Antisemitism: Part One of the Origins of Totalitarianism
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107 See Kohn-Bramstedt, op. cit., p. 112.—The blackmail motive is clearly revealed if we consider that this kind of fund-raising was always organized by local SS units in the localities where they were stationed. See Der Weg der SS, issued by the SS-Hauptamt-Schulungsamt (undated), p. 14.
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108 Ibid., p. 124.—Certain compromises in this respect were made for those requirements pertaining to the maintenance of the camps and the personal needs of the SS. See Wolfson, op. cit., letter of September 19, 1941, from Oswald Pohl, head of the WVH (Wirtschafts-und Verwaltungs-Hauptamt) to the Reichskommissar for price control. It seems that all these economic activities in the concentration camps developed only during the war and under the pressure of acute labor shortage.
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109 Himmler’s speech of October, 1943, at Posen, International Military Trials, Nuremberg, 1945-46, Vol. 29, p. 146.
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110 “Bek Bulat (the pen name of a former Soviet professor) has been able to study documents of the North Caucasian NKVD. From these documents it was obvious that in June, 1937, when the great purge was at its apex, the government prescribed the local NKVDs to have a certain percentage of the population arrested.... The percentage varied from one province to the other, reaching 5 per cent in the least loyal areas. The average for the whole of the Soviet Union was about 3 per cent.” Reported by David J. Dallin in The New Leader, January 8, 1949.—Beck and Godin, op. cit., p. 239, arrive at a slightly divergent and quite plausible assumption, according to which “arrests were planned as follows: The NKVD files covered practically the whole population, and everyone was classified in a category. Thus statistics were available in every town showing how many former Whites, members of opposing parties, etc., were living in them. All incriminating material collected ...and gathered from prisoners’ confessions was also entered in the files, and each person’s card was marked to show how dangerous he was considered; this depending on the amount of suspicious or incriminating material appearing in his file. As the statistics were regularly reported to higher authorities, it was possible to arrange a purge at any moment, with full knowledge of the exact number of persons in each category.”
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111 Baldwin, op. fit.
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112 The Russian secret-police cadres were as much at the “personal disposal” of Stalin as the SS Shock Troops (Verfügungstruppen) were at the personal disposal of Hitler. Both, even if they are called to serve with the military forces in time of war, live under their own special jurisdiction. The special “marriage laws” which served to segregate the SS from the rest of the population, were the first and most fundamental regulations which Himmler introduced when he took over the reorganization of the SS. Even prior to Himmler’s marriage laws, in 1927, the SS was instructed by official decree “never [to participate] in discussions at membership meetings” (Der Weg der SS, op. cit.). The same conduct is reported about the members of the NKVD, who kept deliberately to themselves and above all did not associate with other sections of the party aristocracy (Beck and Godin, op. cit., p. 163).
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113 Typical is the splendid career of police agent Malinovsky, who ended as deputy of the Bolsheviks in parliament. See Bertram D. Wolfe, op. cit., chapter xxxi.
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114 Quoted from Avtorkhanov, op. tit.
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115 The Dark Side of the Moon, New York, 1947.
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116 See Laporte, op. cit., p. 39.
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117 Beck and Godin, op. cit., pp. 234 and 127.
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118 See Nazi Conspiracy, VII, 84 ff.
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119 The Dark Side of the Moon.
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120 “There was little in the SS that was not secret. The greatest secret was the practices in the concentration camps. Not even members of the Gestapo were admitted ...to the camps without a special permit” (Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat, Munich, 1946, p. 297).
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121 Beck and Godin, op. cit., p. 169, report how the arrested NKVD officials “took the greatest care never to reveal any NKVD secrets.”
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122 Typical is the following dialogue reported in Dark Side of the Moon: “To an admission that one had ever been outside Poland the next question invariably was: ‘And for whom were you spying?...One man ...asked: ‘But you too have foreign visitors. Do you suppose they are all spies?’ The answer was: ‘What do you think? Do you imagine we are so naive as not to be perfectly aware of it?’”
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123 David Rousset, The Other Kingdom, New York, 1947.
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124 The Nazis were well aware of the protective wall of incredulity which surrounded their enterprise. A secret report to Rosenberg about the massacre of 5,000 Jews in 1943 states explicitly: “Imagine only that these occurrences would become known to the other side and exploited by them. Most likely such propaganda would have no effect only because people who hear and read about it simply would not be ready to believe it” (Nazi Conspiracy, I, 1001).
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125 In the Tischgespräche, Hitler mentions several times that he “[strives] for a condition in which each individual knows that he lives and dies for the preservation of his species” (p. 349). See also p. 347: “A fly lays millions of eggs, all of which perish. But the flies remain.”
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126 The best reports on Nazi concentration camps are David Rousset, Les Jours de Notre Mort, Paris, 1947; Eugen Kogon, op. cit.; Bruno Bettelheim, “On Dachau and Buchenwald” (from May, 1938, to April, 1939), in Nazi Conspiracy, VII, 824 ff. For Soviet concentration camps, see the excellent collection of reports by Polish survivors published under the title The Dark Side of the Moon; also David J. Dallin, op. cit., though his reports are sometimes less convincing because they come from “prominent” personalities who are intent on drawing up manifestos and indictments.
