HIST103: World History (1600–Present)

The Holocaust and the historical phenomenon of Nazism, which has since become the dark symbol of the 20th century's crimes, has become the subject of numerous historical, psychological, sociological, literary, and philosophical studies. All types of scholars have tried to give an answer to what appeared as the most irrational act of the Western World, which, until at least World War I, had been so sure of its eminent superiority over other civilizations. Many different people have tried to give an explanation for what many deemed unexplainable by its horror. Genocide has too often been the result of one national group trying to control a state.

One important philosophical question, addressed as soon as 1933 by Wilhelm Reich in Mass Psychology of Fascism, was the mystery of the obedience of the German people to such an "insane" operation. Hannah Arendt, in her 1963 report on Adolf Eichmann, made of this last one the symbol of dull obedience to authority in what was seen at first as a scandalous book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), which has since become a classic of political philosophy. Thus, Arendt opposed herself to the first, immediate explanation, which accused the Nazis of "cruelty" and of "sadism."

Later, the historians' debate concerning functionalism and intentionalism also demonstrated that the question couldn't be simplified to a question of cruelty. Many people who participated in the Holocaust were normal people, according to Arendt. Perhaps they were beguiled by Hitler's charisma. Hitler delivered on the economy and restoring German pride; many simply did not want to believe what was happening. Others theorize about the psychology of "obedience," of obeying orders.

Hannah Arendt and some authors, such as Sven Lindqvist or Olivier LeCour Grandmaison, also point to a relative continuity between the crimes committed against "primitive" people during colonialism and the Holocaust. They most notably argue that many techniques which the Nazis would perfect had been used in other continents, such as concentration camps which were developed during the Boer Wars, if not before.

This thesis was met with fierce opposition by some groups, who argued that nothing could be compared to the Holocaust, not even other genocides. Although the Herero genocide (1904-07) and the Armenian genocide (1915-17) are commonly considered the first genocides in history, many argued that the Holocaust had taken proportions that even these crimes against humanity had not achieved. Subsequent genocides, though equally a stain on the human story, such as those in Bosnia and Rwanda, are also of a much smaller scale and, in comparison, were carried out by primitive means of execution, such as using clubs and machetes.

Many have pointed out that the Holocaust was the culmination of nearly 2000 years of traditional Christian Anti-Semitism – the teaching of contempt of Judaism (known as Adversus Iudeaos), which has its roots in the New Testament. This teaching included the popular accusation that the Jews had committed "deicide" in killing Jesus, that the Jews uttered a curse on themselves for so doing – "His blood be on us and on our children" (Matthew 27:25).

Also, Jews constitutionally placed money ahead of God, as exemplified by Judas Iscariot's (his name "Judas" became a synonym for "Jew") selling of the Lord for 30 pieces of silver. Further misconceptions included the accusation of ritual murder, in which Jews were said to kill a Christian infant to extract blood for the Passover. European Christian art frequently depicted anti-semitic images, such as the Judensau (German for "Jews' sow"), a derogatory and dehumanizing image of Jews in obscene contact with a large female pig, an animal unclean to Jews, which appeared in the Middle Ages in carvings on church or cathedral walls and in woodcuts and was revived by the Nazis.

This popular stereotyping and demonizing of Jews meant that there was a widespread implicit, if not explicit, feeling that what was happening to the Jews was, if not right, at least understandable. There were many layers to this Antisemitism. One was also a strong feeling of envy and resentment toward the widespread financial and cultural success of Jews. Another was the popular association of Jews with Communism. Furthermore, the science of eugenics developed in the 19th century by associates of Charles Darwin claimed that some races were more evolved than others. All these ideas fed into the Nazi ideas of Aryan racial superiority and made it easier for Nazis to believe that what they were doing was right and justified.

Why Did People Participate In, Authorize, or Tacitly Accept the Killing?

Obedience

Stanley Milgram was one of a number of post-war psychologists and sociologists who tried to address why people obeyed immoral orders in the Holocaust. Milgram's findings demonstrated that reasonable people when instructed by a person in a position of authority, obeyed commands entailing what they believed to be the death or suffering of others.

These results were confirmed in other experiments as well, such as the Stanford prison experiment. In his book Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), Wilhelm Reich also tried to explain this obedience. The work became known as the foundation of freudo-marxism.

Nobel Nobel prize winner Elias Canetti also addressed the problem of mass obedience in Masse und Macht (1960 – "Crowds and Power"), developing an original theory of the consequences of commandments orders both in the obedient person and in the commander, who may well become a "despotic paranoiac."

Functionalism versus Intentionalism

A major issue in contemporary Holocaust studies is the question of functionalism versus intentionalism. The terms were coined in a 1981 article by the British Marxist historian Timothy Mason to describe two schools of thought about the origins of the Holocaust. Intentionalists hold that the Holocaust was the result of a long-term master plan on the part of Hitler and that he was the driving force behind the Holocaust.

Functionalists hold that Hitler was anti-Semitic but that he did not have a master plan for genocide. Functionalists see the Holocaust as coming from below in the ranks of the German bureaucracy with little or no involvement on the part of Hitler. Functionalists stress that the Nazi anti-Semitic policy was constantly evolving in ever more radical directions, and the end product was the Holocaust.

