The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory

Essays in the History of Ideas

D. Stone

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137029539
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Seconde Guerre mondiale

From interpretations of the Holocaust to fascist thought and anti-fascists' responses, this book tackles topics which are rarely studied in conjunction. This is a unique collection of essays on a wide variety of subjects, which contributes to understanding the roots and consequences of mid-twentieth-century Europe's great catastrophe.

Part I

Interpreting the Holocaust

1

Beyond the ‘Auschwitz Syndrome’: Holocaust Historiography after the Cold War

Lev Rozhetsky was a schoolboy when the Romanian army, the Wehrmacht’s largest ally, occupied south-western Ukraine. His memoir, recently published in English translation in the important collection The Unknown Black Book, is full of terrible stories: girls being tossed into latrines; Jews being tormented, tortured and shot; dogs growing ‘fat as rams’ on the bodies. The perpetrators in this region, usually led by a thin layer of German commanders, included Romanian gendarmerie and local Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans). What Rozhetsky also observed was the involvement of locals, not always in the murder process itself, but in the looting that accompanied it: ‘Having caught the scent of booty, all sorts of dirty scoundrels came running from every direction’, as he put it.¹ Another survivor, the student Sara Gleykh from Mariupol in Ukraine, wrote that ‘The neighbours waited like vultures for us to leave the apartment.’ The same neighbours then ‘quarrelled over things before my eyes, snatching things out of each others’ hands and dragging off pillows, pots and pans, quilts’.² As historian Joshua Rubenstein notes, in the Baltic region and western Ukraine especially, but generally throughout Eastern Europe, ‘it was as if the population understood, without much prodding by the Germans, that there were no limits on what they could do to their Jewish neighbours’.³ From Horyngrad-Krypa in Volhynia, where Ukrainians armed with axes, knives and boards spiked with nails murdered 30 local Jews, to Kaunas where the famous ‘death dealer’ of the city was photographed clubbing Jews to death with an iron bar, there is no shortage of evidence to back up Rubenstein’s claim.

Such narratives, apart from adding to the store of horror, from a historian’s point of view, also reveal that the dominant historiographical explanations of the Holocaust need to be rethought. Historical scholarship on the Holocaust has been, until fairly recently, under the sway of an analysis that sees the murder of the Jews as an ‘industrial genocide’, implemented on the basis of a eugenic worldview that regarded Jews as an inferior ‘race’, and which came into being in an ad hoc or reactive fashion, as changing circumstances in the war narrowed the Nazi regime’s future horizons, necessitating the urgent execution of a programme that might have looked very different had Germany won the war.

More recent, micro-historical studies are beginning to reshape this picture. For some time, historians have put an emphasis on Nazi ‘ideology’, especially antisemitism, as opposed to ‘structure’, with the aim of proving the importance of agency and showing that the Third Reich’s leaders believed what they said.⁴ But newer studies add nuance to this picture, which appears too neat. Replacing ‘structure’ with ‘intention’, even if one talks of a ‘modified intentionalism’,⁵ offers perhaps too coherent an image of the Third Reich and how it functioned.⁶ If the historiographical consensus now seems to suggest that centre-periphery relations were key to the decision-making process and that Jewish policy was made on the hoof, but always in the context of the perpetratrors’ broadly shared antisemitic consensus, it has also become clear that below the highest leadership stratum, participation in the killing process itself and its bureaucracy cannot be put down simply to antisemitism. Plunder and economic gain have again come to the fore, although, as we will see, in a different way from the interpretations of the 1960s. And the murder of the Jews, whilst still retaining its significance as the most urgent and most complete of the Nazis’ genocidal projects, is increasingly seen as but one of several interlocking and inseparable projects of genocide.⁷ This insight in turn leads historians to see the Holocaust in the context of Nazi empire-building and to ask whether this history might be connected to earlier histories of European overseas colonialism. On the one hand, then, the picture is messier – with a wider range of perpetrators participating for various reasons – and broader – the Holocaust is situated in the context of broader Nazi demographic schemes and the context of world history – but without, hopefully, losing a sense of the ideological basis of the whole project that the Third Reich’s leaders insisted upon and which gave coherence to the whole process. In what follows, I will pick up these themes and show how since the end of the Cold War, the ‘discovery’ of Eastern Europe as the heart of the genocidal process is reshaping our understanding of the Holocaust.

