| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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have stuck this out and excepting in cases of
human weakness — to have kept our integrity, this is what has made us
hard. In our history, this is an unwritten and never-to-be-written page of
glory.22 |
The Auschwitz self could be experienced as a call to such
an ordeal and to the necessary but difficult, even heroic, hardness that
entailed. That hardness was race-centered: “We must be honest, decent,
loyal and comradely to members of our own blood, but to nobody else,” so
that if “10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion digging an
anti-tank ditch … [that] interests me only insofar as the anti-tank ditch
for Germany is finished,” as Himmler expressed it in the same Posen speech
of 4 October 1943. All that was to be done within the immortalizing SS mission
as “a National-Socialist order of men of Nordic stamp … [who are] the
forebears of later generations essential to ensure the eternal existence of the
Germanic people of Germany.”23 The
“blood cement” of direct involvement (see page 432) was part of the
shared ordeal: one Einsatzgruppen staff officer “insisted on
principle that all commissioned and noncommissioned officers” under him
“participate in the executions” in order to “overcome ”
themselves as he had “overcome” himself. He was demanding from all an
Einsatzgruppen equivalent of the Auschwitz self — or, what has been
aptly termed “heroic action in a criminal cause.”24
When most of the mass murder of Jews had
already been accomplished (in May 1944), Himmler stressed that only the SS
could have done it, that the killing “could only be tolerable to and
could only be carried out by an organization consisting of the staunchest
individuals, of fanatical, deeply committed National Socialists.”25 SS officials were always to “carry the
burden for our people” — that is, to maintain an ordeal
readiness for murder.
The shift from face-to-face killing by the
Einsatzgruppen to the elaborate machinery of the gas chambers can be
said to have diminished the degree of the ordeal. But the ordeal remained, as
did the demand for ordeal readiness. Then Nazi doctors’ conscious sense
was more that of “unpleasant” ramp duty involving strain,
fatigue, and hardship (what Karl K. called eine Strapaze) requiring a
great deal of alcohol to keep going which in turn led to the further
unpleasantness of a hangover that ruined the next day. The mutual toasting over
the course of a night was undoubtedly an effort to lend some nobility to what
was a further degrading of a criminal ritual But the sense of ordeal was still
there as clearly suggested by B .’s description when trying to convince me
how difficult Nazi doctors’ decisions were in Auschwitz, of the pressure
on Nazi doctors at the moment of selection (“You must go there,
you go there — these alternatives leave no room for
discussion”). Wirths’s insistence upon doing selections himself,
rather than leaving them to other doctors, was a commitment to personal
participation in this ordeal — and probably also an effort to
“overcome” his prior self in favor of an emerging Auschwitz self.
The combination of ordeal and ethos gives us another perspective on the
case of Delmotte (see pages 309-11) and on the effective function |
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