The spirit of the school, the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium, has in fact always been an enlightened, almost liberal Catholicism, hostile to political extremes and carefully independent of the bishop. If young Dr Krapp, the headmaster, felt depressed when I asked him for essays by the pupil Barbie, he was too courteous to show it: files were hunted out, photocopies made, and the mystery of Barbie’s development discussed. How did this sensitive, pious small boy, so withdrawn that few of his school contemporaries even remember him clearly, metamorphose into a torturer?
Even today, and whatever their views, pupils at a German high school navigate cautiously when writing answers about religious belief. Liberal the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium may have been, but it was never prudent simply to dismiss religious faith as nonsense when taking the main state examination to matriculate. Barbie tried to dodge the issue by suggesting that matters of faith ‘affect the inner man’ and were therefore not proper topics for logical discussion. Exactly ninety-nine years before, the boy Marx – a Jew baptized a Lutheran – dared to sail a bit closer to the wind: ‘Before we examine the basis, nature and effects of the union of Christ with the faithful, we should see … whether Man cannot by himself reach the End for which God called him forth out of nothingness.’ Both, of course, were prevaricating. Barbie was already a member of the Hitler Youth when he wrote, committed to anticlerical neopaganism; Karl Marx was high on Hegelian revolutionary liberalism. Both passed the examination, Marx with far greater distinction than Barbie.
Among Barbie’s examiners was Dr Michel, one of his form teachers, who was later to provide a rather disconcerting example of civil courage and its penalties. In 1937, with Hitler in his fifth year of power, Dr Michel ordered his pupils to turn all the desks around so that they faced the door rather than the blackboard. Until now, there had been a crucifix on the end wall of every classroom, above the teacher’s head. A new decree had ordained that the cross must be removed and hung over the door, to be replaced in the position of honour by a portrait of Adolf Hitler. Dr Michel’s class were thus obliged to turn their backs on their Führer. He was instantly reported by one of his colleagues. But all that happened to him was a transfer to another school.
The Nazis in Trier were always outnumbered by the Catholics, and scored miserably in free elections during the Weimar Republic. Even after Hitler assumed full power in 1933, Catholic dissidents – as the case of Dr Michel showed – enjoyed some immunity. But there was no attempt to use this strength. Instead, Bishop Bornewasser (who much later attacked the Nazis over the euthanasia programme) tried to conciliate the new regime by declaring a pilgrimage to the Holy Robe, Trier’s most famous relic. Nazis in uniform shepherded the foreign pilgrims about the town and lined the streets; party dignitaries stood beside the bishop at the cathedral door to welcome important visitors. A film of this episode, one of Hitler’s easiest propaganda victories, is kept locked in the diocesan archives at Trier. There also exists a photograph of Bornewasser standing with Goebbels and giving the Nazi salute. It remains unpublished. ‘To explain it would be too complicated in a caption,’ the owner told me. At the time that the photograph was taken, the new Nazi mayor of Trier was banning Jews from public swimming pools on the grounds that their cheeky and tactless behaviour was upsetting normal citizens.
The creaking and gasping of the lovers in a room along the hotel corridor has died down. Then the silence is broken again by a hoarse voice from the direction of the river outside: ‘Hilfe, Hilfe!’ The voice grows faint, then returns with new desperation. I open the windows, letting in a swarm of river flies, and peer out over the Mosel at the arches of the Roman bridge, at the indifferent headlights of late cars. The source of the voice is invisible. The river is black, with trembling silver flowers of reflected light from the lamps on the bridge. Now the voice from the dark water is screaming and sobbing: ‘Help – O Gott! – help me….’ Windows begin to open along the hotel; guests peer out.
The police van drives straight down the bank to the water’s edge: a floodlight goes on, and suddenly there is another silver flower in the black water, this time with a struggling fly caught in it. ‘Bleibt dock ruhig- stay calm!’ repeats a loudspeaker. Men wade into the Mosel and vanish; there is the sound of wet commotions, more sobbing. Flashlights dance up and down as a man is pulled up the bank. An ambulance drives slowly away, bouncing over the uneven turf. I look along the front of the hotel, where a head protrudes out of each window. Only the window of the two lovers remains shut.
