PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

. . . I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid.

T.S. ELIOT, “THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK”

The Nazis and their crimes have not yet done with us. At the time of my writing, the bodies of hundreds of civilians with bound hands, their corpses bearing the signs of torture and death by close-range gunshots, have been discovered northwest of Kyiv, Ukraine, sprawled in the streets of a city called Bucha. The perpetrators appear to be Russian soldiers. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has everywhere evoked comparisons with Nazi aggression. Putin’s irredentism, which seems driven by a mildly Hitlerian ambition to recover territories lost when the USSR collapsed, has been repeatedly likened to the Munich crisis of 1938.

The murders of Ukrainian civilians, however, conjure a yet darker memory of shooting squads and mayhem targeting non-combatants during World War II. Murderous violence, gratuitous and profligate, is the calling card of Nazi atrocity. That it should appear again in Europe seventy-five years after Hitler’s slaughterhouse was destroyed is at once traumatic and searing. Bucha may yet become the Guernica of our age.

For this reason, the book I published in 2005, Confronting the “Good Death,” may still be worth reading. It chronicles the history of the Nazis’ murder campaign against the disabled and uneven efforts after the war to punish it. While I still agree with the central thesis of this book—a work that had its origins in my doctoral dissertation—I am far less idealistic today, and thus far less angry, than I was when it was written. I have come to accept that “extralegal” forces will inevitably intrude themselves into how violations of humanitarian law by government actors are punished. The question ultimately is whether any justice can be achieved in the face of such adverse circumstances. Given the hurricane-force headwinds blowing against us, can progress be made toward justice? My hunch is that the answer to this question is a qualified “yes,” but we may need to lower our expectations of what “justice” looks like in reality. Justice is a construct invented by imperfect human beings to govern their relations in an imperfect world. It wasn’t invented for university professors of jurisprudence, and it doesn’t exist to titillate idealists, dreamers, and fantasists. Justice is always situated and always runs a gauntlet of power and self-interest. No other justice in the real world is possible.

Confronting the “Good Death” may still merit consideration on another front. It insists that the ideological character of the murders of the disabled be placed in the foreground. In Germany, the first paving stone on the road to lenience and acquittal was laid when the regional court hearing the German Hadamar trial classified the defendant-nurses as accomplices rather than perpetrators, on the theory they had acted “weakly and without will” in the murders of their patients. The tendency to downplay the ideological motives behind the T-4 program would eventually characterize the prosecution of the killers—even when they had clearly committed murder with the motive to extirpate “life unworthy of life.” Similarly, scholarly views of Nazi violence over the past half-century have focused on non-ideological factors behind the crimes: totalitarian theory, Arendt’s “banality” thesis, Milgram’s agentic state theory, Zimbardo’s “power of the situation,” and Browning’s “ordinary men” have all held the stage at various times, commanding the adherence of worldwide audiences. I would observe, however, that these and other theories sideline ideology as a major factor. Confronting the “Good Death” valorizes the critical role of ideology in Nazi atrocity. The killer-doctors and nurses were actuated to their crimes by the eugenic belief that only through excision of “worthless” lives could the “people’s body” be healed. In studying the T-4 program, deflecting responsibility through the ju-jitsu of peer pressure, obedience to authority, or agentic states simply will not do. The punch of ideology cannot be slipped so easily.

And so I greet the republication of Confronting the “Good Death” with ambivalence—persuaded that its message is still timely yet horrified that yesterday’s cruelty may have found new cathodes to power its fearsome energies. If so, then Hitler and the Nazis may once again become relevant. Like Eliot’s eternal footman, they may be in the foyer, our coat in their hands, waiting. They may be with us for some time to come.