Does this mean that when an excess of horror is exposed to view, or displayed in photographs or films, it stuns most people who see it, whether they’re perched in a tree or sitting in a German living room? Does it simply feed their empathy for and engagement on the side of the criminals? Could there be a link between an overload of revealed horror and a well-kept secret? I am led to believe so.
In this sense, the secret and the spectacle of the shootings of the Jews are but two sides of the same event. The mass criminals of today seem to have learned this lesson; they claim credit for their crimes, even filming them and projecting their images crudely around our planet through social networks. The filmed and revealed horrors seem once again to stun and to multiply around the killers.
The writing of this book has forced me to measure how deeply the murder of the Jews was immersed in the rural immobility of Russo-Soviet villages: the same shovels, the same ditches, the same horses, the same paths, the same fences. And mostly, the same requisitions!
This inscription of murder in local immutability made it invisible even when seen by all.
The Russo-Soviet rural collective memory of the 1940s swallows up all specificity. The murder of Jewish neighbors takes place within the permanence of rural life, which will continue on course after the crime, with the same carts, the same shovels, the same horses, the same houses, the same clothes. The Jews have been killed, buried under the habits of daily life. The landscape of the village has not changed. Rather, a portion of its population has simply been swallowed up.
AFTERWORD
Jerusalem, May 11, 2015
Leaning alone against a railing, I look again out at these white stones, polished by men and time, these stones I know so well. They have stood immobile here for many centuries. They are polished by joy, hope, and also pain. The light is diffuse under a fine layer of clouds. I have been invited to Jerusalem to speak about murderous anti-Semitism.
Today I am giving several lectures. A few weeks ago, I was speaking to a large crowd gathered at the University of Milwaukee. In a large, well-lit amphitheater, the faces of many young students looked eager for knowledge. But as soon as I spoke about the rape of Jewish women and the massacres of children, curiosity gave way to horror.
Horror.
The faces become tense, and the expressions grow alarmed. Some discreetly take out tissues. But horror rarely brings on a feeling of responsibility. On the contrary, it elicits a passing disgust, a disgust at knowing, then forgetfulness so as not to think about it anymore. So, I explain, I talk. I try to get my audience to keep thinking while learning the facts. And not to separate the “pleasant” world on one side from the knowledge of the criminal acts of the Shoah by bullets on the other side.
It took me a long time, many years, to live, breathe, and think with my eyes open. To listen, read, reread, question the neighbors to the crimes and search the archives in order to finally think, at least a little. Not only so that I could stand to know about genocidal acts but mostly so that I would not stop thinking once I knew about them. Not to be removed from oneself. To think while watching, to try to understand these acts, is already to resist.
When thought turns off, refuses to hear or see a genocidal act, we become half-conscious, perhaps without being aware of it, a spectator transfixed by the crime.
Purity.
There is no genocidal purity. Many believe, in good faith, that mass killers practice what they preach. It is true that when the Nazis called for the total destruction of the Jews, they tried to achieve it. It is tempting to think that the young SS, police, or soldiers were underlings, obeying orders, shooting human beings like robots faithful to Hitler’s doctrines. Respecting, of course, the rules about purity of blood and righteousness that the Third Reich demanded of them. Notably the ban on sexual relations with “inferior races” and the duty not to take anything that belonged to the Third Reich.
It is tempting to believe that a totalitarian ideology confers on those who practice it a total adherence on a personal level. A totalitarian rectitude in life. The smooth speeches of genocidal leaders most often portray killing as a clean, surgical act, necessary to remove a dangerous part from the human race. The supposed purity of genocidal discourse is nothing more than the uniform cloak of a murderer. It not only authorizes him but also justifies and encourages him. The supposed purity of murderers is part of the pretense of a just genocide. They call themselves pure to justify their duty to exterminate those they deem impure.
A genocidal leader never incites simple underlings but always criminal ones: criminals who, by murdering, will effectively enact the genocide without, in so doing, extracting themselves on a personal level from the usual criminal motivations. In this sense, a genocide is also in part an organized and orchestrated mass crime that promises criminals the achievement of values that will save a country, a “race,” or a political belief. This pretension justifies genocide with supposed “superior values.” Genocide masquerades as a moral act.
To write and to think are my acts of resistance. They are indispensable preliminaries for reacting against a false genocidal morality. They are an act of insurgence in the face of the totalitarian discourse of those who coordinate genocide. To write and think in order to help resist the fascination and occultation that the genocidal act exerts on the spectator. The so-called justice of genocide fascinates and draws in crowds. A genocide, on the scale I am looking at, is, above all, human beings who murder other human beings while pretending to “save” a world from a danger. They “save” by killing, because for them the danger is the other.
I explain to the students in Milwaukee that, to write this, certain chapters made me sit motionless for months, as though incapable of saying the word “I.” As though I were merely a conduit for the narrative repetition of what I had heard on the farms. To say “I” while listening to a witness to genocide costs a lot. What it costs is the price of personal responsibility in which I refuse to let myself be caught. Each chapter represents such a challenge.
