Does the Nazi Holocaust stand alone?

Great Debates
21

But bear with me. The Holocaust was unique in one way, in that there wasn’t a reason for it.

In other atrocities of recent times, there was usually a reason, a goal, and the genocide was a particularly evil means of achieving that goal. For example, in Rwanda, the Tutsis had been made an elite minority by the former colonial administration. In Cambodia, the educated middle-class and elites were a potential source of opposition to the Khmer Rouge. In Russia, the famine was part and parcel of Stalin’s forced mass industrialization of the country, as well as an opportunity to eliminate the kulaks, another potential source of opposition.

I’m not saying any of these were good reasons, but at least there was an end result that, theoretically, could have benefited those ordering or committing the genocide.

I don’t think the Holocaust had a “reason” like that. It was a goal in and of itself. And to me, that makes it more horrible.

Sua

22

I’ll second that! Sure the Holocaust was an event unlike anything we have seen before or since. Boys are different than girls, does that mean that we cannot see them as the same in many ways?

Denying the connection of the Holocaust to other atrocities does nothing but turn its memorial into a self-serving, egotistical rant by the Jewish people (look at me, my people suffered, but don’t you dare try to learn anything from it!).

When my family celebrates the Passover every spring (although I admit it is far, far from an orthodox seder; I am Jewish by culture and tradition, not by faith) which celebrates the escape of the Jews from opression under Pharaoh, we make direct connections to that plight and the plight of the Jews under Hitler. In fact, for me the whole point of that holiday is to gather and remember both persecution and perseverance of all peoples throughout history, and to join in solidarity with all who have suffered oppression and tyrany. Otherwise, what’s the bloody point of remembering in the first place?

23

…but didn’t the mentality that rose under Hitler actually spawn from the severe penalties inflicted on Germany after WWI? I seem to remember that the Allies demanded payment from Germany for losses caused by the war, or something like that. This sent them into a state of perpetual economic depression, or recession, or one of those “ession” words. Hatred for Jews was easy to come by because the Jews tended to be better off financially for a variety of reasons (sorry for dipping into the stereotype). The Jews became easy targets because “they aren’t even real Germans, but they’ve got more money than us.”

I might be off base on some of this, but I think it boiled down to the fact that the Jews were the “haves” and Aryan Germans were the “have-nots”.

So, to say there wasn’t a reason for the German hatred of Jews isn’t really true. It was just more subtle.

24

i don’t think it is that as much as people’s Us vs. Them mentality, which causes people to group up into little tribes, and bicker with others over stupid things, leading to long-standing feuds, with each side acting on a sense of “revenge” for the “wrongs” commited by the other side, to justify their own unethical actions. Parts of Europe are a good example of this, different groups are fighting feuds hundreds of years old, with neither side going to let up. These people are all cowards, no one is willing to make the first steps for peace.

The Holocaust stands alone in the fact that it is so well documented compared to the others. We may have heard of Pol Pot, but we don’t see pictures of the crimes in our history books. So we feel it is not important enough. After all, who cares about these nameless, faceless people, if they live or die, it doesn’t affect us? German men probably thought the same thing about the Jews being rounded up, before they were forced into the army to do Hitler’s will. (and forced is a good word for many of them, if they tried to leave, they were killed).

People need to accept that what happens to others can happen to you, so don’t let it happen to anyone.

A lot of the mentality came from the severe penalties presented to the Germans after the First World War, the Great Depression didn’t help matters, and when bad times are around, people will listen to voices, any voices, that offer a better time. Hitler and his cronies were one such voice, they offered an easy solution, and easy scapegoat, and the promise to make Germany strong again. Many people had no idea what they were getting into, though the signs were there.

25

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Tars Tarkas *
**

I’ll address this first, peripheral as it is to the OP, since it has been mentioned twice in this thread as, at the very least, a sort of justification for Germans going off the deep end and permitting the Holocaust to occur. It doesn’t wash.

Students of history can look back on the War of 1870, in which Germany humiliated France, captured its capital, lopped off its territory (Alsace and Lorraine) and imposed a crushing financial indemnity. France survived all that, overcame subsequent revolution (i.e. the Commune) and widespread anti-Semitism (recall the Dreyfus case?) without turning to wholesale slaughter of an ethnic group. There’s nothing unique about Germany’s position after the Great War. Its homeland was undefiled by war*, while other European nations had suffered comparable or greater losses of life and economic disaster.

That’s the crux of the case. What other modern Western nation (our supposed model for the pinnacle of civilization) has perpetrated anything remotely like the Holocaust? Why were the German people so receptive to this poison and why did this unbelieveable calamity occur? I’m not sure we yet know - but I’m sure it’s not beneficial to Germans to say “Well, the people of any nation could have done this under the circumstances.” They didn’t.

astorian has brought up an important point. While this certainly isn’t true of many people who play down the uniqueness of the Holocaust, denial of the Holocaust’s place in history is a staple of anti-Semites who want to minimize Jewish suffering by implying that the event wasn’t particularly special.

On another note, while it may be gratifying or intellectually satisfying to, as Pjen has, suggest that the U.S. treatment of Native Americans and blacks lies on an equal plane with the Holocaust, it’s false. As ugly, stupid, vicious (and on occasion, murderous) as the treatment of those groups has been in our history, it has never been in the realm of a deliberate attempt at mass extermination. You can round up all historical incidences of colonialism and racism and attempt to throw them in the pot with the Holocaust, and all you do is show a misunderstanding of history and a lack of respect for the victims of the Holocaust.

*unlike that of France, large portions of which were devastated by four years of German occupation which at times included murder of civilians and deliberate poisoning of the land and water supplies. When I indicated in the above-linked death penalty thread that the German government should think twice about an overweening sense of national moral superiority based on 20th century events (the statement that Pjen finds “flippant”), I was referring to the launching and conduct of the First World War as well as the Holocaust and other forms of Nazi oppression and killing.

26

Ummm, we Jews have historically had assets like money & jewelry & lovely candlesticks & so on for a couple of cultural reasons largely imposed by goyim. First of all, we were often not allowed to own property. If a goy was doing well, he could take his money & buy himself a nice piece of land, have an investment, a solid asset. We did not have that option in many countries. Also, our religious precepts do not forbid usury as Christianity once did, so we could lend out our money & recoup some interest. Nobody thinks that’s evil these days when they sign up for a mortgage ay 8.5% interest, or pay the interest charges on their credit cards, but 200 years ago we were thought of as being in league with the devil because we did that.

My point is that we may have seemed to have more money around, but that doesn’t mean we had more assets. Most Germans, however, saw things as you do & there was a lot of resentment.

27

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Jackmannii *
**

I see the holocaust as probably the worst systematic, planned attempted destruction of another people. Its immediacy, its well-documentedness, its use of technology, and its occurrence in a ‘developed’ country make it especially horrific. However, it is merely an extension of the horrors that have been inflicted on ‘the other’ throughout history.

To try to demonize modern day Germans because of that period of history (whilst conveniently ignoring the Poles, Ukranians, Austrians etc. who took part in the same process, and other nations who shipped their Jews voluntarily for extermination) is to ignore the lessons of history. Jackmanni suggested that modern German’s views on societal issues were tainted by their history.

My argument was:

If the Germans are to be excluded from moral argument for their behaviour, THEN

Perhaps the genocide of the Native Americans and Chattel Slave Africans and their descendants might preclude the US from moral argument in a similar way.

It was a debating point and there was no direct comparision with the Holocaust as a whole, only stating that the extermination of groups of Native Amricans could be seen as willed and planned, and the Slavery has nasty similarities to Nazi racial ideology.

The implication was ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.’ (Though I am not a Christian, this is a good starting point for morals, as is ‘Turn the other cheek’, and ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged’, and ‘Vengenace is mine sayest the Lord’)

It is an even cheaper debating point to go on to imply that placing the Shoah in relation to other acts of inhumanity is lessening the sacrifice of its victims (and by implication that to do so is anti-semitic).

IMHO it is appropriate to point out where events of lesser horror reflect and/or imitate elements of the Shoah. By doing so we may place other historic events in relation to the Shoah, and assess current day practices similarly.

28

BTW, if you are interested in Hitler, and what makes a person into someone who attempts Hitler’s kind of things, I greatly recommend “Explaining Hitler”. I’ve read all of it, and it serves as a sort of shortcut to having read many other books about him. Many views and proposals are discussed, and the author is very careful and reasonable. I really enjoyed it.

The only complaint is that there is never any consideration of a spiritual side to the things he did or thought.

29

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Pjen *
**

No. I made it abundantly clear to you in the above-linked death penalty thread that German citizens have a perfect right to make any ethical or moral judgments they wish. My objection was to lofty self-righteous proclamations by the German government. Why continue distorting my views when you can state them accurately?

I’m sorry you haven’t learned much about the offensiveness of diminishing the Holocaust by false comparison. Perhaps it will sink in over time.

30

IMHO the lessons of WW2 and the Holocaust have still to be fully learnt.
Witness in Britain the labelling of ‘asylum seekers’, ‘the un-employed’, ‘single mothers’, ‘ultra-leftists’, ‘communists’, ‘anarchists’, ‘envronmentalists’, and a whole host of others as the cause of the debasing of society. Unfortunately many countries leaders still exploit patriotism and scape-goating as weapons of political propoganda.
Hitler did not invent concentration camps. The british during the Boer War erected them before him.
It seems to me that at this present moment they’re are many ‘neo-hitlers’ in positions of power in most democratic countries.
Those in glass house should not throw stones it is true, our own countries are busy too manufacturing official enemies. Who might be next?

