The Legacy of the Nazi Lagers

On April 11, 1987, the Italian chemist and author Primo Levi was found dead in his apartment building in Turin. Reportedly depressed over worldwide violence, his deteriorating health, and a case of writer’s block, he apparently threw himself down the stairwell of his building. A survivor of Auschwitz, Levi had written a series of works, including The Periodic Table (Schochen Books, 1984), that intermingled stories of his captivity with metaphysical reflections (see THE SCIENTIST, May 18, 1987, p. 23 for a lengthy excerpt). His final completed work, The Drowned and the Saved (Summit Books, 1988) is a dark meditation on the legacy of violence from Hitler’s Lagers (storehouses). This excerpt from his concluding chapter reveals the concerns that troubled his last days. BY PRIMO LEVI The experiences that we survivors of the Nazi Lagers carry within us are extraneous to the new Western generation and become ever more extraneous as the years pass. For the young people of the 1950s and 1960s these were events connected with their fathers: they were spoken about in the family; memories of them still preserved the freshness of things seen. For the young people of the 1980s, they are matters associated with their grandfathers: distant, blurred, “historical.” These young people are besieged by today’s problems, different, urgent: the nuclear threat, unemployment, the depletion of resources, the demographic explosion, frenetically innovative technologies to which they must adjust. The world’s configuration is profoundly changed; Europe is no longer the center of the planet. The colonial empires have yielded to the pressure of the peoples of Asia and Africa thirsting for independence, having been dissolved not without tragedies and struggles between the new nations. Germany, split in two for an indefinite future, has become “respectable,” and in fact holds the destiny of Europe in its hands. The United States-Soviet Union diarchy, born out of World War II, persists; but the ideologies on which the governments of the two sole victors of the last conflict are based have lost much of their credibility and splenor. A skeptical generation stands at the threshold of adulthood, bereft not of ideals but of certainties, indeed distrustful of the grand revealed truth: disposed instead to accept the small truths, changeable from month to month on the convulsed wave of cultural fashions, whether guided or wild. For us to speak with the young becomes ever more difficult. We see it as a duty and, at the same time, as a risk: the risk of appearing anachronistic, of not being listened to. We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experiences, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental, unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It took place in the teeth of all forecasts, it happened in Europe; incredibly, it happened that an entire civilized people, just issued from the fervid cultural flowering of Weimar, followed a buffoon whose figure today inspires laughter, and yet Adolf Hitler was obeyed and his praises were sung right up to the catastrophe. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere. I do not intend to nor can I say that it will happen; it is not very probable that all the factors that unleashed the Nazi madness will again occur simultaneously, but precursory signs loom before us. Violence, “useful” or “useless,” is there before our eyes: it snakes either through sporadic and private episodes, or government lawlessness, both in what we call the first and second worlds, that is to say, the parliamentary democracies and countries in the Communist bloc. In the Third World it is endemic or epidemic. It only awaits its new buffoon (there is no dearth of candidates) to organize it, legalize it, declare it necessary and mandatory, and so contaminate the world. Few countries can be considered immune to a future tide of violence generated by intolerance, lust for power, economic difficulties, religious or political fanaticism, and racialist attritions. It is therefore necessary to sharpen our senses, distrust the prophets, the enchanters, those who speak and write “beautiful words” unsupported by intelligent reasons. It has obscenely been said that there is a need for conflict: that mankind cannot do without it. It has also been said that the local conflicts, violence in the streets, factories, and stadiums, are an equivalent of generalized war and preserve us from it, as petit mal, the epileptic equivalent, preserves from grand mal. It has been observed that never before in Europe did forty years go by without a war such a long European peace is supposedly an historical anomaly. These are captious and suspect arguments. Satan is not necessary there is no need for wars or violence, under any circumstances. There are no problems that cannot be solved around a table, provided there is good will and reciprocal trust—or even reciprocal fear, as the present interminable stalled situation seems to demonstrate, a situation in which the greatest powers confront each other with cordial or threatening faces but have no restraint when it comes to unleashing (or