In Western Europe, our image of the Holocaust centres on Auschwitz-Birkenau, the infamous death camp that has become an icon of evil. This fame is quite justified: after all, Auschwitz was, as one historian puts it, the ‘capital of the Holocaust’, where Jews and Romanies from all over Europe were sent to be killed.⁸ With its numerous auxiliary camps spread around the area of Upper Silesia, Auschwitz was also a major centre for slave labourbased industry (which, economically speaking, achieved little, but caused unfathomable misery and pain to many tens of thousands of inmates).⁹ Yet Auschwitz is not synonymous with the Holocaust per se, which was a Europe-wide phenomenon, much of which appears more akin to colonial massacres than the iconic image of the death camp; rather, an aptly named ‘Auschwitz syndrome’, which has kept us fascinated by the apparent paradox of modern technology being employed in the service of mass murder, has stopped us from seeing other aspects of the Holocaust.¹⁰ If one really wants to look into the heart of darkness, then the relatively unknown Operation Reinhard camps come quickly into view. Along with Chełmno in the Warthegau (part of western Poland incorporated into the Reich), where Jews were first murdered using gas vans, the small Aktion Reinhard camps (named after Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the RSHA murdered by Czech partisans in 1942) of Bełžec, Sobibór and Treblinka were responsible, in the short period of their operation – all were dismantled by the end of 1943 – for the deaths of more than 1.5 million Jews.¹¹ Established by Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader (SSPF) in Lublin, these were ‘pure’ death camps, serving no other purpose than murder, and the process was unpleasant beyond belief. For too long we have talked about the ‘modernity’ of the killing process, shielding the reality from ourselves with talk of ‘industrial genocide’, as if it were a clean, smooth, technical matter. In fact, the motor engines which produced the carbon monoxide (zyklon B was used only at Auschwitz and Majdanek) often broke down, causing an excruciatingly slow death. Besides, these sites were brutal and violent; situated in the ‘wild east’, the guards – again, a thin layer of German officers and then mostly Ukrainians (former Soviet POWs) – were often drunk, and a wild atmosphere prevailed, as the wealth that accumulated from the transports attracted prostitutes and bounty-hunters.¹²

But fewer than half of the victims of the Holocaust were killed in camps, and of those that were, some 1.2 million died in concentration camps proper, that is, those camps run by the SS’s IKL (Inspektion der Konzentrationslager) and WVHA (Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt, or Economic Administrative Main Office), not the ‘pure’ death camps.¹³ Before the Nazis set up death camps in occupied Poland in 1942, about 1.5 million Jews were shot in face-to-face massacres. Some historians have observed that a ‘festive’ or ‘carnivalesque’ atmosphere dominated at the mass shootings that took place in the first sweep through eastern Poland and the Soviet Union in 1941–42.¹⁴ Photographs depicting laughing perpetrators at forest clearings and cheering locals in German and Eastern European towns are not hard to find. Auschwitz remains central to our understanding, but the history of the Holocaust has become much more complex, as historians discover more about the other death camps, about perpetrators other than the SS (for example, the German Order Police, the Wehrmacht, local gendarmerie and auxiliary police – more than 100,000 men served in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine’s police force), about the role played by concentration and forced labour camps (as opposed to death camps), about the almost inexplicable death marches¹⁵ and about motivations for local participation other than the catch-all of antisemitism, such as greed. As Timothy Snyder points out, although Auschwitz is located in Poland, actually very few Polish or Soviet Jews were killed there, and thus the largest victim groups – religiously orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe – are excluded from the most famous symbol of the Holocaust.¹⁶ Historians such as Snyder and Omer Bartov have also started investigating local ethnic relations before the war in the complex societies of the Eastern European borderlands, whose ethnic homogeneity today (a result of the communists finishing off in the immediate post-war years what Hitler had begun) is a far cry from the melange of populations that existed before 1939. They show that before the war, many places, such as western Volhynia, descended from a place of relative ethnic harmony to ‘the battlefield of a multi-sided civil war’ by 1943, ‘with Soviet Ukrainian partisans, Ukrainian nationalist partisans, Polish self-defense outposts, and the German police all engaged’.¹⁷

