by Dan McMillan
By the time Hitler started World War II in September 1939, his anti-Jewish policies had morally corrupted virtually the entire elite of German society, and tens of millions of other Germans as well, all of whom had accepted the Jews’ persecution; many Germans, indeed, had profited from the policies, either by acquiring Jewish-owned businesses at fire-sale prices, or simply by being rid of competitors. Having badly compromised themselves morally, these Germans were psychologically ill-prepared to avoid participating in murder. One problem with making moral compromises is that doing the right thing becomes increasingly difficult: it requires admitting that one’s earlier acts were wrong. In effect, to get clean, one must first get dirtier, a step that few proved willing to take.8
On the eve of World War II, the Nazi regime’s policy was to abuse German Jews so badly that they would feel compelled to emigrate, and hundreds of thousands did manage to get out, although every other country, including the United States, accepted them only grudgingly and with many limitations. After Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, German policy toward the Jews evolved in 1940 into genocidal plans for expelling Europe’s Jews to some kind of reservation, then to mass murder in the spring of 1941, and finally to the complete extermination of European Jewry, a decision taken in the fall of that year. Three factors, more than any others, drove this radicalization of policy.9
Probably the most important factor was Hitler himself. Hitler felt a deep and ferocious hatred for the Jews that was rooted in his belief that they had caused Germany’s defeat in World War I. Paired with his predilection for extreme violence, this hatred meant that ever since the early 1920s, he had probably had it in him to order the Holocaust, and would happily have done so if circumstances had made it possible. Hitler saw the Jews as Germany’s mortal enemies and as the ultimate embodiment of evil. In turn, he saw himself as entrusted with a divine mission to destroy them and thereby become the savior of Germany. Hitler’s self-image as a kind of prophet predisposed him to welcome a truly final “solution” to the “Jewish question” as the fulfillment of his historic destiny.10
Hitler’s subordinates constituted a second radicalizing factor. These men were mostly senior officers of the SS, the paramilitary formation that would later organize and carry out the murder of the Jewish people. They shared Hitler’s belief that Jews were less than human, so they were always ready to escalate the regime’s violence against the Jewish people. Equally important, these men saw that they could advance their careers by taking the initiative to radicalize policy even without orders from Hitler. This was because the Nazi state had disintegrated by the late 1930s into a kind of administrative anarchy in which multiple agencies competed for control over policy, and the only real source of power was Hitler. Pointing to Hitler’s threatening statements about Jews, many of these men tried to further their careers by advocating even greater violence toward Jews than what already had been decreed, in the expectation that Hitler would eventually approve their actions.11
Germany’s military victories during the first two years of World War II constituted the third radicalizing factor. Each new conquest increased the number of Jews under German control, making a nonviolent solution to the imaginary “Jewish problem” increasingly unattractive to Hitler and his henchmen. After overrunning Poland in the fall of 1939, the Nazis had more than 2 million Jews within their grasp. The earlier policy, of pressuring Jews to emigrate, could no longer solve their “problem”: other countries would never agree to the immigration of these millions. This obstacle led Nazi planners to the idea of deporting all Jews to some kind of reservation, initially imagined for eastern Poland. Faced with the difficulty of feeding and resettling large numbers of people, they simply accepted that thousands would die of hunger and neglect. The unexpectedly swift German conquest of Western Europe in the spring of 1940 only compounded the Nazis’ self-imposed Jewish problem. Victory brought many more Jews under German control while offering the exhilarating prospect of permanently “solving” their Jewish problem: shipping more than 6 million European Jews to the inhospitable island of Madagascar, where they would necessarily die in enormous numbers.12
In one of history’s cruelest ironies, a few thousand valiant fighter pilots, by winning the Battle of Britain (fall 1940) and denying the Germans air superiority over the British Isles, may have helped make the Holocaust possible. Unable to invade Britain, the Germans discarded the Madagascar Plan, because British control of the sea lanes made it impossible to ship Europe’s Jewish population to the island. Already skeptical about the prospect of invading Britain, Hitler turned now to fulfilling his ultimate goal: invading and destroying the Soviet Union, a goal made all the more urgent because the United States clearly intended to enter the war on Britain’s side. Hitler now believed that, to prevent an unwinnable war against the British, the Soviets, and the Americans, the alliance that ultimately crushed Germany under the sheer weight of its manpower and arms production, he must destroy the Soviet Union immediately. Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941 all but sealed the fate of European Jewry.13
Attacking the Soviets with the largest invasion force yet seen in history meant a war without mercy against Hitler’s imagined Jewish-communist conspiracy and its Moscow headquarters. German civilian and military authorities planned to starve tens of millions of Soviet citizens to death in order to make room for German settlement of their land. The German Army made little provision for the care of prisoners, with the result that 2 million Soviet soldiers starved or froze to death in German captivity by March 1942. Against the backdrop of this titanic bloodshed, Hitler would have seen no reason to spare the Jews, who, by his perverted logic, were responsible for the war he had started. Tens of thousands of men in mobile shooting squads followed closely behind the German troops that invaded on June 22. These men shot Jewish men and boys of military age, a policy enthusiastically welcomed by the German Army and justified by the claim that the Jews, allegedly all communists, would sabotage the German war effort if left alive. However, one may doubt that this “military necessity” excuse was the real motive for the murders: by mid-August, the death squads had expanded their killing to entire Jewish communities, murdering every man, woman, and child.14
