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Table of Contents
Tables and Semiotic Squares
...2
Introduction
...3
Chapter I. Conditions of Transformation
...7
Chapter II. The Fluid Legality of Nazism
. . . 30
Chapter III. Homo Viator & Formalized Social Rejections
. . . 44
Chapter IV. Transience
. . . 66
Chapter V. Semiotic Squares
. . . 94
Chapter VI. Nazi (Ir)Rationality & Semiotic Squares
. . . 105
Chapter VII. (Ir)rationality & Praxis
. . . 110
Chapter VIII. Panopticon’s Contradictions
. . . 121
Chapter IX. The SS Guard
. . . 152
Chapter X. SS Doctors & The State of Exception
. . . 165
Chapter XI. Nazi Language and the State of Exception
. . . 194
Chapter XII. Shoah & Unending Singularity
. . . 218
Chapter XIII. Concluding Remarks
. . . 239
Paralipomena
. . . 256
Lexicon & Reference
. . . 277 1
Tables
Table 1: Jewish populations established in western Europe
. . . 17
Table 2: Jewish populations established in eastern Europe
. . . 17
Semiotic Squares
Chart I: Nazi Jurist Rationality/Irrationality in the State
. . . 43
Chart II: Example Square of Rationality/Irrationality
. . . 103
Chart III: Example Square of Authority/Submission
. . . 104
Chart IV: Life/Death in the State of Exception
. . . 140
Chart V: SS Guard Rationality/Irrationality
. . . 163
Chart VI: SS Camp Doctor Rationality/Irrationality
. . . 193
2
Introduction
Therefore, Jew, though Justice be thy plea, consider this: That in the course of Justice, none of us shall see salvation. We do pray for mercy and that same prayer doth teach us to render the deeds of mercy…1
1
William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, II, ii, 76. (Washington D.C.: Folgers Shakespeare Library, 2004).
3
This thesis developed from the desire to understand the influence of the German civil society over the pre-mature collapse of the nascent democracy enshrined within the Weimar Republic. As I read about the multifarious German state bunds, multitude of thriving professional opportunities, and the apparently habitual participation in state affairs frequently enjoyed by common citizens, I began appreciating the emerging connections I found between the practices of rationality/irrationality and the methods of identity formation as set within the framework of this emerging dictatorial regime. Although Shoah is the locus of modern exceptionality, rationality/irrationality, legality, and identity are qualities common among all people. Due to the contributions of these three qualities bound in a bloodied braid, this regime FODLPHGVRPDQ\OLYHV ZRUVHWKHVHWKUHHTXDOLWLHVDUHVWLOOXVHGDVPHWKRGV to achieve the same destructive purposes, as illustrated in the tragedies of Cambodia and Rwanda, to name just two of recent history’s genocides. How does a nation rise to the demands of genocide? Is it composed of deliberate and open moves, or does the force of this ‘enemy of humanity’ creep quietly and slyly into the everyday lives, turning a person from active civil citizen to passive killer? Thus the purpose of this thesis served not only to satiate my own academic interests in the forces governing societies, but also to clarify the major professional and personal goals for my own life. How can we keep the promise of “Never Again”? By deliberately rejecting from time to time opportunities uniquely granted by an accident of birth in order to open up those same opportunities to those would otherwise never see them. When the links of one’s personal life and the world at large are consciously strengthened through such acts, I believe that the promise of a better world moves from hope to reality. 4
Contemplating this move hope to reality brings to mind the famous Shakespearean paen for mercy: “though justice be thy plea, consider this: that in the course of justice, none of us shall see salvation.” Perhaps for the one finding justice for the victim is not meant to find this salvation. But it is the responsibility of the outsider to search for it nonetheless, to find a means of salvation for the victim. For me, this thesis is the first step towards actualizing that duty. How do fluctuating identities of minorities, altered by legal and social actions, contribute to genocide? How does a state utilize rationality to justify and manipulate the massacre of its own subjects-turn-objects? With the aid of semiotic squares, this thesis offers a three-fold analysis tracing legal and social vehicles that moved the Weimar Republic, and nascent Reich politics towards Shoah. The three levels of examination charts first, the forced movement of the Jewish citizen from his home, to the interface of the ghetto, DQG WKHQ LQWR$XVFKZLW] VHFRQGWKH HYROXWLRQ RI -HZLVKLGHQWLW\ IURP the quasi-accepted homo viator to the reviled homo sacer WKLUGKRZUDWLRQDODQG irrational actions among three groups of the Nazi Reich precipitating and shaping genocide. As mentioned above, this thesis employs the use of semiotic squares to unfold the multi-faceted and variegated movements of the pre-Reich society to its ultimate downfall in 1945. The decision to use this linguistic tool arose after completing Greimas’ Structural Semantics, which illustrated in depth breakdown of semiotic square methodology. I had struggled previously to find a way to define “rationality” and “irrationality” within a genocidal society, and it seemed a simple and elegant means of escaping the problems of creating novel, yet generalized definitions for these two slippery ideas. The semiotic 5
square is thus the means I employ to underline the many ways members of each examined group found meaning and responsibility in (ir)rationality within Nazi conferred roles and identities. There are three collective groups that are examined in this thesis: SS guards DVVLJQHGWR$XVFKZLW] camp doctors assigned or voluntarily based in $XVFKZLW] 1D]L3DUW\MXULVWVMXGJHVDQGODZ\HUV that practiced solely within the Nazi state. Each group serves as a frame within which Nazi Party rationality and irrationality was uniquely manifested. The analyses of SS guards and doctors focuses on their respective roles in Auschwitz structure, or the state of exception. Significantly, the analysis of Nazi law and conduct of Nazi jurists is based on law and conduct as it existed and evolved within the state itself. The last group is a rough compilation of jurists, judges, and lawyers of the is not categorized as a per se, as I felt the legal system was structured and supported by fundamentally the Nazi legal community, and more significantly by Berlin-based political offices. As the usual case in established states, Reich citizens tended to, by and large, accept the laws passed by State heads. Unlike law within the non-genocidal state, however, Reich citizens seemed to understand that Nazi law operated to either protect the citizen or to dehumanize the Other, typically Jews or Gypsies. Importantly, however, it is inaccurate to believe the frenzied enactment of murderous decrees by 1945 is solely the result of a Nazi jurist rationality system.
6
Chapter I
Conditions of Transformation: The Jewish Viator & Sacer
The traveler’s past changes according to the routes followed: he finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: Foreignness of what you no longer are or possess lies in wait… Futures not achieved are only branches of the past.Ϯ
Maybe each of us is Cain to some Abel, and slay him in the field without knowing it… It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act.3
2
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, (NY: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1972), 29. Primo Levi, as quoted in Todorov Tzvetan, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, (NY: Henry Holt & Co., 1996), 139. 3
7
The socio-legal transformation of the typical Jewish citizen in the Weimar Republic into the perceived enemy of the Third Reich seems to defy satisfactory comprehension. The extreme circumstances of a crippled economy and war-torn nation that had enabled the rise of the Nazi regime still seem insufficient to explain the paradoxically methodical, frenzied brutality of neighbor wrecked upon neighbor. Initial shock and horror have quieted and focused to present the unanswered question: how could a government reverse civil and social acceptance of presumably integrated populations, and replace this acceptance with apathy and hate? Is the power of a government to so swiftly alter general tolerance exacerbated through exploiting and propagandizing extraordinary domestic crises indicative of a possible overarching rationality and irrationality within genocide? If so, is it possible for a typical person in this government to sustainably perform as state murderer by day and affectionate parent by night? This chapter provides the initial groundwork by which to address these difficult and layered questions. The vehicles by which this chapter reaches into the twisted civil, legal, and ethical webs of the Third Reich are two classical figures: “homo viator” and “homo sacer.”
I.
Homo Viator In 1967, Gerhart B. Ladner explored the manner in which medieval
theology had evolved with coterminous social theories of alienation. To connect theology to social theory, Ladner applied the ancient, heavily
8
symbolic figure: homo viator.4 This idea of a wandering, vaguely cursed man was first imagined in Greco-Roman literary analysis and later religiously interpreted in the Middle Ages. The figure and eponym of “homo viator” was specifically fashioned as the means of referencing its analysis in ancient texts.5 Medieval scholars imagined homo viator as the quintessential “alienus.”6 By portraying homo viator as originating from the locus of difference, these scholars condemned homo viator’s foreign elements nature, while portraying him within the biblical narrative. The common depiction of the viator has changed little since the Medieval era. The viator’s travels are fuelled by isolation or alienation and frequently underlined by judicial or heavenly disregard.7 His knowledge and experiences are depicted as full of a dangerous potential to twist venerated norms and tradition.8 As a result of these dangerous traits, the viator’s host community suffers his presence only temporarily and with poor grace. Such collective rejection and xenophobia is a historical trope, bound in suspicion and intolerance. Often this outsider is exiled from the host territory by a state 4 The rarity in contemporary discussion of this figure was unfortunately made clear to me when, despite extensive search, I found very few sources from the past 300 years that dealt with the homo viator meaningfully. One exception (that did not focus on the viator, but did provide a footnote of useful information) is Keld Zeruneith, The Wooden Horse: The Liberation of the Western Mind From Odysseus to Socrates (NY: The Overlook Press, 2007). 5 Gerhart B. Ladner, “Homo Viator: Mediaeval Ideas on Alienation and Order”. Speculum, Vol. 42, no. 2 (April 1967), 233. 6 Gregory the Great, bloralia XII, 36, 41, Migne, Patrologia Latina xxv,1005 C: Quis vero alienus nisi apostata angelus vocatur? as cited in Ladner, “Homo Viator”, 236. “Alienus” refers to the fallen angels cast from the Heavenly divine order. 7 One example is that of Odysseus. Having angered his fellow citizen with his trickery, he was forced to leave his home and enlist to fight in the Trojan War. Following the end of the Trojan War, Odysseus is cursed to perpetual wander the earth until he accepts divine superiority. 8 For example, the Sophists, the wandering Greek philosophers, had resisted building bonds to a particular polis because of the prioritization of monetary gain over state loyalty. Their knowledge of foreign elements that could threaten the city or tempt young men to abandon the city made the Sophists a constant concern to city councils.
9
financed vehicle, for example, on the notorious Narrenschiff, Ship of Fools.9 However, even this state ship carried the viator to other cities, and ensured continued wandering between gates of settled communities. This continued movement re-enforced the divine and mortal sentence of exclusion from a permanent identity. As Foucault framed the viator’s condemned status, “He is… the prisoner of the passage… he knows not whence he came. His truth and his home are the barren wasteland between two lands that can never be his own.”10 The story of this figure’s exile made him a popular metonymic tool among the medieval intellectual ascetics and monks who sought a higher meaning in the human suffering experienced in daily life and the spiritual world. However, with the dawning of scientific progress and the Enlightenment heralding an era of rational behavior, European philosophy turned from such seemingly hopeless and vulnerable figures. It was for this very opposition defining the paradigm shift into the era of a priori knowledge and self-awareness that in fact inspired Ladner to revive in his work this symbolic viator. Ladner’s purpose was to demonstrate the sense of purposeless movement experienced by medieval Europeans who had drifted between alienation and orderly socialized life during the 16th - 17th century Reformation. This sense of perdurable indecision was, however, most aptly illustrated in one particular homogenized group - “homo viator judaicus” or “the wandering Jew.” Ladner referenced the 12th century as the time at which
9 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, (NY: Random House, 1965), 10. 10 Ibid., 11.
10
the idea of “wandering” became equated with “Jewish.” As a result, Jewish history is “present in the Christian image of the Jew from the very crucial beginning of the evolvement of the European mind.”11 A.J.P Taylor analyzed this view through the particular influence of the Protestant Reformer, Martin Luther:
(Luther) gave to Germany a consciousness of national existence… and also the Divine Right of Kings, or rather the Divine Right of any established authority. Obedience was the first, and last, duty of the Christian man. The State can do no wrong; therefore, whatever the State orders… the more eager he (the Christian man) will be to carry out the the most violent and unscrupulous orders of the prince.12 By drawing on Ladner’s dynamic analysis of ‘wandering’ as a trait that delineated the boundaries between Jew and non-Jew, “homo viator” for this paper represents the more modernized 20th century Jewish identity in Germany just preceding the 1935 Nazi implementation of discriminatory socio-legal policies. The figure of homo viator exemplified the reputation of the wandering Jew dated centuries earlier, applicable even in medieval Spain amidst the perdurable Inquisition. However, despite internal strife between host and viator, once national citizenry identified the temporarily settled homo viator judaicus, they were able to turn collective focus away, having set his role as outside/inside the structure of the society, at least for the duration of 11
Galit Hasan-Rokem. “Homo Viator et narrans judaicus: Medieval Jewish Voices in the European Narrative of the Wandering Jew”, Europäische Ethnologie und Folklore im internationalen Kontext. Festschrift für Leander Petzoldt. Hrsg. Ingo Schneider. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ss. 93-102. 12 A.J.P. Taylor, The Course of German History, (London: Routledge Press, 1945), 8-9.
11
his sojourn. Despite a continuous integration of Jewish communities into local and national German economies and societies, the origins of the German Jew as a seemingly rootless, wandering tribe was not forgotten by the collective German entity. Daniel Goldhagen has closely examined this tenuous relation of this historical wariness to the later national movement embracing genocidal goals of the Third Reich.13 However, wariness of the Jewish neighbor cannot entirely be cited as the source of an overwhelming historic anti-Semitism that was ultimately unleashed on an unknowing public.
Such a simplistic
perspective undermines the roles of State Nazi actors and Reich businesses in exploiting the complex, and shadowy factors that may lead any society to systematic massacre. Furthermore, this type of buried animosity was not confined to German borders, as demonstrated at various points even in the history of neighboring Poland. One example of this actualized animosity was the Polish Gezerah (“catastrophe”) in 1655 during which 250,000 Jews refusing to convert were massacred by Polish neighbors. At this point, the Jewish appellation as Luftmenschen (“rootless wanderers”) was solidified in Polish collective memory. Despite such sporadic moments of violence, few could have foreseen how these forms of historical hostility were anticipatory vehicles moving Jewish wealth and vulnerability towards Nazi exploitation. This lack of foresight was in no small part due to the variegated and pervasive means by which the Jewish community had integrated within Germany. Under the legal emancipation of 1869 and genesis of the German 13
Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, (NY: Vintage Books, 1997), 7.
12
constitution of 1871, Jews had been granted a religious and social equality. However nominal these legal steps, religious freedom was nonetheless acknowledged, to the extent of ensuring protection from public outcry after controversial acts, such as ritualistic animal slaughter (of course, only for religious purposes).14 While attempting to gain equal status as Inländer (“residents”) and Staatsbürger (“citizens”), the Jews in Germany produced philosophers (Buber and Mendelssohn), generals (Hoffman and von Sanders), and scientists (Haber and Einstein). Furthermore, the Jewish population was thoroughly immersed in the various bunds (“clubs”) available in Hamburg, Leipzig, Stettin, and other cities.15 Perhaps because of these many efforts, not a single law passed during the unification of the German state was rescinded - even during the advent of anti-Semitic philosophies post-1870, such as Social Darwinism, imperialism, Social conservatism, and the quintessential German “reply” to Marxist classlessness, Volksgemeinschaft (“Volk-community”). Even
during
the
tumultuous
period
following
WWI,
in
which
Dolchstosslegende (“stab in the back legend”) was widely perpetrated, Jewish influence and population in Weimar region did not wane. The socio-legal extent to which Jews had voluntarily immersed themselves, and through the force of time, had become integrated into German life was manifest in their manner of adopting German dress, customs, holidays and food. Paradoxically, it was through this adoption of these German specific forms of “telling” in addition to cultural and legal immersion that a novel trait
14
Sarah Ann Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the ‘Jewish Question’ (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), 54. Saul Friedman, A History of the Holocaust, (Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), 70.
15
13
of a Jewish nature emerged - the ephectic nature, through which a suspension of the standard aloofness served to later expose the vulnerability of Jews in the Weimar Republic and early Nazi era. Thus, it is as tragic as it is ironic that due to increasing levels of immigration and mobility among European Orthodox Jews, it was the German Jews who represented the most vocal group which called for more stringent immigration policies, namely in admitting these foreigners with their traditional lifestyles and dress which tended to focus negative attention to Jews as a mass collective.16 Here the unforgiveable quality and literal activity of “wandering” in the traditional Jew only antagonized and destabilized his counterpart, but this time, not the German citizen, rather the urban Jew, only newly clad and still anxious in his “modernized”, more camouflaged identity. A motivation for this suppression of this potential differance presented by this Orthodox representation is part of the politics of stigmatized identity framed by Goffman as, “he will have accepted a selIIRUKLPVHOI EXWWKLVVHOILV a resident alien, a voice of the group that speaks for and through him.”17 Via the leveling rules inherent in homogeneity and by extension, civil normalization the individualization as encapsulated in the unique nature of homo viator allowed the citizen to more easily measure differences between himself and his peregrine counterpart. This step of finding and vocalizing the differences between groups is a well-recorded step that has always preceded genocide in the 20th century, and now 21st as well. This disjunctivity was 16
Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the “Jewish Question”, 56. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, (London: Penguin, 1963), 123. A related phenomenon is “in group purification” ritual. During this ritual, members of the stigmatized group continuously attempt to “normify” personal and general group and the conduct. Probability of such behavior occurring increases proportionate to the individual’s sense of alliance with “normal.” Ibid., 107 -108.
17
14
verbally expressed in one term applied to the decreased status of the Jews “entwȨrdigen” (‘to deprive of dignity’) – meaning, those sans dignity could not (moreover, should not) be grouped with Nazis, the self-considered representatives of worth. The linguistic manipulations framed by the German language extended to previous understandings of identities of religion and race, as seen with the movement of “Jew” from a religious nomen WRDUDFLDOVOXU DPRYHPHQWZKLFK will examined further in Chapter XI. Later, Badiou articulated this singularity of Jewish identity in the Nazi lexicon, “the name “Jew” was a political creation of the Nazis, without any pre-existing referent, a name whose meaning no one can share with the Nazis.”18
II.
Jewish Populations in Western Europe States By the turn of the 19th century, the German Jewish community became
intensely focused in urban areas, a trend increasingly evident after 1933, when entire families departed the villages of their predecessors and developed homes and businesses in large towns and cities.19 Due to this migrating phenomenon, the percentage of urban Jews numbered over 100,000 increased from 74.2% in 1933 to 82.3% in 1939, resulting in a census from May 1939 in which the Jewish population of 330,89, of which more than 2/3 lived in ten cities.20 However, even with the legal protection ensured by the Weimar constitution, and the stability of identity within the collective memory of 18
Alain Badiou, Ethics, (London: Verso, 2001), 75. Raul Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, vol. I, (NY: Holmes & Meir Publishers Ltd., 1985), 157. 20 Ibid. 19
15
Germany, many Jews had emigrated in the late 1920’s due to the ominous actions of nascent Nazi supporters. This trans-national movement speaks to the multi-faceted Jewish attempts to avoid what appeared to be the start of another Inquisition. However, by 1933, there were fewer than 600,000 Jews in Germany, constituting less than 0.76% of the population,21 although 10,000 of these emigrants ultimately returned to Germany.22 Despite the influx of reverse expats, there remained so few Jews in the German territories, which the Nazis were left to look over their own territorial boundaries to find significant Jewish populations to fixate on and subsequently persecute. As Hilberg noted, “When Hitler came to power, Germany had 515,000 Jews.” After five years, emigration and death had brought that number down to 350,000. However in March 1938, when the Germans took Austria, 190,000 Jews were added to the 350,000, bringing the total to approximately 540,000, that is 25,000 more than the original number.”23 Calculations of the Jewish population in Europe during the Nazi years are validated by Reich records. “After the conquest and division of Poland, Jews …numbered in the… millions. After the campaign against France, there were four million Jews (in) 1941. (There were) 11 million Jews in all of Europe… considered for the ‘Final Solution.”24 By 1939, fewer remained in Western Europe:25
21
Friedman, A History of the Holocaust, 70. Ibid., 77. 23 Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews vol. II., 394. 24 Gotz Aly, “Political Prehistory” in National Socialist Extermination Policies, ed. Ulrich Herbert. (NY: Berghahn Books, 2000), 58. 25 Friedman, A History of the Holocaust, 4. 22
16
Table I
Population
Location
80,000
Greece
90,000
Belgium
140,000
Holland
270,000
France
500,000
Hungary
190,000
Austria
There were more sizable populations in eastern European states:26
Table II
26
Population
Location
40,000
Riga
50,000
Bialystok
60,000
Minsk
65,000
Kracow
80,000
Vilna
85,000
Kharkhov
140,000
Kiev & Leningrad
200,000
Lodz
350,000
Warsaw
Ibid.
17
III.
Jewish & Mischlinge Racial Representations in Nazism To ensure the complete success of flipping earlier attitudes of national
tolerance and, by extension, to ensure success of the Final Solution, the Nazi State unceasingly cajoled and threatened life-world of every Reich citizen. The transformation of attitude was manifested in the displays of increasing disgust and apathy for abject Jew.27 The constant thrumming of state propaganda contributed to this shifting perception by expounding the “racial” nature of Judaism, and minimizing its “religious” elements. This propaganda marked a shift in German liberal philosophy that previously had regarded Judaism as a religion not a race. By re-presenting the Jew as a race, and one powerful enough to juxtapose itself against the German people, anti-Semitism was similarly redefined as a politico-economic norm. As a result, anti-Semitism was no longer confined to the speeches of traditionalists and fanatics. This re-definition enabled anti-Semites to neutralize then subsequent defame Jews as a cursed people historically – and properly - rejected by social and legal norms. Furthermore, through these re-presentations the identity of the Jew became a self-destructive palimpsest, namely that there was an over-representation of powerful state positions upon the excursive German history. German anti-Semitism quickly grasped onto this disparity and in public forums, openly expressed objection, often without reserve. In fact, as Goldhagen once controversially wrote, “The perpetrators, from Hitler to the ORZOLHVWRIILFLDOVZHUHRSHQO\SURXGRIWKHLUDFWLRQVRIWKHLUDFKLHYHPHQWV
27
This abject figure of state disgust was commonly, but certainly not exclusively, portrayed as the traitorous Jew.
18
during the 1930’s, they proclaimed… with the general approval of the Volk.”28 Despite constant encouragement from the Nazi Party in this developing confidence in articulated anti-Semitism, total adoption of this potent attitude among all citizens required the proper environment and sufficient time. Connolly summarized this lengthy process:
The anti-Semite construes the Jew as responsible for the most demeaning evils he and his nation suffer. This insistence serves essential functions. First, it allows the anti-Semite to dissociate himself from responsibility for those things about himself or his condition he finds demeaning… Second, it enables him to avoid recognition of how much the world diverges from the harmonious condition he projects into its basic or true structure, for this true harmony could only be realized if the Jew were removed from it… Third, it allows him to defer critical examination of the good he endorses… Finally, it licenses him to ignore the law in fighting evil he has identified, allowing him to kill the other in the name of the good he refuses to examine. It releases his violent desires from the obligations of selfrestraint.29 Once this “insistence” reached fruition, the ability to hate or at least turn away from condemning discrimination was extended towards other socially unacceptable populations, such as homosexuals, political dissidents, and especially the Roma and Sinti (‘Gypsies’). Inevitably, then Jews were represented as dangerous, esurient, and unworthy of State privileges typically enjoyed by employable citizens. However, from the enforcement period of the 28
Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 429. William Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991/2002), 100. 29
19
Nuremberg Laws to the chaotic end of the war, there remained one true, legal middleman between the Volk and the Jewish “vermin”: the Mischlinge (‘mixed person’). While Chapter II examines this “mixed” person/space in more detail, it is interesting to note at this point how the liminal characteristic of Mischlinge, specifically the inescapable reality of their “not quite here, not quite there” background was to the end of the war frustrating to Nazi officials and bureaucrats. This was especially bothersome to those officials and bureaucrats involved in structuring the 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, (a law created to dismiss all “non-Aryans” from all government positions) because a definition of “non-Aryan” was suddenly as urgently needed as it was seemingly impossible to formulate. Here was one of the first strong examples of the Mischlinge as a bodily space of confrontation between the Nazi perpetrators and the Jewish victims.
IV.
German Civil Awareness: The movement of Jews around the state coupled with the public anti-
Semitic politics driving them away from their homes and history could not have occurred without the knowledge, however unwilling, of the average German citizen. The extent to which the German was aware is a controversial and complicated matter. Therefore, this section will briefly illustrate comments voiced and written during the regime - which appear to exemplify the attitude held by the Germans themselves - alongside three alternative perspectives offered in contemporary literature by Bankier, Agamben and Connolly. 20
One example of the level of civil awareness is from an open letter to the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs from Archbishop Theophile Wurm, confirming the knowledge of Reich citizens of oppressive measures ensuring extermination of the state’s unwanted (namely, the Jews), “the steps taken… have become known in our homeland. They are widely discussed and burden … the conscience of …the German people.”30 Bankier claims that while denial may have aided in German public evasion of the atrocities, by 1943, “…the fear of defeat counterbalanced loyalty to Hitler.”31 The concerns of Reich citizens were not fueled by forbidden gossip VHVVLRQV UDWKHUWKHRSHQFRPPHQWVDQGVSHHFKHVE\+LWOHUFRQILUPHGPDQ\ SUHYLRXV GRXEWV DV WR WKH SROLFLHV RI WKH µ)LQDO 6ROXWLRQ¶ IRU H[DPSOH KLV 1942 New Year’s address which vocalized the regime’s view, “The Jew will not exterminate the peoplHV RI (XURSH KH ZLOO EH WKH YLFWLP RI KLV RZQ machinations instead.”32 Echoing this thought in a public speech in 1943, Goebbels claimed, and far less cryptically, “When the Jews planned the total destruction of the German people, they signed their own death warrant.”33 For the benefit of those who did not rely on the rhetoric of politicians, the Head of the German Labour Front, Robert Ley re-articulated the aforementioned Nazi perspectives, “We swear we are not going to abandon the struggle until the last Jew in Europe has been exterminated and is actually dead.”34 Similarly, these views, further expressed by citizens in a 1941 issue of Das Reich, a published article on the theme of the “Jews are guilty” was 30 David Bankier, “German Public Awareness of the Final Solution”, in The Final Solution: Origins and Implementations, ed. David Cesarani. (London: Routledge, 1994), 217. 31 Ibid,. 218. 32 ibid., 223. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 224.
21
affirmed by a reader who claimed, either seriously or sardonically, “Having read Goebbels’ article in which old people, women and children are made responsible for the death of German soldiers, you can only expect the extermination of the Jews.”35 Finally, following the Wannsee Conference during which top Nazi officials gathered to decide on “the Jewish Question”, Heinrich Himmler delivered the well-known Poznan speech on 4 October 1943 before an assembly of Reich leaders in which he spelled out the exact implications for the “Final Solution.”36 In light of these vocalized and published barrages of Nazi antiSemitism and extermination policies which focused almost exclusively on the general public, it becomes difficult to refute claims that citizens were ignorant of events unfolding around the Reich, and more controversially, that they remained innocent in the face of policies which aided in the genocide. However, denial had become a powerful tool in the face of these atrocities constantly unleashed around the state. Fear likewise served to halt any overly HPRWLRQDORUSXEOLFSURWHVWV DVRQHGHIHQGDQWWHVWLILHGGXULQJWKH1XUHPEHUJ Trials:
The German people were well acquainted with what was happening in the concentration camps and it was known that the fate of anyone too actively opposed to any part of the Nazi programme was liable to be one of great suffering. Indeed, before the Hitler regime was many months old, almost every family in Germany had received first hand accounts of the brutalities inflicted in the concentration camps from someone, either in the 35
Ibid. ‘The Complete Text of the Poznan Speech’, The Holocaust History 36
22
family circle, or in the circle of friends who had served a sentence, and consequently the fear of such camps was a very effective brake on any possible opposition…37 Prior to this social metamorphosis, the German liberals, attempting to save the Jewish population, largely expressed desire to see the Jews renounce their religion which was “asserted to be devoid of love and humanity by the German cultural judgment.”38 Theoretically, according to the liberal understanding, once the Jew had abandoned their religion, they could become fully and finally integrated as Germans. Following the escalation of antiSemitism in the 1930’s, this practice fell away and, “… they were left with the cultural model of Jews as aliens… and fell prey to the only convincing explanation of the Jews’ perniciousness, now considered to be unalterable: The Jews were a race.”39 Similarly, in 1899, British pseudo-intellectual Houston Stewart Chamberlain published his The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, a volume which was to later greatly inspire the racial anti-Semitism of the Nazis. Expounding on the anti-Semitic stereotypes already popularized in Germany, Chamberlain claimed, “The Jewish race is a permanent but mongrel race which retains its mongrel character… people beyond all doubt, degernate physically, mentally, and morally.”40 Furthermore, the Jews were not only mongrelized humans, but also driven with an imperialist desire to “consume and enslave all other nations.”41 37
Testimony of Raymond Geist, 1945, Trial of the Major War Criminals, 111. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 58. 39 Ibid., 59. 40 Friedman, A History of the Holocaust, 42. 41 Ibid. 38
23
Anti-Semitism therefore became not only a tool of propagandists and nationalistic expression, but specifically it also “was associated with everything the conservatives stood for.”42 What the “conservatives” represented was antithetical to the liberal modernism, which did not speak out against the growing existence and thriving culture of German Jews. This lack of vocalized recognition led later to Gideon Hausner’s exclamation, “the nationalist slogans of “Let us have colonies!,” “We need living space!” went well with the cry, “Out with the Jews!’”43 In this way, the Nazi state began to form the façade of its own identity out of a negation of minority participation in the state’s present and future. Grasping the crucial connection of shifting class formations, Agamben noted that “the state is founded not as the expression of a social tie, but as an untying (deliaison) that prohibits.”44 The Reich was not founded on typical forces of class solidarity, social bonds, economic needs, or other unifying tropes so often prominent in struggling societies. Rather, the basis for the Nazi identity was in the double helix of the negation of a minority identity coupled with a majority’s drive for power. Such a formation could only lead to the unnatural inversion of traditional sovereign head that claimed the power of “letting” life and hastening death. Thus in the Nazi state of exception, the figurative sovereign heads seized the power to “disallow” death while “fostering” a life, however temporarily.45
As
Agamben continued: 42 Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy September 1939-March 1942 (London: William Heinemann, 2004), 6. 43 Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Herzl Press, 1978), 15. 44 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 90.
24
Deliaison is not to be understood as the untying of a pre-existing tie.” The tie itself originaraily has the form of any untying or exception in which what is captured is at the same time excluded, and in which human life is politicized only through abandonment to an unconditional power of death.46 However, for all these popular movements supporting suppressive antiSemitic pressures, other scholars noted that, “…it was regarded, if at all, as a symptom of the regime’s general propensity for violence, or as an attempt to intimidate labor…it was not regarded as an autonomous political factor.”47 This view can be understood in the context that until the late 1930’s, the majority to suffer under Nazi violence were political dissidents, be they Jews or not, or social misfits, such as criminals and the mentally ill. This characterization was to find its most vocal support in Hitler’s speeches, tentatively expressed in the late 1930’s and then more forcefully following the deportations of Jews into the ghettos. These early speeches were confined to exploiting conditions of possibility within four basis ideas: first, that Germany suffered from forces of decay, including cancers, ulcers, and DOLHQ YLUXVHV VHFRQG WKDW WKRVH UHVSRQVLEOH IRU WKLV GHFD\ ZHUH 0DU[LVWV -HZV DQG:HLPDUSROLWLFLDQV WKLUG WKHVolk had to ensure its survival and growth by uniting with Austria and acquiring the additional lands of the Slavic SHRSOH IRXUWK LQ RUGHU WR DFKLHYH WKLV QDWLRQDO JUHDWQHVV DQG ODQG WKH Germans had to sacrifice and resist corrupting forces.48
46 47 48
Ibid. Herbert, “New Answers and Questions” in National Socialist Extermination Policies, 23. Friedman, A History of the Holocaust, 54.
25
These ‘forces’ being the racial influence of the Jewish population, an accusation first implied and then openly propounded. Provided the German population could withstand the time of sacrifice and resistance, “Heaven will bring the Germans back into a Reich over which there shall be no Soviet star, no Jewish Star of David… but the symbol of German labor - the Swastika.”49 Even before the Nazis legally seized power, Hitler was able to provide both the reasons for suppressing the Jewish population and sacrificing opportunities for individual gain in the name of the state. The state then becomes its own palimpsest with the superimposition of several factors including:
Resentment against the adverse effects of civilization of SURGXFWLYLW\ DQG SULYDWH DIIOXHQFH LV SURMHFWHG VHcond, the vehicle through rhetorical reassurances about the glory and durability of that civilization are transmitted back to the SRSXODFH DQG WKLUG WKH LQVWUXPHQW RI FDPSDLJQV DJDLQVW WKRVH elements most disturbing to the collective identity.50 The result of interdisciplinary fields combining to so forcefully express views of anti-Semitism as evidenced by their personal experiences led Goldhagen to note, “by pitting Germanness and Jewishness against one another, the cognitive model underlying the notion of race re-capitulated the absolute and binary opposition that …had existed between Christianity and Judaism…the Jews, as a cultural symbol (transformed) into a symbol for all that was awry in the world.”51 The anti-Semitic perspective further 49 50 51
Ibid., 55. Ibid., 206. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 67.
26
propounded the active role of the Jew in perpetuating these global wrongs, thus moving them quietly from a place of religious passivity to active racial animosity. This social alteration found visible culmination in the pervasive acceptance of the portrayal of the Jew as the Nazi Feindbild (“stereotypical enemy”), an animal FRQWDPLQDWLQJQDWLRQDOHIIRUWVDWDVWURQJHUSRSXODWLRQ DV Walter Darre, the Minister for Agriculture framed this effort, “We shall gather together the best blood… We shall see the same type of breeding over the next generation of the pure type of Nordic German.”52 As Connolly noted, this limited form of identity based on differentiation was “…established in relation to differences… socially recognized… it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty.”53 However, egregious displays of violent anti-Semitism still disgusted the citizenry that, as a collective, was still able to conjure up individual and common narrative memories of Jewish neighbors and friends. Therefore, even well into the years of WWII, the Reich could only accept the more virulent anti-Semitic policies if implemented through the normal and recognizable routes of legislated social order.54
V.
Homo Sacer: The second significant identity of the viator was born in the
proscription of Jews as not only half - accepted subjects, but as now a people destined for state sanctioned violence. This seceding identity is now
52 53 54
David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda, (London: Routledge, 1993), 67. Connolly, Identity/Difference, xiv. Browning, Origins of the Final Solution, 10.
27
summarily enveloped in the ancient Roman figure, “homo sacer.” This “homo sacer”, originally defined by Pompeius Festus and later interpreted by Giorgio Agamben, is the citizen-turn-non-citizen, judged by other citizenry and the VRYHUHLJQLWVHOIDVDFULPLQDOZKRFDQEHPXUGHUHGZLWKLPSXQLW\ KRZHYHU he is no longer vulnerable to State sacrifice of his body. Thus the natural irony of ‘sacrum’ (“that which is destined for the gods”55). His place in the society has shifted from citizenship to “sacredness,” (or more appropriately translated, “cursedness”) from the inner communal zones to the outskirts, joining the ranks of bandits, werewolves, and other social non-entities. While the state is unable to physically sacrifice this character, his symbolic sacrifice is carried out by specially designated citizens. In the specific case of the Reich citizen fulfilling his murderous state duties, the Jew “must be sacrificed so the anti-Semite can inflict cruelty without responsibility.” The Jew is sacrificed in order to ensure the anti-Semite’s image of future truth can find maturation, as promised by the Fuhrer. “The other is sacrificed so that the self can project an infantile image of self-identity, national unity, and the human condition.”56 The novel titular as sacer further underlined the former wandering condition as homo viator, which had paradoxically denied him, rather than allow, a more powerful future based on his increased conditions of possibility because of his diverse background and knowledge. Following the implementation of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, the Jewish place in society moved from an alienation of an undesirable position to an outright detested and legally unprotected minority. Further, “If the person entering the camp
55 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 71. 56 Connolly, Identity/Difference, 101.
28
was a Jew, he had already been deprived of his rights as a citizen and denationalized at the time of the Final Solution.”57 Agamben’s analysis of the Jewish concentration camp inmate outlined the rational basis for the Jewish social ostracism, inversely likening exclusion to the enforced isolation of werewolves in fairy tales - just as the Jew was by nature man, and by law, sub-human, so too was the werewolf by nature an animal and by social maintenance, a man.58 Due to this interfacial existence leaving homo sacer unable to find resolution in either realm, the destined execution by a state agent became both inevitable and necessary for the perpetuation of state morality and cultural progress. For once the idea of “good” is solidified in a state “the primacy of will emerges as the best means to create the gap between good and evil.”59 Having outlined the process by which the Jewish identity moved from viator to sacer and the simultaneous German civil response, the question now is how these social shifts were granted expression within a public space that had provided such freedoms of religion and equality of rights, even up to the time of the Nazi 1932 election. What legal reasoning and novel law formation allowed increasingly discriminatory attitudes? How did the Nazi legal system aid oppressive state ideologies and policies? Chapter II addresses these questions and the bifurcated relationship of the Reich citizen and Jewish sacer in the Nazi legal system.
57
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 170. “The Sonderkommandos and the Werewolves: Part III” of Paralipomena contextualizes the designation of this bestial moniker. 59 Connolly, Identity/Difference, 7. 58
29
Chapter II
The Fluid Legality of Nazism
Great as was their crime against those who suffered at their hands, their crime against Germany was even more shameful. They defiled the German temple of justice…60
Lotringer: The Law no longer needs to be written or recognized since it is being made everywhere. It’s no longer necessary to incarcerate people, you simply make them disappear. The Law disappears by spreading over everything. Virilio: The Law is no longer a Law in the political sense: A law which eludes politics is not Law, but mythical law. It’s fate.61
60
David Fraser, Law After Auschwitz: Towards a Jurisprudence of the Holocaust, (North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press), 143. Sylvere Lotringer, as quoted by Paul Virilio, Pure War, (Los Angelos: Semiotext(e), 2007), 136. 61
30
When a new inmate disembarked from the train into the campground of Auschwitz, he emerged a repudiated figure that had fully undergone the transformation of viator to sacer OHJDOO\ XQSURWHFWHG E\ KLV VWDWH VRFLDOO\ disavowed by his former fellow citizens, and after a brief tattooing ritual, condemned to a numerical anonymity among his fellow inmates. This point in the dehumanization process articulated the manner in which a thorough implementation of Nazi socio-legal action had propelled him from a place within the accepted spatial zones of the state and to the unspoken horrors within the exceptional state. Nazi decrees and statutes played a large role in this movement. However, the true force of the laws did not lie in their mere H[LVWHQFH UDWKHU WKHLU authority and claim to force resided in the incessant pressure of Nazi legal rationality behind these laws and the power vested in them. What factors in Nazi law were central to the formation of the Jewish homo viator identity and his subsequent abuse as dealt out by his former friends and neighbors? Certainly other nations have enacted oppressive and freedomstripping legislation without culminating in genocide. So why was it under Nazi law that millions of lives were discarded and the lives of countless others broken and destroyed? One factor was certainly the efficiency by which anti-Semitic legislation was proposed, passed and mass distributed. Another contributing factor was the uncanny ability to draft only acts of legislation which conveyed the regime’s murderous goals with the most generalized phrases and basic terminology, so it was applicable within a variety of geo-political contexts – from the small bunds of a Northern German town to the Polish villagers in
31
Jedwabne.62 However, comprehension for the law’s unique motivation or its place in the grander Nazi legal constellation was never ultima ratio UDWKHUWKH law was shaped deliberately to ensure Reich citizens would enforce it with as oppressive contribution and thorough implementation as appropriate to their geo-political areas. In this manner, each contributing citizen was thus de facto responsible for perpetuating on a lesser scale the same grave human rights violations and crimes against humanity with which their legally powerful leaders were later charged. It is easy, therefore, to feel the same disgust as Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor in the 1947 Nuremberg “Justice Trial”, towards these Nazi judicial personalities:
Those men, leaders of the German judicial system, consciously and deliberately suppressed the law, engaged in an unholy masquerade of brutish tyranny disguised as justice, and converted the German judicial system to an engine of despotism...63 In order to distribute and monitor the constant flow of laws assembled and passed, there necessarily existed a reliable system of communication and available access to information throughout the Reich territories. This system acted as the vehicle by which laws drafted in bureaucratic offices would find tangible expression in the peripheral Reich villages. Hilberg offered one method of deconstructing the method by which laws moved from formality to everyday life. The law would originate in formal issuance by legislative or political offices and would ultimately ground itself in unremarkable activities 62 As illustrated in JT Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 63 Fraser, Law After Auschwitz, 143.
32
of typical citizens:
Law Enacted –> Implementation decrees for law –> Ministerial and territorial ordinances ensuring implementation –> Announcements local population summarizing the law, supporting decrees -> Announcements of local officials notably rare, when perceived necessary for obedience –> Written directives that would fail to be widely published, if at all –> Broad authorizations to subordinates not published –> Oral directives and authorizations -> The adoption of political official conduct that strongly encouraged civil obedience of laws lacking justification.64
I.
Eugenics & Euthanasia under Nazi Law The medical and social implications for Nazi laws on eugenics and
euthanasia are discussed in Chapter X, so this section focuses on structuring dates and passages of significant laws in the early years of the Nazi regime. Specifically, the laws examined here were those that served to weaken, then decimate, earlier legal safeguards for economic security and basic human rights of the Jewish homo viator. In July 1933, racial hygienists Fritz Lenz, Alfred Ploentz, Ernst Rudin, and Gerhard Wagner succeeded in convincing the Reichstag to set down a piece of legislation that had roots established and respected in other nations. This law, “The Law for Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases”, mandated that individuals deemed unfit by any of one of the 181 Genetic Health Courts established by the Reich state must be sterilized.65 Similarly 64
Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, vol. I, 55. Ibid., 805.
65
33
drafted and implemented only two years later were two of the Nazi regime’s most remembered dictatorial decrees: “The Marriage Health Law” and “The /DZIRUWKH3URWHFWLRQRI*HUPDQ%ORRGDQG*HUPDQ+RQRXU´ ERWKHQDEOHG only a month apart in 1935.66 On March 23, 1933, the remaining members of the Reichstag gathered to vote on the approval of “The Enabling Act”, which only required 2/3 vote to pass. In March 1933, the Nazis established Staatsangehoerige (“special tribunals”) to hear the minor political cases involving the daily activities of civil society. In April 1933, Nazis forbade the overcrowding of classrooms, claiming, “Our aim is the biological separation of the Jewish and German races.”67 Having already purged Jewish instructors and texts from the classrooms, now Jews could only sit in the back of the classroom. The total population of Jewish population capped at 1.5%. Furthermore, courses on Rassenkunde (“racial study”) were mandated as a compulsory branch of the curriculum from elementary school until graduation.68 In October 1939, Hitler approved the law creating the Aktion T4 program, a horrific two-year euthanasia program that claimed the lives of 70,273 patients diagnosed with mental or terminal disease. Unlike in the comparatively liberal Scandinavian states, euthanasia was judicially interpreted as equivalent to murder under statutory law in the German Criminal Code.69 Such a 66 FriedLänder, as cited in ed. David Cesarani, The Final Solution: Origins and Implementations, (London: Routledge, 1994), 52. 67 Volkischer Beobachter, as cited in Saul Friedman, A History of the Holocaust, (Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), 72. 68 Ibid. 69 As stated in paragraph 211 of the (pre-Nazi) German Criminal Code, “Whoever kills a person willfully will be punished by death for murder if the killing was pre-meditated.” In the new form, which was in effect from Sept 1941 on the section stated: “The murderer will be punished by death.” “A murderer is one who kills a person out of sheer desire to murder, for the satisfaction of
34
transformation in socio-medical norms among the citizenry and legal community speaks to the power entrusted in the rationality and irrationality under this new national socialist regime. It should be immediately noted here that this ‘transformation’ was a greater significance to the standard civil norms and legal interpretations than to the coterminous domestic and international medical discourses that embraced the praxis of eugenics and euthanasia.
II.
Laws on Mischlinge By September 1935, Jews had been stripped of their citizenship rights
XQGHUWKH1XUHPEHUJ/DZV D PDVVLYHSROLWLFDODFWSURGXFLQJDVWDWHIXOORI Jews bereft of social or legal resource - veritable Staatsangehörige (“national subjects”).70 Further, by November 1935, the Nazis had settled on a definition of a Jew: “anyone who had three Jewish grandparents or who had one Jewish grandparent, if that person practiced Judaism. Those who had one or two grandparents deemed as First or Second Grade Mischlinge were not considered Jewish, provided they did not practice Judaism.”71 In this way, religion did ultimately play a factor in the determination of race, according to official Nazi policy. Through this Nazi logic, in 1935, there were 500,000 full, ¾ and ½ Jews in Germany, and 300,000 Mischlinge.72 Unlike the degrading treatment of the Jews, Mischlinge first grades were able to enjoy recourse in the courts, at least until April 1943. The Mischlinge were half – Jews who did not belong to the Jewish the sexual instincts, for … vile motives; one who kills another maliciously or cruelly, or by publicly dangerous means, or to create the preconditions for another punishable action, or to conceal such an action.”, Ibid., 805. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., 73. 72 Ibid.
