The Inherent Inability to Bring to Justice: The Paradoxical Situations in the Investigation

Peter Weiss, in his play The Investigation, chooses to use real, unmodified testimony with minimum dramatic effect to demonstrate the conflictive reality of the trial. The composition of the play is almost similar to an actual court transcription, with nine anonymous witnesses bearing the testimony of all the witnesses who appeared, eighteen defendants each reflecting a distinct figure, the judge, the prosecuting attorney, and the counsel for the defense. The structure of the play is presented in eleven cantos, following the pattern of Dante's Divina commedia, which compares the processes undergone within camp, from the “The Platform” to “the Fire Ovens”, a metaphorical hell of constant suffering and pain. With no exaggeration or understatement, Weiss enables the victims and perpetrators to speak for themselves, which demonstrates the moral, ideological, and sociostructural paradoxes that were somehow overlooked in the original trial. Through Weiss’ depiction of the issue of defendants’ moral dilemma, ideological justification, and industrial economy of the camp, we can see that the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial is not sufficient and further investigation is necessary to bring to justice.

First and foremost, the most prominent confrontation Weiss portrays is between the defendants and the witnesses on the level of basic ethical standards, which questions the moral legitimacy of putting these former camp administrators on trial in the first place. Throughout the trial, as the witnesses list out the unbearable sufferings they received and the cruelty of the administrators, they always find the truths denied or even twisted by the defendants who try to get away with it. The indifference and dismissive attitude of the defendants toward the witness’ testimony also reflects the cruelty of the camp, as the tortured received absolutely no humane empathy from the torturers in the camp. The confidence within defendants’ attitudes is partially because there was no way to find other supporting evidence. 

8th Witness: Baretzki had a special way of hitting/ He chopped/ He was known for it.... Defendant #13: Now if I had a stick/ surely/ there was no need for me to hit with my hand/ And if I used my hand/ then I wouldn’t need the stick/ I didn’t have any special chop at all. (Weiss 133)

The defendants first confront the prosecution when they completely deny the testimonies of the witnesses, creating a paradox in which neither the witnesses nor the defendants can fully justify their claims. However, it doesn’t mean we need to investigate for more evidence; we already have the undeniable fact that millions of people were structurally murdered, gassed, burnt, and buried, and all of the personnel actively participated as part of the structure of the killing machine that is the extermination camp. Instead, it emphasizes the necessity to investigate the moral dilemma the defendants are facing and the disingenuity behind it. Given all these facts are undeniably true, the defendants still try to distract the topic by throwing duplicitous empathy towards the prisoners and unnecessary arguments and details. They also appeal to the judge that they have no personal feelings against the prisoners and they “did what I could to hold on to my people” (203), and that it is dangerous to intervene the process of extermination because it was beyond their “jurisdiction”(207) and “there was an unwritten law then that applied to everybody/ It was/ Take care about doing favors for prisoners”(207), implying there would be severe consequences for helping the prisoners. However, they, in fact, have the moral right to choose how they execute the orders. When Stark is given orders to execute the prisoners, for example, he himself chooses to execute them in the most cruel way possible: shooting the knees first and letting them suffer. At this point, it almost feels unjust to indulge in the perpetrators’ seemingly self-contradictory testimony. This resonates with the argument made by German philosopher Theodor Adorno, who insists that it would be more moral to immediately shoot the men charged with torturing, along with their overseers, than putting them on trial (Adorno 286). The morality of each defendant held towards the prisoner can never be sufficiently investigated in this court and to allow them to share their testimony is never a moral act not only because it harms the witnesses emotionally but also because it gives them a chance to spread and justify their seeming immorality to a broader audience.

Secondly, the trial also does not sufficiently investigate the ideological justification behind the camp function. Throughout the text, the prosecuting attorney never use terms like “racial genocide” or “anti-semitism” to explain the motivation and background of the defendants. The only investigation they made, however, is how they operate the mass extermination against the soviet prisoners of war (Weiss 220). The Germany court after WWII here clearly faces a perplexing situation in ideological identity. On one hand, Nazism does not suddenly disappear after the end of war, in fact, it persists in the minds of these former German SS officers, and that indirectly sets up a confrontation between Germany’s past ideology and the new one. The Nazi ideology has “hammered” the idea that Jewish people “were to blame for everything”(222) into every members of the society who still live on the same land where their former beliefs are totally rejected. While the regime has gone, the lasting effects and continuity of the Nazi ideology are still indispensable in judging the underlaying intentions and responsibilities of the defendants. 

Prosecuting Attorney: How many did you shoot/ Defendant#12: I can’t remember./ Prosecuting Attorney: More than one/ Defendant#12: Yes/Prosecuting Attorney: More than two/ Defendant#12: Four or five possibly. (219)

Here is an example of how the court is inherently unable to reach a verdict for the defendants because the crime they committed is unidentifiable through any written law. We can see here the prosecuting attorney doing vain attempts to measure the crimes committed by defendant#12, Stark, but the prosecuting attorney here does not acknowledge the dramatic changes in social norms and guiding principles and how that factors into the crime Stark committed. The larger problem is that neither the judge nor the prosecuting attorney recognizes the very nature of the defendants’ act, despite their intentions, is against humanity. It is never the matter of the quantity of people they murdered with their hands that need to be investigated, it is their individual choices made under the influence of the society and how much their action is justifiable or not in a different ideological background and in the universal law of humanity. 

Lastly, we can’t ignore the effect of industrialism on the societal structure of Nazi Germany and how they should be held accountable. Imagine someone who had never heard of the Halocaust is reading The Investigation; he/she will likely assume that the defendants are from an industrial complex given the extensive use of jargons of commodification, of inventories, quotas, etc. However, The play confronts readers with the terrifying gap between this familiar jargon of production and its final product: millions of corpses. Like any other industry, the camp itself has developed a form of economy which is incentivized by killing more people with minimum cost. “7th Witness: For reasons of economy usually/ a less than adequate amount was poured in/ so that the killing/ could take as long as five minutes”(284). The last five minutes, the last five suffocating, miserable, and hopeless minutes, could have been reduced to seconds before death, but the industrialistic nature of the camp unnecessarily causes more torture and tragedy. All the industrialists which actively participate as the perpetrator that exploit the labor of the inmates or provide equipment for the mass extermination are still vibrant and prosperous after the war and even today: I-G Farben, Krupp, Siemens, and even Degesch, the provider of Zyklon B, all become world’s most advanced technological manufacturers, but their past actions shall not be forgotten. By showcasing the decisive role of industrialists in the extermination camp, Weiss puts the prosperous post-war German economic and social structure in confrontation with the crime against humanity committed in the camp, suggesting that the incentives are potentially the fundamental cause of the tragedy. The connection between their accomplishments and the unchecked profits made out of the camp ought to be investigated.

In conclusion, the rearrangement of the real testimony in The Investigation shows the audience the unmodified truth about the mentality of all parties involved in the camp: the inmates, the administrator, and the general public. Hinted in his table of contents, Weiss intends to make the journey similar to the process of falling into hell, or similar to inmates desperately entering the camp, both experiencing enormous amounts of cruelty. Aside from listing out the sufferings of the inmates and cruelty of the administrators, Weiss also draws forth a series of alarming facts that shows the full extent of the complexities surrounding bringing justice to the prisoners, and its inherent inability to address these complexities.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W., and E. B. ASHTON. Negative Dialectics ... Translated by E.B. Ashton. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.

Cohen, Robert. “The Political Aesthetics of Holocaust Literature: Peter Weiss’s The Investigation and Its Critics.” History and Memory, vol. 10, no. 2, Indiana University Press, 1998, pp. 43–67, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25681027.

Weiss, Peter, and Peter Weiss. The Investigation. Boyars, 1982.