The Holocaust Flashcards
Bauer on the Holocaust and humanity
The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviatedfrom human norms; the horror is that it didn’t
Bauer on the importance of ideology to the Holocaust
Nazi racial antisemitic ideology was the central factor in the development toward the Holocaust
without a guiding ideological motivation andjustification, mass murder generally, and the intent to annihilate the Jewish people in particular, would have been unthinkable. Ideology is central.7
According to Bauer, what are the constituent elements of nazi ideology?
The Nazi motivations for killing the Jews consisted of, first, their view of them as Satan incarnate, out to control the world;
second, their view of them as corrupting parasites and vi- ruses whose elimination was a problem of world racial hygiene, in other words, a medical problem;
third, the Utopian dream of a new kind of humanity that would arise once the Jews were eliminated.
Nazi hatred of the jews
BAUER
racial ideology, which was the overarching element in Nazi ideology, was antisemitic at its very core, which means that antisemitism may have been the basic motivation for adopting a Social Darwinistic approach,
in Nazi eyes, the central enemy, the incarnation of the Devil. I would argue that the Nazis exter- nalized their concepts of absolute good and absolute evil into their notion of the Germanic, or Nordic, peoples of the Aryan race and the nonhuman Jewish anti-race, respectively.
Bauer on the rationality of the holocaust
The motivating ideology was purely nonpragmatic and irrational.
One major difference between the Holocaust and other forms of geno- cide is, then, that pragmatic considerations were central with all other genocides, abstract ideological motivations less so
the basic motivation was purely ideological, rooted in an illusionary world of Nazi imagination, where an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world was op- posed to a parallel Aryan quest. No genocide to date had been based so completely on myths, on hallucinations, on abstract, nonpragmatic, ideology—-which then was executed by very rational, pragmatic means.
Bauer on comparisons between Armenia and the Holocaust
In the Armenian genocide, arguably the closest parallel to the Holocaust, the motivation was political and chauvinistic, that is, it had a pragmatic basis.
The Jemiyet (Committee for Union and Progress) of Talaat and Enver and their clique, the so-called Young Turks, wanted to establish a Pan-Turkic empire stretching from Edirne, in European Turkey, to Kazakhstan, an empire dominated by Turkic-speaking peoples
Persecuted by the Turks, the Armenians naturally tended to seek support from the Russians, the bitter enemies of the Ottoman Empire. Autonomist and, by implication, independence-seeking Armenian polit- ical parties increased Turkish suspicions and were, in Turkish eyes, a threat at the very heart of Turkish ethnic territory.
Their genocide served the pragmatic purposes of political expansion, acquisition of land, confiscation of riches, elimination of economic com- petition, and the satisfaction of chauvinistic impulses of the revolution- ary core of the dominant ethnic group
Bauer on comparisons between the Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust
In the case of the Tutsis in Rwanda, the dominant clique of Hutus, led by a French-educated intelligentsia, was after the land that the Tutsis occupied—in an agricultural economy where land is scarce—and after the base of power of the Tutsi Rwandan class cum ethnic group, a minority that had comprised the traditional ruling class for centuries and had a record of oppressing the Hutu majority. This, again, was a pragmatically motivated genocide.10
Bauer on the global character of the holocaust
A second reason why the Holocaust is unprecedented is its global, indeed, universal character. All other genocides were limited geograph- ically; in most cases, the targeted group lived in a reasonably well defined geographic locale…In the case of the Jews, persecution started in Germany but spread all over what the Germans called the German sphere of influence in Europe and then became a policy of total murder.14 Because the Germans fully intended to control not just Europe but the world, whether directly or through allies, this meant that Jews would ultimately be hunted down all over the world.
Bauer on totality and the holocaust
A third element sets the Holocaust apart from other genocides: its in- tended totality. The Nazis were looking for Jews, for all Jews. According to Nazi policy, all persons with three or four Jewish grandparents were sentenced to death for the crime of having been born
Why, according to Bauer, was the holocaust unprecedented?