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127 The Dark Side of the Moon; the introduction also stresses this peculiar lack of communication: “They record but do not communicate.”
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128 See especially Bruno Bettelheim, op. cit. “It seemed as if I had become convinced that these horrible and degrading experiences somehow did not happen to ‘me as subject but to ‘me’ as an object. This experience was corroborated by the statements of other prisoners....it was as if I watched things happening in which I only vaguely participated.... This cannot be true, such things just do not happen.’ ... The prisoners had to convince themselves that this was real, was really happening and not just a nightmare. They were never wholly successful.”
See also Rousset, op. cit., p. 213. “...Those who haven’t seen it with their own eyes can’t believe it. Did you yourself, before you came here, take the rumors about the gas chambers seriously?
“No, I said.
“... You see? Well, they’re all like you. The lot of them in Paris, London, New York, even at Birkenau, right outside the crematoriums ...still incredulous, five minutes before they were sent down into the cellar of the crematorium....”
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129 The first to understand this was Rousset in his Univers Concentrationnaire, 1947.
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130 Rousset, op. cit., p. 587.
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131 See Georges Bataille in Critique, January, 1948, p. 72.
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2 Rousset’s book contains many such “insights” into human “nature,” based chiefly on the observation that after a while the mentality of the inmates is scarcely distinguishable from that of the camp guards.
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133 In order to avoid misunderstandings it may be appropriate to add that with the invention of the hydrogen bomb the whole war question has undergone another decisive change. A discussion of this question is of course beyond the theme of this book.
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134 This happened in Germany toward the end of 1942, whereupon Himmler served notice to all camp commandants “to reduce the death rate at all costs.” For it had turned out that of the 136,000 new arrivals, 70,000 were already dead on reaching the camp or died immediately thereafter. See Nazi Conspiracy, IV, Annex II.—Later reports from Soviet Russian camps unanimously confirm that after 1949—that is, when Stalin was still alive—the death rate in the concentration camps, which previously had reached up to 60 per cent of the inmates, was systematically lowered, presumably due to a general and acute labor shortage in the Soviet Union. This improvement in living conditions should not be confused with the crisis of the regime after Stalin’s death which, characteristically enough, first made itself felt in the concentration camps. Cf. Wilhelm Starlinger, Grenzen der Sowjetmacht, Würzburg, 1955.
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135 See Kogon, op. cit., p. 58: “A large pari of the work exacted in the concentration camps was useless, either it was superfluous or it was so miserably planned that it had to be done over two or three times.” Also Bettelheim, op. cit., pp. 831-32: “New prisoners particularly were forced to perform nonsensical tasks.... They felt debased ...and preferred even harder work when it produced something useful....” Even Dallin, who has built his whole book on the thesis that the purpose of Russian camps is to provide cheap labor, is forced to admit the inefficiency of camp labor, op. cit., p. 105.—The current theories about the Russian camp system as an economic measure for providing a cheap labor supply would stand clearly refuted if recent reports on mass amnesties and the abolition of concentration camps should prove to be true. For if the camps had served an important economic purpose, the regime certainly could not have afforded their rapid liquidation without grave consequences for the whole economic system.
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136 Apart from the millions of people whom the Nazis transported to the extermination camps, they constantly attempted new colonization plans—transported Germans from Germany or the occupied territories to the East for colonization purposes. This was of course a serious handicap for military actions and economic exploitation. For the numerous discussions on these subjects and the constant conflict between the Nazi civilian hierarchy in the Eastern occupied territories and the SS hierarchy see especially Vol. XXIX of Trial of the Major War Criminals, Nuremberg, 1947.
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137 Bettelheim, op. cit., notes that the guards in the camps embraced an attitude toward the atmosphere of unreality similar to that of the prisoners themselves.
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138 It is of some importance to realize that all pictures of concentration camps are misleading insofar as they show the camps in their last stages, at the moment the Allied troops marched in. There were no death camps in Germany proper, and at that point all extermination equipment had already been dismantled. On the other hand, what provoked the outrage of the Allies most and what gives the films their special horror—namely, the sight of the human skeletons—was not at ail typical for the German concentration camps; extermination was handled systematically by gas, not by starvation. The condition of the camps was a result of the war events during the final months: Himmler had ordered the evacuation of all extermination camps in the East, the German camps were consequently vastly overcrowded, and he was no longer in a position to assure the food supply in Germany.
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139 That life in a concentration camp was simply a dragged-out process of dying is stressed by Rousset, op. cit., passim.
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140 Maunz, op. cit., p. 50, insists that criminals should never be sent to the camps for the time of their regular sentences.
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141 The shortage of prison space in Russia has been such that in the year 1925-26, only 36 per cent of all court sentences could be carried out. See Dallin, op. cit., p. 158 ff.
