Atlantic Unbound | February 11, 2004

Interviews

An Insidious Evil


Christopher Browning, the author of 

The Origins of the Final Solution,
explains how ordinary Germans came to accept as inevitable the extermination of the
Jews
.....
The Origins of the Final Solution: September 1939-March 1942
by Christopher Browning
University of Nebraska Press
640 pages, $39.95

In 1968, when Christopher Browning was a doctoral student at the University
of Wisconsin, he proposed a dissertation topic centering on the Nazi era. His
advisor responded with mixed advice: "This would make a great dissertation, but
you know there's no academic future in researching the Holocaust."

Less than a decade later, the Holocaust was being studied at universities
around the world, and Browning found himself at the forefront of a new academic
field. So respected was his work that, in the 1980s, he was approached by
Israel's Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, about working on a project. The museum had
received funding to print a multivolume series about the Nazi era, each book
summarizing the experiences of Jews in a different region of Europe. The project
also called for three volumes that would trace the Nazis' development of the
Final Solution. None of the Israeli researchers involved were eager to explore
the topic from the side of the perpetrators, so the task fell to a group of
non-Jewish academics, each of whom would write on a different few-year period,
tracing the key decisions that gave rise to the Holocaust.

After two decades of research, Browning's volume, The Origins of the Final
Solution: September 1939-March 1942, will be released in March of this year, the
first in the series to be published in English. Like so many authors before
him, Browning sets out to answer the question, "How could the Holocaust have
happened?" The book covers much familiar ground - train deportations, mass
shootings in the East, early experiments with poison gas. What makes Browning's
treatment different from many others is his insistence on considering
historical events as they unfolded, rather than through the lens of hindsight.
Browning does not view the Final Solution as a master plan, carefully crafted by
Hitler at the beginning of the Nazi era. Instead, he looks at Nazi Jewish policy
as an evolving reality that unfolded over an extended period of time, beginning
with a program to expel rather than exterminate Germany's Jews:

Too often, these policies and this period have been seen through a
perspective influenced, indeed distorted and overwhelmed, by the catastrophe that
followed. The policy of Jewish expulsion ... was for many years not taken as
seriously by historians as it had been by the Nazis themselves.

As late as the spring of 1940, Nazi leaders dismissed the idea of mass murder
in favor of relocating the Jews to a colony in Africa. "This method [of
deportation] is still the mildest and best," wrote Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler
in May of that year, "if one rejects the Bolshevik method of physical
extermination of a people out of inner conviction as un-German and impossible." The
so-called Madagascar Plan was aborted when Germany lost the Battle of Britain
later in 1940.

Browning presents the "gas van," introduced in 1939 to kill the mentally ill,
as the first significant step toward Nazi extermination camps. Based on the
theory of eugenics, an offshoot of nineteenth-century Darwinist thought, the
Nazis formulated a program in which euthanasia was used to remove those they
deemed genetically weak. They developed a system wherein a van disguised with the
label "Kaiser's Coffee Company" was driven through the countryside, loaded up
with mental patients, pumped full of carbon monoxide, and driven to remote
areas for forest burials. During the following years, gassing would be
introduced for targeted and later mass killings at concentration camps.

The summer of 1941 brought, in Browning's view, a "quantum leap" toward the
Holocaust. Before that time, Jews had been socially marginalized, ghettoized,
relocated en masse, and singled out for waves of killings from among larger
groups of those considered suspect or inferior (such as alleged Communists and
mental patients). But it was not until Operation Barbarossa, when the Germans
invaded the Soviet Union, that Nazi officials began killing large groups of
Jewish men, women, and children. From this time onward, writes Browning:

…no further escalation in the process was conceivable. It implied the
physical elimination of all Jews, irrespective of gender, age, occupation, or
behavior, and led directly to the destruction of entire communities and the
"de-Jewification" of vast areas. The question was no longer why the Jews should be
killed, but why they should not be killed.

