The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual

by Jonathan Kirsch

  All the while, a female clerk-typist fulfilled the role of the medieval notary, taking down every word uttered by the victim of torture. A Gestapo doctor was occasionally summoned to the torture chamber, but for strictly functional rather than compassionate reasons: “[T]hey are not to render any medical aid, but only to determine whether the prisoner may still be beaten,” reported the authors of The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror in 1933. “They are like the doctors of the Inquisition: the torture is stopped when there is a danger of the victim dying.” Once the victim was revived, the questioning could begin again.25

  The point of such devices and techniques was never merely to extract a confession of wrongdoing—the Nazis were perfectly willing to murder their victims without cause—but rather to compel the victim to name names. Thus, for example, one resistance fighter was kept alive and repeatedly tortured by the Gestapo over a period of more than two years only because his tormentors imagined that he would finally betray the names and whereabouts of other members of the underground. Only when the Nazis were finally convinced that there was nothing that he could or would reveal did the Gestapo finally put him out of his misery. But then, even a victim of torture who eventually consented to betray his comrades generally suffered the same fate.

  Of course, it was not always necessary for the Gestapo to resort to torture to compel a man or woman to betray a friend or neighbor. Whether out of fear or malice or self-interest, a network of willing informers was available to the Gestapo as it had been to the Inquisition. Just as a woman working as a midwife might find herself denounced to the Inquisition as a witch by a jealous business rival, ordinary Germans were often willing to volunteer some damning item of information, whether real or invented, to the Gestapo. “Angry neighbors, bitter in-laws, and disgruntled work colleagues,” states historian Eric A. Johnson, “frequently used the state’s secret police apparatus to settle their personal and often petty scores.”26

  Again like the Inquisition, the Nazi regime refused to call any of its crimes by their rightful names. An ordinary beating was known in Gestapo documents as “Rigorous Examination,” and the more inventive and excruciating forms of torture were called “Especially Rigorous Interrogations.” Just as “relaxing” a condemned heretic meant burning him alive in inquisitorial jargon, the Nazis devised a whole vocabulary of euphemisms to refer obliquely to the arrest, incarceration, and murder of their Jewish victims: “deportation,” “evacuation,” “resettlement,” and “redistribution” all meant the same thing. The use of such circumlocutions is the best evidence that those who participated in crimes against humanity during the Holocaust knew exactly what they were doing and actively sought to cover it up.27 “This is a page of glory in our history,” Himmler declared to a secret meeting of SS generals in 1943, “which has never been written and is never to be written.”28

  Indeed, the violence that Nazi Germany did to language was always intimately linked to the violence it did to its victims. A distinction was made in official German documents between Jews who were assigned to “labor service”—that is, slave labor on starvation rations, a kind of murder in slow motion—and those designated for “special treatment.” Yet the distinction between these two fates was never spoken aloud by the bureaucrats who decided between them. Only during his interrogation by an Israeli police captain long after the war did Eichmann finally decode the phrase: “Special treatment,” he conceded, “was killing.” And the whole ghastly enterprise that resulted in the mass murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children was concealed behind an oblique bureaucratic euphemism that would have appealed to any grand inquisitor for whom the Latin phrases of canon law provided a similar moral fig leaf: “The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem.” 29

  The Strictures of Purity of Blood that were enacted in Spain in the fifteenth century, as we have seen, represented an escalation in the war on heresy, one that was based on blood rather than belief. Nazi Germany embraced the same ominous notion in the so-called Nuremberg Laws, which were announced by Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) at a Nazi party rally in that city in 1935. Thus did Judaism itself come to be regarded in modern Germany as a blood crime for which the only proper punishment was death. In that sense, the Nuremberg Laws can be seen as the first draft of the Holocaust in much the same way that the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council were the “first sketch” of the Inquisition.30

  The centerpiece of the Nuremburg Laws was the Reich Citizenship Law, which formally withdrew the legal rights of citizenship from the Jewish population and reduced them to the status of “subjects” of the Third Reich. A second element was the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, which criminalized sexual contact of any kind between Jews and non-Jews. As the law was later applied in German courts, not only intercourse but also “mutual masturbation” and even kissing were regarded as criminal acts. And, as if to add insult to injury, the Reich Flag Law adopted the swastika-marked banner of the Nazi party as the national colors of Germany and solemnly forbade any Jew from raising the German flag. With the announcement of these decrees, and the steady accumulation of other anti-Jewish laws aimed at the “purification” of Germany, the Nazis provided themselves with the legal rationale for their war on the Jews.31

  Behind the legalese of the Nuremberg Laws can be seen the recrudescence of the same visceral anti-Semitism that had blighted medieval Europe and prompted some of the worst excesses of the Spanish Inquisition. According to the ideologues of the Nazi regime in Germany, starting with Adolf Hitler himself, Jews were an alien and malignant element that had infiltrated Christian civilization and must now be ruthlessly excised. They were condemned as poisoners and parasites, both subhuman and superhuman, an existential threat not only to Germany but to the whole world. Just as the Inquisition sought to rid Christendom of “heretical filth” by every available means, Nazi Germany now declared total war on the Jews.

  Jews were demonized as ravening beasts whose appetites prompted them to stalk their human prey. Thus did the Nuremberg Laws prohibit Jews from employing German women under the age of forty-five on the assumption that a younger woman would be at risk of sexual assault by her Jewish employer. “The Jew systematically defiles the maidens and women of Aryan peoples,” shrilled one of the “orientation bulletins” issued by the SS to its rank and file, thus priming them for their crucial role in the Holocaust. “He is equally driven by cold calculation and uninhibited animal lust.”32

  At the same time, Hitler saw the Jews as both guileful and powerful. He characterized them as agents of a vast international conspiracy bent on world domination, sometimes working their will as a cabal of bankers and sometimes under the banner of Bolshevism—“the ‘gold’ and the ‘red’ internationals”—but always with the goal of overmastering and destroying Western civilization. “[W]e must recognize that there is no good or bad Jew,” insisted Hitler. “He is a Jew: he is driven only by one single thought: how do I raise my nation to become the dominating nation?”33

  So the Nazis looked on the Jewish population of Germany—an accomplished and highly assimilated community—as both dangerous criminals and a source of contamination and disease. They were neither shy nor subtle in announcing their intention to punish the Jewish people for their imaginary crimes. “Without fear, we want to point the finger at the Jew as the inspirer, the author, and the beneficiary of this terrible catastrophe,” ranted Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) during a public address in 1937. “Look, this is the enemy of the world, the destroyer of cultures, the parasite among the nations, the son of chaos, the incarnation of evil, the ferment of decomposition, the visible demon of the decay of humanity.” In his private journal, Goebbels was even more explicit: “This Jewish pestilence must be eradicated,” he wrote. “Totally. None of it should remain.”34

  The image of Jews as pests and parasites is yet another borrowing from the vocabulary of medieval anti-Semitism, but it took on an entirely new and wholly literal meaning in Nazi Germany. Zyklon B, the
brand name for the pellets of prussic acid used to kill Jewish men, women, and children in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and other death camps, was originally designed for use as an insecticide for delousing garments and disinfecting freight cars. Ironically, Zyklon B was invented by a Nobel Prize–winning Jewish industrial chemist who managed to escape from Germany in 1933 and did not live to see the use of his invention to murder his fellow Jews, including some of his own blood relations.

  None of Adolf Hitler’s hateful ideas about Judaism were wholly new or unique. Christians had been forbidden to employ Jewish wet-nurses in the Middle Ages, as we have seen, and sexual contact between Jews and non-Jews was prosecuted under the medieval laws against bestiality. The Nazi iconography of the Jew—and even the specific words and phrases of the sputtering diatribe delivered by Goebbels in 1937—was borrowed from the cracked and yellowing tracts of medieval anti-Semites. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 can be traced all the way back to the Jewry Law of 1268: “The Jews are deprived of the protection of their natural rights and condemned to eternal misery for their sins.” But, as we shall see, the Nazi regime was capable of accomplishing what even the most visionary medieval anti-Semites could have only dreamed of doing.35

  After the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, the Nazi bureaucracy promptly turned itself to the task of identifying and marking Jews. Like the Spanish Inquisition, which issued certificates of blood purity to Old Christians and ascertained the degree of Jewish blood in the veins of conversos, the Gestapo studied baptismal records and other public archives to determine the racial purity of the German population. Here, too, the Nazis updated the old inquisitorial methods by setting up such pseudoscientific institutions as the Reich Office for Kinship Research and the Institute for Racial Science and Ethnology, and pressing anthropologists and geneticists into service in making the deadly distinctions between “full” Jews (Volljuden) and fractional Jews (Mischlinge). Any man, woman, or child with a single Jewish grandparent (known as “a Mischlinge of the second degree”) was at risk of arrest and execution, but “for most party members and officials,” writes Eric A. Johnson, “anyone with a drop of Jewish blood was a Jew.”36

  Many of the Mischlinge, like the conversos of Spain, were professing Christians, either because of their own conversions or because they were descendants of converts. Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (1876–1958), then serving as secretary of state in the Vatican and later to reign as Pope Pius XII, echoed the admonitions issued by the Church when the Spanish Inquisition started burning conversos who insisted that they were earnest converts to Christianity: “The Holy See takes this occasion to add a word on behalf of those German Catholics who themselves have gone over from Judaism to the Christian religion or who are descended in the first generation, or more remotely, from Jews who adopted the Catholic faith,” Pacelli wrote in a note to the German chargé d’affaires in Rome in 1933. Tragically, “a word” was all that the Vatican was able to muster, then or later, although some of the clergy were willing to risk their lives to shelter a few Jews in convents and monasteries during the worst years of the Holocaust. The Church itself made peace with Nazi Germany and turned a blind eye to the murder of both Jews and converted Christians of Jewish ancestry.37

  Thanks to the assimilation and intermarriage of German and other European Jews that began in the nineteenth century, discerning a Jew from a non-Jew was even more difficult in Nazi Germany than it had been in medieval Europe, and so the “Jew badge” of medieval usage was revived in Nazi Germany in the form of a yellow Star of David with the word Jude (Jew) imprinted in black stylized lettering that was meant to suggest the Hebrew alphabet. Later, the same Jew badge was used throughout occupied Europe: Jood appeared on the badges used in Holland, for example, and Juif in France. By 1941, every Jewish man, woman, and child over the age of six in Nazi Germany was required by law to wear the Star of David, and it was a crime in itself to conceal the star with a handbag or a folded newspaper. Again, we are reminded of the Inquisition, which punished any convicted heretic who failed to prominently display the “heretic’s cross” and relied on its own network of informers to track down every offender.

  Jewish men, women, and children were subjected to increasingly brutal measures that were expressly designed to identify them as Jews and isolate them from ordinary Germans. Along with the wearing of the yellow star, all Jews were required to append the name Abraham or Sarah to their given names unless they were already known by names that the Nazi regime deemed to be recognizably Jewish, a list that included such rarely used biblical names as Absalom and Ahab. They were required to post signs that marked their businesses as Jewish-owned, and their passports and identity cards were stamped with the telltale letter J. As a practical matter, the new visibility exposed Jews to insults and assaults on the public streets, but the Nazi authorities actually discouraged such acts of impromptu violence because it only interfered with their ambitious plans to rid Germany of its Jewish population.38 “Violent mob anti-Semitism must be avoided,” one Nazi officer commented in a secret memo. “One does not fight rats with guns, but with poison and gas.”39

