Gestapo (28 page)

“The train due to leave on July 15th, 1942, had to be canceled because according to information received by the S.D.
Kommando
at Bordeaux, there were only one hundred fifty stateless Jews in Bordeaux. There was no time to find other Jews to fill this train. S.S. Colonel Eichmann replied that it was a question of prestige. They had to conduct lengthy negotiations about these trains with the Reichsminister of Transportation, which turned out successfully; and now Paris cancels a train. Such a thing had never happened to him before. The matter was highly shameful. He did not wish to report it to S.S. Lieutenant General Mueller straight away, for the blame would fall on his own shoulders. He was considering whether he would not do without France as an evacuation country altogether.”

Wisliceny also told how when Eichmann had explained to him the real meaning of the “final solution,” he was horrified:

“It was perfectly clear to me that this order spelled
the death of millions of people, I said to Eichmann, ‘God grant that our enemies never have the opportunity of doing the same to the German people,' in reply to which Eichmann told me not to be sentimental; it was an order of the Fuehrer's and would have to be carried out.”

These incidents do not give a picture of men unthinkingly carrying out atrocious orders simply because it has not occurred to them that Jews might be regarded as human. They knew very well that they were, or at least were so regarded by almost everybody but themselves. We find countless examples of this. We find Eichmann himself cajoling the Slovakian government and lying to them to make them hand over their Jews. We find, perhaps most revealingly of all, the R.S.H.A. in Berlin telling Dannecker in Paris that in order to give an impression (to whom?) that the French Jews were being deported in family units, the children, who had been torn away from their parents during the terrible round-ups, were to be mingled discreetly with the convoys of adults—which might or might not include their own parents: “The Jews arriving from the unoccupied zone will be mingled at Drancy with Jewish children now at Pithviers and Beaune-la-Rolande.… According to instructions from the R.S.H.A. no trains containing Jewish children only are to leave.”

It is possible to believe that a certain category of human beings is subhuman. But it is not possible for such a belief to find free and unthinking expression if, at every turn, one is forced to disguise and conceal one's conduct from others who do not share this belief. Throughout the period of the German domination of Europe the working of a guilty conscience in the killers and torturers is clearly to be seen. It was never clearer than in the shocking operation which called for the exhumation and burning of hundreds of thousands of corpses during the great retreat in the East, or in the conflicting orders issued in the last days of the war in the West about what was to be done with the prisoners in concentration camps—some leading lights in the R.S.H.A. wishing to kill the prisoners off and pretend that the camps had been bombed by the Allies, others thinking it more expedient to release the prisoners in the path of the Allied advance.

What then?

In all modern societies there are men and women who, released from all restraints, will behave like beasts towards their fellows. But in the twentieth century it has been only in Germany and in Russia that such men have been able to achieve absolute power; and it is only in Germany that they have deliberately delegated their power without reserve to psychopaths and the criminal riffraff of their country, absolving them from all restraint.

The German system of education, with its exaltation of unquestioning obedience to authority and the consequent encouragement of bullying on the one hand and irresponsibility on the other, must contribute to the sort of behavior contemplated in these pages. It has taken the Germans themselves to develop this system. Have they abolished it?

Further, the habit of obeying authority without question, even when that authority is clearly seen to be evil, accounts in some measure for the remarkable readiness with which intelligent, educated, and, in some ways, highly developed men committed unheard-of crimes. But that this compulsion was by no means absolute is shown by the fact that these same men could on occasion bring themselves to disobey their Leader and even consider plotting against his life. (The situation more than once arose in which an otherwise hardheaded soldier would argue that while Hitler was alive the oath of allegiance was binding; but if he was murdered, then the oath would no longer bind.) In the case of von Kluge and Keitel (there are very many others), it was only fear of the consequences of failure which held them to their oath.

The habit of regarding Jews and Russians as inferior or subhuman helped to condition the minds of many to the acceptance of mass slaughter; but it is important to bear in mind that other peoples than the Germans have regarded other peoples than the Jews and Russians as inferior, or subhuman, without seeking to exterminate them (we are speaking still of the twentieth century, which is the relevant epoch); notably the British in Africa and India, and the American whites
vis-à-vis
the American Negroes. In this connection a comparison between the German and British records in their African colonies is illuminating.

In other words, it is clear that the habit of considering
other people as subhuman, the habit of unquestioning obedience to authority, and the tyranny of a dictator of ruthless temper and unbridled cruelty working on the lusts and fears of his subjects, are all in themselves conducive to the sort of behavior under examination. Other people beside the Germans have accepted the tyranny of a wicked man; others instinctively regard certain categories of their fellowmen as being inferior to the point of being subhuman. We need go no farther than Soviet Russia or Fascist Italy for examples of the one; than the British settlers of Kenya or the Dutch of South Africa for examples of the other. But in no other country has murder and outrage been carried so far as in Nazi Germany, and in no other country have so many individuals from all classes of society been actively involved in murder and outrage.

