The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  The Gestapo interrogator to the Old Bolshevik

  prisoner, in Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

  ‘There’s an osmosis in war, call it what you will, but the victors always tend to assume the… the, eh, trappings of the loser.’

  Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead

  AUSCHWITZ AND HIROSHIMA

  It is a name that has become synonymous with evil: Auschwitz – the Germanized name for the unprepossessing Polish town of Oświécim, thirty-seven miles west of Kraków. It was in the nearby brick-walled barracks converted by the Germans into a concentration camp that a pesticide called Zyklon B was first used for the purpose of mass murder. The date was September 1941, and the initial victims were Soviet prisoners of war. But this was always intended as a test-run for genocide. Initially, the SS converted two farmhouses into provisional gas chambers at a new purpose-built camp known as Auschwitz-Birkenau. When these proved insufficient, four large crematoria were erected between March and June 1943, each consisting of an area for undressing, alarge gas chamber and ovens for incinerating the as phyxiated victims. The purpose was to murder Jews from all over Europe and dispose of their remains in the most efficient way possible. At the peak of its operations, more than 12,000 people were being killed at the complex each day. Altogether, it has been calculated, 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz, all but 122,000 of them Jews. That means that just under a fifth of all Holocaust victims perished there.

  It is its efficiency that makes Auschwitz so uniquely hateful. Among the exhibits visitors can see today are vast piles of human hair shaved from the heads of prisoners which were still awaiting shipment to German textile factories, neatly stuffed into sacks, when the camp was overrun by Soviet forces. In a separate display are examples of the products that were made from earlier consignments: coarse cloth, naval ropes and a peculiarly vile brown netting. Almost as disturbing are the great mounds of dull and dusty shoes; of false limbs; of spectacles; of suitcases with their owners’ addresses painted on them in the vain hope of return, addresses from all over Europe. And these are the merest traces, a tiny fraction of the detritus of genocide. Long gone is the gold from the victims’ pockets, off their fingers, from their teeth. For the Nazis were not content merely to kill those they defined as subhuman. They were impelled also to exploit them economically. A tiny minority were selected to work as slave labourers, some in the death camp itself, others – like Primo Levi, a trained chemist from Turin – in the adjoining factory run by IG Farben at Auschwitz III (also known as Buna or Monowice); still others were employed in nearby farms, mines and arms factories. Most, however, were simply gassed and then processed like so much waste product. You feel, after visiting Auschwitz, that the Germans did everything conceivable to those whom they killed except eat them. No other regime has come so close to H. G. Wells’s nightmare of a mechanized sucking out of human life by voracious aliens.

  Though it was the most efficient, Auschwitz was not necessarily the cruellest of the Nazi death camps. The first people to be gassed by the Third Reich were, as we have seen, German mental patients; they had been asphyxiated with pure carbon monoxide gas. This method was then exported to Eastern Europe, but using exhaust fumes, first in specially converted vans, then in static gas chambers equipped with large diesel engines. This was how people were killed at Sobibor, Treblinka and Bełżec, the camps set up to implement the ‘Action Reinhard’ in the autumn of 1941. Compared with inhaling Zyklon B, which killed most victims with in five to ten minutes, this was a slow way to die. Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, regarded his own methods as ‘humane’ compared with those of his counter part at the last of these camps, the notoriously sadistic Christian Wirth. Shortly before committing suicide in 1945, the SS officer Kurt Gerstein left a harrowing account of what he witnessed at Bełżec:

  The train arrives: 200 Ukrainians fling open the doors and chase people out of the wagons with their leather whips. Instructions come from a large loudspeaker: Undress completely, including artificial limbs, spectacles etc… . Then the women and girls go to the hairdressers who, with two or three snips of the scissors, cut off their hair and put it into potato sacks. ‘That is for some special purpose to do with U Boats, for insulation or something like that,’ the SS Unterscbarführer on duty told me.

