How Could This Happen

by Dan McMillan

  10. Andrzej Strzelecki, “The Plunder of Victims and Their Corpses,” in Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds., Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 246–266; “From the Final Report by Katzmann, Commander of the SS and Police in the District of Galicia, on ‘The Solution of the Jewish Problem’ in Galicia,” 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), 335–341; Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 3:1049.

  11. Quoted in Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 3:1029–1030, n. 12.

  12. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, 109, 160; Friedländer, Years of Extermination, 503, 591–592.

  13. Friedländer, Years of Extermination, 296–297, 592–593; Arad et al., Documents on the Holocaust, 353. From the context it is unclear whether the photographers were Ukrainian, German, or both.

  14. The famine that directly or indirectly carried off most of the Cambodian victims resulted from economic dislocation and a shortfall in rice imports, as opposed to the Germans’ deliberate policy of murder by malnutrition. Although urban dwellers or peasants living outside of zones previously controlled by the Khmer Rouge were clearly disfavored in the Cambodian genocide (Kiernan estimates that 33 percent of them perished, versus 15 percent of the “old people” from KR-controlled rural areas), they were not condemned to death at the outset, whereas every Jew, without exception, would inevitably be murdered, and both victims and killers understood this awful truth. See Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, 163–164, 456–458.

  The “transit camps” in present-day Syria and Iraq, where upward of 600,000 Armenian deportees perished from hunger and disease, have been described as “death camps,” and were clearly used as part of a deliberate effort to decimate the Armenian population. However, they were largely administered and guarded (to keep out hostile tribes) by the Armenians, and produced almost no interaction between Armenians and Turks. They therefore do not represent a parallel to the phenomenon of killers living among their victims in the Holocaust. Kévorkian, Armenian Genocide, 632–670, esp. 632–637 and 670–672.

  15. Quoted in Sereny, Into That Darkness, 131, 189. Yitzhak Arad sees in Stangl the “outlook, that Jews are not within the realm of humanity . . . a complete identification with Nazi racial ideology,” demonstrated by a “withdrawal from any contact with the prisoners, even with regard to the most cruel acts.” Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, 186. However, Stangl did not in fact avoid all contact with prisoners, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter.

  16. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 363; 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), 239.

  17. Friedländer, Years of Extermination, 209.

  18. See, especially, the memoir of Fania Fenelon, who played in a separate women’s orchestra in Auschwitz, Playing for Time (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1976); Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, 227–233.

  19. Lanzmann, Shoah: The Complete Text, 2–3, 84, 91–92; Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, 231–232.

  20. On anger at victims: Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 19–20. Kelman and Hamilton write: “Those who participate in the massacre directly . . . are reinforced in their perception of the victims as less than human by observing their very victimization. The only way they can justify what is being done to these people—both by others and by themselves—and the only way they can extract some degree of meaning out of the absurd events in which they find themselves participating, is by coming to believe that the victims are subhuman and deserve to be rooted out.”

  21. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996), 263–292; Friedländer, Years of Extermination, 509–510; Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess, eds., “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders, trans. Deborah Burnstone (Old Saybrook, CT: Konecky and Konecky, 1991), 104; Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 90–95. Some 11,000 Miedzyrzec Jews were targeted for deportation; the surviving Jews in the town counted 960 who had been killed during the roundup, so I have given a figure of 10,000 who were deported and died at Treblinka. Captain Julius Wohlauf’s men were outraged that Wohlauf had let his bride witness their actions, although it has been argued that their main concern was for the health of a woman who was four months pregnant. Ibid., 93; Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 242–243.

  22. Klee et al., eds., “Good Old Days,” 259–261, 264.

  23. Ibid., 262, and passim.

  24. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 105–106.

  25. Again, Cambodia’s lethal agricultural projects under the Khmer Rouge form a partial exception, but unlike the situation in the Holocaust, the Cambodian victims were not condemned to death in advance, which necessarily meant a very different kind of relationship between guards and prisoners than the type seen in the Holocaust.

  26. Höss, Death Dealer, 35.

  27. On the initial selection at Auschwitz: a good overview is in Lifton, Nazi Doctors, 163–179. On the survivors’ perspective: Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 19–21; Fenelon, Playing for Time, 16–18.

  28. Klee et al., eds., “Good Old Days,” 178–179.

  29. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, 202; Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 128.

  30. Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 103.

  31. Former SS officer Franz Suchomel stated that the men always died first. Lanzmann, Shoah: The Complete Text, 108–109. On the organization of laborers in the camp: Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, 108–113.

