B002QX43GQ EBOK

by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah

  Slaughtering people on a scale unparalleled in human history came to the Germans during the Nazi period as easily and reflexively as swatting flies. The Germans actively killed most of their victims as part of an explicit exterminationist policy, by shooting, gassing, and purposely starving them to death. The communists killed most or even the vast majority of their victims with catastrophic, ideologically induced, and cockeyed economic policies, using humans as production factors, or sacrificing human beings for humanity’s good or history’s march. The Soviets executed perhaps around 10 percent of their more than eight million killed. Had Mao not hatched his murderous Great Leap Forward economic scheme, then millions, indeed perhaps twenty million more Chinese, would not have died. None of this makes these regimes’ murderousness any less murderous than the murderousness of others, or their victims’ deaths any less morally condemnable, significant, or meaningful. But unlike those of the other colossally mass eliminationist and murderous regimes, the Nazis’ drive to slaughter people was organic to their ideology with its racist-biological conception of humanity and human worth and its concomitant drive for racial purity, expansion, and dominance. It was an ideology of destruction.

  Had the Germans won the war, they would have slaughtered the five million additional Jews documented at Wannsee and, if able to, Jews beyond Europe, especially in the United States. They would have slaughtered everywhere mentally ill and developmentally disabled people; all people they called Gypsies; and Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, and other peoples to their east in the tens of millions, as they refashioned the Eurasian continent and humanity. They would have slaughtered, or prevented the birth of, children, as the biological seeds of peoples they wanted to destroy or numerically control, or considered superfluous. As they moved into Africa and Asia, they would have slaughtered or let perish untold millions of various subhumans, Asians being deemed racial cripples and blacks semi-apes. Had the Germans prevailed, they would have destroyed civilization and humanity as we know it.

  If the communists were a heresy on Western civilization, accepting many of its fundamental values and tenets if in a perverted way, the Nazis were an apostasy, seeking its destruction and replacement by a German racial dominion, a world of masters and, of those permitted to live, mainly slaves. After seventy years of communist rule, Russia, Ukraine, the Baltics, and elsewhere, countries and peoples resumed control of their futures. After almost half a century of Soviet domination in Central Europe, in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere, the countries’ peoples emerged intact and educated, and able to pick up, much the poorer in many ways, where they had been nationally and culturally. Had the Nazis ruled these same lands for half or three quarters of a century, no Ukraine or Ukrainian people, no Poland or Polish people, no Russia or Russian people would have been left to resuscitate. The Germans would have repopulated their lands with colonists, slaughtered and enslaved their peoples, obliterated their religions and churches, their cultures and communities. The Germans developed plans to begin this vast systematic destruction, most notably the General Plan for the East, and had in almost no time already started to implement their desires. After half a century or more under a victorious Nazi Germany, European, Western, even pre-Nazi German civilization, would have been destroyed, unrecognizable, incapable of resurrection. Such was Nazism’s caesura with Western civilization. Such was its unparalleled destructiveness.

  No general structural view of mass murder or elimination can account for each individual system’s perpetrators’ enormously variable treatment of their potential victims and then, once an eliminationist campaign begins, of the different groups they actually victimize. Such structural accounts—precisely because they deem irrelevant the perpetrators’ conception of the victims—imply, instead of such variation, a structurally, authority-based, or psychologically or social-psychologically induced uniformity in treatment. Different potential target groups’ different objective political challenges or threats also cannot explain the perpetrators’ varied treatment of potential and actual victims, because most victims posed no threat. After the eliminationist regimes quickly consolidated control, they faced almost no organized domestic political opposition (especially the extremely popular Nazis, widely seen as legitimate in Germany). Each country’s people were in varying combinations supportive or prostrate.

  Aside from political leaders’ strategic decisions about timing and scope, eliminationist programs’ local and regional implementation varies for two principal reasons. Highly centrally organized mass slaughters and eliminations tend to produce more consistency. In those with greater depth and breadth of the target groups’ dehumanization and/or demonization, the perpetrators and the supporting population tend to treat the victims more uniformly. Thus, less centrally controlled eliminationist assaults can produce substantial regional and local variation, depending on local leaders’ decisions and variable local beliefs about the targets. This occurred in Cambodia because the Khmer Rouge’s regional cadres were somewhat differently oriented toward the eliminationist project; in Rwanda because, depending on local leaders and local Hutu-Tutsi relations, some communes’ and villages’ Hutu were easier to unleash into mass-murderous assaults while in others more Hutu dissented and resisted; and in Indonesia, because the centrally initiated and directed murderous assault depended greatly on local leaders and self-organizing groups of executioners, producing substantial regional variation owing to the nature of the hatreds and preexisting communal conflicts. A better and more differentiated understanding of the relationship between eliminationist assaults’ centralized initiation and organization, and their local organization and implementation, requires far more knowledge about most individual eliminationist programs than we have.

