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This below is Chapter 5 Section 4:
Genocides and “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”
The genocides and the “final solution to the jewish question” for which National Socialist Germany is responsible, cannot be understood in their specificity simply by declaring them to be singular and considering distinctions to be superfluous. The incomparable presupposes comparison, and the unity of the designation often conceals the diversity of things.
Genocide is closely related to war, but the two terms do not coincide. Even in classical antiquity, wars between cities or tribes often ended with the killing of all the men of the vanquished and the women and children abducted or sold into slavery: Homer’s epics consistently assume this genocidal character of war. But modern Europe and the Middle Ages were distinguished by the fact that they sought to civilize war, i.e. to make a distinction between combatants and non-combatants. Thus, according to the idea, an entire people could no longer be annihilated, and gradually a right for prisoners of war was established, which guaranteed protection for the defeated and eliminated combatants, as it was done, for example, by the Hague Land War Code of 1907. Most importantly, it stipulated that the will to conclude an armistice or peace created certain rights that precluded the situation from being exploited for the purpose of genocide. Before the outbreak of the First World War, the civilized world considered it normal for the armed forces of two or more states to fight each other with the complete exclusion of the civilian population until a decision was made and peace was concluded through negotiations. The basic requirement was that armies and civilian populations be clearly distinguished. Already at the beginning of the First World War, this condition was jeopardized by the fact that a part of the Belgian population, rightly believing that their country had been invaded, resorted to the free-shooter's war [francs-tireurs] and thereby provoked reprisals from the Germans, in particular the hostage shootings. It became conceivable that such reprisals were directed fundamentally and on a large scale against the entire civilian population because they offered protection and assistance to the franc-tireurs. In an extreme case that could be constructed, the entire Belgian population would have been exterminated in order to take away the basis for the attacks by the franc-tireurs, i.e. in order to achieve preventative security against acts contrary to international law. Thus, literally, genocide have become a reality, namely the killing of all the inhabitants of a country. German politics remained infinitely far from this, but if one extended the lines one arrived at a terrible ideal type. However, even the most ruthless thinker would have taken it for granted that the survival of the people would have been ensured by cessation of resistance.
In another way, the distinction between combatants and non-combatants in the First World War was jeopardized by the fact that both England and Germany resorted to the military tool of blockade. Unlike the war against franc-tireurs or partisans, the blockade was also directed against women and children from the outset; as an extreme case, the possibility arose that the entire population of England or Germany would have starved to death and the armies would have fought on the corpses of women and children. However, nobody thought of that; for everyone there was no question that the defeated state would make peace in time. But the conditions for a radical dehumanization of warfare, i.e. for genocides, were nevertheless created in the First World War, and on the fringes, or rather, in its wake, the first genuine or potential genocides in modern history also became reality: the ethnic tensions in a multi-ethnic state led to genocide of the Armenians by the Turks in direct connection with the war, and a little later there was a population exchange between the Turks and the Greeks, which did not amount to mass expulsions with mass losses only because the great powers kept a watchful eye on it. Air warfare, on the other hand, was limited to its initial beginnings, although it obviously held the possibility of being directed directly against the civilian population as the most sensitive and yet indispensable element of warfare. Progress therefore showed a strange double face: as progress in humanitarian sentiment it sought to contain and humanize war more and more, while as progress in weapons technology it tore down borders that had often meant protection for the non-combatant population even in barbaric times.
