by Dan McMillan
Stangl did not see his actions as murder. He referred to his deeds as his “work,” insisting that he personally had no prejudice against Jews. Indeed, he claimed to have had “quite friendly relations” with Jewish prisoners in both camps. These prisoners—in the case of Treblinka, a floating population of several hundred—had been granted a temporary stay of execution so that they could serve the SS as slave laborers in the camp. Sereny asked Stangl if he had enjoyed any aspect of his “work.” Stangl later circled back to this question, saying “that’s what I enjoyed: human relations” (i.e., with prisoners). Stangl mentioned in particular a Treblinka prisoner from Vienna named Blau. “He was the one I talked to the most, he and his wife. . . . I’d made him the cook in the lower camp. He knew I’d help whenever I could.”2
“There was one day when he knocked at the door of my office about mid-morning and stood to attention and asked permission to speak to me,” said Stangl. “He looked very worried.” Blau’s eighty-year-old father had just arrived on a train from Vienna, and he would die in the gas chambers within the hour. “I said, ‘Really, Blau, you must understand, it’s impossible. A man of eighty . . .’” Blau’s father was too old to work, so Stangl saw no excuse to spare his life.
Blau responded that he understood this. He just did not want his father to die in a gas chamber. He requested permission to take his father to the kitchen, serve him a meal, and then escort him to the so-called Infirmary. Stangl replied: “You go and do what you think best. Officially, I don’t know anything, but you can tell the [guard] I said it was all right.”3
After the elderly man’s meal in the kitchen, Blau led his father to the Infirmary, a structure disguised as a medical facility by a large red cross painted on the wall. After parting with his son, the elder Blau would have been escorted down a long corridor by one or two Jewish prisoners who belonged to the camp’s “red squad.” As he walked, he may not have suspected that anything was amiss. At the end of the corridor, however, he rounded a corner and learned his fate. In front of his eyes lay a pit filled with decomposing corpses. A fire burned steadily in this pit, reducing the bodies to ashes so as to make room for the next round of victims. An SS guard, most likely the sadistic August Miete, directed him to stand on a wooden plank at the edge of the pit. The elder Blau then had to wait for Miete to murder him with a pistol shot to the back of the neck.4
Later that day, the younger Blau returned and thanked Stangl several times. Stangl replied: “Well, Blau, there’s no need to thank me, but if you want to thank me, you may.”5
The fate of this man and his father, and Stangl’s notion that this event counted among the “human relations” he had enjoyed at Treblinka, say a lot about how the Holocaust differed from the other major genocides of the twentieth century. First, to a far greater degree than in other genocides, the perpetrators of the Holocaust denied their victims’ humanity. Stangl regarded his nightmarish transaction with Blau as a normal interaction because he did not think that Blau was really human; thus he felt no guilt—or even discomfort—about killing Blau’s father, or about “socializing” with Blau, even though he planned to later murder him along with all the other Jews in the camp. Second, the killers arguably exercised a more extreme degree of power over their victims than human beings have wielded over other human beings at any other time in history. Consequently, the victims of the Holocaust experienced what may have been the most terrible helplessness, degradation, and humiliation ever witnessed. Thus the younger Blau was reduced to thanking Stangl for the “favor” of having his own father murdered by gunshot instead of poison gas.
