[ThereBeDragons]

"The Good Old Days" - The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders is a book everyone should read. It is not really a book in the regular sense, but a collection of primary sources - documents, photographs, interviews, and letters from members of the non-command ranks of the Nazi regime - from commanders in the the Einsatzgruppen or Wehrmacht to low-ranking members of the Sonderkommando, police, or militia, and even journalists and truck drivers; from the death squads in newly conquered Eastern Europe to Auschwitz and Treblinka. And that's all it is. Other than the introduction and the preface, there is no commentary at all. None is required.

I think everybody with the chance should pick it up and read it through. I cannot really say why, beyond that I feel that everyone should.

Here are some excerpts. Compose yourself and adjust your attitude before reading them.

"I still recall today today the complete terror of the Jews when they first caught sight of the bodies as they reached the top edge of the ravine. Many Jews cried out in terror. It's almost impossible to imagine what nerves of steel it took to carry out that dirty work down there. It was horrible . . . I had to spend the whole morning down in the ravine. For some of the time I had to shoot continuously. Then I was given the job of loading sub-machine-gun magazines with ammunition. While I was doing that, other comrades were assigned to shooting duty. Towards midday we were called away from the ravine and in the afternoon I, with some of the others up at the top, had to lead the Jews to the ravine and from there they walked down the slope on their own. the shooting that day must have lasted until . . . 17.00 or 18.00 hours. Afterwards we were taken back to our quarters. That evening we were given schnapps again." Kurt Werner, Sonderkommando 4a, pg. 66

"In the morning the workers I had ordered failed to appear. Just as I was about to go to the Jewish committee one of my colleagues from the council and asked for my support as the Jews were refusing to work here. I went over. When those arse-holes saw me they ran in all directions. Pity I did not have a pistol on me or else I would have shot some of them down. I then went to the Council of Jews and informed them that if 100 Jews did not report for work within an hour I would select 100 of them not for work but for the firing squad. Barely half an hour later 100 Jews arrived together with a further seventeen for those who had run away. I reported the incident and at the same time gave orders for the fugitives to be shot for refusing to work, which happened precisely twelve hours later. Twenty Jews were finished off. . . . Tomorrow I am going to make a converted effort to ask about my [girlfriend] Trudchen coming here. As a final resort, if I get a refusal I am going to sort out the Radom trip. Then tomorrow I'll write a long letter to Trudchen. Good night my dear little rascal, please still love me, think of me and stay true to me. Now I am going to bed, to look your picture and read your book. When my eyes begin to get tired I shall put the book aside and look at your picture again, give you a big kiss, switch off the light and go to sleep." - Felix Landau, Einsatzcommando, personal diary, 22 July 1941, pg. 101

"I saw SD personnel weeping because they could not cope mentally with what was going on. Then again I encountered others who kept a score-sheet of how many people they had sent to their death. During the course of long conversations I learned that they had been ordered to join this firing-squad and that there was nothing left for them but suicide, and that some indeed had already committed suicide. They said that if they had refused they themselves would have been shot or sent to the Sonderkommandos, where their days would be numbered. Death was certain for them, they said, and they would not survive the war since such afflicted people would never be permitted to the homeland . . . Who today can determine which were those who wept as they carried their duties and which the ones who kept a score-sheet?" - German war correspondent interviewing Latvian auxiliary police, Latvia, 1941; pg. 129

"Then Blobel ordered me to have the children executed. I asked, 'By whom should the shooting be carried out?' he answered, 'By the Waffen-SS.' I raised an objection and said, 'They are all young men. How are we going to answer to them if we make them shoot small children?' To this he said, 'Then use your men.' I then said, 'How can they do that? They have small children as well.' Thsi tug-of-war lasted about ten minutes . . . I suggested that the Ukrainian militia of the Feldkommandant should shoot the children. There were no objections from either side to this suggestion . . . I went out to the woods alone. The Wehrmacht had already brought a grave . . . [The children] were lined up along the top of the grave and shot so that they fell into it. The Ukrainians did not aim at any particular part of the body. They fell into the grave. The wailing was indescribable. I shall never forget the scene throughout my life. I find it very hard to bear. I particularly remember a small fair-haired girl who took me by the hand. She too was shot later." - SS-Obsersturmfuhrer August Hafner, pg. 153-154

"Although I am aware that it is the duty of the police to protect the innocent I was however at that time convinced that the Jewish people were not innocent but guilty. I believed all the propaganda that Jews were criminals and subhuman and that they were the cause of Germany's decline after the First World War. The thought that one should oppose or evade the order to take part in the extermination of the Jews never entered my head either. I followed these orders because they came from the highest leaders of the state and not because I was in any way afraid." Kurt Mobius, pg. 220

