Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

by Peter Hayes

By the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, hatred of Jews was widespread, and it had crystallized around two central generalizations: (1) that Jews were parasitic profiteers, intent on extracting wealth from Christians, and (2) that Jews were incorrigible instruments of Satan, intent on serving his purposes and afflicting the pious.

Martin Luther gave the most extreme voice to these prejudices when he discovered that Jews were no more willing to convert to his version of Christianity than the one he claimed to have reformed. He urged Christians to burn Jews’ synagogues, schools, and homes and subject Jews who would not convert to forced labor.

Even Luther’s contemporary, the learned sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus, a man generally regarded as one of the most open-minded thinkers of his day, wrote, “If hatred of Jews makes the Christian, then we are all plenty Christian.”

As Julius Langbehn, a widely read German antisemite, put the matter: “A Jew can no more become a German than a plum can turn into an apple.”

Of course, the overlapping phases of Jewish stigmatization always had one constant element: a depiction of Jews as contaminating or corrupting. Their proximity was seen as potentially undermining: first to Christians’ faith, then to liberals’ belief in human improvement, and finally to the strength and health of other populations.

The late onset of emancipation in these regions and the strong resistance to it there are significant, for these are the areas where the Nazis later found most of their victims and received the most widespread local assistance in their murder.

To return to the question with which this chapter began: Why the Jews? Because an ancient tradition of blaming them for disasters, both present and prospective, a tradition deeply rooted in religious rivalry and superstition, persisted into the modern world and even assumed new forms during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Nonetheless, by the middle of the nineteenth century, this sort of thinking produced Richard Wagner’s pamphlet “Jewishness in Music.” It asserted that genuine musical works of art were products of the profound German spirit, to which Jews had no access, which is why they supposedly could produce only shallow and artificial works.

Wherever and whenever it occurred, however, resistance to emancipation had a unifying theme: They are fundamentally different from us—less honest and less spiritual—and can never become like us.

That was the story of antisemitism in Germany before World War I in microcosm: The movement was loud, quotable, recurrent, but it had little political traction or legislative success.

So long as discontent was not general or other groups offered responses to it that some people found more persuasive, as the Center Party did to devout Catholics, the socialists did to industrial workers, and the Conservative Party did to landowners and pious Lutherans, political antisemitism could not thrive. Intellectual antisemitism, however, was another matter; it had a broader, more constant audience and reflected a persistent unwillingness to see Jews in Germany as Germans.

The psychiatrist James Gilligan argues that all violence results from the attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.

Both phrases became key components of Hitler’s and Nazism’s insistence that antisemitism was a defensive, not an offensive, stance. This is a central theme in the history of the Holocaust. The argument that persecution was an act of self-defense was so essential as a justification for what the Nazis wanted to do that it repeatedly appears in ever new forms: They threaten us, so we must strike to protect ourselves.

In a nutshell, Nazism is an ideology of feed and breed or race and space that posits a permanent struggle to the death among ethnic groups. Hitler insisted that perpetual struggle is “the law of nature,” but a more fitting term would be “the law of the jungle.”

The only assurances of success were fertility, military strength, and racial purity. The state’s job is to promote these and to destroy anything that works against them. Morality is defined not by principles or commandments but by service to these goals. What promotes them is good and praiseworthy, what impedes them is evil and traitorous. In other words, Nazism combined arrogance about Germany with anxiety about its future, and the combination translated into virtually unlimited aggressiveness.

To subscribe to Hitler’s ideology was to affirm that only the views and only the fates of Germans mattered; swearing never to put oneself in the place of non-Germans was part and parcel of being a National Socialist.

In sum: Nazi ideology was a witches’ brew of self-pity, entitlement, and aggression. It was also a form of magical thinking that promised to end all of Germans’ postwar sufferings, the products of defeat and deceit, by banishing their supposed ultimate cause, the Jews and their agents.

The promise of Nazism was to restore all that was best in Germany’s traditions yet also to revolutionize the country at the same time.

The short answer to the question “why the Germans?” is “because Hitler came to power,” but it is too short an answer.

This was the so-called Kristallnacht (Crystal or Broken Glass Night) pogrom, a wave of destruction and plundering that swept over most remaining Jewish-owned homes and businesses and nearly all of the nation’s synagogues.

By the time the mayhem stopped, the perpetrators had killed at least 91 Jews but perhaps many more, driven at least 300 people to commit suicide, and rounded up some 36,000 Jewish men across the country. About 26,000 of them were exposed the following day to public humiliation as they marched to trains and buses destined for the concentration camps at Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen.

The reaction to Kristallnacht itself reaffirmed this pattern, as numerous people in the street expressed shame and disgust on the morning after, though as much at the wasteful destruction of property and appearance of disorder as at the harm done to Jews.

Whatever the mix of attitudes among the non-Jewish population, the decisive point is that violence and viciousness toward Jews increased steadily during the 1930s in Nazi Germany and in full public view, especially in small cities and the countryside, yet the pattern gave rise to too little rejection or revulsion to make the Nazi regime change course.

And, in September, local offices from all around the country chorused that the order for German Jews to start wearing identifying Stars of David on their clothing had been greeted with “genuine satisfaction” and “gratification.”

In a sense, the question, like the one often raised about Jewish behavior in the ghettos of Poland examined later in this book, is terribly naïve and cruel.

Jews were up against a Nazi movement that was both ruthless and shameless in what it would say about and do to them. They constituted a tiny share of the German population to begin with in 1933 and became ever fewer as time passed. They shared with everyone else an inability to see what was coming, all the more so as it involved behavior unprecedented on the part of a civilized country.

Above all, Germany’s Jews, like those of occupied Europe later, were not monolithic and conspiratorially united, as the Nazis claimed, but divided among themselves about what the Nazi onsl...