35
UHOLJLRQDQGZHUHQRWPDUULHGWRD-HZLVKSHUVRQ WKXVDYHULWDEOH³WKLUGUDFH´ that “bridged the Jewish and German communities.”73 As Hilberg noted, “The Mischlinge were neither black nor white, neither Jews nor Germans.”74 However, while they were not to be treated on the same elevated level as the Germans, they were treated with relatively slighter forms of discrimination. In 1939, there were 64,000 Mischlinge of the first degree and 43,000 Mischlinge of the second degree in the Old Reich, Austria, and Sudeten area.75 “… the non-Aryans (were in) two groups: Mischlinge and Jews. The Mischlinge were no longer subjected to the destruction process…subsequent measures were… taken only against Jews. Henceforth the Mischlinge were left out.”76 The character role as interface enacted by the Mischlinge overtly called into question the malleability of the ideal SS man identity, and even by extension, the ever shifting identity of the Party itself. Existing to define the limits of acceptable racial ancestry, the Mischlinge also served to threaten that norm by their continued existence in the state. “They constitute it (normality) and they threaten it, and the threat is most serious if the constitutional normality is construed as intrinsically true rather than as an entrenched identity containing a particular set of institutional limits.”77 Due to the uncertainty of identity, the classification of the Mischlinge was re-GHILQHGFRQVWDQWO\ DQGPRVWVLJQLILFDQWO\LQ LQRUGHUWRJUDQWDQ increasing number of exceptions to these liminal citizens. This new system 73
Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, vol.III, 417. Ibid. 75 Ibid., 418. 76 Ibid., 72. 77 William Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991/2002), 67. 74
36
was based on two forms of Befreiung (“liberation”). The first, unechte Befreiungen (“pseudo-liberations”), was attained by demonstrating an allegedly Jewish ancestor was in fact not Jewish, or that an alleged adherence to Judaism was in fact non-existent. The second echte Befreiung (“genuine liberation”), was a ‘liberation’ based on the qualifications of the applicant, oftentimes a highly placed civilian or soldier. By 1941, however, Mischlinge of the first degree began facing increasingly stringent decrees which equated them to Jews. It was inevitable that the genocide of full blooded Jews was to come back into the state and encapsulate the fates of those who shared their blood, no matter how slightly, or in other words, “to possess a true identity is to be false to difference, while to be true to difference it to sacrifice the promise of a true identity.”78 By May 1943, Hitler declared Berlin Jude rein, despite 18,515 Jews remaining in midMarch. Following the failed July 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life, Mischlinge in civil service and military were expelled.
III.
Law for the Reconstruction of the Reich In response to the Reichstag Fire in late February 1933, President Paul
von Hindenburg signed into law the Order of the Reich, President for the Protection of People and State which invoked Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution allowing the Reichspräsident to use whatever measures were
78
Ibid.
37
necessary to ensure public safety. Hindenburg further suspended sections 114, 115, 177, 118, 123, and 153 of the Weimar Constitution, all of which had protected rights of citizens such as: personal liberty, the rights of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press, on the right of assembly, the right of association, violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic, and telephonic communications and warrants for houses searches, and (enabled) orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property.79 As draconian as these and similar measures appear to the 21st century western perspective, the Nazi judicial system determinedly maintained a commitment to “legality”. However, the motivation behind this façade, the dictatorial power of the Führer did not allow for subservience, as affirmed in a 1939 speech by Hans Frank: “Whether the Führer governs according to a formal written constitution is not a legal question… The legal question is only whether through his activity the Führer guarantees the existence of his people.”80 Further supporting this power possessed in the sovereign and supported by the people, Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior and of Education stated, “The reconstruction law abolished sovereign rights and executive powers of the Länder and made the Reich the sole bearer of the rights of sovereignty. The supreme powers of the Länder do not exist any longer.”81 This declaration, made with full impunity in March 1933, also vocalized the crucial foundation of hazy legitimacy that would in later years so powerfully carry Nazi legal rationality.
79
Opening speech of Justice Jackson, Trial of the Major War Criminals, 57. David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda, (London: Routledge, 1993), 85. 81 Testimony of Frick, in International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945-1 October 1946. (Buffalo: William S. Hein, 1995),113. 80
38
IX. Legal Rationality The movement towards extermination was exactly that: a movement progressing
towards
an
undefined
outcome,
not
an
immediately
conceptualized destination. The socialized Nazi vehicle to achieve Judenreine spotlighted in socially polar opposite loci: from the solitary authoring of Mein Kampf in a prison cell, to the open proposal of the Madagascar Plan, then back into secrecy and confidentiality with the morally unencumbered construction of the Endlösung plan in the Wannsee Conference. A Judenreine future in the Reich was a goal, a desire, and at times, seemingly the primary identity marker of the Reich itself. On the third day of the Nuremberg Trials, Major Wallis explained the method by which German laws were consolidated under Nazi rule, noting especially that all subversive judges who could not meet either the political or racial requirements of the Nazi judicial standard were “removed.” In addition to filling the court benches with Nazi supporters, the Party also furthered the narrative of Nazi legality by creating criminal courts to hear “special” cases, usually politically oriented. These courts were dominated by racially acceptable and politically subservient judges selected for judicial service based on records of rulings in the State’s interest.
82
This State bias existed even where paradoxically a
particular case may require the judge to rule against a Reich office or official.83 82 In reference to judges acting as state actors employed to produce future norms of political and judicial power, Judith Butler notes, “Juridical power inevitably “produces” what it claims merely to represent; hence politics must be concerned with this dual function of power; the juridical and the productive. In effect, the law produces and then conceals the notion of a “subject before the law” I order to invoke that discursive formation as a naturalized foundational premise that subsequently legitimates that law’s own regulatory hegemony.” Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (NY: Routledge, 1990), 5. 83 Ibid.
39
This type of judicial action that yielded pragmatic, popular outcomes in the frame of an unyielding state grip on “legality” reflects an ancient Greek practice of legal interpretation. This practice, “rheton kai dianoia” required the interpretation of law from the basis of established norm and everyday life. The Sophists often employed this technique to explain legal hierarchies and individual rights.84 The semiotic square displays the binary terms rationality/irrationality as perpetuated and enacted in the judicial realm of the Reich. In the early years of the Reich, Nazi laws did not always consistently address a method of extermination, but in varying degrees, each law referenced in this chapter, and many unreferenced contributed to the imaginary creation of a Judenfrei state. As a result, one use of “rationality” was the coupling of ideology with the Nazi legal system in order to further indirectly or directly deprive a Jew of his civil rights or means to a viable standard of living. This kind of applied rationality is framed in the natural and foreseeable consequences of the Nuremberg Laws:
Jews were deprived of their citizenship. No matter that 12,000 of them had died for Germany in WWI and countless others had won Iron Crosses… not only marriages but sexual relations between Jews and Gentiles became a crime…when the laws were promulgated, there had been 10,000 Jews in Nuremberg. At the end of the war, there were 10.85 Although implementation of Nazi legality and rationality drastically 84
Joanna Jemielniak, “Subversion in the World of Order”. In Contemporary Issues of the Semiotics of Law. Wagner, Anne, Tracey Summerfield, and Farid Samir Benavides Vanegas., eds. (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2005), 129. 85 Joseph Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, (England: The Penguin Group, 1994), 226.
40
changed the life of the Jew by stripping him of his economic security, pride in lineage, and forcibly moved him from home and into the ghetto, he maintained a faint, but tenable grasp of contractual nationality with his state, however unrealistic this grasp may have been. During the September 1935 Nuremberg rallies, the formal vestiges of citizenship and nationality were stripped away leaving him now legally and figuratively denuded. This degradation of human rights and legal protections was the vehicle by which the viator transformed into the cursed sacer. The legal formality of stripping a person of citizenship was, and remains, a life threatening matter. Under coterminous domestic law, and the norms codified in the jus cogens of international law, an individual’s nationality was, and remains, the primary form of international recognition and protection. Denationalization of homo viator transformed him into homo sacer. In other words, this non-figure was stripped of presumed protections by the State, and was no longer permitted to seek the State as a place of self-identity. In international law terms, this is denial of jus soli and hyper-focus on jus sanguinis – the denial of land as a basis of nationality and hyper-focus on blood as the basis for identity. While the judicial sphere of the Nazi state was shaped in order to most efficiently deny social and legal personality to the Jew, the regime’s laws were also enacted in order to create and maintain a sense of order consistent with the ideologies propounded by leading jurists in the pre-Nazi regime. Therefore, the semiotic square of Chart I is a manifestation of Nazi law, both personified and enacted by prominent Nazi jurists. Citizens affected significantly those who were not primarily identified as “Jewish” and therefore a natural and racialized enemy were charged as having committed crimes against the Nazi 41
state or people. The semiotic square in Chart I provides the identities and actions of contrasting judicial officials reputed in the state itself for conduct either in accordance or in defiance of the idealized Nazi standard of rational behavior.86 My primary text of reference for this argument derives from Nikolaus Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons.87 Through his extensive documentation of jurists and laws which supported the initial and long term structure of discipline and abuse in the Nazi prisons, I was able to conceive of a rationality/irrationality which could remain consistent between state and exceptional state boundaries. However differing in their interpretations of this conceptual binary, the Nazi jurists, guards, and doctors were documented in speech and action with a constancy that underlines the tension between what was considered “rational” versus “irrational” within their loci of enunciation.
86 Undoubtedly the extent to which rationality/irrationality was forced to evolve to fit the circumstances of the camp was the reason behind Himmler’s own shock and distress upon witnessing the matter of fact manner in which mass executions, after a period of adjustment, were committed by his SS troops. 87 Nikolaus Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi German, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
42
Chart I
Complex Term (Rationality + Irrationality) Aided in formation of Nazi legal theory ~Wilhelm Crohne, Vice President of the People’s Court. Irrationality Rationality Equal desired Judenrein Reich & law for citizens
Frenzied Nazi; considered extremist.
~ F. Kohl, Straubing.89 ~F. Gürtner, Minister.88 Positive Deixis Rationality + Not Rationality (Rationality + Strictly ran prisons, but refused to torture. Not Irrationality) ~ Rudolf Marx, Prison Administrative head for Reich Ministry of Justice, 1935-1943.90 Legal Juderein. Irrationality + Not-Irrationality ~ Judge Rothau: Tortured inmates, but maintained prisons. “death sentence for ~Staatssekretär Reinhardt, Reich Ministry. every Jew.” Volkisch, but practiced law by state norms.
Negative Deixis (Irrationality + Not Rationality) Brutal prisons legitimated by Nazi discipline. ~ Roland Freisler, State Secretary.91
Established jurist, but often delusional.
~ Hans Frank, Reich ~ Max Vollrath, Head of Ministry of Justice.93 Ichtershausen.92 Not-Irrationality Not- Rationality Neutral Term (Not Rationality + Not Irrationality) Passively involved with implementation of minor local law ~ Judenumsiedlungsabteilungen94 88 Gürtner: led the Reich in horrifying prisoner treatment. He frequently permitted torture to Bavarian prisoners under his guard: “The more ruthlessly the incorrigible and incurable elements are eliminated, the more the community has to look after those, who while having done wrong, have the honest will to return to the community” as quoted in Nikolaus Wachsmann, Ibid., 75. 89 Kohl: governor of Straubing prison. He is well remembered for often wearing an “imaginary uniform complete with a general’s should straps”, Ibid., 43. 90 Marx: governor in multiple prisons before Prussian Ministry of Justice appointment. Ibid., 76. 91 Freisler: prisons ought to be a “house of horror.” Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons, 75. 92 Vollrath: disciplinarian with experience as police and army officer lectured prisoners, “You swine, if you didn’t wank so much, you wouldn’t be so cold.” Quoted Ibid., 30. 93 Frank: member of the Thule Society, an extremist anti-Semitic secret society. But he successfully defended Nazis, including Hitler. He stated, “Justice is whatever is useful for the German people” and “The Nazi state does not negotiate with criminals, it knocks them to the ground.” (Ibid., 74.) 94 “Selecting the houses and steering Jews into them was the job of the local housing authorities.”
43
Chapter III
Homo Viator & Formalized Social Rejections
We shall not cease from exploration/ and at the end of our exploring/ will be to arrive where we started/ and to know the place for the first time.95
It is the sleep of reason that produces monsters.96
In cities, these authorities oversaw programs to track urban Jews. Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 171. 95 T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding” Four Quartets, pt. 5, quoted in Roger Friedland & Deirdre Boden, NowHere: Space, Time, and Modernity, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 14. 96 Francisco de Goya y Lucientes: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters: Plate 43 of The Caprices (Los Caprichos) (18.64.43).
44
This chapter deconstructs the aggregate of ancient norms by which the contemporary Jewish viator symbolically transformed into homo sacer.97 Just as the other chapters examine the transformation literally (in forcible displacement from the home into the ghetto) and philosophically (through state
formulated
linguistics
and
state
actors'
perversion
of
rationality/irrationality), this chapter will do so historically by using lexical and situational support from ancient Greece and Rome. The goal is to display a cross-cultural and cross-millennial parallel between the formal socialized rejection ritual in ancient Greece and Rome to its contemporary manifestation in the Third Reich. The palimpsest of ancient traditions manifested in contemporary society underline the historically repetitive nature of carefully controlled rituals of rejection. While Shoah is sui generis, the factors contributing to its monstrous haeccity are replete in antediluvian reference. This chapter will illustrate first, the movements by which a socially manifested or provoked lusus naturae was introduced to the public forum, made to expiate for alleged wrongs, then formally expelled for the sake of purification and social FDWKDUVLV VHFRQGWKHHYROXWLRQRIWKLVULWXDOLQWKHDQFLHQWZRUOG DQGWKLUG its perverted articulation in Nazi Germany.
I.
Ritualized Elements: Identification, Condemnation, & Expulsion In 1948, Shirley Jackson’s short fiction “The Lottery” was published in
The New Yorker and immediately exploded into the center of a public 97 My primary source for analysis on this figure is from: Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
45
controversy as passionate as the storm around Hannah Arendt’s later piece on Adolf Eichmann. In brief, Jackson’s story was set in a modern society that engaged in an annual ritual intended to ward off drought. This yearly ritual began with the assemblage of all members of the society, including the children and the elderly, in the town center where a venerated community leader mounted an unremarkable black box on a stool. After each person approached the box and withdrew a single strip of folded paper from it, the leader gave the sign for everyone to unfold and reveal their paper. All the strips were bare, except one marked with a black dot. After an emotional argument between the unlucky drawer and the rest of the crowd regarding the validity of the draw, the village members agreed to undertake the ritual again. After the second lottery drawing, the village members gathered around and stoned the unlucky scapegoat.98 While the reasons for the controversy around this fictional account are prevalent and well-founded, the story itself is useful for its simple dramatization of steps involved in the socialized rejection ritual: If manifested99 as a public scapegoat, or an accepted member of the society, s/he was passively brought before the community in a public location seeped in community specific history. One venerated bellwether or a select handful of respected leaders, would proFODLPWKHQHFHVVLW\IRUWKHJDWKHULQJ WKLVUHDVRQ often expressed in a manner individual to each society) because the gravity of the scapegoat’s misdeed(s) required the full community to participate in 98
Jackson, Shirley. “The Lottery,” The New Yorker, June 26, 1948. If provoked into that scapegoat identity, then the member can act as either an active or passive agent that comes before the general community. This was not the case of the Jew in the Reich who was entirely passive, and therefore manifested into his scapegoat identity. The articulation of difference between ‘manifested’ versus ‘provoked’ is from Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion, (London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1957), 27. 99
46
castigation, or because of the seasonal pattern of the ritual100, or because a deity or other external power that could not be challenged had ‘demanded’ a community sacrifice in exchange for continued protection. Once the purpose for the assemblage was established, the ritual moved next to the explication for the necessity of the rejection, or expulsion, or death of the chosen scapegoat, following which was the act of rejection upon the body of this entirely reviled teratosis. Once the scapegoat was expelled from the physical and figurative gathering, this “banalized and absolutized” alien could no longer threaten the community or ethical order.101 What “expulsion” entailed was interpreted per communal tradition, although to some degree, also interpreted per the standards of external communities.102 Incidentally, while discussing the methods of realized rejection, Richard Kearney noted an evolution of the universal abandonment of human sacrifice, a common technique in Greek and other antediluvian society rituals, and an increasing reliance on the bodies of animals or entirely symbolic materials as comparably valued sacrifices. The final and most crucial step in the ritual was the group catharsis reached (immediately) following this purging of the scapegoat. The concept ‘katharsis’ from ‘țĮșĮȡȩȢ’ meaning
100 The correspondence of the seasonal calendar through which some cultural rituals were initiated to the “sacred” speaks to another figurative purpose to the ritualized rejection – the renewal of the individual member as one “recovered in the sacred dimension of life” and thus experiences the “sanctity of human existence as a divine creation” in a conscious rebuttal to the “danger of forgetting what is fundamental, that existence if not given by what modern men call Nature, but is a creation of Others, the gods” who he seeks to approach through this ritual. Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane, 90-92. 101 Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, M.A: Harvard University Press, 2001), 13. 102 Jackson made a special point in her fiction to address this potential influence through one character’s dismissal of another’s argument on the abandonment of lotteries in other villages. Jackson, “The Lottery.”
47
‘purification’, was introduced as a medical metaphor by Aristotle as the emotion produced by an audience the following the conclusion of a tragic drama.103 Although it is the most frequent term used contemporarily to describe this sensation of purification, documented evidence of the phenomenon itself far pre-dates Aristotle’s literary reference. Catharsis is the vehicle by which the society refreshes its collective memory as a cohesive unit endowed with qualities such as shared symbolic references, similar cognitive categories, and unique traits overtly GLVWLQJXLVKLQJLWIURPRWKHUVRFLHWLHV RUDV&DOYLQRVRIUDPHGWKLVFRQVWDQW re-enforcement of historical collective significance, “The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind… Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.”104 Furthermore, through this step of renewing a society’s conscious self–awareness other critical social epiphenomena begin to unfold: “the relation to the stranger is regulated by the law of right, by the becoming-right of justice.”105 Through purging of a figure consciously alienated from the geographically and imaginatively defined community, the social collective (re)affirms “rightness,” and by extension, foundation, from which a prevalent ethical framework (‘the law of right’) and development of its qualia (‘becoming-right of justice’) can emerge. Furthermore, this dehumanization distinguishes clearly the limits of morality for the collective, as Zimbardo argues, “By identifying certain 103 Aristotle, Poetics, ed. & Transl. S.H. Butcher. (NY: Dover Thrift Editions, 1997), i. Previously, the word had been used as a medical term regarding the body’s flushing out of 'katamenia', or reproductive materials. Although today ‘katharsis’ is used to refer to any feeling of purification or purging, the term itself is a term in dramatic literary analysis (with “kenosis” and “kairosis” as lyric and epic equivalents). 104 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, (NY: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1972), 19. 105 As quoted in Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness, (London and New Haven: Routledge, 2003), 70.
48
individuals or groups as being outside the sphere of humanity, dehumanizing agents suspend the morality that might typically govern reasoned actions towards their fellows.”106 The condition of possibility thus engendered from the communal recognition and conscious rejection of an outside element in order to continue a socially dynamic identity formation and presentation exemplifies the (non) concept of differance, the significance of which in the Nazi formation of rationality/irrationality is mapped out in Chapter V. The extent to which variables within the ritual often vary from culture to culture speaks to the impossibility of enclosing in this theoretical framework any more additional detailed conditions beyond the three main universal components: identification, condemnation of the scapegoat, and subsequent rejection coupled with catharsis. However, it is due to the myriad of detailed interpretations and manifestations of these three steps between cultures, there is possibility for expansion and constriction in each step: [Identification of scapegoat/homo sacer -> Exclusivity ritual initiated by community leader -> Ostracism of scapegoat/homo sacer -> Inside/outside borders
re-drawn
(figuratively
and
geographically)
to
expunge
scapegoat/homo sacer -> Exile of scapegoat/homo sacer -> homo sacer is publicly reborn as homo necens -> public or private death/sacrifice -> concurrent or subsequent mass lustration.]
II.
Rejection Rituals of Ancient Greece and Rome107
106 Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, (NY: Random House, 2008), 306. 107 The conceptualization and practice of exiling the homo viator is relevant, however, this figure and his role in rejection has been detailed in Chapter I, section I. Another interesting example of
49
In “The Sophist”, Plato examines alterity as conceptualized in the character of the Eleatic metic who categorically introduces “heteros genos” as a juxtaposition against his own symbolic self. Through this identification of ³RWKHU´WKH6WUDQJHU¶VGLIIHUHQFHLVWKHUHE\DFNQRZOHGJHGDQGMXVWLILHG DQG by extension (according to Plato), so too is there now a recognized validity of ‘non-being’ before ‘being’, of ‘non-truth/false-hood’ before ‘truth’, among other similar binary concepts.108 In this way, the ancient Greek question of how to fit entities of “non-being”, of “negative”, of “other”, “unlimited” into the confines of their signifiers which philosophically engendered the mise en scene by which the Greeks experienced ritualized rejection.109 Hesiod’s Works and Days contributed to the Greek motivation and practice of identifying and rejecting the lazy, wandering outsider by warning, ‘Don’t put off work until DQRWKHU GD\2U HYHQ WRPRUURZ OD]\ PHQ:KR SXW WKLQJV RII DOZD\V KDYH XQILOOHGEDUQV&RQVWDQWDWWHQWLRQPDNHVWKHZRUNJRZHOO ,GOHUVZUHVWOHZLWK ruin all their days.’110 Although the creature of sacrifice in antiquity had been well established with goats, or “scapegoats” in the purification rituals during Yom Kippur, the Greeks significantly altered the crucial element of the ritual: the sacrificial succedaneum “ijĮȡȝĮțȠȢ” or
“pharmakos” through whom the plagues
the wandering phenomenon resulting from expulsion is Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound”, in which Io is condemned to wander without rest for having refused Zeus’ love. 108 Foucault eloquently outlined how one such binary – madness/reason - fits together through reason’s incapability to rid itself of contact with its own negation, madness. Michel Foucault, History of Madness, (London: Routledge, 2006), 242. 109 For additional background on the purposes for Greek rejection rituals, refer to Eric Robertson Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, (California: University of California Press, 2004). 110 Hesiod. Theogony and Works and Days, Transl. Dorothy Wender, (London: Penguin Classics, 1973), 72.
50
crippling the collective community were expelled111, as so alluded in its etymology. The pharmakos’ significance in the ritual was to serve as a mediator, bringing about the reversal of the common danger for the common salvation.112 Evidence for the pharmakos is provided in accounts dating to 6th century Colophon (a city in the region of Lydia), Abdera (a town on the coast of Thrace), and classical Athens. To further accentuate the deep disgust felt for the reviled person selected as pharmakos was the juxtaposition against the veneration for the epic hero who undergoes “katabasis”, or descent into the underworld. One such example was (unsuccessful) katabasis of Orpheus who descended into the underworld to retrieve Eurydice. In 1968, Tel Quel published Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist essay “Plato’s Pharmacy” which explored the significance behind the absence of the term “pharmakos” in Plato’s texts. This absence was noteworthy not for its own sake, but because of the frequent reoccurrence of related terms, such as “pharmakeia” and “pharmakon.” Derrida argued in this essay that although the lexical item, “pharmakos”, does not appear as such in Plato’s texts, the idea itself is made present, as a trace, through its related terms which are used in the texts. Derrida continue his argument further down this chain of logic, however, this layer of deconstruction is as far as this analysis needs to traverse regarding the literal scapegoat ritual. Just as Derrida illustrates the “stealthy”, yet present character of pharmakos as the entity that is there-not-there in the 111
Todd M. Compton, Victim of the Muses: Poet as Scapegoat, Warrior, and Hero in GrecoRoman and Indo-European Myth And History (Washington DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2006). “The Pharmakos Ritual: Testimonia,” http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/7207/pharmakos.htm. 112 Walter Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Myth and Ritual, (California: University of California Press, 1979), 67. The word ‘pharmakos’ signifying the expelled person as well as the process by which the 'katamenia' is released is also reinforced by the etymology of another term common to Greek rituals - ‘orgy’, from ‘orgion’ or ‘act, performance’
51
lexical realm, so too here is the scapegoat an entity which only existed passively through the collective imagination and will of the community.113 Another ritual of socialized rejection was the less permanent and milder version of the pharmakos sacrifice: “ȠıIJȡĮțȚıȝȩȢ” or “ostrakismos” ritual, described by Edmunds as a form of Greek ritual which, in its containment of both the mythical and social elements, was thereby a particularly powerful act unifying the assembled people.114 During this annual ritual in Athenian democracy, an elite member of society was exiled, via democratic vote, from the city for ten years.115 One such prominent member of Athens who was ostracized in 443 BC was Thucydides son of Milesias, an aristocrat who had led an opposition against Athenian imperialists. The last documented use of this ritual as narrated by Plutarch records the ostracism of Hyperbolos in 415 BC. According to Plutarch, Hyperbolos had been exiled through the combined influence of two enemies of whom he, in fact, had been trying to convince the people to expel. Following the subsequent abandonment of ostracism, the 113 Specifically on the significance of increased solidarity born through the use of a common language, Reade ascribes, in part, this to the strength of the Greek imagined community. William Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, (London: Walts & Co., 1872), 76. 114 Lowell Edmunds, Approaches to Greek Myth, (Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 1990), 48-56. As to the various elements involved in this Greek myth/ritual act that was comparatively heavier than other rituals due to the replete placement of signifiers in the space of ritual, refer to James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Abridged Version) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), 122, 133, 147, 311, 360. For examination on a similar structuring of deeply meaningful rituals occurring later in Medieval Germany which were often enacted on holidays and via ritualized movements. I found his discussion especially interesting when contextualizing the mythical placement of the homo viator in the pre-unified German state imagination and narrative. Could there be a connection between these Medieval German rituals figuratively expelling the unwanted wanderer and the later Nazi legislative acts literally undertaking these same rituals? For his references to the pertinent German myths: Ibid., 234, 235, 258, 270, 272, 305, 318, 367, 396, 454, 496. 115 This procedure was also used for maintaining social balance in pre-colonial Aboriginal Australian communities.
52
Athenian populace enacted the regular (as opposed to the annual meeting for ostracism) public indictment process referenced in Athenian legal jargon as “graphƝ paranomon.” Similarly, the Romans also used expulsion in ritual as a political technique for avoiding domestic unrest and as an instrument used in mass revolts or more figuratively, as a paradigm shift. However, unlike the Greek method that perpetuated rituals largely through oral tradition, these socialized rituals were solidified in verbal legislation distributed throughout the territory of Rome. In this context, the “ritual” was as a hybrid socio-legal action redirected for a demonstration, as in a physical solidarity to enforce the exclusivity of meaningful activities and establish boundaries with malleable, but clear center and borders. An example of this conceptualization of “ritual” was the exclusive honor of pouring libations, marking the purposeful release of elements.116 The chanting of ‘devotio’ while standing atop a sword as a pledge to the gods to battle Roman enemies is another example of this tangible demonstration of a re-informed action. The Roman conception of “disgrace” was brought to the forefront of communal norms under an edict of Emperor Justinian which outlined the socio-legal implications of “infamis”/”infamia” (the former was the titular of the disgraced and the latter is the social consequence of this technical legal disgrace). This brevity of this ritual in the public forum was due to the gravity of shame borne by the infamis. As a result, Roman marital law later enacted a special court action of “actio iniuriarum” which ensured that an unsuccessful defendant could avoid the shame of this title by paying damages instead.
116
Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Myth and Ritual, 57.
53
However, the title remained for those considered socially and legally expendable, including prisoners of war, slaves, convicted criminals, and gladiators. Another mechanism by which to deprive legal personality was through employing one of the tri-tiered legal sentences contained under the nomen “capitis deminutio.” The “maxima capitis deminutio” was the most severe of the three tiers, mandating loss of citizenship and personal freedom, including the freedom of public rights and recognition. The “capitis minutia” was the least severe and although it similarly stripped a person of their public rights, it did not denude one of the private rights, such as recognition of marriage rites. The socio-legal ritual which staked “caput”, or the defendant’s life, capital, and liberty was the “causa capitalis”, a type of criminal trial. Although as the example of “homo sacer” demonstrates, there was not always a need for a judicial process in order to formally deprLYHWKHFLWL]HQRIULJKWV rather, the sovereign could designate this figure as a matter of process. While the “homo viator” symbolized the rejected figure in the Greek narrative whose departure indicated a purification ritual, the “homo sacer” in the corresponding Roman life-world stood as the figure used in exclusionary ritual. Homo sacer, as presented in Festus’ On the Significance of Words, was the man whose character judged as criminal by the people. His murderer is granted impunity, however the sacer’s death can not be marked by ritual or sacrifice by the State. It is thus in the naming of the sacer that marks his symbolic execution, his expulsion from the community. The violence that the community is neither directly responsible for or innocent from marks the unnamed sphere of communal human action which is neither sacrum facere or profane. This sphere particular to the community is reflected in the sphere of 54
naming, the origin of this violence unleashed on homo sacer, which is particular to the sovereign. Just as the sovereign engenders this originary violence, the collective entity under the sovereign then act to ensure its completion. This cycle of communicative action never directly referenced through the language itself, but rather through the myths and traditions invoked and celebrated between sovereign and people brings to mind Roland Barthes’ argument that “myth is a type of speech… a system of communication, that it is a message... Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society…”117 Yet, even as myth finds categorization as a type of “speech”, Barthes continues on to argue further that in language, the myth is “betrayed… for language can only obliterate the concept if it hides it, or unmask it if it formulates it.”118 It is through the movements within this tension of language set against the speech-of-no-language that the collective myth is perpetuated through highly codified acts and in meaningful spaces. The Roman courtroom as the codified realm for ritualistic performance and the re-placement of socialized norms into a judicial lexicon and space underlined both the continuance of rituals for social definition and the evolution of a praxis of ritual from the Greek standard. Aspects of both adaptations were expressed centuries later in the Third Reich.
III. 117 118
Contemporary Application
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Transl. Annette Lavers, (NY: Hill & Wang, 1972), 109. Ibid., 129.
55
The Nazi perversion of ritualized rejection was a well documented process which drew heavily on the aforementioned practices formed and solidified in the ancient world. The absence of separate and distinct celebrations of cathartic lustration following each expulsion of each Jew from the Nazi state was the primary difference from the above examples of ancient world rituals - a difference which carries grave significance.119 By structuring their rejection ritual encompassing this unarticulated difference so impermissible of sustainable continuity for the Volk, the Nazis un-ironically demonstrated the characteristics deplored by Chekhov, “All of you are mindlessly destroying the forests and soon there’ll be nothing left on earth. In the same way you mindlessly destroy a man, and soon thanks to you the earth will have neither loyalty, nor purity, nor the capacity for self-sacrifice… in all of you sits a devil of destruction…”120 In order to trace how the alternating mimicries and innovations first cicurated, then distributed by the Reich Ministry for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, the discussion on this contemporary regime’s interpretation of the ancient world rejection ritual is divided into three sections, each corresponding to a part of the three movements in ritualized rejection.
a. Identification The process of identifying and categorizing the stigmatized Jew through socio-historically categories of “cognitive recognition”121 through 119
There may be a significance behind this absence, unfortunately, discussion on whether or not this difference mattered in the Nazi society falls outside the purpose of this chapter, and thesis. 120 Anton Chekhov, Plays, Transl. Peter Carson, (London: Penguin Group, 2002), 155. 121 Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, (London: Penguin, 1963), 67. He then defines this concept as, “… the perceptual act of “placing” an individual, whether as having a particular social identity or particular personal identity. Recognition of social
56
which homo viator in the pre-Nazi state was discussed in Chapter I, and the means by which he was similarly identified in the state during the Nazi years is covered in Chapter IV. This state formulated motivation for searching, discovering, labeling, and finally identifying the Jewish viator was an intense process fueled by twisted traditional legal concepts, novel technological tools, and contemporaneous anti-Semitism. This motivation was such an allconsuming state activity constantly calling for additional resources and personnel that soon it distinguished the notion of “Nazi” from other collective identities through its simply stated and fundamentally violent hatred of Jews. As Baudrillard wrote, “…power exists solely by virtue of its symbolic ability to designate the other, the Enemy, what is at stake, what threatens us, what is Evil.”122 For the Nazi, this power was expressed through a mirrored identity against the Jew. The method of realizing oneself, of becoming oneself, through the praxis of external recognition constitutes Sartre’s “gaze”, clearly, as illustrated in this example of the “Thousand Year Reich” which lasted 12 years, a dangerous maneuver when forging an identity seeped in the destruction of another. Yet for this danger, there remained potential for reward: “ecstasy is phenomenon sui generis, but its place is fixed by the sacrificial ritual”123, or as Burkert phrased it, “Sometimes it is necessary to create dirt in order to be able to clean it” (and thus achieve the desired purification).124 The enforced condition of debasement was advertised through “stigma
identities is a well known gate keeping function of many servers…” 122 William Pawlett, Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality, (UK: Routledge, 2007), 127. 123 Walter, The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, (California: University of California Press, 1983), 125. 124 Ibid., 68.
57
symbols” on the body or property of the scapegoat opened up the possibilities for members in the community to exploit the stigmatized status for personal gain, such as the ambitious jurist Hans Frank who publicly defended Hitler in the Weimar era. However, simultaneous to this possibility of community members exploiting the scapegoat for social advancement, there also exists space for the development of Goffman’s “the wise”125 or Israel’s “Righteous among the Nations”, those few who, for individual reasons, sympathized with the plight of the scapegoat and aid in his survival, often then gaining status within the scapegoat’s life-world.
b. Public Condemnation The means by which Reich citizens contributed to the overall public condemnation of the viator were not uniform, in fact ranging from the minimal duty to turn in fugitive Jews to a complete immersion in the Nazi ideology resulting in zealous behavior akin to Adolf Eichmann. However, there was no necessity for a uniform approach. The only requirement is that the ritual allow articulation and individual expression for “the brutal force that still lurks in men.”126 Mary Douglas considered these requirements for vocalized social loyalty and commitment during the process of enacting the ritual. Further, stressing that symbolic actions, such as the public condemnation, are most powerful when there is a universal belief in the
125 Goffman, Stigma, 28. Borrowing the term from the homosexual lexicon, he defines the “the wise” as “persons who are not normal but whose special situation has made them intimately privy to the secret life of the stigmatized… sympathize with it, and who are accorded a measure of acceptance… (they) are the marginal men before the individual with a fault need feel no shame.” Ibid. 126 Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: the Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, (California: University of California Press, 1983), 45.
58
efficacy of “instituted signs and a sensitivity to condensed symbols”.127 Over time, they gain cultural relevance and meaning as symbols of allegiance to a culture because they mean nothing to other societies or cultures.128 This anticipation of a future meaning and unique relevance, or prolepsis, is one vehicle by which the socialized ritual is able to expand in a carefully contained environment with the society itself. This collective decision to issue into the group memory an empty sign with meaning to be imbued over time is juxtapositioned against the scapegoat’s justification for his presence, a defense that otherwise would not have been made part of his “active bibliography.”129 This distortion of the scapegoat’s individualized narrative is therefore conversely related to the aggrandizement of the community’s memory. This inseparable enantiodromia draws the scapegoat figure into the dianoetic calculations supporting the presentation of the public self as a collected distinguishable entity. Therefore, ritualized rejecting was situated in deeply meaningful containments of space within codified frameworks of time and among a recognized population in order to recall the validation of the community history through analepsis. This space of where homo viator and rejection met in a heavily codified space and time was also the location of the deinstitutionalization procedure which formally removed the links connecting viator to Reich citizen. The significance of this second step in the overall ritual was the active presence of the community, anticipative of the inevitable collective effervescence following the scapegoat expulsion.130 127
Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, (NY: Pantheon Books, 1996), 7. Douglas, Natural Symbols, 8. Goffman, Stigma, 69. 130 Polsky breaks down the discussion of reaching group decision of “who is deviant” and “what 128 129
59
The necessity of the public audience was thusly bifurcated, to verify the collective desire to expunge the alien element, and to reaffirm the “symbolic power” maintaining their own dynamic relationship with their sovereign. Without this support from the assemblage, the sovereign could not have even initiated the ritual, because a “civil society necessarily implies the ability and instinct of reflexivity, and that which is beyond the reifying habits of the state and nature.”131 Thus in this second step, the role of the average citizen to condemn homo viator was mirrored in the role of the sovereign to reiterate and re-inform for the citizen, and in the torment of the viator, through which the traditional and cultural norms which differentiated themselves, the righteous, from this homo viator, the wandering threat. This desire to imaginatively overwhelm the enemy through the temporary self-identification as homo necans, (‘the killing man’)132 is framed as an inherent experience of confrontation:
War can never break free from the magical spectacle because its very purpose is to produce that spectacle: to fell the enemy is not so much to capture as to “captivate” him, to instill (in him) the fear of death before he dies.133 The last element that emphasizes the formal social step of expulsion involves juxtaposing uses of ‘exposure’ versus ‘secrecy.’ Specifically within the Nazi regime, where the scapegoat figure was the Jewish homo viator, the
is deviant” that contributed to the manner and intensity by which the community reaches this exaltation. Ned Polsky, Hustlers, Beats, and Others, (NY: The Lyons Press, 1967), 202. 131 K. Tester, Civil Society, (London: Routledge, 1992), 8. 132 Burkert, Homo Necans, 125. 133 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, (London: Verso Books, 1989), 5.
60
expansion
of
this
particular
binary,
exposed/secretive,
is
fairly
straightforward. As discussed in Chapter I, homo viator as both historical and mythological figure was not trusted by settled city dwellers because of his unverifiable past, a past of secrecy and, therefore, a potential to expose the short comings or failures of the collective’s history and traditions. In order to avoid this potential subversion, homo viator often found himself at the center of a pre-emptive attack by the city assemblagH DQGWKXVLWZDVWKHviator who was ultimately exposed and degraded. The community’s fear of the secrecy contained in the shaded past of the viator, according to Georg Simmel, was because “the secret gives one a position of exception… It is basically independent of the content it guards. … From secrecy, which shades all that is profound and significant, grows the typical error according to which everything mysterious is something important and essential.”134 By bringing the viator into the public realm in order to denude him literally and figuratively, the plurality thus socialized the praxis of identifying themselves as the homogenous entity juxtaposed against the solitary outsider. There are countless examples of this behavior in the Nazi era, from the assembled military masses marching in the streets before Hitler to the impromptu, almost playful crowding of SS guards in Auschwitz to torture an inmate. The concept of first cruelly exposing the viator then secondly subjecting him to expulsion or death is an adaptation trademarked by the Nazi regime.135 134 135
Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, (NY: The Free Press, 1964), 332-3. This cruelty especially stands out when contrasted against the deferential treatment and
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c. Expulsion Foucault’s extensive documentation136 of the rituals in western European villages expelling the mad, the drunk, the unwanted supplies evidence for the continuity of rejection rituals from antiquity to the contemporary day. The evolution of the purpose for the expulsion ritual was evidenced in early Middle Ages practice in who was chosen for expulsion. When a lunatic or drunk was brought before the social core, it was not for divine appeasement, but for judgment on his bodily condition which had rendered his presence unacceptable. The focus of the Medieval ritual was thus bifurcated between traditional praxis of religious worship and mechanisms by which to increase the community social capital. This development permitting multi-motivated ritualized expulsions was articulated later in Reich propaganda focused on the camp guards, providing multifarious justifications and tangible items inundated by the sovereign head with a mysterious strength. On the re-creation and uses of these “potential symbols“, Douglas Hofstadter argues that it is not feasible, perhaps not even possible, to enumerate all the “symbols” within the mind, an unfeasibility reflected in the impossibility of discovering the similarly innumerable “pathways” in the brain.137 Thus there remains the open possibility, constantly, for symbols to gain individual and collective meanings, if only cued properly by an external stimulus. Reich propaganda deliberately
plentiful food offered to the ancient Greek pharmakos before sacrifice. 136 Foucault, History of Madness. The discussion on the literal expulsion of these figures using the Ship of Fools, Part One: Stultifera Navis. 137 Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, (NY: Perseus Books, 1999), 384.
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unfolded its messages through variegated expressions in order to tap into these “potential” symbols lying dormant within the idiolect of any given Reich citizen. The difficulty and tension behind the task of prompting novel symbol formation, indeed the originary position of propaganda in the social sphere, is ensuring the symbols formed in the individual and by extension, collective mind, are those deemed desirable by the state and productive for state purposes. An example of propaganda successfully awakening a “dormant” symbol, also examined in Chapter IX, is the SS trooper’s belt bearing the inscription “Meine Ehre heisst Treue” (‘My Honor is My Loyalty’) and a skull and crossbones. As intended by the Reich Propaganda Ministry, this universal image coupled with the culture specific phrase symbolically brought together the Reich Volk collective into an inextricable bond with the SS individual. In another turn on this idea of figurative relationships with the literal elicited from specifically oriented symbolism, Elaine Scarry bridges the seemingly contradictory relationship of the represented entity with the unrepresented entity to its physical equivalent of the non-body of power with the body sans power. Acknowledging the contradiction of expressing a figure of power as a site without bodily representation, she explains that, in fact, to have no “body” means there are no boundaries that can be drawn limiting one’s power in the world, whereas one with a “body” is capable of being creating, taught, altered, or wounded, and “to have one’s sphere of extension contracted down to the small circle of one’s immediate physical presence.”138 Thus, the embodied is vessel empty of power, without representation, 138
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 207.
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or social leverage, as juxtaposed against the non-bodied, represented figure. This contradiction found expression in Auschwitz’s history in which the bodies of the vulnerable vastly outnumbered the lightly armed SS guard population, yet there were only rare instances of united mass resistance. Furthermore, although the SS guard represented one example of the state’s intangible power always overwhelming homo sacer, the fullest materialization of the power-full and non-bodied entity was, naturally, rarely seen in the camp. This entity serving as one such representative was Heinrich Himmler. Although charged with overseeing the camps, Himmler was famously incapable of emotionally handling the force that was the death camp, even becoming physically unwell after watching a mass execution. As expected, his visits were therefore brief and infrequent, not only for his emotional reactions, but because the social capital of the representing body of state and SS power would diminish with an excessive exposure. Finally, the paucity of his camp excursions were necessary in order to maintain his professional reputation as capable of such loaded state duty and his personal reputation before soldiers expecting from their SS head full strength and support for their most difficult task as guards – the execution of homo sacer. In conclusion, as the viator entered the life-world and death existence of Auschwitz, he completed his last journey as the wandering man. His identity was now homo sacer whose death was no longer his own, but the decision and creation of the citizen tasked with state duties, or as named by Agamben, the executioner of homo sacer. Through this minimal, yet crucial contact between accepted citizen and the condemned sacer, fear perpetuated among the civil body situated around this non-accepted figure and state rejected body ensured a common future capable of continuing to define 64
themselves through communal rejection and perpetually incomplete destruction of this ‘other.’139 It is with and through this type of cautious, yet violent contact with the sovereign designated “scapegoat” which will ensure the continuance of this shape shifting rejection ritual through the births and deaths of future collectives and assembled life-worlds. This is how generations have passed GRZQ WUDGLWLRQV DQG FRQWLQXHG WKH EHVW RI OLIH DORQJ ZLWK LWV ZRUVW WKH conundrum, the double helix, as Atonin Artaud described this horrific yet SHUGXUDEOHUHODWLRQVKLS³(YHU\UHDOHIILJ\KDVDVKDGRZZKLFKLVLWVGRXEOH and art must falter and fail from the moment the sculptor believes he has liberated the kind of shadow whose very existence will destroy his repose.”140
139 William Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991/2002), 67. 140 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, (NY: Grove Press, 1958), 12.
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Chapter IV
Transience
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious They shall not long possess the sky… They shall devour the stars only in apparition … Something there is, something there is more immortal even than the stars.141
141
Walt Whitman (1900) “On the Beach at Night” in Leaves of Grass, (NY: Bantam Classics), 216.
