Post-Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History / Edition 1 available in Paperback
Post-Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0253217288
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253217288
- Pub. Date:
- 01/18/2005
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0253217288
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253217288
- Pub. Date:
- 01/18/2005
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
Post-Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History / Edition 1
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253217288 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/18/2005 |
| Series: | Jewish Literature and Culture |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Post-Holocaust
Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History
By Berel Lang
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2005 Berel LangAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34501-1
CHAPTER 1
The Nazi as Criminal
Inside and Outside the Holocaust
Before discussing what I refer to as Nazi criminality, I feel obliged to raise certain objections to what I have to say about that subject. This means of proceeding may seem out of order, and certainly it makes for an unusual preface. But starting points come in various shapes, and the reasons for venturing a critique of a discussion yet to come will be quickly evident. Although I am not a historian, I propose to consider aspects of the history as well as the theory of Nazism and the Holocaust; furthermore, the psychology of the Nazis as well as their motives and reasons, will have a place in the discussion, although again, I am not a psychologist. I also apply the logic of explanation to Nazi policies and actions, but the logic of explanation, historical or philosophical, is itself a much contested (on some accounts, improbable) means of analysis. Certain ethical criteria, moreover, will figure here in relation to events and interpretations of the Holocaust — although it is generally conceded now that where moral decisions or judgments are at issue, nobody can speak with special authority; indeed, it is a serious question whether anyone speaks on that subject with authority at all.
Furthermore: the first part of this chapter's title — "The Nazi as Criminal" — is likely to sound, and fall, quite flat. With all that we have learned about the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" — that innocuous code name that the Nazis attached to the act of systematic genocide — are we to use the same bland term that is applied to burglars and white-collar embezzlers for its perpetrators? However inadequate our vocabulary for conveying the enormity of the Holocaust, surely there must be apter labels for its perpetrators (more apt, one might hope, even than "perpetrators"). And then, too, more strongly still: the specific thesis asserted here, on the place of the Holocaust in the overall Nazi "Project," may seem not only questionable but dangerous. For what I propose runs contrary to the received reading of the policies and actions of Nazism during its twelve-year rule — a reading that finds the Holocaust at once distinctive in its own terms and central to the Nazi Weltanschauung as a whole, with the latter worldview animated foremost by antisemitism: "eliminationist antiSemitism" (in Goldhagen's version) or "redemptive anti-Semitism" (in Friedlander's) or the more traditional, garden variety of antisemitism pushed to an extreme: Contrary to the accounts that build on these and that in effect equate the Nazi project with their declaration of war against the Jews, the claim argued here characterizes the "Final Solution" as one — prominent, but nonetheless, one — among a number of Nazi policies and programs that, understood as a group, aimed at a goal of racial and nationalist purification to be realized in the German "Volk," thus only to be understood individually against a broader background of Nazi policies in general and the atrocities, including the Holocaust, for which the Nazis were responsible.
This more extensive and inclusive goal also encompasses an ideal of transgression or criminality for its own sake — with criminality appearing, then, not in its usual "utilitarian" role as a means of furthering one's own self-interest, but as an ideal, in effect an end in itself. Especially this last feature gives an unusual edge to what then becomes the no longer bland term of criminal as it applies to the Nazis — both outside and inside the Holocaust. In doing this, it reinscribes as a marker or signature for Nazi history itself the moral standard of criminality that the Nazis had ostensibly sought to empty of meaning. In these terms, transgression, the will to violation as intrinsic to their project, appears as a significant, even necessary condition for clearing the space (moral, political, instrumental) within which the act and idea of national and racial, that is, biological transcendence and, within that, the genocide against the Jews, became first possible and then actual. Conversely, then, this account represents the Holocaust as explicable only within the framework of a larger causal and conceptual pattern — a framework to which the Holocaust clearly and even decisively contributed, but which was impelled by broader sources and goals than the Holocaust alone and which thus makes consideration of these others a requirement for understanding the Holocaust.
