One of the strangest things to those who study the European theater of World War II is why the Nazis didn’t send their militarized concentration camp troops to the front lines in the east.
I don’t know enough about history to know if it would have made a difference or not; probably not. But Berlin certainly knew that the Soviet Union wouldn’t be seeking a simple armistice after Operation Barbossa and the atrocities of Stalingrad. One would think that preserving the safety of the Reich would be more important than the continuation of the holocaust.
Except, as history (and this book) make clear: the safety of the Reich was inextricably linked to racial purity.
The Nazis didn’t just make antisemitic laws to gain Jewish possessions, though that was a large part of it. They made them to criminalize the existence of Jewish people (and LGBTQIA+, and Romani, and slav, and many others). Nazi Germany would not have been able to exist as an autonomous state with their existence. It was the fulcrum on which the Nazi Party lay: Jewish folk were to blame for the hated Treaty of Paris. The Stab in the Back Myth. Etc.
Taking all of this into account, I think Martin Amis did a helluva thing with this book. In telling of the every day lives and frivolities of some of the high command at Auschwitz (with some short gleanings of a Jewish sonnenkommando), Amis does a fantastic job of showing Nazi morality: they do this because the state cannot otherwise exist. And in doing so, Amis shows the horrors of Auschwitz in terms of labor complications and logistical issues to the indifferent Nazis.
And what’s amazing is that the plot is almost secondary, or at least it was to me. Because I couldn’t help but picture how these conversations, machinations, etc. were going on in the midst of the wholesale slaughter and misery of thousands of human beings. Amis forces you to confront the fact that evil is sometimes really simple and that we’re all content to go about our lives if we think we are doing the right thing. It made my stomach turn plenty of times but I couldn’t stop reading.
Now there is an argument to be made that you can write any book but should you? And that’s totally fair of this one. The world has plenty of antisemitism as it is. I don’t know that it needs this kind of fictionalized examination to further consider its horrors.
All I can say is from my (non-Jewish) perspective: I think Amis takes a big swing and hits hard here because he’s not willing to present a simple narrative. These are not people worthy of a deeper reflection; there is no such things as a humane Nazi. These are people, people you know, who have an incredible capacity for evil not because they were born that way or seduced by the devil but because they are answering the call of the state. That’s a hard thing to look at. This book forces you to do so.