by Dan McMillan
14. On the German Army’s enthusiasm for the shootings: see, for example, Fritz, Ostkrieg, 97–104.
15. Christopher Browning has documented a clear correlation between military victory and the radicalization of Hitler’s thinking at several points between September 1939 and October 1941 in Browning, Origins of the Final Solution, esp. 314–330, 370–372, 425–427; both Hitler quotes at 370. Peter Longerich and others have contended that Hitler never made an identifiable decision, and that the policy of complete extermination instead evolved in numerous small increments until one day (in Longerich’s account, in April or May 1942) it happened to be the policy. This interpretation makes little sense: attempting to exterminate 11 million people (by Heydrich’s calculation) isn’t something that people just fall into doing. This interpretation is also not easily reconciled with the overriding importance that Jews had in Hitler’s thinking, the way that the magnitude of the threat they posed defined his own greatness as the hero who vanquished them, the very active role Hitler played at every step in the radicalization of anti-Jewish policy, and Hitler’s role as the sole source of power and legitimacy in the Nazi political system.
16. Citing an unpublished manuscript by Ray Brandon, Timothy Snyder puts the total of shooting victims in 1941 at 1 million, in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 218. Not having seen Brandon’s manuscript, I am sticking with the lower figure given in Friedländer, Years of Extermination, 209.
On the total number shot: Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 3:1320; Peter Black, “Foot Soldiers of the Final Solution: The Trawniki Training Camp and Operation Reinhard,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 25, no. 1 (2011): 2. On the “problems” involved in shooting: Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (New York: Random House, 2002), 215–228; Rudolph [Rudolf] Höss, Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant in Auschwitz, ed. Steven Paskuly, fwd. Primo Levi, trans. Andrew Pollinger (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 156–157.
There is some disagreement among historians over whether Majdanek was truly an extermination camp. The Majdanek gas chamber was used only episodically, and at least one estimate of its death toll has been revised downward to 24,000. Black, “Foot Soldiers of the Final Solution,” 21, 38 n. 285.
17. Murder by carbon monoxide began at Chelmno on December 8, 1941. Browning, Origins of the Final Solution, 418.
Auschwitz murdered Jews at all times of day and night, around the clock in some peak periods, but at Treblinka, any death trains that arrived at night were left standing until morning, so that the killing could begin at daybreak. Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 66. On Auschwitz: see the testimony of Rudolf Vrba in Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: The Complete Text of the Acclaimed Holocaust Film (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 34.
18. See, for example, Filip Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, ed. and trans. Susanne Flatauer (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1979).
19. At Belzec, the guards would briefly turn the lights on in the gas chambers, to see through peepholes how many of their victims had died. See Kurt Gerstein’s observations in Noakes and Pridham, Nazism 1919–1945, 3:1149–1153, esp. 1152. At Auschwitz, the guards likewise turned the lights off to gas their victims. Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945, trans. Ina Friedman and Haya Galai (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 366.
At Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, the Germans initially buried their victims, but later exhumed and burned their bodies to destroy the evidence and switched over to burning all subsequent victims who arrived at the camps.
20. On ghetto inhabitants’ knowledge of their fate: Friedländer, Years of Extermination, 441–442; “Notes by a Jewish Observer in the Lodz Ghetto Following the Deportation of the Children,” dated September 16, 1942, in Yitzhak Arad, Israel Gutman, and Abraham Margaliot, eds., Documents on the Holocaust, 8th ed., trans. Lea Ben Dor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 284–286; Christopher R. Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 69–71. The most thorough and analytical memoir by an Auschwitz survivor is Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Touchstone, 1996).
21. Black, “Foot Soldiers of the Final Solution,” 93 n. 285; Friedländer, Years of Extermination, 662.
22. Alon Confino sees “consensus” among historians about why the Holocaust happened, centered on Nazi ideology, institutional pressures, and the radicalizing context of World War II, in his Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 37–39.
23. Ben Kiernan puts the Cambodian death toll at 1,671,000 in The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 458. Journalists and the United Nations usually put the Rwandan death toll at 800,000; there were only 660,000 Tutsi in the country per the 1991 census. Triangulating from three sets of sources, Alison Des Forges, in “Leave None to Tell the Story”: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), estimated a figure somewhat above 500,000 Tutsi and about 10,000 Hutu. Scott Straus adopted these figures in The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 51.
