Ominous Parallels (32 page)

The process began at the beginning, with the selection of prisoners who had done nothing wrong and who could not understand why they had been arrested.

Hannah Arendt was the first to identify the camps’ need of innocent inmates. She explains the policy in sociopolitical terms, as part of a deliberate Nazi (and Soviet) attempt “to kill the juridical person in man,” i.e., to destroy the concept of man’s rights.

Criminals, Miss Arendt observes, are not proper subjects for a concentration camp. However brutally he is treated by the camp guards, the criminal knows why he is there; he is able to grasp a causal relationship between his actions and his fate. To that extent he retains a certain human dignity. He remains within the normal, pre-totalitarian framework of crime and punishment; he remains within the realm where justice (by some definition) is relevant and where a man’s rights are a reality to be respected or at least considered.

If, however, one deliberately arrests men who have done nothing and tortures them methodically for no reason at all, then the normal framework is thrown out, and even the pretense at justice (in
any
definition) disappears. The contemptuous, sweeping rejection of man’s rights becomes a principle of the system, and the victim is effectively stripped of human status. Thus the camps’ need of innocent inmates. Thus also the fact that those criminals picked for the camps were sent there as a rule only after they had completed their term in prison and were legally free.

“Under no circumstances,” Miss Arendt summarizes, “must the concentration camp become a calculable punishment for definite offenses.” If internment were made dependent on any definition of crime or heresy, no matter how perverse or tyrannical, the camps would become superfluous: “it would make for a new system of justice, which, given any stability at all, could not fail to produce a new juridical person in man, that would elude the totalitarian domination.”
¹¹

The actual results of the camps’ policy in this matter support Miss Arendt’s viewpoint. The criminals were the prisoners least devastated by their arrest; they found their internment easiest to endure and became the camp aristocracy everywhere. Conversely, according to Bettelheim, those worst hit psychologically were the law-abiding, apolitical members of the German middle class; these men, many of whom had sympathized with the Hitler regime, had no inkling of any reason (legal, political, or philosophical) to explain their fate, and this was a fact which they could not deal with or bear. “The prisoner,” noted the commandant of Auschwitz in his autobiography, “can cope with stern but impartial severity, however harsh it may be, but tyranny and manifestly unjust treatment affect his soul like a blow with a club.”
¹²

The concept of rights (or of justice) is not a philosophic primary, though Miss Arendt often seems to treat it as such. What she identifies only as the attack on the “juridical person” is, in fact, part of a wider, all-embracing assault. To give a man’s soul this kind of blow is one step in the process of plunging him into a certain kind of world. All the other steps continued the process.

The salient feature of the camp world was not merely injustice, or even horror, but horror which was
unintelligible
to the victim.

When they arrived at the camps, many of the prisoners, dazed by their arrest and nightmare transport, did not know what was happening to them or even where they were. As a rule the Nazis told them nothing and answered no questions. The guards’ manner was that of a response to the self-evident: they behaved as if the prisoners were creatures with no faculty of intelligence, or as if the prisoners had now entered a realm in which such a faculty was irrelevant.

In the larger society, the Nazis counted heavily on the power of ideology: there is no other way to rule an entire country. The dissemination of ideology, however—any ideology, even the Nazi one—implicitly underscores the importance of ideas, of individual choice and judgment, of the listener’s mind. In the camps no such implication was to be permitted.

No attempt was made to present the Nazi viewpoint to the prisoners. There were no self-justifying speeches, no summaries of
Mein Kampf,
no propaganda, no proselytizing. “Education [in the camps],” declared Himmler, “consists of discipline, never of any kind of instruction on an ideological basis.”
¹³

The SS did not want the prisoners’ intellectual acceptance of Nazism and rebuffed any overtures from would-be converts. When certain prisoners sought to make their peace with the Gestapo, Bettelheim reports, the Gestapo’s response was to insist that prisoners refrain from expressing any of their feelings, even pro-Nazi ones. “Free consent,” observes Miss Arendt, “is as much an obstacle to total domination as free opposition.”
¹⁴

The camp rulers would not tolerate a prisoner’s concerning himself with ideas of any kind, whether Nazi or otherwise. Ideas are irrelevant to an inmate—this was the guiding idea; in Buchenwald and Auschwitz, thought has no place.

