The Unique Crime
Gestapo—Instrument of Tyranny
By Edward Crankshaw
Viking. 275 pp. $3.75.

Edward Crankshaw’s Gestapo contains very little that has not appeared previously in books, articles, or public testimony. Yet reading Mr. Crankshaw now, almost twelve years after the collapse of Nazi Germany, this reviewer—who attended the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, interrogated scores of Nazi war criminals, and saw concentration camps within hours of their liberation—was again struck by the fact that familiarity with the Gestapo’s record does not make it any the more comprehensible. Mr. Crankshaw apparently feels the same way: an undercurrent of bafflement and perplexity runs through his book. At the end he makes an attempt to say why all this happened, but gives it up with the opaque comment that “in the last resort the German failure . . . is a rejection of that reality which includes one’s neighbors.”

Mr. Crankshaw cannot be blamed for not doing better than that. Many who were much closer to the Nazi war crimes—indeed, their very perpetrators—were equally unable to say anything meaningful. Hoess, testifying at Nuremberg, was quite willing to furnish the court with the most minute details of how two and a half million human beings were slaughtered while he was commander of Auschwitz, but as to why, he had no explanation to offer. Nor did any of his co-defendants.

It is because of this inability to cope with the reality of the extermination camps that the world has largely turned its back on the Nazi crimes. These camps are the low-water mark of recorded human history. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can be compared to them. And the urge to shut them out of our minds may be regarded as an admission by our “collective unconscious” that all of mankind was affected by this extension of the range of human depravity.

Yet according to Anthony West, in an extensive review of Gestapo in the New Yorker, Mr. Crankshaw is wrong to treat the Nazi crimes as a unique phenomenon. To Mr. West, Auschwitz, Maidanek, Treblinka, and the flying extermination squads of the SS are manifestations of the same “primitive brutality” that was exhibited in the British concentration camps set up in South Africa during the Boer War, the murder of natives in the Congo who were not working hard enough to suit their Belgian masters, and the shooting of hostages in Ireland to quell the uprising against England.

In essence, this is the same approach that was taken by some of the defendants at Nuremberg. Of course they went much further than Mr. West, claiming that since all civilized nations had resorted to atrocities on occasion without incurring international condemnation and punishment, it was sheer hypocrisy to treat the German atrocities as international war crimes. Otto Ohlendorf, the SS general with a Ph.D. in political science who supervised the killing of 90,000 people, was the foremost exponent of this line of defense, as Crankshaw points out: he could not even see any difference between Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

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We may ignore the casuistry of an SS killer, but we cannot ignore the views expressed by Mr. West, which are very widely held today both here and in Germany. No one can deny that other nations have committed and still commit atrocities, and no one can defend such acts. Yet they all differ from the German crimes in one essential point: in each of them there is a recognizable cause-and-effect relation between the victim and the perpetrator. Take the British concentration camps in South Africa, the most frequently cited example to show that the Nazi horrors were neither new nor different. A full-scale military war was going on at the time and the Boers had undertaken extensive guerrilla activity in the areas occupied by British troops. It was as a direct consequence of this activity that Boer women and children were interned. The camps, then, had a specific, limited aim, and they were broken up with the signing of the armistice. The crime of the British consisted in maintaining such abominably poor health standards that a series of epidemics broke out, killing the inmates by the tens of thousands.

The Gestapo also committed such “cause-and-effect” atrocities. The internment of political opponents, the shooting of hostages, the execution of escaped prisoners of war and of fully uniformed Allied commando raiders were of this type. Yet, terrible though these crimes were, the “final solution” of the “Jewish problem” dwarfed them all and put the Nazis into a special category. For here the rational cause-and-effect relation is utterly absent. The Jews of Europe were much weaker and offered far less organized resistance to the Nazi war machine (except at the very end) than most other occupied peoples. In the East, the German military authorities found them to be good workers when pressed into service. The “final solution” served no useful purpose for the Germans. It deprived them of Jewish labor, forced them to draw thousands of able-bodied men from front-line service to carry out the executions, and clogged up the transportation system. Even after June 1944, when the railroads were already breaking down under the strain of Allied bombings and trains and men were desperately needed to stem the onrushing tide of the Allied advance, trainload after trainload of doomed Jews kept rolling toward Auschwitz.

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Another historically unique feature of the German war crimes was their totality. The fact that the Nazi atrocities claimed such a fantastic number of victims was not so much a matter of technology as of concept. For, unlike the British in South Africa or the Belgians in the Congo, the Germans did not commit their crimes with a limited political, economic, or military objective in mind; moreover, their potential victims were never given a chance to survive by accepting this objective. Jews were doomed because they were Jews. No charge was made against them and the threat of death was not used to coerce them into any sort of “submission.” Nor was the “final solution” intended as a warning to other peoples. The Gestapo made it quite clear that the treatment of the Jews was meant to be without parallel.

Obviously, then, the extermination camps must be regarded as a unique species of human aberration. They were the end result of a mental process that step by step led the Nazis to a total divorce from reality. For the more the Nazi leaders were threatened by real dangers, the more they retreated to a world of weird fantasy in which they were still the undisputed masters with absolute power to destroy their chosen enemies. Killing ever larger numbers of Jews was their psychopathic reaction to the growing strength of their actual enemies. That is why the gas chambers only went into operation after a victory over the Allies ceased to be a likely possibility, and why they reached their crescendo in the last year of the war, when it was obvious that everything was lost. To a certain extent, this process, which makes reality a dependent function of ideology, is characteristic of all totalitarian doctrines, but never has the self-delusion become so absolute and the dogma so completely impervious to the actuality of life around it.

But this still leaves us with the question of why the Jews, of all the captive and defenseless peoples of Europe, were selected to play the part of symbolic enemy. The answer is that they were fitted most perfectly by their history and circumstances for the role of victim, so that choosing them assured the “success” of the action. The European Jews had experienced sporadic outbursts of violent anti-Semitism for centuries; in order to secure protection from the mob, they had developed a pattern of non-resistance to violence and appeasement of the authorities. It was the Jews’ singular resignation in the face of persecution that enabled the SS to prepare for the “final solution” methodically, undisturbedly, and even with the cooperation of the intended victims. No other important minority group in Europe would have reacted in quite the same way.

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