Before Henry Kissinger, who died at the age of 100 on Wednesday, became the most powerful and morally bankrupt secretary of state in modern American history, he was part of the 84th Infantry Division that liberated the Ahlem concentration camp on April 10, 1945. Among those who were rescued was my grandfather, who was likely hours away from death when Kissinger’s infantry arrived. Days earlier, the Nazis had marched most of Ahlem’s surviving prisoners to Bergen-Belsen, but my grandfather hid in the tunnel where he had been forced to chisel rock for 20 hours a day. A small crew of SS guards was instructed to shoot the remaining prisoners; instead, they set the barracks on fire then fled Ahlem to escape the American forces closing in. Weeks later, the 22-year-old Kissinger jotted down his traumatized reflections on the experience. “I had never seen people degraded to the level that people were in Ahlem,” he wrote. “They barely looked human. They were skeletons.” Of one starved survivor who wept before him, Kissinger reflected: “Human dignity, objective values have stopped at this barbed wire”—but “as long as conscience exists as a conception in this world you will personify it.”
Kissinger spent much of the remainder of his long life at war with human dignity and any recognizable conception of a conscience. As Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, he spearheaded the secret campaign to drop nearly 2.8 million tons of bombs on Cambodia, personally approving many of the raids. He marshaled the U.S. behind Augusto Pinochet’s plot to overthrow Salvador Allende, Chile’s lawfully elected democratic socialist, and the resulting reign of terror during which thousands of Chileans were tortured, killed, and “disappeared.” He backed the genocide of Bengali Hindus in 1971, a barbaric rampage of rape and murder that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, because it was committed by a Pakistani regime deemed friendly to the U.S. The list of Kissinger-assisted atrocities goes on: sabotaging peace talks with Vietnam, supporting a junta in Argentina, approving Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor—acts that, taken together, cost hundreds of thousands more civilian lives. The only thing in Kissinger’s life nearly as prolific as this campaign of terror is the volume of his writings.
Kissinger’s profound intellect and scholarly exploits offered definitive proof that genius does not breed wisdom or moral strength, nor does firsthand experience of human atrocity lead one to eschew it. In my grandfather’s own oral history, he explained the impossibility of understanding the Holocaust if you did not witness or experience it. “You can read and study all the books,” he said. “If you weren’t there, you cannot imagine what it was.” Henry Kissinger was there. He saw the horrors. He saw, in his own words, the “skeletons in striped suits,” the heads “held up by a stick that once might have been a throat,” “the empty faces, the dead eyes.” He knew that he may well have been among the dead if his Jewish German family had not fled the Nazis in 1938. And yet, when future regimes sought to unleash unspeakable violence against civilians—in some cases, to wipe out entire groups of people—he assisted and encouraged them, throwing the weight of the United States behind mass murder, and in some cases participating in it himself. And he remained, by all accounts, unweighted by any moral burden right up until the end, the cerebral “statesman” convinced that the brutal killing of innocents was a tolerable price to pay for what he deemed necessary to maintain America’s geopolitical dominance.
After the initial shock of the concentration camp, Kissinger said remarkably little about the Holocaust, in which 13 members of his extended family were killed. “What is there to discuss?” he once snapped when asked about the extermination of 6 million Jews. In fact, Kissinger repeatedly expressed contempt for Jews and Judaism throughout his career. “If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be antisemitic,” he said in 1973, according to his biographer Walter Isaacson. “Any people who has been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong.” That same year, he dismissed American Jews concerned about the fate of Soviet Jews facing persecution as “self-serving” “bastards.” Jewish emigration out of the USSR, he told Nixon, “is not an objective of American foreign policy, and if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” One of his first actions as secretary of state was to rescind State Department employees’ right to take off Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.
In 1975, Rabbi Norman Lamm encouraged Jews to “disassociate” from Kissinger, whom Lamm accused of wanting “not to be a part of our people—its history and its destiny, its suffering and its joys. So be it.” Lamm was reacting to Kissinger’s failure, after visiting his ancestral home in Germany, to say even “a word about the Holocaust” or other Nazi atrocities. The secretary of state’s “silence thunders in my ears and heart,” the rabbi wrote. “All Jews living today are alive only by a twist of fate—a twist of fate that, at the same time, condemned six million to death. The Kissingers were lucky, very lucky. Could there be no mention, then,” of the Jews who did not escape? Did Kissinger simply “forget them?”
I do not think Kissinger forgot about the Holocaust and its victims. Later in life, he occasionally spoke at events related to the liberation of Ahlem, some of which my grandfather attended as well. On these occasions, Kissinger was the somber statesman, describing his encounter with Ahlem’s victims as “one of the most horrifying experiences of my life.” He did, in fact, remember the scene: the emaciated dead bodies, the starving prisoners, the tunnel that my grandfather helped to carve, which the Nazis delusionally intended to use as a secret factory for war materials.
What did Kissinger do with those memories? I think they must have haunted him—otherwise, why did he try so hard to ignore them, to bury his participation in the liberation of Ahlem as a footnote for decades? But I also think he learned from these memories, from his firsthand exposure to hell on earth, and drew out a very different lesson from most liberators. Germany led the murder of 6 million Jews, and almost no one did anything to stop it. Afterward, a conspiracy of silence stifled discussion of the Holocaust among survivors and their families, as though their own persecution were a shameful secret. Germany survived, grew, thrived; Germans carried on; the world had little use for those who wished to dwell on the extermination of European Jews, or for how to deal with the exterminators themselves.
Perhaps the lesson that Kissinger saw in the Holocaust was that mass murder during a geopolitical conflict was, if not quite forgivable, then eminently forgettable by those with the will to do so. That a clash between great powers could cost the lives of millions of innocents, and the world would still shrug and move on once the smoke cleared. That industrial killing had become an inescapable fact of modern warfare. (Kissinger infamously was an early proponent of the theory that “limited nuclear war” could be won with “tactical” weapons and without blowing up the entire world.) I do not think Kissinger even convinced himself that genocide or mass civilian casualties could be good—merely that it was far from a deal-breaker when a U.S. ally, or the American military itself, undertook them. He did not actively desire the death of civilians. He just didn’t care much about it when the geopolitics of slaughter ostensibly aligned in America’s favor.
Before Ahlem, my grandfather was imprisoned at Auschwitz, the worst months of his torment at the hands of the Nazis. “To understand Auschwitz, you have to be a sick man,” he said. “A normal man cannot comprehend it.” Kissinger did not understand Auschwitz and probably never tried to. What he understood, I suspect, was the fact that Auschwitz ushered in a new era, one in which the public would rather let war’s worst moral monstrosities fly under the radar or fade into the past—a preference that gave him tacit permission to unleash monstrosities himself, so long as he did so in the name of American supremacy. Today, as domestic and foreign leaders lavish him with praise as a great and courageous man of history, could anyone say he was wrong?