Towards the end of the war, however, a completely new element was brought into the world when the postulate of class annihilation gained practical significance. A comparatively harmless manifestation was the Allies’ demand for the extradition of 700 German “war criminals,” which was closely linked to the propaganda against the Prussian Junkers. What was meant was not the punishment of individual offenses—the German government agreed to investigate and possibly punish them—but rather the discrediting of an entire ruling class, and it quickly became clear that this intention generated a broad solidarity in Germany, including even many Social Democrats, even though breaking or limiting the power of the Junkers was also one of their goals. In Russia, on the other hand, the principle of class annihilation became a comprehensive reality. It made sense to say that it was by no means a genocide if, after a lost war, the population of a state held its ruling class responsible and broke their resistance with violence. But despite the Armenian massacres, no one could yet even imagine the complete annihilation of a people, and therefore the attack against entire classes without examining individual guilt was perceived as horrible, as genocidal. Furthermore, the Bolsheviks explicitly proclaimed their intention to continue the destruction of the Russian bourgeoisie until the destruction of the “world bourgeoisie.” How could it have failed to create a climate of general concern and fear, even if the positive solidarity of the European bourgeoisie with the Russian bourgeoisie remained low? Was it not also possible to kill a nation by eliminating its ruling class, which in modern Europe included by no means only those feudal lords whom Saint-Simon had called as superfluous in his famous “Parable,” but precisely those technicians and merchants, scientists and financiers, who according to Saint-Simon were to take their place after? And very quickly the opinion arose in some circles that what was happening in Russia was a genocide in the literal sense of the word, because the Jews had murdered the leading class of Russians and Baltic Germans and had taken their place.
The immediate consequence of this view was obviously the postulate of an extermination of the Jews as a punishment and preventative measure, and since the Jews of their own accord—and especially in the Soviet Union—more and more no longer or not yet understood themselves as a denomination, but as a people or a nationality , the so-called “final solution to the jewish question” would have to be described as the ideal-type genocide, which would be founded on the collectivism of assigning guilt to a supra-individual entity. As much as this connection jumps to the eye, it would still be inappropriate to make it the starting point for labeling the Second World War as a war of annihilation, because the beginnings of genocide were already recognizable in the First World War before 1917, and the German genocides were neither the only ones, nor were they limited to the Jews. They nevertheless had specific characteristics, but these can only be discerned through comparison.
The war against Poland began with a tendency towards genocide on the Polish side, namely the so-called “Bloody Sunday of Bromberg,” the slaughter of a few thousand citizens of German origin by enraged Poles. The dive bomber attacks on Warsaw and other cities and the resulting losses of the civilian population, however, were not an response, but were included in the war plan from the outset and, after Guernica and Barcelona, were the first, although still very incomplete, realization of the genocidal tendencies in modern warfare.
A mere resumption of the world war meant the blockade that England and Germany mutually imposed on each other, but as in the world war, the suffering could be made bearable by the even rationing of the available food and, if necessary, ended in a timely manner by a peace treaty. On the other hand, the intention expressed by Churchill in a letter to Lord Beaverbrook on July 8, 1940 was openly and undisguisedly genocidal: there was only one way to defeat Hitler, and that was an “absolutely destructive attack of annihilation of very heavy bombers on the Nazi hinterland.” That the Prime Minister meant statements like this very seriously is all too clear from a speech he gave in April 1941, before the German attack on the Soviet Union: “There are less than 70 million malignant Huns, some of whom are curable and others killable.” In fact, until the invasion in June 1944, the British and Americans waged the war almost entirely—and still to a large extent thereafter—as a war of annihilation through air raids against the German population, to which around 700,000 people fell victim, much of it under terrible, in earlier times unimaginable agonies and torment. Admittedly, Hitler also wanted to “wipe out their cities.” But today it would rightly be considered foolish today to separate these statements from corresponding statements by Churchill or to postulate a one-sided consequence of German cause and English effect.
