MY TOPIC IS THE SIGNIFICANCE of the Holocaust for Western civilization. This is quite an assignment. I know that many Holocaust researchers, compartmentalized in their own academic disciplines, have not been in touch with one another. Only in recent years have theorists turned to history and have asked themselves in more detail, “What happened?” By the same token, empiricists like me, who have always been concerned with concrete questions, are now becoming more contemplative as we address the larger issue of meaning. Still, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to spell out the import of the Holocaust in an evening. Perhaps it could be defined and even refined in that time, but the task would not be finished in a lifetime. Understanding of these matters comes slowly and sometimes not at all. Thus, I will try only to present an outline, one which, incidentally, I have never before attempted. Let us characterize this event in three ways. My approach may sound a little professorial, but it helps to reduce the awesomeness of the topic so that one may, in a certain sense, confront it.
The first consideration, and the foremost one, is the obvious—or perhaps not so obvious—fact that the Holocaust was irreducibly distinct from any other historical event or phenomenon. One cannot explain it in terms of anything else. One cannot submerge it in the campaigns of World War II or in the aims of the Germans in that war. One cannot drown it in scapegoat theories of government. The Holocaust was sui generis. That is the reason it cannot be simply a part of a study of persecutions or dictatorships. It demands its own literature and its own sources. We must always remember that the Holocaust was pursued relentlessly by its perpetrators from 1933 to 1945, it had its own momentum, and it was pressed to its logical conclusion even after it had become evident during the battle of Stalingrad in January 1943 that the war would be lost. The destruction process was implemented regardless of its costs, not for any material gain and not for any military purpose. Even those Jews that may have been needed by the German war industry in a variety of sectors were killed. It becomes increasingly apparent from the sheer examination of the evidence itself that the destruction of the Jews of Europe was willed for itself and was accomplished for its own sake. That is the quality of the Holocaust that presents us with some of its most profound implications.
A second feature of the process is the circumstance that the Germans, embarking on ever more drastic measures against the Jews, were coming into conflict with fundamental prohibitions in law, mores, and morality. The confrontation with these rules was personal and immediate. Within the bureaucracy, the Holocaust became an increasingly sensitive topic. Rationalizations broke down. Notwithstanding the continuous bombardment of words accompanying the destruction of the Jews, the endless propaganda that was intensified even as more and more of the victims died, those of the perpetrators who were closest to the scene of action could no longer justify their actions—they had to repress them. They knew that they had now taken an unprecedented step that no other bureaucracy, and no other nation, had dared. They had moved beyond the limits; they had crossed the threshold, they were in forbidden territory. Never would they be able to justify what they had done.
We see the long-term consequences of this venture in the nature of relations visible to this very day which Western countries, not only the Jews, have with Germany. Once, before the end of World War II, there were men in the United States and Great Britain for whom the reports of what was transpiring in Axis Europe meant very little, for whom persecution of any kind meant very little, until they underwent the shock of seeing something with their own eyes in 1945. They saw the camps. The questions that were raised then have been perpetuated through the years within the United States and throughout the Western world.
Most intensive, however, are the effects of this massive transgression in Germany itself. I was there in 1976, and I found to my utter astonishment that men in the judiciary, in railroad offices, even in the customs administration, introduced themselves to me somewhat as follows: “My name is Schultze. I am thirty-eight years old.” “My name is Krause. I was born in 1939.” What a strange introduction. Such is the division in Germany between the generations. In some respects, it is deeper than the political division between East and West. It cuts across both of these entities. Yet, on occasion, a younger hand reaches toward the older perpetrator, a taboo is suddenly broken, and a weird concordance is established with the past.