- Totality
- Global reach
- Irrationality
- ## Suffering in the camps
Bauer’s conception of the Holocaust as an ‘extreme’ genocide’
If this analysis is correct, then the Holocaust is an extreme form of genocide. It is important to restate what is meant here by “extreme.” The suffering of the victims of this genocide was in no sense greater than the suffering of victims of other genocides—there is no gradation of suffering.
Bauer on the novel use of the concentration camps in the Holocaust
- although the Nazis did not invent the concentration camp, they developed it in new ways.
- they deprived inmates of their “normal” human attributes by systematic humiliation, which reached its peak in their use of what may be called excretionary control—total humiliation by controlling human excretions.
- humiliation was not the result of planning but of a consensus that did not require orders or bureaucratic arrangements. In other words, probably the most extreme form of humiliation known to us was the natural result of the Nazi system.
Bauer on unprecedented suffering in the Holocaust?
one may add a fourth element of unprecedented- ness to the three mentioned above: because the Jews were at the bottom of the hell that was the Nazi concentration camp, they were the victims of an unprecedented crime of total humiliation and fared worse than others who were victims of the same crime.
Bauer’s distinction between ‘genocide’ and ‘holocaust’
I would argue that genocide is the proper name for the brutal process of group elimination accompanied by mass murder re- sulting in the partial annihilation of the victim population as described by Lemkin and the U.N. Convention. Total annihilation can be labeled Holocaust for want of a more acceptable word.
Bauer’s distinction between ‘genocide’ and ‘holocaust’
I would argue that genocide is the proper name for the brutal process of group elimination accompanied by mass murder re- sulting in the partial annihilation of the victim population as described by Lemkin and the U.N. Convention. Total annihilation can be labeled Holocaust for want of a more acceptable word.
Bauer on the distinction of the destruction of the poles from the destruction from the jews
For the Poles, there were no plans for total annihilation. A first draft of the so-called Gener- alplan Qst, which was submitted to Himmler at the end of 1941 by Dr. Konrad Meyer-Hetling, foresaw the expulsion of 31 million people in the Polish and Soviet areas and the Germanization of the rest
Dr. Erhard Wetzel, an important S.S. official and racial expert, found it “obvious that the Polish question cannot be solved in such a way that one would liquidate the Poles in the same manner as the Jews.
So: slavery, deportation, destruction of nationalities as identifiable groups, mass murder by hunger and by active killing—in other words, genocide. But not Holocaust.
Bauer on the genocide of Roma gypsies
150 000 died overall
In 1938, Himmler declared that the “solution” of the Gypsy problem should be in accordance with racial principles…The pure Gypsies, and those who were more Gypsy than German would be protected from destruction under an arrangement reminiscent of the Jewish Councils: nine Sinti chiefs would run these groups.
the main assault on the Roma was on the “half-breeds,” because the danger, from a Nazi point of view, was one of penetration of Gypsy blood into the Aryan race
The real test of Roma-related policies comes in the occupied Soviet territories. Orders given to the Einsatzgruppen in August 1941 appar- ently extended the murder from Jews and Communists to Roma. But three Einsatzgruppen, A, B, and C, did not look for Roma, so relatively few Roma were victimized.
The Nazis did not intend to murder all the Roma. In fact, Himmler writes in his appointment diary, on April 20, 1942, after a meeting with Hitler, “Keine Vernichtung der Zigeuner” (No extermination of the Gypsies).
Bauer on the usefulness of distinguishing holocaust and genocide
We differentiate for a pragmatic reason: to facili- tate the struggle against all these kinds of murder. Just as we cannot fight cholera, typhoid, and cancer with the same medicine, mass murder for political reasons has to be fought differently than genocides and Holocausts.
What, according to Bauer, are the parallels between the Holocaust and Other Genocides
- Suffering
- Always perpetrated using the best possible means available to the perpetrators
(‘Armenians were murdered with machine guns; telegraph, telephones, and railways were used; and Ottoman bureaucracy had acquired its efficiency by learning from French, German, and Austrian teachers. The Hutu in Rwanda used a centralized bureaucracy inherited from Belgian colonialism and radio communications to transmit detailed instruction to every corner of their country. They did not have gas, so they did not use it. The Germans had gas, modem military means, an excellent bureaucratic and propaganda machine, so they used these.’)
