Unremittingly, mundanely evil.

A particularly chilling account of the indifference of average people during the Holocaust. This book consists mostly of letters and diary entries by average people and soldiers during WWII. One minute they are talking about how good the food served to the SS at the concentration camps was and then they're talking about how many children they executed that day. There are also short testimonies from Adolf Eichmann and Rudolf Hoess.
A must read for anyone who is interested in the Holocaust. ( )

What makes this book somewhat disturbing, is that these are just people. People who do terrible things. Even if they know in their hearts they are wrong, they do them anyway. Some enjoy their life. Some just think of it as a duty or a job. This book illustrates how easy it is for human beings to fall back into barbarism. The narratives are short and convey a kind of sick innocence. If you ever asked yourself "how could people do this", you might find an anwer here. ( )

The Good Old Days is a disturbing book. Disturbing for the mindset that it portrays. A world where Jews are considered non-human, where killing them in mass shootings can provoke physical stress (for which the German hierarchy is most solicitous), but no moral questioning, indeed quite the opposite, because of the widespread belief that this work, unpleasant though it may be, has to be done for the security and welfare not only of the Reich but of the German people. The juxtapositions are incomprehensible: one observer notes that the Jews "were not beaten or ill-treated" on their way to the murder sites, though he did remark that the bodies had not been properly covered with sand after the shootings and he notes, with some satisfaction, that this was rectified after he and fellow officers complained to headquarters.

In a small Ukrainian village all the adults were shot and children, about 90 of them ranging from 7 months to 8/9 years, were kept in a house with no water, no sanitation, no food in the summer heat. This became a scandal because visiting German soldiers "were shaken...by these unbelievable conditions and expressed their outrage over them". The soldiers, some of whom had children of their own, "expressed extreme indignation over the conditions in which the children were being kept." But in all of this, and several people wrote comments or reports on the situation, not one single person questioned the fact that the children were all to be shot, in fact, one report stated that, "Both infants and children should have been eliminated immediately in order to have avoided the inhuman agony." What galls and disturbs people is that the whole affair is mismanaged, there is a lack of leadership, and it has disturbing effects on visiting soldiers. Interestingly, one of the first people to complain about the situation is a Catholic military chaplain; his complaint is not based on any moral assessment of the situation, but again on the untidiness of the operation. Also interesting to note that this chaplain was ordained a bishop after the war. I would have thought that moral complicity in the murder of hundreds, if not thousands of men, women and children would have disqualified one from any ecclesiastical position, never mind one of more senior responsibility after the war, but perhaps it is my own weak understanding of the nuances of a theology that could countenance such a thing.

Certainly the state-sanctioned and mandated murder of people let loose a horde of sadists and murderers who unbelievingly found themselves being rewarded and feted for what civilized society would condemn. Nevertheless, some individuals went too far, and the documents describe the verdict of a military court that found an SS man guilty of excess in the cruelty that he employed in murder. But the verdict itself is chilling:

"The accused shall not be punished because of the actions against the Jews as such. The Jews have to be exterminated and none of the Jews that were killed is any great loss. Although the accused should have recognized that the extermination of the Jews was the duty of Kommandos which have been set up especially for this purpose, he should be excused for considering himself to have the authority to take part in the extermination of Jewry himself. Real hatred of the Jews was the driving motivation for the accused. In the process he let himself be drawn into committing cruel actions....which are unworthy of a German man and an SS officer."

Word fail, they are simply inadequate, to deal with this sort of thinking.

The book is also interesting in dispelling the myth of disobedience. There is simply no documented evidence, not even anecdotal evidence, of soldiers being punished, transferred to the front, much less being shot, for refusing to take part in shootings. They would be branded cowards and weaklings, and they might suffer in their promotion prospects (though this was not always the case either), but they could refuse and be assigned other duties or be transferred to other units. Not necessarily easy to do given the social and group pressures in play, but definitely possible for those who retained a conscience and had the strength to follow it.

An excellent companion book to this one is Christopher Browning: Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. It is a detailed consideration of how ordinary, law-abiding men, including family men, despite initial misgivings, could become calloused killers of men, women and children.

Maybe for my upcoming WWII segment. This sounds pretty rough, but...well, it's WWII. Rough kinda comes with the territory, I guess.