Subject: JUICE Holocaust - Lesson #3
Date: Tue, 24 Mar 1998 23:42:08 +0000
To: "Hebraic Heritage Newsgroup"<heb_roots_chr@geocities.com>
From: JUICE Administration <juice@virtual.co.il>
To: holocaust@virtual.co.il
Subject: JUICE Holocaust 3
==============================================================
World Zionist Organization
Jewish University in CyberspacE
juice@wzo.org.il birnbaum@wzo.org.il
http://www.wzo.org.il
==============================================================
Course: Meanings of the Holocaust
Lecture: 3/12
Lecturer: Elly Dlin
Lecture 3: Was the Holocaust Planned and Premeditated?
STAGES OF THE FINAL SOLUTION
Historians tend to divide events into different time periods. These
divisions are a greater or lesser reflection of what actually happened in
the past, but regardless of their accuracy, validity or reliability, all
periodizations are artificial and not to be misconstrued as being an
inherent aspect of the events themselves. Time periods or stages of
development are created by historians and added to the event.
Let me illustrate with the term "Middle Ages". Did anyone living in 14th
century Europe know that they were living in the Middle Ages? Certainly
not. "Middle" implies being between "early" and "later". Presumably
people then (if they thought about it at all) regarded themselves as living
in modern times.
Historians of the Holocaust divide Hitler's 12-year reign into 3 main
periods: from the assumption of power in January 1933 until the start of
war in September 1939, from 1939 until the start of the implementation of
the Final Solution in June 1941, and from then to the end of the Third
Reich in May 1945. In this lecture we will look at two diametrically
opposed interpretations of history that each attempt to answer the question
was the Holocaust premeditated?
THE INTENTIONALISTS SEE A STRAIGHT AND CLEAR ROAD
The intentionalist school is made up of those who are convinced that the
Nazis\Hitler "intended" to kill the Jews at some relatively early point in
time (here historians may differ as to exactly when that point was reached)
and that he proceeded along the road to Auschwitz in a carefully planned
and premeditated fashion. Gerald Fleming (among others) makes reference to
documents, speeches, utterances and testimonies about Adolf Hitler
(including ones that predate his joining the National Socialist Party in
1920) to trace an "unbroken continuity of specific utterances...a straight
path...a single, unbroken, and fatal continuum...to the liquidation orders
that Hitler personally issued during the war" (Gerald Fleming, pp. 13 and
24).
Lucy Dawidowicz writes that "War and annihilation of the Jews were
interdependent. The disorder or war would provide Hitler with the cover
for the unchecked commission of murder. He needed an arena for his
operations where the restraints of common codes of morality and accepted
rules of warfare would not extend...Once Hitler adopted an ideological
position," she adds, "he adhered to it with limpetlike fixity" (quoted in
Michael Marrus, p. 25; a limpet is a snail that tenaciously holds fast to
surfaces).
The intentionalists stress consistency, orderly sequence and persistence
from start to finish in the Nazi's anti-Jewish policies. They understand
Hitler as possessing a coherent "blueprint", parts of which he periodically
revealed in speeches or in writing. His tactics may at times have appeared
to be somewhat haphazard, and periods of stalemate or even back-tracking
were not unknown, but the "final solution" was always Hitler's clear goal
and he pursed it relentlessly.
The intentionalist school was fed by the solid tradition of fervent
anti-Hun propaganda that emerged from both of the two World Wars in the
20th century Europe and by the vast quantity of rumours that were spawned,
such as the one of Germans having collected dead bodies from battlefields
in 1916 and 1917 in order to process human body parts into fertilizers and
soaps (a charge that was taken seriously enough in the 1920s to have been
investigated by a Governmental Commission of the British House of
Commons).
But the underlying logic of the intentionalist school is really founded in
1945 at Nuremberg. The War Crimes Trials were run by judges who needed to
be convinced of "premeditation". The evidence was gathered by lawyers who
wanted to prove the charges articulated by the International Tribunal:
conspiracy to breach international war, orchestrating and launching an
aggressive war, engaging in crimes against humanity with the conscious goal
of committing horrendous atrocities, including inter alia, mass murders of
innocent civilians.
A concrete example of the intentionalists' interpretation of history is
their reading of the 30 January 1939 Reichstag speech that I quoted in my
previous lecture (DOCUMENTS ON THE HOLOCAUST, pp. 134-5).
"One thing I should like to say on this day which may be memorable for
others as well as for us Germans: In the course of my life I have very
often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it. During the
time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance the Jewish race
which only received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would
one day take over the leadership of the State, and with it that of the
whole nation, and that I would then, among many other things, settle the
Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some
time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face. Today I
will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and
outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a
world war, then the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth, and
thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in
Europe!"
They present it as "proof" of Hitler's "intentions", in advance of the
start of the World War, to annihilate the Jews. But is it? That evening
Hitler spoke for hours but devoted only a brief few minutes to the Jews. We
certainly would neither deny nor downplay Hitler's amply demonstrated will
for taking ruthless actions, for striking sudden blows intended to totally
crush his enemies, and for his lust for blood. But was the Holocaust
clearly present in Hitler's mind prior to 1941 and before the surprising
German military victories and the stunning Allied defeats suddenly put his
armies in positions of power and of control that no one could have
predicted beforehand?