I base the claim that people put the Holocaust in a class by itself mainly on the evidence in the paragraphs that follow, but partly also on my experience of talking and teaching about the Holocaust for four decades, and partly on the fact that so much more has been published, and so many more films have been produced, about the Holocaust than about other genocides. This volume of cultural production serves at least as indirect evidence of the special fascination the Holocaust holds for the public. On books, a rough indicator of the public’s interest is the number of entries gained by searching the Amazon website for books on “Holocaust” (12,921), “Rwanda genocide” (1,091), “Armenian genocide” (670), and “Cambodian genocide” (177) (figures as of June 12, 2011). A search on Amazon for films (both feature and made-for-TV movies) turned up 646 entries on the Holocaust, 35 on “Rwanda genocide,” 22 on “Armenian genocide,” and 5 on “Cambodian genocide” (as of June 12, 2011). A public opinion poll taken in the United States in 1992 is inconclusive because it did not ask whether the Holocaust was “unique,” but rather whether there were other historical events to which it could be “compared.” Katherine Bischoping and Andrea Kelmin, “Public Opinion About Comparisons to the Holocaust,” Public Opinion Quarterly 63, no. 4 (1999): 485–507.
The “Gorgon” quotation is from Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 4, also quoted in John K. Roth, “The Ethics of Uniqueness,” in Alan S. Rosenbaum, ed., Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, 2nd ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 2001), 28.
24. See, for example, Alan S. Rosenbaum, ed., Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, 2nd ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 2001); Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, “The Politics of Uniqueness: Reflections on the Recent Polemical Turn in Holocaust Scholarship,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 13, no. 1 (1999): 28–61. The quotation is from Taner Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), xxix. In the case of the Armenian genocide, Akçam finds that “the struggle to prove similarities [to the Holocaust] reached such ludicrous lengths that some of the most significant structural components of the Armenian Genocide, such as religious conversions or the assimilation of Armenian children into Muslim households, were almost completely omitted from analyses of the events of 1915 because such elements played no role in the annihilation of the Jewish people.” Ibid., xxx.
25. Saul Friedländer, in “The ‘Final Solution’: O
n the Unease in Historical Interpretation,” in Lessons and Legacies, vol. 1, The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World, ed. Peter Hayes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 23–35, writes at 31–32: “We should be dealing with this epoch and these events as with any other epoch and events, considering them from all possible angles, suggesting all possible hypotheses and linkages. But, as we know, this is not the case and, implicitly, for most, this cannot be the case.” And at 35: “Paradoxically, the ‘Final Solution,’ as a result of its apparent historical exceptionalism, could well be inaccessible to all attempts at a significant representation and interpretation.” Without referring to Friedländer, Alon Confino suggests that “most historians today” (as opposed to “several decades ago” when this view was “dominant”) would not subscribe to the view that the Holocaust “was unimaginable and is unrepresentable,” although he finds that “a self-imposed methodological and interpretive constraint still exists,” in “Forum: Cultural History and the Holocaust,” German History 31, no. 1 (2013): 61–85, esp. 65; see also 68 and remarks by Amos Goldberg at 69–70.
On Auschwitz being incomprehensible: Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 92, quoted in Friedländer, “The ‘Final Solution,’” 24. On bafflement after five years of study: Friedländer, “The ‘Final Solution,’” 24, paraphrasing Arno J. Mayer in the preface to Mayer’s Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History (New York: Pantheon, 1988); Bergen, War and Genocide, viii. See also Confino, Foundational Pasts, 3.
26. See, for example, Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Free Press, 1993); John C. Zimmerman, Holocaust Denial: Demographics, Testimonies and Ideologies (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000); Steven E. Atkins, Holocaust Denial as an International Movement (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009). On the existence of deniers of other genocides besides the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, I am indebted to Professor Steven Jacobs of the University of Alabama.
CHAPTER 2
1. Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: The Complete Text of the Acclaimed Holocaust Film (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 182.
2. I have seen references to a population of around 1,000 prisoners at Treblinka, but Yitzhak Arad’s overview of the squads of prisoners who did different kinds of work in the camp suggests a total number closer to 500. Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 108–113.
3. Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (New York: Vintage, 1974), 207–208.
4. Testimony of Richard Glazar, in Lanzmann, Shoah: The Complete Text, 111–112; Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, 121–122, 194–195. Glazar remembered the prisoners who escorted victims into the infirmary as belonging to the “blue squad,” but Arad (at 108) said they wore red armbands and were known as the “reds” and “the burial society.”
5. Sereny, Into That Darkness, 207–208.
6. On the burning and drowning of Armenians: Vahakan N. Dadrian, “Patterns of Twentieth Century Genocide: The Armenian, Jewish, and Rwandan Cases, Journal of Genocide Research 6, no. 4 (2004): 490–491. On the Armenian genocide generally: Taner Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus, 6th ed. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004); Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011). On Cambodia: Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). On Rwanda: Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Phillip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).
7. On the uniqueness of the Nazi assault on moral values: see also Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 327, 343–344, 356.
