The Final Solution

Origins and Implementation

David Cesarani, David Cesarani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134744206
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Final Solution clarifies the key questions surrounding the attempt by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews. Drawing on important new research, these authoritative essays focus on the preconditions and antecedents for the 'Final Solution' and examine the immediate origins of the genocidal decision.

Contributors also examine the responses of peoples and governments in Germany, occupied Europe, the USA and among Jews worldwide. The controversial conversions of this study challenge many of our accepted ideas about the period.

Part I
ANTECEDENTS, PRECONDITIONS AND LEGITIMATION

1
VOLKSGEMEINSCHAFT, ‘ARYANIZATION’ AND THE HOLOCAUST

Avraham Barkai

This chapter is an attempt to understand how the persecution of the German Jews, that started in 1933 and gradually escalated in the years preceding the war, conditioned the minds and behaviour of many Germans towards the eventual mass murder of the European Jews. This does not imply the existence of a blueprint or master plan, consistently put into action. Yet, no matter by which version of the ‘intentionalist’ or ‘functionalist’ accounts one prefers to approach this question, it soon becomes clear that without the prior deprivation, ostracism and institutionalized plunder of the German Jews—in full view and with the increasing approval and complicity of millions of Germans—the Final Solution would not have been possible. The cumulative radicalization of the Nazis’ Judenpolitik was primarily a socio-psychological and behavioural process, motivated by ideological aims, and disseminated by an effective combination of propaganda and perceptible actions.¹ Only after these foundations were laid could it proceed, under the conditions of the war against the Soviet Union, towards the Final Solution.

In recent Holocaust research ideological aspects have lately gained more attention than was previously the case. In Germany a younger generation of historians appear to be freer to face, and grapple with, the evidence that the majority of Germans consented to the Nazis’ political aims and the means of their realization. An effort to come to terms with this disturbing past is discernible in many local and regional studies on the histories of large or small Jewish communities. The persecution and expulsion of the Jews takes up a central part also in most general local studies.²

However, the importance of the Volksgemeinschaft concept in National-Socialist ideology still remains somewhat neglected, even by authors who acknowledge the centrality of racism and anti-Semitism. Though both of these elements are frequently found incorporated in völkisch thought, the three are by no means synonymous. This is not the place to retrace the origins of völkisch ideology from its beginnings in the philosophic and literary school of German romanticism, through the aggressive nationalism of the ‘Turnvater’ Jahn, Ernst Moritz Arndt and others.³ Our present interest centres on völkisch political and social concepts as they evolved during and immediately after the First World War and their integration and deployment in the ideological stock-in-trade of Hitler and his party.

The term ‘völkisch’ is as untranslatable from the German as the ‘Volk’ to which it pertains. Through all its variations völkisch thought accorded a transcendental ‘essence’ to a group of people, which transformed it from a solely instrumental or contractual union of individuals into a mythical, self-perpetuating organism. Whereas nations or classes are compared with a heap of stones, the Volk appears as an indissoluble rock. In it every individual is bound by his or her inborn nature and emotions. It is the source of well-being and creativeness. Only in union with the other members of the Volk can the individual find full self-expression of his individu-ality.

Before 1914 völkisch ideology was mainly an intellectual affair of relatively small groups and circles. Nevertheless it was even then remarkably successful in penetrating the political and educational establishment. After the defeat in 1918 and the founding of the ‘Undesired Republic’ it acquired a broad political base. Hitler, in Mein Kampf, described at length how he succeeded in transforming a hodgepodge of rival völkisch sects, with more than a sprinkling of muddle-headed cranks, into a political party with considerable mass appeal. Then in the violent atmosphere of revolution and counter-revolution the National-Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) set out to ‘regain the millions of workers to the idea of the Volk’. ⁴

The Volksgemeinschaft (Volk-community) was the answer of National or German Socialism to the Marxist challenge of the classless society. Even the term Genossen (comrade) was borrowed from the socialist parties to become Volksgenossen. Proletarians and capitalists, peasants and landowners, artisans, blue- or white-collar workers and intellectuals (Arbeiter der Faust und der Stirn) were to be united in the racially purified community of the German Volk, to toil together for the common weal of the fatherland.

Thanks to Hitler’s obsessive Judeophobia, anti-Semitism, which had already become a part of later völkisch thought, now became the central issue. His programmatic speech ‘Why are we anti-Semites?’, opened as an attempt to explain ‘the connection between the workers and the Jewish question’.⁵ From then on the intertwining of the Volksgemeinschaft ideal with anti-Semitic diatribes became characteristic of most of Hitler’s speeches during the formative years of his party.⁶ Whether anti-Judaism or anti-Marxism took first place in Hitler’s Weltanschauung,⁷ what is essential in our present context is the interchangeability of anti-capitalism and anti-Bolshevism in assigning to ‘the Jew’ the role of the Volksfeind (Volk-enemy). Jews were the primary target of völkisch aggression and invective, as the incarnation of everything opposed to the Volksgemeinschaft. This simplistic ‘friend versus enemy’ principle proved to be very effective. Nazi propaganda condemned the Jews as the eternal foe of peoples and races, the ‘grasping’ financial capitalists or the Marxist Novem-berverbrecher (November criminals) of 1918. As conspiring plutocrats they were guilty of the Versailles Treaty, the reparations and the inflation. As the ringleaders of the Russian revolution they personified the Bolshevik menace to Germany and all Christian culture.

Anti-Semitic propaganda was probably not the most influential factor in the Nazis’ rise to power, but there can be no doubt that the anti-Jewish invective during the hectic years of the short-lived republic poisoned the minds of many Germans. It may be that, even then, popular anti-Semitism in Germany was less brutally aggressive than in other, especially some east European, countries; but in no other country did anti-Semitism eventually become the main pillar of the officially proclaimed pseudo-religious ideology of a totalitarian state. With the Nazis in power, the notions of the Volksgemeinschaft versus the Volksfeind were effectively imparted by mass indoctrination. The following is a hypothetical attempt to trace the process by which these ideological tenets, and their propagandist and practical application, paved the way to the Final Solution.