About two-thirds of them were liberal, acculturated, often somewhat secular or entirely non-observant Jews, either members of or in sympathy with the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, a name that signified their desire to be integrated into the German nation and to have the same rights as all other German citizens. For this group, the Nazi attack was difficult to compr...

The other two principal groups, the Orthodox, who accounted for perhaps 20 percent of Jews in Germany in 1933, and the Zionists, who then constituted 5–10 percent, were not so hurt ...

The legend that German Jews faced the persecution passively or incredulously is just that, a legend.

They fought back the only way they collectively could: by equipping as many people as possible with skills that would help them get out and by mutually sustaining all those who remained.

Jewish self-help was fighting a losing battle, but it was an effort that did credit to the people who undertook it.

As was the case in the ghettos further east, such submissiveness resulted from desires for both self-preservation and amelioration. Cooperation with the SS seemed the only available way for Jewish leaders to stay alive and to alleviate the plight of deportees by providing food and blankets to them at the collection and departure points.

The Nazis took fierce reprisals against recalcitrance or resistance. Emblematic of the viciousness were the actions that followed an attempt in May 1942 by a group around a Jew named Herbert Baum to burn down a propaganda exhibition against the Soviet Union in Berlin. The Gestapo caught thirty-three conspirators almost immediately and executed not only those people but another 250 Jewish men, who were rounded up and sent to Sachsenhausen, just outside the city. Another 250 Jewish males then also disappeared into that camp, the families of all 500 men immediately were deported “to the east,” and Goebbels stepped up the timetable for making Berlin “Jew-free.”

How did Hitler manage to ratchet up the persecution of Germany’s Jews during the 1930s without provoking foreign interference or even intervention? He did this, in part, by phasing in restrictions and even occasionally holding out the prospect that some Jews could remain in Germany—or at least in Theresienstadt—in the long run.

Until Kristallnacht and sometimes beyond, many appeasers actually were inclined to blame Jews for poisoning relations with Germany rather than to blame Germany for persecuting Jews.

Divestment for political or moral reasons was a virtually unknown practice in the 1930s, which is the principal reason why almost no major corporation with holdings in Germany, regardless of the country in which its headquarters stood, suspended operations or sold out and withdrew.

For all of these reasons, as well as the general difficulty of seeing ahead, the Nazi persecution of the Jews did not encounter the sort of economic pressures successfully brought to bear some fifty years later on the apartheid regime in South Africa.

In sum, the years 1933–41 taught Hitler and his followers that neither Germans nor foreigners were inclined to interfere with Nazi actions toward Jews.

ONE OFTEN AND surprisingly overlooked feature of the Holocaust is its combination of shocking temporal and spatial compression with sweeping extent.

Three-quarters of the nearly six million victims were killed within only twenty months, from June 1941 to February 1943, and half of the total victims died within only the last eleven months of that time frame.

Altogether, at least three-quarters of the Jews who ever came within reach of Nazi Germany and its allies were killed, constituting in the end two-thirds of the Jews of Europe (six million out of nine million when World War II began; the oft-quoted total of eleven million given in the minutes of the Wannsee Conference was an exaggeration or included converts as well as their children and grandchildren).

For Jewish children sixteen or younger, the mortality rate was almost nine-tenths.

The Nazi leaders knew that they could not employ the methods being used in the lands conquered from the USSR in Central or Western Europe. Simply shooting Jews and burying them in pits was likely to arouse revulsion and opposition there and thus to increase resistance to German rule, which would raise the military costs of maintaining it.

Besides, Himmler quickly came to fear the effect on his men of having to shoot women and children hour after hour, day after day. Indeed, at least one of the Einsatzgruppen commanders, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, later suffered a nervous breakdown, though only briefly. What the Nazi regime needed was a way of killing people that was inconspicuous or, as the SS planners put it, “noiseless” (geräuschlos), and that was more, again as they put it, “humane” . . . to the perpetrators.

This is the context in which to interpret the letter of July 31, 1941, that Göring sent to Heydrich, authorizing him to find “an overall solution to the Jewish question in the German sphere.” Heydrich already had authority over “emigration and evacuation,” as the letter noted. He had no need for new authority unless he was being given a new assignment, and this document extended his competence to the entire “German sphere” and asked h...

The result was a letter, signed by the Nazi Führer on his personal, not his official, stationery and backdated to the opening day of World War II, directing the leader of his personal medical staff, Karl Brandt, and the head of the personal Chancellery, Philipp Bouhler, to expand the practice of granting a “mercy death” to irreversibly disabled people in state institutions. This written instruction, unlike any document ever discovered about the Holocaust, connects Hitler directly and in writing to a murder operation, the so-called Euthanasia Action.

Though the Euthanasia Action continued for the duration of the Third Reich, the operation had two distinct phases, the first of which, from October 1939 to August 1941, was a direct forerunner of the Holocaust, the second, from 1942 to 1945, an extension of it.

Third, on December 12, 1941, the day after Hitler declared war on the United States in solidarity with his Japanese ally, he met with the Nazi Party Gauleiters at his private apartment in Berlin and informed them that the Jews would have to pay “with their lives” for the war they had inflicted on Germany—indeed, that they already were doing so. As historian Peter Fritzsche has remarked, “this is as close to a Hitler order as historians will get,” meaning the closest counterpart to the euthanasia letter he signed that we are likely to find to connect Hitler personally with the command to kill the Jews.

As the pioneering scholar of the Holocaust Raul Hilberg emphasized, the Holocaust bore the characteristic features of many Nazi initiatives: little foresight or preparation, rocky coordination of participating agencies, and even haphazard budgeting. Yet the killing of millions of people turned out to require no better.