Take a single example that I witnessed in 1976. I was the guest of the Central Administration of the German Provinces in Ludwigsburg, which investigates remaining war crimes. I was cordially received. I was shown documents that I wanted to see and I was given a very special treat. A forbidden film was being shown, a propaganda film going way back to the Hitlerite period, dealing with the theme of Jud Süss, a Jew who takes over Stuttgart in another age, exploits the German people, and is finally put to death. I watched this film, of which only two or three prints were alleged to remain. Very well. The office closed, as usual, at 4:00 or 4:30 p.m. I had nothing to do. I browsed in a bookstore, and I found a book, a paperback published by Suhrkamp, one of the major publishing houses. And here was a new play written by someone born after the war, about a Jew who in the middle of the 1970s takes over the city of Frankfurt and exploits it, while the Germans watch helplessly.* In the text there is a monologue that sounds like so very many that had been written in the past but with one line added: “They forgot to gas him.” Thus the play by the German playwright Rainer Werner Fassbinder, since withdrawn from circulation, I understand, because of mounting criticism by the press.
We know, of course, that just as there has been a subtle forbearance by Western countries, and not only by Jews, in their dealings with Germany, there is also a very special relationship of all Western nations, and not only Germany, with the Jews. It manifests itself in a variety of ways, including the difficult, and continuing existence of Israel, which is a post-Holocaust phenomenon par excellence.
The Holocaust is an irreducible phenomenon. It was a deed that sent shock waves, with long-term consequences, through our society. It was also, at the time of its occurrence, an unexpected event.
The first to be affected by that unexpectedness were the victims themselves. At the moment of extreme danger, they could not perceive impending disaster. They could not envision a Western civilization that would ever be capable of launching a “Final Solution.” That is one of the reasons why, in the Jewish Councils all over Europe, nothing was done. Even as rumors of ominous developments began to multiply on the desks of the chairmen of Jewish Councils, they could not believe the country of Beethoven, the home of Goethe, to be capable of deliberate mass destruction. Thus in the summer of 1942, it was the turn of the Jews of Warsaw to be deported. The chairman of the Council of the Warsaw ghetto, Adam Czerniaków, left a diary, a daily series of entries of incomplete sentences from September 1939 to the moment that the deportation began. He recorded all the news, all the reports that reached him actually from Germans he was in contact with, that is, his own persecutors. The rumors multiplied during January, March, and April 1942. Finally, everyone within the ghetto was aware that something was going on, and at this point he went to the Gestapo and asked the crucial question: “Is it true?” “No.” “Is there any basis for the rumors?” “No.” He was not satisfied. He went to another official. “Is it true?” “I haven’t heard anything.” “Is it true?” he asked for a third time. “No.” “Can I deny the rumors?” “Yes.” He went about his business for another day or two. Then he swallowed the poison he had had in his drawer from the beginning. Some months later, the chairman of the Jewish community in Vienna, Dr. Josef Löwenherz, who presided over the deportation of some tens of thousands of people, also had to ask himself the inevitable question. He went to the office of the Gestapo in Vienna where he spoke to the Gestapo man Dr. Karl Ebner. Löwenherz wanted to see the chief of the Vienna Gestapo himself to verify the reports of the Jews being put to death. Ebner thought Löwenherz would have a “bad time” with the chief if he asked about such matters. The Jewish chairman was, however, admitted to the chief’s office; then he was asked to wait outside while a phone call was made to the chief of the Gestapo in Berlin. Then the Vienna Gestapo chief denied the reports.
Two incidents; there were more. The leadership of the Jewish people in 1942 and 1943 would not believe the worst. Neither, by the way, did the Allied powers, despite the indications that were coming in, in some profusion, from occupied Europe. They kept checking, and in the final analysis not much was said and less was done during the most lethal hours of European Jewry. Remember, again, that the basic question was whether a Western nation, a civilized nation, could be capable of such a thing. And then, soon after 1945, we see the query turned around totally as one begins to ask: “Is there any Western nation that is incapable of it?”
