Our Dark Side (14 page)

The most striking thing about eye-witness accounts of the Nazi genocides is in fact that the terrifying normality they describe is a symptom, not of perversion in the clinical sense, but of support for a perverse system that synthesized every possible perversion.

Every component of a delight in evil that had been completely statised or normalized was indeed present in various forms in the camps: slavery, mental or physical torture, head shaving, drownings, murder, electrocution, humiliation, debasement, rape, torture, defilement, vivisection, medical experiments, procuring, allowing dogs to devour corpses, and so on. The whole genocidal system was, in a word, designed not just to exterminate all the human race's ‘impure' categories, but to manufacture what Eugen Kogon (1950; cf. Tillion 1988) calls the ‘extraordinary pleasure' the SS killers could derive from it. Witness this account, which sums up the basic features of a perverse structure specific to Nazism. It is a structure that precludes any possible access to sublimation, even in its sacrificial form: ‘The SS officer calls three Jewish musicians out of the ranks. He asks them to play a Schubert trio. Overwhelmed by the music he adores, the SS officer allows his eyes to fill with tears. And then, once the piece is over, he sends the three musicians to the gas chamber' (cited Val 2007: 196). How can we fail to be reminded of Borges's description (1975) of the famous Lazarus Morell? He described himself as humanity's redeemer, bought slaves and freed them so as to enjoy the pleasure of exterminating them all the more.

Despite the differences between them – Hoess was not like Eichmann, Himmler or Göring – all the Nazi genocidists and dignitaries had one thing in common: they denied the acts they had committed. Whether they admitted their crimes or refused to acknowledge their existence, their attitude was always the same. Either they denied what they had done or pretended to know nothing about it and blamed some idealized authority, as though ‘I was obeying orders' could help to take away the authors' guilt thanks to the art of denial and disguise.

Given that their fanatical loyalty to a perverse system led them to deny their actions, we can understand why the Nazi genocidists did not simply deny that what they did was criminal. They also denied something more, and thus committed the perfect murder by erasing every trace of it. ‘Kill the Jew and then kill anyone who witnessed the murder' was the real order given by those responsible for the extermination. Those who manned the
Sonderkommandos
, which were forced by the SS to empty the gas chambers and to burn the bodies in the crematoria, were selected because they were Jewish. Their fate was to be exterminated in their turn to ensure that they would never bear witness to what they had seen (Venezia 2007).

For the same reasons, the exterminators were eager to kill as many of their victims as they could as they faced their final defeat. The convoys of the dead were given priority over convoys of soldiers (Hilberg 1961). Hours before the allied troops arrived, they destroyed the instruments of murder – the crematoria and gas chambers – and then destroyed themselves in the same way that they had destroyed Germany, either by fleeing to the ends of the earth in disguise to ensure that they would never reappear in a hated world that might judge them, or by committing suicide.

On 30 April 1945, Hitler put a bullet into his brain in his bunker. He had already swallowed the prussic acid he had tested on his Alsatian and had made Eva Braun swallow it just after he married her.
¹²
His example was immediately followed by Magda Goebbels, who used the same poison to kill in cold blood her six children, who were aged between four and twelve. She then committed suicide along with her husband, Josef Goebbels. Why kill the dog? Why kill the six children? Why the masquerade?

The question had been answered the day before by the main protagonist in this macabre scene. In his will, which reproduced the imprecations of
Mein Kampf
, Hitler explained that ‘international Jewry' was responsible for the outbreak of war and for Germany's defeat, and that all the victims of the Final Solution were in fact the real artisans of the crime against humanity that the Nazis would be blamed for. So as not to live in a world ruled by ‘Bolshevized Jewry', he had therefore resolved not only to die by his own hand – together with his dog – but to destroy all traces of the murder by ordering that his body and that of his mistress should be burned. Goebbels and his wife did the same when they killed their children with the same acid – Zyklon B – that had been used in the gas chambers.
¹³

This was indeed a suicide like no other. It was not the proud, despairing suicide of an Emma Bovary, nor that of the resistance fighters who committed suicide rather than speaking under torture, or that of the former deportees. It was not even the
seppuku
of Japan's Second World War Generals, who begged their Emperor's forgiveness for their defeat and observed the feudal tradition in order that the people might be reborn (Pinguet 1993).

Unlike every other form of voluntary death, Nazi suicide was a pathetic equivalent to the genocide perpetrated against the Jews and the so-called impure races. It was a miniature auto-genocide, a perverse form of suicide that permitted no recourse to the possibility of redemption. It was a vain attempt to provide a model for the whole of Germany. Men, women, children, old people, the wounded, the survivors and even animals were being asked to follow the example of their leaders and to vanish for ever: ‘The German people he was prepared to see damned alongside him proved capable of surviving even a Hitler … The old Germany was gone with Hitler. The Germany which had produced Adolf Hitler, had seen its future in his vision, had so readily served him, and had shared in his hubris, had also to share his nemesis' (Kershaw 2000: 841).

The negationism of the 1970s derives from this will to genocide and auto-genocide in the face of an inevitable
nemesis.
It is a product of the revisionist historiography invented by Robert Faurisson, Paul Rassinier, Serge Thion and
La Vieille Taupe
and often supported, in the name of a perverted vision of freedom of expression, by Noam Chomsky. The so-called ‘assassins of memory' (Vidal-Naquet 1994) deny the existence of the gas chambers. Using a form of narration that takes the form of denial, they perpetuate, in other words, not only the genocide of the Jews, but also the eradication of all trace of it. To the extent that is an intellectual structure that is as perverse as Nazism itself, negationism is consubstantial with the genocidal project; it allows those who subscribe to it to perpetuate the crime by turning it into the perfect murder that leaves no history, no trace and no memory.

