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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Death factories and the “chimera of conscience”

April 11 marks the International Day of Liberation of Fascist Concentration Camp Victims
28 April, 2009 - 00:00
RETALIATION. THE NUREMBERG TRIALS / THE CHILDREN IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS: DOOMED TO DEATH HITLER AND CHILDREN

The prisoners of Buchenwald, one of the most terrible Nazi “death camps,” were liberated 64 years ago on April 11. This great event has already become symbolic for the democratic nations across the world: April 11 marks the liberation from state terror, Hitlerism, the plague of racial and national hatred, malicious militarism, and lunatic aspirations for world domination. In a nutshell, this is about liberation from all the things that produced the gigantic national-socialistic machine of destruction, cursed by all the people of our planet.

It is an evident and undeniable truth that the totalitarian 20th century has left us with an unprecedented depreciation of the value of human life. It became very easy and simple to kill a person, especially out of ideological motives.

Let us compare the seemingly different quotations. Adolf Hitler said, “Only a true German, a true Teuton has the right to be called a man.” Joseph Goebbels said, “I liberate you from the chimera called ‘conscience,’ and on behalf of the F hrer I order you to be unmerciful toward representatives of inferior nations!” Makar Nagulnov from Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel Podniataya tselina (Virgin Soil Upturned): “Are you pitying them? Is this the way you are serving the revolution, bastard? Bring before me thousands of children, women, and elderly people; and tell me that I must liquidate them for the sake of the revolution… And I will kill all of them with a machine-gun!”

I will give a thoughtful reader his/her legal right to analyze what is common and different in these expressions and the ways of thinking, in general. Let us agree on one thing: the history of Nazi “death factories” will ever be a lesson for humankind. Its meaning is not quite clear to everybody: the indifference toward violence against a single person is an indirect participation in his/her murder, and the shortest way to the “personal” edge of abyss.

Let us come closer to the topic of our conversation. Of course, it is important to understand, who, why, and with what concrete methods created the system of “death camps.” It is equally important to learn what were the strongholds of this system — fanaticism, fear, lies, denunciation, feeling of national superiority, violence, lack of restraint, or anything else. Searching for an answer, we will benefit from political and psychological portraits of “true Aryans” in the F hrer’s milieu (I will not dare call them people) who were directly involved in mass destruction of people in the concentration camps.

In 1929–45 Heinrich Himmler, one of the bloodiest criminals in human history, headed the Schutzstaffel (SS), the organization responsible for the destruction of millions of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, leftists, simply members of the opposition, and dissenting people in practically all Nazi-occupied European countries. What was this evildoer like? (Incidentally, Himmler’s personal involvement in developing and organizing the state-run system of concentration camps on the territories occupied by the Hitlerites was a determining factor.)

People who knew him closely said that the main butcher of the Brown Reich “was afraid of blood” and “generally was an extremely sensitive and sentimental person” — he personally “would not hurt a fly with his hands, nor would he kill anybody.” It is also known that in the milieu of these monsters many received affectionate diminutive names. So, the SS General Wolf, who served for some period as Himmler’s adjutant was called “Wolfie” (Wolfchen), and one of Himmler’s lady-loves was called “Leveret” (Haschen).

As for the Reichsf hrer’s appearance, the French historian Jacques Delarue wrote: “Whereas Kaltenbrunner and Heidrich have faces of murderers, Himmler, vice versa, has a fleshy, very banal face.” And Gen. Dorenburger, who headed the project to develop the V-1 and V-2 rockets during the Third Reich, wrote about Himmler in the following way: “Even when I wanted to, I could not notice anything outstanding or remarkable in this person wearing an SS uniform; he was of a medium height, quite slender. His gray-blue eyes, behind the glittering pince-nez glasses, were looking from under a low forehead. His lips were pale and thin. A somewhat sarcastic, at times even contemptuous smile was hiding in the corners of his mouth. The well-groomed moustache under a straight nose stood out as a dark stroke against the unhealthy paleness of his face.” Incidentally, let us pay attention to the fact that the ordinary appearance, the absolute “dullness,” and inner emptiness were the features shared the No. 1 Nazi butcher and Nikolay Yezhov, the USSR People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs. They ended their bloody lives in different ways, but they had the retaliation they deserved.