Intentionalists like Lucy Dawidowicz argue that the Holocaust was planned by Hitler from the very beginning of his political career, at very least from 1919 on, if not earlier. The decision for genocide has been traced back as early as November 11, 1918. More recent intentionalist historians like Eberhard Jäckel continue to emphasize the relative. Intentionalist historians such as the American Arno J. Mayer claim Hitler only ordered the Holocaust in December 1941.

Functionalists like hold that the Holocaust was started in 1941-1942 as a result of the failure of the Nazi deportation policy and the impending military losses in Russia. They claim that what some see as extermination fantasies outlined in Hitler's Mein Kampf and other Nazi literature were mere propaganda and did not constitute concrete plans. In Mein Kampf, Hitler repeatedly states his inexorable hatred of the Jewish people, but nowhere does he proclaim his intention to exterminate the Jewish people. This, though, can easily be read into the text.

In particular, Functionalists have noted that in German documents from 1939 to 1941, the term "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was clearly meant to be a "territorial solution," that is, the entire Jewish population was to be expelled somewhere far from Germany and not allowed to come back. At first, the SS planned to create a gigantic "Jewish Reservation" in the Lublin, Poland area.

The so-called "Lublin Plan" was vetoed by Hans Frank, the Governor-General of Poland, who refused to allow the SS to ship any more Jews to the Lublin area after November 1939. The reason why Frank vetoed the "Lublin Plan" was not due to any humane motives but rather because he was opposed to the SS "dumping" Jews into the Government-General.

In 1940, the SS and the German Foreign Office had the so-called "Madagascar Plan" to deport the entire Jewish population of Europe to a "reservation" in Madagascar. The "Madagascar Plan" was canceled because Germany could not defeat the United Kingdom, and until the British blockade was broken, the "Madagascar Plan" could not be put into effect. Finally, Functionalist historians have made much of a memorandum written by Himmler in May 1940, explicitly rejecting extermination of the entire Jewish people as "un-German" and going on to recommend to Hitler the "Madagascar Plan" as the preferred "territorial solution" to the "Jewish Question." Not until July 1941 did the term "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" come to mean extermination.

Controversially, sociologist Daniel Goldhagen argues that ordinary Germans were knowing and willing participants in the Holocaust, which he claims had its roots in a deep eliminationist German anti-Semitism. Most other historians have disagreed with Goldhagen's thesis, arguing that while anti-Semitism undeniably existed in Germany, Goldhagen's idea of a uniquely German "eliminationist" anti-Semitism is untenable and that the extermination was unknown to many and had to be enforced by the dictatorial Nazi apparatus.

Religious Hatred and Racism

The German Nazis considered it their duty to overcome natural compassion and to execute orders for what they believed were higher ideals. Much research has been conducted to explain how ordinary people could have participated in such heinous crimes. There is no doubt that, as in some religious conflicts in the past, some people poisoned with a racial and religious ideology of hatred committed crimes with sadistic pleasure.

Crowd psychology has attempted to explain such heinous acts. Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895) was a major influence on Mein Kampf, in particular relating to the propaganda techniques that Hitler described. Sadistic acts were perhaps most notable in the case of the genocide of the Croatian Nazi collaborators, whose enthusiasm and sadism in their killings of the Serbs appalled Germans, Italians, and even German SS officers, who even acted to restrain the Ustaše.

However, concentration camp literature, such as by Primo Levi or Robert Antelme, described numerous individual sadistic acts, including acts carried out by Kapos (Trustees, Jews given privileges to act as spies for the German prison authorities).

Holocaust Denial

Holocaust denial, also called Holocaust revisionism, is the belief that the Holocaust did not occur, or, more specifically: that far fewer than around six million Jews were killed by the Nazis (numbers below one million, most often around 30,000 are typically cited); that there never was a centrally-planned Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews; and/or that there were not mass killings at the extermination camps. 

Those who hold this position often further claim that Jews and/or Zionists know that the Holocaust never occurred, yet that they are engaged in a massive conspiracy to maintain the illusion of a Holocaust to further their political agenda. As the Holocaust is generally considered by historians to be one of the best-documented events in recent history, these views are not accepted as credible by scholars, with organizations such as the American Historical Association, the largest society of historians in the United States, stating that Holocaust denial is "at best, a form of academic fraud." [13]

Holocaust deniers almost always prefer to be called Holocaust revisionists. Most scholars contend that the latter term is misleading. Historical revisionism, in the original sense of the word, is a well-accepted and mainstream part of the study of history; it is the reexamination of accepted history, with an eye towards updating it with newly discovered, more accurate, and/or less biased information or viewing known information from a new perspective.

In contrast, negationists typically willfully misuse or ignore historical records in order to attempt to prove their conclusions, as Gordon McFee writes:

Public Opinion Quarterly summarized that: "No reputable historian questions the reality of the Holocaust, and those promoting Holocaust denial are overwhelmingly anti-Semites and/or neo-Nazis."

Holocaust denial has also become popular in recent years among radical Muslims: In late 2005, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denounced the Holocaust of European Jewry as a "myth." [15] Public espousal of Holocaust denial is a crime in ten European countries (including France, Poland, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Romania, and Germany). Meanwhile, the Nizkor Project attempts to counter it on the Internet.