An Annihilator of Culture
‘I am certainly tough and I am ready to help solve the Jewish question,’ (Wilhelm) Kube wrote to his superior in December, 1941, ‘but people who come from our own cultural milieu are certainly something else than the native animalized hordes.’ This sort of conscience, which, if rebelled at all, rebelled the murder of people ‘from our own milieu’ has survived the Hitler regime; among Germans today, there exists a stubborn ‘misinformation’ to the effect that ‘only’ Ostjuden, Eastern European Jews, were massacred.
Nor is this way of thinking that distinguishes between the murder of ‘primitive’ and of ‘cultural’ people a monopoly of German people. Harry Mulisch relates how, in connection with the testimony given by Professor Salo Baron about the cultural and spiritual achievements of the Jewish people, the following question suddenly occurred to him: ‘Would the death of the Jews have been less of an evil if they were a people without culture, such as the Gypsies who were also exterminated? is Eichmann on trial as a destroyer of human beings or as an annihilator of culture? Is a murderer of human beings more guilty when a culture is also destroyed in the process?’ And when he put these questions to the Attorney General, it turned out – ‘He [Gideon Hausner] thinks yes, I think no.,’Arendt, Johanna (1963) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil