The famous Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno 1973), which was written while Horkheimer and Adorno were living in exile in the United States, includes a long digression on the limits of reason and the ideals of progress. Being thinkers of the dark Enlightenment, both authors had internalized Freud's idea that the only thing that could limit the death drive – in the form of delight in evil – was sublimation, which was the only thing that gave men access to civilization: ‘Men have gained control over the forces of nature that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man’ (Freud 1929: 145).

The example of Germany did indeed show that the ideals of progress could be inverted into their antithesis and lead to reason's self-destruction. To support their argument, the two Frankfurt School philosophers associate the names of Kant, Sade and Nietzsche, and see Juliette (Sade 1991) as the dialectical moment in the history of Western thought when the enjoyment of regression (amor intellectualis diaboli) metamorphosed into the pleasure of attacking civilization with its own weapons (Horkheimer and Adorno 1973: 94).

Far from claiming, as some were to do, that the works of Sade could be read as a prefiguration of Nazism, they argued that Sade's inversion of the Law meant that the history of the totalitarian movement had already been written. Although they loathed ‘the divine marquis’, they say, in substance, that the followers of positivism had repressed their desire for destruction only to borrow the mask of the highest morality. They therefore began to treat men as things and then, when political circumstance lent themselves to it, as filth that had nothing in common with normal humanity, and finally as mountains of corpses.

Horkheimer and Adorno use the historical caesura of Auschwitz¹ – the paradigm for the worst possible perversion of the ideal of science – to argue that there is a great danger that humanity's entry into mass culture and the biological planning of life will generate new forms of totalitarianism if reason does not succeed in becoming self-critical and overcoming its destructive tendencies.

In 1961 Hannah Arendt covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker. He was found guilty of the elimination of over five million Jews, sentenced to death and executed by hanging on 31 May 1962.² She asked the same question as Horkheimer and Adorno. Eichmann was neither a sadist, a psychopath nor a sexual pervert. He was not a monster, and displayed no visible pathological signs. The evil was within him, but he displayed no signs of any perversion. He was, in other words, normal. Indeed, he was terrifyingly normal because he was the agent of an inversion of the Law that had made crime the norm. Although he admitted having committed atrocities by sending millions of individuals to the gas chambers, he dared to state that he was merely obeying orders and even to deny that he could have been an anti-Semite.³

It would have been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster … Surely, one can hardly call upon the whole world and gather correspondents from the four corners of the earth in order to display Bluebeard in the dock. The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that there were so many like him, and that many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgement, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied … that this new type of criminal … commits his crimes under circumstance that make it well-nigh impossible to know or feel that he is doing wrong. (Arendt 1984: 276)

That is why Arendt took the view that the actions of such a criminal defied justice and that it was absurd to punish someone who had committed such monstrous crimes by executing him. And besides, that is precisely what Eichmann wanted: to be hanged in public and to enjoy his own execution so that he could believe himself to be immortal and the equal of a god. At the foot of the gibbet, he defied his judges, telling them ‘we shall meet again’ and forgot that it was his own funeral: ‘It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness has taught him – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought defying banality of evil’ (Arendt 1984: 252).

It is, then, because he was so extremely normal that Eichmann was the embodiment of perversion at its most abject: a delight in evil, a lack of emotion, automatic gestures, implacable logic, meticulous attention to even minor details and an incredible ability to take responsibility for the most odious crimes by dramatizing them so as to demonstrate how Nazism had turned him into a monster. He was telling the truth when he claimed to have lived by Kant's moral principles (Arendt 1984 [1963]: 135) because, according to Arendt, the wickedness of his orders was nothing in comparison to the imperative force of the order itself. And so he became genocidal without feeling the slightest guilt.

In a preface written for Justine in 1961, Lacan picks up the thesis of Adorno and Horkheimer and dismisses both Sade and Kant without pronouncing in favour of either of them. He was doubtless familiar with the pages Foucault had just devoted to the ‘divine marquis’ in his History of Madness: ‘After Goya and Sade, and since them, unreason belongs to all that is most decisive in any oeuvre: anything that the oeuvre contains which is murderous or constraining’ (Foucault 2006: 535).

Lacan is wrong to argue that Sade did not anticipate Freud, ‘if nothing else, as a catalogue of the perversions’ (2006: 645), but he is right to see Sade's works as the starting point for ‘the insinuating rise in the nineteenth century of the theme of “delight in evil”.’ Sade is, for Lacan, the author of ‘a new theorization of perversion’, and his work is ‘the first step of a subversion’ of which Kant as the ‘turning point’. According to this interpretation, evil, in the Sadean sense, is an equivalent to Kant's ‘good’. Both authors enunciate the principle of the subject's subordination to the Law. According to Lacan, however, Sade introduces the Other in the person of the tormentor and reveals the object of desire (petit a), whereas, for Kant, the destruction of desire is reflected in the moral law, and it reveals the object by outlining a theory of how the Law makes the subject autonomous. Sade's discourse stresses the imperative ‘Thou shalt come’ – and desire remains subject to the law because it is a voluntary instrument of human freedom’. In Kant's discourse, in contrast, the extinction of desire is translated into the moral law: ‘thou shalt free thyself from pathology’.⁴

According to Lacan's interpretation, Kant's morality derives not from a theory of freedom, but from a theory of desire in which the object is repressed. That repression is then ‘illuminated’ by Sade's discourse. There is therefore ‘a symmetry between Sade's imperative dictating jouissance and Kant's categorical imperative’ (Roudinesco 1997: 313).

In their various ways, all these authors – Adorno, Horkheimer, Foucault, Arendt, Lacan and many others, such as Primo Levi – use Auschwitz as a way of explaining a new form of perversion that derives both from reason's self-destruction and from a very strange metamorphosis in the relationship with the Law that authorized apparently normal men to commit the most monstrous crime in the entire history of the human race in the name of obedience to a norm.

The purpose of the crime committed at Auschwitz was to domesticate the selection of species to such a degree that it could be replaced by a race science based upon a purportedly biological remodelling of humanity. The Nazis therefore assumed that they had the right to decide who should and who should not live on planet Earth. Their radical evil was therefore the product of a system based upon the idea that man as such could be deemed superfluous. Saul Friedländer (1993: 82–3) describes it thus:

This, in fact, is something no other regime, whatever its criminality, has attempted to do. In that sense, the Nazi regime attained what is, in my view, some sort of theoretical outer limit: one may envisage an even larger number of victims and a technologically more efficient way of killing, but once a regime decides that groups, whatever the criteria may be, should be annihilated there and never be allowed to live on Earth, the ultimate has been achieved. This limit, from my perspective, was reached only once in modern history: by the Nazis.

