not really amused
It’s almost the end of the semester, and in a couple of weeks i will have my finals. i am reading through Anthony Beevor’s Berlin: The Downfall of 1945 as a supplementary reading to my International Politics, and i am varying between being sick and being totally unhappy. Maybe i am not cut out to be studying politics, since i can not do things without relating to my feelings in some form on manner.
“After the red Army Captured the city a special commission was sent there to investigate the manufacture of soap and leather from ‘corpses of citizens of the USSR, Poland and other countries killed in German concentration camps’. In 1943 Professor Spanner and Assistant Professor Volman had begun to experiment. They then built special facilities for production. ‘The examination of the premises of the Anatomical Institute revealed 148 human corpses which were stored for the production of soap, of which 126 were male corpses, eighteen female and four children. Eighty male corpses and two female corpses were without heads. Eighty-Nine human heads were also found.’ All corpses and heads were stored in metal containers in an alcohol-carbolic solution. It appears that most of the corpses came from Stutthof concentration camp, near the city. ‘The exeuted people whose corpses were used for making soap were of different nationalities, but mostly Poles, Russians and Uzbeks.’ The work evidently received official approval, considering the high rank of its visitors. ‘The Anatomical Institute was visited by the Minister of Education Rust and Minister of Health Care Konti. Gaultier of Danzig Albert Förster visited the institute in 1944 when soap was already produced. He examined all the premises of the Anatomical Institute and i think he knew about the production of soap from human corpses.’ The most astonishing aspects of this appalling story are that nothing was destroyed before the Red Army arrived and that Professor Spanner and his associates never faced charges after the war. The processing of corpses was not a crime” (Beevor, 2002:pp94-95)
I know i have shown Sheetle this a few weeks ago, and i myself have since read and re-read that particular paragraph in utter disbelief, sometimes despair, and other times wondering why. being in politics, it’s hard to avoid the ugliness that sometimes comes with being human. in wars, and arguments, in political fights, sometimes humantiy is forgotten, even discarded, in the march towards being the most “powerful”.
i still can’t grasp it. i can’t grasp how one can hold people in rooms, and gas them to deaths, and look at their dying faces with joy or indifference. while it may not be a crime, i don’t get how people could hold someone else’s husband/wife, child, next of kin, dead in their arms, and then processes them into soaps or anything for that matter. regardless of HOW “degenerate” a person may seem, aren’t we all people too? is there a heart involved in politics? is there a place for the heart to exist?