The Polish writer Artur Miedzyrzecki writes: ‘Misery is close by, right outside your window. But it doesn’t affect you directly. Sleep. So a person hears and does not hear the cry for help. A person does not realise that violence is occuring. He realises it when everything is over. Too late to do anything…. Heroism is first and foremost the courage to see in time.’
In the morning, the Trier newspaper does not mention anything about a man in the river.
Klaus Barbie once cared about the misery outside his window. It was a phase, in his late teens. He joined several Catholic young men’s groups, who went about the city feeding derelicts and visiting the prisons. It was a way of relieving the guilt and confusion of his life at home, where his father, a village schoolmaster, was drinking himself to death. Some of his acquaintances thought this quiet boy was a natural recruit for the priesthood. Barbie himself once considered studying theology. Then, in his twenty-first year, everything changed. His father and his handicapped younger brother died, the pension on which the family hoped to finance Klaus through university was cut off, Hitler came to power, and Klaus became a Nazi.
He never explained this sudden change, and nobody in Trier can account for it. Such conversions were common enough in 1933. He looked into the glaucous, pale blue eyes of the Führer, was dazzled, and fell. All his previous life, his loyalties and beliefs and sufferings, became irrelevant. ‘I have become a serving member in the mighty retinue of the Führer? he wrote later that year. And he remained true. Forty years later, an acquaintance in Peru remembers, a joke about Hitler made Barbie, who was then using the name ‘Altmann,’ leap to his feet, turkey red, shrieking that he would tolerate no insult to the leader in his presence. Year by year, he observed Hitler’s birthday. ‘He lacked only patience,’ he wrote recently to another SS veteran. ‘If we “young ones” had been allowed to take charge in time, he would be alive to celebrate his birthday now….’
It is easier to explain why he made such a brilliant party career so young: adjutant to the Trier-Central Nazi chairman at twenty-one, at twenty-two admitted to full membership of Reinhard Heydrich’s Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the SS intelligence service. Barbie, it seems, was the Nazi stool pigeon in the Gymnasium. The party in Trier saw its main enemy in the Catholic youth groups, especially strong in the high school; Klaus Barbie was a member of one of these groups and was a priceless source of information about his own schoolmates.
In the underpass leading to the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium, Dr Krapp’s pupils have written with a spray can: ‘Better to be a Universal Dilettante than a Specialized Idiot.’
Trier is a beautiful city again, rebuilt carefully after bombing and American artillery tore out its old heart. Rococo churches and Renaissance palaces collapsed; only monuments of dictatorship – the gigantic Roman gateway, the Porta Nigra, and the concrete flak bunker – survived unshaken. Its politics today, dominated by the Christian Democrats, are tranquil, and the arguments that generate ideological heat are mostly about symbols. Lieutenant-Colonel K., an earnest and intelligent soldier, combines the roles of a Bundeswehr officer, a historian of the working-class movement in Trier, and an elected member of the Social Democrat opposition in the city council. When he proposed changing the name of the street still dedicated to Hindenburg, the Christian Democrat city fathers said that such shocking demagogy reminded them of Goebbels. When he suggested that the council formally revoke the grant of honorary citizenship made to Adolf Hitler more than forty years before, they said that they had never heard any
thing so outrageous since the speeches of Julius Streicher. Nothing is proved by all this except how deeply and effectively the Trier establishment has buried the past.
And it is not only the Nazi past that has been buried. On a back wall in the municipal art gallery, I found a small, untitled painting by Peter Krisam, showing French Moroccan cavalry charging a civilian crowd in the marketplace. It was a spirited, angry little canvas, marked only with the date, 1923, hung in an obscure corner. But with that date, a corner of the historical coffin lid began to creak upward. This painting was about the Trier which for hundreds of years understood itself as Germany’s western bastion against French imperialism, the city where the word ‘France’ did not stand for red wine and berets but for bayonets, for spahis riding down demonstrators, for attempt after attempt to lever the whole border region away from its German allegiance. This is an aspect of Trier which is scarcely mentioned in public in these days of Franco-German reconciliation (besides, there are still 20,000 French troops quartered in and around the city). But it was the aspect that dictated the political climate in which Klaus Barbie grew up. That date of 1923 referred to the climax of Franco-German conflict in the aftermath of the First World War, as French occupation troops tried to impose on the population a chain of puppet ‘separatist republics’ intended to bring about the secession of the whole Rhineland from the Reich. Louis XIV had blown up many of Trier’s medieval churches, Napoleon annexed the whole region to France, and after 1945 France refused to permit the return of Trier’s hinterland in the Saar to Germany and ruled the town with a harshly effective network of Sûreté agents and informers.