These differences hardly mean that the Holocaust was in some objective sense worse than the Armenian, Cambodian, or Rwandan genocides. Such a conclusion would hinge on value judgments that are hopelessly subjective: Who can say what kind of suffering is most terrible, which actions are morally most depraved? The Turkish government had tens of thousands of Armenians burned alive and many others drowned on barges sunk in the Black Sea. One could therefore argue that Armenians often suffered more terrible physical pain than did the victims of the Holocaust. Whereas most murders in the Holocaust were carried out in Poland or the Soviet Union, out of sight of most Germans, in Rwanda the killers shamelessly slaughtered their own neighbors—sometimes even their own relatives—in broad daylight with no attempt at secrecy. Perhaps this represented a uniquely terrible breakdown in a society’s moral order. Under the Pol Pot regime, more than one-fifth of the Cambodians lost their lives, a higher proportion even than the fraction of Poland’s population killed in the Holocaust, although a much lower one than the two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population who perished.6
If it makes little sense to claim that the Holocaust was worse than other genocides, the question remains: Why do we see the Holocaust as being somehow unique? I submit that the Holocaust evokes in us a special horror because it represents an implicit death threat against all of us, because it constituted history’s most uncompromising assault upon the principle that every human being deserves to live. The Nazis embraced a racist ideology that defined their victims as less than human, as vermin in human form that they must completely eradicate, much as we exterminate rats and cockroaches. In language that finds only limited parallels in other genocides, they routinely described their victims as “bacilli,” “microbes,” “bacteria,” and “vermin.” And this way of seeing their victims constituted a central motive for the killings.
Human beings have slaughtered each other repeatedly down through the centuries, but always for some concrete purpose: for political power, out of perceived military necessity, to seize land and riches, or to enforce religious conversion. Only during the Holocaust have we come to murder a huge population solely for the sake of killing them. In other mass murders, targets of the violence could often save themselves by changing their behavior: converting to a new faith, surrendering their land and homes, obeying a new ruler, serving their persecutors as slaves, or taking flight. Even to their tormentors, the lives of these victims still had some value, however minimal.7
In Hitler’s Europe, the lives of Jews had lost all value, and no change in their behavior could save them. Their very birth had condemned them all to death. Conversion to Christianity, a profession of loyalty to Hitler, the surrender of all possessions, or work as slaves—none of these actions could change their fate. Even flight was pointless: in October 1941, the regime banned all further Jewish emigration from German-controlled Europe, having decided to murder each and every one. The Nazis’ denial of the value of human life was uncompromising and total.
The Nazis expressed this denial of human beings’ worth by making the determined effort to murder every person of Jewish ancestry in Europe, while hoping one day to destroy every Jewish community on Earth. No Jewish population in Europe was small enough to escape the Nazis’ notice, whether it was the 700 Jews of Norway, out of a prewar population of roughly 1,600, who were sent to Auschwitz, or the 96 captured in July 1944 on the tiny Greek island of Kos. In July 1942, Heinrich Himmler journeyed to Helsinki to meet with the prime minister of Finland in an attempt to catch about 200 foreign Jews who had found refuge in that country.
The Nazis’ striving for complete biological extinction of the Jews has no parallel in history, despite claims to the contrary. Some have argued that the Turkish government aimed to exterminate the country’s entire Armenian population, but the facts say otherwise: the killing largely ended in December 1916, leaving hundreds of thousands of Armenians alive, although the murderers remained in power for another two years. Had they wanted to exterminate the Armenians they easily could have done so, but they did not. A strong case can be made that the Rwandan government and the killers at the local level tried to completely wipe out the country’s Tutsi minority. However, just as the Young Turk leaders had no plans to murder Armenians outside of Turkey’s borders, so, too, did the Hutu government in Kigali harbor no homicidal designs against Tutsi living in Burundi, Uganda, or other neighboring coun
tries. An obvious rejoinder to this point might be that the Turkish and Rwandan governments lacked the military strength to commit genocide beyond their respective national borders; had they been powerful enough, would they not have done so? Yet the answer to this question is clearly no, further highlighting the uniqueness of the Holocaust.8
