The Holocaust

The Third Reich and the Jews

David Engel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317861379
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Fully revised and updated, this second edition includes:

· A much expanded selection of original documents, many never before anthologised in English

· Added treatment of the role of non-Germans in the Holocaust and the geographical variations in Jewish response

· Additional consideration of the much-debated nexus between the Holocaust and modernity

· A new section on how 'the Holocaust' developed as a distinct historical topic

· Useful and informative Chronology, Who's Who and Glossary

David Engel's book is a taut, compact narration that appeals to the intellect as much, if not more, than to the emotions. It is sure to be welcomed by students in departments of History, Politics and European Studies as well as by anyone trying to get to grips with this complex and far-reaching subject for the first time.

Part 1

ANALYSIS

1

Studying the Holocaust

This book is about an encounter between two sets of human beings: on one hand the people who acted on behalf of the German state, its agencies, or its almost 66 million citizens between 30 January 1933 and 8 May 1945; on the other the almost 9 million Jews who lived in Germany, in twenty-one other European countries (Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Hung ary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, the USSR, and Yugoslavia), and in the French and Italian colonial territories (Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia) that were either ruled directly or occupied by Germany or that made a formal alliance with it at any time during that interval. That encounter resulted in the death of about two-thirds of the latter group, in the large majority of cases as a direct result of actions taken by the former.

The 5.8 million Jews who died at German or German-allied hands, mostly during 1941–45, were almost all unarmed civilians who had committed no organized act of aggression against the German state or society and who posed no real threat to their well-being – at least in terms that made sense to reasonable people in the Western world. Yet the leaders of Germany actively sought their deaths. In fact, most of them came to regard the killing of Jews as one of their most important tasks, and from 1941 on they pursued that aim with ruthless vigour. In other words, the story of the encounter between the Third Reich (as the German state was known during almost all of the period in question) and the Jews ultimately became one of premeditated mass murder.

How the government of a modern state could come to such a conclusion – how it could undertake a program of systematic mass murder in the belief that doing so was one of the fundamental reasons for its existence – is exceedingly difficult for reasonable people to grasp. Yet thinking about the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews as an act of murder actually suggests a way of working toward understanding. After all, there are certain questions that are routinely asked about any murder case that can be put to the case at hand as well. These are the questions of motive, means, and opportunity. What led the leaders of the Third Reich to believe that their Jewish victims needed to die? Once they reached that conclusion, how were those leaders able to act upon it with the precise degree of success they eventually achieved? How did they mobilize others to take part in the killing? How were people working on their behalf able to manoeuvre their victims into a position where it was possible to take their lives? Was there anything that some other agent could have done to stop the mass murder campaign or significantly to reduce the number of people who lost their lives because of it?

For many decades scholars have been working to find answers to those questions. They have learned much, but they are still far from knowing everything they would like to know. Moreover, not all of them agree about what the things they know really mean. After all, studying history isn’t exclusively about discovering facts; it is also about figuring out how the facts connect with one another and how they help explain what historians (and, one hopes, others) want to understand. As it turns out, historians often disagree about these things, and their opinions about them sometimes change as new facts are brought to light.

This book will help readers learn the basic facts of the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews – the who/what/when/where/how of the murder case. But it will also show them how different scholars have interpreted those facts and debated about how best to make sense of them. As readers will discover, many key questions about the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews are far from settled. The book will highlight some of those problems, explain why they have yet to be resolved, and point readers towards ways of joining the conversation.

HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE

One of the most basic problems of interpretation stems from the fact that the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews is often assigned a special name – the Holocaust.

That was not always the case. In fact, almost twenty years passed after the Third Reich fell and the Second World War ended before the encounter acquired its own particular label. Until that time the word ‘holocaust’ had been used as a catch-all term for almost any large-scale catastrophe. The great earthquake and fire that devastated San Francisco in 1906, the destruction caused by Japanese air raids in China in 1938, the anticipated outcome of global thermonuclear war – all of these were labelled ‘holocausts’ in the popular press throughout the world before the word (capitalized and preceded by the definite article) came widely to signify what befell Jews at the hands of the Third Reich and its allies.

Reserving the term ‘the Holocaust’ for the murder of two-thirds of European Jewry by the Third Reich suggests that that case of murder constituted a holocaust par excellence. Yet during the first two decades or so following the Second World War, most people did not understand it that way. The regime that ruled the Third Reich, governed by the National Socialist German Workers Party (the Nazis), was notorious for its brutality, and Jews were generally viewed as only one of many sets of victims. Those victims included political and religious dissidents (mostly socialists, communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and political and religious leaders who spoke out against the Reich), vagrants, chronically unemployed persons, habitual criminals, male homosexuals from Germany and Austria, slave labourers, and members of groups targeted for wholesale killing, including the Sinti and Roma (commonly called Gypsies), Soviet prisoners of war, the mentally ill, and the physically disabled. Many members of these groups had been held in a highly-ramified network of concentration, labour, penal, and transit camps, where conditions were vicious and mortality dreadfully high. When British and American armed forces entered those camps in April–May 1945 and gained their first lasting impressions of Nazi atrocities, they found a population of perhaps 700,000 inmates, only about 100,000 of whom were Jews. As a result, it was difficult for them (as well as for the journalists who followed them and reported the horrors they saw) to see anything unusual in the experience of the Jews they met. On the contrary, it was generally believed that Jews had been placed in the camp system for the same reasons as all other prisoners – because (in the words of a report that appeared in the American press from late April 1945) they ‘refused to accept the political philosophy of the Nazi party’ (quoted in Lipstadt, 1986: 255).

