On dialogue with Nazis

How does one address Nazis? A short story, written in the late 1950s by the Polish writer Kazimierz Brandys, imagines the encounter between a young American journalist and an SS general convicted at Nuremberg¹. Having served his sentence, this “Monsieur Ballmeyer” lives as a recluse in a barn at the back of a Bavarian farmyard. Journalists file past to interview him. This one, R. Daves, knows what he wants. He seeks to understand the man and the nature of his crime. He wonders whether the murders he committed cause him suffering, whether he feels regret, what he “really” thinks. He hopes for some plea for redemption.

One is immediately struck by the naïveté of this American. He did not fight in the war, the author specifies, even though we learn, through a confidence let slip to the SS man, that part of his own family was murdered by the Nazis for being Jewish. He addresses the general in a “good-natured and somewhat familiar” tone, which seems to him the most “appropriate.” But he finds himself off balance. He feels “like a gudgeon staring at a pike. Ballmeyer’s gaze is ironic and amused.” The old Nazi toys with him, manipulates him, makes him swallow his self-justifying arguments, and finally throws him off. Daves “is devastated by this conversation.” In wanting to understand the executioner, the young man takes the criminal’s cynicism full in the face. He learns nothing, except the dead end of his own approach.

In writing this story, Brandys asks whether dialogue with this kind of criminal is possible. And finds it futile. A judge or a policeman interrogates. They do not engage in dialogue. They seek to establish facts, to understand the motives of the crime, and sometimes to better grasp the context of which the criminal’s psychology is a part. The aim is judgment and the imposition of a sentence. Neither compassion nor pardon. At most one can hope for some remorse, some apology from the criminal. By entering into a dialogue, a conversation, one arrives at nothing. This journalist wanted to reach the man: “I cannot believe that you have never suffered,” Daves confides to Ballmeyer, “even once, at the thought of the people [you have murdered]. You are gravely mistaken if you believe one can return to the human without the help of other men.” Unshakeable, the other owns what he did, and for morality, takes refuge behind history: “One must not look for those responsible. At Nuremberg it seemed to you that you were accusing men. It was history you were accusing. And it is history that, in the end, will have the last word.” This reply comes after many attempts and ruses by the journalist to reach the man. It shows that it is futile. The journalist ends up telling the general: “Your principal crime is that you do not judge yourself guilty. You have condemned the human being to insomnia, and you fall asleep peacefully.” The soldier evades. He refuses, he concludes, to give his life a meaning. And if this encounter reveals an aspect of the crime, it comes neither from confession nor from remorse, but from the cynicism of this Nazi general for whom the notion of human nature “means nothing.”

*

Another SS general behaves in this way before a Polish resistance fighter, in a prison cell they share in Warsaw in 1949. Both men are sentenced to death. The first is SS general Jürgen Stroop, the man who directed the military operations to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto in April–May 1943. Arrested by the Americans, sentenced to death and then handed over to the Polish authorities, he would be condemned again, then hanged on 6 March 1952. The second is a Polish patriot, Kazimierz Moczarski, the author of the documentary book that reports this encounter². He is an officer of the Home Army (AK), the armed resistance under the authority of the Polish government-in-exile in London recognised by the Allies. Accused of treason by the communists, tortured many times, he awaits the sentence that the same tribunal would pronounce in November 1952. After Stalin’s death, the sentence would be commuted to life imprisonment, then annulled. Moczarski spent eleven years in the jails of the communist regime, two and a half of them awaiting his execution, and nine months with Stroop.

The power of his text, published in a magazine in the early 1970s, owes less to its historical revelations (which are rare) than to the face-to-face encounter. The two men, irreconcilable enemies, must speak to each other and, owing to their forced proximity, end up sharing everything. They are separated only during the interrogation sessions, from which they return in a sorry state. Moczarski chooses to listen to his cellmate, to ask questions in the hope of understanding how he works. He wonders “what historical, psychological, sociological mechanisms could have led part of the German people” to such crimes. He too is interested in the man more than in the Nazi. But each keeps his distance: “I made an effort (though at first this presented certain difficulties for me) to see only the man in Stroop. He sensed this attitude, even though I had clearly marked my disagreement with, and hostility toward, the ideas he had served and the acts he had committed. Nor did Stroop try to pass himself off as a friend of the Poles or to give the impression that he severely condemned his own deeds.”

