Inferno - Max Hastings [316]
In the occupied countries, law was no longer an absolute, but became whatever the conquerors chose that it should be. Few Germans were as squeamish as the Abwehr official Helmuth von Moltke, who during a visit to Oslo found himself occupying a requisitioned Norwegian home. “The … disgusting thing was the feeling of having entered a stranger’s house, to sit there like thieves, while the owner, as I knew, sat in a concentration camp.” In Łódź in April 1940, the Slazak family was evicted from their small flat and shop, which were given to their neighbours, who were ethnic Germans; George’s mother wept bitterly. “My dear father was a gentle giant. I had never known him to lose his temper. Seeing the Bucholts take our home and shop, he shook with anger, but could say nothing with two Gestapo men present.”
German and Japanese carpetbaggers who had achieved little status or respect in their own societies became proconsuls in their nations’ new possessions; Takase Toru, from 1942 to 1945 a powerful figure in Japanese-ruled Singapore, taunted Chinese business leaders: “I have been to Malaya three times before, and seen many of you at dinner table … but you had not paid any notice to me then.” The Japanese extorted a “gift” of 50 million straits dollars from the Chinese community, renamed many streets and advanced clocks two hours to Tokyo time. During the brief 1942 honeymoon between the Burmese and their “liberators,” a Japanese classical theatre troupe performed in Rangoon, singing:
Let us dance happily,
And if we dance happily,
It will be in the heart of Tokyo,
Joy! Joy!
In the midst of Tokyo flowers.
But Japanese arrogance and brutality soon destroyed the goodwill of the Burmese people. Malays likewise recoiled from their new masters’ conduct, exemplified by their ubiquitous habit of urinating in public. The local population was outraged by the Japanese custom of administering a rebuke by a slap in the face. The occupiers grudgingly modified this practice in 1943, decreeing that only senior officers, colonels and above, could physically abuse natives; but scant heed was paid to the restriction. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, vivid chroniclers of the Asian experience, have written: “The Japanese seemed hardly more culturally sensitive than the British and were certainly more brutal.”
Hans Frank, the Nazi ruler of Poland, wrote in his 1942 diary: “Humanity is a word that one dares not use … The power and the certainty of being able to use force without any resistance are the sweetest and most noxious poison that can be introduced into any government.” This is an important statement, for it captures the exhilaration experienced by many Germans and Japanese on finding themselves, together with their local acolytes, occupying posts which conferred absolute powers of life and death. In ordinary peacetime life, men’s and women’s actions are constrained not only by law but by social convention; even those who might feel no moral inhibitions about pillaging, injuring or killing others are subject to machinery which prevents them from doing so. But the men who exercised authority under the totalitarian regimes, emphatically including that of the Soviet Union, knew themselves to be liberated from all constraints and safeguards upon the sanctity of human life, provided only that killings advanced the purposes of the system they served. This huge, terrible freedom thrilled its beneficiaries: the few Nazi officeholders who afterwards gave honest testimony described their exercise of power in lyrical terms.
It was hard for victims, accustomed to lives in ordered communities, to grasp the implications of their absolute impotence. The chasm between a bourgeois society going about its lawful business and the Arbeit Macht Frei entrance arch to Auschwitz was initially too wide for comprehension. Occupation and subjection seemed bad enough; only progressively did it become apparent that there could be higher gradations