indoctrination, Rees wrote in Auschwitz, âWe were convinced ⦠there was a great conspiracy of ... the medical field following the âDoctors' Trialâ in Nuremberg.
Chapter IX:
The SS Guard
“Leave this Europe, where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their streets, in all corners of the globe.” i
“When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find far more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have been committed in the name of rebellion.” ii
Chapter IX: The SS Guard…
Since the Nazi surrender and international exposure to the horrors of the camps, the character of the SS camp guard has been questioned as intensely as the character of Hitler himself. Who were these men (and women) that could carry out state orders of massacre with apparent ease during the day, and then return home at night as civilized citizens capable of enjoying theatre, the fine arts? Is the nature of humanity capable of such callous existence? Perhaps the emotion driving these perdurable questions is not only the passionate need to understand mass brutality, but a fear that such darkness is a natural, albeit latent, trait capable of realization in an extreme situation.iii Thus this chapter focuses on how rationality and irrationality of the SS camp guards was not engendered or as solidified solely under Nazi doctrine as often idealized in Goebbels’ escapist film and radio productions; rather the guards’ rationality/irrationality practices in this liminal state often fell far short of the stringent standards promoted in state depiction of the conceptualized SS man.
I.
Rationality of SS Guards as Executioners: The rationality of the SS relied on a two fold justification; first, the collective social
knowledge of alleged crimes by the Jews against the state, and second, the significance of honor as encapsulated by the Führerprinzip. Regarding the intensity of SS rationalized indoctrination, Rees wrote in Auschwitz, “We were convinced … there was a great conspiracy of Jewishness against us…the Jews put us into misery.” iv In order for National Socialist
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extermination policy in the camps to succeed, the implementation of state propaganda had to be thorough in penetrating the conscience and logic of the SS man. At any given time, there were only 3,000 SS guards within the gates of Auschwitz; clearly demonstrating the absolute need for each guard to embody the prototypical model of stoic military obedience. As many of the guards posted in the camps and on the war fronts were young soldiers nurtured through childhood and pubescence with only myths of Jewish treachery in WWI, they sustained an immunity to the naturalized anti-Semitism of their German progenitors. However, their passionate expressions of generational bitterness and disappointment were inevitably bound to find direction, “by identifying a definable group as the biological embodiment of catastrophic political and social changes...”v This focused outpouring, in conjunction with the thorough nature of state propaganda and careful indoctrination programs, inculcated the soldiers with an anti-Semitic virulence soon rivaling that of their parents. Thus these interactions with Jews in the camp and on the front moved “the eternal appearance of the real and mythical Jew (and) attained a closer resemblance…the abstract enemy – figures now… come to life.”vi A letter published in Der Stürmer even thanked the editors for their accurate portrayal of the backstabbing Jew, “…as every soldier can confirm.”vii If these occasional letters of cold prejudice and alleged self-realizations could be justified as common soldiers attempting to find succor the stresses of war, a military report filed in October 1941 dispels this illusion: Should there still be people who have some compassion left for the Jews, they should be allowed to have a look at such a ghetto: the mass appearance of this rotten, corrupted and decayed race cures any sentimental humanism.
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Of course, even with the sense of an ascetic brotherhood formed in stoicism and militaristic dedication, the common SS man was not immune to the financial benefits replete in this underworld replete with wealth. Desperate to try any tactic to save their lives, even while entering into camp life, Jews offered to the guards their money, jewels, gold, and anything else they had managed to smuggle out of the ghetto. While official policy dictated that these goods be immediately turned over to the State, such easy forms of self-gain were irresistible to the guards, as Höss was to note, “the treasures brought in by the Jews gave rise to avoidable difficulties to the camp itself…(they) were not always strong enough to resist the temptation …(which) lay within such easy reach.” viii In less couched terms, Trunk noted: …none of the personnel was free from having taken bribes. There was scarcely an SS man who had not made themselves rich with money, foreign currency …in the camp, one could buy everybody, everything had a price.ix
Ironically, it came to be then that the very crimes of alleged foreign currency corruption and theft of which many German Jews had been convicted, sending them to death camps, were then actually committed by the SS, often serving as distraction from the murderous camp missions that they had promised the Führer they would fulfill. The time spent in the Schutzstaffel also created in each man the sense of solidity in a nation of prevailing contradictions. “We did not understand what was happening around us, everything was mixed up. The SS offered us a series of simple ideas that we could understand, we believed in them.”x This sense of relief was not confined to the guards; rather it echoed in the minds of their families and friends, all of whom offered support for his task. “Everything was in order again, and clean. There was a feeling of national liberation, a new start… People said, ’Well this is a revolution, it is an astonishing, peaceful revolution, but it is a revolution.’” xi
