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| You are here: 2000 / Workshops, Panels and Seminars / Panel 3: Holocaust Research - From the Archives to the Classroom / Presentation by Professor Ulrich Herbert | |||||||||
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Report from Panel 3 - on Holocaust Research - From the Archives to the Classroom Presentation by Professor Michael R. Marrus Presentation by Professor Ulrich Herbert Presentation by Professor David Bankier Presentation by Professor Ulrich Herbert Herbert, Ulrich Presentation by Professor Ulrich Herbert New answers, New questions. Recent Research
First, the endemic character and extent of anti-Semitism in the German population has been more precisely investigated. In the light of these new findings, anti-Semitic views were indeed quite widespread among at least 50 percent of the population even before 1933, though with varying intensity and in a variety of forms. Yet important here is the fact that only a small minority of Germans were explicitly opposed to anti-Semitism. Perhaps most Germans did not support stringent steps against the Jews, but neither were they they dead-set against such measures. For most, it was a secondary question. Second, there is new evidence that in academic and scientific circles--in various institutes and university departments, among demographers, historians, nutrition experts, folklore annd folklife scholars and others--already in the 1920s and more intensively during the 30s, concepts and scenarios were being discussed that aimed at an "ethnic cleansing" of Eastern Central Europe, in particular an expulsion of the Jews from this area. Such demographic conceptions apparently played a far greater role in the unleashing of the Holocaust than had been earlier assumed. Third, recent research tends to focus more on the victims themselves: now far more than in the past, their history prior to the Holocaust, their specific perceptions of the terrifying developments down to annihilation are at the center of empirical inquiry. Conversely, this new inquiry also looks in new ways at the perpetrators and their biographies: both the men at the trigger and those at their desks in distant Berlin, most especially the top echelons in the police and Security Service and the military and civilian staffs of the occupation administrations. These officials were generally not just dutiful technocrats or spineless murdering automatons; rather, many were recent college graduates, often even quite young, from solid middle-class families--though at the same time convinced of what they were doing and why. Finally, it is evident that meshed with ideological motives, there were also substantial material interests involved, not only in the expropriation of the German Jews before 1939, so-called Aryanization, but likewise in policies toward the Jews in the occupied territories. Yet no matter from what angle you approach the process of how the genocide was launched, the open questions tend to lead in a similar direction: what is the precise relation between between ideological factors like racism and anti-Semitism on the one hand, and "rational" motives such as economic modernization or the problem of food shortages on the other? How did anti-Semitism figure in this complex of events? And what was the role of those Germans who did not regard themselves either as fanatic National Socialists or as opponents? I would now like to examine these questions using two concrete examples taken from recent research. The first centers on Lithuania in the late summer and autumn of 1941. There were some 40,000 Jews in the city of Kovno (Kaunas). Immediately after German forces entered the town, a horrible slaughter ensued, as bloodbath whose gory details defy description. On instructions of the Einsatzgruppe of the Security Police (Sipo) and the Security Service (SD), Lithuanian nationalists hounded the Jews through the city's streets, shooting and murdering hundreds. The Germans then herded approximately 7,000 Jews to a military barracks complex in the town, Fort Seven. Over the next few days, most of these, all males, were executed by German police units and Lithuanian auxiliary police, supposedly because they were alleged to be "Jewish Bolsheviks." In the following weeks, male survivors as well as all the women and children were gathered together in a section of Kovno that had been turned into a ghetto. Eight weeks later, in early September 1941, the German authorities started evacuating a portion of the Kovno ghetto. As in other regions of the occupied Soviet Union, the Jews, declared a superfluous population, were now to be shot--including women and children as well. We are well informed about the behavior of German police units at the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union. Jewish males were murdered in this situation because the leaders of the German police were convinced the Jews posed a dangerous threat to the security of the German occupiers. It was immaterial whether there was any solid evidence for this--rather, it was accepted as an obvious fact requiring no further proof. In keeping with the widespread entrenched anti-Semitism, there was a sense that the Jws in the East had to be dealt with in any event. The threshold of inhibitions vis-a-vis Jews had already sunk to extremely low levels. Yet a situational trigger was required in order to initiate and legitimate operations such as mass shootings. In the aftermath of Himmler's inspection tour to his police and SS units in the occupied areas of the northern Soviet Union, they commenced, starting in August 1941, with the systematic murder of Jewish women and children as well. It is probable there were two decisive (and non-mutually exclusive) factors behind this step. First, the