Conquering the Soviet Union would now let Hitler strike at the entire Jewish population of Europe, making possible a policy radical enough to match his conception of his historic greatness. We will probably never know when Hitler made the decision to murder every Jew in Europe, or his state of mind when he did so. But the best evidence suggests that he crossed this Rubicon in the middle of October 1941, in a state of euphoria prompted by a month of spectacular military victories, triumphs which let him think that his ultimate victory—over the Soviets and the Jews—was at hand. On October 17 Hitler announced to two of his aides that “we are getting rid of the destructive Jews entirely,” proudly declaring, “I proceed with these matters ice-cold. I feel myself to be only the executor of history.” On October 25, speaking to Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, and Himmler’s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler boasted about the murder of the Jewish people: “We are writing history anew from the racial standpoint.”15
By the end of 1941, German shooting squads had murdered some 600,000 Jews on the territory of the Soviet Union; roughly 1.5 million would die this way before the war was over. Deciding that murder by shooting was too slow, Hitler’s aides began construction, in the fall of 1941, of death camps. Here they would murder their victims with poison gas. Ultimately they established six such extermination centers: Auschwitz and Treblinka are the best known and claimed the largest numbers of lives; the others were Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, and Sobibor. Auschwitz and Chelmno lay just inside the newly enlarged borders of Germany, on territory annexed from Poland. The other camps were established in occupied Poland.16
The German government had these extermination camps up and running by midsummer of 1942. Having already begun large-scale gassing at Chelmno in December 1941, they now proceeded to
comb through all the territory they controlled, gathering up Jews from almost every European country, from Belgium and Holland in the West to the Aegean islands of Greece in the far Southeast. They packed their victims tightly into freight cars, usually without food, water, or toilets, frequently with standing room only, and shipped them along the rails to the killing centers. The dreadful journey could take as long as two weeks, and many perished along the way of thirst, exhaustion, or suffocation. Arriving at Auschwitz, Treblinka, or some other death camp, at any time of day or night, the captives were greeted by shouting SS guards and vicious trained dogs and driven to the entrances of gas chambers. They undressed, at gunpoint if necessary, and were forced into airless, windowless bunkers. Chelmno was the only exception: there the SS murdered their victims in the cargo spaces of large vans, into which the vans’ engine exhaust was channeled.17
The gas chambers were disguised as showers, complete with fake water pipes and showerheads. The guards promised their victims that they would find paid work in German defense plants, telling them they needed to shower first and have their clothing disinfected. Surrounded by heavily armed men, grasping at any reason for hope, most victims seem to have accepted this explanation and entered the gas chambers without protest. Some Polish Jews, however, sensed that death awaited them: living near the camps gave them information that eluded victims from, say, France or Holland. Often, therefore, the Germans drove Polish Jews to their doom through sheer terror and a massive display of force.18
Even those victims who initially accepted the cover story about showers must have soon recognized their mistake: the rooms were packed almost to overflowing, and the SS turned off the lights. At Auschwitz and Majdanek, the guards dropped crystals of hydrogen cyanide into the frightened throngs in the chambers. This was a commercially produced pesticide named Zyklon-B. The crystals rapidly vaporized, producing a deadly gas. At the other camps, the Germans poisoned their victims with carbon monoxide from truck or tank engines. Squads of Jewish prisoners then had to drag the victims from the gas chambers and feed them into giant crematoria, where the flames consumed their bodies.19
Before being sent to their deaths, hundreds of thousands of the Germans’ victims survived for a year or longer in ghettos, where the Germans used them as slave labor. Fed a meager diet, packed into overflowing, unsanitary housing, they fought a desperate and losing battle for survival, many suspecting their ultimate fate. Hundreds of thousands more passed through the dozens of work camps erected as satellites of the Auschwitz killing center, or through countless slave labor camps elsewhere. There Jewish prisoners performed hard physical labor in every kind of weather and on a starvation diet, always under a sentence of death. Most survived only a few weeks or months before they died of exhaustion or the guards murdered them because they had become too weak to work. They lived under the watchful eyes of their killers, knowing they were marked for death, trying desperately not to show physical weakness—an impossible task for human beings who were overworked, underfed, and subject to frequent sadistic abuse.20
Some 1.1 million human beings are believed to have died at Auschwitz. Treblinka claimed another 925,000 lives, by the most recent estimate. This industrialized killing continued until November 1944, when Himmler called a halt to the gassing and prepared the evacuation and destruction of the camps in a vain effort to conceal his crimes. His plan was to use the surviving victims as hostages in negotiations with Germany’s enemies. Tens of thousands of camp survivors died of hunger, exhaustion, or gunshot on “death marches” during the last months of the war as the SS led them westward to concentration camps within Germany, such as Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. In these camps, thousands more, including fifteen-year-old Anne Frank, whose published diary later gained worldwide fame, died of hunger or disease only weeks or days before Allied troops liberated them. Between 5 million and 6 million Jews perished in the Holocaust. The exact tally of victims will never be known.21
