The mark of Cain

by John Thompson

07/21/03

Ever watch "Schindler’s List"? Spielberg’s powerful movie about a group of Polish Jews and their German protector in WW-II covers much of the immensity of the Holocaust, but it is a highly detailed film that demands close attention from viewers.

One tiny vignette concerns the time in 1944 when the Nazis sent squads of slave labourers to dig up many of the mass graves of their victims in a vain bid to hide the evidence of their atrocities. In the camera’s eye, a great heap of unearthed cadavers have been stacked up like logs and set aflame; then for just a second or two, a wild-eyed SS officer lurches across the screen, takes a swig from mostly drained bottle of vodka, and fires his pistol into the corpses. Here is a brief but masterly portrait of a man who has gone insane from mass killing; no longer human, he has become a beast beyond all redemption.

Considering all the episodes of mass killing of the helpless in the 20^th Century, we should wonder what happens to the men who do the actual killing. For if such killing is so easy, then we are all condemned by it. But, if performing such murder is too much for many to bear, then — however perversely — there is hope for us all.

When Cain murdered Abel, he was driven into the wilderness and lost to us all, a fate that — if at least in a metaphorical sense — attends most murderers in any sort of civil society.

The mark of Cain can be difficult to bear. We can tolerate those who commit homicide under some circumstances: Killing in self-defence or to protect the innocent is often forgiven, both in our hearts and often even in law. Most of us excuse the homicide committed by soldiers, usually because it is seldom to their personal benefit (but may be undertaken for ours), but also because the soldier assumes a strong degree of personal risk. The societal tolerance for a soldier who kills armed opponents in battle fades rapidly if he deliberately slays unarmed and undefended civilians.

Other killers are much less welcome among us. Howard Engel’s Lord High Executioner suggests that executioners and hangmen led lonely lives. One Elizabethan hangman successfully petitioned for the right to commit necrophilia, as his pariah status largely prevented his chances for finding a breathing bed-partner. In Royal France (and early Quebec), an executioner could choose a bride among the condemned, provided that she consented to marriage to a hangman over being executed by him — frequently there were no takers. Also, when no executioner was available, volunteers for the position would be sought among the backlogged clients; most of whom again usually preferred death to amnesty paired with a new career.

Gilbert and Sullivan aside, Japan never had a "Lord High Executioner"; in the days of Shoguns and Samurai, the task of execution was left to the Eta, the lowest class in society.

Traditionally, in a firing squad, the rifles are loaded separately — and one man has a blank cartridge. This is not so that every member of the squad can believe that he is innocent in performing the execution (the recoil for a blank is much less than it is for a ball cartridge); but so that each has "plausible deniability" afterwards. It is also noteworthy that execution duty is normally regarded as a punishment detail. Few soldiers who volunteer for it are likely to be trusted by their comrades and officers afterwards. This trait even continued among the Wehrmacht in WW II, where Army officers sought to rid their units of men who had volunteered to help out at mass executions of Jews and others.

Even the executors of the Nazi’s cruelest policies had problems. Himmler, the leader of the SS, had to constantly reassure his men who ran the concentration camps that they were doing a "heroic" duty which was even more difficult than front-line fighting. Indeed, one of the reasons for the creation of the Waffen SS combat units (which did have a formidable battlefield reputation) was to let SS men rotate out of camp duty.

To run their camps and execution units, the SS also increasingly turned to recruiting criminals and thugs from throughout Eastern Europe — coarse men for whom the systemic murder of hundreds of thousands of people presented fewer troubles. Martin Gilbert’s stunning history The Holocaust contains a photograph of members of one Einsatzgruppe murder squad posing for the camera — all men who had shot thousands of people, and a close study of their faces suggests they were merciless men whose humanity was fast fading.

Once the extermination camps opened up, the SS took pains to automate the process at a safe psychological remove from many of its men. The 2002 film "The Grey Zone" about the 1944 Sonderkommando revolt at Auschwitz illustrates many of the details of how the camp was actually run, and the effect that working there had on some SS men.

Despite the documentation of the Nazi’s crimes, those done by the Soviets were much more massive. Altogether, their Gulag camp system and massacres by their security forces betray many of the same problems that the Nazis ran into. As Anne Applebaum’s new book Gulag: A History shows, there was a growing reliance on criminals and goons to handle the rough stuff, and many of the camp administrators were never that cultured (or educated) to begin with.

The excavation of burial sites from mass executions in the Soviet Union shows the Soviet NKVD and other security organs faced stress when shooting large numbers of people. Empty bottles of vodka are found through the layers of bodies. However, perhaps this picture is not quite accurate — at some sites the top layer of bodies largely consists of the skeletons of unclothed young women.

The history of executioners and agents of massacre needs more exploration for a number of reasons, and the most important questions are a long way from being answered — we still really need to understand how we can allow ourselves to behave this way, and to fully understand the price it exacts.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca