Life Sentences (27 page)

Some senior German officers, who still believed in the traditional rules of engagement and the gallantries of military etiquette, and who were therefore increasingly disturbed by the rapacious behavior of the militias, began to protest and to make arrests, but Hitler
immediately issued an amnesty for acts motivated by “bitterness against the atrocities committed by the Poles.” Colonel-General Johannes Blaskowitz, who was at that time Commander in Chief East, complained in a memo to the führer of the horrible atrocities that now shadowed the conscience of the country, and of crimes the state would see reason to regret later; but many officers were only too happy to hand whatever brutality they saw or guilt they bore over to the SS, and soon Blaskowitz had another, much less important post. Demotions were lessons to others.

The grander aim behind these persecutions was the emptying of Poland of its Jewish/Polish inhabitants in order to fill it with repatriated Germans. After all, if you are going to acquire a bigger house, its previous owners should not be still flushing the toilets. Expulsions could be rather prompt—twenty minutes in some cases—and the journey cold. One trainload delivered the bodies of forty frozen children, dead on arrival but at their proper station. Eighty-eight thousand Poles and Jews of Posen were whisked away in this fashion during early December of 1939, to be sorted out. Relocation took more time, and a lot more money, since the genuine Germanness of people who had often lived for years away from the Fatherland had to be verified, fakers detected, Jews and weaklings weeded out, and some recompense made to the winners for their losses.

Page after page rolls by the reader’s eye bearing these, even now, astonishing statistics—shocking, revolting, numbing, relentless—that sum up how many broken families, beaten bodies, and murdered men and women, how much loot and illicit booty, how many cruelties had, during this month or that, in simple village or chaotic battlefield, been undertaken and accomplished. The record is rich with irony. For every sincere member of the master race there were those who took bribes from the Jews as often as they took their lives. While the big—the organized—war went on, small wars everywhere flared and flowered. When food became scarce, the black markets had specials. The vast government organization had more cracks than any comedian, and up and down them thousands of busy
creatures scurried, carrying baskets of fruit, tins of fish, bundles of carrots, barrels of oil, bolts of silk, as well as the traditional cigs, booze, chocolates, and lingerie. I wonder what one day’s collection of screams might fetch.

With acres of their fields burned, crops requisitioned, and farmers enslaved, the population began to starve. Rations, if you were a Pole, came to no more than 669 calories a day. Jews received 184. An officer’s spit might contain that much. Robbers roamed the roads and forests. Diseases spread as the body’s resistance also failed. In France, when Germany overran it, refuges fled one city only to fill another. Friends turned upon friends. Denunciation replaced
“bonjour.”
So the campaign of extermination was going nicely. Thin women were the only ones around but nonetheless inviting, exchanging syphilis for a few hundred calories of love.

On the eastern edges of Poland, where the Russians were employing very similar methods of murder and deportation, conditions, though sometimes different, were no better, and the killing contest, at an admittedly rough count, continued to turn out a draw. Jews scarcely knew which way to run; nor dared they stay in place, since anti-Semitism was, in Poland (as it was in Hungary, Romania, the Ukraine) a flourishing native plant. Evans is succinct: “The deliberate reduction of Poland to a state of nature, the boundless exploitation of its resources, the radical degradation of everyday life, the arbitrary exercise of unfettered power, the violent expulsion of Poles from their homes—all of this opened the way to the application of unbridled terror against Poland’s Jews.”

Is this particular mistreatment of the Jews entirely the result of years of Nazi propaganda or even of ancient misgivings? Is something more going on? Because even if I think no better of my neighbor than I do my dog, I treat my dog rather well, and can find the time to feed her, pet her, train her, walk her around. Even if I think of my neighbor as a leper, I might be expected to wish no more for him than removal to a colony; moreover I might be assumed to think of my leper’s daughter as disgusting and far from desirable, when in fact I cannot wait to take her in my arms as roughly as necessary, her
skin as intimate to me as mine, and then to enter her every aperture. Do I not care where I send my sperm?

