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The war had a second effect. It transformed the way in which Germany conducted its business. Pre-war Germany was the most law-abiding country in Europe. Civil violence was unheard of, un-German. Anti-Semitism was everywhere, but physical violence to Jews, let alone an anti-Semitic riot, was something which did not, could not, occur in Germany. The war changed all ...
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Adolf Hitler
he brought together the two consequences of the war, the need for a scapegoat and the cult of violence, focussing the result on the Jews:
Hitler’s anti-Semitism was composed of all the conventional elements, from the Christian Judensau to pseudo-scientific race theory. But it was distinctive in two respects. First, it was to him a complete explanation of the world, a
Weltanschauung, a world outlook.
Second, Hitler was an Austrian by birth but a pan-German by choice, who joined the German, not the Austrian, army in 1914; and his anti-Semitism was a marriage of the German and Austrian models.
In modern times, Germany, and especially Prussia, had been more afraid of the Russian threat than any other. Hitler was now able to place the threat in a plausible anti-Semitic context. But he blended it with the kind of anti-Semitism he had absorbed in Vienna. This concentrated on fear of the Ostjuden, a dark and inferior race corrupting the Germanic blood.
Hitler believed and taught that there was not only a direct political and military threat to Germany from Jewish Bolshevism but a deeper, biological threat from any contact, but especially sexual congress, with members of the Jewish race.
A key element in the Nazi triumph was the generation of schoolteachers who matured in the last decade of the nineteenth century, were infected with Völkisch anti-Semitism, and had become senior teachers by the 1920s.107 The textbooks they used reflected the same influences. The university academics similarly contributed to the rise of Nazi influence by preaching national salvation through panaceas and ‘spiritual revivals’, instead of sceptical empiricism.
The success of the Nazis was due to the willingness of enough young fanatics to devote themselves full-time to the effort, to the party’s egalitarianism and radical programme.110 But an important bond between the Nazis and the students was the use of violent demonstrations against Jews.
the Nazis would never have been able to acquire power without the Great Depression, which hit Germany harder than any other country except the United States.
all revolutions, like his, needed a focus of hostility, to express ‘the feelings of hatred of the broad masses’. He had chosen the Jew not merely out of personal conviction but also out of rational political calculation:
the dualism of Hitler’s anti-Semitic drive, its mixture of emotional loathing and cool reasoning.
Hitler’s dualism expressed itself in two forms of violence to be used against the Jew: the spontaneous, highly emotional, uncontrolled violence of the pogrom, and the cool, systematic, legal and regulated violence of the state, expressed through law and police power.
During Hitler’s twelve years in power, the dualism remained throughout. Right to the end, Jews were the victims both of sudden, individual acts of thoughtless violence, and of systematic state cruelty on a mass-industrial basis.
Nevertheless, there was always a decisive degree of overall strategy and control, which came from no other mind but his, and expressed his anti-Semitic nature. The Holocaust was planned; and Hitler planned it. That is the only conclusion which makes sense of the whole horrifying process.
As before, the ‘outrage’ was used as the pretext for a fresh campaign of legal measures against Jews.
The Nazis found that in practice it was too difficult to define a Jew by race. They had to fall back on religious criteria.
the war made a difference in two essential ways. First, it changed the emphasis of the moral justification for persecuting Jews which Hitler produced. This moral reasoning, crude though it might be, was an important element in the Holocaust because it was used publicly by Goebbels to secure the acquiescence or indifference of the German people, and by Himmler to promote the enthusiasm of those who manned the repressive machine itself. Until the outbreak of war, the argument ran that, since the Jews had been engaged for generations in defrauding the
German people, they had no moral right to their property, and the measures to strip them of it were merely an act of simple restitution, their wealth going back whence it came–to the Reich. With the war, a new argument was added. Hitler had always insisted that, if a war came, it would be the work of the Jews, acting on the international stage; and when it did come, he held the Jews responsible for all the deaths that ensued. The conclusion implicit in this argument was that the Jews had no moral right to their lives either. Indeed, he said on a number of occasions that war would precipitate a
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This brings us to the second consequence of war. The experience of government, 1933-9, had led Hitler to modify his views on the popularity of anti-Semitism. It was useful to focus hatred, in the abstract, but he had learned that open, widespread, physical violence against the Jews as a whole was not acceptable to the German people, at any rate in peacetime. War, howeve...
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context in which genocide could be committed. So far from the Jews creating the war, then, it was rather Hitler who willed th...
