Hitler and the Holocaust (33 page)

Primo Levi has emphasized how the infernal camp system sought to maximize the degradation of its victims by making them complicit in it. Some individuals, like the Kapos of the labor squads, were indeed seduced by material advantages or fatally intoxicated by the power given to them by their tormentors.
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As prisoners who were themselves appointed by the SS to ensure absolute control over other inmates, the Kapos tyrannized them with a cruel sadism that matched that of their German masters. Perhaps the most demonic of all Nazi crimes was, however, the delegation by the SS of the filthiest part of their work to the victims themselves: the running of the crematoriums, the extracting of corpses from the gas chambers, and the pulling of gold teeth from the jaws of the victims were tasks assigned to Jews.
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By making Jewish Sonderkommandos responsible for the ovens, the Nazis could demonstrate that, in Levi’s words, “the sub-race, the sub-men bow to any and all humiliation, even to destroying themselves.”
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The insidious message of the SS was that “if we so wish and we do so much, we can destroy not only your bodies but also your souls, just as we have destroyed ours.”
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Twelve “special squads” succeeded one another at Auschwitz-Birkenau, operating for a few months before they were liquidated. In October 1944, the last squad rebelled against the SS, blew up one of the crematoriums and was wiped out in the only revolt that ever occurred at Auschwitz-Birkenau. To ask why they did not rise up sooner would be to grossly underestimate the hellish sequence of segregation,
humiliation, forced migration, total physical exhaustion, and rupture with any kind of normality that had accompanied their arrival in the camps and continued with even greater ferocity thereafter. Millions of young, robust, well-trained Soviet military prisoners behaved no differently when they fell into German hands, and the few non-Jews among the “special squads” behaved exactly like the Jews. The camps were designed to create a debilitating sense of impotence in their victims, to literally reduce them to
Untermenschen
and thereby remake them in the image of Nazi propaganda. The enemy must not only die, but he or she must die in torment. This “useless” cruelty was not of course unique to the Third Reich, but it certainly was a fundamental feature of Hitlerism, which combined extreme irrationality and sadism with a modern, pseudoscientific streak of technical perfectionism.

The question frequently arises as to how far the National Socialist system, the death camps, and the Holocaust were a uniquely
German
genocide? Daniel Goldhagen has no doubts that the mass killings of Jews were not simply a German enterprise but in its essence a German national project. The perpetrators, in his view, are not accurately described as “ordinary men” (the title of Browning’s parallel study of the police battalions) or simply as Nazis. They were ordinary Germans. And all of German society was permeated by anti-Jewish policy, with extermination at its very center. “Hundreds of thousands of Germans contributed to the genocide and the still larger system of subjugation that was the vast concentration system.”
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I agree with Goldhagen’s general assertion that German anti-Semitic beliefs about Jews “were the central causal agent of the Holocaust” but not with his simplistic explanations of how this came about nor with the exclusive importance he has attached to this factor. I partly agree with his analysis of the camps but question whether all of the perpetrator behavior that Goldhagen brands as distinctively “German” was in fact so unique.

The same combination of murderous anti-Semitism, extreme
anti-Communism, brutality, and sadism can be found in the behavior of the Lithuanian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Romanian, and Croat executioners. Polish peasants at Jedwabne in July 1941 also exhibited similar traits when burning their Jewish neighbors alive or hacking them to death. The anti-Jewish dynamic was equally, if not even more, present in the Austrians who, though “German” by language and culture, originated from a very different history, society, and civilization. It was not so much an all-pervasive “eliminationist anti-Semitism” that was peculiar to Germany; rather, it was the integration of anti-Semitism into the radical chiliasm of Nazism, which was able to seize power and mobilize all the material and propaganda resources of a highly organized state toward its imperialist and genocidal objectives. To suggest that virtually all Germans identified with this totalitarian state and its murderous anti-Semitic goals is surely a gross oversimplification since they cannot be regarded as a single, undifferentiated entity.

