Hitler and the Holocaust (30 page)

Karski’s mission had an immediate impact on the Polish government-in-exile, which on 10 December 1942 formally appealed to the Allied governments to speak out against the extermination of the Jews in Poland. Indeed, it was the prime mover in the Allied declaration a week later, which publicly condemned Nazi crimes against the Jews for the first time. But proclamations were one thing and actions another. On 18 January 1943, Count Edward Raczynski, in the name of the government-in-exile and also on behalf of Polish Jews, demanded that the Allies bomb Germany in reprisal for the exterminations. The British foreign secretary curtly rejected all demands, offering, as Karski put it, “vague promises to intervene in some neutral countries.” In Washington, the Polish courier was received rather more warmly by Roosevelt but without much comprehension of his message, and the practical results were meager. Karski’s records of these and other encounters with British and American statesmen, government officials, and high-ranking military personnel are essential reading. He felt with good reason that the testimony in his report of November 1942 should have provided incontrovertible proof of the genocide and led the Allies to immediately undertake special measures to save the European Jews. This did not happen. Instead, he encountered a mixture of political hypocrisy and soulless bureaucracy, narrow national self-interest and sheer indifference in those Western political and
military leaders who could have ameliorated the Jewish tragedy in larger or smaller ways.
⁷⁶
They did not care, or they cast doubt on the extent of the annihilation, or else they saw the Jewish tragedy as being essentially a “Jewish problem,” rather than one directly related to the meaning of Western civilization and to humanity as a whole.

8

MODERNITY AND THE NAZI GENOCIDE

Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland

PAUL CELAN,
“Death Fugue”

Here in this carload

I am Eve

With my son Abel

If you see my older boy

Cain son of Adam

Tell him that I

DAN PAGIS (written in pencil in a sealed freight car)

In no other place and time has one seen a phenomenon so unexpected and so complex: never were so many human lives extinguished in so short a time, and with so lucid a combination of technological ingenuity, fanaticism and cruelty.

PRIMO LEVI,
The Drowned and the Saved
(1989)

T
he Nazi genocide has been called “the most spectacular and terrifying instance of industrial killing in this century.”
¹
It has also been seen in recent years by a growing number of scholars less as a regression to barbarism or as a uniquely horrible event but rather as a characteristic expression of modernity itself. More specifically, the Holocaust has been interpreted as a product of the destructive bureaucratic and technical capacities of modern Western civilization.
²
This sociological approach, exemplified by the work of Zyg-munt Bauman, goes beyond the pioneering investigations of Raul Hilberg forty years ago, which first detailed the ice-cold, bureaucratic, and industrial efficiency with which the German genocidal program was carried out; as well as beyond the more controversial theses of Hannah Arendt concerning the conditioned readiness of masses of human beings to abdicate any sense of collective or individual moral responsibility under the pressure of modern totalitarian regimes.
³
For Bauman, the Holocaust is not so much a totalitarian phenomenon as the consequence of an inherent potential of modern life and its organizational culture, dominated by “rational” bureaucracies, “scientific” ideologies, depersonalization, and the extreme functional specialization of industrial society.
⁴
Not surprisingly, perhaps, this led him to downplay the influence of historical and ideological factors, such as the anti-Jewish hatred that existed in Christian Europe over many centuries.

In this reading, even “scientific” anti-Semitism, while not ignored, is granted only a qualified, purely functional, and limited causative role in the Nazi genocide.
⁵
Bauman regards modern racism as a desperate attempt to redraw boundaries
that had been crossed as a result of the ceaseless flux and dizzying changes of industrial society. It was an equally vain effort to check and reverse the social mobility produced by Jewish emancipation and to keep the Jews once more in “their place.” There is certainly some truth in this model, but it ignores the persistence of a host of premodern prejudices, emotions, and hatreds for which the Nazi worldview merely provided an updated pseudoscientific window dressing. Moreover, the Holocaust, while certainly “modern” in some of its organizational and technical features, had equally as many “archaic” attributes, down to and including its primitive methods of killing. Indeed, as many Jews were eliminated by shooting in the horrific pit exterminations on the eastern front as died in the factory-style exterminations at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The German historians Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, like Bauman, also regard the Holocaust as having been triggered by modern processes of technical rationalization. However, they claim that the mass murder was designed primarily by technocrats within the German intelligentsia who were involved in planning the Third Reich’s population policy.
⁶
The demographic experts were neither fanatical Nazis nor even anti-Semites but essentially opportunist academics and efficient bureaucrats who believed in “modernization” and at the same time wished to advance their personal careers by helping to map out the Nazi “new order” in Europe. They argued that the deportation or murder of the impoverished Jewish masses in overpopulated agrarian Poland would open the door to greater social mobility and future industrial development. The murder of Jews would get rid of unnecessary consumers and be the first step in a broader plan of genocide against other ethnic groups (Gypsies, Russians, Poles, and others), clearing the way for socioeconomic modernization in eastern Europe. Thus, they say, the Jews were not killed because they were Jews or as the result of an “irrational” racist ideology; rather, they were eliminated on utilitarian grounds
as
Luftmenschen
who stood in the way of modern, rational, Western technocratic civilization. The young planners of the Third Reich set the agenda in preparing “the decisions of their superiors, who for their part attached great significance to the advice of their experts and expressly urged them to research in freedom.”
⁷