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Study of the train factor indicates, perhaps better than anything else, the importance of his Jewish policy in Hitler’s overall scheme, and the extent to which ordinary Germans helped him to push it to its conclusion.
the forced-labour programme could begin in earnest. This was the first part of the Final Solution, of the Holocaust itself, because working to death was the basis on which the system operated.
The absence of written orders led to the claim that the Final Solution was Himmler’s work and that Hitler not only did not order it but did not even know it was happening.142 But this argument will not stand up.143 The administration of the Third Reich was often chaotic but its central principle was clear enough: all key decisions emanated from Hitler.
The decisive date for the Final Solution was almost certainly 1 September 1939, when hostilities began. Hitler had stated plainly, on
30 January that year, what his reaction to war would be: ‘if international-finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging the nations into yet another world war, the consequences will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Europe.’ He regarded the war as his licence for genocide and he set the scientific process in motion the very day war broke out. The first programme, of experimental murder, was conceived in Hitler’s Chancellery and the original order went out on Hitler’s
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But by this time it was also being used to kill Jews from concentration camps who were too sick to work.
Hitler seems to have given the orders for mass extermination in fixed centres in June 1941, at the same time as the mobile killing units went into action.
while the executive agent of the Holocaust was the SS, the crime as a whole was a national effort involving all the hierarchies of the German government, its armed forces, its industry and its party.
Wannsee.
It was from this point on that the exigencies of the Holocaust were given priority even over the war effort itself, reflecting Hitler’s resolve that, whatever the outcome of the war, the European Jews would not survive it.
could the Allies have done anything effective to save European Jewry? The Russians were closest to the Holocaust but never showed the slightest desire to help the Jews in any way.
The British and American governments were in theory sympathetic to the Jews but in practice were terrified that any aggressively pro-Jewish policy would provoke Hitler into a mass expulsion of Jews whom they would then be morally obliged to absorb.
The question of bombing the gas chambers was raised in the early summer of 1944, when
the destruction of the Hungarian Jews got under way.
An operation was feasible. An oil-refining complex 47 miles from Auschwitz was attacked no less than ten times between 7 July and 20 November 1944 (by which point the Holocaust was complete and Himmler ordered the death machinery to be destroyed).
But Churchill was its only real supporter in either government. Both the air forces hated military operations not directed to destroying enemy forces or war potential.
Here we come to a harsh and important point. The refusal to divert forces for a special Jewish rescue operation was in accordance with general war policy. Both governments had decided, with the agreement of their respective Jewish communities, that the speedy and total defeat of Hitler was the best way to help the Jews. This was one reason why the vast and powerful US Jewish community gave little priority to the bombing issue.
But of course all these Jews were killed. Hence the Holocaust was one of the factors which were losing Hitler the war. The British and American governments knew this. What they did not
sufficiently appreciate was that the main military beneficiary of the Holocaust was the Red Army, and the ultimate political beneficiary would be the Soviet empire.
The Allied calculation might have been different if the Jews had produced a resistance movement. None emerged. There were many reasons for this. The Jews had been persecuted for a millennium and a half and had learned from long experience that resistance cost lives rather than saved them. Their history, their theology, their folklore, their social structure, even their vocabulary trained them to negotiate, to pay, to plead, to protest, not to fight. Then too, the Jewish communities, especially in eastern Europe, had been emasculated by many generations of mass migration. The most ambitious had
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The great mass of Jews who remained, overwhelmingly religious, were deceived and self-deceived. Their history told them that all persecutions, however cruel, came to an end; that all oppressors, however exigent, had demands that were ultimately limited and could be met. Their strategy was always geared to saving ‘the remnant’.
The Nazis, precisely to minimize the possibility of resistance, made pitiless use of Jewish sociology and psychology.
In the Soviet-occupied areas, all the bravest community leaders had already been shot before the Germans arrived. The Germans used the Judenrate to spot the actual or potential troublemakers and kill them instantly.
Internally, the ghettos were petty tyrannies, run by men like Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, the strutting dictator of the Lodz ghetto, who even had his head printed on postage stamps.
there was never any doubt in the minds of the Germans about the function of the ghetto and its Jewish authorities. It was to make what contribution it could to the war effort (Lodz had 117 little war factories, Bialystok twenty) and then, when the deportation orders for the camps came, to ensure that the process was orderly.
To keep resistance to a minimum, the Germans lied at every stage of the process, and employed elaborate deceptions.
Jewish religious training tended to encourage passivity. The hasidic Jews were the most ready to accept their fate as God’s will.
Nevertheless, in two important respects the Holocaust, by its sheer enormity, did bring a qualitative change in the way international society reacted to violence inflicted on Jews. It was universally agreed that both punishment and restitution were necessary and to some extent both were carried out.
