4

Cataclysms: Genocide and Memory

Eastern Questions / Ethnic Cleansing / Greeks and Turks / Armenian Catastrophes / Poland’s Demography / Germany’s Ideology / Eastern Expansion and Holocaust / Opposing Perspectives / Memory and Narrative / Hierarchy of Remembrance / Nazism and Stalinism / Labor and Death / Genocide and Class Extinction/ Comparison and Perception

In the less-than-happy chronicle of Turkish-Greek relations, 15 May 1919 is an especially grim day. On this day, Greek troops landed in Smyrna, on the western coast of Asia Minor. Furnished with a mandate from the Supreme Council of the Allied and Associated Powers in Paris and accompanied by an Allied naval squadron, these troops had until recently served under French command in the anti-Bolshevik interventionist forces in southern Russia. Now they were being steered toward a more patriotic task. Under the pretext of preempting an Italian scramble for Western Anatolia, they attempted to incorporate this territory, filled with ancient Hellenic landscapes but now inhabited by Orthodox Greeks and Muslim Turks, into the expanding Greek nation-state.1 These expectations would be disappointed. The Greek attack on the Smyrna region and its thrust into the interior ended in bitter defeat at the hands of the Turks under Kemal Pasha. What followed was the flight and expulsion of well over a million ethnic Greeks from the Turkish nation-state taking shape in Anatolia.² The enterprise of national aggrandizement, driven by visions of a Greater Greece, had resulted in catastrophe.

What ended so dreadfully in 1922 with the flight and expulsion of Greeks from Asia Minor, Thrace, and the Hellespont had already begun on an ominous note. The entire operation amounted to a massacre perpetrated by the Greek expeditionary forces on the Turkish population of Smyrna. The catalyst had been a single shot fired from the top of a derelict Ottoman administrative building as two columns of Hellenic soldiers were advancing from the harbor toward the city. The soldiers responded immediately, firing indiscriminately into a fez-wearing crowd standing by.

With scant knowledge of local customs, the Greeks considered the fez, the standard local male headdress, to be exclusively Muslim, which is to say Turkish. During the Balkan wars, especially during the Greek conquest of Macedonian Salonika in November 1912, Muslim fez-wearing males had been singled out and expelled to the East.³ In Smyrna, after two days of bloodshed in which local Greeks plundered and set fire to the houses and property of their Muslim neighbors, the fez had disappeared from the heads of Muslims, Greek-Orthodox Christians, Armenians, and Jews.⁴ The interethnic violence in Smyrna spilled over into the countryside. Incited by reports of atrocities by Greeks against Muslims, Turks took gruesome revenge on their Greek neighbors in Aydin and the surrounding villages. Intense violence now engulfed the Orthodox populace; men, women, and children were slain indiscriminately. As the struggle between Greeks and Turks penetrated deeper into the interior, the atrocities became more organized, especially where enemy military offensives were anticipated or one’s own forces had suffered a reversal.⁵ The spreading violence took the form of demographic warfare along constantly shifting fronts or else of a blind will toward vengeance after defeat.

The conduct of an ethnic war, with its atrocities and expulsions, evoked the violence in the Balkan wars of 1912–13 in various ways.⁶ While in Anatolia between 1919 and 1922 the lines of conflict were clearly drawn between Orthodox Christians (Greeks) and Muslims (Turks), the situation in ethnically mixed Macedonia had been more complex. During the Second Balkan War of 1913, in which Turkey participated in the anti-Bulgarian alliance, largely Orthodox polities fought over the territorial spoils they had previously wrested from the Ottoman Empire. The conflict was ethnic in that for the sake of their various territorial claims the belligerents announced themselves as national saviors, bringing deliverance to their imagined brethren among the diverse populations of Macedonia, brethren to whom they were bound by ties of language, religion, or some fictive notion of origin.⁷ In this way, the Slavic-speaking Muslims of western Thrace, the so-called Pomaks, were declared lost Christian sons of Bulgaria who had been forcibly Islamicized centuries before. Brutality served to remind the Pomaks of their putative origins. Their return to Bulgarian Orthodoxy was quite harsh indeed: under a hail of blows from canes and cudgels, they were forced to confirm their conversion by publicly eating pork.⁸

Macedonia had been a bone of contention between Serbia and Montenegro but especially between Greece, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. The type of violence unleashed by the Macedonian question and in the associated Balkan wars would later become common currency as “ethnic cleansing.” This violence would not be confined to the Balkans, but rather would spread from the Ottoman Europe to Anatolia, emerging there as a struggle between Greeks and Turks of Asia Minor. In turn, that struggle would culminate in 1922 in the flight and expulsion of the Anatolian Greeks from the land they had inhabited for millennia.⁹

The beginnings of this tragedy are normally traced to events of 1908, a paradoxical date, standing for the revolution of the Young Turks, initially welcomed enthusiastically by Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Armenians, and other subjects of the sultan.¹⁰ All Ottomans, regardless of ethnic or religious affiliation, were finally free from the despotic yoke of Sultan Abdülhamid II and could unite in equality and fraternity. But these expectations were to prove illusory, for the Young Turks in the Committee for Unity and Progress soon displayed Turkish chauvinism, a metamorphosis less surprising than normally supposed.¹¹ Despite proclamations by the revolutionaries to the contrary, such intolerance had actually been basic to the revolution from the start; it had been unleashed not simply to restore the liberal constitution of 1876 but above all to preserve the Ottoman Empire. By introducing reform, the Young Turks hoped to forestall the loss of the three remaining Rumelian districts, Kosovo, Monastir, and Salonika.¹² The extent to which their revolution was driven by dislocations tied to the Macedonian question is reflected in the fact that the events were initiated in the Macedonian garrisons of the Ottoman army as a military enterprise, and this without any coordination with the Salonika-based Committee for Unity and Progress.¹³ In many respects, then, Macedonia had become an Ottoman region of profound importance for maintaining the further territorial integrity of the empire.The fact that the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatürk, originated from Salonika is more than incidental to his biography.

The 1912–13 Balkan wars were Macedonian wars. In the First Balkan War, the Ottoman Empire, weakened by the Tripolitan War against Italy in 1911, was attacked by the four members of the Balkan League: Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and Greece. Their aim was to wrest the remaining Rumelian territories, primarily Macedonia, from the empire. The First Balkan War resulted in the brutal expulsion of the Muslim inhabitants of these territories. Hundreds of thousands of Turkish refugees fled eastward toward Istanbul, where government offices established for that purpose directed them to Anatolia. There they were resettled in the countryside, mainly in the Aydin region.¹⁴

But the absorption and relocation of these Rumelian refugees did not bring the chain of brutal events to an end. Rather, the atrocities suffered by the Macedonian and Thracian Muslims now befell the Anatolian Greeks in turn. Incoming Muslims, assisted by indigenous Turks and the local police, set about terrorizing the Greek Orthodox population of Western Anatolia, a process peaking in the spring of 1914, when entire Greek communities were robbed of their possessions and driven from their homes and land in reprisal for the outrages committed against the Macedonian Muslims. The Turkish action was not totally unplanned. Its systematic character was especially apparent along Asia Minor’s shore, where the Aegean islands, under Greek sovereignty since the Balkan wars, were adjacent to costal regions inhabited by Anatolian Greeks. Within a few months, more than 150,000 Greeks were forced to emigrate to the Greek nation-state, and another 50,000 were displaced to the Anatolian interior.¹⁵

Before the expulsions and deportations were halted, the intent had been to extend them to the major Greek centers of Anatolia such as Smyrna and its surroundings. This was because talks had begun between the Greek and Turkish authorities concerning a possible “transfer,” in other words a regulated population exchange, similar to what had been arranged between Bulgaria and Turkey in 1913, even if that precedent had only confirmed already-realized expulsions.¹⁶ A transfer between Greece and the Ottoman Empire would, to be sure, have to be far more ambitious, involving an exchange of the Orthodox Greeks in Thrace and Western Anatolia for the Muslims in Macedonia and Epirus. In the summer of 1914, both states announced their readiness for the transfer. But they could not agree on a suitable procedure, and so the accord was not ratified.17 Furthermore,the Great War—the “European War,” as it was called in the Orient and the Levant— had begun.

When Greece entered the Great War on the side of the Entente in 1917, the Ottoman authorities resumed deportations of Orthodox populations into the interior, prompted by a desire to secure the empire’s coastline. Greeks living along the Aegean and the Sea of Marmara, areas susceptible to possible Allied amphibious assaults,were relocated deep in the hinterland.The Ottomans were not alone in choosing to depopulate a region considered militarily sensitive. In czarist Russia, it was common practice during World War I to remove populations considered unreliable from sectors adjoining the front. Thus the Galician Jews, believed to harbor sympathies for the Central Powers, were deported to the East. Ethnic Germans received similar treatment. In the Baltic, hundreds of thousands of Jews were likewise relocated.¹⁸ In Rumania, the Jewish populace, allegedly sympathetic to Austria Hungary, was subjected to similar oppressive measures.¹⁹ The fate of some half-million Turkic-speaking Central Asian nomads, the Kazakhs of the Kirghiz-Kazakh Federation, was particularly horrible. Stripped of their herds and possessions, they were driven by the Russians into the desert and mountains in the dead of winter, where they perished miserably. A plea on their behalf by Duma deputy Alexander Kerensky went unheeded.²⁰

The genocide of the Armenians in 1915 took place at the juncture between two displacements:the gradual formation of the Turkish nation-state from the decaying Ottoman Empire and the upheaval accompanying the war on the Caucasus front.²¹ The government inspired deportations and massacres were occasioned by earlier Armenian uprisings and ethnic clashes in mixed areas of settlement as well as by Armenian sympathies for Russia, the archenemy of the Ottoman Empire. This mix of old and new conflicts ended in the annihilation of well over a million Armenians.