The callousness and harshness of the Bolsheviks, working through their own Security Police, is a byword; but in all the Russian actions against humanity, in so far as they can be documented, there has been a marked absence of that sustained and supererogatory zeal which was such a feature of the handiwork of the Ohlendorfs and the Stahl-eckers, the Wirths and the Lindows. The Russian psycopaths and cynics have carried out the actions, and their subordinates, though tainted with that fatal irresponsibility which goes with the acceptance of authority, however evil, have, in countless recorded cases, shown an individual kindliness to the victim which is almost wholly absent from the German record.

It seems to be clear that in certain circumstances other peoples than the Germans would find themselves well on the way to producing a fair imitation of the Gestapo and the S.D. The Russians have done so: indeed, their Security Police served as a model for Mueller and Heydrich. The South African Dutch, also possessed by a rigid ideology, seem to be moving towards it. The Italians, however, with a rigid dictatorship, never came anywhere near it, and in fact showed themselves more resistant to modeling themselves on the Germans than any other people in Europe, including the French. Many Jews in Italy and the South of France owe their lives to the flat refusal of the Italian Fascist authorities, civil and military, to co-operate with Eichmann, and to their ingenuity in frustrating his plans.

Dr. Werner Best, who is now at large and prospering in Western Germany, an ex-S.S. Brigadier, a constant member of the Gestapo, and a pleader for it at Nuremberg, published in 1941 a textbook called
The German Police
, which was officially circulated as a handbook for senior officials and officially recommended as suitable to be given as a prize for meritorious juniors. This handbook contains the following passage which illuminates the darker recesses of the German mentality. The translation cannot do it justice because, to get it into recognizable English at all, violence has had to be done to the pristine incoherence of the original:

“It is not a question of Law, but of Destiny, whether the rules for police action laid down by the will of the Leader are ‘right'—i.e., possible and necessary—and therefore form a body of ‘Police' Law which is suitable and advantageous for the people. For the abuse of the right of lawmaking on the part of the people's Leader—whether in the direction of harmful severity or of harmful leniency—will receive its punishment with greater certainty from Destiny itself, according to the very Law of Life which has been violated, than from any State Tribunal; and the punishment, before History, will be calamity, downfall, and ruin.”

Dr. Werner Best, at Nuremberg, claimed that this was intended as a warning to the leadership. It seems, rather, that it was a reflection of the nihilistic, fate-defying rhetoric which was not spoken, but
lived
, by thousands of Germans who ought to have known better. It expresses with extraordinary aptness the flight from reality into an unpeopled void. It reflects nothing less than the death-wish.

The Germans are a kindly people in their personal relations. Many of the characters in this narrative were good fathers of families, who bought sweets and Christmas trees for their children, and then went out to do some more killing, killing of children and women and old people especially, because these could or would not work for Germany. But the almost total absence of any recorded kindliness on the part not only of the police but also of countless thousands of S.S. men to those whom they regarded as subhuman is a very striking aspect of this whole story. It would seem to correspond with a rejection of real life.
The British, on the other hand, may regard certain Asian and African peoples as inferior, and yet at the same time develop for them a strong and quite deep affection. With their empirical approach they understand instinctively that life as it is must be accepted, and that life is nothing but people—and people are more than one's immediate family circle, which, when it comes to it, may be seen simply as a reflection of oneself.

We have glanced at some, though by no means all, of the attitudes and characteristics which, taken separately, may lead a nation to behave badly and, taken together, may lead it to disaster. But these are not enough to explain the Gestapo and the S.D. They are enough to serve as a warning to us all, since, in some degree, we all share some, if not all, of these characteristics. But in the last resort the German failure, which so far differentiates Germany from all the other nations of the West, including Russia, is “a rejection of that reality which includes one's neighbors,” and an attempt to substitute a false abstraction. It is idealism gone rotten; and until they can learn to accept a reality which includes people, the Germans, in their restless and insane striving for something better, will remain dangerous to those who content themselves with trying to make the best of the world as we know it to be.

1
Throughout this narrative the special ranks of the S.S., meaningless to the reader without German, have been translated into their military equivalents. Thus
Hauptsturmfuehrer
becomes S.S. Captain.

1
Musselmen was the term used in the German concentration camps for prisoners who had been reduced to walking skeletons.

For their most helpful comment and advice, and for the willing assistance they have given me in checking and discovering facts, I take this opportunity of expressing my deep gratitude to my friends Mr. William Gutmann, Mr. Brian Melland, and Mr. Gerald Reitlinger.

Most of the direct quotations are taken from official reports of the Nuremberg Trials.

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

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Copyright © Edward Crankshaw 1956

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ISBN: 9781448205806
eISBN: 9781448205493

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