Hitler and the Holocaust
Read Hitler and the Holocaust Online
Authors: Robert S. Wistrich
M
ODERN
L
IBRARY
C
HRONICLES
C
HINUA
A
CHEBE
on Africa
K
AREN
A
RMSTRONG
on Islam
D
AVID
B
ERLINSKI
on mathematics
R
ICHARD
B
ESSEL
on Nazi Germany
I
AN
B
URUMA
on the rise of modern Japan
J
AMES
D
AVIDSON
on the Golden Age of Athens
S
EAMUS
D
EANE
on the Irish
F
ELIPE
F
ERNÁNDEZ
-A
RMESTO
on the Americas
L
AWRENCE
F
RIEDMAN
on law in America
P
AUL
F
USSELL
on World War II in Europe
P
AUL
J
OHNSON
on the Renaissance
T
ONY
J
UDT
on the Cold War
F
RANK
K
ERMODE
on the age of Shakespeare
J
OEL
K
OTKIN
on the city
H
ANS
K
ÜNG
on the Catholic Church
B
ERNARD
L
EWIS
on the Holy Land
M
ARK
M
AZOWER
on the Balkans
J
OHN
M
ICKLETHWAIT
and A
DRIAN
W
OOLDRIDGE
on the company
P
ANKAJ
M
ISHRA
on the rise of modern India
A
NTHONY
P
AGDEN
on peoples and empires
R
ICHARD
P
IPES
on Communism
C
OLIN
R
ENFREW
on prehistory
J
OHN
R
USSELL
on the museum
K
EVIN
S
TARR
on California
C
ATHARINE
S
TIMPSON
on the university
M
ICHAEL
S
TÜRMER
on the German Empire, 1870–1918
S
TEVEN
W
EINBERG
on science
B
ERNARD
W
ILLIAMS
on freedom
A. N. W
ILSON
on London
G
ORDON
S. W
OOD
on the American Revolution
J
AMES
W
OOD
on the history of the novel
2001 Modern Library Edition
Copyright © 2001 by Robert S. Wistrich
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Modern Library, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,
and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of
Canada Limited, Toronto.
MODERN LIBRARY and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Published by arrangement with Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
a division of Orion Publishing Group Ltd.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Wistrich, Robert S.
Hitler and the Holocaust / Robert Wistrich.
p. cm.—(Modern Library chronicles)
eISBN: 978-1-58836097-7
1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) I. Title. II. Series.
D804.3.W469 2001
940.53’18—dc21
2001030835
Modern Library website address:
www.modernlibrary.com
v3.1
To my mother, Sabina,
who lived through it all without losing faith
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
The research for this book was conducted over a number of years in many archives, libraries, and research institutes in Israel, Europe, Britain, and America. My indebtedness to the work of countless scholars, too numerous to mention here, will be apparent from the endnotes. As one of the six historians appointed to the Vatican Historical Commission to study the role of Pius XII during the Holocaust, I also benefited from access to many sources in at least seven languages that proved helpful in the writing of this book. During the first six months of 2000, I was fortunate enough to be a visiting professor at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in Wassenaar. I wish to thank Professor Wesseling and his gracious staff for their hospitality and assistance. This project was originally proposed to me by Toby Mundy and supervised by Rebecca Wilson of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, whose suggestions were most useful. I gratefully acknowledge the efforts of Frances Bruce in deciphering my handwritten text and putting it into a readable format. I owe a special debt to Trudy Gold, Director of Holocaust Education at the London Jewish Cultural Institute, for help and encouragement at
critical moments. I also learned much from my earlier work with the Institute in writing the text for the educational packet
Lessons of the Holocaust
(1997), now used widely in British schools; and in collaborating with Rex Bloomstein in making the film
Understanding the Holocaust
, for which I also wrote the script. As always, I owe a debt of gratitude to my wife, Daniella, and my three children for their patient understanding of my single-minded dedication to this project. This book is dedicated to my mother, Sabina, born in Cracow ninety years ago, who always set me an example of how one can overcome adversity with fortitude and spirit.
Robert Solomon Wistrich
London/Jerusalem
December 2000
C
ONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
5 B
ETWEEN THE
C
ROSS AND THE
S
WASTIKA
7 B
RITAIN
, A
MERICA, AND THE
H
OLOCAUST
8 M
ODERNITY AND THE
N
AZI
G
ENOCIDE
Notes
About the Author
I
NTRODUCTION
The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right to live among us. The German Nazis had at last decreed: You have no right to live.
RAUL HILBERG,
The Destruction of the European Jews
(1961)
The Holocaust was an unprecedented crime against humanity that aimed at the annihilation of the entire Jewish population of Europe, down to the last man, woman, and child. It was the planned, deliberate policy decision of a powerful state, the Nazi Reich, which mobilized all of its resources to destroy an entire people. The Jews were not condemned to die for their religious beliefs or for their political opinions. Nor were they an economic or military threat to the Nazi state. They were killed not for what they had done but for the simple fact of their existence.
