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Explaining genocide

Explaining genocide. 1948 UN definition (Rafael Lemkin ). Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, including killing members of the group

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Explaining genocide

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  1. Explaining genocide

  2. 1948 UN definition (Rafael Lemkin) Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, including • killing members of the group • deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part • imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group • forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

  3. The mass killing of Jews in World War II: the Holocaust or the Shoah? • Shoah= ‘destruction’ • Holocaust = a burnt offering (a sacrifice)

  4. Was the destruction of European Jewry unique? • uniquely cruel? • Unique in the attempt to remove an entire human group from the earth. • in that sense a crime against humanity (if humanity = the plurality of human groups on the earth).

  5. How many explanations? • Gunnar Heinsohn: there are 42 different theoretical approaches to explaining the Holocaust— plus his own.

  6. A timeline • 1919: September  Hitler joins an obscure fringe group, the DAP (German Workers' Party). • 1923: November 8-9  Hitler leads the abortive Beer Hall Putsch (coup d'état) in Munich. • 1923-1924:  In prison for high treason, Hitler authors Mein Kampf (My Struggle). • 1933: January 30  President Hindenburg, under the sway of the ultra-conservatives, appoints Hitler as Chancellor. • 1933: March to January, 1934  Period of Gleichschaltung (co-ordination under Nazi control) of most aspects of German society • 1933: April  Official boycott of Jewish shops

  7. 1933: October  Germany quits the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations. • 1934: January 26  Germany signs a ten-year treaty of non-aggression with Poland. • 1935: September 15  Promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws relegates Jews to a separate second-class status in Germany, prohibits intermarriage and sexual relations with Germans • 1937: November 5  Hitler reveals his long-range "plans" to the Reich leadership (Hossbach Memorandum). • 1938: March 13Anschluss: Austria is annexed to the "Greater German Reich." • 1938: August  Decree requiring all Jews to adopt the first name "Israel" or "Sarah" • 1938: September 30  Munich Conference: Britain and France grant Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland to Hitler to avoid war; Hitler gives Chamberlain his personal word on future cooperation (the height of the policy of Appeasement). • 1938: November 9-10Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass): German authorities orchestrate a nationwide pogrom against Germany's Jewish population. • 1939: January 30  In a speech to the Reichstag, Hitler predicts that a war in Europe would lead to "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." • 1939: March 15  Hitler's forces invade "rump" Czecho-Slovakia in violation of Hitler's pledges to Chamberlain. • 1939: August 23  Nazi-Soviet Non-aggression Pact (& secret protocol dividing eastern Europe into spheres of influence) is signed in Moscow. • 1939: September 1  German invasion of Poland begins at Gleiwitz (Gliwice)

  8. 1939: October  Hitler signs an order authorizing Operation T-4, the killing of Germans with physical and mental handicaps. The gassing techniques developed during the course of T-4 are later used in the death camps in Poland. • 1940: June 22  Fall of France; German forces occupy northern and western France; collaborationist Vichy government set up in south-eastern France. • 1940: September   Battle of Britain. • 1941: June 22  German invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa); Hitler declares a Vernichtungskrieg (War of Annihilation); behind the front, special killing squads (Einsatzgruppen) begin the mass murder of Jews and Soviet officials. • 1941: mid-July  At a meeting in Berlin, Himmler reveals the plan for the Final Solution to his subordinate, Höss, and puts him in charge of developing a large-scale killing center at Auschwitz (already a camp for Polish political prisoners). • 1941: July 31  The formal order for the planning of a coordinated Final Solution of the Jewish problem throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, already drafted by Eichmann, is signed by Goering.

  9. 1941: September  The efficacy of Zyklon B (prussic acid) for gassing humans is tested on Russian POWs at Auschwitz. General deportation of German Jews begins. • 1941: November 18  After a personal meeting with Himmler on November 15, Reichminister Rosenberg of the Ostministerium tells German journalists in confidence that the Final Solution, consisting of the "biological extermination of all Jews in Europe," has begun. • 1941: December 8  Gassing of Jews begins at Chelmno (Kulmhof). Other death camps come "on line" later: Belzec (March 1942); Sobibor (April-May 1942); Treblinka (July 1942) • 1942: January 20  The Wannsee Conference is held in Berlin to coordinate the Final Solution; ReinhardHeydrich, subordinate of Himmler and head of the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) presides. Eichmann takes official notes at the meeting which survive as evidence. • 1942: July 17-18  Himmler, on his second visit to Auschwitz, personally witnesses killing procedures using Zyklon B. • 1944: July 20  Failed attempt by German conservatives to overthrow the Nazi government and assassinate Hitler (who survives the bomb blast relatively unhurt) • 1945: January 27  Red Army liberates Auschwitz, finds convincing evidence of SS atrocities and of the Holocaust. • 1945: April 14  British army liberates Belsen; mounds of corpses have to be buried by bulldozer. • 1945: May 7  Unconditional surrender of all German forces.