  32. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, 120–121. This estimate of the number killed refers to the new gas chambers, constructed in September and October 1942. Arad suggests that these chambers could absorb a maximum of 2,300 victims. The SS officer Heinrich Matthes testified that each chamber could hold about 300 people, so that 1,800 could be murdered at one blow. Other sources say that there were ten chambers rather than six, so that, according to Arad’s estimate, 3,800 could be killed in one batch.

  33. For a broad spectrum of beliefs within a ghetto about the fate of deportees, see Christopher R. Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 69–71.

  34. Arad et al., eds., Documents on the Holocaust, 283–284.

  35. Shlomo Venezia, Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz, in collaboration with Beatrice Prasquier, trans. Andrew Brown (Malden, MA, 2009), 67–68. “Special squad” refers to the Sonderkommando.

  36. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, 108.

  37. Filip Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz. Three Years in the Gas Chambers, Susanne Flatauer, ed. and trans. (Chicago, 1979); Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, 209–214; Venezia, Inside the Gas Chambers, 74.

  38. Quoted in Lanzmann, Shoah: The Complete Text, 105, 107.

  39. Ibid., 108.

  CHAPTER 3

  1. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 141.

  2. See Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, 1849–1914 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995), 459–486; David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Jürgen Kocka, ed., Bürgertum im 19: Jahrhundert. Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich, 3 vol
s. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988); and the useful summary in Matthew Jefferies, Contesting the German Empire, 1871–1918 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 33–46.

  3. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933–1945, vol. 2, The Years of Extermination (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 213, 221–223, 225; Report of October 15, 1941, from Einsatzgruppe A, 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), 389–393. On willing collaborators throughout Europe more generally: see Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). Recent research shows that many early massacres following the German invasion were less spontaneous efforts by the local population than had previously been thought and that the Germans played an important but concealed role in instigating the killings. Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 192–196.

  4. The best survey of German history during the nineteenth century and first two decades of the twentieth is David Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1780–1918: The Long Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003); older, but still useful, is William Carr, A History of Germany, 1815–1990, 4th ed. (New York: Arnold, 1991). On the empire: see, especially, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871–1918, trans. Kim Traynor (New York: Berg, 1985); also useful is Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Imperial Germany, 1867–1918: Politics, Culture, and Society in an Authoritarian State, trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Arnold, 1995).

  5. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 217–218. On a tendency to obedience during the empire: see the thoughtful discussion in David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) (hereafter Blackbourn, Long Nineteenth Century, 1st ed.), 372–375, but qualified at 41, with respect to the early nineteenth century; more generally, see Gordon A. Craig, The Germans (New York: Putnam, 1982), 22–23 and passim. Note, however, that no less an observer than Carl von Clausewitz, writing in 1807, characterized the French as especially militaristic and obedient to authority, while the Germans, in his opinion, had too critical an attitude to blindly submit to tyranny. Blackbourn, Long Nineteenth Century, 1st ed., xiii.

  On the radicalism of the “second revolution” of 1849: see Blackbourn, Long Nineteenth Century, 1st ed.,162, and Blackbourn’s list of episodes of protest at 171; Jonathan Sperber, Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848–1849 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). On voting in Germany: Blackbourn, Long Nineteenth Century, 1st ed., 411. In 1909–1910, the German socialist party had 720,000 members, more than the socialist parties of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Holland, Norway, Sweden, and Great Britain combined. Ibid., 412.

  On the United States: see, for example, William Greider, Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy, with a new introduction (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009 [1992]); Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010); Robert G. Kaiser, So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government, with a new epilogue (New York: Vintage, 2010); Lawrence Lessig, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It (New York: Hachette, 2011).

  6. The best introduction to German liberalism remains James J. Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); for a more recent review of the literature, see Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, trans. Christiane Banerji (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

  7. Blackbourn, Long Nineteenth Century, 1st ed., 240ff.

  8. Most historians would characterize Bismarck as a political genius whose role in German unification was indispensable. See Jefferies, Contesting the German Empire, 50–61. The best biography is Lothar Gall, Bismarck, the White Revolutionary, trans. J. A. Underwood, 2 vols. (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986); also useful is Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, 3 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

  9. Blackbourn, Long Nineteenth Century, 1st ed., xvi, 249; Carr, History of Germany, 100; quotation and account of the battle in James J. Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 908–909.

