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Holocaust: Mass Murder

Дата публикации: 20 сентября 2007
Публикатор: Научная библиотека Порталус
Рубрика: RUSSIA (TOPICS) - Soviet Russia (1917-53) →
Источник: (c) http://russia.by
Номер публикации: №1190295452


Holocaust: Mass Murder

Was the Holocaust a specifically German atrocity?

Viewpoint: Atrocities on a massive scale during World War II were perpetrated by several warring nations as a matter of state policy.

Viewpoint: There was something particularly and specifically German about the Holocaust and other mass killings of World War II. Based on the authoritarian and exclusionary traditions of the Nazi Regime, such atrocities could only have happened in Germany.
________________________

The massive loss of lives during World War II reflected less the direct effects of combat than its secondary consequences: famine, disease, privation, and not least outright murder. In Europe it began in Poland in 1939, as Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany collaborated to annihilate race and class enemies. In 1940, when Russia occupied the Baltic states, the executions and deportations were on such a scale that many survivors subsequently welcomed the Germans as liberators--and then took up arms to seek revenge against their former persecutors.
Mass murder had established itself even earlier in Asia, where a Japanese army, incapable of conciliating its conquests in China, as early as 1937 sought to establish rule by terror. Far from being consequences of poor discipline, pillage and rape became near doctrine. Japanese treated prisoners of war instrumentally, regarding their mass murder as operationally legitimate under a broad spectrum of conditions. This mind-set spread to civilians as well. Anywhere from fifty thousand to three hundred-thousand people died during the Nanking Massacre of 1937. The 1944 "Ichi-Go Offensive" had as its watchword the "three alls:" kill all, burn all, destroy all. Other infamous acts included the forced recruitment of "comfort women," the murderous medical experiments carried out by Unit 731, and the deliberate large-scale supplying of narcotics to the Chinese civil population.
Following the German invasion of June 1941, the Soviets deported millions of nonethnic Russians whose loyalty was suspected by Joseph Stalin and his henchmen. Soviet military authorities also shot several divisions' worth of their own men, while the government regarded those unfortunate enough to be captured as traitors and sent most of them to the gulags after 1945. The Germans, for their part, shot and starved millions of Russian prisoners of war, were directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions more, and initiated an ethnic war in the Balkans of which the consequences are still being felt in that region. Above all else stands the Jewish Holocaust: the systematic obliteration of six million people, accompanied by a plan for eventually doubling the figure.
Yet, is the Holocaust enough to single out Nazi Germany in an era when collective death became a way of life? The entries for this chapter address the question from a general perspective and a German one.



Viewpoint: Atrocities on a massive scale during World War II were perpetrated by several warring nations as a matter of state policy.

In the spring of 1915 a German submarine, lurking off the coast of Ireland, sent a spread of torpedoes into an ocean liner that had entered the "blockade zone" established by the Imperial Navy. The victim was flying the flag of a belligerent nation, had been warned prior to its sailing that it was defined as a legitimate target, and in fact was a "legitimate" target by twentieth-century standards since it was carrying war munitions. The sinking of the Lusitania forever shifted American public opinion against Germany, would eventually prove to be a significant contributing factor to America's eventual entry into World War I, and was the stuff of endless propaganda posters, photos, and even the first motion picture propaganda cartoon. It is still considered by many to be a war crime.

Thirty years later, almost to the day, a Red Cross ship, loaded with more than six thousand wounded German soldiers and civilian refugees, departed from the Courland Pocket, a German position on the Baltic Coast cut off by the encircling Red Army. A Soviet submarine was waiting. In spite of the fact that the Wilhelm Gustloff was clearly flying Red Cross flags, its decks crammed with refugees packed shoulder to shoulder, the Soviet sub fired without warning. It was the single greatest maritime disaster in history. More than six thousand died, five times as many as were lost on the Lusitania or Titanic. Practically no one noticed the incident. Perhaps only one person in a thousand even know the name of the ship that, as it went down, dumped its passengers into the freezing Baltic. The world had grown used to such things. Wholesale murder, on both sides, was now part of twentieth-century warfare, and such actions were officially sanctioned by the top commands of both sides.

