The genocide of the European Jews is an issue debated in much historiography – through opposing schools of thoughts arguing for an inevitable or gradual view of the systemic mass murder. In the process of Nazi rule hundreds of thousands of people were shoved around like so many pieces on a chessboard in pursuit of their vision of a racially reorganized eastern Europe[1], and it is a culmination of years of discrimination, hatred, deportation, and murder which led to the death of 6 million European Jews. The problem remains, however, of whether the policy followed by the Nazi government, or place – where the European Jews lived and how the subsequent murder thus took place – played a more significant role in determining the genocide. Whilst, as Mommsen argues, the eventual step towards mass destruction occurred at the end of a complex political process[2] and thus the two factors will be undeniably linked, I believe that the continued campaign of hate pursued by Hitler and his Nazi party was translated into a policy of murder and genocide across Europe which could not have occurred without the consistency of the policy created by Nazi infighting, anti-Semitism and determination to clear Germany and its lebensraum of ‘the Jewish problem’.
The genocide of the European Jews was preceded by years of systematic persecution through political policy – the effects of which grew in intensity, violence, and social acceptability and reached the conclusion of the ‘the Final Solution’ and the orders to exterminate Europe’s entire Jewish population. For Goldhagen, the acknowledgement that what occurred within Nazi German was so unimaginable and adverse to Western post-enlightenment values means that historians must accept that there was something fundamentally different about the citizens of Germany – he argues that this is their rampant antisemitism. Virtually no evidence exists to contradict the notion that the intense and ubiquitous public declaration of antisemitism was mirrored in people’s private beliefs[3], and the fact that virtually no antisemitic crees were challenged in Germany during this period gives further legitimacy to this idea. Therefore, the Nazis based their intentions and policies on an articulated, shared understanding of Jews and their eliminationist, racial anti-Semitism[4], and this systemic anti-Jewish sentiment existent not just within the party, but within the country itself led to genocide. Even as the violence intensified and turned to murder by ‘ordinary men’ as members of killing squads such as Police Battalion 101 exemplified in individual historical accounts, ‘we know how surprisingly easy it was for members of the extermination squads to quit their jobs without serious consequences for themselves'[5] from accounts unveiled in the Nuremburg trials. A lack of resistance from the German citizens and willingness to kill of ordinary men in police battalions, local militias, and SS cells despite opportunity to resume other posts without fearing for their life suggests an anti-Semitism existent within Germany that was fuelled by policies of persecution throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. The persecution of the Jews within Nazi Germany itself was multifaceted, and Germans witnessed the promulgation of almost two thousand laws and administrative regulations that degraded and immiserated the country’s Jews in a manner and degree which no minority had suffered for hundreds of years.[6] Verbal violence and anti-Jewish propaganda asserted anti-Semitic views and gave the assault on Jewish bodies a perceived legitimacy, whilst, as Goldhagen argues further, suggested the dire fate which might face them. The Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 enforced a social separation which only grew worse, and Jews lost the right to vote. Removing democratic rights and alienating the German Jews in their home country served to ‘sink them into a state of hopelessness and to isolate them from the larger society in which they had moved freely but a few years earlier. They made Jews socially dead'.[7] In November 1938, the Kristellnacht pogrom made clear that the Jews had no place in Germany, and that the Nazis were willing to use extreme violence in realising their aims - as a general ‘cleansing’ of Germany of Jewish synagogues, Kristallnacht was a proto-genocidal assault.[8] After the introduction of the Star of David badge in 1941 Germans had greater ability to recognize, monitor and shun those bearing the mark. The Nazi campaign of isolationism, hatred and alienation resulted in emigration in droves - of the 525k Jews living in Germany in January 1933, almost 130k emigrated during the next 5 years,[9] often forfeiting all land and property for a perceived sense of safety outside of Nazi Germany. Thus, Mommsen argues ‘if the German citizens share a responsibility - it is to be found in the passive acceptance of the exclusion of the Jewish population, which prepared the way for the Final Solution.[10] Whilst Nazi policy succeeded in forcing roughly half of the Jewish population from Germany, Nazi high command and the Fuhrer remained unsatisfied with the ‘Jewish problem’. Kristellnacht had been an ‘ominous portent of the future'[11] and violence against Jews was part of everyday German, and soon to be European, life. Despite source material suggesting that genocide was not seen as a viable solution until around 1941, from the perspective of violent policy the genocide of the European Jews appeared almost an inevitability.
