| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE
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of at least 80 people. The court took account of their
relative reluctance in the murders and of their friendliness toward prisoners
and gave them startlingly light sentences: Scherpe, four and one-half years;
and Hantl, three and one-half (served in full while he awaited trial), at hard
labor.43
A show of revulsion, even
among men who had done extensive killing, meant a lot in Auschwitz, as did the
merest acknowledgment of the prisoners’ humanity. But the real
psychological point is that men much more ordinary than Klehr — men
without his combination of omnipotence, sadism, and numbing — could be
drawn into the phenol killings. Such men, to be sure, were more vulnerable to
breakdown, especially when killing children (here resembling the
Einsatzgruppen killers). The “decent” phenoler, because his
killing was direct, had a more difficult time sustaining his work than did the
“decent” Nazi doctor, whose responsibility was surely as great but
who was able to place some distance between himself and the corpse. But the
fact that there could be “decent” phenolers at all — that is,
relatively ordinary, well-intentioned men who killed by injection — tells
us much about the malignancy of the Auschwitz environment and the broad
susceptibility of unremarkable men to becoming killers. |
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