That is what makes Auschwitz so different from all the twentieth century's other great acts of barbarity, such as Kolyma (the Gulag) or Hiroshima. Nazism invented a mode of criminality that perverted not only raison d'état but even the criminal impulse itself because, within this configuration, the crime is committed in the name of a rationalized norm and not as an expression of a transgression or an untamed impulse. From that perspective, the Nazi criminal is not Sade's heir even though crime is, in both cases, the result of the inversion of the Law. Sade's criminals obey a savage nature that determines them, but they would never agree, like the Nazi criminal, to submit to a state power that subjugates them to a law of crime. As Bataille once remarked, executioners do not speak, or when they do they speak the language of the state.

Such extremism therefore has to be given a name. Which is why the Nuremberg Tribunal, which had to judge four types of crime – crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity and participation in the formulation of a common plan to commit all these crimes – adopted the term ‘genocide’.⁵

Coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, the neologism⁶ would be used to describe a crime against humanity for which the penal vocabulary had no word: the physical destruction of a population that was regarded as undesirable because it belonged to some species, genus or group,⁷ regardless of the ideas or opinions of the individuals who belonged to that population. In order to be described as such, the genocidal act had to be accompanied by the intentional, systematic and planned extermination. Mass murder, even when organized by states, obviously does not fit into this classification, which implicitly assumes the existence of extra-territorial persecution. Genocide is not just an attempt to destroy the other, but an attempt to annihilate the other's genos. Hence the idea of seeking out the population that is to be exterminated outside the state's territory and beyond its frontiers in order to destroy several generations: children, parents and grandparents.

To that extent, the genocide of the Jews was defined by the Nuremberg Tribunal as the prototype for any other genocides that might subsequently be recognized by the new Charter of the United Nations Organization.⁸

How does someone become genocidal? Who are the killers? Are they all possessed by absolute evil? What perversion forces them to become the collective murderers of the human race? Are they born monsters, or are they the products of a culture and an education? Are they intelligent or stupid? Are they capable of remorse and prise de conscience? What is the nature of their sexuality? Is there some specific pathology that characterizes the authors of genocides?

Nuremberg therefore marked the beginning of a new debate about the origins of evil. What, in this secularized world that had given birth to a perverse science, allowed these killers to see themselves as biological gods? Basically, the answer to this question had to come from a scientific psychology, and not from religion or morality.

A number of experts on psychiatry, psychology and neurology – including Douglas M. Kelley, Gustave Gilbert and Leon Goldensohn – were therefore asked to carry out tests on the main National-Socialist leaders who had been brought before this exceptional tribunal. Despite some differences of opinion, most of them explained that democracy was the only thing that could help to put an end to human cruelty, and that totalitarianism, in contrast, allowed human ‘sadism’ to be exploited for criminal ends.⁹ Turning to the specificity of Nazism, some of the experts insisted that the system had produced a new race of ‘murderous schizoid robots’ devoid of all emotions and normal intelligence,¹⁰ while others claimed that the Nazi leaders displayed serious pathologies and great depravity, or that they had hatched a huge plot against the democracies.

In an article written in 1960, the Viennese psychoanalyst and former deportee Ernst Federn disagreed with the American psychiatrists and argued that, on the contrary, an analysis of the commandant of Auschwitz obviously showed that Hoess suffered not from a schizoid state, but from a ‘compulsive character with an incapacity to form meaningful interpersonal relations; or a schizoid character with a schizophrenic core; or a character disturbance – as such people come to our family agencies and psychiatric clinics’ (Federn 1986: 73).¹¹

Despite the importance of these eye-witness accounts, which are now a major historiographical source, all these approaches to Nazi criminality, which derive from positivist medicine and psychoanalysis, they are disconcertingly poor. Their major failing is that they attempt to prove that, if they could do such things, the authors of the Nazi genocide must, despite their apparent normality, have been psychopaths, mentally ill, pornographers, sexual deviants, drug addicts or neurotics. As a result, the representatives of French mental medicine, who insisted on describing Stalin as a paranoiac and Hitler as a hysteric with perverse and phobic tendencies, came up with the preposterous suggestion, at the famous Congress on Mental Hygiene (London 1948) that great statesmen should be given therapy in order to diminish their ‘aggressive instincts’ and preserve world peace (Roudinesco 1990: 181).

The most striking thing about eye-witness accounts of the Nazi genocides is in fact that the terrifying normality they describe is a symptom, not of perversion in the clinical sense, but of support for a perverse system that synthesized every possible perversion.

Every component of a delight in evil that had been completely statised or normalized was indeed present in various forms in the camps: slavery, mental or physical torture, head shaving, drownings, murder, electrocution, humiliation, debasement, rape, torture, defilement, vivisection, medical experiments, procuring, allowing dogs to devour corpses, and so on. The whole genocidal system was, in a word, designed not just to exterminate all the human race's ‘impure’ categories, but to manufacture what Eugen Kogon (1950; cf. Tillion 1988) calls the ‘extraordinary pleasure’ the SS killers could derive from it. Witness this account, which sums up the basic features of a perverse structure specific to Nazism. It is a structure that precludes any possible access to sublimation, even in its sacrificial form: ‘The SS officer calls three Jewish musicians out of the ranks. He asks them to play a Schubert trio. Overwhelmed by the music he adores, the SS officer allows his eyes to fill with tears. And then, once the piece is over, he sends the three musicians to the gas chamber’ (cited Val 2007: 196). How can we fail to be reminded of Borges's description (1975) of the famous Lazarus Morell? He described himself as humanity's redeemer, bought slaves and freed them so as to enjoy the pleasure of exterminating them all the more.

Despite the differences between them – Hoess was not like Eichmann, Himmler or Göring – all the Nazi genocidists and dignitaries had one thing in common: they denied the acts they had committed. Whether they admitted their crimes or refused to acknowledge their existence, their attitude was always the same. Either they denied what they had done or pretended to know nothing about it and blamed some idealized authority, as though ‘I was obeying orders’ could help to take away the authors' guilt thanks to the art of denial and disguise.

Given that their fanatical loyalty to a perverse system led them to deny their actions, we can understand why the Nazi genocidists did not simply deny that what they did was criminal. They also denied something more, and thus committed the perfect murder by erasing every trace of it. ‘Kill the Jew and then kill anyone who witnessed the murder’ was the real order given by those responsible for the extermination. Those who manned the Sonderkommandos, which were forced by the SS to empty the gas chambers and to burn the bodies in the crematoria, were selected because they were Jewish. Their fate was to be exterminated in their turn to ensure that they would never bear witness to what they had seen (Venezia 2007).

For the same reasons, the exterminators were eager to kill as many of their victims as they could as they faced their final defeat. The convoys of the dead were given priority over convoys of soldiers (Hilberg 1961). Hours before the allied troops arrived, they destroyed the instruments of murder – the crematoria and gas chambers – and then destroyed themselves in the same way that they had destroyed Germany, either by fleeing to the ends of the earth in disguise to ensure that they would never reappear in a hated world that might judge them, or by committing suicide.

On 30 April 1945, Hitler put a bullet into his brain in his bunker. He had already swallowed the prussic acid he had tested on his Alsatian and had made Eva Braun swallow it just after he married her.¹² His example was immediately followed by Magda Goebbels, who used the same poison to kill in cold blood her six children, who were aged between four and twelve. She then committed suicide along with her husband, Josef Goebbels. Why kill the dog? Why kill the six children? Why the masquerade?

The question had been answered the day before by the main protagonist in this macabre scene. In his will, which reproduced the imprecations of Mein Kampf, Hitler explained that ‘international Jewry’ was responsible for the outbreak of war and for Germany's defeat, and that all the victims of the Final Solution were in fact the real artisans of the crime against humanity that the Nazis would be blamed for. So as not to live in a world ruled by ‘Bolshevized Jewry’, he had therefore resolved not only to die by his own hand – together with his dog – but to destroy all traces of the murder by ordering that his body and that of his mistress should be burned. Goebbels and his wife did the same when they killed their children with the same acid – Zyklon B – that had been used in the gas chambers.¹³

This was indeed a suicide like no other. It was not the proud, despairing suicide of an Emma Bovary, nor that of the resistance fighters who committed suicide rather than speaking under torture, or that of the former deportees. It was not even the seppuku of Japan's Second World War Generals, who begged their Emperor's forgiveness for their defeat and observed the feudal tradition in order that the people might be reborn (Pinguet 1993).

Unlike every other form of voluntary death, Nazi suicide was a pathetic equivalent to the genocide perpetrated against the Jews and the so-called impure races. It was a miniature auto-genocide, a perverse form of suicide that permitted no recourse to the possibility of redemption. It was a vain attempt to provide a model for the whole of Germany. Men, women, children, old people, the wounded, the survivors and even animals were being asked to follow the example of their leaders and to vanish for ever: ‘The German people he was prepared to see damned alongside him proved capable of surviving even a Hitler … The old Germany was gone with Hitler. The Germany which had produced Adolf Hitler, had seen its future in his vision, had so readily served him, and had shared in his hubris, had also to share his nemesis’ (Kershaw 2000: 841).

The negationism of the 1970s derives from this will to genocide and auto-genocide in the face of an inevitable nemesis. It is a product of the revisionist historiography invented by Robert Faurisson, Paul Rassinier, Serge Thion and La Vieille Taupe and often supported, in the name of a perverted vision of freedom of expression, by Noam Chomsky. The so-called ‘assassins of memory’ (Vidal-Naquet 1994) deny the existence of the gas chambers. Using a form of narration that takes the form of denial, they perpetuate, in other words, not only the genocide of the Jews, but also the eradication of all trace of it. To the extent that is an intellectual structure that is as perverse as Nazism itself, negationism is consubstantial with the genocidal project; it allows those who subscribe to it to perpetuate the crime by turning it into the perfect murder that leaves no history, no trace and no memory.

Adopting a very different stance to Adorno or Arendt, Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, argues that the genocidal system encouraged an inversion of the Law that took human beings back to their pre-human biological roots.¹⁴ To support his argument, he relies upon the work of Konrad Lorenz, the founder of modern ethology.

From 1935, onwards, Lorenz combined Darwinian evolutionism and the old zoology to construct a biological theory of human and animal behaviour. He had, he claimed, found the ‘missing link’ between chimpanzees and civilized man. He would later say that the biological roots of evil lay in the fact that man is, instinctively and innately, a psychic animal who is both violent and aggressive. It follows that animal ethology should provide a model for the study of behavioural schemata that are found in all living creatures.¹⁵ From this perspective, there is nothing exceptional about man, who is an inter-species killer and not a being endowed with language and speech who is not part of the animal kingdom because he is aware of his own existence. He is therefore more like a rat than any other type of animal. What makes both human beings and rats so exceptional is that they are killers capable of eliminating rivals of the same species, rather than just keeping them at a distance.¹⁶ Lorenz suggests that the formula ‘man is a wolf to man’¹⁷ should be replaced by the more scientifically accurate ‘man is a rat to man’ because wolves are so-called normal animals and do not kill other wolves.

On the basis of his reading of Lorenz, Primo Levi therefore argued that Auschwitz was indeed the product of an inversion of reason. But he saw the system as a symptom of the reawakening of man's most murderous instincts. The modest and banal appearances of those who carried out the genocide was, he said in substance, fully in keeping with the anonymous, blind rationality of our great modern institutions.

Levi thought, however, that Auschwitz, which was a real ‘black hole’ in the history of Western civilization, was both in an asymmetrical relationship with reason, and intrinsic of life itself. In his view, the genocidal experience, being the accursed share of the history of humanity, was knowable only through a memorial history – the eye-witness accounts – or the reconstructed history of the historians. It was, on the other hand, incomprehensible if one tried to understand it from the point of view of its inventors: the authors of the genocide. And he hoped that that would never be possible: ‘The authors of Auschwitz … are diligent, calm. Vulgar and flat; their discussions, declarations and observations, even when they are posthumous, are empty and cold. We cannot understand them … We should not hope for the early appearance of a man capable of commenting on them, of showing us how, at the heart of our Europe and our century, the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” has been turned upside down’ (Levi 2005: 28).

Fortunately, Levi goes against his own principles in both his autobiographical works and his articles (Levi 1987; 1988). Thanks to him, and thanks to all the other deportees who survived to tell their story, we know that Nazism, which represented man's extreme dehumanization of man, could only have been dreamed up by men. Worse still, its inventors were not barbarians living in a state of savagery or in accordance with the precept of a Darwinian horde, as revised and updated by Lorenz's ethology, but members of one of Europe's most civilized peoples. No matter how aggressive they are, and no matter how their instincts are organized, animals never experience the slightest delight in evil. As we have already said, they are neither perverse nor criminal.

And besides, when Himmler came up with the idea of replacing the guards at Auschwitz with dogs, or making dogs guard the prisoners, the trials did not have the expected results. Even though they had been trained to devour prisoners, the Lager's dogs were never the equals of the Nazis who had made them both killers and victims. The ‘vile beasts’ were men, not animals.

As for the accounts given by the killers themselves, we now know that, just like the survivors, they make an essential contribution to our understanding of the mechanisms of the extermination of the Jews.¹⁸ One of the best commentaries of Rudolf Hoess's autobiography is by Primo Levi (in Hoess 2000: 19):

Who were the people ‘on the other side’ and what were they like? Is it possible that all of them were wicked, that no glint of humanity ever shone in their eyes? This question is thoroughly answered by Hoess's book, which shows how readily evil can replace good, besieging it and finally submerging it – yet allowing it to persist in tiny, grotesque islets: an orderly family life, love of nature, Victorian morality.

Written in 1946 at the request of Gilbert, the Nuremberg Tribunal's psychologist and Hoess's lawyers, this autobiography was intended to demonstrate the author's ‘human qualities’ to the Polish Supreme Court, which was to try him for his crimes: the extermination of four million people, torture, the profanation of corpses, executions, medical experiments, and so on.¹⁹ This is therefore a unique document: immediately after the defeat of Germany, proof that the gas chambers did exist is supplied by the man who installed them in Auschwitz.

Certain that he would be executed,²⁰ Hoess attempts in his testimony not to deny the genocidal acts he committed, but to explain them. Unlike most of the accused at Nuremberg, who refused to accept any responsibility, Hoess, who knew that Himmler had committed suicide and that Eichmann had fled, decided, when he was captured, to admit and justify the collective crime in order to become, in the eyes of posterity not a despicable murderer, but a sort of great-hearted hero. It is therefore quite understandable that the negationists have challenged the authenticity of the text; they use the many errors it contains to assert, despite everything we have learned from contemporary historiography, that it is a complete fabrication and was dictated to its author under duress.

Holding nothing back, Hoess described how he became the greatest mass murderer of all time. As it happens, the perversion he displays in his story does not consist in denying that he had committed murder, in eradicating all trace of his actions, or even insisting that he was obeying orders – which would have turned him into a piece of filth, as Eichmann did in his trial – but in the stupefyingly inverted causality he invokes: he believed in all sincerity that the victims had to take full responsibility for their own execution. According to Hoess, they both wanted and desired to be destroyed. Their executioners were therefore no more than the agents of their victims’ will to punish themselves; they wanted to free themselves from the perversions that characterized because they belonged to an impure race. The virtue of this argument is that it allows Hoess to see himself as suffering humanity's benefactor. He allowed the deportees, who were guilty of living useless lives, to surrender their lives to him by rushing into the gas chambers: ‘Let the public continue to regard me as the blood-thirsty beast, the cruel sadist, and the mass-murder; for the masses could never imagine the commandant of Auschwitz in any other light. They could never understand that he, too, had a heart and that he was not evil’ (Hoess 2000: 181).

In order to lend his self-image some credibility, Hoess describes his peaceful Catholic childhood in the countryside, where he was brought up by a grotesque and terrifyingly strict father and an incredibly stupid mother.²¹ He contrasts what he sees as the corrupt urban world with the natural beauty of the Black Forest until the day when, as he was playing on the edge of the forest, he was kidnapped by a band of gypsies. He then de-idealized nature to such a degree that he felt persecuted by its presence. And when his mother becomes worried that he loved his pony too much, he retreats into reading stories about animals to fuel his desire to be a righter of wrongs: ‘My sole confidant was my pony, and I was certain that he understood me. … But love, the kind of love that other children have for their parents … I was never able to give … If I were a victim of injustice, I would not rest until I considered it avenged. In such matters, I was implacable, and was held in terror by my class-mates’ (Hoess 2000: 33).

At the age of thirteen, and with his father's encouragement, he thought of taking up the ministry and could already see himself as a missionary in Africa, so anxious was he to destroy idols and to bring the benefits of civilization to the natives. He was then betrayed by his confessor, who broke the secret of the confessional by telling his parents about a minor incident that had occurred at school: he had unintentionally thrown one of his class-mates down the stairs. That was all it took to make him lose his faith and to resolve that he would never again confess his sins to another human being: he would establish a secret, privileged relationship with a higher God. ‘And I … believed that God had heard my prayer, and had approved of what I had done … the deep, genuine faith of a child had been shattered’ (Hoess 2000: 35).

In 1915, he joined the army, intent upon making his career as an officer, like his father and grandfather before him. Like many Germans of his generation, who were convinced that they belonged to an elite caste, he saw his country's defeat as a humiliation, and resented the Treaty of Versailles because it had debased the values in which he believed. Now an orphan and driven by a powerful urge to kill, he longed to come face-to-face with ‘the enemy’. It was on the Turkish front in Palestine that be killed, in cold blood and at point-blank range, a Hindu soldier from the Indian Army. As he put it (Hoess 2000: 37): ‘My first dead man! The spell was broken.’ And just as he had become a soldier because he hated humanity and felt that he had been betrayed by the Black Forest, his family, religion, and therefore the Christian God, he would, for the rest of his life, love only warriors who identified themselves with gods and who were trained to obey orders.

Already decorated with the Iron Cross, he joined the Freikorps Rossbach and went to fight in the Baltic States. He discovered that ‘the enemy was everywhere’ (Hoess 2000: 42) and that the Letts showed the Germans no mercy: ‘On innumerable occasions I came across this terrible spectacle of burned-out cottages containing the charred corpses of women and children. When I saw it the first time, I was dumbfounded. I believed then that I was witnessing the height of man's destructive madness’ (Hoess 2000: 42–3).

And yet his life would take him to even greater ‘heights’. He admired the Freikorps above all else. These were Hitler's future battalions. In a Germany that had been bled white and that was ravaged by anti-Semitism, they recruited the dregs of the Kaiser's old army, the unemployed, men seeking adventure and revenge, the destitute and the mediocre, or in other words a whole people that was trying to bring about an inversion of the Law that would give them the coherence of a new normative order based upon murder, death and abjection.

In 1922, Hoess joined the National-Socialist Party. A year later, he committed his first political murder by killing a Communist primary schoolteacher called Walter Kadow, who was suspected of having betrayed a German patriot to the French. He was sentenced to ten years in prison but denied that his own country's courts had the right to judge him. After all, the courts were packed with foreigners, Jews and Communists. In prison, Hoess therefore saw himself as a victim, and took advantage of his time in the Brandenburg prison to prepare, without any scruples and in all innocence, for his future career in genocide.

With infinite pleasure, he learned over the next four years, to classify the prison population and to organize it into a hierarchy. When he came into contact with the ‘elite’ of the criminal fraternity of Berlin, he learned the ‘real meaning of life’: submit to the most stupid rules, never accept any favourable treatment, never show weakness and hold any attempt to improve conditions in prison to public obloquy. Released as a result of an amnesty, and unable to live except under the yoke of a disciplinary community, he joined the Artamanen. The sect has set itself the task of establishing model farms in the heart of the German countryside. Here, humans of the master race could at last learn to live with their animal friends and have no contact with impure men. It was here that Hoess met the woman who was to become his wife, and who would give him five children without ever understanding precisely what her husband was doing in Auschwitz. Once more, we see the stupidity that was so convincingly denounced by Flaubert.

