3 From contemporaneous notes of my interview with Ella Deterding, 20 September 2004.
4 Ella referred to Deterding’s estate in Mecklenburg as ‘Dobina’ (it was officially called Dobbin, but the children referred to it as ‘Dobina’).
Chapter Eleven: A Hillside in Grosseto; A Dream of My Father
1 The RSA trip to China took place in May 2006, and was organised by Michaela Crimmin, who was then the director of the RSA’s Art and Ecology programme.
2 Wogan was a BBC TV chat show with the eponymous Terry Wogan presenting. It does seem utterly bizarre that a supposedly experimental theatre group like Complicité should have been on such a mainstream programme, but my memory of this event is quite vivid, because of what followed.
How People in Organisations Can Kill
3 The interview with Gwen Adshead was Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, 11 July 2010. Although extremely sympathetic to Dr Adshead and her colleagues and what they are attempting to achieve in their work, I also wondered what the relatives of the Broadmoor patients’ victims might have felt listening to this programme, and whether they had received correspondingly world-class therapeutic care to help them in their grieving after their partner, their child, their parent had been killed. What is the balance between care for the perpetrators of terrible acts and care for the survivors? Both groups surely are ‘survivors of a disaster’?
4 Regarding Tom Segev’s comment about the way that each task Stangl performed prepared him psychologically for the next (from Soldiers of Evil: The Commandants of the Nazi Concentration Camps), I have often wondered whether those in authority in the ‘euthanasia’ and extermination programmes – like Eicke and Wirth – in the process of training their men for mass killing, had access to medical science and particularly psychologists.
Chapter Twelve: A Pool in East London
1 I think this article (‘101 Solutions to All Your Problems’) was by Michael Ventura, but it could have been James Hillman.
2 I still keep a record of every swim – the lengths and time taken. If I manage to shave ten or fifteen seconds off a previous time, this is a cause of significant satisfaction, though, as I get older, the reverse is more likely. I do realise there is something slightly obsessive about this. All this counting! And not just in the pool; I realise, writing this today, that I’m also a slave to my numerical ordering when shaving – counting out the number of splashes of hot water on my face needed before I can start to shave – a minimum of twenty-eight splashes for two days’ stubble. But, oh, to be released from such counting would be such a liberation. And, to be honest, from time to time, I really do wonder what it’s all about? When you step back and think about life, whether you’ve done thirty-two or thirty-six lengths seems utterly meaningless in the wider scheme of things. And I’m not even sure if all of this manic activity is so healthy anyway. I sometimes think there’s a significant chance that swimming, in the way I do, might kill me – that I’ll overdo it some evening, trying to shave two seconds off my fastest time, and my final view of life will be the ceiling of the pool, with one of those attendants hunched over, slapping my face. And then I imagine the grim humour of my friends – ‘God, all that talk about fitness and swimming, and look what got him in the end! And here we are still on the booze and fags …’
3 Another example of the strange thoughts that often come while swimming. Recently, as I was doing my thirty-two lengths – and I have absolutely no idea why – I suddenly began thinking about shoes and feet in films, and their relationship to death. And how significant such representations can be, yet how I’ve never heard anyone talk about this:
The last sequence in Theorem, as the wealthy industrialist strips off at Milan’s fascist railway station. It’s filmed from above, so we see a belt, trousers fall around his ankles, and then his two bare feet walking through the parting crowd. And then his scream, running through a volcanic landscape as the St Matthew Passion builds. This has haunted me since I first saw it at a university film club.
The scene in Crimes and Misdemeanours when we first see the hitman who’s going to get rid of Angelica Huston (the mistress who’s become too much of a problem for ophthalmologist Martin Landau). We see the killer get out of an unremarkable jeep, and then we get a glimpse, perhaps no more than a second or two, of his shoes. They look comfortable, middle-aged, Hush Puppies or something similar, with a cushioned sole. So different from what we think a ‘killer’ would wear, and all the more disturbing for that reason.
Towards the end of Dead Poets Society, just before the pretty, shy boy (who’s been told by his authoritarian father that he cannot do any more acting, and moreover is being moved to a military school) – before he kills himself, we see his naked feet moving through the house at night. And immediately afterwards we see his father lining his slippers up under the bed, with mathematical precision. An image of such sterility, implying that every aspect of life can be regimented and ordered. These cold slippers a representation of death in life. The force that will kill his own son.
4 The Stuart Hall/Bill Schwarz conversation was subsequently published in the jounal Soundings and is also available online at: https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/sites/default/files/s37_15hall_schwarz.pdf.
How People in Organisations Can Kill
5 The quotation from Richard Baer of witnessing a little girl ‘flaming like a torch …’ I believe came from a publication I was researching in the Wiener Library in the late 1990s. I know it is an exact quotation, because I’ve recorded it in speech marks in my notes, but I have been unable to confirm the precise source, and would welcome verification.
6 ‘History walks on two feet’. A friend sent me this quotation, by Karl Marx, some years ago (also quoted in an article on the Slate website by Fred Kaplan, ‘Learning from Bush’s Mistakes’, 27 September 2007).
Chapter Thirteen: The Doctors of Wannsee Meet in a Villa by the Lake
1 ‘the strongest, most explicit and most widespread protest movement against any policy since the beginning of the Third Reich’ from Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War.
2 Although Hitler formally suspended the T4 programme at the end of August 1941, this did not mean an end to killings at the six psychiatric hospitals. Aktion 14f13 had been established by Himmler and Bouhler in April 1941, to deal with concentration-camp prisoners who were too ill to work, or regarded as ‘excess ballast’. From April 1941, panels of doctors would travel to concentration camps to select prisoners for ‘elimination’. The T4 centres would then be used to carry out the killings of those selected – in summer 1941, 450 prisoners from Buchenwald and 575 prisoners from Auschwitz were gassed at Sonnenstein, and 1,000 prisoners from Mauthausen were gassed at Hartheim; in Autumn 1941, 3,000 prisoners from Dachau were also gassed at Hartheim; in spring 1942, 1,600 women from Ravensbruck were selected and gassed at Bernburg.
Because of this continuation of ‘euthanasia’ killings, and also the fact that recent archival research in former East German archives has uncovered that far greater numbers were killed than originally estimated, the total number of victims between 1939 and 1945 is now thought to be between 275,000 and 300,000 (approximately 200,000 of these within Germany and Austria, and another 100,000 in occupied territories).