Gellately on the degree to which the fate of the jews was decided early on
Hitler and most others in the Nazi Party were certainly antisemitic and broadly racist, but what they wanted to do about it and other aspects of their still vaguely defined agenda was not settled.
‘swift brutalisation’
Gellately
The most dramatic period was heralded with the coming of war in 1939. The opening of hostilities in September 1939 not only affected social life from top to bottom, but soon ushered in far harsher measures, “swift justice,” and an increasing brutalization that affected the attitudes of both the dictatorship and the people. War made the regime more bloody-minded than ever, and it soon hardened people’s hearts and desensitized them to all kinds of inhumanities.
Gellately on the importance of ideology
the underlying racism was of central importance.
How did Hitler plant the idea of racial purification in the 1930s?
Gellately
- He spoke of his desire for the “conquest of new living space in the east and its ruthless Germanization.”
- From 1933 onward he began constructing the racially pure “community of the people,”
elimination of recognizable social types who disturbed the peace, beggars in the streets, recidivist criminals, chronic welfare cases, and others who would not conform to well-tried German values.5
The new regime soon made it clear that racism and specifically antisemitism was now government policy. Although most citizens certainly did not want to see violence, by the end of the prewar era, it seems many of them came to accept that there was a “Jewish question.”
Gellately on German Jews in the early 20th century
At the beginning of the new Reich the German Jews were not really social outsiders. After their full legal emancipation in 1871, they had become increasingly well integrated. Most were proud of their Fatherland,
In what ways, according to Gellately, did war ‘revolutionise the nazi revolution’
He had informed the doctors’ leader back in 1935 that he intended “in the event of war to solve the problem of the asylums in a radical way.”
backdated his secret authorization to the doctors (given in October 1939) to September 1 for the beginning of the “mercy killing operations,” as if the first day of the war represented for him a declaration of war against all Germany’s biological “enemies.”
Once the German armed forces began taking casualties, and thus began losing “superior stock,” it was almost inevitable, given Nazi racial-biological theory, that they would see it as necessary to eliminate “inferior stock” (the incurables) to balance off the losses.
Gellately on the significance of the war in the East
Without the war of conquest in the East, genocide might have been thinkable, but it was not realizable:
The imperialist and racist mission that opened in the East with the attack on Poland in September 1939 expanded ever more dramatically with the opening of the war against the Soviet Union in June 1941.
Gellately tracks threats made against the Jews
Threat was first made in the days following the “Kristallnacht” pogrom, and was repeated in public on January 30, 1939. Over the next several years, when he reiterated this threat in public (also in private), he invariably misdated his prophesy to September 1, 1939, so that in his mind it would seem that this date marked the real beginning of the racist war against the Jews.
Hitler begins to consider ethnic cleansing
When did this happen, why is this significant?
a decision for the total physical elimina- tion of the Jews was taken (if at all) only in the autumn of 1941. In the period from the autumn of 1939 into the first months of 1941, the Nazis consid- ered a territorial solution to the “Jewish question,”
September 21 Heydrich held an important meeting in Berlin at which time he signaled the beginning of changes in anti-Jewish policies, moving from emigration to “resettlement.”
get the Jews in western Poland moved off the land and into ghettos; to send German Jews there as well; and finally to ship there the remaining 30,000 Gypsies in Germany. The “final goal” or Endziel at that point was to move all Jews in the German sphere of influence to some kind of reservation in the East.
Hitler considers offshore resettlement of the Jews: Where and when?
by the spring of 1940 the Nazis shifted their gaze to an overseas area.30 By May Himmler had discussed sending all the Jews to somewhere in Africa, and by June some officials in the Foreign Ministry brought up the possibil- ity of Madagascar, an island off the eastern coast of Africa.