The presence of a third man—a German policeman serving as the general’s orderly, a sort of Sancho Panza—limits the fabrications of the Nazi, who loves to boast. The self-portrait he distils for the Polish resistance fighter tells us above all about his convictions and his mentality. We discover deeply rooted values and a worldview. They are not reducible to the worship of the Führer; they take root in the very depths of his upbringing. They are expressed plainly (he has nothing left to lose), not without contradictions. Amorality and cruelty become natural behaviours. Stroop even feels offended when Moczarski asks him whether he was not seized by pity before so many victims. On the contrary, he exults, he feels happy when he describes his exploits, standing stiffly in a corner of his cell. “In politics there are no moral principles,” this banal Nazi never tires of hammering. The resistance fighter yields nothing. One senses an impassable frontier between two worlds, even though the two men are persecuted by the same policemen.

From then on, one can read these conversations with the ghetto’s executioner as a drama with Shakespearean overtones. Less than the SS general’s words, it is the circumstances that matter, and the behaviour of the protagonists. So says the book’s prefacer, the novelist Andrzej Szczypiorski. So too sensed the director Andrzej Wajda, who staged the text in the theatre as early as the autumn of 1977, when the book was published (after its author’s death). A French version was even shown in France in the 1980s.

We are not watching a historical documentary about the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto and other Nazi atrocities. Rather a heroic deed, that of a resistance fighter caught in the trap of the political police which, in order to destroy him morally, placed him for nine months face-to-face with his worst enemy. The interview-confrontation becomes a patriotic metaphor—Poland facing Hitler, Moczarski facing Stroop—which turns into “a story of honour and depravity,” to quote the title Adam Michnik gave to his afterword written in the 2000s. Szczypiorski goes in the same direction, insisting in his portrait of the author on “the saintliness” and the “tragic” character of his destiny. “This book was born in shadow. And yet, from the first to the last page, it is wholly illuminated by the brilliance of this exceptional personality.” He raises this situation into “an example of humanism.”

Less enthusiastic is the reaction of Michał Borwicz, one of the first historians of the Warsaw ghetto, a former AK officer and founder of the Jewish Historical Committee of Kraków. In 1980 he published a “polemical” review of Kazimierz Moczarski’s book³. While acknowledging the courage of the resistance fighter, a man he respects, he raises the question at once: “Is this a historical testimony?” And he doubts it. He notes numerous implausibilities in Stroop’s words as reported by Moczarski—the Polish expressions used, his estimate of the fighters’ armament, the participation of Polish resisters in the Jews’ struggle—and he characterises the book instead as a literary essay. He makes these concluding remarks: “The author transforms certain phenomena, changes the proportions and details, and foregrounds an ideological conception close to his own.” Thus the Entretiens avec le bourreau cannot be a reliable historical source. It is above all “a well-written work of great literary value.” Moczarski’s writing is “restrained, highly worked, not decorative. The chain of facts, the tensions and the atmosphere—all of it flows organically from the substance of the text. Equally organic and profoundly humanist is his hierarchy of values and moral judgments.” Nothing more.

Today this discussion is resurfacing in Poland. Several biographies of Moczarski have appeared, and historians and literary critics are taking up and developing Borwicz’s criticisms. Notably when the historian of the ghetto shows that no source confirms the existence of Polish fighters alongside the Jewish insurgents. They see in Moczarski’s account not a series of errors or of disinformation on the SS general’s part, but “a sense of patriotism, which partook of the dominant majority culture, an ideological conception identical to the version of the past advanced by the communist authorities since 1963 and further intensified after 1968.⁴” A vision that Polonises the memory of the ghetto uprising and obscures Jewish memory. Adam Michnik replies in advance to this analysis in a postscript to his afterword. He underlines Moczarski’s irreproachable conduct in 1968, when he was driven from his job for having “condemned antisemitism within the regime.” On the contrary, he sees in this book “the author’s reaction to the infamy of antisemitism in Poland in 1968.” Thus, in moving from a forced conversation with an executioner to the honour of a hero and a resistance, the discussion in Poland veers onto the hero himself and his supposed compromises. As if the charge had been reversed.

