The totality of this project is one of its most striking and appalling features. "Unlike the case with any other group, and unlike the massacres before or since, every single one of the millions of targeted Jews was to be murdered. Eradication was to be total. In principle, no Jew was to escape. In this important respect, the Nazis' assault upon Jewry differed from the campaigns against other peoples and groups Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, Poles, Ukrainians, and so on. Assaults on these people could indeed be murderous; their victim’s number in the millions, and their ashes mingle with those of the Jews in Auschwitz and many other camps across Europe. But Nazi ideology did not require their total disappearance. In this respect, the fate of the Jews was unique" (Marrus). In the end, approximately a third of the civilian deaths in Europe during the Second World War were Jewish.
3. TOWARD THE "FINAL SOLUTION" We have already seen that Hitler's radical anti-Semitism crystallized into an ideology in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. In Mein Kampf, Hitler identified three factors that were essential to a people's "racial value its sense of itself and its destiny (nationalism); its form of leadership (the Fuhrer principle); and its capacity to make war (militarism). The Jews, insidious proponents of internationalism, democracy, and pacifism, were a threat on all three counts. Indeed, name a threat, and the Jews were behind it: "They were middlemen who produced nothing, Marxists who took over trade unions, traders who took over the stock exchange, scribblers of filth who contaminated German culture" (Raul Hilberg). They were the traitors who had robbed Germany of victory in the First World War.
Yet it is significant that, "in the electoral breakthrough phase of 1929-33, and indeed up to 1939, Hitler rarely spoke in public about the Jewish question; this reticence stands in stark contrast to his speeches of the early 1920s, in which his obsession with and hatred of the Jews was vented openly and repeatedly" (Christopher Browning). Anti-Semitic measures instigated by the Nazis escalated only gradually through the 1930s, and although the German people acquiesced in legal discrimination, public opinion reacted negatively to the boycott of Jewish businesses in 1933, vandalistic outbreaks in 1935, and above all, to the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. Nevertheless, German Jews were increasingly ostracized from German society during this period, and after Kristallnacht they were expropriated. But the propaganda failure of Kristallnacht is one of the reasons why the Nazis would cloak the "Final Solution" in euphemism and secrecy.
Also in 1938, after the absorption of Austria, a young SS officer, Adolf Eichmann, distinguished himself by devising a profitable system of selling emigration to wealthy Austrian Jews, with part of the proceeds going to cover the costs of expelling the rest. With the attack on Poland a year later, the Nazis started expelling German Jews to the newly conquered territory. But the real turning point was Barbarossa. The Russian front became a laboratory for mass killing techniques. As we have seen, the army was accompanied by Einsatzgruppen whose orders were to shoot Communist Party officials and Jews. When mass shootings proved to be inefficient and demoralizing for the killers, the Einsatzgruppen devised mobile vans into which engine exhaust could be pumped. Soon they were using Zyklon-B gas, which had been used two years earlier in Hitler's euthanasia program for the mentally ill.
Some time in fall 1941, Robert Paxton tells us, "The ultimate threshold was crossed. The sporadic killings of Jews that had accompanied military operations were now regularized into something without human precedent: the systematic extermination by industrial methods of an entire people... Without exact information about its date, we cannot be sure exactly what immediate motives prompted the decision to turn sporadic killings into total extermination. Was it the opportunity opened up by the conquest of vast territories in the east, the vexing problems of administering them and their flood of Slavic and Jewish refugees, or rage at having failed to defeat the Soviets by Blitzkrieg before winter? Whether the impetus came from above or below, the evidence shows that Hitler was kept informed, approved, and permitted precious resources to be diverted from crucial battles to the extermination of the Jews." The turning point came when sporadic killings and expulsions gave way to the bureaucratic and industrial organization of mass murder. It came with Barbarossa, not only because of the millions of Jews it brought under the hegemony of the Reich, but also because of the apocalyptic character of the campaign. This was the war to settle once and for all the fate of the thousand-year Reich.
There is no written order with Hitler's signature on it. Authority in the Third Reich flowed not from laws and orders, issued by specific agencies, but from expressions of "the Fuhrer's wish." We do have, however, from January 1939, a "prophetic" speech in which Hitler warned the Jews of the consequences should they succeed in starting another world war (!): "In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and I 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 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."
By the spring of 1942, extermination camps had been built on former Polish soil, and soon a vast bureaucratic apparatus under the direction of Eichmann was systematically gathering Jews from all over Europe for transportation to the killing centres in Poland. The extermination of millions of human beings was a closely guarded secret; hence the pervasive use of euphemism ("special handling," "removals," "evacuation to the East," "cleansing action," "final solution") by the perpetrators. SS chief Heinrich Himmler, however, spoke for the regime when he addressed his commanders in July 1943: "Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lie side by side, or five hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck this out and accepting cases of human weakness to keep our integrity, this is what has made us hard. In our history, this is an unwritten and never-to-be written page of glory." Here we note the familiar "catastrophe-mindedness" of the leading Nazis, the tendency to see history in apocalyptic terms, the perverse notion of heroism, the unmentionable world-historical mission.
4. THE KILLERS Many thousands of men participated in Hitler's killing machine. What were their motives? Some, no doubt, were fanatical anti-Semites and sadists, of the stamp of the character played by Ralph Fiennes in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. Others appear to have had no history of anti-Jewish hatred and to have been coldly uninvolved with their victims. It's likely that, contrary to the Goldhagen thesis of a single pervasive mentality, Hitler's executioners came in all sorts of varieties: psychopaths and conformists, fanatics and opportunists, adventurers and time-servers. The extensive division of labour in the killing process allowed them to diffuse any sense of responsibility they may have had. The heavy reliance on technology interacted with the dehumanisation of the victims. "To achieve the task of comprehensive mass murder the machine called not only upon the cold-blooded killers in the SS, but also upon remote officials of postal ministries, tax and insuran
ce adjustors, bankers and clergymen, mechanics and accountants municipal officials and stenographers" (Marrus). Before mass murder could begin, there were a series of stages in the isolation of the Jewish population: expropriation, ghettoization, and deportation. And then, for those who were not killed immediately, systematic dehumanisation: "Pen groups of humans for one, five or ten or more days' travel in squalid and demoralizing conditions, supplying neither water nor food nor sanitary facilities. Then separate individuals from families and friends, thrust them among strangers and strip them of their possessions, clothing, hair every trace of their previous social identities. Plunge them in Babel of unintelligible commands and extreme random violence. Make hunger their daily companion. Then make a double-dip out of the communal soup pot, access to goods looted from incoming victims, or the chance of a few weeks or months of life the reward for 'cooperation'" (Inga Clendinnen).
"In mid-March of 1942, some 75 to 80% of all victims of the Holocaust were still alive, while some 20 to 25% had already perished. A mere eleven months later, in mid-February 1943, the situation was exactly the reverse. Some 75 to 80% of all Holocaust victims were already dead, and a mere 25 to 30% clung to a precarious existence. At the core of the Holocaust was an intense eleven-month wave of mass murder... The German attack on the Polish ghettos was not a gradual or an incremental program stretched over a long period of time, but a veritable blitzkrieg, a massive offensive requiring the mobilization of large numbers of shock troops at the very period when the German war effort in Russia hung in the balance" (Browning).
Resistance was very difficult, usually impossible. Many people, desperate and exhausted by hunger, did not understand what was happening to them. No effective aid arrived from outside, there was little support from the surrounding population, and there were few weapons. Yet in 1943 the young Jews of the Warsaw ghetto killed or wounded 700 SS men as they were beginning a third massive roundup, forcing them to dynamite the ghetto block by block. It was something unprecedented in the history of resistance movements: resistance without hope of survival. It was, for the young Jews who participated, a matter of honor.
Hitler did not succeed in destroying all of the Jews of Europe. But if he had won his war he would certainly have done so. He and his regime did destroy the thousand-years-old Yiddish-speaking civilization of central and Eastern Europe, and the six million Jews they murdered were more than two thirds of the Jewish population of pre-war Europe. No event has been more closely studied, and yet it remains, in certain crucial respects, incomprehensible.