History Lessons

It’s fitting, I think, to look for contemporary application for the things we read in history. I know that’s not a news flash – because those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it and other clichés.

But this stood out in a contemporary sense in Joseph E. Persico’s “Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial.”

The racial clashes bothered Gustav Gilbert [one of a handful of psychologists working the German war crimes suspects] as he tried to piece together his analysis of sanctioned mass murder. He had already concluded that, beyond an obedient people, the next requirement for this kind of crime was a belief in the inferiority of one’s victims. He had had a discussion on this point recently with Goring. Goring had asked him about the black officers occasionally seen in the visitors’ gallery. Gould they command troops in combat? Goring wanted to know. Could they ride in the same buses as whites? Gilbert had just spent three days in court watching Robert Jackson prosecute Goring for crimes against humanity, specifically for issuing anti-Semitic edicts. Jim Crow and the Nuremberg Laws – was it not just a difference of degree?

There’s also this:

Rudolf Hoess [Commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp] was “outwardly normal, but lacked something essential to normality, the quality of empathy, the capacity to feel with our fellow man,” [wrote Gilbert]. Hoess had described the millions at Auschwitz not as people, but as “shadows passing before me.” Combine unthinking obedience, racism, and a disconnection from the kinship of mankind, and you could produce an Auschwitz commandant.

His arriving at a solution that satisfied the mind served only to depress Gilbert’s spirits. Every society had its authority-ridden personalities. Bigots exist all over. And schizoids, dead to normal feelings, walk the streets every day. The latent ingredients could be found everywhere. The distinction in Nazi Germany had been that these people had not functioned on the margins of society. They had run it.

We’re not there yet. But as I watch, we stand on the slope. We walk on the edge of a knife, as was said at another pivotal (yet fictional) time.

Hope remains when the company is true.

Do not fear. Be true.