KURT GERSTEIN AND THE INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE ARROUND HIS REPORT. ¿INNOCENT OR GUILTY?
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"I prayed with them and cried out to my God and theirs. How glad I should have been to go into the gas chambers with them! How gladly I should have died the same death as theirs! Then an SS officer in uniform would have been found in the gas chambers. People would have believed it was an accident and the story would have been buried and forgotten. But I could not do this yet. I felt I must not succumb to the temptation to die with these people. I now knew a great deal about these murders."
-Kurt Gerstein. 1942
INTRODUCTION
Despite the judgments that were responsible for compensating the international community in terms of done damages to humanity on behalf of the Holocaust, the leading role of certain members who actively participated in the national Socialist movement led by Adolf Hitler is seen with suspicion even among academics and history buffs due to the new ways of torture and murder ever recorded throughout history up to that time.
Most of all Nazi leaders were investigated and sentenced to death, and while most of them appealed his innocence few were lucky in court. The case of Kurt Gerstein despite the ending of the sentence, it was not possible to carry out because the accused committed suicide in his prison cell, but not before he made a detailed report on what he saw, what he lived and what he joined. With his report which is a mix of a testimony and confession, he left as a precedent numbers, places, details on the paper about crimes that humanity have never seen before.
The Gerstein Report had different studies approaches, in first place because t...
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...on, regardless of motive and purpose, will be perceived by every moral-minded person as participation in an especially crass wrong, and therefore wrong itself. The knowledge of what is right requires that if one cannot help, then one should keep away from any connection to the action.”
The perspectives are not trying to show if Gerstein was a good or bad person, an exemplar or non-exemplar Christian because he had for sure a conscience between good and evil. The perspectives of his innocence or culpability hover around the legal framework and on what charge he would be convicted or acquitted given his labor.
It is clear from all points of view that one man alone cannot defeat a whole regime but collaboration to Nazism has to be punished and collaboration to clarify the facts should be rewarded. As martyr Gerstein had to die, as Nazi member he had to be punished.
There are many heroic individuals in history that have shown greatness during a time of suffering ,as well as remorse when greatness is needed, but one individual stood out to me above them all. He served as a hero among all he knew and all who knew him. This individual, Simon Wiesenthal, deserves praise for his dedication to his heroic work tracking and prosecuting Nazi war criminals that caused thousands of Jews, Gypsies, Poles and other victims of the Holocaust to suffer and perish.
“And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes.” If the Nazis were ok with “hanging a child in front of thousands of onlookers”, who knew what they were capable of?
p. 109 I chose this passage because it amazes me that after all they had suffered, after all the unnecessary hardships the Nazis made them suffer, no one had a thought of revenge. “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me.” p. 109. I chose this passage because it reminds me of a time when I was sick and I had eaten hardly anything and had gotten very little sleep because I was vomiting all night.
If you have been in a History class you have probably heard of an event that happened after World War Two called the Nuremberg Trials. These trials were conducted by the United States. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson was appointed to lead the trials (Berenbaum). During these trials they charged with Crimes against the Peace, War crimes and Crimes against Humanity (Berenbaum). Many major Nazi leaders committed suicide before officials could hang them or before even being caught. The famous Doctor Goebbels killed his children then him and his wife committed suicide (Berenbaum). Only twelve out of the twenty-two who stood trial were hanged, twelve, while the rest just got prison time. Besides major Nazi officials, Physicians were put on trial, the people who were part of the mobile killing squads, Concentration camp officials, Judges and Executives who sold concentration camps Zyklon B. You can expect that they had many excuses, but m...
World War II was no doubt a very dark time, but there were people who vowed revenge on the Nazis for what they had done. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum up to 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. Simon Wiesenthal was a devoted Nazi hunter after he was placed in several concentration camps during World War II and survived through all five of them (“Simon Wiesenthal”). When people think of all the lives the Nazis took, the thought of Nazis killed in revenge normally does not come to mind. Simon Wiesenthal was no doubt one of the strongest Jews to survive the Holocaust and contain the bravery to bring justice upon the Nazis.
"While fighting for victory the German soldier will observe the rules for chivalrous warfare. Cruelties and senseless destruction are below his standard" , or so the commandment printed in every German Soldiers paybook would have us believe. Yet during the Second World War thousands of Jews were victims of war crimes committed by Nazi's, whose actions subverted the code of conduct they claimed to uphold and contravened legislation outlined in the Geneva Convention. It is this legislature that has paved the way for the Jewish community and political leaders to attempt to redress the Nazi's violation, by prosecuting individuals allegedly responsible. Convicting Nazi criminals is an implicit declaration by post-World War II society that the Nazi regime's extermination of over five million Jews won't go unnoticed.
