Hitler and the Holocaust (31 page)

The Slav peoples of Russia were depicted in wartime as racially inferior and sometimes as Asiatic “subhumans” but not as “lice,” “vermin,” or “bugs” to be collectively disposed of by industrialized mass murder. Nor was there any Slavic counterpart to the pit killings conducted by the Einsatzgruppen. Neither Poles, Serbs, nor Russians (though they were close to the bottom of the racial-biological hierarchy) were branded as a “world enemy” or reviled as an antirace that threatened the very foundations of “Aryan” civilization and humanity itself. The struggle against the eastern Slavs was in Nazi terms essentially a war of
Lebensraum.
Had it been successful, it would probably have led to the uprooting rather than the murder of as many as thirty million Slavs (deported to Siberia) and their replacement by German settlers in western Russia, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus.

However, this racist vision of a great Germanic empire gradually crumbled as the Nazi state became embroiled in a life-and-death struggle from late 1941 onward against a reinvigorated Soviet Russia and the British Empire, newly reinforced by the United States. The military stalemate and the
resulting demographic and logistical bottlenecks in early 1942 led to a shift in German policy. In order to make good its manpower losses and preserve its military-industrial complex, Nazi Germany decided to maximize the labor potential of its subject populations. As a result, millions of Soviet POWs (most of whom were later starved to death), Poles, Czechs, and other Europeans were brought into the Reich to work, even though this clearly undermined the Nazi vision of a racially pure
Volksgemeinschaft
.
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At the same time, Jews were being deported
out
of the central Reich territories to the east, where they would be subjected to conveyor-belt extermination. Thus, the “rational” alternative of economic hyperexploitation was explicitly
rejected for
the Jews.
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The significant element of “modernity” in the Nazi genocidal project did not therefore lie in its mythical “economic rationality” or in any link to a breakneck developmental program of social transformation (as occurred in Stalinist Russia) but rather in the methods that it pioneered in killing. At places like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Sobibór, Treblinka, and other death camps, the entire apparatus of the modern German state—the resources of its bureaucracy and military-industrial complex—were put at the disposal of the SS in order to carry out streamlined exterminations. All the skills and techniques of modern technology, of scientific and medical expertise, as well as precise railway scheduling, were enlisted in the service of racial murder. Raul Hilberg, who initiated the study of this administrative process, long ago observed: “The machinery of destruction, then, was structurally no different from organised German society as a whole. The machinery of destruction was the organised community in one of its special roles.”
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The organization of mass murder involved not only the immediate perpetrators but literally tens of thousands of other Germans: diplomats, lawyers, doctors, accountants, bankers, clerks, and railway workers, without whom the trains to the death camps would not have run. This monstrous machinery
of death could not have been unleashed except in a highly organized and bureaucratized society, methodical, perfectionist, and thoroughly
modern
in its deliberate fragmenting of responsibilities and routinizing of operations. Furthermore, it happened in a state that was able to efficiently coordinate countless bureaucrats in relevant Reich ministries, the army, the judiciary, and the medical establishments, as well as Nazi officialdom in the occupied eastern territories, the SS, and the Order Police. Such relentless systematization and its end product—the gas chambers—is what gave the Holocaust its sinister “modern” aura of depersonalized violence.
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The gas chambers and crematoriums were an industrial method for liquidating human beings on the basis of a daily quota; they demonstrated “the modern world’s capability to organise mass death on a new, more advanced and scientifically planned basis.”
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This streamlined process was also distinctively modern in its ability to draw on state-of-the-art punch-card technology, which enabled the Third Reich to coordinate the rounding up of Jews throughout Europe, their deportation to the camps, and the statistics that measured their agonies during the “Final Solution.” Only after the Jews were successfully identified could they be targeted for asset confiscation, deportation, ghettoization, slave labor, and finally extermination. It was custom-designed American IBM technology, as Edwin Black has recently shown, that gave an unprecedented speed and accuracy to the Germans in identifying Jews in censuses, registrations, and racial-ancestry programs, as well as in organizing railway transportation and concentration-camp registrations.
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Similarly, mass murder on this scale could not have happened without the trial run, beginning in 1939, of the Nazi “euthanasia” program. The physicians of the Reich collaborated grossly in using poison gas and lethal injections to murder eighty thousand mentally and physically handicapped Germans. This so-called Operation T4 (named for the central
office at 4 Tiergarten Strasse, Berlin) had been personally ordered by Hitler. As Henry Friedlander has pointed out, “The success of the euthanasia policy convinced the Nazi leadership that mass murder was technically feasible, that ordinary men and women were willing to kill large numbers of innocent human beings, and that the bureaucracy would cooperate in such an unprecedented enterprise.”
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The same sinister methods that were used in Operation T4 to mask the killing of the handicapped would be applied in the Nazi death camps. SS guards would be dressed in the white uniforms of medical technicians, and the victims were always led to believe that they were being taken to a shower room rather than to a gas chamber.

