Subject: JUICE Holocaust 4
Date: Wed, 1 Apr 1998 00:48:21 +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 4
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World Zionist Organization
Jewish University in CyberspacE
juice@wzo.org.il birnbaum@wzo.org.il
http://www.wzo.org.il
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Course: Meanings of the Holocaust
Lecture: 4/12
Lecturer: Elly Dlin
Lecture 4: Why did WE Kill?
A principal offered the following message to his teaching staff on the first
day of the new school year.
"Dear Teacher:
I am a survivor of a concentration camp.
My eyes saw what no man should witness:
Gas chambers built by learned engineers.
Children poisoned by educated physicians.
Infants killed by trained nurses.
Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates.
So I am suspicious of education.
My request is: Help your students become human.
Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths,
educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing and arithmetic are important only if
they serve to make our children more humane." (Quoted in FACING HISTORY AND
OURSELVES, p. 166.)
In this lecture we raise some of the most basic and disturbing question
about ourselves as educated and cultured human beings living in the modern
world. Who are WE? Why did WE KILL? Why did WE KILL in the Holocaust?
What is the nature of man? What is the nature of our civilization that has
made the 20th century into the single most bloody and destructive 100 years
ever to be recorded in human history?
IT COULD HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT. PEOPLE CHOSE HITLER.
Weimar Germany was a functioning democracy that succeeded, for a time, in
the face of tremendous problems. It overcame terror and violence from both
the Left (the Bavarian Soviet and the Spartacus Revolt) and the Right (the
Kapp Revolution and the Hitler Putsch). It survived the economic chaos of
the post-First World War period, stabilized the crippling inflation of 1923
and progressed admirably towards working out its other domestic and foreign
problems. In the mid-1920s democracy was being solidified in Germany.
But the Depression of 1929 was more than the Weimar Republic could shoulder
and the parties of the Weimar Coalition were totally discredited after the
collapse on Wall Street. By 1930 the choice before German citizens was
between a dictatorship of the Right and a dictatorship of the Left. Too
conservative, traditional, capitalistic and Church-influenced to go
Bolshevik, Germans searched for a strong Nationalist leader. They tried
several disappointing candidates until they thought that they found what
they hoped they needed in the unique combination of Nationalism and
Socialism under the banner of Adolf Hitler and within a broad coalition of
conservative, aristocrats, technocrats and generals. Hitler was granted
power; he did NOT seize it. His appointment as Chancellor was in accordance
to the constitution (which by the way was never revoked in the Third Reich
but only suspended "temporarily"). What he did was legal, if it was neither
moral nor ethical.
Millions of people voted for the Nazis. Millions more voted for other
parties and in the last free elections before Hitler's rise to power (6
November 1932) the Nazis received 33.1% of the popular vote. Even after the
assumption of power on 30 January 1933, weeks of physical intimidation and,
following the burning of the Reichstag (28 February), and a hysterical
campaign to exploit the fears of an imminent communist revolt, the Nazis
FAILED to gain a majority of the votes cast on March 5. They got 44%; 56%
went to other parties. Other choices could have been made.
Hitler's coming to power COULD have been prevented. It resulted from
choices people made at the time.
NAZISM AS A PRODUCT OF MODERN TIMES
Charlie Chaplin was not the only one to see Hitler and National Socialism as
a product of modern times. I wish to highlight 3 links between Nazism and
Modernity.
1. There is a totalitarian potential inherent in the French and American
Revolutions. The Universal Rights of Man were a tremendous victory for
freedom and liberty. The power of intermediary institutions that had
controlled and repressed individuals (for example Churches, class
structures, and the guilds) were destroyed. Separate privileges, special
group rights and particular group restrictions were wiped away. The
principle was established that all men were born equal and that each one of
us stands ALONE in full rights, as a citizen of the state.
