How Could This Happen

by Dan McMillan

  In death camps Jewish prisoners sometimes had to participate in killing. Shlomo Venezia, a Jewish Italian who had lived in Greece before the German occupation, worked in the “special squad” of Crematorium III, one of the Auschwitz gas chambers. Venezia and other members of this work detail had to convince the victims that the gas chamber was a shower bath, gather their clothing and possessions after they entered the death chamber, and feed their bodies into the crematorium once they had been murdered. At Crematorium III, the cyanide crystals were poured into the chamber through an opening high on the side of the building. A heavy cover closed this opening, so two prisoners had to lift this cover for an SS man, who poured the cyanide into the crowd of terrified victims.35

  Some people arrived at Auschwitz too frail to walk to the gas chambers. When these victims were brought to Crematorium III, Venezia and his colleagues would have to help them undress, then walk them around a corner, propping them up, so that an SS man could step up behind them and shoot them in the back of the neck. “For us, this was by far the most difficult task to accomplish,” said Venezia. “There couldn’t be anything harder than taking people to their deaths and holding them while they were executed.” Members of the so-called red squad (or “burial society”) at Treblinka faced this horror on a daily basis, carrying or escorting prisoners down the corridors of the Infirmary to the burial pit where their executioner awaited them, although the sources do not say they held victims while they were shot.36

  At the death camps many Jewish prisoners had contact with the trainloads of victims immediately before they were gassed. Often they had to help the SS persuade these unfortunates that the death chambers were actually showers, and that they would not be harmed. At other times their participation was limited to avoiding the victims’ questions, not telling them their fate. Two considerations above all compelled prisoners to act this way. First, if they warned the victims, their own lives were forfeit. Second, the victims were now trapped, locked inside a death camp and surrounded by heavily armed killers. There was no point in frightening them before they entered the gas chambers: they would be terrified soon enough, and the outcome was the same either way. Venezia told of how, as people undressed to enter the gas chambers, he tried to diminish the victims’ suffering by “helping out so that everything would happen as calmly as possible.” He added: “I don’t know whether we can call it ‘collaboration’ when we were trying to reduce, to however small a degree, the suffering of people who were about to die.” If people took too much time to undress, the SS would beat them. In helping the frail and the frightened remove their clothing, Venezia was striving to prevent this.37

  The frequent encounters with the doomed victims put the Jewish camp personnel in a terrible position. Many avoided eye contact with the condemned and pretended not to have heard their searching questions. Sometimes, however, they could not escape a confrontation with those who soon would die. Abraham Bomba, a professional barber from Czestochowa, survived Treblinka because the SS needed him to cut off the women’s hair at their last stop before the gas chambers. He had to cut their hair short, since the Germans wanted as much as they could get, but not so short that it would upset and frighten them: “We just cut their hair and made them believe they were getting a nice haircut,” said Bomba. One day a group of women came in from his native Czestochowa. “I knew a lot of them,” he said. “I knew them; I lived with them in my town. I lived with them in my street, and some of them were my close friends. And when they saw me, they started asking me, Abe this and Abe that—‘What’s going to happen to us?’ What could you tell them? What could you tell?”38

  On another day, the wife and sister of one of his fellow barbers came in to be shorn. “They could not tell them this is the last time they stay alive, because behind them was the German Nazis, SS men, and they knew if they said a word, not only the wife and the woman, who were dead already, but also they would share the same thing with them,” said Bomba. “But in a way, they tried to do the best for them, with a second longer, a minute longer, just to hug them and kiss them, because they knew they would never see them again.”

  So that was the full extent of the freedom of action that Abraham Bomba and his comrades had in the haircutting barracks: to linger over a loved one perhaps a minute longer than usual, but no more, and to spare them the terror of death for just a few more minutes.39

  CHAPTER 3

  WHY GERMANY?

  They construct shelters and trenches, they repair the damage, they build, they fight, they command, they organize and they kill. What else could they do? They are Germans. This way of behavior is not meditated and deliberate, but follows from their nature and from the destiny they have chosen.

  —Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi1

  Why Germany? Why did Germans, and not some other nation, perpetrate what may have been the most terrible genocide in history? If their crime was unique, does it follow that the Germans were also in some way unique? Can one speak of some distinctive German pathology, some flaw in the “German character”? It is, of course, tempting to see the Holocaust as a distinctively or even uniquely German event: doing so creates an alibi for the rest of humanity and reassures us that such murderous potential does not reside within us. We must resist this temptation.