  Then the procession starts to move. They all go along the path with a very pretty girl in front, all naked, men, women, and children, cripples with out their artificial limbs… And so they climb the little staircase and then they can see it all: mothers with their children at their breasts, little naked children, adults, men, women, all naked. They hesitate but they enter the death chambers, driven on by the others behind them or by the leather whips of the SS, the majority without saying a word. A Jewess of about forty, eyes blazing, curses the murderers. She receives five or six lashes with his riding whip from Captain Wirth personally and then disappears into the chamber…

  [After half an hour, all were dead from inhaling diesel fumes.]

  The corpses are thrown out wet with sweat and urine, smeared with excrement and menstrual blood on their legs… The riding whips of the Ukrainians whistle down on the work details. Two dozen dentists open mouths with hooks and look for gold… Some of the workers check genitals and anus for gold, diamonds and valuables.

  Between March and December 1942 an estimated 600,000 people, nearly all Jews(among them the members of the Jewish Council of Zamość), were brutalized, murdered and physically plundered in this fashion. From each transport to Bełżec around 500 were selected to remain alive in order to help dispose of the corpses; after a certain point they too were killed and replaced. Only five people are known to have escaped from the camp, of whom only two survived the war. One of them, Rudolf Reder,* was forever haunted by the cries of little children in the gas chamber: ‘Mummy! But I’ve been good! It’s dark! It’s dark!’ At another camp in Poland, Majdanek, around 170,000 prisoners were murdered not only with gas but also with bullets, beatings and hangings, culminating in the shooting of around 18,000 in Operation Harvest Festival (November 3, 1943). Such were the vile realities of the ‘final solution’ alluded to so elliptically by Reinhard Heydrich at the conference of state secretaries held on the manicured banks of Berlin’s Wannsee on January 20, 1942.

  Other regimes had perpetrated mass murder, as we have seen. Even more people were murdered for political reasons in Stalin’s Soviet Union; and many aspects of life and death in the Nazi concentration camps – especially the vile sadism of the lower ranks – clearly had their analogues in the Gulag. More people would perish as a result of Mao’s tyranny in China. Yet there was something qualitatively different about the Nazis’ war against the Jews and the other unfortunate minorities they considered to be ‘unworthy of life’. It was the fact that it was carried out by such well-educated people, the products of what had been, at least until 1933, one of the most advanced educational systems in the world. It was the fact that it was perpetrated under the leadership of a man who had come to power by primarily democratic means. The Nazi death machine worked economically, scientifically and euphemistically. In a word, it was very, very modern. A few examples may help to illustrate the point:

  The fares charged by the German state railway company, the Reichsbahn, for transporting the Jews of Europe to their deaths: 0.04 reichs marks per adult-kilometre, with half-price fares for children over four and for groups of 400 or more.

  The Breslau University Ph.D. thesis submitted by one Victor Scholz in 1940 and entitled ‘On the Possibilities of Recycling Gold from the Mouths of the Dead’.

  The careful technical and financial calculations of Kurt Prü fer, an engineer at the Erfurt firm of Topf & Sons, who designed the furnaces for the crematoria at Auschwitz.

  The bald account by a Ravensbrück survivor of the experimental operations on female prisoners (known as ‘rabbits’) by Doctors Fischer and Oberhäuser, which included the injection of streptococci into their bones, the insertion without anaesthetic
of toxic chemicals into their uteruses and the amputation of entire limbs ‘to replace damaged body parts of wounded German soldiers’.

  The signs hung on the path to the Buchenwald crematorium which read: ‘There is one path to freedom. Its milestones are called obedience, industry, honesty, order, discipline, cleanliness, sobriety, willingness to sacrifice and love of the fatherland.’

  The insistence of the SS-men at Bełżec that their victims were only ‘going for a bath, and after wards would be sent to work’, a lie reinforced by the employment of a small camp orchestra to drown out the screams of the dying by playing tunes like ‘Highlander, Have You No Regrets?’

