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,