“WE CAN ALL BECOME CAMP BUTCHERS” LESSONS FROM AUSCHWITZ: INSIGHTS OF GUY CASSIERS (TONEELHUIS) AND CHRISTOPHE BUSCH (KAZERNE DOSSIN ) “I’m a little afraid, to be quite honest,” says Toneelhuis director Guy Cassiers. We are standing under the iconic sign ‘Arbeit macht frei’ (Work sets you free) that hangs above the entrance gate to Auschwitz concentration camp. “There’s nothing wrong with that,” says Christophe Busch, director of the Kazerne Dossin in Mechelen, Belgium, from where 25,800 Jews were deported to the camp. “Looking in the mirror isn’t a self-evident thing to do in this place.”
By Yves Desmet / Photos: Jelle Vermeersch
Lessons from Auschwitz perpetrator. Step by step, over the course of a thousand pages, you see someone laying aside his humanity and morality. You keep on hoping that in the end he will go back to being the person he was, but that doesn’t happen, because the downward spiral he is in will swallow him. The question that fascinates me and the reason why I wanted to do this play is: Can all of us become camp butchers? I’m afraid so.”
Neither is it self-evident to want to make a theatre adaptation of The Kindly Ones (De Welwillenden) the fistthick novel by Jonathan Littell that was praised and reviled throughout the world when it appeared ten years ago. For close on 1000 pages, protagonist Max Aue takes you in a droning monologue along the improbable cruelties of World War II. Almost emotionlessly, he speaks of one horror after the other as if they are a matter of course.
Littell has a fictitious character experience all sorts of events, and their immediate reflex was: That’s historically impossible, so how can this novel contribute anything to discovering the truth about the camps?”
Christophe Busch: “For historians, the novel was not self-evident either, simply because
Guy Cassiers: “That’s exactly the power of the novel: it brings you into the mind of the
HUMO: Littell says that he never found an explanation for the horror: in the biographies of the perpetrators, he only found a horrific lack of self-insight and a lot of flawed justifications.
Busch: “The answer is simply ‘yes’. But for such violence you need more than butchers alone. An engine of destruction like that also requires desktop murderers, propagandists, architects, engineers, machinists, and so forth. I see many people capable of doing this under the ‘right’ influence. However, that’s a relatively recent insight. For decades we lived in a kind of denial: the Auschwitz butchers were supposed to be mentally disturbed psychopaths who were able to live out their sadistic fantasies, supported by a devilish Messiah figure going by the name of Adolf
Hitler. That doesn’t add up. There weren’t even enough psychopaths in Germany to be found, for that matter. Psychopaths are also much too much caught up in themselves, they are incapable of becoming part of a structure. But the ‘mad or bad’ theory excused us from having to think about the development that had turned formerly respectable citizens into camp butchers. Suddenly they were completely different from us, they were devils, in a category that could not be compared with us. But alas, research is now showing us that they were just like us, ordinary people, no better, no worse. Only, in their situation they were capable of the unthinkable.” Cassiers: “You can see that again now, too. The fighters who chop off people’s heads in Syria obviously must be crazy, for that’s the only way you can explain such cruelty.” Busch: “Whereas exactly the same processes are at work. The profiles of the Nazi camp butcher, the Rwandan mass murderer and the ISIS fighter show
more similarities than differences.”
NEATLY SOLVED The barracks of Auschwitz look desolate. Groups of tourists and schoolkids – the camp gets over a million and a half visitors a year – go on the customary tour and in one of the barracks suddenly become very quiet when they see the tons of human hair, the tens of thousands of shoes and the suitcases, silent testimonials that the Allies encountered when they liberated the camp. Cassiers: “Somehow or other, this hits me even harder than the iconic photos of the piles of emaciated bodies that we all know. That mountain of shoes, with the children’s little shoes piled on top, says even more about the people who were ultimately dehumanised here.” Busch: “That dehumanisation was precisely one of the mechanisms that the perpetrators used to justify themselves. They shaved off the prisoners’ hair, tattooed numbers on their arms, made them wear rags and starved them. And after a while, when they were shuffling around the camp like skeletons with vacant eyes, that was the ultimate proof for the perpetrators that they indeed were an inferior race that you couldn’t do anything with, and so therefore they might as well be exterminated.