The persecution of the Armenians began in the wake of the crippling defeat of the Third Ottoman Army near Sarikamis in January 1915. War minister Enver Pasha had deployed this ill prepared army on the Armenian high plateau during an exceptionally harsh winter, the aim being to confront far better equipped Russian forces under excellent command, in order to then advance into the oil-rich region of Baku.With four legions of foreign Armenians in the Russian army having fought with distinction against the Ottomans, the Armenians were held responsible for the defeat of the Ottoman troops. In this context, the radical, highly nationalistic, and pan-Turkish faction within the Committee for Unity and Progress seized upon the Armenian military role as a pretext to launch deportations of the Anatolian Armenians that resulted in genocide.²²

As a first step, the generally loyal Armenian soldiers serving in the Ottoman army were disarmed, demobilized, and reassembled in labor battalions. Then all Armenians living in Eastern Anatolia were ordered to surrender whatever weapons they had. When the deportations from Zaitun began in April 1915, members of these labor battalions were herded together and killed.²³ On instructions from interior minister Talat Pasha, thousands of Armenian community leaders were arrested on 24 April, and many were executed. Armenian notables in Istanbul and Smyrna, in the westernmost reaches of the empire, far from the Russian front in the Caucasus, suffered the same fate. From May to June 1915, Armenians living in the eastern provinces were “resettled,” that is, the men were largely murdered on the spot, while the elderly, the women, and the children were forced to leave on foot or shipped off in trains as far as the rail network allowed. Along the way, they often fall prey to marauding Kurdish bands. Most died of exhaustion, hunger, or thirst. The destination of these deportations was the Aleppo region; from there the trek continued on to Deir ez Zor. Those who had managed to survive this ordeal were driven into the Syrian Desert abutting the Euphrates area. From here there was no escape.

The Great War and the dubious accusations leveled by pan Turkish members of the Committee for Unity and Progress furnished the genocide’s immediate pretext. But the real sources of this horrifying event lie deeper, are bound up with the slow dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire over the course of the nineteenth century. At work here was a highly complex process of religious ethnification: the transformation of the empire’s religious communities, the so-called millets, into nations.²⁴ Within the empire, the traditional principle of personality was steadily supplanted by territorial notions of order. With the introduction of even limited local representation, the various regions gradually assumed a “national” tint. Relations between “majority” and “minority,” previously having little relevance within the state’s imperial structure, gradually gained prominence.²⁵ By the end of the nineteenth century, the nationalization of groups whose identity had hitherto been religious had raised the issue of the empire’s “national” character. The Turkicizing Muslims were increasingly becoming the group whose ethnic attributes stamped the physiognomy of the state. In contrast, the Orthodox Christians of various denominations and the Armenians were being increasingly viewed as outsiders. This generations-long process, in which Ottoman subjects of the sultan with differing religious affiliations were transformed into members of diverse nationalities, soon developed a murderous political dynamic. Around the turn of the century, it led to hopeless conflicts between Orthodox Christians and Muslims, as well as among Orthodox communities with different languages and rites.²⁶ It produced seemingly interminable conflicts between Turks and Armenians and between Turks and Greeks, with all the accompanying distress. To the Armenians, it brought genocide.

In this manner, what came to a climax during the Great War was the outcome of a more long-term development. It is here important to note that, toward the end of the nineteenth century, what passed as the civilized world had already learned of massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Between 1894 and 1896, they had been murdered by the thousands, the atrocities beginning in Sassoun, in the vilayet of Bitlis, than spreading to several other provinces. In total, there were between 90,000 and 250,000 victims. Missionaries and consuls apprised Europe of the events, with questions soon raised about the causes and those responsible. Pastor Johannes Lepsius, who was instrumental in gathering evidence of these early massacres as well as of the later genocide, suspected that a central administrative hand was behind the bloodbath.²⁷ Other authors have attributed it to spontaneous reactions by resettled Muslims who following the Russo-Turkish War of 1876–77 had gradually reached Anatolia, where they encountered Christian Armenians purportedly sympathetic to Russia.²⁸ The Armenian and other minority questions were discussed at the Berlin Congress of 1878, reforms now being demanded of the Sublime Porte. The Armenian problem had become an international problem requiring repeated action by the leading powers. In turn, Muslims in the Ottoman Empire began to identify the Armenians and their demands with foreign interests. In the aftermath of the Young Turk Revolution and especially after the 1909 counterrevolution, twenty-thousand Armenians in Cilicia were murdered by gangs. In 1912 Russia raised the Armenian question anew; in February 1914 it reached an accord with the Ottomans for institutional reform in the region, to be implemented under the supervision of two European inspectors—a form of intervention reminding the Ottomans of their earlier, unfavorable agreement on the Macedonian question.²⁹ This generated fear among the Muslims that resettlement and expulsion might become their fate in the eastern provinces as it had been in Rumelia.³⁰

At the outbreak of the Great War, the Ottoman Empire’s Armenians found themselves in an extremely precarious situation. A chain of events leading toward the genocide began to unfold. The events involved Ottoman territorial losses occurring, paradoxically, after the Young Turk’s revolution.³¹ First, there was the final declaration of Bulgarian independence from Ottoman rule in September 1908, followed by the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Tripolitan War of 1911 against Italy, and the Balkan wars of 1912–1913, resulting in the loss of the empire’s last European territory, together with the expulsion of Muslims from Macedonia and Thrace and a constant influx of Muslim refugees from the Caucasus, who could only be resettled in Anatolia with great difficulty. These developments accelerated the transformation of the Ottoman Empire into an increasingly homogeneous Turkish nation-state. The territorial losses radicalized the Young Turks, while the steady decline in numbers of the empire’s other Christian subjects through further territorial losses deprived the Armenians of the traditional protection offered in the empire by multiethnic and multireligious diversity. On the eve of the “European War,” the Armenians, once known as the most loyal of the Sultan’s millets, stood nearly alone in facing the increasingly Turkicized Muslims in Anatolia.³² Only the Greeks in Asia Minor and the Hellespont still continued to inhabit their ancient homeland,—at least until their final expulsion in 1922. But there was a basic difference between their situation and that of the Armenians: namely, the existence of a Greek nation-state in near proximity, capable, if necessary, of absorbing desperate, threatened Orthodox Greeks. This was something the Turkish nationalist and pan-Turkish extremist factions in the Committee for Unity and Progress could rely on, hence the agreement to this effect under discussion in the summer of 1914. The Armenians, to the contrary, had no place of their own to flee to.

The Armenians of Anatolia were consequently doomed. One third of the Ottoman Armenian population survived—some six hundred thousand persons, including the Armenians in Lebanon and Palestine (both still part of the empire). Many had fled from Anatolia to Russian territory before the deportations began; others, the legendary defenders of Musa Dagh, were evacuated by Allied ships; still others managed to survive the camps in the Syrian Desert.The Armenian inhabitants of Constantinople and Smyrna also survived the ferocious persecution, something clearly due to the presence of many European legations in both localities—not least the German military mission headed by Liman von Sanders. Generally, however, the Ottomans’ German and Austrian allies kept a low profile. After the crimes became known, the Entente threatened to punish those responsible. As much as possible, the Young Turk government tried to conceal the true scale of the events; but leading personalities such as defense minister Enver Pasha acknowledged the crime in private conversations, for example, with American ambassador Henry Morgenthau.³³

The territorial secession of the Rumelian Christians from the Ottoman Empire, the expansion of the Greek state in the aftermath of the Balkan wars, the reciprocal expulsions of Muslims and Orthodox Christians in the course of the Greek-Turkish confrontations between 1919 and 1922, and the Armenian genocide were manifestations of a single process: the formation of ethnically homogeneous nation-states from the disintegrating body of a multireligious, multinational empire. This phenomenon was not limited to the territories of the Ottoman Empire and the Eastern Question. With the Great War’s end and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919–20, national and ethnic questions emerged with similar sharpness in the heart of the Continent, in Central and East Central Europe.³⁴

In East Central and Eastern Europe, issues of church affiliation, so crucial in the Balkans and the Levant, were secondary to those of ethnic affiliation. This was very much the case with the new or expanded states that had emerged from the dynastically legitimized multiethnic and multinational empires. Although hardly less diverse than the empires they had successfully disrupted, they strove for the political ideal of national homogeneity.³⁵ The situation with the Russian Empire was strikingly different: even after the political upheaval of 1919, multinationality was able to subsist there in the framework of Bolshevik internationalism; albeit in Communist guise, Soviet Russia and the later Soviet Union remained committed to the empire’s universal character.

