Dead Nazi War Criminals

It is one thing to acknowledge the banality of evil, it is entirely another thing to let evil escape into everyday dullness.

The New York Times is filled today with a long story about Aribert Ferdinand Heim, a doctor wanted for war crimes committed at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. The Times articles refers to the research done on the case by the German television network ZDF, and indeed if you go to their web page [www.zdf.de] you can see an hour long interview with the son about his contacts with his father as he was hiding in Cairo. Heim died in 1992, and just now his hiding place is being made public.

The first half of the interview begins by establishing how the son, Rüdiger Heim, grew up to become an eighteen-year old curious to learn what had become of his absent father. An aunt helps him meet his father in Cairo. He explains that it was difficult for him as a long-haired hanging out in Italy, listening to Dylan and The Who, to get along immediately with his father. We are left to imagine what an old Nazi doctor thinks about his son, the hippy.

It does not take long for the present day Rüdiger, sitting in front of the camera with two younger reporters, to step into the mold of old, settled West German leftist, a familiar person, easily understood by the television audience. After about 20 minutes the interview turns to the war crimes: what did your father say about the charges?

The interview makes clear that when political and public events are diverted into personal experiences, the discussion becomes constrained by the conventions of polite human interaction. When they are talking in someone’s living room, outsiders feel unable to challenge that person. Watching Rudiger Heim explain how he found his father in Cairo, we see a middle aged man calmly explain how repeatedly visited his father. He has presumably retold the tale in stages all his life, yet we nevertheless see how difficult it is for him reveal his ongoing interaction with his hunted father. Only in passing does he mention that after the first visits in the 1970s that he did not see his father for most of the 1980s. There seems to be a lot behind this comment, but we get no follow up. Whatever qualms the son had, whatever confusion, love, rage against his father, all the stuff of the student movement, we are told nothing.

I missed in the first half the empathising aggression of American journalism. "Was it tough for you growing up with the knowledge that your father was a war criminal." "Did other children tease you?" "How did you reconcile your own politics with your father's?"

Even as the son lets his own caution down, the reporters fall even further into the conventions of polite conversation: let the other person get it out, don’t push the confession, it should flow from its own accord. The conversation looks like therapy.

Confessions have their polite conventions, like any other conversation. The reporters encourage Rüdiger Heim. They show their sympathy through nods and even-handed tones. No one moves their body. They stay absolutely still. Turn only their heads, not their torsos. Wave their hands at the wrist, but not the arms

After a while the conversation revolves more around the familial tension, the son defending his relationship to his father while at the same time putting forth his own criticism of his father

By the end of the hour we are at the war criminal's own death, his health problems and whatever happened to his property. These are the ordinary topics about the last days of any elderly Westerner: what kind of cancer did he have, what kind of treatment did he receive, what was the radiation therapy like.
The son even acknowledges how typical the last years were when he states that cancer in a 77-year old man will lead to death within two years, anywhere in the world, even in a hospital in New York.

After the first hour, the interview peters out, Aribert Ferdinand Heim ends up sounding like anyone else. That may well have been goal but it is also the failure of this interview. It is one thing to point out that Nazi war criminals are like other Germans, other people, but another thing to let them become like any other dead uncle: so familial, that they are not even uncanny anymore.