The problem was verbalized by an attorney Edwin Sears in an article that appeared in two issues of the Jewish Forum in 1951. More than a decade later, the British writer Frederic Raphael inserted in his novel Lindmann a three-page fantasy of Jews being deported by a British bureaucracy from British cities. His depiction of the hypothetical event is particularly startling because the characters are British, their thoughts are British, and the mode in which they speak is—far from any German model—typically and completely British. Finally, I should mention the famous experiment at Yale University by Stanley Milgram who showed that people will, under the influence of authority, push buttons. Once I went to New Haven and, remembering that Milgram had drawn his experimental subjects from the city, asked several of my hosts: “Tell me, are you capable of it? Do you believe it could happen in New Haven?” One woman, who had just moved there from another state, said: “Not in our country, not anywhere in the United States, but perhaps it could happen in New Haven.” Another, a Jewish dentist, told me: “Now here is something I want you to know. There was a participant in the experiment who refused to cooperate in it, and that man was a dentist.”
In 1941, the Holocaust was not expected and that is the very reason for our subsequent anxieties. We no longer dare to exclude the unimaginable from our thoughts. Yet, our analytical powers to measure the destructive propensities in all of mankind are too meager for adequate prediction. Hence, our current assessments of possible danger are much less the product of systematic probing than a matter of personal disposition and feeling. To put it simply, if you believe that only Germans are capable of such mass destruction as we have seen between 1933 and 1945, you are an optimist. If you think that many nations have that potential, you are pessimistic indeed.
There is one conclusion we may draw from the past. A destruction process is not the work of a few mad minds. It cannot be accomplished by any handful of men. It is far too complex in its organizational build-up and far too pervasive in its administrative implementation to dispense with specialized bureaucrats in every segment of society. The perpetrators who were responsible for “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe” came from all parts of Germany and all walks of life. One should not assume that a man who may have been an essential individual in these destructive operations is instantaneously recognizable. Let me tell you a short story as a means of giving you a small illustration.
In my quest for railroad documents, I went to the headquarters of the German railways in Frankfurt on Main. After the usual bureaucratic encounters with various offices, I was directed to an annex building in the heart of the section of the city where pornographic materials are sold. That is where the documents center was. A center, incidentally, without documents. By the time I got there it was half-past-eleven in the morning. I stood in the hallway and two gentlemen came by. “What would you be interested in?” they asked. I said, “What I’m interested in is a bit of World War II history.” “Ah,” they said, “Military trains?” “No, civilian passenger traffic on special schedules.” “Ah,” said one of them, “Auschwitz! Treblinka!” Somewhat astonished by the quick recognition of what I was asking for from my sheer expression of interest in special trains, I asked him how he could know? And he said, “Oh, railroad people get around.” He had seen ghettos. He had been to Katyn. He was the first one there when the grave, with all those Polish officers shot by the Soviets, was opened. I listened for ten minutes. Then the other one, who had been quiet, said, “Look. We’re having an early lunch. Why don’t you come with us to the commissary? If you eat by yourself it will cost you twelve mark, and with us it will cost you three.” “That’s very kind.”
We came back to the office. He xeroxed cards of books he thought would interest me. He patiently explained to me why German railroad cars had four wheels rather than eight. It has to do with superior German metallurgy. He explained to me technical matters pertaining to how trains were routed through timetable zones. And then I chanced to ask him about a person named Geitmann, whom you would not have heard of even though he was, in the 1960s, a member of the four-man directorate running the Bundesbahn, the German railroads. This man Geitmann was, during the war, a railroad director of Oppeln, which included the death camp of Auschwitz. Like so many of these railroad people, even like the German railroads themselves that never stopped running, he had made a magnificent career after the war. I said, “Well, what can you tell me about Geitmann, perchance?” My host, a rugged, tall man, around the age of sixty, said, “I know Geitmann.” Interesting. “How? Where? When?” He said, “I was in the railroad directorate of Oppeln.” We went on talking, this way and that. The hour was getting late, but he did not go home. He stayed with me. And then he said, “I have seen Auschwitz.” I said to myself: Perhaps this is a German who made a pilgrimage after the war. Aloud I said, “Did you make a pilgrimage?” “Oh, no. I was there, then.” “What did you do there?” “I put up the signal equipment.” “Are you an engineer?” He said, “Yes.” He wanted me to know. He had no need to tell me. I had walked in off the street. He knew who I was and what I was doing, though the word “Jews” was never mentioned. He told me, and I saw the perpetrator. Was he so very different from all the accountants, all the engineers, all the professionals who by reason of something that touched their jurisdiction were drawn into the destructive work? I am speaking not of volunteers but of men who at some point had to deal with the Jews because the matter was at the stage that required their attention, expertise, and efficiency. Amazing to me, after involving myself for thirty years in this research, is still the question: Why were they not inefficient?