In leading the reader from the Nazis' early deportation of Jews to the launch
of the extermination program in 1942, Browning's book does not seek a single
grand theory behind the Final Solution. Instead, Browning focuses on the
series of contingencies and decisions that brought the Germans increment by
increment to such an extreme. The result is a vision of evil whose origins are not
otherworldly but unnervingly human.

Browning currently resides in Chapel Hill, where he is the Frank Porter
Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina. I spoke with him
by telephone on February 3, 2004.

—Jennie Rothenberg
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Christopher Browning

One point you emphasize throughout the book is the need to look at history
stage by stage, without taking into account what we know now. Why do you feel it
is important to consider the deportation of Jews as a phase unto itself
rather than as a stepping stone to extermination?

The initial or easy tendency in looking at history is to see it through
hindsight. We know ultimately what happened, and therefore we go back and look at
all the steps that led to it happening but remove all the contingencies. We're
very well aware at this moment that we can't predict the future. But we go
back and somehow assume that we can impose a deterministic interpretation on the
past because of what we know from hindsight.

In doing that, we remove the fact that living historical actors at that time,
certainly in 1939 to 1941, didn't yet know what was going to
happen - neither the victims nor the perpetrators. And we cannot understand the decisions
they made unless we understand how they perceived the world they were living in
and the choices that they were facing. We know that Jewish leaders made
certain choices because they couldn't even conceive of a program of systematic mass
extermination awaiting them. Also important is that the Nazis made decisions
at this point. They had various choices.

The goal of this book is to show where those different turning points were,
where people came to forks in the road and went one way instead of another.
This is essential to understanding not just what happened in the end but how it
happened. What was the step-by-step path that led from the conquest of Poland
in 1939 to the opening of the death camps in 1942?

You begin the book by reviewing the historical events that set up the
conditions for the Holocaust in Germany. One of these was, as you put it, "a
distorted and incomplete embrace of the Enlightenment." Can you elaborate on this?

In Germany, after the Napoleonic conquest, the values of the Enlightenment
were spread in an uneven way. What I call the humanistic and individualistic
side of the Enlightenment was generally associated with the French, and in order
to break away from Napoleon, the Germans embraced the scientific and rational
side of the Enlightenment. You have this kind of schizophrenia where Germany
absorbed those aspects of the Enlightenment that gave them the power to drive
the French out but shunned those parts that they considered contrary to German
values.

So a certain strand of German culture rejected such aspects of the
Enlightenment as individual rights and a more liberal, democratic political tradition,
while embracing the notion of rational, bureaucratic management of society.
That's what I mean by a kind of unequal or asymmetrical embrace of the
Enlightenment, at least within one part of German culture.

At the same time as Jews were beginning to be deported from villages in the
East, you explain that the Nazis were working to resettle groups of ethnic
Germans. These were people of German ancestry whose families had lived in Eastern
Europe for generations, and who still lived in German-speaking communities.
How were those two initiatives connected?

What's key is that the Nazis had a vision that their new empire in the East
would be somewhat different from many of the overseas empires that other
European nations had constructed. This wasn't going to be an empire in which you
would have a thin layer of Germans ruling over a foreign native population like,
for instance, the British administration in India. Rather, going along with
the Nazis' very basic racial concepts, if the land didn't belong to
Germany - if it wasn't part of German Lebensraum, settled entirely by people of German
blood - it therefore would be only an annexation of the territories of
Western Poland.

This required the expulsion of all Poles, Jews, Gypsies - as the
"undesired" population. The Germans then had to resettle the area. And the way to find
German blood to do this was to bring back - they used the term
"repatriation" - the ethnic Germans living in the areas that were being conceded to
Stalin by the Non-Aggression Pact: the Baltic Germans, the Ukrainian Germans. So
these people were brought over and placed in refugee camps and then settled
on evacuated Polish farms.

