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The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania
© 1978, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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It seems to us that it would be inaccurate to suppose
that this indifference covered a tacit opposition. The citizen participates in
an event as something inevitable because the one in whom he has confidence
energetically proclaims it necessary.
This state of mind characterizes,
too, with slight differences, the personalities profoundly engaged in the
Hitlerian movement. Speer, Minister of the War Economy, and one of the
principal figures of the Third Reich, wrote in his memoirs:
"I have always been surprised by the slight
trace which Hitler's anti-Semitic remarks have left on me... The hatred which
Hitler professed for the Jews seemed so natural to me at the time that it did
not make much of an impression on me." In another passage he wrote
that he did not feel
"personally concerned by the hunt for Jews,
Free-Masons, Social-Democrats and Jehovah's Witnesses about whom I heard in my
entourage." He thought that it was sufficient for him "not to get
mixed up in that." (12)
Such an
attitude explains that those who executed the Hitlerian action against the Jews
had not to feel marked by the horror of their task. They were attached with the
other artisans of the Third Reich to a single and unique work, albeit strictly
compartmentalized, a work which the Reich created. An Eichmann would certainly
not have succeeded in the gigantic task of Speer. Speer would probably have
been neither able nor willing to support the vision of horror with which
Eichmann's activity was impregnated. But both of them knew that the person who
commanded the ensemble and in whom they had confidence saw the necessity for
the work of each of them. There was no passion for the object of the mission,
but only for its accomplishment. Speer expressed this in his memoirs:
"I have the impression that this desperate
race that I was running with time, this look of a madman that I kept
perpetually fixed on the figures of production and on efficiency curves, had
smothered all consideration and all human sentiments in me... What bothers me
much more is rather that I did not see in the faces of the internees (in the
concentration camps) the reflection of the physionomy [sic] of the regime,
whose existence I was striving with the rage of a maniac to prolong during
these weeks and these months." (13)
In contrast to the case of Speer, master of Hitler's war economy,
the passion of zeal was in the case of the chiefs of the "final solution"
inseparable from the direct and constant vision of this physionomy [sic] of the
regime, given that it was in themselves that the expression of the atrocity of
Hitlerism culminated.
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The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania
© 1978, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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Page 6 |
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