Abstract
We discuss some implications of the Holocaust for moral philosophy. Our thesis is that morality became distorted in the Third Reich at the level of its social articulation. We explore this thesis in application to several front-line perpetrators who maintained false moral self-conceptions. We conclude that more than a priori moral reasoning is required to correct such distortions.
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Notes
Some examples follow: “a) A man who betrays a friend into the hands of a Nazi executioner for the sake of personal advancement is detestable. b) The Nazi commander who ordered a woman burned alive in a crematorium, because she refused to undress for execution, performed a loathsome and revolting deed” (Brandt 1946, 121); “Is the satisfaction ‘good,’ or a good, when ‘the beast of Belsen’ is satisfied by observing the efficiency of his crematory?” (Dommeyer 1946, 357); “Imagine yourself trying to convince Mr. Churchill that when he said ‘that bad man’ he was attributing no moral characteristic to Hitler and that he was in no way contradicting Dr. Goebbels” (Mabbott 1949, 136–137; see also 139, 146, 148); “It is pointless to invent an axiom that men ought always to be treated as ends in themselves in order to demonstrate the truth of ‘It is wicked to send people to Belsen or Buchenwald’” (Weldon 1953, 99, quoted by Wollheim 1955, 414–415); “Suppose […] that an inmate and an executive of Buchenwald confronted us with two conflicting theses. The former asserts, ‘I should not be tortured or exterminated.’ The latter contends, ‘You should be tortured and exterminated.’ Does the conventional theory of truth give us any basis for saying more than, ‘Both you gentlemen are expressing conventional whims. [...]’?” (Wells 1951a, 190); “Only a puristic academic could explain to the inmate of Buchenwald that his feeling of revulsion to human torture is just a matter of 1) arbitrary definition or 2) subjective emotion, and that 3) the response really has no cognitive meaning” (Wells 1951b, 683); “The criticism [of relativism] pictures us watching the proceedings at Dachau and able to say only, ‘Well, of course I feel it is all dreadfully wrong; but then I know Hitler feels it is right; and so I must just try to understand’” (Moore 1958, 379); “Suppose one man says, ‘As a Nazi it is my duty to obey the Führer, and the Führer has ordered that Isidore Bloom should be treated kindly in Dachau. Therefore, Isidore Bloom should be treated kindly in Dachau’; and another man says, ‘As A Christian I believe that all men should be treated kindly. Therefore Isidore Bloom should be treated kindly in Dachau’. According to Toulmin both men would be giving an ethically relevant reason [. . .].” (Nahknikian 1959, 73); “It might, for example, be the case that accepting a description of the way in which Belsen was run involved accepting the assertion ‘Belsen was not an ideal institution’” (Swinburne 1961, 302); “It is perfectly possible to judge rationally that one community is happier than another, e.g. that Cambridge University is a happier community than was Belsen concentration camp” (Ewing 1963, 336).
Of course, satirizing uses of the Holocaust as an example was not Anscombe’s main purpose in the passage we quote.
Although the Nazis knew that their program of extermination would be perceived as wrong by world opinion, they did not see it as wrong themselves. See, for example, Himmler’s notorious Posen address, “in which he described the ‘extermination of the Jewish people’ as ‘a glorious page in our history and one that will never be written and can never be written’” (Cesarani 2004, 158; see also Haas 1992; Koonz 2005).
“Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster,’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown” (Arendt 1994, 54). See also: “He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace” (Arendt 1994, 287–288).
Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann as “a colourless bureaucrat” has been recently criticized by David Cesarani who emphasizes the role of Eichmann’s ideological commitments (Cesarani 2004, 71).
Arendt was accused of insensitivity and arrogance about the terrible dilemmas faced by Jewish communities who dealt with the Third Reich. Moreover, her derogatory remarks on the state prosecutor Gideon Hausner were thought by some to express German–Jewish prejudice towards Jews from the Eastern territories. For a recent critical discussion of these problems see Benhabib (1996, Chapter 6), Neiman (2002, 273ff.), Cohen (2001).
Arendt alludes to this matter again when discussing Eichmann’s “inability to think” in her “Postscript”: “It was precisely this lack of imagination which enabled him to sit for months on end facing a German Jew who was conducting the police interrogation, pouring out his heart to the man and explaining again and again how it was that he reached only the rank of lieutenant colonel in the S.S. and that it had not been his fault that he was not promoted” (Arendt 1994, 287). See also: “But bragging is a common vice, and a more specific, and also more decisive, flaw in Eichmann’s character was his almost total inability to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view. Nowhere was this flaw more conspicuous than in his account of the Vienna episode. He and his men and the Jews were all ‘pulling together,’ . . . . The Jews ‘desired’ to emigrate, and he, Eichmann, was there to help them” (Arendt 1994, 47–48).