The Armenian and Rwandan genocides were both perpetrated by governments that faced an imminent loss of power and that resorted to genocide as a desperate, last-ditch measure. Turkey had lost almost all of its European territory in the Balkan War of 1912. In 1914, the major European powers forced Turkey to accept reforms that granted local self-government to Turkey’s large Armenian minority, which was heavily concentrated in six provinces of the country’s Anatolian heartland. All parties to the agreement understood that it was just the first step toward the creation of an independent Armenian state and the consequent dissolution of Turkey as an independent country. From the fall of 1914 through the spring of 1915, Turkey suffered disastrous military defeats. Fearing their country’s imminent disintegration, Turkey’s rulers set out to destroy nine-tenths of the Armenian population in an effort to forever thwart the creation of an independent Armenia at Turkey’s expense. In Rwanda, the government in Kigali set the genocide in motion because it was losing a civil war against Paul Kagame’s invading army of Tutsi exiles, an army that completed its conquest of Rwanda and ended the genocide a hundred days after the murders began. At the local level, the killers were motivated not by ideas of racial superiority, but rather by a fear that the Tutsi rebels posed an imminent threat to their own safety. If Turkey had won the Balkan War of 1912, its leaders would have seen no need for genocide. The Hutu leaders of Rwanda, had they been strong enough to threaten their neighbors, would not have resorted to murder, but instead would have continued to control the Rwandan Tutsi through discrimination, as they had for decades. In other words, they were acting from weakness rather than from strength. In contrast, the organizers of the Holocaust acted from strength rather than from weakness. The Nazis acted against victims who posed no plausible threat, and not in a mood of fear and desperation, but rather in one of exhilaration and joy.9
The perpetrators of the Holocaust expressed their ideological conviction that Jews were subhuman in several other ways. First, they reduced their victims to the status of material objects, processing them for value as if they were animal carcasses. The SS began the process by systematically plundering Jews of their possessions: cash, jewelry, and flatware; pocket watches and wrist watches; fountain pens and cigarette cases; sheets, quilts, and blankets; cameras and binoculars; mirrors, cosmetics, and baby carriages; eyeglasses, toothbrushes, and false teeth; and anything else of value. The Jews had to surrender even their clothes, forced to strip in front of strangers of both sexes, before they died in the gas chambers or shooting pits.10
But theft of their possessions was only the first step in this dehumanizing process. When Jews arrived at Auschwitz, SS doctors quickly assessed each prisoner’s physical condition. If the camp needed a fresh supply of slave labor, the SS chose some young and robust prisoners for this purpose, sending all others directly to their murder by cyanide gas. Each newly chosen slave received a number tattooed in blue ink on the left forearm, and this number replaced the prisoner’s name from this point forward. “You are only numbers,” a guard told the freshly arrived Julius Ganszer. “A shot, and the number is gone. Don’t try to escape; the only way out of here is by the chimney.” The SS then put their slaves on a starvation diet and systematically worked them to death, using them up as one might any piece of equipment, and replacing them as needed from the cattle cars full of Jews that arrived on an almost daily basis. While they still lived, Jewish prisoners might also find themselves used as laboratory animals in experiments conducted by the Auschwitz doctors.11
Whether they killed them at once or first used them as slaves, the SS always found uses for Jews’ bodies. They sheared off women’s hair to make industrial felt and other textiles; by February 1943, they had harvested more than 6,500 pounds of it. The SS pulled victims’ teeth that had gold fillings and collected Jews’ skulls and skeletons for anthropological research. For decades it was widely believed that the Germans rendered their victims’ body fat in the crematoria, using it to manufacture soap. There is no truth to this legend, yet it shows that people intuitively grasp the radically dehumanizing nature of the Holocaust. This myth also makes sense: if the SS had found a profitable method for making soap from body fat, they would not have hesitated to do it.12
Looking forward to a world in which the Jewish “race” was extinct, the German government gathered artifacts and documentation of Jewish life for a Jewish Central Museum in Prague. Racial anthropologists panicked in late 1941, fearing that their “material” (i.e., Jews) might be killed before the researchers could photograph them. “If we wait too long,” wrote Dr. Dora Maria Kahlich, “valuable material could escape us; mainly our material could be torn out of its family background and of its habitual environment.” Kahlich and a colleague raced to German-occupied Tarnow to photograph Orthodox Jews and measure their bodies. Since some of these human “objects” resisted, Kahlich called on the German Security Police for their “kind” help in securing cooperation from this “material.” Treblinka survivor Jacob Wiernik recalled the day Germans and Ukrainians put him and his family on a train to the death camp: “They photographed us as though we were animals from before the Flood.”13
Committed to a racist ideology that defined Jews as vermin in human form, the German forces treated them as objects while they lived and after they died. Their faith in this racist belief system was so strong that they also lived, with no apparent discomfort, among men and women whom they had all condemned to death, sometimes for years. This may explain the attitude of Franz Stangl, the Treblinka commandant who fondly recalled his “human relations” with Blau and other prisoners.