There is a well-known process, an ever-downward spiral of morality and standards, that inevitably happens in war. Several factors create this process of increasing brutality that eventually leads to an acceptance of horrors unimagined at the start of any conflict. The first factor is a process of time. The longer a conflict continues, the more hardened both sides become to the brutality of war. A good example is the American Civil War (1861-1865). Throughout the first year of the conflict Union commanders issued strict orders recognizing the property rights of Southerners, even the return of runaway slaves. Four years later, when General William Tecumseh Sherman's troops departed from Columbia, South Carolina, what they left behind looked like Berlin or Tokyo in 1945. Prisoners of war released from Andersonville, Georgia, and Camp Douglas, Chicago, in 1865 could have easily been mistaken for survivors of the Bataan Death March (1942).

The second factor is one of accident. Both sides in an armed conflict might initially agree to certain standards, either through formal treaty or informal custom. The accidents of war, however, quickly blur these standards and eventually create a counterresponse. The classic example happened with the German bombing of England during the Battle of Britain. Air Marshal Hermann Göring had laid out key strategic goals and rules of engagement prior to the start of the campaign, and the random bombardment of civilian targets was off limits.

The story is well known how a German bomber force, lost in the unpredictable weather typical of England, accidentally unloaded their bombs on a civilian section of London. British prime minister Winston Churchill, seizing on the event, launched a counterstrike on Berlin the following night. An enraged Hitler, supported by a humiliated Göring, who had boasted that a bomb would never fall on the capital of the Reich, countered with a series of terror raids on London. It eventually destroyed more than a quarter of the city and perhaps lost Germany the war because of the diversion of forces from crucial military targets. It opened, as well, the acceptance by both sides of indiscriminate night bombing of civilian targets.

A third factor in the downward spiral of brutality in war emerges when the potent elements of ideology and race are added to the brew. World War II was a war of ideology and race. In Europe, fascism and the Aryan racial doctrine were pitted against democracy and communism; on the Eastern Front an additional factor was that it was a war of Aryans against Slavs.

Ground combat on the western front was fought with at least a certain adherence to "the rules." Both sides shared a common culture, religion, and acknowledgment that they were of the same racial group. In general, prisoners were treated fairly well if they survived the first few minutes of capture, and efforts were made to avoid civilian casualties and the destruction of culturally significant landmarks. Not to say that there were not abuses, but such actions were not part of an official doctrine except in certain limited situations such as the Malmédy Massacre, in which one hundred captured U.S. soldiers were killed by German soldiers (December 1944); the bombing of Monte Cassino (May 1944); or the executions of Canadian troops by members of the Hitler Youth Division in Normandy (June 1944).

On the Eastern Front, however, brutality was the norm was and officially sanctioned by both sides. From the very start of the campaign into Russia, Wehrmacht (German Army) troops were informed that, due to the "unique demands" of the campaign, the standards of acceptable behavior were to be put aside--thus the infamous "Commissar Order," calling for the immediate execution of captured commissars. Jews were to be marked for "special treatment," and "elimination" of prisoners and captured enemy wounded would not be questioned. Special Operations Units, the infamous Schutzstaffeln (SS) Death Squads, were attached to the armies, with the full knowledge of front commanders. It is impossible to imagine that a single German soldier serving in Russia was not aware of the extent of the brutality going on both on the battle line and in the occupied zones to the rear. The German military command knew as well that official government policy called for the systematic stripping of food out of the occupied zones with the intent of triggering a genocidal reduction in population through starvation and disease.