A few weeks after the beginning of the war, Stalin had the population of the Volga German Republic deported to Siberia. One can assume that not much less than 20% of those deported died during the weeks-long transports in the scorching heat. An even higher percentage can be assumed for the Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians who were transported into the interior of the Soviet Union in a second wave of deportations immediately before the outbreak of war. As early as 1940, the Soviet General Staff was said to have considered special measures against the peoples of the northern Caucasus region, especially the Chechens, Ingush and Kalmyks, since they, who had long resisted Russian expansion under the Tsar, were considered unreliable in the event of war. In fact, many of these peoples joined the Germans, who promised them freedom and independence, and they were resettled in 1944 without exception. The Crimean Tatars met the same fate, and the death rates for the first 18 months were, according to Robert Conquest’s estimates, not much less than 50%. After collectivization had already claimed particularly large numbers of victims among the nomadic peoples of the Asian districts of the Soviet Union, Stalin now carried out genocides quite openly as preventive measures and as punitive actions. It seems that the battles against the partisans of the OUN [Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists], which the Red Army had to wage after the reoccupation of the Ukraine, also tended to have the character of genocide, and it is extremely significant that Khrushchev was not just joking in his secret speech when he claimed that Stalin would have deported the Ukrainians too if there hadn’t been too many of them. And when Marshal Mannerheim informed his German allies that he would conclude an armistice with the Soviet Union, he used the argument that his people would “without doubt be expelled or exterminated” if he did not take the painful step in time. The Soviet Union’s warfare was thus characterized by genocide to an even greater extent than that of England, and one must ask whether even Beneš’ plans for a transfer of the Sudeten Germans could not be subsumed under the term genocide. There can be no doubt that Churchill’s plan to “move Poland westward” and thus to expel the German population from the East German areas beyond the Oder and Neisse can be classified as such.
And yet Hitler’s genocides belong to a different category. The difference is not that they were quantitatively more comprehensive throughout. In terms of numbers, it does not appear that significantly more former officers were shot in the “General Government” than in the Soviet-occupied part of Poland. But Hitler made a principle of extermination and demanded early on that “all representatives of the Polish intelligentsia be killed.” And most importantly, the relationship between ends and means was reversed here. Victory in the defensive war was no longer the goal, while air raids and resettlements were a means forced by circumstances to bring the war to a victorious conclusion, but the creation of free space was the goal and the war was a mere means. Genocide therefore did not cease with the end of the war, but was precisely to be made possible on a larger scale by the victory. Even surrender did not help the peoples concerned, and their willingness to side with Germany was even considered a danger. As early as January 1941, Himmler had said in a speech at Wewelsburg that thirty million people would have to disappear in the East, and as late as 1944 he still maintained his demand that the ethnic border in the East be pushed back by 500 kilometers. The “General Plan East” envisaged the resettlement of 31 million people to Siberia and the “repopulation” of millions more, and even if the mass death of prisoners of war in the winter of 1941/42 was to a large extent due to the unmanageable circumstances, not least to Stalin’s extermination orders, however, Hitler’s will to biologically weaken the Russian people was an important factor, a will to which there was no real analogy on Stalin’s side, even though Ilya Ehrenburg’s call to “Kill” in 1942 corresponded to Hitler’s intention of biological extermination. Certainly the “living space policy” had various motives, and it was by no means solely the result of Hitler’s will: the fear of the demographic superiority of the “Eastern peoples”; dreams of a healthy rural life that alone could put an end to social conflicts and save the Germans from the “death of civilization”; Anglophilia in the form of the urge for a “German India”; last but not the least, the memory of the English blockade in the First World War and its consequences. But even if one isolates Hitler’s most rational thought, the idea of acquiring superpower status for Germany, it is easy to see that Vlasov and his sponsors had no chance as long as Hitler still believed in his victory. Just as he apparently considered the “Bolshevik disintegration” to be an inescapable fate unless very special structures could be consolidated for eternity, so too was he also convinced that possession of weapons would lead to independence and that Vlasov’s national Russia would in the foreseeable future be stronger than the Greater German Reich, which would have been content with the borders of 1939. And that is why Erich Koch carried out Hitler’s policy in the Ukraine, when he pursued a colonial policy as if were “among Negroes,” when he knocked the offered bread and salt out of the hands of Ukrainian delegations that wanted to greet him, when he repeatedly had floggings carried out. In doing so, he pursued a policy of mental genocide, genocide through contempt and degradation, and he had the strange experience that disproved him as well as it disproved Hitler: that the population reacted more violently and emphatically to degradation and contempt than to shootings. The Bolsheviks had—as a memorandum put it—shot many people, but had not had a single one publicly beaten, and the cleverest head in the Eastern Ministry, the diplomat Dr. Bräutigam, drew the conclusion in a remarkable memorandum that Russians and Ukrainians were now fighting for recognition of their human dignity against the Germans. And so it came about that no anti-bolshevik struggle for freedom and human dignity of individuals could be waged against Stalin’s despotic system could be waged in the Soviet Union, even though countless people—Russians, Ukrainians and even Germans—were ready for it, but that in the end only a struggle for conquest and a war of annihilation was waged, which as such had no ideology because it was nothing more than a lightless national struggle and unlimited national egoism. If a nation declares itself to be “superior” and wants to cleanse the earth of everything “inferior,” including the mentally ill, mainly in order to exercise a supposedly natural rule and at the same time “push itself back to health” in a quite material sense, then this is not an ideology , and this nation must therefore not be surprised if it ultimately turns all other nations against itself and even loses the few friends it still had because of different statements and objectives.
