The depravity of human nature, then, is not so much to be called badness, if this word is taken in its strict sense, namely, as a disposition (subjective principle of maxims) to adopt the bad, as bad, into one's maxims as a spring (for that is devilish); but rather perversity of heart, which, on account of the result, is also called a bad heart. This may co-exist with a Will ["Wille"] good in general, and arises from the frailty of human nature, which is not strong enough to follow its adopted principles, combined with its impurity in not distinguishing the springs (even of well-intentioned actions) from one another by moral rule. So that ultimately it looks at best only to the conformity of its actions with the law, not to their derivation from it, that is, to the law itself as the only spring. Now although this does not always give rise to wrong actions and a propensity thereto, that is, to vice, yet the habit of regarding the absence of vice as a conformity of the mind to the law of duty (as virtue) must itself be designated a radical perversity of the human heart (since in this case the spring in the maxims is not regarded at all, but only the obedience to the letter of the law).
This review started like most other reviews in my head: what is the film? Define not by genre, but preferably by purpose or potential. What is the purpose of Radical Evil? To inform? Certainly. To entertain? That’s a tough call to make on any film about the Shoah, but after all Schindler’s List did an excellent job. So yes, to entertain. But let us say that to do so is highly a secondary concern with such a topic. You want it to be watchable, for sure. You need it to be or else no one will watch it to be informed. If people just wanted to be informed they would just read the collected works of Christopher Browning, Timothy Snyder, and Raul Hilberg just to name a few. No. Radical Evil is not such an undertaking. It’s a very specific call to recognize certain elements of human nature that we don’t really want to recognize most days: what does it truly take to kill another human being? So this review started like most others, but ended quite differently.
When I was an undergrad, the whole campus was reading John Keegan’s famous book The Face of Battle, which for thirty years had been upturning the narrative style of centuries. Since Edward Gibbons’ The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, almost three thousand pages and millions of words, had set the pace of historiography all the way into the twentieth century, even past the Shoah, with a ‘top-down’ emphasis of great men doing great things. Horrible things, yes, Harry. But great. Keegan’s supposition in describing Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme, all within walking distance of each other as battlefields, concentrated on what it was actually like to walk into a wall of metal whether it be a knight’s armor, a hundred cavalry sabers, or ten thousand maxim bullets per hour. Keegan found more or less that the great authors telling stories about great men and their followers marching off to death really didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about. Agincourt was too narrow, too muddy, too risky. Waterloo too stretched out with too many combatants, and the Somme with it’s men grouped not at all like it had been described for half a century. Never were they lined up. Never were they fatalistic about going over the top. The details matter, Keegan would claim, and the details are everything to a historian.
Killing is nasty business. It is butchery. Keegan studied what it took physically for an army to march at double time or trot with full armor. It was exhausting, like it was going over the top with eighty five pounds on your back. Now try to kill another human being, another herculean effort to overcome physically. Then came Lieutenant Colonel Dan Grossman’s in depth psychological torture of a read On Killing, that jumped off the deep end when it described the mental act of preparing soldiers to shoot to kill. It wasn’t target practice. It wasn’t winning. It was mental violence just as much as physical. In the Second World War the army found that only about twenty percent of it’s men could actually overcome the moral barrier natural in all human beings. Killing a person meant overcoming this barrier. The answer was training, and train they did. By Vietnam, it was 40%. By The Second Gulf War, 70%. Killing is easier now than ever before, and inversely, fewer people are dying now than in over a hundred years. Irony.
That doesn’t mean that it’s easy to grow up in Shithole Countries like Syria or even what is now the failed ‘republic’ of Venezuela. But it does mean that killing is reduced to these countries and in the high schools of America. What does it take to make someone’s head cleave open in the streets of Aleppo, or the alleys of a favela, or in Stoneman Douglas High School? I abhor violence, but I love films like The Outlaw King on Netflix that does not shy away from the hard labor of taking a hatchet and burying it into someone’s skull. It’s exhausting, like it is described in David Fincher’s Mindhunter, to kill someone. The slaughter is demanding work. It’s worse than changing an engine out of your car or moving your friend into a second floor apartment. You must get something out of it in return, or you wouldn’t do it.
