has taught us by far the most about the backgrounds, the psychology and modus operandi of these criminals. And there are three main reasons for this.
The first consists of the relatively demanding legal obligation for West German courts to motivate extensively and explicitly the considerations and decisions on which their judgments and verdicts are based. For this reason, these judgments are far more informative to the investigator than those by, say, Dutch, East German or Anglo-American courts. The second reason relates to the fact that of all criminal justice systems which dealt with Nazi criminals, the West German one took by far the greatest interest in the (subjective) background of their conduct. And this too resulted in observations and insights of considerable value to historical and criminological research into the question of their motivation. The third reason why, in particular, the West German documentation on the post-war prosecution and trials of Nazi crimes is so informative to us is probably the most surprising one. For as far as the gravest Nazi crimes were concerned, it lasted some fifteen years before any systematic prosecution policy was set up in West-Germany, with the establishment of the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg. As a result of this ‘delayed’ judicial reaction, the perpetrators of these crimes were given every opportunity to re-integrate into post-war German society without much difficulty. And the smooth nature of their ‘return to normalcy’ underscores one of the most crucial insights into the criminological profile of Hitler’s genocide collaborators: its inconspicuous middle-class character.
Before 1933 none of them had even the faintest idea of the criminal career he (or she) would make in the service of their Führer. And the very thought that in ten years’ time they would consist of routine participants in mass murder was as unimaginable to them as to any of their fellow countrymen. Under normal circumstances then, hardly any of them would have turned criminal and in their biographies one looks in vain for characteristics which somehow seem to have preordained them for their role as Hitler’s mass executioners. With rare exceptions, none had criminal antecedents or ←32 | 33→suffered from any certifiable personality disorder which could offer even the beginning of an explanation for their criminal conduct. At the time of this conduct, most were married, headed a family and belonged to either the Catholic or Protestant church communities of which more than 90 % of the German population were members. And despite the fiercely anti-clerical stance of the Nazi movement and the regime, we know that a substantial number of them stuck to their religious convictions and church membership. No different from the average German citizen then, they had been brought up with the elementary notions of right and wrong, on the basis of which they had developed a moral awareness which determined their regular day-to-day behavior within society. What set them apart from their fellow citizens, however, and what finally landed them in court, was that, at some point in their lives, they had chosen to abandon this awareness of right and wrong as a guide-line for their conduct, and to offer their services to a government with a distinctly criminal agenda. It is this choice which brought them on the murderous path of Hitler’s Unrechtsstaat and which calls for further investigation if one seeks a serious answer to Marrus’ puzzling question.
Whoever undertakes such an investigation on the basis of the prosecution records referred to earlier, will discover that the answer to the puzzle lies above all in the absence of distinctive features of those who fill its pages. For they were indeed distinctive because of the crimes of which they stood accused, but hardly because of their unusual personalities or background characteristics. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that most would never have exceeded their inconspicuousness if historical coincidence had not ‘tapped them on the shoulder’, so to speak. And we can get a pretty good idea what this ‘shoulder tap’ looked like when focusing on the recruits for Hitler’s earliest mass murderous enterprise: the so-called Euthanasie-Aktion.
This wholesale medical killing program targeted Germany’s physically and mentally handicapped and was set up by Hitler’s personal Chancellery at the start of the war. It lasted until its very end and cost a total of some 200.000 lives. The patients included in this secret program – men, women and children – were murdered either through carbon-monoxide gassing in one of the six extermination centers spread across Germany, or poisoned by means of lethal injections or overdosed medication in ‘regular’ nursing homes.29 The first – gassing – phase of this ‘mercy killing’ project provided ←33 | 34→considerable expertise for Hitler’s subsequent genocidal operations in Poland and the Soviet Union and part of its staff was later transferred to the so-called Aktion Reinhard camps, Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor, where about one-third of all Jewish victims of the Holocaust perished under its hands.
