Peter Dutton has a tell
On the Opposition leader's theory of shame
Consciousness had nothing to do with it, except that, having scouted the opposing team, our coaches could diagram formations, draw up plays, and, most important, explain the “reads”—in other words, the tells, the clues, the signs, the symptoms—that would disclose what to expect from the first few flickers of movement on the line of scrimmage.
The winter session of Federal Parliament has been particularly fractious, culminating in Peter Dutton suggesting he might sue community independent Zali Steggall for saying that his policy of restricting Australia’s intake of Palestinian refugees is racist. This is the same person who last year told another independent MP, Kylea Tink, to “toughen up” after she complained about the abuse she had received from a Liberal MP.
The tells, the clues, the signs and the symptoms of what sort of person Peter Dutton is have been there for a long time and his recent behaviour has been a further flickering movement on the line of scrimmage. The jury is in, I think.
Still, the leader of the Opposition shot off another warning flare about the nature of his character this week when, unexpectedly to me, I have to say, he declared that the Nazis were in some ways better than Hamas because at least the Nazis “had sufficient sense of shame to try to hide” their crimes.
Peter Dutton can compare Hamas with Nazis as much as he wants but taking it upon himself to credit the latter with shame is a statement that cannot go uncontested. In fact, the Executive Council of Australia Jewry’s co-chief executive, Alex Ryvchin, gave Mr Dutton a quick history lesson pointing out the obvious, that the “Nazis were proud of their work but concealed it for various reasons, ranging from maintaining the deception that Jews arriving at death camps were being resettled rather than murdered to reduce chances of resistance, to preserving the support or at least apathy of local populations by not leaving evidence of mass murder in plain sight.”
Given the legitimate sensitivities at the moment so many people have around issues to do with antisemitism, genocide, and what we can and cannot learn from history, I’m surprised Mr Dutton’s comments haven’t attracted more attention. More critical attention. Because make no mistake, his throwaway line, his careless rhetorical jab, hints at a level of ignorance and recklessness we shouldn’t accept in our political leaders.
I’ll try and explain why.
The literature on Nazism, especially on the Holocaust, is threaded with the notion of shame. It is confronting to read confessions from victims of the Nazi horror, and understand that they, the survivors, could ever feel that somehow it is them who should feel ashamed. Even the “shame” of having survived haunts many of those who got out with their lives and there are endless instances throughout the personal accounts we now have of survivors speaking of this feeling. Historian Inga Clendinnen writes in her book Reading the Holocaust, “Nearly all of those who have spoken or written about the camps acknowledge a scarring disruption: the dissolution of the old sense of self under the impact of the camp, the shame of that dissolution, and the guilt of the memory of moments when the passion to survive swamped every other sentiment.”
Birkenau survivor Dr Hadassah Rosensaft says, for instance, “I don’t know if I have nightmares; but waking dreams, yes...I get terrible headaches, and my sleeping habits are dreadful. I can easily be awake all night and not feel tired in the morning. Nobody will ever be able to tell you the whole story, to describe all the emotions: the fears, the anger, the shame ….”
There are other manifestations of how shame afflicted survivors and let me tell you about Jørgen Kieler.
Kieler was a Danish medical student who interrupted his studies to join the resistance group Frit Danmark (Free Denmark). He and his siblings helped publish an illegal newspaper that rallied anti-war sentiment and supported sabotage actions against the occupying Nazi forces. “Despite the risk, he continued his resistance activities until he was captured and sentenced to execution, a fate he narrowly escaped due to a general strike in Copenhagen. In 1943, Kieler was heavily involved in the successful operation to get the Danish Jews out to Sweden. His ‘cell’ operated two routes, through which 1,500 Jews escaped, with only one casualty, a member of the cell called Cato Bakmann.”1
After the war, Kieler completed his studies and became the director of the Danish Cancer Society. He wrote extensively about his wartime experiences and the German occupation, including a memoir titled Resistance Fighter. He also served as president of the Freedom Foundation of Denmark, supporting other concentration camp survivors. Kieler's contributions to the resistance and his post-war efforts are commemorated in the Museum of Danish Resistance in Copenhagen.
And yet.
