It seems to be clear that in certain circumstances other peoples than the Germans would find themselves well on the way to producing a fair imitation of the Gestapo and the S.D. The Russians have done so: indeed, their Security Police served as a model for Mueller and Heydrich. The South African Dutch, also possessed by a rigid ideology, seem to be moving towards it. The Italians, however, with a rigid dictatorship, never came anywhere near it, and in fact showed themselves more resistant to modeling themselves on the Germans than any other people in Europe, including the French. Many Jews in Italy and the South of France owe their lives to the flat refusal of the Italian Fascist authorities, civil and military, to co-operate with Eichmann, and to their ingenuity in frustrating his plans.
Dr. Werner Best, who is now at large and prospering in Western Germany, an ex-S.S. Brigadier, a constant member of the Gestapo, and a pleader for it at Nuremberg, published in 1941 a textbook called The German Police, which was officially circulated as a handbook for senior officials and officially recommended as suitable to be given as a prize for meritorious juniors. This handbook contains the following passage which illuminates the darker recesses of the German mentality. The translation cannot do it justice because, to get it into recognizable English at all, violence has had to be done to the pristine incoherence of the original:
“It is not a question of Law, but of Destiny, whether the rules for police action laid down by the will of the Leader are ‘right’—i.e., possible and necessary—and therefore form a body of ‘Police’ Law which is suitable and advantageous for the people. For the abuse of the right of lawmaking on the part of the people’s Leader—whether in the direction of harmful severity or of harmful leniency—will receive its punishment with greater certainty from Destiny itself, according to the very Law of Life which has been violated, than from any State Tribunal; and the punishment, before History, will be calamity, downfall, and ruin.”
Dr. Werner Best, at Nuremberg, claimed that this was intended as a warning to the leadership. It seems, rather, that it was a reflection of the nihilistic, fate-defying rhetoric which was not spoken, but lived, by thousands of Germans who ought to have known better. It expresses with extraordinary aptness the flight from reality into an unpeopled void. It reflects nothing less than the death-wish.
The Germans are a kindly people in their personal relations. Many of the characters in this narrative were good fathers of families, who bought sweets and Christmas trees for their children, and then went out to do some more killing, killing of children and women and old people especially, because these could or would not work for Germany. But the almost total absence of any recorded kindliness on the part not only of the police but also of countless thousands of S.S. men to those whom they regarded as subhuman is a very striking aspect of this whole story. It would seem to correspond with a rejection of real life. The British, on the other hand, may regard certain Asian and African peoples as inferior, and yet at the same time develop for them a strong and quite deep affection. With their empirical approach they understand instinctively that life as it is must be accepted, and that life is nothing but people—and people are more than one’s immediate family circle, which, when it comes to it, may be seen simply as a reflection of oneself.
We have glanced at some, though by no means all, of the attitudes and characteristics which, taken separately, may lead a nation to behave badly and, taken together, may lead it to disaster. But these are not enough to explain the Gestapo and the S.D. They are enough to serve as a warning to us all, since, in some degree, we all share some, if not all, of these characteristics. But in the last resort the German failure, which so far differentiates Germany from all the other nations of the West, including Russia, is “a rejection of that reality which includes one’s neighbors,” and an attempt to substitute a false abstraction. It is idealism gone rotten; and until they can learn to accept a reality which includes people, the Germans, in their restless and insane striving for something better, will remain dangerous to those who content themselves with trying to make the best of the world as we know it to be.
1 Throughout this narrative the special ranks of the S.S., meaningless to the reader without German, have been translated into their military equivalents. Thus Hauptsturmfuehrer becomes S.S. Captain.
1 Musselmen was the term used in the German concentration camps for prisoners who had been reduced to walking skeletons.
Acknowledgements
For their most helpful comment and advice, and for the willing assistance they have given me in checking and discovering facts, I take this opportunity of expressing my deep gratitude to my friends Mr. William Gutmann, Mr. Brian Melland, and Mr. Gerald Reitlinger.
Most of the direct quotations are taken from official reports of the Nuremberg Trials.
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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