We cannot remain indifferent to the debate under way in Germany between those who tend to trivialize the Nazi slaughter (Nolte, Hillgruber) and those who assert its uniqueness (Habermas and many others).1 The thesis of the first group is not new: there have been massacres in every century, especially at the outset of this one, and in particular against the “class enemies” in the Soviet Union, hence near the German border. We, the Germans, during the Second World War, simply followed a horrible but by now established practice: an “Asian” practice made up of slaughters, mass deportations, merciless exile to hostile regions, torture, family separations. Our only innovation was technological: we invented the gas chambers. Incidentally, it’s precisely this innovation that was denied by the Faurisson school of “revisionists.”2 Thus the two arguments complete each other in a scheme of historical interpretation that cannot but cause alarm.
Granted, the Soviets cannot be absolved. The slaughter of the kulaks first and, later, the despicable trials and the countless cruel actions against real or alleged enemies of the people are extremely serious offenses. They led to the political isolation of the Soviet Union, which, to varying degrees and with the forced interval of the war, continues to this day. But no justice system absolves a murderer because there are other murderers in the house across the street. Moreover, it’s indisputable that these events were internal to the Soviet Union and that no outsider could have opposed them without resorting to a general war.
The new German revisionists tend to present Hitler’s slaughters as a preventive defense against an “Asian” invasion. This thesis seems to me extremely fragile. It’s far from certain that the Russians intended to invade Germany. On the contrary, they feared Germany, as demonstrated by the hasty Ribbentrop-Molotov pact; the subsequent, sudden German aggression of 1941 confirmed that those fears were justified. Further, it’s not clear how Stalin’s “political” massacres could find their mirror image in Hitler’s extermination of the Jewish people. It’s well-known that, before Hitler’s rise to power, German Jews were deeply German, intimately integrated into the country, considered enemies only by Hitler and the few fanatics who initially followed him. The identification of Judaism with Bolshevism, Hitler’s obsession, had no objective foundation, especially in Germany, where the vast majority of Jews notoriously belonged to the bourgeoisie.
It is true that “the Gulag existed before Auschwitz,” but it shouldn’t be forgotten that the purposes of the two hells were not the same. The first was a massacre among equals; it wasn’t based on racial supremacy, it didn’t divide humanity into superhumans and subhumans; the second was based on an ideology imbued with racism. Had it prevailed, we would find ourselves today in a world split in two: “we,” the masters, on one side, and all others their servants or exterminated because they were racially inferior. This contempt for the fundamental equality of rights among all human beings revealed itself in a multitude of symbolic details, from the Auschwitz tattoo to the use, in the gas chambers, of a poison originally produced to disinfest ships’ holds overrun by rats. The ruthless exploitation of the corpses, and of their ashes, is an exclusive feature of Nazism, and, in spite of those who would like to blur the contours of Hitler’s Germany, remains its emblem to this day.
It is in fact true that mortality in the Gulag was terribly high, but it was a sort of by-product, tolerated with cynical indifference. The primary purpose of the Gulag, however barbaric, had its own logic, consisting in the reinvention of a slave economy aimed at the “construction of Socialism.” Not even in Solzhenitsyn’s writings, trembling with justified rage, does anything similar to Treblinka and Chelmno appear; neither labor camps nor concentration camps, they were black holes for men, women, and children whose only crime was to be Jewish, places where people got off the trains only to enter the gas chambers, and from which no one came back alive. The Soviet invaders of Germany, after the martyrdom of their country (do you remember, among hundreds of episodes, the brutal siege of Leningrad?), were eager for revenge and were responsible for serious excesses, but there weren’t among them Einsatzkommandos, charged with machine-gunning civilians and burying them in huge mass graves that were often dug by the victims themselves. And although they harbored a justifiable craving for retaliation, the Soviets never planned the annihilation of the German people.
No one has ever claimed that there were “selections” in the Gulag, such as those, repeatedly described, which occurred in the German Lagers, where, after a quick look at a prisoner’s front and back, the SS doctors (doctors!) decided who could still work and who was to go to the gas chamber. And I don’t see how this “innovation” could be considered marginal and mitigated by an “only.” This development was not on the “Asian” model; it was thoroughly European. The gas was produced by renowned German chemical factories, German enterprises received the hair of the massacred women, and the gold in teeth extracted from the corpses went to German banks. All this is specifically German, and no German should forget it; nor should he forget that in Nazi Germany, and there alone, even children and the dying were sent to an atrocious death in the name of an abstract and ferocious radicalism without equal in modern times.
In the ambiguous debates that are under way, the fact that the Allies bear a heavy share of the blame has no relevance whatsoever. It’s true that no democratic country offered asylum to the Jews who were threatened or expelled. It’s true that the Americans refused to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz while they repeatedly bombarded the adjacent industrial district. And it’s also true that there were probably sordid reasons for the Allies’ failure to come to the rescue: the fear of having to shelter or support millions of refugees or survivors. But one can’t call this real complicity, and the moral and legal difference between those who take action and those who do nothing to oppose it remains immeasurable.
If today’s Germany cares about the place that it is entitled to among European nations, it cannot and should not whitewash its past.
La Stampa, January 22, 1987
1. Ernst Nolte (b. 1932) is a German historian and philosopher; Andreas Hillgruber (1925–1989) was a German historian; Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) is a German philosopher.
2. Robert Faurisson, a French professor and Holocaust denier, is discussed in several essays in Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1949–1980.