In contrast, the so-called final solution to the jewish question seems to have been an entirely ideologically determined act, because Hitler and Goebbels repeatedly and apparently with all subjective conviction declared it a “service to humanity” to eliminate the “Jewish danger” or to “stab the Jewish ulcer.” Indeed, the connection with anti-bolshevism is much easier to recognize than in the case of the living space policy, but on the other hand it is undeniable that National Socialist anti-semitism represented an extraordinary narrowing and intensification of anti-bolshevism and even more so of anti-Marxism, because it possessed far more the character of interpretation as that of experience. It therefore belongs only to the genus of anti-bolshevism only as a special species, and not even all National Socialists adopted it with equal determination. Nevertheless, it undoubtedly had a supranational appeal and can therefore be described as an ideology. But this subsumption also requires qualification, as will be shown later.
One can let the practical implementation of the final solution begin with the boycott campaign of April 1, 1933, and it is certainly worth considering whether the first anticipation of the genocide policy can be seen in the “Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases” of July 14, 1933.
But although it cannot be denied that the physical extermination of the Jews is hinted at even in the very early statements of Hitler, the idea must not be derived from this that Hitler had been guided by a fixed plan since 1933 or even since 1923. He did not make Jewish policy alone although he was certainly the most important of all individual factors, and moreover, like all politics, it depended on many external circumstances. The efforts of individual authors to construct a unified “extermination process” in which the entire German bureaucracy was involved suffer from a lack of differentiation. It is rather appropriate to distinguish between different phases and moments which initially do not fulfill the concept of genocide and ultimately go beyond it by the method, intention and tendential completeness of the destruction.
The first phase lasted until 1941 and can be called the phase of discrimination. The main goal was to impose the characterization of the Jews as a people rather than a denomination. This tendency was not specifically National Socialist; it was also powerful among the Jews themselves and ultimately resulted from the Jewish self-image, which could not readily come to terms with the millennia-old community reduced to the status of a mere denomination within a religiously neutral state. In this respect, the Zionists were the most genuine Jews, and their desire for a Jewish state was by no means simply the result of a desire to be free of antisemitic hostility. The Zionists’ struggle against the “assimilationists” was therefore a struggle to assert the endangered distinctiveness, while the educated bourgeoisie generally affirmed the decline of the traditional ethnicity, but hoped to be able to imprint some basic features of the Jewish ethos on the modern world. Thus, as early as the second decade of the 20th century, the zionist and the socialist or communist sons and daughters of the Jewish educated bourgeoisie were opposed to each other as as extreme wings in harsh hostility, and Alfred Rosenberg in his 1921 work “The Anti-State Zionism” expressed the suspicion that it was a sophisticated interplay for the purpose of achieving Jewish world domination. In practice, however, the victorious National Socialism sided completely with the Zionists and through the Haavara Agreement of 1935 it promoted the Jewish colonization of Palestine more than any other state. Nevertheless, Adolf Eichmann’s later claim that the SS and the Zionists were “siblings” in their objectives was a gross distortion of the facts. For it was never a matter of discrimination in the neutral sense of the word, namely separation or divorce, but rather the negative discrimination of demotion and segregation. This was already made clear by the Nuremberg Laws, which made sexual contact between Jews and Germans a criminal offense, while all other non-citizens were not subject to any specific restrictions in their relationships with Germans. Already in 1933 and 1935 there was a mental genocide comparable to that of Erich Koch in the Ukraine ante festum, admittedly with the serious difference that the basic emotion was not contempt but fear (of infection, poisoning or decomposition). The third factor was the deprivation of a materially privileged minority or, in National Socialist language, the motive of recovering the German national wealth that had been appropriated by parasites, and in this respect discrimination against Jews was the form of class struggle and class expropriation that was visible enough to satisfy old resentments, and limited enough so as not to provoke insurmountable resistance—hence the deficient mode of expropriation of the bourgeoisie, but the only one possible in European conditions. After the beginning of the war, the promotion of emigration to Palestine was briefly replaced by the plan to settle the Jews in Madagascar, but the development of circumstances soon made it unrealistic.