Such knowledge quickly hardened the Wehrmacht to a standard of behavior unimaginable prior to the start of the conflict. Evidence of this is clear with German units transferred from Russia to stem the Allied advance in 1944. Troops had to be briefed that they were now fighting a "different" enemy, but the briefings often did not take. When Allied units discovered they were facing German units that were Russian-front veterans, the word generally went out not to expect mercy if taken prisoner. It created as well a reaction among Western Allied troops who, when facing SS units, tended to shoot first and ask questions later if the enemy indicated that they wanted to surrender.

The official Soviet policy regarding a racial war is not as well known but was equally brutal. Though the Soviet high command would try to deny the policy of allowing troops to brutalize the enemy, since it did run contrary to Marxist principles about the universal brotherhood of the proletariat, Soviet propaganda aimed at their troops advancing into Germany in 1945 called for an orgy of murder and rape. "Remember your raped mothers, wives and daughters," ran the official party line, "humiliate and humble the women of Germany."

The machine gunning of refugee columns, the mass rape of women of all ages, and the systematic slaughtering of entire communities, especially by rear echelon troops, was an official part of the Soviet war effort. The brutality reached such a frenzy that front-line officers finally dared to protest to the Kremlin, claiming that the honor of the Red Army would forever be sullied and that their troops had gone completely out of control. This policy did much to harden postwar feelings in Eastern Europe, and the hatred created still lingers in the generation that survived the onslaught of Soviet troops.

The issue of race in war was played out with equal brutality in the Pacific war. The Japanese Empire billed itself as the liberator of Asia from white European imperialism. They replaced it with a racial system of their own that was infinitely more brutal. The Rape of Nanking (1937) was officially sanctioned by the Japanese high command. It was a clear signal to all Japanese troops that Chinese civilians were to be treated as nothing more than targets for bayonet practice. In addition, tens of thousands of Korean women were forced into a horrifying system of army-run brothels, which even nearly sixty years later the Japanese government refuses to recognize and apologize for.

On the combat fronts of the Pacific the clash of race and differing cultures was fought out with a brutality perhaps equaling that of the Russian Front. Prisoners were rarely taken by either side, and when large units did surrender, such as the Allied forces at Singapore and Bataan, they were subjected to unspeakable cruelties, including beheading and being buried alive. The war on this front was one that was fought to the death by both sides.

It is ironic to note that America, which claimed it went to battle in World War I over the issue of freedom of the seas and to combat the scourge of unrestricted submarine warfare, officially adopted unrestricted submarine warfare in the Pacific within hours after the strike on Pearl Harbor. When a fleet of Japanese transports was caught near Guadalcanal and sunk by American aircraft, thousands of Japanese soldiers who had survived were systematically machine-gunned in the water, the ocean turning red from the carnage. It was justified as a military necessity. Perhaps it was; but such an action, if it had occurred off the coast of Florida, England, or Italy to U.S. troops, would have drawn howls of protest and be remembered in America to this day. In the Pacific, however, the total elimination of the enemy was policy, and it was the norm.

There is a final factor that plays into the acceptance of brutality in war, and that is one of physical distance from the dead and dying. If an American soldier, using a flamethrower, had deliberately torched a German mother holding her child, he would have been arrested. Hundreds of thousands of German mothers and children died under Allied carpet bombing of cities, but this was an action that was death from an acceptable distance, which became official policy and thus was accepted. In the name of breaking the German war industry and morale, civilians became legitimate targets. In hindsight it is apparent that saturation bombing of cities contributed little to the war other than the general increase of misery. Hundreds of thousands were incinerated at Hamburg, Berlin, and the ultimate expression of incendiary madness, at Dresden (13-14 February 1945).

The same was true in the Pacific, where there was even less moral compunction about the use of firebombing, with the new cocktail of napalm added in. Upward of a quarter of a million died in one night in Tokyo (9-10 March 1945), and the campaign was climaxed finally by the mass incinerations, ignited by official policy, over Hiroshima (6 August 1945) and Nagasaki (9 August 1945).

War is a downwardly spiraling process of brutality. How could the bombing of Dresden, the Commissar Order, or the Japanese army brothels be defined as anything other than official policy? When official policy, which in other times would be defined as murder and genocide, is accepted by either or both sides in war, the grassroots enthusiasm for murder, the individual acts of cruelty by troops or groups of civilians who are "out of control," becomes a mere sideshow, except for those who are the victims. Genocide was official policy on both sides in World War II; there is no other explanation possible for the more than forty million civilians who died in the most brutal conflict in human history.

-- William R. Forstchen, Montreat College, North Carolina


Viewpoint: There was something particularly and specifically German about the Holocaust and other mass killings of World War II. Based on the authoritarian and exclusionary traditions of the Nazi Regime, such atrocities could only have happened in Germany.

The Holocaust is in many respects the paradoxical event of the twentieth century. The paradoxical nature of German involvement in the events of the destruction of the European Jews and other racial "undesirables" is often expressed in the rhetorical question, "How could the land of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Immanuel Kant, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart produce an Adolf Hitler, a Josef Goebbels, and a Heinrich Himmler?" From an historical perspective, the fundamental question arising out of the genocidal actions of the Third Reich remains, "Why Germany?" The answer to this question lies not only in the twelve years of the National Socialist dictatorship but also in the roots of German political, military, cultural, and economic traditions of the nineteenth century. The answer can also be found in the development of a specific current of German intellectual thought tied to the emergence of an ultranationalistic and malevolent anti-Semitic volkish (folkish) ideology in the late nineteenth century. To be sure, anti-Semitism was not a uniquely German phenomenon. The "Dreyfus Affair" (1894-1899), in which a French Alsatian Jew serving on the General Staff was falsely accused of espionage and imprisoned, fractured the French political landscape in a bitter battle between the political forces of the Right and the Left. Additionally, the forced confinement of Russian Jews and the periodic but vicious Polish pogroms against the Jews in the 1920s demonstrated the presence of ant i-Semitism throughout Europe. Still, these discriminatory measures and acts of persecution remained largely episodic and never escalated to the level of genocide. In the end, the seedbed of biological racism and annihilation was prepared upon German soil and firmly implanted in both the structural and intellectual traditions of the Second German Empire (1871-1918).

In the period between the proclamation of the Second Empire and the end of World War II, German history followed a course highlighted by a singularly abnormal evolution of political, social, economic, and military institutions with respect to its Western European neighbors. Some observers of German history have identified the roots of German particularism as early as the mid nineteenth century. Indeed, British historian A. J. P. Taylor focused on the failure of the revolutionary movements throughout the various German lands in 1848 to achieve enduring social and political reforms as a turning point that "failed to turn." The exact origins of a German Sonderweg (special path) are certainly debatable; however, the role of the "Iron Chancellor," Otto von Bismarck, in setting the nascent German nation upon the road to an authoritarian state tradition is without question. In point of fact, as chancellor of Prussia (and later unified Germany) Bismarck initiated many of the authoritarian and exclusionary policies that would eventually guide the German nation on an aberrant trajectory that found its ultimate expression in the crimes committed during the National Socialist dictatorship.

In order to understand the emergence of an extremist right-wing and genocidal government within Germany after 1933, it is first necessary to look back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and examine the role of various antidemocratic forces within the German polity. Several theories have been advanced as to why Germany developed differently than her European neighbors; they have included explanations based on geopolitics, Prussian militarism, and the German ideology. However, the concept of a German Sonderweg found its ultimate expression in the writings of a group of German historians at the University of Bielefeld who characterized the failure of German democracy as a function of a reactionary alliance between the preindustrial elites of "rye and iron," an alliance of shared interests between traditional agrarian elites and industrialists. The German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler highlighted the role of an antidemocratic landed aristocracy that exercised control over the three main pillars of the state--the ministerial bureaucracy, the army, and the diplomatic service. Through their control over these institutions, the traditional agrarian and industrial elites strangled any attempts at popular democratic reform from below and prevented Germany from embarking upon the democratic course of her western neighbors. Furthermore, the economic modernization of the German lands had proven to be an anomalous process in which economic modernization did not engender a reciprocal social and political modernization as had occurred in France, England, and the United States. The authoritarian structures and the inequality of Prussia's procedural traditions (such as the three-class voting system based on tax status that favored large landowners at the expense of the majority of citizens) present in the Second Empire acted as overwhelming obstacles preventing the development of democratic and representative institutions.

