Ordinary People

But Capesius could not even claim to be blinded by ideological anti-Semitism. He was friends with Jews and happy to exchange pleasantries with them, even on the ramp at Auschwitz. When he was finally put on trial, in 1964, Capesius’ prosecutor held this to be especially damning: “The unique and monstrous part of this situation for Capesius was that it wasn’t just about the nameless masses, but that all of a sudden he was confronted with people whom he had earlier known personally or professionally, people who were completely unsuspecting, who saw in meeting him a lucky sign, and trusted him. … How much emotional brutality, what diabolical sadism, what pitiless cynicism must it take to act in the way that this monster acted!”

Perhaps the prosecutor was driven to such rhetorical extremes by the insidiousness of Capesius’ crime, which was not just cruelty or greed, but above all detachment. It is relatively uncomplicated to guard oneself against cruelty and greed—if one wants to. But detachment, a half-willed blindness to the suffering of others, is one of the inescapable conditions of life on earth. Between 1998 and 2003, for instance, about as many people were killed in the Congo War as died in the Holocaust. Our ability to live placidly through this and so many other atrocities lies in a combination of ignorance and helplessness: This happened far away, we didn’t pay attention as it happened, and even if we rent our clothes over it, there was nothing we could do to stop it.

Capesius could not claim the excuse of ignorance. Yet he, like so many other Nazis up to and including Adolf Eichmann, did claim to be helpless in the face of his own crimes. Such men did not make the decisions in the Nazi empire, they only carried them out; and if they had not obeyed their evil orders, someone else would have. Ordinary criminals are seen to deserve punishment because, without their actions, their crimes would not have occurred: If Levi Aron had never been born, Leiby Kletzky would still be alive. But if Victor Capesius had never been born, or if he had refused to take part in the selections at Auschwitz, just as many Jews would have died there. Among the many documents and interviews Schlesak quotes is a letter Capesius wrote from his jail cell while awaiting trial, to a fellow SS pharmacist. In the letter, he explains, “I am … defending myself because the prosecution has said that I am under suspicion of having killed people of my own free will, that I killed for pleasure, and other base motivations.”

In fact, Schlesak, following the trial records, makes a convincing case that Capesius did have a “base motivation,” personal greed. He emerged from the war a suspiciously wealthy man, able to buy a business and pay bribes to Romania’s Communist government to get passports for his relatives. The money for all this, the prosecution argued, could only have come from the valuables Capesius looted from the dead at Auschwitz—including their gold teeth, which he collected and had melted down into ingots. But even this was clearly a crime of opportunity: Before the war, Capesius had not been breaking into people’s houses to rob them.

What damns Capesius most, in Schlesak’s eyes, is his absolute refusal to admit any feelings of guilt or remorse during his trial. “This pathetic excuse for a human being!” he writes. “The only thing guiding him—this is plain from his whole defense and the trial documentation—is this attempt to extricate himself, to talk himself out of his crimes with lies, inventions, and exculpatory witnesses, if necessary. … Over and over again, nothing but dates and numbers for a defense, never an awakening, never any self-reflection: morality, guilt, conscience. Just like Auschwitz itself, a void. Can you learn anything from a void?”

To Arendt, famously, it was this emptiness that explained Eichmann’s capacity to commit his crimes. His fundamental sin, she wrote, was an “inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of someone else.” It’s characteristic of Arendt the intellectual to make thinking the root of virtue; but another name for “thinking from the standpoint of someone else” is compassion, and it feels more accurate to say that it was the absence of compassion, of sympathy, that made the Nazis’ crimes possible. None of us has enough sympathy to give humankind all the care it needs and rightfully demands. But we like to think that ordinary people have enough sympathy to be unable to actually inflict cruelty on someone right in front of their eyes, especially someone they know personally. Capesius’ story does not prove this intuition totally false, but it does suggest that in the right environment—say, in a society where Jews have been demonized and dehumanized by propaganda for years on end, and in a war theater where mass killing is the norm—many people will lose their innate reluctance to be cruel; enough people, certainly, to commit a genocide.

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What happens, in such an environment, to people who do retain a sense of conscience? One answer can be found in Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier’s Letters From the Eastern Front (Princeton, $35), which is more thought-provoking in its ambiguities than The Druggist of Auschwitz is in its outright horrors. The book is a selection of letters written by Konrad Jarausch, who was surely one of the least soldierly soldiers in Hitler’s army. Nearly 40 when the war began, he was a career educator and a pious Protestant who’d spent his life training Christian teachers and editing a journal called School and Church. Too old for the regular army, he was drafted into an auxiliary battalion and sent to Poland to guard prisoners of war. Later he was promoted to non-commissioned officer and assigned to train new recruits in Germany. Finally, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Jarausch was returned to the Eastern Front to run a prisoner of war camp, now on a much larger scale. He died in January 1942 of typhoid, never having laid eyes on his infant son, also named Konrad. That son grew up to become a historian and has now edited this volume of his father’s letters—a remarkable and moving act of filial confrontation and reconciliation.

In many ways, Jarausch is a witness who is easy to identify with—at least, for the kind of reader who is likely to pick up a book like Reluctant Accomplice. As a bookish and introverted man, who spent his spare moments reading Aristotle in Greek, Jarausch found army life totally repellent. Hardly a letter goes by without a complaint about lack of sleep, physical discomfort, bad food, or the vulgarity and drunkenness of his comrades. He is too old for all this, he feels, and as the war stretches on with no end in sight, he starts pulling strings for a discharge, hoping that as a teacher he will qualify as an essential war-worker. The invasion of Russia puts an end to these hopes, and the letters Jarausch wrote in the last six months of his life are increasingly desperate and depressed.

All this meant that Jarausch was fairly well-immunized against the Nazi cult of war and violence. More important still was his profound Christian belief, which put him at odds with the neo-paganism of the Nazis. One of the themes of the letters is the division between older men like himself, who were raised in a still-Christian society, and the younger recruits, who were shaped by the Nazi regime and have nothing but contempt for religion. On Christmas Eve in 1941, for instance, Jarausch relates that the major of his unit asked the men to recite a silent “Our Father.” The next day, the younger, more Nazified soldiers expressed anger at this sentimental Christianity, and “suddenly all our differences came to light: the old and the new, those who fought in the [first] world war and the younger national socialist generation.”

By age, temperament and conviction, then, Jarausch seemed designed for the role of skeptic about the Nazi regime. Reluctant Accomplice charts the growth of Jarausch’s belief that Hitler’s war was a disaster, for humanity and for Germany itself. He was able to arrive at this independent judgment of the war for just the reason Arendt pinpointed: He retained the ability to think, and to think from the point of view of another person.

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Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor for Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.