When Milgram performed his experiment at Yale, his model comprised an authority figure and men who did as they were told. How accustomed we are to thinking in these terms about the administrative process in totalitarian systems. The reality, however, was much more complex. The bureaucracy that destroyed the European Jews was remarkably decentralized, and its most far-reaching actions were not always initiated at the top. Officials serving in middle or even lower positions of responsibility were producers of major ideas. Every once in a while, a particular set of recommendations would be approved by a superior and become a policy, authorization, or directive. Often enough, such was the genesis of an “order.”
Consider a crass but not isolated illustration from the middle of 1941, at a time when the “Final Solution” was in the offing. A letter was dispatched by an SS major in Lodz to his comrade Eichmann about several hundred thousand Jews in the Lodz area. The major thought that during the following winter many Jews would be starving to death in their ghettos. He therefore suggested a quick working device to relieve the unproductive older men as well as women and children of their misery. We cannot determine the exact effect of that communication, but we know that within months “devices” in the form of gas vans were in operation near Lodz and elsewhere. By then, memoranda were hardly even necessary; there was no further need for words. Everyone, in every segment of the bureaucracy, knew what had to be done. Few were the dissenters, fewer the deserters.
You have all heard the saying that a bureaucrat is merely a cog in the wheel—it turns whenever the wheel is turning. As a political scientist, I have a different view: The bureaucrat drives the wheel—without him, it would not turn. And who were these drivers? They were, by and large, like the men in the railroads, trained representatives of a society, rather than its aberrants, deviants, or outcasts. Even Heinrich Himmler, Chief of the German SS and Police, may be said to have been typical of a particular class, place, and time. In a biography written by Bradley Smith,* we learn of his upbringing in a reasonably well-to-do family, his formative years with a governess, his childhood illnesses, and his education. Smith possessed a diary kept by the young Himmler from the time he was about twelve to the age of twenty-six. Himmler had his problems and frustrations, but he had not lost his senses or his ability to make calculated judgments. He was not demented. Now, wouldn’t you be happier if I had been able to show you that all of these perpetrators were crazy?
They were educated men of their time. That is the crux of the question whenever we ponder the meaning of Western civilization after Auschwitz. Our evolution has outpaced our understanding; we can no longer assume that we have a full grasp of the workings of our social institutions, bureaucratic structures, or technology.
Should we wait for comprehension? Should we suspend our analysis until we have more documents, from more countries, of that period? Should we defer to another generation that may bring to the task its own new perspective? I do not think so. Those of us who have lived during the destruction of the Jews or who have first-hand knowledge of something that transpired at that time will read records with a contemporaneous interpretation of their contents. We may identify nuances, allusions, references that may be puzzling to those who come after us. We can therefore make our special contribution to an understanding of this event because we were part of it.
Originally published in The Holocaust: Ideology, Bureaucracy, and Genocide, ed. Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton (Millwood, NY: Kraus International Publications, 1980), 95–102.
* Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod. Stücke, Teil 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976). English Translation: Garbage, the City and Death, published in: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Plays (New York: PAJ Publications, 1985).
* Bradley F. Smith, Heinrich Himmler: A Nazi in the Making, 1900–1926 (Stanford, 1971).