God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World

by Cullen Murphy

  Finkensteinallee No. 63

  “Note-taking and record-keeping were prescribed down to the last detail, so that the Holy Office might study all of the records and keep persons in question under surveillance.” That is the assessment of a historian of the Inquisition in the New World. He could have made the same observation about the Inquisition in medieval France or Renaissance Rome. Collect, preserve, retrieve: inquisitions depend on data storage, and data storage only improves. In 1987, Lawrence Weschler published an account of how the evidence of systematic torture in Brazil, conducted in the 1960s and 1970s by successive military governments, was finally brought to light. One of the investigators explained:

  The Brazilian generals, you see, were technocrats. They were intent on doing things by the book, on following the forms, even if the results were often cruel and perverse. For example, they were obsessed with keeping complete records as they went along. They never expected anyone to delve into those records—certainly not in any systematic fashion. They never imagined they’d be held accountable to anyone. But the forms, the technicalities, required complete and well-ordered records, so they kept them. Now, in the early stages of an internee’s processo—that’s the Portuguese word for a military court proceeding—the authorities often had recourse to torture. This was partly because they were eager to extract as much information as quickly as possible so they would be able to make further arrests before the prisoner’s friends and comrades could learn of his arrest and cover their tracks. But it was also an almost traditional reflex, going back to the days of slavery and the Inquisition.

  An archive elicits conflicting thoughts and behaviors. The wish to preserve the past is a worthwhile instinct—but deciding what to preserve presents a challenge to basic honesty. Archives speak to a need for collective memory. They can inspire a certain humility. But they also reflect some measure of vanity—a high regard for the human enterprise. And then there’s the matter of how archives are used. If open and accessible, they can foster transparency and understanding; if restricted or closed, they can become menacing, putting knowledge in the hands of some and not of others. Jacques Derrida’s delirious and quirky Archive Fever exposes archives for what they are: dangerous, glorious, insidious, inebriating. They impose order on a reality that may in fact have none. By offering storage for memory, they make forgetting possible. But they can also be tools of control.

  The very size of some archival repositories gives one pause. The Sumerian archives at Ebla survive in clay on 17,000 cuneiform fragments—and that’s just the record of a single city, from 4,000 years ago. A medievalist friend once confessed his gratitude to the French Revolution, whose incendiary fervor caused the destruction of 90 percent of the archives of Carcassonne—he could never have completed his doctorate had they remained intact.

  The National Archives of the United States has long since spread out from its central headquarters in Washington to some twenty satellite repositories throughout the country. The facility in College Park, Maryland, is the largest of them all. Gleaming white, with tinted glass, it could be the seat of a biotech company or an intelligence agency. Footpaths wind through an encircling forest of willowy trees—the kind of locale where Hollywood sets secret meetings, frosty exhalations curling above dark coats. Security is tight. ID badges are embedded with tiny transponders that tell your minders exactly where in the building you are. The penthouse floor is for classified material. From time to time you’ll round a corner and be ambushed by a TV screen, which you are on.

  The records on deposit here are not only American; archival administrators, especially imperial ones, are an acquisitive type. U.S. forces, occupying portions of Germany after World War II, took control over as much of the Third Reich’s archives and other printed material as they could find. A portion of Adolf Hitler’s personal library, retrieved from a salt mine near Berchtesgaden, is held at the Library of Congress. For decades, the archives of the Third Reich remained in American hands, though still on German soil, at a facility known as the Berlin Document Center. Eventually it was all microfilmed—a step up from cuneiform, but one that in a digital age seems nearly as antiquated.

  The microfilms—70,000 rolls—reside in the College Park facility, in Room 4050, which is the size of a small supermarket. Other materials from the BDC—original cards and files—sit in boxes on shelves in a different room, one the size of a football field. Some of them involve the lengthy process of “de-Nazification”—figuring out who had done what, and whether individuals should be allowed to return to their lives. On a recent visit, in the company of an archivist, I randomly picked out a file card from a box and found the notation “There are strong objections. Not recommended.” Concentration camp records are here too. The shelving is automated, to save space. At the press of a button, it parts to let you in; people sometimes get trapped when the shelving closes. That is one instrument the Inquisition didn’t think of. To give you some idea of the size of the College Park archive, each of its gigantic storage rooms is known as a stack; the facility contains forty-one of them. You can understand why the government wants to digitize its holdings, and also why the cost of doing so now approaches $1.4 billion, and will continue to rise.

  Room 4050 has calm gray walls and floors, fluorescent lighting, and floor-to-ceiling rows of light-gray filing cabinets. If you know what you are looking for—say, the Nazi Party registration card for Herr Alfred Krautkammer—it is easy enough to locate: Look him up in the catalogue under NSDAP Collection, and you’ll see that the relevant microfilm is in the series A3340-MFOK. The microfilms are arranged alphabetically according to the first name on each roll, and each roll is given a number. Find the number, pull out the box, put the roll on a reader. The archivist helping me had a sense of humor. As she described the search process, she compared it to Ionesco’s “How to Prepare a Hard-Boiled Egg.” Before long, the card appeared on the screen. Krautkammer, Alfred. A butcher by profession. Lived in Wiesbaden. Joined the Nazi Party in 1941.