One of the obvious questions in any attempt to make sense out of this group of annihilation experts concerns the way in which they became involved in Hitler’s killing apparatus. Dietrich Allers, one of the leading managers of this so-called T4 organization (named after its Berlin address, Tiergartenstrasse 4), pictured his introduction as follows:
I was scheduled to go to officer’s training school, but then, in November 1940, my mother met Werner Blankenburg in the street in Berlin. When she told him what I was doing he said, “That’s ridiculous. There is an opening in my department for a lawyer. I’ll fix it.” And that’s how I got into T4.30
Such a dreary prologue to a profession as prominent administrator of mass killing may well appear too ridiculous to be taken seriously, but there is actually no reason to doubt Allers’ version in this respect. Just as with many of his generation, the start of the war meant the unwelcome end of a promising civil career. In Allers’ case it was that of a young lawyer in Prussian public service. Instead, he was now drafted and stationed in Poland as a non-commissioned officer with the task of training recruits. Unsurprisingly, he felt little enthusiasm about his new duties and his mother’s coincidental meeting with his old SA-comrade – Allers had joined both the NSDAP and the SA as a law student in 1932 – offered him an excellent opportunity to escape from his dreaded military existence. Werner Blankenburg had worked himself up to the position of deputy to the operational chief of the ‘euthanasia’ organization, Viktor Brack. And it was indeed a fact that, at the time, the bureau was in desperate need of an experienced legal professional, as the first one had resigned after a fierce dispute.31 Allers, therefore, did not need to think twice before deciding to accept Blankenburg’s offer. The opportunity to leave the military behind, return home and pick up his profession in the service of such a prestigious institute as the Führer Chancellery, was certainly more than he could have dreamed of. And so, as of January 1941, Dietrich Allers started to devote his talents to the administrative aspects of the annihilation program.
←34 | 35→
Allers’ unspectacular and coincidental introduction to T4 was hardly exceptional. As he himself told his post-war interviewer, it applied to most of the organization’s employees:
I was always of the opinion that most people got in through connections. They would hear of the job as being “attached to the Führer Chancellery” and that sounded good. Then of course these jobs carried extra pay; and it meant not having to go to the front.32
Again, there is no reason to distrust Allers on this point, for the post-war criminal records of the organization’s staff show that the T4 organization was indeed to an amazing degree a syndicate of friends, acquaintances and relatives. Thus, Allers’ colleague (and co-defendant) Reinhold Vorberg thanked his appointment as head of its ‘transport service’ (responsible for carrying the selected death candidates to the gassing centers) to his cousin, T4-chief Brack. And his successor was yet another cousin, engineer Gerhardt Siebert. There were also family ties between the bureau’s financial wizard, Hans-Joachim Becker, and Dr. Herbert Linden, one of the main organizers of the killing program. Although it is not entirely clear whether it was Linden who actually recruited Becker for T4, the fact is that the two men got along very well. After Becker’s start with Brack’s bureau, he lived for a while in the household of his brother-in-law, and the two men joined forces in their attempt to save Becker’s epileptic sister from Hitler’s ‘euthanasia’ regime. ‘Millionen-Becker’ was the one who turned T4 into a highly profitable enterprise by his introduction of a clever cost-manipulation system, whereby the patients who had already been gassed and cremated were ‘kept alive’ in an administrative sense so that huge sums of money could be earned with their ‘continued’ care and feeding.33
The head of the central finance office, accountant Friedrich Lorent, was no relative of Brack but an old acquaintance. During the mid-nineteen thirties, the two men had been office neighbors in Berlin and Brack had supported Lorent during a fierce conflict with an SA leader. In the autumn of 1941 Lorent worked as manager of a former Polish company in building materials in Warsaw, a job he allegedly detested because of the chaos and corruption surrounding the German administration of confiscated Polish-Jewish property. While on leave in Berlin, in the winter of 1941/42, Lorent visited Brack and complained about his situation. Brack instantaneously offered him a job at his bureau with the words ‘Du, ich brauche Dich’ ←35 | 36→[‘You, I need you’]. As head of the finance office, Lorent succeeded two other friends of Brack, Willy Schneider and Fritz Schmiedel. Schneider had earlier introduced his cousin, bookkeeper Alfred Ittner, to the organization. In April 1942, Ittner was dispatched to Sobibor.34
