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Overview
This anthology is organized around key issues of the Holocaust, from the historical context for antisemitism to the impediments to escaping Nazi Germany, and from the logistics of the death camps and the carrying out of genocide to the subsequent struggles of the displaced survivors in the aftermath.
Prepared in cooperation with the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, this anthology includes contributions from such luminaries as Jean Ancel, Saul Friedlander, Tony Judt, Alan Kraut, Primo Levi, Robert Proctor, Richard Rhodes, Timothy Snyder, and Susan Zuccotti. Taken together, the selections make the ineffable fathomable and demystify the barbarism underlying the tragedy, inviting readers to learn precisely how the Holocaust was, in fact, possible.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803274891 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 904 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
How Was It Possible?
A Holocaust Reader
By Peter Hayes
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Jewish Foundation for the RighteousAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-7489-1
CHAPTER 1
The Context
Introduction
Peter Hayes
Like all major events, the Holocaust had both long- and short-term causes. Many centuries of animosity toward Jews in Europe made an attempt to expel or eradicate them desirable to some people (i.e., provided motive), but only the conditions of a specific time period allowed the attempt to occur (i.e., provided opportunity). This chapter describes the changing and layered nature of the animosity and begins explaining why its eruption in the first half of the twentieth century surpassed all precedent.
For hundreds of years, the stigmatization of Jews in Europe stemmed from Christian religious teaching. Restrictions on what Jews could own or do or where they could live arose in order to: (1) demonstrate and defend the newer faith's claim to have superseded the older one in God's affection and (2) induce Jews to confirm this by converting. Misery and isolation were thus to be the lot of Jews, but not the extirpation meted out to every other form of religious dissent in Europe prior to the Reformation. They were to live in discomfort, both the Catholic and Orthodox churches taught, until such time that the Jews accepted the Gospel and thus heralded its triumph and the coming of the Kingdom of God.
This theological balancing act between punishment and preservation accounts for both the suffering and the survival of Jewry in Europe into the modern age. In the medieval and early modern eras, lay people periodically lost sight of why a group that had denied Christ's divinity should be treated differently from heretics and infidels and lashed out at Jews, especially in times of adversity. Clergy and true believers increasingly portrayed rejecting Christ as allying with Satan and imagined all sorts of ways in which Jews did his work, from poisoning wells to kidnapping children for murderous rites. The consequences of this demonization sometimes took the lethal forms of massacres or mass expulsions. Yet, the treatment of Jews was never uniform in Christendom, and coexistence continued to alternate with persecution, even after Western or Catholic Christianity fragmented in the 16th century. Among Protestants, for example, Calvinists inclined to a respectful attitude toward Jewry, but followers of Martin Luther echoed the rage he expressed when the Jews proved no more willing to accept his Christianity than the one that it had reformed. After 1648, when the bloody and disastrous wars of religion ended in stalemate, the spread of the concept of religious toleration produced a decline in anti-Jewish violence in Western and Central Europe, but the same cannot be said about the Eastern part of the continent where Orthodoxy held sway.
The differences between Jews' experience in the two halves of the continent grew more marked during what historians call the "long nineteenth century," the years between the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and the onset of World War I in 1914. In Western and most of Central Europe, the emancipation of the Jews from residential and professional restrictions in the wake of the French Revolution gradually became the accepted norm. Not so in the East, where the Russian Empire ruled over and enforced the Pale of Settlement that confined about half of Europe's Jewish population to relatively poor regions in today's Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, and where the launching of pogroms and the forging of antisemitic propaganda, most notoriously The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, were favored tools of governance.
Even in the relatively enlightened parts of Europe, the situation of Jews remained ambiguous and contentious, and new forms of prejudice against them supplemented and in some circles replaced religious condemnation. For as their rights and opportunities expanded, Jews faced a backlash from two sorts of critics, those who argued that Jews had taken too little advantage of the new conditions and those who claimed they had taken too much. The first critique was the province of intellectuals and theologians for the most part, people who expressed disappointment that many Jews still observed their ancient traditions, beliefs, and rituals and thus failed to become indistinguishable from the population around them by embracing either its religion or its rationalism.
The second critique was more broadly based, recurrent, and vehement. Its proponents claimed that as the Jews had emerged from the ghettos and into the worlds of industry, trade, and the professions, they had become the principal beneficiaries of freedom of opportunity and competition. Invisible among college students, manufacturers, lawyers, and doctors in 1800, Jews seemed disproportionately present in all of these prized roles by the 1850s, even more so by the 1880s. Every social group that felt disadvantaged by economic and cultural change during the 19th century—from the nobility and the higher clergy to artisan producers and many farmers—spawned spokespeople dedicated to proving that its situation was not the result of market forces or technological change or new ways of thinking, but of a conspiracy on the part of the minority that was so obviously ascendant. Moreover, in an age of seeing and drawing profound distinctions among humans—spurred by scholarship in linguistics and science, by the burnishing of national identities, and by a new wave of colonial encounters with non-European peoples—numerous voices claimed to be able to demonstrate that the rise of the prospering group stemmed from innate and inbred traits that marked it off immutably from all others.
