Post on 22-Feb-2023
Barbarians from our “Kulturkreis”.
German-Jewish Perceptions
of Nazi perpetrators
Mark Roseman Indiana University, Bloomington
Introduction
Anyone reading Jean Améry’s essay on torture will never forget
the dispassionate precision with which Améry conveys his
tormentor‘s “fleischige, sanguinische Gesicht” (“fleshy sanguine
face”), “bärbeißig-gutmütig” (“gruffly good-natured”) temperament
and above all the genial “‘jetzt passiert’s’” (“Now it’s coming”)
with which this figure “rasselnd und gemütlich” (“in a rattling
and easygoing way”) signaled that the assault on Améry’s body was
about to begin.1 Améry renders this man as a real human being,
one for whom inflicting pain on another body was both routine and
a compelling task, and it is the juxtaposition of routine
normality and horrible intensity that is so gripping and
authentic.2 Few survivors could hope to possess Améry’s quality
as an observer or his literary skills but his account still
invites us to reflect more generally on victims’ experience of
the perpetrators.3 More particularly, as an assimilated Viennese
Jew (only after the war did Améry trade in Hanns for Jean and
Mayer for the French-sounding anagram Améry) his knowledge of the
culture and language of his antagonists seems crucial in his
ability to recognize social cues and types. Were German and
Austrian Jews able to “capture” their captors in a way non-German
Jews could not? Were they privileged observers, in the unenviable
sense that by dint of their proximity and background they
possessed special insights into their tormentors? Were they for
example able to recognize in Hitler’s henchmen particular social
types or see them as representatives of particular milieus? Could
they glean a sense of motive or even discern how far the regime’s
representatives were mere executors of orders rather than agents
in their own right? Or, like those of their co-religionists
elsewhere, did German Jews’ increasingly confined existences
render it impossible for them to see beyond the “ghetto walls”?
More, did their very ownership of German culture preclude making
sense of the countrymen who had turned against them?
It is striking that despite the huge amount of research on the
Holocaust there has been virtually no work on victims’
perceptions of the perpetrators. For a long time, historians of
the Jewish experience and chroniclers of Nazi policy had very
separate agendas, indeed often wrote in different languages. The
most important English-language historian of the Holocaust, Raul
Hilberg, was skeptical whether victims could tell us anything
much beyond their own suffering.4 Literary scholars and
psychoanalysts called into question the victims’ ability to
provide witness at all, or drew attention to the crucial gaps in
their experience.5 Recently, though, victims have figured more
centrally in major accounts of the Holocaust, and Saul
Friedländer’s magnum opus has attracted most attention in this
2
regard.6 Other historians have reasserted the facticity of
survivor testimony.7 My effort to see perpetrators through
victims’ eyes can thus be seen as part of a trend towards writing
a more integrated history of the Holocaust.8
But this analysis should also be understood as testing the limits
to such integration. At stake in the present piece is not only
whether victim testimony, in this case German-Jewish testimony,
constitutes an under-used resource for historical understanding
of the executors of Nazi policy. It is also whether by looking at
it we learn in fact more about the victims themselves. Améry
conveys both the intensity of experience and the challenge of
discerning anything, when he writes that „Everything is self-
evident, and nothing is self-evident as soon as we are thrust
into a reality whose light blinds us and burns us to the bone.”9
Were certain classes of action too threatening and horrible for
the victims to understand them? Is it possible that the victims,
if they survived to record, were capable of precise description
of actions but not useful analysis of motives – because no
analytical framework could contend with the overwhelming
rejection of one’s own humanity and the threats to one’s own
existence? Despite the victims’ superhuman effort to be cool and
precise recorders of events, should we be thinking less of the
“objective” observer, capable of seeing things how they were,
than of men and women caught in an extreme predicament and
struggling to find meaning in what was happening?10
Let me say a few words about methods and sources. Améry’s account
was written well after the war, in the 1960s. While the final
section of this essay briefly analyzes such retrospective
3
testimony and returns once more to Améry, it relies as far as
possible on contemporary wartime sources or immediate post-war
accounts.11 Fascinating as the later memoirs are, the movement of
survivors to new locations in the post-war diaspora often
necessarily altered their perspective. German Jews became
American, Israeli, or even British Jews. Victims’ distinctive
experience began to cross-pollinate with other vantage-points –
victims became historians, and victims read historical accounts.
We should recognize, however, that for all the virtues of
immediacy, contemporary materials raise questions of their own.12
To analyze the way perpetrators are represented in victim
writings, we need to read between the lines.
We should not expect to find just one German Jewish view. Not
only did German Jews form as colorful a mix as Jews elsewhere,
but their opportunities to encounter their persecutors varied
greatly too. Many distinctions – of gender, for example, or
between Ost- and Westjuden – can barely be touched on here. Because
men wrote so many of the contemporary German Jewish accounts that
have been published, this account is in any case very dependent
on a male perspective. We can dwell only briefly on the important
differences between the generations or on the implications of the
fact that so many of the richest chroniclers were not practicing
Jews, indeed in some cases had been brought up as Christians or
had converted to Christianity (in one case to Buddhism!) But
despite all these important variations and nuances we can
legitimately ask whether there were particular shared contexts
within which German Jews were able to observe their co-national
perpetrators, and whether there were distinctive, recurring
4
experiences, insights or values that informed or colored German
Jews’ observations.
The term perpetrator or “Täter” is not one that contemporaries
used. In the entire two volumes of Viktor Klemperer’s wartime
diaries the term occurs to my knowledge only once, and then not
to describe the Nazi activists, but to refer to the instigators
of the bomb plot against Hitler. (Klemperer used the term in its
criminological sense, i.e. in the context of the Nazis’ search
for the culprits, and certainly not to vilify the plotters).13
Thus on the one hand, we need to make some heuristic decisions
about whom we understand as “perpetrators”. In broad terms, the
term is treated as including all those agents of Nazi policy who
were centrally involved with the most injurious and distinctive
aspects of Nazi persecution –dispossession, deportation,
coercion, violence, and murder. But on the other hand, deploying
a term not used by contemporaries means being ready to accept
that victims may not divide up the human terrain in the ways that
we do now.14 How did Jewish victims of Nazi persecution understand
the collective of those who were acting against them? We know,
for example, that for many Eastern European victims the
aggressors were something called the “Germans”, and that little
distinction was made between their inhumanity and their
“Germanity”.15 We might expect that German Jews would be more
nuanced, indeed that the blanket condemnation of Germandom would
place them in some embarrassment as to their own heritage and
identity.
Because so little has been written on these issues, this article
can only raise questions and offer some tentative hypotheses. The
5
first two sections revolve around the striking fact that
perpetrators are so often absent from German Jewish accounts. The
article shows that for the 1930s this reflects a distinctive
German Jewish experience of pervasive social exclusion, on the
one hand, and few direct encounters with “evil” perpetrators, on
the other. The richness of German Jewish testimony from the 1930s
lies above all in revealing the many shades of societal
participation in the exclusionary effort. But at the same time,
as I show, German Jews allude to many more nasty encounters than
they actually describe in their diaries. This mode of
marginalizing the unpleasant was, I argue, a conscious or
unconscious response to the central trauma of the 1930s, namely,
the challenge to their writers’ identity as Germans posed by the
violent assault from their countrymen. The existential threat in
the 1930s for German Jews was to their social status and national
identity, and not so much to their physical existence. From here
the article moves to the experience of Kristallnacht and the
ensuing internment of many German Jewish men in the concentration
camps. Here some outstanding accounts offer real insights into
the behavior of guards and Kapos, but again they also show how
central was the experience of social and national exclusion in
determining what the victims saw, and how they evaluated their
antagonists. As the article moves into the war years, the
question of exclusion becomes less and less central, because it
was on the one hand a foregone conclusion and because on the
other direct threats to life and limb made questions of status
and identity secondary. By now in any case the older generation –
again with the exception of the Theresienstadt chronicles and
6
those few who remained behind on German soil – was either already
in exile or had perished, and so the chronicles and memoirs of
deportation and camp life stem from a younger generation with
little knowledge of pre-Nazi Germany. Finally, the article
briefly explores the complex reopening of a dialogue with Germany
after the war. While initially some German Jews seeking a
connection with postwar German audiences chose to represent the
perpetrators as marginal and not mainstream figures, and thus not
representative of German society, others indicted ever-wider
circles, and Améry’s rewriting of his early postwar essays is a
poignant and powerful example of this.
Perpetrators or fellow travelers?
We should begin by noting the striking feature of German Jewish
diaries and postwar memoirs alluded to above, one that helps to
explain why we have not looked much at victims’ perceptions of
perpetrators, namely, that in many accounts, the perpetrators
barely figure. Even if we interpret the term liberally to include
not only those dishing out physical violence but, say,
practitioners of verbal abuse against Jews, or, purposeful
bureaucrats enforcing anti-Jewish policy, there are months and
indeed years in Viktor Klemperer’s diary, or the equally
voluminous compendia of his compatriot, the Breslau Jew, Willy
Cohn, in which such portraits are limited or absent. In
Klemperer’s diary one has to wait until 1942, and a nasty round
of encounters with the Gestapo, for any kind of sustained account
of ruthless protagonists of Nazi policy.
7
When it comes to German Jews’ ghetto diaries and camp memoirs
written during the war, this absence is often a function of the
increasingly organized character of Nazi persecution – and,
indeed, the use of intermediaries and auxiliaries, which meant
that for large periods of time in the ghettos and even in the
camps there was no direct confrontation with the oppressors.
Intense contact tends to come – in so far as the victims live to
report on it at all – in moments of transition, to and from the
ghetto or camp, far more than in the collective holding areas
themselves. Sophisticated survivor chroniclers, reflecting on
their experience in later years, are at pains to convey this
central element of the way Nazi oppression worked. Thus the young
Austrian teenager in Auschwitz, Ruth Klüger, offering three
vignettes from Auschwitz, allows the guards to appear only
towards the end, conveying how distant they were from much of her
remembered day to day experience (this separation was
particularly marked in the “family camp” where she was quartered
in 1944).16 There was nothing unique to German Jews about this
experience.17 Nor was there in the fact that those who took the
risk of keeping a wartime diary often hesitated to actually
identify their opponents, or did so only in code18 – except that
Jews writing in German had even more reason to fear that a
discovered diary would be understood by the other side. In a
final post-war entry, the Theresienstadt diarist Hugo Heumann
noted helpfully for the reader (he had his son in mind), that
“Much had to remain unsaid” during the war because of his fear of
searches and their consequences.19 Klemperer, with a loyal Aryan
connection to look after his notes, is unusually brave in this
8
respect. And even years after liberation, a German observer, in
this case the non-Jewish Hermann Langbein, wrote that it was not
until seeing a shrunken Joseph Klehr at the Frankfurt Auschwitz
trial that he felt able to see the feared SS as the contemptible
figures that they were and to paint verbal portraits on paper.20
For the period before the war, and certainly before 1938,
however, German Jews were in a distinctive situation. While anti-
Jewish policy and persecution was being ratcheted up with
alacrity, most German Jews were not yet encountering the
systematic atrocities that made “perpetration” the human and
social conundrum it was to become. Uniquely among Jewish victims,
German-Jews began to get to know and form a view of the Nazis at
a time when the anti-Jewish assault operated through laws and
societal-administrative pressures, and was as much about social
and cultural exclusion as physical removal, still less
extermination. Even in the early weeks of considerable street
violence in 1933, insightful Jewish commentators were much more
likely to encounter a complex and wide-ranging societal process
than the agency of a particular set of protagonists. Consider the
entries of the Breslau grammar school teacher, Zionist, and World
War I veteran, Willy Cohn. On 3 March 1933 he learns of a
possible (undefined) threat against his son Wölfl.21 A vague
social network of danger was evident, but he was unsure who the
perpetrators might be. On 8 March, traveling by bus through the
city, Cohn, a convinced socialist, was struck by the number of
Swastikas flying, even in working class districts.22 On 21 March,
again on a bus he was upset by an antisemitic remark, though one
not directed at him,23 and two days later Cohn received „An
9
unpleasant letter from the Tax Office. You can really feel a new
wind blowing. They’re not willing to show Jews any kind of
flexibility“.24 Though Cohn noted on 24 March that all kinds of
things had been going on, with people beaten up in the Party
houses, he went on „much worse than these excesses in my view,“
„are the threats to livelihoods, the bans on ritual slaughter,
and the sackings.“25 Cohn’s world was already being transformed,
but at this stage we meet barely a Brownshirt.26
To a certain extent this paralleled the later situation in the
ghettos: the actual instigators of persecution were well out of
the victims’ sight. But in other respects the German Jewish
experience in the 1930s told a different story to later
experience, one in which “perpetrators” were far less significant
than “policy”. German Jews were far more conscious than their
Eastern European counterparts of a societal-legal machine that
was much larger than the cruelty or agency of any particular set
of players (except, perhaps, Hitler and his immediate circle as
they imagined them). They could see how neighbors or former
colleagues became “transmission belts” of persecution without
necessarily initially having supported it. Sophisticated
observers of the stamp of a Klemperer or a Cohn saw the full
gamut of opportunism, cowardice, adaptability and conviction that
prompted participation or acquiescence in the machinery. On one
day in 1935, Klemperer made notes about the “brave” Fräulein Mey,
who still came to visit them, the “tepid” Frau Kühn, not unkind,
but still believing in the idealism of the regime, and the
horrible Frau Fischer, the “hybrid of sheep and pig”, who had cut
off the “dear, good Kaufmanns”.27
10
German Jews believed, often with good reason, that many who ended
up enforcing policy against them, did so reluctantly. Even in
December 1938, the city librarian, an old Stahlhelm man, was
“distressed beyond words” and unable to hold back his tears when
forced to forbid Professor Klemperer access to the library, a
banishment he tactfully conveyed in a back office.28 With their
old contacts in the Ministries, and their shrewd understanding of
what lay between the lines of official pronouncements and press
articles, Jews in leading positions in the Centralverein or the
Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden were often well informed
even about individual Nazi officials’ positions on specific
policy matters (even if they were sometimes misled by fake
assurances.)29 The German-Jewish understanding and experience of
the 1930s, therefore, was that the Nazis indeed depended on
widespread participation – but not that the Nazis had mobilized an
army of “perpetrators”. Indeed, for a long time, Klemperer was
far more conscious of anxious fellow travelers than of
enthusiasts: “But everyone, literally everyone cringes with
fear.”30
More than anything else what makes the German Jewish accounts so
distinctively valuable is the insight they provide on the
different patterns of participation in German society. This is
true not just of the daily observations they are able to make of
neighbors who crossed the road and averted their gaze or the few
who maintained some kind of contact. Beyond directly recording
what they see, the Cohns, Klemperers, Reichmanns and so on offer
sophisticated assessments of the popular mood, society’s
relationship to the regime, and the mechanisms and degrees by
11
which their neighbors had been prevailed upon to embrace Nazi
ideas. Drawing on the published diaries of non-Jewish Germans,
Peter Fritzsche offers a telling and sensitive portrait of
Germans’ intellectual and moral adaptation to the Nazi era. Among
other new behaviors and values, he writes, for example, that
“Antisemitism was tried on, and it often fitted”.31 German Jews
too help us see individuals trying on new behavior as conditions
allowed or demanded it, and also the sorts of underhand actions
that non-Jewish Germans did not necessarily confide to their own
diaries.
