2. Thoughts on Perpetrators
A Single Piece of Paper in a Washington Museum
The reason we’ve come to Berlin can be traced back to an afternoon I’d spent in Washington five years before, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I had already begun my research then, but what I discovered in Washington that day gave it an extra impetus. Before I take you into the museum, I want to share a challenge the historian Daniel Goldhagen laid down at the beginning of his powerful work, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, published in 1995:
Until now the perpetrators, the most important group of people responsible for the slaughter of European Jewry, excepting the Nazi leadership itself, have received little concerted attention in the literature that describes the events and purports to explain them. Surprisingly, the vast literature on the Holocaust contains little on the people who were its executors … Certain institutions of killing, and the people who manned them, have been hardly treated or not at all … We must therefore refocus our attention, our intellectual energy … onto the perpetrators … What exactly did they do when they were killing? What did they do … while they were not undertaking killing operations? Until a great deal is known about the details of their actions and lives, neither they, nor the perpetration of their crimes can be understood. The unearthing of the perpetrators’ lives, the presentation of a ‘thick’, rather than the customary paper-thin, description of their actions … lays the foundation for the main task – namely to explain their actions.
The main thrust of what Goldhagen is saying here is surely right, even though he underestimates the complexity of the task of creating the three-dimensional portraits of perpetrators he alludes to here. Although he goes on to analyse, in compelling detail, the actions, the killings of many ordinary German police, soldiers and volunteers, one of the few weaknesses of the work for me is that the vast majority of his subjects remain two-dimensional ‘perpetrators’, and to this extent I feel he fails the task he sets himself. On a wider philosophical level, I am also sceptical about whether such actions can ever be truly ‘explained’ – regardless of the amount of information available.
But Goldhagen is certainly right about identifying a vast lacuna at the heart of Holocaust historiography, what might be summarised as ‘perpetrator psychology’ – detailed investigations of both those who killed directly and those who planned and organised the genocide. With the exception of key work by Raul Hilberg, Robert Jay Lifton, Hannah Arendt, Gitta Sereny, Christopher Browning, Yaacov Lozowick and Götz Aly, up to now remarkably little has been written on this subject, though there have been recent indications that this might be beginning to change. There are extremely complex societal and political forces at play here that have an impact on changing emphases in historical study, what aspects of research are prioritised, and why certain books or films receive widespread cultural coverage and others sink without trace – how to explain the initial ignoring of Primo Levi’s work yet the enormous response to Anne Frank’s diary, both published in the immediate post-war years? Why did Raul Hilberg’s monumental work The Destruction of the European Jews have to wait so many years to find a publisher? What can explain the extraordinary global level of media interest in the trial of Eichmann in 1961 when in the late 1940s and 50s many of his former colleagues had melted back into German civil society, some even into government positions? Why did it take fifty years for survivor testimony to start to be gathered together systematically? The initiative that developed into Steven Spielberg’s project to record interviews with those still alive – Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.
This challenge to begin thinking about the perpetrators in a different way first struck me forcibly when, in November 1998, I visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. In one corner of a large room, people are crowding around a particular exhibit that has received much media attention – a rolling film of the Einsatzgruppen (the mobile execution squads) in action on the Eastern Front. This is how the American author Philip Gourevitch describes what he saw:
Peep show format. Snuff films. Naked women led to execution. People are being shot. Into the ditch, shot, spasms, collapse, dirt thrown in over.4 Crowds of naked people. Naked people standing about to be killed, naked people lying down dead. Close-up of a woman’s face and throat as a knife is plunged into her breast – blood all over. Someone holds a severed head in his hand. Mass graves of thousands. Naked. Naked corpses. Street beatings. The gun, the smoke, a figure crumbles. Naked corpses. Naked women dragged to death. Shooting. Screaming. Blackout. The film begins again.
There is minimal information next to this exhibit about either the victims or the perpetrators. Now I want to take you to the other side of this room, where nobody seems very interested in a traditional glass case of documents. I’m reflecting on the hypnotic power of the moving image over the static, disturbed by the voyeurism and conformism of the crowds in front of the TV monitors, drawn to this corner of the room, some because they’ve heard about the controversy, others simply because the large group of people must mean something, so why not see what they’re looking at? Feeling almost a sympathy for the plainness of the paper exhibits, I start to study each one in compensatory detail. My eyes are drawn to one of the documents – a simple list of names. I’m rooted to the spot by this single sheet of paper:
Dr Josef Bühler State Secretary, Generalgouvernement for Occupied Territories of Poland
Adolf Eichmann SS Lt Colonel, Reich Security Main Office, Section IV B4 (Evacuations)
Dr Roland Freisler State Secretary, Reich Justice Ministry
Otto Hofmann SS General, Race and Settlement Main Office
Reinhard Heydrich Head of Security Police and Security Service (SD); Head of RSHA
Gerhard Klopfer SS Brigadier General, NSDAP Party Chancellery
Fredrich Wilhelm Kritzinger Ministerial Director, Reich Chancellery
Dr Rudolf Lange Commander of Security Police, Latvia
Dr Georg Leibbrandt Reich Bureau Chief, Reich Ministry for Occupied Eastern Territories
Martin Luther Assistant State Secretary, Foreign Office
Dr Alfred Meyer NSDAP District Leader, Reich Ministry for Occupied Territories
Heinrich Müller SS Lt General, Head of Secret State Police (Gestapo)
Erich Neumann State Secretary, Office of the Four Year Plan
Dr Karl Eberhard Schöngarth SS Brigadier General, Commander-in-Chief, Security Police, Generalgouvernement for Occupied Territories
Dr Wilhelm Stuckart State Secretary, Reich Interior
These are the names of the fifteen individuals who attended what has become known as the Wannsee Conference, held in a villa in the leafy west Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. The gathering was initiated by Heydrich to pull together as many agencies of the German state as possible to discuss the implementation of ‘die Endlösung der Judenfrage’ (‘the Final Solution of the Jewish question’). Actually there were sixteen people present, but, tantalisingly, we do not know the name of Eichmann’s female secretary, the stenographer, who took shorthand notes on the meeting, without whom there would be no Wannsee Conference minutes in the first place. I have often thought of this young woman, sitting at the side table, touch-typing, while the fifteen men around her talked of extermination. How Eichmann would have prepared her for this meeting, how he would have emphasised the need for total secrecy, total discretion. And the discussion she witnessed – about how an entire race was going to be erased from history – yet this woman herself has vanished without a trace. And I reflect on the lack of curiosity about her shown by all the historians, predominantly men, who have ever written about Wannsee. The minutes which Eichmann later created from her synchronous record are what has survived – but this was only a summary document, a substantially edited account of the meeting, because much of what had been discussed could never have been written down, due to the nature of the ‘over-plain talk’ about methods of killing the Jews which took up the last part of the meeting. Eichmann later explained that he had to clean up the language used, when he created the official version of the minutes.