COLUMN: Nazis in Westchester County

From Michael Brus's, "Narcissist's Holiday," Fall '98 From Michael Brus's, "Narcissist's Holiday," Fall '98George Sackhoff is a decent man. The problem is, he thinks Hitler was a decent man, too. George is a classic American success story -- an immigrant who opened a business and made good. Despite his slight German accent, he could feel at home in any Rotary-attending, civic-minded American town. George is 65, a retired deli owner from Westchester County, N.Y. He has a wife, two grown daughters, a ranch in the Poconos, a condo in North Carolina. The camping trip consisted primarily of singles; George was the only person there who looked like an AARP member. He made up for this generational gap by self-consciously playing the misogynist. When he was asked to help with kitchen duties, he would announce that he would help only if another woman assisted him. Everyone laughed -- that was just George. Beneath the self-conscious humor was an insightful mind. We discussed other trip participants on the ride home, and George sized up the other campers unusually well -- their defenses, their insecurities, their senses of humor. He spoke with wisdom about his experience as a small business owner. He could, he had discovered, sell beer in his deli for several dollars more than it sold for down the street at the supermarket. His loyal customers would never comparison shop. He talked about tolerating obnoxious customers -- "You don't have to like everyone, but you must be friendly to everyone" -- and about how he seems to have far fewer friends since he sold the deli. Then the discussion led to his childhood. He was born in Germany in 1933. He grew up in a rural town, and his mother died when he was very young. Like most boys his age, he belonged to the Hitler Youth. (He once saw Hitler at a local rally.) He insisted that the group had not brainwashed him; most boys, he said, simply regarded the program as a neat excuse to get out of the house and go camping. When the war came, his town was too insignificant to attract bombs, and he was too young to fight. His father fought on the Eastern front, was taken prisoner by the Russians and survived. After the war he got into an argument with his father and left for the United States. Once in America he was drafted into the army. Displaying a young man's bravado, he begged to fight in Korea. But the army stationed him in Berlin, where, among other duties, he guarded a prison holding Rudolf Hess. He also slept with prostitutes, got V.D. and was cured by a black-market doctor. After his tour ended he became engaged to a girl in America. If not for that, he said, he would have made a career out of the U.S. Army. The discussion veered back to his childhood. Then he said: "If it weren't for the Jewish thing, I think Hitler would have been a good man." Inside, my jaw dropped, but I didn't show it. George did not seem to think he had said anything out of the ordinary. I inquired further. George, it seems, sees Hitler as a Napoleonic figure, as a conqueror who spread enlightenment in his wake. "Hitler would have been good for Europe," he told me. After all, Hitler gave the Germans jobs after the desolation of Weimar. Had he conquered Europe, he would have given everyone jobs. Hitler's one failing, George said, was that he wouldn't listen to criticism. This ensured military catastrophe. Moreover, it was silly for Hitler to have persecuted the Jews, because they could have helped him win the war. For George, the Jewish Question was strategic, not moral. I asked him directly: Do you think fascism would have been good for Europe? He did not quite answer the question. As if suddenly detecting a minor character flaw in Der FYhrer, he said, "Maybe it was for the best" that Hitler lost the war. I probed further: Do you believe in neo-fascism, in skinheads? No! he tells me. He's adamantly opposed to hate. And I believe he is sincere. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hanna Arendt chronicled the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal whom Israel kidnapped from Argentina and hanged in 1961. Arendt called her journal, "A Report on the Banality of Evil" because Eichmann revealed himself to be not "radically evil," but rather human. Eichmann was not manipulative so much as self-deceiving. He remembered precisely when he had been promoted and praised by his superiors, but sometimes forgot basic dates, such as when he heard about Hitler's order of a "Final Solution" for the Jews. He even forgot when Germany invaded Poland. Eichmann had occasional crises of conscience about his role in the Final Solution, but he was able to resolve them in conveniently self-serving ways. He considered himself a Zionist, had read Theodor Herzl's Der Judenstaat and tried to deport Jews to Madagascar, the "German Zion." He was friendly to Jews he knew personally. When Hitler ordered that the Jews be killed, Eichmann quickly convinced himself that the cause of extermination was as idealistic and patriotic as the cause of extradition. "Despite all the efforts of the [Israeli] prosecution," Arendt wrote, "everybody could see that this man was not a 'monster,' but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown." George is no clown, and he is infinitely more self-aware than Eichmann. But I believe that George Sackhoff -- U.S. veteran, deli-owner, family man -- would have been just as capable of participating in the Final Solution had he been but 10 years older when the war arrived. "Eichmann's case is different from that of the ordinary criminal," Arendt wrote, "who can shield himself effectively against the reality of a non-criminal world only" when among his criminal friends. "Eichmann needed only to recall the past in order to feel assured that he was not lying and that he was not deceiving himself, for he and the world he lived in had once been in perfect harmony." When George dropped me off at my house, I felt like the psychiatrist who had pronounced Eichmann "normal" -- "More normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him."