eur pol & soc xx class 4 bauereur pol & soc xx class 4 bauer.pdf

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chapterone'What Was the Holocaust?

k a u s e I wanted to bea historian of kws . Th e liolocaust was unfortu-nately, I soon realized, the centra l event in modern or perhaps all jewishhistory And when I said to my friend and mentor Abba Kovner, sur-nvor,po et, and fighter, that that realization scared me, he answered thatking scared was &'excellent basis for studying the Holocaust me~ s p e e c b k ~ . ~ ~ I m d a ~ t o t h i sa t e k i n g heHolocaust. And I am still scared.

Th e objectivity of th e historian be-es an issue with subjects besides the Holocaust, but a historianing with the Holocaust cannot avoid h e ssue.!lowing upon some ideas put forw ard by Karlheinz Deschner,

ng others, it is important to sta rt by den ying the possibility of anective" stance.1 Many have said this before: we are the product ofenvironment, radition, education, prejudices, and so on. T he influ-of our environmen t can bedisastrous, for we may be swayed by a

me and it s consensual impact, or even by a consensus createdby ourw-historians, and hence wr ite what is "politically correct," evenwingly sup press what we feel should be said. Worse, we som etimesly believe that wha t we sa y is our own view, even when i t is nothingt a reflection of the views of a majority, or a groupi or a charismatic

ual, or some other outside source. We need to be aware of ourour subjective approach, in order to formulate an interpreta-facts that will be legitimately rooted in the ahnosphere and the

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i!context of whatever period we describe. We must be aware of the obvi- i

ous truth that thevery decision todeal with solnefacts, so me asp cts ofreality, rather than wit11 others, is a subjective choice. Goethe said, I"Every fact is already a tl~eoi-y." ohann G. Droysen, the nineteenth- 1century Germa n historian, said, "Only a mindless person is objective"- Iand indeed. objectivism s basically uninteresting, because it re il et s the 1chaos ofan inf initechain ofeventn, a chaos that in its elfha s no meaning: f

Do we then conform to a subjectivism that dictates t l ~ eewriting of 'history in every generation? In a sense, we do, partially After all, people :

1in every period look at past events from a different perspective: the his-torians of 908 9 will look at the French Revolution differently from the ;way the historians of 1789, 1889, or 1989 looked at it. Yet th e knowl- iedge and self-perception that accompany an approach whose biases are 1

iarticulated can neutralize those biases to a considerable degree--never IIcompletely, but sufficiently to enable the historian todraw what may be j

termed 'legitimate" conclusions from his or h er study. SIICIIonclusions ;would avoid t he traps of a mindless objectivism, a solipsistic subjectiv-ism, and an endless relativization of facts. A legitimate conclusion is jone that not only avoids identification with known outside pressures ior interferences but also reflects an attempt to understand the periodunder discussion from its own perspective and in its own terms. We 1realize that another age will reinterpret the same events in its own Idistinct way; hopefully, our own findings will become part o fan y futureanalysis, ifwe state, to ourselves as well as to our public, what our biases.may be.

Let me state my biases. I think that the planned total murder of apeople was an unprecedented catastrophe in human civilization. It 1 1appened because it could happen; if it could no t have happened, it wouldnot have done so. And because it happened once, it can happen again.Anyhistorical event is a possibility before it becomes a fact, but when itbemmes a fact, i t also serves as a possible precedent. And although noevent will ever be repeated exactly, it w ill, if it is followed by similarevents, become the first in a line of analogous happenings. T he H ol e

callst can be a precedent, or it can become a warning. My bias is, in asense, political: I believe we ought to do everything in our power t omake sur e it is a warning, not a precedent.

My second bias is that 1am not neutral as between Nazism and anti-Nazism. I detest Nazism. I am against antisemitism and racism of anysort. I am not neutral there, either. I believe, on the strength of thehistorical evidence, that the Nazi regime was just about the womt r+gime that ever disfigured the face of tl~ is arth. Worst from what pointof view? From a basically liberal p i n t of view that, in line wi th Jewishand otl~e rradition s, sees human life as a suprem e value. In all this I amnot being "objective"; but an objectivity that would reject these s tart ingpoints would be nonobjective, besides being totally unacceptable tomebecause it wo ~~ ldun counter to what I assume-another clear bias-tobe the un derstanding that most people have of morality. Morality, inthis context, is based on the idea that acts or ntentions that run counterto the right of individuals an d groups t o exist, to live fully, also runcounter t o th e existence of human life altogether, hence their unaccept-ability. Morality as here presented is an absolute value, then-absolute,tbat is, as long as one posits th e continuation of the human race a s adesired condition.

Now th at 1 have stated my biases, and before we deal with the defini-tion of Holocourt, we have to sidestep what appears to be anot her pitfall,namely, our propensity t o say that because some ti~i ng appened, it hadto happen. Th e American Revolution happened, but i t did n ot have t ohappen. If Bri tisl~ oliticians had understood the importance of th e taxissue to tl ~ e merican colonists and the danger of a successful rebellion,they might well llave turned events toward a Canada-like resolution.likewise, it was the obstinacy of the French royalist regime that ledto tbe storming of the Bastille. World War I1 might well have beenaverted, in thei r own best intere st as it turned out, by Britain, France,and the USSR, as late as June 1939 (when military delegations of thethree Powers w ere discnssinga possible alliance against Germany), hadthey overcome their mutual suspicions.


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4 WhatIls. he HDlOCBUl t l whatwu theHO~OCUU~~ 5T he scourge of determinism, M arxist o r otherwise, is very nt1rc11 n

evidence in discuss ions of the 1 olocanst, and I nncst say clearly tha t theHolocaust happened but tha t it did not have to. It was, to be sure, one ofthe possibilities inherent in the E uro pe a~~ituation, but no t the onlyone. True, from a certain point onward-and one could perl~aps,wit11som e effort, establish that point-the annihilation of the Jews becameinevitable, givenNazi ideology, the developm ent of Germ an s ociety and !bureaucracy, and German political and military superiority in Europe.O r perhaps it became inevitable that ann ihilatio ~~l~ould e attempted.But ifw e retre at in time from early 1941 o the beginning of the war in19.99, or before that, then the Holocaust was not inevitable. Anglo- 'French-Soviet talks in the late spring of 19.99might have prevented ;German expansion, at least in the form that i t ultimately took. Equally, adifferent coalition of Powers around the S ~r let enssue in 1938, oupledwith thedisaffection of the Ge rman military gro up led by Ludwig Beck, !might have prevented the development toward war and th us the oppor-tunity for the Nazis to act upon their murderous ideologys

Intentionalist historians, such as Eberhard Jackel, IIelmut Krausnick,Gera ld Fleming, and Lucy Uawidowicz, have argued that Hitler's inten -tions, and therefore his role, in the process leading up to th e Holocaustare central becauseof thegodlike position he occupied in th e reg i~ne;heother Nazis were an indispensable supporting cast. The e ntourage ofIlitler, according to Jlickel, was rather u~ ~com forta blebout the devel-oping decisions to mass-murder th e Jews? Iieinrich Iiimmler, for in-stance, did n ot envisage mass murd er before 1941, s his memorandumof May 25 , 1940, on th e treatm ent of aliens in P oland, shows; 11e says ithere that t he idea of physically destroying a nation was a Bolsl~evikconcept unacceptable to Germans! Stru ctur alist sor functionalists, suchas Hans M ommsen and Goetz Aly, have explained the factors bringingabout the Holocaust by concentrating on th e development of social andeconomic structures that led to impasses that more o r less forced theGermans t o take the m ost radical solutions. They do not believe thatidmlogy o r decisions by central authorities were at all crucial, but even

tl~eywould agree that w ithout approval by Hitler and his closest circlethe nn~rder ould have been impossible?

A new finding in the Moscow archive, publisl~edn Germany in 1999,puts this discussion-which in any case has been superseded by analysesthat co~n bin e he two perspectives-in a new light. A part of liein-ricl~ immler's appointment notebook has come to light, for December1941.On the 18th 11e notes t hat he'discussed the "Jewish question"(Judcnjage)with Ilitler and that the result was "ahPartisam aus-xumf~n"-"toextern~inateCtl~em] s partisans," w l~ ic l~robably meansto exterminate them on the pretext that they are partisans. It cannotrefer to the coun tries outside the occupied areas of the USSR, because in1941t would not have made any sense to accuse German or Czech o rItalian Jews of being partisans. In the occupied Soviet areas extermina-tion had been going OII for months already, and Hitler had been receivingthe detailed reports of the Einsa&gn@en (murder squads). The Himm-ler note may indicate approval by H itler of a propaganda line that hadbeen purs ~~ edn the East vis-a-vis theGe rman soldiers and that could beused for Ge rma ns generally. Th is alone already indicates that Hitler wa sinvolved as the ce ntral decisionmaker. It also, and incidentally, indicatesthat Reinhard lleydrich occupied asubord inatep osition; the person whodiscussed these things with the dictator and received his instructions"was flimrnler. Six days before that, on December 12, s Joseph Goeb-bels's diary shows, Hitler spoke in front of som e fifty top Nazi officials,Gaeleiters and others, and reminded them that he had warned of them n ~ i n gr~nihilation f theJews ifa world war br okeout (initiated by theJews, as hepe t it on January so, 1939).On December 11,1941, ermanyhad declared war on th e United State s in the wake of Pearl Harbor andthe Arnerican declaration of war on Japan. The situation that he had''predicted in 1939 ad come about, and the time had wm e tod o what hehad told th e Jews he would do: Ymidrfung(annihilation).'

