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The Curse of Greatness is to Step over Dead Bodies Himmler's biographer records that Himmler visited Auschwitz in July 1942 and watched an extermination of Jewish women. By then the efficient and industrial system of factory murder had been perfected by scientists and doctors. The prisoners arriving at Auschwitz were herded off the trains, separated into who would live and die. This process of separating those who would live and die was called "Selection", invoking the Darwinian concept of natural selection. Those meant to die were brought to the "showers". They would indeed by "cleansed" on the supposition that the hygiene of the Nazi State required their elimination from existence. The 'purity' of the Reich demanded their removal. Once the women or men stepped into the showers, men called "disinfectors", released canisters of a poison gas called Zyklon B into the room of naked prisoners. In a half hour all were dead. Dr. Kurt Gerstein, who watched, at the Belzec Camp, a similar process as that viewed by Himmler, wrote that:
One is reminded, in this passage, of the brutality of the voyage of Columbus, and how his men murdered hundreds of thousands of Caribbean Indians for " Gold and God" in Columbus' words. The analogy between Himmler and Columbus is not accidental. The days are gone where religions may be taken to mean only what they seem on the surface to mean. Each religion is a theory of knowledge and thus of power. It is from this that the possibility of atrocity arises, justified by Hinduism and Christianity in the case of Himmler, just as the atrocities of Columbus were justified by Christianity as well as a kind of proto-scientific ideology. Power depends upon the ability to exact benefits for oneself or one's group at the expense of or by punishing others not of one's own party, clan or interest; thus power is fundamentally a paradox, supplying benefits that punish or punishments that benefit, depending one one's standing in a given society. One man's wealth is another man's death: one man's god is another man's terror. This apparent paradox has the result that the greater the will to power in a society, the more it is likely to exact ideological control through a system of hierarchically conferred benefits and punishments. The only way, it would seem, to minimize or eliminate the injustice and tendency to atrocity is to minimize power, minimize and question the authority of knowledge systems and redistribute the benefits equally, minimizing the hierarchy. Gold and god are abstractions or tokens of legitimate knowledge. Gold is a token of material success in a social system of awards; god is a symbolization of the aspirations to power, freedom or knowledge in a given society. Abstract systems and their symbolizations tend to take on a life of their own and create a discontinuity between a system of abstractions and symbols and the reality of concrete lives and activities. Like the atrocities of Columbus, the atrocities of Hitler and Himmler have a basis in the discontinuity between an abstract system of belief and actual people. Actual people are sacrificed for the cause, the idea: for gold, god, the Reich or the Impersonal Truth. The purpose and function of metaphysical or epistemological 'truths" is to justify a system of power or social organization and thus create the "necessary Illusions" that allow a society to exploit unequal benefits for some or murder its own members or the members of an out-group who question the in-group. In Himmler's case, this discontinuity is especially apparent. Himmler told his chiropractor and attendant who wrote memoirs of Himmler's conversations, that he had been charged by Hitler with "the physical destruction of the Jews". Himmler justified this on the basis that:
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