This renewed emphasis on plunder and looting is applicable at the macro level too, not only to individuals. In the 1960s, there was a fashion for the Marxist idea that Nazism was a creature of big business, that is, the claim that Hitler was bankrolled by capitalists who unleashed fascism to protect their interests and to prevent the masses from recognising theirs. In the wake of the emphasis on ‘race’ and ideology of the last 20 years or so, that paradigm virtually disappeared. It became clear that the regime controlled big business, not the other way round, and that the leading Nazis believed in their ideology, especially in what Saul Friedländer calls ‘redemptive antisemitism’.¹⁸ In recent years, however, historians have once again started talking of the Third Reich as a ‘gangster regime’ or as a ‘kleptocracy’, albeit this time round without assumptions about the priority of economic motives. Jonathan Petropoulos, for example, remarks that ‘the Nazis were not only the most notorious murderers in history but also the greatest thieves’.¹⁹ At all levels, individual, institutional, state-led and Europe-wide, the killing process was accompanied by plunder on a fantastic scale.²⁰

The Holocaust was not driven by economics, but it is clear that the possibility of financial gain was a motivating factor. The Nazis carefully calculated the value of the goods taken from the Jews at death camps, and they fleeced occupied countries such as the Netherlands in a remarkably thorough way. Agencies such as the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) were set up to coordinate the theft of artworks across Europe, and the German population was rendered complicit in the murders by the distribution of clothes from dead Jews through the ‘Winter Help’ charity or ‘Jew markets’, such as those which took place in Hamburg.²¹ Studies of perpetrators have revealed that they were not all dyed-in-the-wool antisemites but took part in killing operations for many reasons, including peer pressure, the influence of alcohol and the expectations of their comrades and superiors.²² Similarly, the locals across Eastern Europe were not simply antisemites who killed their neighbours at the first opportunity but people who, in a desperately poor region, saw the ‘elimination’ of the Jews as a chance to acquire some material goods. Extermination and enrichment went hand in hand, as all across Europe, at individual, agency and state levels, greed, corruption and plunder proved inseparably appealing from the process of murder.²³

Antisemitism remains key because it was the regime’s driving force, that is, the framework that permitted various actors with different motives to come together. But the complexities of real life mean that we should not be satisfied with antisemitism as an explanation; antisemitism had long existed, and one needs an explanation as to what generated genocide at this particular point in time, in a region where Jews and Gentiles had co-existed for centuries. One reason, of course, is that the regime and thus the state believed in the paranoid conspiracy theory that the Jews were colonising Germany and were a threat to world stability; previously, antisemitism had remained at the social level. But that explanation concerns only the core of the Nazi regime and does not account for the continent-wide participation in the killing process. There are cases of people, such as Metropolitan Sheptytsky, head of the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine, who both condemned and condoned the Nazis at different junctures. One helpful approach is to think of an ‘antisemitic consensus’: whatever the actual motives of perpetrators, whether greed or envy or hatred, they knew that the regime was fighting a ‘war against the Jews’ and that they could get away with just about anything as long as they paid lip-service to this framework.²⁴ As Wolfgang Seibel, one of the foremost historians of the polycratic organisation of the Holocaust, observes:

Utilitarian motivation of institutional actors was, presumably, the main source of radicalization. Anti-Semitism and state coercion, nonetheless, remained the constitutive basis of persecution. … [A]nti-Semitism represented a kind of convertible currency. Whatever the personal Weltanschauung, as soon as peripheral actors had something to offer the ‘center’ that fitted the anti-Semitic agenda they could expect advantages in exchange.²⁵

Investigations into motivation do not seek to exculpate but to provide answers to the question of how antisemitism could be activated and radicalised at a certain moment. If we do not ask these questions, we end up with the ‘lachrymose narrative’ of Jewish history which is unable to distinguish the Holocaust from a nineteenth-century pogrom. For the Jews who were killed, of course, the result was the same: the motivating factors and the backgrounds of the perpetrators may have been heterogeneous, but the murderous effect was strikingly homogeneous.²⁶

But to ask after perpetrator motivation leads one ultimately to a dead end: the individual psychology of perpetrators cannot be isolated from more important social factors. That is why so much research has been done on the conditions under which the murder process took place. However, although the vast majority of Jews murdered in the Holocaust came from and were murdered in Eastern Europe, we know far more about the Holocaust in Western Europe. We know about survival rates, resistance, opportunities for hiding, rescue attempts, the role of local police forces and bureaucracies in listing, rounding up and deporting Jews, and we have very precise lists of deportations, especially for France, Belgium and the Nether...