One of the most frightening aspects of the Holocaust, is that it was perpetrated in a time which we regard as modern. Modern society was not able to prevent the Holocaust from happening, and we do not know whether modern society has developed any more checks than it possessed fifty years ago, to prevent such a recurrence. The Holocaust has demonstrated the potential of modern civilisation, although for many, such potential remains unrealised.
The Holocaust could clearly not have been perpetrated without the use of modern technology. Technology not only gave the Nazis the ability to murder an astonishing amount of Jews, but technology enabled the perpetrators to be such. Technology separated the act from the consequences. Shooting a Jew in the back of the neck enabled the perpetrator to see the direct result of his actions, no matter how great the shooting distance may have been. Such direct contact with the victim had disturbing psychological consequences for the perpetrator, as we could imagine. However, this problem was reduced with the invention of the gas chambers, which "reduced the role of the killer to that of sanitation officer asked to empty a sackful of 'disinfecting chemicals' through an aperture in the roof of a building the interior of which he was not prompted to visit."1 Modern technology enabled the perpetrators to be alienated from their actions. Such detachment from the result of ones actions enabled murder to be perpetrated with the least anguish suffered by the perpetrator. The gas chambers were often labelled as "baths and disinfecting rooms", while vans painted with the insignia of the Red Cross carried the lethal Cyclon B crystals. While the "sanitation officer" may not have been obliged to enter the gas chamber, it was necessary for someone to hose down the heap of fouled bodies, just as someone else had to transport the dead corpses, and another had to remove the gold teeth from mouths that had choked for fresh air. Someone operated the crematorium, which was able to burn forty-five bodies every twenty minutes.
The capacity of destruction at Auschwitz was little short of two hundred bodies an hour... Nyiszli estimates each crematorium amassed some eighteen to twenty pounds of gold a day. It was melted into small ingots and sent to swell the resources of the Reich in Berlin.2
The German nation, controlled by the Nazis divested much of its energy into the production of Jewish corpses. Everything from the making of trains to carry the victims, to the communications that controlled the entire process, was the end product of a technologically advanced civilisation that decided to turn its economy, as well as its inmost soul, over to manufacturing death.3
This is what civilised society is capable of, the mobilisation of all its available resources to create a world not of this one. Technological advance enabled hell to be created on earth. However, one must not forget that despite the modern killing factories created by the Nazis, half of the Jews were murdered by means of bullets, famine and disease, that is, primitive forms of mass murder. For example, in Russia the Einsatzgruppen
would enter a village or a city and order the prominent Jewish citizens to call together all Jews for the purpose of resettlement. They were requested to hand over their valuables to the leaders of the unit, and shortly before the execution to surrender their outer clothing. The men, women and children were led to a place of execution which in most cases was located next to a more deeply excavated anti-tank ditch. Then they were shot, kneeling or standing, and the corpses thrown into the ditch.4
No great use of technology was needed in such cases of cold blooded murder. However, the Holocaust in its dreadful entirety could not have been committed without the advance of modern technology, which enabled death to become an industrialised scientific process.
While those people who worked in the concentration and death camps are obviously seen as perpetrators, and were important cogs in the machinery of the Holocaust, we cannot afford to ignore those who are perhaps not seen to have played as great a role in the perpetration of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was not perpetrated without the participation of many German bureaucrats at all levels. It was modern bureaucracy that made the Holocaust possible. "The final solution did not clash at any stage with the rational pursuit of efficient, optimal goal-implementation. On the contrary, it arose out of a genuinely rational concern, and it was generated by bureaucracy true to its form and purpose."5 Too many people allowed the Holocaust to happen, from the rail road workers to clerks in offices. It seems that it was so easy to disassociate what one was doing to the horrors occurring in Eastern Europe. The rail road workers carried out their jobs as always, only the cargo changed. And if they had been disturbed by the fate of the new cargo, the need to feed their families and the thought that they could not make a difference to the fate of the Jews anyway, would have no doubt eased many consciences. Almost one and a half million people worked for the Reichsbahn (railway) in Germany, and four hundred thousand in Poland and Russia. "All must have known of the palpable cruelty, many of the actual stench of death, inseparable from these journeys."6 Are we surprised to learn that not a single Reichsbahn official protested? The officials were incredibly efficient, to quote Hilberg, "despite difficulties and delays, no Jew was left alive for lack of transport."7 No-one made any enquiries.
