Höss eventually developed what might be called a fruitful—or at least symbiotic—relationship with the man who was to remain his immediate superior: Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann nurtured Höss’s gifts, which led to some of the more distinguished advances in die Todtentechnologie. In 1941, for example, Eichmann began to find the Jewish problem a source of intolerable vexation not only because of the obvious immensity of the approaching task but because of the sheer practical difficulties involved in the “final solution.” Until that time mass extermination—then conducted by the SS on a relatively modest scale—had been carried out either by shooting, which posed problems having to do with simple bloody mess, unhandiness and inefficiency, or by the introduction of carbon monoxide into an enclosed sealed space, a method which was also inefficient and prohibitively time-consuming. It was Höss who, having observed the effectiveness of a crystallized hydrocyanic compound called Zyklon B when used as a vapor on the rats and the other verminous creatures that infested Auschwitz, suggested this means of liquidation to Eichmann, who, according to Höss, jumped at the idea, though he later denied it. (Why any experimenter was so backward is hard to understand. Cyanide gas had been used in certain American execution chambers for over fifteen years.) Turning nine hundred Russian prisoners of war into guinea pigs, Höss found the gas splendidly suited to the quick dispatch of human beings and it was employed thereafter extensively on countless inmates and arrivals of whatever origin, although after early April, 1943, exclusively on Jews and Gypsies. Höss was also an innovator in the use of such techniques as miniature minefields to blow up wayward or escaping prisoners, high-voltage fences to electrocute them and—his capricious pride—a pack of ferocious Alsatians and Doberman pinschers known as the Hundestaffel that gave Höss mingled joy and dissatisfaction (in a fussy concern that runs persistently through his memoirs), since the dogs, though hounds of hell in savagery by which they had been trained to chew inmates to shreds, did become torpid and ungovernable at moments and were all too skilled at finding out-of-the-way corners to go to sleep. In a large measure, however, his fertile and inventive ideas were successful enough that it may be said that Höss—in consummate travesty of the way that Koch and Ehrlich and Roentgen and others altered the face of medical science during the great German efflorescence of the last half of the previous century—worked upon the entire concept of mass murder a lasting metamorphosis.
For the sake of its historical and sociological significance it has to be pointed out that of all of Höss’s codefendants at the postwar trials in Poland and Germany—those satraps and second-string butchers who made up the SS ranks at Auschwitz and other camps—only a handful had a military background. However, this should not be particularly surprising. Military men are capable of abominable crimes; witness, in our recent time alone, Chile, My Lai, Greece. But it is a “liberal” fallacy that equates the military mind with real evil and makes it the exclusive province of lieutenants or generals; the secondary evil of which the military is frequently capable is aggressive, romantic, melodramatic, thrilling, orgasmic. Real evil, the suffocating evil of Auschwitz—gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring—was perpetrated almost exclusively by civilians. Thus we find that the rolls of the SS at Auschwitz-Birkenau contained almost no professional soldiers but were instead composed of a cross section of German society. They included waiters, bakers, carpenters, restaurant owners, physicians, a bookkeeper, a post office clerk, a waitress, a bank clerk, a nurse, a locksmith, a fireman, a customs officer, a legal advisor, a manufacturer of musical instruments, a specialist in machine construction, a laboratory assistant, the owner of a trucking firm... the list goes on and on with these commonplace and familiar citizens’ pursuits. There needs only to be added the observation that history’s greatest liquidator of Jews, the thick-witted Heinrich Himmler, was a chicken farmer.
No real revelation in all this: in modern times most of the mischief ascribed to the military has been wrought with the advice and consent of civil authority. As for Höss, he seems to be something of an anomaly, inasmuch as his pre-Auschwitz career straddled agriculture and the military. The evidence shows that he had been exceptionally dedicated, and it is precisely that rigorous and unbending attitude of spirit—the concept of duty and obedience above all which dwells unshakably in the mind of every good soldier—that gives his memoirs a desolating convincingness. Reading the sickening chronicle, one becomes persuaded that Höss is sincere when he expresses his misgivings, even his secret revulsion, at this or that gassing or cremation or “selection,” and that dark doubts attend the acts he is required to commit. Lurking behind Höss as he writes, one feels, is the spectral presence of the seventeen-year-old boy, the brilliantly promising young Unterfeldwebel of the army of another era, when distinct notions of honor and pride and rectitude were woven into the fabric of the Prussian code, and that the boy is stricken dumb at the unmentionable depravity in which the grown man is mired. But that is of another time and place, another Reich, and the boy is banished into the farthest shadows, the horror receding and fading with him as the doomed ex-Obersturmbannführer scribbles indefatigably away, justifying his bestial deeds in the name of insensate authority, call of duty, blind obedience.
