Many ancient myths are Manichean tales of good and evil, creation and destruction, joy and suffering, and the world’s shaping and reshaping. Such myths resonate with many perpetrators’ self-conceptions, vaulting aspirations, and omnipotent powers to obliterate hated peoples—as Turks thought about Armenians, Germans about Jews, and Hutu about Tutsi. They resonate with why and what the perpetrators do to alter the world. They resonate with the perpetrators’ dual sense of acting in goodness’s cause and without restraint. Human conduct’s ordinary rules do not apply. Volcanic violence and the eradication of peoples ensues. What could be more godlike?
Seeing the perpetrators as godlike and world refashioners is still more apt for those self-consciously acting in a deity’s name, often a secular god, in order to serve their people, purify them, hasten the end of days, prevent the apocalypse. While perpetrators are focused on the enemy before them—the individual Herero, Armenian, Jew, Pole, Korean, Kulak, Chinese, Kikuyu, communist, Bangladeshi imperialist, Maya, Kurd, Bosnian, Tutsi, Hutu, or infidel—they concentrate on the immediate task. Yet they also know that their eliminationist politics refashions their world. They discuss it. They see it. They understand how they do it.
From top to bottom eliminationist perpetrators refashion the world, yet the transformations do not all have the same effects or origins. Understanding the actual refashionings requires us to look to the perpetrators’ actual mindsets, to their conceptions of what they want, including crucially their conceptions of the victims whom the perpetrators (wrongly) understand as the causes of their actions.i
I examine here four of the central refashionings of eliminationist perpetrators. I start with their most general reshaping of the world, their overall treatment, and variation in treatment, of different victim groups, including relative mortality rates. Actual minds do create different eliminationist worlds. I then move to a critical, underinvestigated theme, how actual minds create different communal worlds, namely the perpetrators’ communities. The perpetrators have a ready-made new social world, their eliminationist institutions. Beyond them, the perpetrators are embedded in a series of broader communities, including national communities, each a world of relations, sometimes overlapping, sometimes discrete, which the perpetrators alter to varying degrees. One such communal world, the camp world, bears special attention, as perpetrators are its founders. Actual minds create different camp worlds, for the perpetrators a new societal system, and for the victims a new immiserating world. Why do they create this new world, and how do different camp systems function? Finally, at the most personal, elemental level, actual minds create different personal worlds. The perpetrators refashion their own and their victims’ individual worlds, with their personalized treatment of every individual, especially with their mind- and body-destroying cruelty.
Perpetrators’ different actual minds producing different eliminationist politics create different actual worlds.
Eliminationist Worlds
When political leaders activate eliminationist beliefs and their bearers are ready to act on their logic, two things conjoin to greatly influence what happens: the perpetrators’ and especially the leaders’ conception of the victims (dehumanized or demonized, and the nature of their threat) and their political goals, including for social and political transformation. The perpetrators’ thinking about the world in itself produces substantial variation in their reshaping of it, in their treatment of victims and potential victims. Different eliminationist regimes’ perpetrators differently dispose of victim groups. And a single eliminationist regime’s perpetrators also often treat different victim groups dissimilarly.
We can further examine these variations by looking at certain regimes, conventionally called totalitarian, that, in seeking to refashion society or the multitude of societies, have initiated vast domestic and international eliminationist programs to exert total control, purify, fend off the apocalypse, bring about the promised paradisial future.
Within the Germans’ empire, the differential treatment of the peoples of different “races,” biologies, and allegiances varied on so many dimensions that just a few examples must suffice. Beginning with the most obvious but wholly overlooked issue, never accorded its critical analytical significance, are the peoples Germans marked or did not mark for eliminationist treatment. Neither the German leadership nor those implementing policies treated all conquered peoples similarly.
Against the French, Germany’s greatest and most dangerous enemy, the Germans did not undertake a mass eliminationist assault. In seventy years, the Germans and French had fought three major wars. In World War I, Germany suffered a devastating and humiliating military defeat, followed by the Versailles Treaty’s ignominious postwar settlement, which Germans principally blamed on the French. Germany had to cede substantial regions to various countries, including Alsace-Lorraine to France and the Saar to a fifteen-year League of Nations mandate, which meant French occupation until 1935. Germany had to pay economically crippling reparations to France, and, owing to conflicts over reparations in 1923, France occupied and pillaged Germany’s industrial heartland, the Ruhr, producing Germany’s most ruinous economic disaster ever, hyperinflation: One trillion marks equaled one dollar. During World War II, the German occupation of France was severe, but Germany did not even initially occupy all of France, granting its southern part formal independence with its own (albeit puppet) government in Vichy. The Germans did not systematically exterminate the French, save French Jews. French life, society, and culture continued.
