The Banality of Evil: N.A.

By Ana Rubio-Serrano

The aim of this book is not only to show the historical Auschwitz but the Auschwitz that has taken root in human beings: first, the inability to distinguish between good and evil; second, the obsession for reaffirming one's own identity as uniquely human and third, the impossibility of thinking about otherness. Even today, Auschwitz persists as a legacy, of which our world is both executor and heir. Auschwitz is, therefore, the starting point, but not the endpoint. This book is a study that shows the model of the anti-human that is born of Nazi anthropology, contrary to the model of man revealed by Christian anthropology.

A humanistically oriented theological and philosophical examination of the "banality of evil" within the universe of the Nazi extermination camps. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: Apr 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781071594841

Book preview

The Banality of Evil

The Counter-Image of God in Nazi Logic

Ana Rubio-Serrano

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Translated by Robert E Anderson 

The Banality of Evil. The Counter-Image of God in Nazi Logic.

Written by Ana Rubio-Serrano

Copyright © 2021 Ana Rubio-Serrano

All rights reserved

Distributed by Babelcube, Inc.

www.babelcube.com

Translated by Robert E Anderson

Cover Design © 2021 Ana Rubio-Serrano

Photos: Pixabay License -Jordan Holiday & rosiekeystrokes-.

Original title: La Banalidad del Mal. La Contraimagen de Dios en la Lógica Nazi.

First Edition: 2006

Second Revised and Expanded Edition: 2021

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Babelcube Books and Babelcube are trademarks of Babelcube Inc.

FACULTY OF THEOLOGY OF CATALONIA

INSTITUTE OF FUNDAMENTAL THEOLOGY

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Ana Rubio-Serrano

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THE BANALITY OF EVIL

THE COUNTER-IMAGE OF GOD IN NAZI LOGIC

PARTIAL PUBLICATION OF THE DOCTORAL THESIS

Submitted to obtain the degree of

Doctor of Theology

Thesis advisor: Dr. José Sols Lucia

Readers and members of the Board: Dr. J. Ignacio González Faus and Dr. Xavier Morlans Molina

The Secretary of the Faculty of Theology of Catalonia does hereby ATTEST:

That Ana Rubio-Serrano did defend and pass, with the grade of Excellent, the thesis La banalidad del mal. La contraimagen de Dios en la lógica Nazi [The Banality of Evil. The Counter-Image of Good in Nazi Logic] at the Faculty of Theology of Catalonia before the Board formed of the thesis advisor Dr. José Sols Lucia and the readers Dr. J. Ignacio González Faus and Dr. Xavier Morlans Molina, on the date September 29, 2005.

Signed: Mr. Vicenç Bosch, Secretary of the FTC.

Author's website:

https://anarubioserrano.com

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Blog on Nazism (Spanish / English):

https://Nazismandholocaust.blogspot.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abbreviations

Auschwitz: The Kingdom of the anti-creation man

I. THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF NAZI TOTALITARIANISM CRITICIZED FROM A PERSONALIST PHILOSOPHY

Depersonalization contrary to the face

The suffering of the other as (un)useful

The Muslim, exponent of extreme and (un)useful violence

The I in the presence of (un)useful suffering

The denial of life, the denial of death

II.CRITICISM OF NAZI NEOPAGAN ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Evil, sin, reconciliation of victims / victimizers

On the origin of evil: Christian theology of victims versus Nazi ontological dualism

Personal sin and structural sin in the Nazi system

Compassionate solidarity and victim-perpetrator reconciliation

Man the maker, a cosmo-logical producer.

The hiddenness of God, freedom of divine man-freedom.

Bibliography

Germany and Adolf Hitler (1889-1945). Significant dates

Notes

ABBREVIATIONS

Documents from the Nuremberg Trials[1]

IMT  Internacional Military Tribunal. Trial of the Major War Criminals before the Internacional Military Tribunal.[2]

NMT  Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals.[3]

NCA  Nazi Conspiracy and Agression.[4]

NO  Nuremberg Organization Documents (NO- series).[5]

Other documents

ÄfB  Ärzteblatt für Berlin.

AVA  Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv, Wien.

BAK  Bundesarchiv Koblenz.

BDC  Berlin Dokument Center.

IfZ  Institut für Zeitgeschichte, München.

JAMA  Journal of the American Medical Association.

LA  Berlin Landesarchiv Berlin.

StA  Staatsarchiv.

StAH  Staatsantwaltschaft bei dem Landgericht Hamburg.

ZStL  Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung national-sozialistische Verbrechen in Ludwigsburg.

AUSCHWITZ:

THE KINGDOM OF THE ANTI-CREATION MAN

This book does not intend to present the historical Auschwitz, but rather the 'Auschwitz'[6] that has turned the human being into a man whose only identity resides in being a mass man, a man without otherness who denies all otherness with a face.[7]

We undoubtedly all know about the horrors caused by Nazism — now, all of that barbarism was based on a pseudo-philosophy and a counter-theology that we will now resist in the following: first of all, with a personalist and humanist ethical vision and, secondly, with the vision of the person that arises from the Christian revelation and which National Socialism ultimately sought to stifle, to abort, to annihilate and to eradicate.

