Foreword to People in Auschwitz
by Hermann Langbein1

Literature about the National Socialist concentration camps can be broadly divided into three categories: diaries or memoirs of deportees, their literary interpretations, and sociological and historical works. This book belongs to the latter group, but it differs markedly from all other works published so far on the subject because of its extreme effort to be objective. It benefited from being written late (only in 1972), so that it could achieve a detachment and a serenity of judgment that would not have been possible immediately following the war, when, understandably, surprise, indignation, and horror prevailed.

The original title, Menschen in Auschwitz, is full of meaning. It sums up the subject and the specific nature of the work, as Mensch means, in German, “human being.” A detail noted by the author in his introduction is revealing. The decisive incentive to write this long-planned book came to him from the comparison between Klehr the Auschwitz nurse and self-styled doctor—the “all-powerful terror of the hospital,” whose horrible crimes are described in the text—and Klehr the aged detainee, crude and helpless, whom Hermann Langbein met on the occasion of the big Auschwitz trial that concluded in 1965. It is then that the vague plan acquired precise contours. Langbein, a former political fighter in Vienna and in Spain, a prisoner in Dachau, Auschwitz, and Neuengamme (but also active in the Lager in the Auschwitz Combat Group, a secret self-defense organization), a militant Communist who left the Party after the events of 1956 in Hungary, decides to tackle a terrifying problem. He won’t just describe Auschwitz; rather, he will try to clarify for himself, his contemporaries, and future generations the sources of Hitler’s barbarity, and how the Germans were able to support it and follow it to its extreme consequences. Since Auschwitz is the work of man and not of the devil, he will move the Acheron: he will plumb the depths of human behavior in Auschwitz, that of the victims, that of the oppressors, and that of their accomplices, at the time of the Lager and afterward.

Thus the subject of the book is Auschwitz, anus mundi, the exemplary and total Lager, product of the expertise accumulated in almost ten years of Hitlerian terror. Indeed, the book contains everything one might wish to know about the Lager, drawn from the author’s own memories and from numerous other sources: its history and geography, the number of inhabitants, its complex social relations, the death factories, the infirmaries, the rules, the exceptions to the rules, the few ways to survive and the many ways to die, the names of the commanders. Langbein’s special “observatory” makes this a unique work in many respects and adds to its significance and universality.

It was a triple observatory. Langbein, a courageous and clever man, was at the same time a member of the clandestine resistance movement within Auschwitz and secretary to Dr. Wirths, one of the most powerful SS officers in the camp. Later, after the liberation, he had access to the proceedings of the most important trials of officials both high and low, many of whom he had known earlier, during the performance of their duties. Through these three channels he was able to obtain a vast amount of data, and he devoted the rest of his life to the study of man confined to extreme conditions. Such are the prisoners inside the barbed wire, but such, too, are the members of the constellation of jailers. They have also reached, willingly or not, the extreme limits of what a man can do or feel. Langbein bends over them with stern inquisitiveness not only to condemn or absolve but also in a desperate attempt to understand how man can go that far. Among contemporary historians, he may be the only one to devote so much attention to this subject. His conclusion is disturbing. Those who bear the greatest responsibility are Menschen, too; they are made of the same raw material we are, and it did not require a great effort or real coercion to make them into cold-blooded assassins of millions of other Menschen. A few years of perverse indoctrination and Dr. Goebbels’s propaganda were sufficient. With some exceptions, they were not sadistic monsters; they were people like us, trapped by the regime because of their pettiness, ignorance, or ambition. Nor were there many fanatical Nazis, since Langbein’s time in Auschwitz coincided with the most “eventful” period, between 1942 and 1944, when, in the face of military defeats, Hitler’s star was in decline.

Langbein studies the life of these ministers of death, before, during, and after their “service.” The resulting image is quite different from that conveyed by the propaganda of the regime or by popular postwar historiography and sadistic-Nazi movies. The Lager SS were not supermen faithful to their loyalty oath, nor were they wild beasts in uniform. Rather, they were wretched, unfeeling, and corrupt individuals who much preferred guarding the Lagers to the “glory” of battle, who tried to become rich by stealing from warehouses, and who carried out their abominable work with obtuse indifference more than with conviction or satisfaction. National Socialism had a deep impact, stifling from a young age their natural moral impulses and giving them in exchange a power over life and death for which they were not prepared and which intoxicated them. Consciously or not, they had taken a dangerous road, the road of obedience and consent that has no return. Totalitarianism, all totalitarianism, is a broad path leading downward; German totalitarianism, Langbein tells us, was “a path on which every step made it harder to turn back and which eventually led to Auschwitz.” And a little further on: “This is the lesson of Auschwitz: the very first step, the acceptance of a social system that aims at total control of human beings, is the most dangerous one. Once such a regime has conceived a plan to eradicate ‘subhumans’ (they need not be Jews or Gypsies) and a person wears its uniform (which can be adorned with symbols other than the runes of the SS and the death’s-head), he has become a tool.”

Another lesson, we might add, is that to judge is necessary but difficult. The enormity of the events described in this book drives us urgently to take sides against the great Nazi criminals and their collaborators, down to the gray zone of the Kapos and the prisoners who were given a rank and authority. Now, it is a characteristic of despotic regimes to coerce the individual’s freedom of choice, making his behavior ambiguous and paralyzing our ability to judge. Who is guilty of the evil that is done (or allowed to be done)? Is it the individual who let himself be convinced or the regime that convinced him? Surely both are responsible: but the measure of guilt must be judged with extreme caution and on a case-by-case basis. This is necessary precisely because we are not totalitarian, and generalizations, which are so loved by totalitarian regimes, are repugnant to us. This book is a rich anthology of complex human cases; it contains frequent reminders (one is rightly addressed to me) to reject easy stereotypes. At Auschwitz, not all “criminals” marked with the green triangle behaved like criminals; not all “political detainees” behaved like political prisoners; and not all Germans hoped for a German victory. It is no accident that the book opens with this quotation: “What Auschwitz was is known only to its inmates and to no one else.” But Langbein, a careful and comprehensive investigator of many cases of conscience, is a rigorous and relentless prosecutor of confirmed crimes and a severe critic of the excuses and lies that the guilty put forward to justify themselves.

Foreword to Hermann Langbein, Uomini ad Auschwitz (People in Auschwitz) (Milan: Mursia, 1984)

1. Published in English by the University of North Carolina Press, in 2004.