Radical Evil faces these tough questions, examining cases like the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese, which is still greatly misunderstood, and studies like the Milgram Effect where people were perfectly fine to watch other people suffer, as long as someone told them it was okay. That’s the world we live in. It’s okay to put stars on their coats. To make them live in outlined neighborhoods. To ban them from our public lives. To give them less food. To corral them like cattle. To force them to do hard labor. To put them into a van with a funnel of exhaust. To clean out the remains of that van filled with bile and vomit and evacuated bowels. One man, who loaded those vans at gunpoint, pulled out his wife and children, wailing for their executioners to put a bullet in his head too. No, he was told. He was needed to get rid of the bodies. There were more Jews coming. Killing is tough work. Most Germans couldn’t do it. Enter the Sonderkommando.
Enter Stefan Ruzowitzky, the Austrian filmmaker trying to unravel how you get from A to C and at the same time, have a ball doing it. Just as it is described in the book The Good Old Days, most Nazis viewed most of the war as a positive experience. It was only the last 18 months that really sucked and before then, it was just the Eastern Front that featured in the top five places no German wanted to be. Maybe they didn’t want to be in Riga. But they killed eleven thousand Jews there all the same, just in one pit. They stacked them like cord wood while they were still alive. A ‘volunteer’ would use a Luger to plug one in the head this way, then that way, since they lay feet to head in the ditch waiting for their bullet. They all cried. Then they all died. Witnesses provided water to the Germans and lunch to the Latvian Fascist Volunteers, the Ukranian Nationalist draftees, the Lithuanian Patriot street fighters...whoever volunteered to do the killing for them, for killing was a nasty business and they all knew it.
It’s these details that drive historians crazy, reading sentence after sentence of disbelief. I had to reread Synder’s statement that most Jews who died were shot, not gassed. Just like Arendt’s statement that because the NAZIs had so mismanaged their foreign and domestic policies, and because of how they enforced the enemies of their culture war to be stateless citizens, the bizarre circumstance arose that if you were a jew who stayed in Germany throughout the war, your chances of surviving the Shoah were better than if you were born in France, or Poland, and definitely, most definitely, most positively, most certainly Romania. Browning, who appears in Radical Evil thanks to his intense portrayal of ‘normal’ Germans doing extraordinary killing in his seminal work on murder Reserve Police Battalion 101, opens an article by writing that by 1942, only 20% of all Jews who had died in the Shoah were dead. And exactly eleven months later, only 20% were left to die. So the great majority of Jews who perished - shot or gassed - died in that eleven month period to 1943.
Simple questions I grew up with while watching Ben Kingsley play Simon Wiesenthal in Murderers Among Us were framed like “how can you line up seven people to try to save bullets?” In college, I wondered what it was like for a twenty two year old officer to berate a man twice his age near a cliff outside Kiev by saying “you’re handling those children too rough. Stop holding the infants by the hair as you shoot them in the head. It’s not humane.” In post grad I read Arendt; it was “how can you fathom the murder of seven thousand Jews a day?” Browning and Snyder are way past this. “Where do you get the staff at the train stations?” They ask. “Who pays the overtime?” What’s the increase in the Sonderkommando staff to handle the increase in ash pounds from the crematoria? Hilberg wrote an entire book on how the trains were managed, and how each Jew paid for his passage to the chimney.
Radical Evil evokes Browning as they show soldiers laughing, drinking, swimming, playing cards, whoring, all the while talking about balancing the bayonet just under the shoulder blade so the bullet would hit square in the back. He writes about how some soldiers couldn’t do this. They were so nervous they blew heads off. The blow back was horrible, covering the executioners in brains and blood. Not one or two. Not three or four, but dozens of dozens of victims. Their grey matter and their spatter all over the soldaten clothes, faces, hands, weapons. It saturated the grass, Syder wrote in Bloodlands. It pooled. One concentration camp guard described to Claude Lanzmann how in the summer, the gasses expelled from the thousands of corpses came up through the top soil and rippled the ground so that you could not walk on it, so strenuous was the terrain. And in 1944, after most of the murders had occurred and after the Battle of Kursk meant the Wehrmacht were in free fall, it was time to dig up all those hundreds of thousands of corpses and burn them all as fast as possible...before the Red Army found them. Radical Evil stays true to the spirit of the details, splitting the screen and showing the detailed reports of the Special Aktions that happen town after town, village after village, hamlet after hamlet, all over eastern Europe. Four thousand, three hundred and nine Juden Mann. Three thousand one hundred and fifty Juden Frau. Nine hundred and fourteen Juden Kinder. Next village. And so on.
