Abstract
Buchenwald, July 1943.1 Morgen’s examination of Buchenwald soon focused on the previous commandant, Karl-Otto Koch, the commandant under whom conditions had been “entirely different,” according to Pister. By the time of Morgen’s visit, Koch had moved on to command the camp Majdanek, in Lublin—a post from which he was subsequently dismissed—and much of his senior staff had been scattered to other assignments as well.2
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Notes
KMI 4.9.46, p. 8. The word “fanatic” shows up in Victor Klemperer’s study The Language of the Third Reich (2006), pp. 52–6. Klemperer was a Jewish academic who survived the war in Dresden and his wartime diary is among the most valuable records of the period. In non-ideological German, Klemperer explains, “the word is invariably very negatively loaded, it denotes a threatening and repulsive quality. Even when one occasionally comes across the expression in an obituary for a research scientist or an artist-he was fanatical about his discipline or his art-the tribute always conjures up associations of petulant introvertedness and embarrassing remoteness” (p. 54). In the Third Reich, however, the word became “an inflation of the terms ‘courageous,’ ‘devoted’ and ‘persistent’: to be more precise, it is a gloriously eloquent fusion of all of these virtues, and even the most innocuous pejorative connotation of the word was dropped” (p. 55).
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© 2015 Herlinde Pauer-Studer and J. David Velleman
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Pauer-Studer, H., Velleman, J.D. (2015). Karl Otto Koch. In: Konrad Morgen. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137496959_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137496959_8
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