Bu"hler's request was given a positive response. (The so-called "Wannsee Protocol," original in the Archives of the Foreign Office, Bonn.)ĭr. He has only one request: that the Jewish question in this region be solved as quickly as possible. Bu"hler furthermore stated that the solution of the Jewish question in the General Government is under the control of the Chief of the Security Police and the SD and that his activities are supported by the authorities in the General Government. Of the approximately 2.5 million Jews in question, the majority are anyway unfit for work. Which is why her work is among the bravest and most significant literature of the century.That the General Government would welcome it if a start were to be made on the final solution of this question in the General Government, because here transportation does not pose a real problem nor would the deployment of a labor force interfere with the process of this operation Jews should be removed from the area of the General Government as quickly as possible, because it is here that the Jew represents a serious danger as a carrier of epidemics, and in addition his incessant black marketeering constantly upsets the country's economic structure. Except that one of the most important ways to avoid evil – or whatever one wants to call it – is by having the self-critical vigilance that such a journey can scare you into developing. And no one was going to thank her for that. She took the reader on a journey not just into the dark soul of the Nazi guard, but also into a darkness that is our own. But her writing was driven by something much deeper than soft-hearted liberal understanding. She was blamed for being too soft on murderers, of understanding them too much. For this can prompt a sort of spiritual crisis in a person and thus act to warn us not to be so trusting of our own virtue. One of the most morally transformative experiences one can have is to catch one's own reflection in the face of the Nazi murderer. The sociologist Gillian Rose once challenged those who represent the Holocaust to do so in a way that doesn't just lead to an identification with the victims, but in a way that also leads to the deeply uncomfortable identification with the perpetrators. His whole identity was so bound up in this function that it was only at the very end of his life that he was able to glimpse something of his own guilt. He saw himself a minor functionary, just obeying orders and doing his best. Stangl had no perception of the big picture. He was more concerned with the neatness of his uniform and with getting things done efficiently and decently. Stangl wasn't much of a man, she insists. The myth she seeks to expose is that evil people are somehow qualitatively different. And in this way she shows us how close we all could be to it. What is so terrifying about the work of Sereny is that she makes evil look ordinary and everyday. Both resisted the easy characterisation of evil as something done by people with horns and funny accents: that is, done by people not like you and me. Nonetheless, Sereny on Stangl has much in common with Arendt on Adolf Eichmann. She ranks alongside Hannah Arendt, whose phrase " the banality of evil", Sereny came to dislike. Few people in the 20th century have done as much as her to explore the nature of moral evil. Mass murderer Franz Stangl, one-time commendant of the Treblinka death camp, died of heart failure 19 hours after he spoke these words to the remarkable investigative journalist Gitta Sereny. He had pronounced the words 'my guilt': but more than the words, the finality of it was the sagging of his body, and on his face." 'So yes,' he said finally, very quietly, 'in reality I share the guilt … Because my guilt … my guilt … only now in these talks … now that I have talked about it all for the first time …' He stopped. These few sentences has taken almost half an hour to produce. 'But I was there,' he said then, in a curiously dry and tired tone of resignation. He gripped the table with both hands as if he were holding on to it. For the first time, in all these many days, I had given him no help. 'I have never intentionally hurt anyone, myself,' he said, with a different, less incisive emphasis, and waited again – for a long time. He paused and waited, but the room remained silent. "'My conscience is clear about what I did myself,' he said, in the same stiffly spoken words he has used countless times at his trial, and in the past weeks, when we had always come back to this subject, over and over again.
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