To be born a Jew, in the eyes of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime, meant that one was a priori not a human being and therefore unworthy of life. There were other innocent victims of Nazi racial ideology: Gypsies, who were considered racially impure, were sent to the gas chambers; Russians, Poles, and other occupied peoples in eastern Europe were reduced to slavery; even those ethnic Germans who were branded as mentally or physically defective were put to death until a public outcry moderated this policy. We know that under the Nazi regime, the SS, the Einsatzgruppen (mobile
killing units), the Wehrmacht, the Order Police, and the guards in the death camps practiced brutality on a hitherto unknown scale; that they mowed down row upon row of shivering, half-naked adults and smashed the heads of Jewish infants without pity or remorse; that they built a vast system of concentration camps and death camps, the purpose of which was the production of corpses on an industrial scale.
The central unanswered question is why? Why were Jews worked to death on senseless, unproductive tasks, even when the Reich was experiencing an acute labor shortage? Why were skilled Jewish armament workers killed in the camps despite the pressing military needs of the Wehrmacht? Why did the Nazis insist they were fighting an omnipotent “Jewish” power even as their mass murder of the Jews revealed the powerlessness of their enemy?
At the heart of this seeming mystery lay a millenarian weltanschauung (worldview) which proclaimed that “the Jews” were the source of all evils—especially internationalism, pacifism, democracy, and Marxism; that they were responsible for Christianity, the Enlightenment, and Freemasonry. They were branded “a ferment of decomposition,” formlessness, chaos, and “racial degeneration.” The Jews were identified with the fragmentation of urban civilization, the dissolving acid of critical rationalism, and the loosening of morality. They stood behind the “rootless cosmopolitanism” of international capital and the threat of world revolution. In a word, they were the
Weltfeind
—the “world enemy” against which National Socialism defined its own grandiose racial utopia of a Thousand-year Reich.
In Hitler’s genocidal, racist ideology, the redemption (
Erlösung
) of the Germans and of “Aryan” humanity depended upon the “Final Solution” (
Endlösung
) of the “Jewish question.” Unless the demonic
Weltfeind
was annihilated, there would be no “peace” in a Europe that was to be united under Germanic leadership so that Germany could fulfill its “natural destiny” by expanding to the east to create
Lebensraum
(living
space) for its people. The Second World War, which Hitler initiated, was simultaneously a war for territorial hegemony and a battle against the mythical Jewish enemy.
War made the Holocaust a concrete possibility. The victories of the Wehrmacht brought millions of Jews under the heel of German power for the first time. The task of annihilating them in cold blood was delegated by Hitler to the SS, under Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and his closest subordinate, Reinhard Heydrich. As early as 1939, a so-called euthanasia program, directly responsible to Hitler and the Führer Chancellery, had been initiated to eliminate nearly ninety thousand ethnic Germans who were deemed “unfit to live” because they were physically or mentally “defective.” This program, halted temporarily in 1941, proved to be a training ground for the “Final Solution.” In late 1941, its personnel, apparatus, and experience in killing by poison gas was transferred to death camps in Poland to be used against the Jews.
The Holocaust required more than an apocalyptic ideology of anti-Semitism in order to be implemented. It was equally the product of the most modern and technically developed society in Europe—one with a highly organized bureaucracy. The streamlined, industrialized mass killings carried out in death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka were of a form unknown in European and world history. But millions of Jews were also killed by the Germans and their helpers via more primitive, “archaic” methods in Russia, eastern Europe, and the Balkans. The Einsatzgruppen and police battalions hunted down Jews and executed them in gruesome pit killings, in forests, ravines, and trenches. Russians, Poles, Serbs, and Ukrainians, although not earmarked for
systematic
mass murder, were also decimated in large numbers. Three million Soviet prisoners of war died in German captivity.
Some, such as Daniel Goldhagen, have argued that the Germans carried out these murders because they were
Germans; their political culture and mind-set, grounded in a nationalist pride in their
Volk
, had been preprogrammed by an “eliminationist anti-Semitism” that had existed since at least the mid-nineteenth century. But before Hitler,
völkisch
racist anti-Semitism had not made great inroads in Germany, though it was far from negligible. Anti-Semitism had been much stronger and more influential in Tsarist Russia, Romania, or in the Habsburg Monarchy and its successor states, especially Poland, Slovakia, and Austria. Germany before 1933 was still a state based on the rule of law, where despite long-standing prejudice Jews achieved remarkable economic success, were well integrated into society, enjoyed equal rights, and decisively shaped its modernist culture.