Our Dark Side (16 page)

He was so keen on checking everything for himself that he entered a gas chamber one day. He wanted to know, he said, how his victims died, and was very anxious not to cause them any suffering. And that is when the miracle occurred: when he looked at the bodies and faces of the dead, he felt reassured because they ‘showed no signs of convulsion' (Hoess 2000: 147). We know from the eye-witness accounts of the
Sonderkommando
that the bodies and faces of those who had been gassed were covered in bruises and swollen, and that the stench of excrement, putrefaction and death given off by this hell was unbearable. This gives us some sense of the power of the perverse denial that allowed Hoess to convince himself of what he refused to hear, see or feel. That moment of
jouissance
is a terrifying expression of the reality of the death drive in its raw state that characterized the world of the Nazis.

On learning that Hitler had committed suicide, Hoess thought of killing himself and his wife but did not do so ‘because of the children'. He later regretted his decision: ‘We should have done it. I have always regretted it since. We would all have been spared a great deal, especially my wife and the children. How much more suffering will they have to endure? We were bound and fettered to that other world, and we should have disappeared with it' (Hoess 2000: 172).

Hoess was hanged before the entrance to the Auschwitz crematorium on 16 April 1947.

Steeped in the banality of evil, imbued with an incredible stupidity, obsessed with the radical rejection of a God who had deceived him, identified with the emptiness of a grotesque life and the inconsistency of the Führer he adored, Hoess was neither Sade nor Gilles de Rais, but a combination of Thénardier and Homais dressed up as Javert. He was encouraged in his wretched career as a State criminal by the establishment in Germany, in tragic circumstances, of a power based upon biocracy whose ideal had metamorphosed into its opposite,
²⁷
and of a hatred of a world that was not subordinated to the principle of the rigorous selection of men by other men.

Hundreds of books have been written on the origins of Nazism, but it has to be admitted that they do not completely exhaust the subject, so great is the interaction between fanaticism, messianism, pathological drives, anti-Semitism, administrative decrees, archaic reactions, scientism, occultism, intentionalism, functionalism, and so on.

The notion of the banality of evil has often been invoked to suggest that, in such circumstances, anyone could have become a Nazi or even committed genocide. It was then argued that conditioning, training and formatting ordinary men was all it took to transform them into bloodthirsty killers who could exterminate their fellows without feeling any emotion.
²⁸
All this is inaccurate, and such arguments rely upon a conception of the human psyche that is based on a belief in the absolute validity of the theory of conditioning that derives from the highly dubious work of Lorenz or Stanley Milgram.
²⁹

While the involvement of a vast population of bureaucrats, informers, railway workers, civil servants, soldiers, officer, jurists, scientists and all kinds of employers was required to implement the extermination of the Jews of Europe (Hilberg 1992), that does not mean that anyone caught up in the spiral of such a system could have become Rudolf Hoess. And those who were in charge of the Final Solution knew that perfectly well, as they selected SS functionaries of a particular calibre to run their death factories.

The history of Kurt Gerstein reveals the obvious inadequacies of the conditioning thesis (Friedländer 1967; Hochhuth 1963; see also Costa-Gavras's film
Amen
, 2003). Although opposed to National-Socialism, this devout mining engineer joined the Waffen SS and was given responsibility for supplying the extermination camps with Zyklon B. The sight of the gassings horrified him and he constantly attempted, albeit very ambivalently at times, to sabotage the products he was responsible for and to humanize the execution of the victims. Far from supporting the idea that all traces should be eliminated, which was so characteristic of Nazi criminality, he tried (in vain) to inform the allies about the implementation of the Final Solution, in which he was fully involved.

Gerstein was a double agent who betrayed himself. He surrendered to the French authorities, who regarded him as a war criminal. In his prison cell, he wrote the first eye-witness account of the existence of the gas chambers. Accused of complicity in murder, convinced that he had in some sense been abandoned by God and punished by men, he hanged himself in the Cherche-Midi prison in July 1945. Rehabilitated by his biographer Saul Friedländer, and posthumously honoured by a playwright and a film director who turned him into a rebellious but powerless hero who was both ambiguous and mystical and torn between good and evil, he is now regarded as one of the Righteous among the Nations.

Being a servant of God, Gerstein refused to obey obscene orders, but continued to support a system whose perversion he denounced. It cost him his life, rather as though he wanted to punish himself for having taken the side of those who perverted the Law. Faced with the spectacle of extermination, Hoess, in contrast, was already convinced of its necessity because he believed that the master race were gods. Far from being a mere agent who simply obeyed the orders of his superiors, he obeyed them because he approved in advance of the unspeakable orders he was given. And while he constantly complains about having to carry out such a terrible task, that simply allows him to congratulate himself on having accomplished it and to complain about it at the same time. And, in a supreme act of perversion, he tries to pass himself off as a moralist and to denounce his victims' vices. It is the lack of any visible sign of perversion and his claim to be the embodiment of good that make Hoess so completely perverse. In that respect, he is Eichmann's perfect pupil: empty, sleek, inconsistent, narrow-minded and normal.

