The Torturers' Notebooks

By ADAM HOCHSCHILD

San Francisco - The disclosure this week that a Guatemalan army officer kept detailed records of the murders of political prisoners helps expose one of the most brutal military regimes in recent memory. And it raises an interesting question. What makes such functionaries keep notes about the killings, torture and "disappearances" they perpetrate?

The soldier who methodically recorded the fates of 183 Guatemalans, even pasting their photos into his notebook, was not alone. When the secret police in the Soviet Union allowed me to enter one of their archives in 1991, I saw a thick-walled room in an old Moscow mansion with row upon row of floor-to-ceiling shelves of tan cardboard boxes. These held 120,000 case files of citizens shot or sent to the gulag under Stalin -- only part of the total for the Moscow region alone.

Every file contained a verbatim record of interrogations in the case. Prisoners had to sign each page of the transcript, which often ran dozens of pages. Sometimes, over several weeks of questioning, you could see how beatings and sleep deprivation had made a victim's once vigorous signature crabbed and shaky. The last document in most files was a certificate of death by execution.

The Guatemalan officer's notebook also reminded me of notebooks from another vicious counter-guerrilla war, waged a century ago: the conquest of Congo by the private army of King Leopold II of Belgium. A lieutenant named Louis Leclercq wrote in his diary on June 22, 1895, that his soldiers "brought us prisoners in the morning, three others towards evening, and three [severed] heads. A man from Baumaneh running through the forest shouting for his lost wife and child . . . received a bullet from one of our sentries. They brought us his head. . . . We burned the village."

Why do men like this write such things down?

To begin with, in one way they're not so different from the rest of us. Why do any of us keep diaries? We tend to feel that putting on paper the day's activities, whatever they may be, somehow gives them an additional significance, a flicker of immortality. Remember, these death squad members don't think of themselves as recording the fates of their victims, but as recording their own accomplishments.

Then there is bureaucracy. Armies run on paperwork, and it's no surprise that an institution that requires a form to requisition a pencil sharpener also requires one when a prisoner is executed. "Procedure meant a great deal to our rulers," Nadezhda Mandelstam said of Soviet forced confessions, "and the whole farrago of nonsense was always meticulously committed to paper."

In Stalinist Russia, interrogation records were also proof that a secret policeman was doing his job. "Those who could obtain [a confession] were to be considered successful operatives," writes Robert Conquest, the historian, "and a poor . . . operative had a short life expectancy." Even in totalitarian systems where policemen don't get shot for failing to meet quotas, proving the work has been done is still the path to keeping a job or getting promoted.

Finally, everyone wants to be a hero. To us, the Japanese soldier in Nanking, the Gestapo agent in occupied France or the Chilean torturer of General Pinochet's regime may be a brute, but to himself he is a hero -- defending the motherland, ridding the world of subversives. And, of course, this image is rigorously reinforced by his training.

When Himmler made his infamous speech justifying the Holocaust to SS generals at Poznan on Oct. 4, 1943, he said: "Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time -- apart from exceptions caused by human weakness -- to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history."

Men carrying out mass murder have usually thought themselves "decent fellows," cultivated the soldierly virtue of being "hard" and have gloried in overcoming any "weakness."

Here, for instance, is a diary entry from Georges Bricusse, another officer in King Leopold's Congo, on a hanging he ordered of an African accused of theft. He describes how the noose is put around the man's neck, and then writes:

"The rope twists for a few moments, then crack, the man is wriggling on the ground. A shot in the back of the neck and the game is up. It didn't make the least impression on me this time!! And to think that the first time I saw the whip administered, I was pale with fright. Africa has some use after all. I could now walk into fire as if to a wedding."

We do not know if the anonymous Guatemalan soldier carefully keeping his notebook wanted posterity to have a record of his deeds, or if he simply wanted to claim credit from his superiors, or if he imagined that he was steeling himself to walk heroically into enemy fire. But whatever led him to write everything down will help put to rest the lie that there was any excuse for the Guatemalan military's campaign of kidnapping, torture and murder against its own people -- a war waged with large amounts of American aid and arms.

Paradoxically, the welcome growth of war crime tribunals, the plans for a permanent international court for such crimes and the detention of Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Britain will probably make death squad commanders less likely to keep records, and therefore harder to bring to account. But, on balance, better that such men should think of their activities as criminalized than as business as usual. And there is a more important accounting that still can be done: of what regimes set the death squads in motion -- and what countries supported them.

Adam Hochschild is the author, most recently, of ``King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa.''