How Could This Happen

by Dan McMillan

  If there was a chance to stop the Holocaust, it probably lay not in protest but rather in shaming the tens of thousands of elites who participated in the murders, and the hundreds of thousands of others who served and supported the Nazi regime in other ways. If the great majority of Germans had been horrified at the killing, instead of coldly indifferent, might elites have acted differently? This seems possible but on balance unlikely, given German elites’ social arrogance and belief in their own superiority. The opinions of the middle and lower classes probably interested them little. Ultimately, the German people’s indifference may be most important, not as a cause of the Holocaust, but as a moral wrong in its own right, a wrong that we need to condemn.

  Is such indifference uniquely—or even especially—German? Our own country’s history gives the lie to such a comforting illusion. During the Rwandan genocide of 1994, at least one military expert argued that 5,000 well-armed American or European troops could have halted the killing. Armed intervention is of course always risky. Perhaps such risks fully justified the inaction of our government and the equal passivity of several European states, any one of which could have mounted a military expedition. Significantly, however, intervention was never even seriously discussed, and neither our Congress nor the American people called for action to stop the killing. During the entire three months of the frenetic killing in Rwanda, during which some 500,000 people were murdered, not once did President Bill Clinton meet with his top advisers to discuss the genocide. Nor did the cabinet-level foreign policy team gather to consider the problem.36

  This hardly means that American inaction in Rwanda is on a moral plane with German crimes in World War II. For one thing, Germans continued to support Adolf Hitler even as he boasted of annihilating and exterminating the Jews of Europe. Germans knew that their government, and often their own family members, perpetrated these crimes, whereas Americans had no hand in the Rwandan genocide. And yet, while Germans had to be careful about criticizing their government, Americans did not even face inconvenience if they wanted to raise their voices in protest. After all, it takes all of a minute to call one’s representative in Congress to express an opinion. My point is of course not to diminish Germans’ guilt by showing that Americans have also cared little for the sufferings of others. The indifference of the German people toward the Jews’ cruel fate was morally disgusting. Yet American indifference, including that of this author, was also disgusting, and both peoples must strive to learn from their moral failures. What explains this seemingly universal lack of concern for the suffering of others?

  Several factors must have contributed to Germans’ fundamental lack of interest in the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism was widespread in German society before Hitler took power in 1933, and thereafter the government segregated Jews from Gentiles and subjected Germans to a steady drumbeat of anti-Semitic propaganda, which surely intensified anti-Semitism among millions of Germans. Segregation also contributed to Germans’ indifference. Jews had in a very real sense ceased to be their neighbors, and friendships between Jews and Gentiles had withered. Many Germans also probably felt that they had too many problems of their own to concern themselves with the fate of strangers. American and British planes rained bombs on German cities, killing half a million civilians, and more than 5 million German men died in combat. “I’ve had it up to here with this war,” one Nazi remarked to Michael Müller-Claudius. “I want [to live in] normal conditions. What role the Jews play in this is not my concern.” Many others saw no need to think about something that they felt powerless to change. “It is risky to talk about it,” another man told Müller-Claudius, “and no one has any influence on these things.” Another remarked that “I didn’t make Jewish policy and I know as little as you do about how it is developing. Ultimately we have an all-powerful government. It alone bears the responsibility.” Finally, Hitler’s enormous popularity, and the fact that “annihilating” the Jews was obviously one of his highest priorities, must have gone a long way toward overcoming any dismay that Germans may have felt about the murders. Yet none of these factors played a role in Americans’ indifference to the Rwandan genocide, so it seems that there must be sociological or psychological mechanisms, common to many human societies, which explain our lack of concern for much of the world’s suffering.37

