Preface
How was it possible that two thirds of European Jewry was murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators? The answer to this question is beyond the scope of any one study however this inquiry is at the core of all scholarship and teaching on the Shoah. My research and education about the Shoah is motivated by an attempt to come closer to an understanding of how it was possible that the Nazis and their collaborators were able to commit this genocide.
1. Rabbi Dr. I. Epstein, editor, Hebrew English Edition of the BabylonianTalmud: Shabbath. Translated by Rabbi Dr. H. Freedman (London: The Soncino Press, 1972). Shabbath 31.a.
2. Alexander Bein, "The Jewish Parasite: Notes on the Semantics of the Jewish Problem....," Yearbook of the Leo Baek Institute Vol. 9 (1964), p.27. Alexander Bein was a Nazi judge.
Hillel, one of Judaism's greatest sages, when asked an equally difficult question “ to teach the Torah while standing on one foot, or in other words, to respond in one sentence to, What are the teachings of the Torah? answered, "What is hateful do not to your neighbour: that is the whole Torah, while the rest is the commentary thereof; go and learn it." (1) The alleged inferiority of the Jewish people during the Nazi reign of terror was no longer, as it had been for centuries before, based on religious differences but on supposedly inherent biological defects. Nazi racial ideology although not the sole cause of the Shoah, was the underlying factor, which fueled social, legal, and political policy of the time. The Nazi legal system declared, "The Jew is not a human being. He is a manifestation of putrescence."(2) An outcome of the view of the defiling and inhuman Jew as defined by the Nazis was their systematic murder during the Shoah.
There are many factors which must be taken into account when examining the causes of the Shoah — economic difficulties, modernity which provided the unprecedented means of mass killing, the political charisma of Adolf Hitler, centuries-old antisemitism, international indifference of world powers effectively sanctioning Nazi policies, German national humiliation subsequent to their defeat in World War I, and manipulative propaganda were all factors that contributed to the Shoah. These, in combination with the emergence of Nazi racial policy from within the scientific communities' study of racial hygienics, provided policies that Reich legislators codified into law.
Racism refers to a holistic view of society and politics based on aesthetics and morality science, and history The theoretical foundations of racism or racial ideology were laid during the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century The next stage of development continued through the nineteenth century until 1918.The interwar period saw the integration of racism into political policies of mass movements in Europe, in particular the Nazi Party Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) proposed that the individual was a part of the Volk, that is, people in the ethnic sense. Herder did not believe that one people was superior to another. He proposed an emphasis on language as an expression of a shared past led to the genetic affinity among various languages.
In the late eighteenth century anthropologists introduced the classification of humankind into "races". Carl Linaeus (1707-1778) classified nations according to their inhabitants' skin colour, and the shape and size of their bodies. Peter Camper, a Dutch anthropologist, made a study of racial topology based on a comparison of the facial and cranial measurements of "blacks" apes, and Europeans.
Joseph Gobineau (1816-1882) argued that the "pure" language of the "Aryans" indicated they could rise above the worldly considerations in life. He attributed the debauchery of the modern age to racial corruption. Gobineau introduced the notion of Aryan racial purity and the subsequent degeneration as a result of the contamination by other races.
From the second half of the nineteenth century Jews were looked upon as a foreign culture in Europe. While in ghettos they posed no threat but once emancipated they were viewed as subversive elements. In 1867 Wilhelm Marr published The Victory of Judaism over Germanism (Der Sieg des Judenthums ber das Germanenthum). He claimed Jews had declared war on Germans and were about to seize control of the German economy.
The fusion of racial-hygienic and Social Darwinist ideas with antisemitism lies with Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) who proposed that Germanic peoples were superior to all others in every respect and that this was based on intellectual abilities. Chamberlain believed that Jews were a demonic threat to Germans and towards the end of his life claimed that Adolf Hitler was the leader needed to overcome the Jews.
Racism and eugenics gathered strength in France and the United States before World War I. It was in France that the forgery by a Frenchman and the tsarist secret police Protocols of the Elders of Zion was conceived and published during the Dreyfus affair. The Protocols purported to be minutes of a secret meeting of leaders of international Jewry in which a plan was drawn up for world domination.
