The Theory and Practice of Hell (5 page)

INTRODUCTION
XV

certain SS practices were emulated in the ranks of the victims, was only deepened after the liberation, when they saw a credulous world invest injustice and brutality with an aura of heroism. Those survivors who battened on the despair of their fellow prisoners will take small comfort from this book, which makes short shrift of false haloes. There are certain telling questions that anyone who has read this book can ask: What was your camp? Your group? Your job? Your iden tifying color? Your party membership? How long did you serve?

Kogon is quite aware that it is a somber burden he has taken on his shoulders. He knows that the book may be exploited for one-sided propaganda purposes, or for purposes of sen sationalism, both of which he despises—sensationalism even more than propaganda. The objective interpretation of these unspeakable events may be perverted, by those more mon strous than the criminals themselves, merely to satisfy esoteric tastes and tickle jaded palates. Or it may merely make a pleasant shudder run down the spines of the smug—and guiltiest of all are the smug, to whom the sufferings of others are no more than a foil for their own well-being. They are the rotten soil from which spring the argument and sophistry justifying any wrong done in the name of authority, any sup pression of the challenge of morality.

Sometimes, moreover, Kogon asked himself whether, in his efforts to dissect the system dispassionately, to point out its every strength and weakness, he was not actually rationalizing it, offering a ready-made blueprint for tyrants yet to come. On several occasions he was tempted to burn the whole manuscript. At other times he thought he might evade respon sibility by remaining anonymous.

But he found himself unable to take either way out. He feels that among the few who escaped the hellish system alive, he brings peculiar qualifications to the task in hand. He is a man of religion as well as of politics, a sociologist as well as a writer. For certain reasons he was able, even at the moment when he himself was the victim of utter degradation, to keep a sense of detachment, to remain a critical witness, to estimate the sphere and significance of events, to trace motivations and reactions in the perverted and violated minds about him, to

xvi
INTRODUCTION

tell the general from the specific. One of the inexorable con sequences is that his name is likely to remain linked to this gloomy and controversial document.

It is his hope that this book may help to keep Germany from ever again surrendering to the powers of evil, that it may warn the rest of the world of the fate awaiting those who do surrender. The purge to which he offers this contribution is a necessary step toward victory, lest in the end the facts become so twisted that the gnawing sense of guilt be stilled, indeed, lest the unregenerate use the facts as a screen for renewed plotting. There is a duty to attempt clarification now, when facts and motives, already growing dim, are not yet obscured. The world, and above all Germany, must pause for self-analysis. A factual report, not of personal history or of atrocities, but covering every aspect of the German con centration camps may well serve to start this process of catharsis. What is needed is not merely a mosaic of many fragments, of individual experiences, but a picture of the system as a whole. This is the answer to the objection that too much has already been said and written about the German concentration camps.
The truth alone can set usfree.

I

THESSSUPER STATE

Late in the fall of 1937, in Frankfurt, I had occasion for an extended discussion with a leading SS man from Vogelsang Castle—a discussion that continued over several afternoons.

It should be noted that Vogelsang, in the Eiffel Mountains, was one of three castles
—Ordensburg
is the German term— where the new Nazi elite was to be incubated.
Ordensburg
really describes a castle belonging to a medieval order, such as the Knights Templar—and that is how the Nazis thought of their elite. At the
Ordensburg
, young men chosen with care were trained for several years under an austere regimen of consecration.

My discussion with the SS officer was very frank on both sides. It dealt with such questions as the meaning of German history, the role of the Third Reich, and the racial theories of the SS. The contrast between the views expressed was, of course, extreme and gave me a wealth of insight, confirming much that I had already suspected. The SS officer was by no means stupid, indeed he had a superior intellect, for all that he was a thoroughgoing fanatic. He made three remarkable statements:

1

2
EUGEN KOGON

'
'What we trainers o f the younger generation o f Ftihrers aspire to is a modern governmental structure on the model o f the ancient Greek city states
.
It is to these aristocratically run democracies with their broad economic basis o f serfdom that we owe the great cultural achievements o f antiquity
.
From five to ten per cent o f the people
,
their finest flower
,
shall rule; the rest must work and obey
.
In this way alone can we attain that peak per formance we must demand o f ourselves and o f the German people
.

“ The new Fiihrer class is selected by the SS—in a

positive sense by means o f the National Political Education Institutes
fNapola^
as a preparatory stage
,
o f the Ordensburgen as the academies proper o f the coming Nazi aristocracy
,
and o f a subsequent active internship in public affairs; in a negative sense by the extermination o f all racially and biologically inferior elements and by the radical removal o f all incorrigible political opposition that refuses on principle to acknowledge thephilosophical basis of the Nazi State and its essential institutions
.

“ Within ten years at the latest it will be possiblefor us in this way to dictate the law o f A dolf Hitler to Europe, put a halt to the other wise inevitable decay o f the continent, and build up a true community o f nations
,
with Germany as the leading power keeping order
. ”

I shall not here cite the arguments I marshaled against these propositions. If there was any need for further incriminating evidence against me, this incident earned me a place of honor on the first Gestapo black list when the Germans marched into Austria on March 12, 1938. What is of importance here is merely the extraordinary precision with which an SS leader was able to set forth the true aims of the Nazi State.

It is the
Schutz-Staffel
1 of Heinrich Himmler that must be regarded as the preordained guardian of the Nazi spirit, the elite on whom was to rest the ultimate exercise of Nazi power.

Schutz-Staffel
literally means “ Defense Echelon.*’ The term was univer sally abbreviated to SS, but the abbreviation could not be written in ordinary Roman or even Gothic letters. It was written as a double lightning Hash,
z / z
, in imitation of ancient runic characters. Ultimately even German typewriters had to carry this symbol on a special key. —
Tr.

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF HELL 3

Himmler, the son of a Bavarian official and a failure as a schoolteacher, had risen from the ranks of the “ Artamans,” an obscure branch of the German youth movement, dedicated to the glorification and arming of the German peasantry. Even then the Nazi symbols of blood, soil and the sword were foreshadowed. Looking at Himmler’s features, moreover, it is not surprising to find that his man was to become the disciple, the henchman and finally the most dogged protagonist of Adolf Hitler’s obsessions. Pince-nez clamped before his cynical eyes and rather stupid face, he was certainly not the prototype of the non-existent and thus all the more exalted “ Teutonic race.” None of the principal Nazi leaders were. Certainly not Alfred Rosenberg, a man without a drop of German blood, who yet presumed to play the part of the great German philosopher; nor Joseph Goebbels, about whose skull formation, stature and clubfoot few words need be wasted; nor the bloated Hermann Goring; nor, especially, their lord and master himself, Adolf Hitler, one of the receding forehead type, of whom his one-time press agent, the cynical “ Putzi” Hanfstaengel, once told foreign correspon dents that at least the hair in his armpits was fair.

What Himmler, Hitler’s policeman, lacked in intelligence, he made up in unwavering pigheadedness. His character exhibited two essential German qualities, quite dissociated from each other: brutality, and a romantic streak. He was able to alternate them like shirts. He was fond of displaying the mystic rigmarole of his “ Sworn Fellowship” before the counterfeit bones of King Henry I, founder of medieval Ger man power in the East, at the midnight consecrations of SS ensigns in the Quedlinburg Cathedral. But daybreak might already see him at some concentration camp, watching the mass whippings of political prisoners. From the symbolism of the sun wheel, the path of the swastika led straight to the smoking furnaces of Auschwitz.

The SS was an organization that served a specific and quite realistic purpose, true, but from the outset Himmler had con ceived and created it as a sacred order. He never intended to turn it into a mass army. Only the general trend of the Third Reich itself drove him in this direction. To the last, he tried time and again to maintain a basic core that should enable him some day to return to his original purpose. That purpose