Book shows how the Holocaust could happen

by Gunther Simmermacher · December 11, 2012

A SMALL TOWN NEAR AUSCHWITZ: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust, by Mary Fulbrook. Oxford University Press, 2012. 448pp. ISBN: 978-0-19-960330-5 �

Reviewed by G�nther Simmermacher

After World War II, most German families had to come to terms with the role of their members in the Third Reich. For the sons and daughters of the Nazi bigwigs this obviously was a painful process. Some have written movingly about it. Less known are the stories of the unexceptional, middle-ranking bureaucrats who did not plan the Holocaust but helped to facilitate it, perhaps unaware of the full magnitude of the crimes they were party to.

One such middle-manager was Udo Klausa (1910-98), a Catholic bureaucrat who served as Landrat (town administrator) in Bedzin, a Polish town near Auschwitz which was annexed by Germany after the invasion of 1939.

Mary Fulbrook�s�A Small Town Near Auschwitz tells the story of this man, one who perceived himself as a decent person. The twist is that the author is friendly with the Klausa family; Udo�s wife Alexandra was Fulbrook�s godmother.

This proximity has given Fulbrook, a historian, access to letters and other private documents which usually are not available to the ordinary historian. This indisputable advantage also creates an ethical dilemma: the author might be tempted to diminish the responsibility of a man she knew and liked. Fulbrook discloses and discusses these ethical conflicts.

In the event, Fulbrook pulls no punches. She interrogates Klausa�s war-time record fairly but robustly, and demolishes many of his post-war justifications, which were recorded in a self-serving memoir. The picture of Klausa that emerges can be applied to many other Germans, and it helps us acquire a sense of how the nation of Goethe, Bach and Gutenberg could have fallen for the thuggery of the Nazi Party.

Fulbrook explains this by reference to seduction and threat. In the early years of their reign, the Nazis increased employment, returned order to the chaos of the Weimar Republic, brought a sense of economic justice and restored an affirming national consciousness. The price for this collective buoyancy was the demise of democracy and the persecution of Jews and political opponents. The long-suffering German people put up with that as an expedient.

Broad acquiescence in the regime was further assured through the uncompromising intimidation by a mighty state that was prepared to exercise fear and reward loyalty.

A Small Town Near Auschwitz makes the obvious but often forgotten point that not all Nazis were the same, or even motivated by a common vision. There were the fanatical �true believers�, fellow travellers swept along by a movement, and those who tried to make �the best out of a bad situation�.

As a practising Catholic, Udo Klausa had many points of philosophical divergence with Nazism, but he found ways to separate his faith from his ambitions of rising up the bureaucratic ranks.

He saw himself not as a convinced Nazi � even though he was a member of the Nazi�s paramilitary SA even before 1933 � but as having �innocently become guilty� (this is the author�s translation; I would use the word �culpable�) through his role in Bedzin.

Fulbrook doesn�t buy Klausa�s pleas of ignorance: he must have known much of what was happening; his repeated and ultimately successful attempts to extricate himself from his position in Bedzin � by serving as a soldier on the Russian front � hint at an unease at what he was being part of.

Klausa�s tenure as Landrat helps to explain how it was possible to carry out the pogroms and random massacres, the systematic dispossession of Jews, the herding into ghettos, the forced labour, the summary executions, the deliberate starvation, and ultimately the industrial extermination � though nothing can possibly explain the arbitrary, gleeful inhumanity shown by many Germans in its execution.

Fulbrook sums it up well: �Not everybody was a perpetrator in the obvious sense of committing direct acts of physical violence or directly giving orders that unleashed such violence. Yet the Holocaust was possible only because so many people acted in ways that, over a long period of time, created the preconditions for the ultimate acts of violence.�

Klausa, Fulbrook writes, lacked the capacity to �register the human consequences of policies carried out in service of a deeply racist state�. This is hardly a defence of the man, but an indictment. The philosopher Hannah Arendt�s famous quote about the �banality of evil� seems to apply to the likes of Klausa even more than it does to its original target, the war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

Fulbrook complements her research into Klausa by interviews with Jewish survivors of Bedzin and towns like it, including Arno Lustiger, a cousin of the late Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, who spoke to nobody about his experiences for 40 years. She also refers to war-time letters and documents from Bedzin�s Jews, thereby giving a voice to the victims of Udo Klausa�s actions.

Some historians argue that attempting to understand the Shoah is not only impossible but also dangerous, saying it should remain incomprehensible. Fulbrook�s book shows that it is possible to glean some understanding of the Shoah without stripping it of its inexplicability.