Moreover, the “camp world,” although the largest and most significant institutional creation in Nazi Germany, did have a parallel in the Soviet Union that cannot be ignored. True, there was no precise equivalent of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the industrialized killing process in the Soviet gulag; there were proportionately fewer fatalities, and medical care was less inadequate. Arguably, too, Soviet guards may have been more compassionate than their German counterparts. But for a survivor like Margerete Buber-Neumann who experienced both the German and Russian camps, the experiences seemed largely identical: “I ask myself deep down, which is really worse, the lice-infested corncob-walled cabins in Birma [in Kazakhstan] or the nightmare-order of Ravensbrück.”
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At the 1950 trial of David Rousset, himself an eloquent survivor of the camps, she posed a similar awkward question: “It is hard to decide which is the least humane—to gas people in five minutes or to strangle them slowly, over the course of three months, by hunger.”
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The Germans were well aware that the Russians had annihilated millions of people through forced labor before they even embarked on their own program of concentration camps, and the SS certainly studied this model closely. While Ernst Nolte’s notion that the death camps were a Nazi copy of the gulag “original” is quite false, it is important to realize that Hitler admired Stalin and that both dictators and regimes were in a macabre symbiotic relationship.
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Nevertheless, there were key differences between the Soviet and Nazi systems. Stalin did not set out to deliberately murder the population of the gulags precisely because he needed a vast slave empire in order to finance the
modernization
of Russia. In other words, unlike the Nazi experiment, there were real economic and utilitarian motives behind the Stalinist projects, however costly and utterly inhuman they may have been.
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The Soviet camps were undoubtedly used to eliminate political enemies (including many Communists), and millions of innocent people died there; but they were oriented to the production of wealth and the industrialization of a backward country: the mining of gold, the felling of timber for export, and the extraction of minerals were indeed an integral part of the gulags.

Prisoners were not sent to the Soviet labor camps to be transformed into
Untermenschen
and then into corpses, as the SS did with the Jews. Some visits and correspondence with the outside world (while rare) was permitted to inmates, who were not totally cut off from the past, their historic communities, and their personal identities. Such elements were expressly denied to Jews in the Nazi camps, who when they prayed, remembered, and learned did so in defiance of their tormentors. Moreover, as Steven Katz has observed, the Nazis did not even engage in the pretense of ideological “reeducation” that (however cynically) was part of the Stalinist gulag.
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There was simply no point in reeducating those who were a priori vermin or “lice.”

Similarly, sexual perversity, salaciousness, and exploitation
played a very different role in the Soviet and Nazi camp systems. Women in the gulag could still hope to trade sexual favors for life and survival. Under Nazi rule, such a possibility rarely, if ever, existed, since sexual exchanges between Germans and Jews (or even Poles) constituted “racial crimes.” As Katz bluntly puts it: “The SS would sexually assault Jewish women and then murder them. They were obligated to murder them.”
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More revealing still was the attitude to mothers and children, who even under the Soviet slave-labor system enjoyed some rights. Despite the terrible material conditions, children could come into the world in the gulag, and mothers were not obliged to work during the last month of pregnancy or the first month after their birth. In Auschwitz and other camps, no Jewish child was allowed to live. As one survivor, Olga Lengyel, recalled, “the Germans succeeded in making murderers of even us. To this day the picture of those murdered babies haunts me. Our own children had perished in the gas chambers and were cremated in the Birkenau ovens, and we dispatched the lives of others before their first voices had left their tiny lungs.”
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Katz makes the very important point that in contrast to the Soviet gulag and all known genocides, past and present, only under the Nazi Reich were (Jewish) mothers and children (one million of them)
“intentionally, systematically, unrelentingly, and without exception
murdered.”
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This was an absolute
novum
of the Holocaust, which marks it off from other crimes in history and underlines Améry’s point that the Reich was a kingdom of night in which the “antiman” reigned supreme. Despite the horrors of the Stalinist gulags, the “class enemies” of the socialist order were never reduced to subhuman vermin outside the realm of human and moral obligation.

Perhaps the closest of all analogies to the Nazi genocide in the twentieth century was the great massacre of the Armenian people by the Turks during the First World War; it destroyed about 40 percent of this ancient national community.
Under the cover of war, able-bodied male Armenians were separated from their families and murdered. The remaining women and children, the old, and the feeble were driven into the Syrian desert on forced marches, deprived of food and water. Many were tortured, raped, and killed both by Turks and by marauding Kurds on the way. This bestial treatment was referred to by the American ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, as “the destruction of the Armenian race.”