We probably do no t have before us a Hitler "decision," because Hit-ler rarely operated that way. But we may well have here a statementthat llitler intended as a general guide to action, in effect a call to his


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6 m a tw t h a OOCUH

minions to get to work and to show initiative in implementing tileguideline. Most histo ria~ ~so not think that such a guideline had everbeen uttered in any formal way, perhaps only in private disc ussions Buton Decemb er 12,1941, there was a clear expression of what was knownin the Thir d Reich as "the FUhrer's wish"-a euphemism for the way heordered th ings to happen. On the face ofif tlie intention alists have it;oncloser examination, however, we see that without the readiness of theparty and state structures to accept and execute this "wish," H itlerwould not have formally expressed it. Plainly, s om of the historians'debates are now out ofdate: Hitler was the decisive factor, though by nomeans th e only one, and he was not the weak dictator tha t some histo-rians have posited. He was directly involved. He pointed o ut th e direc-tion in which h e wanted things to develop. German society was in-volved, too, both at the top and a t the middle, and t he lower rangesbecame part of the consensus.

Another recent.and important correction to our understanding isthat added by agroup ofy oun g German historians working with UlrichHerbert, of the University of Freiburg.6 Herbert and his coautl~orspresent examples from eastern Galicia, Lithuania, Belorussia (Belarus),the %eneralgouvernement" (Poland), and Franc e that show how localinitiatives led to the mass execution of Jews in late 1941 and early1949.Th e perpetrators rationalized these m urder campaigns by practi-cal considerations, such as the "need" to find lodging s for Germ ans, orto carry o ut resettlements of Germans and Poles, or t o do away withsuperfluous mouth s to feed, or to av enge the killings of Germ an soldiershy theF& u & q m L d rn-Zr-52: k!w.5. ? 50- kbi1.1.11 c k

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8 whatW U he Holocmurt! WhatWU theH0lOCaUItII 9historian."" Il e did not mean that these prob le~ns annotultimately be~~nderstood,ut that tremendous difliculties stand in the way of under-standin g them. IIed id not want to imply a mystical interpreta tion of thellolocauvt events; but i~ecause onvi n~i ngxplanations are still unavail-able or are being argued about, 11e wanted to avoid what he called"closure" of the argument, as though we historians had found satisfac-tory answers t o our questions. He advocated a certain open-endednesswhenever we p ut forwa rd our views: we might, he implied, be wrong-there is nothin g terrible about that-and, in any case, othe rs will comealong and pres ent new findings and insights.

On the face of it, this argum ent is almost self-evident and would holdtrue for any historical (and many other) investigations, but it is espe-cially apposite regard ing the Holocaust. Because I basically agree withFriedlUnder's approach, all I am trying to say in these chapters sl~o uldtherefore he taken as obviously subject to discussion and change.

We now w m e to the problem of definitions. Is the Holocaust defin-able? Is it desirable to define it? After all, definitions are abstractionsfiom reality and are useful only insofar as they helpus to better under-stand the wo rld around us. Any historiographical definition is designedto help us unders tand t he event or events being defined. Because lifeisinfinitely more complex than any definition, definitions,by &$nition,cannever he fully adequate to the events they are supposed to define. Weranbut hope that they approximate descriptions of reality. Inevitably,our definitions are selective--they deal with pa rts of a phenomeno n.Thatmakes it even more importan t for our definitions to be as precise aspossible in defining at least those parts of th e phenomenon that theyclaim t o define. And ifexperience shows that the definition does not fitreality, then th e definition has to be changed, not the othe r way around.Inorder todefinetheHolocaust, it mwthe compared tootherevents ifitiq as I hav ejust argued, a human event. It is only by comparison that wecan answer the question of whether it is unprecedented and has featuresnot found in similar events.

.-The term genocidewas coined bv a refugee Polish--.

11 Jewish lawyer in the Uniterl States, in late l94e or early 1943.Len~kin's! def init ion is contradicto~,y )n the one hand, he d e f i n e s ~ ' & a s h e

"*nn ofi~&&gn&nkg~up.. . Generally speaking.: genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a

nation. It is intended rathe* s i m a o o r d i n p l a n f f mactions aiming at the dest ruction of essential fo u n d ~ ~ _ o f th e l i f e o fn& g r s p s , with the aim of a n ~ g t ~ g ~ @ d e ~ l " ~ '(It seems that he intends to say "the grou ps as such," n ot necessa rily allthe individuals in them.) Yet in the preface of the sa me book he say s thatI "the practice of extermination of nations and ethnic groups. .. s called

E by the au thor 'genocide.' " Th e destruction of the essential foundationsof natlonal life includes, according to Lemkin, the destruction of thenat~onalconomic structure, i ts religious institutions, its m oral fiber, itseducation system, and, always, selective mass killings ofparts of thetargeted population.'' W ha t he describes are two distinct alternatives:. 'j one, a radical and murtlerous denationalization acmmpanied by mass/ morder, which destroy? the group a s an entity but leaves many or most

! of the individuals composing it alive; the other, murde r of every singleI individual of the targeted group. It may perhaps be argued th at part idj mass annihilation leads to total extermination. But this is not what1 Lemkin says, though such a possibility certainly canno tbediscounted./ The discussion here is not just academic Lemkin's definitions were1 adopted, in large part, by-the United Nations. In t he Genocide Conven-1 tion, approved on December 9, 9.18, genocide is defined as 'My of the

following acts committed with the inten t to de strop in wh oleor inp ~ f1 .a nat~ ona l, thnical or religious group, as such." Again, both meaningsare included, and the phrase "in whole or in part" ind icates that wha t ismeant is not the development of partial destruction into total m urderbut two variations tha t do not necess arily follow one upon the othe r.

The historical context for Lemkin's work in early 1949 consisted ofthe information he possessed as t o what was happ eningto PoleqCzechqSerhs, Russians, and others. H orrifying information had been receivedconcerning the fate of the Jews, but decent human beings evinced an


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10 WhatWasU~e olocaur t t WhatWastheH o l W u r a t l f t

understandable reluctance to believe that the accounts were literallyand completely true. Wha t waa happelling to som e of t l~e se eople,mainly perhaps the Poles, fitted Lemkin's description of denationaliza-tion accom panied by selective mass murder. I t seems th at 11emade hisdefinition fit real historical developm entsas he saw them; the vaguenesswith which he contemplates the possibility of mur dering all Jews re-flects the sta te ofconsciousness in America of the Jewish fate.

We then come to 1948. Th e United Nations is not a symposium ofscholars-far fmm it. Documents emerging from that quart er are lessthan perfect, because they reflect political pressures and horse tradingbetween states. Thus, unsuccessful pressure was exercised in 1948 toinclude, for instance, the deshuction ofpolitical gr oups within the defi-nition of genocide. The inclusion of religions groups-not a part ofLemkin's definition-was accepted after a long struggle. T he lack ofconsistency in the U.N. wnvention is apparent the m oment wecontinuethe quotation: Genocide, it says, means any of the following acts: "'(a)Killmgmembersoftl~egroup;(b)ausingserious bodily or mental harmto m embers oft heg rou p; (c) Deliberately inflictingon the groupco ndi-tions of l i e calculated to bring about its pl~ysical estruction in wholeor in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births withinthe group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to anothergr o~ p. "' ~ e again see inclusion of both partial and total destruction.

T he conclusion to draw is that one ought to differentiate between theintent to destroy a group in a context ofselective mass murder and tl ~ eintent to annihilate every person of that group. To make this as simple Ias possible, I would suggest retaining the term for "@murder and the term H for t m o n . will argue that :-Holocaust can be used in two ways: to describe what happened to theJews at Nazi hands and to describe what might happen to o thers if the :Holocaust o f the Jewish people becomes a precedent for similar action s :

IWhichever way Holocaustis used, it and gmocj& are clearly connected; Ithey belong to the same species of human action, and the differences

between them remain to be seen, beyond the obvious one of partialversus total destr~ ~ction .