Beyond a policy of persecution which set the scene for and undeniably played a large role in the genocide of the European Jews, a policy of extreme violence against Jews in Germany and other ‘untermenschen’ also contributed heavily to the genocide of the European Jews by creating a culture of violence in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe where murder and terror became parts of everyday life. For Mommsen, the realization of the Final Solution became psychologically possible because Hitler's phrase concerning the 'destruction of the Jewish race in Europe' was adopted as a direct maxim for action, particularly by Himmler.[12] The language used to describe the violence and eventual murder was coded in an attempt to protect the persecutors from possible psychological harm, thereby ‘neutralising’ and normalising it. As Eichmann documented in his trial, ‘all correspondence referring to the matter was subject to rigid “language rules,” and, except in the reports from the Einsatzgruppen, it is rare to find documents in which such bald words as “extermination,” “liquidation,” or “killing” occur.[13] This technique was said to be an ‘enormous help’ in maintaining order and sanity amongst departments, as well as in concealing said violence when the Nazi ‘projects’ received international visitors. As Arendt describes, when Eichmann was sent to show the Theresienstadt ghetto to International Red Cross representatives from Switzerland—he received, together with his orders, his “language rule,” which in this instance consisted of a lie about a non-existent typhus epidemic in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, which the gentlemen also wished to visit.[14] Despite the destruction of the Jews being the mastermind and idea of Hitler himself, the coded language extended to the Fuhrer when it came to protecting himself from the reality of violence. Research of historian Gerald Fleming emphasises Hitler’s arrangement surrounding the use of camouflage language when discussing genocide - when confronted with the actual consequences of the destruction of the Jews, Hitler reacted in exactly the same way as his subordinates, by attempting not to be aware of the facts or suppressing his knowledge. Only in this way could he give free rein to his anti-Semitic tirade.[15] The clearest example of ‘ordinary’ violence and its gradual decline to genocide is in the actions of the Einsatzgruppen, whose violence eventually provided the link to the factory techniques of murder via Operation Reinhard, as the use of gas vans began as a transitional stage to make the psychological toll on the soldiers participating in mass shootings slightly lighter. And yet the Einsatzgruppen were trained killers; the testimonies of police battalions such as Police Battalion 101, documented by Browning, demonstrate how ‘ordinary men’ became desensitised to violence in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe in such a way that hundreds of working-class Hamburg men, with seemingly no previous feelings of anti-Semitic hate, were faced with the decision of how to ‘tactically avoid the shooting of infants and small children.[16] Violence thus permeated almost every sphere of Nazi occupation and ‘grass roots perpetrators became ‘professional killers';[17] but the Euthanasia project of 1939 and the thousands of disabled men, women and children killed in its implementation furthers this. Those who the Nazis marked for slaughter in the Euthanasia program were thought to be far less of a threat to Germany than the Jews. Therefore, Goldhagen argues, ‘unlike the Euthanasia program’s victims, the Jews were considered to be wilfully malignant, powerful, bent upon and perhaps capable of destroying the German people in toto'[18], and to believe that the Nazis would have carried out this particular programme of systemic murder, and not that of the European Jews is almost deluded. This is further evidenced by Browning’s research which suggests that for expertise and assistance in building and operating the extermination center at BelZec, Globocnik was able to draw on personnel from the "euthanasia program" in Germany.[19] A gradual normalisation of violence through a series of policies, growing in severity allowed for the descent into unimaginable murder, which led to the genocide of the European Jews.
