All through 1946, I was employed by the Department of the Army as an interpreter at the International Military Tribunal’s war crimes trials in Nuremberg. One morning I was summoned to my chief’s office and instructed to act for the next few days as an interpreter and guide for a visiting French journalist. A few minutes later, in the office of the United States Chief Prosecutor, Mr. Justice Jackson, I was introduced to the novelist Elsa Triolet, who had once been the companion of the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and is now the wife of the poet Louis Aragon, one of the leading personalities in the French Communist party. (It was she who inspired Aragon’s poems on Les yeux d’Elsa.)
Madame Triolet had come to Nuremberg for the French Communist press to report on the appearance as a witness of Rudolf Hoess, former commandant of the Auschwitz extermination camp. Before seeing Hoess or hearing his testimony, Madame Triolet expressed her indignation. Such a monster, she insisted, should have been executed summarily on arrest; his appearance in a court as a mere witness was a travesty of justice. I agreed with her that Hoess should be condemned and executed, but explained that he still had to face trial before a Polish court, within the frontiers of the country where he had committed his crimes. I also tried to explain the importance of Hoess’s testimony in determining who, among Heinrich Himmler’s immediate subordinates, should now be condemned for formulating the policies which men like Hoess had implemented.
Later, Madame Triolet and I sat side by side as Hoess delivered his astounding testimony before a packed courtroom. Without the quiver of an eyelash, he reported concisely and factually on his “processing” some two to three million Jews and other victims of the Third Reich through gas chambers, crematoria, and concentration camps. Hoess’s appearance and manner were those of a man who would everywhere be considered, in government and business, an unusually competent and reliable administrator, thorough if unimaginative. The face of Madame Triolet, beside me, expressed sheer horror, as if Hoess were a repulsive physical monster mouthing obscenities worse than the vilest pages of the Marquis de Sade. Yet the painfully correct witness never uttered a word that might offend; he spoke of mass murder in the terms of a technician, without any gruesome details, without any of the eloquence of the moralist or of the sadist. No intelligence agency could ever have considered him a “security risk.”
When I subsequently read the Paris Communist press, I found that Madame Triolet had paid no attention at all to my explanations about the trial that awaited Hoess in Poland, under the terms of the Allied extradition agreements on war criminals. She described him as a monster and, moreover, a free man who enjoyed American protection.
Thirteen years later, I found myself reading the autobiographical statement which Hoess had subsequently written in a Cracow prison while awaiting his trial and execution. It confirms my original impression of Hoess as an unimaginative technocrat of genocide. With the permission of the Polish government, Hoess’s original German text has been published in Stuttgart as Volume V of the Deutsche Verlagsanstalt’s Quellen und Darstellungen zur Zeitgeschichte, under the title Kommandant in Auschwitz. In an introduction and footnotes, Martin Broszat does his best to correct statements of the author that fail to correspond to historical fact. But there exist Augean stables of literature that no critical Hercules could ever clean, and the memoirs of Hoess, a Nazi by temperament and unregenerate until the very last, are written in a style and language that betray his opinions in every sentence. Quite naturally, for instance, Hoess describes a Jewish physician as a “Jew-doctor,” much as one might describe a veterinarian as a “horse-doctor”; he enthusiastically presents Himmler as a man of the world, whose charm and culture were literally dazzling; in complaining of bribery and corruption in Auschwitz, he speaks of the clandestine infiltration of “Jew-gold” in such terms that the average reader might imagine that every Jew arrived in an extermination camp with a fortune in cash and jewelry.
At the same time, too much of Hoess’s basic mentality has been taken for granted by the editor, and not sufficiently elucidated. It would be absurd, for instance, to expect Hoess himself to question the principles of Eichmann’s policy for the “final solution” of “the Jewish problem”; he only objected to the inefficiency of the procedures adopted to implement it. A fanatical believer in hard work, efficiency, order, discipline, and cleanliness, Hoess was constantly shocked by the failure of the Third Reich to provide adequate transportation, food, medical and sanitation supplies, and supervisory personnel for its victims. A humanitarian in his macabre way, he was in favor of killing all Jews on their arrival in Auschwitz, instead of selecting from among them a handful of men “fit for work,” and then letting them die eventually of disease, hardship, and hunger in the overcrowded, under-supplied work camps. He was always bothering his Berlin superiors for more supplies, for less corrupt and brutal personnel, above all for a slowdown in the shipments of new arrivals so as to allow him to build a more efficient processing machine: gas chambers and crematoria for the unemployable, and amenities for the employable in his work camps. Without any irony, he could thus set up, at the entrance to the work camp, a huge sign that proclaimed: Arbeit macht frei—“Work brings freedom.”