Flanking Germany to the east as France did to the west was militarily anemic Poland. Poles had not caused Germany and Germans a hundredth of the conflict, loss of life, and suffering the French had. For decades, France loomed largest in Germany’s geostrategic and military thinking, as a concern and an actual martial antagonist. Poland and Poles were a comparative afterthought, having not even existed as an independent country for a hundred years. The Versailles Treaty resurrected it, ceded it German territories, thus giving Germany one realistic antagonism against Poland paralleling France. Yet unlike the Germans’ conventional, if exploitive and brutal, occupation of France, the Germans articulated and practiced thoroughgoing eliminationist politics against the Polish people and were turning Poland into a giant concentration camp. They slaughtered segments of the Polish elite and many other Poles (in addition to the nearly completed extermination of Poland’s three million Jews) and were reducing those Poles they would not kill or expel into helots, beings toiling in abject servitude and slavery. Martin Bormann, Adolf Hitler’s chief of staff, in “Eight Principles for the Government of the Eastern Territories,” summarized Hitler’s views on the Poles’ and other Slavic peoples’ futures the Germans were creating:The Slavs are to work for us. Insofar as we don’t need them, they may die. Therefore compulsory vaccination and German health services are superfluous. The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable. They may use contraceptives and practice abortion, the more the better. Education is dangerous. It is sufficient if they can count up to a hundred. At best an education is admissible which produces useful servants for us. Every educated person is a future enemy. Religion we leave to them as a means of diversion. As to food, they are not to get more than necessary. We are the masters, we come first.3
The Germans’ vastly different treatment of the French and the Poles had nothing to do with war, nothing to do with each peoples’ respective enmity for Germans or suffering they had caused Germans, nothing to do with the intensity of the ethnic conflicts, nothing to do with Germans’ psychological reaction to fortune, whether good or bad, and nothing to do with their expectations or the realities of either people’s resistance. The Germans’ different treatment of the French and Poles had nothing to do with these or the other structural explanations denying the perpetrators’ agency and the critical, almost all-defining element: the Germans’ racial-biological conception of each national group. Indeed, structural explanations suggest that had the Germans subjected one of the peoples t
o an eliminationist assault, they would have targeted the French. But the Germans did the opposite. Why? From Hitler on down, Germans considered the French (though enemies) part of the human family, but the Poles a subhuman race, rightless beings for the master race to use or eliminate as necessary. Even more acutely, the related question poses itself: Why did the Germans slate the defenseless Jews for total extermination? Many Jews were themselves devoted and loyal Germans. Non-German Jews, many germanophiles, loved German culture, teaching their children German. Unlike the French, they harbored no enmity for and had never harmed Germany.
Surveying Europe, the Germans’ treatment of conquered peoples, in overall policy and by the ordinary Germans on the ground, accorded with the Germans’ notions of different “races” and peoples, and about individual and group biology, which, bizarrely, came down to stature, physiognomy, coloration, and notions about “blood.” They privileged tall, blond and blue-eyed, thin-faced people. They valued peoples or “races” in particular, and then individuals within different races, mainly according to the people’s proximity to or distance from this racist ideal. The Germans treated the Nordic peoples, such as Danes, the best, Western Europeans the next best, southern Europeans worse but still much better than Slavic peoples, whom they treated most brutally and murderously, except for peoples Germans deemed racially or biologically polluted or dangerous, mentally ill and developmentally disabled people, Sintis, Romas, and the Jews.
Any theory or explanation of mass murder or elimination must account for the Jews’ singular position among eliminationism’s victims, during our time and throughout history. Jews have been eliminationist politics’ most frequent and varied victims—victimized longer, by the most diverse groups of perpetrators, and in the most countries. Speaking this obvious truth about the Jews’ singularity as victims does not make their mass murder or eliminationist persecutions factually or morally worse.4 It merely establishes factual differences, and that any general account must prominently deal with the singularity. Furthermore, because so many states, regimes, and peoples have practiced eliminationism toward Jews in so many forms, the Jews’ fate provides particular insight into eliminationist politics and assaults. Just as the Nazis were our time’s most omnivorous and versatile mass murderers and eliminators, their principal, most passionately pursued victims, the Jews, are unparalleled among eliminationist onslaughts’ victims. More specifically:1. The Holocaust is our time’s only mass murder where the perpetrators consciously sought (even declaring as much) the total extermination of the targeted group, without exception, everywhere (even if their immediate operational plans were mainly restricted to the entire European continent). Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, in a self-congratulatory speech in 1943 to the assembled governmental and Nazi Party leaders, at once echoed their common beliefs and articulated the imperative guiding their ongoing campaign: “This people must disappear from the face of the earth.”5
2. The Holocaust (together with the parallel killing of the Sinti and Roma) is the only mass murder that perpetrators carried out outside their country not aimed at territorial aggrandizement or consolidation.