  By and large, historians have rejected notions of a German pathology. And given the enormous social, economic, and political diversity of German society during the first half of the twentieth century, it makes little sense to talk of national character, to refer to “the Germans,” as if they were somehow all alike. Such generalizations make little sense when applied to any country, but they are especially ill-advised when talking about Germany during this period.2

  One should also remember that although Germans instigated and directed the Holocaust, they found willing accomplices in virtually every European nation. As German troops rolled into Lithuania, local nationalists began murdering Jews with German encouragement. The Germans swiftly co-opted them and used them as auxiliaries in the extermination program. The same pattern repeated itself in Latvia and Ukraine. Over a one-year period beginning in June 1941, the Romanian government murdered between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews on territories under its control. Moreover, Turks murdered as many as 1.5 million Armenians, one Cambodian in five died under the Khmer Rouge reign of terror, and Rwanda’s Hutu slaughtered 500,000 of their Tutsi neighbors. There is nothing uniquely German about genocide.3

  The foregoing caveats notwithstanding, it also seems obvious that a French or British government, for example, could not have perpetrated the Holocaust. What was different about Germany? Germany stood apart in that a man like Adolf Hitler could not have gained mass support in any of the world’s other major democracies, yet the Nazis won a full third of the vote in the last free German elections in November 1932. Something had gone badly wrong in the development of German politics. A large fraction of the German people had developed political attitudes and beliefs that were incompatible with democratic government. Combined with a large measure of bad luck, this specifically political dysfunction, and not some vague and global pathology in the German “national character,” gave Hitler his opening and made the Holocaust possible. This chapter explains how German politics went so badly off the rails.4

  Germany’s political dysfunction can be traced back to one basic problem: the country did not become a democracy until the revolution of November 1918, in the final days of World War I. German voters’ lack of experience with democracy helps to explain why so many of them voted for Hitler’s Nazi Party. The failure to achieve democracy gave birth to a second problem: an aggressive, racist nationalism that not only helped to bring about World War I but also prepared millions of Germans to later vote for the Nazis. Indeed, Nazi ideas were mostly just a radicalized version of what German nationalism had been on the eve of World War I.

  By the time the war began in 1914, Britain and France had both become stable parliamentary democracies, while Germany remained a semi-authoritari
an empire. “Parliamentary democracy” means two things. First, it means that an elected legislature—the parliament—controls the executive branch of government. Members of parliament become the cabinet ministers, and the cabinet can govern only if it is supported by a majority of the members of parliament. Second, it means that the whole adult population, or at least, in historical terms, its male half, gets to vote for the members of parliament. (Women got the vote in most countries only after World War I ended in 1918, and in France not until after World War II.) Why did Germany not make the transition to democracy before the 1918 revolution?

  Some argue that Germans, compared to other peoples, have been especially obedient to authority. This alleged inclination to obedience has been offered as an explanation for the behavior of some killers in the Holocaust, or for the delayed advent of democracy in Germany. No one has proved this theory by comparing the Germans to other nations in this regard, however, and a lot of evidence speaks against it. Revolutions in Germany in 1848 and 1918, and in East Germany in 1989, demonstrate that Germans are fully capable of rebelling against authority. Their extraordinarily high level of political engagement since the 1880s—whether measured by the percentage of the population that voted, the numbers who joined political parties, or activism in all manner of voluntary associations and pressure groups—shows a tremendous desire on the part of the German people to assert their will in politics. The stereotype of the obedient German also makes it difficult to understand how Germany could have become the thriving democracy that it is today. Conversely, over the past four decades, a relatively small number of wealthy individuals and a host of special interests have badly damaged democracy in the United States, purchasing influence with donations to politicians’ election campaigns. One could argue that most Americans have been robbed of their vote by this flood of campaign cash. Yet no one would claim that the American people have lost their love of freedom or have become especially obedient toward authority.5

  Rather than looking to an unproved theory and common stereotype of “obedient Germans,” one can explain Germany’s delayed democratization through more concrete factors. First, making the transition to parliamentary government has been a difficult and often dangerous undertaking for nearly every nation that has attempted it. Second, Germany’s economic backwardness until the mid-nineteenth century delayed the country’s political development. Third, through no fault of the German people, Germany was created as a unified nation-state in a way that created fearsome obstacles to democracy. Finally, the Germans were too divided against each other by religion, social class, and political partisanship to unite against their hereditary emperor and claim the power to govern themselves.

  Most countries that became parliamentary democracies did so in two steps. First, the parliament, elected by only a propertied fraction of the people, wrested control of the executive branch from a hereditary monarch. Then, often in several smaller increments, parliament expanded the suffrage until it included all men, and later all women. Achieving the first step, parliamentary control of the executive branch, often required considerable violence.

  England, for instance, made the breakthrough to parliamentary government in the seventeenth century, but only after some sixty years of instability and violence, including two revolutions, the beheading of a king, a bloody civil war, and a military dictatorship. In France, the revolution of 1789 led briefly to a kind of parliamentary democracy, followed by terrifying violence, the execution of a king and queen, a series of dictatorships, an intermittent European war spanning more than two decades, and the restoration of the monarchy, with the transition to parliamentary control occurring only in the nineteenth century. Further instability followed, with revolutions in 1830, 1848, and 1871. Parliamentary democracy found a stable footing in France only toward the end of the 1870s. In the United States, it took a revolution and several years of war against Great Britain to place governmental power in the hands of the people’s elected representatives. It then took until 1840 for all white men to get the vote, until 1919 for women to gain the suffrage, and until the 1960s for most African Americans to establish their right to vote. This history should make it clear that Germany’s slow progress toward parliamentary government does not mean that the Germans were politically passive or especially obedient to authority. This task has been difficult and dangerous for most nations that have attempted it.