long-term demographic plans for settlement and population transfer. If the newly occupied areas in the East, and especially the Baltic lands, were to be controlled and settled by the Germans, as spelled out in the numerous planning conceptions, the Jewish population would have to "disappear" from these areas. On the other hand, any notions contemplating a removal of the Soviet Jews "to the East" had been rendered obsolete by the late summer of 1941, once a quick victory over the Red Army it appeared increasingly unlikely. To "disappear" could now only mean one thing, namely to "die." And once many thousands of Jewish men had already been murdered, it no longer seemed such a major step to extend the killing's scope to include women and children as well. A second efficiency-oriented motive was also involved: the Jewish women and children could not be productively utilized as workers. Soon the expression "useless mouths to feed" began to make the rounds. Given the huge and worsening food shortages in the newly conquered territories, a problem even the Wehrmacht began to call attention to, there was mounting pressure to cut the number of mouths to feed even further. Here again we have that situational factor, geared to presumed utilitarian rational considerations. These seemed to suggest--indeed, even to compel--an immediate decision to halt the provision of scarce food to Jews and to shoot them instead. But in Kovno, the picture was complicated by another factor. Several thousand Soviet POWs were housed in a barracks camp at the partially destroyed municipal airport. As was standard practice everywhere in the occupied Soviet Union at that point, the German authorities were providing POWs with little or no food. The result: prisoners were dying on a mass scale. By early September, the death rate had soared from 50 to over 300 daily. By the end of the month, nearly all the Soviet soldiers imprisoned in the Kovno camp were dead. The upshot was that the German occupational authorities now were faced with a labor crisis: namely no forced laborers to rebuild the airport. Consequently, the official attached to the recently opened German Labor Office in Kovno intervened; he passed on a request to his colleague in the German civil administration who had official responsibility for the Jews in Kovno to halt the "partial evacuation" of the Jewish ghetto. His reason: the Jews were needed (to replace the dead Soviet POWs) for construction work at the airfield. The request was approved, and some 3,000 Jews were set to forced labor on clean-up operations at Kovno airport. Nonetheless, both the civil administration and the Security Police continued to insist that the number of Jews unfit for work in the Kovno ghetto was far too high and had to be drastically slashed. So a selection was carried out among ghetto residents on the basis of fitness for labor. On September 26, two thousand largely elderly men, some 3,000 women and 5,400 children were marched to the Ninth Fort, part of a massive fortress sytem built by the Tsars outside Kovno. Over the course of two bloody days, they were shot by members of Einsatzkommando Three of the 11th Police Battalion, i.e. the regular German police and Lithuanian auxiliary police. There was no attempt to hush these events up. Everything took place in full view of all, both the death by starvation of the Soviet prisoners, the pogroms, and then the mass executions of the Jews. All the German authorities in Kovno were in on deliberations concerning the fate of the Jews. As in Kovno, the process sketched here was repeated during this period--the autumn of 1941--in all larger towns and cities in Lithuania, in the Baltic and the occupied Soviet Union. The more closely one examines the facts, the clearer it becomes that the process of the mass murder of millions did not take place isolated from the general occupation administration--rather, it was a integral component of German occupational policy in the East. Moreover, in order to initiate the mass murders, there had been no need whatsoever for any special anti-Semitism on the part of the regular police involved in the killing operations. Individual attitudes among the police toward the Jews were probably not uniform. But that was irrelevant to te job at hand. The decisive factor was that humanitarian sentiments vis-a-vis the Jews no longer counted for much--even among those Germans who did not consider themselves extreme anti-Semites, or perhaps were not even Nazis. Now, indifference, numbness and brutalization went further than just passive acceptance of what others perpetrated. That callous unconcern frequently also sufficed for people to take a hand in the slaughter themselves. Of course, many of the perpetrators were driven by powerful hatred and fanaticism. Yet for others, it seems quite clear that such motives played no role, at least initially. The fateful logical conclusion from this, in Jan-Philipp Reemtsma's formulation: "Many did it because they wanted to. But the others wanted it, because they did it." This case also points up just how arbitrary it is to differentiate between the various groups of victims targeted by Nazi annihiliation policies. On the one hand, the Holocaust of the Jews was specific in its aims, radicality, scope and approach. On the other, in its implementation, it was bound up very closely, at times quite interchangeably, with nearly identical mass murder operations against other groups. This also suggests it is at least questionable to assume one can always distinguish between the differing motives of the individual protagonists in regard to the various victimized groups. Diverse variants of anti-Semitism are clearly manifest here. Among some German perpetrators, and Lithuanians as well, there was a barbarous (yet to a degree still traditional) mode of virulent hatred of Jews. They were oriented basically to the strategy of the pogrom, but were also able to be enlisted as willing executioners in far more extensive operations which they themselves did not initiate. On the other hand, there was a certain kind of intellectual anti-Semitism, especially among the leaders of the Security Police and the Einsatzkommandos. Their anti-Jewish ideology embodied the folkish-radical world view subscribed to by this core group in the genocide, an outlook shared by many younger university graduates. They were not driven by individual hatred but by the conviction that the motive force in history was enmity between peoples: the Jews were the enemies of the German people--and ergo had to be exterminated. Finally, also evident was a widespread attitude of disinterest among an indeterminate but apparently quite sizable number of Germans, especially in the civil and military administration. These persons did not take an active role in furthering the anti-Jewish measures, nor did they desire them. But they no longer had any moral fiber that might have allowed them to preserve a modicum of opposition and outrage. This group, presumably the largest among the Germans in the eastern occupied territories, was ultimately prepared to go along even with the mass murder of the Jews when that was justified by appeals to supposedly inescapable material constraints, not by anti-Semitism. From this vantage, they saw the carnage basically as something secondary accompanying a far greater and more momentous project: the German mission and settlement in the East, the conquest of Bolshevism--or, more generally, just plain victory on the battlefield. To raise objections to that agenda was regarded as unpatriotic and disloyal even by those who otherwise had little in common with the National Socialists. We can see here an indication of how important the non-ideological motives were that emerged in the course of the process described. On the one hand, the element of security: i.e. the murder of the Jewish men as a measure to protect the back areas behind the front. Yet if someone is prepared to regard the slaughter of thousands of Jewish men as a "security measure," that presupposes a perspective that sees Bolshevism and the anti-German resistance as basically some kind of Jewish plot. The killing of Jews as alleged saboteurs confirms the presupposition that they must be Germany's enemies: otherwise the punishment meted out to them would not be so harsh. By means of the deed, bias post festum becomes proven fact. On the other hand, there were the arguments put forward in particular by the Wehrmacht regarding food shortages: since there was too little food, the Jewish women and children categorized as unfit for labor had to be liquidated. Yet that demand to reduce the number of mouths to feed knowingly targets a specific category whose right to life, due to historical anti-Semitism and its outcroppings at the time, was regarded only as conditional--and in any case, less than for other groups. The food shortage suggests it is correct to reduce the numbers of those at the bottom of the ideologically constructed hierarchy, namely the Jews. But post factum, the murder of the Jews also provides a useful potential strategy for solving other "emergency situations." The second example: in early October 1941, the civil administration of the District of Galicia decided to herd the Jews in the small border town of Stanislau (Stanislawow) into their own residential quarter, a forced ghetto--just as already been done in Lemberg and other towns and regions in Galicia. However, the planned ghetto was to be far smaller than the total number of Jews then in Stanislawow. So the local commanding officers issued orders to reduce their number. The slaughter was scheduled for Sunday, October 12, a Jewish holiday. That morning the 1st and 2nd companies of Police Reserve Battalion 133 assembled and were briefed on the "Judenaktion." The carnage began sometime between 10 and 11 a.m. We cannot establish the exact total number of victims it claimed. The probable figure is that some 20,000, about two-thirds of the Jewish community, were executed. According to what the Judenrat was able to ascertain in the aftermath, by dusk some ten to twelve thousand Jews had been murdered, when darkness finally forced police units to halt the "operation." This report on "Bloody Sunday" in Stanislawow illustrates the matter-of-fact, everyday character the murder of the Jews had assumed in the autumn of 1941, even before the systematized mass murder beginning in 1942. Just in Galacia, there were many such massacres before the German authorities revamped policy in the spring of 1942, shifting to liquidation of most of the Jews left in the Belzec death camp. The report is symptomatic in a number of respects. On the one hand, it points up the extent to which all this killing was public, how many non-participants stood and watched the spectacle or later came to view the place where the slaughter had occurred. There are numerous statements by persons who witnessed the massacre. As in most other cases, numerous snapshots were taken. In several postwar court proceedings, there was even mention of 8-mm home movies filmed by members of the civil administration and then shown while on leave back in Germany. However, the report on the Stanislawow massacre is also revealing in regard to the radicalization of anti-Jewish policy in the autumn of 1941. In September, it was still quite uncertain what the future course of Jewish policy in the Generalgouvernement would be. In order to underscore the urgency of deporting the Jews, they were herded into ghettoes that were far too small and cramped--so as to show as