A further aspect of policy which contributed largely to genocide was the infighting which existed within Hitler’s inner circle – as military leaders and Reich ministers created policy which grew gradually more disturbing and violent to appease and gain favour with the Fuhrer. Whilst events occurred with Hitler’s approval and encouragement, as Mommsen argues, given the ideological framework and the existence of machinery to trigger off 'spontaneous' anti-Semitic outrages, they were first conceived by the rival satraps around Hitler, who were unscrupulously determined to outdo one another in implementing National Socialist policies, and thus to please the Führer.[20] Therefore, Hitler’s dream became reality because of the ambitions of members of his inner circle, such as Himmler and the SS to achieve millennium in Hitler’s lifetime and prove their indispensability to the cause. In Eichmann’s description of events, he is sent to see Heydrich who gave him his instructions for the ‘liquidation of the Jews'[21] - Heydrich had been working in this direction for years and in 1941 had eliminated rival contenders for control of the ‘Jewish question’. This infighting was inspired by a desire to enhance their own prestige and extend authority on important motives for many within the party, with Gauleiters competing in rival attempts to declare ‘their’ districts ‘Jew-free’ – competition which ‘played a conspicuous role in the genesis of the Holocaust.[22] Individual Judenreferates felt the need to justify their existence by introducing cumulative anti-Jewish policy which were defamatory and economically superfluous, and as an anonymous member of Police Battalion 101 discusses in Browning’s text, that battalion leaders were ever anxious to get credit for his company's body count.[23]
The policy which led to the genocide of the European Jews was not always ideologically driven – in fact in some instances it can be argued that the murder would have occurred earlier if it wasn’t for the logistical issues which faced the Nazi German state in the forms of economic and foreign policy, in spite of its preoccupation with anti-Semitic rhetoric and the destruction of Europe’s Jews for the creation of a ‘racially pure’ Volk. Despite increasingly violent persecution towards the Jewish population, especially in Russia and occupied Poland, Goldhagen argues that genocide was still not a ‘viable’ option in 1939-40, for ‘as long as Germany had to reckon with the responses of other powerful countries, genocide was not a practical policy.[24] Furthermore, despite Hitler’s obvious desire to take bitter revenge of ‘World Jewry’, historians such as Mommsen argue that statements such as Goering's report at the infamous meeting at the Reich Air Ministry on 12 November 1938, in which he quoted Hitler: 'If the German Reich comes into conflict with foreign powers in the foreseeable future, it goes without saying that in Germany too our main concern will be to settle accounts with the Jews',[25] were intended as threats primarily to exert pressure on the Western nations, particularly Britain and the United States, and are therefore connected with the hostage argument, which had surfaced as early as 1923. Furthermore, whilst the pace of the genocide of the European Jews can be said to be affected heavily by acute awareness of international relations due to the Nazi state’s reluctance for immediate warfare, the pace was encouraged by economic policy, which largely benefited from the removal of Jewish financial rights, and thus removal of Jews altogether. Whilst there were phases during which the pace of the extermination programme was slowed, to permit the temporary exploitation of the prisoners by means of forced labour,[26] in cases such as the RSHA’s attempts to establish an SS economic empire, in industrial and banking circles as the 'spontaneous' and legalized 'Aryanization' measures and the exploitation of the labour of concentration camp prisoners offered advantages to many and among the commercial middle class which, especially in the early years of the regime, tried hard to intensify the repressive measures against their Jewish competitors,[27] legal and illegal economic gains at the expense of the destruction of the European Jews were a part of daily life in the Third Reich which seemed to only further persecution and violence by benefiting those partaking in the violence.
