Sophie's Choice - William Styron [97]
For the sake of its historical and sociological significance it has to be pointed out that of all of Höss’s codefendants at the postwar trials in Poland and Germany—those satraps and second-string butchers who made up the SS ranks at Auschwitz and other camps—only a handful had a military background. However, this should not be particularly surprising. Military men are capable of abominable crimes; witness, in our recent time alone, Chile, My Lai, Greece. But it is a “liberal” fallacy that equates the military mind with real evil and makes it the exclusive province of lieutenants or generals; the secondary evil of which the military is frequently capable is aggressive, romantic, melodramatic, thrilling, orgasmic. Real evil, the suffocating evil of Auschwitz—gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring—was perpetrated almost exclusively by civilians. Thus we find that the rolls of the SS at Auschwitz-Birkenau contained almost no professional soldiers but were instead composed of a cross section of German society. They included waiters, bakers, carpenters, restaurant owners, physicians, a bookkeeper, a post office clerk, a waitress, a bank clerk, a nurse, a locksmith, a fireman, a customs officer, a legal advisor, a manufacturer of musical instruments, a specialist in machine construction, a laboratory assistant, the owner of a trucking firm... the list goes on and on with these commonplace and familiar citizens’ pursuits. There needs only to be added the observation that history’s greatest liquidator of Jews, the thick-witted Heinrich Himmler, was a chicken farmer.
No real revelation in all this: in modern times most of the mischief ascribed to the military has been wrought with the advice and consent of civil authority. As for Höss, he seems to be something of an anomaly, inasmuch as his pre-Auschwitz career straddled agriculture and the military. The evidence shows that he had been exceptionally dedicated, and it is precisely that rigorous and unbending attitude of spirit—the concept of duty and obedience above all which dwells unshakably in the mind of every good soldier—that gives his memoirs a desolating convincingness. Reading the sickening chronicle, one becomes persuaded that Höss is sincere when he expresses his misgivings, even his secret revulsion, at this or that gassing or cremation or “selection,” and that dark doubts attend the acts he is required to commit. Lurking behind Höss as he writes, one feels, is the spectral presence of the seventeen-year-old boy, the brilliantly promising young Unterfeldwebel of the army of another era, when distinct notions of honor and pride and rectitude were woven into the fabric of the Prussian code, and that the boy is stricken dumb at the unmentionable depravity in which the grown man is mired. But that is of another time and place, another Reich, and the boy is banished into the farthest shadows, the horror receding and fading with him as the doomed ex-Obersturmbannführer scribbles indefatigably away, justifying his bestial deeds in the name of insensate authority, call of duty, blind obedience.
One is somehow convinced by the equanimity of this statement: “I must emphasize that I have never personally hated the Jews. It is true that I looked upon them as the enemies of our people. But just because of this I saw no difference between them and the other prisoners, and I treated them all in the same way. I never drew any distinctions. In any event, the emotion of hatred is foreign to my nature.” In the world of the crematoriums hatred is a reckless and incontinent passion, incompatible with the humdrum nature of the quotidian task. Especially if a man has allowed himself to become depleted of all such distracting emotions, the matter of questioning or mistrusting an order becomes academic; he immediately obeys: “When in the summer of 1941 the Reichsführer SS [Himmler] himself gave me the order to prepare installations at Auschwitz where mass exterminations could take place, and personally carry out these exterminations, I did not have the slightest idea of their scale or consequences.