In the literature on other genocides, there are scattered references to the victims being described as vermin or bacteria, but this language was used metaphorically, rather than as an expression of a theory of biological difference, as seen in the Holocaust. This is the case, for example, with the leaders of the Khmer Rouge, who labeled their political enemies as “diseased elements” and “microbes.” Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 401, 406, 549–550. Yet almost all the victims of the Pol Pot regime were ethnic Khmers, so biological racism played a role only in the extermination of the 20,000 Vietnamese who remained in the country, and perhaps in the less thorough assault on the Cham minority.
Biological racism played little role in the Armenian genocide, as shown by the adoption of as many as 200,000 Armenian children into Turkish homes; the large numbers of Turkish men who took Armenian women as wives or concubines after their forced conversion to Islam; and the regime’s assimilationist policies toward non-Turkic Muslims. Akçam, Young Turks’ Crime, xv–xviii, 40–41, 287–339, esp. 334–339. See also Robert F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 251–252. On Turkey and Cambodia: see also Rowan Savage, “‘Disease Incarnate’: Biopolitical Discourse and Genocidal Dehumanization in the Age of Modernity,” Journal of Historical Sociology 20, no. 3 (2007): 404–440, esp. 410, 417, 419, 421. Significantly, Savage’s examples of Armenians being described as “microbes” came from the pens of Turkish nationalists who were medical doctors, so such statements cannot be taken as representative of the CUP leadership. Savage’s Cambodian examples are clearly metaphorical rather than literally biological—for example, Pol Pot’s references to “sickness of consciousness” among politically unreliable elements within the Khmer Rouge.
On Rwanda, Scott Straus’s interviews with 210 convicted killers show that racist ideas or even ethnic antipathy provided a motive for only a minority, while 70 percent of his sample had had at least one Tutsi family member, and almost none of them voiced any objection to the idea of themselves or one of their children marrying a Tutsi. While racist ideas may have been prominent in some of the radio propaganda emanating from Kigali, killers at the local level said racism played little role in their actions, although nationalist and racist ideas do seem to have influenced the most violent killers. Straus, Order of Genocide, 9, 124–135. Much has been made of the use of the term “cockroaches” (inyenzi), supposedly as a derogatory term for Tutsi. However, the term may have been used chiefly with a more narrow meaning, signifying only Kagame’s invasion force. The term inyenzi had been applied to armed Tutsi rebels since the civil strife of the early 1960s, apparently because they, like roaches, were active mainly at night. Only 0.6 percent of the killers Straus interviewed described the violence as “killing inyenzi.” Ibid., 157–160. See also Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 402. Throughout his treatment, Prunier uses this word, and quotes others using it, solely to signify Kagame’s fighters. See Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), 51 n. 34, and passim.
8. On the Jews of Norway, Kos, and Finland: see Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933–1945, vol. 2, The Years of Extermination (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 449, 454, 613.
Vahakn Dadrian, a distinguished historian of the Armenian genocide, contends that the Ittihadist government sought to completely exterminate Turkey’s Armenian population. Dadrian, “Patterns of Twentieth Century Genocide,” 494. In addition to the fact that the Turks left so many
alive whom they could have killed, other facts defeat Dadrian’s claim: tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of Armenians saved their lives by accepting forced conversion to Islam; the Armenian children who were spared and adopted into Turkish homes numbered in at least the tens of thousands, with estimates running as high as 200,000; the regime effectively subcontracted the killing to all manner of irregular and undisciplined groups who operated beyond the government’s control, including Kurdish and Chechen tribesmen, mobs of Turkish villagers, and the infamous Special Organization, consisting of violent felons recruited directly from prison and set upon the hapless Armenian caravans after only a week’s training. Had complete extermination been the goal, they would have relied on disciplined formations subject to centralized control, for example, the army. On conversions and adoptions: see Akçam, Young Turks’ Crime, 287–339; Kévorkian, Armenian Genocide, 295–296, 809–810. On the lack of central control over the killing process: Dadrian, “Patterns of Twentieth Century Genocide,” 490, 505; Kévorkian, Armenian Genocide, 294–296, 630, 652, 665.
On the intention to exterminate the entire Tutsi population of Rwanda: see Straus, Order of Genocide, 49, 53–55, 89, 163–165. However, Straus’s work concerns mainly the killing at the local level, rather than the plans of Hutu leaders in Kigali.
9. On Turkey: see Akçam, Young Turks’ Crime, xvii–xviii, 130–202, esp. 130–134; Dadrian, History of the Armenian Genocide, 185–199. On Rwanda: see Straus, Order of Genocide, 7, 9, 12, 44–49, 135–157.
On Hitler’s euphoric mood when he finalized his decision for complete extermination: see the quotations in Christopher R. Browning, 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. The leadership cadres of the Reich Security Main Office, which constituted the “nerve center” of the Final Solution, shared Hitler’s enthusiasm and exciting sense of unlimited possibilities. Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office, trans. Tom Lampert (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 443–444.