Adopting a very different stance to Adorno or Arendt, Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, argues that the genocidal system encouraged an inversion of the Law that took human beings back to their pre-human biological roots.
¹⁴
To support his argument, he relies upon the work of Konrad Lorenz, the founder of modern ethology.

From 1935, onwards, Lorenz combined Darwinian evolutionism and the old zoology to construct a biological theory of human and animal behaviour. He had, he claimed, found the ‘missing link' between chimpanzees and civilized man. He would later say that the biological roots of evil lay in the fact that man is, instinctively and innately, a psychic animal who is both violent and aggressive. It follows that animal ethology should provide a model for the study of behavioural schemata that are found in all living creatures.
¹⁵
From this perspective, there is nothing exceptional about man, who is an inter-species killer and not a being endowed with language and speech who is not part of the animal kingdom because he is aware of his own existence. He is therefore more like a rat than any other type of animal. What makes both human beings and rats so exceptional is that they are killers capable of eliminating rivals of the same species, rather than just keeping them at a distance.
¹⁶
Lorenz suggests that the formula ‘man is a wolf to man'
¹⁷
should be replaced by the more scientifically accurate ‘man is a rat to man' because wolves are so-called normal animals and do not kill other wolves.

On the basis of his reading of Lorenz, Primo Levi therefore argued that Auschwitz was indeed the product of an inversion of reason. But he saw the system as a symptom of the reawakening of man's most murderous instincts. The modest and banal appearances of those who carried out the genocide was, he said in substance, fully in keeping with the anonymous, blind rationality of our great modern institutions.

Levi thought, however, that Auschwitz, which was a real ‘black hole' in the history of Western civilization, was both in an asymmetrical relationship with reason, and intrinsic of life itself. In his view, the genocidal experience, being the accursed share of the history of humanity, was knowable only through a memorial history – the eye-witness accounts – or the reconstructed history of the historians. It was, on the other hand, incomprehensible if one tried to understand it from the point of view of its inventors: the authors of the genocide. And he hoped that that would never be possible: ‘The authors of Auschwitz … are diligent, calm. Vulgar and flat; their discussions, declarations and observations, even when they are posthumous, are empty and cold. We cannot understand them … We should not hope for the early appearance of a man capable of commenting on them, of showing us how, at the heart of our Europe and our century, the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” has been turned upside down' (Levi 2005: 28).

Fortunately, Levi goes against his own principles in both his autobiographical works and his articles (Levi 1987; 1988). Thanks to him, and thanks to all the other deportees who survived to tell their story, we know that Nazism, which represented man's extreme dehumanization of man, could only have been dreamed up by men. Worse still, its inventors were not barbarians living in a state of savagery or in accordance with the precept of a Darwinian horde, as revised and updated by Lorenz's ethology, but members of one of Europe's most civilized peoples. No matter how aggressive they are, and no matter how their instincts are organized, animals never experience the slightest delight in evil. As we have already said, they are neither perverse nor criminal.

And besides, when Himmler came up with the idea of replacing the guards at Auschwitz with dogs, or making dogs guard the prisoners, the trials did not have the expected results. Even though they had been trained to devour prisoners, the
Lager'
s dogs were never the equals of the Nazis who had made them both killers and victims. The ‘vile beasts' were men, not animals.

As for the accounts given by the killers themselves, we now know that, just like the survivors, they make an essential contribution to our understanding of the mechanisms of the extermination of the Jews.
¹⁸
One of the best commentaries of Rudolf Hoess's autobiography is by Primo Levi (in Hoess 2000: 19):

Written in 1946 at the request of Gilbert, the Nuremberg Tribunal's psychologist and Hoess's lawyers, this autobiography was intended to demonstrate the author's ‘human qualities' to the Polish Supreme Court, which was to try him for his crimes: the extermination of four million people, torture, the profanation of corpses, executions, medical experiments, and so on.
¹⁹
This is therefore a unique document: immediately after the defeat of Germany, proof that the gas chambers did exist is supplied by the man who installed them in Auschwitz.

Certain that he would be executed,
²⁰
Hoess attempts in his testimony not to deny the genocidal acts he committed, but to explain them. Unlike most of the accused at Nuremberg, who refused to accept any responsibility, Hoess, who knew that Himmler had committed suicide and that Eichmann had fled, decided, when he was captured, to admit and justify the collective crime in order to become, in the eyes of posterity not a despicable murderer, but a sort of great-hearted hero. It is therefore quite understandable that the negationists have challenged the authenticity of the text; they use the many errors it contains to assert, despite everything we have learned from contemporary historiography, that it is a complete fabrication and was dictated to its author under duress.

Holding nothing back, Hoess described how he became the greatest mass murderer of all time. As it happens, the perversion he displays in his story does not consist in denying that he had committed murder, in eradicating all trace of his actions, or even insisting that he was obeying orders – which would have turned him into a piece of filth, as Eichmann did in his trial – but in the stupefyingly inverted causality he invokes: he believed in all sincerity that the victims had to take full responsibility for their own execution. According to Hoess, they both wanted and desired to be destroyed. Their executioners were therefore no more than the agents of their victims' will to punish themselves; they wanted to free themselves from the perversions that characterized because they belonged to an impure race. The virtue of this argument is that it allows Hoess to see himself as suffering humanity's benefactor. He allowed the deportees, who were guilty of living useless lives, to surrender their lives to him by rushing into the gas chambers: ‘Let the public continue to regard me as the blood-thirsty beast, the cruel sadist, and the mass-murder; for the masses could never imagine the commandant of Auschwitz in any other light. They could never understand that he, too, had a heart and that he was not evil' (Hoess 2000: 181).