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Established state ethics and norms do not immediately translate into the ethics and norms of its exceptional spatialized Other. The required gradation transports tabulated norms through steps that dehumanize, ultimately transforming the subject into an object, a non-citizen and non-entity. This chapter will outline the literal and metaphorical movements of homo viator. The first step in the physical process embodying this tempered gradation within the Nazi state germinated in the arrest (this chapter will examine the home arrest exclusively), then the second step of dehumanization escorted the Jew into the temporary residence of the ghetto (with examples from a Lithuanian ghetto), and lastly, the third step in which nascent state norms of genocidal policy and action reached maturation through the deportations into Auschwitz. The metaphorical steps trace the literal alterations from zones of previously accepted purity as denoted in the home, into zones of negotiation found in the impromptu structures of the ghettos, and into zones of violence and extermination as exemplified in the camps. The spatial arrangement of each zone serves as display for the state-dictated metamorphosis of homo viator from human into non-being. The passage of the Jew from the locus of citizenship into the novel place as homo sacer was exemplified in the manner by which their former quotidian identity was deliberately invoked and recognized. Previously, the “Jew”, an identity of religiosity had transformed under the Nazi linguistic treatment into primarily a racial identity marker, then secondarily affirmed in religious recognition. In the penal system, the term “Jew” had also bifurcated, into Transportjuden - Jews innocent of crimes, yet nonetheless sent to camps, and Schutzhaftjuden - Jews sentenced to camps for protective custody for crimes
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actually committed.142 Ironically, as records were to later demonstrate, it was often the latter who were granted better treatment than the former.143 The idea of ‘interface’ and ‘sanctuary’ as exclusive zones and distinct from each other is a perspective of the outsider. The Jews, as demonstrated in the following examples of carefully controlled expulsion into and later from the Lodz ghetto, adapted to their new surroundings, by bringing with them traditions of ‘home’. While the typical and superficial objects exemplifying the idea of a ‘home,’ were missing in the ghetto, it was nonetheless shaped into ‘home’ for many of its temporary inhabitants.
I.
Home: “The home is the basis of the truth of society, but society authenticates
and legitimates the family”144, and the homes in the Nazi state were no exception. The home was the genesis of the Nazi man and locus for Aryan philosophy, as indicated by the usual home copy of Mein Kampf, beneath the usual Führer’s portrait. The home was therefore sempiternally open and exposed for state inspection. This domicile exposure was evidenced by the freedom in which SS men could enter without warning or warrant, due to the loss of Section 118 of the newly restricted Constitution. Despite this lack of privacy, many families were able to continue their lives as in the pre-Nazi state, provided they publicly acted out the necessary pro-Nazi role, tacitly abiding by state ethic of obedience. 142
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, (NY: Penguin Classics, 1963), 98. Ibid. 144 Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, (NY: Grove Press, 1965), 66. 143
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Thus, even as Nazi invasion into pure zones cast society into a site of restrained havoc, it nonetheless was maintained in the public and governmental narrative as a place for the accepted citizen to cautiously retain their former economic and social currency, a situation exemplifying Gaston Bachelard’s interpretation of space:
…outside and inside form a dialectic of division, the obvious geometry of which blinds us… out/inside are both intimate, they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility.145 This paradox of the multi-faceted spaces containing citizen and Jew reinforced the unique Nazi use of state legitimated discipline and violence. Once for the well being of all which ensured the minority protection, state power under the Nazis become a tool of dehumanizing an unwelcome minority ostensibly to ensure protection for the majority. In light of the economic and social benefits the Nazi regime was able to bestow on the accepted citizens and especially members upon of the Nazi Party, this alteration was infrequently challenged. One reason for such docility was perhaps in part due to the example made of the White Rose, a group subjected and punished in 1943 for resistance activities against the oppressive laws. It was thus that “…operating at every level of the social body and by mingling ceaselessly the … right to punish, the universality of the carceral lowers the level from which it becomes natural and acceptable to be punished.”146 The significance for this loss of the home as a space of privacy,
145
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, (NY: Beacon Press, 1994), 151. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 303. 146
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recuperation and familial gathering was as much an administrative move for the state as it was an expected event for the Jewish family. The terrorist tactics of the Secret State Police, the Geheime Staatspolizei, (“Gestapo”) included impromptu invasions and unannounced searches of the home. As stated in Feldman’s analysis of symbolic and literal state condoned brutality, “Violence of a certain magnitude and directed at specific sites of symbolic anchorage is privileged vehicle for opening a symbolic order to the exigencies of decentering diachronic process.”147 These tactics introduced into previously designated locus of domesticity a vehement assault which, as intended, was not forgotten once ostensible aims were achieved. The private realm of the home was thus opened for public inspection. The Nazi exposure of the private domesticity to ensure Reich racial purity was enforced through decrees and laws. These decrees and laws compelled Germans to constantly reveal their racial backgrounds, especially in personal pursuits, such as marriage. Through these legal invasions into the personal life, Feldman notes that the idea of a home and private realm as “sanctuary” is often manipulated by state powers as “explicit attempt(s) to territorialize violence, to maintain the institution of the interface as the prescribed place of violence.”148 Despite these violent vehicles, Jewish intermarriage in 1930 was still pervasive, accounting for 27% in Berlin and 39% in Hamburg. The Nazis acted quickly, and outlawed such marriages by 1935, even encouraging Aryans with non-Aryan spouses and local Public Prosecutor’s offices to consider performing annulments.149 Following the creation of similar racial 147
Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 9. Ibid., 37. 149 Friedman, A History of the Holocaust, 73. 148
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decrees, only couples who passed tests of pure Aryan ancestry by certified Sippernforscher (‘genealogists’) were eligible for marriage certificates. For homo viator, the home and other pure zones were shaped into permanent vicinitieVRIERWKSRWHQWLDODQGUHDOL]HGGDQJHU ORFDOHVWKDWODFNHG even the guise of safety or permanence. For example, the first decree forcibly removing the Jew from his home was passed in July 1938. This decree permitted German landlords to terminate leases for any Jewish doctor as long as the landlord could provide a certificate proving that the tenant could live elsewhere.150 The same decree further iterated that homeless Jewish families were to be housed by other Jews who still maintained their apartments. This particular decree exemplifies the two-fold, methodical process by which Jews were stripped of the property in which their personal memories and identities had been formed and simultaneously gathered with other Jews in contained locations. This process of conscious deprivation resulting in containment and vulnerability was manifested in other, variegated ways – from the legal, to the visible, and even the linguistic. While its use during the Nazi regime was novel, the term “Entjudung” was nonetheless first articulated in the notes of intellectual Eugen Dühring in 1881. It was first adopted in 1939 to refer to the removal of Jews from the economic life of Germany. However, by 1940, it had come to stand for the permanent excision of Jews in the society at large.151 Despite the linguistic coyness of Nazi officials regarding the Jews, the intent to remove these “cancerous ulcers” and “supernumerary eaters” was made
150
Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 171. Shaol Esh, “Words and Their Meaning: 25 Examples of Nazi Idiom”, Yad Vashem Studies, Vol. 5 (1963): 133 – 168, 145. 151
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blatantly clear in policies and local statutes. Or in the words of one virulent Nazi poster in early 1920, “We fight the Jews as they cause a racial tuberculosis of nations, and we are convinced that convalescence can only begin when this bacteria has been removed.”152 Developing simultaneously with a lexicon slanted against homo viator was the use of mandated bodily representation by which to delineate ‘Jew’ from ‘non-Jew’. In November 23, 1939, Hans Frank ordered all Jews in Poland over ten years old to wear the Star of David on a band on the right arm. On September 1, 1941, this edict was altered to include Jews within Germany who were to wear a badge of the Star of David over the left breast. Such a decree exemplifies the idea of “telling”, or the use of signs as a means of identification in order to differentiate and organize the unwanted other from the self for the purpose of avoiding contact even while maintaining suspicious surveillance. Due to the statutory law ordering Jews to wear these bands, the body constantly betrayed its owner, casting it into a state of unyielding threat of physical harm from Nazis and, further isolation from other persecuted Jews. While these bands were to form in the latter years of the Nazi regime the most overt means of regulating Jewish identity, other forms of interpellation were utilized for the same purpose, including language (use of Yiddish or Hebrew), the symbolic use of facial hair or lack thereof, and zones of residency that were geographically and socially meaningful (such as ghettos situated in the middle of Polish towns). Even the ration cards were stamped with state prejudice: “ration cards held by Jews were to be stamped with a ‘J’. Special ration coupons could be invalidated by the J. Household
152
Laurence Rees, Auschwitz, (NY: Perseus Books Group, 2005), 11.
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ration cards were to be exchanged for travel and restaurant coupons only in cases of absolute necessity.”153 In a similar state prejudice echoed by neighboring nations such as Switzerland, passports held by Jews were required to also bear the stamped ‘J.’These examples of linguistic and legalized persecution are synecdochic for how the Nazi regime would move forms of identity, once previously denoting group tradition into a guarantee for individual danger. This transporting of the objectification of state subjects towards their constant regulation of movement underlined the exchange of subject’s ownership over themselves to an antagonistic state leader. As Feldman noted, once this event has taken place, a new economy of exchange takes hold over the state:
Economy here speaks to both the production and regulation of subject positions through transformative exchange. Nietzschean economy treats exchange as the recursive passage of the subject into alterity and the mimetic formation of the subject by alterity.154 The last significant activity involving the expulsion of the Jew from the home was the arrest, a two-fold purpose, first to expose the individual, to accentuate his difference from the accepted state bodies, and thus to transform his subject status into one of an object, and the second was the justification of forceful movement into the ghetto. The arrest acted as the vehicle in which to
153 Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), iii. Also: “…the food offices were empowered to set aside special shopping hours for Jews in order to make sure that Aryan purchases were not ‘inconvenienced”, Ibid. 154 Feldman, Formations of Violence, 177.
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demonstrate state power on the body of the individual.
II.
The Ghetto The purpose of the ghetto was segregation through which all previous
personal contacts were curtailed or severed. This meant the main forms of communication, under strict German authoritative control, were telephones, banking connections, and a post office, reinforced in the ghetto through the omnipresent and mandated Star of David stitched on all the residents’ clothes and stringent curfew. 155 Deportation of Jews from the state into the excluded/included zone of the state seemed a natural subsequent policy for Nazis seeking Lebensraum. The movement of Jews into the ghettos signified the parallel movement of violence from the unprecedented invasion of the home into the unprecedented creation of the ghetto. These first steps, legitimated and endorsed by the state, signified an impending unprecedented violence soon to be wrought upon the body of a manifested Reich enemy. The locus of originary violence occurs in the protected zone, a space in which sheer violence is dissimulated for the sake of protecting established state ethics:
Sovereign violence is in truth founded not on a pact but on the exclusive inclusion of bare life in the state. And just as the sovereign power’s first and immediate referent is, in this sense, the life that may be killed but not sacrificed… so in the person of the sovereign, the werewolf, the wolf-man of man, dwells
155
Ibid.
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permanently in the city.156 The interface of the unwanted yet necessary ghetto became the physical location best exemplifying the interfacial status of the Jew, unwanted yet present. In terms of Nazi extermination policy, the ghetto too served as the PHWDSKRULFDOLQWHUIDFH WKHSRLQWVEHWZHHQGHOLEHUDWHDQQLKLODtion and viable labor exploitation. This latter tension often found expression between those such as the SS who wished for a quick deportation to death camps and Eichmann’s department of Jewish matters whose insatiable appetite called incessantly for Lebensraum DQGWKRVH VXFK DVWKHDUPDPHQWV IRUFHVXQGHU Speer and Sauckel who required the bodies of Jews to carry out necessary labor. The public mass expulsions into ghettos from state normalized zones was a natural vehicle by which to continue an anomic imagination surrounding this internal homo viator. The arrest and deportation was the first violent step exemplifying the denationalized Jews. However, the subject of arrest had long since been marked by the state as a danger: “Made visible as a source of pollution, the targeted subject is isolated from his community...”157 In the words of Feldman, this type of movement was used to “channel ethnic violence into specific formats, times and spaces.”158 The differentiation between the Jew and the other sub-humans within the Reich, especially the Poles was linguistic - Eindeutschung, (“Germanization”), meaning the latter survived if capable of physically and figuratively fitting into the novel state: 156 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 107. 157 Feldman, Formations of Violence, 109. 158 Ibid., 29.
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The ghetto was a captive city-state in which territorial confinement was combined with absolute subjugation to German authority. With the creation of the ghettos, the Jewish community… was no longer an integrated whole. Each ghetto was its own, thrown into sudden isolation, with a multiplicity of internal problems and a reliance on the outside world for basic sustenance.159 The ghettos, erected within the city and hidden by high barbed gates and walls, became the exclusive inclusive, a visible locus of state legitimized chaos and violence. Dependent on camp availability and often the state economy, this sojourn in the ghetto would range from months to years. The ghetto functioned as a place of negotiation, of tension between the defensive acts of the inmates and the constantly offensive actions of the Nazis. Thus the ghetto remained for many a place of hesitant identity, a reality tangible represented by the unsure and dilapidated structure of the ghetto itself. As Hilberg noted:
Almost equally important were the sudden and precise moving schedules, which were designed to stun the Jews into leaving most of their valuables behind. The Jews were given no time to prepare for the transport of all their possessions into the ghetto, and they did not have time to find adequate storage space in the overcrowded ghettos districts.160 a. The Judenrat: 159 160
Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, vol. I, 234. Ibid., 242.
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Despite often-disjointed transportation of the Jews into the ghettos, the hierarchy maintained carefully organized from the Judenrat (‘Jewish council’) down to family units and individuals. The Council usually served a two-fold (and at times contradictory) purpose, first to ensure the smooth continuity of everyday life within the ghetto under Nazi policies and second to submit lists of names when Nazi authorities demanded bodies for deportation. The Council members either could comply with these demands, for example Mordechair Chaim Rumowski who believed compliance would ensure survival of the Lodz ghetto residents, or refuse, such as Joseph Parnes in the Lvov ghetto, later shot for his refusal to allow ghetto liquidation. Despite the attempts of Council heads to prevent further abuse of their residents, every aspect of ghetto life was under inspection and therefore susceptible to brutality. Serving as the bureaucratic interface between the Jewish ghetto residents and the Nazis who had placed them there, the Judenrat often was placed in the role of scapegoat as “brutal Nazi fanatics who considered it disgusting and against their racist dignity to have any contact with Jews.”161 While the Gestapo acted occasionally within the ghetto walls Judenrat was under orders to submit weekly reports to the external Kommissar who directed both the economic and social activities of the ghetto. These weekly reports contained details on each aspect of ghetto life, including: factories, including production levels and numbers of working Jews, filed by age and VH[ FXUUHQWGHPRJUDSKLFVRIJKHWWRSRSXODWLRQV PHDVXUHVDGPLQLVWUDWHGE\ the Judenrat for ghetto lifH DFWLYLWLHVDQGVL]HRIWKHJKHWWRSROLFH LQFRPH 161 Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation, (NY: Macmillan Inc., 1972), 299.
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DQG H[SHQGLWXUH RI WKH JKHWWR¶V DGPLQLVWUDWLRQ DQG WKH IRRG VLWXDWLRQ162 Further, ghetto reports were required by health departments to indicate mortality rates, diseases within the ghetto, and the causes of death. However, as hunger and hunger edema soon became the constant primary cause of death, Rumkowski was forbidden in March 1942 to list the truthful causes and was ordered to list reasons such as old age.163 In this way, even the Jews themselves came to deny the truthfulness and legitimacy of their relatives’ deaths. At times, the extent and potency of the diseases were likewise denied as authorities feared it would cause a panic among civilians if they knew how close they lived to these minute yet fatal threats.164 The results of submitted reports were as expected: in 1941, a committee of experts from the Reichskuratorium für Wirschaftlichkeit in Cracow submitted a report recommending the basic food supply in the ghetto RXJKWWREHORZHUWKDQWKHQHFHVVDU\OHYHOVWRVXVWDLQOLIH HFRQRPLFLVRODWLRQ of the ghetto should be eased, in order to allow maximum production from outside clients.165 The unspoken yet ever present reminder within this report was the expendability, yet usefulness of those in Jewish ghettos. The priorities soon evolved into economic benefit, thus anonymous Jews expired from starvation were quickly replaced with other similarly anonymous Jews. The ability of the Jews to work although they had lost their relatives and were in the process of a slow death by starvation continued to work as “efficient and reliable workers.” However, those “whose strength was ebbing” were
162
Ibid., 277. Ibid. Ibid., 279. 165 Ibid., 287. 163 164
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deported and replaced.166 Despite the prevalent knowledge of this reality, the Councils often appealed to their ghetto residents to offer up their greatest and most valued possessions, as if to “ransom their bare physical existence.”167 This level of desperation was further demonstrated on posters around the Vilna ghetto bearing slogans such as, “Jewish women, remember, work saves blood.”168 Other responsibilities of the Judenrat included opening schools and conducting vocational classes. By September 1940, regulations limited these activities and other organizing of Jewish cultural events solely to these Councils.169 Further, because the Jews were considered racial group, the Councils could not act as heads to a religious minority. As one decree in November 1939 stated regarding the Judenrat:
In accordance with the decree, the Jewish community should be defined as a Jewish collective living within the boundaries of a political community. Who is a Jew and who belongs to the Jewish community are questions decided by the order of July 24, 1940...170 This suppression of religion was not only expressed in the unofficial limitation of Judenrat activities, but in decrees forbidding communal prayers in 1940, ostensibly due to the danger of “spreading epidemics.” Earlier in December 1 DOOSUD\HUKRXVHVZHUHRUGHUHGWRFORVH DQRUGHUH[WHQGHG
166
Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, vol.III., 539. Trunk, Judenrat, 395. 168 Ibid., 403. 169 Ibid., 187. 170 Ibid. 167
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later to include the ritual bathhouse. More often then not, the Jewish prayer houses had been closed, on the initiative of the Judenrat who had felt they could be better utilized as shelters for refugees.171 Similarly, the schools in a Polish ghetto were closed in 1941 and converted into hospitals to combat the outbreak of typhus in the community.172 By 1942, the “Committee of Rabbis” organized in the Warsaw ghetto was terminated, leaving Judenrat council members to conduct services and rites such as marriages, often in secret.173 These actions led to the significant withering of religious communities and traditions in the ghettos. Within the Judenrat Council and the general Jewish community which was contained in the ghetto, there was one figure of particular interest and import: the shtadlan, the Jewish “interceder.” As Gideon Hausner described this cursed figure, the shtadlan “speaks the language of the authorities, faithfully represents his brethren, and like the Biblical Mordechai, ‘seeketh the welfare of his people’… Under his outer clothes, the shtadlan used to wear the traditional Jewish grave clothes, for he might not return alive from his errand of mercy.”174
b. Family: The family unit, once the bulwark of Jewish survival, became the Achilles’ heel of the community as Nazi violence took over the private domesticity, and later the ghettos. Often choosing to stay with elderly or sick parents, children and young adults who may have survived individually found 171
Ibid., 191. Ibid., 204. Ibid., 193. 174 Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem, (Jerusalem: Herzl Press, 1978), 197. 172 173
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themselves boarding trains meant for ghettos.“…even when the reality was devastating and threatening, the ties to and consideration of one’s family were possibly the most vital factors these people considered when making their decisions.” In the words of one teenager, “I wanted to flee but my parents would not allow me to do so, as I had another smaller brother, I stayed with my family… We only wanted to look after the family, thus we did not make an effort to flee.”175 The strength within the faPLO\ZDVQRWFRQILQHGWRQXFOHDUIDPLOLHV DV orphans and those without family found themselves “adopted” and sharing close quarters with strangers. Abandoned children would seek solace at the dinner tables and homes of child-less couples, never officially becoming “orphans” for the pragmatic reason that should an orphanage form in the ghetto, it would become the primary target for deportations. Thus, while families were being ripped apart either by Nazi deportation or choice borne from frustration, novel relationships were forming. This impromptu adoption of individuals also helped loosen ties of tradition, opening spaces of negotiation even within the norms and standards customary to Jewish lifestyle. “Contrary to what we all expected, living together in such close proximity, being in each others’ way, and never having any privacy, only brought us closer together.”176 For example, the previous privacy a couple was meant to enjoy when engaging in sexual relations was altered within a ghetto where entire families would share a single room.
175
Testimony of Rachel L, Yad Vashem Archives, Yad Vashem: 033/365. p. 3 (Hebrew), as quoted in Cohen’s “The Experience of the Jewish Family in the Nazi Ghetto: Kovno, A Case Study” Journal of Family History 2006; 31; 267 http://jfh.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/31/3/267. 176 S. Ganor, Light One Candle: A Survivor’s Tale from Lithuania to Jerusalem (NY: Kodansha International, 1995), 203, as quoted in http://jfh.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/31/3/267.
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Another example of these novel ghetto norms was the loss of the mourning tradition that followed the death of a community member. Because the deportations and selections were so frequent and stole away so many members of the community, recitation of the kaddish and observation of the mourning time were no longer viable options. “The Nazis gave their victims no time off for grief, no consideration for bereavement. My mother’s beloved husband of more than twenty years was shot one day, and the next day she had to march out to the Kriegslazarett to clean up the wounded soldiers’ filth.”177 The Jewish time and experience in the ghettos is perhaps most accurately assessed in a song evoking the “incomprehension of a doomed yet innocent people” which was performed for the International Military Tribunal in 1945 by an ensemble comprised of survivors:
Ghetto, I will never forget you,/Dark and crooked streets,/Death looms from every corner./No home. No parents, hungry, forgotten by God and man./ Where is your wife, your child, your family?/Where to? Why? What for?178 Further, once Jews entered the ghetto, laws that had previously protected citizens were voided, including laws on marriage and divorce:
The German authorities did not recognize marriages in the ghettos and new wives continued to be called by their pre-marital family names…divorces were granted …by a judge and two
177 T. Birger, A Daughter’s Gift of Love: A Holocaust Memoir (Philadelphia; Jerusalem: Jewish Publication Society, 1992) 97., as quoted in http://jfh.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/31/3/267. 178 Joseph Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, (England: The Penguin Group, 1994), 334.
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rabbis… either in secret or in open session.179 The ghetto was the spatial and spiritual arrangement immediately preceding the camps, and served as the symbolic deportation of Jewish families and customs. From the entrance into the ghetto, the previous real and imagined community of Jewish families began to disintegrate, leaving only lost individual and the irony of the ghetto. Young adults who had chosen to remain with their families, forsaking their own chances of survival, found themselves in the midst of anomie and the breakdown of tradition. The loss of friends and relations only served to underline the constantly lonely and wandering state of homo viator, and even the strongest of individuals were not exempt from the arbitrary brutality of life within the ghetto. Men and strong young adults in particular were the primary target for arbitrary beatings, shootings, and other abuses, from before entrance into the ghetto until the time deportation. Those among this group considered useful to the Nazi labor force would be allowed to return back to the ghetto and live during selections for deportation, while others, such as the frail and elderly were taken to the camps. At this point, the deportations from the ghettos and into the camp, likewise a public act, exposed the Jew for a final humiliation and symbolic endorsement of state prescribed discipline to his citizen counterpart. The bodies of the selected lost original understanding of meaningful beings and were newly inscribed with the mark of non-human. This tacit acceptance of the marking, deportation, and future camp discipline served to further the use of Auschwitz as a place of containment for non-beings.
179
Trunk, Judenrat, 193.
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However, as noted above, the ghetto was only meant to serve as a temporary location for the wandering Jews. Justifying deportation from ghettos into camps centered on economic reasons. In 1941, the Warsaw director of Dienststelle Generalgouvernement of the Reichskuratorium für Wirtschaftlichkeit found that 400,000 residents of the ghetto required an average monthly subsidy of 4.6 million Reichsmarks. He concluded, as other later Nazis did, that there were only three courses of action to take which would not cast this economic burden on the society: “better exploitation of Jewish labor,” or a “relaxation of confinement,” or “allowing for insufficient supplies to occur without consideration for the consequences.”180 It was in these couched terms, for which the Nazi regime is notoriously remembered, that the policies recommending the starvation of hundreds of thousands of ghetto residents was proposed and implemented.
c. Broken Tradition: Once the Jew entered the ghetto, whether in Poland, Germany or Lithuania, the various forms of “telling” which had betrayed him to the authorities were singularly and systematically stripped away, including ‘traditional garments of the Orthodox Jews in Eastern Europe, the kaftan, and the observance of restrictions against shaving beards and cutting off sidelocks.”181 Following a 1941 German decree, Judenrat head Chaim Rumkowski directed ghetto residents in June of 1942 to shave their beards or else lose their jobs and otherwise not be allowed into the ghetto shops.182 This 180 Gotz Aly, “Political Prehistory” in National Socialist Extermination Policies. ed. Ulrich Herbert. (NY: Berghahn Books, 2000), 74. 181 Trunk, Judenrat, 195. 182 Ibid.
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decree was also announced by the Council of Bochnia in April of 1941, which announced the discontinuance of Jewish sidelocks.183 The proscription of these forms of telling was not the only measure taken to break the Jewish culture within the ghetto. Under stringent Polish legislation, all students enrolled in schools within the ghettos were prohibited from speaking Polish in the classroom. Even administrative faculty of these schools were similarly restricted from using Polish in daily school activities. This statutory prohibition further emphasized the growing rejection of ghettoized Jewish populations.184 Aggravating this language barrier among the students of varying Hebrew proficiency was the logistic difficulty of finding space for all the students in the typically cramped classrooms. The dual obstacles of accommodating language support and sufficient space generally stymied the educational efforts of ghetto populations. However, soon the state rationality process again emerged, soon implementing recommendations for nonscholastic courses in the ghettos. While these decrees were for intellectual classes, German authorities encouraged vocational courses, seeing in them the future of the “Jewish labor force.”185 In 1940, Germans began offering opportunities for Jewish ghetto residents as apprentices in carpentry and plumbing shops. Even women were also extended similar offers for positions as seamstresses. In 1941, these courses commenced with 46 male students, and 37 female.186
183
Ibid., 196. Ibid., 204. Ibid., 205. 186 Ibid., 206. 184 185
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d. Tensions of Rationality and Extermination Beyond the basic economic demand, there were additional reasons that Jews were systematically removed from the ghettos and deported to camps. As Pohl noted, “(the) police would pull Jewish workers out of the factories when particular deportation quotas had to be met.”187 The lagging rate of deportation frustrated the head of ‘Deportation Matters’ among other offices, Adolf Eichmann, who frequently complained at his inability to resettle ethnic Germans because of the remaining Jewish population, “(my) efforts at finding a different territory as a temporary alternative for meeting the deportation quotas have failed.”188 The subsequent movements of Jews into alternative locales were never questioned, as:
…the representatives agreed to the new “path to a solution” (extermination) because it would least affect their interests and because they had long since firmly included the prompt deportation of the Jews into their calculations – because they had expropriated them, herded them together, and treated them as if they did not exist any longer.189 The tension between state rationality and the emotion-ridden drive for extermination of the international Jewry found expression in dialogues between those in the SS and Gestapo and those charged with the production of Germany’s military armaments and labor force. Without consideration of morality or regard to human life, arguments were made to perpetuate the lives of factory workers. The pressures on Fritz Sauckel, the General 187 188 189
Pohl “General Government”, 89. Aly, “Political Pre-History”, 73. Ibid., 73.
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Plenipotentiary for Labor Operations, to produce continuous numbers of slaves often set his duty at odds with Speer, the head of Germany’s armaments office. Often, enough numbers could not be produced, prompting lower level officials to plead paradoxically for reduced deportations and higher calorie rations for the workers. Below are some retrieved arguments argued at the time exemplifying both perspectives: • “It is in the interest of the state…to continue production at the highest capacity. Under no circumstance should it be allowed to be shattered or stopped (by removing Jewish workers). The productive labor force, irrespective of its ethnic origin, it necessary for the management of all factories…”190 • “There is only one way out – a method that the German administration in the Generalgouvernement failed to recognize for a long time: final solution of the Jewish question though complete labor utilization of the Jews. This would result in a gradual liquidation… in accord with the economic potentialities of the country.”191 • “There will always be time to destroy the Jews of Bialystok, even on the last day. In the meantime, however, let them toil for us.”192 • “… it could not be avoided, for reasons of considerable skilled labor shortage, that Jewish workers who are needed for urgent
190 191 192
Trunk, Judenrat, 314. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, vol.I, 342. Trunk, Judenrat, 411.
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reconstruction work, be permitted to live temporarily.”193 • “I urgently request that you not allow the liquidation of those Jews who work in armament factories and repair shops who cannot now be replaced by the native workers…the same applies to Jewish skilled workers who, although not directly employed by the Wehrmacht, are engaged in work important for the war economy.”194
However, the gas chambers of Treblinka and Auschwitz were built specifically to massacre 1,500-2,000 daily and the adjoining crematoria were likewise built to accommodate such mass numbers, and not meeting these quotas was an unthinkable crime in the minds of the camp guards. Furthermore, until late 1941, the gas chambers of Treblinka had long outpaced those of Auschwitz. In fact, the highest rates of mortality during Shoah did QRW RFFXU VROHO\ LQ $XVFKZLW] UDWKHU WKH\ RFFXUUHG LQ WKH FKDPEHUV RI Treblinka, and to a lesser extent in Belzec in 1942. In fact, the frenzied and swift actions of the 101st Police Battalion ensured that in a single day, 19 August 1942, the entire Jewish community of Lomazy (located near Lublin) was sent to Treblinka.195 In this murderous context, the construction of new chambers and crematoria in Auschwitz signified the redoubled intentions of German authorities in Berlin and similarly, of Hans Frank, the governor of the General Gouvernement to fill the chambers daily.
193 194 195
Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, vol. I, 343. Trunk, Judenrat, 407. Pohl,“The Murder of Jews in the General Government”, 83.
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Upon reading these letters of contention not only between the contesting parties, but also addressed to the heads in the Berlin offices, one is struck with the idea that perhaps those seeking permission for continued lives for production so often met with disapproval because while it was permissible to quietly break policies in order to increase production, it was an unforgiveable breach of duty and basic Nazi decency to seek official permission on paper. In the overwhelmingly bureaucratic state, to ask such permission would be superficially seen as asking a geographically distant official to uphold state duty by enhancing the capabilities of the military by agreeing to the request. However, in the eyes of these officials, to agree would be placing the production first, and thereby denying space to the resettlement of ethnic Germans, which was considered priority to the Reich Main Security Office, the same office in which Adolf Eichmann’s zealous commitment to a Judenrein state played out: “As a matter of principle, no economic factors were to be taken into consideration in the solution of the Jewish question.”196 Contrasted to Eichmann’s zealotry were the cooler heads concerned with the means by which the maximum profit could be derived from the starving victims. This concern grew to the point that it was recorded: “by November 1941, hundreds of thousands of people were stranded in resettlement camps or crowded into ghettos, deprived of their economic means…they had to be kept alive starving, with meager or adequate sustenance, but in any case in an unproductive manner – in the middle of a war, in a state of acute scarcity of food, lack of accommodation…”197 This was the situation facing Himmler – rather than being able to announce the 196 197
Trunk, Judenrat, 407. Aly, “Political Pre-history”, 69.
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successful implementation of the ethnic cleansing policy, he was stuck with hundreds of thousands who were neither productive nor removed from ethnic German territory. Tensions exemplifying the Janus nature of the interface were also demonstrated between the official policies of tight-lipped tolerance and restrained behavior towards residents and the breakouts of frenzied violence and early deportations to death camps. The former even cooperated with Jewish attempts at reorganizing ghettoized chaos, for example, in allowing cultural groups whose activities did not clash with the Kulturvolk.198 These attempts at re-defining Jewish collectivity were not phenomenon arising in VLQJXODUJKHWWRV UDWKHUPRUHRIWHQWKHQQRWWKHUHH[LVWHGDQXUJHWRUHQHZWKH “Jewish cultural past…and assimilationist tendencies.”199 The drive for assimilation seems an odd pastime for a people jailed and reviled, however as Holocaust survivor Yitzhak Szwartz noted:
Two opinions prevailed. On one hand, fatalists made peace with their fate, reasoning that what would happen to the entire community would also be their lot. On the other hand, many hoped to escape destruction…hoped with the help of the Almighty or they would survive until… (thus they only had to be) tenacious enough to preserve to the end.200 This hope in the last minute miracle drove both calculating and hopeful Council members to sacrifice the allotted numbers of their ghettoized community during each quota in order to appease the ideally temporary 198 199 200
Trunk, Judenrat, 216. Ibid., 217. Szwartz, Yitzhak, (1956) “Buczacz Memorial Book,” as quoted in Ibid., 419.
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violence appetite of the camps. This logic of slowly feeding a monster in the hope of staving off an explosion of violence, indeed a Holocaust, which would ultimately result in the entire community in mass liquidations. However, this hope that the ghetto could lead back to the state reinforces the concept of interfacial zones, where “the threshold concentrates not only boundary between in/outside, but the possibility of passage from one to the other.”201 The liquidation of ghettos often took place within months, perhaps in the case of a few, a year or two. However, the Lodz ghetto remained a special and entirely unique example of the Jewish struggle to remain alive as long as possible. The final deportation from the camp, which resulted in a complete liquidation was in August 1944 - meaning that the ghetto had inexplicably lasted for four years and four months.202
III.
Auschwitz: For the purpose of continuity on the movement of homo viator, a brief
discussion will be held here regarding the Jewish movement into Auschwitz. Chapter VIII will examine in greater detail the significance of spatial structure and arrangement in the camp. Auschwitz stands as the prime exceptional Other to the Nazi state. Operating as the state of the exception to twelve years of exceptionality in and of itself, Auschwitz in turn defined and redefined humanity and barbarianism. Such a place is an extension of spatio-temporal ownership and a situation in which “nature and law, outside and inside, pass
201 202
Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 74. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, vol I, 223.
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through one another.”203 Not only was Auschwitz a place struggling to identify a dominant force between the tensions of rationalized morality and corruption both financially and socially, it was a place of metaphysical collisions, where the state of nature met the tradition of law and norms, and both struggled for control. This movement of the Jew into Auschwitz was referred to as Abwanderung, (“leaving of a place”) in the internal Nazi offices and official documents. However camouflaged this movement was in couched terms, Auschwitz itself nonetheless retained its accurate purpose – the Vernichtungsstelle, or “extermination center.”204 The time in the camps, despite formation in the state, was not constructed for the long-term custody of Jews, rather, it was for the treading of time until available gas chambers called for bodies. Despite this inevitability, not every inmate believed in the inevitability of his death, rather, his reasons for survival often included the need to bear witness, as evidenced by the numerous accounts found buried under bunks or around the camp,. This reason raises the question of how effective the Nazi state ethics were. Had the state ethics reached the core of each citizen and homo sacer, the Jew would have implicitly understood bearing witness was a fruitless task, as none would comprehend the story of homo sacer. Despite mocking guards, trained to believe the Jew was destined only for the gas chambers, pockets of resistance formed in the camp (demonstrating and ironic twist on this ethic of unrestraint), composed of Jews determined to outlast their guards and the horrors of the camps, for example by continuing the tradition of Shabbat. 203 204
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 37. Esh, “Words and Their Meanings”, 167
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Even after the mass expulsions of the Jews from the state, Hitler was unable to declare Berlin Judenrein by May 1943. As though anticipating Hitler’s frustrated position, Goebbels stated only four weeks prior, “The Jewish question in Berlin has not yet found its final solution yet. There still remains a considerable number of Jews by law, Jew in privileged mixed marriages…they should be deported for good from the capital.”205 Once homo viator had completed his journey to Auschwitz from the state, his body had ceased to be his own, rather it had become an entity upon which the state could utilize, mark, and eventually dispose. “In the old system, the body of the condemned man became the king’s property, on which the sovereign left his mark and brought down the effects of his power. Now he will be rather the property of society, the object of collective and useful appropriation.”206
205 206
Friedman, A History of the Holocaust, 173. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 109.
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Chapter V
Semiotic Squares
… all things become signs in the water’s reflection.207
What matters creative endless toil, when at a snatch, Oblivion ends the coil? As good as if things never had begun. Yet circle back, existence to possess: I’d rather have Eternal Emptiness.208
207 Hebert, Louis (2006), “The Semiotic Square” Signio Semio, (May 2007). 208 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Transl. by Louis MacNeice (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 287.
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A semiotic square typically operates along the same principles of map, that is, to select and enclose a particular concept in order to focus a nuanced, accurate perspective a nuanced of the fluid within a opposition of particular and in-depth perspective a concept. The entirety of the concept is presented the possibilities and limitation of a binary term. This chapter will explore the theoretical structure of “semiotic squares” by breaking down in detail a model semiotic square that contains the theme of this thesis – the binary of “rationality” and “irrationality” (rationality/irrationality). This systematic investigation on how (im)potentiality in pairings born from this privative opposition209 operate and re-operate with each other, in turn bringing to light the possibility to visually illustrate interpretation of rationality/irrationality. This mono-dimensionality disappears and in its place, a realm of multifarious and non-conditional interpretations arises. Following this breakdown of a model square, a complete second square is presented, which (for the sake of diversity) uses the binary “authority” and “submission”, or authority/submission. The semiotic square is employed in this thesis in order to display three differing interpretations of rationality/irrationality: first, the decisions and DFWLRQV RI 66 JXDUGV LQ $XVFKZLW] VHFRQG WKH GHFLVLRQV DQG DFWLRQV RI GRFWRUVLQ$XVFKZLW] DQGWKLUGGHFLVLRQVDQGDFWLRQVSURSRXQGHGE\OHDGLQJ Nazi jurists. Each square offers unique perspective into variegated, dynamic 209
I use for this term the definition from Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, Trans Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, (NY: Hill & Wang, 1964), 76. “A privative opposition means any opposition in which the signifier of a term is characterized by the presence of a significant element, or mark, which is missing in the signifier of the other.” Barthes continues on with a description of the “zero degree of opposition” which could be fruitful in future theoretical study focusing on the Nazi privative opposition ‘rationality’/’irrationality.’
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motivations that motivated the actions of individual members of each group. Pierre Bourdieu argued that the movements and choices of socialized individuals are the result of habitus, or the patterned habits that allow diverse members of society to spontaneously and successfully interact with each other.210 In the cases of these three Nazi organizations, the question at hand is if
an
internalized
and
socialized
habitus
guiding
notions
of
rationality/irrationality differed among these three categories. It is important to note here that a semiotic square is not an attempt to explain the reasoning for one member of the SS guard would choose to kill an inmate, while another guard may choose to adopt an inmate as a little mascot. But it is a means of collecting and organizing the enormous arrays of personalities found in each group, or as framed by the Fu Jen Catholic University, the significance of human-QHVVLVQRWLQWKHSURGXFWLRQRUFUHDWLRQRIQHRWHULFPHDQLQJ UDWKHULW is the “transformation of meanings as “already given” by ideologies into another meaning.”211
I.
What are Semiotic Squares? To begin with a simple definition, the semiotic square is a logical mapping
out of structural possibilities. The square is useful “for any content which can be understood as itself analyzable into binary oppositions, the square will (then) exhaust logical structural relations between its minimal elements.”212 210 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 13. 211 Fu Jen University. Available from: “Structuralism” (August 2008). 212 Algirdas Julien Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method, (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press), 1983, 33.
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The original conception of a square so organized that it could create or clarify meaning from within its own structure is typically attributed to Aristotle’s square of oppositional terms. This square was re-vamped during the 1960’s by Lithuanian mythologist, Algirdas Julien Greimas, who used the squares to demonstrate the dynamism behind the oppositional forces sempiternally in play in traditional Lithuanian fairy tales.213 I adopt his style and methodology for my purpose of examining the forces of rationality set against irrationality within three distinct entities of the Third Reich. The purpose of the squares is to allow for as much flexibility in interpretation as in form – that is, to permit the malleable boundaries of the idea “rationality” and “irrationality” move along with, rather than limit, the actions, behaviors, and recorded comments of members within the three groups examined in this thesis. This potential of the semiotic square to display the (im)potentialities of the actions undertaken by groups and group members is substantiated in Greimas’ own work, “Nothing permits us to assert a semiotic manifestation is dependent on only one system at a time. And so far as it is dependent on several, its closure can be attributed to the interactions of several different systems that produce it.” In this way, the condition of possibility is made for the variance and seemingly inexplicable consequences of charted behaviors in a community.214
II.
How can semiotics squares examine rationality/irrationality? Semiotic squares are a tool to clearly outline characters within a certain
213
Ibid. This condition of possibility for variance is incidentally the keystone by which chaos theory is defined; that is; as any system with the capability to be recorded over an extended period of time which demonstrates consistent fluctuation due to multifarious and uncontrollable factors.
214
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structure and their relationships to other characters in a related structure. As mentioned previously, these three particular groups were selected for analysis within semiotic squares because of unique, simultaneous enactment of (ir)rationality and its praxis. The semiotic squares in the following chapters are going to serve as a visual demonstration on variegated behaviors displayed these views of group (ir)rationality, even within a group considered as homogenous as the SS guards. The squares begin by highlighting in the group the interpretive traits of rationality/irrationality that are universal and merely particular. These noted differences of interpretation and subsequent behavior, in turn, introduce into the discussion the relevance of Derrida’s (non) concept, differance. This (non) concept underlines the qualia which expresses the particularity confined within a given realm. The differance engenders, while simultaneously delineating in juxtaposition, an entity. The differance demonstrates how the dynamic and puckish nature of a concept denies static containment through definition’s singularity. Differance sets, paradoxically, the borders for this potential through its simultaneous opening of a condition of possibility and impossibility in PHDQLQJ LQ RWKHU ZRUGV LW LV WKURXJK differance that germination and destruction of meaning becomes possible. However, Derrida argues that even as this possibility allows for an interpretation of one term in the binary, rationality, it does not guarantee that the same interpretation or even interpretive method can be applied to its opposite, irrationality.215 This (im)potential216 for an unanchored-ness during the process of interpretation 215 216
Jeff Collins & Richard Appignanesi, Introducing Derrida, (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2005), 4. This concept of (im)potential as the potential not to be is from Giorgio Agamben, Daniel
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underlines the necessity of using the semiotic squares in this thesis by which to structure a logic of justifiable parity which exists between both terms in the binary. This thesis examines rationality/irrationality as enacted among members of three distinct groups, thus the necessity for the semiotic square which are able to ‘freeze’ the dynamism within its borders, so as to lay out the variegated and shifting interpretations of an individual display of rationality. This is the lesson of differance – in order to capture the rationality of a guard, perhaps to comprehend his brutal actions, it is necessary to, in a manner of speaking, set a trap by which to capture his irrationality. Once his rationality/irrationality is laid out, it is (in)validated through reading another, coeval guard’s interpretation of rationality/irrationality, which in turn is set against and subsequently (in)validated another guard’s interpretation, and so on. The definition of rationality/irrationality, lies therefore, in a chain WKURXJK ZKLFK ³PHDQLQJ´ LV FRQWH[WXDOL]HG DQ H[WHQGHG YHUVLRQ RI Heraclitus’ “enantiodromia” (“things running into, or revealing their opposites”). This process by which rationality/irrationality of individual group members (or exemplars) is illustrated in a square can also be applied in the wider context of juxtaposing rationality/irrationality of entire groups as collectives, such as the SS guards juxtaposed against camp doctors in pulling out these deeper layers from the squares which that the (non) concept, differance as a place-holder between, for example, the rational brutality of one guard against the irrational brutality of another.
Heller-Roazen, Potentialities, (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 17.
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III.
Reading Semiotic Squares: Example Binary The semiotic square is designed to be both a conceptual network
examining the relationship between and the limits of two opposing concepts (i.e., life/death) as well as the visual representation of this network. The classical reading of the semiotic square generally contains space for five primary elements: the terms defined within the square, the meta-terms, the object(s) classified on the square, the observing subject(s) who does this classifying, and the time of observation and classification.217 The semiotic square is composed of four main terms: Term A, Term B, Term not B, (or Term -B) and Term not A, (or Term -A). A concept is represented by two core terms, Term A and Term B, that signal the concept’s liminal. In other words, these core terms stand on The meta-terms, Term -A and Term –B, are the negative derivatives of the respective core terms. The However, most analyses (including this thesis) involving the semiotic squares generally elaborate in order include four, even six additional terms. So continuing on, the first pair is the complex and neutral pair. By combining Term A with Term B, we derive (Term AB), which is the complex term (so named because it is a combination of two opposites). In the model below, the oppositional pair is “rationality” and “irrationality.” So a Complex Term in this model could be a person or situation capable of simultaneously demonstrating Nazi rationality and irrationality without favoring one over the other. Heinrich Himmler is the quintessential representative well-documented 217 Louis Hébert (2006), “ The Functions of Language ”, in Louis Hébert (dir.), Signo [on-line], Rimouski (Quebec). Available at (August 2008).