  The overwhelming impression is of professionals transformed into psychopaths – morally blinded, perhaps, by their narrow specialisms (that, at least, was the historian Friedrich Meinecke’s theory). Whether collecting rail fares, conducting experiments, devising slogans, writing theses or designing ovens, it was thousands of people like Scholz, Prü fer, Fischer and Oberhäuser who turned Hitler’s deranged dream of genocide into reality. They, just as much as the sadistic SS-men described by Rudolf Reder, were the real perpetrators.

  So monstrous were the crimes perpetrated at Auschwitz, Majdanek and Bełżec – to say nothing of the other death camps at Chelmno, Sobibor and Treblinka – that Americans, Britons, Canadians and Russians have come to derive satisfaction from the belief that, when they fought Nazi Germany, their countries were engaged in a just war. We forget all too easily the extent to which the Allies, too, meted out death to innocent men, women and children to achieve their victory, albeit in quite different ways and with quite different motives. This was no simple war of evil against good. It was a war of evil against lesser evil. For the Axis powers did not collapse spontaneously under the weight of their own depravity. They could be vanquished only by the application of immense and contrary force. But this in turn required terrible moral compromises on the part of the Western powers. It seemed as if the Axis could be defeated only by turning their own inhuman methods against them.

  For many Japanese today, Hiroshima is Asia’s Auschwitz, a supreme symbol of man’s inhumanity to man. Yet Hiroshima was only one of many cities that Allied bombers laid to waste in the later stages of the Second World War. The historian cannot evade the question: what is the difference between Auschwitz and Hiroshima? One possible answer is that, for Hitler, gassing Jews was an end in itself and he would have continued gassing Jews until there were none left, even if the war had ended with a Nazi victory in 1942. By contrast, for Churchill and Roosevelt, strategic bombing was designed not to annihilate the German and Japanese peoples, but simply to end the war. Churchill once joked over lunch about sterilizing the defeated Germans, but that was just black humour (like his symbolic urination on the Siegfried Line and in the Rhine); the ‘final solution’ of the German question would take the old-fashioned, supposedly humane form of partition. Churchill’s paramount objective was not to kill all Germans, any more than it was to save all the Jews, or to liberate the French and the Poles. It was quite simply to bring the war to a victorious conclusion at a cost tolerable to the British people. His secondary objective, much less widely shared, was to avoid ‘presid[ing] over the liquidation of the British Empire’. And his third, which hardly anyone but he thought seriously about until after the war, was to try to ensure that the German threat to Britain was not simply replaced by a Soviet threat. To attain the first of these ends, Churchill was prepared to use all available means.

  Britain emerged on the victorious side of the Second World War at a lower cost in life (though not in treasure) than that imposed by the First World War. This was Churchill’s achievement. Her empire, however, was only partly preserved and gravely weakened. And by 1947, the year that India departed the imperial fold, it became obvious to everyone that another world war, still more devastating than the second, was a distinct possibility. Herein lay the greatest flaw of the Allied victory: its principal beneficiary was the totalitarian regime with which the Western democracies had joined forces in the summer of 1941, Stalin’s Soviet Union. Churchill had joked that if Hitler invaded Hell he would ‘at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons’;* in effect, that was precisely what had happened – and Churchill had offered Stalin much more than fond words. The wartime alliance with Stalin, for all its inevitability and strategic rationality, was nevertheless an authentically Faustian pact, though Britain and America were able to settle their debts to the Soviet Satan with the souls of others. That was why, for so many people in both Europe and Asia, the victories of 1945 did little more than to replace one version of totalitarianism with another.

  It is sometimes asserted that this outcome was only right and proper, in view of the disproportionate contribution of the Soviets to victory. Yet that may be to underestimate the role of the United Kingdom and the United States in slaying the Axis dragons.

