How Do Individuals Descend Into Brutal Savagery? Part II

In Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz, József Debreczeni provides a detailed and graphic recounting of his time in Nazi concentration camps during 1944–1945. While in Eule, Debreczeni speaks with other individuals about the ease with which people fall into savagery, becoming part and parcel of the atrocities, violence, and murder enacted against their neighbors. Debreczeni contemplates how people who have given the world so much can also become so virulent, continuing to argue that even if only ten million of the eighty million German citizens “have a direct or indirect interest and even employment in the machinery of a great outrage against humanity” they drive the other seventy million along.

Before they go to sleep for the night, Maurer asks Debreczeni if he remembers Jakob Wasserman’s novel Der Fall Maurizius (The Maurizius Case), a story of the wrongfully accused Leonhart Maurizius and the reopening of his case. Murer asks if Debreczeni remembers the scene where Kalkusch hears Maurizius’ story and believes in his innocence. After Klakusch thinks about Maurizius “unjustly” being in prison for eighteen years, Murer asks, “How does Klakusch reply to society? He hangs himself.”

Murer expands by connecting Klakusch’s reaction to the seventy million Germans who do not necessarily adhere to the Nazi’s…