The crime without a name

The crime without a name is the novel’s retrospective framing of Nazi mass murder: not a single order or a technological process, but a policy formed at the highest levels, radicalized amid institutional pressures, and carried out by people and organizations with different roles. In a conversation in the Tiergarten, Konrad Peters and Angelus Thomsen consider how the decision to exterminate developed, and Peters insists that modern killing facilities were means of acceleration, not the source of the will to kill.

Authorization and competing pressures

Peters dates the crime’s beginning to July 31, 1941, when a letter drafted by Adolf Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich was sent to Goring and returned with his signature. In Peters’s account, the document gave authority to act on Hitler’s wish for a total solution. The scene presents this as a decisive authorization, while also tracing how the policy’s practical direction changed after it.

At first, decision-makers may still have imagined deporting Jews to a cold, barren place beyond the Urals or in the Arctic Circle after a quick victory over Russia. Peters describes this as extermination by displacement and attrition rather than immediate mass killing. That territorial scheme receded as the war continued and the number of Jews under Nazi control grew; he recalls officials in Poland arguing that the annexation of another three million Jews had made the existing arrangements impossible to manage.

The novel also shows the pressure of competing state priorities. Paul Doll describes himself as caught between the Economic Administration Head Office, which wants more labor for the munitions industries, and the Reich Central Security Department, which presses for the disposal of evacuees. His language casts Jews as a supposed internal threat, exposing the antisemitic premise beneath his administrative complaint. He is also angered by a proposal to work able-bodied mothers to exhaustion in a boot factory at Chełmek, objecting that officials proposing it have not faced the difficulty of separating mothers from their children at the ramp. This conflict does not erase the policy of extermination; it shows how labor demands and deportation and killing could be administered within the same system, and how decisions at one level met practical resistance or adjustment at another.

From killing men to killing families

Peters identifies a further turn in August and September 1941, as the prospect of a territorial solution faded and the decision-makers moved toward killing women and children as well as men. The rationale offered for killing children was that they might later seek revenge; the purported justification for killing younger women was the possibility of pregnancy, while the older women were included in the same sweep. The grotesque inadequacy of these explanations makes the policy’s expansion visible: categories of age and sex become pretexts for extending murder to entire families.

In this account, the shift is neither presented as a fully detailed master plan from the outset nor as an accidental consequence of local disorder. A central authorization, the failure of deportation schemes, pressure from officials responsible for occupied territories, and the progressive extension of killing operate together. The narrative gives the decision a chronology and an institutional setting without suggesting that administrative friction excused the people who made or implemented it.

Industry, methods, and material traces

Peters argues that gas chambers and crematoria were epiphenomena: devices intended to speed killing, reduce costs, and spare the nerves of the killers. Bullets and pyres, he says, would have served the same ultimate purpose because the will to murder already existed. He points to the Einsatzgruppen, which had killed well over a million people by shooting, as evidence that extermination did not depend on a particular technology. The argument shifts attention from machinery alone to the decisions and human agency that made mass murder possible.

That distinction resonates with the novel’s view from Buna-Werke. Thomsen watches prisoners driven at an unnatural pace, while Kapos, SS noncommissioned officers, and company foremen shout at the people below them in the chain of command. What holds his attention most, however, is the group of designers, engineers, and administrators from IG Farben plants in Frankfurt, Leverkusen, and Ludwigshafen, picking their way past wounded, unconscious, and dead bodies with notebooks and measuring tapes. The scene places technical and managerial work beside the bodily consequences of the camp’s labor regime; the suited officials’ careful steps do not remove them from the scene of exploitation.

Violence also registers in the novel through damaged environments and recurring smells. After local worthies complain that water remains undrinkable despite repeated boiling, Doll tells Wolfram Prufer that fermenting material has breached the water table and that the smell will worsen. The scene makes contamination a consequence that cannot be contained by administrative complaint. Elsewhere, driving back with tanks of benzene aboard, Doll repeatedly pulls over to sniff the air and finds the stench increasingly intolerable. These episodes do not explain the whole crime, but they make its material presence intrude into ordinary travel, work, and domestic space.

Knowledge, responsibility, and aftermath

The narrative links the problem of naming the crime to the problem of who knows and who acts. Doll tells Thomsen that he is afraid to die but not afraid to kill, and addresses him as a bearer of secrets. The exchange identifies knowledge as something produced by proximity to violence, even as the people who possess it remain embedded in the machinery of the camp. The novel’s account of the crime therefore depends not only on policy documents, but also on witnesses, officials, workers, and perpetrators whose different positions expose different parts of the system.

The postwar outcomes give that question of responsibility a concrete, uneven reckoning. Doll was moved sideways to a clerical post in the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps in June 1943, reinstated as a commandant in May 1944, captured in March 1946, tried at Nuremberg, and handed over to Polish authorities. In his final statement, he acknowledged having sinned gravely against humanity; he was hanged outside Bunker 11 in Kat Zet I on April 16, 1947. His statement comes after a record of command and participation, not in place of it.

In July 1948, thirteen IG Farben executives and managers, excluding Frithuric Burckl, were convicted at Nuremberg. Suitbert Seedig received an eight-year sentence for slavery and mass murder; Rupprecht Strunck received seven years for plunder and spoliation, slavery, and mass murder. The novel adds that not a kilogram of synthetic rubber or a millilitre of synthetic fuel was ever produced at Buna-Werke. The failed industrial project and the convictions leave the crime’s institutional entanglement in view: the enterprise could be materially unsuccessful and still participate in exploitation and mass murder. The phrase does not resolve the difficulty of naming or apportioning responsibility; it gathers the policy, its execution, its witnesses, and its aftermath into a single moral and historical problem.