The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (38 page)

Within a century after the last victim of the Spanish Inquisition was put to the flames, a new generation of inquisitors came to power in Europe. They enjoyed access to the technology of the twentieth century—railroads, chemical pesticides, automatic weapons, radio transmitters, and much else besides—and they swore themselves to serve rulers who enjoyed far more authority than any pope or king of the Middle Ages. But they embraced the same hateful idea that was the raison d’être of the Inquisition, and so they were able to update and automate the medieval equipment and set it into operation on an industrial scale. “The modern totalitarian state in Nazi Germany and the Leninist-Stalinist Soviet Union and its satellites was a realization of a medieval nightmare,” writes Cantor. “The result was Auschwitz and the Gulag, World War II, and the death of at least twenty million civilians at the hands of the Nazi and Bolshevik governments.”
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To be sure, the willingness to torture and kill one’s fellow human beings because of some trivial difference in appearance or habit or belief hardly began with the Inquisition. The first heretic to be burned alive in Spain, for example, was Priscillian of Ávila, who was sent to the stake on charges of witchcraft in 383, more than a thousand years before the Spanish Inquisition came into existence. The persecutorial impulse—“the urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings imagined as agents of corruption and incarnations of evil”—seems to be hardwired into Western civilization. Sad to say, human beings as a species have never failed to find reasons to regard one another with fear and loathing and thus to offer violence to one another.
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But the Inquisition transformed these ugly and tragic impulses into something vastly more powerful and thus more perilous by draping them in the trappings of law and theology and creating a bureaucracy to organize and administer the bloodshed. Once available, the inquisitorial toolbox could be put to use by any authoritarian regime with the will and the means to unpack and use it. “Here, then, was an engine so constructed that it might be turned effectually to any purpose,” explains Coulton. “Good purpose or bad purpose depended only upon the policy or the caprice of the man or the group who had this tribunal at command.”
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The “engine” to which Coulton is referring is the medieval Inquisition, but his words apply with equal force to the lowercase inquisitions of the twentieth century and, as we shall see, the opening decades of the third millennium, too.

When a young SS officer named Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) first showed up for work at the Main Office for the Security of the Reich in Berlin, he was promptly sworn to secrecy and then ushered into a locked room in the headquarters of the Gestapo in the ornate Prinz-Albrecht-Palais. “Then I saw what we would be doing,” he later recalled, “and it gave me the creeps.” What gave Eichmann the creeps, as it turns out, had nothing to do with the crimes against humanity for which he was later tried and hanged by the state of Israel. But it had everything to do with the machinery of persecution that had been borrowed from the Inquisition and put to use in Nazi Germany.

“We had to put the card files in alphabetical order,” Eichmann told the Israeli police captain who interrogated him in advance of his trial. “It was all about Freemasons. We sorted and sorted. Always taking care to keep the right letters together, the C’s with the C’s and so on. I’d never even heard of the Freemasons, I had no idea what they were.”
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Eichmann’s reminiscences—yet another scene that must be described as Kafkaesque—reveal something important about the Inquisition and the long shadow that it casts across history. Like the friar-inquisitors who came before them, the dutiful bureaucrats who operated the Nazi version of the machinery of persecution were avid collectors of information, which they also gathered from spies, informers, and prisoners interrogated under torture. Both the Inquisition and the Nazi regime were fearful of any idea or practice that fell outside the narrow circle of dogma; thus, for example, both turned their attention to Freemasons, homosexuals, and Jews, among other victims. Both were obsessed with their self-appointed mission of imposing a rigid authoritarian order on an unruly world, always putting “the C’s with the C’s.” Tragically, the similarities do not stop there.

