Hitler and the Holocaust (34 page)

The Holocaust was driven by a millenarian, apocalyptic ideology of annihilation that overthrew all the enlightened and pragmatic assumptions of liberal modernity. This does not in itself make it totally different from all other genocides, but it does highlight the Holocaust as an extreme case. The centrality of anti-Semitism and of the Jews to this cataclysmic event was no accident, and this essential fact helps to explain why it resonates so strongly. For the Holocaust cannot ultimately be divorced from the dominant religious tradition of Western civilization. In the Christian imagination of the West, the Jews are both the “chosen people” and a (reprobate) “witness” to the Christian truth. Their fate therefore has a special religious significance as an expression of God’s role in the drama of history and as an emblematic part of the eternal struggle between salvation and damnation. Richard Rubinstein has aptly characterized the Holocaust as a “modern
version of a Christian holy war carried out by a neopagan National Socialist state hostile to Christianity,” though I do not altogether share his belief that “the Nazis did the dirty work for institutions that were destined to outlast them.”
⁸¹
Hyam Maccoby put it equally well but somewhat differently when he suggested that the Nazis “expressed in racialist terms the concept of the final overcoming of evil that formed the essence of Christian millenarism. The choice of the Jews as a target arose directly out of centuries of Christian teaching which had singled out the Jews as a demonic people dedicated to evil.”
⁸²

Hitler, masquerading as a Germanic warrior “Christ” (the chosen redeemer of a secular salvationist religion) brought this millenarian tradition to a gruesome end in the death camps—the “sacred altars” of the new political religion called National Socialism. In the camps, the images and chronicles of hell to be found in European art and thought were realized in the most macabre fashion. The cataclysmic black passion of the Death-Head SS units announced the extinction of a God of love, compassion, and mercy. The mass murder of the Jews was in that respect a totalitarian-nihilist assault on the ethics of Christianity, as well as the negation of the abstract monotheism that Judaism had bequeathed to the West. In this transvaluation, “the negation of Judaism had to be transformed into the annihilation of the Jews, this time not spiritually but rather physically, not symbolically but in substance.”
⁸³
It is at this metahistorical level—and not in the number of victims or even in its war on secular rationalist modernity, liberalism, and “Judeo-Bolshevism”—that the singularity of the Holocaust asserts itself most sharply. Hitler always regarded the ethics of monotheism as the curse of Western civilization, especially the fifth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” The Nazi ideology whose realization climaxed with Auschwitz-Birkenau had to target the Jews as its victims of choice precisely because it had selected death over life and human sacrifice as the road to redemption.

N
OTES

1. A
NTI
-S
EMITISM AND THE
J
EWS

1.
On the Armenian genocide, see Vahakn N. Dadrian, “The Convergent Aspects of the Armenian and Jewish Cases of Genocide,”
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
3.2 (1996): 151–69, and Robert F. Melson,
Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust
(Chicago, 1992), 145–47, for estimated casualties and pp. 247–57 on similarities and differences. For the wider issues and problems of methodology and comparison, see Leo Kuper,
Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century
(New Haven, 1981); R. J. Rummel,
Death by Government, Genocide, and Mass Murder (New
Brunswick, 1994); Yehuda Bauer, “Holocaust and Genocide: Some Comparisons,” in Peter Hayes, ed.,
Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World
(Evanston, 1991), 34–46; and Alan S. Rosenbaum, ed.,
Is the Holocaust Unique?
(Boulder, 1996), 101–99.

2.
Robert Conquest,
The Great Terror: A Reassessment
(New York, 1990); Robert Conquest,
The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine
(New York, 1986), 217–330. For the differences, see Steven T. Katz, “Auschwitz and the Gulag: A Study in ‘Dissimilarity,’ ” in Alan Berger, ed.,
Proceedings of the Holocaust Scholars Conference
(Lewiston, Me., 1992), 71–89, and
his essay “Mass Death under Communist Rule and the Limits of ‘Otherness,’ ” in Robert S. Wistrich, ed.,
Demonizing the Other: Antisemitism, Racism, and Xenophobia
(Amsterdam, 1999), 267–93. Stephane Courtois et al., eds.,
The Black Book of Communism
(New York, 1997), highlights the scale of mass killing under Communist regimes in the twentieth century.