Although one must be careful in drawing a straight-line trajectory between Bismarck and Hitler, it is clear that many of the policies pursued by Germany's first chancellor laid the foundation for the authoritarian and exclusionary practices of the National Socialist dictatorship. For example, Bismarck's pursuit of Sammlungspolitik (the politics of gathering specific group interests together) resulted in a policy of "negative integration" that produced a state characterized not by its ostensible inclusivity but rather by its marginalization and the exclusion of putative Reichsfeinde (literally enemies of the state). This policy found its practical expression in the discriminatory measures aimed at the Catholic Church and its members in the Kulturkampf (culture clash) during the 1870s and 1880s. A further example involved Bismarck's leading role in the passing of the anti-Socialist laws (1878-1890) designed to forestall the rise in political power of the German Social Democratic Party and its working-class constituency. The anti-Socialist laws restricted the right of workers to organize, prohibited publication of socialist newspapers, and resulted in the imprisonment and/or exile of many leaders of the socialist movement--measures similar to those that would be employed later by Adolf Hitler during the National Socialist "seizure of power."

Not only political leaders but military leaders as well advocated the practice of exclusionary and extremist measures during the Second Empire. In the final war of German unification against France (1870-1871), not only did Chief of the General Staff Helmuth von Moltke reject the concept of civilian control over the military; he also went so far as to frame the war against the French as "a war of extermination." The ability of the German military to run roughshod over domestic political opposition continued into the years before World War I. The Zabern Affair in October 1913 demonstrated the epitome of military arrogance and parliamentary impotence in the Second Empire. In the Alsatian village of Zabern (Saverne), a German lieutenant grossly overreacted to a domestic disturbance by usurping civilian control of the local government through a decree of martial law. The crisis pitted the elected Reichstag (Parliament) versus reactionary forces within the army. In the end, Kaiser William II supported the illegal actions of the military despite opposition from some of his own civilian advisers and a vote of censure from the Parliament. The Zabern Affair highlighted the dysfunctional relationship between the Kaiser, the military, and the Parliament--Germany wore the facade of a limited constitutional democracy, but behind this mask, authoritarianism and military prerogatives reigned supreme.

The tradition of authoritarian governance and the special status of the military certainly shaped the unique trajectory of German history, but it was the insidious intellectual influence of an exclusionary ultranationalistic volkish ideology that paved the long road from Berlin to Auschwit z. For the proponents of volkish thought, Germans were not Germans simply by birth within definable borders or through the shared use of a common language; rather "real Germanness" resulted only through a shared bloodline (jus sanguinis). Within Germany by the end of the nineteenth century, the Jew had been widely characterized as the foreign "other" within influential sections of the German intellectual community. The writings of the historian Heinrich von Treitschke identified the Jews as "dangerous," "alien," and "cosmopolitan" elements within German society. Treitschke's oft-quoted description of the Jews as "Germany's misfortune" placed Jews into the role of an unwelcome and foreign element within the German culture. The journalist Wilhelm Marr, the originator of the term anti-Semitism, argued that the process of Jewish assimilation and intermarriage had caused the corruption of the German corporate body. He exhorted the German people to unleash their wrath to combat this perceived victory of the Jews over the Volk (the German people).