  10. Intentionalist Daniel Goldhagen: the Nazis - that is, the leadership, specifically Hitler: • had to decide to undertake the extermination.  • had to gain control over the Jews, namely over the territory in which they resided (most of which was to the East of Germany (Poland, Russia etc.).  • had to organize the extermination and devote to it sufficient resources.  • had to induce a large number of people to carry out the killings (they could only have agreed if they themselves shared Hitler’s ‘eliminationist anti-semitism’).

  11. Nazi education

  12. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=033hjDunlLc • El eternojudio (2-10mins)

  13. Functionalist/structuralist • Holocaust lies at the end of a long road of ‘cumulative radicalisation’. • In particular, without the war, no holocaust. • Ad hoc decisions by local officials keen to show loyalty to Hitler, who himself issued no concrete orders (Hans Mommsen). • From the Madagascar plan to the Wannsee conference of June 1942 (‘final solution’).

  14. Moderate functionalist (e.g. Browning) • Intention is not enough • Hitler could not have been ignorant of decisions made by immediate subordinates • Victories in September 1939 and June 1941 had an emboldening effect on Hitler, whose basic intentions towards the Jews remained the same.

  15. “The crimes committed by the Nazi regime were neither a mere outcome of some haphazard, involuntary, imperceptible, and chaotic onrush of unrelated events nor a predetermined enactment of a demonic script; they were the result of converging factors, of the interaction between intentions and contingencies, between discernible causes and chance. General ideological objectives and tactical policy decisions enhanced one another and always remained open to more radical moves as circumstances changed” (Saul Friedlander)

  16. Modernity and the Holocaust: the bigger picture • Bauman’s critique of sociology: mainstream sociology sees the holocaust as a failure of modernity, or as a breakdown of civilisation, as an abnormality. But bigger picture accounts question this: holocaust/shoah was as modern as anything else in the 20th century: • Modern nationalism • Imperialism (the precedent of concentration camps) • ‘scientific’ racism (eugenics) • Modern rationality.

  17. Bauman’s alternative • Not an account of direct causes but of conditions. The conditions that made the holocaust possible persist today (that does not mean that it was the ‘natural’ or inevitable outgrowth of modernity either). ‘The truth is that every ingredient of the holocaust was ‘normal’’. • 'The machinery of destruction...was structurally no different from organized German society as a whole. The machinery of destruction was the organized community in one of its special roles’ (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jewry)

  18. Modern rationality • Classification, tidying, elimination of what doesn’t fit ideas about ‘purity’. Logic of Inside/outside. • But the limitless character of modern science and technology – if it is possible it is OK (Dostoyevsky - if God is dead, everything is permitted). • Bureaucracy, efficiency and impersonality • Weber on value-rationality v. means-ends rationality (indifference to ends and to consequences).

  19. Desk killers • The ideal bureaucrat (clear position in a hierarchy, rule-guided behaviour, clearly demarcated responsibility (not the blind following of orders but small-scale problem-solving) • The industrial scale of the killing required people sitting in offices to make decisions ‘without regard for persons’. • Arendt on Eichmann: the banality of evil (‘I was doing my duty’).

  20. Alternative versions of ‘modernity and the holcaust’ • Michael Mann: The Dark Side of Democracy. • Major genocides of 20th century occurred after periods of state collapse followed by rapid democratisation (newly legal political parties, appeals to new ideas about the character of the demos (ethnos trumps class), social mobilisation and instability). • Genocide is at the end of a spectrum that begins with ‘mild ethnic cleansing’.

  21. BUT Mann also critical of Bauman: much genocidal killing has NOT been industrial/bureaucratic. Even the destruction of European Jews was not like that in its early phases. • Browning’s book on Reserve Battalion 101. Ordinary Men (compare Goldhagen’s book using the same material – Ordinary Germans) • One to one killing by individual middle-aged men in the Jozefow area around Lublin. • Obedience to authority rather than a set of anti-semitic beliefs • Another possibility: differing cultures of self-constraint (Norbert Elias on The Germans).

  22. Jews massacred after 22 June 1941.

  23. Babiyar (29-30 September 1941)

  24. Lebensraum and racial purity • Hitler’s initial justification for occupation of Czechoslovakia: protection of Germans in the Sudetenland.

  25. Germany and the Sudetenland 1938

  26. Dangerous geopolitical situations exist today

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