Whilst policy played a more significant role in the genocide of the European Jews, even if just by sheer volume, place cannot be removed from the impact of policy, and place itself is still important, particularly the events which occurred in Russia, can be said to have had an undeniably large impact on the fate of the European Jews by setting a precedent for murder and violence through The Commissar Order and its direct results. When Heydrich received a letter from Goring commissioning him to prepare a Gesamtlösung of the Jewish question within the area of German influence in Europe,[28] he was able to do with this with relative ease as he had been entrusted for years with the task of prepping the ‘Final Solution’, beginning with the war with Russia which had left him in charge of mass killings by the Einsatzgruppen in the East. The attack on the Soviet Union on the 22nd of June 1941 and the early successes of the German armies led to the Commissar Order and the deliberate use of the Einsatzgruppen to liquidate Jewish population groups in the occupied areas, signalling the start of a new phase in violence against Europe’s Jews. Whilst the Einsatzgruppen were careful to avoid giving racial reasons for these murders in their early reports, 1.4 million Russian Jews were murdered[29], and between late July and mid-August, Himmler toured the eastern front, personally urging his men to carry out the mass murder of Russian Jewry.[30] On the eve of Operation Barbarossa, Major Weis of Police Battalion 309 gave orders for his men to proceed ruthlessly against Jews regardless of sex, and in Bialystok, a particularly abominable example of mass violence began, as ‘the next day, thirty wagonloads of corpses were taken to a mass grave. An estimated 2,000 to 2,200 Jews had been killed'[31]. Russia as a place thus had a profound and significant role on the genocide of the European Jews as the violence that ensued set the scene for the murder which was to come. Furthermore, the turn of tide in the war with Russia and higher death rate allowed Himmler fewer human reserves than anticipated in Auschwitz, a then massive prisoner and munitions centre for utilising Soviet POWs since Autumn 1941, and thus the influence of place meant that just a week after the Wannsee Conference, Himmler issued his instruction to 'equip' the SS concentration camps primarily with German Jews.[32] The mass murder of Russian Jews became European - for Birkenau camp, where the technology of gassing had been developed with Soviet prisoners of war as the victims,was now to be part of a comprehensive programme for genocide.
In a similar vein, the influence of place on the genocide of the European Jews can be illustrated by the mass deportations and murders which occurred in Poland and set the scene for the horrors of what was to come. The SS was able to take almost complete control of initiatives in the ‘Jewish question’ in the Polish territories with Himmler at the helm, and the fate of the Jews thus became linked with Generalplan Ost.[33] Methods that were later extended to the Old Reich were first tested in the Generalgouvernement, and the deportation programme which was in place encouraged the Gauleiters of the Reich to send their Jews to the Generalgouvernement, where the conditions in the ghettos were appalling. In the Lodz Ghetto Police Battalion 101 was given a standing order to shoot "without further ado" any Jew who ignored the posted warnings and came too close to the fence. This order was obeyed.[34] The policy of ghettoization in Poland was described in Summer 1940 by Nazi official Greiser as ‘untenable from the 'point of view of nutrition and the control of epidemics',[35] and it was these conditions which led those in the Nazi high command to begin to consider genocide as a serious viable option, as the ‘benevolent’ alternative to the horrors of the ghettos; as SS-Obersturmbannführer Hoppner stated ‘for it should be seriously considered whether it might not be the most humane solution to dispose of those Jews who are unfit for work by some quick-acting means. At any rate this would be more agreeable than letting them starve'.[36] Therefore, whilst policy played a large role in eventual genocide, place in terms of Poland, the ghettos and the Polish Jews, whose ethnicity placed them under the command of the ruthless Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom Himmler, led to genocide. The resulting orders for murder are evidenced by the testimonies of Browning’s Police Battalion 101, as on June 20th, 1942, the battalion received orders for a "special action" in Poland, and on July 11th, they had the task of rounding up the 1,800 Jews in Jozefow - only the male Jews of working age were to be sent to one of Globocnik's camps in Lublin. The women, children, and elderly were simply to be shot on the spot.[37]
Between the fall of 1941 and the spring of 1945, over 260 deportation trains took German, Austrian, and Czech Jews directly to the ghettos and death camps "in the east" (i.e., Poland and Russia) or to the transit ghetto of Theresienstadt north of Prague and from there "to the east.[38] No one participating in the events described in this report could have had the slightest doubt about what he was involved in, namely a mass murder program to exterminate the Jews.[39] Karl Streibel, a key member of Globocnik’s Operation Reinhard staff, visited the POW camps and recruited Ukrainian, Latvian, and Lithuanian "volunteers" (Hilfswilil ge, or Hiwis) who were screened on the basis of their anti-Communist (and hence almost invariably anti-Semitic) sentiments, offered an escape from probable starvation, and promised that they would not be used in combat against the Soviet army.[40] These men constituted a portion of the manpower from which Globocnik would form private armies for his campaign of ghetto-clearing, a further example of place and policy intertwining in the tragic fate of the European Jews.