Something rather shattering for the so law-abiding German Jews,
for example, was that while they were being accused of all sorts
of venality and shady-dealing, those pursuing them proved more
and more corrupt. For many German Jews, the willfulness of the
protagonists was indeed first evident in avarice and
profiteering, and it was thus here that the perpetrator as agent
often begins to be visible beyond general societal mechanisms of
acceptance. Just released from Sachsenhausen in December 1938,
Hans Reichmann, for example, found himself like many German Jews
in dispute with his local tax office, which was assessing his
contribution to the post-Kristallnacht “Jewish levy” on the basis
of outdated property lists and property he no longer owned. No
amount of argument was helping his case – but a backhanded
payment of 500 marks did the trick. Policemen, he noted, now
openly demanded money – to desist from chicanery that they were
in any case not required to engage in.32 According to Artur Prinz,
a leading figure in the Reichsvertretung, by 1938 corruption had
become so widespread, “even down to the lowest level, that some
12
officials - in our own case, e.g. one of our district policemen –
would tell emigrants about to break up their household just what
they wished and expected to get ‘for free.’”33 This was a very
different picture to the rule-bound, process-oriented story
emerging in much of post-war non-Jewish historiography. It would
be more than four decades after the war till the non-Jewish
historiography came to recognize the degree of license,
willfulness and profiteering.34
Another sign of individual engagement and taking liberty, which
German Jews were increasingly experiencing, was the verbal abuse
of various kinds, and not just from Gestapo officials or cheeky
Hitler Youth. Consigned to forced labor in 1941, the assimilated
German Jew Elisabeth Freund noted the loathsome sarcasm and abuse
dished out to the hapless labor force from an official in the
labor administration, the oily, Regierungsinspektor Alfred
Eschhaus.35 They would, he sneered, for the first time in their
lives learn what real work was. The most important word they had
to learn was “Labor Sabotage”, and he would be on the lookout for
it. It was well known that all Jews were mortally ill and thus
not suitable for work, and all had a fine medical assistant
(“Krankenbehandler”, as Jewish doctors were now required to be
called) who would attest to their unfitness. But he, Eschhaus,
was now putting an end to all that. „It would give me the
greatest of pleasure to enlarge the club in the Concentration
Camp.“36
A question that remains is whether German Jews’ travelogues from
the lower foothills of persecution offer us much insight into
what would later be the great Himalayas of murder and mayhem.
13
(This question itself is, of course, outside the ken of
contemporary Jewish accounts, accounts whose precision and
authenticity benefit from the very lack of knowledge of what was
to come.) In part it will depend on our own model of the
mechanisms by which men and a few women came to perpetrate
genocide. But if we see participation as an evolutionary process,
and particularly if we believe the response of bystanders and
fellow travelers was an essential part of that evolution, perhaps
as essential as any specific feature of the mentalities,
selection or training of the central protagonists, then we will
profit from spending time with the German Jewish accounts from
the 1930s.
The trauma of exclusion
But how accurate is German Jews’ representation of what was
happening around them? Any group of observers will vary in
frankness, perspicacity, insight and diligence. Few diarists in
any time or place will offer the laconic, sometimes scorching
honesty about self of a Klemperer. Just as their Eastern European
counterparts in the ghettos would soon prove to be, however,
(though informed by different intellectual traditions),37 many
German Jewish diarists were at great pains to be objective
observers, eschewing so far as they were able emotion and bias,
and often preferring recording observations to elaborate
reflection or analysis. At the same time, like everyone else they
also viewed the world through particular spectacles, and it is
often the light reflected back from their own concerns and
imagination that leaves its mark on the page.14
We can see this initially by looking at what is not said in the
diaries. For, while the absence of “perpetrators” in German
Jewish accounts reflects the reality of an institutionalized and
societally transmitted system of persecution in the 1930s, many
observers also chose to ignore or marginalize the very real
presence of radicals and violent activists. The long periods of
silence in German-Jewish diaries where there is no comment on
Nazi behavior are, on closer inspection, not simply a statement
about the possibility of living in Nazi Germany without directly
encountering the “enemy”. A few days after the Night of the Long
Knives on 4 July 1934, for example, Willy Cohn explained that
“Without the brown uniforms the street scene looks quite
different from what we’ve been used to!” 38 Yet on that street
experience he had until then wasted barely a word. In April 1940
after a trip to the tax office, Cohn noted, „These days you are
happy to be treated well by the authorities“.39 Yet with one or
two exceptions, the encounters he had described until then had
been generally civilized. In other words, while the total picture
painted was indeed cognizant of the threats faced by German Jews,
those threatening them are excluded in the detail. Many of Cohn’s
encounters with officials are barely even mentioned; a brief
visit to the Gestapo on 22 July 1939 is described simply as an
afterthought.40 Yet we know that visits to the Gestapo were always
an alarming event for German Jews, and certainly by 1939. In
Klemperer too, until 1942, with one or two exceptions, most of
the encounters with officialdom he describes are courteous or at
least correct.41 Yet in 1941 he cites as a given that among the
15
German Jews „People have no expectation anymore, hardly even hope
of “decent” treatment.”42
In some respects this parallels the anxieties and choices we can
find also in non-German Jewish memoirs, choices that relegated
the perpetrator to the margins of the text. But in this case it
does not seem that the figures lurking between the lines at this
stage embodied mortal terror for the writers. Klemperer, Cohn et
al were for the most part not in fear for their lives before the
war, the “frightful hints and fragmentary stories”43 from
Buchenwald notwithstanding. Rather, even before they were clearly
threatening life and limb, the Nazis embodied a terror for German
Jews that differed from that later faced by their brethren
abroad. The perpetrators’ power lay for a long time less in
their ability to enact violence (though that was always
considerable) than in their real and symbolic ability to exclude
the victims. On a social plane, middle-class German Jews were
threatened with a loss of status and recognition. The
perpetrators – by their actions, by their lower-middle class
social background, by their power to expel – personified the
threat to a social order in which a great many German Jews had
enjoyed good standing, albeit one called into question by the
post-WW1 resurgence of antisemitism.44 On a national plane, by
denying the victims citizenship and by redefining what the nation
stood for, the perpetrators also personified the legal and
symbolic exclusion of German-Jews from the people’s community.
The central question raised by actors and encounters in the 1930s
was thus different from what we conventionally associate with
Nazi perpetrators. Not: how is it possible for a human being to
16
do this? But: what does it mean that I a respectable and
patriotic German (man – since the accounts we are using are
mostly male) am being treated like this, by this person?
We see both elements repeatedly in Willy Cohn’s account: Thus
Cohn’s powerful description on 31 March 1933 of “The most
humiliating event of my life.” He went to the police: 45
to get my i.d. card stamped, which for us Jews is now valid only for inland use.
The official dealing with it was nice and friendly, but we had to line up in rows,
and it was very tiring, even elderly people like Councilor Rosenstein! ... Degraded
beneath all human dignity! But even that has to be borne.
What goes on in one’s mind, after having sacrificed so many years for Germany,
can’t be expressed.
Cohn concluded vehemently “Now one’s only wish is to hope for a
better future for one’s children in Palestine,” an emphatic break
with Germany that is very rapidly contradicted in the words and
deeds of a man who always stayed loyal to his homeland.
Even in Sachsenhausen in 1938, more than the shocking
arbitrariness and unpredictability of the violence, what so hit
the senior Centralverein figure, Hans Reichmann, was the sense of
social reversal and humiliation. On arrival at Sachsenhausen the
SS “make fun of people and laugh obscenely. Sometimes they
deliver a blow. But it is the mockery that cuts deeper.”46 A day
or two later while the new arrivals were being drilled on the
parade ground a Scharführer Kaiser proved to be not as crude as
some of the other guards. He asked the newcomers about their
professions, and without offering the usual crude reactions to
the list of businessmen, musicians, judges, doctors, chemical
17
engineers and teachers before him. „Six years ago Kaiser looked
up to men like this. He seems not to have forgotten that quite so
completely as the others“.47 Vestiges of the older social world
remained. But most of the time they were ground into the dust.
Educated and once highly respected and respectable Jews were
being tormented and humiliated by 18- to 20-year olds. The worthy
Reichsgerichtsrat Cohn was insulted by a lowly guard to amuse
some visiting Gestapo officials. Afterwards the others sought to
console him, “‘Cohn, don’t be upset. That doesn’t even reach up
to the soles of your shoes.’ But Cohn is suffering, he has been
insulted. He finds it harder than we do to get over the encounter
with malice and spite”.48 Again and again Reichmann returns to the
contrast of age and social standing between the perpetrators and
their victims. One day it was Dr Ludwig Oppenheimer’s turn to be
tormented: „The brutal face stares into the clear, intelligent
eyes of this learned man, whose features show a dedication to
improving the mind nurtured over generations (dessen Züge
generationenlange Hingabe an den Geist geformt hat).”49 Indeed,
when Reichsgerichtsrat Cohn talked of the “Menschen-
Vernichtungsanstalt” (“Institute for Human Destruction”) to his
fellow prisoners, it was clearly the destruction of one’s
standing and self-worth and not physical extermination he had in
mind.50 And as is well known, the Austrian Jewish prisoner of
Dachau and Buchenwald, Bruno Bettelheim, was scathing about his
fellow prisoners’ attachment to their titles:51
Those familiar with the mores of this group will appreciate what a blow it was
when raw privates in the SS addressed them not as Herr Rat (or some other titles
of office) but with the degrading “thou”; even worse they were forbidden to
18
address one another with the titles of office that were their greatest pride, and
were forced to use the much too familiar “thou” form when they spoke to each
other.
The perpetrators’ double power of social degradation and national
exclusion helps to explain why Willy Cohn would dwell so lovingly
on the following exchange with the Gestapo from October 1939
while, as noted, remaining quiet until 1940 about more negative
encounters. A Gestapo official came to the house in October 1939,
to ask how preparations for emigration were progressing:52
I dictated everything for the report he has to write! He was a very decent man,
someone with whom you could deal. … In the course of the conversation I said
among other things that if it came to it I would have to beg the German people
to be allowed to die here, where five generations of my family lie, in a country
where my wife’s grandfather fought at Königgrätz and where every generation of
my family served at the battlefront. That certainly left an impression. He was an
old civil servant and not one of the new ones.
Here, not only did Cohn soften the “other side” with his
declaration of national loyalty, but he also was the educated
man, assisting a simple official, out of his depth. It is hard to
imagine a more poignant encapsulation of that desire for social
recognition than this pleasure in dictating the Gestapo’s own
report.53 In similar vein, when the police and an accompanying
civilian turned up at Klemperer’s house after Kristallnacht to
confiscate his saber and other weapons, though the glimpses of
the scene we are allowed are unpleasant enough, the diary skims
lightly over the unpleasant characters, one of whom “could hardly
be calmed down”, even though their threatening demeanor and air
were surely worthy of more reflection. The center of the account 19
is instead the “good natured and courteous” young policeman.
Klemperer, „ had the feeling he himself found the whole thing
embarrassing.“54
As these last two encounters indicate, as time went on and the
threats from the regime intensified, individual encounters with
figures that we would recognize as perpetrators did indeed begin
to take on greater weight in German Jews accounts. After one such
experience in March 1940 Cohn explicitly records a new insight,
after years of seeking to marginalize the “other”, that there was
something here that needed to be recorded for posterity: “ “I
want to record this visit in all its details, perhaps this will
become a historical document.” 55 Characteristically for Cohn,
however, even here the episode which he records is the one where
“The tone was more polite than the first time; perhaps they were
trying to create some terror in the Jewish population.” Almost in
passing we learn that the Jews called to the Gestapo were forced
to stand outside for half an hour in the snow. From seeking to
relegate the “marginalizers” to the margins, German Jews began to
recognize in the individual behavior they confronted a
historically significant problem. And as conditions worsened,
unpleasant encounters in offices, on the street, at the (forced)
workplace, and in camps and ghettos began to take on life-
threatening proportions. In Klemperer’s case, the perpetrators
made their appearance with a vengeance only in 1942, and for a
good year and a half virtually every waking moment was dominated
by thoughts and fear of the Gestapo.56
But while there is much to be gleaned here there remained often a
hidden but sometimes powerful undertow in German Jewish accounts,
20
a struggle to belong and to identify, that affects the way in
which the perpetrators were represented. Above all, even when
they do make it on to the page, the perpetrators are often subtly
or not so subtly marginalized from mainstream society. This is
most evident in the diary of the quirky, assimilated Breslauer
Jew, Walter Tausk (Tausk was Jewish by background but a Buddhist
by persuasion). When the Nazis appear, then as throwbacks to the
middle ages or as cloddish numbskulls, (Cohn writes of the “Die
Nazioten”)57 surrounded by a population that disapproves of what
they are doing.58 The SA und SS „ were worse than the hordes in
the 30 years War. The people are abused with cattle chains,
cavalry whips, steel rods, truncheons, revolvers, shoulder
straps, belts, and other ‚weapons of the spirit.’“59 The Middle
Ages is a simile to which all the German Jews resort.60 Tausk’s
contrast between the Nazi brutes and the sensible rest also
remind us that in the 1930s the threat, which the perpetrators
embodied, was heavily dependent on what one made of the
bystanders. The ability to exclude was the function of coercive
force, but its reach and symbolic power was heavily influenced by
whether the rest of society bought into it. This is why for a
Klemperer the action of the threatening individual is so often
contextualized or accompanied by reflections on the vox pop. In
July 1933, Walter Tausk was certain that officials were keen to
leave the civil service because in Silesia, this Hochburg of the
party, everything was being “overdone without understanding”.61
There is little evidence that this was so. Cohn claimed around
the time of the April boycott “ “One has the impression that
decent Christian circles are increasingly turning away from these
21
things.”62 In the Berlin of June 1938, amidst a storm of
officially backed agitation against Jewish businesses, officials
of the Centralverein still believed that older police officials
were most unhappy with the daily street violence to which they
were obliged to turn a blind eye.63 This may be true, but the
parallel evidence of police corruption at the same time make us
unsure how far it was wishful thinking. Willy Cohn’s comment on
13 November 1938, as the accounts of what had happened on
Kristallnacht flowed in, that in contrast to the Party the
Beamtenschaft (i.e in this case probably the police rather than
civil servants generally) “is said everywhere to have behaved
decently” was certainly fanciful, though Cohn may have been
accurately reporting what other Jews were saying.64 Thus,
conscious of the instinct to find reassurance wherever possible,
we distrust the number of times that observers in the early years
claim that the mainstream population did not go along with the
actions of the few, or that the policemen did not really believe
in what they are doing. On the other hand, direct experiences
such as Klemperer’s in 1942, seem more reliable:65
On Monday evening [July 29 1942-MR] there was the monthly police inspection. I
opened the front door, the big uniformed man remained standing in the hallway.
“Your name, Sir?” (Sir – where the Gestapo shouts, spits, beat) “Who else lives in
this house please? Are they all present? Yes? Thank you, good evening!” The
police are always courteous, always emphatically different from the Gestapo –
but we have never yet had such an almost disloyal gentlemanly inspection. I
could almost believe that the man knows of the frightfulness of the present terror
and consciously opposes it.