To the limited extent that other books on the Holocaust explain why it happened, they confine themselves largely to the factors discussed in the foregoing pages: Hitler’s racist and anti-Semitic beliefs, which were shared by thousands of the worst killers, and the institutional pressures and wartime context that radicalized Nazi Jewish policy between 1933 and 1942. Yet these elements of an explanation only beg further questions. This book attempts a comprehensive explanation of the Holocaust by answering them: by showing where Hitler’s ideas came from and how they could have enjoyed support among so much of Germany’s elite; how World War I could have produced a generation of men so hardened to human suffering that they would gladly kill millions in the service of these ideas; how a man like Hitler could come to power in Germany, but would not have had a chance in other Western democracies, such as France or the United States; how Hitler, once in power, could become so admired by his countrymen that many of them would have done whatever he commanded; what psychological factors could have allowed men who were not Nazis to murder defenseless civilians; and how other factors let tens of millions of other Germans who knew about the murders react with cold indifference.22
The Holocaust was far from the only mass killing in history. The Turkish government murdered as many as 1.5 million Armenians during World War I; some 1.7 million Cambodians—out of a total population of only 7.9 million—died under the Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 and 1979; and the Rwandan government murdered an estimated 500,000 of its own people in the spring of 1994, in only a hundred days’ time. Yet people instinctively place the Holocaust in a class by itself, not only among mass killings, but among all historical events. It inspires in nearly everyone who encounters it a special kind of loathing and horror, even if we cannot say exactly why. Reading about the Holocaust, or seeing a film like Schindler’s List, seems to paralyze the mind, making it difficult to imagine ever understanding this event. Referring to the creature from Greek mythology whose sight turned men to stone, historian Inga Clendinnen wrote of “the ‘Gorgon effect’—the sickening of imagination and curiosity and the draining of the will which afflicts so many of us when we try to look squarely at the persons and processes implicated in the Holocaust.”23
One can see this unique reaction to the Holocaust in the often heated debate, which has raged for decades among countless experts, over whether the Holocaust was “unique” among genocides. The existence of this debate does not prove that the Holocaust stands in a class by itself, but it does suggest that most of us see it that way. What is more, although the Holocaust was not the first genocide in history, it has become the yardstick for measuring all the others. As a distinguished historian of the Armenian genocide has observed, “every researcher of mass violence other than the Holocaust spent enormous amounts of energy trying to prove that the event they were studying shared similarities with the Holocaust, so as to strengthen the case for genocide.”24
The most striking sign of the special status we grant the Holocaust is that many distinguished scholars claim or imply that we cannot explain why the Holocaust happened. One leading historian characterized Auschwitz as “incomprehensible”; another, after spending five years writing a major work about the Holocaust, confessed that he didn’t understand it any better at the end of the project than he had when he had started his research. Doris Bergen, in the preface to her widely used short history of the Holocaust, listed three questions that her book would not attempt to answer: “Why did such horrible things happen? If there is a God, how could such atrocities have been possible? What are human beings that they can inflict such agony on other people?” Professor Bergen thus put the question “why”—the question this book tries to answer, and which historians have answered about every other major historical event—in the same category as an unanswerable question about the existence and intentions of God. No respected historian has made this claim about the Armenian, Cambodian, or Rwandan genocide, or about any other important historical occurrence.25
The most disturbing symptom of the unique effect the Holocaust ha
s on people is the existence of an enormous Holocaust denial industry and the willingness of people in positions of responsibility to claim that this exhaustively documented catastrophe never happened. While the Turkish government continues to deny the reality of the Armenian genocide, and other genocides, including those in the Balkans during the 1990s, have inspired their own denialists, only in the case of the Holocaust can one find vocal deniers all across the world. I can claim little insight into this disgusting phenomenon, which in large part must be motivated by an especially vicious strand of anti-Semitism. But some Holocaust denial may stem from the unique horror the Holocaust inspires and from an unwillingness to accept that people just like us could have done this. I hope that this book, by explaining how something so unimaginable could have happened, might overcome the inability of many to believe that this catastrophe in fact occurred.26
What accounts for the special status of the Holocaust when compared to other historical events? If it frightens us in some way that is unique, what is the source of its special horror? How was the Holocaust different?
CHAPTER 2
A GENOCIDE LIKE NO OTHER
If you could lick my heart, it would poison you.
—Itzhak Zuckermann, second in command of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising1
In 1971 the journalist Gitta Sereny conducted a remarkable series of interviews with Franz Stangl, who was then serving a life sentence in a West German prison. In 1942 and 1943, Stangl had served as the commanding officer of two death camps, first at Sobibor and then at Treblinka. There he supervised the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews with carbon monoxide gas.