"I couldn't bring myself to look closely, even once. I didn't look inside the entire time. I couldn't no, I couldn't take any more. The screaming, and, and, I was too upset, and so on. I also said that to [SS-Obergruppenfuhere] Muller when I submitted my report. He did not get very much from my report. I then followed the van - I must have been with some of the people from there who knew the way. Then I saw the most horrifying thing I have ever seen in my entire life. The van drove up to a long trench, the doors were opened and bodies thrown out. They still seemed alive, their limbs were so supple. They were thrown in, I can still remember a civilian pulling out teeth with some pliers and then I just got the hell out of there. I got into the car, went off and did not say anything else . . . I'd had more than I could take. I only know that a doctor there in a white coat to me that I should look through a peep-hole at them in the lorry. I refused to do that. I could not, I could not say anything, I had to get away. I went to Berlin, reported to Gruppenfuhrer Muller. I told him exactly what I've just said, there wasn't any more I could tell him. . . . Terrible . . . I'm telling you . . . the inferno, can't, that is, I can't take this, I said to him." - Taped audio interview, Adolf Eichmann, pg. 221

[the_k]

wow..i have never read up much on the holocaust but that little girl story in particular makes my blood boil....

[Siberian Fox]

Thank you for posting this ThereBeDragons. I have moved it to the history section.

that little girl story in particular makes my blood boil

As it would for any normal person. It is the personal stories that bring history to life. It also highlights just how despicable Holocaust denial and Nazi apologism is.

[The Clockwork Rat]

I wish my library had a copy.

[Oxymoron]

Unfortunately I must say that this is not a human abnormality, it wasnt 1 Evil man with a crazy plan. It was a whole peoples acting out, it wasnt merely following orders of a mad man as is usually implied by "history" , it was a Jung type shared unconciouseness act of a nation and its people.

[Potemkin]

And it wasn't just Germany either; many European nations eagerly participated in the Holocaust.

[Kman]

Im reading a book atm called ''Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds'', it deals with similar incidents as the holocaust (its from 1841 so it doesnt cover the holocaust)
In the book the author retells the stories of humanity throughout history where the majority believed in some completely crazy things, like the witch burnings that happened in Europe, the Tulipmania in Holland, various stock bubbles and alot of other stupid shit whole nations believed in (usually there are always a tiny minority that retains their sanity though).

Im gonna try and get a hold of that book TBD when im done with my current one, I find these sort of things fascinating and I want to try and understand why huge groups of people become so stupid sometimes.

[killim]

Then you might be interested by the work of Le Bon "La psychologie des foules" (1895) or the English translation "The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind" (1896) as prior to the WW1 analysis.

[Otebo]

Sounds like an interesting, if disturbing, book. I ordered a copy from Amazon. £8 or so plus a few quid p&p.

[danholo]

Nuts... One of those stories made me cry, with the girl. I hate kids.

[Kapanda]

The story with the little girl didn't make my blood boil, I sympathised with the soldier... he comes accross as weak and confused, and the little girl touched his humane side.

From those exerpts, I gather what is commonly believed: that there were some that were simply bloodthirsty, likely some that just did not care, there were some that knew it was wrong but carried their duties anyway, and some that simply could not bare carrying through systematic mass murders. Most were not inherently "evil-doers".

[Quantum]

I always wondered how otherwise ordinary people could commit such crimes such as those described in the OP. Most people would never dream of doing this but if they're taught to despise Jews by their superior commanders, they would find it easier to kill little children. The Stanford Prison and school experiments come in mind, especially the latter because after the students were assigned to "German" and "Jewish" groups, the German students mistreated the Jewish ones by spitting on them and making them pick up their garbage. As we sit here on our comfy chairs, do you ever think to yourselves: am I above that? Can I be capable of committing war crimes? Most war crimes are committed by people who have been taught to obey orders and never question them, so even if these guards had a moral conscience, how could they have refused orders to kill inmates without facing the consequences which could have meant execution?

[killim]

The likelyhood is very high, as Milgram showed it in his obedience experiments. Iirc the percentages of killing was well over 90% under some conditions.

[noir]

After Jonathan Littell's Holocaust Novel 'The Kindly Ones' another Jewish writer tries to write a book through German eyes

Ordinary Germans

By Coby Ben-Simhon

Tags: Israel news


http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1159102.html



It is midday. In the living room of his Tel Aviv home Nir Baram lights a cigarette and recalls the starting point. "I was 16," he says, placing the pack of Winstons on the table. "I remember reading 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,' by William Shirer, an American journalist who lived in Germany. In Hebrew it was two volumes. The book triggered an array of questions that still occupy me. Most are not about the role of the murderers and the S.S. members in the extermination camps, but about the ordinary people. The normative, bourgeois people who were not ideological by nature. I was extremely interested in the psychological makeup of such people."