*

Quite different is the undertaking of Gitta Sereny. A British journalist of Hungarian Jewish origin, she had the opportunity, in the 1960s and 1970s, to attend trials of Nazi criminals as a journalist, and to interview several of them, and not the least of them. She met Franz Stangl, who had commanded the camps of Sobibor and then Treblinka, and Albert Speer, the architect and Nazi armaments minister, an intimate of Hitler. From these interviews she drew extraordinary books, true models of the genre among the great narratives of the Shoah⁵.

She grew up in Vienna at the time of the Anschluss, then lived in France throughout the war. A nurse in a Catholic institution, she cared for abandoned children, then in 1945 she joined the UNRRA and worked in the displaced-persons (DP) camps in Germany. She was particularly involved in repatriating children stolen by the Nazis and Germanised. She insists on these details, on these “impressions and feelings accumulated during her formative years⁶.” In her last work, composed shortly before her death in 2012, she returns at length to her motivations. She wonders how she could have “solicited these individuals” and for what reasons. She sees in it a generational trait, “a generation that knew the two most devastating dictatorships in the history of the world,” and that was unable to “guess what the future held in store.” Like Moczarski, she wants to understand what makes such a transformation of men possible. “What has always motivated me (…) is the search for what so often and so easily leads human beings onto the path of violence and amorality.” Unlike the petty journalist invented by Brandys, she harbours no illusions. She investigates. “For me, the answer to this fundamental question lies less in a theoretical and intellectual register than on an intimate, human plane. More than any other aspect, it is the many personal relationships (…) that gradually allowed me to understand both the idealistic dimension of tyranny and its capacity to pervert people’s instincts, from good toward evil. The fatal combination of these two factors led, I hope to succeed in showing, to the German trauma⁷.”

She lays out her method and her hesitations. It takes her several months of reflection before meeting Stangl. She states the rules to him from the outset: she does not want to hear again what he said at his trial, nor to argue with him over “the rightness or wrongness” of those declarations. She asks him to talk to her about himself, his childhood, his family, his friends, “in order to learn not what he had done or not done, but what he had loved and what he had hated, and what he felt about the episodes of his life that had led him to the room where he now found himself [she was questioning him in prison after his conviction, in 1971].” If he keeps reciting his justifications, she will leave. If he accepts, “we might perhaps discover a new truth (…) in a domain hitherto incomprehensible.⁸” He accepts. She questions him for seventy hours, in German. Then he dies.

Her book is not limited to the record of these interviews. She verified everything, studied the available archives, tracked down across the world the men and women who had been mixed up in what he had recounted. Other Nazis, his family, surviving victims of Treblinka, witnesses. She produces a vast fresco of the Nazi extermination, far superior to certain literary evocations of today. Her style and her method combine the clarity and evocative power of the best literary journalism with the rigour of historical investigation. She cross-checks testimonies against documents. The result is gripping; we learn a great deal about Sobibor and Treblinka, and how the executioners functioned.

With Albert Speer, who approached her following the publication of this inquiry, she uses the same method. She tells him from the outset what she feels toward him. “I do not claim to come as a friend, to help him or console him. If he killed, I want to discover what drove him to it; if he cheated, I want to understand why.” She explains clearly what the Nazis inspire in her⁹. And she gives us a nuanced but uncompromising portrait of an intellectual close to Hitler, who in the twilight of his life seemed “gnawed by guilt.” In the account, written in 1978, of their two and a half weeks of meetings in Heidelberg, she decodes his evasions and his way of denying his knowledge of the Führer’s plans, of which he was an intimate. Sereny begins by refusing to confront him head-on about this defence mechanism that had allowed him to save his skin at Nuremberg. Then she corners him, and after thirty years of denial, he admits. He shows her a letter he wrote to a Jewish organisation in which he regrets his “tacit acceptance of the persecution and murder of millions of Jews.” She concludes that he is seeking to “reclaim his lost morality.” A purely psychological conclusion, after a subtle analysis of his allegiance to Hitler, of his self-justifying ruses and thus of his double language. If a part of the mystery remains, she describes well the mechanisms that led this intelligent man into such madness.