Yet neither critique succeeded in halting the pattern it attacked. Although the rise of Reform Jewry, primarily in German-speaking lands, narrowed the differences between Jewish and Christian religious observances, Western and Central European Jews mostly remained Jews and conscious of themselves as such. Despite the clamor of newspapers and political parties that sought to undo emancipation in almost every European country and the periodic occurrence of hate-laden incidents such as street riots, ritual murder trials, and the Dreyfus Affair, no roll back of Jews' civil rights took place. On the eve of World War I, Jews in Western and Central Europe were more secure, more integrated into their societies, and, on average, more prosperous than ever before. If they remained subject to discrimination in some quarters, the trend line of acceptance appeared to be in their favor.
The cataclysm of 1914–18 slowed or reversed that trend line in much of Europe. In the first place, Russia's sufferings and setbacks in World War I engendered a series of revolutions and a civil war from which the Bolsheviks emerged victorious. Communists rebelled in both Germany and Hungary, as well, though with less success. In all three uprisings, leaders of Jewish heritage (e.g., Leon Trotsky in Russia, Bela Kun in Hungary, Rosa Luxemburg and Kurt Eisner in Germany) played a prominent part, and opponents trumpeted this as proof of the alien menace Jews supposedly embodied. Especially but not only in Eastern Europe, a poisonous linkage of Jews with Bolshevism now reinforced their demonization by conservatives as instigators of destructive change.
In the second place, Germany's defeat toppled traditional institutions such as the monarchy, left behind intractable economic burdens, and set off an extended national debate over whom to blame. The German public divided deeply and almost evenly over whether responsibility lay with selfish elites that had misled the nation or sinister forces that had undermined it, chief among them the Marxists and the Jews. Germany's electorate also split sharply over the relative value of democratic decision-making or authoritarian rule. Still, one conviction united all political factions: the view that the victorious Allies had victimized Germany unfairly through the Versailles Treaty. Ultimately, a political deadlock between the competing sets of blamers allowed a clique of well-placed elitists and authoritarians to choose the winner. As a result, in January 1933 control over the most potentially powerful country in Europe, whose citizens felt aggrieved by the supposed injustices done to it, fell into the hands of Adolf Hitler, a man who soon became a dictator and who defined all Jews as his country's enemies.
The readings in this chapter lend detail to the main arguments of this introduction. Robert Wistrich's commentary on antisemitism traces its evolution from a religious to a pseudo-scientific formulation of the differences between Jews and others and highlights the prominence of these fateful ideas in late 19th century Austria, the land of Hitler's youth. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann's section on racism delineates the intellectual pedigree of the zoological politics later propagated by the Nazi Fuehrer. Amos Elon's account of contradictions in Central Europe reveals why that part of the world nonetheless offered Jews almost unparalleled, though not unlimited opportunities prior to World War I, and then began to turn on them during it. Even so, Klaus Fischer's summary of Germany's turmoil in the wake of the lost war makes clear that the depth of the nation's political polarization contributed more to Hitler's acquisition of power than the racist and expansionist ideology that was his guiding passion. Finally, Ezra Mendelsohn's survey of communal relations between the wars in the interwar Jewish heartland of East Central Europe, especially Poland, documents Jews' vulnerability to attack, even before the Nazis arrived.
The readings in this chapter alert readers to three key elements of the context in which Nazi Germany's assault on the Jews unfolded after 1933: the ideological inheritance that armed fomenters of hatred with a well-honed array of justifications for persecution; the political background that made the Nazi regime translate its racism into practice gradually and somewhat surreptitiously in the initial phase of Hitler's rule; and the geographical exposure of the largest concentration of European Jews, who lived where they were already at risk during the interwar years and where the Third Reich intended to obtain "living space." In addition, the excerpts will help readers begin assembling convincing answers to the most fundamental questions that historians must ask about the Holocaust: Why then (i.e., not earlier or later)? Why there (not elsewhere)?
Antisemitism
Robert S. Wistrich
From Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred
"Antisemitism" is a problematic term, first invented in the 1870s by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr to describe the "non-confessional" hatred of Jews and Judaism that he and others like him advocated. The movement that began at that time in Germany and soon spread to neighboring Austria, Hungary, France and Russia was a self-conscious reaction to the emancipation of the Jews and their entry into non-Jewish society. In that sense it appeared to be a novel phenomenon, since, as the early antisemites were at pains to stress, they were not opposed to Jews on religious grounds but claimed to be motivated by social, economic, political or "racial" considerations.
Religious hostility in late nineteenth-century Europe was regarded by many intellectuals as something medieval, obscurantist and backward. There was clearly a need to establish a new paradigm for anti-Jewishness which sounded more neutral, objective, "scientific" and in keeping with the liberal, enlightened Zeitgeist. After all, Jews by virtue of their emancipation had become equal citizens before the law in European societies that, formally at least, had abandoned discrimination based on religious differences. Antisemitism that grounded itself in racial and ethnic feelings provided a way around this problem. By focusing attention on allegedly permanent, unchanging characteristics of the Jews as a social and national group (which depicted them as being fundamentally "alien" to their fellow citizens) the antisemites hoped to delegitimize Jewish equality. They sought to restore the social boundaries that had begun to disappear in Europe, and they ultimately expected to return the Jews to their earlier pre-emancipated status.