  It’s a little disconcerting to view such material under these conditions—clean, orderly, antiseptic. I spent some time with the archivist scrolling through spools of microfilm. The cards flew by, hundreds, thousands, like illustrated cels on the way to becoming animation. Occasionally, we would pause for a closer look. Zoom, zoom, stop. Here was the membership card, filled in by typewriter, of a woman who joined the Nazi Party in late 1944, the war already lost. The archivist couldn’t help herself; she said, “That wasn’t very smart.” Zoom, zoom, stop. Here was the card, filled out by hand, of a man who joined the party very early, in 1925. The script was elegant, a reminder that Germany was a country with mass public education and enviable standards of refinement. Civilization itself seems to be peering back from the card, as it peers back from the Inquisition. In El Greco’s famous portrait, Cardinal Niño de Guevara, an inquisitor general of Spain, wears heavy round eyeglasses to indicate that he is an intellectual and a man of advanced ideas. This same man is the subject of the 1935 novella El Greco Paints the Grand Inquisitor, by Stefan Paul Andres, a parable of Nazi Germany.

  The working conditions in Berlin are similar to those in College Park, but the surroundings have a history. For many years, the bulk of the material in the Berlin Document Center was lodged in the cavernous basements of a complex of villas at Wasserkafersteig 1, in Zelendorf, on the edge of the Grunewald, where Hermann Göring maintained his surveillance headquarters. The complex makes a cameo in Len Deighton’s novel Funeral in Berlin. In the 1990s, after the reunification of Germany, when the archives came back into the physical possession of the German government, the millions of files were consolidated in another suburban location, at Finkensteinallee No. 63.

  It is a grim assemblage of brick buildings inside a large gated compound, and might easily be mistaken for a sanitarium. The facility is surrounded by a leafy neighborhood of stout, respectable residences that lived through the war. The compound began its existence in the nineteenth century, as the Royal Prussian Ca
det Institute; the Kaiser himself looked on as the cornerstone was laid. In the 1930s, it became a military barracks. An old photograph shows Hitler reviewing troops in what is now the weedy parking lot where I left my car. New buildings were added in the Nazi era, and remain to this day. The entrance to one of them—an indoor swimming pool, among the largest in the world when it was built—is flanked by heroic concrete statues of “German Man” and “German Woman,” Teutonic versions of the winged bulls that guarded Sargon’s citadel.

  This is the largest federal archive in Germany. File cabinets spill out into Gothic hallways and what once were tiled washrooms. The subject matter ranges from routine administration of the Nazi state to its darkest undertakings. One series holds the records of the People’s Court—some 50,000 items—concerning trials and convictions for treason. Another holds the files of the Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt (Race and Settlement Main Office), with dossiers on the racial background of married members of the SS and their spouses. Each person’s file includes the results of a physical examination. Many include genealogical histories. To make certain of racial purity, some family trees were traced back to the sixteenth century.

  Repressive regimes are record-keeping regimes. Repression demands administration. Seventy-five years ago, when modern data processing began to emerge, IBM’s German subsidiary, with the knowledge of executives in America, provided the Nazi government with punch-card and tabulating machines by the thousands, which the company serviced and kept supplied. The machines were used initially to store information about the German population—including its Jewish component—and later to help manage the operations of extermination and labor camps. “The physician examines the human body and determines whether all organs are working to the benefit of the entire organism,” an executive of IBM’s German subsidiary observed at the opening of a new facility in Berlin in 1934. “We are very much like the physician, in that we dissect, cell by cell, the German cultural body.” He added, “I feel it almost a sacred action.”

  The original membership rolls of the Nazi Party are all here at Finkensteinallee No. 63—they are recorded on 11 million index cards. Party correspondence fills 1.3 million files. The personal dossiers on SS members take up another 350,000. To all this material in the Bundesarchiv must be added the archives from the German Democratic Republic—the former East Germany—a hybrid regime that for half a century blended features of both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, its postwar overlord.

  The East German secret police, the Stasi, occupied a headquarters complex of more than a million square feet, divided among more than twenty buildings, which sprawl across several city blocks in the Lichtenberg district of East Berlin. The complex is modern, shabby, and soul-deadening in that particular East German way; the local authorities are trying to figure out what to do with it. Some of the buildings still serve as storage for Stasi archives, including official reports of the surveillance routinely conducted on millions of East German citizens.

  The movie The Lives of Others, released in 2006, captures the bureaucratization of surveillance in East Germany at its most ordinary. But only the abstraction of numbers can capture the scale. At its peak, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, the Stasi had some 90,000 official employees. Over time, they compiled an archive containing, by one estimate, a billion sheets of paper. Like many bureaucracies, the Stasi was on autopilot for years. As one historian writes, “The daily activities of the spy world—the running of agents, catching spies, tracking enemies of the state, and making spy gadgets, to name just a few—led to the emergence of an insular spy culture, more intent on securing its power than protecting national security.” The intramural machinations of cardinal-inquisitors would have translated very easily to Lichtenberg.

