discussion Banality of evil

[stona]

I was sorting through a folder of various WW2 pictures when I came across this one which brought Hannah Arendt memorable phrase to mind.

It was taken at Solahutte, a sort of R and R camp for SS personnel about twenty miles from Auschwitz.



On the left, Dr Josef Mengele who surely needs no introduction.

Next to him Rudolph Hoess, Auschwitz camp Commandant.

The big guy, who really looks like the thug that he was, is Josef Kramer, Hoess' second in command who was in charge of the nuts and bolts of the extermination process at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He finished the war, and is better known to the British, as Commandant of Bergen-Belsen.

I don't know the fourth man, but he's keeping some pretty revolting company.

An amazing snap shot, that's what it is, not a posed propaganda or publicity photograph....................the banality of evil.

Steve

 

[eddiesolo]

Indeed, watched a program about Mengele and there was a lot of pictures from Solahutte, all smiling and happy, great picnics, smoking and drinking. Hard to get your head around what turns normal people into uncaring, unfeeling monsters, and what is frightening is that it still happens today and is it in all of us...I hope not.

Si.

 

[Alan 45]

Do you know what amazes me ? The fact they managed to hide the worst of the atrocities from their own people

Even alied commanders were shocked when they found these camps it truely is the worst that humans can do to people

 

[eddiesolo]

t truely is the worst that humans can do to people

+1 to that Alan...mankind has many shameful skeletons in his closet

Si.

 

[Guest]

Another one the world has them and they make sure they "pop" up where there is evil.

Captain Alfredo Astiz. Nick named Baby Face. At the time of the Falklands War & before he was a man with his own country mans blood on his hands.

By coincidence just reading Lieutenant Chris Parry's story of "Down South". A Fleet Air Arm observer on "Humphrey" a Wessex Helicopter attached to HMS Antrim a County Class Destroyer (beautiful looking craft). Sent to the Falklands with the RN force to recover the Falklands.

With Plymouth, Endurance, Brilliant, Antrim depth charged (Humphrey the Heli.)the Santa Fe (virtually destroyed her) & then Marines recaptured Georgia.

So Adiz the senior officer was captured. The crew & army types were made prisoner & interned temporarily on Tidespring an RN Aux. Worried due to his turbulent behaviour & worry about organising the prisoners he was then transferred to Antrim. He was prisoned in a cabin with a bathroom. The "suite" was made devoid of all things which may be used in some development. According to Chris Parry who accompanied him around the deck on exercise he was an aloof & dismissive of all of the RN officers. Captain Brian Young decided that they must search his room for any weapons. It was found that he had fashioned a knife out of a metal bedstead. He was left with a mattress.

He was "given" back to Argentina. There were many things after this which I only have vague recollection. But he was a nasty man.

Laurie

 

[Guest]

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Apologies for got to post pictures

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[Guest]

I have a book which identifies the men in a similar picture, it says that by this point, Rudolf Höss is the 'ex-commandant' and Richard Baer is now in charge, with Kramer subordinate to him. Not sure if it's relevant, because it's hard to positively Id people in old photos, even by the 'experts'.

 

[downscale model art]

as long as we live, we should never ever forget. shall we forgive? im sorry, but i cant. too many lost voices remind us not to.

 

[stona]

I have a book which identifies the men in a similar picture, it says that by this point, Rudolf Höss is the 'ex-commandant' and Richard Baer is now in charge, with Kramer subordinate to him. Not sure if it's relevant, because it's hard to positively Id people in old photos, even by the 'experts'.

Hi Steve, that is entirely possible given the chronology of command. It would depend on the date of the photo being post May 1944 when Liebehenschel moved on to Majdanek of course. Any idea who the man on the right might be?

I guess we should say that Kramer was technically Commandant of Auschwitz II (Birkenau) after the reorganisation.

I visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex when it was still technically behind the iron curtain. I and a few others made the journey from Katowice at a time when Poland, in the throws of the confrontations between "Solidarity" and the state was not a very easy place to be. I've always had an interest in history, I was aware of how the system worked, I knew the numbers, but I was not prepared for the scale of the operation. I left that place a changed man.

Cheers

Steve

 

[downscale model art]

hey laurie... try and read FOUR WEEKS IN MAY by david hart dyke.... captain of HMS COVENTRY. cracking book mate!

 

[stona]

as long as we live, we should never ever forget. shall we forgive? im sorry, but i cant. too many lost voices remind us not to.

We don't really have to struggle with the moral issue of forgiveness. This generation has almost entirely passed on and the guilt of the fathers certainly should not be visited on the sons who have nothing to do with this.