  Just as Jewish conversos in Spain were banned by law from various institutions and occupations, Jews in Germany were now excluded from enrollment in public schools and universities, employment as civil servants, the practice of law or medicine, and ownership of farms. They were forbidden to work in the media or the entertainment industry, and later they were refused entry to cinemas, cabarets, circuses, concert halls, museums, libraries, swimming pools, bathhouses, and ice-skating rinks. They were still permitted to ride trains, but they could not enter dining cars or sleeping cars. Various streets and even whole districts were eventually declared off-limits to living Jews, and defunct Jews were denied burial in German cemeteries. The small and ever-diminishing remnant of Jews who survived in Germany after the commencement of Allied bombing during World War II was denied access to bomb shelters.

  The Nazis repeatedly and intentionally followed the example of medieval anti-Semitism in general and the Inquisition in particular. Shortly after the Nazis came to power in 1933, for example, ceremonial book-burnings were organized in Berlin and elsewhere around Germany; some twenty thousand volumes, many of them by Jewish authors ranging from Sholem Asch to Stefan Zweig, were tossed on the bonfires by torch-bearing Nazi youth in Berlin, and thousands more were burned in other cities. The notoriously pornographic Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer published a special issue in 1934 devoted to the age-old blood libel: “The Jewish Murder Plot Against Non-Jewish Humanity Is Uncovered.” A Nazi propaganda film released in 1941, The Eternal Jew, was a remake of the legend of the Wandering Jew. Ominously, the medieval ghetto was put back into use in twentieth-century Europe, although the walled-off Jewish districts in Lodz, Vilna, Warsaw, and elsewhere in German-occupied lands were only holding areas for Jewish men, women, and children awaiting transit to the death camps.40

  Nazi Germany also learned a valuable lesson from the Inquisition when it came to turning persecution into a paying enterprise. Germany systematically looted its Jewish victims by compelling them to sell their land, businesses, artwork, jewelry, and stock at nominal prices, confiscating their homes when they were arrested and “deported,” and imposing collective fines to be paid by the Jewish population, as when the Jews were made to pay one billion marks for the replacement of window-glass smashed during the state-sponsored pogrom in 1938 known as Kristallnacht or Night of the Broken Glass. The Nazi regime charged its Jewish victims for conveying them in cattle cars to the death camps at the “standard rate for third-class travel,” that is, four pfennigs per kilometer with children traveling free of charge. Even the corpses of dead Jews were a source of revenue for Nazi Germany: gold dental work was pulled from the mouths of dead Jews, melted down into ingots, and sent to the Reichsbank in Berlin.41

  All the while, Nazi Germany also followed the example of the Inquisition by draping itself in the thin fabric of “legal justice” and thus rationalizing its wors
t crimes as the dutiful observance of law. Since the Nuremberg Laws had formally stripped the German Jews of the rights of citizenship, the stateless Jews—according to the reasoning of German jurists—could be arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered without offense to German law or legal procedure. “The Jews were placed outside of the German community because of the laws,” explained one Gestapo commander by way of defense at his war-crimes trial. “This was indeed wrong, as I now know, but at the time it was the law of the land.”42

  At least one of the weapons used against Spanish Jewry during the Inquisition was considered but later rejected by Nazi Germany. The Nazis toyed with the idea of the mass expulsion of the Jewish population, a project assigned to the so-called Central Office for Jewish Emigration under Adolf Eichmann. Some Jewish families were allowed to leave Germany during the early years of the Nazi regime but only after they had been looted of their property and wealth.

  The Nazis soon realized, however, that expulsion was an unsatisfactory answer to “the Jewish question.” After all, no country in the world was willing to accept Jewish refugees from Germany in significant numbers, and the Nazis opposed the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine because of their fear that it would serve as a sactuary and a base of operations for Jewish resistance. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939—the tripwire that finally triggered the outbreak of the Second World War—the rapid conquest of new territory in both eastern and western Europe meant that Jews who had managed to escape in the years before the war suddenly found themselves once again on German-occupied soil.43