4 ideas
In 1941 Maximilien Aue, a law-educated SS intelligence officer, is attached to Einsatzgruppe C in Ukraine. He takes part in shootings including Babi Yar outside Kiev, where more than 33,000 Jews were killed in two days in September 1941. Although he intellectually justifies the killings, he develops chronic vomiting and diarrhea, a bodily revolt that coexists with his continued participation and never becomes refusal.
Aue opens by addressing the reader as "my human brothers" and argues that he is no monster. He claims that most people placed in the same institutional position, with the same orders and incentives, would have done the same. On this view, genocide is carried out not by aberrant sadists but by ordinary, educated people who accept the frame they are given and do their jobs within it.
At Auschwitz and in Himmler's apparatus, Aue works on improving the rations and labor output of prisoners, framed as a turf dispute between factions that favor extermination and factions that want exploitable labor. Treating mass murder as a question of efficiency, resource allocation and interagency rivalry lets participants argue in good faith about means while never questioning the end. The bureaucratic language of productivity becomes a way to act inside atrocity while feeling like a reasonable professional.
Aue is also incestuously fixated on his twin sister Una. He probably murders his mother and stepfather, has hallucinatory breakdowns, and is pursued by two police detectives who stand in for the Furies of Aeschylus's Eumenides. This makes him extraordinary, which works against his claim that he is just like the reader. The lens asks whether the book shows how ordinary people commit atrocity, or quietly relocates guilt into a pathological, mythically cursed individual, letting the reader off the hook.