The Kindly Ones полностью

With Dr. Wirths, I had an interesting discussion about precisely this question of physical violence, since to me it evoked problems I had already encountered in the Einsatzgruppen. Wirths agreed with me in saying that even men who, in the beginning, hit only out of obligation ended up developing a taste for it. “Far from correcting hardened criminals,” he passionately affirmed, “we confirm them in their perversity by giving them full rights over the other prisoners. And we’re even creating new ones among our SS. These camps, with the present methods, are a breeding ground for mental illnesses and sadistic deviations; after the war, when these men go back to civilian life, we’ll find ourselves with a considerable problem on our hands.” I explained to him that, according to what I had heard, the decision to transfer the work of extermination to the camps was made partly because of the psychological problems it caused among troops assigned to mass executions. “True,” Wirths replied, “but we’re only shifting the problem, especially by mixing extermination functions with the correctional and economic functions of ordinary camps. The mentality engendered by extermination overpowers and affects all the rest. Even here, in my Reviers, I discovered that some doctors were killing patients, exceeding their instructions. I had a lot of trouble putting a stop to such practices. As for the sadistic tendencies, they are very frequent, especially with the guards, and they’re often connected to sexual troubles.”—“Do you have concrete examples?”—“They rarely come to consult me. But it happens. A month ago, I saw a guard who’s been here for a year. A man from Breslau, thirty-seven years old, married, three children. He confessed to me that he had beaten inmates until he ejaculated, without even touching himself. He no longer had any normal sexual relations; when he had leave, he didn’t go back home, he was so ashamed. But before he came to Auschwitz, he told me, he was perfectly normal.”—“And what did you do for him?”—“In the conditions we have here, there’s not much I can do. He would need extensive psychiatric treatment. I’m trying to have him transferred outside the camp system, but it’s hard: I can’t tell the whole story, or he’d be arrested. But he’s a sick man, he needs to be taken care of.”—“And how do you think this sadism develops?” I asked. “I mean with normal men, without any predisposition that would be revealed under these conditions?” Wirths looked out the window, pensive. He took a long while to reply: “That’s a question I’ve thought a lot about, and it’s difficult to answer. An easy solution would be to blame our propaganda, the way for instance it’s taught here to the troops by Oberscharführer Knittel, who heads the Kulturabteilung: the Häftling is subhuman, he’s not even human, so it’s entirely legitimate to hit him. But that’s not the whole of it—after all, animals aren’t human, either, but none of our guards would treat an animal the way they treat the Häftlinge. Propaganda does play a role, but in a more complex way. I came to the conclusion that the SS guard doesn’t become violent or sadistic because he thinks the inmate is not a human being; on the contrary, his rage increases and turns into sadism when he sees that the inmate, far from being a subhuman as he was taught, is actually at bottom a man, like him, after all, and it’s this resistance, you see, that the guard finds unbearable, this silent persistence of the other, and so the guard beats him to try to make their shared humanity disappear. Of course, that doesn’t work: the more the guard strikes, the more he’s forced to see that the inmate refuses to recognize himself as a non-human. In the end, no other solution remains for him than to kill him, which is an acknowledgment of complete failure.” Wirths fell silent. He was still looking out the window. I broke the silence: “Can I ask you a personal question, Doktor?” Wirths answered without looking at me; his long, thin fingers tapped the table: “You can ask it.”—“Are you a believer?” He took a while to reply. He was still looking outside, toward the street and the crematorium. “I used to be, yes,” he said finally.