22
In German Jewish accounts radical or particularly aggressive
behavior was often described in terms of an individual character
attribute – it is treated as “gemein” (mean) or, in Elisabeth
Freund’s words, responding to the loathsome Alfred Eschhaus
speech mentioned above, “feige” (cowardly), the latter term used
because Eschhaus was addressing a group of women, and thus
unchivalrous and unmanly.66 Even more common is the emphasis on
the Nazis as part of some rough (“rauh”) underclass, social dregs
that Hitler had allowed into positions of influence. Thus Tausk,
observing the marching participants following the seizure of
power in early in February 1933, noted “but in contrast to the
conduct and faces of the Stahlhelm, I have to say in all
objectivity that what I saw in the ranks of the SA and SS was
just utter ‘rubble’. You could not imagine coarser faces. The
expression of the worst corruption and depravity.”67 Cohn writes
dismissively of the “braunen Halunken” („brown gangsters“)68 and
notes a few pages later that „You see the most unbelievable
figures as SA men going around with pistols, men who would never
have become soldiers under normal conditions.“69 When Breslau’s
police president Heines was murdered in the Night of the Long
Knives, Willy Cohn observed „The typical fate of a foot soldier
for sale (Landknecht); those who climb highest fall furthest.“70
Such observations about social background shaded into ones that
merely emphasized crudity, coarseness and inherent brutality.71
As the SA lost significance, the plebian note faded somewhat, but
German Jews’ sense of social reversal continued to be reflected
in an emphasis on the perpetrators as representatives of a lower
class, as the Reichmann passage above indicates.
23
Klemperer was too good an observer to go along with any myth for
too long, but his account of the perpetrators too is full of
efforts to dull the blow by blaming coarse lowly elements. On
June 19 1942 after a more tolerable Gestapo visit, Klemperer
allowed himself to observe to Frau Kreidl, who had recently been
in Gestapo custody that “only the lower ranks are really bad,
when an officer is present, one has a degree of protection. She
responded very emphatically: ‘No!’72“A little later he was forced
to concede that Clemens and Weser, the hated “Boxer” and
“Spitter” of the Dresden Gestapo, were in fact both not so low-
ranking officials after all. The latter was an Inspector, the
other had a captain’s rank. In any case, by then German Jews’
sense of social norms had largely disintegrated.73 Even before
1933 Klemperer had been upset about the antisemitism of his
colleagues74 but increasingly it was the ordinary men on the
street – or, during the war, the workers in the factory where he
performed forced labor - from whom he derived solace. There he
often found the most humanity and least susceptibility to the
regime’s ideology.75 And Reichmann found solace in the humanity of
the ordinary criminals and “asocials” in Sachsenhausen.76 True,
some vestige of the old social order survived in the “keep your
chin up professor!” from a worker who recognized with sympathy
the dignified bourgeois now on his uppers. But in reality
bourgeois Jews were ceasing to worry about their place in a
social world they no longer believed in and focusing on bare
survival or escape.
A painful question is how far German Jewish accounts were shaped
by some kind of hidden identification with the perpetrators, or
24
some vague sense that the philosophical or intellectual basis on
which they excluded Jews was in someway justified. We know that
in 1933, many Jews hoped that they might yet find a place in the
new nationalist movement that the Nazis had unleashed, even if
these hopes were soon dashed and were dropped from memory. The
historian Shulamit Volkov has written eloquently about the
discovery of her father’s letters from Germany in 1933, in which
the later jurist, Zionist, and cofounder of the Israeli judicial
system agonized about whether he might still have a place in Nazi
Germany.77 Nationalist movements within Judaism in particular made
repeated efforts at some kind of recognition by the Nazis, and
even the Reich League of Jewish combat veterans was briefly in
danger of moving in a similar kind of direction.78 The German-
Jewish community as a whole had long held an ambivalent
relationship to the charges of the antisemites, rejecting them on
many levels, and yet seeking to create a new more muscular
Judaism, shifting Jews’ occupation profile to reflect that of
German society as a whole, with more Jews engaged in physical
labor, and so forth. Simple identification with the Nazis is hard
to find in accounts from the 1930s, though we can read Jewish
youngsters later acknowledging that they had wanted to be part of
the Hitler Youth.79 The celebrated Jewish theater and film
director, Imo Moszkowicz, later recalled as an adolescent being
fascinated by the appearance of the SS in uniform, and implying a
clear anxiety that the claims of racial superiority were true.80
Sometimes the identification with the Nazis was playful, to
belittle or defuse their abuse. Klemperer noted in October 1943
that the Jewish forced-laborers in his work-group had taken to
25
mock- abusing each other, Nazi style, yelling at the “old Jew”,
the “Jew Bergmann,” the “washing-Jew” etc.81
We can also find a tendency on the part of various Jewish groups
to blame the victims for the persecution. This was true of Tausk
and Cohn’s fulminations about the Ostjuden, which could have come
from the pen of a National Socialist,82 or of Klemperer’s critique
of the Zionists for drawing the ire of German nationalists,
though Klemperer was also scathing about Jewish contemporaries
who when they saw fellow Jews arbitrarily convicted of some
trumped-up offence blamed the victims.83 Somewhat related is
Klemperer’s complaint in 1933 that many Jews of his acquaintance
were accepting their subordinate status within the “ghetto”, and
his wife Eva’s comment that the Jews’ approach to the Nazis was
making her antisemitic.84 There is also the frequent observation
by German Jews that even in extremis (Reichmann noted this even
in Sachsenhausen) they wanted to do everything by the book and
thus not have anything to reproach themselves with. Perhaps this
helps to explain why official corruption weighed so heavily for
Germans Jews – here was “proof” that the official condemnations
of the Jews were hypocritical and unjust.
Camps and Kristallnacht
We have focused thus far on German Jewish experiences and
observations while still within Germany, and for the most part on
the period up to 1938. The observations from this period, of
course, are tame compared with the kinds of stories the Polish
Jew Eva Hoffman, born after the war, recalls her parents and
26
their survivor friends narrating in whispers in post-war Poland.
Those stories were full of “sadism and humiliation,”
“extravaganzas of cruelty,” and “the bouts of brutal mockery and
loutish laughter that accompanied the free-for-all massacres in
eastern European villages”.85 Shocking, miserable and utterly
life-changing though Nazi policy was for Germany Jews from the
get-go, much of what we have heard so far has lacked the
essential horror that would soon make the Nazi perpetrator a
puzzle for mankind. Elisabeth Freund’s comments about Eschhaus’
“cowardice” and unmanliness indicated that as late as 1940 German
Jewish expectations that women and children would be treated in a
civilized manner had not been entirely dispelled.
For much of the German-Jewish population, it was the events of 9-
11 November 1938 that first revealed their neighbors’ capacity
for orgiastic violence (though Christian Faludi’s recent study,
as indeed the diary of Hans Reichmann remind us of the loss of
restraint already evident in the assaults of June 1938).86 As Alan
Steinweis has pointed out recently, German Jews witnessed and
recorded much broader participation in the November pogroms than
the post-war literature would later acknowledge (though not more
than was evident in early postwar German trials). The victims
knew, for example, that marauding gangs were made up not just of
SS and SA but also the Hitler Youth and sometimes, indeed, direct
neighbors. 87 Klemperer made this point explicitly, after hearing
how the mob in Ulm had pursued the rabbi and set his beard on
fire, “by the mob, that is by the people, and not just by SA
carrying out orders!”88 But Kristallnacht’s relationship to what
follows is a complex one. It was the last major eruption of
27
violence on the streets in Nazi Germany, and many of the key
instigators and executors of later violence were not directly
involved. Moreover, even here the number of deaths remained in
the low hundreds all across Germany, a sign that restraints
continued to apply. Kristallnacht did not prepare German Jews for
what awaited them after 1941, not least the uninhibited violence
against women and children.89
For German Jews interned in concentration camps in the 1930s,
including the huge number interned for weeks after Kristallnacht,
there was ample opportunity for more sustained reflection on the
perpetrator’s scope for individual arbitrariness. Jewish and non-
Jewish inmates in Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen were
witness to the particular, extreme violence meted out without
cause to Jewish inmates. Here for the first time in sustained
fashion German and Austrian Jews experienced the sustained threat
to their bodies and lives that would soon become the dominant
element of Jewish experience under Nazi rule, and a number of
excellent accounts of this experience exist.90 These accounts can
still be read with profit, and particularly Paul Neurath and Hans
Reichmann offer insightful observations of perpetrator behavior.
The Austrian Paul Neurath, later a celebrated sociologist,
observed in his study, for example, a distinction between the
behavior of guards with Jews when no other Germans were present,
and the much more brutal actions when they had a public role to
perform in front of others.91 There was thus an observable
difference between the “public” persona, and the individual as
actor. The CV’s distinguished legal counsel, Hans Reichmann, is a
wonderful observer of people and processes. „For some comrades I
28
was being too objective“ he noted, „because I keep trying to
understand the motives (die letzten Beweggründe) of even our
mortal enemy.“92 His memoir, completed just a few months after his
release, shows indeed that he speculated continually about the
motives for his tormentors’ behavior. In the notorious reception
in the barracks, he observed the 22-year-old SS Scharführer
screaming as if he were drunk, and attributed his drive to
inflict blows to an almost sexual high, „his eyes are bloodshot,
his face flushed as in a fever, his lips drooling.“93 At other
times he recognized the tone of antisemitic agitation passed down
through the generations, a tone he had heard at school and at
university. But he felt there was something more here, and he
speculated about the criminal selection that had taken place,
only to note later that he had not realized at the time that he
was being unfair to ordinary criminals with the comparison. He
also acknowledged the training and indoctrination that the SS had
given these young men, fresh out of school. On another occasion,
after receiving a random kick that left a painful reminder for
ten days, he recognized that despite the powerful impact on him
as victim, the action was almost motiveless. Why had the man
kicked him? „I don’t know and he doesn’t know either.“94 And he
records the strange phenomenon that, at the height of the bitter
cold spell, the gap between guards and prisoners seemed to
shrink:95
During this time something odd happened. For the first time we talk to the
guards. They have high boots, sturdy coats, their heads protected by wooly hats
and mufflers. But they too are freezing and begrudgingly perform their duties.
They are no longer complaining or grouching [at us – MR], they stand with us
29
around the fire and warm themselves. In the roll call break, they allow a
Bavarian cabaret artist to sing his repertoire, not ‘Sauerland’, but ‘The
Bayadere’,96 followed by ‘Morning has Broken’. Short snaps of conversation
gleaned from exchanges with the guards are passed from one person to
another. ‘Company X has had it up to here’. ‘As far as we are concerned, you can
do what you want.’
Like Neurath, therefore, Reichman too observed chinks of light
between the guards and their roles, even if he was also so often
struck by their roughness and arbitrary violence.
Such insights were the preserve of the prisoner – but were they
preserve of the Jewish prisoner? After all, some of the most
penetrating accounts of the concentration camp system appeared
very soon after the war from non-Jewish prisoners such as Eugen
Kogon, and David Rousset, who provided systematic descriptions of
what Rousset dubbed the “concentrationary universe”.97 The speed
with which Kogon and others established a broad public knowledge
of the concentration camps after the war is probably one reason
why yet another systematic account like Neurath’s failed to
attract publishers’ interest.98 It is true that the political
prisoners’ experience was not quite the same as the Jewish
prisoners’, and the perpetrators’ behavior towards these groups
not quite the same either. Particularly those politicals who
were able to take advantage of the network of political
opposition within the camps were not quite so powerless or
exposed to constant abuse as the Jews, and many performed
important functions within the camps.99 This gave them some
limited leverage with the guards, and certainly no Jewish
prisoner could recall an encounter with an SS guard in the way
30
that Jorge Semprún does (even allowing for the latter’s literary
license). Semprún illegally wanders through the woods next to the
camp and is found by a guard, but though the latter draws his
pistol, Semprún is not alarmed: “I look at the SS officer. I want
to laugh. I want to call over to him: ‘Drop your gun, old pal!
You’re too lightweight for the part!’”100 The encounter with the
perpetrators could thus be very different, and to that extent
there was a distinctive Jewish perspective. Yet some Jewish
political prisoners like Neurath, who arrived with a group of
Austrian “Prominenten,” had an experience more akin to the
politicals than to the mass of hapless Jews who were dumped in
the camps after Kristallnacht.101 In the end, the decisive
difference other than the fact that the Jews were more
vulnerable, is the one we have already identified: for the
Communists, the guards in the concentration camps were the “storm
troops” of the Nazis’ war against their ideas. For Jews in the
German concentration camps, the perpetrators symbolized their
exclusion from German society and their ejection from Germany.
Looking at the concentration camps memoirs also raises the
question of the German-Jewish perspective in a different way.
Unlike the daily diaries of social interaction on German streets,
camp memoirs were for obvious reasons mostly written up
afterwards. For the Jewish inmates that meant in most cases
written up abroad, since release from the camps usually came if
the prisoner could prove that emigration was in the offing.
Reichmann’s manuscript is the most immediate – penned in 1939 as
soon as he reached Britain. Because it then lay in a drawer and
was later given to a (German) archive, unmodified for
31
publication, it was never redrafted for a foreign audience. But
Neurath’s account, although also drafted within a very few years
of the experience of incarceration, was already being written in
a different intellectual universe; an odd hybrid between the
personal and the systematic, it was submitted as a sociology
dissertation at Columbia University, even if like Reichmann’s
manuscript, in the end it appeared in full only after the
author’s death. Bruno Bettelheim like Neurath also put pen to
paper about his experiences in Dachau and Buchenwald as early as
1943, but in his case was from the beginning concerned to produce
an account that would serve his thinking and career as a
psychologist. Key scenes, most notably Bettelheim’s central
account of how he mobilized an intact sense of self–worth to
persuade an SS guard to admit him to the infirmary, are probably
invented, and were explicitly designed to prove the utility of a
particular approach to psychology.102 Thus both wrote to fulfill
the demands of professional qualifications and US and global
audiences. Although these authors were indeed German (or
Austrian) Jews, and their Jewishness had not been irrelevant for
their incarceration, what is missing is that sense of a
particular relationship between German-Jews and perpetrators that
is still present in Reichmann’s account. That is why it is
Reichmann who dwells most extensively and eloquently on the
experience of exclusion, and on the questions about German
society raised by the perpetrators. Perhaps the distinction we
need to draw is between insight and meaning; here were former
German and Austrian Jews with insights about the perpetrators,
but the meanings Bettelheim and Neurath were ascribing to their
32
behavior no longer feel located within the German Jewish
experience.
