UBC: The Theory and Practice of Hell
Jan. 28th, 2009 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyKogon, Eugen. The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them. [Der SS-Staat, 1946.] Transl. Heinz Norden. 1950. Introd. Nikolaus Wachsmann. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
But first, a sidenote:
One of the arguments used by the deniers of the Holocaust, whether those who claim it didn't happen at all or those who hold the less radical but really no less peculiar position that Hitler was innocent of it, is the lack of a written order. In making this argument, they are using a logical fallacy, the one that is most trenchantly rebutted by the maxim Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. More specifically, though, they are, willfully or ignorantly, failing to understand a fundamental feature of Nazi existence, which one approaches from one side with Shulamit Volkov's observation that "Nazism was a spoken culture" (Volkov, "The Written Matter and the Spoken Word: On the Gap Between Pre-1914 and Nazi Anti-Semitism," Unanswered Questions 52) and from the other with this passage from Kogon:
For all their love of bureaucracy, the Nazis went to great lengths to avoid ever putting the truth in writing. Hence the endless euphemisms and Orwellian doublespeak, and hence the fact that, no, there probably never was a written order from Hitler to Himmler and Heydrich. No one involved either needed or wanted one.
And while I'm throwing out tangents, here's another one:
Much historians' sweat has been shed over the question of when Hitler (and Himmler and Heydrich) came up with the notion of killing all the Jews of Europe (in 1922? in 1933? in 1939? early in 1941? late in 1941?), and many arguments made about improvisation versus planning. To me, it seems pretty clear that from the beginning of his career as a demagogue, Hitler had a very clear idea that he wanted the Jews to GO AWAY. He didn't care how, and he didn't care what happened to them once they'd gone. He just wanted them OUT of Germany. (Hence the Nazi term Judenfrei, "free of Jews.") Dead was good, but so was absent. "Out of sight, out of mind," I think, was the operating principle, and a very clear (ideologically, mind you, not conceptually) division between Germany on the other hand and the entire rest of the world on the other. Thus the emphasis on emigration in the earlier parts of the Nazi regime, and the quite mad but apparently sincere plan to relocate the Jews to Madagascar. But Hitler's power grew and his megalomania ripened, and then a funny thing happened: "Germany" got bigger. And the bigger "Germany" got, the more Jews it encompassed (e.g., Poland). There was less space OUT of Germany, and moreover, Germany began to seem bigger and bigger, less accountable to the world OUTSIDE (which, of course, was controlled by Jews anyway and therefore suspect). And if absent is as good as dead, then dead is as good as absent. On an ideological level, there was no difference in Nazi thought between killing the Jews and deporting them. It was simply a matter of making them GO AWAY as cheaply and easily as possible. So Hitler's idea was there from the beginning; it was just a question of implementation (and epistemology, but I doubt that ever worried Hitler much). On the question of implementation, I think, yes, the gears switched somewhere in the middle of 1941, but I think part of the reason it's so hard to tell is that ideologically, there was hardly any switch at all. Eichmann and the rest of the bureaucratic system deported Jews and "deported" Jews with the same unblinking efficiency.
I hope that I don't need to say I find this kind of thinking abhorrent. Seeking understanding is not the same as condoning, or as forgiving. Understanding is necessary.
The Theory and Practice of Hell was written by an Austrian Catholic who survived Buchenwald from 1939 to the liberation of the camp in 1945. The book is based on the report he wrote for the Allies, explaining the system of concentration camps and extermination camps. It has the defects of its virtues: Kogon is clearly a child of his times, and you can see some of the same ideas about race and class and biology in his thinking that were distorted and exaggerated into monstrosity and genocide by the Nazis. But he is also doing his best to be clear, to explain. He doesn't try to write a hagiography of the prisoners, but instead does his best to explain the way the camp hierarchy and politics worked. And his book is a testament, not only to basic, brute survival (and reading it, you start to wonder how anyone, any single solitary human being, survived the concentration camps, much less survived for years on end), but to the survival of the things that make us more than brutes.
But first, a sidenote:
One of the arguments used by the deniers of the Holocaust, whether those who claim it didn't happen at all or those who hold the less radical but really no less peculiar position that Hitler was innocent of it, is the lack of a written order. In making this argument, they are using a logical fallacy, the one that is most trenchantly rebutted by the maxim Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. More specifically, though, they are, willfully or ignorantly, failing to understand a fundamental feature of Nazi existence, which one approaches from one side with Shulamit Volkov's observation that "Nazism was a spoken culture" (Volkov, "The Written Matter and the Spoken Word: On the Gap Between Pre-1914 and Nazi Anti-Semitism," Unanswered Questions 52) and from the other with this passage from Kogon:
The SS leadership expected obedience of its subordinates, but it also expected independence. [...] a curious mixture developed, compounded of a cult of obedience and a complete lack of control. In a sense the subordinate had to feel his way between these two attitudes. As a result he was reckoned the best SS member who "knew what had to be done," who did not wait for long-winded orders but acted "in the spirit of the Reich Leader SS."
(Kogon 297)
For all their love of bureaucracy, the Nazis went to great lengths to avoid ever putting the truth in writing. Hence the endless euphemisms and Orwellian doublespeak, and hence the fact that, no, there probably never was a written order from Hitler to Himmler and Heydrich. No one involved either needed or wanted one.
