In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness Kurtz is described as the ultimate product of Western civilisation. All Europe "contributed to the making" of him, and he went out to the Congo with the intention of exerting "a power for good practically unbounded." Yet by the time Marlow reaches him the "powers of darkness" had "claimed him for their own....He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land - I mean, literally." Turning to the person listening to his account of his journey as they sit on the bank of the Thames Marlow states:
"You can't understand. How could you? - with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you or fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums - how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by way of solitude - utter solitude without a policeman - utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness."
Conrad's book is commonly used to try and understand the pathologies of Africa. But it seems to me that this passage provides a profound insight into the descent of Europe into the moral abyss following Hitler's rise to power in 1933. Contemporaneous accounts by German dissidents document a moment, in March of that year, at which opposition to the Nazi takeover simply collapsed. In his diary entry of March 10 1933 Victor Klemperer noted: "A complete revolution and party dictatorship. And all opposing forces as if vanished from the face of the earth... No one dares say anything any more, everyone is afraid." Looking back from his exile in Britain in 1939 the German writer, Sebastian Haffner, wrote "the moral inadequacy of the German character shown in that month is too monstrous to suppose that history will not one day call them to account for it."
From here onwards a kind of moral inversion occurred in German society. The Nazis proceeded to subvert those things that keep ordinary people decent and honest - the concern at what a neighbour might say, consciousness of the watching policeman, the fear of the gallows - and direct them towards morally perverted ends. A public opinion which had been largely opposed to their programme was turned and took up the cry "Juda verrecke!" Over the next twelve years the forces of darkness would progressively claim Germany and Europe for their own.
Where public opinion silently consented to the persecution of the Jews - and punishment directed against any individual who opposed it - there was nothing left to stand in the way of the implementation of the final solution. Without a kind of innate strength the dividing line between right and wrong was, for most individuals involved in the machinery of destruction, an ever-shifting one.
In his seminal account of the Holocaust Raul Hilberg gives the example of one Ernst Biberstein who started out as a Protestant Pastor, then moved into the Church Ministry, then the Reich Security Main Office, and finally ended up as chief of Einsatzkommando 6 in Southern Russia. In this position he was responsible for the murder of two to three thousand people. "To Biberstein," Hilberg noted, "the moral dividing line was like the receding horizon. He walked toward it, but could never reach it."