Last year, I read multiple books about World War II, a few of which I included in my Reverberations of World War II course during the fall. These included novels by Anna Seghers, Victor Serge, Magada Szabó, and more. Along with these, I also read some memoirs that detailed individuals’ experiences in the concentration camps in occupied territories during the war. These included Dr. Miklos Nyiszli’s Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account and József Debreczeni’s Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz. Debreczeni’s account, which originally appeared in Yugoslovia in 1950, remained relatively unknown in the West, for various reasons, until 2023 when an English version appeared.

In Cold Crematorium, Debreczeni provides a detailed account of the year he spent imprisoned by the Nazis and his movement to three different concentration camps. Throughout, Debreczeni describes the internal workings of the camps, with the Nazi perpetrators of the atrocities on the periphery. Jonathan Freeland notes that in Cold Crematorium “the Germans are mostly out of view and off stage; they are the ultimate authorities, the masters of the camp, but their will is done by others.” Debreczeni focuses on the others, the kapos who served “as the Nazis’ enforcers, armed both with truncheons and, deployed no less cruely, the power to distribute the camp’s meager resources.”

While the internal workings of the camps, and how an individual, in the same situation can turn on their fellow inmate, constitute the majority of Debreczeni’s memoir, there are moments where Debreczeni and fellow “slaves,” as he refers to himself and others, discuss how those outside the walls become complicit with the actions carried out within the walls of the camps. During his time in Eule, a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen, Debreczeni and fellow prisoners question how a society can rapidly and easily devolve into violence and “brutal savagery,” as Freeland puts it.

One night, Debreczeni sits with others and converses on their situation. Béla tells the men about a guard at the camp, Jozef, who adhered to the “true German Herd mentality” and who needed obedience and structure, but who also stood in awe when Béla convinced Jozef he was a judge. At that, Jozef made Béla a junior kapo. Jozef continued by telling Béla about the minuscule rations he, as a Nazi, received at the camp and how he had to resort to smoking strawberry leaves. Even with this lack of rations, though, Béla remained “a committed Nazi” who still adhered to “[t]he crazy doctrines, the murky slogans.” Béla wonders, with this, how long Jozef’s commitment will last, especially when realizes his loved ones back home have less than he does in the camp.

Debreczeni retorts Béla’s comments by pointing out that Jozef and others get meat, coffee, cigarettes, and more bread, and they don’t have to work over fourteen hours per day. He continues by stating, “We’re facing eighty million murderers, and if the noose is tightened, they’ll do us in first.” Debreczeni argues that the entirety of Germany’s population stands against them, but Murer and Gleiwitz counter him, claiming that not all of the eighty million German citizens or murderers. Gleiwitz argues that there are “at most ten million.” This conversation leads Debreczeni to think about the descent into savagery, into violence, into murder.

Debreczeni thinks, “You can’t pronounce one big nation that has payed a decisive role in every aspect of history as far as anyone can remember . . . guilty of the collective sin of being maniacal murderers on the one hand, thieving murderers on the other.” Thinking in this becomes nothing more than “an affront not only to the analytical mind but also to human instinct.” Groups of individuals are not monolithic. Not everyone thinks the same. Not everyone falls in line. Some dissent, realizing that even the “legal” may not be “moral.”

However, even though everyone may not think the same, some do, which means that even a small amount of the population can impact the whole and lead them down a path of destruction and violence. Debreczeni continues, “And yet it is a fact that of the eighty million strong mass of the ‘thinking people,’ at least ten million have a direct or indirect interest and even employment in the machinery of a great outrage against humanity.” Even if only ten million individuals out of eighty million express their interest in virulent ideas and implement their programs and the other seventy million stand by and do nothing to intervene and stop them, then as Debreczeni, the seventy million become “accomplices to a crime.”

Debreczeni then asks, “Why then does it occur to so few of them that they are committing a crime?” Essentially, Debreczeni asks why individuals do not see themselves as either committing or becoming complicit in savage crimes against humanity. For Debreczeni, terror alone does not easily explain one’s acquiescence or blindness. He lays out the “inner contradictions” within individual’s and the collective psyche that leads to Nobel Prize winners and artists to mass murderers, “those obsessed with understanding and the gravediggers of civilization.”

Debreczeni doesn’t come to a clear answer about a nation’s descent into “brutal savagery,” but his thoughts mirror, in so many ways, the “logic tight compartments” and split consciousness that Lillian Smith details about white supremacy in the Jim Crow South, the ways that individuals can espouse, out of one side of their mouths civilization and progress while out of the other side demonizing others and violently oppressing them. Along with this disconnect, Debreczeni, Smith, and others point out that invisibility and purposeful ignorance play into all of this because by keeping oneself blind to the atrocities, or pushing them constantly to the side, makes it easier to accept them because they become out of sight and out of mind, not impacting the individual personally.

However, this tactic only prolongs the atrocities because, as Martin Niemöller’s famous poem points out, after they came for the socialists, the unionists, and the Jews, “they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.” Navel gazing and constantly focusing on ourselves allows for the ten million to overtake the seventy million because no one resisted them. No one stood up. Thus, once the ten million got rid of those they demonized, they came after everyone else who stood in their way.

In the next post I will finish up this discussion looking at the rest of Debreczeni’s conversation with his fellow inmates and other works. Until then, what are your thoughts? As always, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.