I also explain that a moment of horror is most often followed by the will to live in peace and sleep well. How many times have we been horrified at the sight of a scene of mass crime that we have forgotten immediately? Forgetting the massacres of others is an integral part of democratic comfort.
And why is it necessary not to sleep well today, seventy years after the Shoah?
Quite simply, because our genocidal sickness, mass murder disguised as morality, is still with us.
The small screens of our computers can turn us into terrified and indifferent spectators. Yazidi women are sold in the markets of the supposed Islamic State; young Jordanian men are burned alive in cages; and on and on, here and there, not only in broad daylight but in the infinite space of social media, ricocheting over a silent sea of information.
The killers of Jews in France and Belgium, they too made sure to strap cameras on their bodies in order to save and transmit images of the faces of their victims, murdered Jewish adults and children. Crime scenes are sent and delivered to whomever wants to watch them. At home. For free.
For the last few months, I have been forcing myself to read, to study, but also to watch the recordings of crimes by the criminals themselves, especially those of ISIS. Some are almost unbearable. I ask myself, how can a cameraman, a sound man, hold their equipment, how can they zoom in on a man burning alive in a cage?
After more than ten years of research, I know that behind the purest, hardest ideologies, in the name of which is taught that it is virtuous, noble, urgent, and necessary to murder others, there is an appetite for gain and theft on the one hand, and on the other hand a sadistic will to commit violence, notably against women and children, who are never safe from the genocidal act.
Genocidal purity.
Leaders of genocides or mass crimes cry from podiums or pulpits in flawless discourses. After more than four thousand interviews of the neighbors of Nazi crimes, I can make this hypothesis: there is no such thing as
genocidal purity.
Even if, for their killers, the victims are reduced to a pure object of the duty to murder, the murderers themselves are in no way the pure executors of some ideological justice. Genocidal murder cannot be separated from murderous appetites. Purity does not exist in mass killers.
But this is what they want us to believe, with their unified discourse, their rhythmic and triumphant music, and their infinitely repeated songs, their marching, their perfectly executed killings, their impeccably edited videos.
I understand, of course, that showing oneself to the camera with a human trophy at one’s feet would seem to confer the illusion of superhuman power on that person who murders—justly, he will claim—other human beings. But a genocidal murderer is motivated by the same appetites as a common one.
Ideology authorizes mass murder and valorizes the criminal, but it does nothing to abolish his criminal appetites. How many houses have been looted, jewelry ripped from bodies, women raped, children tortured, in the name of the purification of our planet?
Some are believers. They set off with their backpacks the way others did seventy years before them in order to don black uniforms and join the ranks. The promise of being a superman, a “true man,” pure and hard, is inseparable from the duty of killing others. The supposed purity of the genocidal superman is seductive.
If the Nazis couldn’t keep themselves from raping Jewish women despite their insane ideology of blood purity, what can we think today of those who butcher, burn, and shoot in the name of Islamic purity? They are nothing more than criminals driven by insatiable appetites, the most powerful of which appears to be an idolatry of themselves, which seems, when it becomes criminal, the source of such pleasure that it demands to be preserved and perpetuated on film.
If certain Nazi executioners divided up the furs of Jewish women before shooting them,1 what are we to make today of the thefts of goods by the Islamic State from conquered peoples? Purity does not exist among contemporary genocidal criminals either.
It is by unmasking the killer, wiping away the lie of the Aryan or Islamic superhuman, that we may be able to manage this pathology. Not simply repeating “Islamist” or “Nazi,” as though they existed according to their own definitions, constitutes for me the first step in combatting them.
I have also learned that a mass killer is never alone with his victim, even if he appears to be in an image. It took many pairs of hands—voluntary, requisitioned, or forced—to ensure that the Jews were publicly murdered.
How many helpers appear onscreen when Islamists kill? When I watch a staged scene today in which men slit other men’s throats against background music and prayers, I ask myself, who else is there behind that scene of genocidal crime? If there are images, there had to be at least a cameraman. A sound man. An editor. If there are clean, sharp knives, someone had to deliver them.
And who buries or burns the bodies? Where are the common graves of ISIS?
To reveal to the world the hideous faces of murderers disguised in the false garb of purity may permit one to hope that younger generations will rise up against the criminals as the just rose between 1941 and 1944.
My thoughts have flown very far. I watch, I listen.
It is a beautiful evening in Jerusalem. Birdsong fills the flowering laurels.
NOTES
Historical Introduction
1. One of the four Einsatzgruppen units that were responsible for the extermination of more than 120,000 people in Moldavia, southern Ukraine, and southern Russia. The Einsatzgruppen were the paramilitary units charged, following the invasion of Poland, with the systematic assassination of people classified as undesirable, such as intellectuals, Communists, Gypsies, and Jews. The Einsatzgruppen killed at least 500,000 Jews in Eastern Europe. They were divided into subunits, called Sonderkommando and Einsatzkommando.
2. This number includes 1.6 million victims in Ukraine (Alexander Kruglov, The Losses Suffered by Ukrainian Jews in 1941–1944, Kharkov: Tarbut, 2005, 360), at least 500,000 in Belarus (Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009, 798), and at least 120,000 in Russia (Ilya Altman, Opfer des Hasses, Zurich: Verlag Gleichen, 2008, 348).