  Similarly, far too little is known about the percentage of dissenters and resisters among perpetrators and among the peoples in whose names the perpetrators act. In many eliminationist assaults, as we now know, little evidence exists of widespread, principled disapproval of the general eliminationist project itself or the specific killings, expulsions, and incarcerations, either among the perpetrators or broader populaces, which reflects their dehumanized and/or demonized conception of the victims’ considerable depth and breadth. Nevertheless, any eliminationist politics has dissenters and resisters, some of whom succeed. Knowing more, substantially more, about their numbers and nature (we know so little probably because usually they were small minorities) would considerably deepen our understanding of individual eliminationist assaults and the occasional variation in their implementation’s success.

  Communal Worlds

  Although significant, dissenters, both individuals and small groups, receive disproportionate attention compared to an overwhelmingly important but neglected theme: the perpetrators’ communities. In Hitler’s Willing Executioners, I wrote about the Holocaust’s perpetrators in a manner that restored their humanity. I treated them fully as human beings having views about their deeds and making decisions about how to act, not as abstractions wrested from their lives’ real social contexts but, as they actually were, embedded in their social relations. Such an approach was at the time absent, even stridently opposed. The German perpetrators of the Holocaust and of eliminationist and exterminationist assaults on Poles, Russians, Sinti, Roma, and other targeted peoples operated within broader communities. They undertook their deeds often over long periods, always with considerable time on their hands to reflect. They had social lives. Wives and girlfriends accompanied many of them (many of whom also became perpetrators). The perpetrators went to church, played sports, even organized athletic competitions. They attended cultural events, went to movies, and had parties. They wrote revealing letters to loved ones and went home on furlough. Most of all they talked—while on duty, while off duty, while eating meals and driving places, among themselves and others, discussing the days’ events, their historic deeds, and more. Those many German perpetrators carrying out their brutal eliminationist tasks in Germany itself, especially in the camps
densely blanketing the country, often lived at home. After a day of mistreating and brutalizing, and even killing victims, they returned to their families, had dinner, played with their children. They spent time with friends, also went to church, and did all the social and communal things, including talking about work, that people do. What is true about the German perpetrators’ rich social and communal lives is also obviously true, a commonplace, about other mass eliminations’ perpetrators.

  Yet if you pretend people killing, expelling, or brutalizing others are atomized individuals, are under authority’s hammer or intense social psychological pressure with no capacity to think, or are bureaucratic abstractions instead of real human beings; if you toss around mind-deadening phrases such as “banality of evil” or “obedience to authority” or “group pressure,” or treat mass murder as if an artificial social psychological environment, such as the Zimbardo Experiment of a tiny number of people (twenty-four) for a short time (six days) with no experimental controls to speak of, so it was not really an “experiment” in a scientific or social scientific sense, is a guide to its perpetrators’ reality and existences as people with families, friends, and communal lives; or if you postulate these fictive and dehumanizing reductions of the perpetrators as a tautological account of their actions and, more broadly, as a way of conceiving and discussing them, then there is no reason, as we have seen, to investigate how they come to hold their views about the world and their victims (or even what those views are). There is also no reason to examine the perpetrators in their multiple communal contexts while committing their eliminationist acts or to examine their social relations, ways of living, and activities. The hardheaded questions we ask to ascertain the perpetrators’ motives and their sources, and the bystanders’ attitudes and their sources, also provide answers that can be built upon to explore the perpetrators’ relationship to the bystanders helping to form the communal contexts of the perpetrators’ eliminationist actions and lives.

  The analytically unfortunate fact is that we know little about eliminationist perpetrators’ communal lives. Some perpetrators, in the Soviet gulag’s frozen reaches, were removed from conventional social life. Yet many other eliminationist perpetrators are like the Germans, going home to dinner and out with friends, partaking in cultural events, attending church, talking about their deeds with others and among themselves—comparing notes, swapping stories, and discussing their deeds’ historic significance—and carrying on with their lives. This was so for the Japanese in Asia, the British in Kenya, the Indonesians slaughtering communists, the communist Chinese, the Tutsi in Burundi, the Serbs in Bosnia, the Hutu in Rwanda, the Political Islamists in Sudan, and so many more, certainly of most perpetrators killing people within their own country. As do other Hutu executioners, Léopord Twagirayezu conveys the easy conversational and convivial nature of the perpetrators’ talk and social lives: “In the evening, we told about Tutsi who had been obstinate, those who had gotten themselves caught, those who had gotten away. Some of us had contests. Others made predictions or bets to win an extra Primus [beer]. The bragging amused us—even if you lost, you put on a smile.”18

  The evidence strongly suggests that perpetrators live in a milieu overwhelmingly supporting and affirming their treatment of the victims in the name of and for their people. As with eliminationist assaults’ many other aspects, if broad principled opposition or dissent had existed, then there would be abundant credible contemporaneous evidence about it. It does not. Nothing suggests that family and friends, or community members generally, saw or treated the perpetrators with disapproval, let alone the withering condemnation that would be directed at those considered among humanity’s worst criminals. Nothing suggests that family, friends, and community members treated the killing and other eliminationist acts as anything more distasteful than an unpleasant part of a necessary eliminationist time and project. Nothing suggests that the perpetrators’ community and social and recreational lives were normalcy’s salve to guilty consciences. And nothing suggests that their communities were saying to them: You are a good man despite what you do. Rather the communal verdict was: You are a good man because of what you do. Nothing suggests that during eliminationist onslaughts the perpetrators’ existences are psychically and social-relationally fragmented. Rather, they consisted of integrated selves, with integrated minds, in integrated communities with their self-conceived heroic, violent acts on behalf of their country, their people, their God, or humanity harmonizing with their communal existences and with family, friends, and acquaintances. In Indonesia, throughout Bali, “whole villages, including children, took part in an island-wide witch-hunt for Communists, who were slashed and clubbed and chopped to death by communal consent.”19 In Bosnia, the ethnic Serbian community was so supportive of the eliminationist assault, and so deeply complicit and involved, that the extremely knowledgeable Alisa Muratčauš, president of the Association of Concentration Camp Torture Survivors in Sarajevo, maintains that “a lot of people from Republika Srpska [Bosnian Serbs] were involved in the crimes, and I think that actually maybe 70 or 80 percent of Republika Srpska’s population should be actually punished in prison, in jail.” Adamant that she does not mean they merely “supported” the crimes of raping, torturing, expelling, and killing people, destroying their houses, and more, she explains that they “actually committed crimes. People who returned to their original community meet very often their perpetrators, [who say] ‘Oh, hi, hello.’”20 In Rwanda, an in-depth study about one community of killers shows how the perpetrators slaughtered their victims with incredible cruelty and lived their lives with family, friends, and community in a thoroughly integrated and symbiotic way. Jean Hatzfeld, its author, writes: “In 1994, between eleven in the morning on Monday April 11 and two in the afternoon on Saturday May 14, about fifty thousand Tutsi, out of a population of around fifty-nine thousand, were massacred by machete, murdered every day of the week, from nine-thirty in the morning until four in the afternoon, by Hutu neighbors and militiamen, on the hills of the commune of Nyamata, in Rwanda.” This, he adds, “is the point of departure of this book.”21

  Clothing of the victims, Nyamata Genocide Memorial, Bugesera District, Rwanda, April 2008

  Although we need more evidence to draw firmly grounded general conclusions for certain eliminationist assaults, the substantial existing evidence suggests that, overwhelmingly, ordinary people, moved by their hatreds and prejudices, by their beliefs in victims’ evil or noxiousness, by their conviction that they and others ought to eliminate the victims, support their countrymen, ethnic group members, or village or communal members’ killing, expelling, or brutalizing others—as Germans did during the Nazi period, as Poles of Jedwabne did, as the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe did regarding ethnic Germans, as British settlers in Kenya did, as Bosnian Serbs did, and as Hutu across Rwanda did. The killers, and those near them in their cities, towns, and villages, and especially those emotionally dear to them, constitute mutually supportive eliminationist communities. Alphonse Hitiyaremye, a Hutu mass murderer, conveys how the Nyamata commune’s ordinary Hutu had this unmistakably affirmed, starting with the killing’s first day, a machete butchering orgy of five thousand Tutsi holed up in the local church and then in the Sainte-Marthe Maternity Hospital:The first evening, coming home from the massacre in the church, our welcome was very well put together by the organizers. We all met up back on the soccer field. Guns were shooting in the air, whistles and suchlike musical instruments were sounding.

  The children pushed into the center all the cows rounded up during the day. Burgomaster [the mayor] Bernard offered the forty fattest ones to the interahamwe, to thank them, and the other cows to the people, to encourage them. We spent the evening slaughtering the cattle, singing, and chatting about the new days on the way. It was the most terrific celebration.22

  The perpetrators of mass annihilation and elimination know they exist in supportive eliminationist milieus; they themselves witness the open communal expressi
ons of support. The eliminationist campaign against the Jews was immensely popular among Germans not only during the pre-exterminationist phase of the 1930s, as everyone in Germany knew—the regime and ordinary Germans alike openly celebrated it with fanfare—but also during the mass-murderous phase starting in 1941.

  To see how this knowledge of the Germans’ broad base of support for the Jews’ elimination was acted upon by the regime, shared by German bystanders, and communicated by the perpetrators to their loved ones, we need merely to look to Europe’s largest concentration of Jews, the Warsaw Ghetto camp in the heart of Poland’s capital. Did the German leadership try to hide half a million Jews’ inhuman conditions? Not at all. In the midst of the Germans’ all-out extermination of the Jews, the German Labor Front’s recreational organization for German workers, called Strength Through Joy, organized coach tours of the ghetto where the Germans were starving the Jews to death on fewer than four hundred calories a day.