  At the death of the hated Pope Paul IV, in 1559, the people of Rome stormed the headquarters of the Inquisition, freeing prisoners and destroying records. After the Berlin Wall came down, the people of East Berlin surged around the Stasi complex and eventually broke their way in. In this instance, the crowd was more interested in preserving records than in destroying them. Stasi operatives had burned or shredded what they could as the end drew near, but they could not overcome their own prowess: the archives had grown too vast. Desperate Stasi officials probably wished they had devoted some effort to developing a working prototype of Orwell’s memory holes. Orwell described them:

  In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

  In the end, the Stasi managed to destroy only about 5 percent of its holdings before the East German regime collapsed. Many of the shredded documents have since been reconstructed, with the help of software that can select thin strands of paper from among a tangle of millions, and match the strands to one another.

  Software for restoring shredded documents is one of only a few things the East Germans didn’t think to invent, judging from exhibits on display in the Stasi Museum, a forlorn domain that occupies a small building in the interior of the Stasi complex. It seems to exist in some strange middle state between tragedy and kitsch. The museum shop is threadbare. The café offers little, served by a sullen matron with the demeanor of Rosa Klebb. The museum is the creation of a group called Anti-Stalinist Action, and comes across as what it is: not the work of professional curators but something homemade, a bitter labor of love.

  Certain artifacts stand out for their sheer banality—beer mugs and shot glasses with the Ministry of State Security’s coat of arms and the slogan “25 years of reliable protection.” They look like items you’d pick up in State College or Ann Arbor. One area of the museum is devoted to ways of concealing cameras: in ties and buttons, thermoses and trees, watering cans and trash cans. The padding of a bra is pulled away to reveal a lens. There is a machine for steaming open letters, at a rate of six hundred an hour. The Stasi was well aware of smugglers’ tricks. One display depicts confiscated Bible tracts, which had been discovered rolled up inside the inner tubes of bicycle tires. Along a wall by a window sit a number of sealed clear bottles that hold specimens of cloth. Stasi technicians had invented a device called the “smell chair,” whose cushion was fitted with an absorbent replaceable cover. During interviews, persons of interest would be seated in the chair; when they left, a sample of cloth would be kept in a bottle for some later use, usually involving dogs—for instance, determining if a suspect had been in a certain room, or hunting someone down. In a corner of the main exhibit space stands a Stasi guardhouse, defaced with graffiti from the heady days of 1989. Painted on the front are the words Freiheit fur Meine Akte—“Freedom for my file.”

  The files have their freedom now, in a sense. All told, the archives at the old cadet institute—Nazi and East German combined—occupy some sixty linear miles of shelf space. There is so much documentation at the Berlin Document Center that a new repository is being built, an annex to the building in the complex that was once the headquarters of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, the Führer’s personal guard. The Reich’s eagle has long since been removed. A graphic display explaining the project, in a makeshift structure near the entrance, has been given a technically correct yet blandly unrevealing title: “The New Building of the Federal Archives in Berlin—Located Between Contradictory Contexts of German History.”

  Th
e reading rooms at the BDC—one in a structure known as Building 901, another in a converted chapel nearby—can handle 150 researchers at a time. The workstations are always busy. As at any archive, there are lockers for coats and bags—a security precaution. There are forms to fill out, identification cards to produce. Officious librarians retrieve specific files. Some researchers are students and historians. Many are ordinary citizens with personal agendas. What happened to certain relatives? Who took the family’s property? Or, maybe, nothing more complicated than What was in my file?

  The Tunnel of Truth

  Francis Walsingham would scarcely recognize the Britain of today. It is a liberal, secular democracy of a model kind. The United Kingdom is the nation in whose judicial system Julian Assange, the beleaguered founder of WikiLeaks, decided to place his trust when he found himself in legal peril. The monarch remains the head of an established church, but there are now far more practicing Catholics in England than there are practicing Anglicans. And there are all those Muslims, a relatively new element, some of whom have resorted to violence for political ends, as some Irish did during the past generation.

  The system will protect itself: here Walsingham would be back on comfortable ground. Faced first with an insurgency in Northern Ireland, beginning in the early 1970s, and then with threats of various kinds from radical Islam, the British government began to modernize its apparatus of surveillance and data collection. It is today a global leader. Britain maintains the largest DNA registry in the world. It is also covered by a system of some 4 million closed-circuit television cameras, the most comprehensive system anywhere. The effort has been promoted by the government with the slogan “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.” In the autumn, when plant life thins, you can see that cameras have been in the flower boxes of clubs and hotels all along. Cameras linked to computers cover roads and highways. After Islamist terrorists unleashed a wave of attacks in London in July of 2005, the police were able to create a nearly continuous video montage of the suicide bombers as they drove in their car from Leeds to a train station outside London: