How Could This Happen
Page 1
HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN
Copyright © 2014 by Dan McMillan
Published by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.
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Designed by Jack Lenzo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McMillan, Dan, Ph.D.
How could this happen : explaining the Holocaust / Dan McMillan.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-465-03664-6 (ebook) 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Causes. 2. Germany—Social conditions—1918–1933. 3. Germany—Social conditions—1933–1945. 4. Germany—Politics and government—1933–1945. I. Title.
D804.3.M398 2014
940.53’1811—dc23
2013051212
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1:Posing the Question
Chapter 2:A Genocide Like No Other
Chapter 3:Why Germany?
Chapter 4:A World of Enemies
Chapter 5:Hardened by War
Chapter 6:Division and Disaster
Chapter 7:Why Hitler?
Chapter 8:From Dictator to Demigod
Chapter 9:Why the Jewish People?
Chapter 10: Hatred as Science
Chapter 11: The Absent Moral Compass
Chapter 12: What They Knew
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION
And we dare speak on behalf of our knowledge? We dare say: “I know?” . . . Answers: I say there are none.
—Elie Wiesel1
Why another book on the Holocaust? Because even the best histories of this catastrophe tell us how it happened, but not why. For each of the most important events of history—for example, the fall of the Roman Empire, the French Revolution, and World War I—there are many books that try to explain why the event occurred. Yet for the Holocaust we seek in vain for a book on its causes. To be sure, most narrative accounts of the Holocaust will touch on anti-Semitism, and some will also examine how Adolf Hitler managed to gain control of Germany. Yet, although Hitler and anti-Semitism were vitally important causes of the Holocaust, they form only part of the story, and not even the largest part. Even worse, the explanation of these causes usually gets lost in the mass of details that make up the narrative, and the frustrated reader finishes the book still having exactly the same question that moved him or her to start reading in the first place: Why did this happen?
It is not enough to narrate the blow-by-blow of events. A reader who wants to know why these events happened needs a book that clearly defines each cause of the Holocaust, explains its historical origins, and clarifies how it combined with the other causes to produce the most terrifying genocide in history. This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the causes of the Holocaust. This is surprising, given the fact that professional historians understand the causes quite well. Ask any group of specialists, and they can easily produce a list of major factors: Germany’s failure to become a democracy until 1918, decades after France, England, and the United States made that transition; the pointless slaughter of World War I, in which 10 million young men lost their lives; the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, without whom the Holocaust would not have happened; the increase in anti-Semitism during the four decades before Hitler took office, and its causes; the rise of “scientific” racism, the widespread belief that major genetic differences between races or nationalities was a scientifically proven fact; and psychological mechanisms that can make it easy for men to kill or allow bystanders to look the other way.
A book like this one should have been written a long time ago. If historians understand the several causes of the Holocaust, why is this book the first to pull all the causes together and explain them in straightforward language? Why have historians hesitated to undertake this vitally necessary task? Some fear that explaining the killers’ motives and actions might seem to lessen their guilt. Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi warned against trying to understand the murderers, “because to understand is almost to justify.” Yet every murderer acted with free will and had no reason to fear punishment if he refused to commit murder. No explanation can diminish the killers’ terrible guilt. Others assume that it honors the victims and does justice to their suffering to say the Holocaust was so terrible that we cannot understand it. The Auschwitz survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel rebuked scholars who sought to explain the Holocaust: “You are fortunate, I ought to envy you, but I do not. I prefer to stand on the side of the child and the mother who died before they understood the formulas and phraseology which are the basis of your science.” People also avoid explaining the Holocaust because it seems uniquely horrifying, and we worry what it may say about us, since people just like us carried out the murders.2
The Holocaust frightens people like no other event in history, evoking an instinctive horror and loathing that almost compel us to look away from it. The special horror of the Holocaust may derive from the way the Nazis completely denied the worth of human life. They declared a very large branch of humanity—many millions of Jews worldwide—to be a kind of vermin in human form that they intended to completely exterminate. “With anti-Semitism,” said Heinrich Himmler, the chief organizer of the Holocaust, “it is exactly as with delousing. . . . It is a matter of cleanliness. . . . We will soon be completely free of lice.” The Jews are the only large ethnic group to have been targeted for complete extinction, a fact that sets the Holocaust apart from all other genocides. Not only did the Nazis set out to murder every Jewish person they could find, but they also reduced them to material objects, processing their bodies for value as if they were animal carcasses: they cut off women’s hair to make textiles, tore out teeth to harvest gold fillings, and used Jewish prisoners as laboratory animals.3
In the first years after World War II, observers dismissed the murderers as a relatively limited number of born criminals, social misfits, and the mentally unhinged. This comforting illusion soon evaporated, and historians found that the overwhelming majority of killers—who may have numbered as many as 200,000—were perfectly ordinary human beings who did not differ from us in their basic psychological makeup, or at least not until they began their careers as murderers. Even worse, many tens of thousands of murderers, far from being the dregs of German society, instead represented the educated elite: doctors, lawyers, university professors, government officials, military officers of all ranks, owners and managers of large corporations, titled aristocrats, and wealthy landowners.4
When normal men and women commit history’s most radical assault on human dignity, we face terrible questions. Is every one of us capable of such boundless depravity? If the Nazis could completely deny their victims’ humanity, does any human being have inherent worth and an unquestioned right to life? If civilization’s fundamental moral standards could lose all of their authority, how can one find meaning and purpose to human existence? If one of the world’s most advanced nations could sink this low, what kind of dark and
violent future lies in store for humanity?
I first confronted these awful questions as a teenager in the 1970s, when I read a book about the Holocaust, Simon Wiesenthal’s The Murderers Among Us. To be able to live with such questions, and to maintain the faith in human goodness that has always given meaning to my life, I needed to understand why the Holocaust happened, and what it did or did not say about humankind. This need has shaped the course of my life ever since: I became completely fluent in German, double-majored in history and German in college, spent my junior year at the Freie Universität in West Berlin, and earned a history PhD from Columbia University. I then taught history at universities in New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, read everything I could about the Holocaust, constantly refined my understanding of its causes, and searched relentlessly for ways to explain these causes as clearly and concisely as I could. Throughout, I never lost sight of the central question: What does it mean to be human in the aftermath of the Holocaust?5
As I soon realized, the better we understand why the Holocaust happened, the more we can look upon the human race and humanity’s future with hope instead of despair. It took a perfect storm of broken people, destructive ideas, unbelievably bad luck, and the bleakest of circumstances to produce history’s most frightening catastrophe. In almost every society, several sturdy barriers stand between a people and the perpetration of mass murder. Only a very long and violent chain of events managed to shatter these barriers in Germany. This book should show its readers why the Holocaust happened, and it should put this event in its proper historical perspective: yes, as perhaps the most terrible thing human beings have ever done, but no, not as proof that we are inherently “evil,” or that we have made no moral progress during our short time on earth, and certainly not as evidence that humanity’s future is anything less than bright and full of promise.
Although everything in this book is consistent with the best scholarship, this is not an academic treatise. This book is for everyone who has ever wondered why the Holocaust happened.
CHAPTER 1
POSING THE QUESTION
This is a glorious page in our history and one that has never been written and can never be written.
—Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, speaking about the murder of the Jewish people1
What was the Holocaust? It was the determined attempt by the German government during World War II, aided by collaborators in most European countries, to murder every single person of Jewish ancestry on the European continent—some 11 million human beings by the Germans’ own calculations. If Hitler had won the war, he almost certainly would have tried to destroy every remaining Jewish community on Earth. This goal of complete biological extinction, together with the degree of power the killers exercised over their victims and their complete denial of the victims’ humanity, makes the Holocaust unique among all mass killings in history. Partly for this reason, I reserve the term “Holocaust” for the attempted extermination of the Jewish people, explicitly setting it apart from the Nazi regime’s murder of millions of Gentiles, including, among others, more than 3 million Soviet prisoners of war; nearly 2 million Poles dead of varied causes under German occupation; as many as 220,000 Roma (Gypsies); many tens of thousands of handicapped patients in German hospitals and asylums; and thousands of homosexual men. Some of these Gentile victims have been named as part of the Holocaust, but doing so makes it hard to grasp the full horror of the Holocaust and spreads confusion about the true causes of all these crimes.2
Not only were the Jews the only group targeted for extinction, but in a very real sense they were, in Hitler’s mind, the main reason for killing most of these other victims. For Hitler, World War II was a war against the Jewish people, who in his mind controlled the governments of Germany’s enemies. In particular, he and his most dedicated followers believed that Jews, operating from Moscow, were responsible for the spread of communism everywhere. Had he not believed in this “Jewish-communist” conspiracy that supposedly threatened Germany, Hitler might have felt no need to start the war in the first place. Ultimately, all of the murders he ordered followed directly or indirectly from his decision to fight his “war against the Jews.”3
By the late 1920s, Hitler had arrived at a comprehensive worldview, a lens through which he understood history and politics. This drastically simplistic belief system reflected his primitive cast of thought, his fascination with violence, and his burning desire to avenge Germany’s defeat in World War I. Hitler embraced a philosophy best characterized as “racial Darwinism.” He believed that history was the record of a merciless struggle for survival between the “races” of humanity. Superior races necessarily destroyed inferior races, a process that improved the human species in the same way that the struggle for survival had driven the evolution of primates into human beings.4
In this harsh struggle for survival, as Hitler saw it, the Germans, although supposedly the best part of a superior race (“Aryans”), suffered two terrible disadvantages. First, there were not enough of them and they did not have sufficient land and natural resources. Being too small a nation, with inadequate manpower and industrial capacity, the Germans could be crushed by a coalition of enemies, which is exactly how they lost both world wars. Second, the Germans suffered grievous internal divisions, caused mostly by the socialist and communist parties and their Marxist theory of class struggle. Behind these destructive internal divisions, according to Hitler, stood the Jews. Hitler believed that Jews fostered class conflict in order to divide and rule the societies in which they lived.