It took many years of historical research to demonstrate that that description overlooked what most observers today regard as a vital feature of the Jews’ experience – that Jews (along with the Sinti and Roma and the disabled) became victims for reasons having nothing at all to do with what they believed or how they behaved. Historians now realize that Jews could have been the most ardent exponents of Nazi ideology, the most fervent advocates for the Third Reich in the disputes that led to the Second World War, yet their fate would have been the same. They have learned that at a certain point in its history the Nazi regime began actively to seek the death of each and every man, woman, and child within reach whom they claimed belonged to the Jewish group. And they have come to understand that the camps in Germany that so shocked their liberators in 1945 (like Dachau, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen) were not the primary sites where the murder of European Jewry took place. On the contrary, millions of Jews were shot to death close to home or asphyxiated upon arrival in specially designed killing centres; most Jewish victims of the Third Reich never made it to a concentration camp.

Those discoveries about the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews made that encounter stand out in the minds of many from other instances of Nazi persecution and encouraged observers to assign it its own special name. Yet other observers have questioned just how unusually horrific those features of the Jews’ mass death at Nazi hands really were. After all, the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews was not the only instance of premeditated mass murder in human history. In fact, it was neither the largest nor proportionally the most extensive case. Estimates of the number of Soviet civilians who died as a result of their government’s deliberate actions against them between 1929 and 1950 vary widely, but all vastly exceed the number of Jews killed by the Third Reich. The losses sustained by the Sinti and Roma under the Third Reich may also have reached or even exceeded two-thirds of their pre-1933 population in many parts of Europe. Some historians have argued that perhaps 95 per cent of the indigenous population of North and South America prior to European settlement – anywhere between 50 and 100 million people – died between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries because of the determination of Europeans to annihilate them; others have disputed the reasons for this massive loss of life, but they have affirmed its extent.

Noting these facts, some scholars have insisted that thinking about the killing of Jews by the Third Reich in isolation from the many other instances of mass murder throughout the ages actually impedes understanding of a broader phenomenon, often called ‘genocide’. This term was invented in 1944 by legal scholar Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish refugee from German-occupied Poland who, while serving as an advisor to the US War Department, wrote a book entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe [Doc. 1]. Lemkin defined ‘genocide’ as ‘the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group’ (Lemkin, 1944: 79). Later he stated that although he originally coined the word to designate mass German killings of Jews, he eventually realized that not only Jews, but members ‘of all peoples, religions, and nationalities’, had been or could become victims of the same crime (Lemkin, 1952: 98); for ‘genocide does not necessarily mean … mass killings of all members of a nation … [but] the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups’ (Lemkin, 1944: 79). Echoing this view, some have contended that the expression ‘the Holocaust’ ought to refer not only to the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews but also to ‘the horrors that Poles, other Slavs, and Gypsies endured at the hands of the Nazis’ (Lukas, 1986: 220). Others have extended the term to encompass the Third Reich’s treatment of homosexuals, the mentally ill or infirm, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, speaking of eleven or twelve million victims of the Holocaust, half of whom were Jews. Still others have employed the word ‘holocaust’ also when referring to cases of mass murder not perpetrated by the Third Reich.

Against this position, some historians have pointed to certain features of the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews that, they claim, render it ‘unique’ among instances of mass murder. Most often, they hold that ‘only in the case of Jewry under the Third Reich’ did ‘a state set out, as a matter of intentional principle and actualized policy, to annihilate physically every man, woman, and child belonging to a specific people’ (Rosenbaum, 1996: 19–20). They often contrast this ‘total murder of every one of the members of a community’ with ‘a policy of selective murder designed to destroy … nations as such, but keep most of their members alive to become a Helot working force’, which is what they understand by the term ‘genocide’ (Bauer, 1978: 34–35). Their assertion that such a programme was implemented only once in history, against the Jews by the Third Reich, has been challenged, often angrily, by scholars who have discerned a similar drive toward total murder in the Third Reich’s treatment of the Sinti and Roma or of the Poles and other Slavic peoples, in the Turkish massacres of Armenians in 1915, or in European actions against the native peoples of the Americas. Although today almost no serious historian denies that the leaders of the Third Reich did indeed hope to kill each and every Jew within their reach, the basic facts of these other cases are still being disputed, and the issue of ‘uniqueness’ remains one of intense debate.

The strong feelings that often accompany this debate indicate that it involves more than an academic controversy. Some evidently believe that if Jews can be said to have been victims of a type of persecution sui generis, they will have a greater claim to special consideration than other peoples who have also suffered horribly from crimes committed against them. In response to this suspicion, some proponents of the ‘uniqueness’ argument have stressed that they are ‘not … endorsing the injudicious claim that the Holocaust is more evil than alternative occurrences of … mass death’ (Katz, 1994: 31). But they continue to insist that the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews is best understood as a historical singularity and that the phrase ‘the Holocaust’ be reserved for that encounter alone.

WHO IS RIGHT?

Is there any way to resolve this debate? Not really. After all, historical events don’t come pre-packaged with ready-made labels: it is historians and other observers who identify, classify, and name events after they occur. Sometimes they agree about these matters; sometimes they disagree. But there is no single correct way to assign boundaries or designations to any particular past occurrence.

Moreover, all historical events are unique in the sense that they involve distinctive individuals at particular points in time. But by the same token it is also difficult to imagine a historical event that does not share at least some characteristics with other events. One can argue about whether the similarities between two sets of events are more significant than the differences between them; but doing so merely begs the question: significant for what purpose? And because different people are likely to have different ideas about what is significant or meaningful for them, no single, definitive answer to this question is possible.

In other words, in order to determine how we might want to interpret the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews, we need to think about why we might want to study it in the first place. At bottom, the purpose of any study in the humanities is to learn about human beings – how they think, feel, and behave, and why they do as they do. This aim surely constitutes a sensible reason for studying what befell European Jewry at Nazi hands. Hence it seems appropriate to ask first of all what things of importance we might learn about human beings in general (and thus about ourselves) by doing so.

One way to answer this question is to examine what people who have confronted that encounter have found to be most noteworthy about it. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has written that ‘the Holocaust was born and executed in our modern rational society, at the high stage of our civilization and at the peak of human cultural achievement, and for this reason it is a problem’ (Bauman, 1989: x). Indeed, the story of the Third Reich and the Jews has surprised many people because it runs counter to what they might intuitively have expected from a ‘modern rational society’ like that of twentieth-century Germany. As will become clear in the following pages, the leaders of the Third Reich looked at the world in a way that made no sense to the rest of Western civilization: in particular, they believed that Jews were (literally) not human, that they were actually a pathogen that threatened (again, literally) to destroy all humanity, and that therefore, by killing all Jews, the Third Reich was actually saving the entire human world from mortal danger. As far as the leaders of the Third Reich were concerned, killing Jews was one of the most important reasons for their state’s very being, and they devoted considerable resources – scientific, economic, and human – to carrying it out. Yet while the Third Reich was in existence, hardly anyone outside of Germany understood that this was so: such thinking, it was believed, may have been possible in earlier times or in other parts of the world still mired in irrational superstition, but not in modern, rational Europe. Only after extensive study did this fundamental feature of the Third Reich become clear to scholars, who had to overcome their most basic assumptions about the effects of modernity upon human beings in order to do so. In other words, studying the Third Reich and the Jews stretches our self-understanding as human beings; it forces us to rethink fundamentally what it means to be human, especially in the modern world.

Perhaps it will eventually be shown and widely agreed that the leaders of the Third Reich (or of another modern state) thought similarly about other peoples. If so, then studying the histories of those peoples’ victimization would no doubt serve a similar purpose, and those histories would invite the same attention as that presently given the history of Europe’s Jews during the Second World War. Nevertheless, the case of the Third Reich and the Jews offers a wealth of documentation that has been compiled and analysed for over half a century; it is thus at present more easily accessible to most people than other similar cases that might exist. In this light, the question of whether the term ‘the Holocaust’ ought to be restricted to the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews or extended to encompass other instances of deliberate mass murder becomes insignificant: the phrase can be used however one wishes, but the manner in which it is used has little bearing upon what the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews stands to teach us about the meaning of modern human existence.

In what follows, ‘the Holocaust’ will refer, as a convenient shorthand, solely to the systematic mass murder of European Jews by the Third Reich, without prejudging the issue of possible equivalents.

STUDYING THE HOLOCAUST HISTORICALLY

Because it was rooted in a view of the world that seemed so alien to the one that prevailed in the modern West, the Holocaust has often been said to be incomprehensible. The novelist Yehiel De-Nur, a camp survivor who wrote under the pseudonym Ka-Tzetnik, has called Auschwitz (the largest of the Nazi killing centres) ‘another planet’, where people ‘breathed according to different laws of nature’ (State of Israel, 1993, vol. 3: 1237). This perception has led many people to claim that the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews cannot be discussed in the same way that it is possible to describe and analyse other sets of historical events. Such people have argued that the Holocaust can be apprehended at best only partially, through the individual memories of survivors or through artistic representations. In works of these types greater emphasis is often placed upon evoking strong emotions t...