Experiencing the perpetrator in the era of
mass-murder
Once they were deported, German-Jews’ experience and reflections
increasingly resembled those of other European Jews. German Jews
starved in ghettos, and were selected on arrival in camps to die
quickly or to work and die a little more slowly. The many
accounts from German-Jewish deportees to Riga, to take one
example, offer much the same dramatic picture of individual
brutality, capricious cruelty, and so forth as Eastern European
sources.103 Probably the only major distinctive experiential
context for some German Jews (alongside their Czech and Austrian
counterparts) were the shorter or longer sojourns in
Theresienstadt. Jews starved and labored hard here too – but even
more than in other ghettos they were uniquely cut off from
witnessing or hearing about the perpetrators. In that context, it
was possible for certain mental habits of careful reflection
(though now removed from the opportunity to observe non-Jewish
neighbors), but also of wishful thinking to continue.104
German Jews continued to be insightful observers of their
tormentors and continue to exhibit a strong awareness of human
variation. Particularly in those contexts where there was some
kind of sustained encounter with German overseers, and that meant
above all in situations in which Jews were set to work under
supervision, victims often registered significant differences
33
among the work details, guards and blocks, or between one camp
leader and his replacement. If we again take the example of the
German deportees to Riga, we find that while treatment at one
work site might be murderous, another could be relatively
survivable.105 Indeed, different victims might have very different
experiences at the hands of one and the same Nazi figure. While
most of the Riga survivors had a very good word to say about the
Wehrmacht’s Feldbekleidungsamt and Inspektor Hans Boos, as
ensuring that his workers obtained better clothing and decent
shoes,106 one survivor, Hannelore Temel, saw him as the agent of
her father’s death.107 But, there was nothing particularly German-
Jewish about this. Christopher Browning has shown for the labor
camp of Starachowice, that those workers who survived the
learning curve were soon aware who were sadists, who were
corruptible and might turn a blind eye, and what small minority
of the personnel might even be sympathetic.108 The dominant
characteristics of the victim perspective – the witnessing of
extraordinary cruelty and engagement, but also of significant
human variation – apply whether the Jewish observers came from
Germany or elsewhere.
To be sure, German Jews were particularly good observers of
social detail and distinction. Diaries and memoirs capture the
original flavor of German invective. In his early post-war
account, Josef Katz recalled a house search in his home town of
Lübeck. A Gestapo official appeared at the house without uniform
and Katz’s sister was bold enough to ask him if he had an
Ausweis. “Shut up”, he says, “or I’ll smash your face in.”109 This
exchange signaled already that Jews had ceased to enjoy the
34
normal decencies, at least from the Gestapo, and anticipated the
verbal assault Katz experienced once his deportation transport
arrived in Riga. The SS official in charge harangued the
transport leader, Oberrabbiner Carlebach, and exhorted him
“‘There. And now let your crowd line up, Mr Chief Rabbi, but
quick. I want to see some action here’” and a little later
followed up with “‘Get going, you bastards, or I’ll send you
flying.’”110 (Of course, the dialog was probably in fact partly
invented when Katz wrote the account, but we trust his ability to
capture original tone.)
Particularly in contemporary or early postwar accounts, German
Jews were good too at noting the precise rank of their
interlocutors, (something that in later memoirs was often lost,
though, and replaced by a tendency to identify any kind of
remembered uniformed presence as SS).111 Indeed, Temel’s account
of her father’s experience in Riga hinged on the dire
consequences of having failed to acknowledge the new rank of a
German official.112 Educated German Jews captured the lower-middle
class social milieu and style of their German masters. Jean
Améry, Viktor Klemperer, but also educated foreign Jews who knew
Germany well provided telling vignettes not only of the brutal SS
figures, but also of the foremen and Meister who directed them at
work. Thus the German born but Dutch educated Renate Laqueur
noted in her Belsen diary that „Our supervisors at work form a
rare species of the German race. Bawlers, rowdies, antisemites,
now erupting in ugly outbreaks of rage, now turning sentimental
and friendly.“113 She was struck that one of her foremen was able
to describe her very well to a colleague. „But they never say
35
anything without some underhand motive. They never stop thinking
about food, women, and explicit jokes.“114
Against the background of such observations, German Jews were
able to note certain rules of behavior and speculate about the
particular motives of individual protagonists. Josef Katz
observed the pleasure in authority of lower-middle class figures
suddenly endowed with great power.115 Lucille Eichengreen
remembered the compensatory brutality of a guard who had lost his
leg in the First World War116 and so on. Such insights into role
playing and power trips were, however, again no preserve of
German Jews. Avraham Tory, the thoughtful and well-informed
chronicler of the Kovno ghetto, described with great precision
the melodrama of which he was an unwilling part: 117
It was quite theatrical but this is how the German rulers usually present
themselves. The Germans speak with us as humans quite often, but when they
suddenly realize that the person they are talking to is simply a Jew, they raise
their voices.
The Yugoslav Hanna Lévy-Hass incarcerated in Bergen-Belsen
observed a female guard” working herself up into a theatrical
rage. Known as the “Gray Mouse”, this young woman: 118
Makes excessive, aggressive gestures, swings her whole body around, and lets
out cries of horror, theatrically calculated, on seeing a poorly washed bowl or a
poorly made bed. She excels in slapping you in the face at full force, sudden,
impetuous, rapid slaps, without ever removing her glove.
In early years, it is true, German Jewish observers were less
likely to demonize the perpetrators than their Eastern European
counterparts. In the latter’s accounts, the most common epithets
36
for the perpetrators are, indeed, “devils” or, even more
commonly, “beasts.” “My most Sacred, beloved, worn-out, blessed,
cherished Mother,” an anguished Dawid Sierakowiak, trapped in the
Łódź ghetto, scorched in the pages of his diary in September
1942, “has fallen victim to the bloodthirsty German Nazi
beast!!!”119 The “beasts” who carried out strip searches of the
women in Mary Berg’s house committee “did not leave until 2 a.m.,
carrying a scanty loot of a few watches.”120 “Outside, at work,
the men are subject to bestial torments,” noted Lévy-Hass in
Bergen-Belsen diary, “The German beasts keep to their preferred
method: terrible beatings and coarse, hysterical invective. ”121
“‘You should have seen their faces,’” Eva Hoffman’s mother said
to her young daughter sometime in the early 1950s. “‘They were
not really human.’”122
German Jews were often initially reluctant to embrace such
vocabulary, in part no doubt because the behavior that confronted
them was not at first so bestial, also because it felt
unbecoming, and because it was reassuring to hold on to a belief
in the humanity of one’s antagonists. Hans Reichmann recalled a
conversation in Berlin in summer 1938, when he had been seeking
to provide assistance to Arnold Katz, whose son, the lawyer, Paul
Katz, had been interned in Buchenwald. Reichmann, though not yet
himself having been through the inferno of Sachsenhausen, already
had a keen understanding of what was happening in the camps and
the danger faced by the younger Katz:123
I get him to focus, and to understand that every sacrifice must be made to
snatch his son from the claws of the ‘beasts’.
‘Are they really beasts?’ he asks in shock.37
I answer: ‘Yes.’ I can go this far without sacrificing too much responsibility and
compromising my attempt to spare him.
Hans Reichmann was unusual for the time in his willingness to
deploy the vocabulary of beasts, devils, “Wölfe, braune Wölfe” 124
“Höllenhünde”125 and so forth as a powerful rhetorical device,
while at the same time not losing his ability to speculate about
the human realities behind by the inhumanity before him.
The more the German Jews were witness to murderous violence
against themselves, the more inexplicable they found the
perpetrators, and the more likely they too were to resort to such
epithets. We can observe this transition in the diary of Renate
Laqueur, the child of German-Jewish emigrées who had grown up in
Holland. She was interned initially in Belsen in the relatively
“privileged” conditions of the “star camp”. Early diary entries
from Belsen in March 1944 indicate that they were not beaten,
though they were soon well aware that others were not being
treated with the same restraint, as the camp began to evolve and
expand into a concentration camp. 126 In this early period, Laqueur
offered contextual explanation for the guards’ behavior. She
abjured the idea of postwar revenge. The guards should not be put
behind barbed wire. Instead “Break up the camps and teach the
people to live, instead of to order, to kick and to shoot.”127
“Ordering people about” [Kommandieren] she noted wryly, while
observing the Dutch elder of her barracks “is an infectious
disease.”128 A day or two later, she watched an SS man with his
Alsatian dog walking between the watch-towers: “What must such a
man be thinking. Does he find it pleasant to stand guard over us?
Does he know that we want to go home, and does he find it ‘good’
38
that we are held here against our will?”129 Her reflections go on
to reveal not only the space for empathy left when one was
treated half-way as a human being, but also the way her knowledge
of German society facilitated telling snapshots of the kinds of
characters she was dealing with at work. But as the treatment in
Belsen worsened, many of Laqueur’s earlier imaginative flights
disappeared. She voiced hatred, and called the SS devils.130 Even
Klemperer, so measured and precise in his witnessing, after
confronted by the ghastly brutality of the worst of the Dresden
Gestapo, described Inspector Weser as “the animal, who also
struck us and spat on us”, and wondered “is he only mentally ill,
or is he a criminal.”131
Jews, both German and non-German, were unhappily granted an
insight long withheld from the historian, namely, the degree of
individual agency that oiled and drove the machinery of
persecution. But in the characterization of the perpetrators as
beasts, was there not also an equal measure of blindness? Did
such language not, in fact, as often as not falsely elevate the
monstrosity of the protagonist before one’s nose and lose sight
of the system that had impelled or encouraged him or her to act?
Writing is of course never just about describing the world or
conveying knowledge. Even when they are not writing under such
duress, people write for many reasons, and to achieve multiple
ends. We should not take these texts simply as the uncomplicated
articulation of an intellectual judgment or understanding. True,
the language of beasts and devils often did denote an
understanding, or more precisely, it bespoke a failure to discern
anything recognizably human in the perpetrators. But this
39
language was also performative. On the one hand, it took
possession of the Nazis’ own abuse. Sometimes such ownership was
claimed in order to defuse it. At other times, the spotlight was
turned on the inventors of this language themselves. Renata
Laqueur wrote in her Belsen diary about “our Germans, this
inferior race”.132 Josef Katz, another German Jewish observer with
a precise capture of language, relished the opportunity to
reverse the tables. After liberation at Rieben, a murderous
hunger-camp and sub-camp of Stutthof, Katz was in the barracks
when a German sergeant and some German soldiers were brought into
the room by Russian guards:
(‘Comerades,’ the German sergeant-major says to us, ‘we have orders from our
captain to see that you are looked after properly.’)
Katz, livid, exploded: 133
Only yesterday we were sub-human and were being staved and exterminated.
Today he is concerned about our welfare. All the pent-up fury, the whole
desperation of the past years wells up in me.
‘You goddamn filthy bastard!’ I shout at him. ‘will you get out of here?’
‘But, comrade,’ the sergeant-major interrupts me, ‘it wasn’t out fault.’
Now all the vocabulary I learned from the SS rains down on him. The situation is
now reversed. For the first time I realize that I can scream at them and vent my
wrath on these beasts, something I have yearned to do for years.)
(Interestingly, however, Katz withholds this “vocabulary” from
his readers.) To a certain extent, such verbal role-reversals
were a particular privilege for the German(-speaking) Jew, whose
mastery of the language was a given, and from whom the insults
could thus proceed with telling mimicry and power. For all Jews, 40
however, the perpetrators represented a threat to their life and
well-being, and imposed conditions on them that called into
question their own humanity. Calling the perpetrators beasts
asserted one’s own humanity and pushed the others out of the
circle of the human. It was the equivalent step in relation to
humanity to the kinds of social marginalizing of the perpetrators
within German society that we find in the earlier German Jewish
accounts.
Inhumanity and “Germanity”
For most non-German Jews, the perpetrators’ inhumanity was
indelibly linked with their German-ness. The Polish Jew and later
renowned literary professor and writer, Michał Głowiński,
remembered that around 1949 or so as a 15-16 year old he
discovered an old issue of a Polish weekly. The first page
offered the sentence “Germans are people”: 134
I was extremely stunned and indignant, because it questioned my deepest
convictions; I absorbed it as an internal contradiction, as if someone had said,
‘beasts are people.’ Some years after the Holocaust, I couldn’t at all conceive of
such a sentence coming from someone’s pen. If I had read that Germans were
criminals, villains, butchers, barbarians or murderers, I wouldn’t have stopped to
reflect at all; I would have regarded such a sentence as expressing an irrefutable
truth and I wouldn’t have remembered it.
After all, Głowiński noted, as a child living in the Warsaw
ghetto and then on the Aryan side it had been a crucial lesson
that any encounter with a German would mean inescapable death. At
the very beginning of the occupation he had been conscious of
41
some individual personalities – the gendarme, Rothimmel, for
example, who came to requisition his grandparents’ furniture in
their small town, shouted a lot, and gave the young boy his first
real taste of Nazi lawlessness:135
The gendarme was a well-known figure in our small town. Later it would be
difficult to speak of concrete individuals, and not only because their names
remained unknown. The point was rather that the Germans were a species, and
distinguishing individual specimens would be pointless, given that all of them –
whether in the ghetto or on the Aryan side – were doing the same things to Jews
and existed for this one purpose. I hear that in recent years a distinct tendency
has emerged to call those who conceived of and carried out the Final Solution
not Germans but Nazis… At the time, though, people spoke only of Germans.
“Even today” Głowiński concluded, “I wouldn’t know how to use a
different word in this context,” even though he was aware that
“not every German was a hired assassin”.
For German Jews, however, there could no such easy equation. How
did German Jews evaluate the Germanness of the perpetrators? In
what sense, as Germans, did they themselves feel implicated by
the perpetrators’ behavior?
As we have seen, in the 1930s German Jewish observers were very
aware of the societal dimensions of participation – and always
seeking to contextualize their negative encounters in evaluations
of the population’s relationship to the regime. In that sense the
evaluation of perpetration from the very beginning had wider
implications. Almost as soon as the Nazis came to power we find
references in German Jewish diaries to a sense of shame on
42
Germany’s behalf. In an oft-quoted passage, Viktor Klemperer saw
in the events around him in March 1933:136
Fantastic Middle Ages: ‘We’ – threatened Jewry. In fact I feel more shame than
fear, shame for Germany. I have truly always felt a German. I have always
imagined: the twentieth century and Mitteleuropa was different from the
fourteenth century and Romania. Mistake.
There are also hints in the diaries that the Germans have some
dark capacity for evil. The so patriotic Willy Cohn surprises us
when he writes a few weeks after the Nazi seizure of power:137
Apparently a letter reached the CV [from] Nazis, [saying] they will beat all the
Jews to death if anything happens to one of the Nazi leaders. One should not let
oneself get upset by such things, even though of course you know the German is
capable of anything. Disgusting.
And in a passage from the end of July 1933 that presciently ends
with the slaughter-house, Walter Tausk, otherwise so often at
pains to make distinctions between the crude Nazis and the
sensible rest, writes that if you look at the Germans through the
eyes of a foreigner, you can only conclude:138
This people is intelligent, but not clever. It’s as far from real wisdom
(Lebenserfahrung), adaptability (Lebensbeweglichkeit), savoir-vivre, and a real
sense of pride (Selbstbewußtsein) as a small child is from a clean shirt. Without
creating some kind of bogeyman (Popanz) you can’t do anything with the
German people, but then you can get away with the most ludicrous theater
(unmöglichste Klamauk): the people will follow with true fanaticism, whether it
ends in the ‚children’s crusade’ or the slaughter houses of Chicago...
But if there was already a sense that the German was “capable of
anything”, at the same time there was a strong desire to rescue a43
sense of true German values and German attitudes from the current
behavior, and, as we have seen, to draw strong dividing lines
between the mean, crude, and cowardly Nazis and the rest of the
population. It is true that that exact dividing line was
continually being threatened. In Sachsenhausen, despite
speculating long and hard about the negative selection and
training of the concentration camp guards, Reichmann hears
civilians on the building site exchanging comments about the
harried prisoners, “‘What a lazy rabble! One should always have a
notebook at hand to note down the numbers of the scoundrels
(Lumpen) there and then. Report them – and that’s that!’”139
Reichmann goes on to wonder if the German people as a whole had
become so brutalized or if it was just the atmosphere of the camp
itself that was contagious. The analogy to this difficulty in
drawing the line is the continued oscillation by a Cohn or
Klemperer about whether they themselves feel German. In March
1933 Klemperer notes emphatically “I for my part will never again
have faith in Germany”140, but in July 1935 he still contradicts
his friend Kaufmann, who talks of Klemperer’s assimilated
character as though it were in the past tense “‘Were? I am German
forever, German >nationalist<’”141
Once German Jews were deported or emigrated, of course, the sense
of belonging to Germany was further challenged. But where they
found themselves thrust alongside Czech or Eastern European Jews,
as in the temporary ghettos in Lublin area or in Theresienstadt,
German Jews found themselves in a particularly perplexing
situation, rejected from their homeland, yet so conscious of
their own Germanness and often of a particular set of virtues
44
that they saw as German. In a remarkable, uncensored letter,
smuggled out of Izbica, near Lublin, near the end of August 1942,
a young idealistic German Jew, Ernst Krombach, offered his fiancé
Marianne Strauss, still in Germany, a comprehensive account of
his situation, after four months in the General Government:142
So now there were three different categories here: Germans, Poles, Czechs. The
German character you know: military discipline, reliable, hard-working. The Pole
is the opposite: ill-disciplined, lazy, dirty, uncomradely, very good at business.
One should not judge them too harshly. External conditions and pressures have
made the Pole what he is. […] The Czechs too are hard to deal with. Why? They
see themselves as Czechs who were driven out by the Germans (understandably
since they were not affected until war started) and regard us as Germans. Unlike
us, they were not thrown back onto their Jewishness and led back to it. […]The
Judenrat thus consists of Czechs whose level of correctness and humanity is
certainly open to criticism. Alongside it there is a Polish Judenrat, whose leader
has managed to get most of the power into his hands (i.e. over both councils).
All in all the most difficult position for us Germans who came with so many
illusions about comradeship and co-operation.
As Ernst Krombach noted, one of German Jews’ most painful
experiences was that they were somehow viewed by their non-German
Jewish brethren as culpable for the disaster, and tarred with the
same brush as the perpetrators. Many chroniclers note this
experience, for example in Theresienstadt, where German and Czech
Jews lived side by side.143 Probably no one captured it more
poignantly than Josef Katz, confronted with an attractive young
Jewish woman in Libau, Latvia, who blamed the German Jews for the
disaster. Later he meets the girl again:144
45
‘I can understand your hatred of the Germans,’ I say, ‘I also hate them with all
my heart, but you can’t include in your hatred people who share your
misfortune.’
They work together and she responds:145
‘It is not your fault that you were born in Germany’, she says. ‘You can’t help
that. But I suspect in you the character traits of our murderers and oppressors. It
cannot possibly be otherwise, since you went to school with them, visited the
same movie houses and theaters. You look like a Yecke, so that makes me feel I
am talking to a German. That you happen to be Jewish is purely a matter of
education. And furthermore’, she adds sarcastically, ‘it was probably only Hitler
who turned you into a Jew. If he hadn’t told you that you were Jews, all of you
would have been assimilated by the German people in a short time, and there
would have been nor more Jews left in Germany. What kind of a Jew is it’, she
adds with a smile, ‘who doesn’t even speak Yiddish?’
Katz acknowledged that there was much truth to this, but pointed
out that his parents had been devout and also that he had been
very young when Hitler came to power. Even if the dialog had not
been quite as it is reproduced in the book, in his memoir he felt
he needed to engage in the special pleading that belonging to a
religious subculture and the “Gnade der späten Geburt” served to
protect him from the charge of being culpably German.
For the most part, however, once German Jews were deported from
German soil, the question of exclusion was already settled.
Attention shifted to the naked question of survival. And yet
there was still occasionally the possibility of some kind of
relationship with the representatives of the German nation with
whom they had to deal. Sometimes, for example, former military
46
service could still oblige some kind of acknowledgment or
recognition from the other side. Hugo Heumann’s wartime diary,
written as though a letter to his son, included a lengthy account
of an experience while in Luxembourg, before his later
deportation to Theresienstadt. Jews had the chance to go to
France, and he was keen to identify whether the location of some
relatives was in occupied or Vichy France. Some confusion
reigned, and so he was advised to seek out the military
authorities there: 146
But it was not so easy to get in there, since civilians were allowed into the
building only when accompanied by a soldier from the neighboring guard […]
but I sent him [a member of the guard – MR] in again and bid him convey that a
German Jews was standing at the door, who himself had been an office in the
war, and who requested some information that would be very important for him.
Thereupon the door was opened, a major came out […] who led me into his office
and suggested I look at the large map hanging there, on which the demarcation
line was drawn, and come to my own conclusions … Thus some 25 years later my
promotion to lieutenant once again stood me in good stead. I mention this
episode to draw attention to the accommodating behavior of the military
authorities; but in any case I felt it as a real experience (habe ich es als ein
Erlebnis empfunden) that these words succeeded in opening a hermetically
sealed door.
But whereas on German soil, a Cohn147 or a Klemperer looked at
such moments of recognition as proof of their continued place in
German society, it is clear Heumann was more ambivalent (at least
by the time he was writing up his diary). He describes the story
in detail, but then feels called upon to explain why he has done
so – and in doing so does not quite make explicit that a moment
47
of personal recognition by a representative of Germany is the
point of the story.
For some German Jews, survival could still hinge on a moment of
connection with a Landsmann. It often helped if there was a local
and regional connection, and of course even more if the guard had
once worked in the parental shoe store, as happened to Trude
Schloß in Stutthof.148 Her husband Lew and his father in fact
escaped from their forced labor in Hamburg, because an
acquaintance provided them with clothes that enabled them to slip
out undetected.149 (Other Jewish co-workers were sadly to pay the
price.) Lore Oppenheimer, like Trude and Lew Schloß a Riga
deportee, met a German soldier from Hannover who, however, was
unable to assist her, before she was moved on.150 According to
Judith Sternberg-Newman, “Frieda” from Osnabrück was twice
rescued from an Auschwitz selection by Lagerführer Franz Hössler
because something about Osnabrück had a claim on his attention.151
Lucille Eichengreen survived a nasty infected wound after a
medical orderly established a gruff kind of connection on the
basis of their shared knowledge of Hamburg Platt.152 Margit
Bernstein was almost completely at the end her tether, digging a
grave for a dead prisoner, when an SS man recognized that she was
able to use a spade and got into conversation with her. Her
Swabian accent among other things made an impact, and a human
connection was established.153 But such connections were often no
longer recalled as moments of confirmation that one belonged to
Germany; rather they had become little personal miracles of
connection that maintained the thread of life – when the bonds to
one’s homeland had been irrevocably broken.154
48
Other German Jews, too, maintained an ambivalent relationship,
sometimes rejecting the perpetrators but holding onto Germany,
sometimes rejecting both, but sometimes still striving for a kind
of recognition. Conscious of the long-held critique that Jews did
not do manual labor or shirked real work, a number of chronicles
implicitly or explicitly reflect German Jews’ desire to prove
that they were not shirkers. We hear echoes of this in Philipp
Manes’ diary155 and in Josef Katz’s frequent literal reproduction
of SS exhortations to provide a proper day’s work. After a
murderous interlude at Salsapils, Katz and the surviving members
of his crew return to the Riga ghetto, where they are greeted
with a speech by Oberscharführer Wolters: “He wants to see some
work or else.” (“Er will Arbeit sehen sonst passiert was.“) “He
gives this speech from the steps in front of the house, standing
there like a general, and basking in his sense of power. I wonder
to myself what he will have been in civilian life – perhaps a
lowly clerical worker or a bank clerk.”156 Here there was clearly
a tension between an exhortation whose moral force one could not
entirely discount, and the disqualifying fact that it was being
voiced by a jumped-up clerk turned general. Such social
observations, designed to disqualify and downgrade the
perpetrators, are common. Simcha Naor’s (formerly Stella
Silberstein) account of life in Auschwitz conveys an open pride
in meeting expectations; “At ease!... I see that you’re able and
willing to work,” she claims to have been told by a brutal guard
whose insult had stimulated her to do twice as much labor, thus
vindicating her oppressors’ expectations even while she expressed
her hatred of their brutality.157
49
Younger Jews, such as Katz or Lucille Eichengreen probably found
it easier to shed their former identity, and with the exception
of the Theresienstadt survivors, it is their voices we hear from
the years of deportation and camps. The established German Jewish
generation, even of a robust figure like Hans Reichmann, who was
able to report on the internments of 1938, could not survive
Auschwitz or a Polish labor camp. Katz claimed not to remember
what it had been like before Hitler. Yet even among older Jews in
Theresienstadt we can see in many accounts as in Heumann’s above
a growing estrangement from Germany, and a tendency to see in the
perpetrators some expression of national character. Already
during the 1930s, both Klemperer and Reichmann had come to feel
that National Socialism drew on prescriptive German weaknesses.
For Reichmann,“The exposure of the true nature (“Demaskierung”)of
the German bourgeois is one of the bitterest disappointments of
the Hitler era.” Perhaps, he went on, the German Bürgertum“sang
so loudly about justice and freedom precisely because it wanted
to drown out ist own fearfulness.“ By August 1942 Klemperer was
writing that it is “becoming ever more clear… , that at bottom,
National Socialism is a German growth, no matter how much it
adopts that is foreign.”158 Both Reichmann and Klemperer mused
that perhaps the Jews were the last real Germans. “Perhaps the
historic failure (“historische Schuld” of German Jews,” Reichmann
mused in 1939, “was, in the Germany of the Twentieth Century, to
have believed in the reality of those ideas from which the German
Bürger had become estranged, which he had perhaps never really
possessed.”)159 Three years later, Klemperer, feeling that as a
50
non-Zionist he had no alternative identity to his Germanness,
goes on:160
The return of the assimilated generation – return to what? One cannot go back,
one cannot go to Zion. Perhaps it is not at all up to us to go, but rather to wait: I
am German and am waiting for the Germans to come back; they have gone to
ground somewhere.
For all their sense that Nazism had exposed German weaknesses,
for the most part Reichmann and Klemperer meant by this the
shallowness of society’s commitment to values that would have
enabled it to recognize or resist Hitler’s danger, or a mixture
of “nebulousness” and “overconsistency”.161 They did not mean that
the murderous brutality of the perpetrator was itself somehow
German. But for those German Jews who were deported, the gap
between inhumanity and “Germanity” was often disappearing. In the
course of the war Hugo Heumann, whose encounter with a
representative of the German military I mentioned above, came to
feel no longer part of German society. Although he saw the
perpetrators as the product of the perverse policy of a
particular individual, he was also aware of the breadth of German
participation. Like many Theresienstadt survivors, this hit him
particularly in the closing weeks of war, when survivors of death
camps and slave labor began to arrive there, more dead than
alive, and reported how they had been “tortured and mistreated by
the hangmen’s assistants of Hitler’s Germany („Hitlerchen
Henkersknechten“): 162
The greatest horrors that the Huns and Vandals ever perpetrated do not stand
comparison with these torments, the products of perverse minds. A once elevated
51
and cultivated people has sunk so far, because it put the ideas of a crazy man
into reality.
His ruminations at the end of the war in Theresienstadt are full
of dread at having to return to their home in Mönchen-Gladbach, a
fate which he and his wife were in fact able to avoid, and they
left Germany soon after the war for Luxembourg. Heumann’s
reference to the “Hunnen,” even if only by way of analogy, is
characteristic. Julius Stanford’s diary, written at regular
intervals during an experience of hiding in Holland, and
published by a minor press seemingly without the transformations
for a mass market that afflict many more mainstream published
diaries, is clumsily good at capturing this evolution. Stanford,
formerly Julius Schloss, had been one of the partners in the
Tietz concern, and after emigrating to Holland he was caught up
there by the German occupation. The initial parts of the diary
are pedantically detailed accounts of his negotiations with
authorities over trumped-up currency accusations, and his ability
to steer his way through the process. His interlocutors are for
the most part decent, and his tone is that of a sober wealthy
individual seeking with foresight and diplomacy to avert the
worst. There is no disassociation from Germany, though obviously
from the Nazis. By the end of the war however, the experience of
German brutality and the knowledge of the fate of friends who had
been deported had quite changed his outlook. In May 1945 he wrote
to his children, who had reached safety in Britain before the
war, “We are very sad to have to tell you that Grandmother Ami
was deported by the Huns to KZ Theresienstadt, like so many
others.” 163 The Germans had now become the Huns.
52
Postwar reflections
After the war, of course, some German Jews sought to reestablish
ties with the country that had rejected them. Those in mixed
marriage who had survived in Theresienstadt often had relatives
or children in Germany to maintain the connection.164 In the
private accounts of these groups, and still more in the post-war
works they published for a German speaking audience, they were at
pains to narrow the circle of the perpetrators, and not to indict
the German people. Else Behrend-Rosenfeld’s account first
published in 1945 under the title “Verfemt und verfolgt” and then
more successfully republished in 1949 under the title “Ich stand
nicht allein”, reproduced a wartime diary written for her husband
abroad. But the content was clearly tailored for a post-war
audience. The perpetrators are a narrow group of Nazis, as well
as a twisted minority within the population. The church is
hostile to Nazi persecution and supportive of the Jews – a group
of nuns particularly so.165 The population rejects the Yellow
Star, the butcher promises to deliver more meat and so forth.166
It is interesting that the recently published collection of
Behrend-Rosenfeld’s wartime and postwar letter-diaries for her
husband match what is in the published account, suggesting that
there have been no crass changes to the wartime manuscripts. At
the same time, after spending time with German prisoners of war
in British captivity and finding that her account of the Nazi
years enjoyed considerable resonance, Behrend-Rosenfeld wrote in
a later epilog to her diary that it was good that her account had
focused on the Germans who helped and downplayed the rest, though
the lord knew that there were plenty of those. In other words, it53
seems she had all along been consciously recording a text that
might be instructive for a German public, a public that would
have been alienated had there been more explicit evidence offered
of its own behavior.167 The prominent Social Democrat survivor,
Jeanette Wolff, in her account ‘Sadismus oder Wahnsinn’ (the
title itself indicated that the problem was not Germany but the
psychological condition of its rulers), published in Germany in
1947, and describing her survival as German Jew in Riga, noted
that ‘For twelve years we [the German people – MR] were ruled by
megalomaniac psychopaths, pederasts and men with inherited
criminal defects [erblich und kriminell belasteten]’.168 Wolff
took care to exonerate the Wehrmacht, even though her
compatriots’ experience of the German army at Riga, where she had
been imprisoned, had been extremely mixed.169
Those who left Germany, however, often publishing decades later,
wrote as grateful citizens of their new countries, and were less
inclined to make this kind of distinction between perpetrators
and population, even if fine distinctions abound in particular
episodes. The examples are legion, but let me just cite the
widely-read memoirs of Lucille Eichengreen, born Celia Landau in
Hamburg in 1925. Eichengreen’s account moves between various
kinds of perpetrator analysis. Quite often there is an air of
sexual deviance around them, or psychological compensation for
some kind of weakness.170 But against this there is also the
implied sense that they are stand-ins for the nation, and
Eichengreen claims that she began to hate the Germans around the
time of Kristallnacht (her father was deported to Poland in the
October expulsions). Rather in conflict with this backdated
54
judgment, however, her memory of the deportation makes a clear
distinction between the decent police who were forced to take her
father, and the hated Gestapo, who turned up at the family house
a year later and dispatched her now returned father to his death
in a concentration camp. Towards the end of the book, all is
continuity. The cold disdain she feels that she encountered on a
trip back to Germany decades after the war suggest nothing has
changed on the part of the population. The author then moves onto
Holocaust denial: 171
Ironically, the Germans themselves provide the evidence that dispels such
questions. As I discovered in the process of writing this book, the German
government maintains carefully detailed, blatantly revealing records of the
names, places, deportations, transports and transport numbers, as well as the
dates of the deaths and burials, of those same human beings whom it [sic - MR]
strove – with such a vengeance – to eliminate from the face of the earth.
The continuity of the “it” suggests that the Federal German
government is really the same one that had operated during the
war, and the care with which “it” maintained records of those
killed is merely the latest incarnation of “its” fatal
propensities. In short, the real perpetrator is some enduring
quality of Germany or the Germans.
One of the most interesting examples of such post-war refractions
of earlier experience can be seen in Jean Améry’s reworkings of
his texts. Surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald, in 1945 Améry
drafted but did not publish reflections that in modified form
would find their way to his famous essays On torture and Resentments
twenty years later.172 In 1945, he drew an apparently clear line
55
between the core perpetrators and the rest of the German people.
Of the former, he argued: 173
We would like to be understood literally: expressions sich as “inhuman”,
“unfeeling”, have become such common currency (Scheidemünzen), and are used
symbiolically for such small offences that they have lost their actual meaning. We
however mean it quite literally when we say that the whole class of lower-level SS
leaders and Gestapo officials no longer posses what is understood in western
civilization as human qualities […] this group can no longer be measured by
normal standards, their actions cannot be predicted using empirical
observations based on the average man, we can certainly analyze them but we
are far from understanding them.
Like Jorge Semprún’s reflections during war, as captured in The
Long Voyage, 174 Améry’s answer to the problem of these perpetrators
was stark and simple:175
We are however in a place beyond guilt and atonement. We demand something
else. We demand, admittedly convinced less by its moral than by its social
necessity, the total physical extermination of all leading Party individuals, all
higher and lower commanders in the SS, the entire personnel of the Secret State
Police – and naturally all those people who, no matter what their office, who are
proven to have committed acts of brutality.
He recognized that „such a general approach will include people
against whom no individual crimes have been proven” but even they
were still “wild criminals. They should be killed.”
By contrast, Améry was relatively sympathetic to the Mitläufer,
for example the Meister and office staff whom he had encountered
as a slave laborer at Monowitz. The former had gradually revealed
his human side, and like many others his blind commitment to the
56
Prussian work ethic had been abused by the Nazis.176 The latter
had proved themselves to be apolitical and clueless about most of
the ideas that had obsessed the Nazis.177 Interestingly the clear
distinction between the perpetrators and the rest of the
population is rather undermined by the other elements of Améry’s
unpublished essay. He acknowledged that upbringing and
environment had made the perpetrators what they were, and that
under other circumstances they might never have been likeable but
would certainly have been harmless. His view about the general
population’s false education was in fact very similar to this
account of the perpetrators,178 and he was by no means certain
that reeducation would really cleanse the people’s heads of all
the false notions they held.179 In that sense, the seeming
objective necessity of eliminating the perpetrators, which he
asserted, ostensibly without pathos, was hard to justify
alongside the more generous allowance for the rest of the
population.180
By 1966, however, when Améry actually published Ressentiments, the
terms of his analysis had changed. On the one hand, it was
clearly no longer acceptable or even plausible to argue that the
perpetrators had to be physically eliminated for German society
to have a chance at renewal. On the other hand, the complacency
and seeming obliviousness of the German population enraged him.181
Thus while in the unpublished piece from 1945 his anger is
murderous, but completely buried in a seemingly objective view of
societal necessity, in Ressentiments, he is no longer calling for
death penalties but is much more explicitly enraged. Most
interestingly for our purposes, in the 1966 version the
57
supposedly clear-cut differentiation between the core
perpetrators and the Mitläufer has disappeared. Whereas before,
in line with the distinction between perpetrators and people, the
foreman, Meister Pfeiffer, had appeared humane, albeit blindly
sold on that Prussian work ethic, now in Ressentiments, Pfeiffer
had become complicit, appearing complacently in his Judenmantel.182
Améry thus offers a powerful example of the way changing post-war
experience caused survivors to reflect on their experience and
alter the way they thought about perpetrators or, in this case,
the boundary between active perpetration and broader societal
complicity. But he also thereby reinforces a point made earlier,
that German-Jewish victim accounts from the home front are often
effective in establishing both the breadth and limits of popular
participation, and often particularly insightful about the
mixture of motives that made people go along with the regime.
When they were exposed to the utter horrors of their Eastern
European counterparts, German Jews were no better able than other
victims to understand what made the protagonists tick, even if
they could reproduce with accuracy the ferocious insults that
accompanied murderous actions. Instead, the perpetrators became
the triggers for a process of inner reappraisal, through which
many German Jews came to question their national identity and
allegiance. In sum, looking at German-Jewish victim accounts of
perpetrators tells us much about the way the propagators of
genocide behaved. But what we learn about the most is the way the
encounter both caused and symbolized the victims’ changing sense
of self.
58
1 Jean Améry, Jenseits Von Schuld Und Sühne. Bewältigungsversuche Eines Überwältigten, 2. Aufl. ed.(München: Szczesny, 1966), 58. Jean Améry, At the mind’s limits: contemplations by a survivor on Auschwitz and its realities, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 26. I would like to thank the many people who have provided information and guidance, notably Anna Hajkova, whose knowledge and references to Theresienstadt testimonies and other writings has been invaluable, Jürgen Matthäus, and the other research fellows during my tenure at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Particular thanks go to Roberta Pergher for her crucial suggestions and textual improvements.In this opening paragraph I convey Améry’s German original. For the sake of readability subsequent quotations are largely in English translation, with German phrases included occasionally or longer passages reproduced in the notes where I felt the English did not quite capture the original.2 Ibid., 58, 61.3 I first explored the victims’ predicament and perceptions in Mark Roseman,"Holocaust Perpetrators in Victims’ Eyes," in Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: SaulFriedlander and the Future of Holocaust Studies, ed. Christian Wiese and Paul Betts (London:Continuum, 2010). 4 Raul Hilberg, Sources of Holocaust Research : An Analysis (Chicago: I.R. Dee, 2001).5 See Cathy Caruth, Trauma : Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1995)., particularly the essay by Dori Laub. Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies : The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).6 Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).7 Christopher R. Browning, Collected Memories : Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony, George L. Mosse Series in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History (Madison, Wis.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); Remembering Survival : Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010); Jürgen Matthäus, Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor : Holocaust Testimony and Its Transformations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).8 For a salutary reminder that what we call “integrated” history, namely, tying perpetrators and victims together, represents merely one potential axis of integration, see the excellent introduction to Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution : A Genocide, Oxford Histories (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)..9 Améry, At the mind's limits : contemplations by a survivor on Auschwitz and its realities, 26. “Alles versteht sich von selbst, und nichts ist selbstverständlich, sobald wir hineingestoßen werden in eine Wirklichkeit, deren Licht uns blind macht und bis insMark versehrt.“ Améry, Jenseits Von Schuld Und Sühne. Bewältigungsversuche Eines Überwältigten, 48.10 For an insightful exploration of the demands posed by trauma on the writers, seeAmos Goldberg, TRaʼumah Be-Guf Rishon : Ketivat Yomanim Bi-TekUfat Ha-Shoʼah, Masah KRitIt (Or Yehudah: Devir : Heksherim, ha-makhon le-heker ha-sifrut veha-tarbut ha-Yehudit veha-Yisreʼelit, 2012).11 Diaries consulted for this article, include Else R. Behrend-Rosenfeld, Ich Stand Nicht Allein : Erlebnisse Einer Jüdin in Deutschland 1933-1944, 3. Aufl. ed. (Köln: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1979); Willy Cohn, Kein Recht, Nirgends : Tagebuch Vom Untergang Des Breslauer
Judentums, 1933-1941 (Köln: Böhlau, 2006); Martha Glass and Barbara Müller-Wesemann, "Jeder Tag in Theresin Ist Ein Geschenk" : Die Theresienstädter Tagebücher Einer Hamburger Jüdin 1943-1945, 1. Aufl. ed. (Hamburg: Ergebnisse, 1996); Irene Hauser, Nicht Einmal Zum Sterben Habe Ich Protektion-- : Tagebuch Von Irene Hauser : Geboren Am 19.3.1901, Von Wien Ins Getto Lodz Deportiert Im Oktober 1941, Materialien (Frankfurt am Main: Arbeitsstelle zur Vorbereitung des Frankfurter Lern- und Dokumentationszentrum des Holocaust, 1992); Albert Herzfeld and Hugo Weidenhaupt, Ein Nichtarischer Deutscher : Die Tagebücher Des Albert Herzfeld 1935-1939 (Düsseldorf: Triltsch, 1982); Hugo Heumann, Germaine Goetzinger, and Marc Schoentgen, Erlebtes-Erlittenes : Von Mönchengladbach Über Luxemburg Nach Theresienstadt : Tagebuch Eines Deutsch-Jüdischen Emigranten (Luxembourg: Centre national de littérature, 2007); Josef Katz, One Who Came Back : The Diary of a Jewish Survivor, [New ed. (Takoma Park, Md.: Dryad Press in association with the University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness : A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941, 1st U.S. ed. (New York: Random House, 1998); I Will Bear Witness : A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945, trans. Martin Chalmers, Modern Library paperback ed. (New York: Modern Library, 2001); Renata Laqueur, Diary of Bergen-Belsen : March 1944 - April 1945 ([Celle]: Stiftung Niedersächsische Gedenkstätten, 2007); Simha Naor, Krankengymnastin in Auschwitz : Aufzeichnungen Des Häftlings Nr. 80574, Originalausg. ed., Herderbücherei (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1986); Lore Oppenheimer, Gabriele Lehmberg, and Martina Mussmann, "--Und Eigentlich Wissen Wir Selbst Nicht, Warum Wir Leben--" : Aus Dem Tagebuch Von Lore Oppenheimer, Geb. Pels, Schriftenreihe Der Mahn- Und Gedenkstätte Ahlem Bd. 1 (Hannover: Region Hannover, 2002); Oskar Rosenfeld and Hanno Loewy, Wozu Noch Welt : Aufzeichnungen Aus Dem Getto Lodz (Frankfurt amMain: Neue Kritik, 1994); Oskar Rosenfeld, Hanno Loewy, and Brigitte Goldstein, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto : Notebooks from Łódz (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2002); Martin Ruch, "Inzwischen Sind Wir Nun Besternt Worden" : Das Tagebuch Der Esther Cohn (1926 - 1944) Und Die Kinder Vom Münchner Antonienheim (Norderstedt: Books on Demand GmbH, 2006); Gerty Spies, My Years in Theresienstadt : How One Woman Survived the Holocaust (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1997); Julian Castle Stanford, Tagebuch Eines Deutschen Juden Im Untergrund : [1938-1945] (Darmstadt: Verlag Darmstädter Blätter, 1980); Walter Tausk, Breslauer Tagebuch, 1933-1940 (Berlin: Siedler, 1988), Biography (bio). Iam aware that a number of these raise questions about the “Germanness” of their authors or the “diariness” of their chronicles; a couple of these are pseudo-diaries, as we will see. Some of these questions are discussed in the course of thepaper. Unpublished material included letters from Julius und Friedrich Brodnitz, inpossession of the US Holocaust Museum; the diaries of Maly Dienemann, held by the Leo Baeck Institute NY; letters of Ernst Krombach, Essen, in the author’s possession and others. 12 For some thoughtful deliberations on victim diaries from concentration camps, see Renata Laqueur Weiss, "Writing in Defiance: Concentration Camp Diaries in Dutch, French and German, 1940-1945" (Thesis (Ph D ), New York University Graduate School of Arts and Science 1971., 1971); Dominique Schröder, ""Motive - Funktionen - Sprache. Zu Tagebüchern Als Quellen Der Konzentrationslagerforschung," in Ns-Zwangslager in Westdeutschland, Frankreich Und Den Niederlanden. Geschichte Und Erinnerung, ed. Janine Doerry, et al. (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2008). On the relationship between contemporary witnessing from the 1930s and later testimonies, see Mark Roseman, "“Der Dank Des Vaterlandes”: Memories and Chronicles of German Jewry in the 1930s,"in Expanding Perspectives on the Holocaust in a Changing World. Lessons and Legacies Volume Xi, ed. Hilary Earl and Karl A. Schleunes (Evanston Illinois: Northwestern University Press2014).
13 Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness : A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945, 336.14 This is a key conclusion of Amy Simon’s forthcoming dissertation on ghetto diaries in Warsaw, Lodz and Vilna, which shows that the cast of “enemies” contains a very different set of players, to what we might expect. Amy Simon, “Representations of Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature”(Dissertation, Indiana University, forthcoming).15 Reflecting in summer 1943 on the way Polish Jews allowed themselves to be deceived, Calal Perechodnik noted: It is the faith Jews have in the cultural achievements of the twentieth century; it is the misunderstanding of the mentality,the bloodthirstiness of the Huns, behaving in defiance of all human principles of Christianity. Calel Perechodnik, Am I a Murderer? Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman, trans. Frank Fox (Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1996), 19. And see below, p.41, forthe comments of the renowned literary professor and writer, Michał Głowiński.16 Ruth Kluger, Still Alive : A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, 1st English-language ed., TheHelen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series (New York: Feminist Press at the CityUniversity of New York, 2001), 52.17 On all this, see Roseman, "Holocaust Perpetrators in Victims’ Eyes.". Children in the ghettos, in particular, often went for long periods without any direct experience of their tormentors, as we learn from Sierakowiak, Mary Berg, Yitskhok Rudashevsky and others. 18 Despite writing in Yiddish, Oscar Rosenfeld was always careful to write “Kripo” in Greek. He referred to the perpetrators as the “Ashekenes” (he used the term “Deutschen” only to refer to Jews from Germany). Rosenfeld and Loewy, Wozu Noch Welt :Aufzeichnungen Aus Dem Getto Lodz.19 Heumann, Goetzinger, and Schoentgen, Erlebtes-Erlittenes : Von Mönchengladbach Über Luxemburg Nach Theresienstadt : Tagebuch Eines Deutsch-Jüdischen Emigranten, 85.20 Hermann Langbein, Menschen in Auschwitz, Neuausg. ed. (Wien: Europaverlag, 1995), 15. Similarly, Simon Wiesenthal writes that his overwhelming sense of dread was dispelled only when he saw a US official interrogating a once feared Nazi and thus bringing the “monster” down to scale. Simon Wiesenthal, The Murderers among Us; the SimonWiesenthal Memoirs, [1st ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 47.21 Conveyed indirectly and deriving ultimately from some disgruntled young Nazi whohad a grudge against Wölfl. 22 “Es fiel mir auf, wieviel Hakenkreuzfahnen selbst in dieser proletarischen Gegend wehen! Es ist bei den Leuten eben ein Glauben aus ihrer Verzweiflung heraus,daß ihnen das noch helfen kann…“ Cohn, p.17.23 „Auf dem Omnibus über eine antisemitische Bemerkung geärgert, die allerdings nicht mir galt, aber man wird sich ja an allerlei zu gewöhnen haben!“24 Cohn, Kein Recht, Nirgends : Tagebuch Vom Untergang Des Breslauer Judentums, 1933-1941, vol 1, p.21. My translation. „Ein unangenehmer Brief vom Finanzamt, da merkt man jetzt auch sehr, daß ein anderer Wind weht und daß sie einem Juden gegenüber zu keinem Entgegenkommen bereit sind.“25 Ibid. My translation.
26 For Viktor Klemperer this same period after the March elections was utterly shocking, but the worst aspect, as he bemoaned on March 10 was not the thuggery butthat “And all opposing forces as if vanished from the face of the earth, it is thisutter collapse of a power only recently present, no, its complete disappearance (just as in 1918), that I find so staggering… No one dares say anything anymore, everyone is afraid.” p.627 Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness : A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941, 135.28 Ibid., 277.29 On this see Reichmann again, Hans Reichmann and Michael Wildt, Deutscher Bürger Und Verfolgter Jude : Novemberpogrom Und Kz Sachsenhausen 1937 Bis 1939, Biographische Quellen Zur Zeitgeschichte (München: R. Oldenbourg, 1998), 96 and 79. On “Heyderich”, see ibid., 88, and footnote 53.30 Victor Klemperer, I will bear witness. A Diary of the Nazi Years, , 1933-1941 (The Modern Library:New York, 1999), pp.30-1 (August 21, 1933). Victor Klemperer, Ich Will Zeugnis Ablegen Bis Zum Letzten, 1. Aufl. ed., 2 vols. (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1995), Vol 1, p.50-1. „Aber alles, buchstäblich alles erstirbt in Angst.“31 Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 78.32 Reichmann and Wildt, Deutscher Buerger, 260.33 Leo Baeck Archives New York, SAFE ME805, Prinz, Arthur Plunging into chaos. And for similar experience, see ibid.34 Those historians who tried to draw attention to this were marginalized. The historian Josef Wulf, himself a Holocaust survivor, had to ‘sometimes laugh’ when confronted in the 1960s with the official history of Nazi policy as it was being formulated by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich. Against their tendency to separate the SS from the rest, he knew of a ‘reality of pastors, Wehrmacht and civilian authorities’ that was being denied and belittled. Cited in Nicolas Berg, Der Holocaust Und Die Westdeutschen Historiker : Erforschung Und Erinnerung, Moderne Zeit ; (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003), 613.. On profiteering, see Frank Bajohr, "Arisierung" in Hamburg : Die Verdrängung Der Jüdischen Unternehmer 1933-1945, Hamburger Beiträge Zur Sozial-Und Zeitgeschichte ; Bd. 35 (Hamburg: Christians, 1997).35 Eschhaus too talked ad infinitum about Jewish malpractice, but was eventually dismissed from the service because of his rampant corruption. Elizabeth Freund and Carola Sachse, Als Zwangsarbeiterin 1941 in Berlin : Die Aufzeichnungen Der Volkswirtin Elisabeth Freund,Selbstzeugnisse Der Neuzeit (Berlin: Akademie, 1996), p.45, footnote 12.36 Ibid., 46, 109-10. My translation of “Es wird mir das größte Vergnügen machen, die[se] Gesellschaft im KZ noch ein bißchen zu vergrößern.”37 The ethnography of Dubnow did not have the same resonance among the acculturatedGerman Jews On the Dubnowian tradition, see David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse : Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 135. and now Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! : Jewish Holocaust Documentationin Early Postwar Europe (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2012).38 Cohn, Kein Recht, Nirgends : Tagebuch Vom Untergang Des Breslauer Judentums, 1933-1941, vol1, p.133. My translation of “Das Straßenbild ist ohne die braunen Uniformen ein so
ganz anderes wie man es sonst gewohnt war!”39 Ibid., vol 2, p.776. „Man ist jetzt schon immer froh, wenn man auf einer Behördegut behandelt wird.“40 Ibid., vol2, p.666.41 Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness : A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941, 439.42 Klemperer, I will bear witness : a diary of the Nazi years 1933-1941: 444. „Man hat keinen Anspruch mehr, kaum noch Hoffnung auf anständige Behandlung“. Ich Will Zeugnis Ablegen Bis Zum Letzten, 686.43 I Will Bear Witness : A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941, 280.44 This is very evident in the Klemperer diaries in the 1920s, despite the fact that Klemperer was a converted protestant. Heide Gerstenberger, ""Meine Prinzipien Über Das Deutschtum Und Die Verschiedenen Nationalitäten Sind Ins Wackeln Gekommen Wie Die Zähne Eines Alten Mannes." Victor Klemperer in Seinem Verhältnis Zu Deutschland Und Zu Den Deutschen," in Im Herzen Der Finsternis : Victor Klemperer Als Chronist Der Ns-Zeit, ed. Hannes Heer (Berlin: Aufbau-Verl., 1997), 11-12. Michael Nerlich, "Victor Klemperer Romanist Oder Warum Soll Nicht Einmal Ein Wunder Geschehen?," ibid., 36.45 Cohn, Kein Recht, Nirgends : Tagebuch Vom Untergang Des Breslauer Judentums, 1933-1941, vol 1, p.24. My translation.46 Reichmann and Wildt, Deutscher Buerger, 122. My translation of “frotzeln und lachen unflätig, gelegentlich setzt es eine Ohrfeige. Aber der Hohn trifft mich tiefer.”47 Ibid., 161. My translation.48 Ibid., 186. My translation.49 Ibid., 179. 50 Ibid., 186.51 Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart; Autonomy in a Mass Age (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press,1960), 121.52 Cohn, Kein Recht, Nirgends : Tagebuch Vom Untergang Des Breslauer Judentums, 1933-1941, Vol 2, p.710. My translation.53 In a similar vein, Klemperer’s descriptions of Gestapo misdeeds are often accompanied by accounts of popular attitudes, by way of compensation. Thus May 8 1942 after reporting the Gestapo’s vile language to seventy year old Frau Kronheim,he adds “"Aber gestern auch dies. Auf dem Wasaplatz zwei grauhaarige Damen, etwa sechzigjährige Lehrerinnen... Sie schüttelten mir nur lächelnd die Hand..."54 Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness : A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941, p.275; Ich Will Zeugnis Ablegen Bis Zum Letzten, vol 1, p.435.55 Cohn, Kein Recht, Nirgends : Tagebuch Vom Untergang Des Breslauer Judentums, 1933-1941, 773.56 Wolfgang Kraushaar, "Karriere Eines Boxers. Johannes Clemens: Vom Dresdener Gestapo-Schläger Yum Doppelagenten Des Kgb Im Bnd," in Im Herzen Der Finsternis : Victor Klemperer Als Chronist Der Ns-Zeit, ed. Hannes Heer (Berlin: Aufbau-Verl., 1997), 154.57 Cohn, Kein Recht, Nirgends : Tagebuch Vom Untergang Des Breslauer Judentums, 1933-1941, 16.
58 Tausk, Breslauer Tagebuch, 1933-1940, 14, 23, 95. Though for qualifications to this general line, see below, p.43.59 Ibid., 26. My translation of „schlimmer als die Horden im Dreißigjährigen Krieg – mit Kuhketten, Artilleriepeitschen, Stahlruten, Knüppeln, Revolvern, Schulterriemen, Koppeln und anderen „Waffen des Geistes“ wird die Bevölkerung malträtiert“.60 E.g. Cohn, Kein Recht, Nirgends : Tagebuch Vom Untergang Des Breslauer Judentums, 1933-1941, 13. and see Klemperer below.61 Tausk, Breslauer Tagebuch, 1933-1940, 95.62 Cohn, Kein Recht, Nirgends : Tagebuch Vom Untergang Des Breslauer Judentums, 1933-1941, 25.63 Reichmann and Wildt, Deutscher Buerger, 77, 82.64 Cohn, Kein Recht, Nirgends : Tagebuch Vom Untergang Des Breslauer Judentums, 1933-1941, 162. My translation65 I Will Bear Witness : A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945, 112.66 Freund and Sachse, Als Zwangsarbeiterin 1941 in Berlin : Die Aufzeichnungen Der Volkswirtin Elisabeth Freund, 46.67 Tausk, Breslauer Tagebuch, 1933-1940, 27. My translation of “aber zum Unterschied vomAuftreten und den Gesichtern der Stahlhelmleute muß ich ganz objektiv sagen; was ich unter SA und SS sah, war ganz großer „Bruch“, waren Visagen, wie sie „verhauener“ gar nicht gedacht werden können! Der Ausdruck ärgster Hefe und Verworfenheit.”68 Cohn, Kein Recht, Nirgends : Tagebuch Vom Untergang Des Breslauer Judentums, 1933-1941, 7. My translation.69 Ibid., 18. My translation.70 Ibid., 131.71 “Die Helme beschatten regelmäßig regelrechte viehische Visagen, denen man die Lust zum Raufen ansieht.“, Tausk observed of the SA on the streets early in 1933 p.14 and in December of the same year again noted „furchtbare Raubtiergesichter“ in a Razzia against the communists. 72 Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness : A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945,80.73 Klemperer’s disillusion with his intellectual peers is evident already in March 1933, see his comments on the Thieme couple on March 17 1933 Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness : A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941, 6. Or later see his disappointment with Professor von Pflugk, the optician and Natscheff in the lending library. Ibid., 254.74 Nerlich, "Victor Klemperer Romanist Oder Warum Soll Nicht Einmal Ein Wunder Geschehen?," 36; ibid.75 Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness : A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945, 306.76 On Klemperer’s and Reichmann’s disillusion with the German bourgeoisie, see alsobelow, p.Error: Reference source not found.
77 Shulamit Volkov, "Prologue: My Father Leaves His German Homeland," in Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation, ed. Shulamit Volkov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).78 Avraham Barkai, "Between Deutschtum Und Judentum: Ideological Controversies inside the Centralverein," in In Search of Jewish Community : Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918-1933, ed. Michael Brenner and Derek Penslar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). Jürgen Matthäus and Mark Roseman, Jewish Responses to Persecution.Vol 1 1933-1938, 5 vols., vol. 1, Documenting Life and Destruction (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press ; In association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2010), document 2-12. 79 See the unusually frank autobiography of the former Essen Jewish youngster, Charles Hannam (Karl Hartland) Charles Hannam, A Boy in Your Situation, Hartland Trilogy (London: Deutsch, 1977). 80 Imo Moszkowicz, Der Grauende Morgen (Munich: Boer, 1996).81 Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness : A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945, 267.82 Cohn, Kein Recht, Nirgends : Tagebuch Vom Untergang Des Breslauer Judentums, 1933-1941, 690, 95, 701; Tausk, Breslauer Tagebuch, 1933-1940. 83 Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness : A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945, 94-95.84 Ich Will Zeugnis Ablegen Bis Zum Letzten, 58.85 Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge : Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust, 1st ed. (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 43.86 Christian Faludi, Die "Juni-Aktion" 1938 : Eine Dokumentation Zur Radikalisierung Der Judenverfolgung (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2013).87 Alan E. Steinweis, Kristallnacht 1938 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).88 Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness : A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941, p.289 (Jan 1, 1939).89 On the discussion of the gendered character of violence during and after Kristallnacht, see Mosche Zimmermann, Deutsche Gegen Deutsche : Das Schicksal Der Juden, 1938-1945, 1. Aufl. ed. (Berlin: Aufbau, 2008).90 The Austrian Paul Neurath, later a celebrated sociologist, the CV’s legal counsel, Hans Reichmann, the Austrian psychologist, Bruno Bettelheim, all wrote impressive accounts of their internment in the concentration camps 1938-9 within a few years of their release (though both Neurath’s and Reichmann’s manuscripts appeared only after their deaths, and Bettelheim’s too, was published a decade and half later). Bettelheim, The Informed Heart; Autonomy in a Mass Age; Paul Martin Neurath, The Society of Terror : Inside the Dachau and Buchenwald Concentration Camps (Boulder, CO: ParadigmPublishers, 2005); Reichmann and Wildt, Deutscher Buerger. To these we can add the many unpublished memoirs in the archives of the Wiener Library in London, the Leo Baeck Institute in New York and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Michael Wildt, “Zur Edition”, in ibid., 39.91 Neurath, The Society of Terror : Inside the Dachau and Buchenwald Concentration Camps.92 Reichmann and Wildt, Deutscher Buerger, 153.
93 Ibid., 124. My translation.94 Ibid., 192. My translation of “Ich weiß es nicht, und er weiß es auch nicht.”95 Ibid., 234.96 Presumably this refers to the Operatta by Emmerich Kalman, produced in the US with the title “The Yankee Princess”. The Bajadere were supposedly eastern temple dancers. 97 David Rousset, L'univers Concentrationnaire (Paris,: Editions du Pavois, 1946); Eugen Kogon, Der Ss-Staat, Das System Der Deutschen Konzentrationslager. [Aufl. FüR Gross-Hessen] (Frankfurt/Main,: Verlag der Frankfurter Hefte, 1946).98 As Neurath himself observed in 1946, “publishers did not want to hear any more about concentration camps without gas chambers. Who wants to hear that? The audience is spoiled.” And then there was the effort at objectivity that both authors had made, “Yes yes ‘we greatly appreciate your objectivity and the clarity of your analysis, but the readers want to have more sensational accounts’”. “Afterword” in Neurath, The Society of Terror : Inside the Dachau and Buchenwald Concentration Camps, 297.99 Jorge Semprún, What a Beautiful Sunday! , 1st ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 223-4.100 Ibid., 198.101 See “Afterword”, in Neurath, The Society of Terror : Inside the Dachau and Buchenwald Concentration Camps, 301.102 Timothy Pytell, "Extreme Experience, Psychological Insight, and Holocaust Perception: Reflections on Bettelheim and Frankl," Psychoanalytic Psychology 24, no. 4 (2007). Bettelheim in fact seems to have survived a tough few months through luck and bribery, which enabled him to gain relatively soft employment.103 Most remarkably Katz, One Who Came Back : The Diary of a Jewish Survivor; Isidor Nussenbaum, He's Not Coming Here Anymore : A Survivor's Story (S.l.: s.n.], 2005); Gertrude Schneider, "The Hangman of Camp Salsapils," in Muted Voices : Jewish Survivors of Latvia Remember, ed. Gertrude Schneider (New York: Philosophical Library, 1987); Muted Voices : Jewish Survivors of Latvia Remember (New York: Philosophical Library, 1987); The Unfinished Road : Jewish Survivors of Latvia Look Back (New York: Praeger, 1991). For a systematic account of the Riga experience, see now Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, Die "Endlösung" in Riga : Ausbeutung Und Vernichtung 1941-1944, Veröffentlichungen Der Forschungsstelle Ludwigsburg Der Universität Stuttgart ; Bd. 6 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006).104 As for example in the diary of the reflective but still so German Philip Manes. See the editors’ introduction to Philipp Manes et al., As If It Were Life : A Wwii Diary from the Theresienstadt Ghetto, 1st ed. (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 8-9. See also the strangely ambivalent account of the entry of an SS officer to the room from the fragment of Gerty Spies’ diary, September 1944, in Spies, My Years in Theresienstadt : How One Woman Survived the Holocaust, 140.105 See the experiences detailed in Nussenbaum, He's Not Coming Here Anymore : A Survivor's Story; Josef Katz, Erinnerungen Eines Überlebenden (Kiel: Neuer Malik Verlag, 1988); Schneider, Muted Voices : Jewish Survivors of Latvia Remember.