  One such mechanism is the diffusion of the sense of responsibility that comes when a large number of people know about some kind of harm. Each person can easily feel that if many people know, then one’s own share of the collective responsibility is small. If the entire nation has knowledge, each individual’s responsibility is insignificant: if all are responsible, no one is responsible. A second mechanism is distancing of the self from the crime or its victim. The further away people feel they are from the victims—whether geographically remote or psychologically distant from people they dislike or simply consider different from themselves—the less they care about the unfortunates’ fate. Stanley Milgram demonstrated the effect of distance in his obedience experiments. When his subjects had to administer the shocks by forcing the victim’s hand down on a metal plate that was supposedly electrified, only 30 percent of them obeyed instructions and escalated the shocks all the way to the end of the experiment. But when the victim was put out of sight behind a wall, a full 62.5 percent obeyed commands all the way to the maximum shock, even though they could hear the victim’s screams on an intercom system. Distance played an obvious role in the Holocaust as well as in the American people’s lack of reaction to the Rwandan genocide. In both cases, the murders took place far away, out of sight and out of mind. In both genocides, the victims seemed different from the bystanders who ignored their fate: the Rwandans because their skin color differed from that of most Americans, and because Americans think of Africa as an exotic and violent place; the Jews because widespread anti-Semitism, incessant Nazi propaganda, and the segregation of Jews and Gentiles created enormous distance between Germans and Jews, including even German Jews, who had rightfully considered themselves to be German.38

  Distancing also bears on a final mechanism, namely, the way that most people draw a circle around a part of humanity, and feel moral obligation only to those who fall within this circle. For some, this “universe of obligation” might include only their family and friends, but for most it is some larger group: a clan or tribe, a religious community, or, most broadly of all, their fellow citizens in the country in which they live. By and large, people feel little concern for that great majority of the human species that falls outside their chosen universe of obligation, and no duty to protect them from harm. We have not yet learned to be our brother’s keeper, and until we do, genocide will remain part of the human condition.39

  CONCLUSION

  The Holocaust terrifies everyone who chooses to think about it, in large part because, until now, no one has really tried to explain why it happened. Not understanding its causes, we fall back on the absurd notion that human beings are evil, and that, despite all the economic and technological progress we have made, we are morally still in the Stone Age. Yet even a cursory look at history shows us that human beings have been both persistently idealistic and astonishingly resourceful. In view of humanity’s idealism and creativity, it seems almost grotesque to argue that our collective future could be anything but bright and full of promise. Nonetheless, the Holocaust might appear to defeat our hope for progress. But this is only if we do not understand why it happened. As the preceding chapters have shown, it took an almost impossible combination of dangerous ideas, ruined people, and unimaginably bad luck to make this catastrophe possible. Putting all the pieces of the puzzle together, we can now answer the question with which this book began: Why did the Holocaust happen?

  The Holocaust happened above all because Germany did not become a democracy before the 1918 revolution. This delay in democratization gave Germany’s ruling elites the motive and the opportunity to fight a long battle, between the 1880s and 1918, against democratic reform and social change. In this
battle they used anti-Semitism and extreme nationalism as their weapons: they accused Jews of creating the socialist movement, and they tried to overcome class conflict by uniting all Germans against alleged “enemies”—Jews at home and other countries abroad. In so doing they prepared themselves and much of the German middle class to support Hitler, the most extreme nationalist and anti-Semite of all. In addition, because democracy came so late to Germany, this form of government did not have enough time to establish its legitimacy among the German people before the Great Depression struck their country with unprecedented fury. Not having learned to value democracy, having been encouraged since the 1880s to fear Jews and hate Germany’s neighbors, desperate amid 30 percent unemployment and the paralysis of their government, a full third of Germany’s voters gave their ballots to the Nazis in the last free elections of November 1932. Yet even after this long evolution which paved Hitler’s road to power, only several blunders by Germany’s government allowed him to take office, while dumb luck on Hitler’s part then gave him the triumphs that convinced countless Germans of his genius and rendered his authority almost immune to challenge.1

