THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS
It is not surprising that those who made terror the actual foun–
dation of their power should know how to exploit it through publicity
and propaganda. The surprising thing is that the psychological and
political efi'ects of this propaganda could survive the collapse of the
Nazi regime and the opening up of the concentration camps. One
would think that the eye-witness reports and, to an even greater degree,
the works of ordered recollection which substantiate one another and
speak directly to the reader, in Rousset's case most persuasively, should
have punctured the propagandist claim that such things were absurd
horror stories. This, as we
all
know, is not the case. Despite over–
whelming proofs, anyone speaking or writing .about concentration
camps is still regarded as suspect; and if the speaker has resolutely re–
turned to the world of the living, he himself is often .assailed by
doubts with regard to his own truthfulness, as though he had mistaken
a nightmare for reality.
This doubt of people concerning themselves and the reality of
their own experience only reveals what the Nazis have always known:
that men determined to commit crimes will find it expedient to or–
ganize them on the vastest, most improbable scale. Not only because
this renders all punishments provided by the legal system inadequate
and absurd; but because the very immensity of the crimes guarantees
·that the murderers who proclaim their innocence with
all
manner of
lies will be more readily believed than the victims who tell the truth.
The Nazis did not even consider it necessary to keep this discovery
to themselves. Hitler circulated millions of copies of his book in which
he stated that to be successful, a lie must be enormous-which did not
prevent people from believing him as, similarly, the Nazis' proclama–
tions, repeated ad nauseam, that the Jews would be exterminated
like bedbugs (i.e., with poison gas), prevented anybody from
not
believing them.
There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically
incredible by means of liberal rationalizations. In each one of us, there
lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. We
attempt to understand elements in present or recollected experience
that simply surpass our powers of understanding. We attempt to
classify as criminal a thing which, as we all feel, no such category
was ever intended to cover. What meaning has the concept of murder
when we are confronted with the mass production of corpses? We
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