The dangers in this thesis, thus also the likely objections to it, will be readily apparent. For at first glance, the thesis may seem no more than a variant of familiar Holocaust revisionism: not Holocaust denial, but the subtler, more challenging effort to redistribute causes and effects in a way that so diffuses the roles of both agent and victim in the Holocaust that at some point they seem virtually to merge. One recalls here, for example, Ernst Nolte's various claims for the unexceptional character of the Holocaust, turning principally on his contention that both historical precedents and contemporary threats (mainly from Soviet Russia) caused or arguably (in his judgment) justified the response it provoked. To be sure, Nolte acknowledges that the Nazi reaction in the form of the "Final Solution" to the threat posed by Russia was extreme; but even so, the reaction appears to him still as falling within the "normal" range — to use a benign medical designation for this far from benign conclusion. But would not categorizing the Holocaust as one of a number of acts by the Nazis in pursuit of a more extensive or fundamental ideal also "normalize" the Holocaust by a similar leveling, bringing it into line with other policies or actions of the Nazi regime that are, however, qualitatively quite different? Surely, it might be argued, this dilution of the Holocaust's distinctiveness challenges the claims of that event's historical and moral weight — with this shift in turn diminishing the burden of moral responsibility that is so crucial an element in any account, historical or moral, of the Holocaust. There has been, after all, widespread acknowledgment, since and because of the Holocaust, of genocide as the most serious violation in the already large and imaginative inventory of human wrongdoing. The twofold murder that genocide entails — of individuals and the group, of the former because of their membership, however involuntary, in the latter — seems to reach as far as the human imagination has yet gone ("progressed," one might say) in conceiving the ways and means of wrongdoing, with the Holocaust a paradigm instance. Is this — genocide in general or the Holocaust in particular — now to be re-presented as only a means to another, more notable end?
Well, No and Yes — those contradictory judgments to be asserted and defended here with equal emphasis. For "No" the account here is not meant to contest the place of genocide (or the Holocaust) in either the historical or moral order of wrongdoing: the evidence for that is clear. But "Yes": I will be suggesting that, ingredient in its numerous specific expressions including the very large one of the Holocaust, the criminality for which the Nazis were responsible involved certain factors that were, however, unrelated to the (specifically) "Jewish Question" at all — factors that require consideration in their generality if the Nazis' individual acts, including the Holocaust, are to be understood. The Holocaust, in other words, is on this view part — a large part, but still — of a more fundamental historical and also moral framework. We are obliged, then, to consider whether and how these apparently conflicting claims — the "No" and the "Yes" — can be reconciled.
NAZI CRIMINALITY
I outline here five events or acts that occurred during the period of Nazi rule from 1933-45, a period when that regime, through the Wehrmacht, its regular army, and the SS, its "state within a state," controlled all large-scale actions undertaken by the government's branches or agencies. The acts described are well known — some more than others, but none of them in dispute on the questions of what took place or who, in the main, was responsible for ordering them or carrying them out. Uncertainty remains in respect to some of them about the exact numbers or identities of the people involved, agents or victims, but this is a common problem for many large-scale historical events. Although the actions described vary in scope and detail, they share certain essential features. And there, on that point, I ask the reader to take an active part in the discussion — so that, in following the descriptions of the five events, readers should name for themselves the common properties they find among the descriptions, properties which thus, in their view, apply to the five as a group. (The examples are given out of chronological order, since for this structural discussion, chronology should not be a consideration.) So:
1. Lidice: On June 4, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo and second-in-command in the SS to Himmler, died — a week after being severely wounded in an attack by two members of the Czech underground on the outskirts of Prague. On June 9, the village of Lidice, ten miles west of Prague, was surrounded by German security police and SD [Security Service] men. A group of women and children from the village were separated from the men; about 200 women were then sent to the women's concentration camp at Ravensbruck, and 90 of the children, separated from their mothers, were sent to a camp in the Wartheland (Polish territory annexed by Germany). The men of the village — 183 in all — and about 70 women were shot on the spot (15 relatives of Czech legionnaires, who were already in custody, were also shot). A short time afterward, the village was razed; not a building was left standing. On October 24 of the same year, 252 Czechs, some relatives and friends of the inhabitants of Lidice but who had not themselves lived there, some who only had the same family names as Lidice residents but who were unrelated to anyone there, were killed in a single day in the concentration camp at Mauthausen. No evidence was ever presented that Heydrich's assassination could be traced to residents of Lidice or, geographically, to the village itself.