  Germany also got a later start toward parliamentary government than its neighbors did, mainly because it developed more slowly economically. Economic backwardness meant that it took German-speaking Europe longer to develop a middle class, including an upper middle class—that is, elites who were of common birth, rather than elites who were members of a hereditary aristocracy. In England, France, and the United States, such middle-class elites played an essential role in the drive toward parliamentary government and in the revolutions this movement helped to produce. It was not until the second decade of the nineteenth century that a critical mass of such elites had developed in Germany. Once this critical mass was in place, they moved forward, establishing a political movement called “Liberalism.”6

  Inspired in part by the ideas of the French Revolution, German liberals demanded a thoroughgoing reform of society and politics. Among their many goals, two took center stage. First, they sought active participation by the people in government. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, Germany was fragmented into three dozen major and minor kingdoms, each governed by a hereditary ruler who did not answer to his citizens in any significant way. Liberals demanded the creation of elected parliaments that would share power with the ruling prince or king. They did not call for actual parliamentary control of the executive, that is, for the parliament to take all power away from the hereditary ruler; nevertheless, the power sharing they proposed represented a dramatic change.

  The second main liberal goal was the creation of a single German nation-state. In this vision, Germans would no longer be citizens of Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, or some lesser kingdom, but instead citizens of Germany, a single country for all speakers of German, just as the French had France. National unification was fundamentally a democratic demand, a call for national self-determination, a demand that Germans be governed by Germans. It was also a practical goal: divided into so many small states, the Germans were vulnerable to aggression from neighboring countries, as Napoleon had reminded them by conquering much of German-speaking Europe during the first decade of the nineteenth century.

  National unification was a politically explosive demand, because it threatened the authority of every hereditary ruler of a German state. The kings of Bavaria or Saxony, for example, would lose some—maybe even all—of their power to a centralized national government, just as the governments of the separate American states had surrendered much of their authority to the government of the United States that was created in 1789. National unification also threatened the territorial integrity of one of the two most powerful German kingdoms. This was Austria, a multiethnic empire composed not only of several million Germans, but also of millions of Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Serbs, Croats, and people of other nationalities. Uniting all Germans under one government would mean taking populous and wealthy German-speaking regions from the Austrian Empire so that they could join a unified Germany. Not surprisingly, Austria consistently worked to sabotage efforts toward German national unity. Although the liberal movement grew rapidly during the first half of the nineteenth century, and elected parliaments with limited powers were introduced in many German kingdoms, at the end of the 1850s the cherished goal of national unity seemed as distant as ever.

  In the years between 1862 and 1871, German history arrived at a crucial fork in the road, and the unpredictable fortunes of war set the country on the path that led, eventually but not inevitably, to the Holocaust. In 1862 it came to a showdown between the king of Prussia and the liberal majority in the lower house of the Prussian parliament. Although the liberals did not call for parliamentary control over th
e executive branch, they did demand significantly expanded power for parliament. Crown and liberals had clashed over the parliament’s right to help shape military policy. In 1860 the liberals refused to vote a regular budget; elections in December 1861 expanded the liberal majority. The deadlock continued, and in March 1862 the king dissolved parliament and called new elections. The elections, held in May, had the opposite effect to the one King Wilhelm I had intended, giving the liberals three-quarters of the seats in the lower house. Wilhelm seriously considered abdicating the throne.7

  At this critical juncture, the greatest political genius in modern European history assumed control of the Prussian government. This man was the newly appointed prime minister, Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck took a hard line against the liberals. In flagrant violation of the constitution, he simply spent money without a budget from parliament, and did this for four years running. In the right circumstances, this protracted struggle might have led to a crisis and expanded power for the Prussian parliament. But instead Bismarck won the game by giving liberal voters a prize that their own leaders could not deliver: the unification of Germany.8

  In a series of three short wars, all ending in complete victory for Prussia, Bismarck maneuvered the rulers of the smaller German states into a position from which they had to join a new German nation-state dominated by Prussia and excluding the German-speaking regions of the Austrian Empire. The turning point during the wars of unification, and in a real sense the hinge of modern German history, came on July 3, 1866, near the town of Sadowa in what today is the Czech Republic. Bismarck had cleverly provoked a war between Prussia and Austria, but Prussia found itself fighting against all of the other major German states as well. Informed observers predicted that Austria would win the war handily. In Paris the betting odds were four to one in Austria’s favor. Public opinion in the German states was overwhelmingly hostile toward Prussia, and even more so toward Bismarck, whom they condemned for provoking needless bloodshed.