ROTHKIRCH: Yes; I was at KUTNO,234 I wanted to take some photographs—that’s my only hobby—and I knew an SS-leader there quite well and I was talking to him about this and that when he said: “Would you like to photograph a shooting?” I said: “No, the very idea is repugnant to me.” “Well, I mean, it makes no difference to us, they are always shot in the morning, but if you like we still have some and we can shoot them in the afternoon sometime.” You can’t imagine how these men have become completely brutalised.235
This description shows how normal executions seemed to the perpetrators. The SS man’s offer to postpone the killings as a favor to a photographer speaks volumes not only about how routine executions had become but also about how openly they were carried out. In this case, no attempt seems to have been made to keep the mass murder secret.
Rothkirch, who talks in dramatic and detailed fashion about the various levels of the extermination process, sees this as a sign of brutalization. But it would again be a mistake to conclude that the speaker himself objects to the extermination of Jews per se:
ROTHKIRCH: Just think of it some of these Jews got away and will keep talking about it. And the craziest thing of all: how is it possible for pictures to get into the press? For there are pictures in this paper (Welt-woche?). They even filmed it and the films, of course, have got abroad; it always leaks out somehow. At LVOV, just like people catching fish with a net, ten SS men would walk along the street and simply grab any Jews who happened to be walking along. If you happened to look Jewish, you were just added to their catch (laughs). Sometime the world will take revenge for that. If those people, the Jews, come to the helm and take revenge, it will of course be terrible. But I think it doubtful whether the enemy will permit them to get there, for most of the foreigners, the English, the French and the Americans, are also quite clever about the Jews. It won’t be like that. They’ve allied themselves with the devil in order to beat us; just as we concluded that alliance with the Bolsheviks for a time, they are doing the same thing. The important question is: which ideology would gain the upper hand in the world? And whether they will trust us? One must now work to that end so that they will trust us and we must steer clear of everything which will arouse them afresh so that we first show them: “Friends, we want to cooperate in creating a sensible world.”236