Now this is precisely what Claude Lanzmann reproaches her for. For him, who solicits the same witnesses ten years later for his film, Gitta Sereny sinks into psychologism. “Sereny’s subject was indeed death,” he writes in his memoirs, “but her approach remained in my eyes purely psychological; she wanted to reflect on evil, to know how family men can calmly murder en masse—the stale platitude of a whole historical-literary posterity. From the very start of my research, on the contrary, the naked astonishment was so great that I braced myself with all my strength in a refusal to understand¹⁰.” Let us set aside the filmmaker’s somewhat haughty and unjust tone to consider the substance of his critique. There is nothing to understand, one does not engage in dialogue with such people, he says in essence. And yet his own approach is not so far from Sereny’s. Refusing to understand the Shoah (which has nothing to do with justifying it) is one of the recurring themes of the author’s commentary on Shoah, which I will not take up here. I would like to limit myself to my subject, by comparing the ways Sereny and Lanzmann approach the same SS man, Franz Suchomel, and use his testimony.

In both works, this figure is crucial. Sereny meets him for several hours at his home, then continues by correspondence. Lanzmann visits him ten years later, but cannot persuade him to be filmed. He uses a hidden camera to record him, and will have to give him money to obtain his testimony. Lanzmann is very keen that the killing process at Treblinka be described by a murderer. He thinks it more convincing. He tells Suchomel as much. Disclaiming any “psychological interest,” being “neither a judge, nor a prosecutor, nor a Nazi-hunter,” he asks for his “help” in convincing “the young Jewish generations who do not understand this catastrophe.” A strange statement, no doubt part of the director’s ruse, since what he wants is a pedagogical exposition: “I therefore asked Suchomel to take the place and the posture of the teacher; I placed myself facing him in the position of a pupil and impressed upon him the importance of the historical role that would be his if he agreed to describe for me the various moments of the mass-killing process at Treblinka.” The result is extremely powerful, opening the second part of the film. We see the lesson in black and white, sometimes live, sometimes on the television monitor watched by the technicians in a van outside. A magnificent montage, which delivers the naked testimony in a dramatic context, but does not discuss it.

Gitta Sereny, by contrast, dissects what he says. She lets Suchomel speak at much greater length (the written form gives her more possibilities than film). He intervenes many times, always as a counterpoint to other testimonies. That of Stangl, which he often disputes, or that of Richard Glazar, a Jewish survivor of Treblinka, who contradicts him. His assertions are also contested by others. Sereny advances in her account by cross-checking. She lets Suchomel speak about details (for her, as for Lanzmann, the details are revealing); she listens to his justifications and his antisemitic ravings. And she composes a gripping picture. The atmosphere and reality of Treblinka grip us by the throat. The method differs from Lanzmann’s, but is not opposed to it. We understand and follow the killing process, from the victims’ point of view, recounted by those who carry it out.

Sereny and Lanzmann knew how to meet Nazi criminals, and drew from it a better understanding of Nazism in its final work: death. Each, with his or her own means, conducts these “interviews” while keeping the necessary distance, and establishes facts. The power of Sereny’s account, her way of arranging Suchomel’s brutal words, corresponds entirely to the emotion of Lanzmann’s “stolen” images. In both cases, dialogue with the Nazi criminal produces only what it must produce: a better historical knowledge.

But what does it tell us about these men?

We see how these SS men function, deeply steeped in Nazi ideology. When they served the Führer in the camps, they were convinced they were eliminating harmful beings, and when they met a victim’s gaze they assimilated it to that of animals (Stangl speaks of young calves!). And yet, twenty or thirty years later, they no longer claim to be insensible to the violence of memory. Suchomel asks Sereny to communicate by letter “because he had a weak heart and said it was too distressing to talk about that¹¹.” Which did not prevent him from conversing at length with Lanzmann, ten years later, in exchange for payment. In fact, whether by turning into a pedagogue of mass killing (Suchomel before Lanzmann) or by describing his daily life at Treblinka (Stangl to Sereny), these criminals told the truth while playing a role. Lanzmann notes of the first: “The role of great witness that I offered him tempted him¹².” And Sereny remarks of the second: “He said more than the truth: he revealed the double man he had become in order to survive¹³.” They even go so far at one point as to express a hint of remorse (not Suchomel!). Albert Speer stages it from his very first meeting with Sereny, who says she was “disconcerted” by “his almost offhand eagerness to admit his guilt” and to discuss everything¹⁴.

It is Stangl, however, who best reveals the limits of this self-examination. To Sereny, who asks him whether he feels guilty, he replies strangely: “My guilt is that I am still here. That is my guilt.” He should have died. And he adds: “I never intentionally did harm to anyone¹⁵.” He died the day after this declaration. A little like the Ballmeyer imagined by Brandys, he saw himself as a victim of history.

Notes