The Theory and Practice of Hell (70 page)

Like master like man. After all, was the situation very much different in the case o f Hitler himself? What we are dealing with here are not baffling mysteries of human nature, but violations of simple, basic, psychological laws in the evolution of inferior minds. It was inferiority—whether of mind, reason, will power, imagination or the numerous social aspects of the human mind—that led these men into the SS, where they readily found refuge and an opportunity to assert their superiority, where they were held fast and driven from vice to vice, from crime to crime. The behavior of each in dividual SS member, whatever his rank, typified the system and its basic orientation.

V

During the bitter winter of 1939-40 many of us at Buchenwald suffered from dysentery or at least from severe diarrhea. One day, in a blizzard, an 6migr6 who had fallen back into the clutches of the SS sat near me on the latrine pole. Like so many who simply depended on the forethought and good nature of their fellows, he had failed to bring any toilet paper despite the rampant disease. He saw that I had several scraps of newspaper and barked at me from the corner of his mouth, in typical camp fashion: “ Gimme a piece!”

I made no reply. I have always hated this way of asking for anything, even in the concentration camp. But when I was done I passed him and placed three scraps of paper on his knees. “ The same old story,” I said in passing, “ the ant and the grasshopper.. . . ”

How did the poor devil react? He leaped up as he was, flung the paper into the mud at his feet, trampled on it furiously, and screamed again and again: “ I don’t need your paper! I don’t need your paper! ”

Hysteria? Certainly. But a whole world must have first collapsed inside his mind! Here was a sensitive man who, in-

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stead of becoming hardened by the humiliations he had suf fered in camp, had on the contrary lost his last protective armor. At the slightest breath of good-natured irony, in the face of all common sense, he “ blew his top,” though he him self had been anything but polite. In fact his very snarl was an expression of the self-same mental upset.

Concentration camps ground the minds of their victims as though between millstones. Who could survive the process without suffering injury? No one came out as he went in. It is quite true that the camps were melting pots tending toward uniformity, but this uniformity was not mental. The prisoners were as diverse as possible in origin, personal endowment, political conviction and intellectual and moral character.

The “ shiftless elements” or “ asocials” and the convicts un derwent the least change in camp. The reason must be sought in certain individual and social resemblances to the SS. They too were men who had gone down in the social scale, who were of limited education, who were predominantly guided by instinct, who lacked convictions arrived at as the result of mental effort. The difference lay in the development, by the members of the SS, of a class so rigid that no individual variations could even begin to strike root. The SS man therefore reached an inner standstill.

SS officers frequently allied themselves with convicts, very rarely with asocials. Why? In his own way the hardened, ac tive, habitual criminal shared a certain “ class consciousness.” He felt a certain professional pride and was inclined to derive from the fact of his expulsion from “ normal society” certain group virtues such as “ loyalty,” “ comradeship,” “ honesty,” unconditional allegiance. Whenever circumstances were favorable, there was an almost inexorable community of in terests that led from the outlaw who had placed himself beyond the pale of society to the desperate host that had abandoned all the principles of humanity. They were brethren under the skin, crows of a feather who soon learned to ex change barefaced winks.

But the bond between the men who wore the black uniform and those who wore the black triangle was on a lower level, purely materialistic and individualistic in character. The asocials had no clan spirit, no bent for daredevil action, no “ touch of greatness.” It is a question, moreover, whether the

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common symbol of black may not have subconsciously repelled the SS. Certainly they could not have known what they were doing when they picked this, of all colors, to mark the asocial category!

Psychological involvement attained significant proportions only among those prisoners who had some claim to superiority, by reason of their individuality or their allegiance to a given group, stratum or class. These were in the main the rational and political opponents of the Nazi regime. Here men of character suffered the impact of subhuman situations and events. The result was a range of psychological patterns that almost defies classification.

Unfortunately I cannot here deal at length with every in

dividual type. I must confine myself to such psychological phenomena as had some degree of generality. It would be fascinating, for example, to write a psychology of Jehovah’s Witnesses. As a rule they stemmed from middle-class trades with relatively simple modes of thought and emotion, though in the concentration camps they unfolded a veritable spectrum o f mental reactions and outward behavior patterns, ranging from the extreme of lofty anticipation of the hereafter down to thoroughly earthy appetites.

The development of mental types took place by way of the process o f adaptation to the new environment. I have already pointed out in my chapter on admission to the concentration camps that every newcomer immediately had to traverse a course of profound personal degradation and humiliation. Naked he was driven through the unbridgeable abyss that separated the two worlds, “ outside” and “ inside.” It was the immediate effects of this terrifying act of compulsion that determined the ultimate destiny o f a prisoner. There were two possibilities and within three months it became apparent which one would apply. By that time a man would have gone into an almost irresistible mental decline—if, indeed, he had not already perished in a physical sense; or he would have begun to adapt himself to the concentration camp. He might abandon all hope, seeing nothing to make life seem worth living. Even if remnants of will power survived the smashing of the old familiar world with its values, the mind, deep in the shadows, would cast off the burden of a body that had lost all impetus to rise above the misery o f the day. And if the human

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wreck that was the result of the efforts of the SS somehow managed to keep on vegetating, it would soon run afoul of someone in the struggle for existence and thus be ex terminated. If, on the other hand, the initial process of devaluation succeeded only in killing off the positive aspects of character, unleashing sinister forces that had been kept under control, then the newcomer, step by step or in a twinkling, might adapt himself to one of the numerous strains of the camp underworld.

Whether inward adaptation to camp life succeeded or not was not primarily a question of social origin or former social position. In this respect there was a sharp contrast between the development potentials of the SS, the asocials and the con victs on the one hand, and of the political andd ideological prisoners on the other. With the former, social and individual origins at least suggested, if they did not dictate, the com plexion of their career in camp; but the latter were quite unable to derive from their former relatively high social position any useful impetus for life in the jungle; indeed, what they brought with them hindered rather than helped them.

Only when the memory of former social standards had been erased could men of high character fall back on their in nermost qualities and begin to gain mastery over their present situation, and even so only with great effort. Utter failure met any attempt to apply once valid social standards to a concentration-camp environment that presented the sharpest possible contrast to any firmly organized social order. Such standards might be smashed at the very outset, during the stage of degradation, to such a degree that their complete uselessness became apparent.

Men were lost if they brought to the concentration camp no more than a non-proletarian class-consciousness, a pride in a clique, clan or caste recognized “ outside.” The whalebone of social stays was irretrievably bent and battered the very first day. If this was all that had been brought along in place of backbone and character, the wearer could be written off at once.

I knew a very high German cabinet official who, on the

night of his admission to Buchenwald, after the humiliations he had suffered, no longer dared look anyone in the eye. His fund of personal values gradually gave him back the self

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confidence he had lost, but it was a self-confidence altogether different from what he had had before. The two Dukes of Hohenberg, already spoken of, who carried manure at Dachau, because of their steadfastness of character won the respect of many prisoners who would otherwise have been hopelessly prejudiced against them. Many similar stories could be told of men who had once enjoyed social prestige.