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who was also notoriously weak stomached when it came to watching mass executions. The opposite is the Neutral Term, in which we combine Term –A and Term –B to derive (Term - A- B). An example of this Neutral Term could be a person or entity that did not engage in the particular group’s rationality/irrationality, for example, a car mechanic would not likely operate under the rationality/irrationality of the SS guard in Auschwitz. The next, and penultimate pairs, to examine in this model, are the positive and negative deixes. By combining Term A with –B, we have the Positive Deixis, which would simply be an extreme example of Term A, or (Term A-B). The SS doctor who would fall into this category would exercise perfect, methodical rationality in his activities – a methodical rationality so thorough as to seem monstrous to us today, even so to his contemporaries. Opposing is the combination of Term B and Term –A, to produce (Term BA), the Negative Deixis. This figure in the Nazi culture would be an irrational, highly emotional catastrophe who would not likely have been chosen for camp duties or higher state office, but nonetheless useful in certain circumstances – for example, Julius Streicher, producer of the low level anti-Semitic newspaper, Der Stürmer. Although personally unpopular, his contributing role as agitator among the lower classes was absolutely necessary in order to create maximum support for the Party and its clearly murderous policies. The final opposition left to examine is the pair located in the center of the square. This pair shall be named the “meta-meta terms” because traditionally they are unnamed. The first meta-meta term is a combination of Term A and Term –A to create (Term A-A), or a figure who, although using 101
neither a rationality nor a not - rationality as structured within this particular square, and by extension group, is nonetheless intimately related to the purpose of the square.218 An exemplar could be the train drivers who transported so many millions from the Reich state into the exceptional realm of Auschwitz. Another representative could be either the local German producers of the Zyklon B insecticide that was used in the camp gas chambers, or I.G. Farben, the patent holder of Zyklon B. Crucially, I.G. Farben as a corporate entity belongs in this meta-meta term because it held the patent for Zyklon B, and also split interests from its sales with two of the local German producers, DEGESCH (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfun mbH) (‘German Corporation for Pest Control’) and Degussa.219 The second oppositional metameta term is the coupling of Term B + Term –B to compose (Term B-B). Continuing using the example from the SS guard square, an example of an individual acting with neither the guards’ irrationality nor not-irrationality, and yet someone deeply involved in the motivations and decision making processes of the guards could be Adolf Eichmann. Serving as a desk official within the state itself, he nonetheless ensured the continuing relevance of the exceptional state, and by extension, the radical idea of “SS Guard Rationality/Irrationality.” Notorious for habitual zealotry in overseeing the mitigation of the “Jewish Problem”, Eichmann seemed to function within his own singular, solitary system of rationality/irrationality. This system perhaps contained its
218 In Chapter IX, the rationality/irrationality of the SS guards is put into a square for analysis, and because of its easy breakdown, the two examples of the the meta-meta terms are used here. 219 “Zyklon B.” Available from < http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/44296> (March 2009).
102
own morality or ethical justification scheme, but it was so rarely expressed in familiar terms that even other ardent Nazis shied away from him and this egregious dedication to Fuhrerprinzip.
Chart II
Complex Term (Rationality + Irrationality) A+B Rationality Irrationality A
Positive Deixis
B
Rationality + Not Rationality
Negative Deixis
A+-A (Rationality +
(Irrationality +
Not Irrationality)
Not Rationality)
Irrationality + Not-Irrationality A + -B
B + -B
-B
B + -A
-A
Not - Irrationality
Not - Rationality
Neutral Term (Not Rationality + Not Irrationality) -A + -B
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Chart III
Complex Term (Authority + Submission) Citizens/Subjects in the Nazi Party ~ Hitler Youth members Authority Submission
Positive Deixis (Authority + Not Submission)
Minor Party heads.
Jews, Roma/Sinti.
~ von Schirach,
~ Germans
Hitler Youth head
pre-Kristallnacht
Rationality + Not Rationality
Negative Deixis
Executioner of homo sacer
(Submission +
~ SS camp guards
Not Authority)
Acted as ultimate power; sovereign.
Status of ultra Irrationality + Not-Irrationality State Head of Exceptional State Program
~ Hitler
~ Heinrich Himmler Status above homo
Reich citizens; not
sacer; degraded
necessarily Party
status in the Party.
members.
~Mischlinge
~ minor businesses
Not- Submission
submission; apathy to fate. ~ Muselmanner
Not- Authority
Neutral Term (Not Authority + Not Submission) Metics/International Organizations ~ Jews living abroad & concerned about Nazi policies
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Chapter VI
Nazi (Ir)Rationality & Semiotic Squares
What you seek is nowhere. The vision is only a shadow, only reflection, lacking any substance. It comes with you, it stays with you, it goes away… if you can go away.220
What sets us against each other is not our aims – they all come to the same thing – but our methods, which are the fruit of our varied reasoning221
220
Ovid, The Metamorphoses, III, 424-31, 446-49, (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005). Antoine de Saint Exupery, Wind, Sand, and Stars, (NY: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1967), 216. 221
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Is there a point at which logic supporting the semotic square will cease, where it will deteriorate reductio ad absurdum if it is pursued too far? According to Jameson:
… (the semiotic square is a) virtual map of conceptual closure… a mechanism which seeming to generate a rich variety of possible concepts and positions remains in fact locked into some initial aporia or double bind that it can’t transform from inside by its own means.222 Georges Bataille theorized that this potential aporia could be avoided by adopting a different perspective when parsing organizational structures, such a these semiotic squares, so rather than enunciating, for example, “rationality” as the opposite of “irrationality”, the two terms are in fact “coincidences” of opposites.223 The Reich re-created itself as the “exceptional” state by invoking emergency state law. Logically, the exceptional space of the state of exception is expressed as the “meta-state of exception” or “exceptional state of exception,” and even “state of exception, squared.” If we proceed on to examine the role of rationality and irrationality, we find rationality begins in an exceptional place – within the Nazi state itself. Similarly, the basis of irrationality is within the exceptional Nazi state:
222 Frederic Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, (NY: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1992), Forward, xv. 223 Connor, Peter Tracey, Georges Bataille and Mysticism of Sin. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 76.
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A. Exceptional Nazi state: exceptional state (ir)rationality B. (Exceptional Nazi state of) exceptional state of exception: exceptional state of exception rationality & exceptional state of exception irrationality.
At this point, we end with the final turn of complexity: what is irrationality in the exceptional state of exception? And who in the Nazi state would best concretely exemplify or practiced this irrationality? But this logical labyrinth would result only if we decide to begin by contradiction – basing the locus of illegality off the locus of legality, specifically, the Weimar Constitution. Is this the best way? It may be more consistent, not to mention, simpler, to begin by agreeing with Agamben that the de facto, not de jure, Nazi ‘State” was born with the invocation of Article 12. Then Nazi state and state of exception relationship to rationality and irrationality would follow so:
A. Nazi State: Nazi state rationality & Nazi state irrationality B. Nazi State of Exception: Nazi state of exception rationality & Nazi state of exception irrationality.
What is most important here is to understand these permutations of rationality and irrationality have unique characteristics in praxis, overlaps in 1D]L VWDWH LUUDWLRQDOLW\ DQG 1D]L VWDWH RI H[FHSWLRQ IRU H[DPSOH D VROGLHU beating a Jew spontaneously and openly. However, the reasons and rationale for this act would be distinct from each other. And so we retreat to theory and abstractions to see these, at times, minute differences. To draw out the example of the reasoning behind the abusive soldier’s actions as a disparity between the Nazi state of exception and the Nazi state irrationality, we only 107
need look at the purpose of each locus. The Nazi State’s purpose, based on propaganda and law, was to reestablish consistency and similar basic social normalcy to a non-warring state (i.e., obey traffic laws, continuation of educational institutions, pride in national identity), while creating a unique Nazi identity and novel state of racial purity. The purpose of the Nazi state of exception was somewhat more variegated in means, but (uncomfortably) similar in goals: consistency in a daily schedule and pre-Nazi social rules and norms (i.e., obeying a state figure of authority). In the state and state of exception, therefore, one was punished, legally, when one disobeyed. However, this basic understanding also calls for the state to discipline when and only when one person (i.e., the state subject or state object) disobeyed. It would be therefore recognized, however silently, as irrational and un-Nazi sate purposeful to abuse any person. Now this person in our example was a Jew, so the beating may find superficial justification in the typical Third Reich citizen, but it still remained an act out of the ordinary and accepted. Therefore it is classified in the semiotic square as an irrational action within the state itself. The purpose of the Nazi state of exception was initially for the housing and alleged rehabilitation of political prisoners. When, inter alia, the Nazi goal of Lebensraum did not materialize as rapidly as necessary, the simple use of housing turned to the necessity of killing. On a side note, had the Nazis kept good on their claims of camps serving as auxiliaries of war production, undoubtedly and ironically, those prisoners would have been better kept and therefore reasonably more productive – perhaps enabling the realization of the “Thousand Year Reich.” 108
Nonetheless, the purpose was basic production and death. So inmate abuse fell within the conceptualization of the ‘rational’ in the guard life-wRUOG opening up space for the SS man to function as a vehicle by which the oppressive law of the state was imprinted on the body of the Jew. Fraser then furthers this concept on motivation driving this transport and transfiguration of law from the state jurists’ formation to camp inmates’ physical toil, “Auschwitz is the place, or rather a place where the law may be carried. It is a site of memory, but it is more than anything, a site of remembering the force of law.”224 In both the state and state of exception, these beatings were not common practice – they were only meant to serve as violent and visual confirmation and complementary action to that particular locus’ purpose. And so the overlap in praxis is nonetheless distinct in reasoning and theory. Ironically, it is the irrationality in the state that serves as a vehicle for its base exceptionalism.
224 David Fraser, Law After Auschwitz: Towards a Jurisprudence of the Holocaust, (North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press), 69.
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Chapter VII
(Ir)Rationality & Praxis
Then we can’t really describe what we have named? No, any description would reify it. Nevertheless, it lets itself be named, being named it can be thought about. … only if thinking is no longer re-presenting Perhaps we are now close to being released into the nature of thinking …through waiting for its nature.225
225
Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, (NY: Harper & Row, 1966), 67.
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This chapter traces the examples by which to ground the theoretical discussion in Chapter V. Specifically, this chapter previous chapters focuses on how the state and the state of exception verbally and physically framed civil and political discourse.
I.
Praxis of Rationality/Irrationality Expressions and fluctuations of Nazi state rationality shifted between
various Reich Ministries, civil offices, military branches, even youth organizations. It was this malleability that allowed the germination of the complex Nazi legal system even as Nazi academics articulated the omniscient presence of the Führer:
The position of Führer combines in itself all sovereign power of the Reich… If we wish to define political power in the volkisch Reich correctly, we must not speak of ‘State power” but of ‘Führer power.” For it is not the State as an impersonal entity that LV WKH VRXUFH RI SROLWLFDO SRZHU UDWKHU WKH SROLWLFDO SRZHU LV given to the Führer as the executor of the nation’s common will… Führer power is not restricted by the safeguards and controls, by autonomous protected spheres, and by vested and LQGLYLGXDOULJKWV UDWKHULWLVIUHHDQGLQGHSHQGHQWH[FOXVLYHDQG unlimited.226 Through this theoretical justification, Huber brought the singularity of the sovereign head into the realm of variegated state entities by demonstrating 226
Ernst Huber’s definition of Führer power, as quoted in David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda, (London: Routledge, 1993), 84.
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their underlying homogeneity as expressions of the Führer’s power. This power demanded the cooperation of entire Ministries as well as individuals, ensuring obedience by making visible the constant possibility of punishment and rejection by the collective state. The Führer’s power in conjunction with the Nazi legal system was ostensibly structured to protect the Reich citizen. However, the structure also ensured civil obedience and predictable behaviors, as noted in one telling statement:
Those who do not share a community’s values - especially those who cannot share them because they are judged to be fundamentally different, not ‘us’ but other-than-us, are threats to our way of life. Enemies exist, aggression against them is justifiable and even necessary for self-defense… they do not exist entirely beyond national borders, they may dwell within as well. If so, they deserve neither assimilation nor legal protection.227 This possibility perdurable, as Foucault argued, was the means by which the acceptance of the existence and purpose of the camps became routine in state narrative: “By operating at every level of the social body and by mingling ceaselessly the art of rectifying and the right to punish, the universality of the carceral lowers the level from which it becomes natural and acceptable to be punished.”228 However, although the basic acceptance based in fear of reprisal
227
John Roth, Ethics During and After the Holocaust: The Shadow of Birkenau, (London: Macmillan, 2007), 87. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 303. 228
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served as ballast for the increasing freedom by which camps and camp activities were furthered, there nonetheless was constant monitoring of military actions. Hitler and his top officials recognized that in exceptional state actions conducted in the state sphere there existed an event horizon of sorts, beyond which the public would not condone or even accept. Thus this statement would have served as a cause for action among the appropriate military leaders:
The number of transgressions by military personnel against the civilian population is increasing… It has also happened lately that soldiers and even officers independently undertook shootings of Jews, or that they participated in such shootings.229 Thus, the rationality underlining the decisions and actions of the top Nazi officials was influenced by public opinion. However, this influence did QRWDOZD\VWDNHWKHIRUPDVRQHPD\H[SHFW DVGHPRQVWUDWHGWKURXJK+LWOHU¶V perversion the national opinion regarding state plans, “Its not a bad idea that public rumor attributes to us a plan to exterminate the Jews. Terror is a salutary thing.” Through such rationality that drafted public policies distributed and enforced throughout the state, Hitler’s rationality played out: a mass diffusion into the collective of a “political guilt” through which policies and practices harnessed the morality of each German, rendering each helpless to protest, as though personally responsible for the crimes of the state. One memoir noted:
People went so far as to formulate and disseminate more or less 229 Order from the commander of Rear Army Group Area South, Sept. 1941, as cited in Hilberg, vol I, 326-327.
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the following assertion: ‘The state must be in a bad way now or it could not happen that these people should simply be sent to their death solely in order that means, which until now have been used for the upkeep of these people, are available for the prosecution of the war.230 However, while this attempt at injecting a sense of political guilt into the public was prevalent, the Nazi leaders were also careful to release the collective sense of moral guilt that the Germans would have felt. “The alleged lack of alternatives and the emergency excused everything since the Jews were the aggressive persecutors and the Germans their innocent victims.”231 This understanding of the Germans pitted against their collective enemy may not have been always accepted without question, but the complacency that silenced unbelievers was often demonstrated in everyday situations. As noted in the diary of one Berlin woman who recorded an incident on a train in which soldiers were commenting on the mass graves of Poles found in Katyn: “a war is a war… you just have to dig one hundred kilometers further and you’ll find the corpses of 10,000 Jews.” Following the comment was silence, indicating an awareness and tacit, though uncomfortable acceptance.232 The silence and implied awareness of these ugly realities occurring close by only re-enforce the totality by which the citizen felt the compulsion laid down by articulated propaganda and the unarticulated, but omnipresent threat of capital punishment to comply with the measures of total warfare as outlined by their sovereign head, “as well as the relationship between needs 230
Ibid., 802. David Bankier, “German Public Awareness of the Final Solution” in The Final Solution: Origins and Implementations. ed. David Cesarani. (NY: Routledge Press, 1996), 224. 232 Ibid., 216-217. 231
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and availability of personnel and material, require measures... It is not a question of ‘marching separately and battling together’, but marching and battling must be done in unison from the beginning from all fields.”233 Thus, the state contrived a sense of unity could not be legitimately brought into question by any individual or collective. Initially, Nazi propaganda limited itself to utilizing basic binary terms both to express the irreconcilable difference between German and homo sacer and the obvious state preference for the former over the latter. However, approximately as the regime celebrated its first and second months in power, Nazi propaganda began shifting into an eventual tri-tiered phenomenon of sophistication. In order to maximize support, the most scientific rationale for oppression found expression almost exclusively in the top tier, among the Nazi scholars and scientists who found rank and livid prejudice distasteful. These scientific and scholarly works often trickled down to the lower two ranks, where the more traditional forms of emotional anti-Semitism glowered. And in this way Nazi propaganda encapsulated an unleashed emotional and violent hate tempered by cold scientific prejudice. Furthermore, the Ministry of Propaganda created a tri-fold narrative buttressing the underlying conscience of each citizen, regardless of tier categorization: “…Germans are different and better than other human groups, one’s existence as a German is dependent on the Volk and its heritage, whose continued vitality, including one’s own posterity, depends on a commitment to its purity. Third, one’s actions should be guided by national interests.”234 233 International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945-1 October 1946. (Buffalo: William S. Hein, 1995), 929. 234 Roth, The Final Solution, 87.
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This latter point was especially crucial for the realization of Nazi plans. The economics behind waging total war and total genocide were an enormous strain on the government, and thus the “socialist” aspect of “National Socialist” came to the forefront of propaganda’s themes: “In volkisch thought, the economy was conceived of as the subordinated servant of the Volk’s political power…the term Volkswirtschaft was explicitly opposed to private economic interest… property was declared Volksvermogen (“Volk-property”) … to be used for the common good.” 235 This call to action was clearly limited to the common citizen who had not been deemed an “enemy” of the state or Volk. Therefore, the Jews, who were not considered part of the Volksgemeinschaft, were assumed to “have gained their wealth by fraud, usury and profiteering, (and therefore) it was only right that their property should be restored to the common stock of the Volksvermogen.236 The Nazis emphasized stark binary terms such as “healthy” and “unhealthy” to spark religious and traditional prejudices, but it was within the meta-terms, within the gray matter, the confusing and undefined, that the scientific/logical reason was placed. This placement created and supported not the type of anti-Semitism that even the German-Jew had come to accept, but a type which lay beyond the known and accepted - namely the anti-Semitism which ruled over the death camps. In November 23, 1939, Hans Frank ordered all Jews in Poland over ten years old to wear the Star of David on a band on the right arm. On September 1, 1941, this edict altered slightly to include Jews within Germany who were to wear a badge of the Star of David over the left breast. Due to statutory law 235 236
Barkai, “Volksgemenschaft, ‘Aryanization,’ and Shoah”, 80. Ibid.
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that ordered Jews to display Star of David badges, the body constantly betrayed its owner, casting it into a state of unyielding threat of physical harm from Nazis and, further isolation from other persecuted Jews. While these bands were to form in the latter years of the Nazi regime the most obvious means of regulating Jewish identity, other forms of interpellation were utilized for the same purpose, as explored in Chapter IV.
II.
Exceptional State Praxis of Nazi Rationality/Irrationality In the realm of the exceptional, the concept of personal liability for state
crimes moved from ethical consideration to bodily reality. Further, the roles of the functionaries was not entirely passive, in fact, there often existed opportunities to express personal opinions on how to best deal with the” Jewish Question.” One such example was in the SS training school for SSJunkerschule, (“SS-officer candidates“) in which some topics on a spring 1937 final exam included: “Which measures would you take in order to check DQGSURYHWKH-HZLVKDQFHVWU\RIDSHUVRQ"´¶ ³&RPSLOHDUHSRUWIRUWKHHQWLUH Reich on ‘Jews in the livestock trade’ and make your own proposals to rectify WKH HYLOV GHVFULEHG´ ³+RZ GR , HQYLVLRQ WKH VROXWLRQ RI WKH -HZLVK question?”237 By moving the “Jewish question” into a theoretical and rhetorical prospect, the conditions of possibility opened up, allowing for creative methods for implementing massacre to become accepted and normalized “solutions” in the exceptional, realized realm. The commanders
237 Aly, “’Jewish Resettlement: Reflections on the Political Prehistory of the Holocaust” in National Socialist Extermination Policies, 55-56.
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of the Einsatzgruppen constructed various justifications for killings. The significance of these rationalizations will be readily apparent once we consider that the Einsatzgruppen GLG QRWJLYH DQ\ UHDVRQVWR+H\GULFK they had to give reasons only to themselves… (this was) the killing of the Jewish danger.238 However private the reasons were to an SS committing innumerable murders, the consequences of his life-depriving actions were nonetheless publicly reviewed, at least among the Reich business owners. As one armament inspector for the Ukraine wrote in a letter complaining of the incessant murders depriving his factories of suitable bodies for labor, “If we shoot the Jews, let the war prisoners die out, expose the urban population to starvation and are about to lose part of the rural population next year owing to hunger, the question is: Who is going to produce anything in this area?”239 However, the state maintained control over how these “solutions” were implemented, and further, who was designated to undertake this task as executioner of homo sacer:
Only those soldiers may take part in such actions as have specifically been ordered to do so. Furthermore, I forbid any member of this unit to participate as a specter. Insofar as military personnel are detailed to these actions, they have to be commanded by an officer. The officer has to see to it that there are no unpleasant excesses by the troops.240
238
Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, vol. I, 329. Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem, (Jerusalem: Herzl Press, 1978), 77. 240 Order from XXX Corps in the 11th Army sent down to companies, August 1941, as cited in Raul Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, vol. I, (NY: Holmes & Meir Publishers Ltd., 1985), 26. 239
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Also in the exceptional state, rationality was conditioned for the economic benefit of the Reich state as created through the exceptional state activities. This included such accounting tasks as the the daily calculations and re-calculations of the worth of life: “It seems Eichmann offered him one million Jews – in return for goods… for example, lorries, I could imagine one lorry for a hundred Jews, but that is only a suggested figure.”241 This bureaucratic rationality was mirrored in the rationality of the doctors and scientists, another group placed within the camps. In a letter to a fellow state official, Dr. Sievers, “We are not conducting these experiments, as a matter of fact, for the sake of some fixed scientific idea, but to be of practical help to the armed forces and beyond that to the German people in a possible emergency.”242 Two statements further articulate the medical and scientific justification for the use of human subjects in experimentation:
To some degree, the therapeutic pattern…is undoubtedly a valid one, and explains why the Wehrmacht, and especially the German Air Force, participated in these experiments. Fanatically bent upon conquest, utterly ruthless as to the means or instruments to be used to achieve victory…the German militarists were willing to gather whatever scientific fruit these experiments might yield.243 Considering the urgency of finding a practical solution to this important problem (the rescue of airplane crews from high altitude), particularly in view of the prevailing experimental 241 Yehuda Bauer, Shoah in Historical Perspective, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978), 143. 242 Vivien Spitz, Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account Of Nazi Experiments On Humans, (Colorado: Sentient Publications, 2005), 138. 243 Ibid., 37.
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conditions, it was necessary to forego for the time being a detailed clarification of the purely scientific problems involved.244 These statements frame justifications for particular methods of rational conduct that occurred in the exceptional state. These justifications permitted the guards and doctors to perform morally as state agents. These contradictions were violently confronted in Auschwitz, the modern embodiment of Bentham’s Panopticon. The development of Auschwitz and the myriad of exceptional (ir)rational conduct that occurred within its walls is the subject of Chapter VIII.
Chapter VIII 244
Ibid., 126.
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Panopticon’s Contradictions
Had I known what Auschwitz was, no power on earth could have made me get on that train. But there was no power on earth that could then have made me believe in the existence of an Auschwitz…245
Some of us are prisoners, The rest of us are guards.246
Auschwitz, the modern trope of man’s destructive nature wrought on man, became the exceptional other to the already exceptional Nazi state. In the early years of the camps (1933-1939), inmates were primarily the
245 Auschwitz Survivor, as quoted in Herbert, Ulrich, National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies. (NY: Berghahn Books, 2000), 82. 246 Bob Dylan, George Jackson, Columbia 45516.
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historically quintessential carceral inhabitants, prisoners intended for an indeterminate, yet not necessarily fatal, detention. However, following the philosophical inception and physical construction of death camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz, soon they were prisoners qua prisoners in only the nominal sense. In short time, they were radically transformed into either immediate or future victims. Following this metamorphosis of penal purpose, inmates were no longer meant to undergo a period of instruction and re-integration for their society. These inmates were instead slated for temporary brutal labor and a quick cessation in the chambers. In 1933, the ideals of the state prison were redefined, “marginalizing” and rejecting the formerly accepted norm of encouraging prisoner “rehabilitation.” As Wachsmann noted, “In so far as penal institutions were still supposed to educate inmates at all, these efforts were to be limited to a few “reformables.”247 While treatment of Auschwitz prisoners theoretically varied according to crime and nationality, distinction often blurred, leaving corpses once Jewish, Polish, homosexual or political dissident in the same graves, bearing the same starved visage, not only in Auschwitz, but other in camps, such as Breendonck and Malines. The official Belgium Government report described the arrival of trains into these two camps:
… the (train) doors were opened and a terrible sigh was revealed. Thick fumes and a disgusting odor escaped, and out of the doors, force open by the pressure from within, they poured, like fish spilling out of a fishing boat one of whose sides had 247
Nikolaus Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi German, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 77.
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been removed – a horrible conglomeration of bloated, reddened and bluish bodies, their eyes protruding from their sockets and clothes soaked in sweat and excrement. Nine corpses were removed from the trucks… In other camps, deportees were executed on the spot. The Jews were ordered to dance around the corpses, singing: “We shall never forget Breendonck, the paradise of the Jews.248 Thus despite bureaucratic orders from Berlin, the obscured strata of victims were ultimately equalized in the crematoria. In this way, “…the essence of the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the subsequent creation of a space in which bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction…”249 The Polish prisoners could be as thoughtlessly decimated in Treblinka as the Jews in Auschwitz, despite the more deliberate and frequent actions of guards to ensure the annihilation of this latter minority.250 These arbitrary killings extended to all prisoners following their introduction into the camps. In early 1943, “the securityconfined prisoners (in Buchenwald) were far more likely than any other groups of inmates to be killed…their average monthly mortality rate was 14%.” This 14% was compared to the 1% of other groups, including political dissidents, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Mauthausen camp.251 This 14% had in fact decreased from the 35% at the end of 1942, marking the greatest percentage of deaths, excluding only that of the Jews. As in the state itself, reasonableness in the camps could not 248
Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem, (Jerusalem: Herzl Press, 1978), 180-1. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 174. 250 James Michener, Poland, (NY: Fawcett, 1984), 489. 251 Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons, 298. 249
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always align with the ambitious agenda of Jewish extermination. These goals were engendered largely through the physical design and legal implementation of the camp itself, influenced by gradations of state rhetoric and legislative action structured against political dissidents and 5HLFKHQHPLHV UKHWRULFVXFKDV*RHULQJ¶VRIW-repeated legal tenet proclaimed in March 1933 that ‘Right is that which serves the German people.’ Drawing on these articulated and visible designs for constantly impending punitive proceedings, Wachsmann argued, “…the main objective was the protection of the national community, to be achieved by stricter punishment (than education).”252 As noted earlier, the main camp of Auschwitz served as the administrative center for the killing complex, while Auschwitz- Birkenau and the satellite camps were originally used in 1940 as a detention center for Polish prisoners. In 1941, Zyklon B was first used in its recently constructed gas chambers. By 1943, four combined crematoria-gas chambers had been constructed and in full use in Auschwitz-Birkenau. These four conjoined buildings were able to massacre approximately 120,000 inside a month.253 In less than the four years between the virgin use of the gas in Auschwitz and the Soviet liberation in 1945, more than one million had been massacred as a result of Nazi policy. Increasing emphasis on massacre over labor led to tensions during the 1942 Wannsee conference, in which Heydrich expressed how the two stances could be compromised – allowing “select” Jews to work in one of the 28 satellite camps of Auschwitz. After a few months of life sapping labor, most if not all suffered from such 252 253
Ibid., 77. Laurence Rees, Auschwitz. (NY: Perseus Books Group, 2005), 169.
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irreparably damaged health and depleted will to live that they were transferred to the gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenua for anonymous extermination.254 State discussions and concurrent ad hoc methods on the movement of Jews from labor camps to extermination centers were based in rational and in later legally endorsed actions. As Agamben noted later, “it is significant that the camps appear together with new laws on citizenship and the denationalization of citizens…The growing dissociation of birth and the nation state is the new fact of politics in our day, and what we call ‘camp’ is this disjunction. The state of exception…now becomes a new and stable spatial arrangement inhabited by the bare life that more and more can no longer be inscribed in that order…”255 The conditions of power’s punitive possibilities were generated by state legal and political actions, both of which ultimately created the physical blueprints and metaphysical application of the camp to maximize the serviceability of inmates. Similar to activities and civil movements in the Nazi state, Auschwitz emerged as a locale capable of merging and enveloping fluid identities with unyielding policies that were constantly and consistently set against the inmate. In this way, while the ghetto had served as an interface between the state and its exceptional other, Auschwitz served as the interface between state prescribed rationality and the illegal cruelty which arises in any extreme situation. Agamben’s conceptualization of this exceptional locus was a space that “establishes a hidden but fundamental relationship between law and absence of law. It is a void, a blank and this 254 255
Ibid., 170. Ibid., 90.
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empty space is constitutive of the legal system.”256 Yet it was within this ‘void’ that many of the greatest horrors were unfolded against the Jewish people. Eugen Kogon, a German political prisoner in Auschwitz, described one particularly sadistic torture prompted during roll call:
Often, following the head count, the command would be heard, ‘All Jews remain behind’ - to sing over and over again deep into the night the vile jingles known as the ‘Jew song’: ‘For years we wrecked deceit upon the nation/No fraud too great for us, no scheme too dark/All that we did was cheat and lie and swindle/Whether with dollar or with pound or mark.’ ‘But now at last the Germans know our nature/And barbed wire hides us safely out of sight/Traducers of the people, we were fearful/ To face the truth that felled us overnight.’ ‘And now, with mournful crooked Jewish noses/We find the hate and discord were in vain/An end to thievery, to food aplenty/Too late, we say, again and yet again.’257 The geography and goals of the camp, “…required enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself.”258 The architecture of the Panopticon-inspired camp effectively destroyed opportunities of individualism to the inmate. Thus, both guard and inmate became overseer, of himself and others. As Foucault described the motivation behind this Panoptic design:
256 Raulff, Ulrich. ‘An Interview with Giorgio Agamben” German Law Journal, vol. 5, no. 5 (April 2004), 609. 257 Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them, Transl. by Heinz Norden, (NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1950), 77. 258 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 141.
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…to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power…the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at any one PRPHQW EXWKHPXVWEHVXUHWKDWKHPD\DOZD\VEHVR259 The exposed design of the camp tangibly represented the Nazi rejection of the confinements reminiscent of an 18th century European dungeon, where darkness could provide some semblance of physical and mental protection.260 The camp, open behind its barbed wires and walls, provided constant and complete access to guards, doctors and other inmates, removing even basic forms of personal preservation, “stripped of its essential liberty,… it became responsible for what it knew of its truth, and was imprisoned in its own gaze...finally chained to the humiliation of being an object for itself.”261 Whereas in the dark of the cell, the inmate was able WRUHWDLQKLV6HOIRQHIRUPHGIURPH[SHULHQFHDQGPHPRU\ LQWKHFDPSKH was constantly to face the Other, one formed from propaganda, realized by the state, and visibly represented by his fellow inmate. The portrayal of the Jew in the Third Reich was of a depersonalized criminal so intent on survival that he would resort to violence, familial abandonment, and thievery - in short, acts of unrestraint and irrationality. “The state of exception thus ceases to be referred to as an external and provisional state of factual danger and comes to be confused with juridical rule itself… the camp is the space
259
Ibid., 201. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, (NY: Pantheon Books, 1977), 147. 261 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, (NY: Random House, 1965), 499. 260
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that is opened when the state of exception becomes the rule.”262 The architectural anatomy of the Nazi death camps was a massive VKRZFDVHRIPRGHUQSHQDOGHVLJQ WKHFXOPLQDWLRQRIDWZRKXQGUHG\HDU long project which had slowly carried the societal interpretation and reliance on the traditional layout and geographic placement of the “prison” from Medieval culture into modernity. Theorist John Pratt confronted this phenomenon in the argument framing transfiguration as caused by spiraling numbers of prisoners cramped, dying, in temporary prisons. These deaths led 19th century carceral officials to propose innovative designs permitting larger centers for long-term containment. These designs also engendered fear in civil society: Their confluence produced an institution that at this juncture hid an administration of punishment from view, but which ZRXOGEHFRPHKLGGHQIURPYLHZLWVHOI GHVSLWHSK\VLFDO disappearance, prisoner’s early representatives would remain in public imagination with the power to haunt weltanschauung of modern society.263 Despite deliberate preventative measures designed into the camp layout, Illicit activities, including theft and corruption, were occurred daily. For Berlin and Munich based officials, prisoner reliance on these shifty tactics seemed to support the thieving Jew stereotype. In turn, the argument supporting prisons outside the state seemed to strengthen. These prisons were a place where, “only those prisoners could keep alive, who, after years 262
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 168. John Pratt in Bashford, Alison and Carolyn Strange. Isolation: Places and Practices of Exclusion. (NY: Routledge, 2003). 263
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of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence… every means, honest or otherwise, theft, betrayal…”264 While in the state, the characteristics of the thief were primarily of chicanery, secrecy and open disgust by fellow citizens, the revealing nature of the camp disallowed these former qualities. Instead, all who engaged in illicit activities were known and grimly understood, if not outright lauded. In this way, the habitus of the inmate shifted as well as their identities in the novel socialization of the camp. “Only because the camps constitute a space of exception in the sense…which not only is law completely suspended but fact and law are completely confused - is everything in the camps truly possible.”265 Again, previous state norms of reasonableness rarely aligned with survival tactics in the camp. As another survivor who outlasted the camps by eating the food hidden in the clothing of gassed Jews, “It was rescue for us. Even animals each other when they feel hunger. We wanted to live…we wanted to survive…to have food, water and enough sleep, those were the things we cared about.”266
I.
The Gas Chambers: The spatial structure of this camp also served as the physical
manifestation of the exceptional state’s temporality. Camp anatomy, as noted by Agamben, reinforced the mechanistic locus of the camp, that is, the gas chamber. The open fields, intended for interminable hours of counting
264 265 266
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, (NY: Simon &Schuster, 1984), 19. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 170. Rees, Auschwitz, 173.
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LQPDWHVFLUFXPURWDWHGDURXQGWKHVHFKDPEHUV WKXVHYHQZKHQWKHLQPDWH¶V survival was momentarily ascertained by his guard during daily roll, he faced the chamber, the prosopon of state legitimized death, omniscient over camp affairs.267 The idea of prosopon, popularized in Greek tragedy as the mask worn by an actor or his feigned facial peculiarities, was the final manifestation of Nazi ideology, the last step in a genocidal calculation. The constant prattle within the state was unyielding – constantly was the citizen lectured on his duty to the state, constantly was he barraged with propaganda and state issued news reports. Similarly in the camp, there was a similar vein of noise, perpetuated by the state and for the state, exemplified in the sounds of inmates working in mines, building barracks, moving equipment, and always, the screams of frenzied SS men beating victims. Yet that which was most threatening to the inmate was that which in fact emitted no sound at all and required no vocalized validation from its victims. And so in the silence of this state formulated prosopon performed also as the inmate’s prosopon WKDWUHYHDOHGKLVFKDUDFWHU HDFKsacer finding bravery or fear, the will to survive or the impulse to capitulate before it. Through this methodical bifurcation of violent vision by the guard tower that glowered over the inmate and the gas chamber that threatened him, the radical ferocity of the Nazi regime, and of general modernity, was fully revealed. The tower kept watch over the physical actions of the inmate, punishing in beatings and hangings that which moved against the barbed OLPLWVRIWKHFDPS WKDWLVDQ\WKLQJWKDWDIILUPHGRQH¶VOLIH, rather than negated it. The chambers functioned as sentinel ensuring the psychological
267
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 38.
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deterioration of prisoners. As mentioned above, it was before the gas chambers that Jewish inmates, as intended by design, were meant to and often did, lose the faith of their religion and hope not only their own futures, but of their collective tribe. It is for this horrific crime against humanity and international customary ethics that the SS guard remains locked in the world’s collective memory as the ultimate representation for lost morality, as the true bios returned to polis268. However, the chamber was a permanent fixture designed for massacre, the sanctification and reification of man’s hated of man. Uncompromising in design, the chambers removed all possibilities for survival, even to those who had practiced daily every means of trickery and instinct to survive.
II.
The Guard Tower: The use of the guard tower within the exceptional state can be
summarized by Foucault: “…in view of this… power should be visible... constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon.269 This guard tower reified the invisible yet verifiable nature of the regime which had erased the inmate’s past and family. Whereas the SS man retained a personalized identity even as he acted as state entity to the inmates on the camp grounds, his private identity 268
Agamben notes in Means Without End that such a return is not possible, as the biological need and body politic have merged inextricably in this modern age and within the exceptional state; however I argue this possibility re-opens before the inexplicable, yet evidenced moral schizophrenia of the guard. Means Without End: Notes on Politics, Transl. by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 139.7. 269 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201.
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ZDVHUDVHGLQWKHWRZHU VXEVWLWXWHGZLWKWKHTXLQWHVVHQWLDOIRUPRIWKH 1D]L DQDXWRPDWRQDVPHUFLOHVVWRZDUGVHQHPLHVDVDQRQ\PRXVLQLGHQWLW\ Unlike the rest of the camp’s anatomy, which lay exposed to the constant and invasive vision of guards and even inmates, the tower was the one feature that was only accessible to the SS men. It guarded not only the camp itself, but the barbed wire beneath LW RULQRWKHUWHUPVWKHWRZHU guarded the liminality of the state and its exceptional Other. It in the tower that response to the age old question, “who is to guard the guards” was grimly answered - the unseen SS agent posted in this elevated liminal, guarding SS trooper and prisoner alike. Just as the gas chamber constituted the final step for the complete erasure of inmate’s general existence and individual identity forged by a lifetime of intangible private memories, so too did the non-negotiability of the guard tower effect the inmate’s possibility of survival and future testimony.
III.
The Electric Barbed Wire: The guard tower was employed not only to ensure continued
imprisonment, but also to confirm the measured life of victims. Suicide, only recently transfigured in state dianoia from sin of the spirit to act of rebellion against the state, was strictly forbidden. As in all aspects of life in the camps, the state execution of individual inmate was (ostensibly) personally preapproved by an agent of the regime. Any attempts by inmates to take their own lives beforehand were met with beatings, starvation diets, or a bullet behind the ear. However, to many determined inmates, the allure of choosing the time and manner of death was worth these potential penalties. The 132
electric barbed wire, originally meant to keep the unlimited exceptionality out of the state and in turn the limited sense of state ethics out, took on a new symbolic peculiarity. The liminal nature of any gate denotes a meeting RIWZRORFDWLRQVKRZHYHULQ$XVFKZLW] WKLVQDWXUHZDVUHGHILQHGLQDQRYHO way, to provide an unforeseen succor. Operating as the opposing vestige against the gas chambers and likewise serving to contain its barbaric purpose within the camp, the barbed wire became perhaps the only place of truth for the prisoner in the Reich. Rejected by the state, and he himself rejecting the exceptional state, the inmate used the wire as the only site suited for his body between the two locations. His act of rejection simultaneously voided the control of guards and usurped the silent operation of the gas chamber, an act explained by Tzvetan Todorov as valuable not for its own sake alone, but as the final ‘expression of will’, casting off the suffocating garb of state imposed identity forged in a violent legality and history. 270
IV.
Inmates’ Erasure of Past/Future: The unyielding and unbroken geography of the camp also eliminated
UXPLQDWRU\PRPHQWVHUDVLQJDQ\FRQGLWLRQRISRVVLELOLW\IRUWKHIXWXUH leaving only a terrible present. However, it was not only the design of the camp that minimized the inmate’s humanity, but also the treatment of his body upon arrival. His introduction to Auschwitz, which included the shaving of hair, the inking of numbers on an arm, the looting of personal 270
Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, (NY: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), 16.
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goods, de-legitimized his past, and in short, reduced him from the bios which so marked the civilized man, back into interminable zoe, the existence of the pre-social bestial man. This re-definition of man brought a redefinition of reality as not just a static fixity awaiting a proper interpretation DQGFRQWH[WXDOL]LQJFLUFXPVWDQFHV UDWKHUDPRUHUHILQHGHQWLW\µWhat depends upon the institutional (and) theoretical organization to establish its fixity and definition.’271 As noted by a survivor, ‘While we were waiting for the shower, our nakedness was brought home to us: we really had nothing now except our bare bodieVHYHQPLQXVKDLU DOOZHSRVVHVVHGOLWHUDOO\ZDVRXUQDNHG existence.’272 Upon this complete denuding of material goods and heartbreakingly personal trinkets (i.e, family photos, small baby blankets), the inmate stood naked, his exposed body now finally and irretrievably available for state inscription. Cruelly, the state issued the now permanent trope for the Jewish sacer ‘teling’ – the tattooed prison number on the arm. With the constant flow of depersonalized activity in the camp, guards were able to quickly differentiate among inmate categories by a similarly recognizable trope - lettered shapes sewn onto prisoner uniforms. As one witness testified in the Nuremberg Trials, ‘The German political inmates had DSODLQUHGVTXDUH WKH3ROHVKDGDUHGVTXDUHZLWKDµ3¶PDUNHGRQLW WKH 5XVVLDQVZLWKDQµ5¶ DOOQDWLRQDOLWLHVFRXOGEHLGHQWLILHGE\WKHILUVWOHWWHURI their country. The red square with a yellow star was the Jew…”273 271 William Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991/2002), 49. 272 Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 28. 273 International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945-1 October 1946. (Buffalo: William S. Hein, 1995), 181.
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Official state policy mandated valuables retrieved from new inmates were to be considered state property, and therefore to be shipped back to the state from the camp, the zone of loosened morality. However, the reality often exposed gratuitous guard looting. Even other prisoners were able to EHQHILWIURPWKHVHKRUGHV ³«VRPXFKZHDOWh was flooding into the camp with so little supervision and so many casual opportunities to steal…”274 These ‘casual opportunities’ finally generated enough concern that the ‘architect of genocide’ Heinrich Himmler was forced to visit Auschwitz and address this ongoing problem of morality within the exceptional state. This problem was far from a philosophical exercise of Nazi ethics for +LPPOHU UDWKHULWZDVDSUHVVLQJTXDQGDU\IRUHIURQWLQKLVPLQGHVSHFLDOO\ after discovering how deeply traumatized his SS troopers remained after spending months shooting Jewish victim at close range. Therefore, his task in the exceptional sphere was to “paint a picture of the SS members as killers… (but) murderers who had retained their honor.”275 Continuing the public display of Reich formulated ethics and morality by each SS trooper, however privately perverted, was an energetic and consistently failing state project. For these reasons, Himmler’s infamous Posen speech of 1943 directly addressed the matter of theft:
We have taken away the riches they (the Jews) had and… have delivered all of these riches to the Reich, to the State. We have taken nothing for ourselves. We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to destroy the people who wanted to destroy us…and our character has not suffered from 274 275
Rees, Auschwitz, 174. Ibid., 175.
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it.276 The use of lines organized to maximize individual inmate visibility during the multiple roll calls in a day demonstrated another aspect of the Nazi death camp - the use of individualization for bullying and gas chamber selection. “…on the principle of partitioning. Each individual has his own SODFH DQGHDFKSODFHLWVLQGLYLGXDO«'LVFLSOLQDU\VSDFHWHQGVWREHGLYLGHG into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed…to eliminate the uncontrolled disappearance of individuals.”277 By controlling and closely organizing the spaces containing separate bodies, the regime at once paradoxically recognized and erased the individual prisoner, as evidenced in daily roll call and occasional selections which judged the individual health and laboring abilities within the mass anonymity of a thousand other uniformed skeletons. Further, by lining inmates together in visible and openly spaced rows, the guards only had to select and beat one, an act which simultaneously conveyed the power of death and victory of state oppressive norms over all. Beatings, as referenced above, furthered the meaning of this two fold act, by emphasizing to all prisoners their potential to experience the same realized bodily pain as their unlucky counterpart. On this employment of envisioned harm, Foucault theorized that the “punishment has to make use of not the body, but of representation. Or rather, it if does make use of the body, it is not so much as the subject of pain
276 277
Ibid., 175. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 143
136
as the object of the representation: the memory of pain...”278 Tzvetzan Todorov follows the logic behind this meta-pain production, “It is less important that the inmates die than that they be alienated from their wills, for it is this alienation that enables guards to fully experience their power over others.”279 The shift of orders from above for the death of inmates to the initiative of those below occurred around 1941. “SS men themselves not killed alleged or actually sick and weakened prisoners. Terms in the camp jargon such as abspritzen (‘injection”), Gifttrinken (“poison drink”) or Todbaden (“death bath”) denoted the excesses of force.280 However, despite the tacit acceptance in Berlin of the SS initiative, official policy still held those in contempt that misused the power of life and death. “… the SS officers who were removed from service in the WVHA’s domain in the summer of 1942 were apparently unable to handle the responsibilities of a commander… they had misused their power… including corruption and alcoholism… they (in Himmler’s view) had not remained anstandig (“decent”) in the face of schwere Aufgabe (“the difficult task”) they had to perform.”281 The phenomenon of “mimicry” referenced by Lenz in 1936 was found 278
Ibid., 94. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, (NY: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), 63. Earlier in the chapter, Todorov quotes Victor Frankl on the matter of human dignity as an indivisible characteristic, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Todorov draws out this concept and names it “dignity” which he then describes as “The exercise of will is thus one ingredient, the agreement of the internal with the external is the other. Dignity then becomes the capacity to satisfy, through one’s actions, criteria that one has internalized… I want my actions to find favor in my own eyes.” Ibid., 65. 280 Karin Orth, “Concentration Camp SS”, 315. 281 Ibid., 317. 279
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later in the exceptional state in homo sacer’s bizarre act in dressing himself in the discarded garb of the SS and adoption of SS cruelty towards fellow inmates – often abusing them as terribly, and at times even more so than the SS personnel. According to Lenz, Jews within the German state up until the 1930’s often relied on mimicry to survive, “Jews who resembled their host Volker stood a better chance of surviving and reproducing, much as butterflies are bred by nature to blend into (their) environment.”282 Countless examples of this inexplicable turn in behavior are frequently mentioned in survivor accounts, specifically, Steinweiss found that established camp prisoners had not only abandoned their state formulated manners, they also had considered the self-conscious courtesy of new inmates to be utterly ludicrous.283 Dr. Philip Zimbardo found similar examples of this phenomenon in his sociology experiment in the 1970’s on prisoner/guard interactions.284
V.
