The Theory and Practice of Hell (74 page)

A good part of the special character developed by men in the concentration camps was purely the product of camp life and vanished with the camps. But other aspects had more inherent force and have become permanent traits that now continue to have their effect on the environments to which the surviving prisoners have been returned.

In my opinion it was a terrible blunder that the psychologist who counseled the statesmen failed altogether to foresee this, though so much about conditions in the concentration camps was known abroad. Preparation for a transition to normalcy should have been made. Nothing whatever was done along these lines!

Yet it would have been so easy to enlist the co-operation of those few prisoners who not only had retained their full in tellectual power but had actually grown in stature during their detention. With their help the bulk of the prisoners should

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have been given a breathing space to enable them to make a gradual readjustment to a world from which they had become estranged. Some should have been sent to rest-homes, to recover in mind and body. Experienced counselors might have helped to smooth out the precipitate mental crisis that threatened to disrupt even further the lives of men who for years had been unaccustomed to normal society.

One has only to think of the surviving Jews from the east who, for understandable reasons, had almost completely lost their bearings; or of the thousands of Poles who thought the hour had now struck for them to contribute their share of hate and chauvinistic depravity. And how carefully even the Ger man concentration-camp prisoners needed to be evaluated! Their minds needed healing, their powers disciplining, their essential worth impartial study before the world could proceed in true expiation to give them the chance for social and political leadership they had earned. But as it was, this was done without foresight, at the mercy of chance, with per sonal connections and the old art o f ruthless self-interest the deciding factor. Only a careful program of preparation could have picked from the ranks of the former concentration-camp prisoners those who, on the basis of the evil through which they had lived and the lessons they had learned, had the capacity to serve the cause of democracy in a Germany reborn.

Chapter Twenty-Four

THE GERMAN PEOPLE AND THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS

- A F T E R 1945

The tyranny of the Third Reich has been broken; but no light has come to Germany in the four years that have gone by since then. Too many new shadows lie across the land—shadows of the Soviet dictatorship and shadows cast by other forms of outrageous injustice. World developments have rendered the “ re-education” of the German people in part impossible, in part so difficult that no one can predict which forces will carry the day.

This is how the situation appears to me at the outset of the year 1949: Were Hitler to return, many would follow him anew—though with a somewhat worse conscience. The National Socialists would be far more radical and ruthless—quite unwilling, this time, to leave even a single enemy alive. They would have plenty of effective propaganda material against both East and West. The oppositional minority would be stronger and more resolute. There would be an immediate life-and-death struggle, with deeds of bloody violence and mounting assassinations. More young people would be on the side of the opposition—young people who have not yet come to know freedom, but who loathe die-

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tatorships, who are too idealistic to obey blindly, and who reject any form of sacrifice for obscure aims.

Not a few Germans are disoriented. Confronting the sinister facts of the present that seem to outweigh by far the forces of the future—which is the typical state of Europe—they do not feel that the execrated past was quite so bad as it is represented—and as it actually was. True, the at traction of liberty is sensed; but the actual path that leads to it is not yet clearly seen. Hence the country is pervaded by many moods and resentments. Despite undeniable economic im provement, the approach to reality has remained unchanged, compounded of idealism and opportunism—more of the latter than of the former. But in many Germans idealism is frustrated, while with most of them opportunism is aimless and impulsive, ready to enter into any alliance that promises swift success.

The basis of political life in Germany remains seriously defective, a state of affairs that bids fair to continue for a long time, in view of the sins of omission and commission since 1945. Only the fruits of constructive co-operation will be able to overcome this danger. Despite the unspeakable harm which Germans have done, both to Germans and to the world, one of the serious aims of such co-operation must be to cast off the burdens of the past, to strive instead for common justice and the common welfare. Only a policy of reconciliation, with and within Germany, vigilant but not grandiloquent, can pave the way for a better future. The facts must be seen in their true light, if illusions are to be avoided. The background and pat tern of the past must be recognized.

Why have the facts about the concentration camp of the Third Reich failed so far to bring about a deep-seated change of heart in the German people? Because it has been shown that the spirit of Hitler lives on in others as well, not merely in Germans; because susceptibility to totalitarian methods has become apparent throughout the world; because hundreds of thousands—indeed millions—of Germans have again fallen victim to them; because the atrocities of the past lose their deterrent effect among the wild horrors of the present; because actions always speak louder than words—especially when those actions persistently fly in the face of preachments.

From 1944 on, especially after the surrender, and in many

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instances deep into the year 1946—in Soviet Russia to this day—German prisoners of war were subjected to conditions often resembling the worst features of Nazi concentration camps. If only the world had not insisted that it was con ducting a crusade against the organized forces of hell! Arthur Koestler once said that the total lie was combated with only half truths. But the majority of the German people had taken them to be the whole truth, and now they saw only the short comings. Their reaction may have been mistaken, indeed, neurotic—but it is understandable.

And the stories that were told by the twelve to fourteen million who were herded from the countries of eastern Europe into the remnant of Germany, often uprooted in the most bar barous fashion, transported singly, in groups, or in whole wretched convoys sealed into railway cars! Try to explain to a mother who has lost her children, to a husband whose wife has been raped, to youngsters who have seen their parents brutally beaten, to all who have experienced death and cruelty in the flesh—try to explain to them that in the vaunted better world these incidents were no more than the melancholy con sequences of prior mass injustice, now befalling the innocent and the guilty alike! Try to make it clear to a whole nation that neither hypocrisy nor cowardice were responsible, if this “ resettlement” program failed to be carried out in orderly and humane fashion, as was decreed in the declarations of Yalta and Potsdam! Even the Nazis did not shunt more millions across the plains of eastern Europe.

And then the deportations! We do not know the precise number of Germans who are compelled to perform slave labor in Russian or other mines and camps of the East. When it is argued that thousands of these new exiles are not suf fering the direst hardships, the German people can reply that neither was this the case with foreign slave labor under the Nazi terror. In any event, the freedom of these deportees, run ning into the tens of thousands, is ruthlessly trodden un derfoot. Until 1947 it could scarcely be denied that the Allies who had waged the Great War against Hitler, Himmler, Sauckel, Frank, and the other great slaveholders formed a common quadripartite Control Council in conquered Ger many, at the same time that they sat in common judgment over the war criminals of the Third Reich at Nuremberg.