Neither, the inmates soon learned, did individuality have any place. When a prisoner entered the camp, he brought with him the knowledge achieved by civilized Western man: it was self-evident to him that he (like all men) was a separate entity with a unique identity. The camps proceeded methodically to flout this self-evidency.

Characteristically, the guards did not know or seek to know anything about any particular inmate beyond his group membership. Often they failed or deliberately refused to recognize any difference at all between one prisoner and another. An eerie egalitarianism prevailed: to the SS the things being manipulated by screams, kicks, and guns were not separate human entities, each with his own appearance, character, life; they were indistinguishable cells of an undifferentiated mass, faceless units made of agony, filth, and groveling, each equal to and interchangeable with hundreds or millions of other such units.

Personal responsibility was not recognized in the camps. If a prisoner took an action regarded as punishable, he was not treated as the culprit. Instead, so far as possible, every member of the group to which he belonged (including himself) was punished for the action, regardless of any member’s own behavior or knowledge of the incident; all were punished equally, ruthlessly, and as a group. (Outside the camps a variant of this method was practiced: the police would intimidate some dissatisfied group—e.g., doctors or lawyers—by arresting a random cross section of its members, without reference to any individual’s action, guilt, or innocence.)

Since the prisoners knew that all could be punished for the acts of any one man, they often feared and tried to stop independent action on the part of other inmates, even action aimed at helping prisoners in special need or danger. Thus feats of heroic courage were often condemned by the beneficiaries themselves, and the heroes, in Bettelheim’s words, were “kept from rekindling respect for the individual, or from inspiring an appreciation of independence.”
¹⁵

Disappear into the mass, the inmate was told repeatedly by the guards: “Don’t dare to be noticeable,” “Don’t dare to come to my attention.” The inmates had to obey—e.g., to fight for the least conspicuous spots in roll-call formations; if a man was noticeable, he might be noticed, and not survive it. On pain of instant beating or death, the victim had to shrink out of the Nazis’ sight and hearing. He had to try to erase any external signs of individuality and turn himself into the anonymous cell his captors held him to be. In effect he had to absorb the guards’ perspective and become, so far as possible, a self-made cipher.

That a specific intention and not merely random cruelty was behind the above is indicated by the policy of the SS toward those prisoners who agreed to serve as their spies. A spy was always vulnerable to reprisals from other prisoners, but the SS would protect a spy only for a limited time, even if he was transmitting desired information; after this time they would kill him (or allow him to be killed). “Under no circumstances,” explains Bettelheim, “would they let a prisoner become a person through his own efforts, even if those efforts were useful to the SS.”
¹⁶

The prisoner could not become a person—above all, in his own eyes. He had to lose any connection to the realm of human efficacy or human worth. He had to learn to see himself as a cringing, foul-smelling subanimal, a thing capable of nothing but momentary escape from terror and momentary satisfaction of the lowest physical needs.

It was not enough for the prisoners to bury and forget their individuality; as some of the prisoners grasped at the time, it was intended that they become in their own eyes objects of loathing.

At the outset [writes one survivor] the living places, the ditches, the mud, the piles of excrement behind the blocks, had appalled me with their horrible filth.... and then I saw the light! I saw that it was not a question of disorder or lack of organization but that, on the contrary, a very thoroughly considered conscious idea was in the back of the camp’s existence. They had condemned us to die in our own filth, to drown in mud, in our own excrement. They wished to abase us, to destroy our human dignity, to efface every vestige of humanity, to return us to the level of wild animals, to fill us with horror and contempt toward ourselves and our fellows.
¹⁷

You cannot understand, because this world cannot be understood; such was the first part of the message broadcast to the prisoner by all the man-degrading, soul-destroying conditions he encountered, including the living standards incompatible with life, the rules without cause, the tortures without purpose—the conditions which no mind could take in or grasp, the conditions imposed
because
no mind could grasp them. And: you cannot understand, because
you
are nothing; such was the second part of the message.