And while I'm throwing out tangents, here's another one:
Much historians' sweat has been shed over the question of when Hitler (and Himmler and Heydrich) came up with the notion of killing all the Jews of Europe (in 1922? in 1933? in 1939? early in 1941? late in 1941?), and many arguments made about improvisation versus planning. To me, it seems pretty clear that from the beginning of his career as a demagogue, Hitler had a very clear idea that he wanted the Jews to GO AWAY. He didn't care how, and he didn't care what happened to them once they'd gone. He just wanted them OUT of Germany. (Hence the Nazi term Judenfrei, "free of Jews.") Dead was good, but so was absent. "Out of sight, out of mind," I think, was the operating principle, and a very clear (ideologically, mind you, not conceptually) division between Germany on the other hand and the entire rest of the world on the other. Thus the emphasis on emigration in the earlier parts of the Nazi regime, and the quite mad but apparently sincere plan to relocate the Jews to Madagascar. But Hitler's power grew and his megalomania ripened, and then a funny thing happened: "Germany" got bigger. And the bigger "Germany" got, the more Jews it encompassed (e.g., Poland). There was less space OUT of Germany, and moreover, Germany began to seem bigger and bigger, less accountable to the world OUTSIDE (which, of course, was controlled by Jews anyway and therefore suspect). And if absent is as good as dead, then dead is as good as absent. On an ideological level, there was no difference in Nazi thought between killing the Jews and deporting them. It was simply a matter of making them GO AWAY as cheaply and easily as possible. So Hitler's idea was there from the beginning; it was just a question of implementation (and epistemology, but I doubt that ever worried Hitler much). On the question of implementation, I think, yes, the gears switched somewhere in the middle of 1941, but I think part of the reason it's so hard to tell is that ideologically, there was hardly any switch at all. Eichmann and the rest of the bureaucratic system deported Jews and "deported" Jews with the same unblinking efficiency.
I hope that I don't need to say I find this kind of thinking abhorrent. Seeking understanding is not the same as condoning, or as forgiving. Understanding is necessary.
The Theory and Practice of Hell was written by an Austrian Catholic who survived Buchenwald from 1939 to the liberation of the camp in 1945. The book is based on the report he wrote for the Allies, explaining the system of concentration camps and extermination camps. It has the defects of its virtues: Kogon is clearly a child of his times, and you can see some of the same ideas about race and class and biology in his thinking that were distorted and exaggerated into monstrosity and genocide by the Nazis. But he is also doing his best to be clear, to explain. He doesn't try to write a hagiography of the prisoners, but instead does his best to explain the way the camp hierarchy and politics worked. And his book is a testament, not only to basic, brute survival (and reading it, you start to wonder how anyone, any single solitary human being, survived the concentration camps, much less survived for years on end), but to the survival of the things that make us more than brutes.
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no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 05:02 am (UTC)...oh.
You have made something click for me, thank you. About where my curious insistence on ways and means comes from.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 05:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 05:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 10:06 am (UTC)Much as I am interested at an intellectual level, in the political and physical workings of the concentration camps, and much as I agree with you about understanding - of the entire political machine and related paraphernalia of Nazism - being necessary, no matter how many times and in what different forms and contexts I read about it, that always hits hardest. How they survived. It seems so utterly improbable, so physically and mentally impossible. One might think that reading a survivor's account, or hearing a survivor's account from her or his own lips, would help clarify things, but I'm always amazed anew that it doesn't. Just the opposite, in fact. No matter how sympathetic a writer who didn't experience it directly is, I can believe in the possibility of survival when I read a second-hand account. But not when I read a first-hand one. I mean, I believe it, of course, that they survived, because they wrote the books, and they're telling me how they survived, but I can not understand how they survived. If you know what I mean?
no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 12:03 pm (UTC)When you listen, it's always clear that it's not so much the physical strength as the *mental* strength. Great care for the other people they run into and great care for their own physical resources balanced as carefully as possible. And they're able to care for others, even 72 hours in when they might be running on less than 4 hours of sleep.
Human brains can be pretty amazing.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 01:44 pm (UTC)Oddly enough, despite my reading, my travels to work camps and death camps and mass graves, etc -- one of my most how did they survive that? moments this year came while watching the film They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, about Depression-era dance marathons, where dancers would compete for money by dancing 2 hours on and 10 minutes off, for thousands of hours, until the last couple dancing won the prize.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 05:04 pm (UTC)We do a fund-raiser dance marathon at the university here every year, called Thon, where people dance for 48 hours straight. One of the pieces of advice for the dancers' minders is, "When they start talking about things that aren't there, don't disagree with them." Crazy...and yet people compete for the honor of participating.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 05:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 06:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 05:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-30 03:58 am (UTC)It was my understanding that buying Madagascar for a Jewish homeland was the first choice of the Zionists, and then when Britain said, "Hey, want to go to Palestine?" they jumped at the chance.
That's a really interesting point about the Nazis' disdain for the written word.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-30 04:17 am (UTC)I'm currently working my way very slowly through The Gulag Archipelago.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-30 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-30 06:44 am (UTC)...considering all the material I'll be amassing on this, I'm wondering if I should do a persuasive essay for my U.S. History class.
One of the things that didn't surprise me was how they managed to survive. But in a way that proves one posters point about how it's hard to believe because such horrors didn't happen to you. Certain things happened to me, so I am no longer surprised by homo sapiens' ability to survive anything.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-30 07:12 pm (UTC)