Ominous Parallels

by Leonard Peikoff

  Since the prisoners knew that all could be punished for the acts of any one man, they often feared and tried to stop independent action on the part of other inmates, even action aimed at helping prisoners in special need or danger. Thus feats of heroic courage were often condemned by the beneficiaries themselves, and the heroes, in Bettelheim’s words, were “kept from rekindling respect for the individual, or from inspiring an appreciation of independence.”15

  Disappear into the mass, the inmate was told repeatedly by the guards: “Don’t dare to be noticeable,” “Don’t dare to come to my attention.” The inmates had to obey—e.g., to fight for the least conspicuous spots in roll-call formations; if a man was noticeable, he might be noticed, and not survive it. On pain of instant beating or death, the victim had to shrink out of the Nazis’ sight and hearing. He had to try to erase any external signs of individuality and turn himself into the anonymous cell his captors held him to be. In effect he had to absorb the guards’ perspective and become, so far as possible, a self-made cipher.

  That a specific intention and not merely random cruelty was behind the above is indicated by the policy of the SS toward those prisoners who agreed to serve as their spies. A spy was always vulnerable to reprisals from other prisoners, but the SS would protect a spy only for a limited time, even if he was transmitting desired information; after this time they would kill him (or allow him to be killed). “Under no circumstances,” explains Bettelheim, “would they let a prisoner become a person through his own efforts, even if those efforts were useful to the SS.”16

  The prisoner could not become a person—above all, in his own eyes. He had to lose any connection to the realm of human efficacy or human worth. He had to learn to see himself as a cringing, foul-smelling subanimal, a thing capable of nothing but momentary escape from terror and momentary satisfaction of the lowest physical needs.

  It was not enough for the prisoners to bury and forget their individuality; as some of the prisoners grasped at the time, it was intended that they become in their own eyes objects of loathing.

  At the outset [writes one survivor] the living places, the ditches, the mud, the piles of excrement behind the blocks, had appalled me with their horrible filth.... and then I saw the light! I saw that it was not a question of disorder or lack of organization but that, on the contrary, a very thoroughly considered conscious idea was in the back of the camp’s existence. They had condemned us to die in our own filth, to drown in mud, in our own excrement. They wished to abase us, to destroy our human dignity, to efface every vestige of humanity, to return us to the level of wild animals, to fill us with horror and contempt toward ourselves and our fellows.17

  You cannot understand, because this world cannot be understood; such was the first part of the message broadcast to the prisoner by all the man-degrading, soul-destroying conditions he encountered, including the living standards incompatible with life, the rules without cause, the tortures without purpose—the conditions which no mind could take in or grasp, the conditions imposed because no mind could grasp them. And: you cannot understand, because you are nothing; such was the second part of the message.

  To preserve a sense of self-value, some prisoners clung in the privacy of their own mind to the power of moral judgment, fiercely affirming the depravity of their torturers and the righteousness of their own cause: survival. In regard to acting on such judgment these men did what they could. Washing, for instance, was considered by many inmates to be a matter of life-and-death importance. This was not “for purposes of cleanliness and health,” a survivor of Auschwitz explains; it was “necessary as an instrument of moral survival,” because it expressed “the power to refuse our consent.”18 Washing was a means of defying the Nazi campaign of degradation; it was a daily reaffirmation of one’s human status; it was a demonstration in action of that without which men could not survive psychologically: self-assertion, self-protection, self-esteem.

  Many prisoners, however, though they may have tended themselves as routine, could not use the weapon of moral judgment. They had succumbed to the camps’ war against what Miss Arendt calls “the moral person,” i.e., to the SS men’s campaign against morality as such.

  One method of this campaign was to confront the prisoner with insolvable dilemmas posing unthinkable alternatives, and then demand that he make a choice. A man would have to choose, for instance, whether to betray and thus send to their death his friends, or his wife and children; to make his position still more impossible he would be warned that suicide would lead to his family’s murder. Or a mother would be told to pick out which one of her children the Nazis should kill.

  It was not enough for the prisoner passively to endure evil; the intention was first to paralyze his moral faculty, then to force him, whatever his choice, to implicate himself in evil. The prisoner becomes, in Miss Arendt’s words, a creature who chooses “no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder”; and he seems to himself to become, however unwillingly, an accessory to the killers. In reason, no man can be held responsible for actions or decisions which have been forced upon him. In many cases, nevertheless, the camp policy did achieve its goal: in the minds of dazed, starving men, it was able to blur the line between victim and killer. The result was to erode the concept of moral responsibility as such, and/or to shift the guilt to the victim.19

  To institutionalize this kind of result (and also to reduce the camps’ need for Nazi manpower), the SS regularly offered to prisoners positions of substantial power in the camp administration. Since the men picked for these jobs effectively controlled most daily operations, they gained a much more secure and tolerable life. These men were in effect allowed to “become a person”; the price was the kind of person they had to become, the kind who demonstrated his loyalty by outdoing the Nazis in harshness.

