Auschwitz Read Free

it appears to hold, and is all the more curious given the rigid training of the SS and the popular stereotype of German soldiers as automatons. As we shall see, this tendency for individual Nazis who committed crimes to feel more personally in control contributed to the development of both Auschwitz and the “Final Solution.”
    It is worth trying to understand why so many of the former Nazis I have met over the last fifteen years appear to find an internal justification for their crimes (“I thought it was the right thing to do”) rather than an external one (“I was ordered to do it”). One obvious explanation is that the Nazis carefully built upon pre-existing convictions. Anti-Semitism existed in Germany long before Adolf Hitler, and plenty of other people blamed the Jews—falsely—for Germany’s defeat in World War I. In fact, the whole of the Nazis’ initial political program in the early 1920s was virtually indistinguishable from those of countless other nationalistic right-wing parties. Hitler brought no originality of political thought—what he brought was originality of leadership. And when the Depression gripped Germany in the early 1930s, millions of Germans voluntarily turned to the Nazis for a solution to the country’s ills. No one in the elections of 1932 was forced at
gunpoint to vote for the Nazis, and the Nazis went on to gain power within the existing law.
    Another clear reason why the belief system among so many Nazis was internalized was the work of Dr. Josef Goebbels, who was perhaps the most effective propagandist of the twentieth century. 5 In popular myth he is often dismissed as a crude polemicist, infamous for Der ewige Jude ( The Eternal Jew ) film in which shots of Jews are intercut with pictures of rats. But, in reality, the vast majority of his work was much more sophisticated and much more insidious. It was Hitler who was more keen on obvious hate-filled films like Der ewige Jude ; Goebbels disliked that rudimentary approach, preferring the much more subtle Jud Süss , a drama in which a beautiful Aryan girl is raped by a Jew. Goebbels’ own audience research (a science he was obsessed with) revealed that he was right; cinemagoers much preferred to see propaganda films where, as he put it, “they cannot see the art in it.”
    Goebbels believed that it was always preferable to reinforce the existing prejudice of the audience rather than to try to change someone’s mind. On those occasions when it was necessary to attempt to alter the views of the German people, his technique was to move “like a convoy—always at the speed of the slowest vessel” 6 and constantly to reiterate, in subtly different ways, the message he wanted the audience to receive. And in doing so he rarely tried to tell the viewers anything—he showed images and told stories that led ordinary Germans to reach the conclusion he wanted, while leaving them thinking that they had worked it out for themselves.
    During the 1930s, Hitler—to Goebbels’ approval—did not often try to impose policies on the majority of the population against its wishes. This was a radical regime, of course, but one that preferred the consent of the majority and, to a large extent, relied upon individual initiative coming from below to generate the dynamism it so desired. All of which meant that, when it came to the persecution of the Jews, the Nazis progressed gingerly.
    Central though the hatred of the Jews was to Hitler, it was not a policy he overtly pushed in the elections of the early 1930s. He did not hide his anti-Semitism, but he and the Nazis consciously emphasized other policies, like their desire to “right the wrongs” of the Versailles treaty, get the unemployed back to work, and restore a sense of national pride. In the immediate aftermath of Hitler becoming Chancellor, there was an outpouring of
violence against the German Jews,