Here is Kieler speaking about how he felt after the war after a memorial service he attended with his family in the 1960s: “On Christmas Eve at 4pm my children and now also my first grandchild join me at the Memorial Park of Ryvangen and there is a ceremony lasting half an hour and we do that rather than going to church. [O]n that occasion and, generally speaking, they have been interested in what happened to me, and they have read my book very keenly, but they have not asked many questions. …I have felt that I have lived in some isolation from my family and, to a greater extent still, from my colleagues here. I feel ashamed to tell them about my experiences because I feel that I am imposing upon them.”2
This heroic person felt ashamed.
Shame is not a word you throw around in this context, Mr Dutton. If you are going to speak it, you need to be careful. You probably thought you were being clever when you said what you said. I mean, how daring! Worse than the Nazis! They felt shame. Gosh.
But you weren’t being clever or daring. You were using this almost sacred concept to score a cheap political point. What a tell.
We have long known that the Nazis tried to hide their crimes, that they went to great lengths to destroy evidence of what they were doing, or had done, particularly in regard to the death camps. Many of the orders that were issued were verbal so there was no written record. There is no official record of Hitler having ordered the Final Solution. Hitler himself never visited any of the concentration camps.
As well, the official documentation was full of euphemisms; everything from “special treatment” to “aktion” to “resettlement” to “zone of interest” were all used to hide the regimes true, murderous intent. As it became apparent that the war was lost, a huge effort was made to destroy whatever paperwork did exist. As part of his own suicide inside the Führerbunker in Berlin, Hitler had his adjutant, Otto Günsche, and other members of the inner circle, carry out his last orders to cremate his body along with whatever written records remained.
Erasure.
The mere existence of crematoria inside deaths camps like the Auschwitz complex is evidence of the lengths the regime went to cover its tracks. As was Operation Aktion 1005, which involved exhuming mass graves and cremating bodies to obliterate forensic evidence. This was carried out between 1942 and 1944 at various sites, including Babi Yar, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
Are these actions evidence of shame? Historians and other scholars are less certain than Peter Dutton.
In Martin Amis’s novel The Zone of Interest (on which the recent Oscar-winning movie was loosely based), a regular point of discussion amongst the Nazi characters (some of whom are based on historical figures) is about how they will be viewed if Germany happens to lose the war. These conversations are heightened as it becomes apparent—if not publicly admissible—that the Russian campaign is failing. In this section of the novel, for example, Camp Kommandant Doll (based on the real-life Rudolf Höss3) is discussing with his second-in-charge, Wolfram Prufer, more efficient ways of dealing with human remains:
‘Excuse me, but I fail to recognise the word impossible, Prufer. It’s not in the SS lexicon. We rise above the objective conditions.’
‘But what’s the point, mein Kommandant?’
‘What’s the point? It’s politics, Prufer. We’re covering our tracks. We’ve even got to grind the ashes. In bone mills, nicht?’
‘Sorry, sir, but I ask again. What’s the point? It’ll only matter if we lose, which we won’t. When we win, which we will, it won’t matter at all.’
I must admit that the same thought had occurred to myself.
‘It’ll still matter a bit when we win,’ I reasoned. ‘You have to take the long view, Prufer. Awkward customers asking questions and poking about.’
‘The point still escapes me, Kommandant. I mean, when we win, we’re supposed to be doing a lot more of this kind of thing, aren’t we? The Gypsies and the Slavs and so on.’
‘Mm. That’s what I thought.’
‘Then why’re we getting all namby-pamby about it now?’ Prufer scratched his head. ‘How many pieces are there, Kommandant? Do we even have a vague idea?’
‘No. But there’s lots.’
Amis, Martin. The Zone of Interest. (pp. 60-61). Random House. Kindle Edition.
Amis himself rejected Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil” but scenes like this certainly suggest a version of it; reducing the human destruction for which these men are responsible to a matter of bureaucratic practicality. Amis prefers the characterisation provided by Robert Jay Lifton in his book The Nazi Doctors (1986), written after Lifton spent “many hours face to face with twenty-eight such Nazis”. He concluded that: “Repeatedly in this study, I describe banal men performing demonic acts. In doing so – or in order to do so – the men themselves changed; and in carrying out their actions, they themselves were no longer banal.”
Saul Bellow’s character, Arthur Semmler says, “The idea of making the century’s greatest crime look dull is not banal. …The banality was only camouflage. What better way to get the curse out of murder than to make it look ordinary, boring, or trite?”