Each of the new states in Central and East Central Europe was plagued by constant tensions between the titular nation and its minorities. The great powers in Paris tried to regulate interethnic and border conflicts by demanding that these newly expanded states sign formal accords protecting minority rights. But over the long term, these accords were unable to shield the minorities from persecution by the ruling nation.³⁶ Increasingly, the minorities fell victim to social, political, and institutional discrimination. Already in the 1920s, a chronic agrarian crisis had produced authoritarian and dictatorial regimes in East Central and Southern Europe; this, in turn, exacerbated the condition of the minorities.³⁷ In particular, Jews in East Central Europe faced a seemingly hopeless situation.³⁸ In Poland, 35 percent of the total population consisted of non-ethnic Poles; Jews comprised over 10 percent of the population. In that context, the intensifying social antagonism between city and countryside had damaging consequences for Poland’s Jewry. For example, when applying for work in government-held monopolies and other state enterprises and agencies, ethnic (Catholic) Poles who had migrated to urban areas were given preference over urban Jews.³⁹ At the same time, the United States, which at the turn of the century had left its gates open for an unlimited immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, now introduced drastic restrictions. In the 1930s, such restrictions, shared with other potential lands of asylum, would prove fatal for the Jewish populace of Poland.⁴⁰

In the 1930s, the dangers facing the Jews of Germany were of a different character than those menacing their coreligionists in Poland.⁴¹ Polish Jews were a numerically significant segment of Polish society. They had encountered both their own government’s discriminatory policies and popular, everyday anti Semitism. They could relate their misery largely to structural problems, especially poverty, inherent in the social reality of the new Polish polity. In contrast, the Jews of Germany, comprising less than 1 percent of the total population, seemed neither to present a social problem nor to challenge Germany’s territorial or ethnic integrity. In interwar Poland, Polish integrists considered all the ethnic minorities to pose a permanent danger to the very existence of an independent Poland. In certain Polish nationalist circles,the Jews were reviled as a “fourth partitioning power.” And they were repeatedly accused of conspiring with other ethnic minorities, including the Ukrainians, the White Russians, the Lithuanians, and the Germans, to undermine the country’s sovereignty through appeals to the clauses in the Polish constitution, approved by the League of Nations, that guaranteed minority protection.⁴²

The East Central European nationalities question, mass poverty, and popular anti-Semitism thus formed the context for the Polish government’s effort to rid itself of what it considered a “surplus” of Jews by encouraging migration to, for instance, Madagascar or Palestine. In contrast, the Nazis’ own, far more radical anti-Jewish measures, an apparent attempt to force all Jews out of Germany,⁴³ were ideologically grounded in a rigid racist weltanschauung, hence located beyond considerations of utility and—what will become clear later—even their own self preservation: a reality eventually leading to the destruction of European Jewry. In the end, it would not even be enough to expel the Jews from the territories under German control. The Nazis thus not only surpassed previous excesses of ethnic cleansing but transformed, in the course of territorial expansion, the very logic of expulsion into its opposite. The Nazi aim, it turned out, was to locate all the Jews living in Europe and assemble them logistically for “eastern settlement”; eventually, this became a concentration for the sake of annihilation. Particularly in that last stage, the process involved something categorically different than trying to achieve ethnic homogeneity by transporting populations beyond one’s own national borders. The deportation of fewer than eight hundred Norwegian Jews to Auschwitz is a phenomenon beyond the “ethnic cleansing” that had already taken place in Europe.⁴⁴ That in July 1944 the Germans shipped the Jews of Rhodes to their annihilation even as they were abandoning their heavy military equipment testifies to an assault on their own most basic interest, on a human instinct for self-preservation widely considered an anthropological commonplace.⁴⁵

While the thrust of National Socialism’s ideologically driven Jewish policy was toward annihilation, this does not mean it was programmatically steered from the start. But ideological willingness in that regard had settled into everything that appeared to be tied to contingency, coincidence, or circumstance. It impregnated a mode of action ostensibly under the sway of practical constraints, thus generating collective will. It consisted of both active, ideologically driven factors and passive elements following the situation’s dictates in opportunistic fashion. This form of willingness headed toward annihilation as if programmatically steered there from the start.

Along with an ideological propensity, the destruction of European Jewry required an advent of unpredictable circumstances in increasingly extreme situations. These circumstances themselves stemmed from both the special character of the Nazi regime and the rapidly unfolding phases of its expansion. Historians have defined the regime’s special character as that of a “polycracy” producing “institutional chaos” and leading in turn to a spiral of self created radicalization;⁴⁶ the consequences of such radicalization in any case do not have an intentional appearance. This was the case as well, it is argued, for the mass annihilation, carried out less for reasons of ideology than because of specific circumstances. To be sure, the Nazis ignored neither racial origin nor other stigmatizing factors in selecting their victims, but such factors were secondary to the circumstances, which produced the actual choice of the groups to be sacrificed. This choice was consequently not the principle consideration in carrying out the Holocaust.⁴⁷

In many respects, this sort of historical argument is plausible. It certainly generates insight into the structures and processes of the Nazi power apparatus. Nevertheless, its ultimate explanatory value is dubious, especially in light of the fact that the very selection of the groups to be victimized reveals an ideological disposition to deal with them as they were finally dealt with.⁴⁸ For the victims were, emphatically, not individuals chosen at random, thus mistakenly consigned to the death mills of a totalitarian regime. Rather, they belonged to certain groups whose stigmatization derived from supposedly immutable genealogical features. It was precisely because of that shared genealogy that they were consigned to a common fate. Again, the victims were not chosen haphazardly, irrespective of collective affiliation, for utilitarian or other practical reasons. Specific persons and groups—Jews, Gypsies, and others—were exterminated for reasons of ideology or from pseudoscientific motives.⁴⁹ In contrast to what the circumstantial or structuralist-functionalist approaches imply, the choice of groups doomed to death can indeed disclose the causes of their destruction. But at the same time, it is crucial to acknowledge both background motives and external circumstances that allowed the monstrous deed to be carried out, for this juncture between motive and circumstance points the way to the Holocaust. The juncture was itself reflected in the direction of Nazi expansion: while it proceeded from west to east, the extermination began on the easternmost edge of the expansion, moving from there in the opposite direction, east to west.The extermination began with conventional mass killings reminiscent of massacres and culminated, pressing westward, in the total genocide of European Jewry.

The topography of annihilation can be delineated as follows: Until November 1938, the Jews of Germany were subjected to harsh discriminatory measures whose purpose was to ensure social isolation and thus induce emigration. The “annexation” of Austria, the first step in Nazi Germany’s expansion, led to genuine expulsions soon extended into Germany proper—into the Altreich. The outbreak of war and the conquest of Poland in 1939 led to the ghettoization of the Jews in the annexed and occupied territories. The actual extermination began in 1941 in tandem with the specifically anti-Bolshevik mode of warfare characterizing Operation Barbarossa. In the areas of the Soviet Union falling under German control, the killing passed through several stages of intensification, culminating in large-scale genocidal massacres. By the end of 1941 or the beginning of 1942, after the rather illusory notion of transferring the Jews to the East had been abandoned due to the inauspicious progress of the Russian campaign, the bureaucratically organized and industrially implemented process of annihilation got under way. It began with the Polish Jews and gradually encompassed all of European Jewry.

Hence until the Kristallnacht in November 1938, the German authorities sought to rid their nation of Jews, whose presence they considered intolerable, by means of forced emigration. This policy was carried out by conservative officials in the relevant ministries in coordination with the remaining Jewish institutions and organizations.⁵⁰ Of course, emigration could only be successfully achieved if immigration into another country was assured. But in the stressful process of searching for acceptance by another country, potential Jewish émigrés had to meet certain conditions, for instance, learning a new useful trade. Leaving Germany was thus an extremely laborious procedure requiring adequate time and planning. Both the Jews and the responsible officials in the Ministry of Economy and Finance believed that under the existing conditions of international peace and relative stability, the procedure would require more than twenty years.⁵¹

But the conditions favoring such a long-term project soon vanished. The expulsions following the Austrian Anschluß in March 1938 undermined the basis for orderly emigration. Faced with a flood of refugees lacking valid papers or possessions or a suitable vocation,the countries of immigration became increasingly reluctant to receive them. They feared, justifiably,that pressure on Jews to leave Germany and Austria would soon mount.⁵² The conference initiated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in Evian in the summer of 1938 was meant to encourage such countries, especially those in the Western Hemisphere, to grant entry to the Jewish refugees. But the conference’s American organizers were also aware of one possible result of any general declaration of readiness to accept new Jewish immigrants: increased pressure by the governments of Poland, Rumania, and Hungary on their Jewish citizens to leave. These East Central European governments had markedly little sympathy for the Jews; and indeed, the planned American conference had encouraged government circles in Warsaw to press ahead with their own long-standing plans to get rid of “surplus” Jews by means of emigration.⁵³ For this reason, the organizers decided to term the Evian conference the Conference on Political Refugees from Germany and Austria. The title was to contain no specific reference to Jews, although they were its main concern.

