The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (40 page)

But the fate of the Jews was something different and something unique, not only because of the sheer numbers who were murdered—and not only because of the nightmarish cruelties and indignities that accompanied their murders—but also because the war against the Jews was seen by Nazi Germany, just as the Inquisition had regarded the war on heresy, as “a confrontation of apocalyptic proportions.” In that sense, the Nazis managed to convince themselves that they were acting in the interest of both moral
and
legal justice when they committed what the rest of the world called crimes against humanity. Hitler himself plainly announced that he intended to exterminate the Jewish people, and he explained why he believed the war against the Jews was a holy war.
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In a public address delivered in the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, he declared:

I have often in my life been a prophet, and usually people laughed at me. Let me be a prophet again today: If international financial Jewry, in Europe and beyond, should succeed in plunging the nations into another world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the world, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.
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The inquisitorial apparatus of the Nazi regime was essential for carrying out the crusade that Hitler preached to the German people. But the theology of the Inquisition was also essential in motivating German police officers, soldiers, bureaucrats, and various other workers (and their collaborators in various occupied countries) to carry out mass murder on an industrial scale. Surely it takes more than an order from on high to give an ordinary human being the will and the stomach for killing other human beings—men and women, children and babies—hour after hour, day after day, year after year.

By following the example of the Inquisition, which had demonstrated how to dehumanize the victim as nothing more than “heretical filth” and, at the same time, how to demonize the victim as a “traitor to God,” the Nazi regime was able to convince its population—or, at least, the hundreds of thousands of men and women who participated in the Holocaust—that torture and murder could be seen as a proud and righteous act.

So Nazi Germany serves as the worst-case scenario of what can happen when the resources of a modern totalitarian state are put in service to a hateful idea. From the moment the Nazi party came to power in Germany, the slanders against the Jewish people were advertised by some of the most gifted propagandists of the twentieth century. The Jews were “the most evil world enemy of all times,” as Hitler himself put it, and “will forever remain beneath humankind, as the rats are beneath the animals,” according to one German newspaper, “parasites, poison carriers, and subversive scroungers.” Meanwhile, all the moving parts of the machinery of persecution were being carefully assembled and lubricated, and once kicked into operation, they did not cease until Germany was utterly defeated by force of arms.
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For some Germans assigned to operate the gas chambers at Auschwitz, then, the task was no more unsettling than delousing a shipment of old clothing; after all, wasn’t Zyklon B intended for use on pests and parasites? For other Germans (and their collaborators in various occupied countries), it was an opportunity to take revenge on “the most evil world enemy of all times,” which may explain why young men in uniform took such apparent pleasure in afflicting their victims with wholly gratuitous acts of violence. Thus, for example, German soldiers were seen to use torches to burn off the beards of observant Jewish men who were being sent to die in the gas chambers, just as the executioners of the Spanish Inquisition had done to their own victims before burning them alive.
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When Cecil Roth’s
The Spanish Inquisition
was first published in 1937, the author added an urgent note to reflect events that were taking place even as the book was being set into type. “The Spanish Inquisition was until yesterday an antiquarian diversion,” wrote Roth in a note dated September 1937. “The events of the past few years, and above all of the past few months, have converted it into a dreadful warning.” Roth felt obliged to point out that his work “is not intended as a satire on present-day conditions,” and he observed that the Inquisition seemed to have risen from its grave to stalk the earth yet again.
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“Its spirit has recently been revived outside Spain,” wrote Roth, “and in certain parts of the world has achieved in the course of the present generation a triumph ostensibly more instantaneous and more remarkable than Torquemada could ever have hoped.”
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Roth’s words were inspired by a remarkable spectacle that was being presented to the Russian people and the rest of the world in a Moscow courtroom—the trial of a handful of Old Bolsheviks who had been present at the creation of the Soviet Union and now stood accused of conspiring to destroy it. So shocking was the sight of the Russian Revolution turning on its own makers that even the highest leadership of Nazi Germany found it noteworthy. “Again a show trial in Moscow,” Goebbels wrote in his journal on January 25, 1937, and he did not fail to notice that the principal defendants were Jewish in origin. “Maybe Stalin does want to smoke the Jews out.”
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The Nazis did not feel obliged to observe any fussy legal niceties before murdering their victims, nor did they deem it advantageous to stage what came to be known as a show trial, that is, a meticulously stage-managed trial that served as a tool of propaganda rather than an act of “legal justice.” Even when Hitler resolved to exterminate a rival faction of the Nazi party in 1934, thus consolidating the machinery of terror in the hands of the SS, he ordered his former comrades to be seized and murdered without any formalities, much less a trial, an event known as the Night of the Long Knives. The same principle applied when it came to the murder of his various other victims, ranging from German mental patients to the Jewish population of Europe.
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Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), by contrast, seemed to take special pleasure in the spectacle of the show trial, a distinctive feature of the Soviet version of the machinery of persecution. Apart from such moments of high drama, the Soviet secret police (known at various times as the Cheka, the GPU, the OGPU, the NKVD, the MVD, and the KGB) used many of the same tools and techniques as the Gestapo. The program of repression directed against the Soviet population lasted from the outset of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 until long after Stalin’s death in 1953, and its victims must be counted in the tens of millions. But the apparatus was occasionally kicked into high gear when whim or circumstance inspired Stalin to focus on one or another of the bogeymen who haunted his imagination. The Soviet equivalent of the Witch Craze took place between 1936 and 1938—a sustained spasm of violence that has come to be called the Great Terror—and Stalin, a former seminary student, assumed the power and function once reserved to the grand inquisitors.

The rationale for the Great Terror was the supposed discovery of a diabolical conspiracy whose object was nothing less than the destruction of the Soviet Union, a notion that echoes the rationale of the Inquisition in its long war on heresy. The conspirators were accused of putting themselves in service to the worst enemies of the Bolshevik Revolution, including Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. The reality is that “the whole alleged plot was a vast cycle of frame-ups by Stalin and his entourage,” all of it intended to eliminate his rivals and strengthen his authority as the absolute dictator of the Soviet Union. Significantly, the arch-villains in Stalin’s show trials were men whose roles in the Bolshevik Revolution had been equal to or arguably even greater than his own, including Leon Trotsky (1876–1940)
*
, Grigory Zinoviev (1883–1936), Lev Kamenev (1883–1936), and Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938).
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The Moscow show trials, like the autos-da-fé of the Inquisition, can be seen as high ceremonials in which arch-heretics were tried and punished as a caution to the rest of the population. Just as Cathars were put on display in the cathedrals and public squares of medieval Europe to abjure their false beliefs before going to the stake, a few prominent Communists were given an opportunity to confess to wholly imaginary crimes in the chandelier-hung Hall of Columns before being returned to the underground cells of the NKVD where death sentences were carried out with a single shot to the back of the head. Such were the improbable scenes that obliged Cecil Roth to warn his readers that
The Spanish Inquisition
was a work of history rather than parody.

World public opinion—not excluding the Nazi leadership and especially the cadres of the Communist party in Russia and elsewhere throughout the world—was staggered when the celebrated heroes of the Bolshevik Revolution stood up in open court and confessed to every imaginable crime against their comrades and Stalin himself. “I, together with Zinoviev and Trotsky, was the organizer and leader of a terrorist plot which planned and prepared a number of terroristic attempts on the lives of the leaders of the government and the Party of our country,” declared Kamenev. “For ten years, if not more, I waged a struggle against the Party, against the government of the land of Soviets, and against Stalin personally.” The confessions were so surreal that the defendants themselves seemed to understand the Kafkaesque quality of the scene they were made to play.
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“Who will believe a single word of ours?” asked one of the defendants in the course of his confession, perhaps in a brave effort at irony. “Who will believe us, we who are facing the Court as a counter-revolutionary gang of bandits, as allies of fascism, of the Gestapo?”
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Even as the trials were in progress—and long after they were over—comparisons were made between the Great Terror and the Inquisition. Indeed, the analogy has come full circle, and some historians now describe the medieval Inquisition as a “proto-Stalinist” phenomenon. Just as the Cathars and Waldensians were condemned as “heretical filth,” the Old Bolsheviks on trial in Moscow were condemned as “filthy scum.” The torturers in service to the NKVD, like their counterparts in the Gestapo, resorted to such old-school techniques as the strappado, which was known as “the swallow” in the parlance of the Soviet secret police. And the Moscow show trials help us understand how wholly innocent men and women—Catholic priests no less than Bolshevik commissars—could be made to confess to any grotesque misdeed that an interrogator might dream up, whether by promise of leniency, application of torture, or threat of death.
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The defendants in the Moscow show trials were charged with acts of wrongdoing that would have been recognizable as violations of law if they had actually taken place—not only assassination, sabotage, and treason but “every possible sordid and shameful crime,” as the notorious Soviet prosecutor, Andrei Vishinsky (1833–1954), put it. Not unlike the accounts of sodomy and sex orgies and infant cannibalism that enlivened the proceedings of the Inquisition, most of the allegations against the defendants in the Moscow show trials were wholly imaginary. Yet the defendants were willing to stand up in open court and confess to even the most unlikely and implausible accusations against them, a fact that has always baffled those who struggle to make sense of the spectacle.
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The threat of torture and death is the most obvious explanation, of course, but a different and more illuminating one can be found in the single most striking similarity between the Inquisition and the Great Terror—the religiosity of the cult of personality that was erected around Stalin. The Soviet Union was avowedly atheist, of course, but Stalinism in practice took on all the trappings of religious true belief; thus, for example, the long list of malefactions charged against the defendants in the Moscow show trials included the crime of “sacrilege.” Soviet citizens were required to conform to the party line in the same way that good Catholics were required to embrace the dogma of the Church, a principle that even such adversaries as Stalin and Trotsky apparently agreed upon.
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“None of us desires or is able to dispute the will of the Party,” declared Trotsky in the years before his estrangement from Stalin and the resulting exile and assassination. “Clearly, the Party is always right.”
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The Inquisition demanded that accused heretics recant and repudiate their supposed heresies before they could be readmitted to the Church, and the Communist party required the same of the defendants in the show trials. “Their constant avowals of political sin, their admissions that Stalin was, after all, right,” explains Robert Conquest in
The Great Terror,
“were based on the idea that it was correct to ‘crawl in the dust,’ suffer any humiliation, to remain in or return to the Party.” Some defendants were such true believers that they were willing to confess to crimes that they did not commit in the deluded hope that their own death and disgrace would serve some higher purpose. The point is made by Arthur Koestler in
Darkness at Noon,
a novel whose principal character is a composite of several of the Old Bolsheviks who figured in the Moscow show trials.
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“Some were silenced by physical fear…; some hoped to save their heads; others at least to save their wives or sons…,” Koestler writes of the fictionalized victims of Soviet terror. “The best of them kept silent in order to do a last service to the Party, by letting themselves be sacrificed as scapegoats.”
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