During cross-examination, he told the presiding judge that in Vienna he “regarded the Jews as opponents with respect to whom a mutually acceptable, a mutually fair solution had to be found” (Arendt 1994, 56–57).
Arendt glosses the German as “moral conduct is a matter of course” (Arendt 2003a, 22), but a literal translation would be “morality explains itself”.
See also Herman 2007, 75: “Even ordinary moral judgment takes place within a community of judgment: a conceptual space constructed by rules of salience—typically social norms—that identify the features of our circumstances that require moral attention, as well as regulative principles that shape agents’ deliberations.”
The notion of a Judenfrage first arose in the wake of the Enlightenment and French revolution, when the Jews were granted civil rights, or were “emancipated”. The supposed question was whether their newly accorded status as fellow citizens of Christians could be reconciled with their religious commitment to “chosenness” and to their future reunion from the diaspora in a restored kingdom of Israel. Posed thus dispassionately, the question was entertained by the Jews themselves, who sometimes wondered to what extent they wished to be assimilated as Frenchmen, Germans, or Austrians. But the question also became a lightning-rod for all sorts of anti-semitism, under the influence of which it mutated into the question of “what to do about” the Jews, or how to reverse their perceived encroachments. The tragically ironic result is that the phrase “a solution of the Jewish question” (eine Lösung der Judenfrage), which was to litter the correspondence and memoranda of Nazi leaders, appeared in 1896 in the subtitle of Theodore Herzl’s Zionist manifesto, Der Judenstaat: Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage (Herzl 2004).
As Browning puts it: “While the Nazis never wanted openly to admit it and struggled against such a conclusion for months, it turned out that, at least temporarily, consolidating Lebensraum in the incorporated territories and solving the Jewish question were not complementary but competing goals” (Browning 2004, 43).
Translation slightly modified for clarity. See also the remark of a subordinate of Hans Frank, Governor-General of unincorporated Poland, to which the Jews were to be deported: “In the end one cannot simply starve them to death” (Browning 2004, 71).
As Christopher Dieckmann writes: “The murder of the Jewish men was seen as a way of executing the order to ‘liquidate’ the Soviet leadership stratum” (Dieckmann 2000, 249). See also Browning 2004, 259: “As in preinvasion memoranda and plans, German officials in the field hid ideological bias behind practical rationalizations, mostly by presenting anti-Jewish measures as part of a wider policy of ‘pacifying’ the occupied area.” See also Browning 2004, 110: “Both (Soviet commissars and Soviet Jews) would have to be eliminated by the onrushing Einsatzgruppen, for ultimately they were perceived as one—the political and biological manifestations of the same Jewish-Bolshevik menace.”
See Browning 2004, 353: “Bach-Zelewski claimed to have told a shaken Himmler after the latter had witnessed a relatively small execution in Minsk: ‘Look at the eyes of the men in this commando, how deeply shaken they are! These men are finished for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics or savages!’” In his post-war testimony Bach-Zelewski also claimed that Himmler “after witnessing the execution in Minsk on August 15 had asked [Einsatzgruppe B commander Arthur] Nebe to consider other killing methods” (Browning 2004, 354).
The term ‘euthanasia’ is in quotation marks because showing mercy to the victims was not in practice the regulating goal of the program (Friedlander 1995, 87).
The first gassings of Jews as such—that is, simply because they were Jews—were carried out on German soil in 1940 as a relatively small part of this “euthanasia” program (Friedlander 1995). Whereas non-Jewish handicapped patients were selected for “euthanasia” after a cursory medical evaluation, Jewish patients were sent to the medical killing centers in exclusively Jewish transports on no medical pretext whatsoever. The fact remains, however, that these transports accounted for a small fraction of what have conservatively been estimated as 70,000 murders of the ill and handicapped (Friedlander 1995, 109), in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, using procedures like those subsequently used at the killing centers in the East, which had not yet been planned, much less constructed. Shortly before Hitler ordered a stop to the “euthanasia” program (which continued by other means nonetheless), physicians previously involved in that program had begun to make periodic visits to concentration camps, where they selected inmates to be transported to the medical killing centers, for the purpose of reducing the number of potential troublemakers and “useless eaters”—that is, inmates unable to work (Friedlander 1995, 142 ff.). Concentration-camp inmates became the sole victims of these centers after the “stop order” was issued, in August of 1941. Here again, the selections included Jews as such, but only as one group among many who were selected for this “special treatment” (Friedlander 1995, 144). (Killings of the handicapped continued by other means, in what was called “wild” euthanasia. See Friedlander 1995, Chapter 8.)
