Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [65]
A possible answer is that in vitiating our idea of human progress, the experience inflicted a moral damage upon mankind. It scarred man’s image of himself horribly, with effects that society is now showing. It may be that the offense against humanity committed by the Germans and permitted by the rest of the world was such that a moral barrier like the sound barrier was broken through, with the result that man, at this moment in history, may no longer believe in his capacity to be good or in the social pattern that once contained him. Disillusioned and without certainty or sense of direction, he appears afflicted and fascinated by self-disgust, as if, having lost sight of the Delectable Mountains, he must wander joylessly in the Cities of the Plain.
This is not a proposition that can be sociologically supported within the limits of a book review. In the book itself Hausner, drawing from all the available evidence, builds up an account which shows how the implausible figure of six million was actually reached. To read the minutes of the Wannsee Conference of 1942 at which the grandiose plan for the Final Solution—extermination of Europe’s Jews—was adopted, is hardly to believe the printed page. No one of the thirteen departments of the German government represented at the meeting questioned the goal, only the methods.
The developing process only becomes believable by watching it happen in these pages, and the immensity of the task suggests the numbers of Germans involved in it: lawyers to draw up the decrees, civil servants to administer them, virtually the whole of the SS to carry out the program, police and certain sections of the Army to assist them, trainmen and truck-drivers to transport the victims, clerks to keep the statistics, bank tellers to tabulate the gold teeth and wedding rings salvaged from the millions of corpses, not to mention the fortunate citizens who received Jewish property, businesses, and belongings.
Amnesia has intervened and our own is no less bland. The role of the free world in this affair, with the exception of the epic Danish rescue and the shelter offered by Sweden and Switzerland, was largely one of omission. In assembling the evidence of repeated opportunity and repeated turning away, Hausner in Chapter 12 reveals the governments of Western democracies in a conspiracy of official silence much as The Deputy revealed the Pope. It forces us to recognize that omission can be an act which must be taken into the final account.
Much of the material of this book has appeared before—most recently in The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg and in the more polemic work of Mr. Hausner’s colleague Jacob Robinson, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight—but nowhere more exhaustively. Mr. Hausner has combined hundreds of accounts by both predators and prey into a towering monument of a book. Its special quality is the reality infused into the incredible facts by the terrifying testimony of survivors. Caught up with them, the reader feels with personal immediacy what it meant to be a Jew, without recourse or exit, in Gestapo-controlled Europe.
The task of having to assemble the case against Eichmann and conduct it under the hot spotlight of world attention, often critical, clearly left Mr. Hausner a ravaged and passionate man, fired by a need to make the public know. What is regrettable is that, writing in a language not his own and ill-served by his editor, he reaches, particularly at the start, for overblown prose to express strength of feeling. This is unfortunate, as it tends to arouse resistance in the reader. However, by skipping the first two chapters, which are unnecessary, the reader will find that the deeper the author gets into his material, the more he lets it speak for itself. All one needs to know is here; the total is overwhelming.
The central and dominant figure is, of course, Lieutenant Colonel Eichmann