The previous volumes of this history will help the reader confront such questions, because they chronicle the historic events that led to National Socialism’s seizure of power in Germany (The
Coming of the Third Reich
, 2003), and then to its solidification (The
Third Reich in Power
, 2005). This particular period in history has given rise to a myriad of questions, some perhaps odd, others almost mysterious. For instance, only one conglomeration of events can be called “the Holocaust.” To write of “a” holocaust suggests there might have been others, and damages this one’s almost sacred status. Is, then, its singularity enough to deprive it of any place in a customary causal path so that history cannot account for it? Or is the Holocaust just the largest of a class of catastrophes, like eruptions, hurricanes, and landslides are? How many must die to achieve the number necessary to count as a holocaust? Fifty thousand? Four hundred thousand? Three million? Is it like deciding that among winds one is the windiest?

Perhaps it is how well organized and sponsored these massacres were that makes them so special. They were a real corporate enterprise, involving the apparatus of a nation-state. On the other hand, Croats, Hungarians, Romanians, including the Poles who were picked on, even the French and the Dutch Nazis, eagerly helped out. Many other issues are theological, such as wondering what God’s purpose was in levying such punishment upon the Jews. Questions of this kind do not trouble historians much. On the other hand, the failure of nearly every element of humanistic interest and accomplishment in Germany to dissuade, slow down, or oppose the actions of the state, borders on total, and this sad futility is discouraging to those who thought that “higher culture” included a more refined morality. Is the fact that older generations of Germans were more likely to disapprove of mass murder due to the younger ones enduring an earlier and longer period of brainwashing, or just to their higher level of testosterone?

There are several strategies one might employ for lessening the
guilt of the Germans without denying the occurrence of their crimes. A number are currently operating in the guise of (fraudulent) memoirs or romanticizing movies. A few such are cited by Jacob Heilbrunn in an article for
The New York Times
. Heilbrunn remarks that “the further the Holocaust recedes into the past, the more it’s being exploited to create a narrative of redemption.” Recently, stories of German opposition to Nazi actions have become particularly popular. There is, however, little that is exotic or particularly daring about the occasional leaflet campaigns that the Social Democrats managed to set going as late as the summer of 1934. Evans, in his second volume, points out that “[b]y this time, almost all the other leading Social Democrats who had remained in Germany were in prison, in a concentration camp, silenced or dead.” Even those who would endeavor to kill Hitler were mostly motivated by their conviction that Germany was finally losing the war, rather than by any deep-seated objections to his policies. At least, that was the opinion the
London Times
found in its reviews of
Germans Against Hitler
by Hans Mommsen (translated into English in 2008) and
Luck of the Devil
(2009) by Ian Kershaw. Although one dead fly may ruin an entire porridge, an innocent olive will not render benevolent a poisoned glass.

Richard Evans is a veteran of these revisionist wars, having earned a few medals for his testimony at the trial of one of honesty’s enemies, David Irving, who had the chutzpah to sue Deborah Lipstadt (a professor at Emory University) for libeling him in her book
Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory
(1993)—a careful exposure of this movement’s bowel-like (regular, hidden, contemptible) strategies. Evans’s evidence has been presented in his own
Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial
(2001). Irving lost his case, but these apologists are not easy to discourage. They lurk about the edges of conflicts like this, especially now that the Internet lends its facilities to any voice that cares to attach a pseudonymous name or academic title to a site from which they can fire off innuendos, profit from ignorance, and cast suspicion. Another excellent exposure of revisionist methods can be
found in Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s
Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust
(1987.) If there are any purely “intellectual crimes,” denying the reality of the Holocaust is surely one of them.

Still, one excuse that I rather like is the presumption that any group of people, finding themselves in the same sort of situation, their histories stocked with similar resentments, would act in a comparably vengeful fashion. Suppose that I have been a pitiful powerless person my whole life, and the child of similarly helpless victims of war, humiliation, and economic collapse. Now, suddenly, finally, I carry your life in my holster, I can act with impunity and at whim, but I must remind the world of my elevation by repeated demonstrations, the more vulgar, petty, and disgusting the better. So after I have raped this Polish-Tunisian-Greek-Gypsy girl, who certainly deserved it, I shall invent little sadistic extras to demand of her: that she cleans the public latrines with her blouse. Jewish bystanders shall be required to doff their silly hats. Polish scum shall be made to lie flat in the mud and kiss dirt. While they are thus prone I shall try not to wobble when I walk upon one of them, but they are incorrigibly lumpy.