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Thirty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Philip Zimbardo conducted his famous Stanford Prison Experiment, which, inter alia, led to a drafting of ethical guidelines for sociological experiments which were not entirely dissimilar to the ethical guidelines drafted for the medical field following the “Doctors’ Trial” in Nuremberg. Following the conclusion of the experiment, Zimbardo received feedback from the boys role-playing as the prison guards. One comment offered during the feedback session particularly stands out for potential applicability to how SS guards felt during their duties (not altogether surprising since these Stanford boys and the SS guards were roughly the same age and of the same or similar educational backgrounds): At the time, if you had questioned me about the effect I was having, I would say well, they must be a wimp. They’re weak or they’re faking. Because I wouldn’t believe what I was doing could actually cause someone to have a nervous breakdown. It was just us sorta getting out jollies with it. You know. Let's be like puppeteers here. Let's make these people do things.xii
In reference to this last sentence “Let’s make these people do things”, Zimbardo notes that the more thoroughly this particular boy immersed himself in his guard duties, he was becoming “more cleverly inventive in designing punishments, the first signs of creative evil.” xiii
A similar remark was made by another boy in the same role: My enjoyment in harassing and punishing prisoners was quite unnatural for me because I tend to think of myself as being sympathetic to the injured, especially animals. I think that it was an outgrowth from my total freedom to rule the prisoners. I began to abuse my authority.xiv
A third revealing report by a ‘guard’ addressed the paradox of violent power – addictive yet liberating - identity produced in the prison guard role: It’s almost like a prison that you create yourself – you get into it, and its just that it
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becomes the definitions you make of yourself, almost become walls, and you want to break out, and you want to be able to tell everyone that, ‘this isn’t really Me at all, and I’m a person who wants to get out and show that I’m free and I do have my own will, and I’m not the sadistic type of person that enjoys this type of thing. xv
Although the above quotations are drawn from a synthetic situation, a mere sociological experiment, the thoughts of Franz Stangl, the Commandant of Sobibor, run surprisingly parallel to Zimbardo’s “guards.” Stangl revealed in a series of interviews his method of handling the murderous tasks of concentration camp duty, ‘”The only way I could live was by compartmentalizing my thinking… there were hundreds of ways to take one’s mind off it (the liquidations). I used them all… I made myself concentrate on work, work, and again, work… I see it (the liquidations), but I don’t do anything to anybody.” xvi
II.
Character of the SS Guard: Just as objecting and refusing orders was overlooked and at times, forgiven in the
occupation of camp doctor, the SS guard was offered a similar leniency after he had committed to his state duties. This offer of opting out of executioner duties addresses the (im)potential for free choice, even for the genocideer. Despite the thorough indoctrination of the SS man, there remained this unaccountable variable of personal morality ostensibly recognized by the Nazi state which ultimately was unable to deny an inherent existence of doubt and humanity. The potential conundrum left the SS with the option of creating a side of themselves which resembled automatons. “The only protection against the cancer of self-doubt in the face of orders that were not immediately explicable was hardness.” xvii This belief was further echoed in
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the words of ranking officers and Reich officials maintaining the lower level soldiers who had to maintain the same iron will as as the higher level soldier, indeed every military figure had to be ‘…as hard as granite, otherwise the work of the Führer will perish.’xviii Nonetheless, all previous beliefs including religious, were supposedly stripped during SS training, leaving only the acceptance of superior orders, the automatic “rightness” of which needing no personal validation because, “…if a superior ordered someone to be imprisoned, someone to be executed…the order must be correct.”xix The SS were further bound by the Führerprinzip, the iron principle which cemented the loyalty of each man with the Party oath, “I vow inviolable fidelity to Adolf Hitler; I vow absolute obedience to him and to the leaders he designates for me.”xx This oath was reinforced through a more physical form of “telling.” Inscribed on each SS trooper’s belt was the SS slogan “Meine Ehre heist Treue” (“My Loyalty is my Honor”). Also inscribed on the belt was a skull and crossbones image, serving as the visible and unyielding representation for the high standard of obedience expected, which was known as Kadavergehorsam, (“the obedience of a corpse”).xxi State propaganda reached its zenith in the combined naked Jewish existence and interred compassion of guards. Despite methodical planning for this outcome, the remaining factor with the potential to upset this novel equation was this aforementioned humanity inherent in SS guards, some of whom had even previously lived as neighbors with the prisoners. This variable was to rarely found fruition in the camps, however, because only SS guards indoctrinated with exceptional ethics of Nazi rationality were accepted for duty. Nonetheless, the SS man lived in the “midst of determinate words and indeterminate meaning… (not just) every fragment of language, but every sound, every noise that is at once resonant with meaning