2. The T-4 Program: Beginning in October 1939, a program was initiated within Germany, designed to kill certain individuals by a Gnadenstod, a "mercy death." In this Program (known as T-4 after the Berlin address of its headquarters at Tiergarten 4), persons living what was judged to be a "life unworthy of life" would be killed: these were, first, children and, then, adults of any background or class judged to be incurably ill, mentally or physically (old age was included among these debilities), and thus a burden on the nation's resources. The selection of those to be killed was made by physicians who also signed falsified death certificates that were then sent to the victims' next-of-kin. The program itself was meant to be kept secret; certainly it was involuntary — for the victims who might have been capable of making decisions as well as for those who were not. Six main centers in Germany were put in operation for carrying out the murders; the victims were transported to those centers from other parts of the country, and the method of killing them at the centers was mainly by gassing. In August, 1941, following protests within Germany from families of victims and several religious officials who gradually became aware of what was happening, the program was officially halted (this cessation coincided — and not accidentally — with the German invasion of Russia); the program continued informally, however, up to the wars end, nearly four years later. The methods of execution in this later period were mainly starvation and chemical injection. Estimates of the number of persons killed in the T-4 Program in Germany prior to its formal abolition range between 75,000 and 125,000 (remember that the program originated before any of the "death camps" were established, indeed before the "Final Solution" had been adopted as policy). There is ample evidence that the program was continued informally throughout the war, with the number of victims during the almost four-year period after its declared conclusion estimated at another 100,000.
3. Massacre in Greece: At the end of July 1943, Mussolini was toppled from power in Italy, and in September, his successor, Marshal Badoglio, surrendered to the Allies. Greece had been occupied by both Italian and German troops (the Germans having entered Greece in order to rescue and complete the Italian invasion). When word of the Italian surrender reached the occupying forces in Greece, the Germans ordered the Italians there either to place themselves under German command or to disarm. Some groups of Italian soldiers refused to accept those terms, and on the Ionian island of Kefalonia, the Italians actively resisted, fighting against the Germans until being overpowered. After the Italians surrendered on September 24, German firing squads shot and killed the surviving Italian troops: 4750 men and 155 officers.
4. The Commando Order: In an order dated October 18, 1942, Hitler stipulated that soldiers of the Allied armies captured by the German army while participating in commando raids on German-occupied territory should be turned over to the Security Police (of the SS) for summary execution. The order was issued after a number of commando raids originating in Great Britain had been directed at the coast of occupied Europe from Norway to southern France. The soldiers taking part in the raids were British commandos and volunteers from Commonwealth armies, together with members of the "Free" forces of some of the occupied countries. All were in uniform during the raids, and indeed Hitlers order recognized this: "From now on, all enemies on so-called commando missions in Europe or Africa, challenged by German troops, even if they are to all appearances soldiers in uniform, whether armed or unarmed, in battle or in flight, are to be slaughtered to the last man. ... Even if these individuals when found should apparently seem to give themselves up, no pardon is to be granted them on principle." Certain German commanding officers took this order as license to kill virtually all captives, whether involved in "commando" raids or not; this has made it impossible to determine how many captured Allied fighters were killed on the basis of this order itself, but the number is almost certainly in the thousands.
5. Russian Prisoners of War: Between the time that Germany attacked Russia in June 1941 and the Wars end in May 1945, an estimated 5,000,000 Russian soldiers were captured by the German armed forces. Of that number, at least 2,500,000 and as many as 3,300,000 (between 45 percent and 60 percent) died in captivity; that is, as prisoners of war. No breakdown is available of these prisoners of war by age or physical condition, but they had evidently been fit enough to serve in the Soviet armed forces. (The latter point distinguishes the composition of this group from others incarcerated by the Nazis in the concentration and death camps.) "Normal" attrition, even under circumstances of hardship, could not account for this large number or percentage of deaths; and indeed, in addition to factors like contagious disease and inadequate medical care, two other factors contributed. The first of these, in the months just after the German invasion of the USSR, was the execution, mainly by shooting, of between 500,000 and 600,000 of the prisoners. The second was a plan of deliberate starvation adopted by the Nazis for the remaining prisoners, for whom the food distributed was known to be at starvation level: adequate on any given day for survival but insufficient over any period of time. By the fall of 1941, 2-3 percent of all Soviet prisoners were dying every day. Unusual proof of the intention as well as the implementation of this policy emerges from the fact that when the Germans, having discovered by early 1942 that the conquest of Russia would require more time than they had anticipated — thus thinking forward to the use of the Russian prisoners as laborers — increased the prisoners' food rations, the death rate dropped immediately. (Even then it was not until 1944 that the rations for Russian POWs were brought up the level of other prisoners, for example, those taken on the Western front. A mocking reference to the early results of this policy appears in the Göring diaries, as Göring, Hitler's second-in-command, notes that "they [the Russian prisoners] are eating each other.")
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Post-Holocaust by Berel Lang. Copyright © 2005 Berel Lang. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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