What the survivors taught me - The Jewish Chronicle

How was it possible that during the 20th century people from Germany, a cultured nation at the heart of Europe, perpetrated such crimes? In my attempt to answer this, I was helped by two accidents of history. The first was I met many former Nazis at exactly the moment when most had nothing to lose by speaking openly. Fifteen years earlier, holding down influential jobs and pillars of their communities, they would not have spoken. The second fortuitous circumstance was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the access to Eastern Europe – not just to archives but people as well.

As I travelled, however, I became aware that the question was not confined to Germany. In the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe, I encountered something frightening: virulent an- tisemitism. I had expected people to tell me how much they hated the Communists. But to hate Jews? It seemed ludicrous, especially since there were hardly any Jews left in the places I was visiting – the Nazis had seen to that. Yet the old man in the Baltic States who had helped the Nazis shoot Jews in 1941 still thought he had done the right thing. And even some of those who had fought against the Nazis held wild antisemitic beliefs. One Ukrainian veteran, who had fought bravely for the Ukrainian Nationalist partisans against the Nazis and the Red Army and had been persecuted as a result, asked me: "What do you think of the view that there is an international conspiracy of Jewish financiers operating out of New York which is trying to destroy all non-Jewish governments?" I looked at him for a second. Not being Jewish myself, it is always something of a shock to encounter naked antisemitism from an unexpected source. I replied: "It's total garbage." The old partisan took a sip of vodka. "Really," he said, "That's your opinion. Interesting."

Those who think that this history is of little relevance today, or that the corrosive antisemitism was somehow confined to the Nazis, would do well to remember that the extermination of the Jews was not imposed by a few mad people upon an unwilling Europe. Indeed, there was nothing 'uniquely exterminatory' about German society before the Nazis came to power and many Jews had fled to Germany in the 1920s to seek sanctuary.

And having questioned a significant number of perpetrators from all of the three totalitarian regimes of World War II - the Nazis, Stalin, and the Japanese - and having written comprehensively about all three dictatorships, I can confirm that the Nazi war criminals I met were different. In the Soviet Union, the climate of fear under Stalin was pervasive in a way it never was in Germany under Hitler. Whereas in Nazi Germany, unless you were a member of a specific risk group, the Jews, the Communists, the gypsies, homosexuals and, indeed, anyone who opposed the regime – you could live comparatively free from fear. People felt personally secure and happy enough that they would have voted to keep Hitler in power if there had been free and fair elections. By contrast, in the Soviet Union, not even Stalin's closest, most loyal colleagues, ever felt they could sleep securely.

W hat appears in the minds of many Nazi war criminals is encapsulated by an interview with Hans Friedrich who admitted to having personally shot Jews, as a member of an SS unit in the East. With the Nazi regime long defeated, he was not sorry for what he did. The easy course for him would have been to hide behind the "acting under orders" or "I was brainwashed by propaganda" excuses, but such was the strength of his own internal conviction that he did not. At the time, he believed it was right to shoot Jews, and gave every appearance of believing it after the war. It is a despicable position – but nonetheless an intriguing one. And the contemporary evidence shows that he is not unique. At Auschwitz, for example, there is not one case in the records that shows that an SS man was prosecuted for refusing to take part in the killings, whilst there is plenty of material showing that the real discipline problem in the camp – from the point of view of the SS leadership – was theft.

It was their own decision to take part, they were not forced into the tyranny

Thus, the conclusion I reached, from interviews, archival research and discussions with researchers, was that there was a greater likelihood of individuals who committed crimes within the Nazi system taking personal responsibility for their actions ("I thought it was the right thing to do"), rather than an external one ("I was ordered to do it"), in marked contrast to war criminals who served Stalin or Hirohito. One obvious reason for this is that the Nazis carefully built on pre-existing convictions. Antisemitism existed in Germany long before Adolf Hitler, and plenty of people blamed the Jews, falsely, for Germany's defeat in World War I. Such that when the Depression gripped Germany in the early 1930s, millions of Germans voluntarily voted for the Nazi party as a solution to the country's ills.

Another reason was the work of Dr Josef Goebbels, who was the most effective propagandist of the 20th century. He is often dismissed as a crude polemicist, infamous for Der ewige Jude (the eternal Jew), a notorious film in which shots of Jews were intercut with pictures of rats. But, in reality, the vast majority of his work was much more sophisticated and much more insidious.

It is also important to convey the excitement that the leading Nazis felt at serving a man who dared to dream in epic terms. Hitler dreamt of defeating France in weeks – the very country in which the German army had been struck for years during World War I – and succeeded. He had dreamt of conquering the Soviet Union, and, in the summer and autumn of 1941, it looked almost certain that he would win. And he dreamt of exterminating the Jews, which in some ways was to prove the easiest task of all.

Furthermore, there was no blueprint for extermination which was imposed from above. Individual Nazis were not coerced by crude threats to commit murder. It was a collective enterprise owned by thousands of people who made the decision themselves, not to just take part, but to contribute initiatives in order to kill human beings and dispose of their bodies on a scale never attempted before. As we follow the journey upon which both the Nazis and those whom they persecuted embarked, we also gain a great deal of insight into the human condition. By observing how people behaved in some of the most extreme conditions in history, there is a great deal we can learn about ourselves.

Toivi Blatt, who was forced by the Nazis to work in Sobibor and then risked his life to escape, says: "People asked me, 'what did you learn?' and I think I'm only sure of one thing – nobody knows themselves." What the survivors taught me (and the perpetrators too) is that human behaviour is fragile and unpredictable and often at the mercy of the situation. Every individual still has, of course, the choice how to behave; it is just that for many people the situation is a key determinant in that choice. Even those individuals such as Hitler himself, who appear to be masters of their own destiny, were to a considerable extent created by their response to previous situations. The Adolf Hitler known to history was substantially formed by the interaction between the pre-war Hitler, who was a worthless drifter, and the events of World War I.

However, this history also shows us that if individuals can be buffeted around by the situation, then groups of human beings working together can create better cultures, which in turn can help individuals to behave more virtuously.

In the end, though, there is a profound sense of sadness around this subject that cannot be reduced. Throughout the time I was working on this project, the voices I heard loudest were those of the people whom we could not interview: the 1.1 million human beings who were murdered in Auschwitz and, in particular, the more than 200,000 children who perished there and were denied the right to grow up and experience life.

One image stuck in my mind from the moment I heard it described. It was of a 'procession' of empty baby carriages – property looted from the dead Jews – pushed out of Auschwitz in rows of five towards the railway station. The prisoner who witnessed the sight said they took an hour to pass by. The children who arrived at Auschwitz in those baby carriages, together with their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, and aunts – all those who died there – are the ones we should always remember.