This juxtaposition of smiling faces talking about the horrible deed of butchery is only made possible by brilliant editing and like Lanzmann, fascinating story telling. It has to be good. No one would watch it. Like Hitler’s Children on Amazon Prime (a great primer for Jojo Rabbit), the documentary pulls you in with great detail outlining a great narrative and not backing away from the chilling point of view of the psychologists and historians and soldiers. Only the victims and perpetrators are missing. And maybe that’s okay.
The black and white reports changing on screen as the soldiers drink their beer and celebrate being jaegers was truly captivating. What does it take, I began to ask like Snyder and Browning, to do such a thing to another human being? What does it take to rip a toddler from her mother’s arms, to kill a child then her wailing mother? To machine gun a village then use a tank to drive over their legs to make sure? What does it take to watch it all, all that killing? To find the children in the local towns to help dig ditches, fetch water, keep the dogs away from the killing pits? What does it take to say no, only to participate later? What does it take to say silent, or to tell everyone who would listen? What does it take to write a report to the commanding general of army group center, or to the pope, or to your wife bragging about how many Jews you shot in the face that day? What does it take to sit down after such a day in front of a typewriter, light a cigarette, and start to tally an after action report for the regimental brass? What does it take to exhale, hit the return arm of the typewriter and tap “Fourteen thousand seven hundred and eight Juden, comprising five thousand three hundred and fifty Juden Mann, three thousand four hundred forty Juden Frau, the remaining all Juden Kinder. Jozoraw, Poland: Judenfrei?” This disgusting, bankrupt morality is masterfully balanced in Radical Evil, which everyone should see.
Bernard Schlink, in the famous novel The Reader, put it best when he summed up a generation’s frustrations with those who knew, and they all knew. “It wasn’t a question of whether you knew or not,” Schlink’s outraged proto-hippy says as he expresses his later day German anger, “the question is why you didn’t put the fucking gun in your mouth when you found out?” One might defend the Germans of 1945 by saying it was a crime to even speak of the Shoah, much less protest it. Ask Sophie Scholl, goddess of German resistance and someone who should be the moral voice of everyone - of course she didn’t live long enough to develop flaws we could criticize. The Gestapo cut her head off. One could also say, well, there weren’t many guns in the German populace during the war. But you get Schlink’s point as I’m sure you get mine. What does it take? And what does it matter? Is it a question of whether or not you know? Who doesn’t know in today’s time? Everyone knows.
Despite what people may think about the current state of our nation, it is not (yet) a fascist dictatorship. The future may not be very bright, but we’re not in the dark days of Lodz yet. I am hesitant to draw too many parallels between an idiot from Bavaria and an idiot from Fifth Avenue. But my question still stands. What does it take? What does it take to separate families, to hate all the time, to accuse, accuse, accuse, those who are different than you? To be constantly Othering? To call whole peoples rapists and murders, and excuse white supremacists as very fine people? What does it take to call a Neo Nazi a very fine person? It’s a disgusting, bankrupt morality. And as you go watch or read the news, as you decide what to do in the short term for your family, for your job, for your business, for your whatever, remember that after it is all said and done, whether our republic is strengthened by the trial or in the dustbin of history because of the rebirth of special aktion squads and Commissar Orders, ask yourself ‘did you know?’ Who knew? Everybody knew. Every single Democrat knows, as every single Republican knows. And when we dig up the bodies, however many of them there are, and wherever they be, it won’t be a question of whether you, John Q Citizen, knew what you were doing when you voted for Donald J. Trump for a second term. Of course you knew. The question is, why you didn’t put the fucking gun in your mouth after you did it?