The documents from the Wannsee Conference are usually equated with the immediate launch of the genocide campaign throughout Europe and demonstrate the intent to murder Jews on an unimaginable scale, even in places which due to Nazi Germany’s eventual defeat remained untouched by the genocide. The aim was to ‘cleanse German living space of Jews in a legal manner',[41] and thus whilst historians of sound moral judgement recognise that nothing morally legal occurred in the genocide of Europe’s Jews, policy did play the most significant role in the genocide of the European Jews, as even in the most top secret of documents – it was the method the Fuhrer wished to follow. Hitler’s fascism was one he realised could only be achieved through politics, and thus his persecution and eventual murder of the European Jews largely followed a similar path. Whilst the war against Russia, and the Ghettos of Poland played an undeniably large role in the eventual genocide, their importance can be attributed to a continual policy of violence and discrimination in the East, which added to the culmination of the realisation of Hitler’s sadistic dream ‘the elimination of European Jewry’. The existence of years of systemic persecution through political acts, the persistence of violence in almost all areas of Nazi policy, party infighting and the foreign and economic policy required to effectively run a state demonstrate how policy was detrimental to the livelihoods of European Jews, as it eroded their lives and sense of hope and led eventually to death, and how place was merely a second thought in a dictatorship which had little regard for individual place and instead preferred the ‘racial purity’ of a German ‘Volk’.
Katie Heggs has just completed her first year of a BA in History and Politics at the University of Cambridge (Churchill College).
Full title when assigned: Which factor played a more significant role in determining the genocide of the European Jews: policy or place?
Notes:
[1] C. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992), p. 39
[2] Mommsen, ‘The Realization of the Unthinkable: The “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” in the Third Reich’, in H. Mommsen, From Weimar to Auschwitz (1991), p. 243
[3] D. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996), p. 30
[4] Ibid., p.132
[5] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil (2006), p. 50
[6] D. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996), p. 138
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid., p. 141
[9] Ibid., p. 139
[10] Mommsen, ‘The Realization of the Unthinkable’, p. 249
[11] Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, p. 140
[12] Mommsen, ‘The Realization of the Unthinkable', p. 234
[13] Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 48
[14] Ibid.
[15] Mommsen, ‘The Realization of the Unthinkable', p. 233
[16] Browning, Ordinary Men, p. 25
[17] Ibid., p. 15
[18] Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, p. 143
[19] Browning, Ordinary Men, p. 50
[20] Mommsen, ‘The Realization of the Unthinkable', p. 227
[21] Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 47
[22] Mommsen, ‘The Realization of the Unthinkable', p. 235
[23] Browning, Ordinary Men, p. 16
[24] Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, p. 144
[25] Mommsen, ‘The Realization of the Unthinkable', p. 232
[26] Ibid., p. 246
[27] Ibid.
[28] Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 47
[29] Mommsen, ‘The Realization of the Unthinkable', p. 244
[30] Browning, Ordinary Men, p. 11
[31] Ibid., p. 30
[32] Ibid., p. 1
[33] Mommsen, ‘The Realization of the Unthinkable', p. 239
[34] Browning, Ordinary Men, p. 41
[35] Mommsen, ‘The Realization of the Unthinkable', p. 242
[36] Ibid.
[37] Browning, Ordinary Men, p. 55
[38] Ibid., p. 36.
[39] Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 47
[40] Ibid.
[41] Wannsee Protocol - January 20, 1942; Translation, https://prorevnews.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/minutes-of-the-wannsee-conference/
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