Camp Commandant Rudolf Höss literally used that reasoning in a discussion with his brother-in-law, who came to visit and exchanged ideas about the camp proceedings. Dehumanisation of the other is one of the most powerful motors leading to genocide.” HUMO: Littell has always refused to sell the film rights to The Kindly Ones because he considers his book unfilmable and is afraid a film would only show the atrocities. Cassiers: “When we asked permission to make our adaptation for theatre, he said he didn’t want to be involved in any way. But he did ask us not to make it explicit – no swastikas, no historical uniforms. Because those symbols could mask the essence, the fact that there are systems and processes which produce this. You can’t simply ascribe it to a unique regime and a unique dictator in a unique age.” Busch: “We still are inclined to pay far too much attention to individual characteristics that supposedly explain a person’s behaviour, and we consistently underestimate the importance of group thinking and group pressure.” Cassiers: “One of the first things we underestimate is the importance of language. The word Endlösung seems like a neutral
term at first. Who could have anything against a ‘final solution’ for a problem? Until you later find out what that word disguised: the slaughtering on an industrial scale of millions of people. A number that can’t be comprehended; the unimaginable, covered up by a term that seems technical and neutral. The other way round, words that are used to describe the other can create a climate in which treating the other differently seems justifiable. Europe is now being flooded with refugees, they say. The image of a tsunami is not far removed from that, whereas the overall numbers are in fact manageable. The British Premier David Cameron spoke of a swarm of refugees; the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said his country is being besieged by refugess. Such language criminalises people who are only fleeing because of acts of war.” Busch: “The Jewish issue was also a refugee problem in many respects. Quite a few European countries
thought that what was happening with the Jews in Germany was terrible, but they nevertheless refused to take them in. There’s the famous story of the SS St. Louis, a ship carrying 900 Jews that set off from Hamburg and sailed back and forth between the Cuban and American coasts for weeks. Nowhere were the refugees permitted to land, and they had to return to Europe without success. After great difficulties, the passengers were allowed to disembark in Antwerp. A few European countries took in the refugees, and after a while some of them consequently fell back into the hands of the Nazis. At which point the Nazis could say: ‘You have a lot of criticism about our Jewish policy, but you don’t want to take in any Jewish refugees yourselves, so in fact you agree with us.’” HUMO: The time has come to warn you about Godwin’s Law: the first one to mention Hitler loses the discussion.
“In a few weeks’ time the Belgian doctor became convinced of the usefulness of Auschwitz, just as today you see how fighters in Syria quickly become radicalised”
Lessons from Auschwitz Busch: “That’s a simple adage for avoiding a discussion or not wanting to see parallels. But the ten steps that led to the genocide at Auschwitz and elsewhere begin with steps that are fairly innocuous. The first one is classification. Take a look at your own identity card. If the word België is printed at the top left, you’re Flemish; if it’s Belgique, then you speak French. It is a Belgian identity card, but they classify you according to language without your being aware of it. Nothing wrong with that – just as there was nothing wrong with the idea of the former Belgian colonialists in Rwanda to state on the identity cards of citizens that they were Hutu, Tutsi or Pygmy. That was also innocuous in itself, but the Rwandan genocide could never have been so efficiently organised without that classification.” HUMO: But here, too, you are still miles apart from this camp. Busch: “Certainly. The second step is also innocuous. Symbolising. Fans of a football club proudly wear a club
T-shirt; the members of the SS wore their insignias with pride. But symbolising can equally well be an obligatory Jewish star, first on your passport, then on your coat. Discrimination and dehumanisation come as steps three and four. In Rwanda, Radio Mille Collines talked about cockroaches that needed to be exterminated; the Nazis spoke about rats and Untermenschen, sub-humans.” Cassiers: “There again you see the power of language, to pave the way for deeds that are at first unthinkable and finally considered normal.” Busch: “It’s the gradual and cumulative radicalisation of a society. And also the development of a selfcontained morality, separate from the other.” Cassiers: “What intrigues me is that they never saw the internal contradiction. They considered themselves a superior race, gifted with many higher values like honour, loyalty, you name it. But despite that, they could ethically descend to the deepest
abyss.” Busch: “They didn’t see it that way. They considered themselves to be ethically superior. To be professionals who wanted to do their job in the best possible way, according to strict regulations and professional standards. Camp ordinances have been found in which Commandant Höss forbids random shooting, or demands that everything be kept clean. There had to be order and obedience, to show that they absolutely were not barbarians. But those professional standards only counted for the ingroup, not for the object outside the group that was to be destroyed.” Cassiers: “But isn’t it incredible that everybody went along with that logic, that there were hardly any exceptions? Then you’re indeed reducing individual responsibility to a minimum. It almost seems as if it’s fated, as if you can’t say no.” Busch: “You mustn’t forget it happened by means of a gradual initiation. For example, there was a Belgian Nazi doctor in
Auschwitz who didn’t want to participate in the selection of the prisoners. So then he was placed under the command of Dr Mengele, who spoke to him about the Nazi racial doctrine and the greatness of das Reich, and explained how important this work was for it. In a few weeks’ time, the Belgian doctor became convinced, rather like how today’s fighters in Syria can become radicalised in a few weeks.”