Among the regular customers of Berlin nightclub waiter Franz Rum was the co-organizer of the killing program which specifically targeted handicapped children (‘Kinder-Euthanasie’), Richard von Hegener. When the nightclub business deteriorated due to the restrictions imposed by the war, Rum looked around for other employment. Von Hegener helped him to a job at the photography section of T4, where the files and pictures of the murdered victims were copied. After a while, however, Rum became allergic to the chemicals used in the process. He asked for other work, ‘preferably in the open air’, as his judges echoed the defendant in their trial judgment. This could be arranged: Rum was offered a new job in a ‘labor camp’ in Poland. It turned out to be Treblinka.35
The brothers Franz and Josef Wolf took over the photo shop in the Czechoslovakian town of Krummau after their father’s death in 1938. Both came to T4 a few years later through the introduction of their fellow townsman Franz Wagner, who already worked at the bureau’s photo department and who knew the Wolf brothers from the time he was an apprentice in their father’s shop. In March 1943, the brothers were transferred to Sobibor. Wagner turned out to be a prolific recruiter for T4 among his townsmen for he also introduced the Krummau tailor Franz Suchomel to the organization. In August 1942, Suchomel was sent to Treblinka.36
And then, there was the CID man from the Austrian town of Linz, Franz Stangl. We will have ample opportunity to get to know him better later on, but he too was among those who came to T4 through ‘friendly intervention’. Thus, Stangl got along badly with his Gestapo chief and was on the lookout for other employment when a former colleague and fellow student from the CID school offered to introduce him to the secret government organization where he himself already worked in what he described as a ‘pleasant job’. Stangl gratefully accepted and came as a policeman to the Hartheim extermination center, and, later on, to Sobibor and Treblinka.37
Those who did not find their way to T4 through this informal network of relatives and friends were generally recruited on the basis of what the Berlin historian and trial expert Wolfgang Scheffler called the ‘coincidence ←36 | 37→principle’.38 A striking example is that of the five young girls (aged between seventeen and twenty years), who became responsible for the registration of the murdered patients and their ‘possessions’ in the Hartheim and Grafeneck extermination centers. They also drew up the transport lists and typed the thousands of ‘comfort letters’ which were sent to the relatives of the murdered victims, including fabricated data on the circumstances of their deaths and falsified names of the doctors involved in their ‘care’. Three of these girls were trainees at the Defaka, or Deutsches Familien Kaufhaus (German Family Department Store) and were simply drafted by the Frankfurt labor exchange. This also happened with the fourth, who was a shop-girl in a Frankfurt store, whereas the fifth was simply conscripted by the Party Gauleitung shortly after passing her school exams. None of these women had a political profile beyond that of a membership of the ‘German Girl’s League’, the ‘National Socialist Welfare Organization’, or the ‘German Labor Front.’39
No less coincidental was the recruitment of the Westphalian farmer’s and miller’s son August Miete. From 1921 onwards, he and his brother ran the farm their father had left them. In the spring of 1940, however, August considered it time to start on his own and – equipped with a recently acquired Nazi Party membership card – requested the Agricultural Chamber in Münster to grant him his own agricultural settlement. Unfortunately, they could not help him, but as an alternative they offered him a position at the estate of the Grafeneck institution. Miete accepted and, from May 1940 until October 1941, tended the farm lands of this gassing center, after which he was transferred to another one at Hadamar. Here, he worked as a so-called Brenner in the institute’s crematorium where the bodies of the gassed victims were burned. In June 1942, Miete came to Treblinka, where, because of his brutal conduct, he turned into a much feared member of the camp’s staff.40
The Münster Agricultural Chamber also recruited the thirty-six years old dairy master Willi Mentz for T4. Since 1929 Mentz had worked in the dairy business but in early 1940 he applied for a job with the police. They could not use him there, but considering his profession the Münster agency offered him ‘something better’, namely a job at Grafeneck. Mentz accepted, and – just like Miete – was informed of what went on there and sworn to secrecy. According to his admission, he tended the Grafeneck livestock for the next ←37 | 38→one-and-a-half year and was then – as Miete – transferred to Hadamar, where he divided his time between work in the vegetable garden and the maintenance of the central heating system. Like Miete, Mentz came to Treblinka in the summer of 1942, where he acquired a similar reputation of brutality.41