3. Proctor N. Robert, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 285.
To examine the near destruction of European Jewry requires an investigation of how the Jews were defined by their murderers. The motives for the Nazi genocide of the Jews are integrally linked to the racial ideology of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi), which made palatable to hundreds of thousands of people organized and systematic genocide. The conviction that there existed genetic differences between humans that justified a ranking of groups according to their innate superiority was at the heart of Nazi racial ideology It categorized beings as superior men or Aryan“only Aryans were the "culture-creating race:" The Chinese and Japanese were only culture bearing. The term "subhuman" generally applied to black and Slavic peoples, and finally the rank of "non-human" was reserved exclusively for Jews. In addition to this stratification of so-called races there was belief that the interbreeding between "races" would result in a deterioration of racial value. The Aryan master race, according to Nazi ideology, would one day reign supreme if its racial purity was maintained and safeguarded. While Aryans represented the perfection of human existence, Jews were the embodiment of evil. Primo Levi, an Italian Jew who was liberated from Auschwitz, refers to the "other world" when describing his experiences under Nazi terror. In this world the Jew was seen as poisoning humanity. The axiom in that world was, "Thou shalt kill." It became necessary and advisable in the name of racial ideological goals to rid the world of all those that opposed the philosophy of the totalitarian Nazi government. In contrast to previous episodes of persecution, there was to be no escape for Jews through conversion to other religions. The Jews were no longer viewed as peoples belonging to a religious group but likened to "vermin," "parasites," and "leeches" that were poisoning humanity Human equality was denied under Nazi rule. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 provided the legal basis for separating and defining Jews from "Aryans". This marked the integration of racism and antisemitism with the legal system of a major European state. This legitimization of racial policy paved the way for the implementation of the "Final Solution." By 30 October 1938 the Office of Racial Policy of the NSDAP published more than 250 "Legal Measures for the Solution of the Jewish Question." (3) The Nazis' model of biological determinism and their notion that science could provide the answers for social problems resulted in the view that the racial programmes were in fact public health programmes. Political ideology pursued in the guise of science provided a powerful weapon in the Nazis’ carnage of the Jews. Prior to the rise of the Nazi Party the study of eugenics in Europe was a popular area of scientific research and study. The scientific community informed the Nazi racial policy and the ideology of the Nazis informed the practice of science.
4. Ibid., 79
5. Ibid.,89.
In 1933, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels asked that all German organizations be educated in the "eugenic way of thinking"; professorships in racial hygiene had been established at Berlin, Bonn, Frankfurt, Gissen, Hamburg, Heidelberg, Jena, K~5nigsberg, Munich, and W0rzburg universities. (4) The Office of Racial Policy (Rassenpolitisches Amt) established on I May 1934, headed by Dr. Walter Gross, was to coordinate and unify all schooling and propaganda in the areas of population and racial policy. The office's confidential journal Informationsdienst reported in 1938 that 64,000 public meetings and seminars had been organized since its founding. Some 3,600 workers helped in its "work of enlightenment". It would be difficult for anyone living in Germany at this time not to have been touched by the activities of this office." (5)
6. The Nazi Primer: Official Handbook for Schooling the Hitler Youth, translated from the original German with a prefance by Harwood L.Childs (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1938).
In the Official Handbook for Schooling the Hitler Youth, published in 1937, the German youth were told:
In no instance up to this time have environmental influences brought about the formation of a new race. That is one more reason for our belief that a Jew remains a Jew, in Germany or any other country. He can never change his race, even by centuries of residence among other people, as he often asserts, but just as often contradicts by his own actions. (6)
7. Ibid., xxxvi.
In his preface to the translation of the Official Handbook for Schooling the Hitler Youth, Harwood L. Childs from Princeton University states:
The Nazi Primer is authoritative. It is not the work of extremists or of a wing of the party. It is not the ideology of an individual, but the product of many minds, the result of a distillation process that has gone on for several years. (7)
8.Ibid., 268.
From the same edition William E. Dodd, former American Ambassador to Germany notes in his commentary "Parents sometimes objected, especially to their young sons’ wearing daggers, but nobody listened to them. The children belong to the state and party not to families." (8) Dodd concludes his commentary on the handbook with the following:
9. Ibid., 280.
And of course there is not a word in it to warn the unwary reader that all the people who might oppose the regime have been absolutely silenced. The central idea behind it is to make the rising generation worship their chief and get ready to "save civilization" from the Jews, from Communism, and from democracy“thus preparing the way for a Nazified world where all freedom of the individual, of education, and of the churches is to be totally suppressed. Is modern civilization to be converted into such a system? (9)
10. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 36-37.
Old prejudice and conspiracy theories such as the untrue theories suggesting Jews were conniving to have global economic control presented in the aforementioned Protocols of the Elders of Zion combined with the base antisemitism of Hitler, resulted in a racial ideology which held the allegedly powerful and wealthy Jews responsible for the consequences of rapid industrialization and modernity. (10) Jews were the scapegoat for the terrible economic conditions in Germany as well as the perceived cause of the defeat in World War I. In addition to the belief that Jews were responsible for the collapse of Germany in 1918, there was an element of the Nazis' racial ideology which maintained that the Jew, the absolute enemy must be isolated and eliminated first spatially and then physically as it turned out.