REAL CRAFTSMEN One of the most appalling barracks in Auschwitz I is Block 11. Cells measuring one square meter in which four prisoners had to spend day after day standing up. Instruments of torture on which prisoners were hung so that their arms pulled out of their sockets. In the barracks next door, Mengele carried out his experiments. Cassiers: “I can still try to understand how people in an organisation of mass destruction go along with it, forced by their function and group
pressure, but why the extreme atrocities? Isn’t there an extra element of sadism in that?” Busch: “Not necessarily. You don’t immediately switch from white to black; you are pushed further along bit by bit. First you watch how a certain torture technique works, then you try it yourself once, and after that you do it with more and more expertise. You don’t feel like a sadist, you believe you’re an expert in interrogation techniques. That mechanism played out everywhere. The stokers of the ovens in the crematoriums made it a point of honour to be able to burn as many bodies as fast as possible; that was their certificate of craftsmanship. They absolutely did not feel they were being complicit in genocide by doing so.” Cassiers: “But surely there aren’t any rational reasons for such extreme violence?” Busch: “Actually, there are. You can compare it to the feathers of a peacock. From an evolutionary point of view, a peacock’s fan
seems rather dumb; it takes a tremendous amount of energy to lug it around and it attracts the attention of all your enemies. But there definitely is an evolutionary advantage: the females see the fan as a clear signal of status and power. In the same way, the most ruthless executioner is at the top of the pecking order: he dares to do things that others hesitate to do. Extreme things that the witnesses will never forget, and that call for revenge. Only the very courageous dare to provoke revenge, wouldn’t you say? “Violence that on the face of it isn’t functional can actually be extremely functional. In our media they say that the beheadings carried out by ISIS could only be done by sick minds. Not so at all. The elite elements are precisely the ones who do it. They mercilessly make their own ideology superior by putting their opponents in Guantánamo suits, in order to give the finger to the US, the big enemy, and to show that the other is no longer a person.”
“Camp Commandant Rudolf Höss is seen as evil personified, but he had the skills of a topnotch CEO, not those of a total psychopath”
Cassiers: “It also appeals to one of the most primary emotions: generating fear and dramatising it. Just as some of our policymakers prefer to capitalise on fear rather than come up with solutions. Fear directors, all of them. (Pause) Doggone it, they’re better at it than I am.” HUMO: Were there really not any Germans at all in Auschwitz who were troubled by it? Busch: “Only a very small minority. Roughly a third willingly went even further than what was expected of them. The overwhelming majority listened obediently and carried out orders. Only a small group had complaints. Cases were reported of
burnout, alcoholism and posttraumatic stress, certainly among the teams that had to carry out the executions. And that was met with understanding. In the miles of camp archives, not one heavy punishment can be found for soldiers who refused to execute prisoners, or for those who couldn’t do it anymore. They were given a furlough or transferred. They could forget about a promotion, but they were hardly punished, if at all. “The development of the gas Zyklon B was a direct consequence of this. Because shooting people was too traumatic for the soldiers, they experimented with hydrogen cyanide gas in the prison, and once
Lessons from Auschwitz they had found the right concentration it proved highly efficient. That too characterised their organisation: it was very top-down, but a ‘good’ idea that came from a lower echelon, such as the use of Zyklon B gas, was readily adopted. People prefer to depict Camp Commandant Rudolf Höss as evil personified, but he was not a lunatic, more like an excellent CEO of an industrial annihilation complex. Organising the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of prisoners, keeping thousands of staff members content, stimulating input from below – all of these are the skills of a top-notch CEO, not those of a total psychopath.”
