Good Nazis, “Killable Bodies”, and Guilt By Association

When a Zionist dismissed Hannah Arendt by citing her relationship with Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher who joined the Nazi Party, I replied,

You are indulging in guilt by association, a common trick of people who don’t want to engage with the actual argument.

…As for whether Heidegger was antisemitic, even Nazis thought he was not.

We know this because Karl Löwith, a friend of Heidegger’s who fled Germany when the Nazis came to power, wrote:

The petty-bourgeois orthodoxy of the [Nazi] party was suspicious of Heidegger’s National Socialism insofar as Jewish and racial considerations played no role. [His book] Sein und Zeit [Being and Time] was dedicated to the Jew Husserl, his Kant book to the half-Jew Scheler, and in his courses at Freiburg, Bergson and Simmel were taught.

Arendt and others who knew Heidegger said his membership in the Nazi Party was an astonishing personal failing, but that did not mean he was antisemitic. Heidegger failed to understand the essence of what he had joined. If you think that’s impossible to do, read on.

Researching the reason good people stood by Heidegger got me thinking about the apparent oxymoron, “good Nazi”, which made me remember two people I think of as casual friends.

The first was a Jewish writer who blamed Germans so much for the Holocaust that he did not want his work sold in Germany. He defended his prejudice by citing Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, a book that was extraordinarily popular when it appeared in the 1990s. Respected historians despised it —one expert on the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, summed it up as being “totally wrong about everything”.

But the book spoke to my friend. It let him hate millions of people for the horrors of the Holocaust. It assured him that he was a good person and Germans were evil. I wish I had known then to ask how he explained the great secrecy around the Wannsee Conference when the Nazi elite officially changed their plan for Jews from expulsion to extermination. (If you know little about the Wannsee Conference, I recommend Conspiracy, a movie based on a transcript of the meeting.)

And I wish I could have pointed to this bit from the Holocaust Encyclopeda:

The SS considered the operations of the killing centers to be top secret, classified information. As with other aspects of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” as well as with all matters related to operations of SS-run camps, the perpetrators were sworn to secrecy and could face prosecution in the event of unauthorized disclosure of information. In part to uphold this secrecy and in part due to health and space reasons, the SS leadership ordered the camp authorities in the autumn of 1942 to henceforth burn the bodies of those murdered at the killing centers and to exhume the bodies of those already buried in order to burn them.

And I wish I could’ve noted this from Holocaust Misconceptions:

Hitler was not elected to office. By the end of 1932 the Nazis were the largest party in the German parliament (Reichstag), and the Nazis formed a coalition government with the conservative German Nationalists in 1933. The Nazis had 3 members of the cabinet, and the conservatives had 9. Hitler was appointed chancellor by President von Hindenburg, and not elected. In the last relatively free election in March of 1933, Hitler received 37% per cent of the vote.

The other friend I remember when talking about Nazis was an ethnically and perhaps religiously Christian woman who was banned from the Wiscon science fiction convention. Her sin? On a panel titled The Desire for Killable Bodies In SFF, she took the traditional liberal position that no one, not even a Nazi, should be treated simply as a “killable body”.

This was the panel description:

In SFF with an action element there’s a desire for cool giant battle scenes, heroes who spin, twirl, slice off heads, and general melee violence. This is an old background trope: the killable mook, guard, or minion whose life can be taken in a cool or funny way is familiar from traditional action films. But many SFF stories take this trope further with a killable race or non-sentient army: the Orcs in Lord of the Rings, the Chitauri in Avengers, and the many robot armies that we see represented solely so that heroes can create cool violent carnage without having to answer difficult moral questions. What happens when SFF comes to rely on this trope? If we’re going to have violent action in SFF, is this better than the alternative? Is it ever not just super racist?

Writers of facile action stories need “killable mooks”. I sometimes tell a story I doubt I will ever write: A time-traveler tries to kill Hitler and is stopped by mysterious agents. At the end of the story, he learns their identity: the Writers Guild of America is protecting Hitler because Nazis in fiction are one of the most profitable kinds of “killable mooks”.

Most of us don’t like thinking about why people do bad things, perhaps because we don’t like to think we might do the same in their place. I’m always amused when conformists insist they would not have conformed in a bad society, but I don’t blame them for their failure to understand their own nature. Humans are herd animals. It’s hard not to conform, so hard that ostracism can lead to suicide.

But to our species’ credit, we are not just herd animals. If we were, the Nazis would not have had to keep their death camps a secret. Some Nazis came to a line that they could not cross. A few of them are among the many people remembered as Righteous Among the Nations, “non-Jewish individuals who have been honored by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, for risking their lives to aid Jews during the Holocaust.”

Nazis could be divided into bad Nazis who supported Hitler’s vision, confused Nazis like Heidegger who did not see the extent of that vision, and good Nazis who eventually understood that vision and opposed it. This division is not perfect, of course. Where do you put the unknown Nazi guard at Dachau who sometimes tossed scraps of food to a starving 13-year-old Jewish boy? The boy, Bill Glied, survived, but his father, mother, and young sister died in the death camps. Many years later, Glied said, “I don’t think people are bad. I think people are made to be bad because of circumstances, because a few other people are suggesting them to be bad.”

Other Holocaust survivors expressed a similar sentiment. Holocaust survivor George Kalman said in a speech to children, “There were very good Nazis, but also there were a lot of nasty, rude torturer Nazis.” Kalman and his parents were lucky enough to be with the people he called good Nazis. The six million Jews and eleven million other people killed by the Nazis were not as fortunate.

Examples of good Nazis and good Germans

The Righteous Among Nations includes at least five Nazis:

1. Oskar Schindler was “a German industrialist, humanitarian and member of the Nazi Party who is credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his enamelware and ammunitions factories... He is the subject of the 1982 novel Schindler’s Ark and its 1993 film adaptation, Schindler’s List.”
2. Hans Walz was a Nazi and an SS member who helped Jewish charities and made funds “available to allow imprisoned Jews to emigrate” and employed “people of ‘mixed descent’” in “vehicle-repair workshops so they could be saved from deportation.”
3. Helmut Kleinicke was “a German engineer who supervised construction projects near Auschwitz concentration camp and saved Jews during the Holocaust.”
4. Karl Plagge was “a German Army officer who rescued Jews during the Holocaust in Lithuania by issuing work permits to non-essential workers.”
5. Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz was “a German diplomat. During World War II, he served as an attaché for Nazi Germany in occupied Denmark. He tipped off the Danes about the Germans’ intended deportation of the Jewish population in 1943 and arranged for their reception in Sweden. Danish resistance groups subsequently rescued 95% of Denmark’s Jewish population.”

A good Nazi saved Chinese people:

• John Rabe was “a German businessman and Nazi Party member best known for his efforts to stop war crimes during the Japanese Nanjing Massacre and his work to protect and help Chinese civilians during the massacre that ensued. The Nanking Safety Zone, which he helped to establish, sheltered approximately 250,000 Chinese people from being killed.”

If you think anyone who fought for Hitler was a Nazi, then you should count these as good Nazis:

