by Primo Levi
The rise of the privileged—not only in the camps but in all human society—is a disturbing but inevitable phenomenon. The only places where you don’t find them are utopias. It is the duty of the righteous man to wage war on every undeserved privilege, but it is a war without end. Wherever power is exercised by the few, or by one man alone, against the many, privilege is born and proliferates, even against the will of power. But power normally tolerates and encourages it. Take a look at the Lager, which—in its Soviet version as well—can serve as a “laboratory”: the hybrid category of inmate-functionaries is both its framework and its most disturbing feature. This category is a gray zone, with undefined contours, which both separates and connects the two opposing camps of masters and servants. It has an incredibly complicated internal structure, and harbors just enough to confound our need to judge.
The gray zone of protekcja and collaboration has multiple roots. In the first place, the smaller the area of power the greater the need for outside assistance. Nazism, in the final years, could not manage without it, determined to maintain its grip on a subjugated Europe and fuel the war fronts that had been bled dry by the growing military resistance of its adversaries. It was indispensable to procure from the occupied countries not only labor but also policemen, and representatives and administrators of German power, which by then was deployed to the breaking point in other places. This latter category includes, with nuances varying in quality and weight, Vidkun Quisling, of Norway; the Vichy regime, in France; the Judenrat of Warsaw; and the Republic of Salò, along with the Ukrainian and Baltic mercenaries employed everywhere for the dirtiest jobs (never for combat) and the Sonderkommandos, whom we’ll discuss. But collaborators from the opposing camp, the former enemies, are treacherous by nature: they have betrayed once and they may do so again. It is not enough to relegate them to marginal tasks: the best way to bind them is to burden them with guilt, cover them with blood, compromise them as much as possible. A bond of complicity is thus forged between them and their masters, and there is no turning back. This type of behavior is known to criminal associations in every time and place, has always been practiced by the Mafia, and is the only explanation for the otherwise indecipherable excesses of Italian terrorism in the 1970s.
In the second place, and contrary to hagiographic and rhetorical conventions, the harsher the oppression, the more widespread among the oppressed is the willingness to collaborate with power. This willingness varies according to endless nuances and motivations: terror, ideological recruitment, slavish imitation of the victor, a shortsighted desire for power (even power that is ridiculously circumscribed in space and time), cowardice, and a clearheaded calculation aimed at evading orders and the imposed order. All these motives, alone or in combination, played an active part in creating this gray area, whose denizens were united by the desire to preserve and consolidate their privilege, against the unprivileged.
Before discussing one by one the motives that drove some prisoners to collaborate, to varying degrees, with the camp authorities, however, we should forcefully assert the imprudence of rushing to moral judgment in human cases such as these. It should be clear that the greatest fault lies with the system, the very structure of the totalitarian state. The criminal complicity of individual collaborators, great and small (never friendly, never transparent!), is always difficult to evaluate. We would prefer to entrust that judgment only to people who have been in similar circumstances and experienced for themselves what it means to act under coercion. Manzoni understood this condition all too well: “The troublemakers, the oppressors, all those who do harm of any sort to others, are guilty not only of the evil they do but also of the perversion of their victims’ minds.”5 The condition of victimhood does not exclude guilt, which is often objectively serious, but I do not know a human court that could be delegated to take its measure.
If it were up to me, if I had to judge, I would freely absolve anyone whose complicity in the crime was minimal and whose coercion was maximal. We, ordinary prisoners, were surrounded by swarms of low-level functionaries. They formed a picturesque menagerie of sweepers, vat washers, night watchmen, bed smoothers (who exploited to their minuscule advantage the German obsession with beds made up flat and square), lice and scabies inspectors, messengers, interpreters, and assistants to assistants. They were generally poor devils like us, who worked the same long hours as everyone else, but who for an extra half-liter of soup would take on these and other “service” functions that were innocuous, sometimes useful, and often invented out of thin air. They were rarely violent, but they tended to develop a typically corporate mentality, and to defend their “job” energetically against anyone, above or below, who tried to steal it from them. Their privilege, which involved additional discomfort and toil, brought them little benefit and did not exempt them from the discipline and suffering inflicted on the others. Their life expectancy was basically the same as that of the non-privileged. They were rough and rude, but they were not perceived as enemies.