How do we evaluate the seriousness (or lack thereof) of the two
"territorial solutions to the Jewish question" - the Nisko Plan (in the
Lublin District of Poland) and the Madagascar Plan (an island off the
south-east coast of Africa). Were they both mere bluff and camouflage or
were they serious attempts to deal with the Jews by exiling them into
territories not intended for ultimate Germanization? Nearly 5,000 Jews
were actually deported to the Lublin District under the Nisko Plan in
October 1939. Technical difficulties that plagued Himmler's more grandiose
plans for large-scale population transfers soon caused this program to be
abandoned also, but for a brief period it was certainly taken seriously by
significant elements in the Third Reich (including Reinhard Heydrich and
the Gestapo men, Heinrich Mueller and Adolf Eichmann).
How serious was the Madagascar Plan? One week after German troops reached
the English Channel and trapped the best units of the Allied Armies as
Dunkerque, Himmler presented a memorandum entitled "Some Thoughts on the
Treatment of Ethnic Groups and Jews in the Occupied East" (a Nuremberg
Document):
"I hope completely to erase the concept of Jews through the possibility of
a great emigration of all Jews to a colony in Africa or elsewhere...However
cruel and tragic each individual case may be, this method is still the
mildest and best, if one rejects the Bolshevik method of physical
extermination of a people out of inner conviction as un-German and
impossible."
Next to this section of the report Hitler added the hand-written notation:
"very good and correct."
Were they fooling themselves or did they really mean it? For a brief
period in the summer of 1940 the German Foreign Office was busily working
on the plan and Mussolini and the Italian Foreign Minister were informed of
the plans to resettle all of the Jews in Madagascar. Construction work was
actually HALTED on the Polish ghettoes since soon they would not be needed.
As one SS officer said in Warsaw: "The war would be over in a month and
the Jews would all leave for Madagascar".
The idea of an island dumping ground for the Jews had to be put on ice as
the Battle for Britain dragged on and then later, by the spring of 1941, a
new and far more lethal stage of the Nazi anti-Jewish policies had been
reached.
Was there a straight and clear road to Auschwitz?
THE FUNCTIONALISTS SEE A TWISTED ROAD
The father of the functionalist approach to the Holocaust is probably Karl
Schluenes who wrote a book in 1970 entitled THE TWISTED ROAD TO AUSCHWITZ,
but the study that broke the solid wall of intentionalist thinking about
National Socialism was undoubtedly A.J.P. Taylors' THE ORIGINS OF THE
SECOND WORLD WAR that appeared more than a decade earlier.
Reenacting the controversy of the 1920s when the "revisionist" historians
attacked the consensus about Germany being solely responsible for the
outbreak of the First World War, Taylor sparked a heated debate with his
argument that Hitler had not intended for the Second World War to begin and
that it was not German actions but those of the Allied governments that had
actually precipitated the conflict.
The functionalists present a confused picture of the inner workings of the
Third Reich. Far from it being seen as a well-oiled hierarchy in which
authority flowed downwards and obedience flowed upwards, the Nazi
bureaucracy was described as a maze of competing power groups that revolved
around the personalities of bitter rivals who were diametrically opposed to
the policies and interests of each other and who were ceaselessly plotting
against and clashing with their rivals. One writer compared the essence of
the Third Reich to a medieval struggle between feudal oligarchies engaged
in a Hobbesian war of all against all (Robert Koehl).
Hitler is seen as a brooding and often distant leader who preferred to let
his subordinates fight it out amongst themselves while he remained passive
and untainted on the sidelines. Once a winner had clearly emerged, the
Fuehrer would ensure that the victor got his laurels by recognizing his de
facto control. It was a sort of "institutional Darwinism" (David
Schoenbaum) in which bureaucrats and bureaucracies struggled to survive and
only the strongest of them would endure. At the heart of the system was
NOT premeditated planning but a fatalistic laissez-faire. What happened
happened. No one could predict who would emerge victorious and which one
of the competing policies and policy-makers would ultimately dominate, but
the one that won was the one that should have one. Its success was post
factum proof of its superiority (had it not been meant to win then it never
would have won) and therefore its success was also ultimate proof of the
rightness of its victory.
CONCRETE EXAMPLES OF DIFFERING INTERPRETATONS
1. The Nuremberg Laws (or in their official names: The Law of Reich
Citizenship and The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German
Honour) 15 September 1935 (all documents in this section are reprinted in
DOCUMENTS ON THE HOLOCAUST). Intentionalists see them as a keystone to
Nazi anti-Jewish measures. They provided a legal definition to the
question "Who is a Jew?", a step that is essential in the process of
marking Jews out from the rest of the society, isolating them and preparing
the ground for their ultimate elimination.