There are serious problems with such an approach, though few would quarrel with the assumption of complicity of German academic experts, “strategists,” and planners in Nazi crimes. But there are too many facts that simply do not square with this theory. There was, for example, little unanimity among the “Jewish” experts in the Reich when proposing solutions for the starving Jews in the Lódz and Warsaw ghettos.
⁸
Furthermore, there is no indication that Hitler, whose contempt for “experts” of all kinds (even in military matters) was well-known, ever paid the slightest attention to the proposals of low-level planners.
⁹
Moreover, one needs to distinguish between a modernization strategy and plain straightforward greed in the plundering of Jewish assets, which was indeed an integral part of Nazi anti-Semitic policy during the
Anschluss
, the pogroms of 1938, the “Aryanization” measures, and the subsequent deportations. The massive expropriation of Jewish wealth and property undoubtedly made Nazism more attractive to millions of non-Jews. But what “modernizing” logic underlay the transport in wartime of 2,200 Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau from the island of Rhodes, two thousand miles away, despite urgent military transport priorities?
¹⁰
What economic or political sense did it make to deport half a million Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 after the Normandy landings of the Allies and the advances of the Red Army from the east had made Germany’s defeat virtually inevitable? If social “modernization” was the Nazi objective, why deport and murder the highly integrated, economically productive Jews of Germany, Austria, Italy, Holland, or France, who were certainly no
Luftmenschen?
The fact that Nazi economists and planners often employed a “utilitarian”
language to mask their prejudices against Jews and Poles by framing their policy proposals in terms of productivity, food supply, public health, or “security threats” should not deceive anyone about their underlying racist content. Rationalizations are not the same as causes. Using the label of “modernization” to categorize the Nazi policy of genocidal annihilation in effect flattens out and “normalizes” mass murder as if it were a slightly deviant variant of normal capitalist development.
¹¹

Genocidal impulses, as we have shown, were inherent in the Nazi movement, ideology, and collective mind-set. In peacetime, it is true that the official goals of the regime were still confined to “racial separation,” followed by expulsions. But by 1939 it was already apparent that if a general war broke out, then conditions would exist for the Nazis to “ethnically cleanse” on a grand scale the physically and mentally handicapped, the Gypsies, and, above all, the Jews.
¹²
The Nazi leadership did not require planning experts to tell them that in wartime “the destruction of the Jews will go hand in hand with the destruction of our enemies.”
¹³
Goebbels, commenting on a Hitler speech in February 1942, added: “The
Führer
realises the full implications of the great opportunities offered by this war.”
¹⁴

The war against the partisans was a case in point. The SS leader in charge of this warfare, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, observed: “The fight against partisans was gradually used as an excuse to carry out other measures, such as the extermination of Jews and Gypsies, the systematic reduction of the Slavic peoples … and the terrorisation of civilians by shooting and looting.”
¹⁵
So, too, social-engineering models were used by planners to give an aura of scientific rationality to genocide. But such camouflage concerns never interfered with the primacy of politics in the Third Reich.
¹⁶
Nor did they prevent Hitler from cursorily dismissing pressures from the army or industrialists to delay the deportation of much-needed skilled Jewish workers.
¹⁷
Ghettos, too, were created in
Poland on ideological and political grounds even though they disrupted the economy.

When Himmler instructed Rudolf Höss to establish the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, the reason given was expressly ideological: the need to extirpate the biological roots of Jewry.
¹⁸
Invariably, Himmler’s orders and those of his speeches that related to the “Final Solution” spoke of the primordial “racial struggle against Jewry,” not of economic benefits.
¹⁹
Moreover, whenever Jews were used for slave labor, Himmler demanded that they be worked to death or quickly replaced by Poles so that, as he put it on 2 October 1942, “all the Jews would disappear in accordance with the
Führer’s
wish [
dem Wunsche des Führers entsprechend
]”
²⁰

Nor is there any convincing evidence for the claim of Aly and Heim that the Nazis ultimately planned the
extermination
of the Slavs (or even of all Slavic elites) as part of their demographic and “modernization” program. Slav nations such as Croatia and Slovakia were allies of Nazi Germany, and the Germans envisaged that Croats and Slovaks would dominate and help destroy the Serb and Czech elites. The Ukrainians and Byelorussians (along with the Balts) were not given even the illusion of independence, but they did have a limited, subordinate status as “helpers” of the Germans, especially in killing Jews. Poles, Serbs, and Great Russians, on the other hand, had no rights at all and were subjected to massacres and horrendous injustices but
not
to systematic genocide. As Himmler expressed it in Poznan in 1943: “Whether the other peoples live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only insofar as we need them as slaves for our culture. Whether or not ten thousand Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only insofar as the tank ditch is completed for Germany.”
²¹

In the logic of Nazi racial imperialism, Russians and Poles were branded as “inferior” and would be reduced to helots of the Reich. But they did not have to die en masse in the name of an apocalyptic, millenarian ideology. Even Nazi officials
and certainly soldiers of the Wehrmacht saw something contrary to their self-image as a
Kulturnation
in any effort to exterminate the entire Polish nation. Significantly, Himmler himself did not exclude “Germanizing” those Poles who were considered “racially valuable” elements; though the rest of the Polish people would be enslaved and economically exploited, with the exception of the elites (clergy, intellectuals, army officers), who were ruthlessly eliminated. Similarly, with the Russians and Ukrainians, utilitarian criteria and expediency played a role in Nazi plans. There was to be a controlled form of “ethnic cleansing,” and it was indeed anticipated in 1941 that millions of Slavs would perish in Russia as a result of German conquest, colonization, and a deliberate policy of starvation. But the total extermination of entire Slavic populations was neither practicable for the Nazis, nor did it serve any major ideological agenda.