From the end of 1941, the second phase was the deportation of German Jews and then also Jews from many European countries to the East. The question is whether these deportations as such and from the outset were part of a process of extermination. Here too, distinctions are appropriate. The crucial preliminary question is whether the Jews could be characterized as a belligerent, i.e., unalterably hostile, group. For a considerable number of German Jews, at least until the pogrom of November 1938, this question must be decisively answered in the negative. By no means only the participants in the war, but they in particular, felt that they were German citizens despite the Nuremberg Laws, and as certainly as German Jews could not be expected to be followers and admirers of Adolf Hitler, they certainly wished no harm to Germany as their fatherland, and there is no evidence that any significant number of them actively supported the Allied cause. However, this statement cannot be the last or only word. Chaim Weizmann’s statement from September 1939 about the Jews fighting on the side of the Allies has already been cited. In August 1941, a gathering of prominent Soviet Jews made an even more impassioned appeal to Jews around the world to support the just struggle of the Soviet Union and its allies. In 1961, an author like Raul Hilberg, who in his book about on “The Destruction of the European Jews" always emphasized the passivity and lack of resistance on the part of the Jews, formulated the sentence: “Throughout the Second World War, the Jews made the Allied cause to their own…and did their utmost to contribute to the achievement of the final victory.” If one remembers that after December 7, 1941, the Americans transported their own citizens of Japanese origin, including women and children, into internment camps and that the British had a significant number of anti-fascist German emigrants transported to Canada as “enemy aliens” one cannot deny a priori that the deportations as such were considered unavoidable in the eyes of the German population. In the autumn of 1941, there were still an astonishingly high number of over 70,000 Jews living in Berlin alone, and if one bears in mind that Stalin, in his speech of July 3, 1941, also included the “rumor-mongers” in his list of dangerous elements within the Soviet population, then one will certainly not be able to deny the justification of precautionary measures. But just as the phase of promoting emigration as a result of the Nuremberg Laws took on a character other than that of Zionism, the next phase, that of deportation, nevertheless had a completely different character, even for the mere spectator, than the American-Japanese or the English case. The Jews were identified by the “Jewish star,” and this was a decidedly a medieval method. The Reich Propaganda Minister’s article, which appeared on this occasion in the weekly newspaper Das Reich under the headline “The Jews Are To Blame,” therefore took on an ominous resemblance to the “Hep-Hep” of the Jewish pogroms.
