There was a lot of talk, after the war, in trying to explain what had happened, about inhumanity. But I am sorry, there is no such thing as inhumanity. There is only humanity and more humanity: and that Döll is a good example. What else was he, Döll, but a good family man who wanted to feed his children, and who obeyed his government, even though in his innermost being he didn’t entirely agree? If he had been born in France or America, he’d have been called a pillar of society and a patriot; but he was born in Germany, and so he is a criminal. Necessity, as the Greeks knew already, is not only a blind goddess, but a cruel one too. Not that there was any lack of criminals, at the time. All of Lublin, as I’ve tried to show, was steeped in a sleazy atmosphere of corruption and excess; the Einsatz, but also colonization and exploitation of that isolated region, made more than one person lose his head. Since my friend Voss’s remarks about this, I have thought about the difference between German colonialism, as it was practiced in the East during those years, and the colonialism of the British and the French, in principle more civilized. There are, as Voss stressed, objective facts: after the loss of its colonies in 1919, Germany had to recall its cadres and close its colonial administration offices; the training institutes remained open in principle, but didn’t attract anyone, because of the lack of prospects; twenty years later, a whole specialized field of knowledge had been lost. That being the case, National Socialism had given impetus to an entire generation, full of new ideas and greedy for new experiences, which, as regards colonization, were perhaps just as valid as the old ones. As for the excesses—the aberrant outbursts like those you could see in the Deutsches Haus or, more systematically, the seeming incapability of our administrators to treat the colonized peoples, some of whom would have been ready to serve us willingly if we had left the door open, other than with violence and contempt—one shouldn’t forget, either, that our colonialism, even in Africa, was a young phenomenon, and that the others, in the beginning, scarcely did any better: just consider the Belgian exterminations in the Congo, and their policy of systematic mutilation, or else the American policy, precursor of and model for our own, of the creation of living space through murder and forced displacement—America, we tend to forget, was anything but a “virgin territory,” but the Americans succeeded where we failed, which makes all the difference. Even the British, so often cited as an example, and whom Voss so admired, needed the trauma of 1858 to begin to develop more sophisticated tools of control; and if, little by little, they learned to play a virtuoso game of carrot-and-stick, we shouldn’t forget that the stick was far from neglected, as one can see from the Amritsar Massacre, the bombing of Kabul, and other examples, many and forgotten.
