DEBATE

Auschwitz, Pokhran and beyond

The claim of the amorality of science is a clever way of escaping responsibility for the horrors that have sprung or can spring from science.

AMULYA K.N. REDDY

A WORLD energy assessment meeting in Cracow, Poland, in September 1999 brought me to within 50 km and an hour's bus ride from Auschwitz and Birkenau, where the concentration camps are now preserved as museums. I decided to go with my energy analysis co-authors on a half-day visit to the camps. Brought from all over Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War, about 1.5 million innocent victims, overwhelmingly Jews, went either directly to the gas chambers and the crematoria at Auschwitz and Birkenau, or indirectly via the camps where they were held prisoners until they were too weak to labour.

The tour of the camps left me with a completely unexpected feeling. The scale of human extermination was so enormous that I had to remind myself - particularly because the camps have been unpopulated since 1944 - that there used to be human beings there. Human belongings - toothbrushes, shoes and suitcases - were piled from floor to ceiling in huge rooms, a separate room for each item, but the aggregate was more reminiscent of factory inputs. Even the human hair that filled a room looked like raw material for an industry - in the case of Auschwitz, the manufacture of tailor's lining cloth.

If Auschwitz was unbelievable, Birkenau, 3 km away, beggared the imagination. Birkenau was spread over 175 hectares with 300 buildings, each capable of housing 1,000 inmates. As my friend Bob Williams pointed out, it was a scale-up from the pilot plant demo at Auschwitz with a peak of 20,000 prisoners to full-scale commercialisation of mass-murder technology at Birkenau with 100,000 prisoners in August 1944. The powerful impression that persisted was of detailed engineering resulting in "... the immense technological complex created... for the purpose of killing human beings" (Auschwitz - How many perished, page 11, Ved Vashem Studies, volume xxi, Jerusalem, 1991). The meticulous organisation and rigorous management were characteristic of mega-industries, "gigantic and horrific factories of death". The main gate of Auschwitz displayed the inscription Arbeit macht frei ("Work brings freedom"). Perhaps a more apt announcement would have been "Technology completely decoupled from values". Also, one could not help reflecting on the frailty of the social institutions that sanctioned these horrors and the failure of legal safeguards to prevent them.

As the scale of killing increases, the technology often (but not always) becomes more and more sophisticated - from knives to guns to machine guns to bombs to gas chambers and crematoria to atomic bombs. Also, with the scale increasing, not only does the distance from victims become greater but also the complexion becomes more and more technical. Burial is sufficient for one body, but for hundreds or thousands of bodies, one thinks in terms of "throughput", "air/fuel ratios" and "burning capacity".

In Auschwitz, it is obvious that nothing happened spontaneously. Everything was designed and planned. One of Germany's top chemical industries, IG Farben, produced the poison Cyclon B for exterminating people in the gas chambers. Careful experiments were done to determine the time it would take for a person to be poisoned. An engineering firm designed the crematoria furnaces to process 350 bodies a day in Auschwitz I. So, there must have been engineers preoccupied with the technical problems. Perhaps, like Oppenheimer talking about the atomic bomb, some even thought that the problem was "technically sweet". Or, like the Department of Atomic Energy scientist at the Bangalore Kaiga debate in 1989 who said: "Hiroshima provided us with a fortunate opportunity to study radiation effects"!)

Once the problem was defined as eliminating hundreds and thousands of people a day, the Auschwitz solution was inevitable. But, who defined the problem and promulgated the order? By and large, it is political decision-makers who define the problem. There was a conference at Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, on January 20, 1942, at which the Nazi leadership decided in less than two hours before lunch on the "final solution" - to exterminate the Jews. Ethnic superiority, racial/religious hatreds and fundamentalist views are well-known bases for decisions with far-reaching destructive impact on human beings.

WHY was this definition of the problem so widely accepted? There could be several reasons. There was the silencing of the informed and articulate dissidents who became the first inputs to the camps. The media were not allowed to reveal the truth. As a result, many citizens genuinely claimed ignorance as an excuse. The most serious problem is the plea of duty and the obligation to carry out orders. Recall the movie Judgment at Nuremberg with Spencer Tracy as the judge trying the Nazi judges for having furthered the extermination of Jews. These judges defended themselves by submitting that they were just carrying out orders. The judgment at Nuremberg was that a human being has to take full responsibility for the consequences of his/her actions and that the excuse of obeying orders is inadmissible.