  IMAGINED VICTORIES

  After the devastating losses inflicted on the Soviet Union by Operation Barbarossa, a second offensive in late 1941 had taken the German army beyond the Moscow–Volga Canal to the very outskirts of the capital itself. So grave did the position look that the Soviet government – though not Stalin, who remained to direct the newly created Stavka (Headquarters) – was removed to Kuibyshev (formerly Samara), more than 500 miles to the south-east. A special refrigerated railway carriage transported the embalmed body of Lenin to safety. On November 1, though the front line was barely forty miles away from Red Square, it was decided to proceed with the usual ceremonies to mark the anniversary of the Revolution. Normally, Stalin would have given a speech in the Bolshoi Theatre but, as it had been bombed, the event was held in the ornate but also bomb-proof precincts of the Mayakovskaya Square Metro station, which was decked out to look like the Bolshoi. In his speech, Stalin had a defiant message for his former confederate, Hitler: ‘If they want a war of extermination they shall have it… Our task now will be to destroy every German to the very last man. Death to the German invaders!’ This was the language of desperation as much as defiance.

  Fortunately for Stalin, he had received – and this time had the sense to believe – intelligence from Richard Sorge in Tokyo that in December 1941 the Japanese intended ‘only an advance into the South Pacific, nothing more’. It was Sorge’s assurance that ‘the Soviet Far East may be considered guaranteed against Japanese attack at least until the end of winter’ that enabled Stalin to divert fifty-eight divisions from Siberia to the West. The weather too was turning against the Germans, freezing fuel and fingers alike, and their casualty rate was soaring as Soviet resistance stiffened. The era of the blitzkrieg was over; what Curzio Malaparte ironically called the ‘Thirty-Year Lightning War’ had begun. Nevertheless the predicament of the Soviet Union in the months that followed Zhukov’s Moscow counteroffensive showed little sign of sustained improvement. German forces overran the Crimea. By the summer of 1942, they had reached the banks of the River Don, the gateway to the Caucasus, and were pressing on towards the Volga. The Soviet oilfields at Maykop were captured; the swastika flew on the peak of Mount Elbruz. Poland, the Baltic states, the Ukraine and Byelorussia: all were in German hands. By this stage in the war, Germany and her allies controlled virtually all of Western and Central Europe too, with the exception of a handful of neutral countries (Eire, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and Spain). As one Russian commentator put it, ‘Paris, Vienna, Prague and Brussels had become provincial German cities.’ The Balkans had yielded to German arms, as had Crete. In North Africa it was very nearly the same story. On June 21, 1942, Rommel’s Afrika Korps captured the British stronghold of To bruk and then thrust into Egypt to within fifty miles of Alexandria. Intoxicated by victory, Hitler contemplated the future German conquest of Brazil, of Central Africa, of New Guinea. The United States, too, would ultimately be ‘incorporated… into the German World Empire’. Ribbentrop’s shopping list for a post-war ‘supplementary colonial area’ included British and French West Africa, Fren
ch Equatorial Africa, the Belgian Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Zanzibar and Northern Rhodesia. Japan, meanwhile, had achieved no less astonishing victories in Asia and the Pacific. By 1941, as we have seen, the greater part of eastern China was in Japanese hands. The six-month onslaught that began with Pearl Harbor created a vast Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, embracing modern-day Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, to say nothing of a huge arc of Pacific islands.

  By the summer of 1942, then, only an incurable optimist could be certain that the Allies would win the war. In March of that year, following the Japanese triumphs in Asia, Churchill seriously contemplated resigning. Eden, who might have succeeded him, was fearful that the Soviets would make a separate peace with Hitler. ‘We have already lost a large proportion of the British Empire,’ lamented Alan Brooke in his diary, ‘and are on the high road to lose a great deal more of it.’ Britain seemed to be ‘a ship… heading inevitably for the rocks… Would we able to save India and Australia?… Egypt was threatened… Russia could never hold, [the] Caucasus was bound to be penetrated.’ The Germans might even reach the Gulf oilfields(‘our Achilles’ heel’).

  Could the Axis powers have consolidated their lightning victories of 1939–42 in such a way as to achieve ultimate victory? Military historians have long debated the strategic options open to Germany and Japan, in search of alternative decisions that might have tipped the war Hitler’s and Hirohito’s way. Leaving aside unlikely scenarios like a successful German invasion of Britain in 1940, a cancellation of Operation Barbarossa or a Japanese decision to attack the Soviet Union rather than the United States, four more or less plausible possibilities have been suggested: