When EC published "Master Race" in 1955, there was little in the mass media about the murder by the
Nazis of millions of Jews, Gypsies, political oppositionists and homosexuals. The images of crowded gas
chambers, mountains of corpses piled like cordwood, and smoke from the burning bodies continuously
spewing out of tall chimneys had not yet established themselves in the public consciousness.
The material was there, however. You just had to look for it. Margaret Bourke-White's Life magazine
photograph of almost-dead staring faces behind barbed wire -- shot at the evacuation of a concentration
camp) at the end of World War II -- was sometimes reprinted. This now-familiar photo is echoed in page
four, panel five of "Master Race," as well as in Art Spiegelman's 1972 version of "Maus" (in his book
Breakdowns). Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz, a harrowing account by Olga Lenyel, a death
camp survivor, was published in 1947. Eugen Kogon's Theory and Practice of Hell, detailing the horrible
workings of the German death camps, was published in 1950. The facts began to surface about the
incredible numbers murdered and the cold-blooded, single-minded efficiency with which it was done.
Many Americans began to discuss the unspeakable crimes of the Holocaust, but most just found it all too
hard to believe. Krigstein's "Master Race" was therefore an exceptional undertaking. As their contribution to the anti-German propaganda effort, wartime movies and comic books had shown concentration
camps and Nazi brutality. But never had they shown the death camps (as distinct from concentration
camps) and the unique atrocities such as "medical" experimentation on living people.
American Jews were most conscious of what the Nazis had done, and it is perhaps no coincidence that
the artist, editor, and publisher involved in "Master Race" were all Jews. Even today, more than 40 years
after the events, reading about the death camps still has an enormous impact. Imagine the effect on
Krigstein, Feldstein, and Gaines in the early 1950s as more and more facts were uncovered about the
assembly-line murder of millions of Jews.
Krigstein's piece didn't spare the sensibility and complacency of the postwar reader. On page four,
panel seven, ordinary citizens cover their noses with handkerchiefs against "the stinking odor of human
flesh burning in the ovens...men's...women's...children's..." Book burnings, mass live burials, a quiet
clinical scene of an operation on a human guinea pig -- "Master Race" starkly depicts the madness of the
Nazi period in Germany as well as the burning vengeance inspired by these unspeakable crimes.
Madness? Perhaps. But that oversimplifies 12 years of German history. One of the most cultivated,
scientific nations in the world had sunk into unprecedented barbarism. SS officers, after a day of
murder and torture, would return to their quarters to read Goethe and listen to Beethoven. Many were
very ordinary, mild-mannered people, such as Adolf Eichmann, who were bureaucrats and paper-pushers -- except that a piece of paper usually meant the dispatching of thousands of human beings to
their deaths. Philosopher Hannah Arendt, in her important 1963 study, Eichmann in Jerusalem, writes of
the "banality of evil," the utter ordinariness of the brutes who planned and executed the Holocaust. The
photographs of the Nuremberg Trials defendants in a book such as Leo Kahn's Nuremberg Trials (1972)
reveal a gallery of sad-looking, sagging, mediocre faces -- a contrast to the melodramatic supervillains
depicted in The Boys from Brazil and other items of pop culture. These are petty clerks with the power
over life and death. As shown in Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews (1967), the
definitive work on the different stages of the Holocaust, Nazi discussions and documents concerning the
extermination were quantitative and businesslike; shipments of human beings to the death camps were
detailed in bills of lading.
"Master Race" plays upon the assumptions Americans had (and still have) about Nazi evil. Working on
the common mystique about Nazi archvillains, Krigstein shows a gaunt character all in black, who we
assume is the commandant. He is pursuing a drab, ordinary-looking fellow, Carl Reissman, who we assume is a Jewish survivor of the death camp he commanded. But "Master Race," through its surprise-ending revelation, assails our assumptions and arrives at the truth. Nazis did not necessarily resemble Count Dracula or Dr. Sivana. They looked more like Reissman, the German man-in-the-street. In that sense (and only in that sense) were executioner and victim interchangeable.
Commandant Carl Reissman parallels Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Hoess, whose autobiography (first published in English in 1959 and used extensively in William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice) is a pathetic exercise in self-justification and breast-beating. Commandant of Auschwitz is full of agonizing similar to Reissman's in "Master Race." The Nuremberg Trials were in the news in 1946 and 1947. Hoess's testimony at Nuremberg, as reported in the papers and later quoted in William L. Shirer's comprehensive The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), contains the following: "We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy, but of course the foul and nauseating from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz." We are on page four, panel seven again. Obviously, the creators of "Master Race" were reading the newspapers very closely (and personally) in the aftermath of the Holocaust in the late Forties.
©Martin Jukovsky
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