Part 7/7 - Interview with a nazi ss officer - franz suchomel - Discussion of treblinka gas chambers

A rare interview with nazi ss officer franz suchomel (Capitalization purposely unused), discussing his experience as an ss officer at treblinka concentration camp August 1942 - October 1943, thereafter sobibor. trieste 1944.
Sentenced to 6 years in 1965. Released in 1969.

suchomel was unaware that the interview was being remotely videotaped by the interviewer Claude Lanzmann's assistants in the Volkswagen bus shown at the beginning of Part 1 of the video.

Click on my profile to view the other 6 parts of the interview.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Holocaust
• gas
• chambers
• suchomel
• WWII
• World
• War
• II
• concentration
• camp
• auschwitz
• death
• camps
• atrocities
• hitler
• treblinka
• sobibor
• bishop
• williamson
• shoah
• denier
• denial
• bergen
• belsen
• birkenau
• mauthausen
• belzec
• dachau
• lublin
• chelmno
• himmler
• extermination
• goebbels
• goering
• bormann
• nazism
• majdanek
• zyklon
• Warsaw
• Ghetto

[Hypebusta]

I am curious why you have purposely not capitalized Franz Suchomel's name. Is that so that it does not show up in searches, or perhaps because you do not consider Franz Suchomel to be human?

[HistorySpeaks4Itself]

@Hypebusta

It's neither, but the latter is close.

[DrCruel]

@HistorySpeaks4Itself You are wrong. Not only is Mr. Suchomel a human being, but he is a rather average specimen. Indeed, he seems to have the virtue of being unusually honest. Under typical circumstances, he would have led a fairly decent life, and in fact I suspect he hasn't killed anyone else since the end of WW II.

The question that needs to be asked (and I believe Hannah Arendt addressed this) is how such an ordinary and reasonably decent fellow can be turned into a monster.

[HistorySpeaks4Itself]

@DrCruel

Sadly, you are probably at least partially correct. I have no doubt that a significant number of people right here on youtube would be executing innocent women and children themselves without hesitation if it meant saving their own skins. All that means is that simply "being human" itself is nothing to be proud of. In fact I can't think of any wild animals that commit genocidal murder on the scale of the holocaust, except maybe certain insects. Being better than insects is a choice.

[breeeegs]

I think it says alot that never refers to the victims as people, but always as "Jews". The Jews were unloaded from the trains, the Jews were stripped naked and beaten with truncheons until they lost the will to live, x amount of Jews were shot that day, etc. Are Jews not people but inconvenient products to be disposed of at will? Does de-humanizing your victims make your crimes easier to live with? I don't see any remorse from him so I doubt its the latter

[antibulletdodger101]

@HistorySpeaks4Itself He wasn´t saving his own skin. SS men were in not a small number of cases free to change unit. Ive never read of any SS man in any camp being executed or jailed for not taking part in the killings. As a sidenote; no SS man in the Einzatsgruppen were ever forced to kill (in you dont count "forced" by rules like social acceptance and such like. Many Einzatsmen refused even though they often were treated with disrespect when they made their choice not to kill)

[CJ1CESSNA]

Just look up the Stanford, and the electric shock, experiment. Ordinary, moral people easily turning into monsters. It truly is scary!

[vladimier12345]

it still makes me angry

[DrCruel]

@DrCruel ( ... correction - the quote is attributable to General Sheridan, not General Sherman. My apologies.)

[DrCruel]

@MissAPierce Understand that Nazis, Marxists, Maoists and other socialists considered what they were doing to be moral and just, as worthy of dying for as killing for. Many did die for their ideology. Nor is this a new phenomenon - accounts of the Indian Wars in the US have much by way of similarities to the savagery of 20th century Europe. Is General Sherman, for example, so far removed from Suchomel when he declares that "a good Indian is a dead Indian"?

[DrCruel]

@MissAPierce Fair enough. But humans are animals, and most of us are predisposed to violence and murder at a fundamental level. Anyone who has seen drill sergeants at work during Army basic training can attest to that. Ladies included, I'm afraid.

I think ideologies are frequently crafted to be excuse for such excesses, if only for the reason than to empower and spread such an ideology through the use of violence. That is as applicable to the idea of a Manifest Destiny as to modern socialism.

[MissAPierce]

@DrCruel I admire your knowledge of the historic relations of the ideologies at work there, but when it comes to genocide, ideologies are never the reason (perpetrators would argue that, I'm sure- they have to for their own conscience's sake) - they're the excuse, and there's a big difference. Marxism, Communism, Anit-Semitism, Capitalism, Socialism, what have you- no one who ascribes to any of those philosophies will commit murder unless they're already predisposed on a more fundamental level.

[MissAPierce]

@DrCruel In that case, you're right. I don't think the arguments the Nazis used are worthy of consideration. Anti-semitism is based on crap thinking, and I'm not going to fall around in the muck to find the roots. As far as their methods, and why so many accepted it- yes, that's interesting. But the answer lies more in the study of psychology than ideology. Sociopaths abound, some are even brilliant, and when you get enough of them together with a common cause and power... look out.

[DrCruel]

@Suyamu It's not an issue of sympathy. Learning to understand a problem does not make one sympathize with the causal agents. It simply makes one more likely to succeed in dealing with them successfully.