The ne xt p i n t to consider is crucial: which groups to describe whenwe talk about genocide. Lemkin talked only about national or ethnicgroups, and he would probably have agreed to extend his category toinclude so-called racial grou ps. T he U.N. convention add s religiousgroups. A number of scholars have added political groups aa well.leNeither of these last two additions makes much sense. People perse-cuted because of their religious beliefscan, in principle if not always inpractice, go over to th e persecutors' religious faith and save themselves.The persecution of theJews in theMiddle Ages is an excellent example:accepting baptism usually-not always-meant rescue. Du rin gth eN aziregime, Jehova11's Witnesses were persecuted in Ger man y because theyrefused to recognize the supreme authority of the state and objected tobeing recruited into the army. But those few members of the g mu p whoyielded and joined the army o r who acknowledged the Nazi state ashaving autl~ orit y ver r hem were no longer persecuted, and ifthey w erein concentration camps, they w ere usually released.The same applies to political persecutees. Even in Soviet Russia,joining the Com munist Par ty was often-not always-a way ofav oidii gstigmatization as "bourgeois." Alexandra Kollontai, a member of theRussian aristocracy, became a leading Bolshevik and sewed as Sovietambassatlor to Sweden. Mo st of the leading Bolsheviks were originally"bourgeois" intellectunls and sometimes former aristocrats In NaziGermany, millions of Communists became loyal Naz is

For both religious and political groups, membership is a matter ofchoice--again, in principle, if not always in practice, On e can chang eone's religion or one's political color. One cannot cha nge one's ethnicityor nationality or "racew-only the penecuto r can d o that, as the Ger-mans did when they "Ger maniz ed Polish adults and children. W ~t ho utsuch action, there is absolutely no way out for the m ember of a targetedethnic or national group: that person is a Pole, or a Rom ("Gypsf), or a


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I2 Whlk.CWthe WO l o Cu u t l IJew, or a Serb. Hence my wnclus ion that the term genocide should bused only for attacks on the group s specified byLemkin.

Genocide, then, is the planned attempt to destroy a national, ethnicor racial group using measures like those outlined by Lemkin and thUN. onvention, measures that accompany the selective mass murder cmembers of th e targeted group. Holocau st ia a radicalization of genocide: a planned attempt to physically annihilate every single member oa targeted ethnic, national, or racial grou p.How important is such a definition? It may help us differentiat~between differentcrimes against humanity, the ultim ate purpose of suctanalyses being to help lessen, and in some future perha ps do away withsuch h o r n n the end, as I have pointed out, reality is more compli.catedby far than ou r attempts to describe it I would therefore suggestthat these definitions be used t o describe a continuum of h u k n massdestruction. One could even use the term re~-dLstruction, ecause b~destro yingo ther humans, the perpetrators very ra dially diminish theiravn humanity. Such an approach may well use the paradigms proposedby RudolphJ.Rummel in his books D m ' & a n d Dcath by Gmmm t . "Accord ing to Rummel, between 1900 and 1987 close to 170millioncivilians (and disarmed ~o w s ) ere killed by governments and quasi-governmental organizations (political parties, e t ~ ) ,he overwhelmingmajority of them by nondemocratic regimes. He calls this phenomenon"democide" (killing of people). He says that 38 million of the peoplekilled were victims ofgenoc ide (he uses th e definitionof the U.N. con-vention), and clos e to 6 million of those were killed in th e Holocaus tThe re is no reason n ot to expand Rummel's paradigm to include wars,which are reciprocal mass murders wm mitted by opposing groups ofpeople, usually males, distinguishe d from one anothe r by funny clothescalled uniforms; such mass murders, too, are committed at the instiga-tion of governmenta and quasi-governmental organizations. Addingwars give s us a continuum ofhu man actions of deadly violence ranging 1- -from wars, via the mu rder of civilians for a vast variety of reasons, togenocide and Holocaust This does n ot mean that wars are%better" than

genocides, nor that the mass murder of civilians is less reprehensiblethan genocide; it does mean that thereareob vious c onnections betweenall these, and that occasionally one form merges into a nother.

No grad ation of human suffering is possible. A soldier who l ost a le gand a lung at Verdun suffered. How can one measure his sufferingagainst the horrors that Japanese civilians endured at H i r o s h ' i How

' can one measure the suffering of a Ram woman a t Auschwitz, who LUWher husband and children die in fron t ofher eyes, against the su fferingofa Jewish woman at the same camp who underwent the same e xpe rien e?Extreme forms of human suffering are not comparable, and one shouldnever say that one form of mass murder is 'less terrible," or even "bet-ter," than another. Th e differencebetween the Holocaust a nd less radi-cal genocides lies not in the amount of sadism or the depth of hellishsuffering, but elsewhere. I t is now time to turn o cnmparisons ha twillclarify the difference.


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I S he Holocaust ExpllCabIeI

and "ordinary" Ilon~anians, he groo r~dw orl~as Inid 1,y two gctlcua-tions ofthe best Romanian intellectnals and executed with t l~ c ~~ i~ la n a .of othe r intellectuals.

Ido not claim that tl~isexp lana tory odel is final; it is intended moas a stimu lant for discussion. T he fact th at the H olocaust is explicabltdoes no t imply any kind ofclosore. Mo re than one satisfactory explatla.tioncan beoffered. What is totally unsatisfactory isana ttemp t toescaphistorical responsibility by arg uing that this tragedy is some tl~ingnysterious th at cannot be explained . If this were true, then the criminalswould become tragic victims of forces beyond human c ontrol. To sajthat th e Holocaust is inexplicable, in th e last resort, is to ustif j it.

. chapter threeComparisons with Othe r Genocides

I have said already that th e only wayto clarify the applicability of definitions and gen erdizatiom is wit hmmparisons The question of whether the Holocaust had elements thathave not existed with any oth er form of genocide (whereas the re aren omajor elements of other genocides that cannot be found in yet othergenocides) is extremely important if we want to find out more aboutm ia l pathology in general.' W hen one discusses unpreceden ted ele-ments in a social phenomenon, the immediate question is, Unprece-dented in comparison with what? T he very claim that a historical ev entis unprecedented can be made only when that event is compared withother events ofapresumably similar nature with which it shares at leastsome qualities. Unless o ne finds a measure of comparability, unpre cPdentedness can mean only tha t the event is not human-in othe r words,ia not historical-in whic h case it is useless to talk about it except inputative theological or my stical contexts.

There are rather obvious psychological barriers t o u nderstanding


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40 Comparlroiu with Othe r Ganoclder Comparlronr wlthO the~ Gen0 clder 41Imass lrn~rder s ud genocidal events such as those tlescril~ed y l l~ ~ do lRumrr~el,whose work was mentioned in the first chapter and will betbasis of muc l~ f what is said here as well. We all know that l~ un~ anevince a tendency to deny the existence of life-tl~reatening vents.school textbooks, wars are described in terms ofpolitical or other mvations and in terms of military strategies and tactics. Napoleon,instance, won the battle ofAusterlitz-but was he ther e alone? Wasnot helped a little bit by a few tens of thousands of soldiers whom(and others) led into battle? How many soldiers were killed on bothsides? We do not usually find these figures in history textbooks. Thmean ing ofsuch statistics i s discussed even less. We rarely find accouof medical practices, includ ing the cutting-off of limbs and the like,descriptions of what happened to those mutilated. According to tEnglish ballad of the late sixteenth century about the gre at l a r d Wit.loughby's exploits in Flanders, 'To soldiers that were mainled, andwounded in the fray, the Queen allowed a pension of eighteen pence aday." Well, that's something. Th e rest-medical treatm ent, wives andchildren, and so on, i sno t mentioned. Other soldiers in other wars werenot lucky enough to have the great Lord Willo ughl~ y ut in a word withQueen Bess-were such songs written abo ut Napoleon , or von Moltke,or the Duke of Marlborough? And what abou t the civilians near theroads that the arm ies traveled on? Wh at about the dead, the wounded,the raped, and the dispossessed? We teach ourc l~il dre n bout the great.ness of the various Napoleons, Palm erstons, and B ismarcks as politicalor military leaders and thus sanitize history.

We all know th at hum an history is colored wit11 blood. We try tominimize, ignore, not teach a b u t, this dark side of l~istory, ecause it isa constant threat to our feelingofsecurity, and we want to avoid dangerby looking t he oth er way. Eric11 Fromm used th e concept o f Thanatos,the destructive instinct, to explain our behavior? It appears that hu-mans veer between th e urg e for life, the "libido" described by Freud (inmuch too sexual terms), and the lifedestroying urge. 1 would arguethat the idea of "good" gods, or a just, omn ipresent , and all-powerful

Gud, or transcelldental nonl~uman eings generally who are supposedto be tl ~ eepositories of morality, and their opposite-devil figures, orevil gods, or a monotheistic God who hides his face-stem from that-immane nt inner conflict. We have these opposites within us, geneticallyfixed by a long history of human developme nt; we can be either "good"and 'Sust" and "humane," or the opposite. We transfer these qualitiesoutside ourselves and create images of transcen dental beings who willpersonalize these qualities for us. We make these gods, or a God, whomwe invented for the purpose, to come back t o us and impose a "good"morality upon us, in order to have an authority t hat will prevent us frombecoming what we know we can become and fear t o become--namely,"bad," "devilish" creatures. When we stray from the straight and nar-row, some of us will call our straying a sin. When we want to sin, wehave our G(g)od(s) instruct us to do so. The result, for the twentiethcentury, is Rummel's statistics.