In popular understanding of the Third Reich, the concentration camps—which held a vast range of criminals, political prisoners, prisoners of war, so-called ‘asocials’, and foreign slave-laborers, as well as Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals—are typically conflated with the death camps where the latter groups were collected solely for the purpose of being murdered.
These centers were preceded in operation only by Chelmno, which used gas vans of a kind that had been developed for the Einsatzgruppen and were operated by an officer who had used such vans to kill the handicapped in Poland (Friedlander 1995, 286, 139).
See Friedlander’s description: “First, subterfuge was used to fool the victims upon arrival with the appearance of normality. In the euthanasia centers, physicians and nurses checking medical files made the killing center look like a regular hospital, while in the camps of Operation Reinhard, the trappings of the reception area and the welcoming speech by a staff member made the killing center look like a labor camp. The victims were told in both places that they had to take showers for hygienic reasons, and the gas chambers were disguised as shower rooms, while the belongings of the victims were carefully collected and registered to maintain the illusion of normality. [. . .] Second, in both the Reich and the East, the victims were crowded into the gas chamber, and their corpses were burned immediately after they had been killed” (Friedlander 1995, 300).
This phrase comes from Adolf Eichmann’s testimony about a conversation with Heydrich in late summer 1941 (Cesarani 2004, 91). Historians generally agree that Hitler’s order was not in writing; they disagree as to when it was issued.
See especially the narrative of the deportation from Hungary in Chapter Six of Cesarani (2004), 159–199.
Starvation of the Soviet population was also an element of German military strategy, which specified that two-thirds of the army was to be “provisioned entirely from the East” by taking food from the mouths of the local population (Dieckmann 2000, 253).
A translation of Kremer’s diary is published in KL Auschwitz as Seen by the SS, published by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim (Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum 1996, ISBN 83-85047-32-8). Selections from Kremer’s diaries can also be found in Klee et al. (1991), 256–268. See p. 296 for biographical details.
When Kremer was invited to attend a training session for propaganda lecturers on “population policy” and “race hygiene”, he wrote: “It may only have been the result, among many other motives, of the desire to stop my scientific work. If only people could see behind the scenes of the scheming university flunkeys who are my ill-wishers. I have always been a thorn in their flesh because of my work and of the fact that I was the first to join the party” (Entry of May 24, 1943; Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum 1996, 181). Elsewhere, Kremer rails against the stupidity of the scientific establishment who “have got themselves into a blind alley by accepting the concepts of leucocytes and phagocytes; they will never be able to escape from their impasse without the radical interference of an outsider”—namely, Kremer himself. He proposes to write a book demonstrating that the cells classified as leucocytes and phagocytes are simply the remnants of decaying tissues that have found their way into the bloodstream (Entry of December 26th, 1943; Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum 1996, 187).
Entry of June 20, 1943; Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum 1996, 182.
See these diary entries: “Extracted and fixed fresh live material from liver, spleen and pancreas” (Entry of Nov. 13, 1942; Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum 1996, 172); “Was present at a punishment and 11 executions. Have taken fresh liver, spleen and pancreas material after an injection of pilocarpine” (Entry of Oct. 17, 1942; Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum 1996, 169); “First frost this night, the afternoon again sunny and warm. Fresh material of liver, spleen and pancreas taken from an abnormal individual” (Entry of Oct. 15, 1942; Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum 1996, 169); “Fresh material (liver, spleen and pancreas) from a Jewish prisoner of 18, extremely atrophic, who had been photographed before. As usual, the liver and spleen were preserved in Carnoy, and the pancreas in Zenker (prisoner no. 68030)” (Entry of Nov. 13, 1942; Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum 1996, 172). Kremer kept this material, and after the war he thought of doing research on it: “I am [. . .] thinking of establishing a small laboratory of my own out of my modest means, once the war is over. Basically, I only need badly a microtome, since I have brought materials from Auschwitz which absolutely must be worked on. I shall put my thoughts in a book, perhaps under the title, Retrogression of Tissues or Histolysis, and so my views shall at least be preserved” (Entry of Dec. 26, 1943; Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum 1996, 186).
Kremer’s research interest in the victims is discussed by Robert Jay Lifton (Lifton 2000, 292–293). Lifton quotes one of Kremer’s colleagues as testifying that “Kremer looked upon the prisoners as so many rabbits”.