106 Reise in Den Tod. Deutsche Juden in Riga 1941 – 1944 (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 2006), 141.107 Hannelore Temel, "A Sad Time to Be Young," in Muted Voices : Jewish Survivors of Latvia Remember, ed. Gertrude Schneider (New York: Philosophical Library, 1987). On this work experience, see also Lilly Pancis, "Deportation to the East," ibid.108 Browning, Remembering Survival : Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp.109 Katz, Erinnerungen Eines Überlebenden, 17. Katz, One who came back : the diary of a Jewish survivor: 7.110 Katz, Erinnerungen Eines Überlebenden, 26. Katz, One who came back : the diary of a Jewish survivor, 19. I have tidied up the English translation in a couple of places where the German has been slightly mistranslated in the English edition. The German phrases are “‘So, und nun lass deinen Haufen antreten, Herr Oberrabbiner, aber schnell, ich will was sehen hier” and „‚Seid ihr noch nicht weg, Sauhunde? Gleich mach’ ich euch Beine!’”111 See e.g. Mark Roseman, The Past in Hiding (London: Allen Lane, 2000), get ref.112 Temel, "A Sad Time to Be Young."113 Renata Laqueur, Bergen-Belsen Tagebuch, 1944-1945, 3. Aufl. ed. (Hannover, 1995), 56. My translation of “Unsere Aufpasser bei der Arbeit sind eine seltene Spezies der deutschen Rasse. Schreihälse, Radaubrüder, Antisemiten, die oft hässliche Wutausbrüche zeigen, dann aber wieder sentimental-zutraulich sind.“114 Ibid. My translation of „Aber sie reden nie, ohne dabei stets die schäbigsten Hintergedanken zu haben. Unentwegt denken sie ans Essen, an Frauen und unzweideutige Witze.“115 Katz, Erinnerungen Eines Überlebenden, 77.116 Lucille Eichengreen and Harriet Hyman Chamberlain, From Ashes to Life : My Memories of theHolocaust (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1994), 105.117 Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust : The Kovno Ghetto Diary, trans. Jerzy Michalowicz (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 181.118 Hanna Lévy-Hass, Vielleicht War Das Alles Erst Der Anfang. Tagebuch Aus Dem Kz Bergen-Belsen ; 1944 -1945, Rotbuch 191 (Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1979), 36-7. Hanna Lévy-Hass, Diary of Bergen-Belsen (Chicago, IL; Minneapolis, Minn., 2009), 84.119 Dawid Sierakowiak, Alan Adelson, and Kamil Turowski, The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak : FiveNotebooks from the Lódz Ghetto (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).120 Mary Berg, The Diary of Mary Berg : Growing up in the Warsaw Ghetto, trans. Susan LeePentlin, New ed. (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006), 207. 121 My translation from Lévy-Hass, Vielleicht War Das Alles Erst Der Anfang. Tagebuch Aus Dem KzBergen-Belsen ; 1944 - 1945, 141. 122 Hoffman, After Such Knowledge : Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust, 12.123 Reichmann and Wildt, Deutscher Buerger, 76. My translation.124 Ibid., 123.125 Ibid., 155.
126 Laqueur, Bergen-Belsen Tagebuch, 1944-1945, 16., and Dominique Schröder, "Ecrire PourSurvivre. Le Phénomène Des Journaux Intimes Dans Les Camps De ConcentrationNationaux-Socialistes. Motifs – Fonctions – Langue," Témoigner. Entre Histoire et Mémoire.Revue pluridisciplinaire de la Fondation Auschwitz, no. 106 (2010); ibid.127 My translation from Laqueur, Bergen-Belsen Tagebuch, 1944-1945, 16..128 My translation from ibid., 17..129 My translation from ibid..130 Ibid., 45..131 Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness : A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945, 176-7.132 My translation from Renate Laqueur’s entry from 29 May 1944 as cited in Schröder, "Ecrire Pour Survivre. Le Phénomène Des Journaux Intimes Dans Les Camps De Concentration Nationaux-Socialistes. Motifs – Fonctions – Langue," 179. The sameentry in the newly published English edition of the diary is less obviously ironic and refers to the “subhuman Germans.” Laqueur, Diary of Bergen-Belsen : March 1944 - April 1945, 86.133 Katz, Erinnerungen Eines Überlebenden, 256-7. Katz, One who came back : the diary of a Jewish survivor: 262-263.134 Michał Głowiński, The Black Seasons, trans. Marci Shore, Jewish Lives (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 170.135 Ibid., 172.136 Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness : A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941, 9 (entry for March 30).137 Cohn, Kein Recht, Nirgends : Tagebuch Vom Untergang Des Breslauer Judentums, 1933-1941, 14.138 Tausk, Breslauer Tagebuch, 1933-1940, 85. 139 Reichmann and Wildt, Deutscher Buerger, 171. My translation of “‘Ein faules Pack! Man müßte immer einen Notizblock bei sich haben und gleich die Nummern der Lumpen aufschreiben, Melden – fertig!’”140 Klemperer, Ich Will Zeugnis Ablegen Bis Zum Letzten, volume 1, 13. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness : A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941, 8 (entry for March 20).141 Cited in Gerstenberger, ""Meine Prinzipien Über Das Deutschtum Und Die Verschiedenen Nationalitäten Sind Ins Wackeln Gekommen Wie Die Zähne Eines Alten Mannes." Victor Klemperer in Seinem Verhältnis Zu Deutschland Und Zu Den Deutschen," 16. English version Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness : A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941, 129 (entry for July 21, 1935).142 Ernst Krombach to Marianne Strauss, August 22, 1942, in Parkes Archive, University of Southampton, MS 324, A2007, file 1/4. My translation reproduced in Roseman, The Past in Hiding.143 Manes et al., As If It Were Life : A Wwii Diary from the Theresienstadt Ghetto.; Anna Hajkova, "Mutmaßungen Über Deutsche Juden: Alte Menschen Aus Deutschland Im TheresienstädterGhetto," in Alltag Im Holocaust : JüDisches Leben Im Grossdeutschen Reich ; 1941-1945, ed. Andrea Löw, Doris L. Bergen, and Anna Hajkova, Schriftenreihe Der Vierteljahrshefte FüR Zeitgeschichte (München: Oldenbourg, 2013).; "Die Fabelhaften Jungs Aus Theresienstadt: Junge Tschechische Männer Als Dominante Soziale Elite Im Theresienstädter Ghetto," in Im
Ghetto 1939-1945 : Neue Forschungen Zu Alltag Und Umfeld. , ed. Christoph Dieckmann and BabetteQuinker, BeiträGe Zur Geschichte Des Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009)..144 Katz, Erinnerungen Eines Überlebenden, 90. Katz, One who came back : the diary of a Jewish survivor: 88-89.145 Ibid., 90-1.146 Heumann, Goetzinger, and Schoentgen, Erlebtes-Erlittenes : Von Mönchengladbach Über Luxemburg Nach Theresienstadt : Tagebuch Eines Deutsch-Jüdischen Emigranten, 49. My translation.147 Cohn’s diary ends a little before his deportation to Kovno in Fall 1941 where hewas murdered with his wife and young daughter.148 Interview by the author with Lew and Trude Schloss, August 11 1998 and Trudy Ullmann Schloss, "A Farm Called Jungfernhof," in The Unfinished Road : Jewish Survivors of Latvia Look Back, ed. Gertrude Schneider (New York: Praeger, 1991).149 Interview by the author with Lew and Trude Schloss, August 11 1998.150 Oppenheimer, Lehmberg, and Mussmann, "--Und Eigentlich Wissen Wir Selbst Nicht, Warum Wir Leben--" : Aus Dem Tagebuch Von Lore Oppenheimer, Geb. Pels, 40.151 Langbein, Menschen in Auschwitz, 483.152 Eichengreen and Chamberlain, From Ashes to Life : My Memories of the Holocaust, 140 CHECK!153 LBIJ, 589 Margit Bernstein Oppenheimer.154 The non-German (and non-Jewish) Semprún notes, incidentally, that knowledge of German culture created bonds of recognition for him too. Having been apprehended looking at a tree in Buchenwald and taken to Hauptsturmführer Schwartz, he says it is Goethe’s tree. “‘Goethe!’ he exclaims. ‘So you know the works of Goethe?’ A distinct change of tone. Kultur has its uses.” Semprún, What a Beautiful Sunday!, 201. A delight in his German had also saved his life in a search on the train. In the case of Schwartz, he explains that he had a German governess as a child. You must be from a good family, explains Schwartz, what are you doing here?155 Manes et al., As If It Were Life : A Wwii Diary from the Theresienstadt Ghetto. 156 Katz, Erinnerungen Eines Überlebenden, 56. My translation.157 Naor, Krankengymnastin in Auschwitz : Aufzeichnungen Des Häftlings Nr. 80574, 45-46. My translation.158 Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness : A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945, 124.159 Reichmann and Wildt, Deutscher Buerger, 272.160 Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness : A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945, 63.161 Ibid., 124.162 Heumann, Goetzinger, and Schoentgen, Erlebtes-Erlittenes : Von Mönchengladbach Über Luxemburg Nach Theresienstadt : Tagebuch Eines Deutsch-Jüdischen Emigranten, 82.163 Stanford, Tagebuch Eines Deutschen Juden Im Untergrund : [1938-1945], 149. My translation.164 Glass and Müller-Wesemann, "Jeder Tag in Theresin Ist Ein Geschenk" : Die Theresienstädter Tagebücher Einer Hamburger Jüdin 1943-1945; Spies, My Years in Theresienstadt : How One Woman Survived the Holocaust.
165 Behrend-Rosenfeld, Ich Stand Nicht Allein : Erlebnisse Einer Jüdin in Deutschland 1933-1944.166 Else R. Behrend-Rosenfeld, Erich Kasberger, and Marita Krauss, Leben in Zwei Welten : Tagebücher Eines Jüdischen Paares in Deutschland Und Im Exil (München: Volk Verlag München, 2011), p.142.167 Else R. Behrend-Rosenfeld, Erich Kasberger, and Marita Krauss, Leben in Zwei Welten : Tagebücher Eines Jüdischen Paares in Deutschland Und Im Exil (München: Volk Verlag München, 2011), p.358.168 My translation from Jeanette Wolff, Sadismus Oder Wahnsinn : Erlebnisse in Den Deutschen Konzentrationslagern Im Osten (Greiz in Thüringen: E. Bretfeld, 1947)., 3.169 See Schneider, Muted Voices : Jewish Survivors of Latvia Remember; The Unfinished Road : Jewish Survivors of Latvia Look Back.170 There is a Herr Becker from the spa who “frequently pinched my face, and seemed to like me” (the 8 year old narrator). There is an overseer with severe first worldwar injuries who asserts his masculinity against the “bitches” in his charge.171 Eichengreen and Chamberlain, From Ashes to Life : My Memories of the Holocaust, 214.172 Jean Améry, "Zur Psychologie Des Deutschen Volkes (1945)," in Jenseits Von Schuld Und Sühne ; Unmeisterliche Wanderjahre ; Örtlichkeiten, Werke (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2002).173 Ibid., 510. My translation of “Wir möchten gerne wörtlich genommen werden: Ausdrücke wie “unmenschlich”, “gefühllos”, sind so sehr zu Scheidemünzen, Symbolen für vergleichsweise niedliche Kleinigkeiten geworden, dass sie ihren eigentlichen Wortsinn verloren haben. Wir aber meinen es ganz buchstäblich, wenn wir sagen, dassdie gesamte Schicht der SS-Unterführer und Gestapobeamten die eigentlichen im abendländischen Sinne menschlichen Qualitäten nicht mehr besitzt. […]diese Gruppe ist mit unseren Maßstäben nicht mehr zu messen, ihre Handlungen sind auf Grund einer am Durchschnittsmenschen entwickelten Empirie nicht vorauszusehen, wir könnensie wohl analysieren aber darum noch lange nicht verstehen.”174 Jorge Semprún, The Long Voyage (New York,: Grove Press, 1964), 38.175 Améry, "Zur Psychologie Des Deutschen Volkes (1945)," 513. My translation.176 Ibid., 518. My translation of Wir befinden uns jedoch noch immer jenseits von Schuld und Sühne. Wir fordern etwas anderes. Wir verlangen, überzeugt zwar nicht von den moralischen, wohl aber von der sozialen Notwendigkeit unserer Forderung, die integrale physische Extermination von sämtlichen führenden Parteipersönlichkeiten, sämtlichen Führer und Unterführern der SS, dem gesamten Personal der Geheimen Staatspolizei – und natürlich allen jenen Personen, die, gleichgültig an welcher Stelle, begangener Grausamkeitsakte überführt sind.177 „In einer Gesellschaft von ungefähr 25 Deutschen, Männer und Frauen, sämtlich Büroangestellte der I.G.-Farbenindustrie, wussten 22 nicht, was eine Reparationszahlung bedeutet. 15 waren sich nicht darüber klar, was eigentlich das Diktat von Versailles gewesen war. Keiner von den 25 wusste zu erklären, was eine Reutermeldung sei. Keiner hatte den Namen Ibsen gehört. 11 kannten den Namen Thälmann nicht.15 glaubten, dass das Geschlecht Hohenzollern während des Mittelalters Deutschland geherrscht habe. 18 hielten Einstein für einen Kommunistenführer bzw Zionistenführer. Von der Relativitätstheorie sagte mir einer wörtlich ‚Sie macht den Menschen zum Sklaven des Sexualtriebes‘“. Ibid., 522.
178 Ibid., 512.179 Ibid., 534; Gerhard Scheit, "Nachwort," in Werke Vol 2. Jenseits Von Schuld Und Sühne ; Unmeisterliche Wanderjahre ; Örtlichkeiten, ed. Jean Améry (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2002), 636.180 This finds its analogy in Semprún’s reflections, though the latter was more self-conscious about the difficulty of distinguishing between perpetrators and population. Semprún, The Long Voyage, 38.181 In a text from the late 1950s, Améry had written about the Germans he met. “Sie haben den Blick von damals. Ihren gut geschnittenen Anzügen ist nicht zu trauen.” Jean Améry, "Im Schatten De Dritten Reichs (1961)," in Werke Vol 2: Jenseits Von Schuld Und Sühne ; Unmeisterliche Wanderjahre ; Örtlichkeiten. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2002), 541; Scheit,"Nachwort," 637.182 "Nachwort," 636.