The genocidal actions of the Turkish state in “solving the Armenian question” led to the deaths of between five hundred thousand and one million Armenians—the main body of its population in Asia Minor and the fountainhead of its culture.
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The lack of Zyklon B, gas chambers, and crematoriums did not hinder the killers from carrying out this harrowing mass murder. The Turks did have at their disposal railways, the telegraph, bureaucratic machinery, and modern propaganda techniques, but the killing itself was still carried out by primitive methods.

The Turkish government’s objective was to destroy the Christian Armenian population inside Turkey, which was deemed to be actively seeking full independence or autonomy. The Armenians found themselves stereotyped as an “alien nationality,” especially after the Young Turk rulers adopted a xenophobic nationalism intended to underpin their dreams of a new Islamic empire stretching from Anatolia to western China. Moreover, the Armenians were particularly vulnerable because of their territorial concentration in eastern Anatolia, which the new rulers saw as the heartland of the future pan-Turkic state.
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Once Turkey had aligned itself with imperial Germany against the czarist Russian Empire during the First World War, the Armenians were quickly branded as Russian spies and secessionists—an internal enemy to be deported, starved, and pitilessly destroyed.
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Armenians had been traditionally despised by Turkish Muslims as infidels, and they had in the 1890s endured massacres (involving about two hundred thousand
victims) which had led them to stockpile weapons in anticipation of a further onslaught. This enabled the Turkish state to rationalize its genocide as a preventive strike against a rebellion by those who were accused (like the Jews in Germany) of “stabbing Turkey in the back” in wartime. Unlike in the Holocaust, however, the killing operations against Armenians were never carried out by specialized perpetrator groups. On the contrary, large segments of the provincial population eagerly participated in regional and local massacres, as well as drowning operations along the Black Sea.
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It is certainly legitimate to see the Armenian genocide as prefiguring the Holocaust, in that the decision to slaughter the Armenians was implacably cruel, deliberate, firm, and irrevocable. But there are also many dissimilarities between the two events. The brutish “war against the Armenians” was primarily a geopolitical rather than an ideological crusade. Furthermore, the Armenians were never designated as a “racial” enemy, and the war against them remained strictly territorial, without any world-historical, metaphysical, or ontological implications. Armenians who converted to Islam were spared; the majority of Armenians in Istanbul (numbering up to two hundred thousand) did survive, and there was no international crusade to seek out and annihilate Armenians beyond the borders of Turkey. For the Turks, the Armenians were never perceived as a Satanic force that threatened civilization as a whole, and their murder was not planned as an end in itself. It in no way detracts from the horror and scope of the slaughter to point out that it resulted from motivations significantly different from those that influenced the Nazis.
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The comparison of genocides is always a difficult exercise, not rendered any easier by the pretentious or mystical claims to “uniqueness” sometimes made for the Holocaust or by the hostile and often irrational responses to such arguments. In focusing on its historical specificity and singularity in this book, there is no implication at all that other massacres or genocides are in any way less interesting, important, or deserving
of attention than the Holocaust. But it is equally clear that no other event of the modern era has so fundamentally challenged the foundations of European civilization—its religious values, legal structures, political ideals, trust in science, and commitment to humanity. The question must therefore be asked: Why has the Holocaust more than other genocides so deeply affected modern consciousness? Why has precisely this tragedy become
the
axial event, sparking a huge and ever-expanding diet of feature films, plays, memoirs, oral histories, TV documentaries, scholarly research, and fiction? I believe that the answer does not lie primarily in various political agendas, in the sensationalist appetite for horror stories, or in the rapacity of a so-called Holocaust industry. Nor can it be adequately explained by the fact that we live in a popular culture where, regrettably, victimhood is a source of empowerment. The avalanche of unadulterated kitsch will doubtless continue to plague us, along with commercial exploitation and political correctness. But the reason for the continuing power of the Holocaust is surely linked to the “big question”: why did it happen?