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From his earliest boyhood, Hoess had been unimaginative and uncommunicative, incapable of perceiving the motives of his own actions or those of others. In his childhood, he preferred the company of animals; he respected but never loved his parents. Describing his own provincial background, he readily adopts an idyllic tone, that of conventional German Romanticism, with all its clichés inherited from such minor Biedermeier classics of Gemütlichkeit as the memoirs of the painter Ludwig Richter. But as soon as he must cope with any personal experience that is at all unusual, he relapses into the dreary jargon of the Nazi bureaucrat.
His father, a devout Catholic, had wanted Hoess to study for the priesthood, but the boy had lost his faith, if we are to believe his memoirs, when his confessor disclosed one of the secrets of the confessional to his family. Shortly after his father’s death, Hoess managed, as an adolescent, to join the German army in the First World War, where he proved to be an unusually effective and courageous soldier. At the time of the armistice, he was in Damascus, after having fought in a cavalry regiment on the Mesopotamian front. Instead of surrendering to the Allies, Hoess and a few of his older companions decided to strike out on their own and return to Germany, under his leadership, by whatever means they might find. With their horses, without maps or supplies, they managed to reach a Turkish port on the Black Sea; from there, by sailing ship, they got to Varna in Bulgaria, then proceeded on horseback through Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary, and Slovakia to Germany. Xenophon’s factual narrative of a similar venture has been a classic for two thousand years; Hoess handles the material of his Anabasis in a paragraph of fourteen colorless lines.
Hoess joined the Nazi party as early as 1922. He was in prison from 1922 to 1928, having been condemned to penal servitude for a political murder which he may not have actually committed but about which, during his trial, he steadfastly refused to give any information that might incriminate the irregular para-military organization to which he belonged or any of his companions. He proved a model prisoner and was released under the terms of an amnesty before having served his full sentence. His account of these years has none of the brilliance that made Ernest von Salomon’s Der Fragebogen a best seller; whereas Salomon appears now to regret his part in murdering Walter Rathenau, Hoess unpacks his own past like so much luggage that he has accumulated without ever evaluating it in the course of a busy life.
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On his release from prison, Hoess became active among the Artamanen, a mystical Nazi back-to-the-land movement that sought to draw German boys and girls away from the “corrupting” influence of the cities and to settle them on the soil. It was among the Artamanen that he met and married his wife, and soon settled on a farm to raise a family. But in 1934 he was asked to join the SS and, because of his extensive experience of prison life, was immediately incorporated in the administration of concentration camps—at first in a minor capacity at Sachsenhausen, then in more responsible positions at Dachau, finally as commandant of Auschwitz, a new camp which he had to create on the site of a group of abandoned Polish Army barracks and of the warehouses of the former Polish tobacco monopoly.1
Hoess’s account of his experiences in Sachsenhausen, Dachau, and Auschwitz is for the most part a long gripe about inefficiency, brutality, and corruption in the Nazi administration of these camps, and about bad morale and lack of solidarity among the inmates. For some of the categories in which German nationals were officially classed, he expresses a grudging respect: the Jehovah’s Witnesses, for instance, so madly meek and disciplined in their martyrdom, and the political prisoners, many of whom displayed courage, solidarity, and a staunch loyalty to their ideals and their fellow prisoners. As a former prisoner himself, Hoess felt a grudging sympathy for the common criminals; and he seems to have viewed the Gypsies, as most SS men did, with romantic condescension for what was primitive and exotic (though this attitude suggested no particular qualms when the order came from Berlin to exterminate these “true children of nature”). For the homosexuals2 and the Jews, however, he expresses nothing but horror and contempt.
