3 The figure of 7 per cent of doctors being members of the SS is from Alessandra Colaianni’s article ‘A long shadow: Nazi doctors, moral vulnerability and contemporary medical culture’, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, 2012.
4 ‘Peep show format. Snuff films. Naked women led to execution. People are being shot …’ from Gourevitch’s article in the Guardian, ‘Nightmare on 15th Street’, 4 December 1999.
5 The Foreign Office files were actually deposited in four different castles – Schloss Falkenstein, Schloss Degenerhausen, Burg Falkenstein and Schloss Stolberg.
6 The interview with ‘Christian’ is from my contemporaneous notes.
7 The image from ‘The Good Old Days’: The Holocaust as Seen by its Perpetrators and Bystanders (ed. Klee, Dressen & Riess) comes in the section on ‘Execution as popular entertainment’ and is titled ‘The Twelve Toppers and a Little Hat: A “Troop Welfare Kamerad” reports’.
8 Enzenberger’s comment – ‘Any cretin can throw a bomb. It is 1,000 times more difficult to defuse one’ – is from an essay in Granta, Christmas 1989.
9 I was so struck by the similarity in Levi’s and Arendt’s views of the perpetrators, expressed in these quotations, that I became curious about whether they may have corresponded during the 1960s. I did ask Jerome Kohn (Arendt’s colleague and literary executor), but he wasn’t aware of any direct contact between them.
10 Some of the background detail on Heydrich in Prague is informed by Callum Macdonald’s The Killing of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. Other details in this section are from The Wannsee Conference and the Genocide of the European Jews, published by the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Education Site, The Participants (ed. Jasch and Kreuzmuller), The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting (Roseman), Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt), and my own research at the Wiener Library archives in London.
11 After the war, Dr Korherr was not prosecuted for his role in providing detailed information on Jewish populations across Europe for Eichmann, Heydrich and Himmler. He later worked for the Federal Ministry of Finance in West Germany, and died in 1989, at the age of eighty-six.
12 Eichmann quote ‘these gentlemen … sat together, and in very blunt words they referred to the matter …’ from Chapter Five, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting by Mark Roseman.
13 ‘Without a doubt, the laws and decrees drafted or approved by Stuckart himself were a cornerstone of the plan to almost completely exterminate Jews …’ from The Participants (ed. Jasch and Kreutzmuller).
14 I met Lanzmann in Cambridge, in March 2000, when he was presenting a screening of his recently released film, A Visitor from the Living – a remarkable interview with Maurice Roussel, a senior member of the Swiss Red Cross team which inspected Theresienstadt in 1944, and passed it as a fit and proper detention camp. After the screening, Lanzmann invited myself, J. and the academics who’d hosted the event to supper. We ended up in the basement of a rather noisy Turkish restaurant in Bridge Street, where we talked for an hour or so – about the Saurer memorandum (and the filming of that section of Shoah), about the Walter Stier interview, and about the Wannsee Conference, and the extremity of psychological compartmentalisation necessary to write such documents, and about the fact that such patterns of thought are absolutely present in our world, in the behaviour of ‘desk killers’ in our corporations and governments. Lanzmann was extremely interested in the research that I had then just started, and said that he’d be happy to show me other material in Paris he’d filmed for Shoah, which related to the kind of ‘Schreibtischtaeter’ mentality I was investigating.
Our conversation was interrupted by something so bizarre it would have fitted neatly into a Coen brothers film. We were just discussing the precise details of the development of the gaswagen, when a half-naked woman, dressed in Anatolian colours, emerged into the basement with performers playing thunderous traditional music, and began to dance on our table! Far from being fazed by such an interruption, Lanzmann fished around in his wallet to give the dancer a tip, before continuing our discussion.
15 Hausner’s speech from the Eichmann trial transcripts, 17 April 1961, and also quoted in Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Chapter Fourteen: Carpathian Days
1 ‘Explicit recipes for being human’ is what Geoffrey Grigson wrote about W.H. Auden’s best poetry, in his contribution to W.H. Auden: A Tribute (edited by Stephen Spender) published in 1975: ‘If we follow him round, as he celebrates, investigates, discards, adds, re-attempts, we find in him explicit recipes for being human.’
2 In Ian Thomson’s biography of Levi, Primo Levi, he notes that there were no fewer than 37 other people named Levi who travelled in Primo Levi’s convoy to Auschwitz (although 161 of the 650 transported that day cannot be identified by name).
3 Izbica, sometimes also referred to as Izbica-Lubelska, is situated approximately 30 km north of Belzec, and was used as a ‘transit ghetto’ for Jews heading to Belzec. When the ghetto was full, fields close to the village, next to the railway tracks, were used as a kind of improvised camp, but without any buildings. The two SS men who ran the camp, Kurt Engel and Ludwig Klem, both in their twenties, were known as ‘the lords of life and death’. Gilbert estimates that between 40,000 and 50,000 Jews were brought here between March 1942 and March 1943 – a supposed staging post between Theresienstadt and Belzec, though many thousands died here at Izbica.
4 Klemperer quotation from LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii (1947), published in English as The Language of the Third Reich.
Chapter Fifteen: Walking into Whiteness
1 ‘I climbed down on the platform to stretch my legs …’ Levi quotation from The Truce, Chapter Three.
2 Not to discount Semprún’s concept of a societal ‘ability to listen’, but it is also worth noting that there may have been particular reasons and circumstances that enabled people to start listening to Levi on the subject of the camps – the publications of his book, and Semprún’s, in early spring 1961, came between the arrest of Richard Baer, the last commandant of Auschwitz, found working as a forester near Hamburg in December 1960, and the beginning of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Tel Aviv in April 1961. So, for the first time since the Nuremberg Trials in 1945/46 there was a substantial, global focus on the Holocaust and its perpetrators.
It is also fascinating to realise that Raul Hilberg’s magisterial The Destruction of the European Jews had a similarly tortuous journey to publication during this same period – only finally seeing the light of day in 1961 with its publication by the small press Quadrangle Books, after several years of rejections from the major publishing houses. And there’s an equally complex narrative for Elie Wiesel’s work coming into the world as well – Night was originally published in Yiddish, in Argentina, as Un di velt hot geshvign (‘And the World Remained Silent’) in 1956. It wasn’t until 1960 that it gained an American publisher, Hill and Wang, and even then, the book initially had only very modest sales.
3 ‘All at once the crowd fell silent …’ Filip Muller’s testimony comes from Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, first published by Chicago/ Ivan R. Dee in 1979, reprinted in 1999 (Ivan R. Dee in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). Muller was also one of Lanzmann’s interviewees, and gives an almost identical account of this episode in Shoah (1985).