Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

by Peter Hayes

In short, the nineteenth century was an era of rapid, constant, and often bewildering change, and change always unnerves and/or harms some people.

Whatever its medieval or modern inspirations, the connection between the incidence of antisemitism and the extent of perceived economic crisis is close;

sum, the more liberalism triumphed, the more visible and successful Jews became, and the more groups that felt endangered or harmed by economic and political trends lent an ear to a convenient explanation of their troubles. That explanation blamed the Jews and promised relief by repealing emancipation and relegating them to their former contained status. The prevalence of such views seemed to grow with the rise of mass politics and the popular press, both of which encouraged agitators and ideologues.

Nazi ideology was a witches’ brew of self-pity, entitlement, and aggression. It

Gregor Strasser, the day-to-day director of Party operations in the early 1930s, when he defined National Socialism as “the opposite of what exists today.” And their method in state and national parliaments, as well as in municipal councils, was to disrupt democratic government, make it dysfunctional, and thus “prove” its ineffectiveness in meeting Germans’ needs. In a fundamental sense, this highly partisan political force ran against politics, with all its messy compromises, disagreements, and imperfections, and promised to replace it with order and strength. National Socialism promised Germans both radical change and reassuring return to old certainties, and the mix appealed to many people in the atmosphere of anxiety that the Depression spread. In short, dissatisfaction with the nation’s political and economic condition, along with fear of communism, the votes for which also were rising, clearly had more to do with Hitler’s ascent than hatred of Jews.

This is why they actively sought to generate street fights with leftist groups; every such battle strengthened the Nazi claim that the nation was on the verge of civil war, and that citizens therefore had to choose up sides

the little north-central German town of Northeim, whose 10,000 citizens

William Sheridan Allen has ventured the observation that more Germans “were drawn to antisemitism because they were drawn to Nazism, not the other way around.” He

Nazi regime engaged in a three-stage discovery or learning process between 1933 and 1941. In the first phase, which lasted for just over five years from the time Hitler came to power until the annexation of Austria in March 1938, the so-called Third Reich learned what it could do, namely persecute the German Jews without encountering serious resistance from Germany’s other inhabitants or from other countries. In the second phase, which lasted for a bit more than three years from the takeover in Austria until the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Nazi Germany learned what it nonetheless could not achieve—namely, the complete “removal” or expulsion of Jews from its territory. In the third phase, which lasted only five months from the attack on the Soviets to the fall of 1941, Hitler and his most important advisor and executor in this matter, Heinrich Himmler, recognized that they possessed not only the motive but also the means and the opportunity to murder the Jews in not only the newly occupied territories of Serbia and the Soviet Union under cover of war, but also in all of Europe.

As the forms of exclusion and persecution multiplied, the Nazi regime also learned that almost no non-Jew would stick up for Germany’s Jews; instead, most people and institutions hastened to adapt to the way the wind was blowing.

Why did prominent, successful, established Germans fail to take a moral stand in 1933? There were many reasons. For one thing, the Nazi regime rapidly acquired a monopoly on political discourse and changed the moral valence of hatred from bad to good.

Prior to 1933, antisemitism seemed crude and shameful in many quarters; now it was identified with patriotism everywhere. Conversely, expressing sympathy for Jews was now an unpatriotic act that could attract suspicion or condemnation. Attacking Jews was of far greater importance to the Nazis than defending them was to other Germans, so most such people decided that discretion was the better part of valor and said nothing.

Hans Schemm, the new Bavarian minister of culture, explained the intellectual obligations this imposed in 1933, when he told a group of professors in Munich, “From now on, it is not up to you to decide whether something is true, but whether it is in the interests of the National Socialist Revolution.”

These stories illustrate how power magnifies the ideas of those who hold it because of the human tendency to seek safety in conformity. The only antidotes are conviction—loyalty to a strong countervailing ideology—and the freedom to express it. Where these are lacking, as was the case in Germany after 1933, ideologues quickly get the upper hand and call the tune for behavior. A minority of haters, backed by the authority of the state, thus becomes free to drive events forward, to make the lives of any targeted group ever more miserable.

However, at the time of its peak murderousness, from July 22 to August 27, 1942, Treblinka killed 280,000 people, an average of 56,000 per week, or 8,000 per day. During one of those five weeks, the daily average reached 10,000. Nearly all of Treblinka’s victims came from

one, the interval between January and May of 1945, when the retreat of the German army on all fronts prompted the regime to try to salvage slave labor for the Reich by marching camp inmates back into Germany. This

less; in Warsaw in 1941, the daily allocation per person was between 180 and 220 calories.

Operation Harvest Festival in the fall of 1943, when Himmler ordered the liquidation of nearly all the remaining Polish work camps and ghettos in reprisal for these acts of Jewish resistance and as a sure method of preventing more of them. The shooting on November 3–4, 1943, of 42,000 Jews in the Lublin district, most of them at Majdanek and nearby Poniatowa, constitutes the largest single massacre of the Holocaust. At

It used to be said that more than 1,000 of them dotted the German landscape by 1945. But if one includes all the sites identified by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is publishing a massive, multivolume encyclopedia of camps and ghettos, the number of camps established at one time or another in Germany and occupied Europe runs to about 40,000.

The difference between living and dying was sometimes between those who calculated the odds and despaired and those who thought that one chance of survival in one hundred or one thousand was good enough.

Everyone knows or should know that freedom is indivisible; when taken away from someone, it can be taken away from anyone. But