In 1934, and with Himmler's support, Hoess began to rise through the ranks of the SS. He joined the Waffen SS and then became a member of the Totenkoptverband (Death's Head Unit). He eventually became a Blockführer in Dachau, which was commanded by the sinister Theodor Eicke, and remained there until 1938. He learned the torturer's trade with enthusiasm, convinced that, having been interned himself and feeling immense compassion for the prisoners, he owed it to himself to look like the most ferocious of men to them.

And in order to prove that he was up to his task, he scrupulously observed the behaviour of the guards, identifying the perverse who felt no pity and were capable of the worst of crimes, the indifferent who obeyed orders, and the kindly who allowed themselves to be taken in by the detainees. He deduced that the best way to improve conditions in the camps was to ensure that the most perverse guards should be given rapid promotion; this would lead to a tenfold improvement in the efficiency of the executions, punishments and tortures.

While he defended the most perverse guards, Hoess developed a particular hatred for other perverts, carefully observed their behaviour and arranged them into a hierarchy. This made it easier to send them to their death. One day, he had dealings with a Rumanian prince who was obsessed with sex. He was always masturbating and was both a fetishist and an invert. His body was covered in tattoos. Hoess took special pleasure in humiliating and observing him. The man was reluctant to get undressed because he did not want anyone to see that the whole of his body was tattooed with obscene pictures. And when Hoess, who was himself a voyeur, asked him about the origins of this ‘picture-book’, the Rumanian told him that ‘he had acquired these tattooings in every sort of seaport, both in the old world and the new’ (Hoess 2000: 94).

In order to reduce him to even greater despair and to make him suffer even more, Hoess forced him to work in atrocious conditions. The man died a few weeks later. Convinced that the Rumanian had died from his sexual vice and not the abominable treatment that had been inflicted upon him Hoess asked the Reichsführer to summon his mother to her son's deathbed. He describes (Hoess 2000: 95) the relief she felt: ‘The mother said that his death was a blessing, both for himself and for her. She had consulted the most famous medical specialists throughout Europe, but without success … She had even, in her despair, suggested to him that he take his own life, but he lacked the courage to do so. Now at least he would be at peace with himself. It makes me shiver even now when I remember this case.’

Recounting this episode once more allows Hoess to describe himself as one of humanity's benefactors. He basically claims that, thanks to this redemptive murder, he had, acting on his superior's orders, succeeded not only in ridding the earth of a perverse creature but, in his mercy, in obeying the wishes of a mother who was so wretched that she wanted to get rid of a son who could not be cured. Hoess actually dared to claim that the humiliation he had undergone freed his victim from a fate that was unworthy of him. That is why he shivers at the idea that, without his vigilance, such a vile sub-human creature might have been able to pursue his wretched existence: he had to be exterminated because the desire for extermination came from him and not his killer.

Four years later, Hoess was transferred to Sachsenhausen and promoted to Haptsturmführer. Convinced that it was his duty to repress any qualms he may have felt, he deliberately hardened himself to his task. As he became more familiar with the logistics of the carceral world – he improved its efficiency, accounting procedures and productivity – and became more unspeakable, the more he felt that he had joined a chosen race, and the more he enjoyed obeying orders. He now had to deal with other internees who had been designated ‘enemies of Germany’ because of their pacifism: Jehovah's Witnesses.

And as it was his job to massacre them by the thousand, he praised their qualities and described them as conscientious workers who loved punishment and prison. He enjoyed watching them sing as they faced the firing squad. This proved, he says (Hoess 2000: 89), that their desire to be exterminated was so great that they were willing to dehumanize themselves in order to be with their God:

Transformed by ecstasy, they stood in front of the wooden wall of the rifle-range, seemingly no longer of this world. Thus do I imagine that the first Christian martyrs must have appeared as they waited in the circus for the wild beasts to tear them in pieces. Their faces completely transformed … they went to their death. All who saw them die were deeply moved, and even the execution squad itself was affected.

On 4 May 1940, Hoess was appointed Commandant of Auschwitz. He remained there until 11 November 1943, which gave him time to implement the Final Solution and, acting on Karl Fritzsch's suggestion, to invent a new form of extermination: gassing by putting tablets of crystals of prussic acid (Zyklon B) into the ventilation shafts of the gas chambers.²² In November 1943, he was appointed head of the political section of the Camps Inspectorate (WVHA). His family remained in Auschwitz until the summer of 1944. He subsequently supervised the organization of the Final Solution and then the evacuation of the prisoners before the Soviet troops reached the camp.²³

As observant as ever, and despite the unpleasant nature of the enormous task he had to perform, he continued to classify the detainees on the basis of pre-defined categories corresponding, more or less, to those symbolized by the famous triangles: red for politicals, black for asocials, brown for gypsies, green for common criminals, pink for homosexuals and yellow for Jews.²⁴

While he regarded Russians, Poles and Communists as sub-human, Hoess described the gypsies as the most stupid of his prisoners. The continuous murder of the gypsies was presumably a way of exorcizing the terror the gypsies of the Black Forest had once inspired in him. They did not understand, he claims, why they were there: ‘Although they were a great source of trouble to me at Auschwitz, they were nevertheless my best-loved prisoners – if I may put it that way … I would have taken great interest in observing their customs and habits if I had not been aware of the impending horror, namely the Extermination Order’ (Hoess 2000: 128).

The worst of all Hoess's prisoners were of course the Jews, even though he claimed never to have felt any hostility towards them. He even went so far as to criticize Julius Streicher's pornographic anti-Semitism which, in his view, made a mockery of ‘serious’ anti-Semitism.²⁵ He describes the Jews as wretched creatures who could easily have fled Germany rather than cluttering up the camps and forcing the poor SS to exterminate them. Being the personification of evil and the most perverse of the perverse, the Jews were, according to Hoess's classification, responsible for the hatred they inspired, and therefore for the need to kill them. Horrified by such perversion, he describes (Hoess 2000: 129) how ‘a Jew had the nail drawn from his big toe by one of the prisoner nurses in exchange for a packet of cigarettes, so that he might get into the hospital’.

