The Irish Times
January 27, 2005
The Final Solution
History is littered with genocide but none compares to the diabolism
of the Third Reich, writes Kevin Myers
Die Endlosung, the final solution, the extermination of Europe’s
Jews, was administratively agreed upon at the Wannsee conference in
Berlin in January 1942. Hitler had probably made up his mind to
exterminate world Jewry after he had declared war against the US the
month before. But before the 15 pencils and pads were laid neatly
around the large mahogany table in the lakeside Wannsee mansion, the
momentum towards genocide had been gathering from deep within
European history.
Widespread anti-Semitism was but one factor in the creation of the
necessary psychology for mass murder. After all, it had long existed
in Europe. The Jews had been chased out of England and Spain in the
middle ages and had sought refuge in the vast and relatively
unpopulated tracts around the Vistula. Subsequently, anti-Semitism
had remained a feature of most societies – but without it being
expressed in terms of organised mass murder.
The arrival of Leninist totalitarianism brought with it the great
enabling idea that the state – not law, nor monarch nor pontiff – was
the supreme authority. And this was not some uniquely Christian
perversion. The notion that the population of the state could be
murderously engineered was first enunciated by the Jewish Bolshevist
Gregory Zinoviev in September 1918.
“To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism.
We must win over to our side 90 million out of the hundred millions
of the inhabitants of Russia under the Soviets. As for the rest of
them, we have nothing to say to them: they must be exterminated.”
The annihilation of class enemies became a commonplace under the
Soviet Union: but though mass murder became a feature of the purges,
the primary purpose of the infamous Gulag was to supply the state
with free labour. The idea of a death camp, where the state used
industrial principles to maximise the output of not economic products
but dead humans, was the singular achievement of the Third Reich.
Of course, killing one’s tribal enemy is as old as mankind. Dead
Philistines and Egyptians brought a sombre joy to the authors of the
Old Testament. Even the term genocide applies to earlier events. The
Mongols are said to have killed 35 million Chinese peasants in the
14th century, and though modern Turkey hotly disputes the word to
describe the Armenian massacres in 1915 – largely, as it happens, by
Kurds – many historians feel the term fits. But nothing in history
quite compares with the Third Reich’s diabolism.
The Final Solution actually began with a euthanasia programme in
German hospitals. Eight thousand children were killed with the
barbiturate luminol.
Other experiments revealed the efficacy of gassing. The gun also
proved useful: the final programme to rid the Reich of the mentally
ill involved shooting 50,000 patients.
When in January 1939, Hitler publicly promised the extermination of
the Jewry of Europe in the event of war, he had probably still not
decided on the wholesale murder of the entire population of Jews.
More likely, what he had in mind was the elimination of the Jews of
the east and the deportation to Madagascar of the “civilised” Jews of
Germany.
That option was ruled out by the continued maritime dominion of the
Royal Navy: hence, as his “Jewish problem” mounted with his victories
in the East, the Final Solution.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of this programme was its
irrationality – though to be sure, it was not entirely irrational.
Jews who could work experienced an even worse fate than those who
were killed outright: they were worked to death.
But there was nonetheless something bizarrely dysfunctional about
reducing doctors, physicists and engineers to manual slave labour. To
have used their intellect would, of course, have undermined the
underlying thesis of the “untermensch”.
Contrary to popular mythology, Nazi Germany was not a single
monolith, remorselessly and ruthlessly obeying orders from the apex.
The general tone was set by Hitler, but his will was imposed through
a myriad of competing agencies. Even the implementation of the Final
Solution involved many organisations, orchestrated by the formal host
of the Wannsee conference, Adolf Eichmann. Even individuals involved
varied startlingly. The elimination of Jews could be executed by the
exquisitely-mannered, Mozart-loving Catholic intellectual Artur
Seyss-Inqart, the butcher of the Netherlands, or by his fellow
Austrian, Odilo Globocnik, a violent and personally disgusting brute
whom his fellow Nazis loathed.
It is this mix, where the mannered and outwardly cultivated consorted
with the truly barbaric, which made the Third Reich so utterly evil.
Thus the unspeakable was fastidiously recorded: Idi Amin meets
bureaucracy. On December 29th, 1942, Hitler received a report from
Himmler written using a special large typeface because of the
Fuhrer’s failing eyesight. It declared that in the Ukraine alone,
special units had executed 363,211 Jews; and in all that murderous
filth, someone was counting. But it was the fate of the Jews of
Salonika which underlines the military insanity of the Final
Solution. Using scarce railway resources at the height of the war,
45,000 were sent the 1,600 km to the muddy horrors of Auschwitz. Just
three survived.
>From the opening days of the war, anti-Semitism had been its keynote,
as the Volkdeutsche Selbschultz – auxiliary units of ethnic Germans
in Poland – fell on their Jewish neighbours, and murdered them simply
because they were Jews.
They were the pioneers for all that followed. Two million Soviet Jews
shot or gassed in situ. Half a million Polish Jews killed in their
ghettoes. Up to two million Jews killed in Treblinka. Nor was it a
German affliction alone. Ukrainians and Balts in particular were
enthusiastic Jew-killers, and Romanian fascists murdered a quarter of
a million Jews.
So Auschwitz stands as a useful concrete symbol of the greatest crime
in Europe’s history: but the Final Solution could anyway have
occurred without it. Moreover, it had been foreshadowed by Stalin’s
camps, and its liberation did not spell the end of murderous racism
on the continent.
Incredibly, the first post-war anti-Semitic pogrom occurred in Poland
a few months later, and the glories of Bosnia lay half a century ahead.