Interfacial Identities & A Corresponding Semiotic Square How is the role and fate of the Kapo foil to that of the Muselmann?
The Muselmann was considered by inmate and guard alike as a walking corpse, one only even breathing through biological endurance. All that had ever marked him as ‘human’ had long since been stripped away. He was the constant representation and fallback for the ancient conceptualization of the
282 Lenz, as cited in Alan Steinweis, Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 49. 283 Ibid., 9. 284 Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, (NY: Random House, 2008).
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polis. His situation had not been self-ZLOOHGRUFUHDWHG KHZDVDVKHZDV because the oppressive environment had successfully overwhelmed and replaced his own identity and history. He had achieved the impossible sinking lower than the mandated place of the Jew in the camp. His death was RQO\HYHUDPDWWHURIWLPH ZKHQLWHYHQWXDOO\DUULYHLWZDVWRWKHUHOLHIRI other inmates, as his small body substituted for their own in the gas chambers. Paradoxically therefore, his final living act in accepting his death gave the ultimate possibility of continued life to another inmate. The Kapo was the Muselmann’s mirror image. Forced to fulfill merciless duties to continue the productivity of the surviving Jews, the Kapo too had forsaken his humanity, either by choice or environmental demands. Even though he may have entered the camp as a Jew, he had lost this identity in his acceptance of Kapo responsibilities. Like the Muselmann, he too had broken his connection with the Jewish identity. His role as the aid to the state executioner led him to take not only a metaphorical part in the deaths of his fellow prisoners, but also an active role, resulting in constant affirmation of uselessness of resistance: “camp inmates brought to the infamous Block 11 to be shot often had their arms held down by the Kapo.”285Although the Kapo was given a slighter higher calorie diet and was at times able to procure newer clothes, his existence in the camp was as threatened as the Muselmann, that is to say, slightly more than the average Jewish inmate. Whereas the average Jewish inmate could find hope of survival in his anonymity, the Kapo naturally stood out as a one who had taken an active role in massDFUH WKXVWRHQVXUHVHFUHF\KLVGHDWKZDVDFHUWDLQLQHYLWDELOLW\
285
Ibid., 28.
139
“His job is to see that the work gets done…thus he has to push his men. As soon as we are longer satisfied with him, he is no longer a Kapo and returns to the other inmates. He knows that they will beat him to death his first night back.”286 His role as foil to the perpetually mute and untouched Muselmann is further evidenced in this collectively focused rage expressed violently on the body of the Kapo, Chart IV illustrates the life/death binary within the camps: Chart IV
Life + Death = SS Guards Life
Death
~ New Inmates
~ Executed Victims
Positive Deixis
Negative Deixis
(Life + Non-Life)
(Death + Non-Death)
~ Jewish Resistance.
~ Reich collaborators.
Condemned to imminent, not imminent death. ~ Inmates imprisoned on lesser charges; foreign prisoners of war.
Immune from immediate death and gain some benefits, still denied citizen status. ~Kapos/SK Non-Life/Not-Life
Non-Death/Not-Death
Non-Life + Non-Death = Muselmann
286
Rees, Auschwitz, 7.
140
This chart provides a simple visualized means of understanding the relationships and relations between the actors in the camp. Even in a place where death was an expected outcome, where life was only a hiatus between the sentencing by the state and the execution in the camp, there was still a sense of the rational relationship building and identity representation as within the state itself. This square specifically sets up the relation between guard and Muselmann as it existed in the realm of the oppositional “life/death” terms, set down by the Nazi state. The Muselmann is as entrenched as the guard in the matters of life/death in the camp, as the square shows. The primary difference between the two actors is the destination set before them – the guard lives and the Muselmann dies. This outcome is petrified as a matter of identity, rather than action or behavior.
VI.
Constructing Contradiction
“Panopticon.” Brought into modern socio-legal philosophy and discussion by Jeremy Bentham and later popularized by Michel Foucault. The word itself flows easily from the pens of plentitudes of poststructuralists as a metonym for any penal system or other exceptional space. But how accurate is it to say the term speaks from and for the exceptional? I look again to Jeremy Bentham. His introduction to the concept of “Panopticon” was by his brother Samuel Bentham.287 In the mid-19th century Russian Prince Potemkin
287
Claude Rawson, God, Gulliver, and Genocide, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
141
implemented a novel factory system of which Samuel Bentham was employed. Samuel described the system to Jeremy, who in turn, unfolded the implications of such a system and expanded almost inadvertently, its possibilities for his audiences. And thus, “Panopticon”, as known to modernity, was born. The original model, however, was meant to serve as a rational and human alternative to the Russian carceral system. The “Panopticon” of open space and movement and visibility only later adopted its sadistic and even masochistic possibilities. As a result, “Panopticon” as the Auschwitz design and architectural implementation for containment and later extermination is, itself, exceptional. Accordingly, the same quandary arises as encountered in Chapter VII – should we proceed from the very beginning and argue Nazi Panopticon is already exceptional as based on its original purpose - humane employment? Or should we proceed from the higher, more abstract level by arguing Panopticon was the only exception, in a way, to the exceptional Nazi state? Thus, Panopticon would be bi-exceptional, exceptional to its origins and exceptional to the Nazi state. As noted in Chapter VI, logic follows so: Meta/Exceptional Exceptional Panopticon: “rationality” and “irrationality” The final step of complexity is this: what is the irrationality of an exceptional-exceptional state of exception? And who in this place would concretely exemplify or practice this irrationality? And just as in Chapter VI and VII where we had to navigate a logical labyrinth in order to arrive at a desired understanding of Nazi state and state of exceptionality, so we too here we find, and defeat, another maze, this one containing Nazi rationality and irrationality. 142
It is tempting to follow Agamben’s example, as so many do, and begin at the higher foundation: Hitler’s state as the state post-Article 12 invocation and Panopticon/Auschwitz began at its common understanding as an oppressive penal system. But it would not be entirely accurate as this would first expose and second not account for, the lacunae of pre-Article 12 invocation and decisions and actions made post-Hitler declaration as Führer. I am going to argue from the logic following perspectives derived from Agamben regarding the Nazi state and state of exception, and from Foucault regarding the use and modernization (and Agamben’s subsequent adoption) of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. That was Panopticon’s first contradiction. Next we turn to the contradiction of theory and practice. The purported use of the inmates’ camp entry was the de-individualization of that which makes anyone a human – obviously, the very last of loved and collected belongings, the genetic aspects differentiating a human body from another, in the camp it was one’s hair, and the social and familial equivalents – one’s name. This intangible removal of name and tangible degradation was meant to serve as the last proof of the state power to un-identify a person, at will. However, this un-identification process was more a re-identification process and one that could save as easily as kill an inmate. In one such situation, Pierre Berg related the how the mistaken ‘9’ in a tattoo number saved his life and damned another.288 And here we see the tip of Panopticon’s second contradiction, and in an ironic way, Panopticon’s ‘normalcy’ serving to show the exceptionalism 288 Pierre Berg and Brian Brock, Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora, (NY: AMACOM, 2008).
143
of the Nazi State. In the state of exception, Auschwitz, the Jew could be beaten and killed for who he was, a fact based on his name and by extension, his identity, whereas in the state, anybody with the Star of David on an armband would be and could be beaten. Truly, homo sacer was to be found, then, not in the state of exception, but in the state itself. To be accurate and to, again, begin at a slightly lower logic than Agamben’s popular and popularized logic, it would seem the true homo sacer in the camp would be the Muselmann. That was Panopticon’s second contradiction. According to Agamben’s reading of Nazi legality as it pertained to the camp, homo sacer could be killed with impunity because he was the designated outsider existing within the inside (be it the state or state of exception). But this reading of Festus only looks at the classification of the inmates from the point of view of Nazi logic, legality, and yes, rationality. I disagree with the reading of Festus insofar as it does not speak to the rationality/irrationality and actions of the inmate. The Muselmänner were the extreme example of those who accepted this knowledge. But what of the lacunae between the state designation which, as far as it was deemed necessary, ensured the manner of camp deaths, and Muselmänner? In this taxonomic lacunae, we have the majority of inmates. Certainly they knew themselves to be in a place of extermination, and to varying degrees, this knowledge moved into eventual acceptance. But there were many, even if only initially who fought this acceptance and this fate. Pierre Berg was one such inmate. Eli Wiesel and Primo Levi were other such examples. Berg more specifically and graphically outlined and examined his own struggle and successes in survival. 144
These men and countless others may have accepted their own nominal and social classification as beasts and state enemies to be extinguished, but this did not prevent them, even momentarily, from continuing to as act as men – to barter, argue, pay, steal and even cannibalize among themselves, and when able, the Kapo and SS guards, all in the name of the quality unique to humans – the expressed desire to live. For what, for whom, why – these were unique to each, but the desire was common to all. Man to himself, beast to state, laboring corpse to camp guards and operational body still warm with experimental possibilities to camp doctors, ‘homo sacer’ was truly only such to the state citizen, who never saw this ‘homo sacer’ post- sacer baptism. And thus, Panopticon’s third contradiction. Again we see a mocking exceptionalism in the state as mirrored by the normalcy of the state of exception. With the constant influx of goods and jewels and food into the camp, the inmate, homo sacer, whatever designation is so appropriate, was in fact more capable of interacting with the state (as personified by the SS guard and other miscellaneous camp staff) for food, protection and survival than he was in the state. This was largely because in the state, the Jew was under closer and more violent scrutiny, as was the State entity or persons who interacted with the Jews. The rationality of the inmate, the rationality of the starving is our quiet constancy. The starving are the same everywhere $XVFKZLW]WKH6WDOLQLVW*XODJRUWRGD\LQ'DUIXU And this constancy, timeless and international, was Panopticon’s fourth contradiction. Time. The cleanest way to breakdown this contradiction is in reference to McTaggart’s “The Unreality of Time” argument which proposes 145
a tri-pronged series by which to examine the containment and relationship of events in time.289 The first is the “A-Series” in which an event occurs as so ordered by the temporal placement of the speaker. In other words, “the series of the temporal positions are in continual transformation, in the sense that an event is first, part of the future, then part of the present, and then the past.’ The second perspective is the “B-Series” in which the events ‘can be ordered according to the different series of temporal positions by way of the two WHUPUHODWLRQVZKLFKDUHDV\PPHWULF LU-reflexive and transitive – ‘comes before’ (or precedes) and ‘comes after’ (or follows).’ The first view, ‘A6HULHV¶LVDµWHQVLRQDO¶DVVHUWLRQ PHDQLQJLWLVEDVHG on the temporal perspective of the speaker, for example, “It is raining today.” The second view, ‘B-Series’, is non-tensional, because it does not depend on temporal placement, for example, “It rained on July 14, 1998 in Honolulu.” The practicality of understanding the differences between these two positions emerges when comparing their truth values. The first assertion, “It is raining WRGD\´LVWUXHIRURQO\WKDWSDUWLFXODUUDLQ\GD\ ZKHUHDVWKHWUXWKYDOXHRI the second assertion will always be true regardless of temporality of the speaker (provided of course that it did, in fact, rain on July 14, 1988, in Honolulu). The third and final category is the C-series. This category arises from the detraction of a B-series’ temporality, which is contextualized by its corresponding A-series. In other words, the C-series stands as the liminal between the A-series and B-VHULHVFKDUDFWHULVWLFV DQRQ-temporal entity 289 John Ellis McTaggart, “The Unreality of Time”, Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, Vol. 17, no. 274 (1908): 456-473. His thesis examined these three series for the purpose of disproving ‘reality’ of time. This part of his argument will not be explored in this section for reasons of irrelevance.
146
containing events locked to each other in permanent relation, as McTaggart explains:
Events have an order. They are, let us say, in the order M, N, O, P. And they are therefore not in the order M, O, N, P, or O, N, M, P, or in any other possible order. But that they have this order no more implies that there is any change than the order of the letters of the alphabet… implies any change. And thus those realities which appear to us as events might form such a series without being entitled to the name of events, since that name is only given to realities which are in a time series.290 In other words, McTaggart structures these three series so as to allow time to be experienced as: temporally based events falling into a linear past, present, and future, which is open to external influences of change, and is sensible in and of itself (A-series), the linear occurrence of ordered events which are only sensible within a temporal setting (B-series), and finally, the permanently ordered occurrence of events lacking direction, and thereby, lacking the element of ‘time’ (C-series). As discussed in earlier, interpretations of rationality/irrationality are solidified in the unique habitus as determined by diverse factors and influences from social norms and practices usually familiar to an individual. Similarly, a relevant interpretation of time for the individual is conditioned by external pressures alternatively constraining and enabling his movements and possibilities. By applying McTaggart’s three series to the categories in the state and state of exception examined in this thesis, a new opportunity
290
Ibid.
147
emerges for understanding how and why events in the state and death camps unfolded as they did. Why did prisoners not rebel? How could doctors maintain both the job as sadistic scientist and the family role of loving parent? It is through appreciating the significance of differing interpretations of time, that the inaction of the former group and the inexplicable ‘doubling’ of the latter begin to re-enter the realm of comprehensibility, of explicable ‘normalcy.’ In this way as well the genocide category, the exceptional event, re-emerges in our collective study as a terrifying future possibility once more. And so in 1908, while proving the unreality of time, McTaggart paradoxically provided the reality of genocide, of Panopticon’s fifth contradiction: Time’s interpretive condition of possibilities. In designating the inmate as the man in homo sacer as a legal nonentity though still bound by legality, the state, and we assumed, the inmate, would fall into line of such a simple, even unconsidered, understanding of time. For the tangible state figure, the guard, time was measured, first, by clocks and calendar, and second, by the activities so designated by those presiding over mere clocks and calendars. For example, morning began at 5am. Breakfast was at 7am. Roll call was at noon. Dinner was at 6pm. A selection occurred on what day and time as determined by either the camp Kommander, so in Auschwitz by Höss, or by another such Nazi official. The time framing act of the SS man was the time of the lawyer in the state, of the American in New York, of the Austrian banker, and so forth. Again, the normalcy of the exceptional- exceptional state mirroring the exceptional state. This is the time captured by the ‘B-Series’/ At any point, the guard could note or reference an event which occurred: for example, “July 24th, 148
1942: 300 Häftlinge gassed and cremated.” As George Jackson described the relationship of time to the imprisoned man, “The Time slips away from me… There is no rest from it even at night… The days, even the weeks lapse one into the other, endlessly into one another. Each day that comes and goes is exactly like the one that went before.”291 And so lingered time in the life world of the concentration camp inmate. After a few days or weeks in the camp, how could he and why would he keep track of such a menial and useless thing as “dates”? For the inmate, time was measured, first, by activities and second, and far rarely, clocks and calendars. Usually these latter forms of temporal custodianship would be secretly or inadvertently found – if one secured the impossible job, as did Primo Levi, of working indoors were such mechanical quotidian objects were as commonplace as they were in the state. However, this inmate working indoors would have already stepped outside of the value of “Jews are to be killed as quickly as possible in the camps, Jews have no use to the state, the Jews are our enemy.” And so while still inmate and very much subjected to the same rules and death possibilities of the inmates, the Jew in the laboratory, in the hospital or kitchen, stood in a niche above the Jew who worked outdoors carrying train rails or wooden planks. These activities, infused with temporal meaning for the guards and other staff in the way of responding to a clock or calendar, were locked in permanent and temporally irrelevant order for the uninformed inmate who had virtually no access to a means of ascertaining hours or days. Thus for the prisoner, morning began when the barrack Kapo or guard yelled for inmates 291 George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994), 10.
149
WRULVHDQGZDVK%UHDNIDVWUROOFDOOVHOHFWLRQGLQQHUEHG DOOFRPPRQ predictable events that nonetheless only began with the order of a guard. And similarly, death. Death for, say inmate 123456, occurred on July 14, 1941, according to the guard. The death of inmate 123456 occurred one day before liberation, or in the day before the bread rations were decreased, according to the other inmates - provided, of course, that they even knew of his death. As reported by a “prisoner” in Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, “My sense of time was also affected, since each day’s torturous moment seemed quite a bit longer than it would have been if one were enjoying oneself. The worst thing about this experience was the total depression that set in from being constantly hassled and the fact that there was no way of getting out.”292 In his own reflections on the experiment, Zimbardo added to this prisoner’s recollection by describing the sensation of time as described by another prisoner, “He also told us of the time distortion that expanded and contracted events and had confused him when he was awakened several times during the night for interminable counts. He reported a mental dullness like a fog surrounding everything.”293 This mental dullness was similarly reflected in the memoirs of ex-convict and playwright, Ken Whalen, “People on the outside tend to live looking toward WKHIXWXUH7KHIXWXUHIRUDFRQYLFWLVYDJXHDQGVNHWFK\+LVSDVWLVJRQH people stop writing after a while. The present become magnified.”294 That was Panopticon’s sixth contradiction.
292 293 294
Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 109. Ibid. Ken Whalen, San Francisco Chronicle, February 14, 1974.
150
In another way that the Jew/homo viator contradicted the Nazi ideal in the matters of time was in the results of history and product of century and century over again, but rarely made or laid down claim to that history. The Nazi consistently laid claim to a historical presence. The Nazi era was mostly focused on creating that temporality. And that was the final contradiction of the Nazi Panopticon.
151
Chapter IX
The SS Guard
Leave this Europe, where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their streets, in all corners of the globe.295
When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find far more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have been committed in the name of rebellion.296
295
Jean Paul Sartre, Introduction in The Dying Colonialism, Frantz Fanon. (New York: Grove Press, 1965), x. C.P. Snow, “Either –Or,”Progressive, (1961), 24.
296
152
Since the Nazi surrender and international exposure to the horrors of the camps, the character of the SS camp guard has been questioned as intensely as the character of Hitler himself. Who were these men (and women) that could carry out state orders of massacre with apparent ease during the day, and then return home at night as civilized citizens capable of enjoying theatre, the fine arts? Is the nature of humanity capable of such callous existence? Perhaps the emotion driving these perdurable questions is not only the passionate need to understand mass brutality, but a fear that such darkness is a natural, albeit latent, trait capable ofrealization in an extreme situation.297
Thus
this
chapter
focuses
on
how
rationality
and
irrationality of the SS camp guards was not engendered or as solidified solely under Nazi doctrine as often idealized in Goebbels’ escapist film SURGXFWLRQV UDWKHUWKHJXDUGV¶UDWLRQDOLW\LUUDWLRQDOLW\SUDFWLFHVLQWKLVOLPLQDO state often fell far short of the stringent standards promoted in state depiction of the conceptualized SS man.
I.
Rationality of SS Guards as Executioners: The rationality of WKH 66 UHOLHG RQ D WZR IROG MXVWLILFDWLRQ first, the
collective social knowledge of alleged crimes by the Jews against the state, and second, the significance of honor as encapsulated by the Führerprinzip. Regarding the intensity of SS rationalized indoctrination, Rees wrote in Auschwitz, “We were convinced… there was a great conspiracy of Jewishness 297 This fear was forcefully expressed twice in recent history, at the conclusions of the psychological experiments of Stanley Milgran and Philip Zimbardo who found authoritative figures and well tuned pressure the elicit brutality in (almost) all of their subjects.
153
against us…the Jews put us into misery.”298 In order for National Socialist extermination policy in the camps to succeed, the implementation of state propaganda had to be thorough in penetrating the conscience and logic of the SS man. At any given time, there were only 3,000 SS guards within the gates RI $XVFKZLW] FOHDUO\ GHPRQVWUDWLQJ WKH DEVROXWH QHHG IRU HDFK JXDUG WR embody the prototypical model of stoic military obedience. As many of the guards posted in the camps and on the war fronts were young soldiers nurtured through childhood and pubescence with only myths of Jewish treachery in WWI, they sustained immunity to the naturalized antiSemitism of their German progenitors. However, their passionate expressions of generational bitterness and disappointment were inevitably bound to find direction, “by identifying a definable group as the biological embodiment of catastrophic political and social changes...”299 This focused outpouring, in conjunction with the thorough nature of state propaganda and careful indoctrination programs, inculcated the soldiers with an anti- Semitic virulence soon rivaling that of their parents. Thus these interactions with Jews in the camp and on the front moved “the eternal appearance of the real and mythical Jew (and) attained a closer resemblance…the abstract enemy – figures now… come to life.”300 A letter published in Der Stürmer even thanked the editors for their accurate portrayal of the backstabbing Jew, “…as every soldier can confirm.”301 If 298
Laurence Rees, Auschwitz, (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2005), 133. Ulrich Herbert, National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 19. 300 Avraham Barkai, “Volksgemenschaft, ‘Aryanization’ and the Holocaust” in the National Socialist Extermination Policies., ed. Ulrich Herbert. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 43. 301 Ibid., 42. 299
154
these occasional letters of cold prejudice and alleged self-realizations could be justified as common soldiers attempting to find succor the stresses of war, a military report filed in October 1941 dispels this illusion:
Should there still be people who have some compassion left for the Jews, they should be allowed to have a look at such a ghetto: the mass appearance of this rotten, corrupted and decayed race cures any sentimental humanism. Of course, even with the sense of an ascetic brotherhood formed in stoicism and militaristic dedication, the common SS man was not immune to the financial benefits replete in this underworld replete with wealth. Desperate to try any tactic to save their lives, even while entering into camp life, Jews offered to the guards their money, jewels, gold, and anything else they had managed to smuggle out of the ghetto. While official policy dictated that these goods be immediately turned over to the State, such easy forms of self-gain were irresistible to the guards, as Höss was to note, “the treasures brought in by the Jews gave rise to avoidable difficulties to the camp itself… (they) were not always strong enough to resist the temptation …(which) lay within such easy reach.”302 More bluntly, Trunk noted:
None of the personnel was free from having taken bribes. There was scarcely an SS man who had not made themselves rich with money, foreign currency… in the camp, one could buy everybody, everything had a price.303 302
Rees, Auschwitz, 173. Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation, (New York: Macmillan Inc., 1972), 398. 303
155
Ironically, it came to be then that the very crimes of alleged foreign currency corruption and theft of which many German Jews had been convicted, sending them to death camps, were then actually committed by the SS, often serving as distraction from the murderous camp missions that they had promised the Führer they would fulfill. The time spent in the Schutzstaffel also created in each man the sense of solidity in a nation of prevailing contradictions. “We did not understand what was happening around us, everything was mixed up. The SS offered us a series of simple ideas that we could understand, we believed in them.”304 This sense of relief ZDV QRWFRQILQHG WRWKHJXDUGV UDWKHULW echoed in the minds of their families and friends, all of whom offered support for his task. “Everything was in order again, and clean. There was a feeling of national liberation, a new start… People said: “Well this is a revolution, it is an astonishing, peaceful revolution, but it is a revolution.”305 Thirty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Philip Zimbardo conducted his famous Stanford Prison Experiment, which, inter alia, led to a drafting of ethical guidelines for sociological experiments which were not entirely dissimilar to the ethical guidelines drafted for the medical field following the “Doctors’ Trial” in Nuremberg. Following the conclusion of the experiment, Zimbardo received feedback from the boys role-playing as the prison guards. One comment offered during the feedback session particularly stands out for potential applicability to how SS guards felt during their duties (not altogether surprising since these Stanford boys and the SS 304 305
Rees, Auschwitz, 9. Ibid., 5.
156
guards were roughly the same age and of the same or similar educational backgrounds):
At the time, if you had questioned me about the effect I was having, I would say well, they must be a wimp. They’re weak or they’re faking. Because I wouldn’t believe what I was doing could actually cause someone to have a nervous breakdown. It was just us sorta getting out jollies with it. You know. Let's be like puppeteers here. Let's make these people do things.306 In reference to this last sentence “Let’s make these people do things,” Zimbardo notes that the more thoroughly this particular boy immersed himself in his guard duties, he was becoming “more cleverly inventive in designing punishments, the first signs of creative evil.”307 A similar remark by another guard articulated this similar position:
My enjoyment in harassing and punishing prisoners was quite natural for me because I tend to think of myself as being sympathetic to the injured, especially animals. I think that it was an outgrowth from my total freedom to rule the prisoners. I began to abuse my authority.308 A third revealing report by a ‘guard’ addressed the paradox of violent power – addictive yet liberating - identity produced in the prison guard role:
306
Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2008), 361. Ibid., 50. 308 Ibid.,186. 307
157
It’s almost like a prison that you create yourself – you get into it, and its just that it becomes the definitions you make of yourself, almost become walls, and you want to break out, and you want to be able to tell everyone that, ‘this isn’t really Me at all, and I’m a person who wants to get out and show that I’m free and I do have my own will, and I’m not the sadistic type of person that enjoys this type of thing.309 Although the above quotations are drawn from a synthetic situation, a mere sociological experiment, the thoughts of Franz Stangl, the Commandant of Sobibor, run surprisingly parallel to Zimbardo’s “guards.” Stangl revealed in a series of interviews his method of handling the murderous tasks of concentration camp duty, “The only way I could live was by compartmentalizing my thinking, there were hundreds of ways to take one’s mind off it (the liquidations). I used them all… I made myself concentrate on work, work, and again, work… I see it (the liquidations), but I don’t do anything to anybody.”310
II.
Character of the SS Guard: Just as objecting and refusing orders was overlooked and at times,
forgiven in the occupation of camp doctor, the SS guard was offered a similar leniency after he had committed to his state duties. This offer of opting out of executioner duties addresses the (im)potential for free choice, even for the
309 310
Ibid. Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness, (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 164.
158
genocidaire. Despite the thorough indoctrination of the SS man, there remained this unaccountable variable of personal morality ostensibly recognized by the Nazi state that ultimately was unable to deny an inherent existence of doubt and humanity. The potential conundrum left the SS with the option of creating a side of themselves that resembled automatons. “The only protection against the cancer of self-doubt in the face of orders that were not immediately explicable was hardness.”311 This belief was further echoed in the words of ranking officers and Reich officials maintaining the lower level soldiers who had to maintain the same iron will as the higher level soldier, indeed every military figure had to be “… as hard as granite, otherwise the work of the Führer will perish.”312 Nonetheless, all previous beliefs including religious, were supposedly stripped during SS training, leaving only the acceptance of superior orders, the automatic “rightness” of which needing no personal validation because, “if a superior ordered someone to be imprisoned, someone to be executed… the order must be correct.”313 The SS were further bound by the Führerprinzip, the iron principle which cemented the loyalty of each man ZLWKWKH3DUW\RDWK³,YRZLQYLRODEOHILGHOLW\WR$GROI+LWOHU ,YRZDEVROXWH obedience to him and to the leaders he designates for me.314 This oath was reinforced through a more physical form of “telling.” Inscribed on each SS trooper’s belt was the SS slogan “Meine Ehre heist Treue” (“My Loyalty is my Honor”). The belt also bore a skull and crossbones, symbolizing the 311
Ibid., 9. Ibid., 8. 313 Rees, Auschwitz, 5. 314 Trial of the Major War Criminals, 55. 312
159
visible and unyielding standard of expected obedience. This standard was known as Kadavergehorsam, (“the obedience of a corpse”).315 State propaganda reached its zenith in the combined naked Jewish existence and interred compassion of guards. Despite methodical planning for this outcome, the remaining factor with the potential to upset this novel equation was this aforementioned humanity inherent in SS guards, some of whom had even previously lived as neighbors with the prisoners. This variable was to rarely found fruition in the camps, however, because only SS guards indoctrinated with exceptional ethics of Nazi rationality were accepted for duty. Nonetheless, the SS man lived in the “midst of determinate words and indeterminate meaning… (not just) every fragment of language, but every sound, every noise that is at once resonant with meaning and wholly indeterminate in meaning.”316 In order to be accepted or chosen for guard duty, the SS man would have already demonstrated his commitment to the state in other violent acts, for example, as a spontaneously formed executioner in the Police Battalion Reserves. Browning speaks to the extent in which the “ordinary German” was able to retain his pre-Nazi identity while acting as state executioner.317 It was from this adoption of an entirely synthetic character that the SS guard was
315
The sense of obedience reinforced from the uniform brings to mind a line from Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale: “Sure this robe of mine doth change my disposition.” (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997), 947. 316
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, (Oxford: Oxf ord University Press, 1985), 135. 317 Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion and the Final Solution in Poland, (New York: R andom House Press Ltd, 1993), 113.
160
selected for Auschwitz duty. However, while the SS had been thoroughly indoctrinated to accept the facts of the death camps, the newly arrived inmates had not. As Höss later noted, “the key to successful mass murder on this scale was to conduct (it)…in an atmosphere of great calm.” If an inmate panicked on the thought of gas chambers, he was taken aside and “shot with a small caliber gun that was quiet enough that those nearby would not hear the noise.”318
Significantly, Höss had been referencing the importance of
keeping the inmates, not the guards, calm during the mass selection process. However, the constant display of an outwardly peaceful demeanor by homo sacer even as their executioners raised their guns to shoot often astonished the guards. Hausner describes the surprise of the SS men and their attempts to understand this inexplicable placidity before death, “SS Colonel Blobel of Einsatzgruppen C, who was later in charge of another macabre Nazi activity, found a ‘psychological’ explanation. “The Jews apparently do not appreciate human life… that is the only reason why they could march to death so quietly. Our men on the spot were more tense than the victims.”319 Despite indoctrination of Nordic chivalrous behavior alongside adherence to state responsibilities, there were constant sparks of spontaneously exercised violence against even the most passive inmate. However, a camp guard could expect at most a gentle rebuke by his senior officer for digressing from inherent dignity natural in a soldierly bearing. Here the exceptional state’s primary ethic of irrationality plays an especially prominent role. While in the state, the guard would be expected to abide by 318 319
Rees, Auschwitz, 104. Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem, (Jerusalem: Herzl Press, 1978), 185.
161
his obligations to state ethics, namely, the abstinence of base murder, he tacitly understood those within the state of the exception could expect no such ethical refinement in his actions. As Feldman argued, “The state (m)others bodies in order to engender itself. The production of bodies - political subjects- the self production of the state.”320 In an attempt to continue the cycle of validating state propaganda, the Jew’s servile and short lived existence within the Panopticon was designed to
simultaneously
further
state economy while strengthening the
guard/prisoner dichotomy which aided in maintaining the guard’s disgust of this useless sacer. The prisoners within the camp were made analogous to the enemies at the front lines who openly attempted to kill German soldiers, thus “…between these two fights, openly at the front line and then on the home front, there’s absolutely no difference – so we exterminated nothing but enemies.”321 While continuous contact between guard and Jew theoretically (and at times, realistically) should have led to personal interactions and thus encourage deterioration of stereotypes, the perpetual visibility of the gas chambers quietly and constantly disallowed this possibility.322 In his discussion of the evolution of state treatment of the insane, Foucault noted 320
Alen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 11 5. 321 Ibid., 133. 322 A notable exception: SS Lieutenant Schwarz, a guard in Sobibor. Hausner described, “He (Schwarz) was visibly embarrassed when he encountered the first “tr ansport” and soon afterward sneaked into the prisoner’s huts saying “I had no idea where I was being sent. I can’t stand it and I have applied for transfer. Now I leave you.” After handshakes and an exchange of good wishes, he was gone. He became a legend: a human SS man.” Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem, 258.
162
that the solution adopted for those operating in the liminal as state aids for the insane was “at the boundaries of the distance inspired by horror, and pity that operated inside the space… one consequence was that the exclusion… took on a whole new meaning: it no longer marked the great caesura… DWWKHIXUWKHVWOLPLWVRIVRFLHW\ EXWLQVLGHWKHJURXSLWVHlf it drew a line of compromise between feelings and duty.”323 Drawing from Foucault’s theory to the reality of Auschwitz, Kogon presented the SS as an entity created under Himmler for two-fold duty, “On the one hand, it was to train the new ruling FODVV RQ WKH RWKHU LW ZDV WR eliminate all opposition… Their main purpose was the elimination of every trace of actual or
potential opposition
to
Nazi
rule.
Segregation,
debasement, humiliation, extermination – these were the effective forms of terror.”324 Auschwitz, among the other death camps, individual in this aspect as well. If a prisoner evaded guard and state power, he still would be entrapped by the psychological despair and physical destruction in the ominous presence and threat of the gas chambers.
323
Michel Foucault, History of Madness, (New York: Routledge, 2005), 432. Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them, Transl. by Heinz Norden, (NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1950), 20. 324
163
Chart V
SS Guard Rationality + Irrationality (Complex Term) Officers outside camps, but involved in executing camp massacres ~Heinrich Müller, Chief of Gestapo Irrationality Rationality Adherent to state laws Disavowed that & Führer principle; “Jews are our “Nordic gentleman”. downfall.” ~ Rare; unlikely assigned to camp duty.
~ Karl Hocker, Commandant Adjutant, Auschwitz Positive Deixis (Rationality + Not Irrationality)
Rationality + Not Rationality Figurative executioner of homo sacer ~ Train drivers of camp inmates ~ Zyklon B producer (I.G. Farben).
Exploited inmates’ skills in the name of the state before Irrationality + Not-Irrationality execution. Operated in state, ensured death in exceptional state by zealous effort; sociopath ~ Rudolf Höss, ~Adolf Eichmann Auschwitz head (Accepted bribes; (Aided inmates with showed disgust of food, clothes, clinic sacer) passes)
Negative Deixis (Irrationality + Not Rationality) Brutal, capable of sadism, feared by other guards; ‘Landsknecht’xxxiii ~ John Demjanjuk, (Sobibor).
~ Hans Lipski, ~ Franz Wunsch, Latvian guard, 1942 saved sister of inmate lover, 1942. Not-Irrationality
Not- Rationality
Not Rationality + Not Irrationality = (Neutral Term) Guards that transferred from camps or did not participate in camp killings ~ SS private Oskar Gröning, 1941.325
325
SS Master Sergeant Mathias Graf, who refused to lead an Einsatzgruppen squad. Justice Musmanno testified in 1961: “I told you about Erwin Schulz, who refused to go along with superior orders and asked that he might be released. And he was released by no one less than Heydrich. And not only was he released from carrying on these onerous, bloodthirsty deeds as a colonel, but later on even promoted to general.” Ibid., 335-6.
164
Chapter X
SS Doctors & The State of Exception
Strange how these mortals so loudly complain of the gods!/ :HDORQHSURGXFHHYLOWKH\VD\ \HWWKHPVHOYHV Make themselves wretched through folly, even counter to Fate.326
The historical account of humans is a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments… I cannot but conclude the bulk of your native to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature has ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.327
326 327
Homer, The Odyssey, book 24 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, (NY: Simon and Schuster, 2005), 146.
165
The ancient European fear of darkness coupled with the fear of homo viator judaicus was manifested most prominently during the Nazi era. Significantly, this fear served as a simultaneous meta-validation and explicit contradiction of Nazi Party ethics. The double helix of self-imposed fear acted primarily as an unuttered validation of the state propaganda depicting the quintessential Nordic soldier and ethnic German as bursting forth into a lighted future, leaving behind the tenebrous mysticism of the Jew whose people had betrayed efforts in WWI. However, this fear was also an established contradiction, considering the location of state directed and thus accepted medical research, conducted in the epicenter of the camps, was in the heart of the state of the exception.328 This contradiction thus served as a metaphorical extension to the Janus-faced foundation of the interface. Unable to ever fully separate state need and state fear, the camp became the novel liminal, a porous cell incorporating the ghetto and the state rationale. The placement of these medical labs is significant to understanding the prevalent and documented contradictions regarding the constant movement of guards and doctors between rationality and inexplicable cruelty. Rather than allowing inmate transportation to laboratories located in the state, where one would expect a doctor of medicine to establish his reputation, Berlin offices instead decreed the doctors to move into the camps. These laboratories were thus built behind the wires of the exceptional state, thus bringing the “rational” doctor into the world of the aberrant inmate. Perhaps this choice of location is a reason why Nazi medical research remains a tainted topic in the 328 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, (NY: Pantheon Books, 1977), 153.
166
contemporary world. These camp doctors may not have been so successful in conduct this same research within the state, where transported prisoners may not have been so expendable due to limited space for containment and the additional expenses of supplying them a diet with which to maintain a viable standard of living. The doctors’ introduction into the camp and camp life were, as Feldman noted: “…qualified by contact with impurity and by the decontamination rites.”329 The medical and scientific research of the camp doctors, even though state delegated, should have been marked with acknowledgements of the human abuse supporting the doctors’ research. This acknowledgement, by logic, would have left his work restricted to the bounds of the camp. However, this was not the case. Often the results presented by the doctors found praise in the Nazi state. Even in late 1942, Dr. Rascher was able to openly present his work at a conference in Nuremberg on “Prevention and Treatment of Freezing” in conjunction with Dr. Weltz who presented a thesis on “Warming up after Freezing to the Danger Point.”330 Consistent national and international support that is documented from within the community of camp doctors, and even a decade earlier, from the legal and medical support of the Reich’s nascent eugenics program. In order to understand how the Auschwitz doctors came to hold such power over the bodies of their inmates and patients, it may be first useful to outline the program preceding Auschwitz experiments – eugenics and the Aktion T4.
329 Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 45. 330 International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945-1 October 1946. (Buffalo: William S. Hein, 1995), 43.
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I.
Eugenics: The practice of eugenics in the Nazi state was jointly inspired by the
‘Marriage Loan Program’ (1933) which encouraged the “births of healthy national comrades” and ‘Law for Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases’ which called for the mandatory sterilization of those deemed unfit by the Genetic Health Courts (1930). These diseases included retardation, physical deformity, epilepsy, deafness, alcoholism and any mental illness.331 These laws and programs were not alone in the international medical or legal community. In both Denmark and Finland, eugenic policies had been approved by 1930.332 In two extraordinary cases of Scandinavian countries, sterilizations in Norway had continued on as state practice through most of the 20th century - in August 1997, it was revealed that 2,000 compulsory sterilizations had been performed between 1937 and 1976.333 Similarly, in Sweden, more than 60,000 “genetically defective” underwent a compulsory sterilization between 1935 and 1976.334 While a number of these sterilizations occurred during years of Nazi occupation, there is no explanation for why these practices continued after the war. Meanwhile on the other side of the ocean, 28 states in the United States had approved and implemented a sterilization program for the criminally insane (including sex offenders) and people “determined to be genetically inferior” by 1920.335 In one 1934 issue of Eugenic News, a magazine 331
Saul Friedman, A History of the Holocaust, (Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), 153. Nikolaus Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi German, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 368. 333 David Fraser, Law After Auschwitz, (North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 2005), 423. 334 Ibid., 425. 335 Friedman, A History of Holocaust, 153. 332
168
published by the US Eugenics Society, the editorial board had even offered medical and moral support for the Nazi castration program of the socially unfit.336 America itself contributed to the international eugenics community itself by sterilizing over 70,000 from 1904-1972 - in one particularly controversial case justified by Justice Holmes because, “Three generations of imbeciles is enough.”337 Of course, as the dates and number sterilized show, the American and other European eugenics programs never reached the obsessive levels as in Nazi Germany. However, even if international enthusiasm for carrying out the program’s objectives were not as pronounced, support for Nazi doctors was widespread, as Friedman noted:
Darre, founder of the Artamanen movement, likened Züchtung (breeding) to keeping a garden free of weeds and praised the writings of Lothrop Stoddard. In 1936, Davenport, Laughlin, and Dr. Foster Kennedy were given honorary degrees from the 8QLYHUVLW\RI+HLGHOEHUJ«E\WKLVWLPH WKHIRUFHGVWHULOL]DWLRQ program was in full swing in Germany.338 The Nazi eugenics program eventually affected some 360,000 individuals by 1939. Because each case had to be argued before one of the 200 Hereditary Health Courts in Germany, approximately 1/20th of every German judge and lawyer dealt with a “hereditary health” matter.339 Often the fate of the defendant would rely on his eugenic value, as expressed in the question, “Has the offender a bad hereditary disposition…is his inner being 336
Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons, 368. Freidman, A History of Holocaust, 153. Ibid., 155. 339 Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons, 150. 337 338
169
asocial?”340 This reliance on the cooperation of the courts was widely supported by the state and its legal community, as exclaimed by one prison doctor, “Racial hygiene and criminal law belong together: both aim at selection by suppressing parasites of the race, enemies of society!”341 However, the drive for thorough implementation of compulsory sterilization found virulent expression in Nazi Germany, which at the time, and still today, marks an unprecedented frenzy. While in Finland, only 54 cases were condemned to castration in 1935-1950, over 1,800 in Germany were convicted in that same period.342 Similarly, while other countries reserved castration for primarily (and often exclusively) the criminally insane, in Germany, the mentally ill and “feeble minded” were sentenced along with the criminally insane. By a logic that braided in public approval on the state derogatory categorization of the mentally ill, with social pressures to remove dangerous influences from the public realm, with the already articulated desire to sterilize the Afro-German children, the so called “Rhineland Bastards”, the philosophy behind the Aktion T4 program unfolded.343
II.
Aktion T4 & Nazi Euthanasia The Nazi euthanasia program, coded Aktion T4, was a short lived,
ferocious program which claimed the lives of over 100,000 mentally ill and physically handicapped German citizens. The first public proposal a state 340
Ibid., 302. Ibid., 151. 342 Ibid., 368. 343 For additional insight into the logic and reason behind medical decision making, refer to Bryon Good, Medicine, rationality, and experience: an anthropological perspective, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 341
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endorsed euthanasia program was after a 1935 rally, when Hitler spoke of an intention to “eliminate the incurably ill” to state physician Dr. Gerhard Wagner. Only a year later, Wagner hosted a conference regarding the shared opinion of fellow high ranking officers to support a program which would both euthanize “idiotic children” and the mentally ill, then justify the brutality by making films on the patient’s lives so the public would understand “the misery of their lives.”344 By 1938, not only were other Nazi officials holding similar conferences, but parents of mentally ill children were requesting the state allow Gnadentod (“mercy killings”) of their children. In early 1939, Hitler granted permission for the genesis of such a program, which was to follow the usual Nazi hierarchy. Political officials gave the order for the implementation of the program to head doctors, thus medicalizing the political philosophy of the Reich. These orders in turn led to the creation of the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Diseases.345 In the first half of the program, Gnadentod was executed on the mentally and physically handicapped youth with injections of luminal. Following the official Fuhrer Decree of October 1939, the program was extended to adults, with an ad hominum justification:
The idea is unbearable to me that the best flower of our youth must lose its life at the front in order that the feeble minded and irresponsible asocial elements can have a secure existence in an asylum.346 344
Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, (NY: Perseus Books Group, 2000), 50. Ibid., 52. 346 Dr. Pfannmuller, as quoted in Ibid., 63. 345
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Despite the inundation of Nazi propaganda calling for the deaths of these “supernumerary eaters” an increasing number of emotional and public protests began to be held by average German citizens and led by German clergy. The outrage felt by the concerned citizens, which was by no means entirely prevalent are represented in this letter addressed to the Reich Minister of Justice:
Since some weeks insane persons are being taken from the institutions on the grounds of military evacuation. The directors of the institution are enjoined to absolute secrecy. Shortly afterwards the relative are informed that the sick person has died…this is plain murder, just as in the concentration camps… this gang of murderers have defiled the German name.347 Concern was likewise felt among top Party officials, as seen here in this letter from Himmler to Brack in 1940:
The population recognizes the gray automobiles of the SS and think they know what is going on at the constantly smoking crematory (of institution Grafeneck). What happens there is secret and yet is no longer one… there remains only one thing, to discontinue the use of the institution in this place…348 Hitler’s inevitable call for cessation in 1941 obviously did not end the
347
Trials of the Major War Criminals, 65. Letter from Chief of Institution for Feeble-Minded in Stetten to Reich Minister of Justice Dr. Frank, September 6 1940, quoted in Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals, Washington, U.S Govt. Print. Off., 1949-1953, Vol. I, p. 854.
348
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SURJUDP UDWKHULWVLPSO\PRYHGH[HFXWLRQVRXWRIWKHSXEOLFH\H5HERUn the exceptional sphere as the “14f13” program in April 1941, it set the precedent for a systematic killing operation of thousands of inmates. The first victims were prisoners of the Sachsenhausen camp who were selected by T4 doctors as “ballast” within the infirmed of the camp, and summarily executed.349 However, it should be noted, that while in Germany, the euthanasia program was conducted under the rationalized context of civilized mercy, in other parts of the Reich, the mentally ill were killed with far less pretense. Predating the processed formality of the Aktion T4 were the secretive massacres of 15,000 mentally ill in West Prussia and Poland in early 1939. These handicapped people were either shot by SS Kommandos or otherwise murdered in makeshift mobile gas chambers.
III.
The Auschwitz Doctors: a.
