How Could This Happen

by Dan McMillan

  As for the rest of the country, Germans of that era can hardly claim to have come away from this tragedy with clean hands. A full third of German voters gave their ballots to the Nazi Party in the last free elections, in November 1932. To be sure, they did not vote for World War II or the Holocaust when they chose Hitler. Foreign policy played little role in the election campaigns of 1930–1932, beyond the standard denunciations of the Versailles Treaty. Given that much of the treaty had been unfair to Germany, condemning it certainly did not mean enthusiasm for war. Everything known about German public opinion during the 1930s indicates that the German people did not want another war, much less the horrifically costly war that they got. As for the Holocaust, even Hitler had no inkling in 1932 that he would later try to exterminate the Jewish people, so the voters can hardly be faulted for not discerning this possibility. However, Hitler’s voters knew full well that the Nazis were violently anti-Semitic, and they chose to accept this ugly reality when they marked their ballots. Once Hitler took power, tens of thousands of Nazi Party activists tormented their Jewish neighbors, while millions of Germans looked on approvingly, and most of the rest showed little solidarity with German Jews, who, in their overwhelming majority, were ardent German patriots who fully identified themselves with German culture. And when their government proceeded to “deport” their Jewish neighbors to certain death, when they learned of mass shootings in the East, when their beloved Leader and his henchmen loudly boasted of exterminating and annihilating the Jews of Europe, tens of millions of Germans not only registered no sign of disapproval, but did not even care enough to gossip about it.5

  The French have a lovely saying that nonetheless is deeply troubling in its implications: “To understand all is to forgive all.” If we understand why psychologically normal people, people just like us, commit terrible crimes, do we surrender our right to judge them in moral terms? Surely we do not. Every killer, every accomplice, every passive bystander in this tragedy had free will and made free choices. No German who pulled a trigger or signed an order had reason to fear punishment if he refused to become a murderer. At the same time, understanding them should make us think twice before assuming that we would have done better had we stood in their shoes. Surely most of us would not, for we share with the Germans the same human nature and the same weaknesses. People often wonder how they would have behaved had they lived in Nazi Germany. Such speculation is pointless: if we had lived in that time and in that place, we would not be the people we are today, but rather someone entirely different. Demonizing the Germans is unworthy of us because it denies both their humanity and ours. We are the Germans and they are we.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish first to thank the many people who gave generously of their time by reading part or all of one of the over twenty drafts that this book has gone through, and by giving me countless valuable comments: Myriam Abramowicz, Soledad Arias, Prof. Shelley Baranowski, Susan Bernofsky, Peter R. Black, John K. Cameron, Noah Cliff, Russ Clune, Prof. John Cox, Susan Dalsimer, Prof. Istvan Deak, Manuela Del Prete, Michael Denneny, Paul DeRienzo, Paul Dippolito, Joseph P. Feely, Mike Friedman, Christopher Geering, Lisa Geering-Tomoff, David I. Graber, R. J. Hanson, Charles Heller, Elaine Heller, Joe Hopkins, Luna Kaufmann, Prof. Ian Kershaw, Paul Keye, Prof. Thomas Kühne, Janet Lee, Gerard Luisi, Ron Maimon, Daniel Maoz, Paul Margulies, Victoria Margulies, Deborah McMillan, Eirlys Mow, Dawn Muniz, Peter M. Paulino, Prof. Robert O. Paxton, Jacqueline Plavier, Michaelyn Plavier, Julianne Rainbolt, Alessandra Seggi, Karina Shaw, Prof. Allan Silver, Renate Soybel, Prof. Kevin Spicer, David Sternlieb, Prof. Kiril Tomoff, Jon Vanden Heuvel, Mark A. Walsh, Prof. Gerhard L. Weinberg, Prof. S. Jonathan Wiesen, Clive Williams, Helmut Zerbes, Joachim Zerbes, and Reinhilde Zerbes. My readers deserve considerable credit for the book’s strengths, while the responsibility for its faults is necessarily mine.

  Heartfelt thanks go also to my agent, William Clark, who always believed in the project and found the ideal publisher for my book. My editors at Basic Books, Lara Heimert and Katy O’Donnell, provided valuable assistance with the writing through the last two stages of revision. Last but hardly least, my publicists, Angela Baggetta and Lynn Goldberg of Goldberg McDuffie Communications, worked tirelessly and effectively to help me reach my audience.

  Special thanks go, finally, to Soledad Arias, John K. Cameron, Istvan Deak, Mike Friedman, Ian Kershaw, Janet Lee, Robert O. Paxton, S. Jonathan Wiesen, and, above all, to my mother, Deborah McMillan, who sustained me with her love and support from the beginning of this journey to the very end.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Elie Wiesel, “Plea for the Dead,” in Legends of Our Time (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), 181–182. The second and third sentences of the quoted passage are separated by roughly a page of text. Emphasis in original.

  2. Primo Levi, quoted in Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 88; Elie Wiesel, “Plea for the Dead,” 180–181. At 181 Wiesel also asked: “We dare interpret the agony and anguish, the self-sacrifice before faith and faith itself of six million human beings, all named Job? Who are we to judge them?”

  3. With Himmler I have departed slightly from a literal translation to make this passage more readable. I have also left out a significant (but in my view misleading) comment on the nature of the Nazi belief system. The complete passage was as follows: “Mit dem Antisemitismus ist es genauso wie mit der Entlausung. Es ist keine Weltanschauungsfrage, daß man die Läuse entfernt. Das ist eine Reinlichkeitsangelegenheit. Genauso ist der Antisemitismus für uns keine Weltanschauungsfrage gewesen, sondern eine Reinlichkeitsangelegenheit, die jetzt bald ausgestanden ist. Wir sind bald entlaust. Wir haben nur noch 20,000 Läuse, dann ist es vorbei damit in ganz Deutschland.” Excerpt from Himmler’s speech to SS-Korpsführer, April 24, 1943, in Heinrich Himmler, Geheimreden 1933 bis 1945, Bradley F. Smith and Agnes Peterson, eds., with an introduction by Joachim C. Fest (Frankfurt: Propyläen, 1974), 200. On the complete extermination and other unique features of the Holocaust, see Chapter 2.

  4. Historians and psychologists generally agree that most perpetrators of the Holocaust were psychologically normal, at least before they began committing mass murder. See, for example, Victoria Barnett, Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 23; Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1989), 19; Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 91; Harald Welzer, Täter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 2005), esp. 7–17; James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Murder, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  5. Simon Wiesenthal, The Murderers Among Us: The Memoirs of the World’s Most Relentless Nazi-Hunter, Joseph Wechsberg, ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1967).

  CHAPTER 1

  1. Quoted in Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader, vol. 3, Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1988), 1199–1200; Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, trans. Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 689ff.

  2. The figure of 11 million was discussed during the Wannsee Conference, January 20, 1942. Noakes and Pridham, eds., Nazism 1919–1945, 3:1127–1135, esp. 1130. On worldwide extermination: Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 49. Gerhard Weinberg goes further, arguing that exterminating all Jewish populations on Earth was an explicit goal of Hitler and his accomplices. Weinberg provides extensive evidence that Hitler took concrete steps toward this goal, for example (as revealed in recent research by Klaus-Michael Mallmann), by attaching an Einsatzkommando shooting squad to General Erwin Rommel’s army. Had Rommel not been defeated at El Alamein, this shooting squad would have embarked on the murder of Jews throughout the Middle
East. Gerhard Weinberg, “A World Wide Holocaust Project,” paper delivered at the conference “Global Perspectives on the Holocaust,” Middle Tennessee State University, October 21, 2011, cited with the author’s permission.

  I remain agnostic on Weinberg’s thesis because I haven’t done research in the primary sources concerning the decision for the Final Solution, and, in addition, because an explicit goal of worldwide extermination does not appear in any of the scholarly literature on the topic. I also see a problem for Weinberg’s thesis in the actions of the Einsatzkommando that was detailed to the German Army, which occupied Tunisia from late 1942 until May 1943. Rather than setting out to murder the 85,000 Jews of Tunisia, the Einsatzkommando subjected them to forced labor, deporting only roughly 20 to death camps. These actions do not seem consistent with a decision for worldwide extermination. See Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 662–663.

  Estimates of the death toll among Roma have varied widely. For Peter Longerich’s careful reconstruction of Himmler’s inconsistent policy toward this minority, see ibid., 668–672, where he suggests a toll in the low tens of thousands. Longerich’s account makes clear that the Nazis never aimed at complete extermination of the Roma. At the upper extreme is Doris L. Bergen’s estimate; she puts the figure at somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 Roma dead, in her War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, 2nd ed. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 200. The estimate of 220,000 comes from the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum, “Genocide of European Roma (Gypsies), 1939–1945,” www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005219, accessed July 1, 2013.

  3. Specifically concerning the war against the Soviet Union, see, for example, Steven G. Fritz, Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 1–76, esp. 4–8, 75–76. The German government also made this accusation a central theme of its propaganda after 1941. See the excellent study by Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). By “indirectly” I mean the handicapped, Sinti and Roma, homosexual men, and other categories of people who, consistent with Nazi racial ideology, were thought to impair Germany’s strength and efficiency during wartime.

  4. The following discussion of Hitler’s worldview is based primarily on Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler´s World View: A Blueprint for Power, trans. Herbert Arnold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), and on Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 2 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998–2000). Kershaw sees Hitler’s worldview as a rationalization of his “burning thirst for revenge” upon the people, Jews foremost among them, whom he blamed for Germany’s humiliating defeat in World War I. Ian Kershaw, “Hitler’s Role in the Final Solution,” in Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 90–91.