But it was the Romanian members of the Iron Guard who did the human race proud when they forced two hundred Jewish men into a slaughterhouse, flayed them from their clothes, and made them walk the line to their stockyard executions, after which their corpses were hung up on meat hooks that had been run through their throats. Those German “doctors,” who looked upon the Jewish children in their hands very much as we do laboratory mice, yet wishing to erase any evidence of their experiments upon them, considerately shot the kids full of morphine and had them hung on hooks for SS men to yank as one has to tug when extricating clothes from a crowded closet.

“Croatian Ustashe units,” perhaps out of friendly rivalry and to demonstrate that you didn’t have to be a Jew, “gouged out the eyes of Serbian men and cut off the women’s breasts with penknives.” They also carried out clever sting operations by promising amnesty to any
villager who converted to Catholicism and then beating to death with spiked clubs the three hundred who showed up at a Glina church for the conversion ceremony. Sometimes they just used ordinary hammers.

And to those making inquiries later, I shall say I did so because someone wearing the appropriate suit of authority or religious habit said it was okay. I shall say I did so because I’ve had a rather hard life myself. I shall say I did so because I am really scared of these flat-black-hatted machinates whose evil ways I’ve heard about on the radio. They are moneylenders, evil connivers, members of the Red Menace. Just look at them: dirty and diseased, bearing beards just begging to be tugged, eating grass like meadow cows. Down what dark twisted avenue of delight does this delight await me? And if I were a member of the Iron Guard that day, would I now—would anyone?—excuse myself by saying those Jews deserved the punishment of the slaughterhouse?

Well, we were preoccupied with our lives at the time, and didn’t notice.

Is it somehow more or less awful if one man kills another hand to hand, or by bomb from a plane, or with a signature at the end of a page? What legitimizes murder: being a soldier in a nice tidy correctly declared war? Or a marine who is taking part in an unprovoked and preemptive attack? Perhaps we are considering a civilian who does in one of the enemy with a hay fork, or a member of the militia who acts in obedience to an order and delivers a merciful shot to the head of a prisoner kneeling before a pit previously prepared for his folded form. What is the degree of difference?

Contrary to common belief, monoxide fumes can be ghastly; reports about how it feels to be buried alive are slight; hanging is far too slow a method; poison is also unpromising. Is it okay to kick in a kidney because its owner is dirty, wearing the wrong clothes, clerks in a hardware store, is a disloyal Red, a moron, merely blind, walks with a limp, or should these people be sent to hospitals, psycho wards, and other capitals of euthanasia?

How should I know? I was preoccupied with my life at the time, and paid no mind.

Do we really have to fuss a lot over who deserves to die? Chance or whim does in the unlucky. Other times it is death by doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. Preemptive strikes against progeny, including mass sterilizations, were studied. “Senior SS officers fantasized about such methods being applied to 10 million racially inferior people, or to Jewish men needed only for labor.…” These were happy times for serial killers, and for those who needed to let off steam in order to seek anger relief. I wonder if the statisticians who are so devoted to numbers have calculated how many commonplace outrages were committed under cover of the general criminality. Well, you must know that the Russians are massacring millions too. And after the way I—we—they’ve been treated, what did you expect? The Jews took it lying down. Starvation, disease did it, whatever it was, not I. The Americans dropped that bomb, didn’t they? Listen, I let the Warsaw Jews have their own mayor. Because it was winter, a load of young children froze while enjoying their train ride. Some things can’t be helped. A few hearts failed from fear of being gassed, or waiting in line and being last. But, gee, there are more Jews now than ever. More Poles too. And that proves that there were never as many killed as has been maintained. Look at what the Allies did to Dresden. What gas chambers? I don’t see any gas chambers.