  In an anarchic political system in which Hitler became the sole source of power and legitimacy, his subordinates pushed constantly to radicalize German policy toward the Jewish people, building their careers by fulfilling what they claimed Hitler wanted, based on his violent and threatening statements about Jews. This mechanism of “working towards the Leader” created pressure for ever more violent policies toward Jews, while showing Hitler that he could count on active help for the most extreme policy he might choose. In turn, Germany’s military victories pushed the thinking of Hitler and his subordinates toward genocide by bringing ever larger numbers of Jews under Germany’s control: they could now imagine eliminating all the Jews of Europe, while less violent methods, such as forced emigration, were no longer feasible. Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941, and thereby destroy an imaginary “Jewish-communist conspiracy,” made the Holocaust not only conceivable, but perhaps inevitable. In a war that would take the lives of millions, it was unlikely that the lives of Jews, whom Hitler blamed for the war, would be spared.

  The decades-long use of anti-Semitism as a weapon against socialism and democracy made the Jews targets of oppression and violence, but it was not enough to mark them all for death. Two further historical developments robbed them of their humanity in the eyes of their killers and made their murder possible. During the decades leading up to the Holocaust, racism reached its high water mark in the history of Western civilization: inborn differences in value between different ethnic groups were now assumed to be scientific facts. Now it was possible to define the Jewish people as a separate species, genetically hardwired to behave destructively and therefore undeserving of life. Equally important, the vast and senseless slaughter of young men in World War I deprived human life of much of its value, creating a generation of killers who prided themselves on the “toughness” which they demonstrated by committing mass murder.

  The foregoing causes of the Holocaust explain how Hitler could come to power, why he came to seek the extinction of the Jewish people, and how racism, anti-Semitism, and worship of Hitler motivated most of the murderers: not only the SS and other Nazis, but also tens of thousands of men and women from the educated elite of German society. Yet countless murderers were neither Nazi Party members nor members of the elite, nor were the tens of millions of Germans who had substantial knowledge of the killing but did not seem to care about it. These killers and bystanders may have been much less anti-Semitic than the country’s elite, indeed, perhaps no more so than the average citizen of France or the United States at that time. While some degree of anti-Semitism, and the violent wartime context, provides a partial explanation, psychological factors—common in many societies besides Germany—also played a crucial role: automatic deference to authority, conformity to group behavior, and adaptation to a role, in the case of the killers; distancing from the victims and diffusion of responsibility, in the case of the bystanders. Put another way, most human beings lack a moral compass and feel no moral obligation toward those who fall outside some group with which they identify.

  Some causes of the Holocaust were psychological and therefore perhaps universally human. Others—“scientific” racism, political anti-Semitism, the cheapening of life in World War I—were common throughout Western civilization in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet some causes were unique to Germany. Although the Germans found willing collaborators all across Europe, the Holocaust was a German project, instigated and organized by a German government, led by Germans at every level of the vast machinery of death. Why did Germany’s rulers, and not the leaders of France, Britain, or Russia, perpetrate what may rank as the most terrible crime in history? What was different about the Germans?

  Germany’s failure to become a democracy before 1918 produced most of the political problems that set Germany apart from other Western societies. This failure can in turn be traced back to two very specific facts that had momentous consequences: Otto von Bismarck’s genius, and the mutual antagonisms between Germany’s political parties. Only Bismarck’s boldness and political skill, combined with the Prussian armies’ luck at the Battle of Sadowa and a brief window of opportunity in international politics, had made possible the creation of a united Germany in the first place. Partisan divisions, more than any other factor, prevented this German Empire from evolving into a parliamentary democracy.