After war broke out in September 1939, orderly emigration became unthinkable—all the more so with the considerable expansion of the number of Jews under German rule that accompanied the conquest of Polish territory. Even if there was still no clear intention to liquidate all the Jews, the conditions that the Nazis created already pointed in this direction. The prewar process of forced emigration and expulsion was now supplanted by internal deportation to the east and a local concentration of the Jewish populace. Between December 1939 and April 1940, Jews from the Reich, the Protectorate of Bohemia, and the annexed Polish territories were deported to the newly created “Generalgouvernement” of Poland, which was declared a “collateral territory” (Nebenland) of the German Reich in June 1940. In comparison with the previous forced emigration, these deportations were a qualitative leap in the direction of annihilation. While emigration, even when less than voluntary, generally involves a prospect of maintaining or even improving one’s social status and living conditions, deportation is a forced change of living place involving loss of civil rights and restrictions on mobility to the point of total subjugation. Deportees are deprived of control not only over their own decisions but even over their own bodies. Consequently, the Jewish emigration westward and following deportations eastward were antithetical in terms of both status and fate.⁵⁴

At the same time that barriers were being raised against emigration, the expulsions and deportations were intensifying in the annexed territories. This was especially the case in the Polish region the Nazis now called the “Wartheland,” under its enterprising Gauleiter, Arthur Greiser, who was particularly eager to Germanize his satrapy. Poles, Jews, and Gypsies were summarily expelled, while ethnic Germans from the Baltic were brought “home into the Reich” and resettled there.⁵⁵ As part of an enterprise of national-racial homogenization, these events evoke earlier ethnic cleansings and population transfers. Initially, both Poles and Jews were ousted from the annexed territories, but that practice was soon discontinued.⁵⁶ To the east, in the nonannexed but German-occupied Generalgouvernement, a distinction was drawn between Poles with “Aryan” papers and Jews. This would later mark the line between life and death. Beginning in 1940, Jews were concentrated in special residential “ghettos,” preferably near railway junctions or in localities affording access to a rail network, since they were not meant to remain in the Generalgouvernement permanently. The Nazis wanted to devise a “territorial solution” to the “Jewish Question.” In October 1939, there had been provisional talk about creating a “Jewish reservation” in eastern occupied Poland, around the Lublin district and Nisko on the San. According to Reinhard Heydrich’s casual formulation, a “Reich ghetto” was to be established.⁵⁷ But this casual form of speech harbored increasing radicalization.

The radicalizing process is manifest in the history of the first ghetto—the  ghetto in the “Warthegau,” created because deportations to the Generalgouvernement had been temporarily halted. Hans Frank had successfully protested against any further importation of Jews, so those arriving from the west were concentrated instead in  Somewhat later, ghettoization began in the Generalgouvernement. The Warsaw ghetto was set up in October 1940, followed by other, larger ghettos the following spring. The Jews in the ghettos were meant to be kept ready for further transport to the “east.”⁵⁸

Ghettoization was introduced as a temporary measure; the ghetto was meant to be a place of transit. But to where? And how long, and under what conditions, would this situation continue? These remained open questions. This extended provisionality soon shifted onto another level of radicalization. On 16 July 1941, hence even before the offensive in the Soviet Union had stalled, Gauleiter Greiser’s office broached the idea of a “humane” solution for the “non-able-bodied” Jews packed into the Lódz ghetto. Mounting problems with food supply and the threat of epidemics made it urgent to dispose of these Jews by some “expeditious means.”⁵⁹

Before such measures were applied and the Jews were gassed en masse as part of “Operation Reinhard,” a “territorial solution” was considered once again, In June 1940, just after the fall of France, officials in the Reich Central Security Office became enthused over another reservation scheme, this time in Madagascar. The island, part of the French colonial empire, would absorb the Jews of Europe who had come under German jurisdiction.60 From the outset, however, the project was wholly unrealistic. Transporting millions of persons, already confined to ghettos and deprived of all means of livelihood, across the ocean, then resettling them on an inhospitable island lacking adequate infrastructure and other essentials was logistically unfeasible. When it became clear that the war with England would yield neither a quick victory nor an accord, the “Madagascar Plan” was shelved.⁶¹ The Jews would thus continue to be kept ready in the ghettos of occupied Poland for deportation to the “East” once the “Russian campaign” began. Meanwhile, the provisional situation was steadily corroding the living circumstances of the penned-up Jews. The misery of these individuals, torn from their social milieu and thrown into confinement, further deepened after rations were reduced and disease began to spread. Gradually the state of affairs came into being that Greiser’s staff had foreseen in the summer of 1941 and that had led to proposals to liquidate the Jews for reasons of “humanity.” That was, in the end, “more pleasant than letting them starve to death.”⁶²

The “humane” solution of killing had been introduced some time before by the highest echelons as “secret state policy.”Hitler’s chancellery was directing the “euthanasia” program inaugurated in the fall of 1939: the elimination of “life-unworthy life”— lebensunwertes Leben—in other words, a covert and systematic execution of physically and mentally disabled Germans.⁶³ The eugenic practices preceding euthanasia had little in common with the parallel anti-Jewish measures instituted in the 1930s. On the one hand, aside from the forcibly sterilized Rhineland Germans of partly black descent,⁶⁴ the victims of euthanasia were by and large “Aryans,” to be eliminated according to the demands of “racial hygiene.” On the other hand, although the Jews were ostensibly murdered for being “non-Aryan,” indeed subhuman, in actuality, for all the Nazi’s racial ideals and anthropological-physiognomical theory, the Third Reich’s legal definition of who was a Jew was necessarily based less on racial criteria than on religious affiliation.⁶⁵

Consequently, the real linkage between euthanasia and the murder of the Jews involved not a unified racial-hygienic argument but relatively secondary factors.⁶⁶ While the machinery devoted to killing “life-unworthy life” was justified by medical-biological principles, there was no direct linkage between eugenic theory and the onset of mass murder of Jews in the East. To be sure, their extermination would be carried out using the technical means developed for the euthanasia program—“Action T-4.” After the latter was halted in August 1941 in the wake of popular protests, its personnel was transferred to the East on account of its “expertise,” in order to process the Jews “deported” from the ghettos in Poland to death mills as part of Operation Reinhard. Hence the industrialized murder began with the arrival of the “Action T-4” cadre; with the construction of the death camps, regular slaughterhouses for human beings were up and running.⁶⁷ But they did not initiate the extermination, which can be traced back to the summer of 1941 and large-scale conventional massacres of Jews during Operation Barbarossa—hence in the framework of the ideological war against Bolshevism.⁶⁸

There is an evident causal nexus between Nazi anti-Bolshevism and the murder of the Jews in the East. The difference between Nazi anti-Bolshevism and its Western, liberal-democratic counterpart already emerged during Germany’s revolutionary insurgencies of 1918–19 and their counterrevolutionary suppression; it was especially manifest in the ideological synthesis of class and race stamping the National Socialist movement. Within the Nazi weltanschauung, the racial dimension of anti-Bolshevism predominated over its political dimension. In Nazi eyes, Bolshevism was not the rule of a certain class or a form of dictatorship by a self-declared proletariat avant-garde, but was rather a racial-ideological composite of “Jewish intelligentsia” and “Slavic subhumans.”⁶⁹ As a result, the Nazis perceived the Soviet Union’s Bolshevik regime as a variant of Jewish world domination. That perception is one reason the Soviet Union’s military staying power and its capacity to resist the German war machine could be so badly underestimated. The attack on the Soviet Union was launched in the firm conviction that the Red Empire would soon collapse.⁷⁰

Anti-Bolshevism as a racist worldview determined the war’s conduct. This can be seen in the increasingly broadened orders given the Wehrmacht, particularly Hitler’s so-called Commissar Decree of March 1941.⁷¹ Political commissars in the Red Army, officials of the Comintern and the Communist Party, as well as other agents of Soviet power were to be summarily executed—in extraordinarily intense acts of enmity commonly associated with civil war. And yet Nazi policy did not halt at this ostensibly political selection of victims. The shooting of Jewish males was soon extended to the annihilation of all Jews;⁷² the putative class war became a war of race. In keeping with its racist-ideological character, the commander of the German Sixth Army, Walter von Reichenau, issued orders in October 1941 making the true nature of the “war in the East” unmistakably clear to German soldiers. The campaign would be guided not by earlier rules of war but by an “inexorable völkish idea” that would be imposed on the “subhumanJews.”⁷³ As “Slavic subhumans,”millions of Soviet prisoners of-war were exposed to starvation and subfreezing temperature and thus themselves abandoned to a grim mass death.⁷⁴

Despite its connection with the euthanasia program, the onset of the extermination of European Jewry was closely bound up with the “eastern campaign” and its anti-Bolshevik, race-ideological orientation.⁷⁵ In many respects, Nazi anti-Bolshevism presented itself as a variant of anti-Semitism. Albeit possibly unconvincing to some, the repeated assertion of a dire threat stemming from a “Jewish intelligentsia” working together with “subhuman Slavs” provided the SS’s Einsatz units, the police reserve battalions, and units of the Wehrmacht with a useful rationale for their murderous activities.⁷⁶ The ideological blight had especially murderous consequences when orders were ambiguous. In August and September 1941, the threshold between an anti-Bolshevik ideological war and genocide of the Jews was crossed imperceptibly; this was followed by growing pressure to totalize the process. Germany’s entire administrative apparatus was now steadily drawn, as if by an invisible hand, into a vortex of visionary planning.⁷⁷ Soon the “total solution of the Jewish Question” had become an exclusively technical question, the main concern being to make it easier for the murderers by creating bureaucratic and spatial distance between them and their victims, while at the same time industrially accelerating the process. This was the context in which the euthanasia experts were to play their parts.⁷⁸ The Jews in the Polish ghettos were now caught up in the factory-like killing machinery; death camps in the close vicinity—Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka—were the destination of the“deportations.”These “human slaughterhouses”⁷⁹ were in constant operation from the spring of 1942 to October 1943. By the time the large industrial complex at Auschwitz had reached its maximal killing capacity, Polish Jewry had thus already been largely eradicated. Deportees to Auschwitz were now transported from the remaining reaches— western, central, southern—of German-occupied Europe.⁸⁰