This certainly also applied to carpenter Karl Frenzel, whose involvement with T4 was the result of nothing less than his procreative abilities. Thus, around Christmas 1939, Frenzel was discharged from Wehrmacht service as a so-called kinderreicher Familienvater (father of a large family). His biological declaration of loyalty to a regime which celebrated the family as the ‘germ cell of the nation’ not only earned his wife a (bronze) medal hailing her motherhood, but also rewarded her husband with suspension of his military duties. This, however, was not at all to Frenzel’s liking as he genuinely enjoyed these duties and now felt embarrassed in front of his comrades and his two brothers, both of whom served in the Wehrmacht. And so, Frenzel immediately reported himself again as a volunteer and enlisted the support of his SA superiors to endorse his request. But Hitler’s family policy was no joking matter and Frenzel received no reply. Instead, his SA chiefs suggested him to report to the Führer Chancellery in Berlin, which was looking for ‘trustworthy party comrades for a special assignment’. Frenzel complied and, in January 1940, together with another fifteen T4 recruits, was informed in Berlin by Brack and Blankenburg about his new duties and sworn to secrecy. He worked – inter alia as crematorium worker – in the gassing centers Grafeneck, Hadamar and Bernburg, and came to Sobibor in April 1942.42
We could extend this list of T4 recruiting examples without much difficulty, but it should be clear by now that Scheffler accurately described the recruitment policies of the killing organization as being largely governed by coincidence. Indeed, if Allers’ mother had not bumped into Werner Blankenburg during her daily shopping round in Berlin, it is highly unlikely that her son would ever have come into contact with the mass extermination business. And if they would have granted August Miete his farm, had accepted Willi Mentz with the police force and had allowed Karl Frenzel his return to the military, the first would have continued his peasant existence, whereas Mentz and Frenzel would have worn the police uniform and the field gray of the Wehrmacht, respectively. None of these four men had actively sought a career in the killing profession and with respect to ←38 | 39→Miete, Mentz and Frenzel one could say that it was not even their ‘first choice.’ Their entry into Hitler’s annihilation machinery then was not the outcome of careful deliberation on the pros and cons of employment in the extermination business, but the result of a chance meeting between fate and opportunity. And for their colleagues this was little different.
Prior to their enrolment in T4 none of them had any idea of its existence, let alone its purpose. Different from the doctors and nurses who were to lend their hand in the ‘euthanasia’ killings, hardly any of them had ever personally visited a psychiatric ward, nursing home or insane asylum and it is highly doubtful whether they had any understanding of (or interest in) their government’s intention with its inhabitants. Typical in this respect was perhaps Reinhold Vorberg’s reaction when cousin Brack promoted him to head of T4’s transport service. When Brack explained its purpose, Vorberg reportedly answered him that he had no idea what the concept of euthanasia stood for and that he couldn’t understand why, in times of war, one should bother with ‘die Verrückten’ [‘the lunatics’].43
Of course, one could still suspect that T4 selected its staff by political criteria, i.e. that the recruitment of the men described here was somehow related to their Nazi profile. And it is certainly true that all of the above were members of the NSDAP or any of its branch organizations. But neither their grounds for entry (often linked to ‘economic’, career-related considerations), nor their commitment to the Party organizations of which they were members (none of them occupied a particularly profiled position within these organizations) can really explain for their selection. That T4 primarily recruited its collaborators from within the circle of Party comrades seems understandable enough, but why exactly it chose these ones from among the millions of candidates can only be explained through the use of the social network described earlier, combined with random selection.44
This even applies to such a notorious T4 criminal as the Stuttgart Kriminalkommissar Christian Wirth, who would play a leading role in both the ‘euthanasia’ killing program as well as in its successor, the Aktion Reinhard. His former colleague, Dietrich Allers, had this to say about the ratio behind Wirth’s recruitment for T4:
I am sure that when Grafeneck [the first extermination centre at which Wirth was appointed ‘office chief’, close to the CID bureau in Stuttgart where he was ←39 | 40→employed, DdM] was opened up and they needed a couple of police officers to put in charge, whoever was the chief of police in that district simply said “You and you” – and one of them was Wirth. Perhaps it was because he was a tough sort of man his superiors thought him capable of doing a difficult job; but it wasn’t a matter of careful or scientific selection of these people.45
And if we may believe the same witness, their motives for acceptance were no less trivial and lacking in ‘inner conviction’ than the grounds for their selection. Invariably, these motives rooted in a common concern for the (im)material advantages associated with T4 employment. That is to say, they consisted of such conventional incentives as concern for jobs, income and status, as well as the welcome perspective of being exempted from military service in times of war. One could call this ordinary opportunism, and that is in fact pretty much what it was.