demonstratively as possible that the living conditions of the Jews were indeed intolerable. That was all the case in Galicia. In the crowded ghettoes, the number of the sick and starving surged. There was no longer capacity for more Jews. If transports with newcomers arrived, then they had to make room for them. Which meant that the superfluous or "supernumerary" Jews had to be liquidated first. Analogous initiatives by German authorities were taken throughout Poland and in the occupied Soviet Union at this time, and the necessary requests for mass executions were piling up on desks in Berlin. In each instance, the arguments put forward for mass murder were linked with the supposed "dangers or threats" that could be averted by "liquidating" the Jews: they could "cleanse the back-area" of the eastern front, or "uncover partisan hideouts," eliminate black marketeering, stamp out certain diseases, punish sabotage or attempts on the lives of German soldiers--or simply push on with Bolshevism's eradication. Anti-Semitism was specifically manifest in the fact that the persecution, oppression and murder of the Jews was justified in each instance by utilitarian arguments. And the protagonists regarded this as convincing: the Jews were styled the agents of Bolshevism, the spreaders of disease, spies or partisans. Or the argument was practical: since there was no living space left for the Jews, their numbers had to be slashed. Or logistical: to continue to give food to Jews unable to work was endangering vital supplies for the military. In this way, the genocide was interlinked with an array of diverse political, military or security aims, or goals in demographic, public-health or food policy. For patriotic reasons alone, such aims were endorsed even by those who personally felt quite distant from the National Socialists and their agenda. Nonetheless, the impetus for intensifying the situation and radicalizing anti-Jewish policy did not spring from any automatic developments--they were initiated with conscious intent. Thus, the "utilitarian" rationales put forward for extreme radical measures against the Jews were neither "rational" arguments to which anti-Semitism was only attached externally. Nor were they some kind of mere masking to cover over the supposedly real factor beneath, namely virulent Jew-hatred. Rather, we can see them as a practical application of anti-Jewish racism, the expression in a specific concrete situation of a fundamental anti-Semitic attitude. There was no longer any criticism of such operations. In the autumn of 1939, the Wehrmacht had been highly critical of actions by the Einsatzgruppen; since the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union, any such elements of critique were almost totally absent. That is also true when it came to the civilian authorities as well. Though they had not actively promoted the initiation of genocide, they now were disinterested and indifferent to the mass murder of the Jews in the occupied territories under their control. That attitude was also manifest in Germany itself, where, beginning in 1942, rumors about the fate of the Jews began to spread, although there was little genuine interest in or concern about what was actually happening to them. Decisive here was the fact that the anti-Semitic groups pressing for action moved in a political sphere the majority of the population did not consider important. Both among the broad masses and the political elite, there was a pervasive attitude that viewed the treatment of the Jews as a secondary matter, something that could be left to the Nazis--especially in the light of the magnitude and scope of political developments since 1933, and most particularly after 1939. After the outbreak of the war, a conception took hold that would prove particularly significant: the notion that the persecution of the Jews was unavoidable, a by-product of the policies of war and territorial conquest, legitimated and sanctioned by the exceptional wartime situation. To oppose that would have necessitated more than just tepid indifference and cautious reserve--namely explicit upfront repudiation rooted in a moral stand. Yet now only few were capable of such principled opposition, especially if anti-Jewish policies were involved. Yet the conclusion we can draw from this is that in order to go along with, condone or even embrace the emerging National Socialist policy of murder and destruction, there was no real need for far-reaching ideological fanaticism, mass hysteria or an encompassing national project. Rather, the widespread disinterest, the pronounced lack of a system of values in which protection for minorities was enshrined as a central ethical norm for civilized society, the massive indifference, the blunting of sensibilities, the yoke of repression--all these proved to be more than enough as a basis. Yet this finding of mounting indifference as a hallmark of the popular attitude toward the Nazi policies of annihilation is in some respects far more alarming than to see German society as rabidly and thoroughly anti-Semitic, with anti-Jewish policies at the very heart of its expectations and demands. If it was not largely or solely a desire for murder that animated the German population in this era--but rather a melange of unconcern, apathy and a blatant lack of ethical norms, the current import of the genocide needs to be reinterpreted. Then the mass murder does not point solely to a historically defined situation and specific German society of the 1930s and 40s, but is significantly widened. Its contagion of indifference becomes an explosive topic, relevant in a deeply disturbing way to our present--not only in Germany, but there after all most of all. >> Back to top |
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