In death camps and slave labor camps, hundreds of thousands of Jews lived side by side with the men and women who planned to kill them all, a kind of gigantic Death Row in which prisoners and guards mingled on a daily basis. The only counterpart to this remarkable phenomenon in other genocides might have been the Khmer Rouge’s disastrous agricultural projects, where hundreds of thousands of Cambodians perished, mostly of starvation, but often by outright murder. Yet the differences outweigh the similarities: few of the Cambodian victims were condemned to death at the outset, whereas every Jewish prisoner, without exception, would inevitably be murdered, and both victims and killers understood this awful truth.14
The perpetrators of the Holocaust seemed to feel little, if any, discomfort in the company of their victims, and from their point of view, why should they? As they saw it, although Jews wore a human face, spoke a human language, and had a human intelligence and human feelings—all of which made it possible to interact with them in a superficially “normal” fashion—nonetheless they were not, according to the Nazi belief system, truly human, and could therefore be murdered without compunction, and often without anger. More than one witness testified that Franz Stangl never personally abused a prisoner. Sobibor survivor Stanislaw Smajzner stated that he “never saw Stangl hurt anyone. . . . What was special about him was his arrogance. And his obvious pleasure in his work and his situation.” Other SS at Sobibor did not seem as contented in their work, although they behaved worse than Stangl did in other ways. Stangl “had this perpetual smile on his face. . . . No, I don’t think it was a nervous smile; it was just that he was happy,” said Smajzner.15
Most of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish camp prisoners performed unskilled physical labor and soon perished from exhaustion and hunger. Prisoners with special skills, however, could often work indoors at less strenuous tasks, draw more ample rations, or acquire valuables that they could trade for food. Such prisoners might survive for a year or more, and their work often brought them into frequent contact with the Germans in the camps. For some Germans, these Jews were professional pee
rs with whom they shared advanced education or special skills. The infamous Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele worked with several Jewish doctors as he performed his cruel experiments on prisoners. An SS colonel, Dr. Joachim Caesar, who ran the Auschwitz agricultural experiments, employed several academically trained Jewish women, who “were placed under ‘historical monument’ protection,” in the words of the camp’s commandant, Rudolf Höss. In Höss’s view, Caesar treated these women “almost as colleagues.” Höss complained that this practice impaired discipline, and observed that “when the necessary punishments were carried out, Caesar took it very personally.”16
A larger number of Jews provided all manner of personal services to the SS and other Germans, mostly in the camps, but sometimes for the shooting units in the towns where they were based. Many, especially women and girls, were used as domestic servants. “Hermann G.,” who helped shoot Jews into mass graves behind the lines on the Eastern Front, wrote home on July 7, 1941: “We don’t need to do anything anymore. H.F. and I have a Jew and, each of us, a Jewess. . . . They do for us everything we want and are at our service. . . . The Jews are fair game. Everybody can snatch any of them on the street and keep them.” He concluded that “one can only give well-meant advice to the Jews: Do not bring children into the world; they have no future anymore.”17
In the camps the SS frequently used prisoners for entertainment. In Auschwitz, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, Jewish musicians played in ensembles or orchestras. Sometimes the music was used to soothe the victims as they entered the gas chambers; at other times, in concerts for the enjoyment of the SS. In Treblinka the orchestra played during the evening roll call, during which weak and ailing prisoners were culled from the ranks and taken to the Infirmary to be shot. Stangl’s Treblinka deputy, Kurt Franz, also organized regular boxing matches between prisoners for the amusement of his comrades. All the other prisoners were forced to watch, and the prisoner orchestra and choir opened the “entertainment.”18