The Bohemians by Norman Ohler

Author:Norman Ohler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781328566232
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2020-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

The description of this gruesome occurrence isn’t all. Adam and John write about the psychological consequences, and their so innocuously titled Open Letter to the Eastern Front leads directly into the hell that this tour of duty unleashes in the psyche of the perpetrators:

I visited a few fellow police officers at the State Hospital recently. They had been sent there from the East on account of nervous breakdowns—all of them. You know what hospitals are like. That special kind of quiet. They had tried to brighten the room up with flowers, the patients were allowed to listen to music—laughably simple touches meant to heal the spirit, plus there were even a few beams of sunlight, it was just like a novel. Anyway there’s a ward there where they put the worst cases, the brother officers were telling me about it with a kind of fearful relief: former beat cops who used to radiate strength, now they can only hop around. Others crawl around on all fours, slowly shaking their heads, their hair falls wildly in their faces, and the look in their eyes is like a St. Bernard’s. The boys told me a lot of horrible things. The quiet in the ward was deceptive; the furies were raging within. Whispering, eyes wide-open, hoping I would give them a word of absolution or justification, they told me about mass shootings, about extreme cruelties, about blood and tears beyond all proportion, the brutal orders from the SS, really more like ultimatums, how unbelievably calm many of the victims were . . . Naturally I didn’t offer a word of consolation to any of the patients, something to help them in the horror-tormented twilight hours of their evenings, and all the more eagerly did they reveal to me their crimes. Am I of all people supposed to drive off the ghosts of the murdered, am I supposed to grant a kind of absolution to someone who confesses after the fact, albeit racked with torment, that for months, as his daily quota, so to speak, he followed orders and shot up to fifty people a day? One of these nevertheless pitiable executioner-creatures—and this will interest you as a criminologist—says he can’t rid himself of the image of a small, dirty rag doll. He also added, feverishly, hastily, that his finger had grown stiff on account of a nasty bite wound . . . Of all things the doll, the last and most helpless thing of all that was left behind, of all things this was now his “illness,” and soon he’d probably have to go “down there” with the St. Bernards. Tell me, Captain, what is the difference between those who murder from degeneracy, out of a sense of duty, or out of cowardice? In any case, this one story has stuck with me only on account of the absurd doll detail—but does there exist anywhere in the world a mind, a person, a book, anything with the capacity for remembering, for setting down all the horrors committed against the Soviet people?! .

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