The following was composed in October 2014 for Dr. Christopher Mauriello's course on the Holocaust at Salem State University in Salem, Massachusetts. The issues it addresses are often passionately debated, and my inexpertise with this history further sets me up for harsh criticism. Hopefully the reader will nonetheless find it constructively thought-provoking. Feedback and corrections welcome.
The
decisive shift in Nazi policy toward Jews from one of persecution to one of
promoting Jewish mortality begins with the ghettoization of Polish Jews
following the September 1939 invasion of Poland. Subsequent policies—mass
shootings, gassings, death marches—represent transitions of scope and manner. That
such policies were conceived and adopted with little principled opposition is
evidence of a particularly virulent form of German antisemitism.
In
December 1941, the World War which Hitler warned of in his January 30, 1939
speech materialized. With Japan and the United States now in the war, Hitler
gathered the party leadership to announce that the promised destruction of
Europe’s Jews was to be put into operation.[1]
In subsequent months and years, gas chambers would be constructed, the ghettoes
would be “liquidated,” and deportations from the West would be redirected from
eastern ghettoes to camps such as Auschwitz.
Yet,
neither this meeting nor the subsequent Wannsee Conference of January 1942 marked
a fundamental shift in Nazi policy. Wannsee represented the bureaucratization
of a policy of mass murder that had been developing its own momentum beginning
with Operation Barbarossa. Months before, the “systematic destruction” of
Jewish men had already begun in conquered Soviet territory. This policy
expanded to include women and children, so that beginning in September “entire
Jewish communities were liquidated.”[2]
Furthermore,
ghettoization had begun in Poland in 1940, a year and a half before Operation
Barbarossa. The purpose of ghettoization was not mass murder, but massive death
was recognized and accepted as an inevitable consequence. The Nazis understood
that—especially in an age before widespread availability of antibiotics—the
imposition of massive crowding and unsanitary conditions would promote death,
as of course would the denial of access to food. Jews fleeing the starvation
and disease of the ghetto were to be shot. “We sentence the Jews in the ghetto
to death by hunger or we shoot them” acknowledged one top Nazi public health
official.[3]
Daniel
Goldhagen has argued that many or most Germans subscribed to a particularly
virulent form of antisemitism—eliminationist antisemitism—and that this was an
essential factor in bringing about the Holocaust. The “ordinary men”
(Christopher Browning’s term) who carried out the Holocaust did so because
“they shared a Hitlerian view of Jews.”[4]
Browning has countered that many Germans participated reluctantly, and that
non-Germans cooperated with German genocidal policies.[5]
“Demonological German antisemitism is in fact not a sufficient explanation” of
the Holocaust, writes Browning.[6]
It
is, however, a necessary one. The rapidly evolving geopolitical situation of
Europe was an essential factor in rendering the Holocaust conceivable and feasible,
but the geopolitical situation does not explain why Jewish mortality was desirable.
Each time the geopolitical situation opened new opportunities to increase the
mortality of Jews, the Nazi leadership, with little to no principled protest
from Germans in-the-know, exploited those opportunities with vim, first with ghettoization,
then with mass shootings, and finally with gas chambers and death marches.
[1] Christian Gerlach,
“The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler’s Decision in
Principle to Exterminate All European Jews,” The Journal of Modern History Vol. 70, No. 4 (December 1998), pp.
784-787.
[2] Gerlach, 761-762.
[3] Dr. Jost Walbaum,
quoted in Arthur Allen The Fantastic
Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged
the Nazis (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014); excerpted at slate.com August 5,
2014, accessed October 18, 2014: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/08/typhus_and_lice_in_jewish_ghettos_nazi_doctors_perverse_groupthink.2.html
[4] “The ‘Willing
Executioners’/’Ordinary Men’ Debate,” Selections from the Symposium, April 8,
1996, 2. Available online from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/Publication_OP_1996-01.pdf
[5]“The ‘Willing
Executioners’/’Ordinary Men’ Debate,” 17-18, 19-20.
[6]“The ‘Willing
Executioners’/’Ordinary Men’ Debate,” 20.
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