And what “the East” meant could not have been completely hidden from any German soldier or civilian working there. In any case, it meant “ghetto” and not merely by analogy of Theresienstadt in Bohemia, where a number of old and privileged Jews led a segregated but tolerable existence, as long as the camp was not used as a transit station for transports to Auschwitz. Although there appears to have been a plan for a short time to reserve a larger area near the Bug for a proper “Jewish state,” it was soon abandoned, and the deported Jews had nowhere to go but to the terribly overpopulated, starving areas, typhus-ridden, walled-off ghettos of Warsaw or Łódź, which was now called Litzmannstadt, or to specially constructed concentration camps. There, what had been the starting point of Jewish destiny in modern times became the end point again: the “shtetl,” from whose medieval confines hundreds of thousands of Jews had moved out to become Germans, Frenchmen, and Americans, or even Zionists in the cultivated West, and which now became their abode again as an all too modern concentration camp.
But where the German Wehrmacht directly encountered Soviet Jewry, with its still largely closed settlement areas, another distinction is in order, which is usually blurred by the term final solution. These are the actions of the “Einsatzgruppen” of the SS, which, as is well known, followed on the heels of the advancing armies in the Soviet Union and which “finished off” many hundreds of thousands of Jews, as their leaders used to express themselves in the USSR event reports [also known as Einsatzgruppen Operational Situation Reports], moreover, reports which by no means exclusively or even predominantly contain the repeatedly quoted and cold-heartedly stated sentences about mass killings, but also news about shooting actions by the withdrawing NKVD as well as informative situation reports that often plead for better treatment of the Russian and Ukrainian populations. Here, too, there is a preliminary question must be asked that is very often passed over in the literature. Not only the Einsatzgruppen themselves, but quite a few members of the Wehrmacht right up to the generals declared in reports that were not intended for the public the Jews to be the main protagonists of the partisan struggle, and therefore they wanted the jewish actions to be understood as reprisals. The well-known decrees of Field Marshals von Reichenau and von Manstein and similar official pronouncements are based on this premise and, in part, also reveal how vivid the memory of the time of the German civil war and the struggle between communists and National Socialists during the Weimar period still was. It would have been very strange indeed if many Jews had not obeyed Stalin’s orders to become partisans. But what was characteristic of the operations of the Einsatzgruppen was that not only was the civil war proportion of 1:100 was often exceeded, but that the partisans or the extermination battalions of the Red Army were identified with the Jews without any further examination. Thus the premises of the bloodbath in the Babij Yar ravine near Kiev, in which 33,000 Jews fell victim, was a large fire and extensive explosions in the city, in which several hundred German soldiers were killed. But the originator had been an extermination battalion of the Soviet Army, and there was not the slightest probability that it would have consisted exclusively or even predominantly of Jews. In the literature, opinions about Jewish participation in the partisan struggle are divided: Western works emphasize the passivity of the Jews, who usually allowed themselves to be shot without resistance; communist literature, on the other hand, is full of reports of heroic activities—not least in the fight against Jewish “collaborators” and “traitors”—while German accounts emphasize sometimes the one, sometimes the other. In numerous cases, however, as is irrefutably clear from the event reports, there was no question of reprisals at all; instead, thousands and tens of thousands of Jews were rounded up and shot by SS men and sometimes also by local auxiliaries. The total number of victims of the Einsatzgruppen in the USSR is estimated by Gerald Reitlinger at over a million, by Raul Hilberg at 1.3 and by Krausnick-Wilhelm at 2.2 million. Especially when one considers the actions of the NKVD and realizes that Katyn was certainly just one case among others, one must and may come to the conclusion that the actions of the Einsatzgruppen were worse than those of the NKVD. The NKVD had sought to kill the leading layer of Poles who, in their eyes, were counter-revolutionary; But the Einsatzgruppen now did in a foreign country what was impossible to do in Germany: they tended to exterminate the mass of the population that was viewed as revolutionary. If the counter-revolutionaries consistently take the revolutionaries as their role models, they will have to commit far worse, because quantitatively more comprehensive acts. But the fact that communists and National Socialists did not simply embody the ideal types of revolution and counter-revolution here too became clear from the fact that in reality only a portion of even Soviet Jews belonged to the revolutionary, i.e. population loyal to Stalin, while conversely, numerous Russians and Ukrainians also identified themselves with the Soviet state. On the other hand, Stalin also turned against entire populations such as the Volga Germans, whom he had deported, in Khrushchev’s words, “together with all communists and Komsomol members” because he saw them as potential helpers of the enemy. Here, too, there was an overshooting, a generalization, a collectivist attribution of guilt, but the number of Volga Germans was comparatively small and it was enough just to send them away. Therefore, the actions of the Einsatzgruppen are the most radical and comprehensive example of a preventive fight against enemies that goes far beyond all the concrete requirements of immediate warfare, and Nikolayevsk, like Katyn, had to appear as actions of a much far less horror. Above all, however, according to the intention of the originator and in the consciousness of the most important participants, these mass killings were inwardly closely connected to the last and final stage, the quasi-industrial mass killing in extermination camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Belzec.