Marr's conflation of German nationalism, the Volk, and the "Jewish Question" set the stage for a radicalization of racial theory in the late nineteenth century. The emergence of racial theorists such as the German Eugen Dühring and the extreme Germanophile Houston Stewart Chamberlain heralded the advent of a new philosophy of racial science. These racialists argued in favor of immutable physical and genetic characteristics such as blood and skull length as determinants of cultural identity. They, in turn, believed that relative values could be assigned to specific cultures thereby allowing for their rank ordering. The bastardization of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection provided the final ingredient to the poisonous stew of racialist philosophy within Germany at the turn of the century. Chamberlain used the theory of social Darwinism to present a worldview that separated groups into culture creators and culture destroyers. He contended that the Teutonic or Aryan culture creators were locked in a life-and-death struggle against the culture destroyers whom he identified as the Jewish race. In this way Chamberlain bound chauvinistic nationalism with the Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest. In turn this linkage of chauvinistic nationalism and anti-Semitic rhetoric shaped the tone of right-wing German nationalist paroles in the period after the Great War.

The origins and course of World War I arose as a result of the aggressive and expansionist goals of German military and political leaders. The German leadership launched a war of conquest and annexation designed to achieve German political and economic control over a greater Mitteleuropa (the heart of Europe). These plans were formulated in the "September Program 1914" (a program involving vast annexations throughout Europe as Germany's goal in the war) and partially realized with the draconian peace of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918), a peace in which Russia was forced to cede approximately 1.3 million square miles and 62 million of its population to German control.

By 1918 the facade of parliamentary control was completely stripped away with the emergence of a military autocracy under the control of General Erich Ludendorff and the Army Supreme Command. The actions of the Supreme Command again demonstrated the fragility of political and personal freedoms within the German state; however, even these measures could not prevent a German defeat. The loss of World War I proved a severe psychological shock to the majority of the German population. The wildly exaggerated optimism of German propaganda and the fact that German troops were still occupying Allied territory led to a widespread feeling of suspended disbelief, if not incredulity, as Germans learned of the Kaiser's abdication and the signing of the armistice in November 1918. Still, the proclamation of a new Republic under the control of the Social Democratic government of Friedrich Ebert offered Germany and her citizens one final opportunity to throw off the authoritarian traditions and exclusionary practices of the past. Like in 1848, Germany in 1918 had reached a fork in the road; one path led to democratization and a place among the family of nations, and the other path followed the continued course of German singularity and authoritarian rule.

The Weimar Republic (1918-1933) was not perhaps "crippled at birth," but it suffered from a number of congenital defects. Germany's first democracy faced many problems, including structural weaknesses in the Weimar constitution, the deleterious role of antidemocratic elites, the influence of ultranationalistic ideology, the radicalization of mass politics, and the financial crises of 1923 and 1929. Ultimately, the Weimar experiment failed due to a combination of social, political, and economic factors. In the political arena, Weimar witnessed a trend toward an electoral polity correctly described as a "democracy with no democrats." One of the first fatal compromises made by the Social Democratic government involved cutting a deal with the officer corps, thus allowing a reactionary military elite to defend their antidemocratic prerogatives from within the government. The antidemocratic leanings of the Reichswehr (German Military) were never more clearly demonstrated than during the refusal of the army leadership to take action against a right-wing coup attempt in March 1920 (Kapp Putsch). The government survived the attempted coup, but the incident again demonstrated the disdain among the traditional elites for the Republic.

The National Socialist electoral breakthrough in 1930 (the Nazis became the second largest faction in the parliament) along with the dramatic success of July 1932 reflected a willingness of a large section of the German population to revert to a past authoritarian and exclusionary tradition in the face of the worldwide economic hardships caused by the aftereffects of the Great Depression in 1929. It is often argued that at no time did the National Socialists receive a majority of the German vote. Although technically correct, one should not overlook the fact that almost 13.8 million Germans (37 percent of all voters) cast their ballot for an ultranationalist and demonstrably anti-Semitic party in July 1932. It is also argued that the November elections of 1932 in which the National Socialists lost 2 million voters demonstrated the rejection of extreme Nazi actions. However, this argument ignores the fact that 11.7 million voters remained committed to the National Socialists despite these excesses and the Party's anti- Semitic platform.