On 29 November 1941, Reinhard Heydrich invited middle-level personnel in the state and Nazi-party bureaucracy to attend a meeting on the “Jewish Question” that later became known as the Wannsee Conference, a reference to its venue in the lakeside villa of an affluent Berlin suburb. The meeting, which took place on 20 January 1942, was not aimed at passing a formal resolution⁸¹— none was needed, since the annihilation of the Jews was already well under way. Typical of the “Final Solution” in its entirety, the mass murder had itself proceeded by degrees.⁸²

What was the actual purpose of this ominous meeting, held not during normal business hours in the Reich Security Main Office, but rather at noon in a secluded villa? There is circumstantial evidence supporting the idea that Heydrich wished to receive some special authority on the “Jewish Question” from his colleagues in other agencies. But this explanation is inadequate, for the Wannsee Conference seems to have been much more significant than that.83 First, the intention to simulate a bureaucratic procedure to secure administrative legitimation for a mass-murder process that was long under way is evident. Furthermore, by bringing in representatives from a variety of responsible offices in the state and party apparatus, the simulated procedure could contribute to the bureaucratic rationalization and thus acceleration of the genocidal enterprise. Through the conference, Heydrich was able to enlist the governmental and party bureaucracy for a task until then solely within the competence of the Reich Security Main Office, the SS, and the Wehrmacht, but without surrendering overall control. He thus succeeded in “nailing down” the involvement of the state secretaries and office heads who were present, as Eichmann putit during his interrogationinJerusalem.⁸⁴

The timing of the Wannsee Conference is significant. The rapid succession of events between August and December 1941 point to various processes and individual decisions at work in the “Jewish Question” that fed into the Final Solution. Among these were the expansion of killing actions by the Einsatz squads into genocidal murder of all Jews they could get their hands on, the decision to include German Jews in the deportations, the construction of the Belzec extermination camp, the declaration of war against the United States in December 1941, the first systematic killings in Chelmno in the Wartheland, and so forth. These decisions and processes suggest a “caesura”⁸⁵ in the entire complex of unfolding events; from that point onward, the entirety of European Jewry was to be exterminated.It remains doubtful whether a clear, administratively effective decision, traceable to specific officials, rests behind the killing process’s sequential intensification. This is the case despite the fact that on 12 December 1941, one day after declaring war on the United States, Hitler informed the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter elite assembled in the chancellery’s private quarters that his “prophecy” would now be fulfilled: the Jews, who bore ultimate blame for the war, would be “destroyed.”⁸⁶

The declaration of war against the United States and the expansion of the conflict into a world war probably further radicalized the approach to the “Jewish Question.”⁸⁷ In Hitler’s fantasy, the Jews were, after all, an international power that exploited both Bolshevism and Western plutocracy to enhance their domination.⁸⁸ This ideological projection had now become ubiquitous: in the media, in propaganda, in public declarations, and in the Führer’s unrelenting anti-Jewish rhetoric. Within his closest circle, there was certainly no doubt about his intentions. He repeatedly tied the ever-widening war to the Jews; this in turn generated an array of increasingly severe measures against them. The intensification of activities in the chancellery in this period is striking. In particular, Himmler’s calendar entry for 18 December 1941— “Jewish Question / to be eradicated as partisans”—appears to strongly suggest that such a decision was reached in consultation with Hitler.⁸⁹

Nevertheless, as indicated, doubts persist regarding the existence of a decision or order clearly demarcating the threshold where the Holocaust began. The total annihilation of the Jews by Einsatz squads and similar formations had already begun in formerly Soviet territory long before America’s entry into the war and the accompanying posturing and rhetorical hyperbole.⁹⁰ To stress again: what appears to have unfolded was a kind of gliding escalation, the limitless extension of a practice of extermination already established in principle. When, following mass executions in an area stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, the deportations were extended to the German Jews in the fall of 1941, the fate of Polish Jewry had long been sealed, their liquidation only a technical question, initially addressed in November with the construction of the Belzec death camp.⁹¹

The Wannsee Conference thus represented an institutional legitimation of ongoing mass murder. Heydrich was probing to see if the bureaucracy would offer some resistance to his “solution of the Jewish Question.” In this regard, the conference was a complete success. None of the bureau chiefs expressed any reservations regarding his competency. Nor had he been obliged to coordinate with other offices in matters regarding the Final Solution. As things turned out, including the bureaucracy in the process ensured its further radicalization.

At first glance, then, the Wannsee Conference’s choreography appears to have been designed to confirm Heydrich’s competence—a competence otherwise infringing on the prerogatives of almost every agency. But that was not all there was to it, for the conference was held in the context of those liminal events, in the autumn and winter of 1941, heralding the transition from annihilation of the “Bolshevik” Jews in the East to the Final Solution. The conference, then, marks the “caesura” during which the complete destruction of European Jewry was set in motion. On the administrative level, there was a need for a symbolic act; the transition to the Holocaust was to have its bureaucratic signet. But there was no official resolution sanctioning action, and it is not surprising that the state secretaries and bureau chiefs participating in the meeting were later at a loss to say just what had come out of it or why it had been held in the first place. Heydrich, on the other hand, was in a much better position to gauge its success. Relieved, the plenipotentiary for the “total solution of the Jewish Question,” a man who normally eschewed alcohol, enjoyed a glass of cognac with his paladin Adolf Eichmann.⁹²

It would be mistaken to conclude that the decisions leading to the Final Solution amounted to a deplorable but still in the end basically negligent procedure. Even when what is at stake is a series of distinct but interrelated deeds rather than an elaborate plan driven by a declared will to act, intense deliberation and ideological motivation can be manifestly present. This disarticulation of intention contributed significantly to the Holocaust’s relatively smooth implementation. Also, the fraying of accountability served to foil later attempts to prosecute the crimes before a court of law.⁹³ And yet no matter how detached and disconnected the execution of the Final Solution may have seemed to its principle agents, the fact that it constituted a gross violation of all ethical norms must have been obvious to all of them. On the threshold of horrendous crime, these agents found it necessary to seek reasons to justify their actions. Here absolving themselves by transferring responsibility to superiors or supralegal authorities—appealing, for example, to the “will of the Führer”—may have been convenient.⁹⁴ We would be seriously underestimating the role of justification as a basis for action if we considered a particular welt-anschauung important only when it follows a comprehensive program or a political itinerary pursued down to the smallest detail. This is not how ideology operates. Rather, it works through osmosis. It spreads a thin veneer of justification over events and can perform a useful service in allaying doubts or overcoming moral inhibitions when under social pressure. To this end, neither ideological conviction in the sense of an overall worldview nor a pervasive anti-Semitic animus is necessary, contrary to what some wish to argue.⁹⁵ Instead, it suffices simply to appeal to the ideology in moments of doubt or inner conflict. Of course, any such justification of nakedly criminal acts comes up against limits when the victims are persons with whom one feels a bond of kinship or ethnicity, as revealed in the popular protest against euthanasia or the case of the “factory Jews” in Berlin successfully shielded by their “Aryan” wives.⁹⁶ Killing is easier if perpetrated against groups of outsiders, especially if they are transformed into a pliable mass and, if possible, proscribed as an “eternal enemy.”⁹⁷

When one tries to understand the events leading to the Nazi extermination of European Jewry, two apparently separate factors are of special importance: first, a characteristic institutional process of Nazi agencies, an effort unfolding in extreme situations to solve problems of their own making, tending to generate intensification and radicalization; second, the precise groups against whom the increasingly radical measures were to be directed. Despite the Nazi regime’s institutional chaos, there was in fact little doubt about who was to be persecuted and finally subjected to “special treatment.” Initially the victims—Jews, Gypsies, the disabled, and others—were stigmatized; only later were they subjected to the corresponding treatment. There was no threat from the regime toward Germans who belonged to the “national community” (the Volksgemeinschaft). The only doubt was whether a specific individual should be assigned to a stigmatized group.⁹⁸

The identity of the victims is important for identifying a broader intentionality—that not only of the crime’s initiators but also of perpetrators on the middle and lower levels—driving the annihilation. In contrast to the criminalizing of individuals, collective stigmatizing reveals, by its very nature, the underlying motive for an act of persecution. And the presence of a motive itself attests to a widely denied intentional action. Many have tried to escape accountability by claiming not to have known what was happening to the Jews. But it is difficult to maintain convincingly that they did not know that something was happening to the Jews. In these deplorable proceedings, a motive emerges that must have been present latently and independent of the regime’s official proclamations, again without necessarily being articulated openly and with ideological fervor. It was enough to signal passive readiness through indifference. For the deed’s realization, it was immaterial whether either initiators or perpetrators were motivated by a strong sense of inward conviction. What mattered far more was that they acted as if they were so motivated. Consequently, the anti-Jewish measures did not require an anti-Semitism of firm conviction.The murder of the Jews was an anti-Semitic act in that it needed no other motive than the fact that Jews were involved.