The downside is that standing alone in the confusion and incomprehensibility
of the modern bureaucratic state can be cold, lonely and dangerous. Just
ask Joseph K. in Franz Kafka's novel "The Trial" or feel the isolation and
pain of the anonymous narrator in Jerzy Kozinski's "The Painted Bird". Kurt
Vonnegut shows the dangers of the principle of equality in his short story
"Harrison Bergeron". It starts:
"The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal. They weren't only equal
before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was
smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else.
Nobody was stronger or quicker than anyone else."
All this equality was due to amendments to the Constitution and the
unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General who
would add weights to the strong, ugly masks to the pretty and electronic
interference to the brains of the bright to prevent anyone from having an
unfair advantage over anyone else.
2. Hitler was very much a modern politician. He used the radio, film, cars
and airplanes to appeal directly to the people. He stage-managed mass
rallies and packaged slogans to win over the hearts of the masses. And it
worked.
If by modernization we mean "the displacement of traditional societies by an
unprecedentedly thorough and rapid process of change, basically similar
everywhere, involving industrialization, urbanization, secularization and
rationalization" (Henry Turner, p. 118) then Germany was modernized by the
Third Reich.
3. A crucial aspect of modernity in the realization that people are in
control of their own fate: that we are NOT pawns of nature nor are we
puppets whose strings are pulled by an omnipotent super-being. In modernity
people are seen to be subjects of their own destiny; people can (and should)
control and subjugate nature; unlock every mystery and solve any problem.
Human Beings are sovereign on earth.
The task of defining and controlling the parameters between good and evil,
acceptable and unacceptable behaviour traditionally fell to the Church and
the priesthood. But in a secular age the role has shifted to science and
doctors to determine what was "normal" and "abnormal". It was they who led
the National Socialist bid to biologically reshape mankind in the
ideological image of scientific racism. Separated from a sense of
limitations (theological, moral, ethical, or whatever) the commandment "Thou
Shalt Not Kill" disappeared as a brake against the commission of large-scale
genocide. Murder in the Third Reich became the new moral imperative; aiding
Jews was recast as a sin. And transgressions were rare.
YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE EVIL TO BE A MASS MURDERER
Disturbed by the unemotional, gray, bureaucratic personality of Adolf
Eichmann, social psychologist Stanley Milgram designed a series of
experiments to test the degree to which people were obedient to authority.
Unsuspecting subjects were placed in a situation in which they thought that
they were administering increasingly powerful electric shocks to ordinary
people at the encouragement of a man in a white lab coat. Experts predicted
that only a few marginal individuals in any random population would remain
fully obedient to the end of the board (marked "extremely dangerous"). In
fact on average barely 1/3 of each sample broke off the experiment and
refused to continue to inflict punishment and pain on innocents whereas
about 2/3 of each sample remained fully obedient to authority.
A high school history teacher in California felt his explanations as to why
so many willingly followed Hitler to be inadequate so he started a
quasi-fascist movement in school and soon everyone was being swept along in
"The Wave" and began acting in ways that exceeded normal boundaries -
especially in regards to being violent to each other (see the ABC
dramatization).
Holocaust survivors such as Jean Amery testified that torture appeared to
bring a type of euphoric trance to the faces of their oppressors who were
"concentrated in murderous self-realization" (p. 36). Franz Stangl who
served as commandant of the Death Camp in Treblinka, where an estimated
870,000 were murdered, joined the Police Force out of a combination of
boredom and opportunism and before being absorbed into the Gestapo used his
professional skills to chase and to arrest Nazis. Repeatedly he told Gitta
Sereny, the journalist who interviewed him, that he had nothing against Jews
and, after the end of the Third Reich and the termination of his role as a
major organizer of the mass murders, he integrated easily into post-war
German society. Private investigators and "Nazi hunters" have expose quiet
family men as having once been ruthless executioners.
One did not have to be an antisemite to join the Nazi Party. One did not
have to hate Jews to persecute them. One did not have to be a crazed,
blood-thirsty killer to murder innocent people. And one did not have to be
a sick, maladjusted sociopath to get used to routinely participating in mass
murder.
