But, as he explained after the war, that machinery was set in motion by Hitler, whose will was law in the Führer-State: mass murder had become ‘technically legal’. All he could do, he said, was to forge ahead with prosecuting the perpetrators for ‘illegal’ killings and lesser crimes, in the hope of somehow throwing sand in the works. He even sought an arrest warrant for Adolf Eichmann – but only for embezzling a pouch of diamonds.
.. Whoever takes so much as a mark of it, is a dead man. A number of SS men – there are not very many of them – have fallen short, and they will die, without mercy. We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us. But we have not the right to enrich ourselves with so much as a fur, a watch, a mark, or a cigarette or anything else.
.. Morgen had reached the limits of his judicial powers. So he did the only thing he could think of, by bringing some of the perpetrators to trial on other charges. He found that Maximilian Grabner, chief of the Gestapo at Auschwitz, routinely killed prisoners in the camp jail when it became too crowded. Of course, Morgen realised that these murders paled in comparison with the horrendous crime he had uncovered, but that crime had been ordered by Hilter, and so prosecuting ‘illegal’ killings such as Grabner’s was all he could do to interfere.
.. Thus, when Morgen reported the mass extermination to superiors, his ‘most emphatic and most crucial advice’, he says, ‘was that the SS members who participated in the gassing were thereby so corrupted that they would in future prove no longer serviceable as normal soldiers or even as citizens, and furthermore that the leadership of the state was destroying its own moral foundations with these monstrous crimes’.
Why are we obsessed with the Nazis?
It has become increasingly difficult to sustain the view, rooted in wartime allied propaganda and given more sophisticated expression in the work of the dominant school of left-liberal West Germans of the 1970s to 1990s, that the roots of nazism lay deep in the German past. Often seen against the long-term background of modern German history since the era of Bismarck’s unification of the country in the 19th century, the Third Reich is now increasingly also viewed in a broader international, even global context, as part of the age of imperialism, its drive for domination building on a broader tradition of the German quest for empire.
.. In the new, transnational vision that has emerged among historians in our own era of globalisation, nazism appears as an ideology drawing on sources from many countries, from Russia to France, Italy to Turkey, rather than being the culmination of exclusively German intellectual traditions, as the historians of the postwar generation argued. Racial doctrines borrowed from the French theorist Arthur de Gobineau were married to a distorted version of social Darwinism originating in Britain, antisemitism derived from Russian and French writers was fused with anti-Bolshevism imported from the Whites in the Russian civil war, the worship of violence and hatred of parliamentarism taken from Mussolini’s Italian fascist movement were joined to ideas of national reawakening taken from Kemal Atatürk’s nationalist revolution in Turkey.