The shame felt by people like Jørgen Kieler is at once deeply human and non-political, as Hannah Arendt has argued elsewhere, and I would suggest that her idea of the banality of evil, whatever else you think of it, is predicated on an idea about a lack of shame. In her essay “Organised Guilt and Universal Responsibility”, Arendt makes a complex argument about our need to assume a sense of shame for all the crimes of humanity because only a politics constituted on that bedrock is capable of recognising and resisting the sort evil the Nazis represented and that may forever be present in our kind:
This elemental shame, which many people of the most various nationalities share with one another today, is what finally is left of our sense of international solidarity, and it has not yet found an adequate political expression.
…For the idea of humanity, when purged of all sentimentality, has the very serious consequence that in one form or another men must assume responsibility for all crimes committed by men and that all nations share the onus of evil committed by all others. Shame at being a human being is the purely individual and still non-political expression of this insight.
…Those who today are ready to follow…do not content themselves with the hypocritical confession, “God be thanked, I am not like that,” in horror at the undreamed-of potentialities of the German national character. Rather, in fear and trembling, have they finally realized of what man is capable — and this is indeed the precondition of any modern political thinking. …Upon them and only upon them, who are filled with a genuine fear of the inescapable guilt of the human race, can there be any reliance when it comes to fighting fearlessly, uncompromisingly, everywhere against the incalculable evil that men are capable of bringing about.
Is Peter Dutton really arguing that this is what the Nazis were feeling as they attempted to cover up their crimes? Is this the “shame” he is invoking? If not, then what? What is he talking about?
We have to ask something else, too: when Mr Dutton says that the Nazis “had sufficient sense of shame to try to hide” their crimes, who does he actually mean? Which Nazis? Nazis in general? Specific Nazis? Does he mean Hitler? The vagueness of his claim speaks to the shallowness of his argument, if I dare call it that.
If Dutton’s linkage of the covering up crimes with shame was to have any real substance, you would expect to see evidence of that connection during the Nuremburg trails, when the immense amount of documentation that the prosecutors did have was laid out and the perpetrators in custody had every opportunity to express the shame that Dutton says drove their attempts to hide evidence.
Unfortunately for his theory, little such evidence emerged.
I guess you can make a case that Rudolf Höss4 and Albert Speer exhibited some remorse about their actions and involvements, but their admissions, such as they were, have to be taken with a grain of salt. Höss’s memoir, written as he awaited execution, includes this:
My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the solitude of my prison cell, I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandant of Auschwitz, I was responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the 'Third Reich' for human destruction. In so doing I have inflicted terrible wounds on humanity. I caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. …Despite all that has happened I have experienced humane treatment which I could never have expected, and which has deeply shamed me. May the facts which are now coming out about the horrible crimes against humanity make the repetition of such cruel acts impossible for all time.
It sounds compelling, but we shouldn’t be fooled. As Primo Levi reminds us in the Introduction he wrote to a paperback edition of Höss’s autobiography:
This book [is] filled with evil, and this evil is narrated with a disturbing bureaucratic obtuseness; it has no literary quality, and reading it is agony. Furthermore, despite his efforts at defending himself, the author comes across as what he is: a coarse, stupid, arrogant, long-winded scoundrel, who sometimes blatantly lies. Yet this autobiography of the Commandant of Auschwitz is one of the most instructive books ever published because it very accurately describes the course of a human life that was exemplary in its way. In a climate different from the one he happened to grow up in, Rudolph Hoess would quite likely have wound up as some sort of drab functionary, committed to discipline and dedicated to order – at most a careerist with modest ambitions. Instead, he evolved, step by step, into one of the greatest criminals in history.
Whatever their level of sincerity, Speer and Höss were the exception amongst those who stood trial at Nuremburg. More typical was Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s Deputy until 1941, who never gave up his infatuation with Hitler and his commitment to the cause of the Third Reich. “I was permitted to work for many years of my life under the greatest son whom my people has brought forth in its thousand year history,” Hess testified at Nuremberg. “Even if I could, I would not want to erase this period of time from my existence. I am happy to know that I have done my duty, to my people, my duty as a German, as a National Socialist, as a loyal follower of my Fuehrer. I do not regret anything.
“If I were to begin all over again, I would act just as I have acted, even if I knew that in the end I should meet a fiery death at the stake. No matter what human beings may do, I shall some day stand before the judgment seat of the Eternal. I shall answer to Him, and I know He will judge me innocent.”
No evidence of shame there, Mr Dutton. What ever are you talking about?
In a farewell letter written to Harald Quandt, her son from her first marriage, Magda Goebbels, the wife of Hitler’s propaganda minister, writes: "Our wonderful idea is perishing, along with everything beautiful, admirable, noble and good that I have known in my life. The world that comes after the Führer and National Socialism is not worth living in, and that is why I have brought the children here with me. They are too precious for the life that comes after us, and a merciful God will understand me when I myself give them salvation."
She then poisoned herself and her six children.
Speaking of children, in his Posen speeches, delivered in secret to certain members of the Nazi hierarchy, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and Gestapo, provides us with perhaps our only clear account of the Nazi plans of extermination. “Among ourselves,” he said, “it should be expressed once very candidly, even though we will never speak publicly about it.”5 In the same speech, he laments the burden of the necessity of slaughtering children as part of the process:
For I did not consider myself justified in exterminating the men—in other words, killing them or having them killed—and then allowing their children to grow up to wreak vengeance on our children and grandchildren. The difficult decision had to be taken to make these people disappear from the face of the earth. For the organization that had to carry out this duty it was the most difficult that we have ever had to undertake.
Does any of this suggest shame to you, Mr Dutton?
In his extraordinary account of the way in which generations have tried to understand Hitler and the horror created through the years of the Third Reich, American journalist and researcher Ron Rosenbaum devotes the final, long chapter of his book Explaining Hitler to the question of whether Hitler himself was capable of feeling shame, of whether his actions at any point indicated the existence of that emotion within him.6
It is a question Rosenbaum takes very seriously and it was prompted, he explains, by reading the work of historian Christopher Browning. Browning argues that Hitler’s decision to finally embark on the Final Solution was made after a number of hesitations over the years, hesitations that indicate to Browning some sense of trepidation or doubt about undertaking such an action.7
“I think he was a true believer,” Browning tells Rosenbaum. “That he does believe Jews were the source of all evil in the world. But I also think he was aware of the enormity of what he was doing, and so what you get in fact is a kind of series of hesitations. My tracing of the final decision to go over the brink in the fall of 1941 shows that this is not a big-bang decision. That there are, in fact, a series of decisions. And that there is even hesitation at the end.”8
It is Browning’s use of the word enormity that makes Rosenbaum think that shame perhaps played some part in Hitler’s hesitation, and as he quizzes Browning about it, he provides a forensic analysis of Hitler’s apparent prevarication about instigating the Final Solution. Browning’s eventual sense is that what is happening is not a moral hesitation but is about whether the idea—exterminating Jews—is, in fact, practical.
“[His hesitation is] logistical and practical—will it work?—you know, in August of 1940 he had to call off the euthanasia program (Aktion T4) because of popular reaction against it. So he can’t not be aware there might be some problems…And that is one of the most humanly devastating things about this, that where there ought to have been a bump in the road, there doesn’t appear to have been one. …So he had to be concerned about that: Can he in fact carry this off?
“I think that…he must also have realized that this, in a sense, was going to define his destiny. This was how Hitler was going to go down in history. And it must have been intoxicating in one sense, but it had to have been scary on the other hand.”
Rosenbaum then considers the work of historian Lucy Dawidowicz and the evidence she provides in her book, The War Against the Jews. As opposed to Browning’s “functionalism” Dawidowicz was from the “intentionalist” camp of historians and argues that the plan to exterminate the Jews was Hitler’s goal from the very beginning of his political career. Rosenbaum carefully lays out her argument calling it the “most powerful and direct challenge to Browning’s vision of Hitler…”
I can’t do the Dawidowicz argument justice here, but she dates Hitler’s decision to pursue extermination to 1918—providing much contemporaneous evidence—and even more to the point of our discussion here, she argues that at the same time he planned to conceal his true intent.
“How does one advocate … an idea … whose novelty lies in its utter radicalism?” she asks of Hitler’s extermination plan. “One disguises it.”
All the evidence Browning offers of hesitation and prevarication, Dawidowicz sees as evidence of the gleeful malice and she hears in many of the documents she cites the sound of Hitler laughing at those he is fooling. “It’s the laughter of someone savoring a secretive triumph,” Rosenbaum writes, “someone whose pleasure is clearly enhanced by an awareness of its profoundly illicit nature, whose pleasure can only be truly savored by the cognoscenti aware of the magnitude of the illicit acts that are concealed by esoteric references to mass murder as ‘subsiding laughter.’”