A more subtle and varied judgment is required for those who held senior positions: the heads—Kapos—of the work squads, the barrack chiefs, the bookkeepers, and the world of inmates who performed various, often sensitive tasks (which I did not even suspect at the time) in the camps’ administrative offices, the Political Department (a de facto branch of the Gestapo), the Work Office, and the punishment cells. (The German term Kapo derives directly from the Italian capo; the oxytonical pronunciation, introduced by French prisoners, did not circulate until many years later, when it was popularized by the film of the same name by Gillo Pontecorvo, and it was preferred in Italy precisely because of its differential value.) Some of them, thanks to their ability or to luck, had access to top-secret information in their respective Lagers, and, like Hermann Langbein at Auschwitz, Eugen Kogon at Buchenwald, and Hans Marsalek at Mauthausen, became historians of the camps. It’s hard to know what to admire more, their courage or their cunning, which enabled them to help their comrades in many concrete ways by carefully observing the individual SS officers with whom they were in contact and intuiting who among them could be corrupted, who dissuaded from the cruelest decisions, who blackmailed, who deceived, and who frightened by the possibility of a redde rationem, a reckoning, at war’s end. Some, like the three men named, were members of secret defense organizations, so the power invested in them by their posts was offset by the extreme danger they ran as “resisters” and keepers of secrets.
The functionaries I am describing here were not collaborators in the least, or were so only in appearance. In fact, they were opponents in disguise. Not so most of the others in positions of command, who proved to be human specimens ranging from mediocre to terrible. Rather than grind a person down, power corrupts. Their power, which was of a unique nature, corrupted even more intensely.
Power exists in every variety of human social organization. To different degrees it is controlled, usurped, conferred from above or recognized from below, and assigned by merit, corporate solidarity, blood, or wealth. A certain measure of man’s domination of man is probably inscribed in our genetic heritage as herd animals. The notion that power is intrinsically harmful to the community is unproved. But the power held by the functionaries I’m talking about, even the low-ranking ones, such as the work-squad Kapos, was basically unlimited. In other words, a lower limit was set on their violence—in the sense that they were punished or dismissed if they were not harsh enough—but not an upper limit. That is to say, they were free to inflict the worst atrocities on their subordinates as punishment for any transgression, or even for no reason at all. Until the end of 1943, it was not rare for a Kapo to beat a prisoner to death without any fear of repercussion. Limits were not introduced until later, when the demand for labor became more acute. The Kapos were not supposed to mistreat prisoners in a way that would permanently diminish their capacity for work; but by then the evil practice had been established, and the new rules were not always respected.
In this way the ca
mps replicated, on a smaller scale but with amplified characteristics, the hierarchical structure of the totalitarian state, in which all power is invested from above, and any check on it from below is almost impossible. But this “almost” is important: there has never been a state that was truly “totalitarian” in this respect. Some form of rearguard action, a corrective to total abuse, has never been absent, not even in the Third Reich or in Stalin’s Soviet Union. In both regimes, a deterrent was provided, to varying degrees, by public opinion, the judiciary, the foreign press, the churches, and the sense of humanity and justice that ten or twenty years of tyranny cannot eradicate. Only within the concentration camps was any check from below nonexistent, and the power of petty despots absolute. It is understandable that such broad power would be overwhelmingly attractive to the type of person who is greedy for power; that individuals with moderate instincts also aspired to it, drawn to the many material advantages of the post; and that the power at their disposal proved to be fatally intoxicating.
What kind of person became a Kapo? Once again, we need to make a distinction. In the first place, those who were offered the opportunity, individuals in whom the camp commander or his deputies (who were often good psychologists) glimpsed a potential collaborator: common criminals taken from the prisons, for whom a career as a torturer offered an excellent alternative to detention; political prisoners sapped by five or ten years of suffering, or at any rate morally debilitated; later, even Jews, who saw the crumb of authority offered to them as the only way to escape the “final solution.” But, as I said before, there were also many who aspired to power spontaneously. There were the sadists, who were few but greatly feared, since for them the position of privilege coincided with the opportunity to inflict suffering and humiliation on the people below them. There were the frustrated, another feature of the microcosm of the Lager that replicates the macrocosm of totalitarian society; in both worlds, power is conceded generously, independent of ability and merit, to those who are willing to defer to hierarchical authority and thereby win an otherwise unattainable social promotion. Finally, there were many among the oppressed who were contaminated by the oppressors and tended to unconsciously identify with them.
There has been much discussion of this mimesis, the identification, imitation, or trading of roles between oppressor and victim. This is not virgin territory: assertions of all kinds have been made, true and invented, disturbing and banal, insightful and stupid. On the contrary, it is a field that has been clumsily plowed, trampled, and ravaged. When the film director Liliana Cavani was asked to explain briefly the meaning of a fine but mendacious film of hers, The Night Porter (1973), she stated, “We are all victims or murderers and we accept these roles voluntarily. Only Sade and Dostoyevsky really understood this.”6 She added that she believed that “in every environment, in every relationship, there is a victim-tormentor dynamic more or less clearly expressed and generally experienced on an unconscious level.”
I am no expert on the unconscious or the inner depths, but I do know that there are few experts, and that those few are more cautious. I do not know, nor am I particularly interested in knowing, whether a murderer is lurking deep within me, but I do know that I was an innocent victim and not a murderer. I know that murderers existed, and not just in Germany, and that they still exist, retired or on active duty, and that confusing them with their victims is a moral disease, an aesthetic license, or a sinister sign of complicity. Above all, it is a precious service rendered (intentional or not) to the deniers of the truth. I know that anything can happen in the camps, and on the human stage in general, and that the single example therefore proves very little. Having said this clearly, and reaffirmed that confusing the two roles signifies a desire to mystify the very basis of our need for justice, I still have a few observations to make.