  5. Alan E. Steinweis, Kristallnacht 1938 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Noakes and Pridham, Nazism 1919–1945, vol. 2, State, Economy and Society (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1984), 553–554. On the number who died in concentration camps: Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (New York: Oxford University Press), 112–113.

  6. A partial catalog of the regime’s countless anti-Jewish measures is found in Joseph Walk, ed., Das Sonderrecht für die Juden im NS-Staat: Eine Sammlung der gesetzlichen Maßnahmen und Richtlinien-Inhalt und Bedeutung, 2nd ed. (Heidelberg: C. F. Müller Wissenschaft, 2013 [reprint of 1996 2nd ed.]). The secret police (Gestapo) and local Nazi Party activists worked relentlessly to intimidate people who maintained even the most casual personal or business contact with Jews, as Robert Gellately has demonstrated in his study of the Gestapo in Würzburg and Lower Franconia in his book The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 160, 174–204. One man was investigated for shaking a Jew’s hand on the street; a woman who visited an elderly Jewish woman, for whom she had worked as a servant for ten years, spent three weeks in jail for this “offense.” Ibid., 174, 177. The Gestapo’s case files were deliberately destroyed in every jurisdiction except Düsseldorf and Würzburg–Lower Franconia, but Gellately persuasively argues that the pressure to avoid contact with Jews would have been, if anything, more severe in other parts of Germany, as Würzburg lay in a Catholic region that had shown little sympathy for Nazism before Hitler took power in 1933. Regions with large Jewish populations and a history of Nazi voting would have seen larger numbers of people willing to report their neighbors for “Jew-friendly” behavior. Ibid., 185–186.

  7. On Jewish policy as a tool to expand the Nazi Party’s power, and Jews’ exclusion from different spheres: see Longerich, Holocaust, 31–32, 72–85.

  8. A vivid example of the dilemma created by moral compromises is the path taken by German big business as it collaborated in the persecution and murder of the Jews, a subject analyzed by Peter Hayes in “State Policy and Corporate Involvement in the Holocaust,” in Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck, eds., The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 197–218.

  9. Ian Kershaw locates the decision in late November or early December 1941 in his Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940–1941 (New York: Penguin, 2007), 464. Christopher R. Browning locates the decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe in mid-October in The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942, with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 370–372. In contrast, Himmler’s biographer, Peter Longerich, sees no single point at which a decision was made, but rather an accretion of smaller steps leading to a point, not until late April or early May 1942, at which total extermination was now the policy. Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 541–574, esp. 563–564. Longerich’s thesis is problematic for several reasons: Hitler is almost absent from Longerich’s discussion of the decision-making process, although his active involvement at every step is well documented; Longerich fails to adequately explore the implications of Himmler’s order on October 23, 1941, blocking all further emigration from German-controlled Europe; Longerich’s account tends to understate the important role that death camps had assumed in the Nazi leadership’s thinking by the end of 1941; and the minutes of the Wannsee Conference (January 20, 1942) explicitly announce a plan to murder 11 million European Jews. Saul Friedländer argues that Hitler was compelled by his “prophecy” of January 1939 to commit himself, in the presence of the higher ranks of the Nazi Party, to total extermination of the Jews no later than the second week of December 1941: now that the United States was at war with Germany (December 11), the world war of Hitler’s prophecy had begun, so that the Jews of Europe would have to be “annihilated.” Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933–1945, vol. 2, The Years of Extermination (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 286–288. However, Kershaw has argued persuasively that Hitler would not have made anything like a formal announcement of such a policy to such a large number of players. Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, 99.

  10. On Hitler as an indispensable cause of the Holocaust: see, for example, Ian Kershaw, “Hitler and the Holocaust,” in Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, 237–281. Raul Hilberg finds that “without him,” the Holocaust would have been “inconceivable.” Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), ix. On Hitler’s “historic mission” against the Jews: see Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933–1945, vol. 1, The Years of Persecution (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 73–112; Friedländer, Years of Extermination, 286–288.

  11. A prime example is Himmler’s pushing the shooting squads to expand their killing to entire Jewish communities, in a bid to expand his own power, and in the (correct) expectation that Hitler would approve. Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 530–540.

  12. On the early expuls
ion plans: see Browning, Origins of the Final Solution, 36–71, and the summary table at 109. On the planners’ acceptance that very many Jews would die: see Longerich, Holocaust, 153–155. On the Madagascar Plan: see Browning, Origins of the Final Solution, 88–89; Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office, trans. Tom Lampert (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 303.

  13. Kershaw, Fateful Choices, 54–90; Fritz, Ostkrieg, 1–76. Kershaw emphasizes that Hitler had always been skeptical of the prospects of successfully invading Britain and announced his decision to invade the Soviet Union to his generals on July 31, 1940, long before the decisive weeks of the Battle of Britain. However, Hitler’s decision was not finalized in military directives until December, and no one can say what course he would have chosen had the Luftwaffe defeated the Royal Air Force in the fall of 1940.