Looking backward, we can divide perception and interpretation of the Holocaust into two contradictory perspectives, attached to two different realms of experience and memory. These realms lead, in turn, to antithetical questions about the past. The question about the circumstances culminating in the Holocaust, the question of how it could happen, is asked above all by those who have adopted the perpetrators’ viewpoint, whether out of emotional shock, intellectual curiosity, or a sense of collective belonging. These individuals tend to universalize their question, citing similar events in the hope of understanding what happened, and exploring—as it were, anthropologically—various factors that might allow similar events to recur. The contrasting perspective tends to adopt the viewpoint of the victims. The fact that the horrifying crimes of the Holocaust were emphatically not inflicted on persons irrespective of origin, but rather on a specific group of people stigmatized on grounds of ethnicity, encourages a focus on the motives of the perpetrators. The question then asked about the Holocaust as a historical event is why it happened. Or more particularistically: “Why us?”⁹⁹

These central, epistemologically contrary historical questions asked about the Holocaust—on the one hand, the question of its circumstances, its how; on the other hand, the question of its causes, its why—can be classified according to origin, antithetically generated historical images, and associated narratives; by definition, they profoundly influence the event’s historical reconstruction. In the ultimative terms of their couching, the very nature of the mass annihilation seems to be confirmed.¹⁰⁰ Strikingly, this unfolding antithetical historical discourse appears to follow the pattern of statement and counterstatement between plaintiff and accused characterizing a court of law.¹⁰¹ Although thoroughly confirming the basic facts of the case, the accused will still be tempted to offer cogent reasons for not being guilty. In view of the complex events that led to the mass murder, the accused may sometimes succeed in such an endeavor, especially in regard to the decision-making processes, but also to the obscurity resulting from the genocide’s division of labor. Above all, the accused will here be tempted to minimize anything suggesting intent or subjective readiness—the centrality, for instance, of virulent anti-Semitism in the infliction of pain on stigmatized human beings. In general, they will downplay the importance of ideology. Attached to the collective memory defining their ethnic affiliation, they will maintain that the horrific events resulted from negligence rather than guilt.¹⁰²

It is different for those belonging to the collective of victims. For them, the perpetrators’ guilt is proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Intent is undeniable. After all, the victims were singled out for annihilation solely on the basis of their origin. There were no other reasons, since the victims were totally blameless. And this sole reason, origin, evokes the question of why, a why pointing to remote pasts. This is the locus where the question’s answer appears to lie hidden—within a pre-past, reaching back into religious myth.¹⁰³

Such reasoning is by no means misguided. In justifying their actions, the perpetrators themselves repeatedly referred to religious and secular preconditions.¹⁰⁴ With the Holocaust thus supercharged with polarized prehistories stored in cultural memory, citing trivial circumstances as its underlying cause seems tantamount to a cheap apologia.

To have murdered the Jews out of anti-Semitism seems to be far more dramatic, while impregnated with a higher meaning than doing so out of caprice or sheer negligence. For undeniably, throughout Western memory the Jews have stood for more than themselves. In the self-identity of Christendom, they have long occupied an exceptional position—immemorially, quite independent of the Holocaust. For Christianity, they are the Other par excellence; this Other is constitutive of the Christian religion.¹⁰⁵ In Christian memory, there is thus an inevitable linkage between the physical destruction of the Jews and their metaphysical importance. Consequently, the Holocaust becomes more than one genocide among others—all the more so after Christian memory has shed its sacred vesture and assumed a secular, universal form. Likewise, within that memory, the Jews clearly differ in their significance from other victims of the Nazi mass murder, a hierarchy of victimization thus crystallizing in posterity’s consciousness. This hierarchy certainly reflects not the real relative worth of those killed but only their relative vividness—hence the Jewish genocide’s dramatic resonance—in the self-awareness of the West.

In his interrogation in Nuremberg, which led to his conviction and sentencing to death by hanging, Viktor Brack, one of the guiding figures of the euthanasia program, accepted full responsibility for the killing of the physically and mentally disabled but denied any role in the murder of European Jewry.¹⁰⁶ After the American examiner confronted him with a letter he had signed and sent to Himmler in June 1942 proving beyond doubt that he had proposed selecting two to three million of the approximately ten million Jews slated for extermination, consigning them to forced labor, and thereby rendering them “incapable of reproducing,” Brack burst into tears. Was this because he viewed the murder of the disabled differently? Or was it because he believed that behind the victors stood the Manichean power of World Jewry? Or was it rather that the Jews a priori had some exceptional status owing to their position in Christian myth? Whatever the reason, the proof of his participation in their annihilation seemed to stir special feelings in him.¹⁰⁷

Cultural memory assigns different values to different groups of victims. The greater the significance of a group for one’s own identity, the more space it seems to occupy in memory. Because the Jews and their associated myths are constitutive of Christian memory, it seems that their extermination involved more than the death of the Jews themselves. Also, the Christian or Christian hued sense of self is implicated. Thus the special commemorative rituals for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust may also have another function: to re-appropriate lost elements of Christian tradition. Hence although the murder of the Gypsies is also tied in memory to ancient realms of European culture, it seems to burden the conscience less than does that of the Jews; despite centuries of vilification and mistreatment, the Gypsies comprise an ethnic group belonging to the Christian religion, and thus stand on this side of the line separating Christians from Jews.¹⁰⁸

In view of the enormity of the Nazi mass murder, it seems paradoxical that historically transmitted, whenever possible religious mnemonic patterns play a greater role in constructing the Holocaust’s memory than do the actual events. These patterns have furnished an imagistic arsenal centered on a phenomenon that, owing to its horror, its abstractness, its relatively brief duration, but, above all, its literal defiance of reason, eludes proper description. This is all the more the case in that through their act the Nazis succeeded in confirming, as it were in negative distortion, just those cultural spheres of recollection with their mythical and historical patterns—for example, the notion of Jewish election. Consciousness cannot escape an evocation of such patterns.

Memory of the past is bound up with the operation of collective memory. In looking back at real or fantasized events, a group of individuals accumulates a mnemonic canon; others in turn identify with it and pass it on.¹⁰⁹ Duration is fundamental to the weight and impact of this sort of memory: it needs several generations to crystallize into a “community of solidarity.” Over time, the canon condenses, rationalizing itself as a history of descent— as an ethnos. An enduring memory, rationalized in terms of origin, differs in a basic way from the sort of memory producing ad hoc cohesion. The latter mainly characterizes social or political groupings, as well as institutional entities, which are unable to preserve memory over the long term. It fades especially quickly when the circumstances that brought the individuals together do not lend themselves to being continued. This is evidently the case with forced collectives, those whose cohesion is imposed from without. The victims of euthanasia and their relations cannot form a sense of collective memory for the simple reason that the stigmatized attributes of their affiliation are not transmitted further.¹¹⁰ No feelings of continued belonging can develop; no genealogy of remembrance can coalesce.The recollection is in any case preserved passively, etched in the memories of those guilty of the crime. Passing on such recollections as history requires professional institutions devoted to preserving and expanding knowledge, not to maintaining the canon of memory constituting an ethnos.¹¹¹

In this manner, the memory of “sociocide,” class murder, is archived, not transmitted from one generation to another as is the case with genocide. The mnemonic rituals practiced in Germany to commemorate the Nazi crimes thus markedly differ from the passive memorializing of the victims of Stalinism in the former Soviet Union. The reasons for this discrepancy are obvious. On the one hand, Hitler’s crimes are perceived as atrocities committed by Germany against others. They have entered the collective memory of the Germans and been preserved in the memory of others as German crimes. The Nazi period is considered an integral element of German history; as such, it is indelibly engraved in collective memory. On the other hand, the crimes of Stalin and the Soviet Union’s Communist regime can hardly be construed as Russian crimes. Furthermore, a distinctively Soviet memory is hardly sustainable, especially since the peoples of the former Soviet Union have distanced themselves from a defunct confederation that, in any event, was merely an administrative framework.¹¹² While in Germany Nazism succeeded in fusing nation and regime, seeking its victims mainly outside the Volksgemeinschaft, the Soviet populace was the main victim of its own regime. And while Hitler waged his war as a German war against adversaries mainly beyond Germany’s borders, Stalin’s war was internal—a catastrophe ostensibly launched as a social upheaval, appropriating the idiom of class struggle and civil war. Hitler’s racial mania drew on the narrative and terminology of integral nationalism. As a consequence, Nazism, dressed in distinctively German colors, was able to contaminate German memory with the crimes of the Nazi regime. They are preserved in the canon of memory of Germans and others as German crimes.

The formation of a post-Soviet memory in which the crimes of Stalin and the Communist regime are preserved in their full enormity is intrinsically problematic. How can crimes eluding ethnic and hence long-term memory be kept collectively alive? Can actions perpetrated not in the name of a collective, such as the nation, but in the name of a social construct, such as class, be commemorated in a suitable form? What earlier narratives must be evoked in order to admit these crimes into memory?

To the extent that they have not been incorporated into individual long-term memories, the crimes of Soviet Communism threaten to fall into oblivion, at least outside the realm of academic history.¹¹³ On the other hand, it is clear that those nations whose memories retain traces of their fierce struggle against old imperial Russia have tended to be more successful in recollecting the Stalinist past. These are peoples whose histories of suffering under Soviet domination can be tied to the various narratives of their earlier resistance to the czarist empire. Above all the Poles come to mind here, together with the Hungarians and even to a certain degree the Germans, in whose eastern provinces postwar Soviet rule established itself as distinctively “Russian,” thus burdening itself with memories of both world wars.