5 The opportunist route to crime (and back)
That something as trite as common self-interest could serve as the prime motivation for participation in mass murder may be considered too meager an explanation. And yet, everyone knows how potent an incentive opportunism can be, even in societies which we would generally consider to be liberal, diversified, democratic and free. In social environments with an authoritarian, dictatorial or totalitarian ruling system, however, its prevalence as a behavior governing principle is obviously even more manifest. Here, opportunism becomes a veritable way of life for anyone but the incorrigible rebel at all costs. And it is precisely because of these costs that the latter’s presence is quite rare in such societies. Thus, under the circumstances prevailing in the Third Reich opportunism became the supreme ally of its criminal regime. Far more than the personal idiosyncrasies of its collaborators, these circumstances form the true key to Michael Marrus’ puzzle, and their impact can again be studied particularly well within the context of Hitler’s Euthanasie-Aktion.
To Hitler, his medical assassination program was more than the fulfilment of a long cherished wish; it was the ultimate test for his claim to unconditional power. For with the inauguration of this program on the day of his invasion of Poland, he crossed a threshold which he had eschewed until then. In 1935 Hitler had already informed his inner circle that, in case of war, he would settle the ‘euthanasia question’ as public opposition ←40 | 41→to it would be less prominent and easier to tackle than in normal times.46 Obviously, two years after his appointment to Reich Chancellor he still could not trust the German people to support his extermination agenda. Indeed, only a few months earlier, his own Minister of Justice, National-Conservative Franz Gürtner, had informed his staff in no unclear terms that any form of state-organized euthanasia remained unacceptable: ‘If we would start out in this direction, it would touch on the very foundation of Christianity’s teachings to humanity; it would be the fulfilment of Nietzschean thoughts.’47 Consequently, in the final report of the Ministerial Committee for the Revision of the Penal Code of 1936, any suggestions in this ‘Nietzschean’ sense were dismissed out of hand: ‘There can be no question of an authorization of the extermination of so-called life-unworthy life.’ Thus, the committee concluded that forced sterilization was to remain the most drastic measure which the state was allowed in its combat against the ‘degeneration within society’:
But the strength of the moral standard of the prohibition on killing should not be allowed to weaken through the provision of exemptions for victims of severe illnesses or accidents because of considerations of mere expediency, even if these unfortunate persons are still only related to society through their past or outward appearance.
And so it was to remain, in legal terms at least. For until the very end of Hitler’s rule any form of euthanasia would continue to be forbidden by law.
For obvious reasons then, Gürtner and his department were kept in the dark when the extermination program was being set up by the Führer Chancellery in the summer of 1939. It was not until a year later that Gürtner received a photocopy (!) of the decree which had set the killings in motion. It consisted of a one-line note, dated September 1, 1939, and signed by Hitler:
Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. Brandt, M.D., are charged with the responsibility of enlarging the authority of certain physicians, to be designated by name, so that persons who, according to human judgement, are incurable can, upon a most careful diagnosis of their condition of sickness, be accorded a mercy death.
By this time, however, Gürtner had already been informed of the killing practices which, based on Hitler’s ruling, were taking place all over Germany. On 8 July 1940, he had received an extensive report by the guardianship judge of the Brandenburg court, Dr. Lothar Kreyssig. It mentioned murders which allegedly had taken place in the Hartheim nursing ←41 | 42→institute, near Linz. In his report, judge Kreyssig was very outspoken in his criticism on the perversion of justice under Nazism in general, as well as on Gürtner’s acquiescing compliance with it. In accordance with their repugnant principle ‘Recht ist was dem Volke nutzt’ [‘Right is what benefits the people’], the Nazis had exempted entire areas of public life from the rule of law. Next to the concentration camps, this exemption now apparently also applied to the psychiatric homes and nursing institutes. Kreyssig informed his minister that he considered it his ‘undoubted duty’ as a judge ‘to uphold the law’, and that – after formally asking his highest superior for advice in the matter – he was determined to act accordingly.