But, argue the functionalists, if they were so crucial to the process, why
were they drafted almost as an after-thought on the back of a napkin in an
all-night cafe? The context in which these laws were presented was the
"normalization" of relations between the Aryan race and the Jews. If these
were the new terms under which life was to proceed then it provided some
stability. If these provisions defined what were the restrictions and
limitations under the law, then the rest was "illegal". Contact between
Aryans and Jews was now narrowly circumscribed - for example, it became
illegal for Jews to employ in their households female Aryans under 45 years
old - but not totally eliminated since it was now legal to employ one over
45 years old, or to hire a male.
The representative body of German Jewry responded that the Nuremberg Laws
"come as the heaviest of blows for the Jews in Germany" but at the same
time they create "a basis on which a tolerable relationship becomes
possible between the German and the Jewish people." Taken in context, the
Jewish reaction of alarm and fear may have also been mixed with relief.
2. Another example of differing interpretations is in regards to the
policy of ghettoization. The Instructions by Heydrich on Policies and
Operations Concerning Jews in the Occupied Territories, 21 September 1939
(known by the nickname "schnellbrief"). It distinguishes between "final
aims" and "the stages leading to the fulfillment of this final aim". It
set out the areas that "are to be cleared of Jews" and also the
principle of "as few concentration centers as possible...only (in) cities
which are rail junctions, or are at least located on railroad lines". In
addition to defining the ghettoes, it also outlined the size and
responsibility of the Jewish councils and several key German economic
interests, such as labour and food sources.
Again the intentionalists hold this document up as a cornerstone of the
Nazi's anti-Jewish policies. Yet the actual practice of the Third Reich
was so diverse and variegated in places that these provisions were kept
more in the breech. So how important were they? How do we explain that as
central a feature as the ghettoes is not a carefully planned and considered
program but an after-thought, considered haphazardly, some 3 weeks after
the start of the War?
And what is the "final aim" or "endziel"? Does the fact that is it not
defined even in a highly secret document of the secret police not imply
that it has not yet been clarified? Are the "endziel" and the "endloesung"
(the final solution) the same thing, as the intentionalists would have us
believe? After all, NO document uses them interchangeably. Functionalist
historians stress the probability that the real meaning of the "endziel" to
be a territorial solution for the Jewish question (either the "Nisko Plan"
in the Lublin District or the "Madagascar Plan"). They also point out that
the first appearance in a document of the term "endloesung" was in 31 July
1941 - several weeks after the start of the organized mass murders of Jews
in the East. The term first appears in a letter sent to Heydrich by
Goering entrusting him to report back on "the preliminary organizational,
practical and financial measures for the execution of the intended final
solution ("endloesung) of the Jewish question.".
6 months into the mass killings, at Wannsee, Heydrich was nervous that
someone would raise serious objections to his policies or would challenge
SS control in this area. When that did not happen, his relief was apparent
to all, as described by Eichmann during his interrogation.
THE BOTTOM LINE OF THIS DISPUTE
Yet the gap between the two positions, the intentionalist and functionalist,
is far from unbridgeable. The pure intentionalist position does not
completely hold because if Hitler was merely waiting for the first
opportune moment to implement his pre-conceived murderous intentions then
why did he wait 2 1/2 years before beginning the Final Solution in Poland?
He held absolute control over millions of Jews from September 1939 but only
began the mass murders in the spring of 1942.
But neither does a pure functionalist position fit the facts, for if the
murder of the Jews was nothing more than a random side-show that happened
to develop out of conditions at the time than how can we explain Hitler's
steadfast determination, in the face of repeated difficulties and
set-backs, not to desist from pursuing the Jewish question? Each failure
seemed only to cause him to re-double his efforts to find a solution. And
from his first surviving letter in 1919 until his final written statement -
his suicide note of 29 April 1945 - the one subject that most occupied his
attention was the fight against international Jewry. Hitler's ideology may
neither have been pretty nor fully consistent, but it was of primary
importance to everything that he did, and antisemitism was always at its
very heart.
Perhaps a greater challenge than making sense of the individual character
and role of Adolf Hitler is trying to understand why so many perfectly
normally people followed him along that murderous path. It is to that
question that we will turn in our next lecture.
REFERENCES:
DOCUMENTS ON THE HOLOCAUST, Yitzhak Arad, Yisrael Gutman and Avraham
Margaliot, eds., Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1981, Nuremberg Laws pp. 76-80,
Jewish reactions pp. 84-8, Schnellbrief pp. 173-8, Final Solution Order p.
233, the protocol of the Wannsee Conference pp. 249-61 and his last
testament, pp. 162-3.
Fleming, Gerald, HITLER AND THE FINAL SOLUTION, Berkeley, California:
University of California Press, 1984.
Koehl, Robert, "Nazism as Feudalism", in AMERICAN POLICIAL SCIENCE
QUARTERLY, 1959.
Marrus, Michael, THE HOLOCAUST IN HISTORY, Hanover and London: University
Press of New England, 1987.
NUREMBERG DOCUMENTS, the Green Series, Volume 13, Document 1880, pp.
147-50.
Schluenes, Karl, THE TWISTED ROAD TO AUSCHWITZ, Bloomingdale: University of
Illinois, 1970.
Schoenbaum, David, HITLER'S SOCIAL REVOLUTION, New York: Doubleday & Co.,
1966.
Taylor, A.J.P., THE ORIGINS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR, Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1961.
************************************************************************