Much of what is known about the Nazi period has been uncovered not by historians but by police commissioners and prosecutors … But the prosecutors’ interest is limited. They are concerned with finding individual proof of violent crimes [my emphasis]. Thus, they did not know how to handle someone like Ludwig Trieb; they did not accept the planning files he almost forced on them. At first they did not even look for Herbert Becker, head of the T-4 Planning Department …
The judiciary pushed the bloody side of the Nazi regime into the foreground, thus obscuring the structures and goals at the root of the mass murders. The crimes became individual aberrations … The distorted image obtained from legal documents is preferred in the literature … The cost, however, is the historical truth. Paradoxically, this image diminishes the real horror of the National Socialist state.
We can see exactly the same process at work with the sentencing of the Wannsee doctors. Because Stuckart, Leibbrandt and Klopfer had not either killed directly, or directly ordered killings, they were found to be ‘minimally incriminated’ or ‘lesser offenders’. And yet numerous concentration-camp guards, with vastly less criminal responsibility but who had killed prisoners directly, were executed immediately after the war.
Tom Bower, in Blind Eye to Murder, widens this examination and finds that whole sections of German society (such as industry and finance) that had colluded critically in Nazism went virtually unpunished after the war:
Schacht’s acquittal, Speer’s lenient sentence and the failure to prosecute Krupp made nonsense of the original intention of condemning the industrial and financial section of the German Establishment. Murder in occupied Europe and in the gas chambers had been exposed and condemned, but murder in the factories and mines had gone unpunished.
And indeed, of thirty-two senior Nazi industrialists and financiers initially indicted after the war, only six ever came to trial. Eleven out of IG Farben’s twenty-three directors escaped conviction altogether. Hermann Abs was one of those directors, and as a banker had also been one of those most responsible for Deutsche Bank’s financial support of the Nazi Party. Abs spent just three months in an internment camp and later resumed his work at Deutsche Bank. He was chairman until 1995. An even more extreme case concerns Dr Hans Globke, another doctor of law, like so many of the men of Wannsee. He was the civil servant at the Ministry of the Interior who was responsible for drafting the Nuremberg Race Laws, together with Dr Stuckart. Not only was he released from internment in 1946 and never prosecuted, but, even more shockingly, he became chief of staff to Adenauer’s government from 1953 to 1963. The outrageous post-war whitewashing of Nazi Schreibtischtaeter is perhaps best summed up in the words of the British lawyer Sir Percy Mills, defending the steel and arms manufacturer Krupp and other industrialists in post-war trials – senior management who had been enthusiastic proponents of wartime slave labour (often referred to as ‘extermination through work’). Mills said this, quite shamelessly, in defence of his clients: ‘They were not Nazis – they were businessmen.’
To understand such realities is to understand the ‘rage against the fathers’, as it has sometimes been described, the post-war whitewashing of history which went on in Germany, and which incensed those like Gudrun Ensslin who argued: ‘They’ll kill us all – you know what pigs we are up against – that is the generation of Auschwitz we’ve got against us – you can’t argue with the people who made Auschwitz.’
I would suggest that we as a society still suffer from a myopic view of how to assess organisational killing – we still, for the most part, share the narrow police approach to dealing with murders (i.e. looking for ‘individual proof of violent crimes’). We have not really moved on to be able to judge bureaucratic killing or corporate killing in a clear way – or those who plan and finance such killing – witness the immense difficulties that have arisen over recent years with the proposals for even limited ‘corporate manslaughter’ laws (in my view ridiculously narrow in their focus). Or look at the failure, even in the clearest possible case of corporate killing – Bhopal, where up to 16,000 people were estimated to have been killed through Union Carbide’s negligence in 1984 – to hold any of the American executives to account.
Even activists can fall into this trap of fetishising the act of violence, rather than the causation of that act. I heard a report of a conference that took place in the Netherlands not long ago, focussing on the abuses of oil corporations. The star turn was an American lawyer who had brought human rights cases against corporations, and at one point he apparently started to warm to his theme, shouting at the delegates: ‘We need rapes, we need torture, we need killings! that’s the kind of ammunition we need to nail these people’. By focussing too much on the act of direct violence we fail to understand the psychology and structures which have caused the violence in the first place. Our historical focus on ‘direct’ killing has actually worked to disguise a more disturbing reality – that of bureaucratic and corporate killing. To show this reality, we need to find a new kind of language:
How are we to show the violence of a spreadsheet?
How are we to show the violence of a set of minutes?
How are we to show the violence of an idea?
Often the violence of capitalism is rendered invisible. Often the violence of the desk killer goes unseen. We have few records of the meetings of those gentlemen in the Netherlands, Portugal and England who pioneered the organisation of mass slavery. The most tenacious work in archives will not give us accounts of how the directors of the East India Company reacted to the starvation of 11 million Bengalis. I cannot show you the minutes that detail the ‘damage limitation’ discussions of the directors of Shell on the afternoon of 10 November 1995, when news of the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his eight fellow Ogoni activists came through. But it’s very hard to believe that such meetings did not take place.
*
That is the extraordinary aspect of the Wannsee minutes – not only did they survive (thanks to that scrupulous filing clerk in the Foreign Office), but this is a document where the violence, for once, bleeds from the paper. And from this meeting, from this simple document, and the thirty copies subsequently sent to ministries across Berlin and occupied Europe, flows an immediate unleashing of vast organisational resources at the height of war – trains, guards, lorries, wire, dogs, searchlights, guns, barracks – stretching out from Berlin in an insane starburst of lines. With the words of the Führer, just ten days after Wannsee, echoing through the continent, ‘the result of this war will be the annihilation of Jewry’ …
Within seven weeks of this conference the first transport of 1,001 Jews from Theresienstadt leaves for the newly constructed Belzec death camp on 11 March. And preparations for the extermination centres at Treblinka and Sobibor are fully under way, creating in their wake vast amounts of administrative work on construction, transport of guards, police and materials, and the need for hundreds of trains and thousands of personnel to be deployed, all across Europe. Telephones ring from Drancy on the outskirts of Paris to the smallest town by the Black Sea. Thousands of telegrams and messages flit back and forth between Tallinn in the north and the Greek islands to the south. An army of officials are checking census forms, preparing lists, meeting with Jewish authorities. Another battery of bank staff are organising forms for the transfer of assets. Other clerks are desperately trying to find warehouses big enough to store millions of clothes. Two hundred and thirty miles to the east of Berlin, along an unmetalled country road, every day now the Saurer lorries continue to shuttle between the tiny village of Chelmno and the forests of RzeszÓw with their deathly loads of ‘merchandise’. And three hundred miles away, towards Krakow, a substantial increase in road and rail traffic can now be seen around the Polish town of Oświęcim. IG Farben’s huge Buna chemical works is getting more slave labourers every day and the builders are busy delivering bricks, wood and cement in enormous quantities to the little hamlet named after the birch woods surrounding it – Birkenau.