There is something very interesting in this regard. There's a strong notion
that one of the crimes against Germany that has not been given enough attention
is the terrible ethnic cleansing of Germans from Eastern Europe at the end of
World War II. It's true that hundreds of thousands of people died in
expulsions from Sudetenland, Poland, and elsewhere. This aspect of German suffering
has not been given enough attention. But neglected in all of that, I believe, is
the reality that the first destruction of ethnic German communities in
Eastern Europe was not done by the victorious Red Army, by the Czechs or the Poles,
but by Himmler. He was the one who uprooted the ethnic Germans from the Baltic
and the Ukraine.

Very clear in all this was that in Nazi ideology, individuals had no choice
about where they wanted to live. They were part of a blood community, and they
belonged to the German race. Hitler and Himmler would dispose of them as they
chose. They could be picked up and moved around and placed wherever it suited
the Nazi regime.

When we think of the Jewish ghettos set up by the Nazis in Poland, we usually
envision harsh ghetto managers who tormented and starved the residents. You
argue that this wasn't necessarily the case, that many ghetto managers wanted
the Jews to stay healthy so they could be productive workers. What evidence did
you find to suggest that?


The evidence is in the documents. As I explain in the book, there were two
groups that I call the attritionists and the productionists. There certainly
were some who wanted to see the disappearance of the Jewish population through
deliberate starvation. But a greater number of the ghetto managers wanted to
maximize the productivity of the ghettos for the sake of the German war economy.
A large part of this was driven by a desire for personal gain. The German
presence in the East was extremely corrupt, and these men saw financial
opportunities for themselves in the ghettos. And at the same time, they saw the problem
of spreading diseases and epidemics. Typhus, after all, could not be contained
by ghetto walls.

So it was not in the best interests of the ghetto managers to create a sick
and starving Jewish population. That ended up happening because the Jews were
always given last priority, only provided for after the needs of other
surrounding communities had been addressed. And there were not enough materials or
provisions to go around.

When you discuss eugenics, a philosophy the Nazis used to justify their
killing of the mentally ill, you briefly mention that this movement had a strong
following in some American states around that same time. Do you think the U.S.
might have started on a similar track if the Nazis hadn't taken the idea to its
farthest extreme?

Well, the goal of the eugenics movement in the United States was not
murder - "euthanasia," as the Germans called it - sterilization. And it
never had any explicit racial component as it did in Germany. There was, however,
the initiative to sterilize low-income people with large families, and that
ended up impacting the black population more than the white. Of course, that
whole movement in America and around the world was discredited after eugenics
became associated with Nazi policy.

When the Nazis began to move into the Soviet Union, they incited German
officials to violence by linking Jews with the Bolshevist threat. You say that the
Nazis drew on old anti-Jewish stereotypes to do this - the idea of Jewish
people as a foreign, eastern race and communism as a sinister Asiatic ideology.
But the Nazis also propagated the idea that Jews were money-hungry
capitalists. How were they able to paint the Jew as both archetypal communist and greedy
capitalist without worrying about self-contradiction?

Certainly the two Hitler accusations - the old Medieval stereotype that
the Jews were the capitalist parasites, the moneysuckers, and the newer
stereotype of Jews as revolutionary Bolshevik subversives - as quite
contradictory. The Jew can't be both the capitalist and the communist at one and the same
time. But to square that circle, one can resort to conspiracy theory. This is,
of course, what the Nazis did - they said that behind these two different
assaults on Germany, by the capitalist Jews on the one hand and the communist
Jews on the other, was an insidious Jewish conspiracy that was coming to attack
in all forms.

Conspiracy theory reconciles what would be, on the surface, two incompatible
pieces of evidence. And of course, conspiracy theory is infinitely elastic. No
matter what contradiction you come to, if you go one step further back and
imagine something else behind that, you can reconcile almost any kind of
conflicting evidence. That is what the Nazis did. They had what I call "chimeric
anti-Semitism," a fantasy in their own minds. But it became acceptable to many
others because it touched upon so many long-embedded anti-Semitic stereotypes
that, in one way or another, were accepted by large numbers of people in Europe.
For Hitler himself, all of this came together in this fantasized world
conspiracy.

In some of the letters you quote, written by German officials in the East to
their wives back home, there's a claim that the Bolshevist Jews were going to
murder German women and children if they weren't killed first. Do you think
these men genuinely believed this?