Now, of course, the factuality of this last and most extreme stage, the killing of around three million Jews, all of whom did not come from partisan areas of the Soviet Union, in the gas chambers of the extermination camps has been disputed by some authors, while the actions of the Einsatzgruppen has not yet been disputed by anyone. This literature by no means comes exclusively from Germans or neo-fascists. The evidence usually consists of doubting the authenticity of central documents such as the minutes of the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, or of the authors pointing out the inconsistency of witness statements and the large differences between the figures given by the experts. It is not uncommon for it to be claimed that mass gassings of this magnitude was not technically possible with the means available. But even if in view of these arguments one were to withhold judgment and ignore the numerous other testimonies—including those of Eichmann, of the Auschwitz commandant Höss and of numerous inmates of the camps—the fact of the deaths of many hundreds of thousands remains, as does the further fact that a strikingly large proportion of these dead were Jews. There remain public statements such as Hitler’s repeated prophecies or statements about the “annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe” and Julius Streicher’s statement in a 1943 issue of “Stürmer” that Judaism was approaching its “extinction” with giant strides. And there are also numerous statements that Hitler made in conversations with foreign diplomats or in the midst of his round table, statements that at the same time bring to light the actual background of his antisemitism.
On February 17, 1942, at the Führer’s headquarters, Hitler said to his dinner guests, among whom was Heinrich Himmler: “The phenomenon of antiquity—the fall of the ancient world—was the mobilization of the mob under the slogan of Christianity, although this term has so little to do with religion as Marxist socialism had to do with the solution of the social question…It took Christianity 1,400 years to develop into ultimate bestiality. We must not therefore say that Bolshevism has already been overcome. But the more thoroughly the Jews are thrown out, the faster the danger is eliminated. The Jew is the catalyst on which the fuel ignites. A nation that has no Jews is returned to the natural order…If the world were given over to the German professor for a few centuries, then after a million years there would be nothing but cretins walking around with us: giant heads on nothing of a body.”
What Adolf Hitler actually meant by the word “Jew” is nothing other than what almost all thinkers of the 19th century called progress with a positive accent, that complex of growing domination of nature and alienation from nature, of industrialization and freedom of trade, of emancipation and individualism, which Nietzsche first and after him some philosophers of life such as Ludwig Klages and Theodor Lessing first declared to be a threat to life. For Hitler, this life is identical to the natural order, i.e. the simultaneously rural and warlike structure of society, which, in his opinion, still exists in a classic way in contemporary Japan, while in Europe it was endangered first by the peace utopia of Christianity and then by excessive industrialization with its symptoms of crisis and decomposition. Hitler therefore had in mind the same world-historical process that, for Marx, was both progress and decline, the process that could be called the intellectualization of the world. But despite some approaches, Marx and Nietzsche, Lessing and even Klages always remained far from claiming that there was a concrete, human cause for this process. Hitler, however, took this step, which was a radical reversal of all previous ideology, but which itself should no longer be called ideology in the original sense, because he attributed to a group of people the power to bring about a transcendental process. Nevertheless, the thesis was not merely nonsensical, because the Jews, as a “people of the book” and then as a group that seemingly was particularly encouraged by emancipation and in reality particularly deeply affected by it, actually had a prominent relationship to that intellectualization, but they were not cause, but manifestation. In this respect, it was not without consequence that Hitler, in his defense of war as an indispensable part of the natural order, directed the genocidal tendencies of modern war primarily against the Jews. But a genocide carried out with this intention is no longer a mere genocide. How much the reversal of the