The truth remains that, in the concentration camps and outside them, there are people who are gray, ambiguous, and quick to compromise. The extreme tension of the camp tends to augment their numbers. They bear their own share of guilt (increasing in proportion to their freedom of choice), in addition to which there are the vectors and instruments of the system’s guilt. The truth remains that most of the oppressors, during or (more often) after their actions, realized the evil they were doing or had done, and may have had misgivings, felt uneasy, or even been punished, but their suffering is not enough for them to be counted among the victims. By the same token, the mistakes and capitulations of the prisoners are not enough to align them with their jailers: the inmates of the camps—hundreds of thousands of people from every social class and almost every country in Europe—represented an average, unselected sampling of humanity. Even if we leave aside the infernal environment into which they had been abruptly plunged, it is illogical to expect from them—and rhetorical and false to claim that everyone always practiced—the behavior we expect of saints and Stoic philosophers. In reality, in the overwhelming majority of cases, their behavior was coerced with an iron fist. Within a few weeks or months, the deprivations to which they were subjected brought them to a condition of sheer survival, a daily battle against hunger, cold, exhaustion, and beatings, in which the room for choices (especially moral choices) was reduced to nothing. Very few of them survived the ordeal, and it was through a combination of many improbable events. In other words, they were saved by luck, and it makes little sense to look for something in common among their fates, apart, perhaps, from initial good health.
• • •
The Sonderkommandos of Auschwitz and the other death camps represent an extreme case of collaboration. I would hesitate to speak of privilege here: the members of the squads were privileged (but at what cost!) only in the sense that for a few months they got enough to eat, not because their situation was enviable. The SS used the duly vague title “Sonderkommando,” or Special Squad, to indicate the group of inmates assigned to operate the crematoriums. Their duties were to maintain order among the new arrivals (often unaware of the fate awaiting them) who were to be herded into the gas chambers; remove the corpses from the chambers; extract gold teeth from their jaws; shear off the women’s hair; sort and classify clothing, shoes, and the contents of the baggage; transport the bodies to the crematoriums; supervise the operation of the ovens; and remove and dispose of the ashes. The Sonderkommando at Auschwitz numbered between seven hundred and one thousand units, depending on the period.
The Sonderkommandos did not escape the common fate. On the contrary, the SS was extremely diligent in making sure that none of them would live to tell. At Auschwitz there was a succession of twelve squads. Each one operated for a few months, then was slaughtered, each time with a different ruse to prevent possible resistance, and the next squad, for its initiation, would cremate the corpses of its predecessors. In October 1944, the last squad rebelled against the SS, blew up one of the crematoriums, and was exterminated in the unequal fight that I will describe below. Consequently, there were very few Sonderkommando survivors, and those few escaped death by some unpredictable twist of fate. None of them spoke willingly after liberation, and none speak willingly now, about their horrifying situation. The information we do have about the Sonderkommandos derives from various sources: the spare depositions of those who survived; the admissions of their “bosses” during trials before various courts; allusions contained in depositions by German or Polish “civilians” who had chance encounters with the squads; and, finally, the pages of diaries that some of them scribbled furiously for future memory and buried with extreme care in the vicinity of the Auschwitz crematoriums. While all of these sources concur, it is difficult, almost impossible, for us to construct a picture of how the men lived day to day, how they saw themselves, and how they accepted their condition.
At first, they were selected by the SS from among the prisoners already registered, and according to testimony the selection was based not only on their physical strength but also on a thorough examination of their physiognomy. In rare cases, a prisoner was inducted as punishm
ent. At a later stage, the preferred method was to take the candidates directly from the station platform, the moment the trains arrived. The SS “psychologists” realized that it would be easier to recruit from among these desperate and disoriented people, exhausted by the journey and drained of resistance, at the crucial moment of stepping off the train, when every new arrival truly felt that he was on the threshold of a dark, terrifying, and unearthly place.
The Sonderkommandos were for the most part made up of Jews. In one sense, there is nothing surprising about this, since the main purpose of the Lagers was to destroy the Jews, and, from 1943 on, the population of Auschwitz was 90 to 95 percent Jewish. In another sense, this paroxysm of perfidy and hatred is astonishing: it had to be Jews who put Jews in the ovens, in order to prove that Jews, the subrace, the subhumans, would submit to any humiliation, even their own destruction. At the same time, there has been testimony that not every SS officer willingly accepted mass murder as a daily chore; assigning part of the work—the dirtiest part, to be exact—to the victims themselves was supposed to help relieve some consciences (and probably did).