Wednesday, May 18, 2005

An SS Officer Remembers: The Bookkeeper from Auschwitz - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

An SS Officer Remembers: The Bookkeeper from Auschwitz - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

Unbelievable. No matter how many times I read about concentration camps, I still always come back to the same question: HOW? How could it happen? How could people do such a thing? How can they live with themselves?

Here is a PARTIAL answer for at least one man:
"Groning, though, didn't kill anyone. He didn't pour Zyklon B into the shafts or burn the piles of dead. He watched. He stood there, shocked at first, then indifferent. It became a routine.

He lived in an organized world and its order ensured that the terror of the concentration camps could be compartmentalized, kept apart from the foundations of civilization. The terror was subject to clear command structures and tightly regulated service schedules, assignments of duties and positions, making one man a torturer and another a bookkeeper."

Read the entire article

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