Imagined Community:
The Auschwitz camp doctors, the five of whom most notoriously remembered, Dr. Herta Oberhauser, Professor Carl Clauberg, Dr. Herta Oberhauser. Dr. Josef Mengele, and Dr. Franz Lucas, formed an imagined community complete with the power to determine life and death. Although membership within this community did not require identical personalities or goals regarding Jewish extermination, all had taken an 18th month long course on National Socialist medical policies and were Party members.350 In the words of one survivor describing the range of personalities among the camp 349 350
Orth, “Concentration Camp SS”, 315. Trials of the Major War Criminals, 59.
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doctors, “(there were) zealots who participated eagerly in the extermination process and evHQGLG³H[WUDZRUN´RQEHKDOIRINLOOLQJ WKRVHZKRZHQWDERXW the process more or less methodically and did not more and no less than they IHOWWKH\KDGWRGR DQGWKRVHZKRSDUWLFLSDWHGLQWKHH[WHUPLQDWLRQSURFHVV only reluctantly.”351 Prior to July 1942, the selection was periodical and thereby often avoided by the reluctant, the adoption of a systematic selection process for all trains bearing new inmate, the abyss between the zealots and the reluctant became more pronounced. Those averse to the selection duty were able to withdraw if they expressed their reluctance in terms of “inability rather than defiance.”352 In the face of these recalcitrant doctors, Dr. Christian Wirths even responded with, “Finally, a person of character.” His comment underlines the rationality within the camps, and the expected standard of SS professionalism even in an exceptional state. As one doctor phrased it, those unable or unwilling to step down from their state duties, “the selections were the specific ordeal the initiate had to undergo in order to emerge as a functioning Auschwitz ‘adult’.”353 Further, speaking for the doctors whose time in Auschwitz was not especially marked with zealotry, this doctor went on to explain that “the essential psychological situation of doctors was resignation to its killing structure…I’m here, I can’t get out. If prisoners come this is the natural phenomenon.”354 The (ir)rationality of the camp based doctors stood in juxtaposition against the state’s expression of (ir)rationality. The primary focus of the 351
Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, 194. Trials of the Major War Criminals, 198. Ibid., 196 354 Ibid. 352 353
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doctors was found in the realm of striving towards scientific and medical success of novel experimentation, while the state’s cardinal concern (in the early regime years) rested upon the furtherance of joint economic and militaristic visions and then, in the last stages of the regime, on ensuring basic state security.355 This imagined community of doctors operated within the paradigm which propounded, “on the whole, racism and anti-Semitism (which) manifest themselves, not across national boundaries, but within them. In other words, they justify not so much foreign wars as domestic repression and domination.”356 This drive for domination was fueled by organizations such as the Ahnenerbe Society which was dedicated to studying the cultural traditions and anthropology of the Germans. As the war progressed, scientists of the Ahnenerbe Society, usually honorary members of the SS, opened the researched foundation “Experiments Ahnenerbe” which encouraged the use of experiments on inferior humans.357 Due to these kind of collective activities and the assemblage of transferred (and seemingly uninterrupted) state norms into the exceptional sphere led Lifton to conclude that the doctors must have undergone a “doubling” process by which doctors struggled with their previous ethics and the requirements of the exceptional state:
The conflicting oaths, contradictions between murderous cruelty and momentary kindness … seemed to manifest continuously during their time in Auschwitz. For the schism tended not to be 355 Alan Steinweiss, Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany, (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 62. 356 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (NY: Verso, 1991), 150. 357 Trials of the Major War Criminals, 36.
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resolved. Its persistence was part of the overall psychological equilibrium that enabled the SS doctor to do his deadly work. He became integrated into a large, brutal, highly functional system… Auschwitz was a collective effort.358 However accurate this psychological diagnosis may have held for some individual doctors, ‘doubling’ can not account for the universal and uniformity underlying the rationalities and irrationalities mirrored in the decisions and actions of doctors in all the camps. It was rather in the doctors’ de-individualization of the inmates led to a dichotomy of inmates and doctors. The role of the doctor was to demonstrate to his state his understanding of the proper duties and obedience of a professional scientist and physician. In these same actions, he portrayed for homo viator the uselessness of struggle, as his métier, which was previously to monitor and stave off death, had morphed to in fact hasten death’s arrival. The doctors’ understanding of the state and acceptance of Aryan philosophy denied the possibilities of compassion and mercy to the inmates. “It is not…out of sheer sadism that the SS men desire his (Jewish) defeat. They know that they system succeeds in destroying its victims before he mounts the scaffold is incomparably best for keeping the people in slavery.”359 His rationality aligned briefly with conditioned reason – it was reasonable according to Nazi ethics to exterminate those who betrayed the nascent Reich. “’Rational utility’ and corresponding doctrine and planning replaced moral and ethical and religious values. Nazi propaganda was highly effective in perverting public opinion and public conscience in a remarkably 358 359
Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, 212-3. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, (NY: Penguin Classics, 1963), 87.
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short time. In the medical profession this expressed itself in a rapid decline in standards of professional ethics.”360 Further, under Nazi law and SS doctrine, the doctor was bound to the commands sent to him by superior officers. Along this route of obedience, it was only time before he was to create an impromptu medical ethic which could co-exist with his call to state obedience. “…no physician on his own would …conduct such an experiment by… moral sense, unless he had this immunity from the authoritarian state, which would give him… security under formal law and…a direct order to carry out.”361 This respect for the order was echoed by a witness during the Nuremberg Trial about the lack of legal recourse for assistants to charge the doctors with inmate murder, “If he has orders, then we can’t do anything about it.”362 Thus the emergence of the stupefying paradox in which the doctor could conduct experiments using prisoners as expendable laboratory animals, yet as an SS man and physician, still considering himself a man of medicine and humanity, which was naturally extended to other Aryans. One such example of this paradoxical nature is revealed in the private letter by Dr. Rascher regarding his immediate indignation upon learning about the sexual exploitation of Aryan women:
My racial conscience is outraged by the prospect of exposing to racially inferior concentration camp elements of a girl who is outwardly pure Nordic and who might be led on the right path by proper employment. For this reason, I decline to use this girl for 360 361 362
Alexander Mitscherlich, Doctors of Infamy, (NY: Henry Schuman, 1949), xxxi. Ibid., 161. Trials of the Major War Criminals, 198.
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my experimental purposes…363 Further, based out of the vestiges of respectability the medical profession projected, the Nazi doctors continued to operate under the mask of professionalism. Thus, long after citizens and leaders had privately acknowledged the horrors unfolding in the death camps, doctors nonetheless continued filing falsified death certificates. Incidentally, the program charged with specific reference to these falsifications was ‘14f13.’ The name itself, the product of the bureaucratic nature of Nazism underlining all exceptional state activities, had been born in the Medical Commission’s office in Berlin, the heart of the Reich state.364 A referenced and outline in Chapter VII, between the dual efforts of the doctor and guard, the inherent anomie of the camp and its exceptional nature became a space of norms, history and meaning. Lacking individual knowledge of inmates, except the occasional awareness of a particularly useful inmate, the doctor rather was certain of his power and the simultaneous existence of his patients and their lack of longevity. “He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity.”365 “Awareness of being imbedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of continuity, yet of “forgetting” the experience of this continuity - product of the ruptures of the late 18th century, engenders the need for a narrative of ‘identity.’366 363
cite Mitscherlich, Doctors of Infamy, 118. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 26. 366 Ibid., 205. 364 365
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“The consolidation of identity through the constitution of difference. The self assurance of identity through the construction of otherness… to come to terms with one’s implication in these strategies, one needs to examine established tactics of self-identity, not so much by engaging in self-inquiry into one’s deep interior as by exploring the means by which one has become constituted as what one is…”367 Just as in any modern society, the imagined community of the doctors exemplified typical human behavior, including the usual concerns for personal advancement and professional recognition. Within the state, these advancements would have been achieved with academic publication on the contemporary manner of staving off death, and continual patient maintenance in the office.368 In the exceptional state, the situation was reversed – publication was based on the experimentation and deaths of inferior beings, and when the human bodies had ceased to be useful, they were either burned, or their organs were extracted and sent outside the camp to academic centers, such as the Pathological Institute at Munich, for further analysis.369 The overall structure of the doctors’ imagined community was later presented as:
Just the way it is in a civilian community with all the human squabbling… Not only professional conflicts but also positions 367 William Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991/2002), 9. 368 In Studying the Jew, Steinweiss specifically noted how the body parts and blood samples of Auschwitz inmates were posted by Nazi camp doctors and sent into the Reich state. Doctors who operated solely within the state, often in cities as Berlin or Munich, turned a blind eye to the origins of these samples, thus acquitting quietly these exceptional state doctors of their abuse of unlimited inmate-turn-patient access. These subtle acceptances were echoed also in the attitudes of scientists and scholars within the state who would cite the studies, data and experimental findings of the exceptional state doctors. 369 Trials of the Major War Criminals, 42.
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of power… were fought out just as in any civilian organization… And it was exactly that way within the concentration camp especially so because of the secrecy and because it had such an exceptional position.”370 b.
Ethics:
Similar to ethics in the state, ethics in Auschwitz were based in rationality and obedience to the Fuhrer’s law. Re-defining the laws of the “good life” and the “good citizen,” Nazi ethics commemorated scientific work which justified Nazi ideology. Nazi philosophy engendered its own unique laws which governed morality and had legislated virtue. “The State may claim on two grounds to legislate on matters of morals. The Platonic ideal is that the State exists to promote virtue among its citizens. If that is its function, then whatever power is sovereign in the State…must have the right and duty to declare what standards of morality are to be observed as virtuous and must ascertain them as it thinks best.” This elucidation on the Nazi interpretation of the worthy life deterred from the accepted path in American, and by extension, other European national standards of morality and its ethical treatment of citizens and subjects. Agamben further details this disparity by noting, “this is not acceptable to Anglo-American thought. It invests the State with power of determination between good and evil, destroys freedom of conscience and is the paved road to tyranny.”371 The eugenics and euthanasia program, especially the Aktion T4 was an early and ominous insight into the modus operandi of Nazi doctrine. “Fundamentally, Nazism was a thoroughgoing ethics of Life. It had its own 370 371
Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, 179. Patrick Devlin, The Enforcement of Morals, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 87.
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concept of “dignified life”, and it accepted, implacably, the necessity of putting an end to undignified lives. Nazism isolated and carried to its ultimate conclusion the nihilist core of the “ethical disposition once it has at its disposal the political means to do something other than prattle.”372 As with other decrees of the Nazi state, eugenics was initially a tenuous movement soon validated with civil support, albeit a short lived one, funding, and a plentiful supply of bodies under Nazi law. Here too, as Foucault noted, “the question of evil (began) to work upon the ancient theme of force, how the question of law (began) to modify the theme of art and techne…”373
c. Experimental Acts by Auschwitz Doctors: The 1945-1946 Nuremberg Trial of German Major War Criminals found the doctors liable on four counts: Common design or conspiracy, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and membership in a criminal organization. The second count dealt primarily with the experiments conducted in the concentration camps, including: high altitude experiments, freezing experiments, malaria experiments, lost (mustard) gas experiments, sulfanilamide experiments, sea water experiments, epidemic jaundice experiments, sterilization experiments, spotted fever/typhus experiments, experiments with poison, and incendiary experiments.374 Not all of these were FRQGXFWHGLQ$XVFKZLW] IUHTXHQWO\FROODERUDWLRQDPRQJWKHGRFWRUVDQGWKHLU results re-tested and methodology re-fined occurred across camps. Thus, while the primary concern of this section is to examine the composition of the
372 373 374
Alain Badiou, Ethics, (NY: Verso, 2001), 36. Foucault, The Care of Self: The History of Sexuality. (NY: Vintage House, 1990), 68. Trials of the Major War Criminals, 11-13.
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imagined community and experiments of doctors in Auschwitz, experiments and doctors in other camps will be referenced in passing. According to Lifton, the experiments of Auschwitz doctors fell into two basic catHJRULHV WKRVHWKDWZHUHUHJLPHRUGHUHGIRUWKHIXOILOOPHQWRI ideological or military purposes, and those that were created ad hoc out of the initiative of the doctors acting as scientists.375 These two justifications for camp experiments eventually came to likewise encapsulate the reasons for using prisoners as guinea pigs. The doctors of Auschwitz were called on and funded by the state to undertake a number of tasks, including selections for the chambers, treating of inmate/patients, and scientific research. This research as mentioned above was often for medical knowledge meant to aid in survival of military personnel, or in the justification of Nazi top tier propaganda regarding the inferiority of Jews and other undesirables. The former research projects often included experiments in drowning, asphyxiation, high altitude survival, or immunity to diseases. The latter forms of research included experiments with twins, dwarves, pregnant women, and any other person considered medically unique, or abnormal. The extent to which state officials had cooperated with and even encouraged the nascent wishes of doctors to experiment on humans was made apparent in the evidence presented in “Doctors’ Trials” of 1946. The goals of the doctors’ were succinctly noted in the opening statement, “…these experiments revealing nothing which civilized medicine can use…the experiments were not only criminal but a scientific failure…and just as it destroyed character and morals, it dulled the mind.”376 As the 375 376
Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, 269. Mitscherlich, Doctors of Infamy, xx.
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prosecution claimed, the successes of these allegedly useful experiments have been widely disavowed. Nonetheless, while the conclusions reached in these experiments may not be necessary to debate here, it is vital to understand how these experiments came to maturation in the camps.
Auschwitz is much better suited in every respect for such tests than Dachau, because it is colder there, and because the size of the grounds causes less of a stir to be made (the test persons yell when they freeze)…377 Unusual for the Nazi habit of hiding genocidal policies beneath layered euphemisms, letters between SS physicians regarding the use of prisoners among all the camps was surprisingly open. As quoted in one such letter from Reich Physician SS Dr. Grawitz addressed to Himmler:
…this office offers no objection to carrying out at the Rascher experimental laboratory in the Dachau concentration camp…Jews or other prisoners to be taken from quarantine (are) to be used as far as possible…I suggest that the anti-social gypsy half-breeds in Auschwitz be used…378 Lifton noted that often, “…doctors were further enabled … by the shared sense that Auschwitz was morally separate from the rest of the world…not geographical isolation, but its existence as a special enclave of bizarre evil, which rendered it exempt from ordinary rules of behavior…also its extreme contradictions contributed to its function.”379 Empowered by this 377 378 379
Ibid., 30. Ibid., 37. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, 200.
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exceptionality of both location and state duty, doctors conducted their experiments in the paradoxically comfortable security of state condoned professionalism – a comfort which addresses Agamben’ problem on the reformation of politics when called into play by the presence of the bare life in the camp, “the space of this absolute impossibility of deciding between fact and law, rule and application, exception and rule, which nevertheless incessantly decides between them.”380 The moral individuality of Auschwitz and even its location in occupied Poland moved the death camp from the terrain of familiarity to a place as little experienced as the Elysian Fields – a place of myth and surrender. Further, as testified by Professor Schroeder during the Nuremberg Trials: “because of the then prevalent…air raids over the whole of Germany, no guarantee for an uninterrupted executions of these experiments could be given... However, it was known that air raids (did not occur) on the concentration camps.”381 During the “Doctors’ Trials,” the prosecution staff interrogated Neff, a technical assistant to Dr. Rascher, offered these details on freezing and drug/alcohol experiments undertaken:
“Now will you tell the Tribunal approximately how many test persons were used over the whole period? “Between 280-300 test persons were used… the total number of experiments ran to between 360-400, since some test persons had to undergo two and even three experiments…between 80-90 died of the freezing experiments.” 380
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 173. Trials of the Major War Criminals, 437.
381
184
“Now, how many experimental subjects do you remember they used in the Holzlohner-Finke-Rascher experiments? “During that period some 50-60 persons were used… there were 15 fatalities, or it may have been 18…”382 Adding to his testimony on the nature of Dr. Rascher’s experiments was this statement on Dr. Mengele’s camp practices offered by a survivor:
Between 1943-1945, Dr. Mengele … sen(t) thousands to their deaths. When typhoid struck the camp in May 1943, he ordered the extermination of 1,600 Gypsies.. To contain an outbreak of typhus, he had 600 women prisoners killed. At the end of 1944, …he arranged the gassing of all 40,000 over ten days in November. That same year, he approved the killing of 1,000 young boys who could not touch the top of a soccer goal.383 A doctor came from Auschwitz for several days, possibly a week, and all day long, while he was in camp, he was busy sterilizing gypsy children, without using any anesthetics. After sterilizing the children used to come out crying, asking their mothers what had been done to them.384 However, herein even this place of incessant terror and unbroken anomie laid the inability of the Nazis to entirely conquer the inherent ethics of SS guards and Reich citizens. Despite the open violence on Jews and other former state subjects in the streets of Germany and Poland, it was necessarily acknowledged that such persecution was ostensibly reserved for the 382 383 384
Ibid., 25. Friedman, A History of Holocaust, 376. Mitscherlich Doctors of Infamy, 140.
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misdemeanors of Reich enemies. In order to continue harming the Jews and other unwanted populations, the state constantly had to re-affirm its moral exceptionality in its genocidal acts. Without disturbing pre-existing norms of morality and ethics, necessary to continue the state’s progress, citizens had to understand they themselves could escape the same fate as the Jews if they acted according to Nazi Party socio-legal limitations.
In the words of one
SS guard, “I never received instruction in criminal law and procedures. The thing was, though, I already knew, as a person, which crimes had to be punished with death...”385 His unquestioned reliance on “healthy common sense” born from the heart of Nazi doctrine underlined the unthinking manner in which the SS practiced their unique complicity. In other words, any major possibilities of compassion were disabled once the SS had surrendered his previous norms and morals, and had adopted Nazi ethics of state obedience and virulent anti-Semitism. This surrender was additionally illustrated in the few demographics of those who were selected to handle both the chemicals and victims for the chambers. “The group handling the gas had been originally drawn from personnel associated with the manufacturer, but the responsibility was transferred to a special group of “disinfectors” from among the SS medical corpsmen…part of the duty of the doctor on the Auschwitz ramp was to take the necessary measures to protect them exposure to Zyklon-B and to be prepared to treat them should such exposure occur.”386 In his state correspondences, the doctor most frequently provided two explanations for his laboratory that symbolically doubled as an altar to 385 386
Orth, “Concentration Camp SS”, 331. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, 161.
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Thanatos. The first reason was for the maintenance of a controlled camp population, which in turn justified his second reason to forge the maximum efficiency from his facilities, which were consistently strained by inmate medical needs.387 Nonetheless, despite plentiful evidence to the contrary, the doctor was not arbitrarily handed the power of death over life, as seen in the 1933 example in Dachau, where the Munich Prosecutor’s Office implicated a camp doctor for an inmate’s murder.388 The possibilities replete for research and experimentation born in the constant and massive sample sizes available in the inmate population of Auschwitz were not lost upon enterprising scientists and doctors, for example:
I agree to the proposal to test a process for making sea water potable on prisoners in concentration camps. I suggest that the anti-social gypsy half-breeds in Auschwitz… to be used for this purpose.389 The Reich propaganda that specifically focused the medical community geared its messages to discourage compassion in those who dealt with the inmates on a daily basis, lest the sight of their suffering and abbreviated lives conjure sympathy in the doctors. Lifton similarly characterizes the Nazi agenda as ‘ruthlessly’ committed to crushing those still embracing the concept of compassion for labeled Reich enemies, for ‘…as the symptom of an illness which threatens the healthy unity of an indivisible national organism, regardless of the subjective wishes of its supporters.’
387 388 389
Ibid., 150. Ibid., 154. Ibid., 37.
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Subsequently, through this enforced denial of empathy and absence of any opportunity for a medical professional in the liminal state to express a doubt in the broader state agenda and categorizations, the doctors aided in extending the state based depiction of disease-cure imagery as a still larger reversal of healing and killing.”390 The objectives driving Nazi state research lacked the sadism so often historically leveled towards its doctors. The research topics were directed by the state for the purpose of aiding state war efforts and at times, for furthering ideologies set forth by race theorists, not for the unrestricted, unbound pleasures of torturing the defenseless. Sadism, the jouissance derived from pain of another, was contradictory to the intended and initial purpose of research, as directed by the state. “… I grant authorization for the use in the experiments of eight criminals under the sentence of death at Auschwitz…I share your view that an effective campaign against infectious jaundice would be of immense value…signed, H. Himmler.”391 Here Himmler, acting as the agent of the rational state, found the solutions for state ills in the bodies of the condemned, those who can no longer contribute intellectually or economically to the state. “The Fuhrer is truly, a nomos empuschon, a living law. Hence, the difficulty of judging according to normal juridical criteria when judging those officials… (who) did nothing other than execute the word of the Fuhrer.”392 As mentioned above, the ethic of Nazism was put forth as an ethic of restraint. This ethic can be clearly demonstrated in the manner in which Nazi
390 391 392
Ibid., 153. Mitscherlich, Doctors of Infamy, 52. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 173.
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doctrine called for the dignified and beautiful Nordic, one free from the mystic chaos and irrationality of the Jew. And does this not then bring to mind the bearing of notorious and quintessential Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele, characterized as handsome as Clark Gable or Rudoloph Valentino?393 Thus, while the abuses in the laboratories and the SS status of many Nazi doctors belonged in the exceptional state, the purposes of research and doctor were in fact meant to fall in alignment with this state ethic. This exemplification rendered them as the exclusive inclusive within the exceptional state, a foil to the Jewish homo sacer who had managed to remain in his home within the Nazi state, (usually due to an Aryan spouse or paid protection by a state official). Regarding the overall attitudes and environments of this rational state doctor/researcher, Lifton argued that “the disturbing thing was that it was not something irrational.”394 It was something calm - there was nothing emotional about Auschwitz.”395 In the camp, evolution was marked by the techne-ization of all aspects, from prisoner indoctrination to death, as “the self could divest itself from immediate ethical concerns by concentrating only on the “purely technical“… demonstrating “humanity” meant killing with technical efficiency.”396 Thus in Auschwitz, the utilization of techne, which originally marked the presence of the enlightened bios, was identified by its use by the political animal to massacre his bare life foil.
d. The Selection: 393
Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, 343. Ibid. Ibid., 213. 396 Ibid., 453. 394 395
189
Among the acts of thinly formed restraint in Auschwitz, one of its prominent manifestations stands out in history - selection for the gas chambers. As mentioned above, the selections for the chambers were initially a periodical act administrated when the camp began to swell with inmates. However, with the increased importations, guards and doctors soon fell into the habit of conducting selections determining life and death at the arrival of newly admitted prisoners. Over time, the process of selection became so methodical and patterned that a survivor was able to deconstruct it during testimony at the Nuremberg Trials:
The series of steps in SS doctors’ involvement in the killing: First, the chief doctors’ assignments to his subordinated concerning duty schedules and immediate selections policies. Second, the individual doctor’s appeared on the ramp… Third, the doctor rode in the ambulance or Red Cross car to the crematoria. Fourth, the doctor ordered how many pellets of gas should be thrown in. Fifth, he observed through the hole how the people are dying. Sixth, when the people were dead… he gave the order to ventilate… to open the gas chamber… Seventh, he signed a form that the people are dead and how long it took. Eighth, he observed the teeth extraction from the corpses.397 Although there was the steady increase of victims due to this level of dedicated slaughter, the camp itself remained second in mortality rates to 7UHEOLQND XQWLO ZKHQDVXGGHQDQGFRQVWDQWLQIOX[RI+XQJDULDQ-HZV into Auschwitz rapidly ensures the notoriety of the camp as the deadliest in
397
Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, 166.
190
the Reich.398 This reputation was in no small part from its reliance on that intensive selection process. As Lifton wrote:
Nazi doctors were best observed … when selecting on the medical blocks. In those selections, the SS doctor performed his healing-killing reversal within a medical context. They were therefore a key to medicalized killing and a special truth of Auschwitz. Selections on a medical block were a murderous caricature of triage: the doctor sorted out the sick and weak to be fed to the killing machinery.399 Administrating the equivalent of Foucault’s “medical gaze,” the guard or doctor would judge the strength of each inmate as they filed quietly before him. Should the inmate appear strong at first glance, he would live, if not, then he would find immediate placement in the chambers. However, the significance therein lies in the many examples where strong inmates would be sent to the chambers, and the weak would live, or where an entire line would be inexplicably massacred. Thus even under the guise of restraint, unrestraint was the norm. This particular form of genocide is one of the more inexplicable that the 20th century had experienced. The selection was no instinctive act of rage leveled towards a combatant charged with treachery or war crimes. It was rather the final state reproof to a prisoner, an eschatological admission of an animal state, unworthy of the individualistic death granted de facto to humans. It was a drawback to the 18th century, where this manner of execution was a mere political operation.400 “The truth - is that the Jews were 398 399 400
Rees, Auschwitz, 219. Ibid., 186. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 53.
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not exterminated in a mad and giant Shoah but as exactly Hitler had announced, “as lice,” which is to say, as bare life. The dimension in which the extermination took place is neither religious nor law, but bio-politics.”401 The guards and doctors were granted limited rights within Auschwitz WKDWZHUHQRWHQWLUHO\GLVVLPLODUWRWKRVHRIWKHVRYHUHLJQ LQRWKHUZRUGVLQ this liminal setting the guard and the doctor modernized the classical scenario of controlling power, now enabled at every moment “to foster life or disallow it,” and in this way they ruled over “the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life.”402 The omnipresence of power was evidenced again during the selection in which the individualization of the inmate body was brought to the forefront of camp needs even as it enforced an unchallenged inmate homogeneity, this paradox made possible by the state agent using and shaping inmate individuality as a means of continuing collective anonymity.403 Lastly, the it is significant that the employment of state prescribed death dictated the formations of norms made functional within the imagined PHGLFDODVVHPEODJHLQWKHFDPS DQRUPDOL]DWLRQRIGHDWKULWXDOV subsequently found acceptance in the psyche of the citizen-cum-SS guard. The uncertainty of life or death, work or gas chamber, survivor or corpse, figuratively returned homo sacer back to his previous social niche as homo viator, the one perpetually buffeted between two potential fates.
401
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 114. Foucault, Introduction: The History of Sexuality, 138-139. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 184. 402 403
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Chart VI
Nazi Camp Doctors (Ir)Rationality Rationality + Irrationality = (Complex Term) (Outside Auschwitz, engaged in exceptional acts of medical brutality) ~ Dr. Wundt & Dr. Karl Brandt Rationality Nazi member; supported T4 Aktion for state use; performed mass euthanasia in camps.
Irrationality Operated outside the camp science community. Allowed senseless death or deaths useful elsewhere.
~ Irma Grese, “Blond Angel ~ Dr. August Hirt, of Death” guarded 18,000 prepped cyanide salts for inmates & aided tests of chambers, University of female breasts. Strasbourg professor. Positive Deixis Rationality + Not Rationality Negative Deixis (Initial supporter, then dissenter) ( Rationality + Not (Irrationality + Not ~ Dr. Ferdinand Sauerbach, publicly Rationality) Irrationality) supported Hitler, but denounced Innovative, Nazism in 1946. Sadistic merciless killer procedures, while acting as experimented for Irrationality + Not-Irrationality “Nordic (Did not participate in experiments, own pleasure, not but active supporter or contributor) gentleman.” for state benefit. ~ Dr. Lolling, SS Colonel, collected ~ Dr. Josef Mengele ~ Dr. Hans Eysele404 prisoner skin for “personal” use. Used inmates as lab Less brutal than Negative assistants, or used religion as Deixis, but less careful of a reason to opt out of human subjects than rational doctor. selection lines. ~ Dr. Carl Clauberg
~ Dr. Herta Oberheuser
Not-Rationality ~ Catholic Doctors (Used religion as a reason to opt out of camp duties) Rationality + Not Irrationality = (Neutral Term)
Not-Irrationality
404 Dr. Eysele used prisoners for personal experiments in Buchenwald. In order to “complete his training,” he engaged in human vivisections that would kill the patient. He would abduct prisoners from camp streets to clinics and inject them with apomorphine to for emetic effect. “He performed operations and amputations without the slightest reason. He never used anesthesia.” Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them, Transl. by Heinz Norden, (NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1950), 143.
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Chapter XI
Nazi Language and the State of Exception
Domination itself is servile when beholden to opinion, for you depend upon the prejudices of those you govern by means of their prejudices.405
It is not a question of suppressing the spoken language, but of giving words approximately the importance they have in dreams.406
405 406
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, (NY: Basic Books, 1979), 83. Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, (NY: Grove Press, 1958), 94.
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Unlike the language developed and maintained in a non-genocidal state, the language of state genocide is created and maintained as a vehicle by which the State agenda of death is pursued as scrupulously as the traditional agenda of maintaining citizenry and State life. The Nazi state language requires independent examination because it operated as the vehicle by which state citizens could equally engage in the mundane daily errands, and perpetrate a collective genocidal agenda. Language encompassed by the Reich state defied Wittgenstein – to that which WKHVWDWHFRXOGQRWVSHDNLWGLG IXUWKHULWSURGXFHGDVSHHFKHVSHFLDOO\VKDSHG and engineered to pre-emptively counter any claims of legitimacy homo viator may have found in his attempts to communicate, to survive even, within the new Nazi regime. These claims of legitimacy expressed in both verbal and non-verbal expression were usurped by the primacy of the Nazi lexicon and gestural monopoly. Language was at once the ballast and vehicle by which to support and further factors of rationality/irrationality and legality employed in identity formation. Lexical items could therefore be as geographically or physically bound to either the Reich state or Auschwitz, depending on the context and intent. Thereby rather than drawing on state signifiers for death and hate coined for the barest comprehension of a citizen, such as Sonderbehandlung (“special treatment”), those in the physical state of exception and those constructing camp mechanisms relied on the terms that were openly abusive and geared towards dominance of SS, such as Vernichtungsstelle, (“extermination institute”). It is the continuing academic and cultural norm to paradoxically label the preponderance of Nazi items signifying the national project of oppressive and 195
genocidal traits as “euphemisms.” Euphemisms are the derivative of the Greek prefix “eu” meaning “good, beneficial.” However, the monstrosity of the Nazi vocabulary isolates itself in the absolute opposite category as both a semantic and phonetic cacophony and kinesthetic abhorrence. It is the purpose of this chapter to deconstruct this linguistic and gestural dissonance whereby to illustrate how Reich linguistically dissimulated then and distributed its genocidal project. This chapter investigates two binary categories selected for both their universal presence in communication techniques and their extraordinary manipulation for new and perverted operation in the Nazi regime: verbal/gestural and propaganda/daily communication. The two categories examine the role of language as an operation in the daily and bodily realm of the citizen. The discussion of these two binaries is inclusively framed within both the state and in the state of exception, in order to display the constant possibilities for morphological and semantic innovation between the two spheres. It is the goal of this chapter to illustrate how these methods of interpersonal linguistics each contributed to the means by which the genocidal project was laid out and enacted by the Nazi citizenry and state. The physical movements of an agent in his habitus, or typical social spaces inside the state or state of exception evinces the manner by which language engenders the agent’s reality. 407 His language, just as his movement, is limited by the quality and quantity of power contained in his social capital. This power produces a tangible condition of possibility for by which an agent’s UHDOLW\ LV DFWXDOL]HG VLJQLILFDQWO\ WKH ODQJXDJH RSHUDWHG LV WKH SRZHU UH407
Donna Harraway, as quoted in Zillah Eisenstein, The Female Body and The Law, (Berkeley: University of California, 1989), 23.
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produced which in each interaction could serve to his benefit or detriment. These interactions as occurrences in variegated locations of geography and loci of state enunciated purpose is manifested through the re-signification of state specific lexical items and linguistic tokens, the latter of which as verbal or gestural. The malleability of meaning evinced in heterogeneous state zones thus serves as a spotlight illuminating the locus of language’s strength “in the interplay between… two aspects of meaning and in the room for development afforded by the adaptability of conventions.408 Verbal communication is defined in this thesis as a meaningful exchange between members of a linguistic community via transcribed and oral methods. Gestural communication as general, unsubstantiated term contains a myriad of ERGLO\SRVVLELOLWLHV KRZHYHULQWKLVFKDSWHUWKHWHUPUHIHUWRWKHNLQHVWKHWLF movements which can either contain a common meaning which does not require the aid of speech or serve as a complement to the primary speech operation. In regards to the substantive difference between the state propaganda and the speech of daily correspondence is intent. The state’s primary motivation when disseminating a novel propaganda item was to offer to the state new instructions, commands, impersonal interrogations, whereas the intent of daily communication in the Nazi state, and elsewhere, encompasses a far greater range of possibility, from the mundane, phatic greeting to the intimate, deeply inter-personal sharing of unguarded emotion. However, this accessibility of sincere interaction in the quotidian conversation carries the additional contingencies for a denial or lie, or even of 408 Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet, “Power: Gender Relations.” Annual Review of Anthology, Vol. 21 (1992), 474.
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a statement turning-back on itself, as Scarry argues, “each verbal utterance has at all times the explosive duality of being at once very possibly true and very possibly false.”409 It is no coincidence that Nazi Party informers more frequently reported their friends and family, close relations who had revealed anti-Party
emotion
inadvertently
through
the
spontaneous
intimacy
characterizing daily speech.
I.
Verbal
Elaine Scarry outlines the metaphoric extension of the body as though the articulated voice: 7KHYRLFHEHFRPHVDILQDOVRXUFHRIVHOIH[WHQVLRQ VRORQJDVRQH is speaking, the self extends out beyond the boundaries of the body, occupies a space much larger than the body… Their ceaseless talk articulates their unspoken understanding that only in silence do the edges of the self become coterminous with the edges of the body it will die with.410 Frequently following the silencing of minority voices is the process of terminating the body of this minority. This metaphoric death takes shape in the Reich state and state of exception through homo viator KHZKRKDVEHHQGHQLHG his voice in the state finds his body denied experience and vitality in the camp. The guard and doctor are privileged with the voice in both realms, as demonstrated through the guards’ continuous creation RIQHRORJLVPV liquidiert
409
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 136. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 33.
410
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(“liquidated”), Liquidierung des Judentums (“liquidation of Jewry”), erledigt (“finished off”), Sonderaktionen (“special actions”), Sonderbehandlung (“special treatment”), Vollzugstatigkeit (“execution activity”), entsprechend behandelt (“treated appropriately”), Bereinigung der Judenfrage (“cleaning up of the Jewish question”), and juden frei gemacht (“made free of Jews”).411 As the popularization of these terms implies, the guards’ voice remained as present and unthreatened as his body. Through this dichotomous relationship of guard’s articulated voice to the sacer’s de-signified body, the Nazi “mime of power” presented itself once more, “for power is in its fraudulent as in its legitimate forms is always based on distance from the body.”412 One of the most well known terms from the Nazi lexicon is “Die Endlösung” (“Final Solution”). The implications and unspoken purpose of the phrase were as clear to the Nazi officials as fiercely contested its literal translation, a contestation especially well recorded in the heated exchange between Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson and Hermann Goering during the Nuremberg Trials. The matter concerning the meaning and translation of the phrase arose again twenty years later, at Eichmann’s own trial in 1961. Eichmann, not surprisingly, had coined the phrase, then using it in all his subsequent documents. He later explained, during an attempt to mitigate his personal responsibility for the genocide, “I suggested these words. At the time I meant by this the elimination of the Jews, their marching out of the German nation. Later, these harmless words were used as camouflage for the killing.”413 Eichmann’s excuses aside, the term itself serves as a useful linguistic
411 412 413
Ibid. Ibid., 45-46. Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem, (Jerusalem: Herzl Press, 1978), 40.
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representation for one of the (im)potential fallacies in semiological analysis: “In the linguistic model, nothing enters the language without having been tried in speech, but conversely, no speech is accessible… if it is not drawn from the “treasure” of the language.”414 The term ‘Final Solution’, in other words, could only have summoned or sustained its monstrous power and constant use through its clear possibilities for individual understanding and lexical functionality. Eichmann’s excuse alludes to one of the few mutual factors between Party speech and the intimate dialogue: the ongoing reliance for metaphors metaphors to relay a speaker’s ideas, concepts, goals, and strategies which are otherwise incomprehensible to the listener. Lakoff and Johnson describe metaphors as, “not merely things to be seen beyond. In fact one can see beyond them only by using other metaphors. It is though the ability to comprehend experience through metaphor were a sense… providing the only ways to perceive and experience much of the world.”415 Through metaphors, state speeches urging on the oppression of homo sacer most frequently employed metaphors. Through this lexical placeholders, the regime propaganda could set forth one anti-Semitic concept or visual depiction of Jewish thievery and despite the diversity of the Reich population, inevitably generate a responsive comprehension through each individual’s mental associations to that concept or depiction. Through this manipulation of just a single figure of speech, a cautious, momentary but genuine parity could unite the single citizen to the state body. 414 Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, Transl. by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, (NY: Hill & Wang, 1964), 31. 415 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 239.
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II.
Non-Verbal/Gestural The fluidity of the state instruction’s transference of into common, non-
verbal habits of individuals was most clearly displayed in the common Reich greeting, which under Hitler’s rule ‘became (an) expression of the individual’s inner acceptance of the allegiance demanded by others.”416 Allert’s interpretation of the regime’s strict employment of bodily gestures and rituals of gestural social acknowledgment differs from the traditional analysis of greetings, which tend to facilitate communication between two or more people in the same spatial and temporal location with an array of options for greeting sequences and opportunities to express a unique self in a micro-social process. It is apparent a drastic shift occurred from the basic element of acknowledgment popularized in the Weimar greetings to greetings with explicit and novel political functions. Through the constraints exercised deliberately by WKH1D]LWKLVGUDVWLFVKLIWDOWHUHGUHDVRQVIRUDQGPHWKRGVLQVSHHFKSURGXFWLRQ a highly significant move which, according to Artaud, required the complete re-interpretation of speech in a “concrete and spatial sense, combining it with everything… significant in the concrete domain – to manipulate it like a solid object…”417 In other words, in order to maintain the new meaning and function of a gesture inscribed in the typical Nazi greeting, its verbal accompaniment had to reflect and reinforce this meaning and function as well. Similar to Mary Douglas’ argument discussed in Chappter III is Hugh Dalziel Duncan’s thesis Symbols in Society, proposing whomever controls the creation and distribution of images used in daily communication controls the
416 Allert Tilman, The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of Gesture, (NY: Henry Holt & Company, Inc., 2008), 11. 417 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, (NY: Grove Press, 1958), 72.
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whole of society. Further, who controls that communication then has the monopoly over the official national memory of the past, of the nation’s historical recollection.418 Through the authority to monitor and radicalize discourse in each variegated node constituting national population, a coeval authority emerges, granting access to redefine and reinvent societal possibilities. Artaud claims that verbal aspects of language which remain viable and plausible as systems for speech production are only shadows, base ‘responses’ in the collective theatre of communication, it is in fact through the petrifaction of gesture that entire ranges of communicative possibilities, the ‘true abstractions’ potential in speech and gesture are achieved, “… for besides the language of words, there is the culture of gestures.”419 This range of possibility remained under strict control in the Nazi state, where linguistic novelties would be introduced or constantly practiced with the entire citizenry during mass rallies and parades, as though to prevent any misinterpretation or subversive representation of its meaning or physical method of display. One such example of the state monopoly over a gesture and accompanying verbal enunciation was the Hitler salute, in which the right arm is extended from the chest at a 45 degree angle tilted slightly to the right, with a simultaneous exclamation “Heil Hitler!” and clicking of the heels. This salute, which exercised the full range of the body and voice during the regime, has continued on as a movement and utterance still monopolized by the Nazi state, a two fold illustration which particularly demonstrates Artaud’s above statement on the potential of the ‘culture of gestures.’ 418 419
Hugh Dalziel Duncan, Symbols in Society, (NY: Oxford University Press, 1968), 23. Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 108.
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The charged environment of altered and un-made familiar or known gesture420 unfolded as part of the ongoing dehumanizing project wrecked upon the viator: to unmake his world was to unmake his originality and previously unquestioned right to exist. This externalization of the viator’s figurative disintegration was represented through the state’s de-objectification and subsequent re-signification of certain objects previously taken for granted. Two examples of this dual step towards dehumanization are the shower heads in the gas chambers and the trucks used for transporting the victims, both of which are explored in more detail in Chapter XII. The differentiation of purpose was exhibited through the converted use of objects421 unique to the camp, for example, the prisoner barracks. From its interior structure purposely quashing occupants, to its temporary architectural materials metaphorically signifying the temporary state of the occupants, the semiotics of the barracks continuously harmed the body of the sacer in order to hasten both psychological and physical demise. As clarified by Scarry, this unfolding process of the sacer’s death had in fact begun with the state’s denial of his viator history, his legitimacy as a citizen:
Whenever death can be designated as “soon” the dying has already begun… dying not because he has yet experienced the damage that will end his life but because he has begun to experience the body that will end his life, the body that can be killed, and which when killed will carry away the conditions that allow him to exist.422
420 421 422
Scarry, The Body in Pain, 41. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 31.
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III.
Propaganda Who in the state delegated the force behind certain words? How does
this originary force remain intact once distributed among each citizen and civil organization, considering the natural habit for individuals to imbue and digest new and unfamiliar terms with meaning provided through personals frames of references? Horkheimer, himself profoundly influenced by the Nazi regime, addresses this problem by explaining the potential danger in granting State control over reason, and ultimately rationality.423 Adorno adds to this unflattering conceptualization of State and its potentially fascist grip over language by presenting language as a system thrown into an intentional state of chaos and seeming disorganization by the State in order to maintain a capitalist system over the people and the various state power relations.424 Unfortunately, common citizens further their own unknowing manipulation by repeating the stereotypes and false truths popularized and distributed in the public forum. Thus, the full crisis that germinated in the Nazi regime through the perversion of language comes to light at the nexus of these two philosophers’ theories. The State is capable of manipulating situations and people by manipulating their language, or ‘jargon’, and language use. Through power gathered in that original manipulation, the State perpetuates ever increasingly violent stereotypes and prejudices among its population. It becomes simpler to forget the internal problems of the society when there is a common enemy to hate, as Marcuse outlined in One-Dimensional Man. Echoing these thoughts, Agamben also urges one to be “…only your face. Go to the threshold. Do not remain the VXEMHFWRI\RXUSURSHUWLHVRUIDFXOWLHVGRQRWVWD\EHQHDWKWKHP UDWKHUJRZLWK 423 424
Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), 61. Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, (London: Routledge, 2003), vii.
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them, in them, beyond them.”425 Nazi propaganda was not merely the “means of affecting the use of mass media of communications, the manner in which a mass audience perceives and DVFULEHVWKHPHDQLQJWRWKHPDWHULDOZRUOG ´426 it was a unique combination of mythical and practical/political speech and historical civil conception. “At many points German biases became indistinguishable from National Socialist thought, a situation the Party exploited by claiming sole authority to define genuine Germanness.”427 Part of this Germanness was the acceptance of the stereotyped ideal of the Jews, which was expressed in “virulent resentment.” This acceptance was necessary because belief constantly undergoes its own verification through production, and thus the power of words “is a belief in the legitimacy of the words and he who utters them, a belief which words themselves can’t produce.”428 The production of linguistic elements in propaganda therefore performed beyond the mere mono-dimensional utilitarian speech act, perpetually limited to basic expressions such as delineating friend from foe. It was also the force behind radio and movie propaganda encapsulating ideas such as ‘nationalism’, which had taken hold over the ever creative German imagination. Through common linguistic elements vocalized and displayed repeatedly in conjunction with certain words or phrases during state radio and film programs, the usual individualization process through which imagery connects to words begins to
425
Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, Transl. by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 31. 426 Jay Baird, The Mythical World of Nazi War Propaganda, 1939-1945, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974), 3. 427 Ibid., 4. 428 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 70.
