Sherry Chandler

Brutality creates brutes

Reading this passage from Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, I couldn’t help but think of Abu Ghraib and our general brutish defense culture:

A photographer began taking pictures of people before they were killed. It was May 1940, in a medieval castle in Austria. The people in Hartheim Castle who were being killed were mentally and physically handicapped; their bodies were burned in a cremation oven. “Hitler felt that by exterminating these so-called useless eaters,” one of the T-4 euthanasianists later testified, “it would be possible to relieve more doctors, male and female nurses, and other personnel, hospital beds, and other facilities for the use of the Armed Forces.”

The smell of burning bothered the photographer. Hartheim’s supervisor, a former police officer, said: Drink, you’ll feel better. So the photographer drank and took the pictures. The assembly-line killings led to the brutalization of the staff, writes one historian: “Reports abounded of drunken orgies, numerous sexual liaisons, brawling and bullying.” One eyewitness said that at the castle “almost all employees were intimate with each other.” More than nine thousand people died at Hartheim in 1940. [p. 174]

If you have not watched Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, I suggest that you do so. It was one of the most difficult films I ever watched. But we must not bury our collective heads in the sand about this stuff, lest we wind up giving tacit approval to something much worse.

Ulrich von Hassell, right-wing opponent of Hitler, wrote in his diaries about the war in Poland. It was October 19, 1939.

“Among well-informed people in Berline I noticed a good deal of despair,” von Hassell wrote. Germany’s good name was disgraced by the bombing of Warsaw and the anti-Semitic bestialities of the SS. “When people use their revolvers to shoot down a group of Jews herded into a synagogue,” von Hassell said, “one is filled with shame.” [p. 153]

Americans, too, are filled with shame I think. Certainly I am. It takes something more. I don’t know what. Maybe not being afraid.