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given only the most generalized directive and was forced to use imagination
and originality to deal with the problems: How to organize? How to de–
ceive? How
to
transport? How to expropriate property? How to finance?
How
to
kill? How to get rid of the bodies?
The Nazi solutions were technical, "gray." But hidden behind the
grayness was a brilliant grand scheme: to transport millions of people to their
death in the shortest, simplest way possible, by means of a formula based on
a carefully calculated and measured dose of deceit, intimidation, and cunning,
and on breaking the willpower of the victims so that they would not believe
what awaited them and would not be moved to such desperate acts as
escape, resistance, or bursts of mass panic. Any display of panic was liable to
hinder the process. Therefore, euphemisms had to be used, even in internal
documents; explicit expressions had to be censored; innocent encouraging
words, such as "resettlement," "job training," "special treatment,"
"merchandise" had to be chosen. The killing itself was described by classic
anti-Semitic metaphors: Cleansing the world ofJews; cleansing the body of
parasites; cleansing the Jews of their diseases. (This last metaphor also be–
came widely current among the Jews themselves; Zionists made much use of
it.) And so the Jews were taken to be washed , to the shower that would
cleanse them so that they might "turn over a new leaf." Deep in their hearts
the Jews, too, wanted to be cleansed and to turn over a new leaf. The
shower metaphor is thus illumined by sparks of genius, far from the bureau–
cratic grayness usually attributed to the Nazis. The imagination of the mur–
derers fed on the limited imagination of the murdered. The creative
imagination of Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, and Golovenchik surpassed the
imagination of Mary Kafka and Herman Pasternak. The only remains of
Kafka and Pasternak were empty suitca es in a heap of baggage.
In
Eichmann in jerusalem,
Hannah Arendt argues that evil is not sa–
tanic and that we should not attribute to it a lofty, shadowy dimension, a ro–
mantic-demonic mysterious magic. In her words, evil is "banal." The Nazi
crime had been committed by petty bureaucrats. The killers could have been
Everyman, and only technological "mass society" and its impersonal concepts
made the achievement of the "final solution" possible. In 1938, Thomas
Mann expressed somewhat similar thoughts in an essay with the astonishing
title "Brother Hitler." Mann never repeated these words after the outbreak
of World War Two.
In Saul Bellow's
Mr. Sammler's Planet,
there is the following
conversation: " 'The idea being,' said Margotte, 'that here is no great spirit of
evil. Those people were too insignificant, Uncle. They were just ordinary
lower-class people, administrators, small bureaucrats. ... A mass society does
not produce great criminals. .. . It's like instead of a forest with enormous