3. Other known methods of killing are poison, live burial, and death in mines or wells.
4. On September 29 and 30, 1941, the Sonderkommando 4a, a subunit of the Einsatzgruppen, killed more than 33,000 Jews in the ravine of Babi Yar in Kiev.
5. The trial of the Einsatzgruppen, which took place from 1947 to 1948 in Nuremberg, Germany, was one of twelve trials by an American military tribunal (The United States of America against Otto Ohlendorf, et al.). Twenty-four members of the Einsatzgruppen SS were tried, of whom fourteen were condemned to death.
6. Trials of war criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council law no. 10, Nuremberg, October 1946–April 1949, Washington 1949–1953, volume IV/1, 490.
7. German term for an execution.
8. Interrogation of Herbert Wollenweber from May 14, 1970, BArch B162/1068, 4,312–13.
9. Interrogation of Franz Halle from March 2, 1962, BArch B162/5642, 493.
10. The name of the operation to exterminate the Jews and Gypsies of Generalgouvernement in Poland, between March 1942 and October 1943 in the three camps of Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka. More than two million Jews and fifty thousand Gypsies were killed.
11. A German state intelligence service between 1920 and 1944.
12. Report of October 24, 1941, a document of the Nuremberg trial PS-3047 (piece no. 4).
13. An incomplete Russian-language version appeared in Jerusalem and then in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1991. The first complete version was published in 1993 in Vilnius, Lithuania, and then in 1995 in France: Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, Le Livre noir (Actes Sud).
14. Complete name: Extraordinary State Commission for the Findings and Investigation of the Atrocities Committed by the German-Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices, and the Damages Caused to Citizens, Kolkhoz, Public Bodies, State Enterprises and the Institution of the USSR. Material is also available on microfilm at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
15. George Ginsburgs, Moscow’s Road to Nuremberg, La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1996, 40. The archives of the commission contain 54,000 documents of proof of war crimes as well as four million other documents pertaining to material damages caused during the occupation.
16. Investigations were held in both West and East Germany.
17. Andrej Umansky is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure, University of Cologne, Germany, and is historical and legal advisor to Yahad-In Unum. He obtained a master’s degree in French and German law from the Universities of Cologne and Paris I and another master’s degree in the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe from the University of Paris IV. In 2016, he finished his PhD at the University Amiens, France, about the Holocaust in the Northern Caucasus in 1942–43.
Introduction
1. Gallimard, Algiers, 1937.
2. Small town at the Polish border of western Ukraine.
3. The camp, Stalag 325, was created by the Germans in 1942 for French and Belgian prisoners of war who had either attempted to escape from a German camp or refused to work. By 1943, the number of prisoners in Rawa Ruska and its subcamps had risen to 24,000. In 1943, the camp was closed and the prisoners were transferred to other camps.
4. Maurice Chevalier (1888–1972) was a French singer and actor.
5. Aron Jean-Marie Lustiger (1926–2007), cardinal and archbishop of Paris, whose family is of Jewish origin.
Chapter 1: The Architect
1. George Smiley, an officer of British Intelligence, is a fictional character of John Le Carré.
2. The Ukrainian police was composed of men from the village or its surroundings, recruited and trained by the Germans immediately upon their arrival. At first, a commando of local police had to be made available in every town and in every district. Its size,
depending on the number of inhabitants, was on average 150 to 200 men. At the beginning, the Germans recruited among former militia members, then quickly turned to candidates from the local population who would work more or less voluntarily. In July 1942, when the genocide was at its height, there were about 37,000 local police in the service of the Reichskommissariat in Ukraine and under military administration in the East, a number that rose to 100,000 by the time of the liberation. Comparable structures were created in other occupied regions of the USSR.
3. Small town in the Rivne region of Ukraine.
4. A portion of the Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) can be found in the town in Bade-Würtemberg. It houses the files for the investigation and documentation of the Central Service of Investigation of National Socialist crimes, created in 1958, which to this day conducts preliminary investigations and coordinates German judicial institutions.
5. Deposition of September 24, 1964, BArch (Bundesarchiv), B 162/3433, 794ff.
6. Former German municipal police.
7. Legnica (Leignitz, in German) is a town in the southwest of Poland.
8. Small Belarusian town at the Lithuanian border.
9. Units of the local auxiliary police.
10. Abbreviation of the German word Hilfswillige, auxiliary volunteers.
11. Town in northwest Belarus.
12. District.
13. Rank equivalent to first lieutenant.
14. Acronym for Sicherheitsdienst, literally “Security Department.” It was an intelligence service of the SS, central to the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the central security office of the Reich.
Chapter 2: The Requisitions
1. Kolkhoz and sovkhoz were components of the socialized agricultural system that emerged after the Russian Revolution of April 1917.
2. Mayor and representative of the State in the communes of Ukraine before 1939. The German authorities borrowed from the system of the starosta by reinstating the pre-1939 mayors or by naming new ones. Their functions were limited and they were under the authority of the German administration. Their involvement in the executions varied from case to case but could go as far as an active and voluntary participation.
In Broad Daylight Page 25