Are WE so different? Could it have been US behind the guns and whips?
MURDER BY THE ELITE
Who were the killers?
The Holocaust was NOT perpetrated by drunk, unemployed Storm Troopers. A
thug could kill hundreds, even thousands of people, but the murder of
millions required the careful planning and systematic organization of the
administrative elite. These were educated men. Of the 14 men invited to a
luncheon meeting on 20 January 1942 in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, 8 held
PhD's from Europe's finest Universities. On the agenda was the coordination
of the murder of 11 million Jews. No one flinched. No one protested. No
one even tried to raise a hesitant objection disguised as a problem. The
only request recorded in the minutes was from Dr. Buehler, the
representative of the Nazi administration in occupied Poland, who asked that
the Jewish problem in his region be solved as quickly as possible.
Dr. Joseph Goebbels' held a PhD was in literature and philosophy, from
Heidelberg University, one of the finest, oldest and most respected in Europe.
Doctor Josef Mengele, "the Angel of Death in Auschwitz" received a medical
degree from the University of Frankfurt and his PhD from the University of
Munich. And one wants to know what exactly he studied? How is it possible
to earn 2 higher degrees without learning that killing innocent people is
wrong?
Otto Ohlendorf served as the commander of a mobile killing squad that shot
at least 90,000 people in the Crimea and Northern Caucasian region. Before
he joined the SS in 1936 he had studied and taught law. Did he ever learn
what it means to be human?
And perhaps even more disturbing that the question of what went wrong with
the education of the Mengeles and the Ohlendorfs is the question: How
different are WE? Are the graduating classes of our medical schools
learning anything substantially different than was taught to Josef Mengele.
And are the young lawyers accepted this year into the bar any better
prepared to make the really difficult choices and dilemmas that they may
face then were the young lawyers who made sure that the Nuremberg Laws were
drafted legally?
Decades ago, a university professor warned in a newspaper article against a
trend in teaching about Nazism and the Holocaust. He compared it to the new
trend in car insurance known as "No Fault Insurance". No Fault insurance
stems from the assumption that few, if any, drivers are actually looking to
have an accident. But, given the number of cars on the road, the weather,
road conditions, and unavoidable human error - "Accidents Happen". It's no
one's fault. Attempts to apportion blame accomplish nothing, needlessly
occupy lawyers, judges and courts, and on the bottom line, only serve to
escalate the costs of car insurance.
"No Fault" may be an appropriate answer for the insurance industry but it
cannot be extrapolated into history. Events in the past don't "just happen"
and people are NOT completely manipulated by anonymous external forces.. To
quote the most recent proponent of this line of argumentation: "Simply put,
the perpetrators, having consulted their own convictions and morality and
having judged the mass annihilation of Jews to be right, did not want to say
'no'" (p. 14). So writes Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who calls his book
HITLER'S WILLING EXECUTIONERS.
The personal implications of the Holocaust that emerge from looking at the
Nazis and their accomplices is that people are responsible for their
behaviour and for the choices that they make.
REFERENCES:
Amery, Jean, AT THE MIND'S LIMITS, Bloomington: University of Indiana
Press, 1980.
FACING HISTORY AND OURSELVES: HOLOCAUST AND HUMAN BEHAVIOR, Margot Stern
Strom and William Parsons, eds., Watertown, MA: International Educations,
Inc, 1982.
Goldhagen, Daniel J., HITLER'S WILLING EXECUTIONERS, New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1996.
Kafka, Franz, THE TRIAL, copyright 1937, New York: Vintage Books, 1969.
Kosinski, Jerzy, THE PAINTED BIRD, London: W.H. Allen, 1966.
Milgram, Stanley, OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY.
Sereny, Gitta, INTO THAT DARKNESS, New York: Vintage Books, 1983.
Turner, Henry, "Fascism and Modernization", in REAPPRAISALS OF FASCISM,
Henry Turner, ed., New York: New Viewpoints, 1975.
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