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Preface

What is man? Man is a two-legged animal of a specific bio-chemical composition. This composition determines all our physical and mental attributes. No man has attributes of himself; he can only have attributes of the species. You only have to determine that one member of the species can jump to know that all members can. Some will jump a little bit higher than others, but what is impossible to the species, is impossible to the individual. You do not need to examine every member of the human species to conclude that none of them can fly. And the individual has no property which not also belongs to the species.

M.S. Arnoni

The subject of this book originates in the stories of my father. They concerned his experiences as a young adult during the Second World War, both in his native country, The Netherlands, as well as in France, where he was captured on his route to Spain. He was imprisoned and finally sentenced to concentration camp detention for the duration of the war. While on a convicts’ transport to Germany he had a miraculous escape and with some difficulty managed to find his way home, where he went into hiding. In many ways his stories were a lot like those in the books which boys of my generation devoured. They invariably pictured ‘the good war’ against the German occupiers as an exciting and patriotic adventure with a victorious ending. In this sense they also reflected much of the triumphant atmosphere of the annual commemorations and celebrations of my country’s liberation from five years of German occupation. On the other hand, however, these same stories contained certain aspects which my youthful imagination found difficult or even outright impossible to understand. These ‘mysterious’ ingredients concerned the many violent deaths which occurred in them. They included relatives, French cell mates and other acquaintances of my father, who were killed by German hands. But whereas all of their stories were indeed shocking in themselves, not all were equally incomprehensible to me, however. There was, I felt, a significant ‘qualitative’ difference between them.

Both my father’s mother and two of his cousins, for example, were killed by the Germans. Whereas his mother was gunned down in the street by a military patrol during an evening stroll, one of his cousins ended his life before a firing squad while the other perished in a concentration camp. The stories about their fate certainly made a deep impression on me, but somehow they still remained intelligible. The two cousins – brothers – died as a consequence of their resistance activities and from their letters I learned that they accepted their fate as the ultimate sacrifice of their principled rebellion against the regime of the German occupiers. And indeed, their sorry end seemed to retain a certain ‘contextual logic’. After all, any resistance against a superior enemy carries the potential risk of severe punishment and the two brothers appear to have realized this. And whereas a similar logic was absent in the case of my grandmother, here it had been replaced by that of sheer coincidence. In an environment with very nervous and ‘trigger-happy’ German soldiers, just one day after the airborne operation of 17 September 1944 in the surroundings of Arnhem, she unfortunately found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Tragic though their deaths were, conceptually they were still a far cry from those of the other victims present in my father’s stories. These consisted of fellow inhabitants of his home town, who were taken away and murdered in faraway Poland for no other apparent reason than that they were considered ‘life-unworthy’, as they happened to be of Jewish ancestry. My father knew most of them from everyday life in pre-war times. They were middle-aged or even elderly men and women, local shopkeepers and others, whose families had worked and lived peacefully and inconspicuously within the community for generations and who constituted not even the remotest threat to the German war effort or the safety of the occupying troops. Their story seemed outright absurd to me.

As I came to learn more and more about their fate and that of millions like them in other parts of occupied Europe, this sense of absurdity obviously only increased. How was I to interpret what I ‘witnessed’ in their stories? Indeed, how was I to understand this enormous criminal drama which had taken place only shortly before I was born, amidst a cultural environment in which the generations of my parents and grandparents had lived and which I recognized as essentially mine as well? With the expansion of my knowledge of Hitler’s genocidal universe, my preoccupation with these matters converted itself into something of a personal existential question. For if the actors of this universe belonged to the species of which I was a specimen, what then did that tell me about the characteristics of this species, and, by implication, about myself?

Prompted by my curiosity about the answers to these questions, I became a voracious reader on the subject and at the close of my history studies at the University of Leiden, around the mid-nineteen eighties, I had ‘digested’ a great many of them. What repeatedly struck me in the books I read, however, was the relative absence of interest in an objective, analytical approach to the background of the criminals involved. Whereas most authors described their unimaginable atrocities in considerable detail, hardly any of them made a serious effort to address their profile in a systematic and analytically objective fashion. This seemed all the more surprising to me as, ever since 1945, scores of criminal trials had been conducted against those responsible for these atrocities. Thus, I assumed that much information on their personal background and criminal development should be readily available in the documentation of these trials. For my doctoral thesis I therefore decided to study the defendants of the so-called Nuremberg ‘Einsatzgruppen Trial’, dubbed ‘the biggest murder trial in history’ by its chief prosecutor.¹ But whereas the published documentation of this trial again contained much on their crimes, it included disappointingly little on their personal histories.

Shortly after starting my work on this Nuremberg material in the Royal Library in The Hague, I stumbled upon a set of volumes entitled Justiz und NS-Verbrechen [‘Justice and Nazi Crimes’]. As I browsed through their contents I found that they contained hundreds of post-war trial judgments by West German courts on a dazzling variety of Nazi crimes, including a number of Einsatzgruppen cases. Different from the American documentation, however, these German trial judgments often contained substantial biographical information on the defendants. As it enabled me to study their personal profiles, including their ‘route to crime’, this material was precisely what I was looking for. While I acquainted myself with the idiosyncrasies of German criminal law and its application to the prosecution of Nazi criminals, I discovered that its focus on the subjective aspects pertaining to the defendants and their past behavior, formed a core ingredient of the German criminal law system. Coupled with the courts’ relatively extensive motivation of their considerations and decisions, this turned these judgments into a unique and valuable source for the investigation of the perpetrators’ profiles. Thus, I gratefully included the German Einsatzgruppen cases in my original research project.

Much to my surprise, the ‘Justiz und NS-Verbrechen’ collection of German trial judgments turned out not to be published in Germany, as one would have expected, but in my native country, The Netherlands. At the University of Amsterdam a Dutch professor of criminal law, named Frits Rüter, was in charge of the publication project. While working on his dissertation in Freiburg, Germany, way back in the nineteen sixties, Rüter had started to systematically collect the post-war German trial judgments against Nazi criminals. From 1968 onwards, he began to publish them in a series of hefty volumes.² After my graduation I contacted him with plans for further study and he was kind enough to offer me a PhD position at his institute. Thus, I spent the following years investigating the German trials and finally wrote my dissertation on a number of them. After completing my studies I joined Rüter as editor of the series.

While working on the JuNSV edition, I was again puzzled by the fact that so little use had been made of this judicial documentation for the investigation of the criminal actors involved in Hitler’s murder programs.³ On the whole, it appeared to me that many avoided the subject for some reason or other. And I came to wonder whether one of these reasons might not perhaps consist of the fact that this judicial documentation offered a somewhat unsettling perspective on the perpetrators’ profiles; a perspective namely, that, instead of presenting them as one-dimensional incarnations of evil, showed them as identifiable representatives of the species. For those who consider these criminals sufficiently judged by their actions and who therefore reject any special interest in their backgrounds, such a perspective might indeed be reprehensible. Illustrative of such a view is perhaps the comment of the (once) renowned psychoanalyst, Bruno Bettelheim, on an effort to interpret the personalities of Nazi doctors: ‘there are acts so vile that our task is to reject and prevent them, not to try to understand them….’⁴ Considering Bettelheim’s profession as well as his own thoughts on related subjects, this seems to me a curious point of view, but it is, no doubt, shared by many others.⁵ Even though I can sympathize with the emotions behind such a position, however, for reasons set out in this book I cannot agree with it.

As said, the book’s inspiration stems from my father’s stories. But there is certainly also another inspirer of at least equal importance. This is the Auschwitz survivor whose observations stand above this introduction. It is with these observations in mind that this study was undertaken.⁶