Todays modern society is so incredibly apathetic, how much suffering would we allow for another as long as we are quite safe? It is impossible to know whether, fifty years after the Holocaust, we would also allow ourselves be absorbed into some other machinery of destruction.
Thorough comprehensive, exhaustive murder required the replacement of the mob with a bureaucracy, the replacement of shared rage with obedient authority. The requisite bureaucracy would be effective whether manned by extreme or tepid anti‑Semites, considerably broadening the pool of potential recruits; it would govern the actions of its members not by arousing passions but by organising routines; it would only make distinctions it was designed to make, not those its members might be moved to make, say, between children and adults, scholar and thief, innocent and guilty; it would be responsible to the will of the ultimate authority through a hierarchy of responsibility ‑ whatever that will might be.8
Karl Dietrich Bracher 9 believes that Nazi Germany operated as a dual system. The inner part consisted of the "SS state", while the outer part was made up of the traditional establishment, including the civil service, the army, schools, universities and churches.
This latter system was allowed separate existence to the end, but was also increasingly penetrated, manipulated, perverted. And since it resisted the process sporadically and never radically, it enabled the SS state to do what it could never have done simply on its own.10
The Holocaust has demonstrated that despite centuries of accumulated knowledge humans are capable of the most terrible behaviour, and of ignoring all the moral laws that have ever existed. With regard to Cyclon B, which ended the lives of millions, J Borkin says the following,
There was still another episode that gave the officials of Degesch more than a hint of the dreadful purpose to which their Cyclon B was being put by the SS. When manufactured as a pesticide Cyclon B contained a special odour, or indicator, to warn human beings of its lethal presence. The inclusion of such a warning odour was required by German law. When the SS demanded that the new, large order of Cyclon B omit the indicator, no one familiar with the workings of the SS could have failed to realise the purpose behind the strange request. The Degesch executives at first were unwilling to comply. But compassion was not behind their refusal. What troubled them was the fact that the SS request endangered Degesch's monopoly position. The patent on Cyclon B had long since expired. However, Degesch retained its monopoly by a patent on the warning odour. To remove the indicator was bad business, opening up the possibility of unwelcome competition. The SS made short shrift of this objection and the company removed the warning odour. Now the doomed would not even know that it was Degesch's Cyclon B.11
Financial concerns, in this case, were of greater importance than those to be murdered by Cyclon B. Such was the bureaucracy in Germany in the 1940's, we cannot be sure that a similar bureaucracy does not operate in the society of the 1990's.
It is important to remember Dwight Macdonald's suggestion that in post‑Holocaust society, "it was not those who break the law but those most obedient to the law who would be the greatest threat to humanity."12 Or as Bauer states, "the horror of the Holocaust is not that in it humans deviated from human behaviour, the horror is that they didn't."13 It almost appears that we have ceased to be free thinking individuals with notions of what is and what is not acceptable. There is so much
that we are willing to accept and to believe, especially if a "higher authority" instructs, or simply suggests to us. It is frightening to think the extent to which each of us would follow orders. Milgram's experiments suggests that many more people than we would like to believe will obey orders to the end.
An important point is made by Kren and Rappoport (pp22‑23). Hitler's euthanasia program destroyed approximately seventy thousand Germans, who were regarded as being in some way, mentally or physically deficient. The number of deaths is likely to have been much greater had their not been a public outcry, with the bishop of Münster attacking the program from his pulpit. There was not a similar outburst regarding the horrors of Auschwitz or the many other Nazi camps. Perhaps this is because by 1943, the population of Germany was,
much more used to the idea of large‑scale death, and for another, Nazi control over all German institutions, including the church, was much increased. The whole apparatus and climate of repression was simply of a greater order magnitude than in 1940‑1. Those who considered public protest did not protest because by this time they were convinced that any such action would only lead to their speedy arrest and probable death.14
How frightening to think that we could become "used to the idea of large‑scale death". However, I believe that we have a remarkable ability, as humans, to develop high degrees of insensibility.