We should never forget. Let the voices of the victims and the perpetrators remind us. Claude Lanzmann's film "Shoah" for all its shortcomings did attempt to do this

Cheers

Steve

 

[Guest]

Try this out,

My wife is 1st generation canadian born, german + croatian. Her parents came here in the 1950s, but He was born in 1927, and She in 1935. Meaning, my mother in law was born in nazi germany. She was 10 by the end and had lost her father and younger sister and it had changed her in ways that she refuses to admit. Her grandfather was born during the time of the Wiemar Republic and saw national socialism for the tyrannical dictatorship it really promised to be. As a consequence, he instilled a very strong sense of anti-naizism in his granddaughter. So much so that she refused to give the nazi salute, and her family constantly lived in fear that they would be denounced to the gestapo. One thing that saved them was that they had a small fortune by the standards of the day, and that they lived in a small town in northern germany near the denmark border and were largely out of the way for most of it.

But the father was a committed nazi soldier. He held the rank of "unteroffizier" and was wounded in action some time in 1944. He was home on sick leave and was told that "maybe he should just sit the rest of this out". (he has 3 daughters to consider). But he was a die-hard nazi and maybe even felt some sense of responsibility to the rest of the squad, to help lead them back out, back home. Or maybe he believed that might was right and since the germans proved they didn't have the might, they didn't have the right. And like hitler, thought that there was nothing left to live for. We will never know. He was sent back to the russian front and was M.i.A. on Jan, 31-Feb 01, 1945. Maybe captured and didn't survive the round up and transportation. Maybe killed through labour, the way the germans often treated their own prisoners. Either way, he never came back.

My father in law is croatian and fought against the nazis for the british. He was often involved in intelligence gathering and reporting. And smuggling. And then partisan work against Marshall Tito in croatia. It's all he likes to talk about anymore, and well, he's drunk most of the time these days...

I was raised in a navy family and was brought up to regard germans as 'the enemy'.

Hmm...that actually explains a lot about me, to myself.

Well played Mr Freud, well played...

 

[Guest]

I think it is very important not to forget and this is why I have so much respect for the Germans who have made museums out of many of thier concentration camps. They don't want to forget either but they also want to ensure it does not happen again. Not forgiving harbours the issues that led to it in the first place and I think we all have to move forward together with the joint resolve to never allow it again. There really is no point in not forgiving nthe current generation who had no part in those events and not forgiving is what allows the resentments to breed again. "All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing". I believe not forgiving is doing nothing.

 

[Guest]

hey laurie... try and read FOUR WEEKS IN MAY by david hart dyke.... captain of HMS COVENTRY. cracking book mate!

Thanks will do that. Try Lieutenant Chris Parry's story of "Down South". Half way through & one of the best written & interesting books I have read.

Apologies for interrupting your piece here Steve.

Laurie

 

[Gern]

You can find atrocity almost anywhere - and committed by almost anybody.

In the Black Country we have a proud industrial heritage which is highly celebrated. We even have a living museum dedicated to it. Much of this local industry involved chainmaking in small, local workshops. Many of these provided the only work available in some areas and whole families, including the elder children would work there.

Few stop and think however that the chainmakers derived a significant proportion of their income from making and selling slave chains. Everybody knew how awful life was for slaves, yet ordinary folk such as you'll meet every day made a living from it without sparing a thought for the misery and death they were contributing to.

You don't have to be a monster to act like one.

Terry Pratchett says it much better than I can:

"And it all meant this: that there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do."

Gern

 

[BarryW]

You can find atrocity almost anywhere - and committed by almost anybody.In the Black Country we have a proud industrial heritage which is highly celebrated. We even have a living museum dedicated to it. Much of this local industry involved chainmaking in small, local workshops. Many of these provided the only work available in some areas and whole families, including the elder children would work there.

Few stop and think however that the chainmakers derived a significant proportion of their income from making and selling slave chains. Everybody knew how awful life was for slaves, yet ordinary folk such as you'll meet every day made a living from it without sparing a thought for the misery and death they were contributing to.

You don't have to be a monster to act like one.

Terry Pratchett says it much better than I can:

"And it all meant this: that there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do."

Gern

An interesting point but, of course, the British Empire banned the slave trade well over 200 years ago and quite rightly devoted huge resources to stopping it which would have caused hardship to those even indirectly involved such as making chains. It is very easy to condemn people based on modern values and with all the information sources available. Those making chains had no real way to grasp the full horror of what their use entailed given the limited information sources available to them. It is also true to say that, from our modern perspective, the contrast between our lives and how the slaves were treated is far more pronounced than between the lives or ordinary 'free' people and the slaves of the time. For those people in the picture though there are no such excuses as for those making the chains, they knew what they were doing and truly were evil personified.

