Faces of evil

Dara Mandle in Contentions

Today, the New York Times makes available photographs obtained by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum from the other side of Auschwitz: not the familiar images of starving prisoners, but new shots of vivacious German officers. It churns the stomach to envision the high life these Germans enjoyed while participating in the murder of over one million people.Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the camp commandant, compiled the scrapbook. The photos, which include the first authenticated images of the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele at the camp, feature Höcker lighting a towering Christmas tree and a singalong of SS men at their Alpine retreat.

In the Times article the writer observes:

For example, one of the Höcker pictures, shot on July 22, 1944, shows a group of cheerful young women who worked as SS communications specialists eating bowls of fresh blueberries. One turns her bowl upside down and makes a mock frown because she has finished her portion.On that day, said Judith Cohen, a historian at the Holocaust museum in Washington, 150 new prisoners arrived at the Birkenau site. Of that group, 21 men and 12 women were selected for work, the rest transported immediately to the gas chambers.

The contrast between the recreational actions of the Germans and their murderous enterprise demonstrates, I guess, the “banality of evil.” It reminds me of Avner Less’s account of interrogating Eichmann.

Adolf Eichmann was captured in Argentina 23 years ago, placed on trial for seven months in Jerusalem and then hanged. He was interrogated by Capt. Avner W. Less for 275 hours. The book is interesting for its solid police work as well as its portrait of Eichmann. Even Captain Less, a Berliner who emigrated to Palestine, uses ”ordinary” and ”normal” to describe Eichmann:”My first reaction when the prisoner finally stood facing us in the khaki shirt and trousers and open sandals was one of disappointment. I no longer know what I had expected -probably the sort of Nazi you see in the movies: tall, blond, with piercing blue eyes and brutual features expressive of domineering arrogance. Whereas this rather thin, balding man not much taller than myself looked utterly ordinary. The very normality of his appearance gave his dispassionate testimony an even more depressing impact than I had expected.”

The transcripts reveal that this ”ordinary” man was clever without being intelligent. Knowing that his life is at stake, he clings to the tactics of the major defendants at the Nuremberg trials. He lies – until defeated by documentary evidence showing his signature or a record of his presence in concentration camps. When this doesn’t work, he presents himself as a small cog and puts all the blame on others, subordinates as well as superiors. Most often, Eichmann pleads: ”Orders from above.”

There is unexpected drama in the relationship between the police captain and his prisoner. Eichmann respected his interrogator while trying to save his own neck. He felt that one uniform was speaking to another, that rank had its privileges, even for a prisoner. The reader watches for the cat-and-mouse interplay. When Captain Less tells him that his father had been deported to Auschwitz by Eichmann’s own headquarters, Eichmann opens his eyes wide and cries out: ”But that’s horrible, Herr Captain! That’s horrible!”

Like the Germans at Aucshwitz, Eichmann was seemingly able to switch off his emotions. He could compartmentalize. He could be human. Or he could be the architect of millions of murders.

When I originally read that account I hadn’t thought that his expression of sympathy for Less’s father was a pretense as much as cluelessness, an inability to connect his own actions with their consequences. He was devoid of conscience.

What these pictures remind us is that in Nazi Germany the business of murder wasn’t just acceptable. It was, to the Nazis, just another day at the office. Or worse. Another day at a resort.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad.