origins of fascism
...he Einsatzgruppen, however, initially lacked a clear concept. It seems as if the SS itself did not yet know what exactly it wanted to do with the millions of Jews in the areas conquered by the German army. How exactly the decision for the systematic extermination of the Jews came about is unclear. Hitler seems not to have given a written order (or else it is lost). But in the fall of 1941 the SS constructed death factories with gas chambers. A Europe-wide extermination program started. In the following three years the remaining Jews from Germany and all occupied countries were rounded up, put into freight trains, and driven across Europe to the death camps in Poland, most notably Auschwitz, Maidanek, and Treblinka. There the survivors of the transports were led to a ramp on which Nazi doctors separated the most fit and sent them to the work camps right next to the extermination camps. The others were led into windowless chambers. After they had undressed (presumably to take a shower), gas dropped in from the ceiling and killed them within minutes. Most of those who had to work did not survive either. Besides Jews, the "death factories" also killed opponents of the regime (German and non-German), Gypsies, Russian prisoners of war, and many other innocent people. The gruesome mass murder intensified toward the end of the war, as Hitler believed that the extermination of the Jews would be his lasting "achievement" in history and that future generations would be grateful. The Holocaust claimed roughly six million Jewish victims. Around five million other people were killed as well, including between two and three million Soviet prisoners of war, many gypsies, German resisters, communists, homosexuals, and other groups. The death machinery worked as long as German troops held Poland. When the Russians advanced in late 1944, the SS destroyed the death camps and the relating documents (making the task of historians to establish exact numbers and procedures more difficult). The debate on the genesis of the Holocaust: The decision-making process which led to the Holocaust is the subject of debate. The frequently mentioned Wannsee conference in January 1942 cannot have been the decisive meeting, since the death machine was already in place and had started to work in December 1941 (in a newspaper article, Eberhard Jäckel has argued that the conference served no more than SS leader Heydrich's private purposes: he convened some members of the government to tell them about the extermination program in order to suggest that he, not SS-chief Himmler, was in charge). The debate on the genesis of the holocaust at one time pitted two camps of historians against each other: the intentionalists and the functionalists. The intentionalists argued that Hitler always wanted to exterminate Jews and people he considered racially inferior. The Holocaust thus appeared as a logical consequence of Nazi politics, of Hitler's world view, and of the dictatorship that gave him and the SS such a vast range of power. That Jews would ultimately be exterminated was only a matter of time and circumstance. The intentionalists were not troubled by the fact that no written order was ever found; they argued that Hitler made his intention so clear to his entourage as to make an explicit order unnecessary. The functionalists emphasized that no long-term plans for extermination existed and that until 1941 expulsion was the official goal, although Hitler occasionally spoke of exterminating the racial target groups already shortly before the war. According to the functionalists, the Holocaust developed as a gradual radicalization process. They stressed that expulsion became impractical once there was no place to bring the Jews, and that extermination started in 1941 as spontaneous acts by local SS units, which did not know what to do with the Jews under their control. Most historians have since moved to a middle position: on the one side, it seems that the intention for drastic steps against Jews and other groups existed all along in the minds of Hitler and the leading Nazis, even if it was not refined at the beginning ("removal" of the Jews was an ambiguous term that could mean both, expulsion and extermination). It took time and specific circumstances for the implementation of radical destruction. Hitler seems to have closed all other options or convinced his followers that they were not practicable, and the dreadful scenario of total war with the Soviet Union may have been a necessary prerequisite for such a drastic program of organized mass murder. And yet, the total destruction of the Jews does not seem to have been the regime's policy from the beginning. Why would they have encouraged emigration of the German Jews even up to 1941? Did Hitler believe that he would conquer the world anyway and exterminate the Jews who emigrated sooner or later? Here, I think the functionalists have a stronger point. Hitler contemplated different "solutions" to the self-imposed "Jewish Question." One possibility always was expulsion, which he in a way liked because he had frequently argued that Jews would destroy all viable states if one let them do so. Why not expel all the Jews, so that they would destabilize Germany's potential enemies? Systematic extermination therefore seems to have been adopted only when other options had proven impracticable. The functionalists point out that even the Einsatzgruppen found it repulsive and demoralizing to shoot thousands of unarmed people all the time. From the point of view of the SS, the killings were inefficient, cost too much ammunition, and required too many men. But, against the functionalists, I would stress that extermination did not come as a coincidence or improvisation of local commanders who did not know what else to do with the Jews. (One could also argue that the question for the Einsatzgruppen was not so much what to do with the Jews but how to kill them.) The "experiment" with hospitalized Germans in 1939-40 shows that extermination was considered a legitimate way to create a racially "pure" state, and the reshuffling of Eastern Europe according to Hitler's ideology demanded huge resettlements and always implied the Holocaust as a real possibility. Questions: What did people in Germany and elsewhere know about the Holocaust? Why did people participate in the Holocaust (not only Germans), and why did so few try to stop it? First of all, it was difficult to believe what actually happened. The Nazi regime did not propagate the Holocaust and made an effort to suggest to Germans and others that the deported Jews were merely resettled to places where they could live more comfortably (see the film "Theresienstadt: The Führer Gives a City to the Jews"). It was difficult to believe the mere facts: how would a regime fighting a ferocious war requiring all available resources commission hundreds of trains and thousands of men to assemble, transport, and finally kill millions of innocent people who did not represent any threat at all? I once heard the Dutch historian Louis De Jong, who as a Jew had emigrated to England, say that he had reliable information about Auschwitz in 1942 and tried to convey the facts to the British government; nobody would pay much attention to him. When De Jong finally asked a government official whether he believed that De Jong was lying, the official answered: "I do not believe that you are lying, but I cannot believe what you say." Whoever outside of German-occupied Europe had knowledge about the Holocaust tended to repress it, sometimes out of disbelief, sometimes out of anti-Semitism, most often probably out of indifference. It is wrong to imagine the contemporary governments of the United States, Britain, or the Soviet Union as friendly to Jews. The question whether the United States Air Force could and should have bombed the death camps or at least the railroad lines still comes up again and again. President Roosevelt, who for a long time seems to have deliberately ignored the facts, did not consider the bombing of death camps a high priority even though it was militarily possible, at least after the conquest of Southern Italy in 1943. In Germany itself, many people -- particularly in the cities -- were aware of the deportations, and the trains bringing Jews from Western Europe to Poland in 1942-44 did not go unnoticed. German soldiers in Eastern Europe observed mass shootings, and a sizeable number of them participated one way or another in the mass murder. Soldiers wrote home, and we know that some of them spoke frankly about the atrocities. Still, was it easy for Germans to put the bits and pieces together and understand that systematic race murder was occurring? Disbelief, confusion, and indifference mattered in Germany, too. The background of a ferocios war appeared to justify drastic measures. Propaganda painted a benevolent image while helping to create a national obsession with potential destroyers of the home front (memory of 1918) and partisans. Rumors of atrocities spread, but specific information about the death camps was kept secret by the regime, which felt almost embarrassed about its crimes in the face of outsiders. Germans did not automatically know the whole truth, but it would have been possible for most of them to learn it. Few people, however, cared to find out. Jews were not a central concern in their minds, and there were few left in Germany proper. The priority of most Germans during the war was to survive; they got increasingly worried about the course of the war and could see no alternative to the Nazi regime except a communist invasion, which almost everybody dreaded. The bystander mentality, which had helped the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship, also helped the implementation of the Holocaust. The repressive potential of the regime, finally, made every protest a life-and-death risk, even though repression often worked more as a deterrent than as a real threat in the question of the Holocaust: the regime rarely punished people who refused to participate in the extermination program. In Hamburg, for example, concerned citizens once protested in front of the Gestapo office after the SS had rounded up half-Jews; against all expectations, the SS backed down and sent the half-Jews home. For those Germans who suspected that terrible things happened to the deported Jews the "Hitler Myth" often served to exculpate the dictator; they believed that Hitler could not possibly have allowed such atrocious things to happen and that the Holocaust must be a special policy of Himmler or others in opposition to Hitler. There is no reason to believe that a vast majority of Germans actively condoned the Holocaust and the regime's racist agenda. The regime tried to propagate this agenda but kept the atrocities secret for fear of raising opposition. Occasional resistance and small-scale help for Jews (such as hiding) existed in Germany as in all other countries occupied by the Germans. Memoirs of Jews from Nazi Germany usually draw a complex picture: some non-Jews gave little signs of solidarity and support, others showed hatred, still others (the majority) did not want to look. Two shades of opinion about the attitute of the Germans have emerged: In his study of public opinion in Bavaria 1933-45, the British historian Ian Kershaw writes: "I should like to think that had I been around at the time I would have been a convinced anti-Nazi engaged in the underground resistance fight. However, I know really that I would have been as confused and felt as helpless as most of the people I am writing about." More critical views assign passive complicity to the Germans (and often to other peoples as well), point to the widespread anti-Semitism in the Nazi years and before 1933, and see the Holocaust taking place in a conspiracy of silence. A most radical view, recently expressed by Daniel Goldhagen, states that an "eliminationist" anti-Semitism had taken root in Germany long before 1933 and -- with some help from Nazi propaganda -- made the vast majority of Germans approve of the Holocaust and willing to kill Jews. Most professional historians on both sides of the Atlantic have criticized and rejected this interpretation and shown the book to be fatally flawed by almost every standard of historical analysis. (For reviews of Goldhagen's book, see H-German: Discussion of D. J. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. and Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth, New York: Henry Holt, 1998.) Goldhagen undertakes no comparative analysis of anti-Semitisms. He brushes aside manifestations of eliminationist anti-Semitism in other countries by arguing that Germany implemented the Holocaust, not any other country. His study thus rests on a gigantic circular argument: why did the Holocaust happen in Germany? Because Germany had for centuries been a pathologically anti-Semitic culture. Why had it been that way? Because the Holocaust shows it… If one accepts that Germans were demonologically possessed anti-Semites, then even philo-Semitism can be interpreted as a hidden form of eliminationist anti-Semitism, as Goldhagen does. His refusal to differentiate between Germans in general and the most radical Nazis makes almost every German into a rabid Nazi anti-Semite. This argument is insulting and grossly generalizing, and it undercuts every effort to explain the Holocaust. If Germans were as Goldhagen depicts them, the Holocaust hardly needs an explanation. What does need an explanation, however, is Goldhagen's startling thesis that Germans after 1945 suddenly lost all the terrible anti-Semitism that had so deeply been ingrained in their culture and "cognitive structure" for centuries. Goldhagen also dismisses the importance of the cooperation of non-Germans in the Holocaust, which was often completely voluntary. Finally, he downplays all the other victims of Nazi terror; against all evidence, he argues that "Germans" killed Jews with much more brutality and glee than they killed Russian prisoners of war, partisans, gypsies, homosexuals, resisters. In short, it appears to me that the public reception of the book is much more interesting than its argument: why did this book get so much applause in the United States and even in Germany despite the devastating critique of professional historians? Who participated in the Holocaust and why so? Various explanations have been suggested, and I think that -- given the complexity of the mass murder -- no single one is satisfactory although most of them are valid in some respects. The Holocaust was a complex undertaking involving thousands of men and women who shared different degrees of responsibility and participated for different reasons. The train engineer or switchboard operator in a random small town was involved just as was the Einsatzgruppen member, the camp guard, the person denunciating hidden Jews anywhere in Europe, the industrialist using forced labor from the camps, the SS commander, or the doctor conducting human experiments. It seems to me that no single explanation can account for the variety of situations and motives of those involved in the killings, although some interpretations carry us further than others. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt has pointed out that the Holocaust was implemented in a bureaucratic fashion and that the executors showed a technocratic mentality. Arendt claimed that the mass murderers were frighteningly "normal," that the administrators of death in many ways looked like "normal" administrators. They believed to be doing something necessary and correct and tried to do it as they were told. Although it is probably safe to say that people who worked in the death machine had on average a stronger commitment to Nazi ideology than most others, they rarely had a totally different morality and system of beliefs. This observation was shared by the first incisive scholarly study of the Holocaust (by Raul Hilberg) and by the findings of American prison psychiatrists who analyzed captured Nazi leaders in 1945-46. Careerism often seems to have been a decisive motivation as well. Service in the SS became a fast alley to higher status and income for soldiers, policemen, administrators, physicians, and experts in different professions. Young physicians could advance quickly if they signed up for human experiments in a death camp. They considered eugenic policies as scientific modernity and progress. The regime, moreover, tried to imbue the participants with the spirit of being an elite at the very top of scientific and political-social progress. On a more opportunistic note, service in the extermination machinery was infinitely less risky for able-bodied men than service in the army on the eastern front. To be sure, the SS did have some battle units fighting on the most dangerous frontline spots, but the Einsatzgruppen and the host of administrative and camp guard personnel had relatively safe jobs, good food supplies, and decent living quarters, all of which were lacking at the eastern front. The division of labor and the hierarchy of orders may have made it easier for people to carry out mass killings. One person could feel as only one wheel in a big machine: one was rounding up Jews without asking what would happen to them, another would run the deportation train, somebody else would open the doors of arriving trains, his (or her) comrade would lead the prisoners to the gas chamber after a physician had "examined" them, somebody else would close the doors of the gas chamber, another person would open the gas valves, and so on. Every single person could claim to have acted only on orders and to have done only small things in the whole process. But the decisive fact is that people overrode whatever misgivings they may have had toward what they were doing. Not all people who carried out the Holocaust were radical anti-Semites, Jew-haters, or convinced Pseudo-Darwinists. Some did what they were asked to do with the detachment of bureaucrats. That emotional detachment was considered a strength becomes clear in Himmler's famous speech to SS comrades in October 1943: "Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lie side by side, or five hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck this out and -- excepting cases of human weakness -- to have remained decent persons [sic!], that is what has made us hard. In our history, this is an unwritten and never-to-be written page of glory." The Nazi stigmatization of Jews as enemies, drawing from a long history of European anti-Semitism, made the killings more plausible to the considerable number of men and women who were involved in the mechanics of genocide. But there is also evidence that many in the Einsatzgruppen, the army, and the death camps killed with pleasure and extraordinary cruelty. This applies to the murder of Jews, Polish elites, Russian prisoners, resistance groups, and cilvilians in German-occupied areas. Some shooting commandos tortured their victims in all ways their perverse fantasy suggested to them. They did more than their orders asked them to do. That defying orders to kill Jews or other victims would have led to punishment and possibly the death of the refusing person has been shown to be untrue with respect to some of the killing units. We could probably find examples of people whose refusal to take part in any action supporting the Holocaust would have had grave consequences, but we still have no comprehensive answer to this question. Of course, we would have to presume that these people would have wanted to stay away from all aspects of the mass killing, had they had a choice. The "bureaucratic" view, argued by Arendt and others with persuasive originality, has found many followers. I believe it does elucidate important aspects of the Holocaust but is weak on others. The terror of the Einsatzgruppen and the killing of Jews on death marches in late 1944 and early 1945, for instance, were not bureaucratic but literally bloody and brutal in the most direct way. It is also not true that these people had to follow orders, since there was a possibility to refuse to kill without being punished. These people, often ordinary policemen, killed because they believed it was maybe an ugly but nevertheless a rightful task. They had absorbed enough Nazi propaganda to find justification in what was asked of them, even though many of them were not fanatical Nazis or SS members. Excessive consumption of alcohol often eased their task. Policemen, whether Nazis or not, do not allow generalizations for a whole people, and I even know of NSDAP members who did not condone anti-Semitism and who helped Jews. This was a profoundly contradictory attitude, since Hitler's ideology aimed at racial destruction, but contradictions and inconsistencies are a common find wherever historians scrape the surface of sweeping explanations. One point often gets lost in the attempts of some historians to explain the Holocaust out of old anti-Semitic traditions in German culture: even though Germans (including Austrians) were undoubtedly the "movers" and organizers of genocide, the participants in the Holocaust were not only Germans. Without cooperation of many people in the German-occupied territories the Holocaust would not have been possible on the same scale. Outside Germany, local citizens and officials helped to round up Jews for transportation to the death camps. The camps employed many local people, and the order police shooting commandos often included large non-German units. In Latvia, a volunteer corps of Latvians did most of the killing. There was an endemic shortage of German personnel in the East, so that many camps in the occupied Soviet Union were staffed by a majority of local people. In one camp, only the commander was German (see Finkelstein/Birn, A Nation on Trial). In short, the bystander mentality and anti-Semitic traditions facilitated the Holocaust not only in Germany, and if passive compliance or a conspiracy of silence apply to the Germans, they also mattered in the attitude of many French, Belgians, Croats, Slovenes, Poles, U...