The Cunning of History

The Holocaust and the American Future

Richard L. Rubenstein

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061852893
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

Theologian Richard L. Rubenstein writes of the Holocaust, why it happened, why it happened when it did, and why it may happen again and again.

"Few books possess the power to leave the reader with the feeling of awareness that we call a sense of revelation. The Cunning of History seems to me to be one of these... Rubenstein is forcing us to reinterpret the meaning of Auschwitz—especially, though not exclusively, from the standpoint of its existence as part of a continuum of slavery that has been engrafted for centuries onto the very body of Western civilization. Therefore, in the process of destroying the myth and the preconception, he is making us see that that encampment of death and suffering may have been more horrible than we had ever imagined. It was slavery in its ultimate embodiment. He is making us understand that the etiology of Auschwitz—to some, a diabolical, perhaps freakish excrescence, which vanished from the face of the earth with the destruction of the crematoria in 1945—is actually embedded deeply in a cultural tradition that stretches back to the Middle Passage from the coast of Africa, and beyond, to the enforced servitude in ancient Greece and Rome. Rubenstein is saying that we ignore this linkage, and the existence of the sleeping virus in the bloodstream of civilization, at risk of our future." — William Styron, from the Introduction.

CHAPTER 1

Mass Death and Contemporary Civilization

Why should anyone bother to reflect once again on the extermination of Europe’s Jews by the Germans thirty years ago? The event is over and done. The world has witnessed a plethora of new horrors since that time. And, given the global threat of overpopulation, it will probably witness the death of even greater numbers by famine in the near future. Why not consign the story to the dustbin of history and be done with it?

Part of the answer lies in the fact that the popular imagination will not let the Nazi period die. People still continue to be fascinated by Hitler, Himmler, and the SS. Books about the Nazis continue to appear. They are bought in large numbers by a curious public. The Nazi period also continues to be a subject of great interest for the movies and television. Much of the popular interest is undoubtedly perverse. Some people use the Nazi story as a vehicle to express their own fantasies of sadistic domination of their peers, a domination they could never achieve in real life. Others may have an unsettling need for total submission that can more safely be expressed in fantasy than reality.

Yet, in spite of the perverse fascination, there is a sound basis for the interest in the period. The passing of time has made it increasingly evident that a hitherto unbreachable moral and political barrier in the history of Western civilization was successfully overcome by the Nazis in World War II and that henceforth the systematic, bureaucratically administered extermination of millions of citizens or subject peoples will forever be one of the capacities and temptations of government. Whether or not such a temptation is ever again exercised, the mere fact that every modern government possesses such power cannot but alter the relations between those who govern and those who are governed. This power must also alter the texture of foreign relations. According to Max Weber, “The state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory.”¹ Auschwitz has enlarged our conception of the state’s capacity to do violence. A barrier has been overcome in what for millennia had been regarded as the permissible limits of political action. The Nazi period serves as a warning of what we can all too easily become were we faced with a political or an economic crisis of overwhelming proportions. The public may be fascinated by the Nazis; hopefully, it is also warned by them.

In studying the Holocaust, the extermination of Europe’s Jews, it is necessary to recognize that our feelings may be strongly aroused. Both the Nazis and their victims elicit some very complicated emotional responses from most people. These feelings are important but they can add to our difficulties in arriving at an understanding of what took place. In order to understand the Holocaust, it is necessary to adopt a mental attitude that excludes all feelings of sympathy or hostility towards both the victims and the perpetrators. This is a methodological procedure and, admittedly, an extremely difficult one. Nevertheless, this bracketing is necessary, not only because of the emotions aroused by the Nazis, but also because of the ambivalent reactions Jews inevitably arouse in Western culture. In view of the fact that (a) most Europeans and Americans are the spiritual and cultural heirs of a religious tradition in which both the incarnate deity and his betrayer are Jewish and that (b) the fate of the Jews has been a primary datum used to prove the truth of Christianity from its inception, it is difficult for even the most secularized non-Jew to be without a complex mixture of feelings when confronted with Jewish disaster. These feelings are likely to include both guilt and gratification.

Nor are Jews normally capable of greater objectivity in dealing with the Holocaust. The event has challenged the very foundations of Jewish religious faith. It has reinforced all of the millennial distrust on the part of Jews for the non-Jewish world. It has also raised the exceedingly painful issue of the role of the Judenräte, the Jewish community councils which everywhere controlled the Jewish communities and which were used by the Germans as a principal instrument to facilitate the process of extermination.

Both Jews and non-Jews have good reasons for responding with emotion to the Holocaust. Were such a response conducive to insight concerning its political and moral consequences, there would be no reason to attempt the kind of bracketing which is here advised. However, some degree of objectivity is necessary in order to understand what took place. It is therefore necessary to withhold, insofar as it is possible, both sympathetic and hostile feelings as we attempt to arrive at some comprehension of the long-range significance of the process by which the Jews of Europe were destroyed.

It is, of course, somewhat easier to assess the meaning of the Holocaust today than it was a generation ago. During and immediately after World War II, the shock of the experience was too great. As the camps were liberated, brutal media images of survivors who seemed hardly more than walking skeletons were mixed with images of mounds of unburied corpses. The pictures hinted at the frightfulness of what had taken place, but their very horror also tended to obscure comprehension. The moral and psychological categories under which such scenes could be comprehended were hatred, cruelty, and sadism. The past was searched to find parallels with which the event could be understood. Human history is filled with incidents of rapine, robbery, and massacre. It was to such categories that the mind was initially drawn. In addition, the Jews had been the victims of degrading assault so often that there was an understandable tendency to regard the Holocaust as a contemporary manifestation of the anti-Jewish violence that had so often exploded during the two-thousand-year sojourn of the Jews in Europe.

There was also a paucity of facts. It was known that millions had been killed, but, until the German archives and the survivors’ memoirs became available, it was not possible to get an accurate picture of the destruction process as a whole. Because of the total collapse of the German state in 1945, its archives became available soon after the events had taken place. Under normal conditions, many of the most important documents would never have become available. Even after having been made available, the archival material, the transcripts of the war crimes trials and the avalanche of memoirs all had to be digested. To some extent, that process is still going on. Unfortunately, whenever scholars have attempted to comprehend the Holocaust in terms of pre-twentieth-century experience, they have invariably failed to recognize the phenomenon for what it was, a thoroughly modern exercise in total domination that could only have been carried out by an advanced political community with a highly trained, tightly disciplined police and civil service bureaucracy.

As reflection replaced shock, attention shifted from a description of the mobile killing units and the death camps to the analysis of the process by which the extermination was carried out. The process was a highly complex series of acts which started simply with the bureaucratic definition of who was a Jew.² Once defined as a Jew, by the German state bureaucracy, a person was progressively deprived of all personal property and citizenship rights. The final step in the process came when he was eliminated altogether. The destruction process required the cooperation of every sector of German society. The bureaucrats drew up the definitions and decrees; the churches gave evidence of Aryan descent; the postal authorities carried the messages of definition, expropriation, denaturalization, and deportation; business corporations dismissed their Jewish employees and took over “Aryanized” properties; the railroads carried the victims to their place of execution, a place made available to the Gestapo and the SS by the Wehrmacht. To repeat, the operation required and received the participation of every major social, political, and religious institution of the German Reich.

The essential steps in the process of annihilation have been outlined by the historian and political scientist, Raul Hilberg, in his comprehensive and indispensable study, The Destruction of the European Jews.³ According to Hilberg, since the fourth Christian century, there have been three fundamental anti-Jewish policies, conversion, expulsion, and annihilation. Until the twentieth century, only two of the policies were attempted in a systematic way, conversion and expulsion. Throughout the history of Christianity, there have been countless attempts to inflict violence upon Jews. These assaults were often encouraged by religious and secular authorities. Nevertheless, such outbursts, no matter how extensive, were never transformed into systematic, bureaucratically administered policies of outright extermination until World War II. According to Hilberg, the Nazis were both “innovators” and “improvisors” in their elimination of the Jews.⁴

Each of the three policies directed against Jews represented an intensification of hostile action beyond the previous step. Conversion was an attempt to subvert Jewish religious and communal institutions by securing defections to the rival faith. Expulsion was an attempt to rid a community of Jews as unwanted outsiders. Annihilation was the most radical form of expulsion. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental difference between conversion and expulsion on the one hand and extermination on the other. In conversion and expulsion, the death threat was often used as a means to an end; in extermination, killing became the end in itself.

Before the twentieth century, the Christian religious tradition was both the source of much traditional anti-Jewish hostility and an effective barrier against the final murderous step. Something changed in the twentieth century. As always, there were men who sought to rid their communities of Jews and Jewish influence, but the methods proposed were no longer limited by traditional religious or moral restraints. The rationalizations with which a massacre of the Jews could be justified were at least as old as Christendom. We need not repeat here what has been written on the subject of Christian anti-Jewish images. For our purposes, it is sufficient to note that those stereotypical images did not lead to systematic extermination until the twentieth century. There was little that the Nazis had to add to the negative image of the Jew they had inherited from Martin Luther or from the Pan-German anti-Semites of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In every instance, the Jew was depicted as an enemy within the gates, a criminal and a kind of plague or species of vermin.⁵ Gil Eliot has observed that such images ascribe to an adversary or a potential victim a paranthropoid identity.⁶ As Eliot has asserted, once a human being has been stripped of his human and given a paranthropoid identity, the normal moral impediments cease to operate.

To repeat, something happened in the twentieth century that made it morally and psychologically possible to realize dreams of destructiveness that had previously been confined to fantasy. Part of the reason for the radicalization of the destructive tendencies can, of course, be found in such specific events as the defeat of Germany in World War I after four years of fighting of unprecedented violence. An element of even greater importance was the fact that the secularized culture which substituted calculating rationality for the older traditional norms in personal and group relations did not mature fully until the twentieth century. Yet another factor was the conjunction of the charismatic leadership of Adolf Hitler, the bureaucratic competence of the German police and civil service, and the mood of the German people at a particular moment in history. Himmler and Goebbels, for example, were convinced that Hitler’s leadership gave the Germans a unique opportunity to eliminate the Jews that might never be repeated.⁷

All of the elements cited played their part, but more was involved. The Holocaust was an expression of some of the most significant political, moral, religious and demographic tendencies of Western civilization in the twentieth century. The Holocaust cannot be divorced from the very same culture of modernity that produced the two world wars and Hitler.

There were, of course, unique elements in the Holocaust. It was the first attempt by a modern, legally constituted government to pursue a policy of bureaucratically organized genocide both within and beyond its own frontiers. As such, it must be distinguished from the use of violence by a state against another state or even against its own people for the purpose of securing compliance with its policies. One of the most terrifying instances of state violence was the American nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Although nuclear weapons are capable of greater destructiveness than were the German death camps, there was a significant difference between Hiroshima and Auschwitz. The American assault ceased as soon as the Japanese surrendered. During World War II, German mass violence against enemy civilians was intensified after the victims had surrendered.⁸

Nevertheless, for all of its uniqueness, the Holocaust must be seen against the horizon of the unprecedented magnitude of violence in the twentieth century. No century in human history can match the twentieth in the sheer number of human beings slaughtered as a direct consequence of the political activity of the great states. One estimate of the humanly inflicted deaths of the twentieth century places the total at about one hundred million.⁹ As fewer men have fallen prey to such natural ills as the plague and epidemic, the technology of human violence has taken up much of the slack. Those whom nature did not kill before their time were often slain by their fellowmen.

Twentieth-century mass slaughter began in earnest with World War I. About 6,000 people were killed every day for over 1,500 days.¹⁰ The total was around ten million. World War I was the first truly modern war of the century. The civilian societies of both the Allied and the Central powers were organized in such a way that millions of ordinary people were withdrawn from their normal occupations, supplied with weapons of unprecedented destructiveness and dispatched to the battle fronts. Without the systematic organization of both population and industry, it would have been impossible to wage the kind of mass war that was fought.

A mass war has its own logic that is very different from the almost ritualistic and symbolic contests of compact units of military professionals that used to wage war on their country’s behalf. Diego de Velasquez’s magnificent painting, The Surrender of Breda (June 25, 1625), which hangs in Madrid’s Prado Museum reminds us of the way European wars used to be fought: With the troops of both sides facing each other, the Dutch commander Justin of Nassau bows as he surrenders the keys of the city to the Spanish commander, the Genoese general Ambrogio Spinola. Spinola has dismounted from his horse and has placed his right hand on the shoulder of Justin as he accepts the keys. Spinola’s gesture suggests knightly comradeship. There is mutual respect. The victor knows that things could have gone the other way. He is also convinced that the victory belongs to God.

In modern warfare, there is no knightly comradeship. The objective is often to deprive the enemy of his basic instrument of violence, his army. In essence, that is what General von Falkenhayn, the German commander, attempted at the Battle of Verdun. Von Falkenhayn’s strategy was biological. His objective at Verdun was to exterminate as many of the enemy as possible.¹¹ This was a giant step towards the death camps of World War II. For the first time in memory a European nation had attempted to alter the biological rather than the military and political balance of power with an adversary. It did not occur to Von Falkenhayn that he could not slaughter the French without suffering the loss of a comparable number of his own men. The tragic story of Verdun is well known. About five hundred thousand men died on each side in a nine-month battle that ended with the battle lines more or less in the same place at the end as at the beginning. Apparently, the German military and civilian authorities did not consider so great a human sacrifice too high a price to pay for victory. It is somewhat easier to understand the resolve of the French to take their losses. They were convinced that their national existence was at stake. No similar danger threatened the Germans. They were the attackers. They were, of course, determined to win the war no matter what the cost.

From the perspective of subsequent history, Verdun offered a hint of the extent to which the leaders of Germany regarded their own people as expendable. If the German leaders were prepared to sacrifice their own people on so vast a scale, they were hardly likely to be concerned about the fate of enemy populations. Nevertheless, there is an important difference between German behavior at Verdun in 1915 and the behavior of the Nazis during World War II. There is no evidence that the Germans would have intensified their violence against their adversaries had they won World War I. Even the large-scale violence at Verdun was not a prelude to the annihilation or the permanent enslavement of the French nation. As we have noted, in World War II, the Nazis intensified their violence against their enemies after they had surrendered, especially in Eastern Europe.

Nor were the Germans alone in their indifference to the fate of large numbers of their own men. On July 1, 1916 General Sir Douglas Haig began the Battle of the Somme. By the end of the first day, the British had lost nearly sixty thousand men including half of all of the officers assigned to the battle! This was by far the worst casualty rate yet for either side. In spite of the insane casualty rate, Haig refused to desist. He was determined to break through the German l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Notes
• Copyright
• About the Publisher