Few historians will today deny the broad popular consensus behind the National-Socialist regime and its policies. Although coercion and terror always loomed in the wings, they were far from being decisive for most Germans. At first hesitant, the majority very soon identified enthusiastically with the new regime. In this process the government’s early economic and political achievements were admittedly more important than any ideological factors. Nevertheless it resulted in what has been defined as the ‘ecstasy of the ruled…a climate of mass-hysteria…generating constant and unconscious acclamation of the regime’. ⁸ Even if this climate was engineered and manipulated by propaganda, it nonetheless served to create at least the illusion of an all-embracing solidarity of the German people regardless of class or social background, standing united behind their ‘Führer’.

Indeed, this was not entirely illusory. Many years ago Ralf Dahrendorf and David Schoenbaum turned our attention to the real social transformations which occurred in the Third Reich, in what they assumed to be an unintentional but nonetheless irreversible process of modernization.⁹ Recently their argument was taken up by a group of young German historians who seek to replace ex post facto popular concurrence with Nazism with Hitler’s vision as a farsighted social revolutionary.¹⁰ Be that as it may, the central importance of Volksgemeinschaft ideology is stressed by all these authors. Today we know better than twenty or thirty years ago how this ideology functioned to achieve the consent of the German people.

Let us turn to some of the most outstanding examples. The Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, or DAF), the largest mass organization in the Third Reich, gained influence and support not only by propaganda but by some real achievements which affected the social conditions of the workers at the factory as well as at home. The activities of its Kraft durch Freude (Strength by enjoyment) organization offered cheap recreation and travel abroad to lower-class Germans who had never before known their like. ¹¹ The Arbeitsdienst (labour service) was also idealized as the ‘school of the Volksgemeinschaft’. Besides providing re-employment and public works schemes it pursued paramilitary training in an atmosphere of egali-tarian comradeship. ¹² Even philanthropy, delegated to the party-affiliated Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (NSV), became an effective tool of populist propaganda. Winter relief was staged as a demonstration of Volks solidarity in action, with ministers and party big-shots rattling collecting boxes on street corners.¹³ Besides the yearly May Day mass rallies a chain of folklorist festivities, culminating in the grandiose cult of the annual party assemblies at Nuremberg, combined to convince many Germans that the ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft had come true.¹⁴

Needless to say, the Jews had no part in any of this. While the German economy recovered, Jewish businesses and employment declined. Jewish enterprises were progressively isolated as more and more Jews worked with and for other Jews. Barred from the Labour Front, Jewish workers and employees were not only excluded from its benefits but were soon dismissed from larger, even Jewish-owned enterprises. From 1935 on, welfare and winter relief for Jews in need was separately organized. Retail shop owners were the first and main targets of the anti-Jewish boycott. Those Jewish lawyers and physicians who, for some years, were exempted from the restrictive legislation of April 1933, lost most of their non-Jewish clients or patients. Gentile professionals were forbidden to share clinics or offices with Jewish colleagues. Jews were evicted from corporation boards and managements, from professional associations, savings banks and other cooperative credit or insurance companies.¹⁵

Economic persecution was only one side of a wide-ranging policy of social ostracism. The German Jews were gradually but consistently isolated from German society. While legislation was at first only partially and sporadically applied, the Nuremberg laws of September 1935 fulfilled the NSDAP’s programme of 1920, reserving full citizen rights to ‘pure-blooded’ Volksgenossen only. At the same time the ‘Laws for the purity of German blood’ extended the isolation of the Jews to the intimate private sphere. What had already been largely accomplished by aggressive propaganda, organized boycott, personal harassment and central or local administration, now became the official legal status of an emotionally segregated minority. Any trust in the Rechtsstaat (rule of law) that German Jews might still have retained became pure self-deception in June 1936 at the latest, when the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the principle of ‘civic death’ on the grounds of ‘lawfully acknowledged principles of racial policy’.¹⁶

The discussion about the influence of German public opinion on the decisions of the Nazi leadership, and specifically on their Jewish policy, has lately somewhat abated. Not many historians will agree that with regard ‘to the visible anti-Jewish violence’ of the Nazis during the pogroms of November 1938 the ‘traditional German values retained the upper hand over Nazi propaganda’. Even fewer will subscribe to the opinion that ‘Hitler and his henchmen murdered the Jews from Germany and other parts of Europe against the will of the German people.’¹⁷ The evaluations made by scholars like Otto Dov Kulka and Ian Kershaw, which were at one time in conflict, have now to some extent converged. Remaining differences are largely semantic: whether the attitude of the German popu-lace to the persecution and finally to the deportation of the Jews was one of ‘indifference’, ‘acquiescence’, ‘passivity’ or ‘passive complicity’.¹⁸ Most historians today will agree that all of these attitudes were in evidence but that almost no active, and very little passive opposition, can be positively identified. Still, to answer the most perplexing question, how so many Germans of every social and educational background could become murderers or accomplices to murder would require a profound socio-psychological exploration of day-to-day attitudes towards the Jews and their plight among ordinary men, women, adolescents and even children.¹⁹

To my knowledge no suc...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: ANTECEDENTS, PRECONDITIONS AND LEGITIMATION
• PART II: OPERATION BARBAROSSA, THE WEHRMACHT AND THE QUESTION OF TIMING
• PART III: THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE FINAL SOLUTION AND RESPONSES
• PART IV: HISTORIOGRAPHY
• CONCLUSION: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FINAL SOLUTION