  Some prisoners were tempted by such a prospect. Some gave in, choosing to become torturers rather than objects of torture. Many, writhing under the whip of a brutal “Capo” (prisoner foreman), felt that they did not know any longer whom to hate.

  Besides special dilemmas and temptations provided by the SS, there were the choices inherent in camp life itself, the virtue-mocking, conscience-dulling choices which no one could escape. When a man sees that his survival (or that of his wife or child) depends on a neighbor’s piece of bread and that the neighbor’s survival depends on it, too, the choice is stealing from a starving man or starving. When a council of prisoners meets to discuss an uncontrollably rebellious inmate, whose actions might provoke fatal reprisal against the whole group, the choice is murder of a helpless sufferer or being murdered. Even under such conditions there were men who decided, as conscientiously as they could, on what moral principles they would act and how far they would permit themselves to go. But there were many more who gave in to futility. Those who surrendered came to feel that everyone, themselves included, is irredeemably wrong, or that “right” and “wrong” are terms without meaning.

  The base of human knowledge is the evidence provided by the senses, which are man’s primary means of contact with reality. The camps did not restrict their concern to the higher reaches of cognition and evaluation; they went all the way, down to the root.

  The concomitant of the conditions declaring: “Who are you to understand?” and “Who are you to judge?” was the brazen campaign declaring: “Who are you to perceive?”

  “Don’t dare to notice”—the prisoners were ordered—don’t look at what is going on around you, avert your eyes and ears, don’t be conscious. To violate this rule, Bettelheim states, was dangerous. “For example, if an SS man was killing off a prisoner and other prisoners dared to look at what was going on in front of their eyes he would instantly go after them, too.”

  To avoid such reprisals the prisoner had to learn to suppress any outward signs of perceptiveness (as he had to suppress any signs of individuality); or else he had really to comply with the rule, to train himself in the art and practice of nonperception. Sometimes
(if he could not help knowing a forbidden fact) “this passive compliance—not to see or not to know—was not enough; in order to survive one had to actively pretend not to observe, not to know what the SS required one not to know.”20

  Some prisoners concluded that the safest course was to become mentally inert, to deliberately suspend their own consciousness and allow their power of observation to atrophy. The greater a prisoner’s intelligence, they felt, the more he grasped or knew, the greater was the threat to his survival. To these men the inversion was complete: in the outside world, perception was a necessity of life; in the camps the two were antonyms. But nonperception did not work, either: to the extent that prisoners succeeded in stifling their power of awareness, they were helpless to protect themselves even from avoidable danger, and they did not last long.

  Not infrequently a guard who had forbidden a prisoner to notice a certain action would, a few minutes later, call the same prisoner’s attention to the action and even stress it. “This was no contradiction,” Bettelheim explains, “it was simply an impressive lesson that said: you may notice only what we wish you to notice, but you invite death if you notice things on your own volition.”

  The prisoner was expected to give up everything; he was to give up every voluntary trait and function, from thought and values down to the movement of his eyes and the tilt of his head. “But,” remarks Bettelheim, “if one gives up observing, reacting, and taking action, one gives up living one’s own life. And this is exactly what the SS wanted to happen.”21

  Most of the guards did not know it, but the same type of cause was producing the same type of effect in them, also. The young SS man may have imagined that he was merely doing a job or earning a promotion, but, in fact, he was no longer living his own life, either.

  The guards were well-clothed, well-fed, and ideologically trained. But they, too, were being processed and shaped. The prisoner was learning to submit to absolute power. The guard (or administrator) was learning to wield it, with everything this requires, and destroys, in the wielder.

  With every causeless punishment he inflicted, whether in response to an order or on his own initiative, the young guard was negating the idea of man as a sovereign, rights-possessing entity; he was negating it not only in the prisoner’s mind, but in his own. With every unthinkable atrocity he committed, the guard was negating his former sense of morality; he was helping to make unreal in his own eyes his pre-camp life, including such non-Nazi values as he had once pursued. With every insane rule and switching contradiction he enforced or invented, the guard was schooling himself in senselessness; he was learning to make the negation of logic into a mental habit, which soon became second nature to him. (The guard experienced all these negations from the receiving end, also: there was no form of punishment or evil or wanton caprice that his superiors did not inflict on him, whenever they chose.)

  The guards’ defiance of all sense created in them a profound feeling of instability and helplessness and, as a result, a profound feeling of dependence on their superiors. Thus obedience in the camps became a self-reinforcing trait: it was gradually stripping the SS of their capacity to judge or to protest. Obedience was turning the young Nazis into monsters, monsters of obedience. According to Bettelheim, the higher a man stood in the hierarchy, the more fully he embodied this state. Bettelheim gives the example of Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, who

  so laid aside his personal existence that he ended a mere executor of official demands. While his physical death came later, he became a living corpse from the time he assumed command of Auschwitz.... [H]e had to divest himself so entirely of self respect and self love, of feeling and personality, that for all practical purposes he was little more than a machine functioning only as his superiors flicked the buttons of command.22

  The power-lusters of the death factories did not pursue their quest with impunity. The opponents of man’s rights, trampling on the rights of others, were underscoring their own rightlessness. The crusaders against the individual, crushing the “self respect and self love” of their enemies, were losing their own in the process. The authors and rulers of a brain-wrecking dimension, learning to accept and adapt to it, were making themselves brainless.