  As a consequence, German politics from the 1880s all the way down to the end of the Third Reich in 1945 was dominated by a single recurring dynamic: as class and partisan divisions intensified, attempts to overcome these divisions by the demagogic use of anti-Semitism and aggressive nationalism became ever more extreme. By the time the Great Depression struck in 1929, German politics had developed in such a destructive fashion that an authoritarian outcome was probable and discrimination against German Jews almost inevitable. Yet most of the fatal weaknesses in Germany’s political system can be blamed on only two causes: Bismarck’s genius and the intensity of partisan strife. We must also recognize that happenstance played an indispensable role in this tragedy.2

  Had Bismarck not arrived on the scene in 1862, or if Prussia had lost the 1866 war against Austria as informed observers had expected, the German Empire would not have been created at the time that it was, nor with Bismarck’s authoritarian constitution, if it were even created at all. If so, Germans could have learned the democratic process long before 1918. The German voter would not have been indoctrinated with rabid nationalism and anti-Semitism, and German foreign policy would not have provoked the tensions that led to World War I. Furthermore, absent terrible blunders by the German government after the Depression began, Hitler would not have gotten into power. Only astonishing luck on Hitler’s part gave him a spectacular run of domestic and foreign policy triumphs between 1933 and 1941. These triumphs convinced millions of his genius, neutralizing opposition and moving his followers to commit unspeakable crimes at his behest. Only Germany’s lightning-fast conquest of France in 1940—a victory won almost in spite of Hitler rather than because of him—made possible Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and the Holocaust. And if Hitler had died in World War I, as did 2 million of his countrymen, or in the assassination attempt that nearly claimed his life in November 1939, all of world history in the twentieth century would have taken a very different course, and the Holocaust would not have happened.

  Seen in this light, the specifically German causes of the Holocaust, although they were indispensable to making it happen, don’t make the Germans seem terribly different from other peoples, which is precisely the point: they weren’t and they aren’t. Not some deep and widespread flaw in German “national psychology,” but rather accidents of history and partisan strife, combined to make possible Hitler’s rise to power and the loyalty of millions to him. The crucial problem of partisan divisions should also remind us how pointless
it is to generalize about the Germans as if they were all alike. If anything, their worst problem was that they differed too much from each other, that they were too diverse.

  To argue against theories of German national pathology is certainly not to argue for German innocence. True, it makes no sense to speak of collective guilt, to blame “the German people” for Nazi crimes. Nonetheless, during the twelve years of the Third Reich, tens of millions of individual Germans made terrible moral choices. The worst offenders were the country’s elite, perhaps half a million men and several thousand women, the leaders of German society in all of its institutions and contexts. Beyond the many tens of thousands who led the Nazi Party at its upper levels, tens of thousands more helped to carry out the extermination of European Jewry. Army officers of all ranks supported the shooting squads that raged behind the lines of the eastern front; many ordered their men to help with the killing. Hundreds of corporations used half a million Jews as slave labor, showing little concern as these workers perished at horrific rates from malnutrition and abuse. Civil servants organized and legalized the Jews’ discrimination, deportation, and murder. Very seldom did any of these soldiers, managers, or bureaucrats opt out of their ghastly assignment, although they could have done so easily and without serious penalty.3

  Most of Germany’s elite did not participate in murder, although this may be only because they weren’t given the opportunity. Unlike the volunteers in the SS, killers from the professions, the civil service, the military, and the business community were largely selected at random. They differed not at all from the rest of the elite—in background, outlook, or moral character. Therefore, their conduct tells us how most others of their class would have acted if asked to participate. Moreover, even those elites who did not participate bore a much greater responsibility than did most citizens. Without them, the Nazi regime could not have functioned, and so they must bear some guilt for its criminal acts. Unlike most Germans, these men and women had opportunities to influence policy, if only by remonstrating with friends and colleagues who were directly involved. Finally, as the leaders of their society, they were more engaged politically than most citizens and necessarily better informed. They read newspapers and listened to radio, and the murderers were their friends and lovers, fathers and sons, husbands and wives. Each of these men and women encountered plentiful and varied information about mass murder, information that was available to every German, but especially to them. If they did not actually know about the killing—and postwar surveys suggest a majority did not—this was only because they refused to know, because they chose to ignore terrible truths that they, more than anyone else, had a moral obligation to confront.4