Jesús Tecú Osorio, Rabinal, Guatemala, June 2008
Elie Ngarambe, Kigali, Rwanda, May 2008
The facts of the perpetrators’ bodily actions offer voluminous evidence that seamlessly complements the evidence of the perpetrators’ words, showing that they approve of the eliminationist assaults and goals to which they contribute. As these and legions of other instances demonstrate, eliminationist perpetrators routinely degrade and torture their victims physically. They degrade them by using them as playthings, bending them to their will, using them to display their dominance, showing them in so many, often diabolical, ways that they are masters and the victims are without rights, respect, or the basic human protections. The perpetrators imprint on their victims’ bodies, and thereby their psyches, their conception of them as worthless or vile beings who deserve their hopeless fate. Breaking the victims’ bodies and spirit is often integral to the eliminationist project. For those victims for whom such cruelty is a prelude to death, they suffer the expressive venting of the perpetrators’ hatred. For those victims left alive, the crippling, defining memories of suffering are also meant to warn them of their fate should they resist or seek to turn the tables. The perpetrators’ organized raping, such as the Serbs’ institutionalized raping of Bosniak and Kosovar women, is a textbook instance.
Shortly before deporting the Jews of Łuków, Poland, to Treblinka’s gas chambers in November 1942, Germans of Police Battalion 101 take time out to force Jews to pose for photographic mementos.
Such perpetrators’ actions and expressions are mass extermination and elimination’s commonplaces, familiar to those even passably acquainted with such operations. They cannot possibly be accounted for by any postulate holding the perpetrators to disapprove or not approve of their deeds. If you are told to kill or guard a person, you do not have to degrade, mock, and torture that person. You do not have to pursue her death with zeal, passion, and energy, and take initiative to execute the deed. You do not have to memorialize the deed by taking trophy photographs of your quarry or handiwork, of the kind contained in the photo album of a Japanese soldier in Manchuria, titled “Bandit Suppression Operation Commemorative Picture,” which captured soldiers going into action. The album contained several photos of scenes in which the soldier himself had participated: “One showed three severed heads, one with eyes still staring, balanced on a fence; another, a soldier holding a precisely severed head by its hair, the face turned toward the camera; yet another of a Chinese, his arms bound tightly, is captured in [the soldier’s own] hand, ‘his life hangs by a thread.’”56
Auschwitz personnel gather for drinks at a hunting lodge, Solahütte retreat near Auschwitz, Poland, 1944.
A fact ignored by all those denying the German perpetrators’ willingness and approval is the reason archives filled with photographs of the Holocaust exist: The perpetrators took them. They did so, obviously, not to create evidence to indict themselves but to memorialize and celebrate their deeds. In emblematic scenes from the Holocaust, German personnel at Auschwitz, where the Germans gassed more than a million Jews, let themselves be photographed in festive, merry poses, preserved in a photo album of Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the camp commander. Similarly, Kurt Franz, the commander of Treblinka, where the Germans gassed more than 700,000 Jews, kept a photographic scrapbook celebrating his time there, as his handwritten words on one page tells us, as “The Good Old Days.”
The Germans regularly photographed the Jews in agony or dead (often in piles), or themselves in joyous poses mocking them, frequently forcing them to pose in genre scenes. The Germans were brazen and proud about their photographs. They passed them around, sent them home to loved ones, enshrined them in photo albums. German perpetrators treated the memorializing photographs of their extermination operations of Jews, including of “Jew hunts,” as their common property. One unit of ordinary German perpetrators hung their photographs in their headquarters, so that the unit’s members could order copies.57 Of these men who sent copies to their families, we do not know what they wrote. But we do know what Ferdinand Welz, an artillery man, wrote in May 1942, when he sent his parents several photographs. The batch included the extraordinarily gruesome, almost surrealistic bird’s-eye-view photograph (reproduced above) of naked and partly clothed corpses of Polish Jews piled on top of one another in a ditch, with arms and legs and heads and torsos intertwined. Few people could look at such a shocking scene—of the sort many have probably never beheld—without recoiling in horror. Referring to these photographs, Welz wrote: “I am enclosing for you several photographs, which I hope will not make you feel ill. Yes, they’re Jews. For them, the dream of Germany’s annihilation is over.”58 He tells his parents that he no longer has the negatives; could they please preserve the photos for him?
Dead Polish Jews, spring 1942
Certainly, if you are told to kill a person, you do not have to celebrate and feast afterward. In Rwanda such festivities began almost immediately with Major Bernard Ntuyahaga, initially in charge of mass murdering Tutsi in Kigali’s central residential area, celebrating the success afterward “in noisy parties at his home.”59 In the Nyamata commune, where ordinary Hutu hacked to death fifty thousand of the fifty-nine thousand Tutsi living among them, the celebrations began after the first day of killing and continued on a nightly basis, as different Hutu killers report. “The evening atmosphere was festive,” says one. Another concurs: “In the evening, families listened to music. . . . The men sang, everyone drank, the women changed dresses three times in an evening. It was noisier than weddings, it was drunken reveling every day.”60
The Germans also frequently marked their killings with symbolic displays. Particularly after large killing operations, or when milestones had been reached in exterminating the Jews of a particular area, they held “death banquets,” “victory celebrations,” or as the Chelmno extermination camp’s staff did, upon the camp’s closing after annihilating more than 145,000 Jews, a self-satisfied farewell party.61 Serbs similarly festively marked their deeds in Bosnia, with no less than communal celebrations blessed by their church leaders, who conducted formal rituals celebrating town “cleansings” of all non-Serbs.62
If you disapproved of mass killings, you would not do these things. If you believed that you had to kill someone or the person telling you to do so would kill you, or were somehow pressured or somehow felt duty bound to kill someone you held to be an innocent victim, you would not choose to torture the person first, or increase his suffering, let alone do so with evident glee. You would do the opposite. Yet the evidence suggests that few actual perpetrators ever did. Had the perpetrators disapproved of mass murder and elimination, they would have created a substantial record, a vast record, of such disapproval—in contemporaneous utterances, letters to family and friends, and diaries, in their actions in so many ways, by foot dragging, sabotage, doing the job badly, and by acting and speaking kindly to the victims, which survivors would have surely eagerly reported in gratitude. All that has come to light from all our age’s mass murders and eliminations amounts to virtually nothing, to no credible record of such disapproval and dissent. This absence is all the more striking because people living under the most coercive regimes—including people living under the very regimes that practiced eliminationist politics—have left vast records of disapproval, dissent, and resistance against the regimes and against their measures that the people actually disliked.
The postulates that the perpetrators disapprove or do not approve of their deeds are falsified by the facts of just the eliminationist politics’ signature act, for which they were put forward: the killing itself. When such claims are held up to the perpetrators’ other actions—which the claims studiously and not surprisingly ignore—they do not even make sense. These widespread acts of cruelty and celebration, the perpetrators’ approving words when dealing with, brutalizing, and killing their victims, reveal themselves to be integral to the eliminationist projects’ execution. They flatly contradict the notion
that those implementing them see the projects as wrong.
Had the perpetrators the world over never killed a single person but still done all the other things they actually did do to their victims, then I think two things would have happened. The perpetrators’ many and various nonlethal acts toward their victims would not have been lost, let alone been almost entirely obscured, in the shadow cast by the killing and its horror, and lost—as they are in study after study—from our analytical view. And, in light of the then overwhelming and manifest evidence that makes the idea that perpetrators disapproved of all their own cruelties, brutalities, and degradations of the victims, and disapproved of their expressions of hatred and mockery and of approval and merriment, utterly absurd, no one would have seriously put forward postulates depending on the notion that the perpetrators saw their own eliminationist acts as wrong.63
These postulates have been most systematically and thoroughly assessed for the mass murder for which many were first advanced, and have been most frequently and forcefully asserted: the Germans’ annihilation of the Jews. In Hitler’s Willing Executioners I demonstrated that they are conceptually untenable and belied by overwhelming evidence, including the voluminous testimony of the survivors (each one having often observed over the years, many, frequently hundreds of German perpetrators) and the testimony of those killers who speak candidly. As one ordinary German perpetrator explains, in giving testimony about all those he knew during the annihilation: “I must admit that we felt a certain joy when we would seize a Jew whom one could kill. I cannot remember an instance when a policeman had to be ordered to an execution. The shootings were, to my knowledge, always carried out on a voluntary basis; one could have gained the impression that various policemen got a big kick out of it.”64 Oscar Pinkus, a Jewish survivor, drawing on his own experience and other Jewish victims’ observations, does not blame the Germans for implementing their orders, because “we never expected individual Germans to disobey orders.” Instead, the Germans’ “record is fatal because, above and beyond the orders, they individually and voluntarily, actively and tacitly, endorsed, enjoyed and enlarged the official program [of extermination].” 65 Pinkus could have been speaking for the survivors of one mass murder and elimination after the next. In their vast testimony, survivors of eliminationist assaults, when they address the issues, say almost in a single voice that the perpetrators hated and wanted to kill them. They give no reason to think the perpetrators were disapproving, reluctant, or unwilling, and every reason to believe that perpetrators endorsed, enjoyed, and enlarged the eliminationist program.
There is simply no plausible account that does not make up or ignore the basic facts that can tell us why, absent massive coercion, so many people against their will would slaughter other people. And there is no plausible account of any kind for why disapproving people, indeed so many disapproving people across cultures and time, would torture the victims and celebrate in their deaths and expulsions. If we wish to understand and explain why the killers kill, why the eliminationist warriors physically and symbolically assault their victims, we must first recognize the sobering truth that perpetrators, exceptions notwithstanding, approve of what they do. Fulgence, an ordinary Hutu who willingly slaughtered Tutsi, epigrammatically and emblematically conveys what has been true of perpetrators: “I thought wrong. I went wrong. I did wrong.”66 Recognizing this then leads to the question, and the investigation, of how the perpetrators came to this approval, came to the point where they “thought wrong,” and why they see the annihilation, expulsion, and incarceration of other peoples and groups as right, necessary, and laudable.
Before exploring this, another aspect of mass slaughters must be fully confronted and analyzed: the gruesomeness. Treatments of the Holocaust, because of their omission of the perpetrators and their analytically misleading emphasis on the faceless gas chambers, which established a sanitized paradigm of inquiry and understanding for mass murders in general, have effectively obscured the horror of the act of killing—not for the victims, which we all know—but for the perpetrators. In the overwhelming majority of our time’s mass murders, the perpetrators killed their victims face-to-face, typically individual killer to individual victim. In very many, the killers slaughtered people with handheld implements. For so many perpetrators it is literally true, and for so many more it would be metaphorically correct, to say that they—Germans, British in Kenya, Indonesians, Khmer Rouge, Guatemalans, Tutsi in Burundi, Hutu in Rwanda, Serbs, Sudanese, and many more—butchered their victims. Elie Ngarambe, a Hutu killer, now mild mannered, is by his own account utterly transformed because he and other demythologized killers no longer believe as they once did that Tutsi are not human beings but snakes and cockroaches seeking to enslave the Hutu. He looks back on the events with understanding but also with a degree of incredulity, at how he and all the others could cut up people: “I cannot find a way to explain that, but the only answer I can get is that it was like a cloud, something like darkness. I can call it ignorance.” Then he corrects himself, for even though the poisonous things they held Tutsi to be were a kind of ignorance, “but [it] is not ignorance. It is cruelty that we worked with, with my fellow criminals in Rwanda.” What they did, their cruelty, Ngarambe demonstrated for me with chopping hand motions of great precision, showing me how Hutu “cut” their victims “into pieces”: “You see, you would hold a machete like this. Then you would run after a person and hack him like this. Slash him, and after that you would ground him, and cut him into pieces. But the most common [weapon] was a club. You would hit, and ground the head. With a machete, it was like how you cut a banana tree. The only difference is that flesh is soft but the tree is hard. A person you cut once and the second time he is in pieces.”67 Blood everywhere. Screams of agony. Victims pleading for their lives, or alternately to be killed more quickly to end their pain. How would the perpetrators, uncoerced, summon the psychological and emotional wherewithal to do this if they did not believe their actions were right, good, and necessary? How would they do it time after time?
Individual victims of the Khmer Rouge in Tuol Sleng prison, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, August 1989
Think of the difficulty you may have, and that so many people do have, in reading this book’s descriptions of perpetrators torturing or killing innocent men, women, or children. Think of people, perhaps including you, wincing when reading such accounts or seeing such scenes in documentaries. Think of how much harder—ten, a hundred, a thousand, an infinite number of times harder—it would be for you to be killing, slaughtering, butchering a man with a machete. Or a woman. Or a child. You cut him. Then cut him again. They cut him again and again. Think of listening to the person you are about to murder begging, crying for mercy, for her life. Think of hearing your victim’s screams, as you hack at or “cut” her and then cut her again, and again and again, or the screams of a boy as you hack at his eight-year-old body. Yet the perpetrators do it, and hear it. And they do it with zeal, alacrity, and self-satisfaction, even enjoyment. They do it again and again and again. Ngarambe explains that the people pleaded, saying, “‘Please forgive me; I am going to give you money.’ Or a woman would say, ‘Please forgive me. Or take me and take care of me. See I am a beautiful woman.’ And you say, ‘No, I am going to kill you instead.’”68 Then the perpetrator would cut or club his victim, and cut or club her or him again, in the manner Ngarambe demonstrated and described in blow-by-blow detail.
Not surprisingly, some zealous executioners, including some Hutu, found it sometimes difficult to kill people they knew. This was met with a mixture of understanding and mild rebuke or a fine for the perpetrator but no mercy for the victim. Élie explains that “someone who avoided the fatal gesture before a good acquaintance did it out of kindness to himself, not to his acquaintance, because he knew it brought no mercy to the other person, who’d be struck down anyhow. Quite the contrary, the victim might wind up cut more cruelly, for having slowed up the job for a moment.”69 Not surprisingly, some others find the
actual butchery’s blood and guts distasteful, just as not all meat eaters want to work the slaughterhouse, and some killers need to acclimate themselves to the gore. One testifying German mass murderer makes it clear that he approved of the Jews’ extermination. Yet his first time killing he felt discomfort. After he had already shot “between about ten to twenty” Jews, “I requested to be relieved particularly because my neighbor shot so ineptly. Apparently, he always held the barrel of the rifle too high because horrible wounds were inflicted on the victims. In some cases, the entire rear skull of a victim was so shattered that brain matter spattered about. I simply could not look at it any longer.”70 Not moral opposition but disgust led him to ask for relief, a request his understanding superiors almost naturally granted. Just as it is wrong to gullibly accept the perpetrators’ routine denials of their involvement, agency, and culpability, it is wrong, as some eagerly do, to point to a perpetrator shying away from killing an acquaintance or having such a visceral reaction, especially the first time he kills, as proof that he thinks his victims innocent and do not deserve to die. Testimony from the Indonesians’ slaughter of communists, by a man referring to himself (conforming to Indonesian politeness rules, in the third person) as Kartawidjaja’s Son No. 2, speaks to this and other important themes.
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