When Eichmann was later transferred to what he called “the Jews department,” he was handed a copy of Theodor Herzl’s
The Jewish State
and told “to make an abstract of it to serve as an orientation booklet for the General SS”—a kind of latter-day inquisitor’s manual. Even after Eichmann had been promoted to the upper ranks of the bureaucracy whose job it was to find and kill Jews, his underlings were still collecting and sorting index cards (
Judenkartei
or “Jew cards”) that were “intended to identify every Jew living in the Reich,” a task the Nazi regime deemed necessary “for a successful internal struggle against Jewry.”
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Just as the Roman Inquisition was headquartered in the Vatican and the Spanish Inquisition was governed by
La Suprema
in the Palace of the Inquisition in Madrid, their counterpart in Nazi Germany was administered from a complex of stately buildings in Berlin, the same site where Eichmann was first assigned to sort index cards. Working under the command of a failed chicken farmer named Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) who rose to the lofty rank of Reichsführer, the dutiful Nazi bureaucrats supervised the day-to-day operations of the secret state police (Geheime Staatspolizei, better known as the Gestapo), the criminal police, the security service of the SS, and the various other departments in charge of the mundane tasks required to carry out a well-organized genocide. Together they aspired to create and operate “an entirely integrated system of surveillance, reporting and arrests,” according to historian and Holocaust survivor Saul Friedländer, with the ultimate goal of supplying “combustible material” for the crematoria.
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To accomplish these tasks, the Nazis used many of the same instruments of torture that would have been found in any inquisitorial dungeon. The Gestapo, for example, contrived its own version of the strappado by suspending the victim from a rope threaded through his or her handcuffs, and then dangling and jerking the victim at the pleasure of the questioning officer. The ordeal by water was applied by forcibly submerging the victim in a tub of cold water or by leaving the victim in a barrel of water placed outside in cold weather until he or she was nearly frozen, and the ordeal by fire was administered by use of a soldering iron.

The Nazis were enchanted with medieval legend and lore, as we shall see, but they were not content with medieval technology, and so they encouraged innovation and invention in the application of torture. A favorite technique of the Gestapo was to apply electrical shocks conveyed through wires attached to the penis and the anus of the victim. Like the Renaissance artisan who fashioned the Pear as a tool for the torture of heretics, some nameless German inventor in service to the Nazi regime devised a cunning little metal box with a thread-and-screw device that allowed the Gestapo torturer to slowly crush the testicles of his victim during questioning.

All the while, a female clerk-typist fulfilled the role of the medieval notary, taking down every word uttered by the victim of torture. A Gestapo doctor was occasionally summoned to the torture chamber, but for strictly functional rather than compassionate reasons: “[T]hey are not to render any medical aid, but only to determine whether the prisoner may still be beaten,” reported the authors of
The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror
in 1933. “They are like the doctors of the Inquisition: the torture is stopped when there is a danger of the victim dying.” Once the victim was revived, the questioning could begin again.
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The point of such devices and techniques was never merely to extract a confession of wrongdoing—the Nazis were perfectly willing to murder their victims without cause—but rather to compel the victim to name names. Thus, for example, one resistance fighter was kept alive and repeatedly tortured by the Gestapo over a period of more than two years only because his tormentors imagined that he would finally betray the names and whereabouts of other members of the underground. Only when the Nazis were finally convinced that there was nothing that he could or would reveal did the Gestapo finally put him out of his misery. But then, even a victim of torture who eventually consented to betray his comrades generally suffered the same fate.