Kremer’s reaction to the sight of the gas-chambers is echoed by one of Robert J. Lifton’s informants: “There was no one in Germany or in the whole world who had not heard Hitler’s and Streicher’s proclamation that the Jews had to be exterminated [vernichtet]. . . . Everybody heard that. And everybody ‘heard past it’ [vorbeigehört; ‘didn’t take it in’]. Because nobody believed that such a reality would come into practice. . . . And suddenly one is confronted with the fact that what one used to, my God!, take for propaganda verbiage [Propagandageschwätz] is now totally, completely, wholly [ganz, ganz, ganz] matter-of-fact [trocken; literally, ‘dry’] and strategically concrete, that it is being realized [verwirklicht] with 100-percent strategy. That above all shook one. That one did not foresee [but] . . . you knew if, and all of a sudden you are standing in front of it. Did you really know it?” (Lifton 2000, 204–205; elipses and interpolations in the original).
See also this quotation from one of Lifton’s informants: “There were numerous discussions: Should one gas more or should one [gas fewer]? Where is the limit to be set? That is, if you take more old people into the camps, then there are more diseased people, and that, for many reasons, is the worse problem is they are in the working camp . . . where there is only so much possibility [for keeping limited numbers of people alive]. . . .” (Lifton 2000, 176–177).
As Lifton’s informant Dr. B. put it: “What is better for him [the prisoner]—whether he croaks [verreckt] in shit or goes to heaven in [a cloud of] gas? That settled the whole matter for the initiates [Eingeweihten]” (Lifton 2000, 196).
This quotation is from a prisoner who worked with the SS physicians in the capacity of a “nonmedical scientist.”
There appears to be an error in the dating of these entries by Klee, Dressen, Riess. The entries appear in the order shown, which is clearly the order of the narrative, but they bear dates in reverse order.
See also: “The men had the day off today, some of them went hunting. I had to work here. Thanks and praise is sure to come my way. The above-mentioned Sturmbannführer went off hunting once again with his five men. The work is going ahead well. I have just been informed by the Haupsturmbannführer that I am to take over the training of the militia. Apparently, I have the right attitude” (Entry of July 21; Klee et al. 1991, 100).
In his entry of July 9 Landau notes: “If only I had post from my Trude. During the day when I am buried in work it is all right but during the night the loneliness and inactivity simply make me despair” (Klee et al. 1991, 94–5). What Landau might have felt about his immediate circumstances—that they could undermine his faith in humanity—he felt instead about this distant figure: “If she, who has come to mean so much to me, disappointed me I would be completely devastated. I think that I would lose my belief in humanity right up to the day I died” (Klee et al. 1991, 103).
At another point, Landau says, “I’m quite happy to play at being master builder and architect [. . .]” (Entry of July 20, Klee et al. 1991, 99).
Landau was tried and sentenced to life in prison by the Landesgericht Stuttgart in 1963 (Klee et al. 1991, 298).
Kretschmer’s letters appear in Klee et al. (1991), 163–171. The date of Kretschmer’s enrollment in the party is here listed as 1949, which is obviously a misprint.
Compare the case of the Mafioso introduced by G.A. Cohen in his commentary on Christine Korsgaard’s Sources of Normativity (Cohen 1996, 183–184). See also Korsgaard’s reply (Korsgaard 1996, 256–258). The Mafioso considers the Mafia ethos as a law for himself creating obligations the violation of which would amount to a loss of his practical identity. Korsgaard takes the objection seriously; she rejects explicitly the “easy way out”, namely to claim simply that reflection would have led the Mafioso to recognize the immorality of his role and to give it up. She admits with respect to the Mafioso that “[T]here is a sense in which these obligations are real—not just psychologically but normatively” (Korsgaard 1996, 257). When we say that Kretschmer had a consistent normative framework, we do not go as far as Korsgaard; that is, we do not mean that Kretschmer’s normative framework yielded genuine obligations.