Most genocides are conceived by their perpetrators as actions of self
defense: "We must do this now because, if we don't, they will do it to our women and
our children later." Mass murder is then justified as a preventive measure. I
think this is just part of the mentality that makes genocide possible. First
you divide people between "us" and "them." Then you cast the
other "them" as a terrible threat. In turn, you justify your doing terrible things to
"them" as self defense.

You describe August 15, 1941, as "a caesura in the history of the Holocaust."
What sets this date apart?

My argument is that the transition from what I would call a kind of vague,
unformulated vision of homicide in the future to the Final Solution - that
is, a coherent program to murder every last Jewish man, woman, and child in
Europe - took place in two stages; first for the Soviet Union and then for the
rest of Europe. The Nazis may have come into the Soviet Union in June and July
of 1941 under the assumption that, in some way, there would be no Jews
left - through some unspecified mixture of starvation, shooting, and expulsion
and on some unspecified timetable. By mid-August, we have evidence that this had
evolved into a very clear notion that the Jews would all be killed very
quickly.

The reason I say August 15 is because we have a report from one of the
killing squads, the Einsatz Commando III in Lithuania, that breaks down the actual
body count day by day, with victims listed by categories of communist or Jew.
And within the category of Jew, they break it down by both age and gender. We
know when they were shooting men, women, and children, and in what proportions.
What is clear is that up until mid-August, they were following a pattern of
shooting adult male Jewish leadership and Jews associated with the Communist
military danger. Then, on August 15, the proportions changed drastically, and
the major victims became Jewish women and children. This was a retargeting. When
they started to give priority to killing women and children, this was no
longer a selective murder of potential enemy male Jews but a program to wipe out
the Jewish race in its entirety.

I think this was in fact a transition that took place in different places
over a longer period of time. But August 15, 1941, is the one date we can
pinpoint very precisely for Einsatz Commando III.

I was interested by a statement from a Nazi official stationed in Minsk about
the deportation of the Reich Jews, those from German cities like Hamburg and
Berlin. In contrast with the Jews of Eastern Europe, the official described
the Reich Jews as "human beings who come from our cultural sphere" and was
troubled by the idea of exterminating them. In general, do you think many Nazi
officials found the killing of the Reich Jews harder to stomach?

The Nazis assumed that, under the guise of this anti-Communist crusade in
Russia, they could kill Soviet Jews without any real problems on the home front.
But when it came to murdering German Jews, they had to be much more sensitive.
I think they were worried that there might be a public-relations problem if
word got out of their massacring German Jews. The letter from the Minsk
official is evidence of this, and we see other cases, too.

When the first trainloads of Jews were murdered in Kovno and Riga, rumors
came back to Germany and some people were upset. Himmler was certainly aware that
there would be a qualitative difference in the indifference or acceptance of
murdering Russian Jews as opposed to German Jews. Thus, after the first six
trains of German Jews were murdered in late November and early December, that
program was suspended for a while. The Jews deported in the spring of 1942 were
initially sent to ghettos in Poland -  a sense "put on ice" for a
while - and then sent on to death camps later. In the same way, Jews, particularly
elderly ones, were sent to Theresienstadt first and then sent on to Auschwitz.

Your conclusion goes into a discussion of Hitler's role in the Final
Solution. You emphasize that Hitler's enthusiasm brought together all kinds of
people - eugenists who wanted to achieve racial purity, technicians who wanted to
display their skills, political careerists who wanted to get ahead. But you
also point out that many of the specific ideas and plans did not come from
Hitler but from his subordinates, who took their cues from Hitler's vague
statements. Do you think those second-level Nazi leaders like Himmler should be held as
responsible as Hitler for the Holocaust?

It's true that Hitler did not have to be a micromanager in this. He was able
to make exhortations, give prophetic speeches. It was embedded in the Nazi
system that the duty or imperative on all loyal Nazis was, in their own terms, to
"work towards the Fuehrer," to always anticipate and support him, in a sense
devote your life to him. When he made a prophecy, your obligation was to make
that prophecy come true. When he staked out something in terms of a vague
goal, your job was to make that concrete.