Rubenstein believes that "the very selection of Adolf Hitler by the German people and the demonic fascination he exerted upon them cannot be divorced from the radical rejection of normality and its restraints which took place under Nazism."15 Rubenstein proceeds to mention Freud's thought on the formation and obedience of groups who permit themselves cruelties and immoralities. Group behaviour according to Freud includes the intensification of affect and diminution of intellectual functioning... unquestioning loyalty to the leader and the identification of moral standards of his will." It is interesting to note that in Nazi Germany, all German officials were obliged to take an oath of allegiance to Hitler himself, rather than the constitution. Rubenstein believes that Hitler became the super ego of all Germans, "he became their conscience and source of judgment." Hitler is clearly seen as such a charismatic leader, that he was able to change the moral sensibilities of the "Aryan" population.16
A state is clearly able to violate the rights of man, as long as the majority of its people allow it. When a society faces what Kren and Rappoport call a crisis, its internal guidance mechanisms, such as institutions of law, education and religion, do not necessarily cease to function, but function in a way in which they are useless regarding the protection of humanity. All the checks and balances such institutions provide for society become irrelevant. The crisis faced by society is such, because such protective
measures contained by society's institutions prove totally inadequate with regard to the protection of human lives.
Leo Kuper warns us of the sovereignty claimed by a state, such sovereignty includes the "right to commit genocide, or engage in genocidal massacres, against people under its rule, and... the UN for all practical purposes, defends this right." 17
What a sovereign state may perpetrate against its people was a question raised by the Nuremberg war crimes trials. The presiding American judge recognised the "unlimited character of the state's sovereignty even in the extermination of its own citizens." Justice Robert Jackson argued that no state can sit in judgment of anothers treatment of its minorities. How can this be so? Surely the right to human life exceeds the right of the sovereign state to destroy life. Modern society defends the right of the sovereign state to do as it wishes to those who reside within its territorial boundaries, even when this involves infringement on the right to ones life. The Holocaust clearly stands apart from those genocides that preceded it. The Holocaust has shown us that in fact anything is possible. The Holocaust has demonstrated how far the civilising process can take us down the path of inhumanity, if we do not stop it in due time.
Another insight into the potential of civilised society is seen by the actions of national companies such as IG Farben during the Nazi era. IG Farben created a corporate‑sponsored slave labour camp for the Jews at Auschwitz, this camp, called Monowitz, was created to exploit Jews more effectively. Thus even German industry was able to collaborate directly with the SS in the destruction of European Jewry. Jewish inmates were to be exploited to the highest degree with the lowest level of expenditure, or in other words, they were to be worked to death. IG Farben was able to apply a cost‑benefit equation, the cost was Jewish lives, the benefit was reaching economic goals. The diet of IG Farben inmates was designed so that after three months if were not all dead, they would be unfit to work and were consequently sent to the gas chambers.18
We are also able to see what modern civilisation has given us when we look at how ghastly experiments were conducted on many prisoners. I am amazed to read of how medical practitioners were able to conduct experiments on human beings, but of course, Jews were never regarded as human, they were regarded as vermin to be exploited in as many ways imaginable. Medical experiments were conducted in order to advance German medical knowledge. Countless experiments were performed in the hope of discovering the best way to sterilise as many "undesireables" in as short a time as possible. Although, after much suffering it was finally decided that castration was in fact the most effective method. We can only be thankful that Nazi Germany was defeated, with their desires to sterilise non‑Aryans, while hoping to multiply the German nation. Technology within the medical sense was able to be exploited to the most obscene levels. Katz cites a letter from Claubey to Himmler on 7 June 1943. This letter records the results of a high altitude experiment conducted on a thirty‑seven year old Jew. I feel disturbed by simply reading such an account, but as Katz points out, the letter is written with the upmost of technical precision, scientific objectification and total detachment. The experiment was even recorded on film to be shown later. How astonishing the need for greater medical knowledge seems to be, the desire was in fact so great that so many
moral codes could be transgressed. Katz also gives an account of the experiments conducted by the builders of the crematoria on dead bodies, in order to discover the most efficient way of using the ovens.19 In such experiments it was realised that women's bodies burnt more easily than those of men. The Nazis were able to incorporate practically all aspects of German society into their machinery of destruction. One can only despair at the thought that our society is clearly not civilised enough, we have such a long way to go. In the years since the Holocaust it is difficult to believe that we have progressed down the path to greater civilisation. Today there exists much anti‑Semitic literature, and many deny the Holocaust altogether. We still have to learn from the lesson of the Holocaust.
1 Zygmunt Bauman, "Sociology after the Holocaust,"
British Journal of Sociology, (1988), 39: p493.