This personal statement on individual responsibility of Germans for Nazi crimes, written by a man active among German anti-Nazis, uses as its text Victor Bernstein’s important book Final Judgment: The Story of Nuremberg (With an introduction by Max Lerner. New York, Boni and Gaer, 1947. 289 pp .$3.50). It touches a subject on which emotions naturally run high. But it is important that the problem continue to be discussed from diverse points of view, in the interest of clarifying the nature and causes of the Nazi onslaught on the Jews, and its implications for Germany’s future.
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What reasons prompted the mass murder of European Jews by the Nazis? Victor Bernstein, in his book Final Judgment, after a careful study of all the available documents, concludes that “this documentary history tells us what happened, but not why.” “Nowhere has there been unearthed,” he maintains, “any direct documentary evidence concerning the time, the place, and the personnel involved when the decision was made to exterminate European Jewry.” All Mr. Bernstein feels that the facts justify him in saying is that the Jews were killed because a handful of Nazi leaders wanted it that way.
Interpreting and quoting from official documents that were collected for the Nuremberg trial, but not all of which were introduced as evidence there, Bernstein in the first two parts of his book traces the history of the Nazi regime from its inception, retelling in precise detail a story that had until recently to be filled out by deduction and interpretation.
Anyone who took part in the underground war against Hitler will look with mixed feelings at the wealth of top-secret records now spread out before the world. How much courage, fear, and torture was once involved in the effort to get hold of the least bit of concrete information about the Nazi rearmament program! How fragmentary was the information that anti-Nazis and Nazi victims were able to tell about the Luftwaffe, the concentration camps, the Nazi will to conquer by all and any means! And yet, would their warnings not have been more than adequate for a world willing to be warned? Today, the publication of documents once guarded in impenetrable secrecy is in a sense anti-climactic. Actually we already knew, from the very early days of the war, and even before, essentially everything they had to reveal.
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In the third part of Final Judgment, which takes up half his book, Mr. Bernstein presents a documentary history of the crimes that will forever be associated with Nazi Germany: genocide, the purposeful destruction of whole nations and races; the big industry of the concentration camps, “turning out chiefly corpses and war goods”; the mining of gold from the teeth of the gassed; slave labor; vivisection practiced on human beings.
Mr. Bernstein shows the criminal part played by the German army in the mass murder of civilians, mostly Jews, and of war prisoners, mostly Russians. He quotes from business correspondence to prove the eager cooperation of German industrialists in providing furnaces for the crematoria. He indicts German scientists by publishing records of “research” done on the living, almost all ending in agonizing death, and on the dead, murdered and cut up according to scientific specifications. Step by step Mr. Bernstein builds up to a total case against the German people as a whole, whom he accuses of having been accomplices in the Nazi crimes, whether voluntarily, by mere participation, or by condoning and “knowing without doing.”
But this charge is, in my opinion, quite at odds with the kind of judgment Max Lerner asks when, in his introduction, he calls for “the will and intelligence to grasp the full meaning of a powerful evil and an evil power which beggar all historical parallels.”
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Were I personally to accept certain passages of Final Judgment, no alternative would be left for me but to plead guilty to everything the Nazis and their followers did. I am one of the 70,000,000 whose minds, in Max Lerner’s words, were poisoned and hearts “hardened beyond human recognition.” Lerner might exonerate me because I was lucky enough to flee Germany in time to escape any part in “the deeds of the poisoned minds and the dehumanized hearts.” But I could not accept such magnanimous acquittal before my own conscience. I was there long enough to become guilty.
Since the question of individual responsibility is crucial to Bernstein’s case against the Germans, permit me to relate one incident out of many. One of the inmates of the concentration camp in which I was imprisoned for a time was recaptured after escaping. The camp administration threatened to punish all the prisoners if they themselves did not “discipline” the unfortunate man. That night a group of men, all prisoners, broke into our sleeping quarters, tore the man from his bunk, and beat him ferociously. Twelve hundred other men witnessed this, men not without convictions and courage. One cried out from the darkness of the tiers: “You cowards!” The next moment he, too, lay unconscious on the cement floor. It was not I.
Deeds of “the poisoned minds and dehumanized hearts” of 70,000,000 people? Let me quote from the first letter I received from my sister in Germany after the war: “For three years, night after night, the bombers would come over and the children and I would sit in the cellar, trembling with fear. And all the time I drew hope from the thought that the terrible destruction would help rid us of the brown plague.” My mother, equipped with a good many prejudices, including a mild form of social anti-Semitism, described how she witnessed the arrest of the only Jewish family in our small town. “All I could do was greet Mrs. D. with my eyes as we passed each other.”