COMPANY CELEBRATION OF DEATH Christophe Busch shows us around the hinterlands of Auschwitz, where tourists never come: the industrial complexes of the chemical giant IG Farben – at least four times the surface area of Auschwitz itself
– that still spews out its smoke to this day, and where hundreds of thousands of forced labourers manufactured ammunition and rubber until they died from hardship. Each time we try to park our car, a security agent chases us away from the closed barriers. Everywhere in this area you see rows and rows of concrete garage-boxes – not the reminders of the communist era, as today’s generation of Poles claim, but the recycled makeshift quarters of former forced labourers. Throughout the entire district you run into the iconic camp poles, the remnants of barracks, military garages and warehouses, potato sheds, factory ruins. Busch: “Lots of people think that Auschwitz only consisted of the two preserved camps in the demarcated UNESCO zone, and that makes it easy to maintain that it was a German enclave which the local population knew very little about. The reality is that you couldn’t miss it, because the entire district is strewn with the evidence of camps
“Many people are baffled by the fact that the butchers could listen to Bach and Wagner after a day at the gas chambers, but art was a sign of superiority”
and forced labour. And also because half of the population of the town of Oświęcim, right next to the camp, was Jewish and had disappeared in a very short time. That’s right, the camp was run by Nazis and collaborators. But there was a good reason why they chose this remote district: already before the war, the population here was pretty antiSemitic.” Passing through a back gate we arrive at the Kommandatur, where Höss lived with his family and his officers lived with their families. Right behind the house ran the river Sola, in which the children could swim. Rare Japanese cherry trees stood in the garden and the scent of their blossoms mitigated the stench of the crematorium hidden behind a little wall less than a hundred meters away. Cassiers: “They literally lived with their work, they didn’t have any shame about it at all.” Busch: “Auschwitz was certainly no Siberia for the Nazis who were sent here; the top of the Third Reich was stationed here. The German cities were being bombarded and on the Eastern front you had to fight in the trenches, but here you were safe, with every possible luxury. A little further on there was a big multipurpose hall, the SS-Küche, where theatre shows, films, lectures and concerts were organised.”
Cassiers: “Many people are baffled by the fact that the butchers could calmly listen to Bach and Wagner after a day at the gas chambers, but I’m beginning to understand it. Art was a sign of superiority, with the twisted logic that if we can appreciate such music we couldn’t possibly be barbarians.” Busch: “Ten years ago a photo album turned up of snapshots taken by the camp commandant’s adjutant, Karl-Friedrich Höcker. It contains improbable photos made at the reservoir of the river Sola that show the elated atmosphere of a company party: dancing and laughing people, an accordion, everyone in high spirts, a real team-building moment. We now know when those photos were taken: on 15 July 1944, a half year before the liberation of the camp. The company had been awarded a badge of honour that day, for they had succeeded in gassing and cremating as much as 320,000 Hungarian Jews in only two months’ time. The proof that they were doing their work better and better and more professionally had to be celebrated in a suitable manner – even though they already could have known that the war had been lost by then. But they went on expanding and building until the very end. A few weeks before the camp was liberated, when they could already hear the Russian cannons, they nonetheless inaugurated a hospital.”
