As the BBC reports today, Germany has signed a Nazi-files accord, which will give access beyond victims to the files kept by the Nazis. The accord still has to be ratified by the eleven members of the ITS commission (Germany, Belgium, Britain, France, Israel, Italy, Greece, Luxembourg, Poland, the Netherlands and the US).
The 47 million files stored in the spa town of Bad Arolsen hold meticulously recorded information on forced labourers, concentration camp victims and political prisoners.
In grey, bureaucratic language the Nazis documented everything – from the number of lice on a prisoner’s head to the exact moment of their execution.
The archives have been used to help people trace their relatives, but were kept closed to protect victims’ privacy.
The files contain also the names of collaborators, homosexuals and prostitutes.
Much of this information may be incorrect – the Nazis often had an interest in defaming their victims.
Germany had previously refused to open these archives because of privacy concerns.
The opening of the archives is a significant event, although I do not envy the task of historians who will soon begin to review and hopefully understand what is stored in Bad Arolsen—nothing less than the essence of the Nazi horror. What sets the Third Reich and its Judenvernichtung apart from other genocides and progroms is not alone the sheer magnitude, but also the chilling efficiency with which it was carried out. What government and administration in the 1940 would have been capable of organizing even the transport of the millions of victims from all corners of conquered Europe to Ausschwitz and the other camps? The logistics of that destruction are staggering.
This raises a point that I hope historians will explore as they analyze the Nazi files: The state, with its monopoly on force, becomes more threatening as it becomes more efficient. In many areas, the protection of civil rights consists in the efforts to hobble the state, for example, by placing limits on information exchanges and collaborations between agencies or by restricting the domestic role of the military. On the other hand, we want the state to be efficient in protecting us, in discovering and preventing crime, and in using its resources. The difficult question therefore becomes, to what extent do we want government to be inefficient, for the sake of liberty? (The famous maxime, that is better that ten guilty men go unpunished than one innocent man be hanged, is a variation on this theme.)
There are, as I have argued, two fundamental approaches to the tension between the efficient state power and individual liberty. If we take the view that the state (as represented by the head of state and the administration—and to some extent by parliament), is either “good” or “evil,” there is little reason to fret and worry about maximum state efficiency as long as we know that the state is “good.” It is the righteousness of those in office that protects us, rather than laws and procedures that would hamper saintly as well as morally-corrupt governments. The other approach is to balance powers and restrict competencies, always assuming that government will be “evil.” Or to put it another way, the guarantors of individual liberty in the state should be strong enough to protect us even from a government that doesn’t have the best interests of the citizens, or of minorities, at heart.
License
This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.
Thanks for this interesting post! I am, however, reluctant to attempt a defense of civil rights on the basis of the inefficiency that they introduce in the smooth functioning of the governmental machinery. I would much rather begin my argument with civil rights, the protection of which is the raison d’etre for any legitimate state. In my view, it is the (expansion of the) state that requires justification, not (the expansion of) civil liberties. But, that said, the current political discourse, being what it is, starts by and large from the premise of government and governmental efficiency, not civil rights. In that climate the “inefficiency is good” argument may indeed be one of the best arrows in our quiver. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact, however, that any “inefficiency defense” of civil rights and democracy implies the acceptance of a frame of refererce, which is fundamentally hostile to civil rights and democracy as independent values.