11. For an extensive discussion of this topic , see Stehphen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York:W.W.Norton and Company, 1981).
Today many accept but still some reject that there is one race, the human race and the notion of races is indeed spurious. (11) As we stand upon the threshold of a new millennium we are haunted again by perpetrators of genocide who, too, are motivated by their beliefs of "racial superiority" The Fallacy of Race and the Shoah reminds while warning through the paradigm of the Shoah of the destructive powers of prejudice.
The world, too, failed to uphold the value of equal rights, which was frequently said to be common to all humankind. The Evian Conference in 1938 and the Bermuda Conference in 1943 were testimony to this and indeed sanctioned the belief in the inequality of humankind. Only the citizens of Denmark declared and acted upon their commitment to the equality of all their citizens. In a lasting moral victory by their fellow countrymen the Jews of Denmark were virtually all saved.
12. Nora Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1939-1945 (New York: T.Y. Crowell Co., 1973), xi-xii.
The notions of shame, embarrassment, and even other worldliness that are inevitably associated with the Shoah are difficult to articulate in academic discourse. "The world of Auschwitz was, in truth, another planet" (12) There is a sense in which only a survivor has the right and the means to deal with the subject. For the survivor, the reality of the Shoah is known through his experience. The work of historians and scholars by its very nature is incomplete in that it omits the suffering and the authenticity that characterizes witness testimony Perhaps survivors more than others can understand why it has been said that censorship is the mother of metaphor. There can be no doubt, however, that in order to fully understand this era one must use as many tools of analysis as possible. These include economic, historical, political, and sociological discourse. The Shoah is one of the most documented events of history and includes the perpetrators records and those of the many victims of Nazi oppression. The historical record comprises many categories“Leo Haas’ clandestine drawings of Theresienstadt are victims' visual records; the deportation lists and reports of the Einsatzgruppen are examples of perpetrators' records. The word of the survivor is not a metaphor but a literary document and is a part of the documentation.
13. The Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) were classified by the Nazis as "asociaIs" of an inferior "race" and, due to their nomadic life, believed to be enemies of the state. The "asocial" individual& behaviour in the Nazis& view was innate and as such inherited.The following quote from the Reich and Prussian Minister of the Interior, 14 December 1937, concerning the "preventive fight against crime" defines several examples of the "asocial": "Persons who through minor, but repeated, infractions of the law demonstrate that they will not adapt themselves to the natural discipline of a National Socialist state, e.g. beggars, tramps, (Gypsies), whores, alcoholics with contagious diseases, particularly sexually transmitted diseases, who evade the measures taken by the public health authorities" (Grundlegender Erlass uber die vorbeugende Verbrechensbekaempfung durch die Polizei des Reichs und Preussischen Ministers des Innern vom l4. 12.1937, Reichssicherheitshauptamt-AmtV[ed.]. Vorbeugende Verbrechensbekampfung [Berlin, 1942]41.) Once taken into preventive custody these individuals were sent to concentration damps. Many of the roundups of these "asocials" otherwise classified as "work-shy" was motivated by economic need. In 1938 there was a general work shortage in Germany resulting from rearmament and war preparations. The Gestapo raids provided labour for the SS founded German Earth and Stone Quarry Ltd (Dest) which ran the quarries in Buchenwald, Flossenburg, Neuengamme, and Sachsenhausen. The number of Roma an Sinti believed to have perished in concentration and dearh camps and killing centres is 500,000. The Roma and Sinti were relentlessly persecuted under the Nazi regime, however the Nazi Policy toward them was not as coordinated as it was to jews. The Roma and Sinti were housed in Bialystok, Lodz, and Warshaw ghettos.
There is no one way of knowing or single path to the acquisition of knowledge. This volume demonstrates that there are many sources and means of inquiry in the study of the Shoah. Distancing ourselves chronologically and circumstantially allows the researcher of the late twentieth century the freedom to push boundaries and bridge disciplines, bringing us closer to an understanding of the events.
The book consists of two sections“the first focuses on interpretation and reflects on the meaning of the individual during the Shoah. "Shoah" is the Hebrew word meaning "destruction" and is commonly used instead of the term "Holocaust" It refers to the systematic annihilation of 6 million Jews by the Nazi regime and their collaborators during World War II. Although all Jews were targeted for destruction, millions of other innocent men, women, and children were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis during the Shoah and the events leading to it between 1933 and 1945. These included Soviet prisoners of war, Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), (13) Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, the disabled, and other political and religious dissidents, such as communists, socialists, and trade unionists. In total, some 11 million innocent men, women, and children perished.
