The complicity of the Mitläufer

The complicity of the Mitläufer describes a form of participation that is neither wholehearted zeal nor meaningful refusal. The narrator calls himself and Konrad Peters “obstruktive Mitläufer”: men who drag their feet, scuff carpets, and scratch parquet, but still go along. Their petty resistance does not cancel their compliance. The repeated admission, widening from two men to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, makes complicity a social condition rather than an exceptional personal failing—and leaves the speaker inside the accusation he is making.

Meaning and Limits of Obstruction

The narrator’s formulation turns on the tension between obstruction and obedience. He and Konrad Peters do what they can to impede the machinery around them, but their actions remain gestures within a system they continue to serve. The repeated confession that they went along is decisive: delay and reluctance may register a private refusal, but they do not amount to stopping the work or escaping responsibility for it. The passage offers no clean distinction between the reluctant participant and the committed one; it describes a compromised position in which resistance exists, yet fails to break complicity.

The scale of the confession intensifies rather than softens it. The narrator estimates that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, were like them. This turns his self-description into a claim about collective conduct, but not an exoneration. The number suggests how ordinary such accommodation could be, while the repeated phrase insists that widespread participation remains participation. His rueful identification with Peters exposes the temptation to make reluctance itself into a defence: both men may have hindered the process at the margins, but the narrator’s own words return to the same conclusion—“we went along.”

Command, Work, and Participation

Elsewhere, the narrative gives this compromised conduct a concrete institutional setting. Paul Doll tells a subordinate that an order comes from Gruppenführer Horst Blobel and therefore from the Reichsführer-SS. The appeal to command authority presents a chain of responsibility, not an absence of responsibility: the order is transmitted downward with its authority made explicit. In another encounter, Doll tells the leader of the Sonderkommando that he sees someone afraid to die but not afraid to kill, and that such people have their uses. The exchange links the system’s practical demands to coercion and killing, even as its language shifts attention toward the subordinate’s character and usefulness.

The book also shows how complicity persists through administrative routines. Fritz Mobius reads Rupprecht Strunck’s report identifying a coordinator on the factory floor; the identification follows a report by an NCO and the discovery of a calendar in a tool cabin. These details place accountability within ordinary procedures of reporting, record-keeping, and review. After the war, Strunck was sentenced to seven years for plunder and spoliation, slavery, and mass murder. Suitbert Seedig received an eight-year sentence for slavery and mass murder. The Buna-Werke produced no synthetic rubber or synthetic fuel, but the failure to achieve that production did not erase the criminal conduct attached to the enterprise.

Resistance and the Cost of Refusal

The narrator measures the phrase “obstructive” against the risks of more open opposition. In the Third Germany, he says, bravery meant readiness to die after torture while naming no one; even a person who resisted in an occupied country might die as a martyr, whereas in Germany a martyr could die in ignominy and leave behind only fear. Resistance is therefore not presented as a simple alternative available to everyone on equal terms. The threat of torture and the degradation of the resister help explain the atmosphere in which people might hesitate, but the account does not turn that explanation into absolution.

Dieter Kruger’s fate makes the contrast painfully personal. The narrator imagines that Kruger’s parents, if still alive, would speak of him only in whispers; a wife might remove his photograph from the mantelpiece, and children might be told to avert their faces from his memory. These are conditional images, not confirmed details of Kruger’s family, and their force lies in the social erasure they envisage. In the occupied countries, the narrator says, a resister might inspire others. In the Third Germany, the same death could be hidden from public memory and made a source of fear. He concludes that Kruger’s death served no one except himself. That admission makes the narrator’s private attachment part of the account, while underscoring how little public meaning the system allowed resistance to retain.

Obedience, Death, and Retrospective Judgment

A placard in the camp office declares, “My loyalty is my honour and my honour is my loyalty.” Against that public creed, the narrator turns to Kadavergehorsam, the word for ideal obedience that contains a corpse. The corpse becomes the measure of a system in which the dead lie in crematoria and pits, while those who obey are described as dead too. The image does not equate the living and the murdered in circumstance; it exposes obedience as a kind of surrender that lets the machinery continue. Loyalty’s official language and the image of the corpse stand together as opposing accounts of what obedience means.

Paul Doll’s postwar trajectory further complicates any attempt to separate participation from its consequences. Demoted to a clerical position at the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps in Berlin in June 1943, he was reinstalled as commandant in May 1944. Captured in March 1946, tried at Nuremberg, and handed over to the Polish authorities, he wrote in his final statement that he had come to realize he had sinned gravely against humanity. He was hanged outside Bunker 11 in Kat Zet I on April 16, 1947. His statement records a late recognition of guilt; it does not undo the actions and offices that preceded it. Together with the narrator’s confession of going along, these outcomes make the concept more than a description of reluctant temperament: they ask how responsibility persists through hesitation, delegated orders, routine administration, and belated remorse.