Cassiers: “These photos are even more shocking than the piles of bodies, because they are completely amoral. You see people who are happy that they have killed other people and who display not a trace of guilt – on the contrary.” Busch: “A mechanism that helped tremendously was the compartmentalisation of the horror. Adolf Eichmann plead at his trial that he had never killed anyone, he had just organised one thing and another and kept documents up to date in files. The SS secretaries did nothing more than tear off telex messages and pass them on, the doctors nothing else than separate healthy people from the sick, the kapos [prisoners assigned supervisory functions by the SS – ed.] nothing but oversee transports. Finally, the Zyklon B was thrown in the gas chambers by Sonderkommandos, work units composed of inmates who themselves were exterminated once every couple of months. That’s what made it so hard afterward to convict the offenders and to determine sentences. People who hadn’t killed anyone
personally often bore a greater responsibility because they had dreamed up techniques that enabled others to kill on a massive scale. But our system of justice is based on individual responsibility and punishment, it is not designed for judging a system. As a result, many Schreibtischtäter [intellectual murderers – ed.] got off with relatively light punishments.” Cassiers: “Just like many financial collaborators. IG Farben and Volkswagen paid the SS gladly for forced labourers; Hugo Boss designed their uniforms…” Busch: “Right, but as a German company, how else could you survive the war? It was only possible by accepting the logic of the system. Don’t forget that an entire society here was being led toward extremism.” HUMO: There was only one small uprising in Auschwitz. How do you explain the fact that people who had nothing to lose suffered their fate in resignation? Busch; “Besides a perpetrator’s
mentality, there’s also such a thing as a victim’s mentality. Almost no one was in a physical condition to undertake anything, and even if you managed to escape, what then? For miles around, there were only inhospitable forests. Many people threw themselves against the electrified fences and committed suicide that way. Some people survived by cooperating, but usually it was just luck. Natan Ramet, the founder of the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance in the Kazerne Dossin, managed several times to get back in line when the soup was handed out, thus receiving two portions of watery soup. Another prisoner who did the same was caught and shot dead. Luck and accidentally not being discovered sometimes meant the difference between life and death. But here’s something remarkable: at one of our memorial ceremonies you could see all these 80-year-old survivors lined up and standing motionless for an hour, whereas the young soldiers had trouble keeping still. Those survivors must have been strong as an ox, with a cast-iron constitution.”
Lessons from Auschwitz STARING INTO HELL We have arrived at the platform of Birkenau, world-famous since Steven Spielberg’s seven-Oscar-winning film, Schindler’s List. This is where they decided who was to be immediately sent to the gas chambers and who was eligible for forced labour. The train tracks to death seem too small for all those transports, and they were. Most of the transports arrived at the Judenrampe, the Jewish platform, a larger switching station a little outside the camp that until recently had been rather maliciously forgotten in Poland – that way you could keep maintaining that the processions of Jews were only visible in the camp itself.
Cassiers: “It is the emptiness, the enormity of everything that vanished, that makes this even more impressive than all of the barracks of Auschwitz I, which also had many political prisoners [Auschwitz was the base camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau the extermination camp – ed.]. This is really the place where death was a mass-produced article, the place where the main character, Max Aue, exists in hell without batting an eye. More than a million people dead: How can anyone comprehend that? It is so horrific that I can understand very well that the most natural reaction is to look away, and to deny that we could also be capable of doing something like that if the circumstances – the
“In many respects the Jewish issue was a refugee problem also. Quite a few European countries refused to take in Jews”
stories, the symbols and the leaders – made it possible. It happened again in Rwanda, and in Srebrenica, and in Syria. Where does the certainty come from that it could never happen again with us? In our treatment of the refugees, aren’t we already taking a step toward dehumanisation, the phase that comes before persecution?” Busch: “People will deny that, because it’s the last thing they want to hear. With the Milgram experiment, in which a majority of the test subjects turned out to be prepared to administer painful electric shocks with no qualms at all, the professor described these results to two groups of students who had not participated in the tests. He told one group that 65 percent of the test subjects had been prepared to administer a deadly shock, which was indeed true. He told the other group that this number had been only 10 percent. With the first group, he scored terribly in terms of believability; with the second, very highly. We simply don’t want to know that
we blindly follow an authority without much of a problem at all, and then become not even immoral so much as amoral.”
STATE OF SIEGE In the women’s barracks of Birkenau, too, the wooden sleeping planks were triple high. There were fights over who got to lie on top, because that way when someone died or had dysentery, their bodily fluids wouldn’t land on you. This was the domain of Irma Grese, an extremely cruel camp guard, who tied the legs of pregnant women together so that the mother and baby would die during delivery. She was the model for Ilsa: The Wolf of the SS, a series of porn films from the 70s. Before being executed by the Allies, Irma Grese, still only 22 years old, ended her last letter with the words: “My fate may be in the hands of the judge, my honour is not.” Cassiers: “Such denial is ubiquitous: at the trials, in the thinking of Max Aue, in the claim later made by
the German people, ‘Wir haben es nicht gewusst’, ‘We didn’t know’. Time and again, the denial as the final phase of genocide. Time and again, the speedy radicalisation of young people, in this case a girl. There is a parallel here too: the Nazis, Mussolini and ISIS all avow to be a cult of the young, the new generation that will immediately and radically eradicate the past and the problems.”
in the meantime – the rise of Pim Fortuyn, his murder, the way that the city and the society were thrown for a loop – I had not seen that coming at all. That fascinates me immensely, to this day, how it all happened, what mechanisms were at the bottom of it, why a society suddenly goes in a completely different direction. A fascination for acquiring power and what you can do with that.”
