I did research on a number of items in this book including, as I noted at the time, the SS commander of the Mauthausen concentration camp Franz Ziereis and his (TRIGGER WARNING!!!) eventual fate. The man’s 11 year-old son, Siegfried, killed? murdered? what the boy confessed was 40 inmates just...because his father said that he could. Siegfried may...just may...have lived until 2012...although I don’t have solid confirmation on that (and I don’t know how common of a name that is in Germany).
I mean, what’s the distance, really, from a Siegfried Ziereis to a...Kyle Rittenhouse (leaving aside the age difference)?
And, of course, mostly undocumented cases of things like this were probably prevalent during the period of American slavery.
Shirer’s two volumes of diaries, which formed the major basis of his best seller The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, horrified me all over again. For very different reasons.
Spring 1947
There was something unworthy of us in the intolerance that spread over the land. It brought the shocking attack on David E. Lilienthal and the snide remarks of mediocre politicians on those magnificent American scientists whose genius had unlocked the last secret of the atom and who pleaded honestly and sincerely with the politicians not to misuse what they had discovered. It brought the President’s executive order prescribing ridiculous “loyalty“ tests for the federal government’s own employees, an act that smacked to me of the detestable German Gestapo and the dreaded Russian G.P.U., and that according to some of the most eminent jurists in the land, denied our civil servants the most elementary rights of Anglo-Saxon justice and relegated them to a category of second-class citizens, which they were not.
The final words here about End of a Berlin Diary: 1944-1947 are neither mine nor William Shirer’s but were written by Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss, the commandmant of Auschwitz. Shirer enters Höss’s statement in the Spring 1947 entry of his book.
The “final solution” of the Jewish question meant the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe. I was ordered to establish extermination facilities at Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time, there were already in the General Government [of Poland] three other extermination camps: Belzek, Treblinka, and Wolzek. I visited Treblinka to find out how they carried out their extermination. The Camp Commandant at Treblinka told me he had liquidated 80,000 in the course of one-half year. He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto. He used monoxide gas and I did not think that his methods were very efficient. So when I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, I used Cyclon B, which was a crystallized prussic acid which we dropped into the death chamber from a small opening. It took from 3 to 15 minutes to kill the people in the death chamber, depending upon the climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. We usually waited about one-half hour before we opened the doors and removed the bodies. After the bodies were removed our special commandos took off the rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses.
I need to take a walk outside after reading that. Maybe a shower. Certainly a smoke.
I am reading:
Dawn by Octavia Butler
Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941-1955 by Patricia Highsmith and Anna von Planta