HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES

FURTHER LEARNING

Presented by Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE)

PLEASE NOTE: These materials are intended to be read after you experience the production.

PHOTOGRAPHING THE REICH

When we see an old daguerreotype or photograph, we're often struck by the dour, almost hostile expressions, the distinct feeling that these people took no joy in having their picture taken. Such an affect often stemmed from the clunky cameras used in early photography, which might require a person to sit for 10 minutes or more with little to do but face down a technician under a dark cloth. That all changed in 1925 with the advent of the Leica I in Germany, a 35mm portable camera. Now a photo could actually be a snapshot of a carefree moment, a frozen image of a second in a person's life. As photographic theorist and literary critic

Roland Barthes summed up the power of modern photo-taking:

“What is the content of the photographic message? What does the photograph transmit?
By definition, the scene itself, the literal reality.”

But the invention afforded another opportunity: the photograph as performance. Though without our modern filters and tuners, the quick snapshot meant people could mold themselves for the camera, crack an expression, freeze in a gesture, or otherwise convey whatever emotion they wanted future viewers to see. Every Leica photo was a story told as much by the model as by the camera.

Nazi ideology promoted the idea that, with the removal of undesirables, Aryans could become a pure, joyous race. Individual Germans knew this, absorbed it from newspaper articles, films, and familial conversations. Just as today a selfie or vacation photo can be an advertisement for our own ideal life, this new easy photography from within the Reich points as much toward a hoped-for future as to an existing present. Where does performance end and momentary joy begin? Can the two be disentwined?

Post-Leica I, photography captures a moment in time. More than this, it separates one second in one place, bounded by the frame, from all others. Just outside could be anyone or anything—or nothing. Someone chose what to include and what to exclude. Each person chooses this smirk or that gesture. “[D]espite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness,” writes Susan Sontag, “the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience.”

As we read these pictures of Auschwitz, we must ask ourselves:

OSTRAUM, THE HOLOCAUST,
AND THE THOUSAND YEAR REICH

When we look back now, the rise of Nazism seems like a forgone conclusion. In school, and even from our families for some, we hear about the quick rise and begrudging fall of Adolf Hitler and his genocidal movement, the undeniable bravery it took to defeat a hate-filled party imbued with historical necessity. But this is only true in retrospect. In reality, the rise of Nazism was a process filled with setbacks, serendipities, and unexpected turns. When we view the Third Reich as a foregone conclusion, one that required no apathy or complicity from everyday people, we misread, fall into Sontag's false reality trap, as if the image were the thing, and as if lives and memories were static rather than dynamic.

In 1923, Adolf Hitler first attempted to take power by leading a putsch and a half-cocked rush to Berlin, modeled on Benito Mussolini's famous March on Rome. It failed. While incarcerated, he finished writing his autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf, a work rife with the hate that would later characterize the regime. Hitler's popularity among locals in Munich, including with the judge at his two trials, Georg Neithardt, led to few consequences despite this violent attempt to seize power. He began to believe that the democratic path, coupled with the tacit and explicit support of prominent professionals and leaders, would prove a better way. He was right. From the late 1920s onward, regular elections produced unstable governing coalitions. At the same time, Hitler's party exploited this instability and continued its rise, tailoring its approach to individual voting blocs, including farmers suffering from falling prices and inflation, anticommunists, antisemites, and nationalists disturbed by defeat in World War I. In 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler, head of the largest party in parliament, chancellor. A career soldier and statesman, Hindenburg thought he could control the new leader. He was wrong.

Four weeks later, the Reichstag or parliament building burned. A young Dutch communist was blamed, though Hitler may have secretly ordered the arson. The shock to the nation allowed the Nazis to push for the suspension of most civil liberties. What we now think of as the Nazizeit, or Nazi Period, had begun. German professionals, by and large, submitted to the new project. As historian Konrad H. Jarausch writes, apathy and desperation as much as ideology smoothed Hitler's rise to power:

Acquiescence meant that a consolidation of power followed. In 1934, the Nazis purged prominent members of the Sturmabteiling (SA), which had previously acted as the party's shock troops in beating Jews and other undesirables. Only four years later on the night of November 9-10, 1938, the Nazis led and allowed pogroms, property destruction, and the burning of synagogues. These events are now known as Kristallnacht. This attack on German Jews came long before there was an Auschwitz or extermination camps. And yet, the violent assault is a prelude to what we now know transpired. What could have taken the Nazis from these first steps to their so-called “Final Solution”?

Aktion T4, a concerted campaign of forced euthanasia for the disabled and chronically infirm inspired by early 20th-century American experiments in eugenics, furnishes a key precursor. Led by soldier and former philosophy student Philipp Bouhler and Hitler's personal physician Karl Brandt, this program, which began in 1939, killed between 275,000-300,000 people in an effort to improve the Reich's “racial hygiene.” As World War II began, the drive to clear out eastern territories grew, leading the chemist and SS functionary August Becker to design gas vans that could be used to kill large numbers of people quickly and efficiently with carbon monoxide. A means to “scientific” mass murder had finally been invented.

After 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, the Nazis accelerated this policy of “efficient” murder. If Hitler's Reich was really to last one thousand years, it would need space, space to the East of what was then Germany, on which to settle and proliferate the Aryan race. They called this land Ostraum or “Eastern Space,” the land which, as Nazi economist and head of the Reichsbank Walther Funk put it, was “rich in raw materials and not yet opened up [to] Europe, [it] will be Europe's promising colonial land.” The Nazis began removing the local population, especially its Jews, vastly overpopulating the existing forced labor camp system, and leading the authorities to build more and more.

AUSCHWITZ: PLACE AND PEOPLE

Set against lush greenery in the warmer months and blanketing snow in winter, the complex makes for a world of contrasts—the peaceful rest of arboreal Solahütte and the wintry chill of the starving masses.

Just as millions lived and died in barracks and gas chambers, so did administrators, soldiers, doctors, and other professionals live, get sick, and recover within the complex. Their commute could take only minutes.

Auschwitz was, like any such marvel of human engineering, insured. An insurance company forced the camp to build this cistern to keep their coverage up-to-date.

Just as mundane issues like insurance and construction continued through the Holocaust, so did normal people, those whose service was required to keep the sprawling complex up-and-running. What sort of men could participate in such a thing so directly, so intimately?

OSWALD POHL

RUDOLPH HÖSS

RICHARD BAER

KARL-FRIEDRICH HÖCKER

FRANZ HÖSSLER

JOSEF MENGELE

EDUARD WIRTHS

JOHANN KREMER

HEINZ BAUMKÖTTER

A pastry chef, a warehouse worker, a bank teller, physicians, soldiers—these are but a few of those who bear direct responsibility for the crimes committed at Auschwitz. None of them woke up one day and committed themselves to genocide. Some were gung-ho; others claimed merely to have done what they'd been told. Does it matter? What does it mean that one's training—whether in labor, the professions, or elsewhere—does not necessarily mark one out for resistance, but rather, so often for complicity in some of the Nazi's worst crimes?

COMPLICITY: BIG AND SMALL

Complicity comes in many shapes and sizes. Very few had to make selections at Auschwitz. Fewer still had to undertake medical experimentation on live human subjects in the names of science and racial hygiene. Fewest of all are those who headed entire concentration and extermination camps. Indeed, almost everyone involved with Auschwitz was involved with the SS, since they ran the camp, meaning that their complicity is bound up in membership in among the Reich's most vicious and well-known organizations.

But what about those who lent their intellects and professional skills to the Nazis, those who offered their secretarial and administrative skills to the party, those who—above all—simply didn't stand up and say “no”?

Take Fritz Thyssen, a businessman in the steel industry from one of Germany's most prominent industrialist families. In the early days of Hitler's rise, he offered his full-throated support, largely because of his fervent nationalism and fear of Communism. His monetary backing and influence were such that he even played a role in convincing Hitler to carry out the Night of Long Knives. But Thyssen opposed the outbreak of World War II and the mistreatment of German Catholics in the mid-30s. As a result, he was put in a concentration camp, survived the war, and died in 1951.

Günther Quandt was an industrialist who got his start in the textile industry, later branching into a variety of sectors like weapons, ammunition, batteries, potash mining, and even automobile production (he held stakes in both BMW and what would become Mercedes-Benz). His factories benefitted from the use of Nazi slave labor, with one factory in Hannover even containing an execution area. His connections to the burgeoning Reich's elite were such that his ex-wife married Josef Goebbels (with Hitler as the best man) in 1931. After the war, he was found to be no more than a “fellow traveler” and released. Quandt died on vacation in Cairo less than a decade later.