Herman’s text does not offer this hypothesis, and she has pointed out to us that it is not what she had in mind: “My thought in the paper was that they had available to them a richer culture fully capable of setting up a skeptical challenge to received views, and that it was sufficient and sufficiently available to make them responsible for their false quasi-empirical beliefs.” (Personal correspondence)
To be sure, citizens of the Third Reich could get it right, despite the force of the socially provided understandings. However, they didn’t escape that force by relying on the familiar forms that moral thinking usually takes. Those forms had become unreliable, as Arendt points out:
[A]ll those who were fully qualified in matters of morality and held them in the highest esteem [. . .] proved not only to be incapable of learning anything; but worse, yielding easily to temptation, they most convincingly demonstrated through their application of traditional concepts and yardsticks during and after the fact, how inadequate these had become, how little ... they had been framed or intended to be applied to conditions as they actually arose. (Arendt 2003a, 25)
Thus, the ones who got it right were not guided by moral rules:
Those few who were still able to tell right from wrong went really only by their own judgments, and they did so freely; there were no rules to be abided by, under which the particular cases with which they were confronted could be subsumed. They had to decide each instance as it arose, because no rules existed for the unprecedented. (Arendt 1994, 295)
It was not only moral rules that were unreliable; moral sentiments, too, could not be trusted, because they had been misinterpreted and misdirected):
[T]he problem was how to overcome not so much [the front-line perpetrators’] conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler—who was apparently rather strongly afflicted with these instinctive reactions himself—was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders! (Arendt 1994, 130)
Himmler’s “trick” is discussed at some length by Jonathan Bennett (Bennett 1974). Also relevant here are interviews with “rescuers” after the War, many of whom failed or even refused to describe their actions in moral terms. See, e.g., Halter (1998); Onliner and Onliner (1988); Block and Drucker (1992); Onliner (2004). One of the most common explanations offered by rescuers was simply this: “It was the normal thing to do.” Here are some relevant quotations: “To give a hand to someone who needs help? [. . .] But . . . that’s only normal!” (Halter 1998, 5); “I thought it was something quite natural. We knew we must help these people. It is not even pity, it’s normal, that’s all” (Halter 1998, 35); see also Halter (1998, 52, 158, 238, 291); Block and Drucker (1992, 9); Onliner (2004, 50, 88); “I think I reacted spontaneously, because I am like that” Halter (1998), 51; “You see a child, you see how, ... in the street, in the station, everything is refused, everything except death—and in the early morning light this child looks at you with his big eyes, with enormous eyes: what do you do? I did it, that’s all.” (Halter 1998, 74); “I never spent my time asking why I did all that. I did it, that’s all” (Halter 1998, 109); see also: “[In response to the question ‘Why did you decide to help?’] I decided nothing. A man knocked on my door. He said he was in danger. I asked him to stay, and he stayed till the end of the war” (Halter 1998, 108); “I cannot give you any reasons. It was not a question of reasoning. Let’s put it this way. There were people in need and we helped them . . . . People always ask how we started, but we didn’t start. It started. And it started very gradually. We never gave it much thought” (Onliner and Onliner 1988, 216); “I don’t know exactly why I helped. It’s just the kind of person I am” (Block and Drucker 1992, 232).
See also Arendt’s remark: “On nothing, perhaps, has civilized jurisprudence prided itself more than on this taking into account of the subjective factor. Where this intent is absent, where, for whatever reasons, even reasons of moral insanity, the ability to distinguish between right and wrong is impaired, we feel no crime has been committed. We refuse, and consider as barbaric, the propositions ‚that a great crime offends nature, so that the very earth cries out for vengeance; that evil violates a natural harmony which only retribution can restore; that a wronged collectivity owes a duty to the moral order to punish the criminal’ (Yosal Rogat). And yet I think it is undeniable that it was precisely on the ground of these long-forgotten propositions that Eichmann was brought to justice to begin with, and that they were, in fact, the supreme justification for the death penalty” (Arendt 1994, 277).
In the German original: “Dennoch ist Auschwitz das Ergebnis von Tausenden von Schritten, unternommen von gewöhnlichen Menschen, die anders hätten handeln können. Sie haben es wirklich nicht so gemeint – und das ist auch wirklich egal. Umso schlimmer für die Absicht” (Neiman 2008, 47).
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Acknowledgments
This paper was presented to the faculty workshop at the Institute for Law and Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Our thanks to the organizer, Claire Finkelstein, and to Paul Guyer and Adrienne Martin, among other participants. Thanks also to the participants in the Remarque seminar at Remarque Institute of NYU. The paper was also presented at the colloquium of the Department of Philosophy of the University of Graz. We thank Lukas Meyer for organizing the colloquium and especially Richard Hofmann for his commentary. For comments and discussion on other occasions, we are grateful to: Annette Baier, Carolyn Benson, Paul Bloomfield, Raymond Critch, David Dyzenhaus, Matthew Evans, Julian Fink, Christian Fleck, Barbara Herman, Don Herzog, Tony Judt, Christina Kleiser, Peter Koller, Anton Leist, Thomas Nagel, David Owens, Joseph Raz, Sam Scheffler, Eric Schwitzgebel, Nishi Shah, Sharon Street, Matthew Silverstein, David Sussman. Our research is in part funded by the ‘Zukunftsfonds der Republik Österreich’. Finally, we thank Jeff Sebo for extensive research assistance.
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Pauer-Studer, H., Velleman, J.D. Distortions of Normativity. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 14, 329–356 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-010-9246-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-010-9246-7