Sorry if this is a bit rambling, it is my first post.

Peace to all

Ernie

31

Dave Swaney

How interesting because just last night I watched Connections 3 on cable (I love that show!) and he mentioned that way back when, some German guy, unhappy about how the Germans were being Germans, mainly Germany split into something like a couple of dozen little city states, went and decided to ‘create’ a great past German heritage, based on the idea that the Germans were the Original People of the world. (This concept came back to life a couple of hundred years later with Hitler.) So, he ‘created’ Gothic architecture, created various German myths, which started the ball rolling for Germans to unify into one nation and to be of the opinion that they were better than everyone else.

Your idea is pretty good, but I’d like to add that the German people seem to be easily persuaded into violence and nearly blind obedience in any cause that sets them above anyone else. Kind of odd considering that their original stock was the independent Vikings.

SuaSponte

I think you have a valid point generally, but, in a warped sort of way, there was. The Jews have a history of not only being very prosperous, but very clannish and through history, one can see many points of resentment directed against them. Toss in the fact that Christians blame the Jews for executing the Son of God, whom the Jews do not believe in, and Germans were mostly Christian (hard to believe, right)?, and that Jews back then, for various reasons, not all their own fault, were not all that popular in many nations and you have a Scapegoat.

For a major revolution like Hitler’s to work, you must have a scapegoat. The Jews had plenty of money and were mainly the bankers in Germany, which was in bad shape after getting their butts kicked in WW1. Hitler hated the Jews and by some miracle of oratory power alone, managed to turn almost an entire nation against them. He focused the German anger at being defeated in WW1 at them, blamed them for the slow economic restoration of the nation afterwards, compared their ‘richness’ of the time to the average German’s poverty, and orchestrated the biggest manipulation of thinking people into murder that the world has ever known.

Without the Jews, it is possible that Hitler might not have been able to drive his people into the rage required for attacking another nation and starting a war. He then confiscated the Jewish riches and used it to finance his military. Then, while exterminating the Jews, he used them as unpaid slave labor, letting them think that so long as they produced well, they would live, but having no intention of keeping them alive very long. As the war raged on, they were both a useful resource of labor and a burden consuming supplies.

Without the Jewish forced labor, Hitler might have had problems advancing as fast as he did across Europe.

I mean, when you think about it, he could have simply confiscated their properties and kicked them out of the country, but they were valuable for propaganda used to unite Germany, a big free labor force full of various useful skills, and a focus to prove to his followers that other people were inferior to Germans.

It actually boggles the mind to think how one man could turn an entire nation against a racial group to the point of legal murder and abuse within the space of a couple of years and that thinking, feeling, intelligent people let it happen.

The Holocaust was remarkably different from current mass murders on a whole lot of levels.

It should never have happened.

32

**

Learn to avoid such awful generalizations. Also, the Vikings were Nordic. Germans descended from ancient Germanic tribes, not Vikings.

**

In Europe, Jews were prosperous because they most of them were forced into usury by Christian doctrine. Jews were not clannish; they were economically, socially and legally segregated from the Christian population. It was only after the rise of liberalism after the French Revolution that Jewish populations, mostly in Western Europe, began to culturally and linguistically assimilate into the general population.

**

Even before Hitler’s appearance in the German consciousness, anti-Semitism in Europe had progressed from a hatred fueled by religious fervor into one fueled by nationalism and scientific concepts of race and biology.

**

Hitler never initiated a revolution. The Nazi party was voted into power democratically, after which he kept his campaign promise to abolish German democracy. Hitler never invented the use of Jews as scapegoats, he appropriated what had already been a common European practice for well over a thousand years. Hitler never managed to convert Germany to his cause through anti-Semitism; he converted them by convincing the German people that they were a superior people, that they were a people unjustly oppressed by those weaker than themselves; in short, he appealed to their nationalist pride and patriotism. He used arguments of anti-Semitism, German destiny and Aryan racial myths to buttress feeling of German pride and his own power.

**

Nationalist fervor drove the German people’s willingness to go to war. Anti-Semitism was merely one means to that end. Also, those Jews who were lucky enough to be chosen for slave labour, rather than immediate extermination, were under absolutely no illusions about their chances for survival in the long-term, or about the Nazi’s willingness to execute them at any given moment.

He tried; no other nation would take them. Previous to WWII the Nazis encouraged the emigration of Jews from Germany - this never worked, however, since no other nation was willing to allow large numbers of Jews to immigrate.