Genocide and mass murder are described in all swalled sacredbooks, whether the Indian Vedas, or the Bible, or the Quran. As a Jew, Imust live with the fact that the civilization that I inherited also encom-passes the call for genocide in its canon. In the previous chapter 1mentioned the sto ry about the m urder of the Midianites (Numbers 31).If that sto ry is not a "divine" justification for genoc ide, 1 don't knowwhat is. Later ge nerations of sages had the unenviable tas k of explainingit away-but let it be said that they felt uncomfortable about the murderand did notwant it to become a precedent for th e Jews' behavior,so theydid their pathetic best to eradicate it by "interpretation." Thi s strateg yof changing texts by (re)interpreting them is, on the whole, one must-admit, the mark of a reasonably advanced civilization.

Theological justifications for mass murder and genocide exist out-side the mo notheistic religions, of course; it would be worthw hile, how-ever, to examine the question of whether monotheism is not m ore mur-derous than oth er form s of religion. After all, millions of Christian s andnon-Christians have been killed by other Christians in the name of aloving God. The point is that the m onotheistic God of th e Middle East


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46 COmpYlsons wlt hot her Genocides

civilization competed wit11 l i~r l i i sl~ivilizatio~~,hicl~ t had precedeon what later became Turkish territory by many centories.

Persecuted by the Turks, the Arnmenians naturally tended to see1supp ort from the Russians, the bitter enemies of the O tt o~ na r~~npircAutonom ist and, by implication, independence-seeking Armenian poli~ical parties increased Turkis h suspicions and were, in Tur ki sl~ ye$a t hrea t at the very heart of Turlcish ethnic territory. T he WesterrPowers used Armenian aspirations to press the Ottoman a ~rtl~ oritie srgive up important elements of Ottoman sovereignty; they seer~~ ingl;supported Armenian aspirations, hut dropped them when it was nllonger in their interest to do so. The Ar~neuian s ere abar~donelln1before, during, and after World War I were killed in 11ugenumbersTheir genocide served the pragmatic purposes of political expansionacquisition of land, confiscation of riches, elimination of ec ono ~ni colnpetition , and t he satisfaction of chauvinistic impulses of the revolutiomar y core of the dominant etl ~n ic roup, impulses exacerbate11 by feeling!of utte r frustration and humiliation in a crisis-ridden and disintegrating empire.'

In the case ofthe Tuts isin Rwanda, thedom inant cliqueof 1111t11s,ledby a French-educated intelligentsia, was after the land that the Tutsisoccupied-in an agric~ rltural corlolrly where land is scarce-and aftelthe base of power of the l'utsi llwandan class cum ethni c group, aminority that had comprised the traditional ruling class for centuriesand had a record of oppressing the I1ut11majority. This, again, was apragmatically motivated genocide.lo

Th e defini tion of the Can ~bo dia ~~isaster as gen ocide preseltts prolr-lems, because the aim of the Khmer perpe trators was obviously not thedisappearance of the l(hmer people. Yet it certainly has elements of agenocide. According to Ben Kiernan's findings, there w ere thre e groupsofvictim s: ethnic Khrner who were city dwellers o r who in sorrle otherway were deemed potential or real enemies; Chams, Muslims who weremassacre d in large numbers; and Vietnamese livin g in Cambodia, rnany

CompnrlsonswlthOther Genoclda 47

i ofwhom managed to escape to Vietnamese territory. W hat concerns usj here is that the motivation for the murd er of Khmer by Khmer was thei achievement of a class-based utopia, according to which the putative/ real interests of potentially oppositional city dwellers were to be elimi- Ib nated by annihilating the city dwellers themselves. Agricultural com-b .I munlsm of an extreme so rt 'c o~ ld e assured only by removing all! possible centers of dissen t-a clear political motivation, which showed a1 kind ofdistorted ra tionality de spite the irrationally extr eme sadism andI brutality wit11 which i t was executed."

It would be superfluous t o analyze the motivation for the annihilationtj of the Caribs at the hands of the Spaniards, or the genocide of MeGcani and Peruvian Indian peoples t hat followed-clearly, the que st for gold,; commerce, and natural riches was the central motive, and the conver-I sion to C hristianity a n ideological "superstructure."Even in the case of the Roma (Gypsies) the pragmatic aspect stands

out. In the territory of the G erman Reich, a racist ideology demandingtheir complete removal, in large part by their annihilation, predomi-nated, but outside th e Reich, matters were different. Nazi policy toward Ithe Roma was hazy. Recen t research has shown that fro m early1949on,the Wehrmacht, probably following a consensus emanating from the

: Party, distinguished between seden tary and wande ring Roma. Th e lat-ter were to be murdere d, because they were in the way and could notbeintegrated in a future Germa ndom inated political order. TheNazis did

1 not usually bother about tl~eormer, althougll there were some e xc e pI tions. The settl ed Roma ( the definition of who was "settled" was vague)were largely trea ted like o the r local inhabitants." I will deal with this

I issue below.I One major difference between th e Holocaust and other forms ofgeno-

cide is, then, that pragmatic considerations were central with all othergenocides, abstract ideological motivations less so. With the Holocaust.pragmatic considerations were m arginal. Yes, a tremen dous effort wasexerted to rob the Jews of their property or to take it after they were


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48 Comparisons wlth Other Ganocldea

murdered. Uut no serio ~rs istorian has ever claimed that ro l~l ~e ryatthe basic reason for the murder. Robbery was the outcom e of the Ilolecaust, not itscause.T he Jews had no territory to he coveted. Contrary tclegend, German Jews did not control the German economy, althoughthey were prominent in some of its branches-and they did not act ara p u p ut as competing individuals. Further, they had no militarypower, and in Germ any itself their political powerwas marginal a t bestPolitically, the only proniinent Jew in the Weimar Republic after 19sawas Walther Rathenau, the minister of foreign affairs, and he was mur-dered in 1999 by right-wing extremists. No, the basic motivation waspurely ideological, rooted in an illusionary world of Nazi imagination,where an international Jewish conspiracy to control th e world w as o pposed to a parallel Aryan quest. No genocide to date had been basedso completely on myths, on hallucinations, on abstract, nonpragmatic,ideology-which then was executed by very rational, pragmatic means.Just as Christian antisemitism was based on theological speculationsthat fulfilled impo rtant practical fun ctions, so Nazi antisem itism, whichoriginated in the same Christian clel~rsions ut whicl~ hancloned themoral principles of Christianity along with its religious beliefs, trans-lated its murderous abstractions into gra d~ ~a llyeveloping policies ofsegregation, sta rvation, hum iliation, and, finally, planned total murder.Th e murder of the Jews took place because a murderous ideology moti-vated it, but first the ideology overcame contrary ideas and notions inGerm an society in the concre te historical context of convergin g crises."

A second reason why the Holocaust is unprecedented is its global,indeed, universal character. All other genocides were limited geograp l-id ly ; in m ost cases, the targeted gr oup lived in a reasonably welldefined geographic locale (Indian peoples in the Americas, Khmer andCham in Cambodia [Kampuchea], Tu tsi mainly in Rwanda, Uganda,Burundi, and Zaire; and so on). The Tu rks targeted Armenians in eth-nically Turkish areas; they did not care aboot Armenians elsewhere;even the Arm enians in Jerusalem, which was considered t o be ethnicallyArab and which was controlled by the Ottomans, were not targeted.

ComparlsonrrrtUlOtherGenocides 49 1Wandering and settled groupsofR oma w ere murdered in Germany, butoutside Germany, settled Roma were of no special concern; the Nazisdid not attempt to register Roma outside the Reich. In the case of theJews, persecution started in Germany but spread all over what theGermans called the G erman sphere of influence in Europe and thenbecame a policy of total mu,rder.'+Because the Germans fully intendedto cor~ tro l ot just Europe.but.the world, whether directly or throughallies, this meant that Jews would ultimately be hunted down all overthe world. Hitler's well-known expression, that in fighting the Jew hewas doing the work of the Lord, had a clear universalist implication.Indeed, it was antisemitism that was exported 'om Nazi Germa ny,everywhere. Thi s global character of the intended murder of all Jews isunprecedented in human history.

A third element sets the Holocaust apart f mm other genocides: ita in-tended totality.T he Nazis were looking for Jews, for all Jews. Accordingto Nazi policy, all persons with three or four Jewish gra ndparents weresentenced to death for the crim eof having been born. Such ap olicy hasnever been applied in human history before and would have undoubt-edly been applied universally if Germany had won the war. If we com-pare this to other genocides-for instance, the case of the Caribs, wh owere indeed totally exterminated by Spanish policies-we find tha tthere were never plans to achieve that aim, nor was it express statepol-icy to do so, although that was the practical outcome. In O ttoman Tu r-key, some Arme nian women and small children were spared t o be sexu-ally used or to be educated as Turks. Further, as I pointed out above,Armenians were intended to be eradicated in mainly ethnic Turkishareas, no t necessarily elsewhere. North American Indian tribes w erevictims of genocide for reasons of greed an d exploitation, and m urde rwas the outcome of national policies, but again, there was no govern-mental plan for total extermination. In genocidal attacks on peoplesbefore the twentieth century, the technology, on th e one hand, and t hecomplicated hureaucratic structures guided by universalistic utopianideologies, on the other hand, had not yet developed. One could argue


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that had the murder of the Caribs and the North American Indianstaken place at a time when state-directed a ~~t iil~i latio nas possible, thatpolicy would have been followed. This may well be so, which s l~ ow sotonly that the Holocaust was unprecedented but that human civilizationis prone to make Holocausts possible when conditions are ripe-whichis another central point in our argument. In othe r words, the Holocaustca n be repeated, not to be sur e in exactly the same way, not by Germ anqno t toward Jews, but by anyone toward anyone. It was the Jews the lasttime round; w edo not know w ho the Jews may be if there is a ne xt time.

If this analysis is correct, then th e Holocaust is an extrem e form ofgenocide. It is important to restate what is meant here by "extreme."T h e suffering of the victims of this genocide was in no se nse greate rthan the suffering of victims of other genocides-there is no gradationof suffering. Thus, the fate of Roma victims at Auschwitz was exactlyparallel to that of the Jewish victim^.'^ What is meant by "extreme"is expressed by the three elements described above: the ideological,global, and total character of the genocide of the Jews. Th e extremenessof th e Holocaust is what makes it unprecedented.Various commentators have labeled as unprecedented a num ber ofother aspects of the Holocaust. One is the supposed fumr icuhninrs.some quasi-genetic, peculiarly German expression of extre me violenceo r s a d i ~ m . ' ~his explanation is less than convincing, quite apar t fromsmacking of reverse racism. Collaborators with the Nazis from amon gothe r European nations were certainly no less brutal than the Germ answere. T he Croatian concentration camp of Jasenovac was, if anything,mo re horrible than its Nazi counterparts. Romanian troops and policeshowed their m ettle at such death traps in Transn istria as Rogdanovcaand during the death marches of Bessarabian Jews into the Trans-nistrian territory: some 260,000Romanian and 100,000Ukrainian Jewswere murdered by Romanian perpetrators" Most Lithuanian Jewswere murdered by Lithuanian collaborators, although with German-I encouragement and in large part u nder German supervision. And in alli oth er genocides known t o us, the perpetrators acted similarly, as anyone

I! who has researched t l ~ epaniards in the New World, European settler s;. in North America, Cam bodian communists or Hutu perpetrators, to! name but a few, will read ily acknow ledge.

Is modern efliciency a special hallmark of th e Holocaus t? Th at mayr?1 seem to be the case, but in som e other genocides, too, the contempo raryi state of technology was fully utilized. Probably the best example is1 the Armenian case: the ~u r k i s h erpetrators used the telegraph to; inform their people of the steps to be taken against the targeted vic-

tims, they used railways to transport troops, and they established anarmed force directed from the center to serve as the chief agency forperpetrating the murder." One might make a similar argum ent re-garding the destruction of the North American Indians at th e hands ofwhite Americans.

On the other hand, although the Nazis did not invent the concentra-tion camp, they developed it in new ways. Especially novel was theintricate procedure by which they deprived inmates of their "normal"human attributes by systematic humiliation, which reached its peak intheir use of what may be called excre tionar y control-to tal humiliationby controlling human excretions. Perhaps th e most frigh tening aspectof this development is that, t o date, no N azi docum ent has been foundthat points to a d iscussion of how to humiliate victims. Th e conclusionis inevitable: humiliation was n ot the resu lt of plannin g but of a consen-sus that did not require orders o r bureaucratic arrangements. In o therwords, probably the most ex trem e form of humiliation known to us wasthenatural result of the Nazi system.

Also novel in its extrem ity, though not in i ts essence, was the Naziuse ofcamp inm ates against othe r camp inmates. T he same basic policywas followed in the E ast European ghe ttos.

I believe one should as far as possible avoid the term dehumnnixu-tion to describe what happened to the inmates of camps and ghettos,because, ifanything, the term fits the Nazis: they "dehumanized" them-selves. Wh at they did to their hapless victims was to trans fer th eir ownabandonment of all previous norms accepted as "civilized" onto naNy


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I2 C~mpurIsons lth Other Genocides ComparI%on% th Other Genoddes 53 Icivilized beings, Jews and others.'l'he comm on nse oft he tern1dchumo Nazis tried to rule notjust Ge r ~ n a n ~ut Enrope, and ultimately the 8&a,tionwould eave tlleperpetrator as tile , * l lulnanUan d tile victim a s ] world, ill the name of a new principle, the principle of "race." T rue, theythan human. ~ h ~ t ,ndeecj, was the intended outcome, but in fact started from nationalism and acted in the name of the German people.Nazi treatment of those interned in camps and ghettos sllowed nut, rnoved hy ttleir interpretation of the racial doctrine, they distancedopposite, because it was the Nazis w ho los t the cl~aracteristics f themselves progressively from a purely Ge rman ideology. Th e fascinat-lized human beings When that m inority ofinmate s who survived ing document of July 1940 sllows that the murder campaign was in-liberated, they returned to their civilized waysof life; it is hig llly d tended todecimate the German people as well-the mon ster was aboutful whether their tor turers did, unless they repented, wllicl~ ppa todevour its children."Tlle world was to be ruled by thestrong er,very few of them did. In othe r words, th e Nazis remained dellurn better races, with th e German ic peoples of the Aryan race at th e top ofeven after the nightm are ended; those of their victims who survi new hierarc l?y.not. Toreach such a utopian sitnation, they had tooppose, I would argue,

Arguably, therefore, one may add a f ourth element of unprece the major achievements of the European culture that preceded them,ness to the threementioned above: because the Jews wereat the especially the legacy of the French Revolution and the Emancipation.of the hell that was the Nazi concentration camp, they were the If one is to believe llermann Rauscllning's record of his talks withof amunprecedented crime of total h~nniliation nd fared wo Hiller--and Illat may he problematic* ecause hewro te hem down fromother s who were victims of the same crirne. memory and published them years after they took place-then Hitler

Yet a finh element might be added. It refers to the regime fro appears to llave been aware Of Ille trem endous import Of his rei7e11ionthe Holocaust sprang, and may provide some of its contex winstu m a n i t ~ P o would go fu rther than that and Claim that th erevolutions before ~ ~ ~ i ~ ~ a locialism that aimed at organizirl National Socialist rebellion against humanism, liberalism, democracy,ity were made in the name of class, nation, or religion, T socialism, conservatism, pacifism, and so on, was the most radical at-

IIattempts to reshume society and make on e real or imagine tempt at changing the world that history has recorded to date: the mo stethnic or national group, or religious belief dom inant while novel and the most revolutionary.Th e Nazi regime was unprecedented,or subordinating others, ~h~ list of revolutionaries includ to use the term I have suggested as a description of the Holocaust. It isnists, for instance, who, originally at least, tried to define lh eUnprecedented quality Of the Nazi regime that goes far instruc ture of society. Today, the fundamentalist regimes of explaining the unprecedented nature of the Holocaust In attackingand Sudan try to make their version of Islam th e definin everythi% that llad been definedas humane and Inoral before it, thatsociety. Nazism saw the Jews as its main enemy was logical in a way. Why

Attempts like these have been made before the twen alloU1d this be sopCatholicism, in the past, claimed preeminence and absol TI1e Jews are a peculiar grou p Of people They most certainly~~~~i~~ ussia absolute power for monarch cannot be defined in racial-genetic terms, des pite the be tter represents-racy and the orthodox churcll , ~l~~ lncas over tion ofce rtain illnesses among Jews than amo ng others an d despite thew l ~ i c l ~nly a certain class of people l~ a d say in rnnrli mc"?nt clairrl that certain genetic qualities set the priestly or quasi-same applied, even more forcefully, in the caste syste priestly par t Of th e .Iewish population apa rt from Others (ma ny people


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54 Comparlrons with othar Genocidal ~ompnr4rons ithOther Qenocldes 55

wllose name, Cohen, means "priest" share certain genetic cllaracter p r a ry Greeks and Romans speak different languages, derived thoughtics). Clearly, Ethiopian , Indian, Moroccan, and Russian Jews sllow they are from the ancient ones; they no longer worship the same gods;result of interm ingling wit11 other groups. In tlle first century of they n o longer w rite continuations of the sam e literature, nor do theyCommon Era (the century that saw the destruction of the Jerusa follow similar customs. But the Jews a re still here, a nd the ir culture is,Temple) the Jewish pop~ ~lat ionultiplied by a t least loo percent, if if not the oldest, one of the oldest continuing civilizations we know.more, and that was th e result not of natural increase but of the addi Anyone reading modern Hebrew can read te xts th at were written threeto the Jewish people of large numbers of gentiles by a process w thousand years ago without a dictionary. Let a modern reader of En-details arestill not qui te clarified. In Jewish sources of t l ~ eeriod glish try that wit11 Chaucer, or a modern reader of Indian languagesare called "the G od-fearing ones" and a ppear t o have joined Jecommunities without full membership; Ilowever, their children e that there w as an internal logic to th e Nazi attack onconverted at birth, s o the next generation was fully Jewish. the Jews, who were th e symbolic surviving remnant o f thevalue s and

If the Jews ar e not a "race," they certainly inh erited s culture Nazis wanted t o destroy. Thi s may be a con tributingcivilization in which the ir unique religion played a dom inan t part. nition of the Holocaust.civilization created a vast oral hadition, which became a w rittedition and decisively influenced modern civilization. Christiani in his monumental, brilliant, and, in my new, un-lslamsreoffshoo ts oft his tradition. If,say, in theeighteenth cent is of the Nazi bureaucracy may not have intended toordinary European possessed a book at all, it would have l,e he pictu re of a stereotypically efficient "teutonic" bu-Christian Bible, which wa s composed of two parts , the Old a nd tl t is what many observers have seen. In actual fact,Testaments. Both were largely written by Jews. The impact was riddled with inefficiency, and m uch leeway wasJewish tradition can he seen in all of 'Western" or "Nortllern " 1 initiatives, which sometim es clashed with plannedfrom Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dan te to Polish and Russian lit ng descriptions, one migh t perhaps da re to suggestfrom the impact of the moral teachings of the prophets to legal rienced pre-Nazi bureauc rats filled responsible ps i -and the Rights of Man. Th e Jews tl~en~selve so not follow t l ~precepts any more th an anyone else does, and they ar e neitnor w orse than any ot her group. Rut they are different insoare the bearers of this special tradition, althol~gl~ ost of colnpetition between quasi-feudal Nazi lord s re-perately want n ot t o be different at all. Others empllasize other bureaucratic structure, and there were theence to the ex tent ofc reatin g an impassable barrier betweenand other s sis and war, according to a leadership principle that encouraged self-

Western o r North ern civilization (ifone can call it a civiliAuschwitz) is built on two pillars: Athen s and Rome, anBut Athens and Rome, which are the source of modern aes ot, as some have arg ued, in evidence in Naziof modern lite rature, mod ern law, and much else, are no


18/23

56 Comprrlsons wlt h Ot her Gbnocldbl(Auscl~witz-Uirltenau, l~elmno, ubibo r,Trebl ir~ka, elzec, Maly 'I'ros-tinetz)PLwere designed to kill Jews (several thousand R o~n a, nd somehund reds Poles and Soviet pow s were also gassed in tlien~),P' he mur-der of these multitudes, people who could have been used, at the veryleast, t o p d u c e armaments, build airfields or roads, work in fields andfactories, was opposed t o modern econom ic principles.

Another aspect of unprecedentedness is perhaps mo re elusive. Theway a modern society that had given the world som e of the most im-portant achievements of a humanistic culture became, in a lrorrify-ingly sh ort time, a recruiting ground for brutal murderers is a fact withwhich we have to grapple con~tantly.~'What is so stunning is theparticipation of a vast majority of the Germans in genocidal projects,first and foremost against Jews, but also against others. Wh at is fright-ening is th e thought tha t if it conld happen in Germany, it can happenelsewhere. The stereotypical genetic accusation against Gern~ar~sssuch, so dear to many Jews and non-Jews, is a way ofsayi ng that it conldhappen only in Germany, with Germans, and because "we" are notGermans, we need not be troubled too m ucl~ .'~t is a n obvious case ofanxiety repression.

The discussion about the unprecedented features of the lloloca~rstleads us i nto the question of tlie relation and comparison of the Holo-caust, a s an ex hem e case of genocide, to othe r genocides. In order to doso, let us return for the moment to tlie vexed question of existingdefinitions. I would argue that genocide is the proper name for thebrutal process of group elimination accompanied by mass murder re-sult ing in the partial annihilation of the victim population as describedby Lemkin and th e U.N. Convention. To tal annihilation can he labeledHolocaust for want of a more acceptable word. Defined in this way, theterm gmocidc would be applicable, for instance, to what the Nazis at-tempted to do to th e Polish people. There w as no inte nt to annihilateeverg Pole; there was an i nten t to eliminate the Polish people qua pec-ple, qua community, by the destruction ofautonomous Polish economicstructures, by the decimation of their religious leadership, by the de-

structior~ f all educational institutions, and by the prevention of anykind of Polisli political structures. All this was accompanied by en-slavement, kidnapping of children, forceful Germanization, and massmurder.

Th e parallels between tlie genocide of the Jews and the genocide ofthe Poles are obv ious Wha t a? the differences? For th e Poles, therewere no plans for total annihilation. A first draf t of the so-called Gener-alphn Ost,which was submitted to Himmler at the end o f 1941by Dr.Konrad Meyer-IIetling, foresaw the expulsion of 31 million people inthe Polish and Soviet areas and th e Germaniza tion of the rest, presum-ahly by methods th at would include the liquidation of the intelligentsiaand any potential leaders, a policy that had in an y case been pursued vis-8-vis the Poles from September 1959. Th e plan did not go into anydetails; these were later considered by Dr. Erhard Wetzel, an im portan tS.S. official and racial ex pert. T he B altic peoples we re t o be eliminatedas separate groups, the Germanizable elements were t o be absorbed,and those who were not Germanizable (cindnrtschungsfdhhig)were to beinvited to become th e ruling class of the Slavic expellees in the E as tWetzel found it "obvious that the Polish question cannot be solved insuc l~ way that one would liquidate the Poles in the same man ner as th eJews. Such a solution . would be a standing accusation against theGerman people into the far distan t future."" He proposed to German izesome and depo rt the rest to western Siberia, where their antagonism t othe Russians would ensure hat no united anti-german front would everbe formed. T h e anti-German elements would be annihilat ed Ukrai-nians who could not be Germanized would also be used against theRussians, and the Belorussians would form a helo t population reserve,to be used for lat~o r.Wetzel likewise opposed the total mass murder of the Russians,which had been proposed by Dr. Wolfgang Abel of the Kaiser WilhelmInstitute, th e same illustrious institution of academic learning t hat hadsupported tha t othe r famous medical docto r with a Ph.D., JosefMengeleofAusc1iwitz notoriety. Wetzel thought t ha t Russians would beneeded

58 Compv twns wlth Othar aanocldes Compmrlaons wlth Otheraenocldm 59


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for labor but had to be kept on a very sho rt leash. IIim ~~l ler' seac t io~~othese proposals was positive. The Nazis mig ht well have tried to traus-late these plans into practice had the defeat at Stalingrad not put anend to them. No less important was the plau-which did not work inpractice-to starve about 30million of the conqu ered S oviet populationto death in order to make food available for Ge rma nys7 So: slavery,deportation, destruction of nationalities as identifiable groups, massmurder by hu nger and by active killing-in othe r words, genocide. Butnot H olocaust

The term genocide applies to the Armenian case even more aptly.There, too, theelimination o fArmenian identity was aspired to, and allArmenians in what was considered to be Turkish ethnic territory wereextinguished by mass murder, although the death ofe very single Ar mbnian everywhere was not postulated as an aim. Persecution was ethnic,not racial, as in the Jewish case. The fateof the O ttoman Armenians wasdecisively fleete d by ad evelopment already alluded to: the Great Pow-ers intervened in favor of the A rmenian desire to develop cult~rral ndpolitical autonomy within the framework of the Ottoman E~npire norder to influence and weaken the empire, but were not prepared to fol-low through. Th e Armenians, encouraged by the stand of the Powers,demand ed autonomy, incen sine:Tu rkisl~ ationa lists, but were left in the-lurch by those who had seemingly supporte d them. Nobody cared aboutthe Arm enians and their tragedy was forgotten, as [Iitler is supposed tohave said in regard to them when d iscussing the fate of the Poles beforehis armies attacked Poland." Th e Jews were equa lly abandoned by theWeste rn Powers, w ho kept expre ssing their sym pathy for their fate, butJews, contrary to the Armenians vis-a-vis the Turks, never actuallydemanded anything from the Germans. The parallels and differences areagain apparent, the differences being that the Arm cnians were a recog-nized ethnic g roup within the Ottoman Empire, whereas the Jews weresometimes considered an ethnic group, sometimes a purely religiousgro up and sometimes a combination of both; nor was the re an inter-national legal precedent that would have obligated the Powers to inter-

11 vene in their favor, contrary t o the Armenian case. In t he Armenian case,

ag in , tile number of victims compared to the total number of the tar-geted population (probably at least one-ha lf) is mos t likely highe r thanin the Jewish case (one-third of the Jews of t he w orld were killed-whichmay be co lnparable to the T uts i case as well).

One strikin g feature of the Armenian genocide is its denial by theheirs of the perpetrators Nazi Germany wa s defeated, and its heirs,by con trast, acknowledged th e murder of the Jews, the Holo caust, aswell as the murder of other victims T he United States has acceptedthat nineteenth-century A mericans were responsible for the murder ofNorth Am erican Indians, and Spain has recognized w hat Spaniards didin the Americas. This is true of some other genocides as well, thoughnot all. Modern Turkey, however, adamantly refuses to acknowledgethe mass destruction of the Armenian people, although t he Turkishrepublican regime established by Mustafa Kemal Pasha Atatllrk at o nepoint not only, in his own words, acknow ledged th e facts but exp licitlycondemned the government of 'Young Turks" that had been responsi-ble.p9 Republican Turkey reversed the defeat of the Turkish armies atAllied hands, forced an exchange of popl~lationswith Greece, therebyestablishing a homogeneous nation (with the exception of the Kurds ineastern Turkey), and became determined to suppress them emory of thegenocide. It could d o that because it became, thanks t o th e efforts of theKemalist government, in a very real sense a victorious power. Vic-torious powers need not search for skeletons in their c upboa rds Wh atthis denial does to Turkish national identity is another matter. Onecould argue that Turkey will never achieve a balanced identity unless i tacknowledges that the predecessors of the prese nt regim e presided over

: the murder of anoth er people.A similar conclusion might be drawn from the mu rder of Roma.TWOAmerican (Jewish) historians, Sybil Milton and Henry Friedlander,

' have argued, in a series of publications, that wh at they call the H o bcallst is what t he Nazis did to Jews, "Gypsies," a nd the Ge rma n handi-capped (ahout 70,000 ofwhom were murdered in the first stag e of what


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GO Comparlsons wlth Other Genocldas

was e~~ pl~ernisticallynown as the "eutl~anasia" Irogranl, 111lti1 A I I ~ I I S1941, and many thousands more half-secretly afte rwa r~l).~ "he argilment is that the Nazis' policies regarding the Roma and the 11andicapped were motivated by the same kind of racist ideology a s was tlieilpolicy on the Jews.

Nazi policies toward the Roma and the hand icapped were, it is trueformulated in racist terms and based on a biological-racist ideologjQuotations by these and other authors from orders by I-limmler ancopinions an d policy directives by othe r Nazis are adequate proo fof thatThe fact, however, is that aNNazi policies toward other peoples werrgov ern ed by the ir racist ap proach . Thu s, Tor instance, S.S. officers wercnot allowed to marry Italian women without receiving special permissionq because Italians were not considered to be equal to the masterrace,even while Italy was an ally of Germany. Ofcourse, it was impossi-ble to maintain these racist principles in the real world. Slavs wenconsidered to be inferior Aryans, but Slovaks, Croats, and U ~tlgarians-all Slavs-were allies, so there was no general ant iS la v policy. Instead,

I some Slavs were treated as sublrun~anAryans; others were not. Latinswere considered to be better than Slav8 but th e poor performance alItalian soldiers on the battlefields apparently caused some do1111ts boutthat in the minds of good Nazis. Nazi attitudes toward Rollla werecomplicated by their place of origin, n ortl ~w este rn ndia, w11icl1madethem A rya ns Th e solution was to label them low-type Aryans who hadmingled with the lowest of the European Aryans (including the lowestof theG erm an population itself). They had become, in Nazi eyes, hered-itary asocial criminals. This stereotyping can be doc un~c nted rom alarg e numb er of Nazi sources. Th e Nazis set up a special organization,the Rassenhygienische und Bevolkerungsl~iologiscl~eorscl~ungsstelledes Reichsgesundlleitsamtes (Researcl~ nstitute for Racial Hygieneand Population Biology at the Reich Health Office), implying th at the"Gypsy" problem (like the Jewish one) was basically a pr ob len ~ f social(preventive) medicine. Th e institute was run hy a yonn g doctor, Robert

Ritter, ancl a medical practitio ner-nurs e, Eva Justin (wh o received he rM.D. later). The y managed to divide 18,922 of the 28,607 "Gypsies" inGermany acc ording to "race": 1,079were classified as "pure" Gypsies,6,999 as "n~oreGypsy than German," e.976 as "half-breedq" e.we a s"more German than Gypsy," e.931 as uncertain, and e,65n as "Germanswho behaved as Gypsies:'sl

In 1938, Himmler declared that the "solution" of the Gypsy prob-lem sl~ oul d e in accordance with racial principles. In the wake of thearrest of many Germ an Roma (of the Sinti clans in the main)-manywere pa t in special camps, and quite a number w ere sent t o concentra-tion camps-a problem arose for Himmler: after all, Sinti Gypsies werenot Jews, and in principle Nazi ideology was supposed to respect theunique qualities of e very rac e (except Jews and, presumably, blacks),especially when Gypsies were, aRer all, at least part Aryan, and some ofthem, the "pure" Gypsies, had to he treated even better than the partAryans. Himmler therefore decided to separate German Gypsies inaccordance with Ritter's findings. Th e pure Gypsies, and those whowere more Gypsy than German would be protected from destructionunder an arrangement reminiscent of the Jewish Councils: nine S i t ichiefs would run these groups. H e even considered giving them permis-sion to maintain their life of wandering. Hitler's powerful secretary,Martin Bormann, demurred (December 3, 1942). Th e American histo-rians mentioned above quote this objection to show that nothing cameof Aimmler's idea to segregate pure Gypsies in order to keep themalive.However, there now are new findings: Himmler met with Hitler onDecember 6, 194.9, and as a result, on February e l , 1943, Himmlerinformed the minister ofjustice, Otto Thierack, that "the Gypsy ques-tion" s11011ld e discussed furth er in accordance with information re-ceived from the party secretariat (Bormann). "Recent research" hadmade it clear "that there are positive racial elements also among theG y p s i e ~ . " ~ ~ormann was assured that there was no plan to let theGypsies wan der a11o11tn Reicii territory; they were to be permitted t o


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travel in a circumscribed area o~ ~t si( lehe Reich's bou ndaries, in groupscontrolled, presumably, hy German police. It seems clear that Ilimn~lerhad decided, in principle at least, to le t these Roma live.

It also appears that, as a result of these discussions with IIitler, therest of the Germ an Roma were to be m urdered after being used as awork ing force: on December 16, 1949,Himmler ordered all the Roma inthe Reich not included in the pure ca tegory (and some others) to besent to concentration camps. Those who were not to be sent therewould be sterilized (discussions held early in January 1943 betweenvarious branches of the S.S.). Thus, w ith th e possible exception of thepure Roma, who would in any case not b e permitted to stay in Germany,all the other Roma in the Reich would be "removed," whether by mur-der o r by sterilization.

Here I must point to two major differences between the treatme nt olJews and the treatment of Roma. In t he Jewish case, the main mur.demu s attack was on Jews who had three o r four Jewish grandparents"HalfJews" (Mirchlingc) had a chance of s~trvival ecause the Nazi!were uns ure how to deal with them." By con trast , the main assault orthe Rom a was on t he "half-breeds," because the d anger, from a Nazpoint of view, was one of penetration of Gypsy blood into the Aryanrace. In principle, such mixing was possible because Roma were no1Jews; but because mixing was undesirable, it had to be preventedHence, pure Roma in the Reicl~ ad a chance of survival; pure Jew!did not.

A second point is much more important: the whole Gypsy prohlemwas of marginal importance to the Nazi regime. Ritler himself appears to have mentioned the Gypsies twice only, both times duringrambling afterdinner conversations. Once, on May 2, 1940, Hitler o bjeded to the presence of Gypsies in the Wehrm acht and said that hewould talk to Wilhelm Keitel about that, but the order to remove Gypsiesfrom th earm y was not issued until February 1941.And on October9, 1941,Hitler complained about the suffering of German peasants stthe hands of Gypsies and opined that Hungarians were like Gy p si e ~ .~ I

have stated repeatedly that the Nazis saw in the Roma a m arg ina lpr oblem, and was attacked for having said that I hought they were a mar-ginal problem; this, of course, is nonsense. It is sim ply a fact th at theJews were,& theNazis, the central enemy, a metahistorical s atan wh ohad to be destroye d. Roma,>r &Nazis, were a minor imtant, and, aswit11 othe r social problem s tl!e tendency for the Nazi regime w as tosolve it by murder.

Roma living in the Reicl~were but a very small minority of theEuropean Roma. Michael Zimmermann has examined a g rea t amountof material on the Roma living in other European countries. Althoughnew findings may change the conclusions he reached, his wnclusionsare well worth re peating. In Serbia, which was the first co untr y whereal l Jews were murdered, massacres of Roma and Jewish men occ urred.The first massacre was a reprisal for the killing of Germ an soldiers bypartisans. The n all Jewish men and, later, women an d child ren as wellwere murdered , and also some Roma, using the sam e location for bothJews and Roma. On Decemb er 8, 1941, camp was established at Sem-lin, next to the Roma settlement near Belgrade, and between 6.980and 7,600 Jews, including women and children, were inc arcerated there,along with 99%Roma women and children. The Jews w ere murdered;the Roma fanlilies were released."The re were 1 15,000 Roma in Serbiain 1943.By the end of the war, about 1,00 0,mainly men, had been killedby the Ge rma ns Although many of the others suffered and died inthe course of the war, includ ing some as victims of anti-partisan Ger-man atrocities and some as partisans and soldiers, the vast majoritysurvived.

