Those few-remaining and surely haunted souls are all in the 100-year-old range. Can you imagine living that long knowing how you could have made such terrible life decisions all those many years ago? Even more amazing is that almost none of these people have ever admitted to just plain fucking up. They had a job to do and they did it - in their sad little minds, at least.
I usually try to highlight the most interesting points from articles in my "Best Magazine Reads" series. But this one you really should read for yourself. That said, much of the article centers on an evil secretary and is more jolting than any horror movies I can recall. Here's a teaser:
Investigators [at the bureau] have sought to define and clarify the scale of the crime that was the Holocaust. Where did responsibility for the killings end? Here (one inch) with Hitler and his generals? Here (two inches) with camp commandants, doctors, executioners? Here (three inches) with military functionaries such as guards? Or here (four inches) with non-military functionaries, the secretaries, telephone operators, and so on?
The question is a live and urgent one in Germany because at this point it is really only the functionaries, the guards and secretaries, juvenile Nazis barely out of their teens when the regime collapsed, who may remain alive. Having lived this long, into an era of elevated national regret about the past, they are being fingered to bear what guilt there is that remains.
Recently, for the first time in Germany’s history, a civilian employee of a Nazi camp was brought to trial as an accessory to mass murder. “The typist" is a woman that [Germans] knew either as Irmgard Furchner or as die Sekretärin des Bösen, the secretary of evil.
When she worked for the Nazis she was in her teens [and worked at a concentration camp] called Stutthof ... a remote blue dot in the northeastern corner of Nazi territory, close to the Baltic Sea and what is now the Polish city of Gdańsk. Neither the largest nor the deadliest of the camps, Stutthof was described by one survivor who’d also lived through Auschwitz as the cruelest. It was built in 1939, and by 1942 it held tens of thousands of captive European Jews.
[She started working there] in 1943—the year that a section of Stutthof’s fence was electrified, the year the grounds were enlarged to accommodate a crematorium. Of the 64,000 people who would ultimately lose their lives in Stutthof, some were tricked to their deaths, ushered aboard a plausible-looking train and then gassed, or ordered to stand still to be measured before they were shot from behind. Most perished from malnourishment or disease in the barracks. Furchner was 18 when she got there. She had already worked in a bank in her home village, nearby, and she could type. A photograph from this period shows a pale young woman wearing a dark dress, smiling as she posed in front of the brick-walled administration building that was now her daily place of work.
Furchner’s job was to take dictation from the camp commandant, Paul-Werner Hoppe, a figure who routinely wrote execution orders and arranged killings on-site. Sometimes he dictated memorandums to his employees that combined the terrible and the mundane. There would be a cheerful announcement of someone’s promotion and on the same piece of typed paper (just another bullet point on an agenda) advice about the sorts of wagons that would be needed for a transport of prisoners to Auschwitz.
“This genocide wasn’t effcient because of the crazy people at the top,” [said one of the investigators interviewed for the article]. “It was efficient because every day, thousands of Germans like Frau Furchner showed up at an offce and did their jobs. This is why they got so far. This genocide. It was so…so ordinary.” He hoped her case would lay a new inscription on the past: that ordinary people did this too. He hoped it would send a different sort of message to the future: that ordinary people could do this too.
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