This elicited all sorts of initiatives, all sorts of plans. Those were
brought to Hitler. Sometimes he said, "No, you didn't read me right." Sometimes he
put up a red light. Sometimes he flashed a yellow light - "not ready
yet" - as sometimes he shone a green light and gave approval to go ahead. The
person who read Hitler the best in this regard was Himmler. He was the one who
could usually anticipate what Hitler wanted and understand what Hitler meant.
This was why the SS gained in power so rapidly in this period, because as
Himmler was leading them, he became increasingly indispensable to Hitler in terms of
turning prophecies into realities.

For a historian, this form of decision-making is maddeningly imprecise. You
can't go to a single document or a single meeting and say, "Here is where
something was decided." There is a stretched out stage of Hitler giving vague
signals, others reading those signals, they coming to Hitler, he affirming they had
understood him well, they going back and making plans and then bringing those
back. So the decision-making process can go on over months, during which time
there is not one single day or document we can pinpoint and say, "This is
when it happened."

Could there have been a scenario in which Hitler might have gone around
making sweeping, vague proclamations but no one would have come forward to make
those concrete?

Among the many different people who were "working towards the Fuehrer," there
were some very committed ideologues, very committed anti-Semites. Some of
them were pressing Hitler before he was ready. He was not only giving green
lights but giving red lights, at times saying, "No, this is premature." The way
this worked, even if a Himmler or Heydrich had not come forward with various
proposals, it's almost inevitable that someone else would have. Himmler or
Heydrich may have distinguished themselves by being the first there, but they
certainly weren't the only ones. There were enough people vying for Hitler's favor in
all of this that, even if those two had not been there, I think the process
would have tended in that direction in any case. Others would have filled the
void.

In terms of Hitler giving the "green light," you say this often coincided
with a big Nazi victory. The more success Hitler experienced in his campaign, the
more daring he became with implementing his plans.

I argue for a very stark correlation between the victory euphoria that Hitler
experienced - September 1939, May and June 1940, July 1941, and late
September and early October of 1941 - with what I consider the four pivotal
points of radicalization of Nazi Jewish policy. I hypothesize that one of the
factors influential with Hitler - one of the reasons he gave green
lights - was the big boost he got from the sense that Europe was now at his feet,
that previous restraints had fallen away. He felt he could be more uninhibited,
that he could give greater rein to turning his fantasies into reality.
Therefore, Nazi victories were an accelerating factor, a factor conducive to the
intensification of racial persecution.

This book goes into the minutest details about the unfolding of the Final
Solution, focusing on everything from the train schedules to the different kinds
of gas tested by the Nazi technicians. What is the value of quantifying evil
in this way, breaking it down into small details rather than only looking at
the bigger picture?

It's always easy to identify the Holocaust with Hitler, which is certainly
not wrong. He was, as I argue, the prime decision maker and instigator in this.
But if we want a fuller picture of how these things came about, then we need
to get at the layered, complex reality in which all sorts of people made
incremental contributions. It's important to see the impulses toward the Final
Solution as having come not only from Hitler from above but from many other people
below.

We may, in the end, conclude that the Holocaust has very unique
characteristics among genocides. But to be unique in some ways is not to be unique in all
ways. The various perpetrators who became involved in the Final Solution and
their decision-making processes were not unique. In fact, I would argue that
many of the elements in this were a coming together of quite common factors and
ordinary people. That, I think, is very important to recognize if we don't want
to place the Holocaust apart as some kind of suprahistorical, mystical event
that we cannot fathom and shouldn't even try to understand.

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2004-02-11.htm
==============
Professor F. Littell has said "You can't discuss the truth of the holocaust.
That is a distortion of the concept of free speech. The United States should
emulate West Germany, which outlaws such exercises."--Mind-boggling! Don't you
think?
http://64.143.9.197/jhr/v11/v11p365_Bennett.html
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