9 I only realised re-reading Borka recently after many years that (as children often do, subconsciously) I’d changed Borka’s gender to my own, so total was my identification with this goose that didn’t quite seem to fit in.
Chapter Two: Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer and the Desk Killer
1 ‘I had made a contribution in which I described the research …
The initial research for I You We Them began in 1996, when I was a co-director of the political arts organisation Platform, and lasted almost a decade. It is not possible here to summarise ten years’ work, but the main phases in how the research eventually evolved into what you are now reading were as follows:
1996–2003: Early research and development of the ‘killing us softly’ lecture performances.
As part of Platform’s ambitious, ten-year project, ‘90% Crude’ – an attempt to analyse the social and environmental impacts of transnational corporations, with specific reference to the oil industry – I began to focus on how individuals who worked for such corporations were able to reconcile their own ethics and beliefs with the sometimes devastating impacts of their companies’ work. In the late 1990s I read widely in the field of perpetrator psychology, helped greatly by the staff and archive of the Wiener Library in London. I also began to research corporate collusion in the Holocaust – the numerous companies and businesses that worked so closely with the Nazi regime and the SS. In 1999 I decided to create a series of ‘lecture-performances’ to bring my research on ‘desk killers’ (both in history and today) to live audiences. These events also included film excerpts, images of walks at sites of genocide, passages of music and poetry, and discussion with those attending. Between 1999 and 2003 there were eight performances of killing us softly at Platform’s space near Tower Bridge. The last event took place just before the outbreak of the Iraq War, at the end of March 2003.
2003–2004: Development of The Desk Killer into a book proposal, and the second research phase.
It became clear that although the live events had helped to evolve the work significantly, it was now time to find a new form. I began to work on the challenge of how to convert a scripted, live event into the very different form of a book, provisionally titled The Desk Killer. During the winter 2003–2004 I also undertook an important research trip to Berlin and Poland, visiting some of the key sites I’d been researching – the villa of the Wannsee Conference, the Buna-Monowitz complex at Oswiecim (Auschwitz) and Chelmno, where the Saurer gaswagen were used.
2005: The third research phase, supported by the Lannan Foundation.
In early 2005, with the support of a major grant from the Lannan Foundation in New Mexico, I was able to employ a part-time researcher to help with the growing scope of the developing book, and one area in particular – IG Farben’s vast synthetic fuels and rubber plant in Auschwitz, run in collaboration with the SS and the slave labour they provided from the neighbouring Monowitz concentration camp in the town. I also made another research trip – to Bosnia (to try and investigate Kurt Waldheim’s wartime role there), and to Belgrade (to investigate the use of the Saurer gaswagen at the Semlin camp next to the River Sava). This research trip concluded with a return visit to Oswiecim, and several days working in the archives there, with the director, Dr Piotr Setkiewicz, learning more about the IG Farben complex and their cooperation with the SS, and many other companies who were also closely involved with the network of concentration camps and labour camps in Auschwitz and the surrounding area.
2006: The first writing phase.
In January 2006, still supported by the Lannan grant, I was able to take a six-month sabbatical from Platform, and our work on the ‘Remember Saro-Wiwa’ initiative – a campaign to create a memorial to the murdered Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and his eight colleagues – to begin the writing of The Desk Killer at a cottage on the Suffolk coast, which is where this book begins.
2 ‘In this trial, we shall also encounter a new kind of killer …’ Hausner’s opening speech quotations taken from the Eichmann trial transcripts, 17 April 1961. I find it intriguing, given Arendt’s subsequent, vituperative criticism of Hausner, to read these words and realise how much they echo some of her own later thoughts and analysis of Eichmann’s pioneering form of white-collar genocide.
3 The advert for UAV Operator – UAE National Executive Solutions, Abu Dhabi, UAE was online at https://www.gulftalent.com/uae/jobs/uav-operator-uae-national-62963 (complete with the original spelling mistake – arial instead of aerial).
Chapter Three: How We Look at History: A Moment at Liverpool Street Station
1 My account of the Meili affair has drawn primarily on Meili’s testimony to the US Senate on 6 May 1997, and the transcript of this hearing – ‘Hearing on Shredding of Holocaust Era Documents’, and also on an LA Times article of 4 March 2001 (‘Swiss bank whistleblower pays a high price’), and a Guardian piece on whistleblowers, 22 November 2014 (‘“There were hundreds of us crying out for help”: the afterlife of the whistleblower’). The settlement of UBS and the Swiss banks for collaboration with Nazism is informed by Mario KÖnig’s report for the Bergier Commission, Interhandel: The Swiss Holding of IG Farben and its Metamorphoses – An Affair About Property and Interests (1910–1999), Stuart Eizenstat’s book Imperfect Justice, The American Jewish Year Book 1998 edited by Daniel Singer, and Swiss Banks and Jewish Souls by Gregg Rickman.
2 The Swiss banks described as ‘pro-fascist financial operators’ by Walter Sholes, US counsel in Basel during the war – quoted in Nazi Gold by Tom Bower.
Chapter Four: Journeys with J.
1 ‘We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious’ from Austerlitz by Sebald.
2 One memory from my year on CUSU in 1983 stays with me, and is perhaps worth recounting. The Federation of Conservative Students were in their deeply offensive, extreme-Thatcherite heyday, aided by the far-right Monday Club – and, at an NUS conference I attended at Warwick University, many of them (including, I recall, the current Speaker of the House of Commons – who was then secretary of the Monday Club’s ‘Immigration and Repatriation Committee’ – and several other future Tory MPs and ministers), proudly sported badges reading ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’.
3 The Bishopsgate Institute in London has recently acquired the Platform archive, which is publicly accessible. I recently spent a very nostalgic couple of hours going through some of the earliest files of material from the Cambridge and Addenbrooke’s campaign days, finding notes that J. and I had written, and publicity materials typed on my old Olympia typewriter.
Other figures in Platform’s early days, many of who became artists and activists in their own right subsequently, were Paula Webb, Ravi Mirchandani, Rod Bolt and David Evans; Richard Fredman, Ingrid Simler, John Parry and Abigail Morris (the Corn Exchange project); Anna Wright, Wesley Stace, Mel Steel, Graham Burns and Mark Whelan (‘Addenbrooke’s Blues’).