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142 “Gestapo and SS have always attached great importance to mixing the categories of inmates in the camps. In no camp have the inmates belonged exclusively to one category” (Kogon, op. cit., p. 19).
In Russia, it has also been customary from the beginning to mix political prisoners and criminals. During the first ten years of Soviet power, the Left political groups enjoyed certain privileges; only with the full development of the totalitarian character of the regime “after the end of the twenties, the politicals were even officially treated as inferior to the common criminals” (Dallin, op. cit., p. 177 ff.).
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143 Rousset’s book suffers from his overestimation of the influence of the German Communists, who dominated the internal administration of Buchenwald during the war.
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144 See for instance the testimony of Mrs. Buber-Neumann (former wife of the German Communist Heinz Neumann), who survived Soviet and German concentration camps: “The Russians never ...evinced the sadistic streak of the Nazis.... Our Russian guards were decent men and not sadists, but they faithfully fulfilled the requirements of the inhuman system” (Under Two Dictators).
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145 Bruno Bettelheim, “Behavior in Extreme Situations,” in Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 4, 1943, describes the self-esteem of the criminals and the political prisoners as compared with those who have not done anything. The latter “were least able to withstand the initial shock,” the first to disintegrate. Bettelheim blames this on their middle-class origin.
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146 Rousset, op. cit., p. 71.
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147 For conditions in French concentration camps, see Arthur Koestler, Scum of the Earth, 1941.
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148 Kogon, op. cit., p. 6.
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149 See Nazi Conspiracy, IV. 800 ff.
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150 Beck and Godin, op. cit., state explicitly that “opponents constituted only a relatively small proportion of the [Russian] prison population” (p. 87), and that there was no connection whatever between “a man’s imprisonment and any offense” (p. 95).
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151 Bruno Bettelheim, “On Dachau and Buchenwald,” when discussing the fact that most prisoners “made their peace with the values of the Gestapo,” emphasizes that “this was not the result of propaganda ...the Gestapo insisted that it would prevent them from expressing their feelings anyway” (pp. 834-35).
Himmler explicitly prohibited propaganda of any kind in the camps. “Education consists of discipline, never of any kind of instruction on an ideological basis.” “On Organization and Obligation of the SS and the Police,” in National-politischer Lehrgang tier Wehrmacht, 1937. Quoted from Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 616 ff.
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152 Rousset, op. cit., p. 464.
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153 See the report of Sergei Malakhov in Dallin, op. cit., pp. 20 ff.
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154 See Albert Camus in Twice A Year, 1947.
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155 Rousset’s book, op. cit., consists largely of discussions of this dilemma by prisoners.
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156 Bettelheim, op. cit., describes the process by which the guards as well as the prisoners became “conditioned” to the life in the camp and were afraid of returning to the outer world.
Rousset, therefore, is right when he insists that the truth is that “victim and executioner are alike ignoble; the lesson of the camps is the brotherhood of abjection” (p. 588).
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157 Bettelheim, op. cit., describes how “the main concern of the new prisoners seemed to be to remain intact as a personality” while the problem of the old prisoners was “how to live as well as possible within the camp.”
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158 Rousset, op. cit., p. 390, reports an SS-man haranguing a professor as follows: “You used to be a professor. Well, you’re no professor now. You’re no big shot any more. You’re nothing but a little runt now. Just as little as you can be. I’m the big fellow now.”
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159 Kogon, op. cit., p. 6, speaks of the possibility that the camps will be maintained as training and experimental grounds for the SS. He also gives a good report on the difference between the early camps administered by the SA and the later ones under the SS. “None of these first camps had more than a thousand inmates.... Life in them beggared all description. The accounts of the few old prisoners who survived those years agree that there was scarcely any form of sadistic perversion that was not practiced by the SA men. But they were all acts of individual bestiality, there was still no fully organized cold system, embracing masses of men. This was the accomplishment of the SS” (p. 7).
This new mechanized system eased the feeling of responsibility as much as was humanly possible. When, for instance, the order came to kill every day several hundred Russian prisoners, the slaughter was performed by shooting through a hole without seeing the victim. (See Ernest Feder, “Essai sur la Psychologie de la Terreur,” in Syntheses, Brussels, 1946.) On the other hand, perversion was artificially produced in otherwise normal men. Rousset reports the following from a SS guard: “Usually I keep on hitting until I ejaculate. I have a wife and three children in Breslau. I used to be perfectly normal. That’s what they’ve made of me. Now when they give me a pass out of here, I don’t go home. I don’t dare look my wife in the face” (p. 273).—The documents from the Hitler era contain numerous testimonials for the average normality of those entrusted with carrying out Hitler’s program of extermination. A good collection is found in Leon Poliakov’s “The Weapon of Antisemitism,” published by UNESCO in The Third Reich, London, 1955. Most of the men in the units used for these purposes were not volunteers but had been drafted from the ordinary police for these special assignments. But even trained SS-men found this kind of duty worse than front-line fighting. In his report of a mass execution by the SS, an eyewitness gives high praise to this troop which had been so “idealistic” that it was able to bear “the entire extermination without the help of liquor.”