Hitler and the Holocaust (2 page)

Hitler’s rise to power would not have been possible without the carnage of the First World War, the traumatic impact of German military defeat, the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, the economic crises of the Weimar Republic, and the fear of Communist revolution. Anti-Semitism, while central to Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Himmler, Jules Streicher, and other Nazi leaders, was not the main vote-getter of the movement. But once racist anti-Semitism became the official state ideology of the Third Reich, reinforced by an extraordinarily powerful propaganda apparatus and a barrage of anti-Jewish laws, its impact was devastating.

It is, however, important to realize that the receptiveness of Germans (and other Europeans) to the demonization of the Jews owed a great deal to the much older tradition of Christian anti-Judaism. The Nazis did not need to invent the images of “the Jew” as a usurer, blasphemer, traitor, ritual murderer, dangerous conspirator against Christendom, or a deadly threat to the foundations of morality. Both secular rulers and Christian churches had ensured that (until the French Revolution) Jews were pariahs in European society, condemned to positions of inferiority and subordination. Racism had been used in Catholic Spain in the fifteenth century, for example, to justify the removal of even converted
Jews from public functions and positions of economic influence.

The Protestant Reformation, especially in Germany, brought little improvement in the status of the Jews. Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish diatribes would moreover become a contributing factor in the complicity of so many German Protestants with Hitler’s deeds during the Third Reich’s anti-Semitic persecutions. Catholics, too, were increasingly implicated in anti-Semitic political movements in France, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and other European states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the Holocaust, many Catholic clerics, like their Protestant counterparts, were often indifferent or even hostile to Jews. The deep ambivalence of the Vatican and the Christian churches cannot, however, be understood without taking into account the long-standing “teaching of contempt,” which had deep roots in the New Testament itself and in the teachings of the Church Fathers. Nazism, though ultimately determined to uproot Christianity, built on the negative stereotypes about Jews and Judaism that the churches had disseminated for centuries.

The Germans did not carry out the Holocaust alone, although under Nazi rule they were undoubtedly its spearhead and driving force. When it came to killing Jews, they found many willing collaborators and “helpers” among Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Romanians, Croats, and others. Austrians (who had been annexed to the German Reich in 1938) formed a wholly disproportionate number of the SS killers, death-camp commandants, and personnel involved in the “Final Solution.” Even official France “collaborated” eagerly, not in the killing of Jews but in their deportation eastward and in the passage of draconian racist legislation.

The Holocaust was a
pan-European
event that could not have happened unless millions of Europeans by the late 1930s had wished to see an end to the age-old Jewish presence in
their midst. This consensus was especially strong in the countries of east-central Europe, where the bulk of Jewry lived and retained its own national characteristics and cultural distinctiveness. But there was also a growing anti-Semitism in western Europe and America, tied to the hardships caused by the Great Depression, increased xenophobia, fear of immigrants, and the influence of fascist ideas.

This hostility was evidenced by the unwillingness of British and American decision-makers to undertake any significant rescue efforts on behalf of European Jewry during the Holocaust. Already in the 1930s, the quota system in the United States had precluded any mass immigration of Jews from central and eastern Europe, which might have relieved some of the enormous pressures on Jewry. British concerns about Arab unrest in Palestine, following increased Jewish immigration in the 1930s to their “national home,” led to another major refuge being denied them. Hitler duly noted these responses and the appeasement policy of the West before 1939 and drew his own conclusions: his expansionist ambitions could be pursued without too great a risk, and the West would not interfere with his increasingly radical anti-Jewish measures.

The Jews of Europe, on the eve of the Holocaust, found themselves in a trap from which there appeared to be no escape. They were faced with the most menacing and dangerous enemy in their history—a dynamic power in the heart of Europe that openly sought their destruction. Its influence was felt in neighboring states, especially to the east and southeast, which were passing laws of their own to restrict Jewish rights and pushing for the removal or emigration of their Jewish populations. Moreover, the three million Jews in Communist Russia were cut off from the rest of the Jewish world; yet the identification of Jews with Bolshevism had become a highly dangerous political myth that would eventually fuel the mass murders carried out by the Nazis and their allies on the eastern front after June 1941.

The Jews of America were limited in what they could do for European Jewry by a combination of their own insecurity, their fears of anti-Semitism, and the reality of American isolationism prior to late 1941. The Jews of Palestine were still a relatively small community under British control and faced with a hostile Arab majority. The Zionist movement, while growing, was too fragmented politically and fractious to be effective.

The Nazi myth of the Jews as a well-organized, international power with clearly defined goals and common “racial” interests could not therefore have been further removed from reality. The Jews were in fact disorganized, relatively powerless, and lacking in solidarity or any agreed political agenda. Before and during the Holocaust they did not have a state, an army, a common territory, or a flag, let alone a coherent organizational center.

Except in rare cases, such as Denmark, Finland, Italy, and Bulgaria (which had relatively small Jewish populations), the Jews would moreover be cruelly disappointed by the lack of solidarity shown them by most of their Gentile neighbors once the dark night of persecution descended upon them. Even more bitter was the ease with which the protection of European states and governments was withdrawn and their rights were sacrificed as if they were absolute pariahs, beyond the pale of civilization. Hitler’s war thus found many Jews trapped and virtually defenseless against a ruthless enemy bent on their total destruction in a world largely indifferent to their fate.

From this searing and potentially shattering trauma, the Jewish people nonetheless rose up after the Second World War to establish their own independent state. Other nations and minorities also learned the price of powerlessness after the Second World War and have fought to achieve their freedom from totalitarian tyranny and foreign oppression. But the Holocaust also has more universal lessons: it reminds us that xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism can lead to group
violence and atrocities on an unimaginable scale; and that any society—however culturally, scientifically, and technologically advanced—can become totally criminal once it loses its ability to distinguish between right and wrong. The Holocaust underlines the danger of trusting in the idolatry of power without ethical restraint. It drives home the lesson that each individual is responsible for his or her own conscience and fate. It is a warning from history that obeying orders can be no excuse for criminal acts.

If there is a general lesson, then, it is that we must learn that evil can and must be resisted in its early stages; that we always have choices; and that there can be no place for racism and anti-Semitism in a civilized society. Thinking about the Holocaust is like staring into an abyss and hoping it will not stare back. It is the ultimate extreme case, a black hole of history that not only challenges our facile assumptions about modernity and progress but questions our very sense of what it means to be human.

1

ANTI-SEMITISM AND THE JEWS

After Satan Christians have no greater enemies than the Jews.… They pray many times each day that God may destroy us through pestilence, famine and war, aye, that all beings and creatures may rise up with them against the Christians.

ABRAHAM A SANCTA CLARA
Viennese Catholic preacher (1683)

I hold the Jewish race to be the born enemy of pure humanity and everything noble in it. It is certain that it is running us Germans into the ground, and I am perhaps the last German who knows how to hold himself upright in the face of Judaism, which already rules everything.

RICHARD WAGNER (1881)

Jewry is one of the great negative principles of world history and thus can only be understood as a parasite within the opposing positive principle. As little as Judas Iscariot with his thirty silver coins … can be understood without the Lord whose community he sneeringly betrayed … that night side of history called Jewry cannot be understood without being positioned in the totality of the historical process where God and Satan, Creation and Destruction confront each other in an eternal struggle.

WALTER FRANK, “German Science in Its Struggle against World Jewry,” German radio broadcast, 11 and 13 January 1939

T
hroughout recorded time, there have been countless massacres, some on religious grounds, others for political or territorial reasons. Native peoples have been exterminated in colonial wars. Millions of Africans were sold into slavery. The colonization of North America, Australia, Africa, and other parts of the globe by expanding Western societies involved constant displacement, despoliation, and sometimes even the genocide of indigenous populations in the name of empire, plunder, and “progress.” The Turkish massacre of more than a million Armenians during the First World War marked a new scale of brutality.
¹
However, if the number of victims alone were to be our point of departure, then we should look to those unfortunate Soviet citizens who were shot, starved, or worked to death in the gulags of Stalinist Russia as “enemies of the people,” in the name of Marxist ideology.
²
The victims of this “autogenocide,” which a totalitarian regime inflicted on its own subjects, numbered at least twenty million. (While staggeringly high, this was a much lower percentage of all Soviet citizens than the one third of all Jewish people in the world who were killed by the Nazis.) Even higher casualties were registered in Maoist China (the full story has yet to be told) and, on a much smaller scale, in Communist Cambodia during the 1970s. The slaughter in Rwanda and “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s demonstrate that the genocidal chapter in human history is far from over.

Even during the Second World War, several genocides occurred, though of different magnitudes. Approximately three million Polish Gentiles fell victim to the Nazis, as did a similar number of Russian POWs who were starved to death by
the Germans. Both groups were used as guinea pigs at Auschwitz-Birkenau before the gassing of Jews began. The German war in the east involved much more than exterminating the Jews: it was initially conceived of as part of a larger design for a radical racial restructuring in which Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians would be expropriated, deported, or killed.
³
Gypsies, too, were earmarked for destruction; between 250,000 and half a million Gypsies were sent to their deaths between 1939 and 1945, coterminous with the Jewish Holocaust. Gypsies (Roma and Sinti) did not, of course, hold the same place either in Christian consciousness or in the Nazi worldview as did Jews or Judaism, but prejudice and hostility toward their nomadic way of life was nonetheless widespread and in some ways comparable to the perception of Jews as alien to Christian Europe.
⁴

The Nazis were particularly hostile toward the Gypsies as an “antisocial” element and as “people of different blood” who fell under the Nuremberg race laws of 1935. (Heinrich Himmler’s decree of December 1937 permitted their arrest on the extremely elastic grounds of asocial behavior, even without the commission of any criminal act.) As early as 1936, some groups of Gypsies were sent to the Dachau concentration camp. Further legislation in 1938 to deal with the “Gypsy plague” aimed at a strict separation between “pure” (Sinti and Lalleri) and “mixed blood” Gypsies, as well as between Germans and Gypsies.
⁵
According to the Nazi Office for Racial Hygiene and Population Biology, more than 90 percent of the German Gypsies were defined as non-Aryan “mixed bloods,” the favored government policy toward which was sterilization. During the war, Nazi policy became even more radical, and in the fall of 1941, five thousand Austrian Gypsies were deported to the Lódz ghetto. Then, in early 1942, some Gypsies were murdered along with Jews in the Chelmno death camp. Gypsies started arriving in Auschwitz-Birkenau on 26 February 1943; a great many died from hunger, disease, and “medical experiments.” In 1944, women
and children were gassed. In the Baltic states and the Soviet Union, Gypsies were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen; in Yugoslavia, they were killed by the Pavelić regime; in Hungary, they were persecuted and rounded up by Arrow Cross fascists. In France, they were interned and later sent to camps in Germany. Two thirds of the Polish Gypsies died under Nazi occupation.

The Nazis regarded “the fight against the Gypsy Menace” after 1935 as “a matter of race” and insisted on the need to “separate once and for all the Gypsy race (
Zigeunertum
) from the German nation (
Volkstum),”
to prevent the danger of miscegenation. In that respect, there was an ideological link between the murder of Jews and Gypsies in the Nazi vision of radical ethnic cleansing or “purification” of the
Volksgemeinschaft
(people’s community). Indeed, the settlement of the “Gypsy question” was conceived from the outset in the framework of “knowledge stemming from ethnological research” under the jurisdiction of Heinrich Himmler as Reichsführer SS and chief of the German police. The fate of the Gypsies, as Himmler made clear in September 1942, was not a matter for the law or the courts, any more than was that of the Jews. Hence, they were totally at the mercy of the police and the SS and were liable to be thrown at any time into concentration camps. The accusations against them of hereditary racial inferiority, economic parasitism, or sexual “immorality,” all of which were seen as threatening to the general German population, overlapped with the demagoguery of anti-Semitism.
⁶
The Gypsies, however, were deemed a “social menace,” not a total and universal enemy like the Jews, engaged in a universal conspiracy against Germany and the “Aryan” world. The “Gypsy question” had, for example, only marginal importance in the Nazi political agenda, and Hitler himself referred publicly to Gypsies on only two occasions, in stark contrast to his relentless obsession with the Jews.
⁷
Moreover, those Gypsies who were considered “racially pure” were never regarded as a danger to the
German people and were even thought of as having noble blood. Thus, the horrible crime against the Gypsies as a social group did not aim in principle at their
total
annihilation.