Doing a job
I’ve been reading Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, and as an offshoot from that this morning I read some of chapter 7 of Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men. I would have read more but I had to stop because I couldn’t take it. I’d forgotten how horrible it is reading it.
It’s about a police battalion, made up of middle-aged men because all the younger men were in the military, who were assigned to kill all the Jews except the able-bodied men (who were sent to a work camp) in a Polish village by walking them into the woods, making them lie down, and shooting them.
It’s horrific, and at the same time it’s instructive. I plan to continue once I get my strength back.
I took down the Lifton the other day (Ordinary Men is a few books down on the same shelf) and as I held it in my hand weighing up whether it was the right time to finish it I felt as if the book was gaining a horrible weight and it would require a massive effort to just open it, never mind read it. Like yourself ‘I’d forgotten how horrible it is reading it’. However as you also say it is incredibly instructive. But how much instruction do we need? I don’t know now if I will ever revisit my Holocaust shelf. About 10yrs ago I spent several months reading through account after account and maybe that’s enough. However I feel that this reaction isn’t specific to the Holocaust. I’ve recently read Mao:The Unknown Story by Chang & Halliday and again the sheer oceanic misery and horror is overwhelming. Ditto The Gulag Archipelago. I wonder though, maybe we ought to keep reading so as to keep analysing? Moral responsibility.
All the best
An important read. Years before the Wansee conference, civilian policemen willingly slaughtered whole towns. As I recall, the author estimated that around a million of the 6 million Jewish victims of Hitler were killed in 1939-40 in mass shootings.
And the book put the lie to the ‘we had to obey orders’ claim. While soldiers COULD be executed for disobedience, the order they had refused would have to be documented. So, managing future history as always, men who balked or refused were quietly reassigned elsewhere.
Philip, I know – that’s just it, isn’t it. It’s really hard to do. Years ago I made a serious attempt to read Raul Hilberg, and did read a chunk, but then I had to stop, because I could no longer take the dirty feeling it gave me. I don’t know how else to describe it. I felt as if dunked in filth, and I reached a point where I couldn’t take it any more.
And the Browning chapter does the same thing. The walls close in and the filth rises – and before long I close the book.
One of the Holocaust survivors in a book that I read (sorry, I was in my 20s at that time and I don’t remember his name nor the title of the book) sketched a picture – a metaphor, really – which stayed with me for many years to come. He called Auschwitz a “condensed world”. Not inhuman, just condensed.
He meant that the proportion of good and evil in Auschwitz was the same as everywhere else. Remove the neutral element (like water), and you obtain the condensed material. Remove the neutral substance of our life and you obtain Auschwitz – that was his metaphor. Nothing scientific, no way, just a metaphor.
I imagine him as one of those who could never get rid of the “dirty feeling” you mention. I think he was seeing Auschwitz everywhere.
#1:
Alternatively, we could make it off limits to all impressionable 20-year-olds :) This also sounds sometimes like a good idea.
The ordinariness of the people committing socially sanctioned atrocities is hugely important.
It’s why horrors too awful to even read about keep happening over and over again. After it’s done and stopped everybody’s aghast at those people who did it. It’s them, somebody else, not us. Pointing out how enjoying ideological purity and beating up on the non-conformists is the embryonic beginning of the same mentality gets nothing but outraged “How dare you! We’re not like Them! This is different.” Doesn’t matter whether it’s pointed out at a Trump rally or a blog or a full grown Cultural Revolution.
“This” (I sometimes want to shout at people) “This! How you feel now. The justified anger, the legitimate targets, all the people in it together with you. That’s all it takes to destroy millions! Stop now!”
I lived in Munich many years ago, and every now and again I’d run into men who I’d hear had been SS during WWII. Invariably, they were just portly, totally ordinary citizens. You could talk to them for weeks, months, and you’d never notice anything unusual about them. Because I don’t think there was anything.
I’m convinced that the only action we need to take if we’re serious about “Never Again!” is to understand that any group, all groups, have enforcers and bystanders and that’s all it takes. And that we can start training in kindergarten to learn to recognize those states of mind and to avoid them.