of Leiden, around the mid-nineteen eighties, I had ‘digested’ a great many of them. What repeatedly struck me in the books I read, however, was the relative absence of interest in an objective, analytical approach to the background of the criminals involved. Whereas most authors described their unimaginable atrocities in considerable detail, hardly any of them made a serious effort to address their profile in a systematic and analytically objective fashion. This seemed all the more surprising to me as, ever since 1945, scores of criminal trials had been conducted against those responsible for these atrocities. Thus, I assumed that much information on their personal background and criminal development should be readily available in the documentation of these trials. For my doctoral thesis I therefore decided to study the defendants of the so-called Nuremberg ‘Einsatzgruppen Trial’, dubbed ‘the biggest murder trial in history’ by its chief prosecutor.1 But whereas the published documentation of this trial again contained much on their crimes, it included disappointingly little on their personal histories.
Shortly after starting my work on this Nuremberg material in the Royal Library in The Hague, I stumbled upon a set of volumes entitled Justiz und NS-Verbrechen [‘Justice and Nazi Crimes’]. As I browsed through their contents I found that they contained hundreds of post-war trial judgments by West German courts on a dazzling variety of Nazi crimes, including a number of Einsatzgruppen cases. Different from the American documentation, however, these German trial judgments often contained substantial biographical information on the defendants. As it enabled me to study their personal profiles, including their ‘route to crime’, this material was precisely what I was looking for. While I acquainted myself with the idiosyncrasies of German criminal law and its application to the prosecution of Nazi criminals, I discovered that its focus on the subjective aspects pertaining to the defendants and their past behavior, formed a core ingredient of the German criminal law system. Coupled with the courts’ relatively extensive motivation of their considerations and decisions, this turned these judgments into a unique and valuable source for the investigation of the perpetrators’ profiles. Thus, I gratefully included the German Einsatzgruppen cases in my original research project.
Much to my surprise, the ‘Justiz und NS-Verbrechen’ collection of German trial judgments turned out not to be published in Germany, as one would have expected, but in my native country, The Netherlands. At the University of Amsterdam a Dutch professor of criminal law, named Frits Rüter, was in charge of the publication project. While working on his dissertation in Freiburg, Germany, way back in the nineteen sixties, Rüter had started to systematically collect the post-war German trial judgments against Nazi criminals. From 1968 onwards, he began to publish them in a series of hefty volumes.2 After my graduation I contacted him with plans for further study and he was kind enough to offer me a PhD position at his institute. Thus, I spent the following years investigating the German trials and finally wrote my dissertation on a number of them. After completing my studies I joined Rüter as editor of the series.
While working on the JuNSV edition, I was again puzzled by the fact that so little use had been made of this judicial documentation for the investigation of the criminal actors involved in Hitler’s murder programs.3 On the whole, it appeared to me that many avoided the subject for some reason or other. And I came to wonder whether one of these reasons might not perhaps consist of the fact that this judicial documentation offered a somewhat unsettling perspective on the perpetrators’ profiles; a perspective namely, that, instead of presenting them as one-dimensional incarnations of evil, showed them as identifiable representatives of the species. For those who consider these criminals sufficiently judged by their actions and who therefore reject any special interest in their backgrounds, such a perspective might indeed be reprehensible. Illustrative of such a view is perhaps the comment of the (once) renowned psychoanalyst, Bruno Bettelheim, on an effort to interpret the personalities of Nazi doctors: ‘there are acts so vile that our task is to reject and prevent them, not to try to understand them….’4 Considering Bettelheim’s profession as well as his own thoughts on related subjects, this seems to me a curious point of view, but it is, no doubt, shared by many others.5 Even though I can sympathize with the emotions behind such a position, however, for reasons set out in this book I cannot agree with it.
As said, the book’s inspiration stems from my father’s stories. But there is certainly also another inspirer of at least equal importance. This is the Auschwitz survivor whose observations stand above this introduction. It is with these observations in mind that this study was undertaken.6
About the author
Dick de Mildt is a historian and co-editor of the multi-volume documentation series of post-war German trial judgments concerning Nazi crimes, Justiz und NS-Verbrechen.
About the book
This book presents you with the background profiles of those mass exterminators of National Socialism who wound up in court. It pictures their ‘route to crime’ and explains why their court room profiles have always remained so controversial in the eyes of post-war observers and commentators. Both inside and outside academia, this controversy continuous to flare up every now and then. It invariably focusses on Hannah Arendt’s famous thesis about the personality of Adolf Eichmann, Hitler’s manager of mass destruction. We will take a closer look at the arguments involved in this ‘debate’ on the Banality of Evil and see how Arendt’s interpretation of Eichmann relates to the perspectives of the post-war courts who tried other exterminators of Hitler’s empire.
This eBook can be cited
This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.
Contents
5. The opportunist route to crime (and back)
6. ‘Show me yourself with your dog, and I’ll tell you what you are’
II Pars pro toto: Franz Stangl
1. Conversations with the executioner
2. ‘The Lord God knows me’
3. The dynamics of evil
The Austrian prologue
Hartheim and beyond
4. Truth and fiction
Duress of orders
The incorruptible policeman: Stangl’s self-portrait
The awareness of injustice
III The Palmström Syndrome