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and wholly indeterminate in meaning.”xxii In order to be accepted or chosen for guard duty, the SS man would have already demonstrated his commitment to the state in other violent acts, for example, as a spontaneously formed executioner in the Police Battalion Reserves. Browning speaks to the extent in which the “ordinary German” was able to retain his pre-Nazi identity while acting as state executioner.xxiii It was from this adoption of an entirely synthetic character that the SS guard was selected for Auschwitz duty. However, while the SS had been thoroughly indoctrinated to accept the facts of the death camps, the newly arrived inmates had not. As Höss was to later write, “the key to successful mass murder on this scale was to conduct (it)…in an atmosphere of great calm.” If an inmate panicked on the thought of gas chambers, he was taken aside and “shot with a small caliber gun that was quiet enough that those nearby would not hear the noise.”xxiv Significantly, Höss had been referencing the importance of keeping the inmates, not the guards, calm during the mass selection process. However, the constant display of an outwardly peaceful demeanor by the homo sacer even as their executioners raised their guns to shoot often astonished the guards. Hausner describes the surprise of the SS men and their attempts to understand this inexplicable placidity before death, “SS Colonel Blobel of Einsatzgruppen C, who was later in charge of another macabre Nazi activity, found a ‘psychological’ explanation. “The Jews apparently do not appreciate human life… that is the only reason why they could march to death so quietly. Our men on the spot were more tense than the victims.”’xxv Despite indoctrination of Nordic chivalrous behavior alongside adherence to state responsibilities, there were constant sparks of spontaneously exercised violence against even
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the most passive inmate. However, a camp guard could expect at most a gentle rebuke by his senior officer for digressing from inherent dignity natural in a soldierly bearing. Here the exceptional state’s primary ethic of irrationality plays an especially prominent role. While in the state, the guard would be expected to abide by his obligations to state ethics, namely, the abstinence of base murder, he tacitly understood those within the state of the exception could expect no such ethical refinement in his actions. As Feldman argued, “The state (m)others bodies in order to engender itself. The production of bodies - political subjects- the self production of the state.”xxvi In an attempt to continue the cycle of validating state propaganda, the Jew’s servile and short lived existence within the Panopticon was designed to simultaneously further state economy while strengthening the guard/prisoner dichotomy which aided in maintaining the guard’s disgust of this useless sacer. The prisoners within the camp were made analogous to the enemies at the front lines who openly attempted to kill German soldiers, thus “…between these two fights, openly at the front line and then on the home front, there’s absolutely no difference – so we exterminated nothing but enemies.”xxvii While continuous contact between guard and Jew theoretically (and at times, realistically) should have led to personal interactions and thus encourage deterioration of stereotypes, the perpetual visibility of the gas chambers quietly and constantly disallowed this possibility.xxviii In his discussion of the evolution of state treatment of the insane, Foucault noted that the solution adopted for those operating in the liminal as state aids for the insane was “at the boundaries of the distance inspired by horror, and pity that operated inside the space… one consequence was that the exclusion… took on a whole new meaning: it no longer marked the great caesura … at the furthest limits of society;
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but inside the group itself it drew a line of compromise between feelings and duty.”xxix Drawing from Foucault’s theory to the reality of Auschwitz, Kogon presented the SS as an entity created under Himmler for two-fold duty, “On the one hand, it was to train the new ruling class; on the other, it was to eliminate all opposition… Their main purpose was the elimination of every trace of actual or potential potential opposition to Nazi rule. Segregation, debasement, humiliation, extermination – these were the effective forms of terror.”xxx The cause behind these unformed relationships between guards and prisoners eventually diffused into the relationships of prisoners, usurping the primacy of life affirming connections between Jewish families; as Wiesel recorded on his time in Buchenwald, “In this place, there is no such thing as father, brother, friend. Each of us lives and dies alone…” xxxi Auschwitz, among the other death camps, individual in this aspect as well. If one was not conquered by the guard and his implied state power, then one nonetheless remained entrapped by the psychological despair and physical destruction in the ominous presence and threat of the gas chambers.
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Semiotic Square of Nazi Camp SS Guards’ Understanding and Use of (Ir)Rationality
Rationality + Irrationality = (Complex Term) (Superior officers outside the camps, but involved in executing camp massacres) ~Heinrich Müller, Chief of Gestapo Rationality Irrationality (Following state orders & Führer principle while acting as a “Nordic gentleman”)
(Non participant in state propaganda that the “Jews are our downfall”)
~ Karl Hocker, adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz Rationality + Not Irrationality =(Positive Deixis) (Exploited inmates’ skills in the name of the state, then disposed of them)
~ Rare examples of this guard, unlikely he would have been assigned to camp duty Rationality + Not Rationality = (The figurative executioner of the homo sacer, and/or the assistant to the execution) ~ The train drivers, or ~ Zyklon B producers, or ~ Zyklon B patent holder, (I.G. Farben)
Irrationality + Not Rationality =(Negative Deixis) (Brutal in duties, capable of sadism,xxxii considered dangerous by other guards. Referred to as a “Landsknecht”xxxiii)
~ SS-Obersturmbannführer Irrationality + Not-Irrationality = Rudolf Höss, Commander (The desk official who operated in the state realm, but of Auschwitz, 1940 - 1943 ensured the genocide within the exceptional realm through ~ John Demjanjuk, brutal zealous workloads and lack of moral instinct) guard (assigned to Sobibor ~Adolf Eichmann camp)
(Accepted bribes from inmates, but maintained state disgust of the sacer)
(Maintained some contact with inmates: helped inmates survive or provided additional food or clothes)
~ Hans Lipski, Latvian SS guard, 1942
~ Franz Wunsch, SS guard who saved the sister of an inmate with whom he was involved, 1942.
Not-Irrationality
Not- Rationality
~ SS private Oskar Gröning, 1941
xxxiv
(Those who either transferred out of camp or did not participate in killings) Not Rationality + Not Irrationality = (Neutral Term)
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i
Jean Paul Sartre, Introduction in The Dying Colonialism, Frantz Fanon. (New York: Grove Press, 1965), x. C.P. Snow, “Either –Or”, Progressive, (1961), 24. iii This fear was forcefully expressed twice in recent history – at the conclusions of the psychological experiments of Stanley Milgran and Philip Zimbardo who found authoritative figures and well tuned pressure could elicit brutality in (almost) all of their subjects. iv Laurence Rees, Auschwitz, (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2005), 133. v Ulrich Herbert, National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 19. vi Avraham Barkai, “Volksgemenschaft. ‘Aryanization.’ and the Holocaust”, in National Socialist Extermination Policies. ed. Ulrich Herbert. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 43. vii Ibid., 42. viii Rees, Auschwitz, 173. ix Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation, (New York: Macmillan Inc., 1972), 398. x Rees, Auschwitz, 9. xi Ibid., 5. xii Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, (New York: Random House, 2008), 361. xiii Ibid., 50. xiv Ibid., 186. xv Ibid. xvi Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness, (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 164. xvii Ibid., 9. xviii Ibid., 8. xix Rees, Auschwitz, 5. xx Trial of the Major War Criminals, 55. xxi The sense of obedience reinforced from the uniform brings to mind a line from Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, IV iv: ‘Sure this robe of mine doth change my disposition.’ (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997), 947. xxii Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 135. xxiii Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion and the Final Solution in Poland, (New York: Random House Press Ltd, 1993), 113. xxiv Rees, Auschwitz, 104. xxv Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem, (Jerusalem: Herzl Press, 1978), 185. xxvi Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland, ii
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(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 115. xxvii Ibid., 133. xxviii A notable exception to this reality was SS Lieutenant Schwarz, a guard in Sobibor. As Hausner described, “He (Schwarz) was visibly embarrassed when he encountered the first “transport” and soon afterward sneaked into the prisoner’s huts saying “I had no idea where I was being sent. I can’t stand it and I have applied for transfer. Now I leave you.” After handshakes and an exchange of good wishes, he was gone. He became a legend: a human SS man.’ Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem, 258. xxix Michel Foucault, History of Madness, (New York: Routledge, 2005), 432. xxx Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them, Trans. Heinz Norden, (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1950), 20. xxxi Eli Wiesel, Night, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 107. xxxii Another description of this type of guard as illustrated by Kogon, “… the ‘inner son of a bitch’ could be projected to someone else and ‘licked’ with an enthusiasm that ranged all the way to sadism.” Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell, 286. xxxiii “Eichmann was what we called in German a “Landsknecht”… by which we meant a man who when he puts on his uniform, leave his conscience and reason in the wardrobe.”) Ibid., 385. xxxiv Another example of an SS man opting out of duty was SS Master Sergeant Mathias Graf who refused to lead a squad of Einsatzgruppen. Furthermore, as Justice Musmanno testified during the Eichmann trial, “I told you about Erwin Schulz, who refused to go along with superior orders and asked that he might be released. And he was released by no one less than Heydrich. And not only was he released from carrying on these onerous, bloodthirsty deeds as a colonel, but later on he was even promoted to general. The same thing was true with Franz Six… The same thing was true in regard to Nosske.” Ibid., 335-6.
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