The Kindly Ones

It wasn’t a problem of humanity. Some people, of course, could criticize our actions in the name of religious values, but I wasn’t one of them, and in the SS there must not have been many; or in the name of democratic values, but we had moved beyond what is called democracy in Germany sometime ago. Blobel’s arguments, in fact, were not entirely idiotic: if the supreme value is the Volk, the people to which one belongs, and if the will of this Volk is embodied in a leader, then in fact, Führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft. But still it was vital to comprehend within oneself the necessity of the Führer’s orders: if one accepted them out of a simple Prussian spirit of obedience, out of a Knecht’s spirit, without understanding them and without accepting them, that is without submitting to them, then one was nothing but a sheep, a slave and not a man. When the Jew submitted to the Law, he felt that this Law lived in him, and the more terrible, hard, demanding it was, the more he loved it. National Socialism had to be that too: a living Law. Killing was a terrible thing; the reaction of the officers was a good proof of that, even if they didn’t all draw the consequences of their own reactions; and the man for whom killing was not a terrible thing, killing an armed man as well as an unarmed man, and an unarmed man as well as a woman and her child, was nothing but an animal, unworthy of belonging to a community of men. But it was possible that this terrible thing was also a necessary thing; and in that case we had to submit to this necessity. Our propaganda repeated over and over again that the Russians were Untermenschen, sub-humans; but I refused to believe that. I had interrogated captured officers, Commissars, and I saw that they too were men like us, men who wished only good, who loved their families and their country. But these Commissars and these officers had caused millions of their own fellow citizens to die, they had deported the Kulaks, starved the Ukrainian peasantry, repressed and shot the bourgeois and deviationists of all stripes. Among them were sadists and psychopaths, of course, but also kind men, honest and upright, who sincerely wanted the good of their people and of the working class; and though they had gone astray, they were still men of good faith. They too were for the most part convinced of the necessity of what they were doing, they weren’t all madmen, opportunists, and criminals like that Kieper; among our enemies too, a good and honest man could convince himself to do terrible things. What they were asking us to do now posed the same problem for us.