Thus the members of a single German family became guilty in some of Mr. Bernstein’s ways: one kept quiet while his comrade was tortured, another trembled and hoped but did nothing, and the third made the barest gesture of futile sympathy.
On this level, I too am guilty and personally responsible. But by the same criteria, who, anywhere, will go free? What government, what church, what nation, what individual was not involved in the Nazi assault upon civilization in one of these ways?
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Seventy million Germans poisoned of mind and dehumanized of heart! How anxious we are in interracial and intercultural work to break down the barriers piled up by lazy, stupid, and vicious generalizations. How indignantly we protest when American fascist agitators make statements about “the Jews,” “the foreigners,” “the Russians”! Isn’t the acceptance of the individual’s right to be judged on his own merits the Alpha and Omega of all our efforts to combat discrimination? It would be immoral to evade the problem of Germany’s guilt on the ground that not all Germans were Nazis. But it is just as immoral to confuse it by considering all Germans Nazis or, at best, willingly seduced by them.
Evidence of their collective guilt, Mr. Bernstein insists, is offered by the fact that the Germans knew about the bestialities practiced in the extermination camps and elsewhere. He produces document after document to prove that at least they “were guilty of knowing without doing.” A few knew everything, he writes, and everybody knew something. When I was released from Oranienburg, I went to Berlin and enjoyed the indescribable sensation of freedom by having a haircut of my own choosing. The barber must have detected the traces of the camp barber’s unprofessional hand, and he asked where I had got my last haircut. When I nonchalantly answered “in Oranienburg,” he dropped his scissors—then finished my haircut without uttering another word.
He, too, knew what was going on in the early concentration camps in Germany. And his reaction to a man who had just come out of one of them was plainly one of fear. I was a danger simply because I had been there. My parents, whom I visited before I left Germany, did not ask a single question about my experiences while in “protective custody,” although they had worked feverishly to get me out. I am sure that they, too, knew “something,” and it was enough not to make them ask for more. Nor did I have any desire to burden them with details. For Bernstein, such knowledge establishes guilt, and the more knowledge, the greater the guilt. .“That the German people knew enough about concentration camps to want desperately to keep out of them is obvious. But they knew more than that—oh, ever so much more!” The logic escapes me. If they knew ever so much more, it only means they had even more powerful reasons for trying to keep out and stay quiet and submit.
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That there are strong motives for the individual who lives in a terrorized society to fail to know, and not want to know, what happens to its more unfortunate victims, need not be argued. It is not physical fear alone that makes him avoid any contact with the areas of danger—it is the desire for self-preservation itself. The numbness into which he withdraws in order not to be destroyed physically and morally can only begin to fade when the terror is broken. True, for regeneration, the awareness and acceptance of guilt and responsibility are crucial. But it is a process that cannot be furthered from the outside by having it hammered into the heads of Germans that they, one and all, are equally guilty of committing or of having failed to prevent the commission of the most staggering crimes in history.
What infuriates Bernstein and so many other reporters on post-Hider Germany is the unwillingness of most Germans to admit individual guilt. With but few exceptions, they are now trying to exculpate themselves, Bernstein complains, and the world should not stand for it. What he does not see is that for years millions of individual Germans must have been trying to exculpate themselves, long before the victorious Allies brought them face to face with final judgment. By closing eyes and ears, by finding comfort in the fact that they did not give the orders, by dissociating themselves in their minds from an inhumanity from which they could not dissociate themselves in reality, these Germans tried to keep their hands clean. Few dared to communicate critical thoughts to their friends, even fewer dared to act.
In this last I see one of the most burning of the psychological conflicts now torturing the best of them. The terror situation having been removed by outside force, they must now relive the humiliation of the years when fear—which was the aim of the terror—drove them into acquiescence and passivity. The problem of individual guilt now arising no longer involves an abstract responsibility to be dealt with by escaping into mental reservation or know-nothingness. It has become something very concrete. The memory of the innumerable occurrences no German could have helped witnessing or experiencing now haunts him—occurrences that found him wanting: the sacking of Jewish homes, victims in the hands of an SA gang, the bread he did not dare to slip to his arrested neighbor’s children.
Today their sins of omission threaten the self-respect of Germans who never were Nazis. They are, and will go on, seeking and finding rationalizations and alibis to justify to themselves a role that they know degraded them. And they do this all the more when the world outside insists on forcing them to admit their guilt. In this field, no easy victories are possible. I have not the means to estimate the extent to which such individual reckoning of accounts is now going on in Germany, but I do know that it is going on; and at the same time I venture to say that the Allied authorities will not get the people they want by choosing them from among the winners of public breast-beating contests.
The dodging of individual responsibility by the defendants was one of the most exasperating experiences of the Nuremberg trial. The violent reactions of Americans are understandable when, in probing the German mind, they unfailingly discover that the respondent was “only a little man” who had no power of decision and no choice but to obey. The crimes were committed by somebody, and they were of such dimensions that they could not have been carried out by just a few SS-men or “special task units.” Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, must have been involved at various levels of responsibility. They were.
But a reporter less bent on establishing collective responsibility might have found it worthwhile tentatively to accept at face value what the little men had to say about their roles—and go on from there. He then could not have failed to observe that there is indeed a specific structure without which a totalitarian society cannot exist, and which determines the behavior of almost every individual in it. .A man who has for any length of time lived under totalitarianism is simply not the same as the man of a free society. .To measure him by standards recognized under democracy may reveal the extent of his disintegration as a human being, but does not provide a fair basis for judging him. Those who, in explaining the success of National Socialism, fall back on the “German character” with its innate brutality, servility, sadism, self-pity, and general lack of human dignity, sidestep the crucial issue of the individual’s fate in a totalitarian society. Under the Nazi tenor, characteristics of different social and national groups were dissolved in the merciless struggle for individual survival. I offer Max Lerner and Victor Bernstein no insult when I visualize them next to me in Oranienburg, standing at attention while the swastika was being raised, or crawling through the latrine when a Sturmführer found it amusing. Nor does it reflect on the French, Russian, Polish, Dutch, and other prisoners of war in Nazi hands that by 1944 they produced 40 per cent of all German armaments, as Bernstein himself reports. Was there any more tragic figure amid the Nazi holocaust than the Jewish community leader who, as in Vilna and elsewhere, had to select the names to fill the Gestapo’s quota of candidates for extermination? Who would dare to be his judge?
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In his endeavor to make out a total case against the Germans, Bernstein overlooks the meaning and the very lesson of Nazism. Not even he believes that the Nazi regime ingratiated itself with the German people by its crimes against the Jews of Europe. He writes: “However much the German people condoned, they certainly did not initiate or demand the extermination of Jewry.” And he quotes from a confidential bulletin issued by the Nazi party Chancellory on October 9, 1942, addressed to lower party ranks:
“While the final solution of the Jewish question is being worked out, discussions are lately going on among the population of various parts of the Reich concerning very severe’ measures against the Jews, particularly in the Eastern territories. Investigations have shown that such statements, mostly in distorted or exaggerated form, were passed on by men on leave from various units employed in the East who personally had the opportunity to observe such measures.”
A reporter without a political ax to grind might have been struck by the fact that the Nazi party deemed it necessary to draw the attention of its lower ranks to such “discussions,” obviously in order to counteract and suppress them, and that as late as 1942 it found it necessary to lie to its own supporters by describing eyewitness reports as “mostly distorted or exaggerated” and by putting “very severe” in quotation marks. Tin’s document does show that the Nazis did not consider the truth about what they were doing to Jews something that would find German popular approval or increase German morale.
Nazi anti-Semitism was not, I believe, governed by any fixed program. Its course can be understood only in the context of the essential goals the Nazi regime set for itself at various stages of its course. Up to 1938, internal consolidation and undisturbed rearmament had top priority. Until then, the “final goal” of Nazi Jewish policy was the emigration of all Jews living in Reich territory (directive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Berlin, January 25, 1938). .On November 10, 1938, the first nation-wide, organized terrorist attack on the German Jews took place. Coming a few weeks after Munich, it was the signal that Hider was ready for war and willing to risk it should the European powers dare stand in the way of German expansion. Until the actual outbreak of war, Hitler used the Jews still in his power to blackmail foreign governments into appeasement. .“If the international Jewish financiers within and without Europe succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the world, and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the obliteration of the Jewish race in Europe,” he said in the Reichstag on January 30, 1939.
The mass extermination actually began with the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and reached its height in the following three years. The last gassing, according to a sworn witness, took place in the first half of November 1944. .An order prohibiting the further killing of Jews was issued by Himmler on November 25, 1944. .The witness ascribed this order to Himmler’s hope of establishing contact with the Allies.
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This is the barest sketch of the course of Nazi anti-Semitism. It could be filled out with a mass of detail. As it is, it is taken entirely from Final Judgment. .It is strange, in view of this evidence, that such an experienced and astute writer as Victor Bernstein should be unable to come to any conclusion as to the motives of the Nazi extermination policy. At least one conclusion seems inevitable. The mass killing was a decision by which Hitler meant to burn all bridges. This time, no possibility of retreat or compromise should be left to the weak-hearted. From the moment the two-front war started, and increasingly so as the prospect of victory receded, he sought to tie all to his fate by making every German an accomplice in his crimes, so that no group or individual might hope for exoneration after his own downfall.
How well Hitler succeeded in this intention can be seen in the totalitarian “Final Judgment” pronounced by a man who prides himself on being a liberal American.
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