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participants to converge in Saint-Amand. He asks whether Francis
Bout de l'An, a former leftist and now a committed fascist and member
of the French branch of the Waffen SS, and who was at the root of the
massacre, was wrong in expecting the maquisards to free the hostages
(including his own wife), whether individual beings are more than the
ideology they serve, to what extent lofty political objectives disguise
pride and vanity, and how group psychology may override military
strategy. Mostly, he examines this episode as a moral paradigm, all
along pondering the nature of sacrifice, responsibility, and suffering in
times of civil war. Todorov only implies that once again innocent Jews
became sacrificial lambs, but does state that "Lecussan [who instigated
the massacre] is not an anomaly, a raging sadist...who would profit
from circumstances
to
assuage his instincts. On the contrary, he is the
logical product of a system." As Todorov puts each participant to the
moral tests that point to their dilemmas and maps out the step-by-step
decisions each of them faced, he tells us that acts taking place in the
public sphere cannot be judged exclusively in terms of the intentions
that motivated them, and that, ultimately, ethics of responsibility must
override ethics of conviction.
But Lawrence Langer convincingly argues that polarities between
morality and immorality "disintegrate in a place like Auschwitz." He
points out that Todorov, by speaking interchangeably of Nazi Germany
and Stalin's Russia, by universalizing the Holocaust, and by trying to
schematize mass murder, turns the Holocaust into "little more than a
drastic example of this modern conflict, and once we understand that,
we will be in a better position to combat the totalitarian form of sup–
pression of which the Holocaust was a not so singular example."
Moreover, by shifting the blame onto the Nazis' bureaucratic system,
Todorov inadvertently aligns himself with the Germans who argued that
they had to follow orders. However, as Langer reminds us, there was no
special order, for instance, to the SS man who tore a baby in two in front
of its mother, or
to
those who buried their victims alive after having shot
them: these were ultra-sadistic acts by individuals. And as Christopher
Browning in
Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion
101
and the Final Solu–
tion in Poland
(1991) showed, and as Daniel Goldhagen elaborated in
Hitler's Willing Executioners
(1996),
many more Germans (and Poles
and Slavs?) were involved in the killing of Jews than previously had been
suspected-whether or not they claimed to have followed orders. Brown–
ing's study of Police Battalion
101
documented that a group of men who
were not fanatic Nazis got into the habit of shooting Jews. Still, that
Browning at the end of his book wonders whether
anyone
might have