3.
Götz Aly,
“Final Solution”: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews
(London, 1999); Michael Burleigh,
The Third Reich: A New History
(London, 2000), 486–573. See also Richard C. Lukas,
The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation, 1939–1944
(Lexington, Ky., 1986), 1–39.

4.
Angus Fraser,
The Gypsies
(Cambridge, 1996); Donald Kenrick and Gratton Puxon,
The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies
(New York, 1972), 76–186; Ian Hancock,
The Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution
(Ann Arbor, 1988). A comprehensive comparative perspective can be found in Wolfgang Wippermann,
“Wie die Zigeuner”: Antisemitismus und Antiziganismus in Vergleich
(Berlin, 1997).

5.
Ian Hancock, “Gypsy History in Germany and the Neighbouring Lands: A Chronology to the Holocaust and Beyond,”
Nationalities Papers
19.3 (winter 1991); 395–412; Henry R. Hutten-bach, “The Romani Porajmos: The Nazi Genocide of Europe’s Gypsies,” ibid., 373ff.; Sybil Milton, “Gypsies and the Holocaust”,
The History Teacher
24.4 (August 1991): 1–13.

6.
Yehuda Bauer, “Gypsies,” in
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust
(New York, 1990), 2:634–38, Fraser,
Gypsies
, 260; Kenrick and Puxon,
Destiny
, 140ff

7.
Michael Zimmermann,
Rassenntopie und Genozid: Die nationalsozialistische “Lösung der Zigeunerfrage”
(Hamburg, 1996), 297ff, and
Verfolgt, vertrieben, vernichtet. Die nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik gegen Sinti und Roma
(Rulda, 1989), 61–83.

8.
Klaus Fischer,
The History of an Obsession: German Judeophobia and the Holocaust
(London, 1998), 81–153.

9.
Jakob Wassermann,
Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude
(Berlin, 1921); Fischer,
History
, 174–75.

10.
Yirmiyahu Yovel,
Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews
(Cambridge, 1998), 127–29.

11.
See Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich, eds.,
Nietzsche: Godfather of Fascism?
’ (Princeton, 2001), introduction.

12.
Good examples of this annexation are Alfred Bäumler,
Nietzsche als Philosoph und Politiker
(Leipzig, 1931), and Alfred Rosenberg,
Friedrich Nietzsche
(Munich, 1944).

13.
For an imaginative and controversial elaboration, see George Steiner’s novel,
The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H.
(London, 1981), 120, and his essay, “The Long Life of Metaphor: An Approach to ‘the Shoah,’ ”
Encounter
(February 1987): 55–61, as well as Ron Rosenbaum,
Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil
(New York, 1998), 307–18.

14.
Ernst Piper, “Alfred Rosenberg—der Prophet des Seelenkrieges,” in Michael Ley and Julius H. Schoeps, eds.,
Der Nationalsozialismus als politische Religion
(Frankfurt, 1997), 107–25.

15.
Hermann Rauschning,
The Voice of Destruction
(New York, 1940), 235–42.

16.
Jacob Katz,
Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of the Emancipation of the Jews
(New York, 1978), 191–219.

17.
James Parkes,
The Conflict of the Church and Synagogue
(Cleveland, 1961), 151–270; Rosemary Ruether,
Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of AntiSemitism
(New York, 1971); Alan Davies, ed.,
Antisemitism and the Foundations of Christianity
(New York, 1979); Edward H. Flannery
The Anguish of the Jews
(New York, 1985), 47–144; and most recently James Carroll,
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews
(Boston, 2001), 67–342. All of the above are Christian scholars.

18.
Ruether,
Faith
, 113; Carroll,
Constantine’s Sword
, 92–93. See also Hyam Maccoby
The Sacred Executioner: Human Sacrifice and the Legacy of Guilt
(London, 1982), 146.

19.
Maccoby,
Sacred Executioner
, 121–33.

20.
Joshua Trachtenberg,
The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism
(New Haven, 1943), 11–56; Robert S. Wistrich,
Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred
(New York, 1992), 13–42.