Just as perverse as Hoess, but in different ways, Josef Mengele was a pure product of German institutional science. Born into a family of Catholic industrialists, and fascinated from an early age by the world of the abnormal, he would, in other circumstances, have become something other than what Nazism made him: a genocidal killer. He might have become a criminal or a child-abuser, an exhibitionist, a voyeur, a sexologist of deviancy, the initiator of pointless experiments, an impostor, charlatan or drug trafficker…

In 1935, or two years after Hitler's seizure of power, he defended his doctoral thesis in the human sciences at the Munich Institute of Anthropology. It was on the ‘racial morphology of the frontal section of the jaw in four racial groups'. He then enjoyed a brilliant medical career and fitted in very well with the elite community of German geneticists and anthropologists, who had all been converted to Nazi biocracy. A great believer in race hygiene, Menger devoted his medical thesis (1939) to the study of families with hare-lips, and then joined the Waffen SS.

From May 1943 onwards he worked in Birkenau where, as a researcher supported by the Deutsche Forschunggemeinschaft (DFG: German Research Community), he carried out ‘experiments' in hereditary pathologies, twins, tuberculosis, typhus, specific protides, eye colour and gangrenous nomatitis.
³⁰

A keen diagnostician who was obsessively anxious to promote effective treatments and to prove the validity of his research, he treated typhus by methodically sending anyone suffering from it to the gas chamber. In the gypsies' camp, where they played at ‘burning Jews', he set up a sort of kindergarten for the young twins he himself selected when they arrived in the camp. Dressed in his white coat, he visited them every day and gave them more food than the other detainees. He handed out sweets, and took the children for rides in his car. Having seduced them, he calmly pursued his research by injecting their eyes with various substances that were meant to change their colour. He was as interested in pigmentary anomalies of the eyes as in deformations of teeth and jaws. He sometimes attempted to create Siamese twins artificially by surgically suturing the veins of normal twins.

When the children died, in atrocious conditions and usually from lingering infections, he carried out post-mortems in the anatomopathological laboratory he had established at the heart of the crematorium in an attempt to understand the biological mechanisms behind the twinship that so fascinated him. One day, he threw the infant of a mother who had just given birth into the flames because she had begged mercy for her own mother. On another occasion, he had sixty pairs of adolescent twins exterminated at once.

Mengele also had a real passion for dwarfs. He enjoyed selecting whole families of them, forcing them to wear make-up and dress up in grotesque costumes so that he could sit in their midst like some comic opera king, smoking and watching them for hours for his own amusement. When he had had enough of these games, he would then lead them on foot to the crematorium at night. He regularly sent his research findings to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Geselleschaft, where they were examined with the greatest of interest.

Handsome, elegant, perfumed, wearing white gloves and happily whistling arias from
Tosca
, he would select human beings on the ramp at Birkenhau by flicking on his boots with his whip. He venerated Beethoven's symphonies, loved dogs, ate apple pie and was polite to everyone. He had no distinguishing features other than an absolute cynicism, a complete lack of emotion, a scientistic fanaticism and a boundless will to eliminate the Jews, whom he held responsible, because they were intelligent, for the degradation of the German ‘race'.

He recorded the minor incidents of everyday life in a ledger with meticulous care: toilets blocked, power cuts, aspirators repaired … In the same way, he wrote long lists of the real illnesses that afflicted his difficult life as he sent thousands of human beings to their death: migraines, headaches, dizzy spells, rheumatism, diarrhoea, pains in the bladder (Klee 1997; Langbein 2007).

Fleeing Auschwitz, Mengele emigrated to Latin America, escaping his pursuers for ever, and still convinced that Jews were the enemies of the human race. He suffered a fatal heart attack while swimming on a beach in Brazil in 1979, and was buried under a false name. But the science he had tried so hard to pervert caught up with him posthumously: in 1992, his body was exhumed and identified by genetic tests.

Nazism demonstrates how a state can become perverted by inverting the ideals of the Enlightenment, cultivating a belief in pure evil and instrumentalizing science in order to annihilate humanity itself. It reveals, in order to dominate it all the more, the subterranean and repressed part of a reality of drives, bodies and passions that Western civilization has always fought. Nazism was a perverse system, and its goal was to eliminate what it designated as a ‘perverse people', and not least, the Jews, who were deemed to be the most perverse of them all.

In that respect, its main representative – the Führer – was, as Kershaw so rightly emphasized, nothing more than an empty and inconsistent man whose only aphrodisiac was the ability to exercise power (
Führerprinzip
) over his fellow men, the crowds and Germany. Power was ‘compensation for all the deeply felt setbacks of the first half of his life' (Kershaw 1998: xxvii–xxviii).

While the mystics fantasized about destroying their bodies so as to offer God the spectacle of a liberating enslavement, and while the libertines and Sade rebelled against God by promoting the body as the only site of
jouissance
, and while the sexologists, finally, tried to domesticate the pleasures and furies of the body by drawing up a ‘catalogue of perversions', the Nazis succeeded in using the state to transform completely the many figures of perversion. They turned science into the instrument of delight in evil which, by going beyond any representation of the sublime and the abject, of licit and illicit, allowed them to describe all men, or in other words the human race, as a perverse people that had to be reduced to scraps that could be quantified and reified: bones, ligaments, muscles, hands, skin, eyes, organs and hair.

We can therefore understand why Adorno could, almost certainly wrongly, wonder if it was possible to think after Auschwitz, so great was his belief that there was a danger that the reconciliation of reason and its dark side would once more be found to be at fault.