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PARTISAN REVIEW
systems were different. There have been no suggestions that the testimony
of refugees from Nazi Germany, or of Nazi concentration camp sur–
vivors, should be treated with reservations, that they were not com–
pletely dependable or that they were a biased source of information. By
contrast, the social scientific value of corresponding reports by refugees
from Communist societies was often questioned, as for example by
Noam Chomsky who vigorously disputed the credibility of refugees from
Pol Pot's Cambodia.
Few, if any, scholars were advised to constrain their moral indigna–
tion while studying Nazism; students of communist systems were regularly
cautioned to curb their moral impulses and were admonished when they
allowed them to find expression in their work. Students of Nazi Ger–
many were not warned against the danger of imposing their own, eth–
nocentric, "Western" values, or urged to refrain from becoming judg–
mental.
Researchers and writers on Nazism did not feel compelled to silence
the belief that Nazi leaders and functionaries were deeply flawed human
beings, nor did they avoid hinting at the possibility that they were often
possessed of a deformed psyche or of specific psychopathologies. (To be
sure there was also the "banality of evil" approach pioneered by Hannah
Arendt, but that too was confined to the realm of Nazism.) In any event
inquiries into the psychology and personality of Nazi leaders and activists
were common, and unlike similar probings of the personality of Com–
munist leaders, generally treated with more respect. Hitler was generally
perceived as self-evidently demagogic, undignified, and uneducated, fur–
ther and finally delegitimating himself and his regime by suicide. Leaders
of Communist systems succeeded in presenting a more dignified,
thoughtful image; they rarely ranted and raved in public, and when they
did, as for instance Castro, these prolonged exercises in demagogy were
somehow overlooked. Communist leaders also succeeded at times and up
to a point in projecting an image of themselves as intellectuals in power,
philosopher kings.
While Western intellectuals and the educated public (and even the
less educated, exposed to the mass media) acquired some knowledge of
the major misdeeds of Nazism and the Holocaust in particular, it is un–
likely that one in a thousand Americans ever heard of Kolyma or
Vorkuta (Soviet prison camps where millions perished) or can recognize
the names of Beria, Yagoda or Yezhov, whose activities corresponded to
those of Eichmann or Himmler, names more readily recognized by
Americans. And if most Americans have some idea of what
SS
or
Gestapo
stand for, it is quite unlikely that
GPU
or
NKVD
mean anything to