"Antisemitism"—a term that came into general use as part of this politically motivated anti-Jewish campaign of the 1880s—was never directed against "Semites" as such. The term "Semitic" derived from the Biblical Shem, one of Noah's three sons, and designated a group of cognate languages including Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Babylonian, Assyrian and Ethiopic, rather than an ethnic or racial group. Similarly, the contrasting term "Aryan" or "Indo-European," which became popular at this time, referred originally to the Indian branch of the Indo-European languages. Strictly speaking, "Aryans" were people speaking Sanskrit and related languages who had invaded India in prehistoric times and subjugated its indigenous inhabitants. Indians and Iranians were "Aryans" but Germans and North Europeans certainly were not, any more than European Jews, who no longer spoke Hebrew, could be meaningfully described as "Semites."
Nevertheless, in the late nineteenth century this pseudo-scientific nonsense became eminently respectable even among the European intellectual elites, so that the distinction between "Aryan" and "Semite" was easily grafted on to the much older distinction between Christian and Jew. As a result, for the last hundred years, the illogical term "antisemitism," which never really meant hatred of "Semites" (for example, Arabs) at all, but rather hatred of Jews, has come to be accepted in general usage as denoting all forms of hostility toward Jews and Judaism throughout history.
There is clearly a danger in using antisemitism in this overly generalized way, extending it to all times and places regardless of specific circumstances, differences between historical epochs and cultures, or other factors that might give the term more specificity and critical sharpness. Antisemitism is not a natural, meta-historical or a metaphysical phenomenon whose essence has remained unchanged throughout all its manifestations over the centuries. Nor is it an intrinsic part of the psychic structure of Gentiles, a kind of microbe or virus which invariably attacks non-Jews, provoking the "eternal hatred" for the "eternal people." Such a theory, which has some roots in the Jewish tradition ("Esau hates Jacob," the legacy of Amalek, etc.) and was adopted by early Zionists in Eastern Europe such as [Leo] Pinsker, [M.] Lilienblum and [Nachum] Sokolow, is quite unhistorical.
It ignores the fact that Jews have often been welcomed by the surrounding society; that their equality of status and integration was accepted as a binding legal and social principle in many countries during the modern period; and it crucially forgets that Jewish participation in cultural, scientific, economic and political life since the Western Enlightenment has in many respects been a remarkable success story. If antisemitism had really been a "hereditary disease of the Gentiles," or been based on an instinctive racial aversion to Jews (as antisemites sometimes claim), such a development would have been impossible. Admittedly, there has also been a backlash to Jewish integration, influence or success at some points in time—whether in first-century Alexandria and Rome, in medieval Muslim or Christian Spain, in fin-de-siècle Paris and Vienna or in Weimar Germany—but this pattern has definite historical causes and has nothing to do with any theory of innate Gentile antisemitism.
Any empirically valid discussion of antisemitism or hatred of Jews must, in my opinion, first of all come to terms with the problem of its historical continuity and development. This necessarily leads us back to the Hellenistic era, when a widespread Jewish Diaspora first emerged that was quite distinctive in the ancient world. Not only were the Jews the only monotheistic minority in this pagan world, bearers of a doctrine of election which claimed that Judaism was the sole truth, the supreme ethical teaching; not only did they persist in their historic existence as a separate social and religious group; not only did they refuse even to intermingle with the Gentiles because of their own dietary laws, Sabbath observance and prohibition on intermarriage; above all, this unique Diasporic nation which had set itself apart asserted spiritual supremacy over the polytheistic majority.
There is nothing surprising in the fact that such special characteristics and claims could provoke the hostility or resentment which one finds in Greek and Latin literature. To some extent this pre-Christian antisemitism looks like the normal, xenophobic prejudice that has prevailed between ethno-religious groups during virtually every period of history. But such a plausible conclusion ignores the unique character of the Jewish Diaspora, its unusual social cohesion, compactness and religiously sanctioned exclusiveness. This does not mean that the cause of antisemitism lay in the Jews themselves, but it can help us to understand how the peculiar brand of social hostility that we call by this name first arose as one possible response (there were of course others, ranging from admiration to indifference) to the reality of Jewish exclusiveness.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from How Was It Possible? by Peter Hayes. Copyright © 2015 Jewish Foundation for the Righteous. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Foreword Harvey Schulweis,
Introduction Peter Hayes,
Editorial Note,
Chapter 1. The Context,
Chapter 2. Nazism in Power,
Chapter 3. Impediments to Escape,
Chapter 4. The New Order in Europe,
Chapter 5. Jews in the Nazi Grip,
Chapter 6. The German Killers and Their Methods,
Chapter 7. Collaboration and Its Limits,
Chapter 8. Rescuing Jews—Means and Obstacles,
Chapter 9. Aftermath,
List of Abbreviations,
Source Acknowledgments,
Index,