The real te st of Roma-related policies comes in the occupied Soviet',territories. Orders given to the Eisa tzgru ppe n in Aug ust 1941 ppar-ently extended the murder from Jews and Communists to Roma Butthree Einsatzgrnppen, A, B, and C, did not look for Roma, so relatively:>fewRoma were victimized. By contrast, Otto Ohlen dorf's gm up D!: murdered "all" Gypsies "because they were no t settled," which wouldindicate that he targeted wandering Roma, not settled ones, although


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there is no clear corroborating evidence.= In the C ri~ne a,ettled Ron~awere murdered as well as wanderers (hy Ol~len dorf'smen, mainly): 844Roma, plus 17,646 Jews in late 1941, and an additional 1,683 Roma,some of whom w ere probably settled, and about 10,000 Jews in early1949, for a total of 31,000.~'

Yet, slowly, a different policy evolved. On Novem ber 21. 1941, thegeneral commanding the rear areas on the Northe rn F ront decreed that"settled G ypsies, wbo have been living in the sam e place for two years,and a re unde r no political or criminal suspicion, sl~o uld e left a10ne."'~Th ere w ere exceptions, such as the commander of the 339th InfantryDivision, who wanted to kill all Gypsies. But from early 1944 on, thegeneral policy, as Zimmermann shows for the Baltic region, w as todifferentiate between settled and wan dering Roma, though in practice,in Latvia for instance, this distinction was not necessarily made untilApril 1942,when th e commander of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei,o r o ~ ~ o ) , ' ~ a r lriedrich Knecht, decided that 'bnly vagabond Gypsies"should be exterminated . As a result, almost on+halFof Latvia's 3,800Roma died. Especially in Estonia, the new policy came too late to savethe small local Roma p~p ulati on."~he Ostministerium (responsible forcivilian administration in the Baltic areas and parts of Belarus) run byAlfred Rosenberg provides a good example of this wavering policy. In194% t wa s decided not to differentiate between settled and w anderingRoma. Then o n May 11, 1943, when an order suggested by the localadministration was se nt to Berlin for review, Himmler made it clear that"settled G ypsies should be treated like the local population."* For oc-cupied Poland, Himmler, through the commander of the O rde r Policethere, on August 1.9, 1942, ordered that there should in principle be nopolice intervention against settled Gypsies?' T ha t such decisions left agre at de al ofr oom for murderous initiatives is obvious. A Polis11 histo-rian, Jerzy Ficowski, quoted by Zimm ermann, claims tha t out of e8,oooRoma in Poland, 8,000 were murdered?* If now, fifty years later, a ocording to incomplete information, there ar e considerably more than

100,000Roma in Poland, the figure of 28.000 prewar Roma is problem-atic; it would appe ar tha t mo re research is needed.

Probably the only area where no distinction between settled andwandering Roma was made was Croatia, where between 26,000 andb0,OOO Roma were murdered. There, however, the initiative most cer-tainly was not Germ an but local. Th e Croat fascist regime u nder AntePavelic murdered hun dreds of thdusands of Serbs, tens of thousan ds ofRoma, and som e 35,000 Jews, with the Germ ans looking on benignly-there was no need for the m t o intervene o r guide. Only with the Jewsdid the Germans "help": t he remn ants of Croat Jews were deported todeath camps in P~ la n d ? ~n Romania, the local fascist regime deportedaome 20,000-26,000 Roma (out of 300,000),not soldiers or craftsmen,to Transnistria, the Romanian-administered area between theDniesterand the Bug in occupied Ukraine, along with 170,000 Jews. Of thedeported Roma, 8,000-9,000 are estimated t o have died, although one,not very reliable Romanian source says a total of 36,000 Roma died inRomania during the war." Th e losses in Slovakia and Hu nga ry weresmall by comparison and took place in th e final stages of the war, withtheir attendant confusion and the increased brutality of the withdraw-ing German armies.

In accordance with Himn~ler's rders, 42,600 Roma were deportedto Auschwitz, some 81 percent of whom came from the Reich andthe "Protectorate" (the Czech lands) and 6 percent from Poland. TheAuschwitz records show that more than 6,600 were gassed, and morethan 13,600died of hunger, disease, and exhaustion. Of th e Germ an andAustrian Rom a, %,500were sterilized, which was an indescribable dis-aster, in a sense worse than death, in terms of the Roma culture. Inaddition, 6,007Austrian Roma wh o were deported to the Jewish ghettoof Mdt died at Cl~elmno, nd of the 9,330 deported to Poland fromGermany in the early stages, over 50 percent died, as did half of the

h u t 1,000 Roma from the Reich detained in various concentration'camps. In all, abo ut 1 5 , m erman and 8,250Austrian Roma died (out

66 Comparlsona wIt hOt her aenoclder Comparlsonrwtth Other (ienocldes


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of a total of s~ ,oW,xc lud i~~gor our pllrl)oses tl~ove lefi~~edy Ritteras Germans behaving like Gypsies). W l~ el l~ erl~ os e ho were not killedwere pure Gypsies or more Gypsy than Germ an is not clear.

Z i r m a n n provides no overall figure of Roma losses, but if we addup the figures for individual European countries contained in his rpsearch, we arrive at a grand total of about 150,000.Because we do notknow how many Roma there were in 1939, we cannot estimate thelosses in percentages.f6I wish to repeat that there is no gradation of suffering and that thenumber of victims does not determine the cruelty of the onslaughtClearly, theNaz is wanted to eliminate tlie Roma as anidentifiablegroupofpeople, the bearers of a culture. The y carried ou t this policy by massmurder, humiliation, and the utmost brutality and sadism. Within theReich, this meant tota l elimination, by murder, sterilization, or deporta-tion. Outside the Reich, after a period of hesitation and mixed signals,wandering Roma were murdered, whereas settled Roma were, hy andlarge, left alone.

What we have here is a genocide, not a Holocaust, that is, not anintent, nor its implementation (as far as the perpetrator managed tocomplete it), to murder every single individual of the targeted popula-tion on a global scale. Th e Nazis did not inten d to murder all the RomaIn fact, Himmler writes in his appointment diary, on April 90, 1949,after a m eeting with Hitler,"KcintVcrnichtungder Zignner" (No exter-mination of the Gypsies).= The view expressed so often by varioushistorians that the Germ ans planned to annihilate all Roma is wrong.

I have devoted some attention to the comparison of the llolocaustwith the genocide of the Roma because of what I believe to be anerroneous interpretation that is gaining ground in the literature aboutgenocide. T l ~ eoot of the error might be expressed in the very legiti-mate question What is the point in emphasizing differences when thcparallelq especially the basic fact of the mass murder, are so obvious?The re ar e a couple of answers. One is th at if we consider all brutaligand murder to be the same, there is no point in making any difference

67l a t w e e ~ ~nass ir~urde r, enocide, and, say, the amok killing ofchildren ina Scottisl~ illage by a disturbed individual: all victims of murder wouldbe classified alike. We differentiate for a pragma tic reason: t o facili-tate the strugg le against all these kinds of murder. Just as we cannot

I fight cholera, typhoid, and cancer with the sam e medicine, mass m urder$ for political reasons has to be.fought differently than genocides and1 fiolocausts.

Tha t leads 11s to a second reason why the differences should be ana-lyzed: by learn ing what has happened las t time, we learn not on ly aboutthe perpetrators but also about the so-called bystanders and abou t the

: behavior of the victim populations and their leadership groups underthis kind of ultimate threat. Acquiring know ledge makes clear the dia-

I lectic relationship between tlie particularism and the universalism of thehorror. The Holocaust happened to a particular people for particularreasons at a particular time. All historical events are concrete in thismanner: they happen with particular people for particular reasons atparticular times. The y are not repeated exactly bu t approxim ately andwith the same characteristics ofparticularity And that is exactly whatmakes them of universal significance. Wh at hap pened beforecan h a p

1 pen again. We all are possible victim$ possible perpetrator4 possible: bystanders. With Rwanda, Cambodia, former Yugoslavia, and other

placeq most of us are bystanders, who have so far learned very littleh m he past. Th e flolocaust is a warning. It adds three command-

; ments to the ten of the Jewish-Christian tradition: Thou shalt not be a', pcrpctratnr; Thou shah not be apassivc vic tim and Thou most c d i n l y halt: ~ t b ebystnndet:We do not know whether we will succeed in spre ading

this knowledge. But if there is even a chance in a million that sense. hould prevail, we have a moral obligation, n the s pirit of Kantian moralphilosophy, to try.