Of course, it was not always necessary for the Gestapo to resort to torture to compel a man or woman to betray a friend or neighbor. Whether out of fear or malice or self-interest, a network of willing informers was available to the Gestapo as it had been to the Inquisition. Just as a woman working as a midwife might find herself denounced to the Inquisition as a witch by a jealous business rival, ordinary Germans were often willing to volunteer some damning item of information, whether real or invented, to the Gestapo. “Angry neighbors, bitter in-laws, and disgruntled work colleagues,” states historian Eric A. Johnson, “frequently used the state’s secret police apparatus to settle their personal and often petty scores.”
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Again like the Inquisition, the Nazi regime refused to call any of its crimes by their rightful names. An ordinary beating was known in Gestapo documents as “Rigorous Examination,” and the more inventive and excruciating forms of torture were called “Especially Rigorous Interrogations.” Just as “relaxing” a condemned heretic meant burning him alive in inquisitorial jargon, the Nazis devised a whole vocabulary of euphemisms to refer obliquely to the arrest, incarceration, and murder of their Jewish victims: “deportation,” “evacuation,” “resettlement,” and “redistribution” all meant the same thing. The use of such circumlocutions is the best evidence that those who participated in crimes against humanity during the Holocaust knew exactly what they were doing and actively sought to cover it up.
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“This is a page of glory in our history,” Himmler declared to a secret meeting of SS generals in 1943, “which has never been written and is never to be written.”
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Indeed, the violence that Nazi Germany did to language was always intimately linked to the violence it did to its victims. A distinction was made in official German documents between Jews who were assigned to “labor service”—that is, slave labor on starvation rations, a kind of murder in slow motion—and those designated for “special treatment.” Yet the distinction between these two fates was never spoken aloud by the bureaucrats who decided between them. Only during his interrogation by an Israeli police captain long after the war did Eichmann finally decode the phrase: “Special treatment,” he conceded, “was killing.” And the whole ghastly enterprise that resulted in the mass murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children was concealed behind an oblique bureaucratic euphemism that would have appealed to any grand inquisitor for whom the Latin phrases of canon law provided a similar moral fig leaf: “The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem.”
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The Strictures of Purity of Blood that were enacted in Spain in the fifteenth century, as we have seen, represented an escalation in the war on heresy, one that was based on blood rather than belief. Nazi Germany embraced the same ominous notion in the so-called Nuremberg Laws, which were announced by Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) at a Nazi party rally in that city in 1935. Thus did Judaism itself come to be regarded in modern Germany as a blood crime for which the only proper punishment was death. In that sense, the Nuremberg Laws can be seen as the first draft of the Holocaust in much the same way that the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council were the “first sketch” of the Inquisition.
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The centerpiece of the Nuremburg Laws was the Reich Citizenship Law, which formally withdrew the legal rights of citizenship from the Jewish population and reduced them to the status of “subjects” of the Third Reich. A second element was the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, which criminalized sexual contact of any kind between Jews and non-Jews. As the law was later applied in German courts, not only intercourse but also “mutual masturbation” and even kissing were regarded as criminal acts. And, as if to add insult to injury, the Reich Flag Law adopted the swastika-marked banner of the Nazi party as the national colors of Germany and solemnly forbade any Jew from raising the German flag. With the announcement of these decrees, and the steady accumulation of other anti-Jewish laws aimed at the “purification” of Germany, the Nazis provided themselves with the legal rationale for their war on the Jews.
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Behind the legalese of the Nuremberg Laws can be seen the recrudescence of the same visceral anti-Semitism that had blighted medieval Europe and prompted some of the worst excesses of the Spanish Inquisition. According to the ideologues of the Nazi regime in Germany, starting with Adolf Hitler himself, Jews were an alien and malignant element that had infiltrated Christian civilization and must now be ruthlessly excised. They were condemned as poisoners and parasites, both subhuman and superhuman, an existential threat not only to Germany but to the whole world. Just as the Inquisition sought to rid Christendom of “heretical filth” by every available means, Nazi Germany now declared total war on the Jews.

Jews were demonized as ravening beasts whose appetites prompted them to stalk their human prey. Thus did the Nuremberg Laws prohibit Jews from employing German women under the age of forty-five on the assumption that a younger woman would be at risk of sexual assault by her Jewish employer. “The Jew systematically defiles the maidens and women of Aryan peoples,” shrilled one of the “orientation bulletins” issued by the SS to its rank and file, thus priming them for their crucial role in the Holocaust. “He is equally driven by cold calculation and uninhibited animal lust.”
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