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become a communal process with similar images connecting to similar phrase. Significantly, when this collective process of a collective bonding through the visual, verbal, and oral senses deals with the establishment of anti-Semitic attitudes or oppressive legislative mechanisms, parallels between the Nazi rejection ritual and the ancient Greek and Roman once more emerge. Further state maneuvers to gain and maintain collective control over associative processes eventually took on form in an all encompassing propaganda system resembling a tri-level pyramid. The lowest tier, composed largely of blatantly untrue stereotypes ala Julius Streicher, was for the benefit of the uneducated and uncritical. The second middle tier focused on the generally well educated, middle income families or young professionals who were unwilling to accept an open persecution of neighbors without at least a lightly theoretical basis and largely visual explication of the Jewish damage and danger to the Reich. The third and highest tier was composed of the most ‘scientifically’ justified propaganda. This minute level was shaped for the benefit of intellectuals, scientists, and lawyers. Drawing on phrenology studies conducted in the pre-Nazi state in universities and in the asylums during the Aktion T4, this method of propaganda justified eugenics and extermination couched in heavy scientific or otherwise field specific jargon. This particular tier found prevalent support among the more intellectually inclined officials of the Party, such as Hoess, “who professed to despise …the pornographic anti-Semitism propagated by Streicher.” During his Nuremberg interrogations following the Nazi surrender, he admitted to believing that his anti-Semitism was therefore “more rational…rather (his primary concern was in) the International world Jewish
206
conspiracy… by which Jews secretly held the levers of power.”429 These innovative forms of propaganda allowed the citizen to mindlessly digest the state hunger for persecution in his own mind, building often unarticulated and unquestioned justifications built out of unique prejudices and knowledge. This privatized movement was reinforced by the public speeches and rallies, which in turn was reinforced by the belief in propaganda. For example, the underlying stress of the uncertain political and economic development of Germany was expressed in propaganda as the stress caused by the Jewish presence.430 This expression of a “national misfortune” moved individual, private concerns of the citizen into the public forum, a space and opportunity for unifying citizen with fellow citizen. On occasion, these opportunities for unity were staged for dramatic effect, creating Stunden der Nation, (‘national moments’) in which the community as a whole paused in conscious participation of the Fuhrer expressing his presence.431 Propaganda in the Third Reich would not have achieved such staggering levels of success had it remained solely in the intellectualized frame of reference in the citizen’s life-world. In order for the citizen to even partially accept the barrage of information and instruction spelt out through various manifestations, a successful “hidden correspondence”432 had to transpire between the habitus of the state and the habitus of the citizen. This successful interaction would bring the citizen into the social space of the state, and the state into the social space of the citizen.433 Artaud’s discussion on the stage and 429
Laurence Rees, Auschwitz, (NY: Perseus Books Group, 2005), 3. David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda, (London: Routledge, 1993), 76. 431 Ibid., 115. 432 Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 41. 433 Ironically, despite historical horrors resulting from this porous relationship between State and citizen, public and private, this breakdown of border remains the steadfast goal of the progressive 430
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the audience in the theatre runs alongside the logic behind Nazi spatialization techniques:
We abolish the stage and the auditorium and replace them by a single site, without partition or barrier of any kind, which will become the theatre of the action. A direct communication will be re-established between the spectator and the spectacle… from the fact that that the spectator, place din the middle of the action, is engulfed and physically affected by it.434 However, even as the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda was compelled to occasionally offer points of veracity in order to maintain a relationship of trust with the independent citizen and spectator, the messages put forth in the propaganda would have only remained a tangential element, a stage of irrelevant spectacles so to speak, in the citizen’s life if it could not eventually and smoothly be incorporated into a corporeal reality.435 This incorporation was the ultimate goal of Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, as illustrated in his 1933 speech to the managerial staff of German radio in the Haus des Rundfunks: “As the piano is to the pianist, so the transmitter is to you, the instrument you play on as sovereign masters of public opinion.”436 He later expanded his lectures on the task of managing public opinion, this time regarding the government’s responsibility to not merely “inform, but instruct” the press to adopt a “crusading” spirit which would reflect the spirit of the times, and in this way avoid a “daily war” with the press
feminist car ethics project. 434 Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 96. 435 Welch, The Third Reich, 35. 436 Ibid., 30.
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corps. The expression of anti-Semitism is evidenced through cinematic propaganda tools, such as the 1940 film, Der ewige Jude (The Wandering Jew) which illustrated the impermanence of the body and loyalty of the “wandering Jew.” The tacit state disapproval of this wandering was justified through his literal movements allegedly spreading plagues through Medieval Europe and continuing to defy the commitment to ongoing manual labor which had defined the existence and history of his settled counterparts.437 Through an updated Reich Cinema Law drafted and released in 1934, films were judged by a new use of distinction marks, Pradikate, which had been originally introduced in the Weimar era. Although the Pradikate system under the Weimar Republic had been considered an covetous honor because of their accompanying tax reduction, in the Reich film industry, these marks were a troublesome but compulsory purchase for a film seeking to be released in the state. The Reich further expanded upon this system by dividing the distinctions into eleven categories which ranged from “culturally valuable” to “politically and artistically especially valuable”, the former category reserved for films produced by established directors or films created solely for exportation, with the latter maintained for Nazi youth organizations or school events.438 The Nazi program of anti-Semitism focused on three major themes which were nebulous and malleable enough to fit into the three tiers which conformed to the three basic socio-economic classes of Germany. The three views expounded on themes of Jewish support of exploitative capitalism, Jewish support of Marxist Socialism, and the Jewish struggle against Aryan 437 438
Ibid., 78. Ibid., 45.
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interests both nationally and internationally.439 Nazi anti-Semitism focused on “struggles” between the races, which found expression in the various symbols of bellicosity and combat in not only propaganda, but in the German world view. War became not only a means to an end, rather it was celebration of the German spirit, a “life spirit” which was sanctified and validated by fallen soldiers. This “life spirit” led to a novel hero-ization movement of Germany in which the characteristics of deceased soldiers took on near immortal status and importance. This attitude was expressed not only in films and speeches, but in the everyday songs sung by soldiers:
And even if heaven, hell, and the world Were to be allied against us, We would hold our heads high And fight until the last man fell wounded…440 This song illustrates the unbreakable commitment held by German soldiers on the front lines to unite and fight, even against a figurative heaven DQGWKHZRUOG IXUWKHULWZDVFRQVWDQWO\YDOLGDWHGE\WKHQDWLRQDOLVWIHHOLQJV abound in the state. According to Hoess, “The Fuhrer lives! In boundless gratitude we all feed today as if he has been given to us anew. Providence has spare our Fuhrer in the past, and Providence will spare our Fuhrer in the future, because he has been sent on a great mission…”441 This level of frenzied faith and expressed love for the Fuhrer and by extension, the German spirit, was termed Steigerungsmoglichkeit. The flames of these nationalist passions were 439
Sarah Ann Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the ‘Jewish Question’, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), 78. Baird, The Mythical World of Nazi War Propaganda, 8. 441 Ibid., 66. 440
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constantly finding shape and form in the skills of Nazi propagandists and leaders, as seen in the May 1940 order from Goebbels to Hans Fritzche regarding German fear of French and British military reprisals, “Intensify the panic which is beginning to spread, and do everything possible to incite more unrest and to bring tensions to a peak.”442 Such tensions of future judgment had far earlier affected those charged with the duty as executioner of homo sacer, directed the shooting, they began to repress as well as justify their activities… (which is) quite noticeable in the choice of language for reports of individual killing actions… employing terms that tended to either justify the killings or to obscure them altogether.443 As with all forms of effective propaganda, the Nazis always included the element of truth in their rabid canards, speeches, and films. Half of the Jewish population within the Reichstag had indeed voted against war credits.444 Further, the percentage of the Jewish population that enlisted for the army in WWI, was disproportionately low to their German population. To add to these alleged insults, Jews, historically loyal to governments, were visibly active to the interim government, hastily formed to surrender to the Allies.445 Furthermore, unlike other minorities, the German Jews were largely concentrated in urban settings. By 1933, more than 1/3 of the Jewish population was living in Berlin.446 This level of visibility in cities exposed the Jewish population in a more extreme manner than if it had been leveled more evenly across the German state. 442
Ibid., 87. Raul Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, vol. I, (NY: Holmes & Meir Publishers Ltd., 1985), 329. 444 Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the “Jewish Question”, 76. 445 Ibid., 98. 446 Ibid., 87. 443
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Nazi propaganda also made use of the over-representation of Jews in the German employment pre-1933. Citing the 61% involved in labor force against the 18% ethnic Germans, the 2% of Jewish workers involved in manual labor, such as agriculture, versus the 29% ethnic Germans.447 Further, Jews had attained their comparatively higher statuses in society because of their educational achievements. Once German universities had become to accept Jews in 1790, it was only 80 years before Jews were over-represented within academia, both as instructors and students. Between 1870-1933, Jews comprised 12% of lecturers, and between 1905-1931, 25% of students in grammar schools were likewise Jewish. Staring into the margins of the state apparatus, the average citizen could not wage war against such an overwhelming force that appealed to his mind and emotions, even if disposed to subversive action:
It is the ordinary citizen who is oppressed…the ordinary citizen is ill-equipped to do battle on a field of unpunctuated clauses and strewn with legal jargon. But what is worse is that if he wants to do battle it is only with great difficulty he can find anyone to do it with. The man behind the counter has not the slightest idea what is in the form, nor the man behind him, nor the man behind the managing director’s desk.448
How did political speeches influence the choices and developing acceptance of Nazism within society? Herbert claims that in the pre-Nazi era it 447 448
Ibid., 98. Patrick Devlin, The Enforcement of Morals, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 49.
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was more from “indifference and readiness to accept the persecution of the Jews and to ignore it as ‘unimportant’ which characterized the attitude of ‘normal Germans’ in those years.”449 This level of apathy towards individual rights, protection of minorities and belief in tolerance in society indicates a relatively weak civil society. This level of unseated civil society in Germany was demonstrated in a lack of protest towards authorities in November 1938 when over 20,000 Jewish males were incarcerated. As far as the heads of the Nazi state were concerned, “the murder of Jews would no longer involve legal repercussions, as long as one avoided public sensations, uproar… nothing was to be expected from the German population than indifference.”450 “ Initials acts of anti-Semitic legislation were furthered in “bureaucratic momentum,” which required the adaption of civil servants to positions that concerned Jewish policies which came to exist within their civic realms. Eventually, the allure of a career as a Judensachbearbeiter drew the attention of many disinterested with their tedious civil servant jobs. In the beliefs of Christopher Browning, it was in this arsenal of bureaucratic man-machines that the Nazi regime found professional legitimation.451 Under Nazi logic and later under law within the regime, it followed that “the notion of race functions (so it) does not refer to any situation of external fact but instead realizes an immediate coincidence of fact and law…a zone in which the distinction between life and politics, between questions of fact and question of law, has literally no more meaning.”452 449 Ulrich Herbert, National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies, (NY: Berghahn Books, 2000), 23. 450 Ibid., 24. 451 Christopher Browning, Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy September 1939-March 1942, (London: William Heinemann, 2004), 11. 452 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, (Stanford: Stanford University
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To create a retroactive genealogy, the Nazi Party called upon real and imagined historical “confrontations” of Judaism to German identity that could no longer be ignored, else the indistinct Jewish threat of domination would be realized by destroying Volkish ideology. The use of this genealogy was noted by Connolly as a means of drawing upon concepts “of intrinsic identity and otherness into question in order to tap agonistic care for difference from the experience of not being exhausted by the identities that fix a particular life… drawing on the… powers of imagination derived from it.”453 Bourdieu adds to this illustration of confronting and resolving alterity by framing the reliance on a lingua franca as a “paradox (which) presupposes a common medium, but one which works… only by eliciting and reviving singular, and therefore, socially marked, experiences.454 This view was not confined to politics. Even within the usually immune world of musicians and opera, the famous composer Wilhelm Wagner found a way to express this anti-Semitism. He made no effort to disguise his belief that Jews “could not share the Leidenschaften (passions) of the nation, had no claim on Volksgeist (national spirit). Jews were soulless wanderers hostile to European art and civilization.”455 Bringing Judaism into the realm of racial identity brought likewise the relationship of German to Jew into violence. As Hitler pronounced in an early speech outlining this new relationship, “Whoever wants to live must therefore fight and whoever does not wish to do battle in this world of eternal struggle does not deserve to live.”456 Press, 1995), 172. 453 Ibid., 182. 454 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) 39 455 Saul Friedman, A History of the Holocaust, (Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), 45. 456 Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the ‘Jewish Question’, 87.
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This call for violence and German assertion was proclaimed even by academics, such as Heinrich Treitschke, a professor at the University of Berlin at the time of Bismarck. He called upon the German state to first condemn the Jews as “our national misfortune” and then to recognize itself as an “organic entity embodying the aspirations of its people, it was born in violence and entitled to seize Lebensraum by any means.”457 Similarly, German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte expressed the stereotypical Jewish drive for conquest, “A mighty state stretches across almost all the countries of Europe, hostile in intent and engaged in constant strife with everyone else…this is Jewry.”458
IV.
Daily Communication Discourse in the Nazi regime flowed in a vertical direction, originating
from Party heads and propaganda ministers downwards to the lower Party members and citizens. The opportunity for communicative reciprocity was scarce between higher Party official and citizen and naturally non-existent from homo sacer to any in the state. Under the newer and reasoned anti-Semitism, however, the Nazis had to re-justify, re-explain and reiterate in multiple formal and informal exchanges the reason why the Jewish homo viator was unwelcome and unwanted in the new, glorious Reich. All these newer forms of anti-Semitic explanations were focused around academically and scientifically based reasoning. Necessarily, these purported academic reasons and explanations decreased in formalized logic and empirical study the further it moved from educated, top tiered Nazi society. Thus the necessity remained for 457 458
Friedman, A History of the Holocaust, 39. Ibid., 38.
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older, more traditional forms of anti-Semitism based in emotion. Having already been established in the collective memory of citizens, these forms of prejudice called for no citation to further justify the new regime, nor explanation for their having been formed at all. In at least one respect, the newer forms of anti-Semitism were far more vile than the traditional resentment – by using Jewish texts and beliefs as a legitimized springboard for justification of Nazi anti-Semitic policies. When these actual sources fell short, Nazi scholars relied on distorted translations and even utterly falsified texts, such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Even in the realm of politics, a field ostensibly dominated by the Jew, this anti-Semitic vein was popularized. This attitude is exemplified in a speech delivered in the Reichstag by a member of an anti-Semitic party:
That every Jew who at this moment has not done anything bad may nevertheless under the proper conditions do precisely that, because his racial qualities drive him to do it… if it were a matter of fighting with honest weapoQVDJDLQVWDQKRQHVWHQHP\ WKHQLW would be a matter of course that the Germans would not fear such a people. But the Jews, who operate like parasites, are a different kind of problem…the Jews are cholera germs.459 Due to the tension between a diminished of quickly emigrating Jewish population and the zealous drive by German jurists for legally enacted antiSemitism, German Jews soon became over-represented in the Nazi court convictions in terms of racial policy defiance. In 1939, 12% of convicted SDVVSRUWRIIHQFHVZHUHFRPPLWWHGE\-HZV OLNHZLVHFRQYLFWHGIRU³UDFLDO 459
Ibid.
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GHILOHPHQW´ZHUHIURPWKHGZLQGOLQJ-HZLVKSRSXODWLRQ DQGILQDOO\-HZVZHUH likewise over-represented in a third legal situation, with 29% convicted of “foreign currency offenses.”460 Through the decreasing numbers of Jews available to bodily defy or dispel stereotypes, it became simpler to preach antiSemitism from the pulpit, classroom, and courtroom. In conclusion, through the conscious categorizing of these four methods of indoctrination and their occasional compilation for mass rallies and parades, the language of the Nazi state usurped the private lexicon and, by extension, the entire linguistic structure held by each citizen through an arbitrary and deliberate substitution of previous definitions and implications in the common language.
460 Nikolaus Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 159.
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Chapter XII
Shoah & Unending Singularity
But where there is Danger… there also grows Salvation.461
The line dividing good and evil cuts through the center of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?462
461
Friedrich Holderlin & Eduard Morike, Selected Poems, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 12. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, (NY: Harper and Row, 1973), 615. 462
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Where does Shoah belong within the panoply of modern genocides? Developing a sensitive, useful model within this larger framework requires a student of comparative genocide to deliberately engage in a search for its singular, wholly unique elements. There are many reasons for this paradoxical exercise. Examination of this genocide ought not to be limited to passive factchecking for history textbooks, or even the standard goal to “raise awareness.” The most powerful reason is urgent and basic: prevention. Possibilities of violence and chaos are uniquely manifested in the norms and technological advances of each generation. This fundamental frustration requires practitioners to first understand the difference of singular and universal genocidal traits. The second, more difficult step involves recognition of nascent, universal elements manifesting in modern or developing states. The mechanized systems of massacre were the personal projects of Nazis intimately familiar with Jewish cultural nuances. The laws of Germany from 1890-1933 were as tolerant for religion and culture as other national FRWHUPLQRXVDFWVOHJLVODWLRQ \HWLWWRRNOHVVWKDQWZR\HDUVIRUWKRVHODZVWREH suspended and the oppressive Nuremberg Laws to be implemented forcefully and enthusiastically in their place. This drastic overturning of legal mainstays is a visible manifestation of a deeper rejection of norms and values, of anomie. Thus the necessity for ongoing reflection on this genocide is to prepare for a future that carries the possibility of another such systematic overturn of established norms culminating in subsequent genocide. Shoah is the modern day Laocoon, the doomed prophet heralding the downfall of the Trojans even while strangled by the goddess Hera’s snakes. Shoah was horrifying and memorable, above other genocides, because it occurred in a Western nation, seeped in history and culture enjoyed and 219
appropriated by the rest of the world. It was a genocide which was not entirely created in emotion, for all of Hitler’s speeches and Goebbels’ propaganda, nor was this a massacre perpetrated in secret, unknown to a passive and pacific citizenry, and lastly, this was not a catastrophe constructed against anonymous victims - for many of the massacred Jews, their murderers were friends and neighbors.
I.
Arendt On 11 April 1961, Adolf Eichmann, the “architect of the Holocaust” was
brought before the Israeli Court and indicted on 15 criminal charges. The trial lasted for 14 weeks, and at its conclusion, Eichmann was found guilty on every count and sentenced to death shortly thereafter on 31 May 1962. The Eichmann trial was an enormous affair because of both the gravity of his alleged crimes and the daring means by which Mossad agents had smuggled his kidnapped body from Buenos Aires and into Jerusalem. During the first few weeks of his trial, all the seats in the new Israeli courthouse were full of survivors, international journalists, and many others anxious to see violent history and placid justice meet at last. One such interested spectator was Hannah Arendt, a reporter for the New Yorker and a Jew who had left Germany just prior to Hitler’s ascension. Her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, based on her observations of the trial produced unexpected levels of support and critique, largely from her pithy, yet controversial argument. Her thesis claimed the blatant juxtaposition of his modest and rather forgettable appearance against his massive war crimes had broken down the 220
common and unchallenged view held by many that Nazi criminals were vicious anti-Semites, or wildly ambitious and apathetic, or completely psychopathic. However, she continued on to explain that Eichmann was capable of committing such crimes because he followed no other morality or law than the law of Fuhrerprinzip. Having lost the ability to examine a superior order within a personal framework of ethics, Eichmann simply did what he was told and to the absolute best of his ability and resources. However, even with such unbridled enthusiasm, the gas chambers never could have taken so many lives and with so little national, and international, protest without the similar full hearted support from other Nazi and non-Nazi citizens and organizations. Arendt found supporters and positive interpretations for her theory on Eichmann, including Dr. Stanley Milgram, whose famous authority experiments at Yale University brought home (literally) Arendt’s conclusions. His experiments demonstrated how everyday, normal people will act against their own, often vocalized, moral objections and obey an authoritative figure to the detriment of a helpless subject. Among Arendt’s critics was a fellow writer, Richard Crossman of The Observer:
But what are we to make of Miss Arendt’s sensational conclusions? I still think our fears were reasonable enough at the time. But none of them was substantiated by the trial itself. Yet whereas the rest of us were frank enough to admit we were wrong in our predictions Miss Arendt has preferred to retreat to a new position… By the end of the trial, indeed, it was clear that Eichmann was a far stronger and more malignant character than many of us had supposed. Miss Arendt, however, could not abandon her theory about his banality because it was essential to
221
her main theme.463 However superficially compelling Arendt’s argument is, and chilling Milgram’s experiments were, the idea of a “banality of evil” quietly supporting the heinous decisions and actions of thousands mutely offers an extraordinarily dark future in which many potential genocidaires could leave behind morality and individual ethics to commit crimes as large-scale as the crimes of Adolf Eichmann. Understanding her initial intent with this catchphrase was to capture the essence of a war criminal and use his actions as a warning to future generations, there are still parts of Eichmann’s character that are not as fully explained. For example, Eichmann was found to portray sociopathic tendencies by the prosecution team psychologist, who had been hired to support the argument of sanity.464 In fact, for those deeply involved in Eichmann’s prosecution, the results of his psychological tests were as surprising as they were revealing:
As soon as we started our legal preparations, we realized that Eichmann might plead insanity. To counter such a maneuver I directed that he be examined by psychiatrists, One of the tests applied had been devised by the well-known Hungarian psychologist Professor L. Szondi. It consists of showing the person under examination a number of photographs arranged in groups. Each group contains pictures of a convicted murderer, a proven sadist, a certified lunatic. The person being examined is asked to select from each group photographs of two people who attract and two others who repel him. 463 Richard Crossman, “The Observer”, 13 October 1963, as quoted in Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem, (Jerusalem: Herzl Press, 1978), 465. 464 Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem, 7.
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Eichmann was given the test ten times over a period of forty days. In all, he selected faces he liked and disliked 240 times. To be certain of the proper interpretation of the results, the examining psychiatrists decided to send them to the author of the tests, without revealing the identity of the selector.
The psychologist’s reply was, to put it mildly, astonishing… The person who took the test, he said, revealed in all phases a man obsessed with an urge for power and an insatiable tendency to kill. “You have on your hands a most dangerous person, “ Dr. Szondi wrote. In every single group, the subject had unerringly picked out the most negative types of those appealing to him. Dr. Szondi said this had never happened in his 24 years of practice, in the course of which he had tested more than 6,000 criminals. Other psychological tests produced similar results. They all confirmed that Eichmann, though legally sane and fully responsible for his actions, was possessed of a dangerous and perverted personality, with an unusual and unlimited capacity for using his fellow men as inanimate objects for the attainment for his goals.465
II.
Eichmann The question of Eichmann’s character became all the more relevant and
frightening once his psychological test results had been revealed. If the man 465
Ibid.
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was legally sane, and thereby responsible for his actions, could Arendt’s analysis retain merit after all, is it a matter of disbanding personal ethics amidst exceptional circumstances? This question is especially relevant to the theme of rationality/irrationality in this thesis. Eichmann acted through a pure sense of obedience, which could be construed as a manifestation of pure rationality. He KDVDSSHDUHGRQWKHVHPLRWLFVTXDUHVLQWKLVWKHVLVWKURXJKWKDWLQWHUSUHWDWLRQ however, his true identity as a sociopath should remain at the forefront of any categorization in which he is involved. In order to contextualize his decisions and actions, a brief outline of his background and involvement in the genocide is useful. The first assumption of the Nazi official is of a perverted and abusive childhood shaping the character into a sadist and obedience monger. However, at least for Eichmann, this was not the case. “The years of my youth were sunny. We were seven children at home, among them one sister. I used to engage in a lot sport… my best friend at the time was a Jew from Tyrol… his older brother impressed me.”466 In his youth, Eichmann enjoyed the company of the decorated soldiers of WWI, and was “overjoyed to march in their ranks or join them at rifle shooting exercises.” However, even the depth of impression made by such company was not enough for him to suppress criticism of the nascent Nazi Party in Linz, which he claimed was composed of “frustrated people or half-wits.” Only a few years later, Eichmann proposed the establishment of a special authority located in Vienna that oversaw control of Jewish life and the cooperation of Jewish officials. This establishment was the “Zentralstelle fuer
466
Ibid., 28.
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Juedische Auswanderung” (“The Central Office for Jewish Emigration”) and during his time as its head, Eichmann established the “standard” treatment for the treatment of Jewish officials and functionaries.467 Hausner describes a typical interaction between Eichmann and a Jewish officials:
Eichmann ordered the imprisoned director of the Jewish Community Office, Dr. Joseph Loewenherz.. Then, at the first available excuse, he slapped him in the face, saying immediately that it was his intention to rehabilitate Jewish lives and asking Loewenherz to prepare a plan for the organization of the Jewish community and promotion of Jewish emigration from Austria. He made it quite clear that cooperation with him was the only way to survival, both for the Jewish masses. Thus, the cornerstone for a system which was later developed and brought to perfection throughout occupied Europe, by using the Jewish spokesperson themselves as unwitting tools.468 As discussed in Chapter XI, during his time as the head of Nazi officials spearheading the “Jewish problem”, Eichmann proposed and habitually employed the phrase “Final Solution.” Yet this linguistic notoriety was not the sole contribution of his novel proposals – while state officials argued out the merits of ‘Cyclon B’ versus ‘exhaust gas’ systems, Eichmann individually resolved the matter for the Reich officials by introducing ‘Cyclon B’ into the
467
Sadly, Eichmann’s unpredictable methods which wildly oscillated between the violence expected from an SS man and pacification in the tone of a negotiator, did not phase out with much of theNazi influence following the surrender in 1945. This tactic has evolved into a popular technique practiced by the police, especially when operating in urban projects, the modern day “ghetto.” For a more in depth examination of how the police employ this and other tactics and how the project residents react and challenge these tactics, see Loic Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). 468 Ibid., 37-8.
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camps on a test basis. When these experiments “succeeded”, he ordered each camp to use only ‘Cyclon B’ for their gas chambers.469 This level of innovative skill and cold hearted dedication, even among the top of Nazi officials hardly justifies Arendt’s summation of Eichmann’s character: “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were… terribly and terrifyingly normal.”470
III.
Banality of (tangible) Evil471 The idea of a banality of evil, therefore, seems only truly appropriate
when applied to objects or tools used for furthering an evil, or here, genocidal purpose. The risk in this proposal is the continuing reliance on other tropes of Shoah, such as the pile of shoes or hair, to serve as a synecdoche in order to more completely signify how a twelve year regime could produce twelve to fifteen million victims. As the survivors of the camps slip into old age, the difficulty increases in finding an individual voice to articulate the experience of genocide, which then increases a demand for singular items representing collective horror. The slippage from loss of individual victims to increased demand has led to the creation of the tourist attraction of Auschwitz. Baudrillard described the emptiness of meaning as “all disappearing forms, art seeks to duplicate itself by means of simulation, but it’ll nevertheless soon be
469
Ibid., 91. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 276. For further discussion on the uses of tropes, refer to Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, (Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press).
470 471
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gone. 472 The subsequent manifestation of this simulation is a collection of hollow memorials to part catastrophes. The final and inevitable result is a field banal, self-referencing, and capable of only “advertising.”473 Two particular objects stand out at as reifications for the modernity and banality behind Shoah. The first is the shower nozzles installed in each of the gas chambers, the second are trucks by which many victims were transported to their deaths. The significance of these two particular objects lies in their commonality, a characteristic that was utilized for the nefarious ambitions of the Nazi regime. The gas chambers, first proposed as a means of ridding the mentally ill and physically incapacitated in the 1939-1941 Aktion T4, were originally in vans. By filling these vans with undesirables, the Nazis were able to simultaneously massacre and transport bodies to high walled and well-guarded hospitals. It took little time for German citizens to understand these activities and protest at their visibility. Thus, it was with the inception of the sterile shower within the hospital, formerly a place of healing and life affirmation, as a means of massacre that Nazis were able to both allay the fears of its future victims and thus more quickly decimate the unwanted population. The shower head became the means by which the poison gas Zyklon B was distributed into the lungs of millions. Trucks in Nazi Germany were often disguised when transporting or killing Jews. Painting on symbols from the Red Cross or taking on the guise as a mere supply van, trucks were the original means of moving Jews out of the 472
Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (NY: Verso, 1993),
. 473
Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (NY: Verso, 1993),
.
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home and into the ghetto, and also the means for moving mentally ill citizens into hospitals. These novel uses were not lost on the German citizens. “The people have come to recognize the vehicles in which patients are taken from their original institution …to the liquidation… even the children call out, ‘They’re taking some more people to be gassed.’”474 Following the cessation of the Aktion T4, trucks also became the backup means for moving ghetto residents into the camps when trains were full or broken. The basic use of a truck is in the movement of goods and tools meant to aid in the progress of a society. Altering only the latter half of that idea, the Nazis were able to begin both the physical and ideological inception of Shoah. It is telling that when German citizens were able to penetrate through the camouflage of the killing trucks, the protests were at once so pervasive and violent, that these trucks of massacre were abandoned or modified by the Nazis. In the words of one such protestor, “Whom if not the helpless should the law protect? May the responsible authorities make sure these disastrous measures are abolished…”475 In the angry open letter of one relative of Himmler, “(previously she) had steadfast confidence in the Fuhrer, (but now she) could feel the ground…give way beneath our feet…”476 Finally, the grumblings of disconcerted citizens of those executed and citizens concerned their own ill relatives could be soon executed came to emotional and public protests. “…the removal of residents from the Ottilien Home has caused a great deal of unpleasantness… among those upset and crying were Party members.”477 These and other resistance acts
474
Alexander Mitscherlich, Doctors of Infamy, (NY: Henry Schuman, 1949), 105. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, (NY: Perseus Books Group, 2000), 92. 476 Ibid., 90. 477 Ibid. 475
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of German citizens and priests eventually brought an end to the Aktion T4. The purpose of examining these quotidian objects is to understand that genocide rarely require novel forms of technological advancement to carry out its goals. The gas chamber was only a small step from the gassing showers used in asylums in 1939. The trucks never lost their origLQDOSXUSRVHIRUWUDQVSRUW instead only employing its nefarious Other when called upon by the state to relieve it of unwanted citizens. Recognizing it is in hatred and fear genocide is primarily fueled, and secondarily by opportunity and creative alteration of tools, is the necessary first step in preventing its future re-enactment. Despite the marginalization of former prison or containment site during its time of use, it nonetheless takes the imagination of contemporary citizens to see how the place continues to haunt cultural memory, even after the release (or death) of the last prisoner.478 The locus of primary contention with Arendt’s logic is that if carried out even slightly, there is a potential denial of human choice and possibility. This thesis has laid out the process by which rationality/irrationality was exhibited in three different state formulated entities located in the state itself and the exceptional state. However horrific the crimes committed by representatives of these groups, they were not committed in a vacuum by soul-less automatons. There was a clear consistency of rational/irrational thought and decision produced by the men and women employed as jurists, guards, and doctors. It is difficult to accept the possibility that these men and women were neither as sociopathic as Eichmann truly was, or as “banal” in their personal ethics as $UHQGWKDVLQGLUHFWO\DQG0LOJUDPGLUHFWO\SURSRXQGHG UDWKHUWKHVHPHQDQG 478 Alison Bashford and Carolyn Strange, Isolation: Places and Practices of Exclusion, (NY: Routledge, 2003), 10.
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women exercised their intellects and techne for reasons familiar to any collection of men and women in the 21st century, such as ambition, or personal grudge, or a basic fear which was grounded in ignorance and uncertainty. As the semiotic squares illustrated, there was a plentiful selection of brutal and sadistic guards. However, their actions were capable of being perceived in their own time as brutal and sadistic, just as the ideal rational camp doctor who unflinchingly exploited human subjects for his experiments was capable of gaining repute as a knowledgeable doctor and gentleman. The expansive condition of possibility for character traits and reputation was even extended so far as to incorporate the occasional sociopath, namely, Eichmann, within the fold of state based rationality/irrationality. It is difficult to accept, once more, that there existed a rationality/irrationality through which Reich citizens, from the “Good German” to Eichmann himself, derived normalcy from the previous anomie ruling over their state. There is nothing banal about adaptation to one’s extreme environment. As distasteful as the implications of this theory on the banality of evil are when applied to historical catastrophes, the potential for dangerous behavior and mass destruction suddenly becomes far more significant a threat to the safety of individuals and the collective international community when these same implications are applied to future unstable nations. Rather than relying on the uneasy, but convincing oppositions of character put forth through Arendt’s logic which holds there exist only sociopathic Eichmann figures or apathetic/intimidated/gullible followers who kill on command in genocide and pre-genocide conditions, it is imperative to look only to oneself and ask, “Am I capable of adopting a rationality of hate and violence?” Such introspection is a profound act which forcefully rejects the 230
potential and (im)potential involvement of oneself in future scenarios of violence, or even seemingly basic and inconsequential intolerance. What more effective and relevant beginning is there with which to combat the non-banality of this historical massacre and to secure a non-violent rationality/irrationality for the future? A final point on the political and rhetorical allusion of Shoah as the ultimate trope for human malfeasance and evil: “the extermination and the Nazis are both declared unthinkable, unsayable, without conceivable precedent or posterity - since they define the absolute form of Evil - yet they are constantly invoked, compared, used to schematize every circumstance in which one wants to produce, among opinions an effect of awareness of Evil, since the only way to access Evil in general is under the historical condition of radical Evil.”479 By calling on the memory of Auschwitz each time a crime against an individual, institution, or nation, the significance of the individualistic nature of Auschwitz loses a bit of its inherent potency. As seen in the casual manner in which tourists enter and tour Auschwitz, the camp and all it stands for is increasingly losing LWVIRUELGGLQJQDWXUH Ds though the mouth of Hell itself has yawned opened and set up kiosks with food for sale. And herein lies the true banality of evil.
IV.
Shoah’s Haeccity Shoah was committed as a means to an end and the end itself. The camps
ZHUHQRWFRQVLGHUHGWREHSHUPDQHQWZLWKLQWKHVWDWH UDWKHUWKH\ZHUHWKHUHWR fulfill a temporary need for the cleansing of the state. Once the enemies within
479
Alain Badiou, Ethics, (London: Verso, 2001), 63.
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the national boundaries had been eliminated, they were mostly likely to be used as factories, or torn down altogether. The typical German was thus encouraged to look to the bright Volkish future, rather than to his genocidal present. Thus, in order to become a true Nazi, the German had to release his hold on reality and trust completely in the Volk and Fuhrer. “An identity might have ontological depth because it construes itself as the bearer of an intrinsic truth that it knows to be true, or it might have faith in its truth... when it will be Transl. into knowledge.”480 Further, the individuality of this genocide was brought about because, as Agamben noted in the modern totalitarianism, “the establishment, by means of the state of the exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who… cannot be integrated into the political system.”481 There was also a completeness of state control that was instrumental in coordinating each state and civil body in order to rapidly implement the Nazi laws that were constantly being passed. For example, the laws against sexual contact with Jews did not extend to mere fraternization, but were also enacted to consider rape of camp inmates, otherwise below the concern of the law, to be considered likewise a state offense. The greatest criminal in the state was the citizen who had sexual affairs with a Jews. In other genocides, rape and sexual crimes were considered as part of the soldier’s reward, and further, these acts were encouraged, as seen in the Turkish genocide, and Hutu massacre of Tutsis. The systematic method by which the genocide was carried out spoke to what was considered a barbaric 480 William Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991/2002), 49. 481 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 2.
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instinct that acted against the modern age, ostensibly the age of culture and civilization. However, as Bauman argued, Shoah was in fact a product of modernity, the “other” of the technological progress of the 20th FHQWXU\ (DFK of the two faces can no more exist without the other than can the two sides of a coin." 482 The contradictions and paradoxes contained in Auschwitz were detailed in Chapter VIII, IX, and X. The remaining point to examine on this exceptional space is the haeccity of the Panopticon itself as the primary, even exclusive, qualia of Shoah. The Auschwitz camp was the place in which up was down and black and white, with the opposite just as likely. This zone, designated and designed purposely for this effect has not found repetition in our era’s subsequent genocides. Only during the Nazi reign of terror were categories of meaningful space both delineated as purposeful loci in which oppressive policies, dissimulated violence, and outright massacre unfolded, and subsequently recognized by victims, perpetrators, and worst of all, domestic and international bystanders. The domestic bystanders were the citizens who had refused to collectively resist an evil, citizens deplored today as the “Good Germans.” The international bystanders included the informed but disinterested individuals, mass organizations such as The New York Times, and sovereign heads, all of whom respected the Nazi genocidal categories by respecting the 300-year-old concept of ‘sovereignty.’ Since the oath of ‘Never Again’, genocides and acts of mass murder are publicly showcased as frequently in fictionalized cinematic productions as in live news reports broadcasted on television every night. Furthermore, with
482
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, (NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 7.
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increased reliance on the ever expanding capabilities in communicative technology and the post-Nuremberg advent of the United Nations, the possibility for individuals and entities to willfully ignore an ongoing genocide and other, lesser acts of human rights abuse, even if its occurring in a remote location on another continent. This modernized scenario which curtails opportunity for denying the impact or significance of unfolding atrocities reintroduces Shoah as the Janus genocide, so modern in tools of human destruction, and yet the last modern genocide in which its widespread violence was capable of evading media attention and aggressive international humanitarian inspection and action. Increasingly, the trend of individual concern in international conflicts aided in the technological tools capable of bringing similarly motivated, yet geographically isolated individuals together indicates a previously unimagined possibility for the cessation of genocide – shame. Just as pharmakos of ancient Greece, homo sacer of Rome, the Jews of Germany were all ritualistically expunged from their figurative and literal communities, so too today does the genocidal state, especially the sovereign head, face branding as an undesirable nation in an international community which practices ‘expulsion’ via economic and sporting sanctions, loss of a representing seat the United Nations General Assembly, restricted travel and international aid, and humanitarian intervention, if conditions engendering the genocide or human rights abuse worsen. Eschaton is that which is thoroughly seeped in a history and yet by existing within it will paradoxically ensure its collapse and demise. The (figurative) catalyst for paradigm shifts, critical re-examinations of modernity, ethics, domestic/foreign/international law, and even the formation of new 234
nation states, Shoah has altered almost every aspect of the human condition which engendered its murderous epiphenomenonal place in history. Despite this massive influence, Shoah has suffered from an ongoing and unique injury – the denial of its own happening. The denial of Shoah is as horrific an injury as it is inexplicable in its continuance. With zealous arguments incessantly downplaying or outright denying the genocide, the international community remains astounded at this aggressive ugliness. It is the legacy of Shoah to endure this injury, additional evidence for its unique nature. These points constituting Shoah’s haeccity having been established, there are nonetheless many points of Shoah that are parallel to the factors of other massacres, as occasionally alluded to in earlier chapters. Four consisteny elements include the State stranglehold over language formation and alteration, law, media, movements within the state territory, and monopoly over the fostering or decimating of population numbers. Rationality and irrationality are to these four elements what the unmentioned ‘pharmakos’ was to the pharmakeia-pharmakon-pharmakeus chain – a ‘trace’ most vividly seen out of the periphery of one’s eye, so to speak. This metaphoric ‘trace’ of rationality/irrationality serves an additional, more sober purpose in the genocide study. Just as its absence yet signified presence in a text disavows the possibility for the text’s total closure, so too does the unreferenced rationality/irrationality trace signified so loudly in unending camp massacre disavow the possibility for a conclusive containment of Shoah. As demonstrated in this thesis, rationality/irrationality is manifested, brought into significance through the permutations of decisions and actions that rarely, if ever, directly address the matter of rationality/irrationality itself. How many Jews for how many trucks? How many calories to keep the Muselmann 235
productive in his unending death? These calculations served Nazi state officials as a means by which to shape general standards of rationality and irrationality. These general standards, as intended, were adopted by and personalized within certain broad groups of Nazi actors, such as camp doctors and SS guards. The four reference factors common to modern genocides are manifestations of the state and civil genocidal project. But there is one crucial element that presupposes and contains those four other factors. This keystone is the human element, that variable forever upsetting static and stochastic systems and theories. That cultures from extraordinarily different histories, philosophies, state ideologies, and economies have succumbed to the extreme circumstances engendering their man made abhorrence reaffirms the common human element running through genocides from both contemporary times - Rwanda, Darfur, Cambodia, Soviet Union, Shoah, and Armenia. In past eras, this element arises frequently throughout the 400-year European colonialist invasion upon indigenous AmericDQV GXULQJ the 1750s the Qing dynasty destruction upon the Dzungars DQG ODVWO\ WKURXJKRXW WKH th century British “settlement” of Australian Aboriginals. This human element is skilled in encouraging latent possibilities of chaos. The element itself arises from countless, multi-faceted sources, such as: • A State or state like authority with continuing access to power • A State or state like authority acting in concert with the recognized PLOLWDU\IRUFH • An active bystander mentality adopted to varying degrees by external VWDWHSRZHUV 236
• A population thoroughly, either intentionally or inadvertently, immersed in the murdering project and confronted with an open condition of wide ranging possibilities for genocidal action, whether as a passive entity legitimizing the genocide through continuing life as previous to the genocide, or as the perpetrator assigned as the executioner of KRPRVDFHU •
A specific victim demographic set within the larger state population either arbitrarily manifested or designated or historically ‘validated’ through the State authority undertaking the JHQRFLGHSURMHFW
• And as discussed in Chapter XIII, the constant failure of the international community after the cessation of the genocidal project to move beyond the (understandable) fixation on certain tropes established during the time of crisis and commit to a more global understanding and application of the lessons grimly taught by the genocide by which to enable a more peaceful future. This list offers only a few means by which universal genocidal conditions arise in particular communities. As a result, this element raises a crucial matter that still remains unresolved: at the crux of Shoah analysis is the degree to which Shoah as a genocidal phenomenon can be ascribed to the German culture. Where do the universal elements of genocide and the particular conditions and norms of a community meet? In what manner does the universal and particular forge in a state such that dehumanization and genocide are inevitable events? While the opposing merits and challenges of the perspectives shaping this debate have thus presented an interesting and ongoing question, it is rather our goal is to simply understand how the enormity of the unpredictable, human 237
element factors fits in with other contributory factors in the larger genocidal project. A last note on the categorizations common in genocides: racism. The Nazi method of shaping extremist propaganda directing social movement(s) aided also in a national psychological entrapment - a population bound by a racism so radical and pervasive that only through expunging fundamental threatening minorities could they conceptualize a future safety. Thus, the ominous and omnipresent possibility of racism is of such force that in any genocidal formation its specter is always present483 even if there are not immediate references to racial difference or superiority. This condition of potentiality of the ever-becoming racism additionally characterizes and actualizes the state program of genocide. Thus to reiterate the earlier point of this chapter, studying these categories of universal nature and then envisioning their specific realizations within geographic and de-moralized state boundaries is vital for a preventative future.
483
Ibid., 153.
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Chapter XIII
Concluding Remarks
Men have forgotten this truth, said the fox. But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.484
I swear by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another, nor ask another to live for mine.485
484 485
Antoine de-Saint Exupery, Le Petit Prince, (Florida: Harcourt Inc., 2001), 82. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, (NY: Penguin Group, 1999), 346.
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Why did citizens contained in the territorial and influential borders of the Nazi genocidal state respond to oppressive governmental policies only slightly softened with watershed forms and quantities of propaganda? The addition of practical plans outlining a viable standard of living under the Party was irresistible to those even unmoved from emotion-ridden speeches. That these plans were realized which rescued the average citizen from starvation was an impressive economic feat, considering in the shadowing months of WWI, German citizens had resorted to burning currency to keep warm. The price of bread had risen to over one million reichsmarks. The Nazis not only eliminated unemployment, but were able to offer luxurious forms of vacations and activities for children – all of course for the good of the state. Provided the violent extent of their complicity was never fully revealed, the Germans proved capable of following Party lines. A Faustian tradeoff resulted: “it is crucial to the Nazis’ racist anti-Semitism (which) eventually entailed a destruction process that required and received cooperation from every sector of German society.”486 After the liberation of camps and subsequent Nuremberg Trials, members of German civil society frequently claimed, “Man hat uns belogen und betrogen.”487 After reading the personal letters, testimonies, interviews, recorded conversations, diaries, and articles of Germans at that time, and following the 486
John Roth, Ethics During and After the Holocaust: The Shadow of Birkenau, (London: Macmillan, 2007), 28. “We were lied to and betrayed,” as quoted in Joseph Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, (England: The Penguin Group, 1994), 86.
487
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de-Nazification process (if one could argue such a process was possible or feasible then), one could arrive at a different idea of the German attitude. The initial question is this: what is apathy, and are there gradations of this outlook? Starting from the view that apathy is a process, and not in fact a final and static attitude, apathy is arrived at and maintained through a variety of sources - fear, complacency and success. One can find a dug out route in life which is comfortable, well fitting and useful for goals. This discovery and acceptance of the route is the first step into apathy. The choice to remain in it can be the result of any of the aforementioned sources. Whatever the source is, whatever the reason is, apathy takes time, and consistency. The lack of these two variables leads one to conjecture that perhaps the Germans were of an entirely different, though superficially similar, attitude. Before Hitler came to power, with perhaps the brief interlude of economic growth from 1925-1928 under Stresemann, the Germans were in incredibly dire straits. Bread cost millions of reichsmarks, Germans by the millions were unemployed and starving, children were running wild, uncontrolled and growing up in a time of desperation. For the varied reasons Hitler came to power, the Germans had undeniable found someone who was able to provide food and employment. How quickly we abandon loved ones, beliefs, material goods in exchange for food, water, basic tools of survival in an extreme situation. For whatever policies adopted, for the hundreds of thousands persecuted, Germany under Hitler was still not Russia under Stalin. Provided one played the part of the Nazi supporter and was of the "correct" racial background, life was a far better thing than post WWI. People had jobs again, ones that provided vacation time - vacations that the state supported and included activities such as skiing, 241
cruises, bike trips, hiking, mountain climbing, etc. Children were enrolled in school again, and because of policies that limited the number of Jewish students, the rooms had excess resources and teachers. Employment skyrocketed and because of the strict physical regimes each civilian had to undergo, Germans soon ranked as among the fittest citizens in the world. And by protesting the Aktion T4 program, they were even able to hang on to the last vestiges of morality and ethics (which as we saw, was effective only to the degree that it was publicly shut down. It was reinstated as the '14f13' program in the camps in 1941). However, as Welch argues, it was this dominance over every aspect of the citizen’s life, the compulsory involvement in programs designed to aid in the war effort that individuals were incapable of drawing on self-referential frameworks in matters of ethical concerns.488 In addition, even when the gravity of ethical questions caused the citizen to look outside of state reference, they were overwhelmed by a sense of entrapment – even if they were capable of this individual ethical revolt, their family was still trapped within the Nazi structure. As Hitler proudly claimed in 1933:
When an opponent says, “I will not come over to your side,” I calmly say, “Your child belongs to us already, you will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time, they will know nothing else but this new community.489
The many forces leading to bystander apathy are outside the scope of this thesis. However, it is necessary to briefly note that Reich programs boosting 488 489
David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda, (London: Routledge, 1993), 65. Ibid., 63.
