Let me now cut to the chase. My simple charge, which is not a matter of opinion to be challenged by Antonia Byatt and her troop of "Big Names", is that neither in life nor, therefore, in a fiction that claims to be life-like, could the illiterate Hanna have joined the SS. In generous response to my inquiry, Michael Burleigh, a professional historian who spent many years becoming a, not to say the, leading authority on the Nazi regime, informed me, "Every recruit [to the SS] had to fill in a form (quite a long one) nowadays held in the Berlin document centre/Holocaust Museum - I've used hundreds of them myself. Such a bureaucratic regime required literacy of its servants."
Schlink actually claims, in the novel, that Hanna saw an advertisement for "jobs" in the SS in a newspaper, though how she could have read it is an unanswered question. Burleigh remarks, "The SS did not need to advertise and the Totenkopf regiment/division (ie camp personnel) were an elite within an elite who would have been selected from existing members... [although] towards the end of the war people were drafted." Hanna, however, at no stage says that she was conscripted.
We may therefore conclude that the central point about The Reader, that it proves that fiction too can be a fake and a fraud, does not fall under the de gustibus clause: it wilfully cheats and distorts what actually happened in order to play a malign version of the Arendt moral impartiality: Hanna and her victims (she regularly selects women to be sent to the gas chamber) can now be herded into a common category of history's unfortunate little people (Thomas Mann, in Royal Highness, made prescient play with the indifference of princes, and classy writers, who feel no great distress when the nameless become casualties).
As for the implication that Hanna had no choice but to make the best of a literally bad job, Burleigh confirms, "There were people who refused to kill, but the Totenkopf...were not among them. I can't recall any examples of people being punished - the gas chamber people were all real experts and, though they sometimes grumbled, tended to be enthusiasts." For those who want to exempt women from vicious enthusiasm, Burleigh's Death and Deliverance may abate their sentimentality, though I doubt if Schlink or the filmmakers ever consulted it.