HUMO: In the past few years, you have increasingly made productions that deal with power and the abuse of power, with the disintegration and overturning of societies.
HUMO: Your version of The Kindly Ones lasts a little over three hours. In a society where everything must be said in 140 characters, that’s almost a provocation.
Cassiers: “I didn’t used to do that. I come from a generation of theatre makers who considered it their first duty to question the old forms of the classical repertoire companies. In the eight years that I worked in Rotterdam, I made many wonderful productions, but they were productions I could have made anywhere in the world. What happened in Rotterdam
Cassiers: “Then so be it, wouldn’t you say? (Laughs) Where else but in theatre can you still focus on something for so long? ‘Sit down, turn off your phone and now I’m going to beguile you and this entire group with a story that tells you something, gives insights, raises emotions.’ It doesn’t happen every day, but sometimes you can hear an audience starting to breathe
““Both Nazism and ISIS avow to be a cult of the young, the new generation that will radically eradicate the past and the problems”
almost simultaneously, becoming a unit that experiences everything word by word. Those are the moments you keep doing it for.” HUMO: In the realisation that you mostly preach to your own church, the people who already are believers? Cassiers: “Even if that were the case, people still have the right to hear stories and arguments in order to be able to defend their position better. I once made a monologue with Viviane De Muynck based on Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis: the story of a concentration camp doctor but told from back to front. She opens her eyes on her deathbed,
stands up, goes back to her practice, travels to Europe, becomes a camp doctor in Auschwitz, puts people back together again, heals them, and in the gas chambers creates an entire new folk that is sent out into the world.” HUMO: Can you turn things around? De-nazify Nazis, de-radicalise ISIS fighters? Busch: “It’s difficult, often impossible, but sometimes it works. Occasionally a trigger can set off a better insight in someone. Having a person in front of your gunsights who looks exactly like a younger brother or sister, for example. Then the spiral is broken and reason takes over
Lessons from Auschwitz
from indoctrination. That’s why I think that we aren’t dealing with the fighters coming back from Syria in the right way. Some of those guys go to fight, of course, but others simply wanted to offer humanitarian help. We shouldn’t be naïve and believe that all of the stories are true, but it’s also not a good idea to confine all those youngsters with an ankle monitor. A person who has experienced it and has got out of it is a thousand times more credible as a witness than a psychologist who tries to tell you how the mechanisms work.”
Cassiers: “That too is universal. My father [actor and director Jef Cassiers – ed.] had a heavy drinking problem, for which he finally had himself committed. He kicked the habit, and in the last years of his life he testified to others and helped many of them break away from alcohol just like he had. The fact that he had become an example also helped him not to fall back into it.” HUMO: What makes you uneasy today? Busch: “How we react to terror: America, which after 9/11 enacted the Patriot Act and has suspended a number of
its core values – to this day. France, the cradle of the Enlightenment, which after Paris declared a state of siege and continues it. How public opinion figures are beginning to push increasingly radical ideas, that instantly arouse a mirror radicalism on the other side of the spectrum, and that are no longer contested by the centre, which desperately and ineffectively tries to build a bridge between the two extremes. Where is the power that can rise above the daily culture of fear? I must say I think it’s terrific that Catherine De Bolle, Commissioner General
of the Federal Police, sends her officers to the Kazerne Dossin to teach them how these mechanisms work.” HUMO: But a day later those same officers are sent to the French border to stop the refugees, going against the Schengen Agreement. Busch: “Yes, but at least they’ll think about what they are doing there. They’ll discuss things, probably approach and treat the refugees differently. In what was once a very military organisation, that’s already a step forward.”
HUMO, March 8th, 2016