To preserve a sense of self-value, some prisoners clung in the privacy of their own mind to the power of moral judgment, fiercely affirming the depravity of their torturers and the righteousness of their own cause: survival. In regard to acting on such judgment these men did what they could. Washing, for instance, was considered by many inmates to be a matter of life-and-death importance. This was not “for purposes of cleanliness and health,” a survivor of Auschwitz explains; it was “necessary as an instrument of moral survival,” because it expressed “the power to refuse our consent.”
¹⁸
Washing was a means of defying the Nazi campaign of degradation; it was a daily reaffirmation of one’s human status; it was a demonstration in action of that without which men could not survive psychologically: self-assertion, self-protection, self-esteem.

Many prisoners, however, though they may have tended themselves as routine, could not use the weapon of moral judgment. They had succumbed to the camps’ war against what Miss Arendt calls “the moral person,” i.e., to the SS men’s campaign against morality as such.

One method of this campaign was to confront the prisoner with insolvable dilemmas posing unthinkable alternatives, and then demand that he make a choice. A man would have to choose, for instance, whether to betray and thus send to their death his friends, or his wife and children; to make his position still more impossible he would be warned that suicide would lead to his family’s murder. Or a mother would be told to pick out which one of her children the Nazis should kill.

It was not enough for the prisoner passively to endure evil; the intention was first to paralyze his moral faculty, then to force him, whatever his choice, to implicate himself in evil. The prisoner becomes, in Miss Arendt’s words, a creature who chooses “no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder”; and he seems to himself to become, however unwillingly, an accessory to the killers. In reason, no man can be held responsible for actions or decisions which have been forced upon him. In many cases, nevertheless, the camp policy did achieve its goal: in the minds of dazed, starving men, it was able to blur the line between victim and killer. The result was to erode the concept of moral responsibility as such, and/or to shift the guilt to the victim.
¹⁹

To institutionalize this kind of result (and also to reduce the camps’ need for Nazi manpower), the SS regularly offered to prisoners positions of substantial power in the camp administration. Since the men picked for these jobs effectively controlled most daily operations, they gained a much more secure and tolerable life. These men were in effect allowed to “become a person”; the price was the kind of person they had to become, the kind who demonstrated his loyalty by outdoing the Nazis in harshness.

Some prisoners were tempted by such a prospect. Some gave in, choosing to become torturers rather than objects of torture. Many, writhing under the whip of a brutal “Capo” (prisoner foreman), felt that they did not know any longer whom to hate.

Besides special dilemmas and temptations provided by the SS, there were the choices inherent in camp life itself, the virtue-mocking, conscience-dulling choices which no one could escape. When a man sees that his survival (or that of his wife or child) depends on a neighbor’s piece of bread and that the neighbor’s survival depends on it, too, the choice is stealing from a starving man or starving. When a council of prisoners meets to discuss an uncontrollably rebellious inmate, whose actions might provoke fatal reprisal against the whole group, the choice is murder of a helpless sufferer or being murdered. Even under such conditions there were men who decided, as conscientiously as they could, on what moral principles they would act and how far they would permit themselves to go. But there were many more who gave in to futility. Those who surrendered came to feel that everyone, themselves included, is irredeemably wrong, or that “right” and “wrong” are terms without meaning.

The base of human knowledge is the evidence provided by the senses, which are man’s primary means of contact with reality. The camps did not restrict their concern to the higher reaches of cognition and evaluation; they went all the way, down to the root.