The German perpetrators who staffed the machinery of destruction, whether in offices or in the camps, were “not a special kind of German” but rather “a remarkable cross section of the German population.”
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Engaged in a vast murder operation, officially shrouded in secrecy, they appeared to be immune from any pangs of conscience. A vocabulary of euphemisms like “evacuation” or “special treatment” shielded them from any guilty feelings or doubts about the justice of their enterprise.
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Hans Mommsen has persuasively argued that the use of bureaucratic and technocratic methods repressed any moral inhibitions among the perpetrators, turning the death of Jews into a technical problem of killing capacity. His view of the Holocaust is that it was essentially a rationalized, quasi-automatic process in which the extermination of those “unfit for work” developed a dynamic of its own: “The bureaucratic machinery created by Eichmann and Heydrich functioned more or less automatically; it was thus symptomatic that Eichmann consciously circumvented Himmler’s order, at the end of 1944, to stop the Final Solution. There was no need for external ideological impulses to keep the process of extermination going.”
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But the machinery of death did not exist in an ideological
void. Even a model bureaucrat like Eichmann—though no fanatical anti-Semite—displayed extraordinary zeal in hunting down Jews. His constant complaints about obstacles in the fulfillment of death-camp quotas, his impatience with the existence of loopholes such as the free zone in Vichy France, or the uncooperativeness of the Italians and other German allies in expediting the rounding up of Jews were not merely driven by a petty bureaucrat’s desire to prove his efficiency. Eichmann was a convinced Nazi who rejoiced in the slaughter of Jews. The perpetrators—bureaucrats like Eichmann, modernizing technocrats, planners, and professional people—fitted themselves effortlessly into the prevailing genocidal ethos because they believed in what they were doing.
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Their motives were not always identical to those of the top Nazi decision makers, but there is every reason to think that they internalized the institutionalized anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime. It is most unlikely that they would have implemented mass murder against any arbitrarily designated enemy group.

The so-called functionalist school of historians has long argued that the “Final Solution” was not the product of any grand design but that the Nazi regime was administered by “a maze of competing power groups and rival bureaucracies” seeking the favor of a distant Führer.
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In their view, such lack of coordination and fragmentation of decision making led to a “cumulative radicalization” of policies, each more arbitrary, violent, and radical in their implementation than its predecessors.
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The Nazis, it has been said, had no specific plan to “solve the Jewish question” in 1933 and simply drifted step by step down a very twisted road to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
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Even the annihilations, according to Martin Broszat, had a largely improvisatory character and did not derive from a specific Hitler order or from a clear “will to exterminate” but rather from a series of local Nazi initiatives aimed at solving local problems (food supply, logistical difficulties, and so on) on the eastern front. For Broszat, the Nazis had to find “a way out of a blind alley” into which they had maneuvered themselves.
Once the practice of liquidation was established, it gained predominance and eventually evolved in an ad hoc manner into a comprehensive program that was subsequently approved by Hitler.
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This seems plausible enough until one recalls that throughout the history of Nazi Germany, Hitler pursued a modus operandi of deliberate incitement against the Jews while leaving the execution of the policy to subordinates.

Moreover, some functionalist theories tend (perhaps unintentionally) to normalize Nazism by suggesting that its leaders stumbled into the most extreme criminal behavior. They unconvincingly turn Hitler himself into a weak, indecisive, procrastinating leader whose visionary political perspectives on the “Jewish question” had only a minor impact on the practical policy of genocide.
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The functionalists also downplay the ancient hatred of Jews, its transformation into “scientific” racism, the status, testimony, and suffering of the Jews themselves as a social and national group, the role of bystanders (individuals as well as states), not to mention the ideological motivations and mentality of the perpetrators.

More recent German scholarship has sought to go beyond the earlier abstract debates on “modernity” and the clash between intentionalists (who believe in the centrality of Hitler and a coordinated decision to murder the Jews of Europe) and skeptical functionalists. Ulrich Herbert, for example, while adopting the theory of “cumulative radicalization” and stressing the role of bureaucracy, does not assume that local decisions—whether in Serbia, Lithuania, or Byelorussia—were made outside a context of deeply ingrained anti-Semitism. He believes that the Holocaust was not simply the result of directives from Berlin but of an interaction between the center and an increasingly radicalized periphery.
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The empirical studies of Dieter Pohl and Thomas Sandkühler, discussing the General Government and Galicia, highlight the importance of the periphery and the pivotal role of the civil administration in pushing vigorously for a radical anti-Jewish
policy.
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This kind of research into the complex local political process in the German-occupied territories is certainly welcome; unfortunately, some of it tends to blur the decisive role of Hitler, Himmler, and others in Berlin in initiating, centralizing, and unifying the multitude of regional actions that were all part of a much larger and comprehensive “Final Solution.” There are other weaknesses in this new trend in scholarship: the voice of the Jewish victims is rarely heard, and there is a tendency to overstate the symmetry between the Holocaust and the “ethnic cleansing” of other groups (especially Slavs) in eastern Europe. Only the Gypsies, as we have shown, offer a serious point of comparison, though their role in Nazi ideology was minimal.

Herbert, like Goldhagen before him, emphasizes both the numbers of the perpetrators involved (more than was previously assumed) and the fact that the murders were frequently carried out in a traditional, even “archaic” way.
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Much of the Nazi genocide, he reminds us, is not adequately described by the notion of factory-style killing, a so-called clean death by gassing, or the quasi-anonymous process of the German bureaucracy. The massacres of Jews in Lithuania, Poland, and the Balkans as well as the killings by Wehrmacht soldiers and the Einsatzgruppen on the eastern front support this point.
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The “hot-blooded” slaughters and “Jew hunts” carried out by Order Police battalions in occupied Poland (described by Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen) present us with a distinctly unmodern side of the Holocaust, one that aligns it more closely with other twentieth-century genocides. No high technology was required for the 40 percent of Holocaust victims who died through malnutrition, famine, and disease in the ghettos, through being worked to death in labor camps, through deportations late in the war that turned into horrific death marches, or through the gruesome executions in pits, trenches, and ravines, using machine guns, rifles, and revolvers. There was nothing particularly modern
or civilized about such genocidal acts, any more than there is about those since 1945 in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and other “backward” parts of the world. No spectacular industrial measures were needed for this purpose. Yet the moral lesson of the concentration and death camps in particular suggests that what Europe witnessed in the middle of the twentieth century was nonetheless something unprecedented: not so much in the statistics of the dead but in the devilish scale of the sufferings inflicted on the victims and the depravity of their tormentors.
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