In the reciprocal evolution of system and persons, some SS and other Nazis (the Hitlerjugend in Karski’s report) came to enjoy their limitless power over other humans. The freedom to completely control others’ lives and bodies might give some people a dizzying sense of power or perhaps the experience of both abandonment and strength as in an intense sexual experience. Their background and experience also prepares some people for sadistic pleasure, which develops out of a history of connection between one’s own pleasure and others’ pain.
One’s own advantage or satisfaction can be regularly associated with others’ disadvantage or suffering: a bully might forcefully take away toys from other children; rivalry may lead to good feelings when a sibling suffers. Past hurts or feeling diminished can lead people to feel elevated relative to others who suffer. Satisfactions gained from power and from others’ suffering can fuse. SS members had many experiences that taught sadism. Coming to enjoy their victims’ suffering also had a special function: it could erase doubt and make “work” satisfying. The SS could also feel satifaction from successfully combating “evil.”
Keneally offers a glimpse of another individual path.
Poldek Pfefferberg was told about the list by an SS NCO named Hans Schreiber. Schreiber, a young man in his mid-twenties, had as evil a name as any other SS man in Plaszow, but Pfefferberg had become something of a mild favorite of his in that way that was common to relations – throughout the system – between individual prisoners and SS personnel. It had begun one day when Pfefferberg, as a group leader in his barracks, had had responsibility for window cleaning. Schreiber inspected the glass and found a smudge, and began browbeating Poldek in the style that was often a prelude to execution. Pfefferberg lost his temper and told Schreiber that both of them knew the windows were perfectly polished and if Schreiber wanted a reason to shoot him, he ought to do so without any more delay. The outburst had, in a contradictory way, amused Schreiber, who afterward occasionally used to stop Pfefferberg and ask him how he and his wife were, and sometimes even gave Poldek and apple for Mila. In the summer of 1944, Poldek had appealed to him desperately to extricate Mila from a trainload of women being sent from Plaszow to the evil camp at Stutthof on the Baltic. Mila was already in the lines boarding the cattle cars when Schreiber came waving a piece of paper and calling her name. Another time, a Sunday, he turned up drunk at Pfefferberg’s barracks and, in front of Poldek and a few other prisoners, began to weep for what he called “the dreadful things” he had done in Plaszow. He intended, he said, to expiate them on the Eastern Front. In the end, he would.25
It seems that when Pfefferberg refused to react as a helpless victim, but reacted with an intensity and humanness not fitting the victim role, Schreiber slipped out of the role of executioner. Pfefferberg’s anger awoke in Schreiber a human response. That, and his subsequent kindness to Pfefferberg, nurtured in him a consideration for others. One reason for the effectiveness of Oskar Schindler, who saved 1200 Jews, and Raoul Wallenberg, who saved tens of thousands, was that they reacted contrary to the expectations of the SS and Hungarian Nazis.26 In facing Nazis accustomed to fear and trembling, they acted with self-assurance and authority, sometimes even demanding help in helping Jews.
As the SS became a large, complex, partly bureaucratic elite, more men became members who were not self-selected or selected by authorities for their ability to fulfill task requirements. At one point the whole German equestrian society was incorporated into the SS. Most of these new members became socialized into the SS system. Some late joiners, however, made an incorrect self-selection; they were unaware of some of the requirements of membership or did not anticipate their own reactions to them. These reactions, based perhaps on “inclusive” moral values, inhibited their evolution and resulted in a gap between the role and the person. There were probably few such members in the SS, owing not only to initial self-selection and socialization into the system, but also to dismissal and quitting. Those who did not fit the requirements of SS training, such as extreme obedience and physical courage, were screened out.27 Those whose values and world view did not fit them for membership could drop out.
A few SS men were relatively humane, at least at times.28 Prisoners reported that on occasion their lives were saved by SS guards. We can imagine that even very small, causal acts of humanity would have great impact on prisoners searching for humanity in an overwhelmingly cruel, inhumane system.
Only in a very few reported instances was the motivation of a kind SS member clearly to save a Jew. Keneally tells the story of an SS guard who accompanied two children and their fathers from Schindler’s camp to Auschwitz and then accompanied three hundred women from Auschwitz back to Schindler’s camp, acting in a humane, friendly, helpful manner all the way, at one point even crying in response to their sorrow.29 All this happened, however, near the end of the war, when the footsteps of the western Allies on one side and the Russians on the other could almost be heard. We do not know to what extent the behavior of this man (and others) was the result of a changed perspective due to changed