 

[BarryW]

Do you know what amazes me ? The fact they managed to hide the worst of the atrocities from their own peopleEven alied commanders were shocked when they found these camps it truely is the worst that humans can do to people

I knew an old chap who was among the British troops to liberate Belsen Belsen. He could barely speak about it and the anger he felt towards the guards and contempt for the local people who he said turned a blind eye. He died a year or so ago, a couple of years after I accompanied him and other vets to Arnhem and a ceremony when they 'laid up' their standards in a Dutch museum.

 

[Guest]

An interesting point but, of course, the British Empire banned the slave trade well over 200 years ago

An interesting fact is that it wasn't till 2010 that you could be actually charged with 'slavery' as a crime, before that you would have to be charged with other offences amounting to the fact.

2010 also saw legislation to create an 'anti slavery day' if memory serves.

 

[stona]

Britain banned and attempted to interdict the slave trade in the British Empire. The institution of slavery was not banned as such a bill would probably not have passed through parliament for reasons familiar today. The eventual bill, passed into law as "The Slave Trade Act" of 1807, was as good a compromise as could be got. The great slave owning companies and institutions (including almost incredibly the Church of England) must have known that the writing was on the wall.

The French had already banned slavery, in theory at least, at the time of the revolution some years previously. Britain abolished slavery in 1833 throughout most of the Empire. It was finally abolished completely, including the earlier exemptions, in 1843 which is much later than many imagine.

Richard raises a good point about the honesty of the Germans. German people today do not shy away from what happened in the past (with the exception of a lunatic fringe which all democracies allow) and deserve tremendous respect for that. Not all nations are so honest about the darker periods of their pasts.

We are not always so honest in this country about many unsavoury episodes. The devastating effects of the slave trade, not only on the human beings who suffered almost inconceivable horrors as a result but also the wider ramifications for the development of an entire continent are not always properly acknowledged.

Dave's (Gern) example of the slave chains is another example of the banality of evil. The chain makers were not "bad" people. They were merely cogs in a larger system that led to the chains they bashed being locked around the necks and limbs of people living thousands of miles away.

Is a man manufacturing crematoria ovens at Topf and Sohne in Erfurt or H.Kori or Didier Werk in Berlin any different? I think not.

Men like Goldenhagen have argued that the holocaust was much more widely known and understood in Germany during the war than that wartime generation admitted and I think that he is probably correct. I doubt that those oven makers knew where their product was going to end up any more than Dave's metal bashers knew to what use their chains would be put.

There is indeed no comparison between the working people above and the men in that picture. As Barry says, the men in that picture knew exactly what they were doing. The thing that so worried Arendt is that they are just ordinary men. Looking along the rows of men in the dock at Nuremberg you see the same thing. With a few exceptions not particularly bright or talented men but opportunists and over promoted thugs.

Cheers

Steve

 

[flyjoe180]

I knew an old chap who was among the British troops to liberate Belsen Belsen. He could barely speak about it and the anger he felt towards the guards and contempt for the local people who he said turned a blind eye. He died a year or so ago, a couple of years after I accompanied him and other vets to Arnhem and a ceremony when they 'laid up' their standards in a Dutch museum.

My Granddad was in a British Pioneer unit that helped to liberate and then bury bodies at Bergen Belsen and had similar sentiments to your friend. After serving throughout the war it was his experience of Bergen Belsen that haunted him until he died. My Great Uncle who I have mentioned here before was captured after HMS Saracen was sunk in the Mediterranean Sea and was subsequently sent to a German concentration camp after being caught in a sabotage plot on a railway line that went wrong. He was released to a POW camp later but he described his experiences of that camp in a biography of his life. The treatment of the Russians and Jews he saw was of the lowest level of humanity. He had nothing but contempt for the SS guards and their commanders. Lastly the man I was named after was captured by the Japanese in Burma and survived a Japanese POW camp where he was starved and mistreated. He too survived the war but he would never have bought a Japanese made product I would wager.

If you haven't already, have a read of the book about American olympic runner Louis Zamperini ("UNBROKEN" by Laura Hillenbrand). It gives a great insight into the brutal mentality of some of the Japanese guards, in particular one sergeant, Matsuhiro Watanabe (known to the Australian POWs as Watabastard) who was so brutal he made MacArthur's top 100 most wanted criminals. Watanabe was allowed to go free after the USA made an agreement with Japan to let the remaining criminals go in return for military favours to oppose the Soviet Union.