Not content with accusing victims who were living in an extreme situation of having sole responsibility for the tortures they inflicted upon themselves in order to survive, Hoess introduced sub-categories into his classification. Some Jews were even filthier than others: Jewish women, who were more depraved than the men, Jewish intellectuals, who were capable of corrupting other Jews in order to escape their common fate, and, finally, the Sonderkommando, who were the worst of all because they organized the extermination of their brothers and, especially because they had learned to outwit the vigilance of even the best-trained dogs, and to prevent them from acting as killers. For Hoess, the Sonderkommando were therefore the incarnation of pure evil. More perverse than the perverse – and therefore more Jewish than other Jews in the hierarchy of abjection – they were the real agents of their co-religionists’ extermination and, worse still, the masters of the animal kingdom.

In his confession, Hoess describes his personal life, but carefully omits all mention of the sexual relationship he had with a woman wearing the green triangle and of how he tried to kill her when she became pregnant.²⁶

Puritanical and virtuous, Hoess neither drank nor smoked and wore a modest tunic. He loved his wife, who was a great comfort to him in his moments of anguish, even though she did not understand what was happening outside the little house where they lived with their children. Overcome by sadness at night, he would seek refuge with the horses in the stables. Throughout his entire experience of the Final Solution, he was careful to give his children a good education and surrounded them with their favourite pets: ducks, grass snakes and cats. His domestic servants – a gardener and a cook – were prisoners. When his wife received guests, she procured food illegally and without paying for it. Narrow-minded and completely stupid, Hoess was, according to Eichmann himself, unable to understand the complexity of extermination: ‘He was not a ferocious, cruel and narrow-minded camp commandant. No, he was a man who was accustomed to judging himself, and who liked to account for what he was doing’ (cited Poliakov 1964: 186).

He was so keen on checking everything for himself that he entered a gas chamber one day. He wanted to know, he said, how his victims died, and was very anxious not to cause them any suffering. And that is when the miracle occurred: when he looked at the bodies and faces of the dead, he felt reassured because they ‘showed no signs of convulsion’ (Hoess 2000: 147). We know from the eye-witness accounts of the Sonderkommando that the bodies and faces of those who had been gassed were covered in bruises and swollen, and that the stench of excrement, putrefaction and death given off by this hell was unbearable. This gives us some sense of the power of the perverse denial that allowed Hoess to convince himself of what he refused to hear, see or feel. That moment of jouissance is a terrifying expression of the reality of the death drive in its raw state that characterized the world of the Nazis.

On learning that Hitler had committed suicide, Hoess thought of killing himself and his wife but did not do so ‘because of the children’. He later regretted his decision: ‘We should have done it. I have always regretted it since. We would all have been spared a great deal, especially my wife and the children. How much more suffering will they have to endure? We were bound and fettered to that other world, and we should have disappeared with it’ (Hoess 2000: 172).

Hoess was hanged before the entrance to the Auschwitz crematorium on 16 April 1947.

Steeped in the banality of evil, imbued with an incredible stupidity, obsessed with the radical rejection of a God who had deceived him, identified with the emptiness of a grotesque life and the inconsistency of the Führer he adored, Hoess was neither Sade nor Gilles de Rais, but a combination of Thénardier and Homais dressed up as Javert. He was encouraged in his wretched career as a State criminal by the establishment in Germany, in tragic circumstances, of a power based upon biocracy whose ideal had metamorphosed into its opposite,²⁷ and of a hatred of a world that was not subordinated to the principle of the rigorous selection of men by other men.

Hundreds of books have been written on the origins of Nazism, but it has to be admitted that they do not completely exhaust the subject, so great is the interaction between fanaticism, messianism, pathological drives, anti-Semitism, administrative decrees, archaic reactions, scientism, occultism, intentionalism, functionalism, and so on.

The notion of the banality of evil has often been invoked to suggest that, in such circumstances, anyone could have become a Nazi or even committed genocide. It was then argued that conditioning, training and formatting ordinary men was all it took to transform them into bloodthirsty killers who could exterminate their fellows without feeling any emotion.²⁸ All this is inaccurate, and such arguments rely upon a conception of the human psyche that is based on a belief in the absolute validity of the theory of conditioning that derives from the highly dubious work of Lorenz or Stanley Milgram.²⁹

While the involvement of a vast population of bureaucrats, informers, railway workers, civil servants, soldiers, officer, jurists, scientists and all kinds of employers was required to implement the extermination of the Jews of Europe (Hilberg 1992), that does not mean that anyone caught up in the spiral of such a system could have become Rudolf Hoess. And those who were in charge of the Final Solution knew that perfectly well, as they selected SS functionaries of a particular calibre to run their death factories.

The history of Kurt Gerstein reveals the obvious inadequacies of the conditioning thesis (Friedländer 1967; Hochhuth 1963; see also Costa-Gavras's film Amen, 2003). Although opposed to National-Socialism, this devout mining engineer joined the Waffen SS and was given responsibility for supplying the extermination camps with Zyklon B. The sight of the gassings horrified him and he constantly attempted, albeit very ambivalently at times, to sabotage the products he was responsible for and to humanize the execution of the victims. Far from supporting the idea that all traces should be eliminated, which was so characteristic of Nazi criminality, he tried (in vain) to inform the allies about the implementation of the Final Solution, in which he was fully involved.

Gerstein was a double agent who betrayed himself. He surrendered to the French authorities, who regarded him as a war criminal. In his prison cell, he wrote the first eye-witness account of the existence of the gas chambers. Accused of complicity in murder, convinced that he had in some sense been abandoned by God and punished by men, he hanged himself in the Cherche-Midi prison in July 1945. Rehabilitated by his biographer Saul Friedländer, and posthumously honoured by a playwright and a film director who turned him into a rebellious but powerless hero who was both ambiguous and mystical and torn between good and evil, he is now regarded as one of the Righteous among the Nations.

Being a servant of God, Gerstein refused to obey obscene orders, but continued to support a system whose perversion he denounced. It cost him his life, rather as though he wanted to punish himself for having taken the side of those who perverted the Law. Faced with the spectacle of extermination, Hoess, in contrast, was already convinced of its necessity because he believed that the master race were gods. Far from being a mere agent who simply obeyed the orders of his superiors, he obeyed them because he approved in advance of the unspeakable orders he was given. And while he constantly complains about having to carry out such a terrible task, that simply allows him to congratulate himself on having accomplished it and to complain about it at the same time. And, in a supreme act of perversion, he tries to pass himself off as a moralist and to denounce his victims’ vices. It is the lack of any visible sign of perversion and his claim to be the embodiment of good that make Hoess so completely perverse. In that respect, he is Eichmann's perfect pupil: empty, sleek, inconsistent, narrow-minded and normal.

Just as perverse as Hoess, but in different ways, Josef Mengele was a pure product of German institutional science. Born into a family of Catholic industrialists, and fascinated from an early age by the world of the abnormal, he would, in other circumstances, have become something other than what Nazism made him: a genocidal killer. He might have become a criminal or a child-abuser, an exhibitionist, a voyeur, a sexologist of deviancy, the initiator of pointless experiments, an impostor, charlatan or drug trafficker…

In 1935, or two years after Hitler's seizure of power, he defended his doctoral thesis in the human sciences at the Munich Institute of Anthropology. It was on the ‘racial morphology of the frontal section of the jaw in four racial groups’. He then enjoyed a brilliant medical career and fitted in very well with the elite community of German geneticists and anthropologists, who had all been converted to Nazi biocracy. A great believer in race hygiene, Menger devoted his medical thesis (1939) to the study of families with hare-lips, and then joined the Waffen SS.

From May 1943 onwards he worked in Birkenau where, as a researcher supported by the Deutsche Forschunggemeinschaft (DFG: German Research Community), he carried out ‘experiments’ in hereditary pathologies, twins, tuberculosis, typhus, specific protides, eye colour and gangrenous nomatitis.³⁰

A keen diagnostician who was obsessively anxious to promote effective treatments and to prove the validity of his research, he treated typhus by methodically sending anyone suffering from it to the gas chamber. In the gypsies’ camp, where they played at ‘burning Jews’, he set up a sort of kindergarten for the young twins he himself selected when they arrived in the camp. Dressed in his white coat, he visited them every day and gave them more food than the other detainees. He handed out sweets, and took the children for rides in his car. Having seduced them, he calmly pursued his research by injecting their eyes with various substances that were meant to change their colour. He was as interested in pigmentary anomalies of the eyes as in deformations of teeth and jaws. He sometimes attempted to create Siamese twins artificially by surgically suturing the veins of normal twins.

When the children died, in atrocious conditions and usually from lingering infections, he carried out post-mortems in the anatomopathological laboratory he had established at the heart of the crematorium in an attempt to understand the biological mechanisms behind the twinship that so fascinated him. One day, he threw the infant of a mother who had just given birth into the flames because she had begged mercy for her own mother. On another occasion, he had sixty pairs of adolescent twins exterminated at once.

Mengele also had a real passion for dwarfs. He enjoyed selecting whole families of them, forcing them to wear make-up and dress up in grotesque costumes so that he could sit in their midst like some comic opera king, smoking and watching them for hours for his own amusement. When he had had enough of these games, he would then lead them on foot to the crematorium at night. He regularly sent his research findings to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Geselleschaft, where they were examined with the greatest of interest.

Handsome, elegant, perfumed, wearing white gloves and happily whistling arias from Tosca, he would select human beings on the ramp at Birkenhau by flicking on his boots with his whip. He venerated Beethoven's symphonies, loved dogs, ate apple pie and was polite to everyone. He had no distinguishing features other than an absolute cynicism, a complete lack of emotion, a scientistic fanaticism and a boundless will to eliminate the Jews, whom he held responsible, because they were intelligent, for the degradation of the German ‘race’.

He recorded the minor incidents of everyday life in a ledger with meticulous care: toilets blocked, power cuts, aspirators repaired … In the same way, he wrote long lists of the real illnesses that afflicted his difficult life as he sent thousands of human beings to their death: migraines, headaches, dizzy spells, rheumatism, diarrhoea, pains in the bladder (Klee 1997; Langbein 2007).

Fleeing Auschwitz, Mengele emigrated to Latin America, escaping his pursuers for ever, and still convinced that Jews were the enemies of the human race. He suffered a fatal heart attack while swimming on a beach in Brazil in 1979, and was buried under a false name. But the science he had tried so hard to pervert caught up with him posthumously: in 1992, his body was exhumed and identified by genetic tests.

Nazism demonstrates how a state can become perverted by inverting the ideals of the Enlightenment, cultivating a belief in pure evil and instrumentalizing science in order to annihilate humanity itself. It reveals, in order to dominate it all the more, the subterranean and repressed part of a reality of drives, bodies and passions that Western civilization has always fought. Nazism was a perverse system, and its goal was to eliminate what it designated as a ‘perverse people’, and not least, the Jews, who were deemed to be the most perverse of them all.

In that respect, its main representative – the Führer – was, as Kershaw so rightly emphasized, nothing more than an empty and inconsistent man whose only aphrodisiac was the ability to exercise power (Führerprinzip) over his fellow men, the crowds and Germany. Power was ‘compensation for all the deeply felt setbacks of the first half of his life’ (Kershaw 1998: xxvii–xxviii).

Single-mindedness, inflexibility, ruthlessness in discarding all hindrances, cynical adroitness, the all-or-nothing gambler's instincts for the highest stakes: each of these helped to shape the nature of his power. These features of character came together in Hitler's inner drive: his boundless egomania. Power was Hitler's aphrodisiac … Lacking any capacity for limitation, the progressive megalomania inevitably contained the seeds of self-destruction for the regime Hitler led. The match with his own inbuilt suicidal tendencies was perfect.

While the mystics fantasized about destroying their bodies so as to offer God the spectacle of a liberating enslavement, and while the libertines and Sade rebelled against God by promoting the body as the only site of jouissance, and while the sexologists, finally, tried to domesticate the pleasures and furies of the body by drawing up a ‘catalogue of perversions’, the Nazis succeeded in using the state to transform completely the many figures of perversion. They turned science into the instrument of delight in evil which, by going beyond any representation of the sublime and the abject, of licit and illicit, allowed them to describe all men, or in other words the human race, as a perverse people that had to be reduced to scraps that could be quantified and reified: bones, ligaments, muscles, hands, skin, eyes, organs and hair.

We can therefore understand why Adorno could, almost certainly wrongly, wonder if it was possible to think after Auschwitz, so great was his belief that there was a danger that the reconciliation of reason and its dark side would once more be found to be at fault.

¹ The generic name ‘Auschwitz’ has come to symbolize the Nazi genocide of the Jews, or of the 5.5 million Jews who were exterminated during the Final Solution. In the space of five years, 1.3 men, women and children were deported to the camp at Auschwitz and 1.1 million of them were exterminated; 90% of them were Jewish. Built at the order of Heinrich Himmler, Auschwitz was an industrial complex made up of three camps: Auschwitz I (the original camp) was a concentration camp opened on 20 May 1940; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, was a concentration and extermination camp (gas chambers and crematoria) opened on 8 October 1941, and Auschwitz III-Montwitz, which opened on 31 May 1942, was a labour camp serving IG-Farben's factories. A further fifty or so small camps were scattered across the region and came under the same administration. The name Auschwitz has also come to signify the Nazis’ extermination of the human race, and therefore the genocide of the Jews, the gypsies and all representatives of supposedly impure races. It is in that sense that it is used here.