Here at last was a key to the ‘Bildung of Barbie.’ The folklore of his childhood was composed of fresh memories of resistance to the French and their tame ‘separatists.’ His own father came from the Saar, cut away from Germany after the defeat of 1918, and after fighting the whole war on the western front, he had taken part in the patriotic, anti-French resistance. When Klaus Barbie entered the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium, there were still older boys who could boast of their experiences dodging the scimitars of the spahis in the market square in 1923.
And here, too, lay a clue to one of the sickest manifestations of Barbie’s character: his hero-worship of Jean Moulin. Barbie, with the Lyons Einsatzkommando, captured the French resistance leader in 1943, who had been betrayed by one of his own countrymen to the foreign occupiers. Moulin died soon afterward of injuries which Barbie still claims were self-inflicted but which most witnesses say were the result of Barbie’s interrogation methods. Everything that Barbie has said since, however, suggests that he identified in Moulin the German patriots, some of them partisans and saboteurs, who paid for their guerrilla war against the French occupants of 1923 with their lives, and who had become the mythical figures of his own youth.
When he faced this calm, resolute prisoner in Gestapo headquarters at Lyons, Barbie saw only a mirror image from recent Rhineland history. He did not grasp the difference between a nationalist fanatic and a democratic politician like Moulin. Instead, he thought he recognised – this squat, trivial, warped little policeman – the special human quality and stature which, as a Nazi, he had been trained to worship and blindly to obey. But this superman, this ‘member of history,’ was at his mercy. And, if the evidence can be believed, Barbie fell upon him, battering and clubbing him until Moulin was a bleeding wreck beyond recovery. In an interview, Barbie once gave away a horrible fragment of the truth: ‘As I interrogated Jean Moulin, I felt that he was myself.’
Many years after the war, ‘Altmann’ made a business trip from Bolivia to Europe. He had been twice condemned to death in France in absentia, and there was a warrant out for his arrest. But he took a risk. He went to Paris, to the Pantheon where Moulin’s remains now rest. In that empty place, the man who had begun life as a Christian idealist, who had passed through the careers of a Nazi torturer and an American secret agent, and who was now a corrupt businessman in South America, paid his indecipherable respects.
[1983
The Death Doctors
On a winter morning in Frankfurt, when it was still dark, the journalists were taken into a small, well-guarded room to show them the defendants at the forthcoming Auschwitz trial. That was in 1963.1 remember staring at those faces, as the photographers scrambled among them, as if physiognomy would begin to unlock the mystery of how human beings – what sort of human beings? – had done those things.
Here and there were the faces of wild beasts, grinning uncomprehendingly: terrible Boger with his yellow eyes, the great skull of Kaduk. There was no mystery about them. When Etty Hillesum saw faces like those guarding the trains as they drew into the camp at Westerbork to begin the deportations to Auschwitz, she thought of the line in Scripture which says that God made man in His own image and, for the first and last time, her religious faith was shaken to its roots. But then there were the others. Mulka, the camp adjutant, looking like a bad-tempered old shopkeeper, or Perry Broad, who had been one of the youngest SS guards, still a sleek and youthful man in an immaculate three-piece suit with the expression of somebody accused of parking his Jaguar in a pedestrian zone. Their appearance told me nothing.