philosophy of history, the defense of the natural order and the revolutionary experience of 1918 went hand in hand for Hitler becomes irrefutably clear if a sentence that he said to the Croatian Marshal Kwaternik on July 22, 1941 is added: “If even one state for whatever reason tolerated a Jewish family with itself, it would become the bacillus hearth for a new decomposition.” He did mention Madagascar and Siberia as possible residences for European Jews. But Madagascar was already closed to him, and Siberia would soon to be equally closed to him. If he had brought Jews from Germany and the rest of Europe to Poland to live in ghettos there, he would have been nothing more than a talker. At the time of his conversation with Kwaternik, he already had German mental patients killed by gas, and it is quite possible that this method seemed particularly “humane” to him. Whoever takes Hitler seriously cannot deny the extermination actions at Auschwitz and Treblinka or the gas chambers. Nor can he equate Auschwitz and Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor with the extermination measures that the Croatian Ustasha implemented against the Pravo-Slavic population of their state. Auschwitz was in an even deeper sense an overshoot than the anti-partisan fight aimed at total security and therefore preventative, and that the biological planning socialism of “eradication of everything harmful and unhealthy” to which so many gypsies fell victim and which was also directed against the Slavs. The final solution is unique in a sense that is not merely trivial. But it is not therefore incomparable, because the right to call it unique only arises from the most comprehensive comparison possible, and the great hiatus of incomprehensibility may only be set at a point that comes into view after a long path of struggle for understanding.
But it cannot be denied that this transcendental extermination took place in the greatest secrecy. Whoever, like Hilberg, holds the opinion or tries to suggest that all members of the SS Economic and Administrative Office or even all the railwaymen who dispatched trains to Auschwitz must have known about the gas chambers should consequently deny that the “Order No. 1,” that no one should know more than is absolutely necessary for the execution of their immediate tasks, separated people from one another even more than the division of labor in modern society does anyway, and that a hundred specialists can build armored cars while thousands of other specialists believe that they produced individual parts for caterpillar tractors. Hilberg himself reports that Mrs. Schirach witnessed a nighttime roundup of Jews in Amsterdam and was so upset that she reported it to her husband. He advised her to draw the Führer’s attention to such “abuses” on her next visit to headquarters. But Hitler only listened to her “ungraciously” and after an “exchange of words” the Schirach couple left the room. And the most famous of the German tank generals next to Rommel, Guderian, said in March 1945 with obvious sincerity to representatives of the press that he had fought in the East for a long time, but that he had never noticed anything about the “devil’s ovens, gas chambers and similar products of a morbid imagination,” with which an order from Marshal Zhukov tried to incite the “feelings of hatred of the primitive Soviet soldiers.”
The final solution is without a doubt the most extreme and characteristic of all deeds of National Socialism, but its concealment is just as essential to it as the reversal of the traditional philosophy of history, which even Hitler was never dared to present publicly. As a tendency to be the complete annihilation of a world-people, it differs significantly from all genocides and is the exact antithesis of the tendency to complete annihilation of a world-class through Bolshevism, and in this respect it is the biologically transformed copy of the social original. But for that very reason it is not just biological destruction, but it means a decision with regard to the historical process as a whole, a decision against progress but on the basis of progressive realities, while Bolshevism was a decision for progress but in close connection with retarded realities. Nevertheless, the final solution is not the only perspective in which the relationship between National Socialism and Bolshevism may be seen. Bolshevism and National Socialism were always opposites, and they remained so until the end, but at no point were they opposed to each other in an contradictory way, and the closer the war came to its end, the more clearly a “change of characteristics” became apparent.