There's a new exhibit at the US Holocaust Museum, which they've put up on-line. It's a collection of 116 photographs from Auschwitz, showing SS officers in their spare time, on-duty, and so on. The first 12 are the ones I find the most interesting and simultaneously unsettling; it's just photos of people having fun. Lots of them look like really nice people; the sorts of faces you would expect to see amongst your friends. Except that the men are wearing the uniforms of SS officers, the women of SS auxiliaries, even while they're playing accordions and laughing in the rain.
(There was lots of rain there. I've heard that the amount of smoke produced tended to seed clouds.)
Several of the later photos are interesting, too. #57 shows the commandant (Richard Baer), the previous commandant (Rudolf Hoess), and Josef Mengele just hanging out; this picture has a lot less of the "oh, what nice guys" aspect and a lot more of the "wow. So this is what villains look like in their spare time" aspect.
The usual sentiments about "the banality of evil" apply. The NY Times has an article and op-ed piece about the exhibit, which have some interesting bits about the provenance and significance of the photos.
What really strikes me about these is that the people photographed were doing horrifying things on a day-to-day basis; and not impersonal ones, but the sort where you're hearing people screaming in agony and terror, dragging them off and shooting them, and so on. Nor were they situations like combat where adrenaline and continual danger can keep you from thinking too much about it. Yet they seem calm, relaxed, happy. How did they manage to section off their lives to this extent?
Put it in terms of the survival of your family, homes, communities, and even race and people very quickly will do all manner of evil to protect those things that they hold dear.
The only way to combat such madness is to eliminate ignorance.
But we haven't had much success in the world with that, have we.
September 24 2007, 21:40:29 UTC 8 years ago
September 25 2007, 16:12:01 UTC 8 years ago
Put it in terms of the survival of your family, homes, communities, and even race and people very quickly will do all manner of evil to protect those things that they hold dear.
The only way to combat such madness is to eliminate ignorance.
But we haven't had much success in the world with that, have we.