Auschwitz is the Kingdom[8] of that anti-creation man who worked for the Führer in the death camps. And it is from that anti-creation man, from that inhumane condition, that the human being must rethink himself. It is indisputable that Auschwitz did, because of its destructive dimension, reach a level of evil that no other genocide had ever reached; but that was not because of the number of victims, but rather because of the systematic annihilation, which was justified in legal and religious terms, that was carried out against human life by the same State. The latter gave the green light for the eradication of entire peoples whose very traces were to be erased from their worldview. The victims were denied death and remembrance: they were just blocks of wood ready to be burned. Death factories were built where prisoners were robbed of their humanity to the point that many became Muslims — that is to say, living corpses, the pre-final stage of dehumanization. The anti-creation man of Auschwitz hates the human being because he is diversity (creativity, weakness, different in identity: birth)[9], and sees in otherness the enemy that prevents the advent of his Kingdom: namely, the practice of reducing the other to the Self, that is to say, carrying out the sovereignty of the I transferred to the political-existential sphere where the victims had to be converted into a tortured mass ready to be eliminated, and the executioners, a torturing and expendable mass. Once both of them were immersed in the most absolute solitude — that is to say, in the renunciation of Existence and Being-Oneself — they would be and were, in fact, unable to see the otherness of both the human other and the transcendent, invisible, divine Other. That is to say, the recognition of the other, outside oneself, as being individually different and exceptional, without one otherness being reduced to the other. Different because each person is unique; and exceptional because each person is a goal and an origin, namely, a logic of relationships and not of sovereignty or slavery.

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF NAZI TOTALITARIANISM CRITICIZED FROM A PERSONALIST PHILOSOPHY

Depersonalization contrary to the face

If, for Nazism, with Hitler at its head, the other (that which is different from the Self — the Self considered as the backbone of his Kingdom) is the weakness, the incapacity that corrodes humanity, the incarnation of one's own inhumanity that restricts all freedom of action and progress in man, the enemy that must be destroyed, for Levinas, on the other hand, the other is precisely the key to what is human. We find the human in the response to the call of the other who claims our concern for him, our responsibility. It is not the autonomy of the subject, then, that defines man as a human being, capable and free, but rather his heteronomy. Responsibility thus precedes freedom.[10] The I becomes the hostage of the other, in Levinas' expression — that is to say, the other manifests itself in the encounter as the limit of one's own I. Even more, in the interpersonal sphere, the I and the you are constituted by limiting each other, contradicting each other, affirming their mutual otherness.[11]

In the case of Nazism, heteronomy is abolished because it is considered a danger for the formation of the new Aryan race that must carry out the establishment of a new millenarian Reich, since placing the other before the I does not allow the creation of an absolute, nihilistic and concentrationist totalitarianism. Heteronomy is openness, acceptance, interpersonal relations, dialogue and, above all, commitment; but autonomy has also been swept away in the field of subjective freedom. The I no longer belongs to each individual, but to the Führer. Nazi totalitarianism assumes that the authority of the Führer through his collaborators, his followers and the Party extends to all spheres of public and private life:

He (Hitler) shapes the collective will of the people according to his own will and enjoys the political unity and totality of the people in opposition to individual interests. The Führer brings together within himself all the sovereign authority of the Reich; all the public authority of the state as well as of the movement derives from the authority of the Führer [...]. The state does not hold political authority as an impersonal unit, but rather receives it from the Führer as the executor of the national will. The authority of the Führer is complete and encompasses everything; it brings all the means of political leadership together into itself; it extends to all fields of national life; it includes the entire people, who are obliged to be loyal and to obey the Führer.[12]

Thus, the autonomy that is lavished on the Third Reich is only a shadow that has been reified. The new autonomy and the lack of heteronomy irremediably lead to the depersonalization of the individual.

While for Bruno Bettelheim, the goal of the Nazi system was depersonalization,[13] for Tzvetan Todorov, depersonalization is a "means of transforming individuals into ingredients of a project that transcends them.[14] For us, depersonalization is indeed a means that has as its intermediate ends: first, the annihilation of the human being (the person is lowered to the last expression until reduced to nothing); and second, the conquest of the world (the advent of the Third Reich). Now, both intermediate ends must lead to an ultimate end: the conquest of man; the new era in which the anti-creation man is the only protagonist.

It is, without doubt, the depersonalization of individuals, especially in the Läger (concentration camps, places where the Kingdom is experienced as an experiment that, once its success has been demonstrated, must be transferred to the entire society) where the totalitarian evil gains more strength and becomes more evident. The victims were the