After World War II the world began to here accounts of the atrocities and crimes committed by the Nazi’s to the Jews and other enemies of the Nazis. The international community wanted answers and called for the persecution of the criminals that participated in the murder of millions throughout Europe. The SS was responsible for playing a leading role in the Holocaust for the involvement in the death of millions of innocent lives. Throughout, Europe concentration camps were established to detain Jews, political prisoners, POW’s and enemies of the Third Reich. The largest camp during World War II was Auschwitz under the command of SS Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Hoess; Auschwitz emerged as the site for the largest mass murder in the history of the world. (The, 2005)
This is clearly evident towards the victims of the Holocaust, whereby the ultra-nationalist mentality of the Nazi Party established a culture of immense violence against the targeted population. A major characteristic of modernisation was ethnic targeting and an underlying racial dimension which motivated perpetrators to commit wholesale massacres. A number of violent policies stemming from the notion of ethnic cleansing became conducive to repression, murder and ultimately genocide. The scope of twentieth century violence can be explained by modernity’s defining features such as the combined force of new technologies of warfare and administrative techniques that “categorised people along strict lines of nation and race”. Genocides stem from long-term obsession on the part of the perpetrators with the emphasis on religious or cultural differences of the victim group. Nationalism provided society with an opportunity to systematically categorise society based on ethnicity and race. This was certainly a modern phenomenon and was conducive in spreading violence and ultimately genocide. A defining feature of the twentieth century, and more specifically the Holocaust is the perpetrators ability to totally disregard the identity of its victims. Fear and “ubiquity of perpetrators and victims” are considered at the core of modern genocide that “encompasses society in a vicious cycle of devastation and murder”. The premeditated plan of the Nazi Regime is outlined in its ability to merely transform society’s perception of the victims into repulsive figures that threaten the prosperity of the nation. This became an effective technique that rendered mass support among the citizens of Nazi Germany. Hitler’s vision of the Final Solution was to create a Judenfrei Europe as Judaism was considered “a mortal, universal
...erson that shows that there might actually be something going on. That this man is intelligent about this horrific case. If you were a non Jew and you tried to fight back you would end up dead, or severely injured by the punishment that the Nazis inflicted on you. Sadly, this rebellion of non Jews never happened to free the Jewish people suffering in the Concentration camps.
This shows how silence encourages the tormentor, Hitler, as the tormentor did not decline in progress, but merely perpetuated in progress since no one stopped him from doing so, not even those who had heard the warning. The price of silence was also paid by the people who were indifferent and quiet about the injustice, A majority of them died. However those who speak out against the injustice were also killed. Such as the hangings of the pipel who was under the service of the Oberkapo of the 52nd cable Kommando. He was hanged for taking part in preparing for a rebellion, “But his young pipel remained behind, in solitary confinement. He too was tortured, but he too remained silent. The SS then condemned him to death, him and two other inmates who had been found to possess arms.”(pg 64)
At Nuremberg trials, Speer escaped the death penalty and only receives 20 years imprisonment. During the trials, Speer differentiated himself from other High Nazis by expressing remorse for his involvement in the regime and claiming ignorance of the Holocaust. This seemingly highly influenced the judge’s final verdict on Speer’s fate. After his release , Speer erected the image of a ‘Good Nazi’ by portraying himself as a mere apolitical technocrat swept along the Nazi regime in which he had minimal influence.
“It is a concentration camp. Here, you must work. If you don’t you will go straight to the chimney” (Wiesel 39). During World War II, the largest and deadliest war in history, Jews were forcefully put into concentration camps to work while the Nazi soldiers benefited from it. If the Jewish prisoners were incapable of working, or refused to work they were sent to the crematorium, a furnace in which S.S soldiers used a deadly gas called Zyklon-B (“Elie and Oprah at Auschwitz (Fixed Repeats)”). Elie Wiesel, the author of the memoir Night, was a victim of the Holocaust (“Elie and Oprah at Auschwitz (Fixed Repeats)”). In the memoir Wiesel describes the pain and suffering he and his
‘Acts of whatever kind, which, without justifiable cause, do harm to others, may be, and in the more important cases absolutely require to be, controlled by the unfavorable sentiments, and, when needful, by the active interference of mankind. The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.’
It was the unity of action and the unity of mind that was the ultimate triumph in defying the Germans. It wasn’t each prisoner fighting for his own memory. It was each prisoner fighting for the memories of all prisoners.
The idea that to be human is to be guilty arises from both Christian and existential ideology. The Christian concept stems from a Biblical interpretation that essentially states: When Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge and fell from innocence, his sin was subsequently inherited by all of mankind from the moment they were born. This is called Original Sin, and the Christian belief is that the only way humans are redeemed from this sin and avoid Hell is, firstly, through Jesus Christ’s sacrifice of Himself and, secondly, through the adoption of Christ’s teachings. The Original Sin doctrine is important in The Trial because the story takes place in an increasingly Christian nationalist Germany, in which the prevalent Christian ideology permeated, at least on a subconscious level, nearly every aspect of everyday life and society. The idea that every human was born with Original Sin would have undoubtedly influenced K.’s and the Law’s perception of guilt in relation to his trial.