It was, I think, more an instinctive obediance to authority figures rather than rabid anti-Semitism that drove the German people’s willingness to committ acts of mass murder. Check out Christoper Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland for more details on this.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060995068/familyhaven/104-2394178-1105540

33

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Jeff *
**

“Most” Jews were not userers. Look at whatever employment stats exist for the time and you’ll find a lot of small shopkeepers, traders, miscellaneous workmen and professionals - but the “Jewish bankers” stereotype is one that’s been way overdone.

Nice job disposing of the “clannishness” stereotype though. Plus, the persecuted tend to stick together for protection. For some, that equals “clannishness”.

34

**

Whoops, you’re right. I’m just running on memory, so please excuse any such misleading generalizations. I’m not sure if I’m right about the Viking issue either.

**

Gracias.

35

Memo to self on spelling - it’s usurers.

36

I know that some people at my old high school had somehow been taught that the Nisei(sp?) internment camps were equal to the Nazi concentration camps. And these are people I like and respect, I mean what the fuck? As bad and unethical as those camps were, we never undertook a program of extermination of our Japanese citizens. Our prophaganda(sp?) may have been very nasty and racist, but I don’t think we even came close to what the Nazis did.

And I don’t recall a Nazi equivilent to the 442nd Infantry (a Nisei combat unit sent to fight in Italy towards the end of WW2, establishing an excellent combat record.) I don’t recall a Jewish Regiment in the battle for Berlin.

37

Lots of good points in that post, Jeff, but I’m not entirely sure this was true. IIRC, the Nazis were the party with the highest percentage of votes in the final democratic election, but this was less than 40%. Also, Hitler abolished democracy after the Reichstag fire, which he used to whip up fear of communists and anarchists who were blamed for it (I think it’s still uncertain exactly who did set fire to the building, but the Nazis certainly benefited politically from it.)

I’d also like to second Dave S.'s recommendation of Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler, particularly for its bringing to light the history of the SA in the months before Hitler came to power. What is most of interest is that the left-wing press of the time (what Hitler called The Poisoned Kitchen), particularly the Munich Press, were doing what they could to expose the Nazis as a bunch of murderous criminals, who day after day would beat up or kill opponents. The fact that this was in the news leading up to Hitler’s election goes against the common perception that the Germans had no idea what they were getting into by electing him.

Also, the specific anti-Jewish rhetoric that linked the First and Second World Wars was based around the ‘stab in the back’ myth. At the end of WWI, the German generals were so embarrassed by their military defeat, that despite begging their politicians to surrender, they afterwards spread the story that they could have won the war, but were ‘stabbed in the back’ by the government, who were backed by ‘Jewish interests’. Hitler claims in Mein Kampf that it was upon hearing of this ‘betrayal’, as a nearly blind soldier in military hospital, that he decided on his mission in life - to destroy the Jews.

38

My point was that Hitler and the Nazi party assumed power using the framework of law and articles of the Weimar Constitution, and as such their takeover never amounted to a revolution. They used two emergency provisions written into the constitution itself to garner their power.

The first, article 48, allowed the president to suspend constitutional guarantees of civil liberties and negate the power of the state governments. This was passed by Hindenburg the morning after the Reichstag fire and was still in effect when the Nazis took office. It was never rescinded.

Article 25 allowed the Reichstag to grant legislative power to the Chancellor in the event of a 2/3 majority vote. This was done soon after the election, and confirmed by a victory of 441 to 94 (though 107 socialist members were prevented from voting). Intended, like Article 48, as temporary emergency measure, it too was never rescinded.

Prior to the elections, the Nazis had been rather upfront about their goals. Goebbels was quoted saying: “We will become members of the Weimar order with its own acquiescence…we come as enemies.”

39

This isn’t an exercise in German-bashing, but to suggest taking a look at another untidy piece of German history, the mostly-successful extermination of the Herero in the German South West Africa colony, at the beginning of the 20th Century.

In many ways, this was just a warm-up for the Holocaust, with something between 85-90% of the Herero being killed.

Too, without taking away from the tragedy of the Jews in the Holocaust, there were also others who were marked for extermination as a group. And even the Poles, according far less than second-class citizenship, were killed in the millions, even if they weren’t Jews.

Just broadening the picture…

40

It’s true that the Nazis “won” the election with 40% of the vote, but even that needs some qualification.

Imagine if the Reform party over the next three years recruited ten thousand thugs for essentially a private army, and then proceeded to beat Republicans at rallies, kill Libertarian candidates, and firebomb newspapers that endorsed Democrats.

People might get the idea that to vote another way would be to put your personal neck in great danger.