One is somehow convinced by the equanimity of this statement: “I must emphasize that I have never personally hated the Jews. It is true that I looked upon them as the enemies of our people. But just because of this I saw no difference between them and the other prisoners, and I treated them all in the same way. I never drew any distinctions. In any event, the emotion of hatred is foreign to my nature.” In the world of the crematoriums hatred is a reckless and incontinent passion, incompatible with the humdrum nature of the quotidian task. Especially if a man has allowed himself to become depleted of all such distracting emotions, the matter of questioning or mistrusting an order becomes academic; he immediately obeys: “When in the summer of 1941 the Reichsführer SS [Himmler] himself gave me the order to prepare installations at Auschwitz where mass exterminations could take place, and personally carry out these exterminations, I did not have the slightest idea of their scale or consequences. It was certainly an extraordinary and monstrous order. Nevertheless, the reasons behind the extermination program seemed to me right. I did not reflect on it at the time: I had been given an order and I had to carry it out. Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view.”
And so the carnage begins, beneath Höss’s narrow, watchful and impassive eye: “I had to appear cold and indifferent to events that must have wrung the heart of anyone possessed of human feelings. I might not even look away when afraid lest my natural emotions get the upper hand. I had to watch coldly, while the mothers with laughing or crying children went into the gas chambers...
“On one occasion two small children were so absorbed in some game that they refused to let their mother tear them away from it. Even the Jews of the Special Detachment were reluctant to pick the children up. The imploring look in the eyes of the mother, who certainly knew what was happening, is something I shall never forget. The people were already in the gas chamber and becoming restive, and I had to act. Everyone was looking at me. I nodded to the junior noncommissioned officer on duty and he picked up the screaming, struggling children in his arms and carried them into the gas chamber, accompanied by their mother, who was weeping in the most heartrending fashion. My pity was so great that I longed to vanish from the scene: yet I might not show the slightest trace of emotion. [Arendt writes: “The problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used... was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning those instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of m
y duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!”] I had to see everything. I had to watch hour after hour, by day and by night, the removal and burning of the bodies, the extraction of the teeth, the cutting of the hair, the whole grisly, interminable business. I had to stand for hours on end in the ghastly stench, while the mass graves were being opened and the bodies dragged out and burned.
“I had to look through the peephole of the gas chambers and watch the process of death itself, because the doctors wanted me to see it... The Reichsführer SS sent various high-ranking party leaders and SS officers to Auschwitz so that they might see for themselves the process of extermination of the Jews... I was repeatedly asked by them how I and my men could go on watching these operations and how we were able to stand it. My invariable answer was that the iron determination with which we must carry out Hitler’s orders could only be obtained by a stifling of all human emotions.”
But granite would be tormented by such scenes. A convulsive despondency, megrims, anxiety, freezing doubt, inward shudders, Weltschmerz that passes understanding—all overwhelm Höss as the process of murder achieves its runaway momentum. He is plunged into realms that transcend reason, belief, sanity, Satan. Yet his tone is rueful, elegiac: “I was no longer happy in Auschwitz once the mass exterminations had begun... If I was deeply affected by some incident, I found it impossible to go back to my house and my family. I would mount my horse and ride until I had chased the terrible picture away. Often at night I would walk through the stables and seek relief among my beloved animals. When I saw my children happily playing or observed my wife’s delight over our youngest, the thought would often come to me: How long will our happiness last? My wife could never understand these gloomy moods of mine and ascribed them to some annoyance connected with my work. My family, to be sure, were well provided for in Auschwitz. Every wish that my wife or children expressed was granted them. The children could live a free and untrammeled life. My wife’s garden was a paradise of flowers. The prisoners never missed an opportunity for doing some little act of kindness to my wife or children, and thus attracting their attention. No former prisoner can ever say that he was in any way or at any time badly treated in our house. My wife’s greatest pleasure would have been to give a present to every prisoner who was in any way connected with our household. The children were perpetually begging me for cigarettes for the prisoners. They were particularly fond of the ones who worked in the garden. My whole family displayed an intense love of agriculture and particularly for animals of all sorts. Every Sunday I had to walk them all across the fields and visit the stables, and we must never overlook the kennels where the dogs were kept. Our two horses and the foal were especially beloved. The children always kept animals in the garden, creatures the prisoners were forever bringing them. Tortoises, martens, cats, lizards: there was always something new and interesting to be seen there. In the summer they splashed in the paddling pool in the garden, or in the Sola River. But their greatest joy was when Daddy bathed with them. He had, however, so little time for these childish pleasures...”
It was into this enchanted bower that Sophie was to stray during the early fall of 1943, at a time when by night the billowing flames from the Birkenau crematoriums blazed so intensely that the regional German military command, situated one hundred kilometers away near Cracow, grew apprehensive lest the fires attract enemy air forays, and when by day a bluish veil of burning human flesh beclouded the golden autumnal sunlight, sifting out over garden and paddling pool and orchard and stable and hedgerow its sickish sweet, inescapably pervasive charnelhouse mist. I do not recall Sophie’s telling me about ever being the recipient of a present from Frau Höss, but it confirms one’s belief in the basic truthfulness of Höss’s account to know that during Sophie’s brief stay under the Commandant’s roof she, like the other prisoners, just as he claimed, was never in any way or at any time badly treated. Although even this in the end, as it turned out, was not so much really to be thankful for.