Hoess quotes some shocking examples of demoralization among the concentration camp inmates, including cases of cannibalism among Russian prisoners of war. He appears to have been particularly shocked by the demoralization of many Jewish inmates. But the macabre parody of the Aliyah that three million Jews experienced in the concentration camps had, by tearing them away from their communities and families, deprived them of any real hope of survival. Jewish families were broken up on their arrival in an extermination camp. Most women, children, elderly people, and invalids were killed immediately; only one out of every four or five Jews—mostly men—were selected for precarious survival in the labor camps. Hoess was surprised that many of these survivors accepted jobs in the processing of new arrivals, directing them from the trains to the gas chambers and removing their corpses to the crematoria. He was not similarly shocked, however, When German SS-men in Sachsenhausen and Dachau were willing to execute other Germans who had been summarily condemned.
Reviewing this strangely inarticulate book in the London magazine, World Jewry, Gerald Reitlinger, an expert in the subject of Nazi genocide, was as puzzled as I am by the problems that it raises. As testimony on the crimes of the Nazi regime, it is peculiarly unrevealing, except insofar as it corroborates facts that are already known. As a revelation of the mind of the universal bureaucrat, it poses far more serious problems.
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La Nuit is an unusually poignant account of the Auschwitz labor camps by an inmate. Elie Wiesel, a former Talmudic student in an Orthodox community in Transylvania and now an Israeli citizen, here describes the impact of this vision of inferno on his religious beliefs. This is rather new in the literature; until now, most of the accounts have been by the more assimilated Jewish survivors.
Wiesel admits that he lost his trust in God when he was forced to witness the hanging of a child who had already been tortured, in vain, in order to extract information about weapons which had been found in his section of the camp. Two adults were hanged at the same time and the whole camp made to march past the place of execution:
The two adults were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen, huge and blue. But the third rope was still quivering. The child weighed so little that he was still alive. For more than half an hour, he remained dangling in his struggle between life and death, as we witnessed his agony. When I passed before the gibbet, he was still alive, his tongue still red, his eyes still bright. Behind me, I heard a man say: ‘Where is God?’ I felt within me a voice that gave an answer: ‘Where is He? Here, we have hanged Him, on this gibbet. . .’
In an otherwise admirably compassionate preface, the great French writer François Mauriac, who has done more than any other Nobel Prize winner in recent years to condemn crimes against humanity, even those of his own government in North Africa, expresses surprise that Wiesel abjured the Jewish religion. A theologian would explain to Mauriac that our religion is founded on a Covenant with God, whose existence is made manifest, requiring no act of faith, no Credo quia absurdum, only trust in his willingness to keep his part, in spite of our shortcomings. Even Jesus on the cross felt that his trust in God, as a Jew, had been violated: “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” But Wiesel’s account of how he lost his faith suggests other echoes, besides those of the New Testament. In Stavrogin’s confession, Dostoevsky described how a little girl, whom the protagonist of The Possessed had raped, then felt that “God is dead” and hanged herself. Wiesel’s loss of faith led him, however, as a former Talmudist who had been initiated in Cabbalistic thought, to theological allegorizations of his subsequent experiences in Auschwitz. At one point shortly before his liberation, for instance, he might have prolonged his father’s life for a day or two at the risk of depriving himself of some slight chance of survival. In his mind, the incident became a reversal of the Akedah, with Isaac actually sacrificing Abraham, so that the Covenant ceased to be valid; for in a godless world no ram appeared miraculously to substitute for the human victim.
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In every nation, however civilized, there is today a dangerously high proportion of people like Rudolf Hoess, technically or bureaucratically competent individuals who manage to achieve positions of responsibility no matter how unfit they may be to be trusted with the fate of other human beings. In 18th-century France, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre caused a stir by proposing a project to make the peers of the realm serve useful purposes. In our own time, governments such as those of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and contemporary France seem to have discovered that one means of reducing crime in civilian life is to encourage pathological criminals to serve in the forces of law and order. To attribute the moral blindness of a Hoess entirely to the fact that he happens to have been a German is a nonsensical corollary of the equally nonsensical racist theory of German collective guilt.
Wiesel’s La nuit was published in Paris in the same series of documents of the Editions de Minuit (former clandestine publishers of the French Resistance under German occupation) as Henri Alleg’s banned La question, and a spate of other revelations of brutalities of the French army and secret police in Algeria.3 In the past two years, the publication of these pamphlets, one of which is prefaced by Mauriac and another by Sartre, has been a major event in French literary life, comparable only with the publication of Zola’s J’accuse in the days of the Dreyfus affair.
In the preface to the London edition of La gangrène—in which five Algerian students describe how they were tortured in the Paris headquarters of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, in premises which had been used for similar purposes fifteen years ago by the Gestapo—Peter Benenson, Queen’s Counsel, writes: “It seems almost unbelievable that, somewhere in what has long been regarded as the most highly civilized city in the world, there should be a room where officers of the French Republic deliberately suspend naked young Algerians over a spit slung between two tables, and proceed to discharge spasms of electric current through their sexual organs.”
As a former beneficiary of an eleventh-hour police grilling at the hands of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, in the same premises of the rue des Saussaies, only a hundred yards from the Presidential palace, I was not surprised to learn that several of the crimes of which French troops and police units are now accused are exactly the same as those that I have found described again and again in the accounts of survivors of Nazi brutality. But are we Americans as innocent as we pretend, just because we so readily condemn atrocities committed in foreign lands, particularly those :that happen to be behind the Iron Curtain? Benenson points out that the censorship on news and visitors in colonial areas dependent on democracies is less total than, for instance, in Angola or Tibet; but the English edition of La gangrène to which he has written the preface contains added sections that provide little comfort for his countrymen. They frankly discuss atrocities committed by British troops in Cyprus in October 1958, as well as the consequences of the infamous Cowan Plan in the Hola camp for Mau Mau internees in Kenya, where eleven Africans were clubbed to death, it appears, for refusing to carry out a forced labor assignment.
Only recently, I chanced to dine in London with an American technician who was on his way home from a construction job with an oil company in one of the Persian Gulf sheikdoms. He described how he had often recruited “native” laborers for his projects from the camps of kidnapped African slaves, mostly pilgrims to Mecca. These are the only manpower pools from which oil companies in that area are allowed to recruit unskilled labor, thus providing local potentates with additional income. I checked this information by consulting British oilmen who had also visited these sheikdoms; they all spoke in exactly the same tone as the technicians of the I. G. Farben chemical trust whom I had heard interrogated in Nuremberg about their experiences in selecting slave laborers from among the inmates of Auschwitz.4
The more I travel and the more I learn about the real nature of the world in which I live, the less can I believe in anything but the integrity of a chosen few—the few who absolutely refuse the responsibilities of power in institutions, whether public or private, which seem so readily to tolerate crime.
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1 This was in 1940, at a time when the Roosevelt administration still maintained diplomatic relations with the Nazi government whose policies of genocide Hoess was preparing to implement. Three years later, when the gas chambers and crematoria had already been working overtime for nearly two years, our Voice of America was still forbidden by directives from Washington to mention these atrocities in broadcasts to occupied Europe. It was repeatedly explained, until the Dutch Government-in-Exile in London published an official protest against the deportations and exterminations of Dutch Jews, that the Jewish sources which had reported the details of genocide were not reliable.
2 The editor was tactful enough to cut most of the anecdotes about the homosexuals whom Hoess observed in prisons; but we are treated to a brief description of a therapy devised by Hoess for the cure of homosexuality: confining each “patient” with a convicted prostitute who was expected to report on the success or failure of the treatment.
3 L'affaire Audin, by Pierre Vidal-Nacquet; La question Algérienne, by Jean Dresch, Charles A. Julien, Henri Marrou, Alfred Sauvy, and Pierre Stibbs; La gangrène, by Bechir Boumaza, Mustapha Francis, Benaissa Souami, Abd-el-Kader Belhad, and Moussa Khebaili. The English edition of La gangrène was published in London by John Calder, Ltd.
4 This is no place to discuss the truth or falsehood of Salomon's accusations, in Der Fragebogen, of brutal treatment of German prisoners of war and internees at the hands of U.S. Army camp guards. But we should not forget that we once allowed our government to dispossess, deport from the West Coast, and intern our Nisei co-citizens under circumstances that few of us would now find tolerable; nor that the treatment of internees in many of our mental homes, county jails, prisons, and penitentiaries remains quite inhuman.
