Another WWII hypothetical. Only this one happens to be absolutely true. It’s 1940 and you’re a young male Jew in occupied Europe. You are transported to Auschwitz, where you’re given a little pep talk by the Lagerfuehrerer; “You have no idea where you are. This is not a Spa, this is a German concentration camp. The longest one lives here is 3 months, and if among you are priests or Jews they could live just 6 weeks.”
You’re made a barbers assistant, then after a year in the hellish camp you’re summoned to the private villa of the camp commandant, Rudolf Hoess - a man author Primo Levi accurately described as a “…a coarse, stupid, arrogant, long winded scoundrel”, but also a man well versed in overseeing mass murder.
His wife meets you at the door, then leads you to the bathroom, and a chair next to the sink. Hoess sits lights a cigar, not uttering a word. You have an array of sharp implements at your disposal.
The barber’s name was Josef Paczynski. He decided not to murder the Nazi and against all odds survived his time in the camp.
Ok. I’ll play. I would cut his hair. I do think I’d kill him.
I can’t control what he does, but I can control what I do. Killing him may or may not save other people’s lives. It won’t bring back the lives of the people he’s already had killed. But killing him almost certainly does end my life.
As for trying to escape - it depends on the situation. I’d have to judge the risk.
I have no idea whether killing him would be the right thing to do or not. I would almost certainly be too chicken to actually kill him. Then, later, I would come up with a post-hoc moral justification for why I didn’t do it. Shouldn’t be hard, since there’s a laundry list of possible reasons why killing him is wrong. I would also most likely be too chicken to try to escape.
I’m not at all saying that the actual barber in the story was a coward not to do it, though. Just speaking for myself.
What would killing him accomplish? He would just be replaced with another commandant. It would certainly end my life and most likely make the lives of all other prisoners that much worse.
I would not kill him, not because it was too dangerous, but because it is both morally wrong and pragmatically shortsighted.
Of course, we can only say what we hope we’d do, none of us knows what effect those conditions would have on our ability to think and act. But I hope I would kill him. It’s entirely possible that he would be replaced by someone who would run the place the same way. But Hoess was good at his job, and ran an efficient operation. Most people don’t, and during war often the best folks are sent to positions where they can lead the fighting, not administer the prisons. (A poor comparison, but you know what I mean.)
So, at a minimum I can hope that a less efficient killer will replace Hoess. And though I’d have little desire to survive under such conditions, I would try to escape, in order to spread the word about what is happening. The fewer people who can claim not to have known, the better.
I try to always leave a situation better than I found it, but I also try very hard to leave a bad situation.
I’m a coward, and my sense of self-preservation would be too strong – even if I knew I would probably die within a few months more of living in the concentration camp, I’d still do anything I could to live a little longer.
You know in 1984, when Winston is in the jail and he wants to commit suicide, but he just can’t, because he’d do anything to survive, if only presently? Yeah. It’s like that.
That was his rationale, he says “And of course I realized if this silent son of a bitch would go, there will be another man who will take his place”.
Incredibly risky no matter what the situation, of the approximately 1.1 million deaths there there are a recorded 144 successful escapes out of 802 attempts. If you were caught you would be starved to death, or tortured and put on display.
So escape takes massive balls and luck, both of which Kazimierz Piechowski had - in a stolen SS car and uniform they drove right out of there, almost coming unstuck when they didn’t open the gate. He shouted at the guard to open it.
Wouldn’t kill him; I’d expect the Nazis to indulge in reprisal killings. Not only would Hoess be replaced, but the situation would almost instantly be made much worse. Plus, I’d die myself - which might not matter if it accomplished anything, but again, I’d probably be getting innocent people killed with me.
There’s the seed of a passive-aggressively Machiavellian plot in there. Give him, say, a Zippy the Pin Head cut. Something that makes him look really ridiculous. The uber-hierarchical nature of the SS would prevent anybody ever telling him it looks ridiculous. Thus would begin an Emperor’s New Clothes situation, in which the camp slowly descends into chaos while the troops are both too frightened to tell him he looks stupid, but also begin to lose faith in his judgement. Soon he’ll have no control whatsoever.
I’d just do whatever I needed to do to survive. In a situation like that, I think that’s what most anyone would do. I’m really not comfortable speculating on this from my desk, having just eaten a good lunch.
Yes, I agree that killing him accomplishes virtually nothing of any worth. It doesn’t take a genius to manage a concentration camp and they’re not going to consider anyone soft enough to make the conditions any better. Killing someone like Hitler would be more tempting, because it’s unlikely that anyone could step into his shoes.
Plus, it was well-known that Jewish resistance of any kind would result in reprisal killings. So I’ve sacrificed myself and 100 of my friends to replace genocidal maniac A with genocidal maniac B?
I also have to admit that a very large part of my motivation would be to avoid being tortured as an example. The idea of killing him and *not *dying is what scares me most in this scenario. If I killed him, it’d either be part of a suicide plan or an escape plan.
I wouldn’t kill him - not for any personal reasons, but because the retaliation against the other prisoners would almost certainly be brutal, relentless, and total - and if it really was Hoess, probably carried out at Dachau, Sobibor, and Treblinka as well.
There was a short story I read once- very tense-that had a similar theme. I want to say it was set in an unnamed South American country, but it was about a barber who was suspected, correctly, of having subversive sympathies who gives a shave to the brutal hated local secret police chief. Does anybody remember it?
You know Goebbels refused to go to bars with Hitler? Turns out Hitler was a mean drunk.
So goes an old joke, the punchline for those who find it funny being that as terrible as Hitler was, how much worse could he get when drunk?
I kind of feel the same way about this. When you’re dealing with extermination camps where people are experimented on, how much worse is it really going to get?
It’s possible that with Hoess gone, there’d be enough confusion in the bureaucracy to enable more escapes or retaliation against guards.
And the idea that killing Hoess would make me as bad as him is bullshit. Hoess was one of the worst people in history. You might object to killing across the board, but killing a single mass-murderer who is planning to have you murdered does not make you as bad as the mass murderer.
For all those reasons plus one more, I’d not kill him–that additional reason being that I’m kind of a coward.
