Book Reviews

who did nothing. And there were those who, though they didn't take part in the actual killings, carried out the administrative jobs con nected with the maintenance of the grisly death camps. Hannah Arendt has spoken of the "banality of evil." In the Hitler State "little" men, taking orders, made their little decisions. Taken separately, these seemed ordinary concessions to prudence. By the time the cumulative effect of step by-step choices became apparent it was too late to extricate one's self from the web that had been woven. Suicide or the assassination of one's evil superiors was always possible, but the vulnerability of one's family and friends was usu ally enough to repress any belated decision to become a martyr. A Tool of the Totalitarian State Gitta Sereny picked a not-so little man, but a cog-type individ ual nonetheless, for her study of how a person who bore no ill will toward other human beings could be trapped into becoming an ad ministrative tool in the hands of a State that had decided to make mass murder an instrument of policy. She spent seventy hours in 1971 talking with Franz Stangl, who had been the Kommandant of Treblinka extermination camp in Poland where more than a million Jews died. Stangl, who had escaped from Austria via the so-called "Vatican Route" to Rome after the .Allies had overrun the Nazi lines, had been extradited from Brazil to stand trial at Dusseldorf, and he seemed to want to talk with a stranger about the meaning of his life. His story, and that of his wife and family, is anything but banal, for it raises fundamental questions which all of us, in this day of burgeoning State power, must an swer even though our immediate circumstances may not yet involve decisions that are life-or-death matters.

Franz Stangl died of heart fail ure the day after Gitta Sereny had completed her interviewing. He had finally admitted to a sort of guilt for not taking a stand against what went on in the extermination camps. "My guilt," he said, "is that I am still here." But in the context of a life that could not have perfect foresight, was a stand ever possible for a man of Stangl's nature? He did not want to do evil and he would never 1975 THE EVILS OF NAZISM 511 have willed it. He had a normal animal commitment· to remaining alive, and hE. could never have brought himself to hurt his wife and daughters. Remaining Alive As a young police officer in Aus tria, he had good reason to think he was on a Nazi list for extermina tion after the Anschluss. After all, he had received a citation for bring ing a secret Austrian Nazi to jus tice for poaching. He got out of that by spreading the story that he himself had been a secret Nazi.

Speaking more than thirty years later, Stangl told Gitta Sereny that he should have killed himself in 1938. "I hate the Germans," he burst out in 1971, "for what they pulled me into." But this was hind sight; no one with an instinct for survival would have taken a differ ent course than the one chosen by Stangl at the time. The problem of remaining alive involved escaping to Germany from Austria, where a Party function ary named Prohaska had it in for him. So, from the frying pan Stangl jumped into the fire, taking a job at Schloss Hartheim connected with the Nazi Euthanasia Program. Stang I had nothing to do with choosing the crippled or mentally re tarded people that Nazi State doc tors had selected for "mercy-kill ings." And he could not have known that the Euthanasia Program was a trial run for gassing six million Jews, along with other "undesir ables" and "enemies of the State."

When he was asked to be Kom mandant in Poland of extermina tion camps, he tried to wriggle out of it. But nobody was willing to pick him for a job in the Crimea. He consoled himself at Sobibor and Treblinka by telling himself that he had nothing to do with shoving people into the extinction corridor and by saying that if he ·were to quit his administrative job it would not save a single Jew. If he had made a strong stand, the Nazis would not only have liquidated him, they would have seized his wife and children and shipped them to con centration camps where, most probably, they would have died. Gitta Sereny does not condemn Stangl explicitly; she lets him con demn himself. He knew he had ac quiesced in evil. But he was caught. Like everyone else with family and friends in Germany he was a man who had given hostages to the superstate. Lessons for All of Us The story is horrifying in its im plications for all of us. As we give more and more power to our gov ernments in the West to override what used to be called the inalien able rights (to life, liberty and property) , how do we know that we 512 THE FREEMAN August aren't doing precisely what Stangl did when he first tried to placate the Nazis in 1938 in Austria? One little thing leads to another. The monster State does not show its hideous face an at once. In Ger many the Nazis were legally elected by a people who thought they were helping to solve an economic crisis and to get back at Versailles.

Meanwhile, as Gitta Sereny of fers us her heart-rending document about mass killings in Hitler's Ger many, the Communists are busy liquidating thousands in Cambodia and Vietnam. They do it for "class" reasons, not "race." But is it any more consoling to be beheaded as a bourgeois than as a Jew? The total State is the same every where. So beware of those "little" decisions. They make you a Stangl tomorrow. , HANDSOME BLUE LEATHERLEX FREEMAN BINDERS $2.50 each THE FOUNDATION FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION, INC. IRVINGTONON-HUDSON, NEW YORK 10533 the Freeman VOL. 25, NO.9. SEPTEMBER 1975 Is Freedom High-on Today's Agenda? Freedom, alas, is more often given away than taken away. On Feedingthe World To bleed America will not feed the world; look to freedom. Alla,n C. Brownfeld Dick Beeler 515 522 Shop Talk Edson I. Ga.ylord 524 The president of a prospering enterprise speaks with employees about competition and how to meet it successfully.