  No one, neither prisoners nor guards, could stand it or even fully believe it.

  The prisoners could not believe a world in which the whim of the SS set all the terms of human existence, replacing reality as the basic absolute and frame of reference. They could not believe a world which seemed, in Miss Arendt’s words, “to give permanence to the process of dying itself,” as if “some evil spirit gone mad were amusing himself by stopping them for a while between life and death....” They had to struggle even to take in the kind of events they witnessed or heard about, such as major surgery being performed on prisoners by trained doctors, “without the slightest reason,” a survivor writes, and without anesthesia; or, as another reports, an inmate being thrown for punishment into “a large kettle of boiling water, intended for preparing coffee for the camp. The [victim] was scalded to death, but the coffee was prepared from the water all the same”; or youngsters being picked out at random, “seized by their feet and dashed against tree trunks”; or flames “leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. [The Nazis] were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load—little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it—saw it with my own eyes.... Was I awake? I could not believe it.”

  “It seemed to me, I’m in another world.... It was so unbelievable that many of the prisoners had hallucinations ...” (survivor of Auschwitz). “I lived as in a dream, waiting for someone to awaken me” (survivor of Auschwitz). “This can’t be true; such things just don’t happen” (prisoners at Buchenwald, according to Bettelheim).23

  Aside from the actual murders, this was the most lethal feature of the camps: that most prisoners could not accept the reality of what they saw, they could not reconcile the horror with life as they had once known it, and yet they could not deny the evidence of their senses. To such men, the camps lost all connection to life on earth and acquired a kind of metaphysical aura, the aura of being not human institutions in Europe, but “another world,” an impossible world, like a second, supernatural dimension of existence inconceivable in itself yet wiping out the first. The concentration camp seemed to its inmates to be a dimension which is at the same time a foolish nightmare and true reality; a dimension which cannot be, yet cannot be escaped; a dimension which is not, but which also, terrifyingly, is. It was a world of A and non-A .

  By the nature of what went on behind the barbed-wire fences, the concentration camps to most inmates represented in essence, a universe which violates the basic law of exis tence, the Law of Identity.

  Most prisoners could have coped somehow with privation or with pain, or even (up to a point) with purposeful torture in a knowable world. They were helpless to deal with metaphysical disorientation. They could not cope with the eerie feeling that the solid objects and facts of the past have vanished; that there is no difference any longer between truth and raving; that the universe itself, the realm and sum of that which is, has gone crazy. The concomitant of such a feeling is a state of paralysis.

  Some prisoners were able to hold on to their knowledge of reality even during the camp experience. They were able to defeat the eerie “other world” around them by clinging to some kind of consistent convictions of their own, on the implicit premise that, the camps to the contrary notwithstanding, things are what they are. Many prisoners, however, had no lead to explain any part of what they saw, and they succumbed to the metaphysical pressure.

  The most widely known of the latter cases are the columns of prisoners who marched to certain death with no attempt to put up a fight, despite the fact that they vastly outnumbered the guards. This phenomenon, often taken as a sign of cowardice, has nothing to do with the concepts of courage or cowardice, which are inapplicable in this context. These prisoners did know the fate in store for them—they had heard about it fr
om others, or they saw the smoke coming from the crematoria, or they smelled the burning flesh—but most of them could not believe or deal with a universe where such a fate, on such a scale and without any reason, was possible. The result was inertia, vagueness, mental drifting, and obedience. (Some undoubtedly were not disoriented, but chose passivity deliberately, as a form of suicide.)

  What disarmed the death-marchers was the converse of the Big Lie: the Incredible Truth,24 which cannot be accepted and which acts to annul the victim’s grasp of reality as such.

  The final product of the camps, one which the Nazis carefully shaped, was death. What the SS shaped was mass death without a murmur of protest; death accepted placidly by victims and killers alike; death carried out not as any kind of exception, not as an act of purposeful vengeance or hatred, but as casual, smiling, even homey routine, often against a background of colorful flower beds and to the accompaniment of lilting operetta music. It was to be death as a confirmation of all that had preceded it, death as a last demonstration of absolute power and absolute unreason, death as the final triumph of Nazism over man and over the human spirit.

  But the killers, too, were human, at least biologically, and even with all their training could hardly stomach such a triumph. Most could not face what they were doing and tried not to know whatever they did not have to know. Like the prisoners, the SS, too, ended up in effect practicing the art of “not noticing.” The prisoner’s “noticing” was to be knocked out of him by terror; for itself the SS found another method: drink.

  Most of the guards were drunk so often that sobriety became noteworthy: “In his report of a mass execution by the SS,” Miss Arendt writes, “a [Nazi] 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.”25