As I recently mentioned in my last post Night and Fog demonstrates a lot of different perspectives on Nazism in Germany. The scene that I chose I think is pretty obvious since I also discussed it last week. The scene is the part of the film (second link) where the S.S Officers are put on trial and deny fault in the atrocities they carried out on behalf of their superiors and personal decisions.
In this scene, several officers are put on trial and the simply state they are not responsible for the crimes against humanity they are being accused of. The narrator follows up by asking the simple question, "They who is responsible?" The reason I chose this particular scene despite having so many other options that show the true horrors of the Holocaust is because this scene speaks to me in more than one simple perspective. It also makes me question why, and how evil like this tend to exist in the world. This scene supports the article I discussed in my last post as well; It shows the fact that the S.S Officers did not believe what they were doing was wrong because no one was reprimanding them for their actions. It wasn't until outside forces finally brought down Hitler and the Nazis that shame fell upon all those who supported this heinous cause. As discussed in the lecture there were many factors that brought about the rise of Nazism in Germany and everything fell together in pieces that basically made these events inevitable. That does not excuse the fact that no one was aware of the level of violence that would come of it, or the fact that this turned out to be a full blown genocide meant to eliminate anyone that didn't fit the aryan criteria.
This scene made my thoughts go a step deeper by analyzing how it is that these S.S Officer could have functioned. I do believe that some officers truly didn't consider themselves at fault and placed blame on their commanding superiors that provided them with orders. I also believe many lied and were fully aware of their actions as well as were proud of their job and hate towards anyone that wasn't like them - especially jews. However, the evil that sits at the root of these events I believe go further into the psyche of the officers. I believe that there is a certain mindset that needs to be so terribly engrained that allows someone to starve, decapitate and to put it simply, kill another human being that they have no relation to. I believe there is a level of dehumanization that goes into their mental training when they were working their shifts at these concentration camps. I believe they went beyond breaking the spirit of these people - they dehumanized them. By dehumanize I mean treat them in such a way that they don't consider the jewish people, the disabled people or anyone else they picked up to cargo them out to concentration camps, human. In the film they also showed what they did with the bodies of the people. They had warehouse sized rooms filled with hair. They bulldozed bodies into ditches just as they would piles of trash and they hacked up the bodies, piling their heads into baskets like vegetables in time of harvest. They harvest. They harvest skin for books and other items, bones for hair brushes, tooth brushes, bodies for soap and so on. To consider making objects out of human remains doesn't sound like something a rational person would do. In reality, this is all irrational. The idea that you can look at person and say they are nothing like you, despite the fact that they clearly are, it's sicking. The officers changed the appearance of these people by shaving their heads and starving them to death. This was the first step. They them their material belonging that they carefully chose to keep, their clothes and their hair - they made sure to make them look as inhuman as possible. Amongst each other it would be difficult to tell these starving bodies apart but for the SS officers it was easy for them to set themselves apart and do what they thought they had to do. They broke these people both in mind and spirit to carry out their task. It wasn't that just Hitler was this amazing charismatic leader that was going to place Germany at the top of the global power game. It wasn't just that he stepped in at just the right time, and declared himself Die Fürhrer. It wasn't just that people had lost hope in humanity as Nihilism spread. It was the fact that this was a thoroughly calculated task of genocide against everyone that wasn't of the aryan race. Jews in particular, much like in most of history were used as the scapegoats. The ones that were to take the blame of Germany's recent stroke of perpetual bad luck.
Someone needed to pay the consequences of what was happening to Germany. Someone needed to make these people feel better - to rid of them of this sense of meaninglessness towards life. Someone needed to make things better. That was the role of the victims. That was the purpose their lives served. They gave these officers a sense of duty to the country. They were doing these things for the greater good and they were getting rewarded. They dehumanized these people so that they could see them as objects that could be processed into something else. The destruction was internal and became external as politics became more involved, and ways of disposing the bodies with more quickness became an issue. These officers are to blame. Always have, always will be. They can't simply be excused as being brainwashed, and not knowing at all what they were doing. There is a level of consciousness that goes into all of this. It is impossible to tell if higher ups specifically asked them to shoot babies in the air or throw a piece of bread at a group of starving people and watch them tear each other apart despite being fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters. There are certain things as describe to Eli Wiesel's book Night and demonstrated in Night and Fog that one would think it's an act of the individual and not a command.
I have also read the Banality of Evil mentioned in the lecture and it tackles this same issue of consciousness in ones actions and who is to blame for what happened. It addresses the fact that the people committing these atrocities were regular people and not evil geniuses or anything that might look out of the ordinary. These were people, just like everyone else who went off on the wrong footing and landed in a very dark place. These are people that look like anyone else walking down the street who were also hauling dead bodies out of cargo trains to incinerate those who didn't survive. These were people listening to Hitler's words, reading Mein Kampf, and feeling as if the world was against them. The support of extremely wealthy companies and affluent people, as discussed in the lecture also helped provide a sense of security on their actions. They can't possibly think they're doing something wrong when such "great" people praise their work and efforts to changing the world.
Going back to my chosen scene, I chose it because it incorporates the way that the people of Germany were broken. They were broken mentally and emotionally due to the horrors of war they had to witness. The millions of deaths and the idea of a Godless world that would allow things like this to happen and have them take the blame. The Nihilistic attitude was running at its all time high right before Nazism grabbed the reigns and tried to direct these people into a place false salvation. There is no salvation. This scene also made me think ahead. It made me think of the aftermath of the war and the downfall of Hitler. It made me think about the consequences and the wrath of hate people felt after finding out the true horrors of the Concentration Camps. It made me think of the people that are out there today who still believe in Hitler's vision of a world rid of anyone but them. It made me think of the Nihilism that continues existing even within our own society as we ignore the genocide currently occurring throughout the world and in places people definitely know about like North Korea. It made me realize that people always seek someone to blame and someone to take responsibility but it should be us taking responsibility.
So when the Narrator ask "Who then, is responsible?"
Humanity is.
We find endless ways to destroy ourselves on a daily basis. It doesn't get more Nihilistic than that.
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