Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

by Peter Hayes

Belzec killed at least 434,000 people, but perhaps as many as 600,000, in the only ten months that it was open, an average of up to 2,000 people per day, more than two-thirds of them from southern and southeastern Poland and the rest Jews from other parts of Europe who had been deposited in ghettos in and around Lublin.

Sobibor consumed between 167,000 and 200,000 people during its seventeen-month life span, most of them from Poland, but some from prewar Czechoslovakia, many from France and the Netherlands, and a few from Greater Germany, Belarus, and Lithuania.

Treblinka, the last to close, wiped out up to 925,000 people in the eighteen months before Operation Reinhard ended in November 1943, which made it almost as lethal as Belzec on a daily basis. 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 w...

All three Reinhard camps were in operation simultaneously for only four out of the six months from July to December 1942, yet in that half-year the three sites killed more than one million Jews, which is more Jews and nearly as many people all told as Auschwitz-Birkenau wiped out in four years. Altogether, these three places devoured between 1.5 and 1.8 million human beings. Including Chelmno, the four CO camps killed up to 2 million people.

Fewer than 400 Jews ever emerged alive from all four sites, and of these only somewhere between 90 and 150 outlived World War II.

As it was, some 1.3 million people arrived at the camp between its opening in May 1940 and its evacuation in January 1945, of whom approximately 1.1 million died—there or in one of the subcamps.

Perhaps half of the survivors died at other installations before World War II ended, and only 100,000 emerged alive from the conflict.

One of the most chilling aspects of the history of the Holocaust is that so much carnage could occur without any serious ill effect on the German war effort, in fact with little diversion of manpower, matériel, and money.

So how could the Nazis achieve such an extensive massacre in so short a time? The first piece of the answer is: because they perfected a low-cost, low-overhead, low-tech, and self-financing process of killing with great speed.

We turn now to a second component of the answer: because the Nazi movement and state generated and unleashed remarkably dedicated killers.

This was an instance of what one might call unplanned annihilation, though one should add that intention was clearly present, since the humane thing to do was to leave the prisoners in camps for the Allies to capture. The decisions to withdraw them under horrendous conditions and then to try to maintain control of them for as long as possible were, in effect, murderous, and the number of resulting deaths was about as large as in the massacre of Hungarian Jewry in the spring of 1944.

First, the sensitive and controversial matter of the response of the Jews themselves: “Why didn’t more Jews fight back more often?” is a common question that succeeding generations have posed from the comfort of living in liberal and law-observing societies.

The question is not quite fair, since flare-ups of armed resistance did occur when the Nazis began deportations from particular places.

He goes on to argue that the efforts of Jewish communities to sustain themselves, to maintain order, and to placate the Nazis actually helped the Germans to achieve annihilation.

Hannah Arendt’s famous work of 1963, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pushed this point further. She called “the role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people . . . the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.” In her opinion, “without Jewish help in administration and police work . . . there would have been either complete chaos or an impossibly severe drain on German manpower.”

Bauer is determined to avoid blaming the victims for their fates, and if that means he sometimes stretches the definition of resistance to include ordinary acts of self-preservation, his position is nonetheless preferable to Hilberg’s and Arendt’s. Their harsh accusations have not stood up to historical analysis over the past forty years. Above all, they underestimate the forms of resistance that Jews participated in, and they overestimate the possibilities of armed resistance or even noncooperation that were available to Jews, either upon initial contact with the Nazis or later.

The gay men caught in this system suffered excruciating punishments, but they constituted a tiny portion of the target population. Why? Because the Nazis cared only about their behavior, not their nature.

Put in contemporary phrasing, Himmler believed that most gay men could be “scared straight.”

Everyone knows or should know that freedom is indivisible; when taken away from someone, it can be taken away from anyone. But few people dare act on that principle—or think they need to do so—even under the best of circumstances.

For all our appropriate attention to the Righteous Among the Nations memorialized by Yad Vashem and the brave individuals who risked their lives to hide or otherwise save people, no more than 5–10 percent of the Jews who survived the Holocaust did so by virtue of someone’s individual heroism.

The extent to which many ordinary Polish citizens benefited from the murders is apparent even today in the Polish restitution laws, which stipulate that no one can reclaim property stolen from Jews unless the applicant is a resident of Poland. Given that most surviving Jews left after 1945 or were driven out by the late 1960s, this law effectively protects a massive degree of theft, and it was designed to do so precisely because the theft was so massive.

The short answer is that a combination of antisemitism and economic and political interests worked to restrict the admission of Jews to other countries throughout the Holocaust and to inhibit other action on their behalf.

In other words, the existence of a Jewish state, especially one in which the most insular segments of the population play an increasingly decisive role, presents dangers to Jews elsewhere as well as benefits.

Lesson One is: Be alert but not afraid. Some degree of antisemitism is ineradicable for the foreseeable future; it has too long a pedigree and is too much the dark side of apartness and normal social frictions to disappear.