American historian Thomas Childers conducted an empirical analysis of Weimar voting patterns that conclusively established the appeal of the Nazi Party throughout a broad cross section of German society. The German electorate turned in significant numbers toward the Nazis for several reasons. Certainly, the charisma of the Führer, Adolf Hitler, played an important role. Likewise, Hitler's rejection of the restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles (1919) and his open renunciation of the "war guilt" clause (a clause in the treaty that forced Germany to accept full responsibility for starting the war) were acts that resonated within many social groups and classes. In addition, Hitler's promise to restore order had an intrinsic appeal to groups that desired the return of stability in the wake of the economic slump and political violence of the late 1920s. Likewise, the military elites were in essential agreement with Hitler's plans for rearmament and expansion. They may have expressed misgivings over tactics, methods, and timing, but they certainly saw Hitler and his party as a real if not somewhat prickly gift. In addition, wealthy industrialists may not have provided the funding for Hitler's rise to power, but they certainly recognized the benefits that might be gained with a chancellor who could control the demands of the labor unions. Each of these groups had their own particular reasons for supporting Hitler and his party, and although some may not have shared completely his anti-Semitic views, the exclusionary measures adopted by the Nazis against the Jews were not enough to generate widespread opposition to the regime. The willingness of many Germans to accept Hitler's tirades against the Jews reflected the latent appeal of anti-Semitism across a broad spectrum of society. Indeed, Hitler's philosophy simply echoed the themes of late-nineteenth-century Volkish thought by emphasizing nationalism and the concept of a unique German cultural community based on the singular quality of shared blood. In the end, Hitler was only continuing a policy established by Bismarck, except the new Reichsfeinde were not Catholics or Socialists but rather Jews. However, annihilation and not discrimination constituted the objective of National Socialist racial policy.

The exclusion of the Jews from German society proved to be the first step in a process that led to the loss of their civil and political rights, the expropriation of their property, and ultimately their murder. Without doubt, Hitler and his henchmen constructed the roads leading to Treblinka, Belzec, and Auschwitz, and they are responsible for the subsequent annihilation of 11 million persons, including Jews, Sinti and Roma (Gypsies), Poles, homosexuals, and Slavs. Still, the gas chambers constructed to kill Jews at Auschwitz or those used to kill handicapped Germans within the borders of the Third Reich could not have been built without the foundation laid by an historical tradition of authoritarian rule and exclusionary practices. The Third Reich ultimately traced its origins, when not its genocidal impulse, to the antidemocratic practices of the Second Empire.

-- Edward B. Westermann, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill


Ghetto Humor

Life in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II was grim. The following story that comes out of that time and place illustrates the sardonic as well as defiant humor of the Jewish inhabitants.

A police officer comes into a Jewish home and wants to confiscate the possessions. The woman cries, pleading that she is a widow and has a child to support. The officer agrees not to take the things, on one condition--that she guess which of his eyes is the artificial one.

"The left one," the woman guesses.

"How did you know?"

"Because that one has the human look."

Source: Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), p. 90.

FURTHER READINGS


References


Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 191 9-1 933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983);

Fritz Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War (New York: Norton, 1967);

Jost Hermand, Old Dreams of a New Reich: Volkish Utopias and National Socialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992);

Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, 1840-1945Old Dreams of a New Reich: Volkish Utopias and National Socialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969);

William M. McGovern, From Luther to Hitler (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1946);

George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964);

Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871-1918 (Leamington Spa, U.K. & Dover, N.H.: Berg, 1985);

Wolfgang Wippermann and Michael Burleigh, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Опубликовано на Порталусе 20 сентября 2007 года

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