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Hannah Arendt pointed out the linguistic tendency under Nazism to speak of those receiving orders as bearing a “burden,” implying that those who followed instructions were themselves victims.²²¹ It was a sign of an intact moral sense to criticize the executions precisely because one had always supported the persecution of Jews. In his Posen speech, Himmler himself refers to the “weighty task” of annihilation and the challenge of remaining “morally upright” while killing others. The precondition for a perspective like this was that the overarching definition of what was just and unjust had already been turned on its head. Within this frame of reference, killing people could be considered “good” because it benefited the welfare of the racial community. The National Socialist ethics of murder normatively encompassed individual scruples and individual suffering when faced with the task of doing the killing.

Priebe’s story continues:

When they went to work in the morning—we always had to pass the place on our way to the bombing ground—each morning they came along, old women and men, in separate parties. The women came along, all arm-in-arm; they were forced to sing their Jewish songs. You couldn’t help noticing some very well-dressed women among them. There were some really attractive women there. You could really have called them “ladies.”

The story went round that they were simply driven into a sort of reservoir. Then water was let in and ran out again at the other end. By then there was nothing left of them at all. The number of young SS fellows who had nervous breakdowns simply because they could carry on with it no longer! There were some real thugs amongst them too. One of them told my father he didn’t know what he’d do when all the Jews were dead. He had got so used to it he could no longer exist without it. I couldn’t do that either. I simply couldn’t. I could kill fellows who had committed crimes, but women and children—and tiny children! The children scream and everything. The only good thing is that they took the SS and not the Armed Forces for that.²²²