How hard is it to be a “fellow traveler” anyway? And how difficult might it be for an industrialist seeking to diversify to look the other way when free labor is offered? How often do we already look the other way now?

Complicity at the highest levels of power can feel even more remote. Hans-Joachim Caesar, for example, was a lawyer and financial official who served the Reichsbank in various capacities, beginning before the war and continuing right up until the end. During his time at the bank, he was responsible for the confiscation of Jewish property and the overseeing of foreign-held assets within Nazi-controlled lands. He died in 1990, having assisted in enriching the Nazi state, refusing to leave his post when Hitler came to power.

Can one do any “good” by remaining within such a system? Eduard Wirths is supposed to have tried. Fritz Thyssen protested what he had enabled.

One of these men was a doctor, the other a businessman. If you are a physician or a businessperson, a lawyer or a banker, do you see yourself in your colleagues of the Nazi period? Is it easier to imagine yourself accidentally enabling the rise of evil like Fritz Thyssen than it is to imagine making selections like the good-natured Dr. Eduard Wirths? Why? If your fellow professionals could become so deeply involved, what would stop you?

“Helferinnen” means “female helpers,” a title that in itself occludes and diminishes responsibility. Their very name implies that they were ancillary, just assistants. But how many executives could function without assistants? How well could any of us do our jobs without the vast array of support staff who make our work possible? How many of us form the lifeblood of our companies or professions in ways that are often mundane and thankless?

Something as simple as relaying an update on supplies or informing the doctors the trains had arrived expedited the killing without making one have to see anyone die. It kept extermination “on schedule” without the need to think of concentration camp life as anything more than a job. This was less personal than the work of the doctors, but was it any less “necessary” to the Nazi war machine?

Matters are made more complicated by the freedom from traditional constraints associated with the joining up as a female helper with the SS.

They performed for the camera like anyone. But there must have been great joy, even liberation, in getting to get out and serve, to be a part of something removed from the domestic space. Through such programs, the Nazis offered a kind of freedom, appealed to a very real desire for independence and participation. Is this a co-opted feminism?

We ought to ask ourselves: which needs or wants of ours could be converted, could make us parts of some evil whole, a system in which we could ignore our doubts and forgive ourselves because of the remoteness of our cooperation?

Whether we identify with Wirths or Caesar or Melita Maschmann of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, we must recognize how many hands and brains, wits and muscles it takes to empower tragedy and evil. No one person creates it. No one person can put it to an end. The Holocaust was a process rather than an event; it was built over time on the assent of millions. Staring that down—accepting it—allows us to make our conception of the Reich more than a static photograph. It invites us to consider the dynamics that lie just out of frame.

EVIL: WHY AND HOW

U.S Occupation of Haiti

(1915 - 1934)

3,250 - 20,500 Deaths

Imperial Japanese War

(1937 - 1945)

3-14 M Deaths

Mau Mau Uprising

(1952 - 1960)

20,000+ Deaths

Bangladesh Genocide

(1971)

300K- 3M Deaths

Darfur Genocide

(2003 - Present)

80 - 500K Deaths

Rohingya Genocide

(2016 - Present)

25K+ Deaths

Rwandan Genocide

(1994)

491 - 800K Deaths

This chart does not compare these conflicts and genocides; rather, it deliberately juxtaposes events with vastly different death counts, all of which required acts of complicity from everyday people, from professionals, from laborers—in a word, from everyone. It also only accounts for mortalities. As with the Holocaust, we should keep in mind that casualties and traumas are lifelong and even intergenerational for survivors of unjust wars, genocides, and other acts of evil.

What sorts of “everyday” jobs or professional decisions lie behind these events? What sorts of “decent” or even “good” motivations might these people have had in their own minds? What sort of biases or stereotypes might people have spread or used as justifications for their decisions? For every overtly cruel person inflicting pain, how many “helpers” are needed to make that moment possible?

How can silence or a refusal to listen be a form of “help”? Is evil manifest in one cruel act or in the network of thoughts and actions that make that transparently grievous act possible?

When asked why he worked to save victims during the Rwandan Genocide, Italian businessman and diplomat Pierantonio Costa recalled: “I just responded to my conscience. What must be done must be done.” What prevents us from responding to our consciences? Above all, what allows us to excuse what should be done when faced with evil?