“Sixty thousand Jews every day go up in smoke”

by David Benjamin

“In December, the conservative Manhattan Institute found that … a majority of Republican men under 50 think that the Holocaust either didn’t happen or was exaggerated.”—Michelle Goldberg, New York Times, 12 March

PARIS—For a couple of hours in 1961, the Holocaust came to Tomah, Wisconsin. Until then, my entire knowledge of Jews was that Jesus was one, which made Jews okay by me because Jesus was my guy. Two of my first friends, who lived across the Alley on Ann Street, David and Tony Cooper, were Jewish, but I had no clue. They could’ve spoken Yiddish and gone around wearing yarmulkes and tallits, and I still wouldn’t have figured it out.

But on a Wednesday evening—when hardly anybody went out—the Erwin Theater, my local movie house, screened a documentary, Mein Kampf. The film compiled footage of the Third Reich’s concentration camps and death factories, shot by the Nazis themselves and by Allied troops who liberated the camps. I was twelve. I was a budding film buff. I was probably the only kid in town with the chutzpah to go to a movie all my myself on a school night. And I was curious.

I came out of the Erwin traumatized. The images—great piles of dead bodies, naked and obscenely emaciated, bulldozed into pits, oven doors swinging open to reveal scorched skeletons, boxcars overflowing with corpses, deep-set eyes in ghostly faces incapable of expression—filled my mind and kept me awake at night.

Since then, I’ve learned more about Jews and Judaism, and I’ve studied the Holocaust—not exhaustively, but curiously. Twice, on trips to Munich, I’ve strolled the grounds of Hitler’s first concentration camp, in the lovely suburb of Dachau. This background made my recent visit to Nuremberg significant.

The Nuremberg Laws, officially “the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,” which established race-hatred against Jews as the central ethic of Adolf Hitler’s reich, were drafted in Nuremberg. Partly because of Nuremberg’s symbolic importance to the Nazi Party and the Holocaust, the Allies decided to convene war crimes trials there. The site of the major prosecutions, Courtroom 600—where the surviving visionaries of industrial murder, Hermann Göring, Wilhelm Keitel, Julius Streicher, etc., went on trial—has been preserved, along with a memorial museum.

Before boarding the train to Nuremberg from Paris, I had boned up by watching the two most effective film depictions of the trials, Stanley Kramer’s remarkably intimate 1961 drama, Judgment at Nuremberg, and the 2000 miniseries, Nuremberg, with Alec Baldwin. Hence, when I ventured into Courtroom 600, I recognized the dark paneling and the ponderous sculpted doorway through which the defendants were marched every day. I felt the claustrophobia that must have affected everyone when the room filled with lawyers, spectators, photographers, reporters and unrepentant Nazis.

I could picture Montgomery Clift in Judgment at Nuremberg portraying a hapless shlemiel, Rudolf Peterson, sterilized for being feeble-minded, and crying out that no, no, no, he was not feeble-minded. And Judy Garland, playing frumpily against type as Irene Hoffman, who had in her girlhood committed the capital offense of befriending an elderly Jew. Capital not for her, of course, but for the Jew.

And I could picture, in Nuremberg, Jill Hennessey as the assistant to prosecutor Robert Jackson (Alec Baldwin), turning from the screen as the prosecution showed the same footage I’d seen in Mein Kampf when I was twelve.
After watching these films and visiting the Memorial to the Nuremberg Process, I thought about the legal and narrative logistics with which directors Kramer and Yves Simoneau had to cope.

Kramer, for example, did not attempt to chronicle the main trial of all those famous villains, Göring, Albert Speer, Ribbentrop and the rest. Instead, he sent Spencer Tracy to preside in a subtrial of four judges who had compromised their principles, enforcing Nazi laws they knew were unjust, and who had sentenced to death defendants they knew to be innocent.

The result is a troubling morality play. The most compelling performance is Maximilian Schell’s portrayal of defense attorney Hans Rolfe, for which Schell won a Best Actor Oscar. Rolfe mounts a passionate peroration in defense of the defendants’ adherence (“just following orders”) to the Nazi “laws” fomented by Streicher and Wilhelm Stuckart in Nuremberg. This powerful speech serves to explain, as clearly as can be done in a movie script, how a nation of “civilized” people could rationalize the greatest atrocity in human history.

Schell’s analog in Nuremberg (2000) is Brian Cox, as Reichsmarschall Göring. As he conveys—creepily—Göring’s chameleon charm and coldblooded Nazi conviction, Cox takes over the film. In his Göring, there is an evocation of Milton’s tragic Satan in Paradise Lost, a pathos that elicits a pang of sympathy from captors and prosecutors who know he’s a monster.

Most of the survivors of the Final Solution are dead now. Most Germans would prefer to forget about it, and the right wing, everywhere in the world, is promoting the fiction—to a willing audience—that it was a mirage. That’s why another movie on the subject is important. Conspiracy, aired by HBO in 2001, is a bookend to the films about the war crimes trials. It’s about the moment and the place where the slaughter was conceived.

On January 20, 1942, just outside Berlin in Wannsee, the most secret meeting of the Reich was convened by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, to create the bureaucratic machinery for the Final Solution. Heydrich read a directive from Göring that read, “I hereby charge you with making all necessary preparations in regard to organizational and financial matters for bringing about a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe.”

To this, Heydrich, played by Kenneth Branagh with a reptilian savoir faire, added, “And for that, I read the cleansing of the entire continent of Europe.”

This two hours in Wannsee brought to an administrative climax the visceral and pathological hatred of Jews embedded in Hitler’s psyche and expostulated in his magnum opus, Mein Kampf. The meeting reveals how the measure of loyal Germanness became a revulsion of anyone deemed non-German, which meant anti-German, a doctrine whose onus settled inevitably and most fatefully on Hitler’s warped and murderous obsession with the Jews.

Before the gathering, the result was a foregone conclusion. The only serious pushback to Heydrich’s plan came from Wilhelm Stuckart (Colin Firth), who was troubled because Adolf Eichmann was eating his homework. Stuckart had created a veritable taxonomy of Jewishness, and Eichmann was blowing it out of the water, making no distinctions or exceptions. Eichmann’s position was that suspicion that someone was Jewish made him a Jew. Period. Gas chamber.

Eichmann (an icily officious Stanley Tucci) almost cracks a smirk when he describes the “industrial” efficiency to be achieved at a new Nazi facility in Silesia called Auschwitz. After Eichmann recites the breathtaking statistics achievable there, SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller (played by Brendan Coyle), exclaims, with ravenous wonder, “Sixty thousand Jews every day go up in smoke!” Then, in a sort of Nazi circle-jerk, the generals and high functionaries of the Thousand-Year Reich pound the table in tribute.

We know this meeting happened and much of what was said because one participant, an undersecretary of the foreign ministry named—ironically—Martin Luther, did not destroy his Wannsee file. The spirit of the meeting, which redounded eventually down to the trials in Courtroom 600, was captured ominously in Reinhard Heydrich’s benediction:

“Keep them on the trains, and history will honor us for having the will and the vision to advance the human race to greater purity in a space of time so short that Charles Darwin would be astonished.”