The Polish example clearly illustrates a fusion of the present with narratives drawn from the past. More than any other nationality, the Poles have been able to incorporate Soviet oppression into a long concatenation of historical events. Their amassed arsenal of memory reaches back to the uprisings of the nineteenth century, the partitions of the late eighteenth century, and further back to the seventeenth century’s Polish-Muscovite antagonism, manifest in its extreme religious form in a confrontation between Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism.¹¹⁴ This entire prehistory has converged into the image of the slaughter of fifteen thousand Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD in 1940 in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk. In this manner, crimes by Poland’s Communist regime have been converted in collective memory to crimes committed by Russia against Poland.

In Hungary, a historical soundboard has been provided by the 1848–49 revolution and its suppression by Russian troops.¹¹⁵ This emblematic experience became somehow amplified by the 1956 events in Budapest. Like wise, Finland’s special position in the Cold War cannot be genuinely understood without the prehistory of the Finno-Russian War of 1939–40. And the former Baltic Soviet republics themselves possess enough historical material to identify czarist Russia in Soviet domination. In various ways, the situation is quite similar to that of other peoples of the former Soviet Union, for the Soviet regime’s “social” crimes, perpetrated in the language of class, have been assimilated to ethnically constituted memories and narratives: those of imperial Russian crimes of expansion, colonialization, and forced Russification. This process is especially marked in the case of the “persecuted peoples” such as the Tartars, the Kalmucks, and the Volga Germans, who were subjected to a Stalinist policy of mass deportation and resettlement.¹¹⁶ With the exception of the approach taken to the highly urbanized Jewish population, whose intelligentsia was accused of “cosmopolitanism” and thus of high treason in the late Stalinist period and then subjected to anti-Semitic persecution and murder, Stalin’s regime presented itself to those it ruled in its pure form: as a despotism relying on mere arbitrariness and devoted to an ambitious social experiment whose results were catastrophic. But in an ironic reversal, in post-Soviet Russia—and not just on the extreme fringes of the political spectrum—Soviet Communist rule has often been given an ethnic cast and depicted in terms of rule by non-Russian nationalities: by Jewish, Caucasian, Baltic, and other ethnic minorities.

A conversion of episodes from Soviet Communism’s social experiment into a form of national narrative is especially pronounced in the Ukraine. The consequences of the forced collectivization between 1929 and 1933, and particularly the terrible famine of 1932, are preserved in national memory as an act of intentional genocide.¹¹⁷ Throughout the “black earth” region and other agricultural areas of the Soviet Union such as Kazakhstan, the events of the period of forced collectivization and “deKulakization” have been transposed to earlier narrative and interpretive structures, thus integrated into historical memory. The narrative of the Russian Civil War here plays a strong role. For the Ukraine, southern Russia, and the northern Caucasus were not only harmed by forced collectivization and the subsequent famine but had already been ravaged by the civil war and foreign intervention.¹¹⁸ For their part, the Soviet authorities, including party representatives and the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, had repeatedly imagined in the early 1930s that they were being threatened with acts of sabotage by members of the White Guard, veterans of the White Armies, landowners, New Economic Policy profiteers, clerics, and other counterrevolutionaries, thus defining the horrors of forced collectivization they themselves were perpetrating as an extension of the civil war. The agricultural areas of southern Russia and the Ukraine were thus transformed into a battle zone of internecine conflict, a zone in which, with the characteristic despotism of the Soviet regime, anyone could be depicted as a saboteur and class enemy. In the search for scapegoats to explain the results of economic mismanagement, inefficiency, and theft in the coercively established collective farms, suspicions and accusations spread like an epidemic; the mood resembled that surrounding the witch hunts of an earlier era. National and local conflicts fed into this general mélange of distrust.¹¹⁹

Styled into “class struggle,” the persecutions, arrests, executions, and deportations took the form of “social purging” in former areas of the civil war. Paradoxically, the process followed a principle of lineage, not in the ethnic sense, but in respect to the status and position of a person’s ancestors—a kind of social genealogy, offering ideological justification for the abuse and punishment of purported delinquents.¹²⁰ Such “biologized” class origin was enough to be accused of counterrevolutionary acts, or at least to be suspected of subversive intent. Supposedly reactionary fathers and grandfathers had their “sins” visited upon their sons and daughters and grandchildren. As “objective” class enemies, they were consigned to the mills of social purging.¹²¹ Anyone branded a class enemy was subject to the caprice of the authorities and the machinations of his fellow citizens. In this atmosphere of rank suspicion, every conceivable local conflict—from personal enmity to rivalries based on social envy—was rationalized and legitimized by means of the terminology and ideology of class struggle. At times, such conflicts reached back into the prerevolutionary period; they were resuscitated during the civil war and continued into the era of the New Economic Policy. There was, in fact, plenty of tinder for conflict, and it was easy to exploit the dominant legitimizing code to harm others. The terror kindled from above was further fanned from below. Hence in a climate of fear and mutual distrust, the arbitrary power epitomizing the Stalinist system destroyed the last remnants of social solidarity, producing a total atomization of society.

Their self-perceptions notwithstanding, Communism and Nazism are linked by striking similarities. Seen from the vantage of liberal democracy, with its institutional safeguards for civil rights, its separation of powers, legal security, and, above all, division between public and private spheres, both regimes exemplify a totalitarianism intensified by ties to a charismatic leader. Both were driven by worldviews grounded in the philosophy of history— tribunes of legitimization for political action highly suspect to Western polities. In accordance with Communist belief, Stalin’s regime sought to accelerate historical time; it was ready to sacrifice the past and the present to a supposedly better future. Nazism intended to halt time’s current through a biologistic social fiction, in other words: race. In the historical-philosophical project of either accelerating or stemming time’s flow, the individual is superseded, simply grist in a mill. The project is of a utopian nature, whether projected in the name of universal humankind or of a race to be bred, and requires the exercise of tremendous institutional force for its realization. Hence owing to their horrific crimes, both the Nazi and the Stalinist regime are engraved in our memory of the twentieth century as twins of terror.

Still, if we leave the obvious parallels behind and examine the question more closely, a more complex picture emerges. A comparative counting of victims is complicated by the fact that the Nazi regime lasted twelve years and was destroyed from without, while the Soviet regime lasted more than two generations, until it collapsed from within. Also, the crimes of the Nazis were largely committed during the war and were directed against those defined as Fremdvölkische, “alien peoples”; the crimes of Stalinism were committed in peacetime, with a terrible climax in forced collectivization and mass starvation, exacting a toll of countless millions of lives.¹²² This social war was waged almost entirely against the agrarian classes, whereas the purges in the Communist Party, the military command, and the technocratic class between 1936 and 1939 mainly affected members of the elite—a kind of prophylactic civil war.¹²³ An internal relaxation only set in during World War II; in the “Great War for the Fatherland,” the regime appealed to the patriotic sentiments of the populace. Repression was substantially reduced, though not rescinded. After the war, the number of Gulag inmates burgeoned, only declining in the “thaw” after Stalin’s death.¹²⁴

The important temporal and numerical differences do not make quantitative comparison easy. There are also difficulties in qualifying the victims, a problematic procedure in the best of cases. But one thing is clear: compared to the Nazi regime, the Stalinist system was notable for its extreme despotic caprice. Not even its highest echelons were exempt from periodic and systematic persecution. Participation in power and rule involved exposure and jeopardy; it certainly offered no security.¹²⁵ The political elites, held accountable for constant failings and aberrations, were executed as scapegoats. The recurrent comparison between the Kirov affair and the Röhm putsch is misguided, if only because the “night of the long knives” was exceptional in the relatively brief annals of the Nazi regime, while similar episodes were chronic in Stalin’s Soviet Union.¹²⁶ In the heyday of Stalinism, despotism and fear were the elixir of rule. Anyone could fall victim: the regime’s opponents, its supporters, Stalin’s henchmen, sycophants and lackeys, the members of special units involved in mass executions, together with respectable citizens and comrades with no inkling why they had been drawn into the mills of the “Red Inquisition.”¹²⁷

Compared with this arbitrariness, Hitler’s rule gives the impression of order, even of legal security. After all, the criteria for persecution were “objective.”¹²⁸ Everyone could be certain of his fate, one way or the other. In any event, the Volksgenossen— “national comrades”—who did not actively oppose the regime were allowed to go about their lives unmolested. Hence for members of the Volksgemeinschaft, the regime was far less totalitarian than Stalin’s Soviet Union was for its own population. At the same time, thanks to its initial successes, the Nazi regime enjoyed relatively broad support during the war. To a significant degree, it was a system of rule with the people rather than against them. As for those excluded from the Volksgemeinschaft, it was made clear to them that they were unwanted. Generally, those affected were apprised in advance of the tightening noose of restrictions and other oppressive measures.¹²⁹ There was nothing capricious here,although they were indeed kept in the dark concerning their final fate.

Probably the most clear-cut difference between the Stalinist and the Nazi regime was the nature of the deaths of their victims. At the heart of this difference was the use made of labor. Apart from those who died of starvation, millions were subjected by Soviet Communism to forced labor. This type of exploitation developed from the system of forced military labor introduced by Trotsky; it soon supplied an array of sectors and enterprises with cheap labor.¹³⁰ The responsible office, subordinate to the Commissariat for Internal Affairs, had access to a virtually limitless pool of workers,replenished by a constant influx of new“delinquents.” In this way, political and legal despotism went hand in hand with the system of compulsory labor in Stalin’s Soviet Union—a reality with horrific consequences. Due to the unlimited and regularly restocked fund of slave labor, there was a tendency to disregard the minimum of nutrition and rest necessary for the workers’ physical survival.¹³¹ Worn to the bone, they were forced to meet performance quotas exceeding their physical limits.