3. Aside from a few other groups the Nazis targeted, the Holocaust is the only mass murder without any foundation in realistic conflict.
4. The Holocaust is the only mass murder assented and contributed to by significant portions of many different national, ethnic, and religious groups (some themselves being attacked by the Germans), and in which coalitions of governments participated in an international genocidal alliance.
5. The Jews are the only group against whom there has been and continues to be (among Political Islamists and many Arabs) an ongoing eliminationist politics (including exterminationist moments) across centuries, even millennia, perpetrated by enormously varied regimes, political movements, and peoples. These eliminationist politics have also spanned three continents and found grounding in two major religions, Christianity and Islam, and the world’s principal secular religion, Marxism.
6. The Jews are the only people attacked for being wealthy and being poor, for being stateless and having a state, for remaining separate from countries’ majority groups and assimilating into them, for being religious and being secular.
7. The profound anti-Jewish prejudice, known as antisemitism, whatever its sometimes substantial variations, is the only discourse, ideology, hatred that was and is truly transnational and woven into modern (as well as premodern) civilization’s very fabric. 6 Hence the eliminationist assault upon Jews’ transnationality and endurance.
The distinctiveness of the Germans’ total annihilationist assault upon the Jews in itself shows that the Germans’ conception of peoples and groups (also shaping the Germans’ political, including imperial, designs) explains not only whom they targeted (Jews and Poles) and did not target (Danes and French) for eliminationist politics. It also explains the Germans’ differing eliminationist means and treatment of the various peoples they did choose to target in eliminationist onslaughts. Sociologist Anna Pawełczyńska, a Polish survivor of Auschwitz, explains:A prisoner’s nationality and citizenship . . . became a differentiating criterion with far-reaching consequences for his or her chances of surviving. Replacing national distinctions, pseudo-scientific theories of race began to take drastic effect by ranking the different nationalities of prisoners, thus spelling out for them their turns to die. That ranking decidedly foredoomed their chances of survival. First place in this sequence of dying was assigned to prisoners of Jewish descent and Gypsies . . . and the proof was their mass murder through the use of assembly-line techniques.
Slavs (especially Poles and Soviet citizens) were put in second place; the expressions of this were the various methods of murder used against them at different times and the (unrealized) program of general sterilization.
Third came the other nations of Europe for whom (as the documents show) the program of extermination or exploitation had not been precisely established. Only prisoners of German nationality were excluded from this plan; for this and various other reasons the odds for their survival were considerably greater than those of other prisoners .7
The Germans’ conception of various peoples and groups is the only adequate explanation for which peoples the Germans exterminated totally or partially, and if partially, to what degree, for which peoples the Germans were helotizing, and how they prioritized their eliminationist assaults. It is the only adequate explanation for the relative death rates of different peoples in structurally similar situations (as the Mauthausen camp figures, cited in Chapter 4, show), and, as I discuss shortly, the Germans’ treatment of different peoples’ children and relative cruelty toward different victim peoples. It is the only adequate explanation for the Germans’ use of nonexterminationist means when dealing with other putatively lesser beings or lesser threats, and that while all other eliminationist perpetrators also employ various eliminationist means and partial assaults on their victims, the Germans always deemed nonlethal measures against the Jews inadequate unless as a stepping stone (which is how the Germans usually conceived of them) to utter extermination. Friedrich Übelhör, the top civil administrator in the Łódź District of Poland, articulated this when discussing the eventually highly productive Łódź Ghetto’s establishment: “The creation of the ghetto is, of course, only a transition measure. I shall determine at what time and with what means the ghetto—and thereby also the city of Łódź—will be cleansed of Jews. The final goal, at any rate, must be that we burn out this bubonic plague utterly.”8 The final goal. Bubonic plague. Burn it out. Utterly. He might have added for the history of eliminationist assaults: only by the Germans and only for the Jews.
Finally, and also analytically ignored, the Nazis failed to treat their real and dangerous domestic enemies as every structural theory and every theory of totalitarian politics mandates. The German political Left, especially communists, were the Nazis’ bitter enemies, having fought them in the Weimar Republic’s streets, and after World War I take
n power temporarily with a revolutionary insurgency in Bavaria. The German Left had a million-fold large, disciplined, and martial followership. Yet the Nazis did not proceed as communist totalitarian regimes did, to systematically eliminate their real enemies—the Soviets established their initial “Terror” and gulag for their czarist and other enemies. The Nazis killed comparatively few among these real domestic enemies, even among their leadership, and left their millions of followers all but unscathed—relatively unmolested, unmonitored, unthreatened. Yet in the Soviet Union’s western regions, the Germans did the opposite, extirpating the bearers of Soviet communism, which they conceived of as “Jewish-Bolshevism,” a Jewish-created and -controlled ideological disease and threat.
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