BookWorld: Killing millions from behind their desks

I You We Them: Volume 1: Walking Into the World of the Desk Killer By Dan Gretton Farrar, Straus andGiroux. 1,090 pp. $ 40 - - - When Dan Gretton, a British author, activist and teacher, looked out on the North Sea from the Suffolk coast on a gray day in the winter of 2006, a curious and provocative thought occurred to him. “In that sea, there still exist, in minuscule particles, the pulverised stones of Spandau prison dumped into these waters after its last prisoner died,” he muses in the opening passage of “I You WeThem: Volume 1: Walking Into the World of the Desk Killer.” He recalls the decade of work that went into the research and writing of his book: “Ten years of visiting archives, walking through sites of extermination, reading interviews with survivors and perpetrators, and thousands of pages of testimony.”

The sheer scale of Gretton’s workspeaks volumes - andImean that literally - about the depth and breadth of his knowledge about what he calls “desk killers.” At more than 1,000 pages, “I You We Them” is the first of a two- volume work, and each volume consists of two lengthy books. ( He began writing in 2006, and the first volume was published in Britain in 2019.) But the work looms so large because it ismuch more than a history of bureaucratic crime. Rather, Gretton has written himselfdeeply and intimately into the work, which also serves as a poignant memoir; a travelogue that leads the reader through time and space, history and memory; and an extended exercise in observation and introspection.

A walk through London, for example, turns out to be Gretton’s effort to trace the outline of the site where the old Bedlam lunatic asylum once stood. “There is so much that we still do not see,” hewrites. “There are somany connections that we have not yet begun to make. Although they lie in front of us; we pass them every day on our way to work, on our way home. Only on a rare day does somethingmakeus stop. And for some unfathomable reason, on this particular day, we look up and notice what we’ve never seen before.” Here is a glimpse of the restless imagination that drove Gretton toundertake and completehis daunting task.

But the rude beast that slouches across every page of “I You We Them” is the Holocaust. “Desk killer” - Schreibtischtaeter in German - immediately conjures up Adolf Eichmann, and Gretton traces the concept to Gideon Hausner, who served as prosecutor in Eichmann’s trial in 1961. He acknowledges that the notion of a murderous bureaucrat is implied in Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, “the banality of evil,” but he also points out that it is now embedded in the popular culture, citing a lyric from Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” as an example: “You that hide behind desks.”

The demons can be detected in a journal entry that a 23- year- old Gretton wrote about an excursion across Germany in 1987, two decades before he started working on “I YouMe Them.” “We took off right, deeper into the pines. Soft, needled track with smaller pathways every nowand then beckoning us away from the main one,” he writes. But the pastoral tone turns suddenly historical and then horrific: “The power of the film,

Shoah, still somuch withme - the recurring, silent sweeps of camera down pine tracks, to make this landscape so sinister. The muffling silence of the woods ( as Phil Ochs once sang - ‘ The fair trees of the forest have hid a thousand crimes’). The way that Chełmno and Treblinka were buried deep in the forest - few people would ever hear the screams.”

When applied to the Holocaust in particular and genocide in general, the notion of the desk killer turns out to be a serviceable taxonomical tool. Albert Speer, for example, Hitler’s favorite architect and the man in charge of German armaments, “sought safety in abstraction - systems, statistics, problems,” as Gretton points out. “Although he was personable, even charming, this disguised an essential lacuna inhim- an inability to fully understand the emotions of others, or indeed himself.” When Speer visited a weapons factory where slave laborers were worked to death - “one of the very fewtimes in thewarwhenhe was directly confronted with the human cost of his directives from Berlin” - he was unable to “look into the eyes of the slave labourers - his slave labourers.”