RICHARD KOENIGSBERG: One of the great scholars of German military training—and therefore of the Holocaust—an extreme version of military training—was PRIMO LEVI. I have produced several passages below from his book, The Drowned and the Saved before these comments here of my own.
The essence of military institutions is basic training. This is where leaders convert passive young men (approximately eighteen years old) into “bad mother fuckers.” It’s an arduous process. Violence doesn’t come naturally. Young men are tormented into believing they are bad mother fuckers, convinced that their primary job is to kill—kill--kill “the enemy” (whomever the enemy may be).
Not many of us are conversant with basic training. It’s a hidden process (“things hidden since the foundation of time”). It's held in secret. No one wants to know about it. They prefer to see the glorious, marching soldiers that are the result of basic training.
It’s not difficult to see that the Holocaust derived from basic training: turning passivity into activity. The debased German soldiers—who had experience the degradation of basic training—put the Jew in his place.
Now the German soldier was the master or leader—the Jew a substitute the German soldier, who was debased and degraded even more extremely than the German soldier had been debased and degraded in basic training.
Not difficult to understand, really, once we recognized that the German soldier had once been an abject, tormented pathetic young man. Now the Holocaust victim took his place. He became the tormentor and the Jew took his place as the abject, tormented, pathetic human being: TURNING PASSIVITY INTO ACTIVITY.
Primo Levi (1986) observes that through Hitlerian Germany by 1934, the barracks code and violence of the “drill” had begun to invade the field of education, and had been turned against the German people. The newspapers of the period which describe exhausting marches imposed on adolescent boys & girls: up to fifty kilometers a day, with knapsacks on their backs & no pity for stragglers.
The concentration camps were structured in the spirit of the drill or barracks code, a bizarre version of “basic training.” Primo Levi says that in many of its painful and absurd aspects the concentration world was “only a version, an adaptation of German military procedure.” The army of prisoners in the Lagers was an “inglorious copy of the army proper or, more accurately, its caricature.”
An army has a uniform, and so did the Jewish victim in the camp. Both must have five buttons, “or else there was trouble.” An army marches by in military step, in close order, to the sound of a band, and “so too there must be a band in the, and the march-past must be a march past by the book, with ‘eyes left’ before the reviewing stand, and to the sound of music.”
Useless Violence
A barracks heritage also was the ritual of “making the beds.” Of course, this locution is largely euphemistic, where there were bunk beds; each berth comprised a thin mattress filled with wood shavings, two blankets, and a straw pillow, and as a rule two people slept on it.
The beds had to be made immediately after reveille, simultaneously throughout the hut, and it was therefore necessary for the occupants of the lower bunks to manage at best they could to fix mattress and blanket between the legs of the tenants of the upper levels, who were in precarious balance on the wooden rims and were also intent on the same job: all beds had to be put in order within a minute or two, because the bread distribution began immediately after.
Those were frantic moments: the atmosphere filled with dust to the point of becoming opaque, with nervous tension & curses exchanged in all languages, because “making beds” (Bettenbauen, the technical term) was a sacral operation to be performed in accordance with iron rules.
The mattress, fetid with mold & strewn with suspect stains, had to be fluffed up: for that purpose there existed two slits in the lining, through which one could insert the hands. One of the two blankets was supposed to be turned under the mattress and the other spread out over the pillow in such a way as to form a neat step, with sharp edges.
When the operation was finished, the ensemble must look like a rectangular parallelepiped with well-smoothed edges, on which was placed the smaller parallelepiped of the pillow.
For the SS in the camp, and consequently for all barracks heads, Bettenbauen had a prime and indecipherable importance: perhaps it was a symbol of order and discipline. Anyone who did not make his bed properly, or forgot to make it, was punished publicly and savagely.