Apart from the above factors that operate in the case of officials and technical personnel, there is the additional device of taking a top-down macro view (for instance, national security, geopolitical compulsions and so on). In such a macro view, numbers and statistics displace human beings. New proxy words dominate the discussions - "burning capacity" replaces "the number of corpses burnt", "kilotonnes yield" replaces "kilodeaths", and so on.

Functionaries, however, cannot avoid contact with the prisoners and victims in order to keep the system going. What is overwhelming in Auschwitz and Birkenau (as my friend Thomas Johansson also noted) is the unbelievable cold-bloodedness of the operation. It appears that the guards treated the inmates inhumanly because they believed that the victims were sub-human and "things" rather than people. Once this belief is propagated and accepted, anything goes - as in the growing number of examples of ethnic cleansing and genocide (native Americans, Partition, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor).

LASKI DIFFUSION / GAMMA
At the main gate of the Auschwitz museum, participants of a march in April 1998 in memory of the victims of the Holocaust. The inscription on the arch reads: "Work brings freedom".

The tour of Auschwitz ends at the gas chamber and the crematorium. But just before that, near the main gate, is the gallows where Rudolf Hess, the bestial camp commander, was hanged after a trial.

Just when I felt that this was fair retribution, a doubt arose: are only the vanquished tried as war criminals, while the victors go scot-free?

Reeling under the impact of what we had seen, I began to wonder how the development of the atomic bombs at Los Alamos, the test at Alamogordo and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki differed from the Nazi concentration camps. Of course the Allies in the Second World War were not driven by the racism of the Nazis, and they were not pursuing a final solution of extermination of any particular religious group. But with regard to the scale of killing, the recruitment of capable minds, the harnessing of science and technology (some people perhaps hoping that the weapons would never be used and others even opposing the use of the weapons after they were developed), the extent of organisation, the resort to effective management, and the choice of targets to maximise the annihilation of Japanese civilians, the Manhattan project was like the concentration camps, in fact, even more horrendous in its impact.

BUT, for me it was not merely the standard school question "Compare and contrast X and Y". I was leaving the same evening for India and I was agonising over what all this meant for India. Over the past year and a half, the country had witnessed the scientist-politician nexus underlying the nuclear tests at Pokhran, the use of security arguments to advance party agendas, the jingoism of the scientists, the virtual absence of dissent, the silence of its media with a few notable exceptions and the obfuscation of reality. After an initial silence on the subject (as if it never happened), the journal Current Science publicised the official/government version of the "kilotonnes yield" of the test bombs but rejected/suppressed M.V. Ramana's estimates of the hundreds of thousands of innocent non-combatants who would be killed if even a primitive atomic bomb were exploded on Mumbai or Karachi.

Other questions bothered me. Are the institutions on the Indian sub-continent necessarily more robust and moral than those in the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s? Are Indian politicians and parties less prone to exploiting religious animosities? Are Indian scientists and engineers less eager to get political support for their next ego trip or power play (for instance, neutron bombs because they kill but do not destroy). Once the nuclear-tipped missiles are deployed, are there guarantees against "some crazy guy doing some crazy thing"? Are we sure that Pokhran will not lead as inevitably to Lahore and/or Chagai to Mumbai as Alamogordo led to Hiroshima?

The claim of the amorality of science is a clever way of escaping responsibility for the horrors that have sprung or can spring from science. For example, the well-known statement of a missile developer that he is "only an engineer" and that his "missile can also be used for delivering flowers". The relationship between the scientist (the subject) and the object of scientific study must be such that initial separation (and distance) ends in subsequent unification (and embrace). The suppression of emotion during analysis must give way to emotion after analysis. The functioning of scientists as individuals, groups and institutions must be constrained and limited by moral strictures and taboos. Otherwise, the isolation of the subject from the object, the removal or absence of emotions and feelings, and the perception of people as "things", all lead inevitably to science becoming the instrument of violence, oppression and evil. Science, therefore, is not neutral, but it can be - and must be - encoded with life-affirming values, as Shiv Viswanathan demands. The link between science and morality must be re-established.

A crucial safeguard is to insist that, quite apart from the top-down macro view of security, yields, kill-ratios and so on, there must be a bottom-up micro view based on human beings. We must see beyond the numbers and the statistics, we must see children and parents and grandparents, lovers and married couples, siblings, friends and comrades. We must never forget the Gandhi talisman:"Recall the face of the poorest and most helpless person... and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he be able to gain anything from it? Will it restore to him control over his life and destiny?"

Amulya K.N. Reddy retired as a Professor of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He is currently president of the International Energy Initiative.