The Nazi regime was also familiar with slave labor. It was performed, however, by others, not by ethnic Germans, for Nazism’s exploitation of slaves was closely bound up with its campaigns of expansion and conquest.¹³² In conjunction with the Nazi utopia, Nazi enslavement offers an idea implemented in the course of its campaign, in conjunction with the Nazi utopia, of what would have happened if Germany had emerged victorious from the Second World War: a hierarchy of races and labor. In Eastern Europe, entire peoples would have been reduced to helotry.¹³³ For the time being, the regime was focusing on the war economy in its slave-labor policies. Some of the slaves were literally worked to death, but they were doomed in any event. In the Stalinist forced labor system, the death of the slaves was likewise considered part of the bargain, but it was not a specific and central aim.¹³⁴

In any event, the fundamental difference between regimes becomes particularly clear in that locus where individuals were an-nihilated beyond all exigencies of labor. The Nazis, as suggested, killed for the sake of killing. In the extreme case of their genocide of the Jews, they made use of labor merely to create an impression of utility. For this reason, Stalin’s Gulag cannot be compared coherently with full coherence to Hitler’s death factories—his plants for the production of corpses, beyond any rationale of exploitation and economic benefit. The Final Solution was a project annulling even what are broadly considered universally valid standards of self-preservation. Stalinism had nothing comparable to offer.135

Stalinism and Nazism were basically distinct systems emerging from different cultures under dissimilar conditions. That they were locked in a global struggle—real, partial, or only ostensible—has always posed challenging questions. And yet inquiring into underlying motives is far more to the point than any juxtaposition of the systems. A need for comparison is by no means self-evident; rather, it seems to derive from specific, culturally determined memories that feel compelled to counterpose atrocities. To that extent, the modes of comparison are not universally valid. Instead, they stem from particularistically grounded collective memories, converting events such as state-perpetrated crimes into the canon and narrative of the ethnos.

As indicated, the process of converting crimes by a regime into crimes against an ethnic collective becomes strikingly clear in the case of Poland. On the basis of a geopolitical location between Germany and Russia and an associated—tragic—history, two types of suffering have fused in Polish memory: a suffering caused by regimes perceived as totalitarian; and a suffering that stems from the oppression of the Poles as a nation.¹³⁶ Consequently, with national interpretation of the Katyn massacre drowning out its significance as a state crime committed by Stalin, its recollection has remained vivid to the present day, keeping Poland ever vigilant toward Russia. That vigilance does not arise from fears regarding a possible resurgence of Communism in Moscow, but rather from the long memory of Poland’s tragic history with the Russian Empire.

Why there has been a tendency in Germany to systematically compare these two totalitarian systems is a particularly complex question. The main reason would appear to be that in its actions beyond its borders, Nazism has served for the Germans as an example of exaggerated nationalism rather than of a regime comparable in its despotism to Stalin’s.¹³⁷ The attack on the Soviet Union begun in 1941 entered collective memory as the “Russian campaign”: at the time of its launching, enmity toward the Soviet Union as a regime was of less consequence than an acutely racist nationalism; its professed anti-Bolshevism appeared in a national rather than a universal-political guise.¹³⁸ In Soviet wartime memory also elements linked to the regime’s Communist self-identity were downplayed; instead, there was intense emphasis on the patriotic—Russian—character of the war against the German invaders, combined with a Russification of Soviet memory. Concepts such as “Hitlerism” and “anti-Fascism” remained in currency, but they steadily lost their political meaning. And the closer the Red Army came to German territory in its westward thrust during the war’s final phase, as atavistic horrors perpetrated by “the Russians” spread fear and anxiety among the Germans, ideological motives further yielded on both sides to national and ethnic ascriptions.¹³⁹

The postwar flight and expulsion of the German populace from areas now incorporated into Poland in the east, as well as from the Sudetenland, which reverted to Czechoslovakia, were prompted by ethnic and not social motives. This process cannot be compared to crimes of the Communist regime such as the “social purges” carried out during the forced collectivizations of the 1930s. Rather, although a reaction to Nazi oppression, resettlement, and genocide, the process had much in common with “ethnic cleansing,” with the tradition of the nationality conflicts that took place between the Great War and World War II. And this is actually the way the expulsions have been engraved in Germany’s collective memory. They cannot, in any event, be at all construed as resulting from a struggle between regimes, in the sense of the epochal confrontation between Bolshevism and anti-Bolshevism. Against the background of the experiences of the interwar period and the war instigated by Hitler, the Western allies sanctioned these population shifts as a solution to festering problems of nationalities and minorities.¹⁴⁰

In postwar Germany, the sufferings of the Germans were not publicly remembered. There was virtually no mention of the victims of postwar deportations or the destruction inflicted by strategic Allied bombing. Those who fell in action went officially unmourned. There were probably a number of reasons for this, one being of crucial importance: a shared intuition that the crimes committed by the Germans in the name of Germany were of such magnitude they commanded a collective silence—an expression of justice weighed and removed from any claim to balance.

The collective memory of the Germans searched for ways to overcome this paralysis.¹⁴¹ Accusations against the West were taboo in the early postwar decades. Because of the German question—closely bound up with the deepening Cold War—the memory of the Anglo-American bombing was sealed, although it would be revived by a later generation as new and allegedly similar events unfolded elsewhere in the world.¹⁴² The Soviet Union offered a more valid mnemonic terrain for comparison. As has often been suggested, this may well have been due to the Cold War’s political-ideological constellations. Especially in a divided Germany, with the East German state viewing its legitimation solely in terms of class and withdrawing as an anti-Fascist polity from any collective German memory, a comparison between the systems was made on the basis of confronting values and worldviews. The political enmity between East Germany and West Germany resuscitated images and concepts developed in the clashes of the Weimar Republic, the Communists in the East—in keeping with their unshakable philosophy of history—equating their adversaries in the West with the ogre of “Fascism.”¹⁴³ Amid the ideological rhetoric, traces of collective memory still managed to surface, for example, when representatives of the East German regime were branded traitors and henchmen of the “Russians” or when West German politicians were denounced as lackeys of the “Anglo-Americans,” who were ultimately blamed for the destruction of the German cities.¹⁴⁴

In Germany’s collective memory, the comparison between systems in the East and the West has itself been projected backward onto the screen of the “Russian campaign”—an intense and brutal ideological war that in the period of its launching had, for its part, been mnemonically rendered into an exclusively anti Bolshevik crusade. For after all, other European nations had them-selves participated earlier in militarily defending the Occident against the Soviets. Inscribed in this constellation, the “Russian campaign” could be registered as the decisive front in a universal civil war, the crimes committed during Operation Barbarossa thus being balanced against the crimes of the Soviet regime, the emblematics of Stalingrad’s horror against those of Stalinism’s terror. Two factors appear to have been at work in the backward projection of the postwar period: on the one hand, the Cold War emerging after 1945 seemed to support such an interpretation; on the other hand, there was the fact that the crimes of Nazi Germany had been, finally, directed against others, those of the Soviet regime against its own population.

The German wish to convert the crimes committed by Nazi Germany into crimes of a regime runs against the collective memory of those who lived in the Soviet Union and their descendants. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Soviet populace was victimized by both of the century’s most oppressive regimes: the regime grounded in the violence of Communist utopian ideals and their experiment with humanity; and the regime grounded in the violent ideal of racial purity and in racial warfare with an anti Bolshevik rationale. In keeping with the collective memory’s tenets, both regimes are widely perceived as having been directed against the Russian people, though in different ways: on the one hand, through crimes based on class; on the other hand, through crimes based on race. To an extent, this distinction corresponds to the modes of memory manifest in the former East German state, in that a link has been forged there between the effects of Nazirule and those of the Communist regime that followed. While ethnic Germans may perceive the two regimes as totalitarian variants, for those who had been excluded from the German Volksgemeinschaft on grounds of race and then managed to survive the extermination project, the Communist regime, despite its despicable totalitarian features, can hardly be compared with it.

On the Continent in the interwar period, Fascism and Communism, the twentieth century’s dominant ideologies supplying meaning and orientation, were arrayed against each other in civil-war formation.¹⁴⁵ Especially in the realm of ideas, it was hard to avoid the confrontation, even if the century’s conflicts were driven by other impulses as well. Today the contours of the debates unfolding then have lost their interpretive power. Nevertheless, they continue to exert an influence on efforts to grasp the past, in particular the enormous crimes against humanity committed by both Nazism and Stalinism. Understanding these crimes seems akin to reaching a judgment concerning the century itself. Otherwise, it would be hard to explain the passion accompanying debates on this issue; their discursive mode of ultima ratio suggests deep-seated motives emerging from the memory space of religion.¹⁴⁶ As soon as the debate turns to the status and significance of the crimes, the religious contours of the discourse become unmistakable. This is particularly true in relation to the Holocaust, for the question of its possible singularity seems to recapitulate earlier disputes about the idea of Jewish election. While the need to compare and the resulting anthropologizing of the crime seem to reflect Christian modes of narrative discourse, the insistence on singularity would appear to reflect their Jewish counterpart.¹⁴⁷ In this way, the features of religious narrative have strongly stamped an unfolding, ostensibly secular historical discussion. We may thus suspect that any effort at doing historical justice to the reality of what happened will have trouble escaping a vortex of prelayered narratives that move in the direction of final causes.