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12 THE HOLOCAUST: MORAL THEORY AND IMMORAL ACTS George M. Kren Susan Sontag writes that "one's first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany. For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau.... Nothing I have seen ... ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously."1 This text may be contrasted with three others: one, by Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz, a second by Adolf Eichmann, and finally one by an anonymous railroad official. Rudolf Hoss, while in prison in Poland awaiting his execution, wrote a revealing, self-pitying autobiography. At its conclusion, speaking of himself in the third person, he stated: "He too, had a heart, and ... was not evil."2 Adolf Eichmann during his police interrogation in Jerusalem, and later at his trial asserted that "he had lived his whole life according to Kant's moral precepts, and especially according to a Kantian definition of duty."3 The remarks of both Hoss and Eichmann possess a ring of truth; they were not, at least in the obvious sense, self-serving, and express sincerely held views. What does it mean that the commander of the largest death camp in which millions were systematically and deliberately killed, that the person who commanded the machinery of death at Auschwitz, would say about himself that "he was a good man"? Raul Hilberg, whose Destruction of the European Jews is the single most important work on the Holocaust,4 recounts the following experience: In my quest for railroad documents I went to the headquarters of the German railways in Frankfurt on Main.... I was directed to an annex building in the heart of the section of the city ... where the document center was. I stood in the hallway and two gentlemen came by. "What would you be interested in?" they asked. I said I am indebted to Phil Royster and Robert Linder for helpful discussions of this essay. An earlier version of it was published in the Journal of Value Inquiry 21 (1987): 55-64. Copyrighted Material 245 246 I PART THREE: ECHOES FROM THE DEATH CAMPS "What I'm interested in is a bit of World War II history." "Ah," they said, "Military trains?" "No, civilian passenger traffic on special schedules." "Ah," said one of them, "Auschwitz! Treblinka!" Somewhat astonished by the quick recognition of what I was asking for from my sheer expression of interest in special trains, I asked him how he could know? And he said, "Gh railroad people get around." He had seen ghettos. He had been to Katyn. He was the first one there when the grave, with all those Polish officers shot by the Soviets, was opened. [After lunch] we came back to the office.... He explained to me technical matters pertaining to how trains were routed through timetable zones.... And then he said "I have seen Auschwitz." I said to myself: Perhaps this is a German who made a pilgrimage after the war. Aloud I said, "Did you make a pilgrimage?" "Gh no. I was there, then." "What did you do there?" "I put up the signal equipment."s Almost all who have studied the Holocaust speak of it as a radical novum which has left an indelible mark upon twentieth-century history. Yet in an odd way that mark is almost invisible, like the latent image of an exposed but undeveloped photographic film. Christian theology has almost completely ignored it, as have philosophers. Though the Holocaust experience raises major ethical issues, students in ethics have shown no interest in dealing with them.6 Histories of the twentieth century barely mention it? Philippe Aries, in his monumental history of death, lovingly spent pages on changes in cemetery architecture, on burial customs and charnel houses-but gas chambers are never mentioned .8 Even in the twentieth century death and dying appear to Aries as if they were private matters. "The good death," portrayed in many eighteenth- and even nineteenth-century paintings of the dying manit is always a man-surrounded by many tearful family members to whom he passes on final sage advice, is, after all, not normative for the twentieth century, where death in a prison camp, through bombing or other forms of violence, by execution by left-wing or right-wing death squads, through neglect in jail, through killing because one belongs to the wrong social group-such as in the Soviet Union in the thirties or more recently...

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