“You should have seen their faces. They were not really human” (Hoffman, 12). This is how Eva Hoffman’s mother, a Holocaust survivor, described German troops that rounded up Jews for mass killing in Nazi-occupied Poland. She was by no means alone in harboring the notion that the perpetrators of extraordinary evil were non-human in some way. During the early postwar era, this perception of the German victimizers was firmly entrenched in the cultural imagination in Europe and beyond. Tellingly, Benedict Kautsky entitled his concentration camp memoir
Teufel und Verdammte[
Devils and the Damned,1946].
In sharp contrast, Zofia Nałkowska insisted in the epigraph to her 1946 short story collection, Medaliony [Medallions], that the perpetrators of Nazi atrocities should be viewed as human
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Citation: Filipowicz, Halina. "Niemcy". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 December 2023 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=39332, accessed 23 November 2024.]