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employment and civil leisure were established in heightened Jewish income taxes, often outright confiscation of Jewish property. Similarly, that the reconstruction of national armaments was completed was due to slave labor. Even in the outraged citizen, the inevitable dilemmas arose: what viable options existed? Give up the unforeseen second chance at life with a steady income, food, a future for the children in order to protest the largely hidden abuse of a largely foreign people? This logic underlines the belief to that apathy never had time to form in the German nation. It was a situation of pure and total shut down, evidenced in the general non-reaction of the public to state publications that displayed Jewish “threats” to the Reich.490 In order to survive, at least in the beginning, the average German had to not just ignore the abuses, but completely and utterly cease to even see them. The uncomfortable and oft-noted silences in public places when an average German was vulgar enough to bring up the camps and mass deaths speaks to this reality. Denial may be too far on the other side of this spectrum (opposite apathy) to encapsulate this attitude as well. Denial implies that it was never thought of or discussed. However, it was - in private homes, among trusted friends, relatives. When one was on the street however, the veil of feigned indifference fell down again. There was after all, the threat of camps to vocal dissidents:
The machine of destruction was an aggregate – no one agency was charged with the whole operation. Even though a particular office might have exercised a supervisory function in the implementation of a particular measure, no single organization directed or 490
Ibid., 82.
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coordinated the entire process. The engine of destruction was a sprawling, diverse, and – above all – decentralized apparatus.491 Lastly, on the matter of the Reich citizens’ careful reaction to the exceptional state’s horrors, it is useful to recall Zimbardo’s compelling insight on the reactions of the family and friends visiting their makeshift prisoner sons during the week long Stanford Prison Experiments:
The visitors try to make the best of it, chatting among themselves about this interesting study. Some complain about the arbitrary rules, but remarkably, they meekly comply with them, as good guests do. We have set the stage for them to believe that what they are seeing in this lovely place is standard, and to distrust what they might hear from their irresponsible, selfish kids and buddies, who are likely to complain. And so they too become unwitting participants in the prison drama we are staging.492
I. The International Community: The other challenge contained within Shoah was the handicap on the LQWHUQDWLRQDO FRPPXQLW\¶V SRWHQWLDO LQWHUYHQWLRQ D KDQGLFDS FRPSULVHG RI governmental policies denying fully informed news reports on the development of racist laws and genocidal policies. Although pockets of concerned citizens
491 Raul Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, vol. I, (NY: Holmes & Meir Publishers Ltd., 1985), 55. 492 Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, (NY: Random House, 2008), 94. For a brief description on the ‘drama’ staged by the Gestapo through which to deceive and confuse the families of inmates, see: Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them, Trans Heinz Norden, (NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1950), 68.
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in America did struggle successfully to publish reports of the European atrocities in major newspapers, such as the New York Times, the American political environment proved inhospitable to larger social movements calling for uniform national action. Reflecting on this civil barrier to knowledge and action, Yehuda Bauer noted, “Any rescue action from the outside had to overcome these handicaps first. The process of knowing usually came in a number of stages: first, thHLQIRUPDWLRQKDGWREHGLVVHPLQDWHG WKHQLWKDGWR EHEHOLHYHG WKHQLWKDGWREHLQWHUQDOL]HGWKDWLVVRPHFRQQHFWLRQKDGWREH HVWDEOLVKHGEHWZHHQWKHQHZUHDOLW\DQGWKHFRXUVHRIDFWLRQ ILQDOO\WKHUHFDPH action, when and if it came.”493 Contrasting to the lack of availability of the German policies to the outside world was the overly accessible state controlled media. As Speer noted in his prophetic closing words in the Nuremberg Trial about the uses of modern communication, “…the more technical the world becomes, the more individual freedom and the self rule of mankind becomes essential…a nation believing in its future will never perish”494 The genocide was made possible and then carried out because of a series of actions and un-actions taken by both the Nazi state, and the world at large. If the former had been less organized and less focused on an agenda of religious and racial hatred, and the latter had been less inclined to respect national sovereignty, Shoah could never have been carried out to the extent it was. As Hitler himself noted, “It is shameful example to observe today how the entire democratic world dissolves in tears of pity but then in spite of its obvious duty
493 Yehuda Bauer, Holocaust in Historical Perspective, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978), 18. 494 Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, 378.
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to help, closes its heart to the poor, tortured Jewish people.”495 Before these words, the herald of the Nazi atrocity, it must become the goal of every nation today to transcend differences of politics, tradition, and law in order to disprove +LWOHU¶VGHSLFWLRQRIKXPDQLW\ RULQWKHZRUGVRI=LPEDUGR³7RHQFRXUDJHWKH sacrifice of youth for the sake of advancing the ideologies of the old must be considered a form of evil that transcends local politics and expedient strategies.”496 However, this disinclination and inability to become fully involved in understanding the atrocities followed documentation of the atrocities:
repeated exposure to horror developed a callus on conscience, Barrett found. The first time you read of the murder of children, it was with disbelief, the tenth time with sadness, the fiftieth time with one part of the brain wondering what would be on the menu that night at the Grand Hotel. That, Barrett believed, was the worst part of the job.497
II.
Power born in Rational Genocide: The danger of a rationally calculated genocide is in the amount of
irrationality inuQGDWHG LQ WKH DFWV WKHPVHOYHV WKH ODWWHU RI ZKLFK LV ZKDW outsiders often exclusively and dangerously remember, to the detriment of accurate historical readings and future generations. As one scholar noted in 1990, “The nationalist socialist rule was based on the ecstasy of the ruled. The institutions that were contrived and the mechanisms that were installed to 495 496 497
Ibid., 396. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 292. Ibid., 114.
246
conquer and establish were aimed to permanently intoxicate the people, and to create a climate of mass hysteria which generated a consistent and unconscious acclamation of the regime.”498 Unfortunately, it was rarely these citizens, so intoxicated with the power of Nazism, that were forced to undertake the murderous tasks of their SS counterpart. The SS, while indoctrinated and firm in his persuasion, was not so recalled with drunkenness with hysteria. Rather, his role in massacre is more often marked with his drunkenness from alcoholism based in attempts to forget what he had been ordered to do.
We give meaning to existential suffering, then, by holding ourselves responsible for it…it can’t be a god who must be protected from responsibility for evil. It can’t be nature. It will have to be us, if it is to be. We will have to be the responsible agents… A strong doctrine of responsibility is one that supposes that every discernible evil must be caused by some agency that is itself blameworthy and deserves to be treated as the embodiment of evil will.499 Lastly, there is a danger of generalization, which has been unavoidably utilized in this paper, of equating all 80 million Germans as “Nazis” when in fact the national membership never rose above ten percent. Even when speaking of bona fide Nazi Party members, there nonetheless remains the potential of generalizing as undefined acts and beliefs of members whose individual acts and beliefs ranged across a wide terrain of morality. The ideal
498 Wolfgang Benz (1990)“Herrschaft und Gesellschaft im nationalisocialistischen” as quoted in ed. David Cesarani ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ Aryanization, and Holocaust” in The Final Solution: Origins and Implementations, (London: Routledge, 1994), 46. 499 Ibid., 99.
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route would be then to rather speak of individual acts within a state where individual acts saved or condemned lives. Along this line of thought, American sociologist Albert Bandura once wrote, “Our ability to selectively engage and disengage our moral standards… helps explain how people can be barbarically cruel in one moment and compassionate the next.”500 This individual choice of moral selection requires the external viewer to individualize the atrocities by taking the necessary step back from works such as Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which puts the reader and all non-Germans on the side of the victims, and all Germans, both of today and then, on the side of the Nazis. Minimizing the environment and susceptibility of a war torn culture and broken state, Goldhagen to simplify the multi-faceted rationality behind the Nazi regime. Or, in the closing words of Benz:
If one lacks care for oneself, one will surely lack the abundance from which care for individuality in others might emerge… Ironically, then, serious threats to freedom grow out these intersections between individual and collective freedom. These threats become most severe when the state suppresses claims to self-identity that might jeopardize its own claim to be an effective vehicle of freedom, and when large segments of the populace vindicate this response out of a wish to see the state as an effective instrument of collective freedom.501
III.
Future Genocide:
500
Albert Bandura, as quoted in Benedict Casey, “When Death Is on the Docket, the Moral Compass Wavers,” New York Times, February 7, 2006. Ibid.
501
248
The significance of these musings is not in the idle wonderments of historical fact, but rather, for a contemporary application. How do current forms of ethnic cleansings utilize the state of the exception and homo sacer to realize goals of ethnic cleansing? In the case of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the state of the exception was not as much a tangible separation from the state itself, as an ever-present reality, a usurpation of the state itself. As seen in the indiscriminate attacks which exploded in Bosnia, often chaos meant to be contained in the exceptional state burst forth with complete detriment to the state, leaving buildings leveled and thousands of civilian casualties. As Alain Badiou framed future perspectives of Shoah: “As the supreme negative example, this crime is inimitable, but every crime is an imitation of it.”502 Little in the Third Reich or Shoah is easily or accurately theorized. This was a catholic genocide encapsulating murders of rage, murders justified by alleged scientific need, murders of cold calculation, and murders for state economics. There were citizens who aided Jews (Oskar Schindler), those who went above and beyond their Nazi roles to persecute the Jews (Adolf Eichmann), Jews who accepted their fate, and those who did not (the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943). There were SS guards who chose to humiliate their inmates, those who showed mercy, Nazi doctors who showed restraint in their research, and those who did not. The constant reversal of roles demonstrated their own malleability. Homo sacer could resist death and the SS guard could show compassion in the camp. The number of corpses at the finality of WWII demonstrates the rarity of humane acts, however there are too many accounts of such unusual happy happenings for denial.
502
Alain Badiou, Ethics, (NY: Verso, 2001), 63.
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In the era of the “Good German,” a figure formed by the civilizing effects of a democracy and willed state of dictatorship, the corpses produced in the gas chambers are claimed to him before bio-political machine. The responsibility of homo sacer’s body is to the people, his accusers, and to the state which placed him in such a situation. “Now, who then it to govern the ruler? The law, RIFRXUVH LWPXVWQRWKRZHYHUEHXQGHUVWRRGDVWKHZULWWHQODZEXWUDWKHUDV reason, the logos, which live in the role of the ruler and must never abandon him.”503 The question of homo sacer also gives rise to the inexplicability of Jewish complicity. As one with former citizenship, monetary/social value, and ties within the community, what compelled him to tacitly accept judgment of fellow citizenry? This Socratic-esque obedience of state appetite to the point of humiliation and eventual obliteration seems extreme, if not entirely bizarre. It was not murder alone that destroyed the Jewish population across Europe. It was a death, symbolically fulfilled by citizens, and physically by guards, exploited to the fullest, demonstrating the penetration of state ethics into both the citizen as political animal and the bodily representation of their chosen homo sacer. Daniel Goldhagen proposed this obedience was perhaps due to the Jew’s knowledge and tacit acceptance of the traditional simmering anti-Semitic forces present in his German state. It may not have been a case of the Jew entering a situation of antiSemitism as much as homo viator, historically unwelcome in Germanic tribes, whose sojourn had lasted too long, and in a nation entirely capable of fluid hate: “the course of the formation of political will… is an open process: the
503
Michel Foucault, The Care of Self, (NY: Vintage House, 1990), 88.
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transitions between schemes, peremptory actions and decisions are always PDOOHDEOH WKHERXQGDULHVEHWZHHQWKHQXPHURXV participating and interested institutions, between the various administrative levels...”504 Further, as Hilberg noted, the process of genocide is invariant: Definition…Concentration/Seizure…Annihilation…this is the invariant structure of the basic process (of genocide), for no group can be killed without a concentration or seizure of the victims, and no victims can be segregated before the perpetrator knows who belongs to the group.505 The avoidance of this process leading a society into the degradation relies on a transparent government that is as monitored by active citizens as it monitors its subjects. Additionally, groups endowed with more power over life, death, and freedom, such as doctors, must also be a passive focus of attention as well as an alert subject aware of its own potentials to temper and limit the freedoms of other citizens. Philip Zimbardo, the sociologist reputed for the 1970’s Stanford Prison experiment on prisoner/guard relations has recently analyzed possibilities of brutality and sadism in spaces of extreme situations, such as concentration camps, prisons, and detention centers: The System includes the Situation, but it is more enduring, more widespread, involving extensive networks of people, their expectations, norms, policies, and perhaps laws. Over time, Systems come to have a historical foundation and sometimes also a political and economic power structure that governs and directs the behaviors of many people within its spheres of influence. 504
Gotz Aly, “Political Prehistory” in National Socialist Extermination Policies. ed. Ulrich Herbert. (NY: Berghahn Books, 2000), 54. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews vol.III, 999.
505
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Systems are the engines that run situations that create behavioral contexts that influence the human action of those under their control. At some point, the System may become an autonomous entity, independent of those who initially started it, or even of those in apparent authority within its power structure… If you were placed in a strange and novel cruel Situation within a powerful System, you would probably not emerge as the same person who entered that crucible of human nature. You would not recognize your familiar image if it were held next to the mirror image of what you had become…506 (emphasis added) Following through with the revelations of this “System’s” violence and reoccurring potential, a set of ten ethical guidelines were drafted and adopted into the medical field as a modernized Hippocratic Oath after the “Doctors’ Trial” at Nuremberg. While these guidelines spoke most forcefully from the remnants of Dr. Mengele’s human subject experiments, this “Nuremberg Code” was meant to cover all forms of experiment which could degrade a person’s individual standard or means of living. After the horrific images of Gypsy children starved and lined against a wall, of twins surgically opened and infected deliberately, and of inmates’ bodies lying on floors as the sign of a failed experiment, the common universal reaction was revulsion and a commitment to ensure “never again.” However, Professor David Fraser is quick to demonstrate how sadistic and low potential gain kinds of experiments continued on well after the last 1XUHPEHUJ7ULDO LQRQHH[DPSle, the “Tuskegee experiments” in which 399 African Americans exposed to syphilis remained untreated so doctors could
506
Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 180-1.
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observe the progression of the disease over forty years.507 Professor Jay Katz articulates his doubt that the Nuremberg Code could summon such a monumental over turn of this ancient medical practice of human subject experimentation:
The Nazi victims were subject to coercion, sadism, and torture: the Nuremberg Code celebrates freedom and human dignity. As medical professionals, we remain unconvinced that we should embrace the code’s principles in the spirit in which they were promulgated. It remains my dream that we shall do so. It may be only a dream, but it comforts my nightmares.508
IV.
Final Thoughts: The perdurable nature of genocidal rationality/irrationality does permit
the certainty of at least one aspect of future genocidaire conduct. Regardless of the particular method, nationality, or philosophy espoused in a future massacre, one predictable factor is the deliberate adoption of rationality seeped in violence. There is a period of initial confusion in the agent genocidaire that struggles to survive, however briefly. During Dr. Zimbardo’s Prison Experiments, one guard vocalized the process of confusion:
I wanted to see just what kind of verbal abuse that people can take 507
David Fraser, Law After Auschwitz, (North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 2005), 422. Jay Katz, “Human Sacrifice and Human Experimentation: Reflections at Nuremberg”, Yale Law School Occasional Papers, Second Series, Number 2 (1997), as cited in David Fraser, Law After Auschwitz: Towards a Jurisprudence of the Holocaust, (North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 2005), 420.
508
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before they start objecting, before they start lashing back, under the circumstances. And it surprised me that no one said anything to stop me. No one said, ‘Jeez, you can’t say those things to me, those tings are sick.’ Nobody said that, they just accepted what I said… They’d do push-ups without question, they’d sit in the Hole, they’d abuse each other, and here they’re supposed to be together as a unit in jail, but they’re abusing each other because I requested them to and no on questioned my authority at all. And it really shocked me. Why didn’t people say something when I started to abuse people? I started to get so profane, and still, people didn’t say anything. Why?509
In the face of this shameful question, perhaps it’s easier to deny than accept the reality in which this boy/’guard’ operated. Maybe when we see how many programs, from the outreach and education to peacekeeping, all set in place in order to remember the past horrors and to prevent future genocide. Maybe when we see the hopes and the attempts to fulfill those two simple sounding elements, it becomes easier to deny the severity of Shoah, to deny the entire event, even. Because if so many care and so many try and yet there still remains so many signs of failure – then what hope is there really for this world of ours? This methodology of imitating the “Other” in order to bring about the “Other’s” downfall would be a handsome gesture – just as the Nazis’ stole from the Jewish mindset in order to destroy them, so too then will we steal from the Nazi mindset to finally end their continuing ugliness. For now, however, it may be best to emulate Katz’s attitude - cautious optimism grounded in the reality of our repetitive and brutal history. In every genocide and mass act of destruction, the full array of human
509
Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 194.
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character emerges, however briefly, however undistinguished. Just as Aleksander Solzhenitsyn portrayed the individual’s inextricable and fluctuating propensities of good and evil, so too does every society unavoidably nurture those capable of suddenly and inexplicably exemplifying these extremes in times of crises, from the heroic Oskar Schindler to the sociopathic Adolf Eichmann. And it is this, the ineluctable enablement of human danger and salvation, the perdurable joy and unending tragedy, which finally defines the rationality and irrationality of a common humanity.
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PARALIPOMENA
256
On SS Guards
Bataille & Auschwitz, Part I.
No beast is there without glimmer of Infinity. No eye so vile nor abject that brushes not Against lightning from on high, Now tender, now fierce.510
510 Victor Hugo, La Légende des siècles, as quoted in Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, transl. Leon S. Roudiez (NY: Columbia UP, 1982).
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The camps were the nominal and moral state of exception, only infrequently exceptional in geographic or inscribed isolation. No longer were the SS guards under the norms or regulations of pre-Nazi society, now they were living in a realm of ‘meta-meta ethics and morality.’ The SS operated in this meta-meta realm, this second degree because they existed beyond the pale of the already incredible meta-norms and regulations of the Nazi state. Yet the Nazi state and the Auschwitz state of exception were rare in their sui generis natures, interlocked, each existing in validation of and in validating the exceptionality of the other. The restraint which was ordered by state heads regarding daily acts of the Nazis living within the state was a constant, if not consistent, policy. While certain forms and perpetrators of violence were justified within Nazi law and certainly by Nazi norms, arbitrary violence and brutality in the state was not so granted. However, as to be expected in any gratuitously dynamic system, its occasional expression was not always legally or formally punished. Now in the camps, the SS existed in a meta-meta realm which was grounded and supported by a dynamic state that had intellectualized and gradually rationalized the removal of Reich enemies, by any means necessary.
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In conjunction with this novel, perhaps entirely unprecedented environment was the open-ness within the bodies and minds of the SS guards, an open-ness which offered the opportunity for the unleashing of a passion formerly denied, interred, or simply undiscovered. We call this passion "evil". Bataille sees this place of open-ness as the loci of discard-ness, a place to shake off our former frameworks of social-ness and to ask, freshly de-nuded, "What exists?" This rejection, which ranged from the partial to the complete, was not of an exclusive Nazi sense of "social-ness" because the state entity was itself a metastate, and moreover, a nascent one. The rejection was of the state which had educated and nurtured these guards - the Weimar Republic. "What exists?" The question unanswered is ironically of that nature through which traditional philosophy and societal studies stake validation in ancient genesis and continued existence. The potential for man to taste, as mystical experience, the sovereignty of evil. Having been freed from religiosity and dogma, and the monopoly of ethics in the state, the SS man began the steps towards this revelation, by an internalization of a double helix, this instinct toward deliberate state duty/state rationality and inadvertent realization of "pure experience" as genocidaire.
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Paradoxically, to become the effective genocidaire idealized by the state, he had to continue to pierce, with internalized, unvoiced questions, the validity of the state and its endorsed knowledge all the way to the core of its own professed logic. Having reached the state’s hollow core, he unbound the Titans of his uncontrollable emerging passions, and in doing so, drowned his state legitimated identity, subjectivity, and history, all in a sudden frenzied outburst of evil, of utter violence. This genocidaire’s ‘inner experience’, expressed through the ‘mystical’ is referenced in the lexicon of Bataille, as independent of historical context of church authorized revelations. The inner experience has no sovereign but itself. It does not limit the meaning of its existence to a pre-ordained dogma, it does not limit its existence or degrade its value in seeking philosophical explanation. Indeed, language itself cannot stand over or in presupposition to this sovereign inner experience. As evidenced during its most elevated and ecstatic moments, the experiencing man inevitably falls silent, unable to express coherently speak of his event. It is independent of the world outside the body and mind of the experiencing man.
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Similarly, the "pure experience" is not in reference to those commonly cited historical chronologies still actively defining us, or the self-willed and realized identity; rather, it is founded skirting the boundaries of the "heterogeneous" realm, defined by Bataille as the locus of society's unconscious and conscious rejection of certain elements by which to ensure its own productivity and order. In other words, it is the locus of the rejection ritual, the originary space for potential collective rejuvenation. The experiences within this, ‘trace’, this unspoken, yet constantly referenced realm emerge as a force or shock to those who function within perceived safety of the insecure, synthetic homogenous realm, or a realm which provides no access to opportunities for "pure experiences". Thus, they are surrounded by the choice picks of norms and values. These people are the ‘Good Germans’, the ‘normal’, the ‘neurotypical’. Those outside the Third Reich and even those within it still immune to its forces. The sudden and dominating force of the shocks heralding the presence of a "pure experience" summons forth the community to cease usual state issued duties, and under the careful gaze of the sovereign (in whatever form it might take), undertake the rituals to achieve katharsis, that ancient Greek ritual of purification via formalized purging or expulsion, resulting in revitalization for all. 261
This social purging is an inversion of the force from the "pure experience". The force, existing as a norm within its heterogeneous realm, briefly touches that homogenous world to at once indirectly define social norms of "otherness" and to directly validate the existence of this feared metaphysical other. Thus, the community gathers itself in emotion and population, and in an outburst of violent action, repels the force's influence and returns it to its realm of unpredictable heterogeneity. In this violence, the community symbolically touches that realm, and in doing so, performs the inverse act of that violating force – the community both identifies indirectly boundaries between these colliding worlds and directly validates the existence of this ethereal realm and its sovereignty from the community's homogenous world; an act mimicked in the assigned duties of the executioner of homo sacer. The release of this force was the simultaneous repulsion and gathering of the metaphoric reproductive influence this force could unleash upon the community. This sort of influence, and its implied bodily dangers, is often ascribed to the unwanted, the marginalized – however, this influence bears the most power to alter tradition when it is heard as Siren song in the ears of the elite and salient.
The repelling act is thus appropriately named for the
"kartamenia" or menstrual fluid out of which replication is born. 262
This struggle and repulsion is only recorded into the socio-historical annals if unsuccessful – if the force or its influences were not able to penetrate the protective and heroic sheath of tradition – or if it was not ultimately useful as a vehicle for furthering norms within the homogenous world. On the other hand, the successful struggles are sometimes memorialized in myths, in cultural forms of entertainment (from theatre to permutations of wrestling matches) and especially in carefully coded legislation. In returning to the "inner experience" of the Nazi state, the SS trooper found a liberation, an unanchordness in the camps. Limited previously by authoritatarian dogma holding the "Volk" as sovereign, he found silence instead within the camps during these pure moments, those most elevated moments of his inner experience. While the state dreamed and bore the most efficacious methods of massacre, of producing dizzying piles of corpses, he was otherwise set loose within the camps. Surrounded by death, it is only appropriate he too experienced a kind of death – a cessation of state-ness and metaphysical constraint. The smile of the SS men during beatings was an unspoken acknowledgement of the sovereignty of these pure expressions. Sovereign into
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itself, and out of the grasp of the common language, the smiling SS stood speechless utterly transfixed in their human totality reinforced in their inverse enormous and secret daily actions. The dynamic Nazi state rationality was never fully opposed against the limitations of its extermination project, or vice versa; rather they slide in and along each other, always maintaining violent, metaphysical idea forms which occasionally found expression in policy. This malleable relationship, at times parallel in reflecting methods and at other times irreconcilable as the absolute binary, was one means by which the praxis and space for genocidal idea was created. The absolute and religious maintenance of this relationship is one reason why Shoah is unique - the kaleidoscope imagery of brilliant Volk future against the absoluteness of concurrent camp horrors. Other states either slide into passions or grasp onto abiding deep policy, resulting for the former, in massacres reminiscent Rwanda, and in the latter, in collectives potential in their violence, still relying on the safe destructiveness dissimulated in policy; both acting for the same dual purpose of a dominance in the ever shifting space of superiority and the diminution of the perdurable, the marginalized.
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On SS Guards
Bataille & Auschwitz, Part II
The fact is that street cleaners are welcomed like angels, their task of removing the residue of yesterday’s existence is surrounded by a respectful silence, like a ritual that inspires devotion, perhaps only because once things have been cast off nobody wants to have to think of them further…511
511
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, (NY: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1972), 35.
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As new, disoriented SS guards attempted to adjust to camp life, they began the process of identifying surrounding unfamiliar aspects within the familiarity framework of the known and experienced, the process of connecting the conceptual/mental domain (source) to conceptual/mental domain (target). And yet so quickly the mapping halted and stalled out, for that exact, basic reason – this was a novel situation, a precedent. They had no domain to viably map onto, so even propaganda and indoctrination fall onto an uncharted territory, a conceptual barathrum. And we see this tacitly acknowledged by the state in the near apologetic speeches that Himmler would pathetically deliver for the SS when in Auschwitz. And this nexus of seeming entrapment, the familiar foiled stubbornly against the unfamiliar is where Bataille enters with incredible levels of insight. Unlike the totality of liberation gained in the SS trooper’s ultimate rejection of the church and the state persistent in their incessant attempts to lay down parameters binding his (im)potential inner experience, the typical SS failure to abandon the state and its ongoing permutations in order to become the complete genocidaire had been pre-conceived and so imagined by the state. This rejection of the state foiled against the acceptance of failure was expressed, manifested in the aforementioned smile. Had the state completely 266
and thoroughly trained their SS, conceptual domain would have been developed to the extent for this metaphor to be mapped and reconciled. But as Lakoff noted, slogans are empty when there is no deep structure for the surface frames, aka slogans, to hang onto – and thus the system is bereft of use or pragmatic meaning. So because of this falling short and the lack of complete re-programming, because, to be fair, no one could have foreseen what was to unfold within the state of exception, the SS were forced to adapt, both unconsciously and consciously. Bataille deliberately chose to release himself from these domestic powers, as well as he could philosophically, and in so doing, decry from his external space of liberated thought, the endeavors thus far to express the force/power behind the inner or pure experience. However, he then undertakes this very task. The SS were made inverse to themselves, and ironically so. Having existed and killed so forcefully on the peripheries they displayed an aptness for massacre. This aptness moved them as though a Faustian vehicle from these outskirts and into the camps, the most sacred and inner sanctum, the heart of Nazi power and violence. They thus find themselves rejecting first the morals
267
and ethics of their progenitor state (the Weimar Republic) and then secondly, rejecting the teachings of superiority long since drummed into their consciousness, and then thirdly, rejecting the language which had presupposed and simultaneously evolved with them – a language which finally fell silent, insufficient for their needs in the camp. And through this, their own inadvertent self structured, self contained, and self executed rejection ritual, they emerged as the executioner, the damned one as denuded of self permutation as the legally and historically bare homo sacer. Unable to safely or adequately articulate their transformations into genocidaires, because of their position as model Nazis, they were unable to properly reconcile the metaphor. From source to target conceptual networks, they could not actualize the primeval need for catharsis via attempted articulation of the inner experience as motivated his own personal drives and universal fear. But the inability to speak, the denial of language were the sacrifices made during his baptism as executioner, the loss of his story and bibliography as fated as his victims. Yet through violent externalization born in this frustrated muteness, he occasionally found the vestiges of catharsis. And here we see the disparity of the metaphor full originated from cognition, yet never entirely resolved through the body. 268
Decades later it is impossible to know how many SS guards were able to realize this fundamental rupture: state cognition -> functional cognition into truncated cognition -> bodily expression. The danger points existed for these human operants in the state and in the camp. Despite their identical and primary underlying order to obeying the Fuhrer, alternate and at times, dichotomous forms of situational rationality were employed. This rationality was therefore dynamic and for the sake of the individual's sense of internal consonance, constantly finding affirmation in an individual sense of
agent's history and experiences and in his socio-
environmental context. Propaganda spoke to the individual personally, validating his obedience and loyalty, even serving as interface between the state at large and the intangible context individualizing an agent. Thus, the importance of shaping propaganda items to fit eacch demographic became crucial. In attempting to limit the conditions of possibilities available to the Third Reich citizen, the state soon encountered the need for specialized propaganda and localized Nazi public discourse, which could operate in conjunction with the state to muffle any potentially threatening variables within the conscience of an individual or group of individuals. Due to this pressure, an individual would then find it difficult to improvise or spontaneously create 269
a situation in which his state based and controlled language could not fully or satisfactorily cover; thus rendering him even less likely to know to want to step outside the State's clearly visible and violently protected boundaries of selfexpression. Thus very few within the state would have had an extra-linguistic or extra-political access by which to even imagine the inner experience. Meanwhile through state exercise of a rationality seeped in fear and an invariable unknowing layering of emotion was central to the citizens survival. They may not have had an opportunity for an inner experience simply they had so focused their emotions and cognitive processes on avoiding that which immediately threatened them. However, the SS in the camps were of a dichotomous nature, unlike the state dwelling figures. Trained to suppress emotions and bypass their fear, the SS instead repressed and channeled their instincts and feelings – a situation which again, only ever led to an explosion, a katharsis, of these interred passions. For as Bataille noted, the intensity and forcefulness of the inner experience is inversely related to the intensity of self containment, of propriety within the sovereign structures of social context and political/moral boundaries.
270
So it is no wonder beatings spontaneously erupted, or smiles and laughter would inexplicably appear, especially among those who were the most efficient killers. Everything in their camp environment spoke against their training, even the temporality of the structures and buildings themselves. Impermanent and hastily erected, filled with still living enemies of the State who were yet fed by the State every day, even clothed and housed, and incredibly, cared for medically! Corruption ruled and families were rarely allowed to visit, at most strictly contained in sterilized zones. Not only was the role of the SS set at odds with the role of a basic state bureaucrat, not only was his very perception of life and death called into question, but his environment was to be the cause of all these capitulating assumptions. And thus the SS was bound as in a helix with his homo sacer, bound by something more permanent and fundamental than the relinquished language – his tormented inner experience, which revolved around and around the unending existence and inexorable death of homo sacer.
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The Sonderkommandos
&
The Werewolves
If existence in all its moments is all of itself, this is the place of indivisible existence. But why, then, does the city exist? What lines separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of the wheels from the howl of the wolves?512
512
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, (NY: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1972), 18.
272
The Argive myths relayed by Herodotus of Halicarnassus on the nature of werewolves provided the mise en scene for contemporary application of this transformation at the threshold of ethical character and state duties.The Sonderkommandos (SK) were the true werewolves, they were the allegorical Orpheus after failing to save his love from Hades. Yet when he returned, having failed to bring back Eurydice, he was ripped apart by the incensed Bacchae. One hopes the SK found kinder succor in mercy from their fellow Jew in the underworld. The SK were the true werewolves, locked in a state, an actualized condition and delineated as outsiders in a world they could not escape, just as the werewolf trapped in his dynamic physiology and bestial enmity. The SK were unwilling, and still forced into a static identity. Most scholars would argue that it is the guard who enacted the wolf as he constantly re-garbed himself as he moved from one extreme situation to another, from the state to the state of exception. But that is too literal a reading of character. Just as the inmate was made to be a mass in one and one in a mass, so too was the werewolf rarely illustrated in fairy tales with blatantly distinguishing features. The SK was targeted by the state as an inmate fundamentally from entry to death, and so the werewolf as well, trapped as the
273
unfixed man fixed in fate. And both temporarily underwent a transfiguration in response to an issued command over which they had no control. The SK man and the werewolf were as passive an agent as active a being. They were reluctant, the most significant trait among their metaphorical connection. The SS men were willing agents, even overeager to demonstrate murderous obedience to Fuhrerprinzip, a quality preceding any assignment of guard duty. This willingness was in one way demonstrated by murdering one considered undesirable by the State. Thus, the State solidified and legitimized the SS man. The State never does this for the SK/werewolf, one who is ousted from the genesis of his condition, unlike the guard who is, contrarily, even more accepted following his maturation and willing acceptance of his State bestowed title and identity. And so, this essay challenges the claim that the SS man was appropriate LQILJXUDWLYHDVVXPSWLRQDVWKHZHUHZROI LQIDFWLWLVWKURXJKWKH66PDQDV juxtaposed against the SK, that this broken camp figure most vividly portrays the reviled beast. The (ir)rationality which the guards displayed was a conscious and visible representation for/and of the deliberate stability created supported by the State. The only significant moment of interaction between the State and the
274
SK was when the SK were brought into the camp as mere inmates and formally un-person-ed. They became a number, a moment parallel to the virgin transmogrification of the werewolf. As passively and smoothly as they were rejected by their State, they actively challenge and refuse death during initial transfiguration. And from this basic defiance, the two continuously battle against their keepers – in the camp, the SK’s keeper was the guard, in the fairy tale, the keeper of the werewolf was the localized, faceless mass spontaneously grouped in ferocious rage hunting him for in vengeance for a murdered villager, a murdered insider. However in life, both were able to able to derive sustenance from the deaths and ongoing victimization by the State accepted entities. In the camps, this Transl. to the SK grim reward for his duties in the additional nutrition from the extra serving of soup or bread slice slyly slipped into his hand. They handled the dead and were so saved. The SK were also able to steal whatever small trinkets hidden by the inmates freshly killed in the showers. By selling these trinkets, the SK could bargain up for a better set of shoes or increased dinner portions, or outright bribe a soldier to protect him during an upcoming selection. However, if they were caught stealing from the bodies too often or too
275
obviously, they themselves risked torture and a single shot to the head by an indifferent guard. And so even on the threshold of their survival, they made a life. Similarly, the werewolf was able to eke out a life by occasionally picking RIIWKHFXULRXVQDWXUHVHHNHURUDVWUD\IDUPDQLPDO LIWRRIUHTXHQWO\RUWRR overtly, villagers inevitably set down their State based duties to engage in the clichéd hunt. With rising adrenaline and blood lust, the villagers would hunt down and murder the werewolf, their self proclaimed threat. This entrance into the death space is where the previously parallel existence of the two entities, our figurative werewolf in the SK and our literal mythical werewolf diverge, even set in binary opposition. The end of the SK was usually designated by a singular entity, a guard, possibly a doctor. The SK was then killed in a large group of other inmates. The werewolf, however, was a singular creature who would be the murderous focus for a large group. And so the many was pursued by one and the one was pursued by many, respectively. The exceptions for those killings also mirror each other. At times, a solitary or small group of inmates would be hung as a warning to their fellow inmates. Thus their death is for a different purpose than the blind extermination for which Nazism is so remembered. Similarly, a purposeful and perhaps even unprovoked hunt by villagers to find and annihilate a lair of werewolves.
276
Both the corpses of the werewolf and the SK were thoughtlessly tossed aside. Its only slain bodies of animals with a fixed nature which typically end up as hunting badges, such as the lion or bear head over the fireplace in the hunting lodge. Similarly, it is only the accepted and citizen celebrated for State loyalty who is given the hero’s funeral. And so only through these murderous vehicles were the SK and the werewolf contrarily brought to death, illustrating the sole divergence from an otherwise near parallel existence. This divergence occurs at their executioners’ altars to thanatopolitics – the SK in the camp, the place of “making” death, and the werewolf in the forest, the depicted space in fairy tales as life affirming, mysterious, self sustaining, full of possibility, freedom, entrapment. Possibility above all else.
277
Lexicon
278
Aktion T4: Named for Tiergartenstrasse 4 in which the program design and offices concerning the sterilization and euthanasia programs were based, this program was instated by enthusiastic doctors and Hitler with the goal of granting “mercy deaths” to patients considered incurable by competent physicians. Although the program only lasted officially from October 1939 to August 1941, more than 70,000 patients were murdered. After public outcry became near mutinous, Hitler publicly ended the program. However, under the code name f1413, the project of mass euthanasia and eugenics research continued, this time secretively in concentration camps. Evidence supplied at the Nuremberg Trials concluded this program caused 275,000 deaths. It was during these massacres that nascent gassing experiments were perfected as weapons of mass murder and brought into use 3 September 1941 in the Auschwitz gas chambers. Andersartkgkeit: (‘racial otherness’) Arbeitslager: (‘labor camp’) Aryan: Ideal Nazi figure with a physical appearance based on Nordic characteristics, solely interested in Nazi philosophy with complete dedication to Nazi nationalistic goals. Dolchstoßlegende: (‘dagger stab legend’) A popularized theory circulated in Germany post WWI and the 1919 Treaty of Versailles which cast blame and aspersion on the traitors of Germany who had “stabbed daggers in the back” of their fellow citizens in signing the deeply one-sided Versailles Treaty with terms that would cast Germany into an even deeper state of economic degradation and social humiliation. Durchfremdung: The theory claiming that a racial contamination of hereditary elements was carried by the Jewish Volk which would potentially pollute the 279
pure blood of the Aryan Volk. Endlösung: (‘Final Solution’) Previous to 1942, approximately one million Jews had already been slaughtered. However, at the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, top Nazi officials gathered to work out once and for all the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. The terms of this “Final Solution” were later articulated in detail by Heinrich Himmler in his famous Posen speech before Reich leaders on 6 October 1943. Entjudung: The removal of Jews from the German economic life, coined in 1881 by academic Eugen Duhring. Ethics: The (un)codified state/cultural norms in both tradition and law. Executioner of homo sacer: The SS guard who frequently slaughtered homo sacer, the Jewish inmate, as a matter of state policy which unquestioningly required acquiescence. Fremdling: An alien people both racially and religiously distinct from the host people. Geheime Staatspolizei: (‘Secret State Police’) More simply and commonly known as “Gestapo”. Gestapo was the secret State police of the Third Reich, administered by the Reich Main Security Office, and was granted the authority to investigate crimes committed against the Reich (for example, treason, espionage, and sabotage). Later, the jurists at the Nuremberg Trial in 1945 would categorize this organization as criminal, meaning that a national authority of a signatory State could bring to trial a former member in that criminal organization to answer for crimes committed while acting in membership capacity. Geltungsjuden: (‘Jews under the law’) Glaubensjuden: (‘community of Jews’) 280
Gleichschaltung: (‘Co-ordination) The consolidation of governmental offices in the early years of the Nazi regime, left a solidification of a concentrated power source in the hands of State authorities. The term itself refers to the enforced cooperation of all Nazi operated cultural, political and economic activities. Häftling: (‘prisoner’) A prisoner in the Nazi concentration camp. Homo sacer: (‘sacred man’) Popularized in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Originally based in Roman law, this entity has evolved to serve as the contemporary interface between bestiality and human civilization. He is selected from the general population for a particular trait or characteristic and is scarified, ostensibly for the good of the whole community. Homo viator: (‘wandering man’) This figure is one of a wandering history, unsettled future and is entirely reliant on his physical environment, the good temper of his settled citizen counterparts, and the uncontestable will of state authority. One historical example is Odysseus, condemned to wander the earth expiating his sins until forgiven by the gods. Identity: Telling behaviors and beliefs which inform the learned behaviors and norms of a person or people. Inlandern: (‘resident’) A fully accepted citizen in the Nazi Reich. Irrationality: A behavior which defies both state dictated logic and traditional morality and was frequently exhibited in the state of the exception. This paper examines how rationality defined the state’s choices in forming legal decrees and statutes, and how this rationality filtered down to drive civil society’s acceptance and self-propagation of state propaganda. Judenrein: (‘free of Jews’) Judensachbearbeiter: (‘Jewish expert’) The title of Nazi bureaucrats and state 281
workers educated in the matters of Jewish history, tradition, and culture. Kaddish: A Jewish prayer of mourning. Kulturkampf: (‘struggle for culture’) Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck’s struggle for a secularity superiority over the predominant status quo of Catholic dominance. Lebensraum: (‘living space’) Luftmenschen: (‘rootless wanderers’) Mauscheln/Gemauschel Andersartig: The popular term used to describe distinctly Jewish body movements and gestures which made them different from other people in the Western European environments. Muselmann: (‘Muslim man’) A titular reference to the shadowy figure in the camps that had lost all will to live yet still lingered on, serving as the interface between death and subsisting existence. Panopticon: The name and design of a circular prison allowing for all contained entities to be viewed by anyone at any given time, first proposed by Samuel Bentham in a letter to his brother Jeremy Bentham, “Panopticon Letter” (published in 1791). Jeremy later went on to popularize the term in philosophical and political circles. Pharmakos: Ancient Greek idea of a human scapegoat who was sacrificed on the first day of Thargelia, the festival of Apollo, held in Athens. Rassenchande: (‘race defilement’) An act of extramarital sex between Aryans and Jews, specifically forbidden under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. Rationality: The logic leading to certain behaviors as dictated legally and normalized culturally. Etymologically speaking, “rationality” is from the Latin “rationalis” “of, or belonging to reason” which originates from “ratio” “reason, calculation.” This work examines how rationality can differ among groups 282
within the same state, even within the same geographic boundaries, and yet still produce the same behaviors as desired by the State. Shtadlan: The Jewish “interceder” described by Gideon Hausner as the figure who “speaks the language of the authorities, faithfully represents his brethren, and like the Biblical Mordechai, ‘seeketh the welfare of his people’… Under his outer clothes, the shtadlan used to wear the traditional Jewish grave clothes, for he might not return alive from his errand of mercy.”
Schreibtisch: (‘Bureaucratic perpetrators’) These “desk killers” practiced their own kind of rationality which promoted civil obedience to the Reich even as it ensured the oppression of (often former) racially “defiled” friends and neighbors. Semiotic Squares: The semiotic square is designed to be both a conceptual network examining the relationship between and the limits of two opposing concepts (i.e., life/death) as well as the visual representation of this network. Semiotics: The study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign systems. It includes the study of how meaning is constructed and understood by single individuals and entire groups in society. Schutzhaftjuden: Jewish felons sent to camps for “protective custody”, usually juxtaposed in criminology against the transportjuden, innocent Jews also sent to the camps for the same reason (see Transportjuden). Schutzstaffel (SS) 2ULJLQDOO\FUHDWHGWRVHUYHDV+LWOHU¶VSHUVRQDOERG\JXDUGV the duties of the guards were later expanded to serve as an all around military elite. The service was overseen and administered by Heinrich Himmler. Sicherheitsdienst (SD): The original Nazi unit for intelligence and security, 283
was overseen first by Himmler who in turn appointed former Navy officer Reinhard Heydrich to take over the unit’s management. Sippenforscher: A Nazi genealogist who judged Third Reich couples for Aryan purity. Sovereign: The human figure and idealized entity acknowledged by external authorities and organizations as one who exclusively holds rule over a given territory and population. Staatsangehoriger: (‘National subject’) The Jews’ legal position post6HSWHPEHU WKDW LV WKHLU VWDWH SRVLWLRQ DIWHU EHLQJ VWULSSHG RI WKHLU previous civil and legal rights by the Nuremberg Laws enacted in 1935. Staatsburger: (‘citizen’) Another term for a recognized citizen of the Reich. State: For this paper, the “State” is the Third Reich in its territorial and social normative entirety from 1941-1945. State of the exception: A permanent locus devoid of norms, a zone bereft of state ethics and standards, despite its geographic placement in the state. It is not a place of dictatorship, unless one is to define the absence of state norms as a dictatorial oppression of potential ethical state re-settlement. Steigerungsmoglichkeit: The level of frenzied faith and expressed love of the Fuhrer, and by extension, the whole of the German spirit. Sturmabteilung (SA): An assault unit with origins pre-dating the rise of Hitler. The unit was brought under the direct control of Himmler after 1933. Himmler soon assigned Stabschef Ernst Röhm to the assignment of controlling the often violent SA. Transportjuden: Jews innocent of crimes accused by the State but sent to a concentration camp nonetheless (see: Schutzhaftjuden). Untergang: (‘destruction’) 284
Untermenschen: (‘lower men’) One popular term referring to the existence of non-Aryan, therefore inferior humans. Volk: (‘people’) The members of an exclusive community with common goals including domination and strict boundaries of identity that are frequently based on racial background. Volksgeschichte: (‘People’s history’) Volkstod: (‘Death of the Volk’) The extinguishing of the racially based identity that served to inform other characteristics of the community’s members. Volkstum: A racial consciousness/racially based identity.
285
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