When a Literary Giant Entered the Mind of a Nazi

Just months after the collapse of the Third Reich, Jorge Luis Borges wrote 'Deutsches Requiem'

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In 2006, The Kindly Ones by the Jewish-American author Jonathan Littell was published. It didn't take long for this voluminous novel to cause a controversy in literary circles and beyond. Becoming in the process probably one, if not, the most famous literary attempts to imagine the inner world of a Nazi executioner.

Decades earlier, one of the greatest literary figures in history took on a similar task. Just months after the collapse of the Third Reich, and before the full extent of Nazi atrocities was known, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a dense and dizzying text titled Deutsches Requiem.

This fictional story is presented as the testimony of Otto Dietrich Zur Linde, a Nazi officer who speaks shortly before he "passes into the realm of death," as he awaits execution as a war criminal following Nazi Germany’s defeat. In his brief testimony, which spans seven or eight pages in English translations, Zur Linde does not seek to justify himself, apologize, or atone for his sins. As he states outright in his opening words: "I seek no pardon, for I fell no guilt, but I would like to be understood."

Zur Linde begins by detailing his aristocratic lineage, emphasizing that he is an integral part of Germany, not a distortion of it. To him, Germany is a mirror of the world, reflecting its fundamental flaws—above all, the Jewish-Christian morality that Nazism arose to eradicate. If human tenderness and compassion represent one side of man, violence and war represent the other. The Nazi Party, in his view, placed this darker side at the center of its philosophy and actions.

On the eve of World War II, Zur Linde was shot twice in the leg "behind the synagogue" in the town of Tilsit. The injury necessitated amputation and drastically altered his service trajectory. Unable to fight heroically on the battlefield, he chose another path to serve the Nazi ideal. As he puts it, the task undertaken by Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment—murdering his landlady—was far more daunting than all of Napoleon's conquests combined. Thus, instead of military valor, he committed himself to a different kind of service: overseeing prisons, concentration camps, and extermination facilities.

Following this realization, Zur Linde was appointed subdirector of the Tarnowitz concentration camp, where countless Jews perished under his supervision. Among them was the fictional poet David Jerusalem, whose work Zur Linde claims to have admired for its simple joy and love of life.

"This transformation is common in battle, amid the clamor of the captains and the shouting, such is not the case in a wretched cell, when insidious deceitful mercy tempts us with ancient tenderness." Zur Linde asserts that the Nazi era was equivalent to the formative years of Islam or Christianity—a complete revolution shaping the future of the world, necessitating the emergence of a "new man." He declares himself willing to embody this new man and to undertake the hardest labor—torturing, starving, and annihilating helpless Jews—whom the Nazi doctrine saw as the originators of humanity’s flawed morality.

With this compact yet stunning text—like all of Borges’ works—the Argentine writer sought to do what the Nazis themselves failed to do after the war: articulate the testimony of the ideal Nazi, what Borges later called a "Platonic Nazi." This is a murderer and torturer who wholeheartedly believes in the core tenets of National Socialism—a man who, even after the fall of the Third Reich, will not break, will not justify himself, and will not claim he was merely following orders like Adolf Eichmann, nor dismiss his atrocities as the mere cost of war and territorial expansion like Hermann Göring. Above all, Borges’ story aims to expose the ideological foundation of Nazi belief as he understood it—seen through the eyes of a literary titan who, though not Jewish himself, fought his entire life for Jewish rights. Borges viewed Nazism as the pinnacle of human barbarism, a philosophy and theology entirely devoted to the sanctification of violence.

The protagonist of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, fictional SD officer Max Aue, is a repulsive and destructive figure who is largely indifferent to the horrors of extermination. Many literary critics and historians have noted that the novel's philosophy correspond directly with Hannah Arendt’s thesis on the banality of evil: the Nazi executioner who performs his duties without much interest, with detachment, and above all—without passion. But this is not the case for Zur Linde or for Borges, his creator. For them, the Nazi seeks the destruction of the Jewish people not because he has been ordered to do so, but out of a genuine passion for the act. Even if he finds his work unpleasant and difficult, he believes that the genocide he is carrying out is meant to "dress humanity anew." The Jewish enemy is, for the Nazi, almost a mirror image—reflecting conscience, humanity, compassion, and, ironically, the meek Christian morality that he believes threatened to destroy Germany. Thus, Zur Linde concludes at the story’s end that it does not really matter that Germany lost the war and Britain triumphed. As long as violence and barbarism rule the world, Nazi Germany has fulfilled its historical role.

Some have interpreted Borges’ short story as a moral parable on the disintegration of Nazi Germany’s values: it was not traditional Christian antisemitism that fueled the Holocaust but rather the abandonment of Jewish-Christian morality itself that made the worst atrocities possible. Through his concise and incisive work, Borges managed to capture the essence of Nazi evil in a way that was ahead of its time. Unlike psychological or historical analyses that sought to explain the crimes of the Third Reich through human weakness, blind obedience, or moral apathy, Borges depicts a Nazi ideologue in his purest form—a man driven by deep belief, passion, and even devotion to the idea of extermination. Through Zur Linde’s words, Borges not only holds up a mirror—harsh yet precise—to the spiritual abyss of Nazism but also warns of its potential resurgence in new guises.

Beyond its literary significance, the short story Deutsches Requiem remains a chilling reminder that Nazism was not merely a system of orders and obedience but a dark vision of a new world—one that saw violence and barbarism as the path to salvation.