And there were the doctors. These men, trained in famous academies and some with high research qualifications, bound by the Hippocratic oath, had carried out selections on the ramp – dividing the incoming torrent from the trains into those who were sent straight to the gas chambers and those who were to be worked to death. Some had killed thousands by injections, or carried out experiments on helpless men, women, and children. Most had taken part in internal selections within the medical blocks, consigning to death those with infectious diseases, those too weak to be worth keeping, and those whose bodies had fulfilled their purposes in research.
If the sight of the doctors answered no fundamental questions, neither did the evidence as the long trial got into its stride. It became clear that the doctors above all had subscribed to an ‘Auschwitz code of values’ which could not be reconciled in their own minds with the charge that they had betrayed all medical or human standards. It was not even as simple as ‘evil, be thou my good.’ Early in the trial, one witness described how a group of Polish children had been brought to Auschwitz after being caught stealing coal. Since there was at the time no separate block for children, they were distributed among different huts. However, a medical decision was taken that ‘it was morally dangerous for children to sleep among adult men.’ So the children were taken to the medical block and given lethal injections. ‘In this way,’ said the witness quietly, ‘the morals of the camp were preserved.’
More than twenty years have passed since that trial, and it is only now, after reading Professor Lifton’s book, that I have begun to understand the fundamental question ‘How could they?’ – the subjective process in the minds of these doctors which allowed them to assimilate killing to the commandment of healing. But the importance and stature of ‘The Nazi Doctors’ is much greater than that remark suggests. This is not only one of the most important works on medical ethics yet written. It also breaks through the frontiers of historiography to provide a convincing psychological interpretation of the Third Reich and the crimes of National Socialism. No one will be able, in my view, to write perceptively about those times in the future without referring to this interpretation, without bringing into the centre of the analysis the dynamic which Lifton calls ‘the biomedical imperative.’
Rudolf Hess said in 1934 that ‘National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.’ It was an appeal to which a large part of the German medical profession responded with a sense of dazzled, revolutionary liberation. Medicine was no longer just one profession among others, or one of many branches of applied science and research. It had become the profession, the central intellectual resource of the New Order. Doctors acquired a status that engineers, nuclear physicists, even generals could not approach. Doctors were ‘biological soldiers.’ Medicine was breaking away from mere ‘Christian
’ or ‘Judaic’ compassion for the individual, and from the passive, remedial job of healing the sick. From now on, medical science would address itself to the ‘positive’ task of actively shaping the future of the human race, to cultivating and pruning genetic stock for the future, to using ‘biological laws’ in the service of a new understanding of the wholeness and interdependence of all life.
Lifton establishes the chronology, the steps that led eventually to doctors – not professional SS officers, but doctors of medicine – performing the supreme sacral rite of National Socialism: the selections on the ramp at Auschwitz. There were five such steps. The first was coercive sterilisation. The second was the killing of impaired babies and children. The third was the so-called ‘euthanasia’ programme, the killing of impaired adults -cripples and the mentally handicapped – in the gas chambers of special institutes and adapted hospitals. Then came the extension of ‘euthanasia’ to impaired or racially undesirable inmates brought from the concentration camps. Finally came the mass extermination of entire racial groups in the Einsatzkom-mando operations and then in the death camps.
The ideas of ‘racial hygiene’ or coercive eugenics were circulating widely in the early years of this century, and not only in Germany. By 1920, for example, some twenty states in the United States had laws for the compulsory sterilisation of the ‘feeble minded’ and criminally insane. But in Germany, such thoughts were fatally to converge with new concepts about euthanasia. In Anglo-Saxon societies, as Lifton remarks, euthanasia implied on the whole the right of a person to choose death. In Germany, however, it had been argued since the late nineteenth century that the State as the supreme social organism retained the right to impose death on some of its subjects in the interest of the collectivity, the sacrifice of lives in war being only the most obvious precedent. An influential book published in 1920 by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunrverten Lebens, put forward the concept of ‘life unworthy of life,’ which was to become central to Nazi thinking and practice. The authors, a professor of law and a professor of psychiatry, declared that the destruction of ‘unworthy life’ was in itself a healing process – a treatment for the social organism; they discussed the ‘ballast existence’ of human beings reduced to empty shells and prophesied ‘a new age … [There has been] an overestimation of the value of life as such.’
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