  10. See the amusing examples of Bismarck worship in Blackbourn, Long Nineteenth Century, 1st ed., 257–258. Many historians argue that Bismarck was able to unify Germany in part because he acted within “a unique window of opportunity in European affairs” that opened in the 1860s, which was caused by, among other factors, the impetus given to German unification by the unification of Italy, Russia’s turning away from European politics after its defeat in the Crimean War, Britain’s preoccupation with “domestic and imperial issues,” and Napoleon III’s desperate search for foreign policy successes to enhance his regime’s legitimacy in France. Jefferies, Contesting the German Empire, 58.

  11. This argument has been made by, among others, Hagen Schulze, in Weimar: Deutschland, 1917–1933 (Berlin: Severin und Siedler, 1982), 67ff. For the most recent thorough treatment of this thesis, see Christoph Schönberger, “Die überholte Parlamentarisierung: Einflußgewinn und fehlende Herrschaftsfähigkeit des Reichstages im sich demokratisierenden Kaiserreich,” Historische Zeitschrift 272, no. 3 (2001): 623–666. As David Blackbourn points out, a potential reformist coalition of socialists, center, and left liberals had a permanent majority of seats in parliament from 1890 onward, but were divided by the mutual hostility of liberals and Catholics as well as the antagonism between socialists and both of the other parties. Blackbourn adds other factors that militated against a transition to parliamentary control: electoral districts that favored the conservative countryside over the cities, the executive’s ability to dissolve parliament and call new elections, the parties’ cooperation with the executive in exchange for favors, the popularity of the monarchy as an institution, and the tendency of economic-interest pressure groups to divide the parties internally and from each other. However, Blackbourn also points out that the first two problems were hardly decisive, while the parties’ cooperation in exchange for favors and the power of economic interests strike me as functions of parliament’s weakness. Pressure groups flourished in part because the lack of parliamentary control privileged economic interests that could lobby the executive branch directly. See Blackbourn, Long Nineteenth Century, 1st ed., 417–424.

  12. On France’s lack of homogeneity: Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976).

  13. The seminal work is Rainer Lepsius, “Parteiensystem und Sozialstruktur: Zum Problem der Demokratisierung der deutschen Gesellschaft,” in Wilhelm Abel, ed., Wirtschaft, Geschichte und Wirtschaftsgeschichte: Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Friedrich Lütge (Stuttgart: G. Fischer, 1966), 371ff. Research since the 1980s has somewhat diminished the appeal of this explanatory model, as scholars have demonstrated unexpected overlapping of constituencies (for example, middle-class voters for the socialist party) as well as greater fluidity between the parties as voters shifted back and forth between them. Jefferies, Contesting the German Empire, 120–125. However, Brett Fairbairn has concluded that the transition to mass mobilization of voters by the parties circa 1900 “reinforced the roots of certain parties in particular social structures and groupings. It did not substitute for social affiliations, but rather strengthened them.” Brett Fairbairn, Democracy in the Undemocratic State: The Reichstag Elections of 1898 and 1903 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 242–243. Similarly, Christoph Schönberger finds that the transition to mass politics only intensified the divisions between the German parties as represented in the Reichstag, so that “
they were therefore hardly capable of [forming] coalitions and [exercising] power.” Schönberger, “Die überholte Parlamentarisierung,” 656.

  Fairbairn has questioned the thesis that party antagonisms prevented the transition to parliamentary rule, but unfortunately he measures the fragmentation of the political spectrum not by the incompatibility of the parties’ programs and the mutual hostility expressed in their rhetoric, but rather by such mechanical criteria as the average share of the vote per party and the “effective number of parties,” which leads to, among other problems, the absurd contention that fragmentation had decreased by 1912 because the socialists had attracted such a large fraction of the electorate. In fact, as will be seen below, the socialist victory in 1912 only heightened a sense of crisis in German politics. Fairbairn, Democracy in the Undemocratic State, 256–257.

  On the socialist milieu: Vernon L. Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), esp. 22–23.

  14. See the Socialists’ Erfurt Program (1891), the party’s official dogma until revisions were made in 1921, in Karl Kautsky, Das Erfurter Programm: In seinem grundsätzlichen Teil erläutert, intro. Susanne Miller (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1980), 253–258, and Kautsky’s comments at 146. This volume is a reprint of the 17th ed., originally published in 1922, and largely unchanged since the first edition in 1892, although the party had adopted a new program the preceding year.

  15. Gerhard A. Ritter, ed., Das deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871–1914: Ein historisches Lesebuch (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1992), 366–367.