The Statement Game

Primo Levi

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

But most Germans didn’t know because they didn’t want to know. Because, indeed, they wanted not to know. It is certainly true that the German people, as a whole, did not even try to resist. In Hitler’s Germany a particular code was widespread—those who knew did not talk; those who did not know did not ask questions; those who did ask questions received no answers. Shutting his mouth, his eyes, and his ears, the typical German citizen built for himself the illusion of not knowing, hence of not being an accomplice to the things taking place in front of his very door.

(Interview TNR)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek justification for his actions.

Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and other’s eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.

Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.

Goldhagen, Daniel. Hitler’s Willing Executioners : Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. 1st Vintage books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.

Goldhagen develops the view that societies foster certain axiomatic principles, ideas and assumptions that are unquestioned and even unrecognized. He sees a new such axiom developing in Germany in the 19th century.

Pages 71, 72

“Klemens Felden…has done a content analysis of fifty-one prominent antisemtic writers and publications that appeared between 1861 and 1895 in Germany. The findings are starling. Twenty-eight of them proposed ‘solutions’ to the ‘Jewish Problem.’ Of those, nineteen called for the physical extermination of the Jews. During this pre-genocidal era of European civilization—when consciousness of the mass human slaughter of the First and Second World Wars, let alone of genocide as an instrument of national policy, did not exist—fully two-thirds of these prominent antisemites took their beliefs to their extreme logical consequences and uttered, indeed called for, a genocidal response.”

“By the end of the nineteenth century, the view that Jews posed extreme danger to Germany and that the source of their perniciousness was immutable, namely their race, and the consequential belief that the Jews had to be eliminated from Germany were extremely widespread in German society. The tendency to consider and propose the most radical form of elimination—that is, extermination—was already strong and had been given much voice. German society continued to be thoroughly antisemitic, as it had been at the beginning of the nineteenth century, yet the nature of the transformed, modernized racial antisemitsim suggested more comprehensive, radical, even deadly ‘solutions’ to the perceived ‘Jewish Problem.’”

Lozowick, Yaacov. Hitler’s Bureaucrats: The Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil. English ed. London ; New York: Continuum, 2002.

8: As he studied the Nazi / SS bureaucracy: "I realized that this was a group of people completely aware of what they were doing, people with high ideological motivation, people of initiative and dexterity who contributed far beyond what was necessary. And there could be no doubt about it: they clearly understood that their deeds were not positive except in the value system of the Third Reich. They hated Jews and thought that getting rid of them would to Germany's good.

275: "Eichmann and his colleagues knew exactly what they were doing, did it wholeheartedly, and afterwards regretted only being caught. The word evil fits them in its full awesome sense."

Browning, Christopher. Ordinary Men : Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. 1st HarperPerennial ed., Reissued [with a new afterword by the author]. New York: HarperPerennial, 1998.

2: Police Reserve Battalion 101 was part of the Order Police sent to the Eastern Front. These were civilians who served as reservist policemen, not regular military. But in July 1942, on patrol in Poland, they received new orders.

“The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 climbed down from their trucks and assembled in a half-circle around their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, a fifty-three-year-old career policeman affectionately known by his men as ‘Papa Trapp.’ The time had come for Trapp to address the men and inform them of the assignment the battalion had received.

“Pale and nervous, with choking voice and tears in his eyes, Trapp visibly fought to control himself as he spoke. The battalion, he said plaintively, had to perform a frightfully unpleasant task. This assignment was not to his liking, indeed it was highly regrettable, but the orders came from the highest authorities. If it would make their task any easier, the men should remember that in Germany the bombs were falling on women and children.

“He then turned to the matter at hand. The Jews had instigated the American boycott that had damaged Germany, one policeman remembered Trapp saying. There were Jews in the village of Jozefow who were involved with the partisans, he explained according to two others. The battalion had now been ordered to round up these Jews. The male Jews of working age were to be separated and taken to a work camp. The remaining Jews—the women, children, and elderly—were to be shot on the spot by the battalion. Having explained what awaited his men, Trapp then made an extraordinary offer: if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he could step out.”

[Only about a dozen of the 500 men in the battalion took Trapp’s offer of removing themselves from this duty. Many men in the battalion were interviewed in the 1960s on their conduct in the war.]

72: “Most of the interrogated policemen denied that they had any choice. Faced with the testimony of others, many did not contest that Trapp had made the offer but claimed that they had not heard that part of the speech or could not remember it. A few policemen made the attempt to confront the question of choice but failed to find the words. It was a different time and place, as if they had been on another political planet, and the political values and vocabulary of the 1960s were useless in explaining the situation in which they had found themselves in 1942. Quite atypical in describing his state of mind that morning of July 13 was a policeman who admitted to killing as many as twenty Jews before quitting. ‘I thought that I could master the situation and that without me the Jews were not going to escape their fate anyway…. Truthfully I must say that at the time we didn’t reflect about it at all. Only years later did any of us become truly conscious of what had happened then…. Only later did it first occur to me that had not been right.’”

Frankl, Viktor E. Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. 3rd ed. A Touchstone Book. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984.

pp. 18-19, 63

"...each of them was nothing but a number. On their admission to the camp (at least this was the method in Auschwitz) all their documents had been taken from them, together with their other possessions. Each prisoner therefore, had had an opportunity to claim a fictitious name or profession; and for various reasons many did this. The authorities were interested only in the captives' numbers. These numbers were often tattooed on their skin, and also had to be sewn to a certain spot on the trousers, jacket, or coat. Any guard who wanted to make a charge against a prisoner just glanced at his number (and how we dreaded such glances!); he never asked for his name."

Frankl describes a transport of sick prisoners:

"If one of the sick men had died before the cart left, he was thrown on anyway--the list had to be correct. This list was the only thing that mattered. A man counted only because he had a prison number. One literally became a number: dead or alive--that was unimportant; the life of a 'number' was completely irrelevant. What stood behind that number and that life mattered even less: the fate, the history, the name of the man."

“Unforgiven: A War Criminal’s Remorse.” YouTube, October 2018, accessed Sep 3, 2021https://youtu.be/EcsUn4x_BYs

Esad Landzo, was a teenager when he was recruited as a guard at the Celebici prison camp during the Bosnian war in the 1990s. He was later tried for his actions and sentenced to prison.

While reflecting on what drove his actions, he describes the social validation he received when he became a guard at Celebici: “People start to like me. I want to be the perfect soldier...I thought if I did more than they ask me, they would be happier. So I did...I knew I would not be punished. So I let myself do more than anybody else. I was a hero then.”

(From a paper by SHU graduate student Kimberley Pate, “Humanization in Genocide,” (2021)

Nadia Murad and Jenna Krajeski, The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight against the Islamic State, First edition (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017).

In the beginning of The Last Girl, Murad relates how a militant explained why they had stolen small numbers of Yazidi-owned livestock before arriving to kill and kidnap the village members: “We wouldn’t find out why the kidnappers stole the animals-the hen, the chicks, and our two sheep-until almost two weeks later...A militant, who had helped round up all of Kocho’s residents into the village’s secondary school, later explained the kidnappings to a few of the village’s women. ‘You say we came out of nowhere, but we sent you messages,’ he said, his rifle swinging at his side. ‘When we took the hen and the chicks, it was to tell you we were going to take your women and children. When we took the ram, it was like taking your tribal leaders, and when we killed the ram, it meant we planned on killing those leaders. And the young lamb, she was your girls’.”