In Hitler’s view, and that of his dedicated followers, the Jews’ dangerous qualities were rooted in biology, in their genetic makeup. Their parasitic behavior was not a merely cultural phenomenon, which might be subject to change, but rather the inevitable outgrowth of a biological uniqueness that made them less than human. Therefore, Hitler and his accomplices commonly described Jews as bacteria or vermin to be eradicated by antiseptic methods.
Hitler believed he must take two steps to ensure Germany’s survival amid the Darwinian combat of races. First, he had to eliminate the Jews from German society, and second, he had to acquire “living space” (Lebensraum) from the Soviet Union. He meant to annex huge swaths of western Russia, drive out or kill the Slavic inhabitants, and populate the territory with German farmers. Germany would gain fertile farmland for its food supply and raw materials for its military industries. Healthy peasant families, given unlimited land on which to prosper, would breed ample numbers of soldiers for the wars of the future. Conquering the Soviet Union would also kill two birds with one stone. Because the Soviet Union was a communist state, in Hitler’s eyes that automatically meant it was controlled by Jews. By destroying the Soviet Union, he would eliminate the center of a worldwide “Jewish-communist” conspiracy.
Taking power in January 1933, Hitler set out to remove the Jews from German society, although he did not yet plan to murder them. The Nazi regime first aimed to eliminate “Jewish influence” on German society by segregating Jews from Gentiles, excluding them from the professions, government service, and cultural life; robbing them of their citizenship; and confiscating Jewish-owned businesses. This devastating assault on Germany’s Jewish community found its most shocking expression in “Crystal Night” (Kristallnacht), a nationwide anti-Jewish riot of November 9–10, 1938. Using as a pretext the assassination of a German diplomat by a young Polish Jew, the regime sent instructions to rank-and-file Nazi Party activists all across Germany late on the evening of November 9. The entire country erupted in an orgy of violence. Nazi thugs, aided by thousands of other Germans who spontaneously volunteered, set synagogues afire and smashed the windows of Jewish-owned shops, the broken glass giving this episode its name. At least 91 Jews were murdered, and 25,000 to 30,000 Jewish men were arrested; roughly 20,000 of them were taken to concentration camps, where 400 died of hunger and abuse.5
The regime’s comprehensive system of segregation and discrimination, inscribed in hundreds of
laws and regulations, did much to make the Holocaust possible. By driving Jews from the schools and the workplace, by criminalizing sexual contact between Jews and Gentiles, and by pressuring Gentiles to abandon friendships with Jews, the Nazis completely isolated German Jews and destroyed the social and emotional ties that had bound them to their countrymen. Consequently, by the time the government began deporting German Jews to their deaths in October 1941, they had become strangers to their neighbors. German Jews’ isolation helps us understand why tens of millions of Germans, who knew at least something about the killing, seem to have cared little about people who had once been valued coworkers, neighbors, and friends.6
The flood of anti-Jewish measures during the 1930s also paved the way to genocide by expanding the Nazi movement’s power over German society and moving millions of Germans to compromise their moral and ethical principles. The erosion of principles took place gradually each time the German citizenry accepted a new set of anti-Semitic policies. In every sphere of life, anti-Jewish initiatives destroyed personal and institutional autonomy, with the state establishing its right to dictate even such personal choices as those concerning friendship and romance. The military, the civil service, and the business community abandoned their control over whom to hire, promote, or fire, dismissing their Jewish colleagues at the regime’s request. Doctors, lawyers, and university professors, happy to be rid of their many Jewish competitors, agreed to their exclusion from these professions. German professionals thus abandoned the vital principle of meritocracy, a principle that justified the autonomy of these professions and their claim to exalted social status. The learned professions also compromised their intellectual integrity, with doctors affirming the rightness of racial theories and academics working to cleanse their disciplines of “Jewish thinking,” an effort that produced such absurdities as the search for a “German physics” and a “German mathematics.” Lawyers swiftly abandoned two core principles that had defined their profession: the rule of law and the legal equality of all citizens. The Christian churches, abdicating their proclaimed role as the moral conscience of society, largely shunned their parishioners who had “Jewish blood,” even though most of these unfortunates had converted to Christianity long before.7