In the first section, history is presented through the experience of Jews from the Carpatho-Ruthenian region of Czechoslovakia“Peter Kleinmann and his family It is the tiny descriptive details of the Shoah known through the experiences of an individual that provide aspects of the past that enable us to recognize the enormity of these events. Dealing with a subject of such immensity as the Shoah by examining an individual's experiences within a historical perspective allows us a glimpse of this past reality.
This study challenges the limits of representation in Shoah studies. The relationships between time and space, and eternity and perspective were forever changed through the survivors of the Shoah. Humankind and its characteristic of innate goodness, a belief held since the Enlightenment, can no longer be defended as an all inclusive truth. The structure of evil's intimate grammar is known only amongst survivors. I am privileged that Peter Kleinmann shared with me the extraordinary way in which he turned the language of horror and destruction into an experience of freedom. Time and time again the scholar is humbled by expressions of the tenacity of the human spirit such are found in the poetry of Ytzhak Katzenelson, Nelly Sachs, Abraham Sutzkever, Gertrude Kolmar, Paul Celan; in the music of Viktor UlIman; in the art of Petr Kien, Leo Haas, Fritz Taussig, and Friedl Dicker-Brandeis.
14. See Isaiah Berlin, The Sense of Reality, for an extensive discussion of how knowledge is ascertained. This collision of ideas is detailed and illustrated in the chapter of The Fallacy of Race and the Shoah "Visualizing Memory. A Last Detail." For a discussion on perspective and the possibility of the metaphor of a world view see Panofsky. Erwin, Perspective and Symbolic Form, translated by Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1997). The Hegelian assumption that the change of a notion must be reasonable in the sense that there exists a link between the fact of change and the content of the idea changing is illustrated in the reaction of the historian in the aforementioned chapter. Only when one is able to change perspective is one able to see through (perspectiva is a Latin word that means "seeing through"). Moving beyond philology is possible only when, as Panofsky did, one invokes the problem-solving model and contextualization (symbolic form).
Over ten years of research and documentation have gone into the making of this book. This included visits to 20 primary sites in Austria, Czech Republic, Germany Hungary Israel, Poland, Slovakia, Switzerland, and Ukraine and included 400 oral histories and interviews with bystanders, liberators, Righteous Gentiles, and survivors as well as an extensive search of the largely uncatalogued microfilm of the military trials in Dachau located in the United States Military Archives in Maryland. All survivor testimony has been verified through the archives in the museum and memorial sites of Auschwitz, Dachau, Flossenburg, and Gross-Rosen. Seventy-five key documents from the Flossenborg and Gross-Rosen concentration camps not previously available to the public have informed this study.
Dealing with people collectively and individually provides insight into the perpetrators process of murder and metaphorically provides the background of speech upon which the silence of those who perished can be heard. This study shows that the existence of survivors is the very metaphor of the Shoah itself.
With the example of the individual one is able to more effectively convey the universal issues that inevitably arise in studying the Shoah“evil, courage to care, human dignity moral responsibility and the existential qualities of humankind. Dovid Wolfe, a.k.a. Dudi, a.k.a. Dezider, a.k.a. 83150, a.k.a. Peter, survived this enigmatic world created by the Nazis because of a twist of fate. He was brought face to face with a fellow inmate, his brother Al, during a selection in which Peter was identified as a Muselmann. At this time Al was a prisoner, forced to record numbers (Schreiber) of the emaciated prisoners, who because they were no longer useful as slave labourers, were to be murdered. The fact that two brothers' fates were at polar ends of the implementation of the "Final Solution"“one on his way to death and the other processing him poignantly illustrates the senselessness and banality of the Nazi killing machine.