7
“SO MAYBE YOU can see, Stingo,” Sophie told me that first day in the park, “how Nathan saved my life. It was fantastic! Here I was, very ill, fainting, falling down, and along comes—how do you call him?—Prince Charming, and he save my life. And it was so easy, you see, like magic, as if he had a magic wand and he wave it over me, and very soon I am all well.”
“How long did it take?” I said. “Between the time...”
“You mean after that day when he found me? Oh, hardly any time at all, really. Two weeks, three weeks, something like that. Allez! Go away!” She skipped a small stone at the largest and most aggressive swan invading our picnic ground on the lake. “Go away! I hate that one, don’t you? Un vrai gonif. Come here, Tadeusz.” She made little clucking sounds at her disheveled favorite, enticing him with the remnants of a bagel. Hesitantly, the outcast waddled forward with blowzy feathers and a forlorn lopsided glance, pecking at the crumbs as she spoke. I listened intently even though I had other concerns in the offing. Perhaps because my coming assignation with the divine Lapidus had caused me to oscillate between rapture and apprehension, I tried to quell both emotions by drinking several cans of beer—thus violating my self-imposed rule about alcohol during daylight or working hours. But I needed something to stifle my monumental anticipation and to slow my galloping pulse.
I consulted my wristwatch, to discover with sickening suspense that only six hours must pass before I would be tapping at Leslie’s door. Clouds like creamy blobs, iridescent Disneyesque confections, moved serenely toward the ocean, sending dappled patterns of light and shade across our grassy little promontory where Sophie talked about Nathan, and I listened, and the turmoil of traffic on the distant Brooklyn avenues drummed with an intermittent booming sound, very faint, like some harmless, ceremonial cannonade. “Nathan’s brother’s name is Larry,” she continued. “He’s a wonderful person and Nathan adores him. Nathan took me to see Larry the next day, at his office in Forest Hills. He gave me a long examination and all during the examination I remember he kept saying, ‘I think Nathan must be right about you—it’s just remarkable, this natural instinct he has about medicine.’ But Larry wasn’t sure. He thought Nathan must be right about this deficiency I had. I was so terribly pale then. He thought it couldn’t be anything else after I told him all my symptoms. But naturally, he must be sure. So he got me an appointment with a friend of his, a spécialiste at the Columbia hospital, the Presbyterian hospital. This is a doctor of deficiency—no—”
“A doctor specializing in dietary deficiencies,” I said, hazarding a reasonable guess.
“Yes, exactly. This is a doctor named Warren Hatfield, who study medicine with Larry before the war. Anyway, that same day we ride together, Nathan and I, to New York to see Dr. Hatfield. Nathan borrowed Larry’s car and crossed me over the bridge to the Columbia hospital. Oh, Stingo, I remember that so well, that ride with Nathan to the hospital. Larry’s car is a décapotable—you know, a convertible—and all my life ever since I was growing up in Poland, I wanted to ride in a convertible, like the ones I had seen in pictures and in the movies. Such a silly ambition, yes, to ride in an open car, but here I was on this beautiful summer day riding with Nathan and the sun coming down and the wind blowing through my hair. It was so strange. I was still sick, you see, but I feel good! I mean I knew somehow I was going to be made well. And all because of Nathan.
“It was early in the afternoon, I remember. I had never been to Manhattan except by the subway train at night, and now from the car for the first time I see the river by daytime and the incredible skyscrapers of the city and the airplanes in the clear sky. It was so majestic and so beautiful and exciting, I was near to crying. And I would look at Nathan from the corner of my eye while he talked very fast about Larry and all of these marvelous things he done as a doctor. And then he would talk about medicine, and about how he would now wager anything on earth that he was right about my condition, and how it could be cured, and et cetera. And I don’t know how to
describe this feeling I had, looking at Nathan as we drove up Broadway. I suppose you would call it—what?—awe, there’s a fine English word. Awe that this sweet gentle friendly man would come along and just be so caring and serious to make me well. He was my savior, Stingo, just that, and I never had a savior before...
“And of course he was right, you see. At Columbia, at the hospital, I stay for three days while Dr. Hatfield makes the tests, and they show that Nathan is right. I am profoundly lacking iron. Oh, I am lacking some other things too, but they are not so important. It is mainly iron. And while I am there for those three days in the hospital Nathan comes to visit me every day.”
“How did you feel about all this?” I asked.
“About what?”
“Well, I don’t mean to pry,” I went on, “but you’ve been describing one of the wildest, nicest whirlwind encounters I’ve ever heard of. After all, at that point you’re still pretty much strangers. You don’t really know Nathan, don’t know what motivates him, other than that he’s obviously very much attracted to you, to say the least.” I paused, then said slowly, “Again, Sophie, stop me if I’m getting a little too personal, but I’ve always wondered what happens in a woman’s mind when a terrific, forceful, attractive guy like this comes along and—well, to use that expression again, sweeps you off your feet.”
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 178