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

59

Endnotes

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.