As Germany lay on the ground, defeated, in early 1945, not only the Russians but also the Americans undertook mass internments and defamed entire categories of the German population. The Americans termed their method “automatic arrest.” This means that thousands and hundreds of thousands of members of certain demographic groups—for example all high-level civil servants—were summarily [ohne jede weitere Rücksicht] stripped of their rights and taken to a camp. This was the logical result of the criminalization of an entire people and the completion of the infamous Morgenthau Plan.
I was in such a camp under automatic arrest in 1945/6. In March 1947 I came to be held for two months in the prison at Nuremberg, as witness and “possible defendant,” as this interesting institution of American criminal proceedings is known, which allows witnesses to be preemptively incarcerated. Neither in automatic arrest nor during this time in prison or at any later point was any formal charge lodged against me. Nor was any punishable action proven. But it was precisely this experience of modern methods of criminalization, the concrete encounter with the results of a doctrine of just war, that had to make the deepest impression upon an expert and teacher of law in general and of international law in particular.
Most of the pieces printed here were written under automatic arrest, in the camp at Berlin-Lichterfelde-Süd, a camp that was very tough in the winter of 1945/6 and where there was a strict ban on writing. Nevertheless there was a humane American camp doctor who, out of sympathy, allowed me to make notes and even helped me via evasion of controls to get letters and notes out of the camp. It is chiefly thanks to his contribution that this little book came out, and thus he must be named here. His first name was Charles; he came from Boston; his education and humanity rescued America’s honor in our eyes. His understanding and his heart had remained free of the psychosis created by a horrible war propaganda. It goes without saying that the American camp administrations of that time soon removed him from his post. But he had done his providential work. I do not know what became of him. May God protect and bless him wherever he is today.
I ask my reader to read this book as if it were a series of letters personally directed to him. Only in this way is the form of exposition justified and understandable. This book emerges from a mass situation characteristic of modern methods of warfare. This is not a case of romantic or heroic prison literature, of complaints or outpourings in the style of Silvio Pellico’s Le mie prigioni,1 of individualistic lyrical confessions like Paul Verlaine’s Mes prisons,2 or even of The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde.3 Today the all-conquering progress of modern technology forces a new form of severity and cruelty, a hard and cruel coldness that manifests itself not only in the modern invention of the Cold War. The progress of modern technology is at the same time progress in the removal of romantic subjectivism, progress in the appropriation of the human individual, progress in mass criminalization and mass automation. A giant apparatus indiscriminately swallows up hundreds of thousands of people. The old Leviathan appears almost cozy by comparison, and the old prison almost idyllic.
If the victim of such machinery speaks, this is not so much a matter of saying how one feels as one of saying what one thinks under the pressures of such a situation. All the dignity of the human being is concentrated in thinking. The situation induced by the pressure of automation is so strong that any mere aphorism becomes unimportant. But also any systematics grows weak, insofar as it emerged from other situations. I ask that this book be read as a communication of this kind of knowledge, which emerged out of new situations. A well-meaning critic called this book a modern book of comfort. This is high praise, but we do not want to forget that the comfort here takes its lonely course through reflections and meditations.
Santiago de Compostela
Summer 1958
NOTE This Foreword to the Spanish edition (Ex captivitate salus: Experiencias de los años 1945–1946, Santiago de Compostela 1960, translated by Anima Schmitt de Otero) was added by Carl Schmitt to both personal copies of the German edition of Ex captivitate salus, held in the estate of Carl Schmitt, State Archive of North Rhine-Westphalia, RW 265–21245 and 21479. In both cases there are two pages of typewritten carbon copies with handwritten corrections. A German version of the Foreword to the Spanish edition was first published on the basis of a reverse translation from the Spanish template of Günter Maschke in Schmittiana II, Brussels 1990, pp. 79–80.