allowing the unleashing) of bloody wars among those “protected” by them, supplying sophisticated weapons, spies, mercenaries, and military advisers instead of arbiters of peace. Nor is the theory of preventive violence acceptable: from violence only violence is born, following a pendular action that, as time goes by, rather than dying down, becomes more frenzied. In actuality, many signs lead us to think of a genealogy of today’s violence that branches out precisely from the violence that was dominant in Hitler’s Germany. Certainly it was not absent before, in the remote and recent past: nevertheless, even in the midst of the insensate slaughter of World War I there survived the traits of a reciprocal respect between the antagonists, a vestige of humanity toward prisoners and unarmed citizens, a tendential respect for treaties: a believer might say “a certain fear of God.” The adversary was neither a demon nor a worm. After the Nazi Gott mit uns, everything changed. Goering’s terrorist bombings were answered by the “carpet” bombings of the Allies. The destruction of a people and a civilization was proven to be possible and desirable both in itself and as an instrument of rule. Hitler learned the massive exploitation of slave labor in the schools of Stalin, but in the Soviet Union it was brought back again, multiplied, at the end of the war. The exodus of minds from Germany and Italy, together with the fear of being surpassed by Nazi scientists, gave birth to nuclear bombs. Desperate, the Jewish survivors in flight from Europe after the great shipwreck have created in the bosom of the Arab world an island of Western civilization, a portentous palingenesis of Judaism, and the pretext for renewed hatred. After the defeat, the silent Nazi diaspora has taught the art of persecution and torture to the military and political men of a dozen countries, on the shores of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific. Many new tyrants have kept in their drawer Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf with a few changes perhaps, and the substitution of a few names, it can still come in handy. The Hitlerian example demonstrated to what an extent a war fought in the industrial era can be devastating even without having recourse to nuclear weapons. During the last 20 years the ill-fated Vietnamese enterprise, the Falkland conflict, the Iran-Iraq war, and the events in Cambodia and Afghanistan confirm it. Yet, it has also demonstrated—(not in the rigorous sense of mathematicians, unfortunately) that, at least sometimes, at least in part, historical crimes are punished. The powerful of the Third Reich ended on the gallows or in suicide; the German people suffered a Biblical “massacre” of the first horn that decimated a generation and a partition of their country that put an end to century-old German pride. It is not absurd to. assume that, had Nazism not shown itself so very ruthless from the start, the alliance among its adversaries would not have been formed, or would have broken up before the end of the conflict, shattered. The world war willed by the Nazis and Japanese was a suicidal war: all wars should be feared as such. More often and more insistently as that time recedes, we are asked by the young who our “torturers” were, of what cloth they were made. The term torturers alludes to our exguardians, the SS, and is in my opinion inappropriate: it brings to mind twisted individuals, ill-born, sadists, afflicted by an original flaw. Instead, they were made of the same cloth as we, they were average human beings, averagely intelligent, averagely wicked: save the exceptions, they were not monsters, they had our faces, but they had been reared badly. They were, for the greater part, diligent followers and functionaries, some fanatically convinced of the Nazi doctrine, many indifferent, or fearful of punishment, or desirous of a good career, or too obedient. All of them had been subjected to the terrifying miseducation provided for and imposed by the schools created in accordance with the wishes of Hitler and his collaborators, and then completed by the SS “drill.” Many had joined this militia because of the prestige it conferred, because of its omnipotence, or even just to escape family problems. Some, very few in truth, had changes of heart, requested transfers to the front lines, gave cautious help to prisoners or chose suicide. Let it be clear that to a greater or lesser degree all were responsible, but it must be just as clear that behind their responsibility stands that great majority of Germans who accepted in the beginning, out of mental laziness, myopic calculation, stupidity, and national pride the “beautiful words” of Corporal Hitler, followed him as long as luck and the lack of scruples favored him, were swept away by his ruin, afflicted by deaths, misery, and remorse, and rehabilitated a few years later as the result of an unprincipled political game. Copyright © 1986 by Giulio Einaudi editore, SpA. Translation copyright © 1988 by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Reprinted by permission.

The Legacy of the Nazi Lagers

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