² The Final Solution was implemented by Heinrich Himmler; Eichmann was in charge of its logistics and Rudolf Hoess, who was in command of several camps, answered to them.

³ He did, on the other hand, say (cited Arendt 1994: 460: ‘ “I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.” ’)

⁴ I have been unable to establish with any certainty whether or not Lacan had read the pages Arendt devotes to the Eichmann trial.

⁵ The International Nuremberg Tribunal was created by the agreement signed by France, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union on 8 August 1945. Eighty major Nazi war criminals appeared before it between 20 November 1945 and 1 October 1946. Some two hundred other people were subsequently put on trial at Nuremberg, while one thousand six hundred were brought before other military courts.

⁶ From the Greek genos (birth, genus, species) and the Latin verb caedere (to kill).

⁷ A ‘group’ can be described in ethnic, religious, national or racial terms. The criteria used by the authors of the Nazi genocide could, by extension, include handicaps, anomalies or perverse sexuality (the mentally ill, the abnormal, dwarfs, hunchbacks, conjoined sisters, twins, sexual perverts, homosexuals …).

⁹ As I have already emphasized, the notion of sadism, which was invented by the discourse of psychopathology, has nothing to do with Sade's theory of evil.

¹⁰ Gilbert (1947; 1950). Gilbert was an American intelligence officer who spoke fluent German and who had trained as a psychologist. Like his colleague the psychiatrist Douglas M. Kelly, he took the view that the war criminals who had been put at his disposal were ‘laboratory mice’. He enjoyed treating them as such and made them the target of his sarcastic remarks. He thought that Rudolf Hoess was intellectually normal but suffered from ‘schizoid apathy’. The more ‘neutral’ Goldensohn supported the ‘international plot’ thesis (Goldensohn and Gellaltely 2004).

¹¹ Rather than investigating the psychology of the killers, Bruno Bettelheim (1974) who, in 1938–9, was deported to Dachau and then Buchenwald (which had yet to become an extermination camp), developed the concept of an ‘extreme situation’ to describe the living conditions that force men either to abdicate, and to identify with the destructive power embodied in both their torturers and those around them, and their situation, or to resist by adopting the survival strategy that leads the subject to build an autistic-style inner world whose fortifications can protect him from outside aggression.

¹² The Nazis claimed to be the protectors of certain animals and especially dogs and horses. As we have seen, Himmler claimed that it was an insult to animals to say that homosexuals behave as they did. Hitler's bitch Blondi was the love of his life and, in Mein Kampf, he linked Jews to rats, spiders, bloodsuckers, earthworms, vampires, parasites and bacilli. Göring passed an anti-vivisection law, but thought that cutting human beings to pieces was quite normal.

¹³ See Ian Kershaw's Nemesis (2000). In Greek mythology, Nemesis, the daughter of night, is the goddess who demands that the gods punish men for their madness and overweening pride.

¹⁴ Primo Levi was in Auschwitz III from January 1944 until February 1945, and was present when the camp was liberated by Soviet Troops. He was one of the first deportees to describe his experience of the camps in the magisterial If This be a Man (Levi 1987).

¹⁵ See Lorenz (1981; 1966). First used by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire to describe the study of animal behaviour in the natural environment (zoology), the term ‘ethology’ is used by Lorenz in the post-Darwinian sense of the comparative biological study of animal and human behaviour.

¹⁶ Lorenz is mistaken: many animals kill others of the same species, but that does not mean that they are murderers or exterminators in the same way that men are. It is the law of men that defines murder and the awareness of murder, and not the laws of nature or biology.

¹⁷ Coined by Plautus (Homo homini lupus), the formula was popularized by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

¹⁸ On this topic, see the account of Franz Stangl, Commandant of Treblinka, as reported by Gitta Sereny (Sereny 1974). In Shoah (1986), Claude Lanzmann describes the killers and their victims as using radically different language-regimes.

¹⁹ The book consists of two texts: the first, dated November 1946, was used as evidence against Ernst Kaltenbrunner at Nuremberg in April of that year, and describes in detail the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish question in Auschwitz concentration camp’; the second, dated February 1947, is the autobiography proper.

²⁰ When asked by Leon Goldensohn, who had been asked to write a report on him, what his punishment should be, Hoess replied that he should be hanged, meaning not that he deserved to die, but that he should suffer the same fate as the other accused. See Goldensohn and Gellately (2004).

²¹ In his novel Death is My Trade (1954), Robert Merle invents a diabolical childhood for Hoess, drawing on the autobiography and notes communicated to him by Gilbert. In similar fashion, Norman Mailer (2007) invents a terrible childhood for Hitler, and has the Devil appear in the shape of destiny.

²² Hoess is mistaken when he claims that Himmler ordered the complete extermination of the Jews in the summer of 1941. Elsewhere, he insists that he could not recall the precise date. Himmler had in fact asked him to draw up plans for the mass extermination of the deportees, and the first Soviet prisoners were gassed in August and September 1941. It was after Hitler met the main leaders of the Nazi party in Berlin on 12 December 1941 and after the Wansee Conference of 21 January 1942 that the Final Solution was implemented. Its goal was to exterminate eleven million European Jews within a year. Thanks to the actions of Hoess and his successors, Auschwitz became the biggest death factory in the entire Nazi concentration system until the Soviet troups arrived on 27 January 1945. See Brayard (2004).

²³ WVHA: Wirtschafts und Verwatlunghauptamt. Hoess spent nine years of his life managing camps; three and a half of those years were spent at Auschwitz.

²⁴ Because they were ‘race polluters’ of the worst kind, the Jews wore a second, inverted, yellow star beneath the first; this formed a six-pointed star (cf. Kogon 1950). The category of Nacht und Nebel (night and fog) applied to prisoners who had to be tried and executed in secret.

²⁵ Julius Streicher (1885–1946), founder and editor of the anti-Semitic paper Der Stürmer. Found guilty of crimes against humanity by the Nuremberg Tribunal, he was hanged.

²⁶ Hoess was accused of abusing his power by the SS judge Konrad Morgen, but the affair was quickly hushed up. Cf. Langebin (1975: 391).

²⁷ The best account of biocracy, after Weindling (1989), is that given by Massin (2003). (See also Massin 1993.)

²⁸ This is the thesis of Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (1997). For a critique see Burin's excellent article (1997).

²⁹ Stanley Milgram (1933–84), American psychologist and designer of the so-called ‘obedience to authority’ experiment. A subject is placed in an experimental situation and conditioned to obey murderous orders that go against his conscience (Milgram 1974).

³⁰ A disease caused by malnutrition: the tissue of the cheek atrophies and reveals the teeth and the bones of the jaw.