Apparently, what matters is not the personal features of the Fascist regime bonzes but the systemic fundamentals of this regime, as well as its ideology, which held the national-socialist state together through hatred, terror, and blood. This was an ideology that relied exclusively on “strength” and the “right of the superior race” in all its affairs, an ideology of supernationalism and malicious national exlusiveness. It involved an absolutely “black-and-white” vision of the world (ours-theirs, friend-enemy, and the enemy should be isolated and destroyed in the camps), and bureaucracy that embodied the most terrible genocidal acts in the language of directives, instructions, and dry formulas. Bloody pedants — this was something new in history!

Publicists and historians who study the extermination camps — the most awful circles of the Nazi hell — pay a special attention to one circumstance. The destruction of people in the most terrible camps (Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Bergen-Belsen) had a strong industrial foundation (!). As a matter of obligation, one had to create an “industrial base” for genocide and murders, and this was done. The Nazi set and resolved the tasks of providing transport, construction, technical, and other kinds of equipment to the butchers in Auschwitz and other “death factories.” This was possible first of all owing to the fact that bandits, adventurers, and criminals of the blackest dye captured an entire state and turned it into a tool for committing their evil deeds.

However, the ideological zombing of the German nation played a special — in fact, fateful — role. The Nazi dogmas ordered to destroy people with “dirty” blood — and the bloodthirsty maniacs that had come to power got down to business. To this end they issued the notorious Nuremberg Racial Laws. An awful role was played by the press subject to Hitler: one of the most popular newspapers in national-socialist Germany Stuermer every day placed on its pages “catchy,” “effective,” and “professionally made” headings like “Prepare a grave for them (inferior races — Author), from which they won’t be able to rise,” “They will be uprooted for ever,” “They will be slaughtered in mass,” “They must be rooted out,” etc.

Here is Himmler’s very cynical April 1940 statement: “Anti-Semitism is the same thing as sanitization. Removing lice is a matter of hygiene rather than ideology. In the same way, anti-Semitism is not a matter of ideology for us, but a hygienic problem that we will resolve in a short while. We have only 20,000 lice left, and this question will be over in all Germany.” There is no doubt that later, after “finally resolving the Jewish question,” Nazi would have put an end to the “Polish,” “Ukrainian,” “Belarusian,” “Russian,” and other “questions,” had they won in this war.

The main butcher and the “head” of the Auschwitz exterminating team Rudolf Ferdinand Hoess testified at the Nuremberg trials of 1946 that the Nazi regime launched practical preparations for genocide at the beginning of the war, in 1939. Hoess’ biography is interesting, too. In 1923 he was sentenced to a 10-year imprisonment for willful homicide. In 1933 he was appointed to Dachau by Himmler himself, after which he served as deputy superintendent and superintendent in another concentration camp — Sachsenhausen.

In 1940 Hoess was transferred to Auschwitz, where he created one of the world’s most terrible “death camps.” In Auschwitz over 4 million people, primarily Jews and Slavs, were killed; after the collapse of Nazi Germany, Hoess was hiding under the false name of Lang; in early 1946 he was found and extradited to Poland. On April 2, 1947, the Supreme Military Tribunal of this country sentenced the butcher to death penalty: he was hanged on the territory of Auschwitz. The confession of the Nazi criminal proved convincingly that the concentration camps in Hitler’s Germany were by no means a result of Hitler, Himmler, or other butchers’ improvisation; on the contrary, this was a highly organized and well-thought-out “system of measures.”

Certainly, the murderers, who took the highest offices in Hitler’s Germany did not have any need to shoot, hang, kill with poisonous gases, or freeze living people. This was done at their orders by other butchers, who performed this “rough labor,” and the “leaders” had only to give orders, which were executed without demur.

There is another thing to be remembered today. Oncologists say that an incurable, fateful disease may be timely diagnosed after revealing certain symptoms. The malignant changes in the consciousness of society manifest themselves when two key words like “compassion” and “conscience” disappear from the everyday life. This is the first step on the way to totalitarianism.

By Ihor SIUNDIUKOV, The Day. Photos provided by the author
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