Thus, Rosenbaum concludes, “one comes away from immersion in Lucy Dawidowicz’s powerful argument feeling that shamelessness rather than shame, that shameless laughter rather than trepidation, is what Hitler experienced inwardly (and outwardly as well...” He goes so far as to suggest that “it might not be an exaggeration to think that, had he known how some scholarship a half century after his death had come to portray him—as a sensitive, trepidatious soul—he might enjoy one final shameless laugh.”9
Think about that, Mr Dutton, before you next decide to score cheap political points by suggesting “the Nazis” were exhibiting shame. Hitler is laughing at you.
In his monumental testimony of his experience in Auschwitz, If This is a Man, Italian writer Primo Levi, uses the word shame at least twenty times and every time he makes you feel the injustice of it, the deeply human response it is to the unimaginable cruelty he and others suffered. At the end of the war, in one final attempt to hide their crimes and deny their prisoners liberation, the guards at Auschwitz rounded up the “healthy” prisoners and forced them into what became known as the “death march”. Most died. The previous day, Levi had been admitted to the infirmary as he had contracted scarlet fever. He was therefore spared the death march and was one of the first to see the Russian soldiers arriving at the camp.
The first Russian patrol came in sight of the camp about midday on 27 January 1945. Charles and I were the first to see them: we were carrying Sómogyi’s body to the common grave, the first of our room mates to die. We tipped the stretcher on to the defiled snow, as the pit was now full, and no other grave was at hand: Charles took off his beret as a salute to both the living and the dead.
They were four young soldiers on horseback, who advanced along the road that marked the limits of the camp, cautiously holding their sten-guns. When they reached the barbed wire, they stopped to look, exchanging a few timid words, and throwing strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive.
…They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man’s crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defence.
I’ll let that be the last word on shame.
Gill, Anton. The Journey Back From Hell: Memoirs of Concentration Camp Survivors (p. 154). Sharpe Books. Kindle Edition.
ibid p.163
There is an alternative spelling of his name as Hoess.
Not be confused with Rudolf Hess.
The speeches themselves were delivered in secret but they were also recorded on phonograph albums, which are now in US National Archives. The speeches were transcribed and those transcriptions also survive, as do references to them in other documentation, as well as eye-witness accounts from some of those present.
I highly recommend the book which, Rosembaum explains in the introduction, started as a way of understanding who Hitler was but whose focus shifted, “from a search for the one single explanation of Hitler to a search for the agendas of the searchers, an attempt to explain the explainers. From hoping I could find some previously unknown ultimate truth about Hitler to the more modest hope of critically assessing the claims of some explainers and seeing what I could learn from the struggle of those I admired. Finding in the efforts of scholars and explainers of all sorts if not the truth about Hitler, then some truths about what we talk about when we talk about Hitler.”
Just adding, this sort of prevarication when faced with big decisions was a feature of Hitler’s leadership and is well documented in Ullrich Volker’s two-volume biography of Hitler. “But as always when faced with major decisions, Hitler hesitated to take the final plunge. ‘He’s still brooding’, Goebbels noted on 21 February. ‘Should he remilitarise the Rhineland? Difficult question . . . The Führer is about to forge ahead. He thinks and ponders, and then suddenly he acts.’”
Ullrich, Volker. Hitler: Volume I: Ascent 1889–1939 (Hitler Biographies Book 1) (p. 662). Random House. Kindle Edition.
Rosenbaum, Ron. Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (p. 638). Faber & Faber. Kindle Edition.
“[D]uring a speech in Munich to commemorate the 19th anniversary of his failed 'Beer Hall Putsch', on November 8, 1942 [Hitler said]: “You will recall the Reichstag session during which I declared: 'if Jewry should bring about a world war, the result will be...the extermination of Jewry in Europe.' People laughed about me as a prophet. Of those who laughed then, countless numbers no longer laugh today, and those who still laugh now will no longer laugh a short time from now.” See this essay, “We will never speak of it”.
I suspect the concept of shame is quite foreign to Dutton.
I think you guys are giving Dutton too much credit. Dutton’s knowledge of history is likely to be very, very thin and I’d say his knowledge of the holocaust is no more than the general public (which would be low), thus when he made his comment about “shame” he had no idea what he was potentially opening himself up to, like I suspect most of us wouldn’t. However, he won’t backtrack and admit his lack of understanding and apologise.
Imo Dutton’s a dullard who has a self-inflated sense of importance, a self-belief in where he’s going, he’s a self-entitled @@@@k. By making his comment I’m not claiming any exceptionalism for myself.