• Wilhelm Canaris “was a German admiral and the chief of the Abwehr (the German military-intelligence service) from 1935 to 1944. Canaris was initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler, and the Nazi regime. Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, however, Canaris turned against Hitler and committed acts of both passive and active resistance during the war.”
• Wilm Hosenfeld “was a German Army officer who…helped to hide or rescue several Polish people, including Jews, in Nazi-German occupied Poland, and helped Jewish pianist and composer Władysław Szpilman to survive, hidden, in the ruins of Warsaw during the last months of 1944, an act which was portrayed in the 2002 film The Pianist.”
• Kurt Gerstein “was a German SS officer and head of technical disinfection services of the Hygiene-Institut der Waffen-SS (Institute for Hygiene of the Waffen-SS). After witnessing mass murders in the Belzec and Treblinka Nazi extermination camps, Gerstein gave a detailed report to Swedish diplomat Göran von Otter, as well as to Swiss diplomats, members of the Roman Catholic Church with contacts to Pope Pius XII, and to the Dutch government-in-exile, in an effort to inform the international community about the Holocaust as it was happening.”
• Heinz Heydrich was the younger brother of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. “After the death of his brother in June 1942, Heinz Heydrich helped Jews escape the Holocaust.”
• SS-Rottenführer Viktor Pestek provided Siegfried Lederer, a Czech Jew, with an SS uniform so he could escape from Auschwitz. “Pestek opposed the Holocaust; he was a devout Catholic and was infatuated with Renée Neumann, a Jewish prisoner. Pestek accompanied Lederer out of the camp, and the two men traveled together to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to obtain false documents for Neumann and her mother. Lederer, a former Czechoslovak Army officer and member of the Czech resistance, tried unsuccessfully to warn the Jews at Theresienstadt Ghetto about the mass murders at Auschwitz. He and Pestek returned to Auschwitz in an attempt to rescue Neumann and her mother. Pestek was arrested under disputed circumstances and later executed.”
• Hans Münch, “also known as The Good Man of Auschwitz, was a German Nazi Party member who worked as an SS physician at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Münch was nicknamed The Good Man of Auschwitz for his refusal to assist in the mass murders there. He developed many elaborate ruses to keep inmates alive. He was the only person acquitted of war crimes at the 1947 Auschwitz trial in Kraków, where many inmates testified in his favour.”
• Albert Göring was “a German engineer, businessman, and the younger brother of Hermann Göring (head of the German Luftwaffe, founder of the Gestapo, and leading member of the Nazi Party). In contrast to his brother, Albert was opposed to Nazism, and helped Jews and others persecuted in Nazi Germany.[2] He was shunned in post-war Germany because of his family name, and died without any public recognition, receiving scant attention for his humanitarian efforts until decades after his death.[3]”
• Axel von dem Bussche was “a German officer during World War II and was a member of the German Resistance. He planned to assassinate Adolf Hitler in coordination with Claus von Stauffenberg in November 1943 at the Wolfsschanze. In 1942, von dem Bussche witnessed by chance an SS-organised gruesome massacre of more than 3,000 mostly Jewish civilians carried out by the SD at the old Dubno airport. This experience traumatized him and turned him decidedly against Hitler. He joined an ad hoc resistance group within Army Group Centre later to be led by Count Claus von Stauffenberg.”

Bonus:

Franz Stigler should count as a good German, or at least as an honorable one. Stigler “is best known for his role in a December 1943 incident in which he spared the crew of a severely damaged B-17 bomber. He escorted the plane to safety over enemy lines. The story was kept secret for many years, but in 1990 the two pilots finally reunited and were close friends until their deaths in 2008.”

PS. After Heidegger and Arendt’s deaths, his private notebooks—which defenders like Arendt and Derrida could not have read — were published. Parts of them have been criticized as antisemitic. I have not read them, so I cannot say whether the excerpts are antisemitic in context, but I am comfortable calling Heidegger a confused Nazi because I agree with this part of Heidegger’s ‘black notebooks’ reveal antisemitism at core of his philosophy:

Other philosophers have argued that the new revelations do not amount to a “smoking gun” of antisemitism, and should not lead to a dismissal of Heidegger’s other writings even if they did. “Philosophy is about learning to be aware of problems in your own thinking where you might not have suspected them,” said the British philosopher Jonathan Rée about the black notebooks.

“The best of what Heidegger wrote — indeed the best of philosophy in general — is not an injunction to agree with a proffered opinion, but a plea to all of us to make our thinking more thoughtful.”

PS #2: As a boy he survived the Holocaust — then fell in love with the daughter of a Nazi soldier. They've been married 69 years.

Martha said he was so worried to tell her that she knew it could only be because he was Jewish. She recalled he said to her, “I’m going to tell you something and you’re not going to love me any longer.”

She wasn’t bothered though by the news, she said, nor was her family. Martha said her family was very liberal and her father joined the Nazi party because he was forced to‚ not because he hated Jews. She wasn’t surprised Werner was Jewish and says it “wasn’t a deal-breaker.” Werner said he never viewed his wife’s family as Nazis — and “they just accepted me as their son-in-law.” It was not an issue for them or Martha.

His father-in-law was a decent human being, said Salinger: “I love him and he loved me.”