Afterward, exhaling smoke, he mentions Albert Speer, Hitler's personal architect. "I read his autobiography later and was struck by his character. He came from a family of architects and was raised to fulfill his father's expectations. He was not a Nazi ideologue and did not share Hitler's racist madness. But, like many Germans, he allowed the perversion to penetrate the center." Baram's rapid-fire speech is interrupted by the sounds of drilling from next door. "Even though Speer was involved in the expulsion of the Jews from Berlin and, as minister of munitions, demanded ever larger numbers of forced laborers, he wrote in his autobiography that he had the feeling certain things were being done but that he did not know. He told himself a story of self-deception.

In his new novel, "Anashim Tovim" ("Good People"), Baram takes the plunge. He observes World War II through the eyes of members of the educated bourgeoisie who joined the totalitarian system and perpetrated horrific deeds. The empathy with which he describes them makes the book exceptionally intriguing and disturbing.

The book opens in the autumn of 1938, in Berlin. Two figures propel the narrative: the Berlin-based advertising man Thomas Heiselberg, who is determined to become a great man, and a young Jewish woman, Alexandra Weissberg, from an intellectual family, who lives in Leningrad. They both join brutal criminal systems but believe they are doing the least possible evil under the circumstances. Heiselberg loses his job, enters the Nazi bureaucracy at a junior level and rises through its ranks, while Weissberg forges an alliance with the Communist Party that will ultimately destroy her family.

It is the fourth novel published by Baram, 33, who was awarded this year's Eshkol Prize for literature. It's a European novel, sprinkled with light snow, Russian poetry and pipe tobacco. "It's hard to argue with the proposition that it's not an Israeli book," Baram admits with obvious pleasure. "I am a devotee of the European novel. I wrote the book in the European tradition, because that's what it required. It is not set in Israel and is in no way an allegory of the Israeli situation. The questions it raises are germane to every period and every situation."

You once said that you find it difficult to like Israeli literature because you are not fond of psychological bourgeois realism. Yet you have written a novel that is both very realistic and very bourgeois.

"When I wrote my previous book, 'The Remaker of Dreams,' I had very set views about literature. I believed, and I still believe, that Hebrew literature should be more attentive to the fusion between fantasy and realism. I had not planned to write 'Good People' in the way I did. When I started writing I thought it would have fantastical elements, but afterward I realized that the realism with which it is written was the only way to proceed. People develop, you know, and today I am far more open in my opinions. I think a reasonable and non-dictatorial literary space, which is attentive to many types of non-mainstream literature, is more apt."

Do you worry that a fat European novel like this, dense with characters and story lines, might be interpreted as overly ambitious?


Level of horror

Baram knows he will be criticized for his decision to depict in a humane light characters who are swept into one of the darkest periods in human history. He takes out a piece of paper on which he has written a few words. "In the final analysis Nazism, like other cases of genocide that have occurred since, did not leave behind any question that goes beyond the human," he reads. "Perhaps the opposite: It expanded the boundaries of the human and effectively forced us to render national feelings, which we might prefer to describe as monstrous, into simple human concepts. A prodigiously powerful mechanism of denial, the tendency to organize reality in a way which will not sidetrack us, the ability to turn our gaze away from the horrors and a desire not to be pushed out of the consensus - none of this is alien to anyone who was born in this world." He finishes reading and lifts his head from the page.

"There is a very powerful passage in the book in which the Jews are expelled from Lublin. The book's protagonist has a central role in the expulsion operation, but he wants to do it in a nice, respectable way. By choice, the concentration camps are not part of the book. I wanted to set down what my characters see, to fashion characters who create a ramified system of denial, who sense that something wrong is going on but do not really know what it is. I focused on a different level of horrors. Even the horrors to which my protagonists - who were not "in the field" - are exposed, are enough to stir them to ask all the moral questions about the war. Every reader who encounters the choices made by Thomas and Alexandra will ask himself what he would have done in their place. I do not believe in creating characters for whom the reader feels warmth and will cozy up with throughout the whole story."

By creating complex but also elegant and captivating characters whose immoral decisions the reader accepts, you seem to be saying that we must understand these people.

"Some readers will think that what Alexandra did - turning in family friends - is something they would do. She believes that in this way she will save her siblings. When you describe a character's psychological makeup you write through his eyes, and that can make people uneasy. This book asks all the ethical and moral questions and offers answers. It shows that a person's psychological makeup is flexible and elastic and capable of being blind to anything that will endanger the feeling that he is a good person. The book is entitled 'Good People' not because I think they are good people but because they think they are good people and I write them."

While working on the book, did you ask yourself what you would have done in their situation?