The second section sets forth the historical context in which these experiences occurred. This comprehensive historical summary of the Shoah represents a succinct synopsis of existing secondary literature and primary sources. An overview of Jewish life in Europe is presented, followed by a more detailed examination of the Nazi process attempting to annihilate European Jewry In order to contextualize individual experiences of European Jews, the second section also includes a description of Jewish life in the Carpathian region of Czechoslovakia and the events of the Shoah as they occurred in this region. The documents from the Flossenburg and Gross-Rosen concentration camps include orders from offices in Germany sent to camps in Poland listing the names of prisoners to be executed and detailing the times of execution. These documents signed by highranking Nazi officials illustrate the tedium and absurdity of the actions of those implementing the "Final Solution"
I shall always have a debt of gratitude to Peter Kleinmann for allowing me the privilege of interviewing him. I have been humbled by his patience and understanding of the academic requisites needed to verify and substantiate his testimony I spent hours and days probing and questioning him almost without limit in order to uncover the turn of phrase or insight needed to come closer to describing the past. His insight taught me that the answer to questions may lie outside attempts to bring closure from within the normative means and showed me how to challenge and confront my resistant imagination. During these sessions I observed that having the courage of one's convictions allows the unpredictable solution to be propounded. Ignorance resulting from ignoring and the denial in forgetting led to the ironing out of problems and not to solutions. The qualities of obedience, harmony and conformism can lead to deprivation of the powers of choice, of creation, of the pursuit of individual ends, of personal freedom. Challenging petty tyrannies and overcoming the persecution of originality which many find so great a menace, will lead one outside the prison house of the mind. At times when the existing historical record was at odds with his testimony I came to realize that discord, change, and dissonance are not innately bad. Special sorts of impacts are needed for altering the point of view from which the problem seemed a problem: by shifting emphasis, by shifting the vision of those who are perplexed in such a way that they see that the distinction upon which they had laid much emphasis did not in fact exist or rested on lack of insight. The solutions to so-called problems can be found in the recognition that they may indeed be irrelevant or meaningless, or shown to be confusions resting upon consequences that derived from the mechanical use of words or concepts without examination of their application. (14)
15. Paul Henle, "Language, Thought, and Culture," In Theory in Anthropology, Robert A. Manners and David Kaplan, editors (Chicago: Aldine, 1971), 421.
A goal of this research, which crosses several disciplines including anthropology art, history Judaic studies, and literature, is to demonstrate that interpretation and reality are irrevocably interwoven. The research presents insights into the evolution of the language of destruction. Language imposes forced observations“such as the way tense implies time and consequence. In the case of English verbs, we are made to observe number and person. Observations that are imposed by inflections constitute a mental set.
Normally language is taken for granted. Its easy and fluid use leads to the assumption that it is a transparent medium used for the transmission of thought. In his article "Language, Thought, and Culture," Paul Henle cites the following quote by Edward Sapir: "language is a selfcontained, creative symbolic organization, which not only refers to experience largely acquired without its help but actually defines experience for us by reason of its formal completeness and because of our unconscious projection of its implicit expectations into the field of experience." (15) Linguists have maintained that a language constitutes a sort of logic, a general frame of reference, and so moulds the thoughts of its habitual users. Further to this, claims are made that where a language and a culture have developed together, there are significant relationships between the general aspects of grammar and the characteristic of the culture as a whole.
When speaking of the effect of language on thought we must also include perception and the conceptual organization of experience. Thus to understand the relationship between language, thought, and culture, perceptions and conceptions must be added to our inquiry Words are the building blocks of language. It is conceivable that differences in organization of the building blocks can result in differences in philosophies. For example, when we introduce certain German words and terms into the English vocabulary such as Judenrein, Kristallnacht, Kapo, Aktion, Lager, Muselmann, Gestapo, Sonderkommando, Arbeit Macht Frei, and even the abbreviations SS and Nazi, we are building a prejudice into the English language influencing our perceptions and conceptions of Germans and Germany. There is no doubt that prejudice and prejudgement influence philosophy hermeneutics, and philology.
Stephen Bleyer and Peter Kleinmann in the former Theresienstadt concentration camp, 1995. (Photo: Naomi Kramer)
I would be remiss were Ito introduce this book without a posthumous thank you to my good friend, the late Stephen Bleyer. The following perhaps encapsulates my understanding of this "other world" in today's world. In December of 1994, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation asked me to acquaint them with a survivor of Auschwitz for the programme televising from Poland the commemorative events of the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The programme included off-site interviews of historians, survivors, and liberators to be included in the commemorative global broadcast, via satellite. I requested of Stephen Bleyer that he do something that was beyond the limits of my imagination: that is, 50 years after his "liberation" in Auschwitz, I asked this Hungarian Jew, Eliezer Mordecai Ben Shimon who had been deported to Auschwitz seven months prior to his "liberation" on 27 January 1945, to consent to being beamed back into this killing centre via satellite and then back again for the world to hear him recount his experiences under the reign of Nazi terror. He agreed, as he put it, to this return without going.
Survivor testimony in this volume leads us outside the incubus of symbols and enables us to distinguish between symbols, icons, and thought. The time in which we live is characterized by continuous advancements in science and technology Perhaps in the future the events of the Shoah will be seen and understood for the first time by a civilization light years away and their perception beamed back to us with new insight.