The Fires of Hell

In The Drowned and the Saved Levi forwards the claim that the most demonic of crimes the Nazis committed was not their act of mass genocide but instead the intentional transfer of the guilt of that act to the Jewish prisoners selected to work the crematoriums. The Nazis were not only shifting the burden of guilt onto the selected prisoners, who one day shared the same fate as the work they faced, but were also dragging them down the road to hell alongside themselves, “depriving them of the solace of innocence” (53). They were chosen to be surrounded by death, and if they so declined, death became their sentence snuffing out potential months of survival. “Death is their trade at all hours, death is a habit,” Levi wrote; and though those prisoners worked in hell, they could not escape their ultimate end at the hand of the same work they executed (55). Their innocence turned into a state of constant daze, a delicate balance that held them in the position of monsters capable of the deception and destruction of their own kind, as it robbed their souls and destroyed their guiltless existence. They became like their destroyers. This crime is indeed the greatest of Nazi Germany. To steal a life is terrible in itself, horrifying, devastating. But the intentional stripping of innocence, the transfer of guilt, and the shaping into monsters capable of committing the most atrocious acts and deserting their own kind is worse. As Levi wrote, “We, the master race, are your destroyers, but you are no better than we are; if we so wish, and we do so wish, we can destroy not only your bodies but also your souls, just as we have destroyed ours” (53-54); and so the Nazi took their prisoners with them deep into the fires of hell.