21.
Ibid.

22.
Trachtenberg,
Devil
, 124–39; Gavin Langmuir, “Historiographic Crucifixion,” in
Les Juifs au regard de l’histoire: mélanges en l’honneur de Bernhard Blumenkranz
(Paris, 1985), 109–27; Rainer Erb, ed.,
Die Legende vom Ritualmord: Zur Geschichte der Blutbeschuldigung gegen Juden
(Berlin, 1993).

23.
See Wistrich,
Demonizing the Other
, 1–12.

24.
Heiko A. Oberman,
The Roots of Antisemitism in the Age of Renaissance and Reformation
(Philadelphia, 1984), 117.

25.
Martin Luther, “Von den Juden und ihren Lügen,”
Luthers Reformations-Schriften
20 (1890), 1861–2026.

26.
Henri Zukier, “The Transformation of Hatred: Antisemitism as a Struggle for Group Identity,” in Wistrich,
Demonizing the Other
, 118–30.

27.
Y-M. Yerushalmi, “L’Antisemitisme racial est-il apparu au XX
^e
siècle? De la ‘limpieza de sangre’ espagnole au nazisme: continuités et ruptures,”
Esprit
(March–April 1993), 5–35.

28.
Ibid. See also Henry Kamen,
Inquisition and Society in Spain in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
(Bloomington, 1985), 6–43, 62–133; Ben-Zion Netanyahu,
The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain
(New York, 1995), 207–512, 925–1094.

29.
B. D. Weinryb,
The Jews of Poland
(Philadelphia, 1973), 185–95; Jaroslaw Pelenski, “The Cossack Insurrections in Jewish-Ukrainian Relations,” in Peter Potichnyj and Howard Aster, eds.,
Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective
(Edmonton, 1988).

30.
Jay R. Berkowitz,
The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-century France
(Detroit, 1989), 71.

31.
Pierre Sorlin,
“La Croix” et les Juifs (1880–1889
) (Paris, 1967); Stephen Wilson,
Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair
(East Brunswick, N.J., 1982), 456–584; Pierre Birnbaum,
“La France aux Français”: Histoire des haines nationalistes
(Paris, 1993), 29–82, 102–16, 187–220.

32.
Richard I. Cohen, “Recurrent Images in French Antisemitism in the Third Republic,” in Wistrich,
Demonizing the Other
, 183–95; Zeev Sternhell,
La Droite révolutionnaire, 1885–1914
(Paris, 1978), 177–244; Pierre Birnbaum, “
La République Juive” de Léon Blum à Pierre Mendes-France
(Paris, 1988), and
The Jews of the Republic
(Stanford, 1996), 136–58, 301–17.

33.
Paul W. Massing,
Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Antisemitism in Imperial Germany
(New York, 1949); Uriel Tal,
Yahadut ve-Natzrut be-Raykh ha-Sheni
[Judaism and Christianity in the Second Reich] (Jerusalem, 1975), 185–234; F. Stern,
The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study of the Rise of German Ideology
(Berkeley, 1961), 267–98; Robert S. Wistrich,
Socialism and the
Jews: The Dilemmas of Assimilation in Germany and Austria-Hungary
(London, 1982).

34.
W. Boehlich, ed.,
Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit
(Frankfurt, 1965), 5–51, 77–90, 222–35; P. G. J. Pulzer,
The Rise of Political Antisemitism in Germany and Austria
(Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 71–120; Werner Jochmann,
Gesellschaftskrise und Judenfeindschaft in Deutschland, 1870–1945
(Hamburg, 1988), 30–98.

35.
George L. Mosse,
The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich
(New York, 1971), 280–317. Jochmann,
Gesellschaftskrise
, 99–170; Shulamit Volkov, “The Written Matter and the Spoken Word: On the Gap Between pre-1914 and Nazi antiSemitism,” in F. Furet, ed.,
Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews
(New York, 1989), 33–53; Daniel Goldhagen,
Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
(New York, 1996), 49–128; and Robert S. Wistrich, “Helping Hitler,”
Commentary
(July 1996), 27–31, for a critique.